CHAPTER 21
Feeling faint, Flannery dropped her head and reached out an arm. Hollis rushed over and grabbed it. Carefully, she straightened with his help, unsure of her footing.
“I better see you home right now,” Hollis said, his face rinsing of color.
“No,” she said, struggling to pull herself out of the haze. “I can see myself home—”
“Don’t worry. I’ll have my deputy drive your car out to Jean’s tonight. I’ll follow him and make sure he gets it back safe to you.”
Reluctantly, Flannery handed him her keys.
They drove in silence back through the Palisades. Flannery stared out at a whir of passing mountain rock and scraggly trees.
After a bit, Hollis said, “That bullet could’ve come from anywhere, you know? We don’t want to alarm folks. We have to stick to what we told back then. For our families’ sake.”
Flannery shook her head. “We need to tell them what you know. Should’ve told them everything back then on prom night. Everything.”
Hollis tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Flannery, think how it would crush our families, your mama hearing about your sister’s . . . well, your sister’s indecency like that.”
“It’s indecent not to tell,” she huffed.
“Not to tell everyone what? That we’re burying the town tramp?”
“How dare you.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Flannery. To drag up old hard feelings like that. I’d have to tell everything. I’ve got a wife and kids to think about. A good, decent job here.”
“This isn’t about your decency. You have to tell now. Someone was shot, and someone else did the shooting.”
“It’s likely Danny did it playing around.”
“We can’t be sure someone didn’t aim to hurt them. You don’t get shot in the arm playing around. I think someone did this.”
“Can’t think of a soul who would wanna hurt those two.”
“I didn’t see him toting a gun that night. Only you. Where did he get the gun to play around with, Hollis? Huh?”
“Dammit, Flannery! He had himself an old .22. Shit, you know my family.” He cut a worried eye to her. “Us Henry boys have always had guns. We grew up carrying guns around with our teddy bears before most babes can suck a month off their pacifiers.” Hollis shifted uncomfortably in his seat, glanced out the car window.
“You’re the sheriff. You need to go right back there and tell about prom night. About the fight. About the drinking. You—”
“Quit harping on me, dammit!” Hollis stuck up a hot hand and banged it on the steering wheel, making Flannery sink back into the seat.
“You need to listen to me on this one, peaches,” he snapped, slamming his fist down on the dash twice, “and shut your big flap. Shut it.”
Instinctively, Flannery raised a hand to shield her face, shrinking back against the door.
Her ex-husband behaving like that and worse, countless times, surfaced like a striking rattler. It didn’t matter that she had long since left him. It didn’t take much to rise the fear. She had struggled mightily to shed that history. But no matter how much she tried, something as harmless as the unexpected slam of the door from a burst of wind or a dropped dish or the pop of a bottle cap brought it screaming back, the terror, the overriding fear of what would come next. It’d been many years, but it felt as raw as yesterday.
“H-Hollis,” she tried to breathe.
“Shut up about old history,” Hollis ordered with a final thump to the dash. “That’s nothing but school-yard shit, and ain’t half of it true.”
* * *
The summer of ’52 came and lingered in Glass Ferry with no word of the missing teens, and nary a peep from Patsy.
Flannery longed for any sense of normalcy, for school even, looking forward to September. She and Mama barely slept, keeping at least one ear cocked for the telephone to ring, a window to open, or a door to shut. Hoping.
During the day, Mama kept the curtains drawn tight. She wouldn’t let any of her canasta-club ladies come visit, telling Flannery to send them away when they tried. Keeping her teen daughter inside, refusing to let her walk to town or see anyone herself.
If Flannery argued to go out, Mama would cry, scaring Flannery into silence. When the twins’ birthday rolled around, Mama surprised Flannery and pulled back the drapes. Then Mama baked Patsy a strawberry cake, the first one.
Flannery had been so relieved to see Mama up and moving, lit up like that, she’d passed on Mama’s offer to make a birthday pie for her own celebration.
Mama was sure the birthday cake would summon Patsy home. And soon the house was festive with their chatter. “Go bring up my music,” Mama said, sending Flannery down to the cellar for the old records she’d stored after Honey Bee’s death.
Flannery scampered downstairs. She remembered how scared Patsy was of the dark cellar. How her sister would cry if she had to go down there alone. How Honey Bee’d used busted tombstones for the cellar floor because concrete was so expensive. He’d collected and hosed off the crumbly gravestones to “keep you from carrying the dirt upstairs to Mama’s nice rugs.”
Honey Bee and Uncle Mary had gone over to Pleasant Hill to see the folks called the Shakers. The religious group sold pieces of spent and busted tombstones, the ones that were old and broken, erecting new ones for their dearly departeds. Honey Bee covered the entire cellar floor with the Shaker gravestones.
But in order to turn on the light down here, you had to stand on Polly Meachum’s headstone, the pitted slab rugged under the dangling bulb at the bottom of the stairs.
Patsy’d claimed her legs pricked with a rash, darn near buckled, every time she yanked on the light chain. That the young girl, Polly, was reaching up to snatch her away to the dead. Patsy mused Polly’d surely died of boredom, same as the rest of those boring deceased folk in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, after Honey Bee had come home talking about the ways of the peculiar folks.
Honey Bee and Uncle Mary told Mama that the Shakers didn’t believe in getting hitched. They thought God was both a man and a woman, so all folks were made the same as Him. “All of us are brothers and sisters,” the Shakers proclaimed to Honey Bee and Uncle Mary that day, and they’d insisted it would be a sin to marry your relations like that. Have babies with your kin.
Honey Bee’d said the Shakers were simple folks, smart farmers, but for all their religion, and it was indeed mighty, they sure knew how to put a fever in their feet and kick up a heel or two.
“Saw ’em grab the Hallelujah in their bones and shimmy like the devil with its tail caught under Heaven’s porch rocker,” Uncle Mary’d said. “Shakers they be.”
At the bottom of the cellar steps, Flannery reached a hand down and scratched furiously at her itching leg, snagging her nylons. Sighing, she yanked on the light, eager to get Mama’s records. She thought about the Shakers’ simple life, and how Patsy liked to make fun of them.
Flannery knew her sister didn’t want simple, didn’t want to be a farm wife, Patsy wanted a smart businessman, tall, red dance heels, fun friends, and a fancy Sears Modern home in a pretty place that didn’t stink of bourbon. Flannery worried that Patsy might never come home.
“Flannery,” Mama called from the top of the steps, “don’t forget Jelly Roll Morton.”
“Found it,” Flannery said, spotting it atop the stack of albums on the shelf. Honey Bee had picked up a lot of records in his business travels downriver.
Happy for Mama’s changed mood, Flannery toted the records up from the cellar for the birthday celebration and plopped them on Honey Bee’s old cellarette in the parlor. She cranked up the Victor record player in there and put on all of Mama’s favorite music. Spun Cab Calloway tunes for her, played Joe Turner’s “Low Down Dirty Shame Blues,” and watched Mama light her itchy soles with some fancy footwork when Slim Gaillard’s “Palm Springs Jump” swept through the room.
It was the very best birthday present Flannery could’ve had, seeing her Mama living and the life lit in her feet like that. The first of many of the false celebrations.
And a week later when the cake still sat on the counter, Patsy’s sixteen white-striped candles cemented in the pink icing, Mama’s mood changed, the curtains were drawn again, and Flannery pleaded with Mama to call the doctor. “Mama, I heard the doctor can fix all kinds of ailments, and he has medicine—”
“Will his pills bring Patsy home?” Mama said, saddened, tamping the discussion.
Sylvia Jenkin came over three times that summer and probably snooped a lot more that Flannery didn’t know about. Twice with her husband, Davey. Mama looked at Flannery and pulled her into the dark hall, tapping a hushing finger to her mouth as the neighbors knocked on the front door. In a moment, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkin went back to the kitchen door.
Flannery poked her head around the corner. Slinking up to the windows, the Jenkins cupped their hands to the glass, peering inside.
Mr. and Mrs. Jenkin were troublesome neighbors, “busybodies,” Mama and Honey Bee told the girls long ago. Meddlesome folks who worried and wormed their way into other people’s affairs, pretending to be helpful. Until no one was looking. Always doling out advice with a Bible in one hand and a gun-cocked finger in another, the Jenkins had a need to feel almighty.
Childless, the Jenkins would yell at the twins if they wandered onto their property, chase Flannery and Patsy off, or scold Mama if the girls’ laughter carried too high a pitch. Once the neighbors sent a note to the girls’ teacher, complaining about their tomboyish ways after they’d climbed the chinaberry tree down the road.
Honey Bee was sure the difficult neighbors had poisoned his beloved cattle dog after the old pooch dug a hole in their flower bed to escape the heat on a summer day.
“There’s a name for those kind of folks,” Honey Bee’d said, “a name good folks don’t say but they all know, and it comes from the most disgraceful part of a foul person.”
Then Honey Bee would mutter under his breath, “Liddle dirty diddle-dicks,” until Mama had to shush him, run him out of the room with a snapping dish towel she always had stuck in her apron pocket, taking halfhearted licks to his tucked hip and head.
With Patsy gone, Mama wandered the old house endlessly like a ghost looking for its haunt, calling the bones of their dwelling awake with her restless pacing throughout the nights, her breaths of despair filling wall-to-wall, rinsing the corners and crevices with her tears.
Flannery knew the house itself was miserable. It shifted differently, popped and screeched, wriggling its bones from the weight of all that sadness. Flannery begged Mama to have the ladies over so the two of them could bake cookies and forget about Patsy, just for a while. Asked to go to town so she could see some kids from school since they lived too far out for classmates to come calling.
“Come on, Mama. A little company. Please,” Flannery whittled. “Or, let’s dress up in those pretty little circle dresses you made last fall. Put on our gloves and go to town. We can take a ride to Lexington and see the window dressings downtown. Maybe a trip to Joyland—”
“I’m too tired, Flannery.” Mama brushed the thoughts aside. “And it’s stingy to think of yourself when your sister could be in trouble out there.”
Flannery hadn’t been to Joyland since Honey Bee’d passed. She thought of holding Honey Bee’s strong, leathery hands, strolling amongst the booths, seeing the rides and all the happy folks with the smells of summer lit in cotton candy, hot dogs, onions, and sweaty excitement.
He’d taken the whole family many times, mostly on the last day of the season when the park would give away a shiny new automobile to one lucky visitor.
Patsy and Flannery had ridden the carousel with the big, sparkling gold and blue horses. Flannery loved the carousel. On the hottest days, the horse and saddle felt cool on her skin. And always later the girls would dare each other to ride the big wooden Wildcat roller coaster.
They’d go off together on the Pretzel canal ride favored by the older kids, eagerly climbing inside the metal cart that promised a mysterious trip into a cool, dark tunnel. In the channel they were spooked by the sudden and loud, creaky noises, panicked by loudly clanging cymbals, and unnerved by the film of thin, creepy hanging threads, until the cart glided around the last bend for an abrupt but terrifying glimpse of a wooden cutout of a bucking billy goat. Flannery always had to beg Patsy to ride it with her. She just couldn’t do it alone even though Patsy was sure to suffer nightmares for a week or more after.
Nothing changed over the years, but going to Joyland always seemed like her very first visit. And nothing beat the pool either. During the summers the twins had taken some free swimming lessons offered by the park. Though Flannery had learned to swim in the river, it was still a blast to dip into the big Joyland pool whose signs boasted that swimming in it was like “swimming in drinking water.”
At night, Joyland brought in famous singers like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman to their dance hall. For a fifty-cent admission adults could have themselves a big shindig.
One summer, a townswoman, widow Nester Parrish, joined the Butler family at the park. After a full day packed with swimming and rides, Mama and Honey Bee went dancing that night inside the Joy Club, leaving the twins in Nester’s care.
Flannery and Patsy got to see the amusement park all lit up, and when Nester wasn’t looking, the girls peeked inside the dance hall and saw Count Basie playing to a packed dance floor full of twisting, hopping, jitterbugging adults.
The girls had caught the fever too, all riled up, shimmying and dancing together under the twinkling Ferris wheel lights, giggling and singing until Nester threatened to turn the little heathens over her lap and whoop them a good one.
Thinking about the old days like that made Flannery press Mama again.
“Mama, come on, let’s go back to Joyland. Please,” Flannery said, digging in harder. “It’s too sad waiting around like this. Joyland’s a short drive. A fun day away. Summer is nearly gone. It’ll be fun, and if Patsy comes home—”
“Flannery Bee.” Mama warned the discussion was wearing her.
“We could have your ladies over and chat some?” Flannery pushed harder. “Please, Mama. I’ll make some Benedictine sandwiches and mix the punch for your card game. You can fix your deviled eggs, and oh, some of your orange pound cake would be nice. Please.”
Mama wouldn’t budge and dug deeper into her despair.
It nearly drove Flannery crazy, and at times she was sure she’d done went and caught it. Sometimes Flannery slipped outside and ran down to the barn. Inside, Flannery would kick and cry her pent-up howls, soak the worm-worn rafters and dirt floor with her helplessness, cursing Patsy for the nightmare she’d left Mama and Flannery to live with.
“Patsy,” she’d cry, “how could you do this to us, how could you? Damn you! Damn you to Hell for leaving me. Come home now!”
And in a while Flannery would plead and beg God, “Bring her home, Lord, bring Patsy back to us. Keep her safe and lead her home.”
Then splintering her pleas, Flannery’d bargain. “I promise to be the best sister. Promise to take care of her and treat her like the queenie she is if You’ll only just return her to us. Just please, please give me back my sister, and I’ll never be jealous or angry with her or You again. Please, God, please.”
One day, Mrs. Henry stopped by. Flannery rushed out to the porch to greet the sheriff’s wife before Mama could snatch her daughter back inside. It didn’t look like Mrs. Henry was faring any better than Mama. Or herself. She had a dish in her unsteady hands. “I brought you and Jean some of my chicken corn casserole.”
“Mama’s resting,” Flannery told her, dying to know if she had any news.
Mrs. Henry handed Flannery the dish and pushed back the flowery scarf covering her head, letting it hang off her shoulders.
Flannery could tell Danny’s mama had been “resting” too. The worry over her missing son had kept her confined to the house, left her with dark bags under her eyes. Mrs. Henry stood there balling up the side of her pretty, blue-blossomed dress. She looked frailer than the last time Flannery had seen her at Spanks Grocery a few weeks before.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Flannery said. “Uh, is there any word about my sister? Danny?”
Mrs. Henry shook her head. “No, I thought I could ask the same?”
“No, ma’am. Nothing.”
“Flannery, I’ve been thinking. Is there anything Patsy might’ve said that night about leaving Glass Ferry? Hinted where she might’ve gone?”
The question struck a nerve. Flannery and Hollis hadn’t rehearsed that one. It made lots of sense for Patsy to have hinted, to have packed something if she and Danny had planned to run away. It’d be best to take the easy way out. “I don’t recall Patsy saying anything about leaving, ma’am.”
“Are you sure they didn’t mention where they were headed to?” Mrs. Henry looked at Flannery, her soft brown eyes desperate. “Anybody say—”
“Nuh-uh. I . . . Uh, no, ma’am.” Flannery felt the lie bloom on her cheeks. “I’ve been here, helping Mama.”
“Have ya heard anything? Any kids talking? Anything? A letter from her?”
For a second, Flannery wanted to tell. Tell Mrs. Henry everything she and Hollis hadn’t. “Nothing, like I told Sheriff. Maybe Hollis knows some of Danny’s friends who might know more?”
“Hollis has left for the university. He hasn’t called much. His father is still looking for the missing automobile—and no one’s seen it.”
For the first time ever, Flannery thought about leaving too, thought about going to school in the city. Getting herself a higher education to snag one of those fine secretarial jobs like the ones the teachers raved about. Leave this old town. Maybe go to work at the Stagg distillery downriver. Flannery’d heard the talk, how the company was getting bigger, and liked hiring educated folks and smart females for their secretaries. Who knew, maybe she could open a liquor store and saloon, get herself a bartending license like Abraham Lincoln had done over in Illinois. After all, if a president could do that, it surely was a smart thing to do.
“We haven’t heard a word, Mrs. Henry. Sorry, ma’am.”
Mrs. Henry grimaced. “How is Jean?”
Flannery looked over her shoulder to the door. The sheriff’s wife grabbed hold of Flannery’s hesitation. “Maybe I’ll send the doctor out,” Mrs. Henry said. “I’m sure he’d like to see how she’s doing. Might have some tonic for her ailings.”
“Yes, ma’am, that’d be real nice. Mama’s been a little peaked. Well, I . . . I better get this food inside and check on her.” Flannery patted the casserole lid. “Smells real good. Thank you. We’ll return the dish soon.”
The doctor came by, but he didn’t seem concerned with Mama’s withering state. He told Flannery the rest would do her good, then left pills to help with her female nerves too. The doc peered over his thick glasses, studied Flannery, and said, “If yours act up some, you can take half a pill with your meals, same as her. Mighty fine for the female hysterics.” Then he wrote the instructions on the bottle and left.
Many times Flannery fell asleep on Patsy’s bed, hoping she would awaken to find her sister across from her. That Patsy would again be able to raise a fuss, telling her to get her lazy bones into her own bed. And Flannery would yell back at her twin for leaving, but then they’d make up, and everyone, especially Mama, would be happy.
Each morning Flannery awoke to silence, rousing to a startled hopelessness, her heart knocking her fully awake, her thin gown soaked in panicked sweat. Hollow, she’d beat the pillow and mattress with her fist, damning Patsy for abandoning her, screaming inside herself for her sister to come home. When Flannery wore out her bruising knuckles, she grabbed her baton out of the closet.
One morning in late August, Flannery stood breathless over the bed, slamming the short metal rod against the feather pillow, again and again, tearing the ticking, whacking until she couldn’t lift the baton another inch. Couldn’t drag another ugly fit across those silent sheets one more day.
She watched the feathers sail into the charged air for a good while, fearing she’d gone mad. Flannery thought about her sister crying in school for her when they were young. Clung to the one thing she could always count on Patsy for. Clawed to keep it. If she could hold on to that till Patsy came home, it would keep the insanity away.
Who would care for Mama if they toted Flannery away, locked her in an asylum like the one way out off State Road 80? Mama was already as good as there in her folly; Flannery knew folks were speculating, talking. How else would Mrs. Henry know to send the doctor around if they weren’t?
Flannery tried to fill her mind with sensible, calm things to keep her sanity, but soon it would all slip and she’d push her angry face into the pillow, or bark wretched sobs into a pile of bed linens, fearing Mama or anyone else would see she had caught the madness.
School started in September, and Flannery was more than ready to escape the house and Mama. Excited to push through her senior year, yet scared she would be doing it without her twin.
She had not done a single thing alone, Flannery realized, and with that thought her stomach grew queasy, and she had to run to the bathroom.
Flannery had barely slept the night before her first day back, up several times emptying her nervous stomach. She dreamed Patsy had come dragging in. Same ol’ Patsy, but in a new pink dress, all darling and dazzling, wearing her pearls and carrying schoolbooks. And Mama’d never said a word. Not one in her dream. Just sent Patsy off to school with a big piece of strawberry cake. The dream roused Flannery from her sleep, and it had felt so real she jumped up and checked the drawer where she’d stashed the pearls.
But it was only that, a dream. Flannery walked alone on the first day of school.
A carload of boys slowed just enough to toss out a jar and a curse. “Bootlegging floozy.”
“If you’re gonna drink ’shine, Luke Spears, at least make it better than that nasty cat piss your daddy sells,” Flannery yelled at them, booting the empty Mason jar of hooch out of her way.
Spears stuck his arm out of the window and raised his middle finger.
Flannery and Patsy were used to the kids’ teasing about moonshine, getting railed upon despite Honey Bee’s good reputation, his business license, and the hills being full of bad bootleggers like the Spearses. It wasn’t a big deal except to the kids whose parents had found other jobs, who thought they were better off finding a different trade that might make them richer: mechanic, shop owner, preacher, or such.
Most everybody in Glass Ferry had kin who were, or who had been in the whiskey business. It was a way of life here, food on the table, a roof over heads, a means of survival. And it had been that way for her parents in the ’20s and ’30s and their parents and those ancestors who’d started before them with the old, squatty turnip-pot stills.
Mama’d enjoyed the money from it until Honey Bee got sick and before the sheriff began taking more food from their table with his higher protection fees. The taxes.
Even Violet Perry’s preacher daddy was the son of a moonshiner, but he’d snuck and bought the best spirits off Honey Bee instead of from his kinfolk.
Some kids had lost relatives who’d been killed in moonshining raids. And more than a few teachers had husbands working at the legal distilleries downriver, and even more kin lighting illegal stills tucked way up in the hills—with one family going so far as to dig a room-sized cavern into the grounds of their family cemetery, then covering it with borrowed tombstones to hide their operation down there from the government agents.
“There’s a lot worse things a man could become in this dark, bloody Kentucky land,” Honey Bee’d said. “Kentucky without its whiskey men, its stills, would be like New York City without business suits and buildings.”
But everyone knew being a floozy—a mother having a baby out of wedlock—was the very worst a girl could become around here.
Flannery wished she had fixed the flat tire on her bicycle before school started. She picked up her pace and hurried down the road.
“Heard tell Patsy ran way.” The kids in the school lot pushed and poked for answers. “Heard she ran off to marry Danny,” they whispered. “Heard why, too.” They looked over their shoulders for teachers, snuck hands to their bellies and poked them and then one another for amusement.
Violet Perry perched on the rail leading into the school building. She wore a tight new sweater she’d pinched her falsies into despite the hot September day. Her friend Bess leaned in beside her. Violet pointed her finger and said under her breath, but loud enough for Flannery to hear, “Imagine we won’t be seeing Patsy again until that bread in the oven is good an’ done.”
Bess smirked. “Maybe a tad longer. Loaves from two bakers might need to bake extra long.”
“Don’t you know it,” another girl squeezed in and smarted. “What with two bakers there’s no telling how many are in that twin’s oven.”
“Humph, twins, have you ever?” someone else squeaked. “My mama said it ain’t natural for a woman to have a litter like that. Them’s circus freaks.”
“Dumb bootleggers,” Violet muttered.
“Like your kin,” Flannery said low.
Violet glared.
“She’ll come back a’toting,” the girls pecked. “Toting a double stack of diapers.”
“Ew,” one girl said. “My daddy hadn’t never seen twins ’fore the Butlers and says it’s bad luck for folks and only fit for beasts to birth more than one at a time.”
Flannery hated how they were the only twins around, the only ones that folks from around here had ever seen, despite Mama insisting it was doubly good.
“My girls have what others don’t,” Mama had told them.
“An extra life inside them, another branch, reaching, sheltering the other, like God’s angels protecting this old earth when He’s busy. Look after each other, girls.” She’d hugged and reminded them when they worried about their peculiarity.
Flannery and Patsy’d been relieved last winter when they heard about a set of boys born two counties over on New Year’s Day. “1952’s newest babies are, of all things, twins!” the radio announced.
Flannery growled at the girls’ bad-mouthing Patsy like that and pushed past them, biting down on her tongue.
“Flannery Butler,” the girls called after her, “where’s Patsy Baker?” Their laughter trailed.
Inside, Flannery headed to her classroom. A few girls from baton practice huddled together in the hall. They shot Flannery nervous smiles, but never called her over.
Wendell Black spotted her and raised a shy hand. Flannery stopped and tossed one back. For a second it looked like he might come over and talk to her. Then her freshman teacher, Mrs. Goebal, called, motioning Flannery to her side. “You look lost. Looks like you lost your other half, Miss Butler. Did Patsy join the circus with that clown Danny?” She chortled low with another teacher locked beside her in a classroom doorway.
The gossip punched to the bone. At that, Flannery drew back her shoulders, screwed her face, and lit a look that meant to do a’cuttin’. Slipped the teacher the meanest eye she could muster for trashing her sister’s good name.
Mrs. Goebal dropped her jaw and pressed a hand to her chest. “Well, I never,” she exclaimed, patting. “Heathens.” She snatched Flannery’s sleeve. “I should paddle you.”
But something in the hardness trapped in Flannery’s eyes made the woman release her.
When Flannery got home from school that afternoon, she found Mama on the porch, upset, clutching something wrapped in cloth.
“What is it?” Flannery said warily, grabbing the wooden porch rail. “What you got in there, Mama?” She lumbered up the steps with her schoolbooks and set them on the rail.
“Those awful kids,” Mama said. “They came speeding down the drive, and one of them jumped out and threw this on the porch. I was resting, but I came running when I heard them whooping it up out here. I saw the two Scott boys and the Franklin girl in that old green pickup of the Scotts.”
“Bess Franklin,” Flannery said.
“Yes, that’s her. Violet Perry’s friend. See what they left? Look, Flannery. Look . . .” Mama worked up a wail and shoved the lumpy package in her daughter’s face.
Flannery peeled back a dirty blanket and saw the small baby dolls, their bald, rubber heads marked in thick, tomato-red paint that read PATSY’S BASTARDS.