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