Cut It Deep

I went in with Daddy to see Doc Rice.

Doc said,

“Why’d you wait so long

to show someone those spots, Bayard?”

I scowled at Daddy.

He looked at the wall.

I think

he didn’t care much,

if he had some cancer

and took and died.

Figured he’d see Ma then,

he’d see my brother.

It’d be out of his hands.

He’d be out of the dust.

Now he’s going to wear bandages

where Doc cut the cancer out

the best he could.

And we have to wait

and hope Daddy didn’t

get help too late.

I ask Doc about my hands.

“What,” I say,

“can I do with them?”

Doc looks carefully at the mottled skin,

the stretched and striped and crackled skin.

“Quit picking at them,” he says.

“Rub some ointment in them before you go to bed,”

he says.

“And use them, Billie Jo,” he says.

“They’ll heal up fine if you just use them.”

Daddy sits on my bed

and I open the boxes,

the two boxes

that have been in my closet

for years now.

The dust is over everything,

but I blow it off,

and Daddy is so quiet

when he sees

some of the things

that’re still so strong of Ma,

and we end up keeping everything but a palmful

of broken doll dishes.

I thought once to go through these boxes with

Ma,

but Daddy is

sitting on the edge of my bed.

My mouth feels cottony.

I fix dinner

and Daddy tells me about

when he was a boy.

He says, “I wasn’t always sure

about the wheat,

about the land,

about life in the Panhandle.

I dreamed of running off too,

though I never did.

I didn’t have half your sauce, Billie Jo,” he says.

And it’s the first time I ever knew

there was so much to the two of us,

so much more than our red hair

and our long legs

and the way we rub our eyes
when we’re tired.

October 1935