Anyhow, yesterday we sat watching our program and, all of a sudden, there’s this haze over the set like the angel hair we used to trail across our mantelpiece at Christmas. The set blows up. Then comes the vilest wire stink you ever did smell. One old lady—real old—she cried, thinking that the entire group of all them children had burned up. Some folks get more superstitious as they age. Woman had once been a schoolteacher, and now she was back to thinking that actors were tiny and lived, blow-dried and wife-swapping, in that box year round. Today, riding her chair, same lady wheeled in here holding a tin can in her lap. She’d come collecting to have the set fixed. The Home just shelled out forty dollars for repairs. Our director said we’d have to go without for a while. But the frail teacher collecting dimes, she is just dying to know about two divorces, one murder, and who Debby’s daddy really is. I told her I didn’t have not a cent to chip in, though my heart was in the right place. She looked mighty let down. So I reached into my bedside table, wrote on a scrap of paper: “I, Lucy Marsden, offer my total support to this here effort at repair.” I slipped that in her tin can. Well, it cheered her right up. She saw herself to be Miss Joan of Arc out gathering ransom for them pretty young folks locked in, waiting to see daylight and troubles again.
That’s one thing about getting on up in years. The Lord giveth and sometimes the Lord, in taking you away, He handeth back a bit. One woman down the hall died last week, nothing new. Room Twenty-six. But, just before, I rolled in to set with her. She was like me—the last survivor of a long line but ended up alone as if she’d been the one and only all along. I double-parked beside her bed, got hold of her nearest hand. Our nursing staff is real overworked and Jerome was probably off doing some set-and-dry-and-dye job down the hall.
Those of us still clear-thinking (more or less—I have my days), we sometimes try and help out where we might. Keeps you from getting stir-crazy and thinking that the daytime shows are the onliest things left spinning in the world beyond our parking lot. Well, my patient started talking out of her head somewhat, talking about planting a three-row bed of zinnias. But when I woke from a little unplanned catnap, she was laying there looking right square at me, concerned, like she was my nurse. Handsome woman, always very particular in her clothes, didn’t look a day over seventy-five and she was, like me, gnawing towards her first century’s end.
“You know, Lucille,” she recognized me and everything. Sounded just as reasonable as Woodrow Wilson in his steel-rimmed prime, says, “I thought it’d hurt. I mean, yes, certainly it’s quite a shock to the system, ending—but there’s not the kind of pain I’d been dreading since around, say, sixty-eight. It eases you as it slides out from under the person, like a favor your body pays you at the end. I worked as a waitress at the Virginia Beach one summer as a girl. They’d leave your tip under their plate when the meal was done. You’d think: Here’s just another stranger’s dirty dish—no reward for all my smiling help—but sometimes something was hid under there for you. The suspense was seeing how much you’d got.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said, clutching her old paw in mine. “It’s some mercy, anyways.”
But then she was right slam back to being six, bullying me (like I was her long-suffering black mammy) to go fetch that child’s red watering can from off the window ledge. Plain, she saw it there. I made to roll over for it, humoring her. Well, she pulled on my armrest. “Now wasn’t that foolish of me?” she laughed, but, too, it was the slow heaving’s starting up. You learn to know the sound of it. I soon had to go call Jerome and our head nurse.
Still, I figure the more exits a body is in on, the clearer you see: You do have some control over how you slide out. People manage it in their own peculiar style, you know? Me, I used to think it was some dark chute you fell down. You’d be standing in line to buy some cheese, Death dropped over you, conked you blind. Into that you’d slide: blackness and a jaw as big as the state capitol.
Now I see—it’s in you all along. It ain’t no net that falls from up on high. It’s there—like a gift for music, this appetite long hid, waiting. (It just happens to be your final knack, is all, and it’s one talent that—right democratic—don’t nobody escape.) Comforting to see how it’s tucked inside our marrow from babyhood forwards. No way can you stop its happening. Thing is, it’s still personal. So when old Death rears up—you can control and shape it some, it being you.
To Lucy here, that feels a blessing. See, I’m learning: Cradle to crypt, we get to stay who we are.
Only fair, really … we die in character.
9
MOMMA, seeing me mope upstairs, called, “Well, who stabbed you?” I made sure the bathroom door was locked, I struggled free of clothes, slid into hot hot water. Before Shirley, I never sat in a tub with anybody else. But now, whenever I climbed in alone, this much porcelain looked huge as a tooth-colored mausoleum. Plus, clear water (unlike juice) made a magnifying lens the size of a oval tabletop. I hated how much of you you saw aquariumed under there—still you, but now all sprigged and changing, swollen some. I propped the bath brush at my tub’s far end. I pretended that the brush was human. “Hi,” I said.
“Sister?” Momma stood calling from the hall, jiggling the lock. “Are you crying? or sniffling with a cold? You’re crying.” I refused to tell what was wrong. She hurried downstairs, made a quick social call downhill, dashed back here. She’d never before visited Shirl’s cottage. I imagined her queenly taps (three only) at the planked door. I felt ashamed of Mom, of us. We’d been rich in all the wrong ways. I had forever played poor, and Shirl, ashamed of being poor, acted semi-wealthy. We had never been straight with each other. Maybe we should’ve both played Poppa or both Momma or switched more regular?
My full-time momma kept retesting the doorknob. She knew something but wanted to hear my own reason for crying. I finally hollered, “I ain’t crying!” Well, then she really roared like I’d never heard a person do. I slid underwater for cover. She kept hurling one shoulder against door. Screamed I was a wicked wicked child to go on using that dreadful word—and after Ain’t had just cost me my one and only friend on earth.
“How, can, you, still, say, it, child, how?” She struck my door hard, risked ruining her pianist’s hands. She staggered to a hall table, grappled with something and chucked it (the huge pink vase she’d never cared for) down our stairwell. The sound—across marble foyer—scattered purest terror. In water, I lay whimpering as Momma cried: “Ain’t is the dagger you have driven through your mother’s heart. In our town, as of right now, you are truly dead, child. Even the horse renter’s daughter has dropped you cold. You have nobody now. Satisfied? You are not yet thirteen. A corpse cannot make her debut. Socially, Lucille, you’re a little … blue little dead girl.—My life is over.”
I was in water, shaking. Water was so cool now. “Monster,” she was kicking busted crockery off the stairs. Doc Collier was called. He stuffed her with many a pill, ordered her to lay flat prone in a dark room till strength came back. I worried she might use returned strength to throttle me. Poppa, sullen-acting now, hid me from her all Saturday and Sunday. He acted hurt, treated me like I’d purposely left Shirl, not vice-a-versa. Saturday night, I looked out my bedroom window, saw more things dropping, heard breakage chime our brick walk. From upstairs, Momma was throwing forth all bedclothes. She’d tossed two mantel pug dogs. In smithereens: matching Stratfordshire cockatoos she’d owned since she was six. I laid under covers listening: Pop tried talking loud but nice, then loud, then slapped her. Next a stillness dropped with only me awake right in the middle of it, me the cause of everything. I felt like a tooth so rotten it prays to be yanked clear of where it hatched and stayed and spoiled, a thing so brown and bad it longs to be thrown away forever. On the city dump. Maybe, for good measure, burned. Yeah. Burned, too. (I want to be cremated. Pretty soon too, child. I probably said that.)
Sunday on the porch—with her tucked in bed upstairs—he acted like his lady wife was dead, like Momma was a form
of Shirley—too perfect and so, lost to us. “I told you about my greatest day of all? In Bear Grass, was walking to shoot pool, carrying a cue I’d whittled from aged hickory. I’d sewed a little broadcloth sack, riveted on a suitcase handle to give it the official look. Hiking along train tracks, thinking nothing. The 2:04 that never stops in Bear Grass seemed to slow down on my left.
“Its blamed whistle was sure blasting when I hear a splinter and a sound like forty gallons of water, a huge balloon breaking over the cowcatcher. That was the horse, hit. Woods stood off to my right and I catch a rustling amongst the highest limbs, Runt Funny. Then I seen a thin trailing cloth fall into sedge grass. We’d had rain the night before and so our ground was soft, a mercy. I took the falling thing for maybe some eagle swooping off its tree-limb perch. I go over. It’s a very pretty young lady face-up, eyes closed, her wearing a cape. Cape was lined with white silk, it rested open all beneath her like wings fanning out. Her bodice had been tore but not so much as to look cheap. A little blood was on her but that was scattered too—artistic-like. Up ahead, the locomotive grinds still, great scuttling and sudden shouts. I didn’t rightly connect all that to what I’d found here. Not right then. I dropped my pool cue, I fell onto my knees beside it. (I didn’t yet consider it a human but some bird or angel fallen from on high.) I mashed my ear to her/its chest, a beating, good. ‘Sammy, you appear to be in such luck, boy,’ I told myself while pulling her cape as a kind of sled into deeper woods. Then—after dabbing at her face with spring water—I toted her on home, she weighed next to nothing in those days, child. I hid my pool cue to go back for.
“Them at the train, picking up the pieces of her cousin, noted how half the horse was on one side of the track, half on the other. They believed that she must be scattered, too, a mushy goner. People who’d watched the foolish buggy chase from the train’s smoking car, they told our sheriff, ‘A girl was with the unlucky gent, handsome girl—pity, really.’ We had her three days all to ourselves before she come to. Ma and Pa acted impressed I’d found her. I was always lucky about finding things, but never a whole girl! I used to set near her pallet, watch her sleep. One day she opened her eyes. Someway I knew she’d know me if ever she woke. She seemed to, too. She looked around like thinking that our plain cabin was some stage set or a joke. ‘Am I alive? This is Heaven, is it not?’
“I nodded to my angel from the treetops or the sky. ‘Heaven. Yes’m. Whatever.’
“Finally I went to town and told the sheriff, ‘Look, I found somebody.’ Her rich folks had offered a reward. I didn’t know. I didn’t know who-all they were, though her silk-lined cape proved something. Soon as I confessed to the sheriff, I regretted it, child. When he asked me for her hair color and all, I shook my head No, not yet. Couldn’t surrender that, not yet. I would only repeat what I’d said to him so far, ‘I found somebody. I found me somebody.’”
Poppa now reached over, touched my shoulder. “After all that poor Bianca’s lived through—that accident when she was a wee girl, plus the train mess—this latest thing is small potatoes, Runt Funny. She’ll do fine. High-strung is all.”
“Yes, sir,” said I, and held on to his hand.
10
THEN for me it was Monday (oh, how I dreaded school). I saw her. Waiting for the bell, already huddled with that fancy bunch, she wore white. The Baptist preacher’s girl stood near Emily Saiterwaite, the Episcopal one’s. They’d decided to share her. Both were touching the back of Shirl’s new hairdo. They gossiped with each other, not her. How could my Shirley let them poke at her like that? Hair all ringed and crimped on top made Shirl (alive under this pie and crown) look older. It showed off her fine stem neck—she already appeared way richer, better, nearbout up to princess, but cooled off, too. They’d plucked all drab cloth flowers from her, they’d pared her of lackluster lace. I missed the pretty junk. You won’t be surprised to know: Tackiness has always interested me. I’d forgot that Shirl was so much taller than me. A person had to look up to her.
When I shuffled past their group, the Mayor’s daughter laughed, “Shh. Here comes you know what.” Hurrying, I let myself give Shirl a look. It won’t a mean look nor was there a mess of forgiveness in it, just a look. I knew she wouldn’t tell a soul what-all had really happened. We couldn’t tell, no words of ours (town talk or farm language) covered that.
I made my walk seem cocksure and boyish as I could. I crooked thumbs under my skirt’s waistband, jammed my chin out. Shirl gave back half of one ill nod—her mouth, the basis of a smile that never formed. She looked like their prisoner but, I saw, she’d picked her jail.—She’d always been a bit too easy to boss. In the privacy of our tree, she forever agreed to play Wife, a role (like Indian for massacring) nobody chooses first but somebody’s got to undertake. Maybe it served me right, losing my friend to others’ orders? But oh how fast those scuzzball hoity-toilets had got their claws into my pale blood sister!
They all now turned from me. Two caught Shirl’s white puff sleeves. Snorting, they spun her clear of my smarting face. Shirl’s lifted hair showed off, at her neck’s nap, two shy silvery fluffs—not long enough to reach up, join the plaiting. Out these wavered, looking so sad and sweet there, surprised by daylight after years spent under curls’ humid awning.
Even from the back I still admired her.
POPPA sulked all over the house. He stood thirty minutes in our dark pantry. He helped Momma to her piano, where she sat playing back issues of Prelude of the Month—her music precise then forgetful. Pop looked off the porch and out at envying farmers, envying them. Felt like our place had been quarantined because of me and my foul mouth. Pop blamed hisself, his swampy history. He missed Shirl’s coming over, grinning at Mr. Card’s stupidest stunts. When he called her “Shirley Goodness and Mercy, follow me all the days of my life,” I knew that he half meant the invitation. Whenever Shirl told me she flat liked the way my daddy looked, I’d report right back to him. He beamed, “Surely not. Shirley said that about this gooney-bird face?” and he’d rush upstairs, shave, come down in plaid suspenders, yanking on them, walking bowlegged, asking, “How’m I doing?”
Now he fell into the porch swing, not even moving. I wanted to tell him not to fault old Ain’t. Maybe he should blame a skunk, a handy sponge, a weird itch. Blame how two girls got squirted by a unexpected animal. Blame how, though vegetable juice was strong enough to squelch the stink, it couldn’t stop girls’ noticing each other, couldn’t stop their feeling so warm towards one another—from clinging like the honest little animals that they were. Blame how vegetable cannot cancel animal. Only Animal can cancel Animal.
All language starts as Farm Language.
I tried lightening things by telling jokes. “Thanks kindly,” he says after a set of my level bests. “But, Runt Funny, I’ve heard those ones.” Of a sudden, I understood: All my jokes were his. I’d never considered it before. But he’d never squashed me before by pointing this out. It was, I saw, adulthood setting in.
AROUND then, he started squinting at me, he’d take a pinch of my calico dress between two fingers, testing it: “Your momma can do better’n this.” Poppa would hoist my braids and—like Momma—pull them to a lump atop my head. He grinned disappointment, shook his head sideways, dabbed my nose with my pigtails like repainting me. “Poor weegie, you got more freckles than your speckledy old man.”
Poppa’d never complained about my non-prettiness before. He always said my being the perfect Runt Funny was what kept me snug on the porch with him. I thought (because of this) my face was someway lucky. But now I caught him studying my ankles, my hands—Pop’s eyes (nobody’s fools) working like the appraiser folks hire to come in, tag the furniture of somebody that’s died.
Poppa commenced wearing nicer clothes on weekdays. Something about this weighed on me, like he was trying to look nice so I wouldn’t be bothered. He showed a sudden interest in our yard, strolling out there in a white shirt to clip the box hedge, smiling half-toadying to all nice folks that passed
on foot. Farmers he still cut dead.
Poppa had always kept close track of the social scene that never let him in it. That season there was a full-tilt scandal: The plumpish daughter of the peanut-mill owner got engaged to a strapping Italian scissor-sharpening drifter who’d been working around her poppa’s house. The fellow was handsome but (word had it) couldn’t read a lick. Folks let out as how, when the bride-to-be’s heartsick mother asked the dark boy for his wedding invitation list, he coughed up two names: a circus barker from Providence and his own parole officer out of Newport News. Poppa said he was shocked, flat shocked that such a family had fallen to such bad luck. Pop claimed the boy should be horsewhipped and the girl must either get sent to Europe on a slow boat (to get over the romance) or else have her trust fund punished. Momma and me sat still during Pop’s high-falutin speeches. We didn’t mention how these selfsame charges had been aimed at Momma’s own marriage choice. “And if you,” he turned to me one day, “ever did that to this household, if you put a boll-weevil blotch on our fine name …” “What?” I asked, not caring. “You’d do what to me, you redheaded hicky clodkicker?”
I saw his face fold in on itself—double—like hands clapping—then smartly release. He turned aside. “That does it,” he whispered. “Boy, Runt Funny, that really does it for now. Cut me down, why don’t you?”