All the Forgivenesses Read online




  ALL THE FORGIVENESSES

  ELIZABETH HARDINGER

  JOHN SCOGNAMIGLIO BOOKS

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgments

  ALL THE FORGIVENESSES ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  JOHN SCOGNAMIGLIO BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Hardinger

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  The JS and John Scognamiglio Books logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2044-3

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: September 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2046-7 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-2046-6 (e-book)

  For Charles

  The light surrounding me

  As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest

  of all the forgivenesses.

  —Joan Baez

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  Galena, Kentucky, 1906

  Daddy, he was the one always shot the pig. There’s a trick to it. You want to stun her so she falls directly and the heart keeps pumping and she drains out quick. If you shoot her back of the ear, say, like some people does, you might just nick the brain, and she’s like to run around the yard spewing blood and squealing, whirl in a circle, bounce off the cellar door. Might take five or six shots to drop her, and you’ll ruin good meat. No need for her to suffer like that. Daddy knowed just where to shoot her—right between the eyes but up a little bit. Sticking her, that takes a good eye and a sharp knife. You don’t stick her in the vein, might take a long time for her to drain out.

  That day, when Mama seen Daddy walking over toward the pig with the long rifle, she hollered at me and Timmy to get back. “Bertie, get aholt of him!” Which I done.

  Daddy walked a couple more steps and turned around and shot the pig, and she fell down directly. Then he stuck her, and the blood poured out.

  “Bang,” said Timmy. His eyes was bright.

  “Come on,” I said to him. “Let’s go look at the fire.” Timmy was three year old, and he’d as soon play with a stick on fire as blood. I took aholt of him and drug him over to where the women was congregated, like they will. Soon’s the sun come up, the women had built the fire and hoisted the big oil drum up on the grate. Then everbody carried buckets of water to half-fill it. Pretty soon it heated up, and the steam smelled of the pigs that had been boiled in it before. Smelled so good my mouth’d filled up.

  “Mind he don’t fall in the fire,” Grandma Sweet said. She run her fingers up and down her arms, stripping off water.

  “I know.” I myself wasn’t but six and a half, but, like Mama always said, you would’ve thought Timmy was my own baby instead of my brother, the way I was always making over him. Mama called me “little mother,” but I didn’t mind it. She meant it kindly.

  “Don’t let him touch the pig,” Mama said to me. “I told you, keep a close eye on him. Ain’t got no time to look after him today.” She had my sister Dacia on her hip, smiling at her, jiggling the baby’s lower lip with her finger while Dacia cooed.

  “Bang,” Timmy said again. He giggled in that way little children does, like they’re full of bubbles.

  I took aholt of his hand. His fingers was cold, I remember. It was fall. You want cool weather for killing a pig so’s the meat gets good and chilled that night.

  We was all there at Grandma and Grandpa Sweet’s place: Daddy, Mama, my older brothers William and Buck, me, Timothy—I called him Timmy—and Dacia. Opal and the twins wasn’t born yet.

  A lot of the Sweet relations was there, too. Mama, her given name was Polly Jolene Sweet. I don’t remember most of their names, I was so little. Aunt JoyAnn and Aunt Birddella was there, and most likely Alma—and four or five older girl cousins. Hardly nobody my age. Most of them was older. I remember my cousin Frank, who had one side of his head flat and couldn’t but half see. It wasn’t often the Sweets got together. Everbody lived on little acreages scattered throughout the hills, and a pig killing was like a day at the fair practically.

  Grandma and Grandpa Sweet’s house, now it was built up on a bluff. There wasn’t much front yard, and the back sloped up a ways and then there was the backwoods. There was a creek run down the hill and curled around in front of the bluff and wandered on down through more woods for a ways. They called it Tenmile Creek. We had to jump over a narrow place in the Tenmile to get up to the house, or, if it was high, we stepped along the rocks.

  We was living in the Appalachian hills in southeast Kentucky, but I didn’t know that then. It was just the place where we lived at. For all I knowed, it was the whole world.

  Me and Timmy watched as the men spread the pig’s hind legs apart and tied the feet to the spreader. Then they threaded a two-by-four through the spreader and heaved her up and carried her over to the old sweetgum tree, the one with the big stout branch they used for hanging pigs. They strung her up by the hind legs, and then they waited around, smoking, till the blood petered out. I pulled Timmy back out of their road again as they carried her over and lowered her headfirst into the boiling water to scald her. After a little bit, they lifted her out and hung her back up in the tree to skin.

  Then Daddy and the other men and boys took off to go hunting, I guess ten or twelve of them altogether. My big brothers, William and Buck, went with them. I seen Daddy lift his whiskey bottle before they got to the woods.

  With the pig hanging in the tree, the next thing was to scrape the hair. Now the pigs we had in them days was about half wild, seems like—they had thick brown hair, coarse and stiff. Some people just skinned them, hair and all, and throwed the skin to the dogs. But us, we scraped off the hair first, and then we saved the bare skin to fry up. Cracklins, now that was good eating. Mama told me you ain’t had good food till you’ve eat cracklins.

  Grandma and two other women and an older girl, they scraped the hair. It made a snick-snick sound.

  “Mind you don’t break the skin,” Grandma said.

  Grandma’s half-tail red tom come up. “Scat!” one of the women hollered. She kicked him, and he yowled and took off.

  Timmy laughed. Then he stuck his nose in the air and said, “What stinks?”

  “Hush, it’s just pig,” I told him.

  “We just gonna stand around all day?” he said.

  “What—”

  “Leapfrog!” He jumped up high as he could, stretching his arms out wide. “Leapfrog!”

  “I hear you! No need to holler!” I
faced away from the pig and bent over, and Timmy jumped up and landed right smack in the middle of my spine. We both fell down in a heap, and Timmy laughed till the snot come out of his nose. He never got the hang of leapfrog.

  I was content to play with Timmy in the yard while they gutted her. I didn’t want to watch anyhow. It about made me sick, tell the truth. You start off by cutting around her rear end and pulling out a gob of innards and tying it off with a string. Then you slice her down the middle and pull out the entrails. Nasty work. Then you saw down through the backbone to halve her, and you’re ready to butcher.

  Mama and the aunts set up the two sawhorses with the old door laid across them for a worktable. It was painted black, that door was, and it had a hole where the knob used to be. They used that same door ever time.

  The women stood around the table, cutting up the meat and visiting like women will. Seemed like there was a lot to tell. “Well, John, now, John tore off his big toenail the other day, drove the spade clean through it,” a woman in a blue bandanna said. “Like to bawled his head off, a growed man.”

  They all laughed.

  I heard more snatches. “Poured bleach down the hole, and I ain’t seen a termite since.” “I told him, don’t you never come home like that again unless you’re right with the Lord.” “Well, who do you reckon was standing there? His mother!” “We always salt it afterwards. I never heard of salting it before. Don’t it get tough? It don’t? Seems like it’d get tough.” “Told her and told her, it’s your own fault. Said, don’t come crying to me. You was asking for it.” “Well, of course we didn’t know him from Adam’s housecat.”

  Aunt JoyAnn, she was one of them standing there and working, and Mama next to her watching and playing with Dacia. JoyAnn said to Mama how pretty of a baby Dacia’d gotten to be.

  “She’s a Sweet, all right. Look at all that curly hair,” Mama said, petting her. “Now Bertie, she takes after her daddy’s side, sure enough. You know his mama said to me one time, ‘Us Winslows got eye-colored eyes and hair-colored hair.’ ” Mama and JoyAnn both laughed. No matter how many hundred times I heard “eye-colored eyes and hair-colored hair,” it never made no sense to me, though I got the point.

  Then Mama told the story—like JoyAnn didn’t already know it—about how they named the baby Dacia after Mama’s favorite cousin twice removed, who was a famous gospel singer and sung at the Union Gospel Tabernacle in Nashville and married a rich man and always wore rouge. I never seen that Dacia myself, but Mama and them was all the time talking about her. They called her somebody’s Dacia, I forget who, and our Dacia they called Polly’s Dacia. Our Dacia was too little to walk yet, but if she was setting on your lap and you started singing or even just clapping, why, she’d dance, swaying her head and flinging her arms. She was loose-jointed as a rag doll.

  Now some people, when they seen her name spelled out, called her “Day-SEE-uh,” but that ain’t right. It’s “DAY-shuh.” Sometimes I’d call her Day-SEE-uh just to tease her.

  I looked up when Mama said, “Dacia, boo!” Mama swooped her nose down close to Dacia’s face and then pulled back. “Boo!” She done it again. Dacia broke out in a toothless grin and started burbling. Then JoyAnn laughed and said, “Boo.”

  They kept it up till Dacia got tired of it and started fussing. “Bertie,” Mama called to me, “come put Dacia down.”

  “Now Bertie, she was a colicky baby, remember?” Mama said to JoyAnn. I reckon she knowed I could hear her. “My Lord, you’d’ve thought her stomach had a mouse in it, the way she gagged and spewed up milk. You never seen the like. Bertie! Come get Dacia!”

  I stopped playing with Timmy and walked over there.

  “You’d pick her up—stiff as a washboard!” Mama went on. “Never smiled! Sour as a chokecherry! I thought, ‘I waited all this time for a girl, and this is what I got?’ ” Then she leaned over and said something in JoyAnn’s ear, something about Daddy—I heard her say his name, Albert—and JoyAnn laughed.

  Wasn’t no use of me crying about being called a washboard or a chokecherry or even a Winslow, I knowed that. Didn’t do no good. Just showed you didn’t have no sense of humor. Come to that, the way I was raised, it wasn’t no use of crying—or even whining—about hurt feelings, period, unless somebody’d died. If you was a bawl-baby, you got shamed, you got teased, or people just ignored you like you’d embarrassed yourself, which I reckon bothered me the most of all. If you kept at it, you got punished, though usually only a slap. So you learned to hide your feelings or wait till you was out behind the barn and nobody could hear you.

  Mama looked at me standing there. “When I call your name, you come—hear me?” She kissed the baby and laid her in my arms. “Mind you don’t drop her.” I seen Mama’s shirt had wet spots from nursing.

  Soon’s I took aholt of the baby she started bawling, and she bawled all the way to the house. Timmy followed behind us with his head hung down.

  I carried her into the side room, where Grandma kept the cribs. I picked the littlest one, but still I wasn’t hardly big enough to reach over the side, and I dropped the baby a little bit. She hollered like she’d been whipped.

  “Stop bawling, you baby, you ain’t hurt.” I took Timmy by the hand and walked him back to the yard. I said to him, “Don’t worry, she’ll fall asleep directly.”

  By the time they was done butchering the pig and wrapping up the meat in newspapers, me and Timmy was tuckered out. I made him a pallet in the corner of Grandma and Grandpa’s room. I seen he had a little brown crust of pig’s blood on the tail of his shirt. I scraped at it with my finger. His eyelids fluttered, and he went to sleep.

  I set there and looked at him for a while. There’s a certain velvet sheen to the eyelids of a sleeping child. Some baby animals have it, too.

  When I walked back outside, some of the women was washing up and some was laying out food. Mama was telling them the story on me—how I snuck down to the creek at our place, Elbow Creek, by myself. I loved it down there on the Elbow. I fished for tadpoles and crawdads there, and things there was peaceful. But I was forbade to go to the creek by myself. I was not ordinarily a contrary child, but ever little bit I felt like I had to go down there and just set and listen to how quiet it was. It was like I couldn’t help myself. Well, this time that Mama was talking about—a week, more or less, before the day we butchered the pig—well, when I come back home, I’d stood there and told her I never went down to Elbow Creek, and me with mud all up and down my skirt. Mama like to had a fit. She feared me going down to Elbow Creek, sure enough, but it was me bearing false witness, now that she couldn’t hardly abide.

  Mama said to them women, “So I said to her, said, ‘Bertie, I sure would hate to think Jesus got nails pounded into his hands just so I could tell a lie and get away with it.’ ”

  “Saved by grace,” Aunt Birddella said.

  “What about that snake that time?” somebody said. “Wasn’t that Bertie? You know, that time Albert—” And I said, “What?” And Mama said, “Hush, we wasn’t talking about you.” And I said, “Yes, you was, you—” And Mama narrowed her eyes. “Hush, I said.”

  Then I had a memory light on my chest like a butterfly will, lingering for a moment, its wings quivering. In my memory I was real little, and there was a man there with snakes, and I was setting on Daddy’s shoulders with my hair flyaway, and there was a commotion, and then me and him was walking home. Then I blinked and these pictures flew off, and I felt goose bumps all up and down my arms.

  “Saved by grace, thank God Amighty.” This was the woman with the blue bandanna, nodding, and her eyes closed.

  Now Mama and her kin was the kind that believed you was saved by grace and not by works, so you could get away with a sin if you wanted to—you just didn’t want to. Grace was God’s way of letting you into Heaven even though you was a born sinner. But the way Mama taught grace was a hard teaching. According to her lights, if you was in God’s grace you didn’t even want to do bad no more.

>   But me, seemed like I was always wanting to sin. For sure I’d ruther lie than take a whipping. There was times I was like to covet, and I was like to get a hungry headache at Sabbath service. I got to where I hardly ever wanted to go no more. Not to mention, honoring your mother and father meant doing their will without complaining even in your heart. That was hard. So whenever Mama talked about them nails in Jesus’ hands, seems like my insides would fold in two.

  And besides, after I went down to the Elbow, she’d made me go cut her a switch anyhow, and she give me a whipping. “Shame on you for disobedience, shame on you for making me whip you,” she hollered, and afterward she throwed the switch into the trees. I’d felt scalded.

  Now one of the other women spoke up. “My little Pleasant, she hardly ever lies, but does she steal—food! Right out of the pantry. I told her, said—”

  “It’s ready,” somebody said. “Come and eat it before the flies get it.” So we all lined up next to the worktable. They had scrubbed it down and put on a red-and-white cloth, and they’d set out bowls and bowls of food.

  “We waiting on the men?”

  “How come?” the bandanna woman said. “They wait on us?”

  Everbody laughed.

  “Let us pray,” Grandma Sweet said, and we all bowed our heads. She thanked our heavenly father for sending Jesus to die on the cross and get raised up after three days by God’s grace. “Hallelujah,” Mama said. Grandma Sweet thanked God for the food we was about to eat by His grace, too, and we all said amen.

  Everbody took a breath and helped themself to the food. Mama filled me a plate, and we set around on chairs and tree stumps and eat. The women kept on talking. Mama bragged on me making my first pie crust in a teacup. I didn’t know why she bragged on it since it was a mess and I’d like to cried over it, it fell into so many pieces. Mama bragged on me ever little bit, on how handy I was around the house, and though I warmed to the praise, it always made me break out in a sweat. I never liked people looking at me. But it did feel good knowing I was able to do something that pleased Mama.