All the Forgivenesses Read online

  While we eat, the sun come out, like it will sometimes in the fall, and the air warmed up. Some of them took off their sweaters and set around fanning themself, and some of them spread out a quilt and laid down. Their heads dropped back and their mouths fell open. Pretty soon my flat-headed cousin Frank come along carrying a stick with a rag tied to it. He took up a place and stood over three of the sleeping women and waved the stick back and forth, I reckon to keep the flies off. I remembered, then, that I’d saw him do that before. Frank, if you once showed him how to do something and got him started, why, he would keep doing it till you told him not to no more.

  It got quiet.

  Mama, she laid down on a quilt and dropped off. Now I myself never liked taking a nap, but after I watched Frank waving the stick for a while, I laid down next to Mama and fell asleep, too.

  Next thing I knowed, why, Daddy, William, Buck, and the other men come tromping into the yard. Men and boys makes a racket just by walking along, seems like. Must be the things they carry—guns, knives, traps, chains, tack—not to mention the buckles on their boots and the noises bubbling up from their gullet.

  They’d got a mess of rabbit and three pheasant, and Daddy had a gunny sack half-full of squirrel.

  “Jesus wept!” he bellowed to Mama. She was setting on the quilt holding Dacia, fluffing the baby’s hair with her fingers.

  “Ain’t you got nothing to do?” Daddy said. “Smother me some squirrel!” He loved him some squirrel gravy.

  William and Buck and the men swarmed to the table like locusts and started eating the leftover food right out of the bowls.

  Mama give me Dacia to hold, and then her and two of the women dumped out the scald water and rolled the oil drum out of their road. Then they built up the fire again and started in cleaning and cooking the game. The chill had came back, and they had on their shawls and sweaters.

  “I need to go to the backhouse,” I said to Mama.

  She never said nothing, only reached down and took the baby from me and balanced her on her hip.

  I went to the backhouse and relieved myself. Then I wandered into the house to check on Timmy, but he wasn’t laying there no more.

  “Where you at, Timmy?” I hollered. “Daddy and them’s back, and Mama’s making smothered squirrel!” Grandma and Grandpa’s house was bigger than ours, four rooms, but it didn’t take long to search through it. Timmy wasn’t nowhere.

  I went outside and started looking for him. Timmy was like to hide from me. He’d watch me from his hiding place, and whenever I got close he’d start to giggling. Then when I found him, he’d take to laughing like I’d happened on him just by luck.

  Now I looked through his favorite hiding places. I searched the grove to the west of the house, and then I looked out back of the barn, behind the backhouse, underneath of the outcropping by the big mossy rock, calling his name.

  I was standing at the edge of the backwoods when Daddy come walking toward me, his shoulders bobbing up and down like they always done from his bad knee.

  “What the Sam Hill you doing up here, girl? Didn’t you hear us calling you in?” He reached where I was at, and he bent down and give me a hard swat on the behind.

  I blinked back tears. “I can’t find Timmy.”

  “Can’t find him? He hiding?”

  “How would I know?” If I hadn’t’ve been so sidetracked I never would’ve mouthed off like that.

  Daddy raised his hand and slapped me in the face. Hardly nothing I hated worse than getting slapped.

  He took aholt of me by the elbows. “My squirrel’s getting cold.”

  “I went—I looked—”

  He give me a hard stare, his eyes big and wild. I smelled liquor on him, which I most always did. He squeezed my arms.

  “We was playing hide-and-go-seek, Daddy. I don’t know where he’s at.” That lie just tumbled out of my mouth.

  Daddy swore, grabbed me up, and carried me back to the house. The ragged skin on his hands scratched my underarms.

  Wasn’t long before everbody started up looking for Timmy. The dogs bayed and tore around the yard like dogs does. They give them the scent, and the dogs loped off, and people followed them. I remember my older brothers’ faces stiff with fright.

  Directly Mama give me Dacia and had me to go in the house and set there with an older girl cousin of mine. I laid Dacia on a blanket on the floor and set near to the stove and bawled, shivering. Dacia, she stared at me for a while and then took up whimpering, and I had to swallow back my tears and keep her company. Otherwise she was like to start howling.

  Sometime after dark, Mama come and got us, and we walked the three mile home. When I seen our house coming up, with its familiar hewed wood siding and corrugated tin roof, I sunk down to my knees. Mama, she kept going, and after a little bit I rose and caught up with her. We never eat that night except Dacia.

  Seems like I never slept that night for praying. I asked the Lord to lead the men to where Timmy was at, shivering in the cold but living still. I prayed they would find him alive for Mama’s sake, and I promised I’d never take my eyes off of him again. But the praying never done me no good. I felt myself drug down into a dark place, and seemed like my eyes never closed all night long. I knowed whatever happened to Timmy, it was my fault, and nobody realized it but me. There wasn’t no getting around it.

  I got it in my mind that if Timmy died, Daddy would shoot me. I hoped he would sneak up on me and shoot me in the back of the head so I wouldn’t see it coming. Maybe I dreamed that.

  The next morning I was looking out the front window and seen Daddy and my older brothers walking up to the house. Aunt JoyAnn was with them. Mama had me to wait in her and Daddy’s room while she went out and talked to them. I heard her wailing, and I knowed Timmy was dead.

  Pretty soon Mama and Daddy come in. They stood there side by side.

  “We found him a ways downstream on the Tenmile,” Daddy said. His voice went high-pitched. He cleared his throat. “He was wedged in some rocks, is why we never found him till daylight.”

  My throat twanged from holding back tears. I looked at my hands and waited for the judgment of the Lord to come down upon me. I deserved it.

  “The Lord called Timmy home, and he’ll be up there in Heaven, waiting for us, when we get there,” Mama said. “He’s happy in the Lord.” There was red all around her eyes.

  “But I want him back,” I blurted out.

  Daddy blowed out his breath. “You think we don’t? Wantin’ ain’t gettin’. Time you learned.”

  About that time I heard Buck sobbing in the front room, and then the sound of it changed, like somebody had pulled him to their chest. William, I heard him clear his throat two or three times.

  “Tell me what happened,” Mama said to me.

  My tears dried up. “Well.” I took a breath and then another. “Maybe he hid, and after while he looked around and didn’t see me, and maybe he . . . felt like I wasn’t looking for him no more, so he took off by himself.” It was like I was speaking with the tongue of the Devil himself. I wondered if God was gathering up thunderbolts to rain down upon me.

  “He knowed better, he was told,” Mama said. “Don’t a one of you pay no attention.” I seen how her bottom lip was pointing off to the side on its own ever little bit. She never had that tic before.

  Now JoyAnn come in carrying Dacia. The baby’s cheeks was pink, and she was babbling. She looked for all the world like a painted doll. They don’t come no prettier than Dacia was, even I’ve got to admit that.

  “We got to go take care of him,” Mama said to me.

  For a tiny second my heart went wild, but then I realized she was talking about Timmy’s body, not him. I pictured his body stuck in the rocks, cold and wet. It wasn’t like I hadn’t saw little drowned animals before. Their skin is waxy, and their hair clings to it like thread.

  JoyAnn set with me and Dacia that day while Mama and them buried Timmy. They went ahead and put him out by the big mossy rock a
t Grandma and Grandpa’s, which they could since her and him owned their place. Afterward people talked about how big and brave my brothers was, helping dig the hole.

  Now me and JoyAnn, there wasn’t hardly a word spoke between us all day, seems like. I slept some in the afternoon. When I got up, I felt extra wakeful. JoyAnn had me to go feed and water the chickens and horses and gather the eggs, which I done. I felt like I was floating six inches off the ground and not really touching anything, like a ghost, though as I poured the grain into the feeders I noticed it give off its usual smell of old fruit, and the dust floated up. Blue, our dapple gray mare, she nickered and puffed out her nostrils and nuzzled my neck like she done, but it was like I was standing a ways off and watching it. I didn’t get no feeling out of it.

  When I come back inside, JoyAnn seen me and wiped her nose and patted the side chair for me to set down. “You don’t remember this, but you stayed with us for a while, you and Timothy, while your mother recovered from his birth,” she said. “You must’ve been about three.”

  I never said nothing.

  “I recollect how you’d drag him around like a doll, and you barely bigger than him.” She blowed her nose on her hankie. “You’d crawl up in the rocking chair, and your legs was so short, your feet hung over the edge. So you’d lean back hard as you could, back and forth, back and forth, singing to him.”

  Nobody said nothing for a while. Pretty soon she got up and made some supper. Then she put me and Dacia to bed—Dacia in her crib, and me in my pallet in the corner of the front room. Mama and Daddy and William and Buck, they wasn’t back yet.

  I must have fell asleep for a while. I dreamed Timmy himself sent an avenging angel after me, roaring like a bear. I woke up, and I heard that angel up above me, and I made water a little in my drawers. But then I realized it was Daddy on the roof, drunk, talking and hollering to himself like he done. I imagined I could smell his slobber and throw-up through the tin. I wondered what was going to happen to us now. Our family was ruined, seemed like, without Timmy there where he belonged. Me, I didn’t belong there no more neither. With what I done, I didn’t belong nowhere. God nor Jesus wouldn’t want me in their heart now, seemed like.

  I laid there for a long time. I tried to pray, but my teeth chattered to the point where I couldn’t. I cried for a while, quiet as I could, till my lips felt dried out. I ached all over. I had a painful buzz in my mouth that wouldn’t go away.

  I needed Mama. I needed to tell her I’d lied to her and Daddy both. I wasn’t watching Timmy like I was supposed to, and it was my fault he was dead. I went over it in my mind, how I would say it, how I would beg forgiveness and ask Mama to pray with me and get me right with the Lord like she knowed how. I reckoned everbody would hate me. I knowed I would be punished in some terrible way. But I deserved it. And besides, it would be better than feeling like I never belonged nowhere.

  Finally, I rose up and tiptoed into Mama and Daddy’s room. By the moonlight from the window I seen Mama laying there, facing the wall.

  I didn’t hear Daddy up on the roof no more. I don’t know if he’d passed out or if the thunder in my ears was too loud for me to hear him.

  “Mama,” I whispered.

  She turned over quick, and I was surprised to see she had a half smile on her face. But soon’s she seen me, she pursed her lips. “What are you doing up? Get back to bed.”

  I opened my mouth, but no words come out.

  “Stop your bawling now,” she said, though I wasn’t. “Ain’t no tears in Heaven, you know that. Timothy’s asleep in Jesus.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Lord don’t want to see you crying, hear me? Ain’t your place to tell God Amighty what to do.”

  I tried to get started. “I never thought Timmy would die.” That word die had a thickness to it that stuck in my throat.

  “Ever living thing dies,” she said. “It’s the curse of sin. The wages of sin is death.”

  This took all the breath out of me.

  “I’m tired, you hear? Go back to bed.” Now her shoulders squirmed like she was being tickled, and I seen a light come on in her eyes. Then I heard giggling, and I knowed Dacia was in the bed with her, curled up behind her, and that was how come Mama’d been half smiling before. She give a little sigh and turned over, and you could see her body loosen under the quilt. The thought of her making over Dacia at that moment was like sand in my teeth.

  I walked back into the front room and dropped onto my pallet. After while I started smelling my water on my underdrawers, and I knowed I couldn’t abide it through the night till morning. I got up and made me a bowl of soap and water, and I took my time rinsing them out and blotting them with a dishrag. I hung them up on the back of the chair. I didn’t have no clean ones, so I laid back down with nothing on underneath of my nightshirt. I hadn’t never slept that way before, and it felt amiss in some way I couldn’t fathom. That alone would have kept me up the rest of the night, even if I didn’t have nothing else haunting me like I done. After while, I put my drawers back on, damp. It made me cold all over, but there wasn’t nothing to do but stand it.

  Chapter 2

  Off and on Daddy was a horse trader, and whenever he went on a trip to buy and sell horses, he took my big brothers William and Buck with him. About the time I turned nine year old, why, I started in asking him could I go—Buck was only seven when he’d started going—but Daddy said it wasn’t nothing a girl could do that was useful to him. I’d filled my mind up with notions of what-all went on, and I hated missing out on it.

  But Mama, she said it was bound to be rough, and besides I was needed at home. She’d had Opal by then, who she named after a dead sister of Memaw’s. I don’t imagine Mama knowed what a real opal was. If she did, she never said nothing about it to me.

  One morning early I stood out on the porch and watched Daddy and them get ready to set out. My brothers was bareback on Blue, and I remember Buck was yawning so hard I heard his jaw click. They had four or five horses by a rope.

  You could tell them two boys was brothers, bony-shouldered and dark-haired, but William, he had squinty eyes like a coyote and always looked mad no matter what. Buck was more like Daddy, a storyteller and jokester, and him and Daddy was close. The boys was always in my life of course, but seems like they was like to be off somewheres with Daddy and not in the house very much, which naturally was where my days was spent and my heart and head was, with Mama and the little ones. It was like, there was Daddy and my brothers in their world, and then there was us in ours. So my brothers was almost like neighbors, as far as feelings. You’d think about them when they wasn’t around, but you didn’t miss them but once in a while. I growed up with it, so I never thought it was strange. We knowed plenty of people lived like that.

  I often wondered, if Timmy had lived, would Daddy have tried to take him away from us like that, too? I pictured him older and me standing up to Daddy, keeping myself between the two of them, so Timmy wouldn’t end up like William, with narrow eyes. Ever year on Timmy’s birthday I told myself how old he would be and pictured him bigger. The rest of them went to visit his grave, but I didn’t. Couldn’t nobody make me.

  That morning with the horses, didn’t neither William nor Buck say nothing, nor Daddy. Daddy curried Sparky down, raising dust from his back, and then he saddled him up and mounted. It pained me to watch Daddy and them ride off without me along. Wasn’t nothing I didn’t love about horses, especially their sweet, dusty smell.

  “Bertie, where you at?” Mama called from inside the house. “Stop fooling around out there, and get yourself in here and help me out.”

  I wiped my eyes and went inside.

  Mama was setting at the table with Dacia on her lap, unwinding the rags tied in her hair. Dacia’s head swayed back and forth, and she smiled like she was in a rapture. You never seen a prettier girl, little as she was.

  I walked over to the washbowl and took up doing the breakfast dishes. Behind me Mama started singing.


  Soft as the voice of an angel, breathing a lesson unheard,

  Hope, with a gentle persuasion, whispers her comforting word.

  Now Dacia took it up, though she garbled the words. I myself started singing, but Mama hushed me. “I’m trying to teach her, and besides you can’t carry a tune.” I glanced at them, and I seen Mama was running her fingers along Dacia’s scalp, zigzag, to release the curls. Dacia arched her back like a cat, her eyes closed.

  “Soft as the voice of an angel,” Mama sung, and Dacia sung—more like said—“Soff a boyce angel,” like a three-year-old will. Mama sung it again, and Dacia sung it wrong again, and Mama sung it again. It was quiet in the house, and my head still plagued with the night cobwebs, and it was like the two of them was whispering.

  Mama said to her, “I’d sure like to see an angel in person, wouldn’t you?”

  “Angel.”

  “I had me one once,” Mama said. I knowed who she meant, and it gutted me.

  “Me too,” Dacia said.

  “Bertie,” Mama said. “Go get me a jar of grape jelly—this ’n’s moldy.”

  I wiped my hands and went outdoors to the root cellar dug in the side of the house. The rock steps was crumbly, and the cellar was cool and dry, smelling like old clay. I heard, or thought I heard, Mama and Dacia singing and laughing upstairs. I found the jelly right off, but I stayed down there for a while. I knowed other hymns—“Up From the Grave He Arose,” “Rock of Ages,” “Work for the Night Is Coming,” lots of them—but not a one I liked as well as “Whispering Hope.” I sung the whole song to myself, all three verses and all three refrains. I pictured Mama in the house, impatient.

  When I got back, Mama was saying to Dacia, “Like the angels themself.” Mama said to me, “Where you been all this time?”