Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “Multitude of sins is right. Say I’m not a whore. Say it!” Her voice raised this way sounded shrill, unfamiliar.

  “Not a whore,” he said and sighed.

  Mrs. Betcher had never heard him sound regretful or resigned before this, and she liked it. She turned on the television to a rebroadcast of Oprah, a show she’d never watched before Carl was dying. She let the confident, positive voices fill the living room while she picked at her lunch, a piece of sandwich bread with margarine, a scoop of tuna salad with relish and mayonnaise her sister had made for her, and a peach half from a can. She glanced over at her husband, who was moving his head side to side as though in pain or ecstasy. Seeing her husband weak should have made her want to forgive him—she had always wished she could protect weak people and animals—but instead she was feeling renewed anger, a delicious angry heat that flowed all through her and gave her strength. She should’ve been ashamed that she was causing her husband pain, but instead she just felt mad at him, and a little mad at herself for never speaking out against him. When her husband whipped their son hard enough to raise welts for wetting his bed, she should have marched into the street and shouted to the neighbors what he’d done. Instead she had only worked to calm Carl down by cooking him bacon and eggs and going out to the shop to work as usual, leaving Carl Jr. crying in his room. If Carl Sr. was in the shop with her, she’d figured, he wouldn’t be able to punish Carl Jr. for whimpering.

  At the memory of her son crying, she now threw her fork at Carl Betcher. When it bounced off the bed rail onto the carpet, she threw the plate of tuna salad and the bowl with a peach, too, but they hit the mattress and bounced gently to the carpet. Because throwing felt so good, she tossed the salt and pepper and sugar and a saucepan that was on the stove, and those landed on his torso and stayed there on the bed. She picked up the scoop of tuna salad off the floor and smashed it with her open hand on his chest, and then washed her hands and went out into the shop; she had plenty of good-paying work, but instead she put down some craft paper and unfurled the deep red velvet curtain across the floor. She tuned the radio away from AM talk, where it had always been, to FM classical from the university and studied the old seams.

  That Sunday, she went to her sister Joan’s church, shook the minister’s cool hand, and prayed and listened alongside the others. Joan claimed to be praying for Carl’s poor withered soul, but Mrs. Betcher prayed mostly for her son to come back. She wanted to see his face, hold his thin body in her arms. Her son was a gentle person, though often rash and not terribly smart. He was not the sort of person who should be removing asbestos from buildings, but that was what he was doing. She let Joan and the minister assume she was praying for her husband to be free from pain, but really she wished for her husband’s suffering to increase until he confessed to his crimes, until he begged her for forgiveness.

  In the fifth week, the skin on Carl’s feet tightened and reddened and turned shiny. When she called her son that night, she started crying as soon as he answered, and he tried to comfort her. “Ma, don’t worry. I won’t spit on his grave like I said. I wouldn’t hurt you like that.”

  Why not spit on his grave? she wanted to ask, but she said, “I’m sorry, Junior. I’m just feeling the strain.”

  “Maybe Dad just got screwed up in Vietnam,” he said later in the conversation. “Maybe that’s why he was how he was. I work with a guy whose dad killed himself after coming home. Do you know where Dad was stationed?”

  She said she had to go out to the shop and hung up the phone. She was not looking for excuses for the man.

  In the sixth week, five weeks after Carl was supposed to die, the hospice nurse who had come the first day, the tall black man, seemed surprised. He checked Carl’s pulse and blood pressure and smiled. “The man’s staying steady. Maybe God’s keeping your husband alive for some reason,” he said. “A higher purpose.”

  Mrs. Betcher noticed the nurse had a gold cross with a flame pinned to his jacket, the same church logo Joan wore on her blazer. It gave Mrs. Betcher a sense that these people all belonged to a cult.

  “Nigger,” whispered Betcher as though contemplating something awesome. “Satan is a nigger.”

  The wife looked up at the nurse apologetically.

  “I’ve heard worse,” he said. He sounded tired. “God works in mysterious ways.”

  “How painful is this for him?” Mrs. Betcher asked, as she’d asked the other nurses.

  “The morphine drip helps,” he said, “but there’s no denying he’s in pain. He may not be released from pain in this life.”

  “Once he stapled his foot to the floor in the shop and it took the paramedics a half hour to get here. He didn’t complain about the pain. He just kept telling me how to sew a pair of fancy boat cushions we had to finish.” She stopped herself from saying what came next into her head, the complaint that Carl had not paid into Social Security. She had never been one to complain, but she was feeling like a bottle that was uncorked.

  The wife and the nurse stared at the gray old man on the bed. Mrs. Betcher hadn’t dared try to trim his beard or hair, so he looked like he was from biblical times. His stomach had shrunk appreciably since he’d come home to die.

  “God forgive me, please,” Carl Betcher whispered in a way that made his wife think a fever had broken. “I am your servant.”

  “Well, it’s nice to hear a man say that,” the nurse said. “He’s a religious man?”

  “No, never,” she said. “But now he says he wants forgiveness for a multitude of sins.”

  “Multitude of sins is from Peter. It’s about loving your fellow man.”

  After the nurse left, Mrs. Betcher lifted the straw to Carl’s lips, and he drank a whole glass of water. She was grateful that he never said anything that made the nurses suspect she was less than kind to him.

  “Carl,” she said, “what do you want God to forgive you for? What sins?”

  “Forgive me, my Lord, I have forsaken Jesus,” he announced to the air.

  “What other wrong have you done in this life that needs forgiveness?” she asked. “Who else have you forsaken?”

  “My mother warned me to keep Jesus in my heart, but I didn’t listen.”

  “Isn’t there anything else?” she said and whispered, “I can stop the hell fires.”

  Carl Betcher fell asleep.

  CARL’S BELLY FAT continued to diminish, and in the eighth week the tumor stood out under his skin like a pot-roast-size tongue pressing to break through and speak, and the surgical staples holding his belly together kept that flaccid mouth shut. Mrs. Betcher dabbed ointment on those wounds as his skin grew slack. The doctors had assured her the cancer would continue to spread, but the tumor itself remained the same size. The hospice folks advised her to apply lotion to his feet.

  “Sometimes they get dry and crack. Not usually this bad,” the big white lady nurse said when she came again. She shook her head. “The air must be very dry in here.”

  When a storm knocked out the power one night in the ninth week, darkness fell upon them, and the heat stopped blowing on Carl Betcher’s feet. When the sun rose, Mrs. Betcher awakened and found the house cool. She put extra blankets on Carl and fed him a can of nutritional drink, which he didn’t finish. Bundled in sweaters, she lit a hurricane lamp and carried it through the breezeway out to the shop, which was heated with propane. She started work on a canvas boat cover, but lost interest and spent all morning with the curtain, re-sewing the old seams that had come undone over the years, studying and then copying the beautiful stitches. She wanted to get a sense of the fabric before she tackled the big rips in the middle. In the lamplight, the crimson color took on greater depth. When she took a break for lunch a few hours later, the house was cold, and Carl was motionless.

  “Wake up,” she said. She opened a new case of Ensure and took out a can of strawberry, which was all she bought now. She wished she’d saved one can of chocolate or vanilla, flavors he preferred, as an incentive for him to st
ay alive a little while longer. “Wake up, Carl.”

  Carl Betcher mumbled, and for the first time, he refused the straw she offered. His voice was so quiet she had to put her ear nearly to his mouth to hear him.

  “I’m not going to hell,” he whispered. “God is leading me home. He has shone his light on the path to Him. God has forgiven me.”

  “For what, Carl? What has God forgiven you for?”

  “Forsaking Jesus.” He sounded exhausted, his voice a hiss.

  “What else?”

  There was a long pause before he whispered, “Jesus is my Lord and Savior, my light in the darkness.”

  “How about forgiveness for hitting your wife? And your son? Is God forgiving you for that?”

  She felt that weird swimming energy enter her arm, and she struck his chest hard with the back of her hand, but his body was so relaxed, she might have been hitting a pile of canvas. Had he felt so remorseless when hurting her over the years?

  “What about the things you’ve said to me, Carl? Did God forgive you for calling me a whore? For telling me to shut up like I was a dog? What about all those times you forced me, made me sick from it? Well, I don’t forgive you, and God shouldn’t forgive you, either.”

  Her husband didn’t seem to hear her. She shook his shoulders. Carl Betcher appeared to be trying to open his eyes, but in spite of the effort, he was falling away from her.

  “No, Carl, you can’t leave it like this. No!” She brought over the photograph of Carl Jr. and held it to his face; Carl Jr. sported a scraggly beard and a big sweet smile. “Look. He survived, even with what you did to him. Say you’re sorry to him and me.”

  She thought that she had forgiven him during their marriage, each time he had hurt her—she’d said it aloud—but if she had truly forgiven him, then her anger would not be overwhelming her right now. She knew the importance of forgiveness, understood the grace of the gesture that she among mortal creatures could make for this dying man for his multitude of sins. And for herself. But he needed to ask for her forgiveness. For who was God to forgive what Carl Betcher had done to her?

  Strange that in life she’d never thought of hurting him, not for revenge or punishment, but had only wanted to free herself and Carl Jr. from his hurtfulness. Now she wanted to keep hurting him, more than she wanted food or drink or warmth.

  She went back into the dark shop that afternoon to work, but fell to her knees on the cold concrete. She didn’t know if she even believed in God anymore, but she prayed for the electricity to return so she could fire up the space heater. When Joan arrived an hour later, she found Mary Betcher kneeling on a cushion, fighting to tear out a seam on the heavy velvet curtain—she’d never known such strong thread, as strong as fishing line, but silky. She’d found some good new thread and dyed it the exact color she needed, but wasn’t certain she could make the repair invisible.

  “Oh, sweetie, get up off the floor,” Joan said. “You work too hard, and you’re going to make yourself sick. You should have called me right away when the power went out. I heard about it on the radio.”

  “My phone needs electricity to work,” she said, knowing she could have plugged in the old phone she kept in the closet.

  Her sister had arrived in a white van with a cross and flame on the side, driven by the pastor of her church, a tall, thick man in a puffy yellow parka, and they were accompanied by a small bald hatless man. The pastor loomed over the short guy, who wheeled Carl Betcher’s diesel generator outside between the house and the shop and fired it up, restoring enough power for the refrigerator and the microwave and the electric start on the gas furnaces. He warned Mary not to use any unnecessary appliances. She wondered if she might consider the space heater necessary by any stretch of the imagination. Once the kitchen warmed tolerably, Mary and her sister sat at the table, and Mary unwrapped the tuna salad sandwich her sister had brought for her, but the fish tasted metallic, and she spit the first bite into her napkin and couldn’t bring herself to take another.

  “I thought you liked my tuna salad,” her sister said and took a bite of the sandwich herself to taste it. She found it satisfactory and returned it to Mary’s plate.

  “He told God he was sorry he had sinned,” said Mrs. Betcher, wiping her face. “He said Jesus was his Savior.”

  “He said that? Praise the Lord!” Her sister nodded her head in an exaggerated way, as Mary had seen her do in church.

  “Will God really forgive him? I mean, after all he’s done?” Mrs. Betcher asked. She had never told Joan any particulars of her life with Carl, so her sister couldn’t really know what she was asking. The sky outside the window was bitter gray, hopeless. The trees looked like bundles of giant dead sticks. Mary Betcher couldn’t imagine spring would be here in a month.

  “Of course he will,” Joan said. “If he returned to Jesus, he’ll be saved. You kept him alive long enough to save his soul, Mary. You don’t even realize how you’ve done the Lord’s work.”

  For a big man, the pastor moved quietly, so Mary didn’t notice him in the kitchen until he leaned over the table and blocked the light from the hall. The yellow of his parka was a kind of artificial sun.

  “Soon your husband will be with the Lord,” the pastor said. “And you are a part of our community now, Mrs. Betcher, God’s community. We understand your grief and will hold you in our embrace.” He held out his arms to offer an embrace, but Mary turned from him.

  “I’ll be fine,” she whispered.

  “The boy favors his father. He’s got a strong face,” the pastor said. With a long arm he reached out and picked up the old photo of Carl Jr.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Mary slept late and awakened to the sound of the hospice nurse knocking. When she stepped into the living room and saw the lifeless gray body, she felt a surge of anger more overwhelming than anything she could remember. It felt like a bookend to the joy she’d felt forty years ago on her wedding day. She threw a full can of strawberry Ensure at Carl hard enough to break his jawbone, but it only nestled between his neck and shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Betcher,” said the nurse, when Mary let her into the house. “Are you going to be okay?”

  A few hours after that, the power came back on.

  Carl Jr. would arrive in Michigan the night before the funeral service at her sister’s church, but when Joan called and offered to come over, she lied, said Carl Jr. would be there shortly, and he’d be tired from the road.

  “Call me if you need anything,” her sister said expansively. “Anything at all. It’s no bother. Oh, Mary, we were so close when we were growing up, and I want to be close like that again. And if you ever just don’t want to be alone in that house, I’ll come over and stay with you.”

  Mary said goodbye and pressed the disconnect button on the phone. Not want to be alone in her house? What a notion—it was her house! Nothing in the refrigerator—her refrigerator!—looked palatable, so she opened a can of strawberry drink and took a long sweet swallow. As a teenager, she and her sister had attended an outdoor party where she’d been served a slice of Neapolitan ice cream on a paper plate. Under the ice cream was an elegant sheet of gold-and-white paper. She ate the chocolate and vanilla, and was letting the strawberry melt a little in the sunlight, intending to savor it. She was perched on a plastic stool, looking at a row of giant pink peonies in perfect bloom. And then a naked little boy ran through the party—there might’ve been a swimming pool of some kind, because she remembered the sound of splashing—and he’d knocked her plate out of her hands, sent her strawberry ice cream into the air. Joan, three years older, was right behind him chasing him—maybe she was supposed to be babysitting—and she stepped on the ice cream, smashed it into the grass, and kept going.

  All her life Mary had felt the hurt of the incident, had held onto her anger, but now she saw the plain truth: she should have eaten the pink first.

  She finished the can of Ensure, and it felt good to have something in her belly before going out into the shop. She was
looking forward to working on the curtain, which lay spread out on the floor, glowing in the diffuse morning light coming in through the windows with open curtains. She was planning her repair for the first sword wound, which was nineteen inches long. She had gone through the old things in her sewing basket and then her closet and decided that she would cut a piece from a lap robe from a Cadillac from the 1920s. She would dye the tan piece red and work it in her hands until it regained its original suppleness, and then use it for backing. She hoped it would not interrupt the flowing of the curtain. She had never been to a play at a theater, but she would go to one just to see this curtain after she repaired it. She took a handful of the curtain and pressed it to her neck.

  She hadn’t yet turned on the lights when she heard a vehicle pull up outside the shop. She moved along the wall until she could see past the counter and through the front window. It was the white van with a cross and flame on it. She thought how similar the white church van looked to the black van into which they’d slid Carl Betcher’s body—few people she knew drove such new, expensive vehicles. A big figure stepped out, and she could see puffy snow boots and the bottom of a sun-yellow parka. When he was halfway to the door, she could see the pastor’s whole body. He stopped and gazed around like a landowner, as though he and God had a plan for what Carl Betcher had left behind. Joan was not with him. Mary locked the door to the shop and moved slowly back into the shadows.

  “Mrs. Betcher, are you there?” The big man knocked and tried the door handle so fiercely that Mary’s heart began to pound. She sat on the big red curtain and then stretched out flat, and slowly she pulled the velvet all around herself and over her head like a cloak. He shouted, “Mrs. Betcher, are you okay?” and cupped his hands against the window on the door. She hunkered down. The old velvet curtain, so heavy, so hard to handle, so difficult to repair, felt fine against her skin. Heavenly.

  To You, as a Woman

  When the clinic nurse told me I should wear only cotton underpants, I laughed out loud—a nervous laugh—I couldn’t help it. She didn’t smile, just shook her head and wrote something down. Maybe my not wearing panties disturbs you, too, as a woman, but surely it doesn’t disturb you as much as other things I might have done, things we all might have done. Maybe there is a scale or a number line, and on it are all the things that disturb you, such as having people see your kitchen dirty, gaining twenty pounds, having a menstrual accident in public, or getting raped by gangbangers. Your nightmares probably don’t involve anyone who resembles me, with my slender figure or my wide-set brown eyes or my hair curling around my triangular face. You will understand I’m not being vain when I say my face is naturally attractive and does not require cosmetics, which would take time and care to apply and would cost money that I don’t have, the way ladies’ underwear and children’s shoes and chocolate candies cost money.