Chapter 3

By the time we got to the new place it felt like we had traveled to the other side of the world. Missouri didn’t seem like there was hardly no woods. Seemed like knee-high grass growed everwhere, and prairie flowers. Our house was a tiny thing. If you pushed on the walls, you felt them give a little. One blessing, the water pump was on the back porch instead of out in the yard.

One day about a week after we got there, I was out in the yard killing three chickens for a lady name of Florence who lived in town. I’d been dressing chickens and game for people back home, and it wasn’t hard to find customers in Missouri. I’d just went door-to-door in town, asking. At first I just killed birds they’d boughten, but later on we built up our flock to where sometimes I sold them the chicken, too. Or either way, whichever they wanted.

That day I’d just set the first one’s head under the broomstick when I heard female voices coming, an older and a younger. From the road, there was a big bend and a long rise before you got to the house, and I heard them before I seen them. I pulled the chicken’s head off and tossed the carcass. It begun running around like they will.

Now I could make out what the older woman was saying. “Alta Bea, I want you to keep a civil tongue in your mouth.”

“Don’t I always?” the younger one said.

“They have a nine-year-old girl you could walk to school with”—I realized with a start she must mean me—“and for heaven’s sake, don’t act stuck-up.”

“Mother, I—”

“And don’t mention your father’s a banker unless they ask, and then say he works at the bank. Or works in town. But only if they ask.”

“I am not stuck-up,” Alta Bea said.

“There’s no shame in honest work,” her mother said. “God is no respecter of persons. Remember, there was a time when your father and I hardly had anything, too.”

“I know.”

I pulled off the second head and let go the carcass.

“We don’t have to be friends with them,” the mother said. “But I won’t have it said that I’m not neighborly.”

I watched them make the rise just as I was tossing the last carcass. I felt warm drops of blood on my ankles.

They walked up to me, and the mother gasped. “Well, forever more.” The girl, Alta Bea, stared at me with big eyes. She was a head and a half taller than me, and she had more hair than I ever seen on a human in my life, more than Dacia. This girl’s hair was almost black, and spilling out of its pins.

“Mama!” I hollered. “Company!”

I seen Alta Bea look down. I followed her eyes, and there was the broomstick on the ground and the three chicken heads lined up next to it.

The woman said, “Hello, I’m Mrs. Snedeker from across the road, and this is my daughter, Alta Bea. She’s twelve. What’s your name?”

“Mama!” I called again. I felt shy. It was Mama always met new people.

Alta Bea stared at a headless chicken laying on its side with its feet opening and closing like they does. “How’d you do that?” she said.

“I’ve brought a pie,” Mrs. Snedeker said. “Do you like green-apple pies? Some people think green apples will give you worms, but I always—”

Now Mama come to the door, drying her hands on her apron. “I’m a-doin’ some warsh,” she said to them. “I got a pot of coffee, want some?”

Alta Bea and her mother walked in, and Mama said to me, “Bertie, rench out a cup.” I heard Mama say “warsh” and “rench” because already I noticed how these strangers talked different.

“Bertie?” Alta Bea said. “Did you say ‘Bertie’?”

Now Dacia jumped up from the little bed in the corner. “Birdy!” she hollered.

“Mind you don’t wake up Opal,” Mama said.

“It ain’t Birdy, it’s Bertie,” I said to Dacia, “which you know good and well.” I shook the water off the coffee cup.

“Birdy Birdy Birdy,” Dacia said on purpose.

Mrs. Snedeker set the pie on the table, and Mama brushed off a chair with her apron and motioned for her to sit down. Alta Bea, she perched on the edge of the bed.

“My husband, Albert, why, he’s off trading horses,” Mama said. “He’s fixing to plant a crop when the time comes. Rye, I reckon, or wheat.”

“My daddy?” Dacia said, blinking, like she didn’t know that. Seemed like sometimes she wanted people to think she was younger than she really was. She liked people to make over her.

Mrs. Snedeker smiled. “My husband works in town.”

Mama said to me, “You better finish them chickens before the dogs get ’em.”

Alta Bea jumped to her feet. “I’ll help.”

Outside, I picked up two of the chicken carcasses and motioned for Alta Bea to go get the other’n. She walked over and looked down at it.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Ain’t you never dressed a chicken before?” Well, of course she hadn’t. “Just take it by the feet,” I told her. But when she touched it, she yanked her hand back.

“Won’t bite you,” I said.

“I know.” But when she picked it up, the toes curled around her fingers. I seen a shudder run through her, and she looked like she was like to gag, but she held fast to the carcass and followed me back inside.

Now Mama dunked each chicken one at a time in the pot. She used the feet like spoons to push it under the steaming water. Alta Bea’s mother was chattering, telling Mama how our house used to be a pump house, but Mr. Packebush, the landlord, he’d put on the front room and the porch after his wife died and he wanted tenants to farm this eighty acres. Things like that. Her voice sounded pinched, I reckoned from trying not to breathe in through her nose on account of the smell of blood, feathers, feet, innards, and dirt.

When the chickens was hot, me and Alta Bea carried them back outside, and I showed her how to pluck the feathers. You start with the pinfeathers. I pulled them out by the handful—they made a soft plock sound. Didn’t take but a minute.

I seen she was watching me. “Go on,” I said.

It looks easier than it is, I reckon. The feathers stuck to her fingers like hair, and the more she tried to grab aholt of them, the worse they stuck. “I can’t do this,” she said, sniffling.

“Here.” I took her chicken and finished the pinfeathers. Then I spread out a wing, took aholt of a long, stiff wingfeather, and yanked it out. “Here, while it’s still hot.”

She took aholt of her chicken and started in ripping.

“Don’t tear the skin,” I said. “It’s like to tear.” I wondered, could she really be twelve years old and so ignorant?

“How’d you get the name of Bertie?” she said.

“Short for Albertina,” I said. “He wouldn’t have no boy named after him, said it wasn’t nobody in this life that was, or ever would be, like to him.” Daddy’s very words. “But Albertina, that was a name he liked, though it seemed too fancy for the plain baby I was. So they named me Albertina and called me Bertie.”

“Oh.” She jerked on a feather.

“How many brothers and sisters have you got?” I said.

“Not any.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t.”

“Huh.” I watched her for a while. “Well, besides them two girls in the house, I’ve got two big brothers. They sleep in the barn mostly.”

“Oh.”

“Mama’s like to have another’n before you know it.”

She looked surprised. “She is?”

I could tell her chicken was cooling down. “Here,” I said, and I give her my two to hold while I tried to clean up the mess she’d made of hers. After while I looked up at her.

“Stop staring at my hair,” she said.

“I never seen so much hair on a human head.”

“My dad says I cost a fortune in hairpins.”

“You could braid it.”

She rolled her eyes. “Only little girls braid their hair.”

“My memaw braids hers ever day of her life.”

“‘Memaw’?”

“My grandma on Daddy’s side.”

“Well, maybe grown women braid their hair in Kentucky. Around here, it’s only little girls.”

I wondered how she knowed where we was from, but I reckoned her mama knowed everthing about the neighbors, like mine knowed everbody back home. “I seen a picture one time of a Chinaman had a braid halfway down his back,” I said.

“Well, you won’t find any Chinamen in Obsidian.”

We looked at each other and busted out laughing, the both of us. I felt a stab of pleasure.

Just then Mama stepped outside and called us in to have a bite of pie.

Soon’s we eat, Alta Bea and her mama left. I watched from the doorway as they walked down the rise. Just before they went out of sight, I seen Alta Bea smell her fingers. She looked at her mama, and when she seen nobody was looking, she put her hands close to her face and took in two deep breaths. It was a wonder. Her hands must’ve stunk of raw chicken.

“She sure is tall, ain’t she?” I said to Mama. “For twelve.”

“Who? Oh, her. Stuck-up.”

“She is?” I turned to look at her, and I seen her roll her eyes. Dacia was setting on Mama’s lap, acting sleepy, and Mama petted her hair.

“Her mama seemed nice,” I said.

“Can’t say I favor her pie crust.”

“Maybe Alta Bea and me, we could walk to school together.”

Mama sighed. “Come and get her, will you? My arms is played out.”

Dacia was dead weight, and I had to buck her up on my shoulder. She mewed like a kitten, but she never woken up.

“I know you like school,” Mama said, “but I’m going to need you home for a while.” She rubbed her one shoulder. She looked more tired than I ever seen her before.

“Oh, I know. Just sometimes.” In Mama and Daddy’s room I laid Dacia on the bed. I seen her eyelashes made a shadow on her face. She was sweaty, but she was still of the age where it smelled sweet. I pulled her hair back off of her neck.

Directly Mama come in the room and laid down with her, and I left them be. Mama, she slept half the day.

* * *

Wasn’t but a week later Alta Bea knocked on the door and asked could I come over and play, and Mama said yes, if I wasn’t gone too long.

Alta Bea’s house beat anything I ever seen. I couldn’t hardly keep track of the rooms: the front room, the setting room, which she called the parlor, and then a room in the back that was full of books plus two tables just for writing and three cushion chairs. There was a big room to eat in and a room for cooking, with a little alcove for washing clothes. They had a woman come in once a week.

Before I could blink, Alta Bea run up the stairs two at a time. A long hallway and doors into four bedrooms. The second on the right was hers.

I stopped in the doorway and just stared. Her room was the size of our front room. A bed big enough for two or three people, with a carved wooden headboard. A tall cabinet with two doors, and clothes spilling out. And books, my Lord! On the floor, on the bed, on the windowsill, all over.

“Come on in, silly,” she said.

Going in, I tripped on a pair of cast-iron shutters built into the floor—a heat register, Alta Bea told me. We got down on our knees, and she pushed a handle to open up the shutters. Through the grate you could see down into the setting room below.

“For heat,” Alta Bea said. “Heat rises, you know.”

I looked down through the grate. It was like looking at a picture in a frame.

Alta Bea said, “You can listen at night. I hear lots of things I’m not supposed to.” Her eyes was shining.

“Like what?” I said.

She laughed and slammed the grate shut. A puff of dust come up. “Come on.”

It surprised me she laughed and never answered my question, and it stung.

Alta Bea clomped downstairs and took me back into the room with the bookshelves. There was a box and two pair of scissors set out, and Alta Bea opened the box and pulled out the prettiest curly-headed paper dolls I ever seen, with lots of clothes, and all of them with tabs to fold over to hang them on with. I never knowed there was such a thing as boughten paper dolls. At home I had always cut mine out of the Sears catalog, and the clothes was different sizes from the bodies. I wondered if everbody in Missouri had such things, or just Alta Bea.

As we was cutting, she said, “What grade will you be in?”

“I don’t know. I was in the third last year back home, but I don’t know how they do it here.” I accidentally snipped the corner off of a dress, so I put a little spit on it and pressed the pieces back together.

“I’ll be in seventh,” she said. “I wish I would be in high school.”

Now me, I wasn’t in school but half the time, and my geography and arithmetic wasn’t very good. “Seventh,” I said. “That sounds hard.”

She made a puh sound with her lips. “School’s so easy, it’s pitiful. I’m reading college-level books at home. Dad quizzes me.”

“College?” I put down my scissors and stared at her. I’d heard talk of college, where teachers and doctors went to. I’d never heard of no girl going.

“I want to know everything,” she said. “I want to know how things work. One time, my father had this pocket watch, and I took it apart, and it had these wheels inside. Gears.” She took a piece of paper and drawed circles on it with a pencil. “So when you wind it, it tightens a spring, and then, as the spring lets go, it moves this wheel, and then the gears—see?”

I looked at the picture, and I seen what she meant.

“And see, this wheel is bigger, so it takes longer, so it’s like the hour hand? Then it gears down to the littler wheel, and it moves faster—the minute hand.” Sweat come out on her forehead, from excitement seemed like.

“Your daddy, did he tell you about the watch?” I said. “My daddy showed me how to throw a knife one time.”

She frowned. “When he found me with it, he gave me a spanking. The only one of my life.”

“Oh.” One whipping. She must be awful good. Mama would admire that.

Directly Alta Bea asked me what was my favorite subject in school.

“Reading. I like to read the Bible.”

“Look at these shoes,” she said. “Aren’t they darling?”

I didn’t answer. I had heard the word darling before, but I couldn’t figure out how it connected to them paper doll shoes.

She give a strange laugh. “Really, I’m too old to play paper dolls. I don’t want to play this anymore.” She reached over and grabbed my doll, and she it tore in two. She throwed pieces willy-nilly into the box and shoved it across the table. Scraps fell on the floor.

I didn’t know what to think. She said she was too old to play with paper dolls, but to me she was acting like a child. I reached over and put the lid on the box.

“Mother!” she hollered. “Mother!”

It was like her mother’d been standing out in the hall waiting—there she was.

“We’re tired of paper dolls,” Alta Bea said to her. “There’s nothing to do.”

“Would you like to look through my button box?”

Alta Bea rolled her eyes.

“I would,” I said.

Her mother smiled. “I’ll get it.”

You never seen the like of them buttons—bone, ivory, wood, shell, stone, all kinds, all colors, carved into ever sort of a thing you can imagine. There was ever animal, flower, feather, and jewel in the world, and even some made-up things. I spread my fingers and buried both hands up to my wrists. Them buttons was cool to the touch, like natural things is.

Alta Bea, she reached over and took the box and dumped the buttons all out on the floor. She laughed, and then I laughed. I loved the clicking sound they made, and I loved what they looked like spreading out, like coins. We set down on the rug side by side and started fingering them and putting them in piles. It was the most contented I’d felt since I got there.

“My mother has a button box,” I said, “but nothing like this. I never—”

“How old is she?” Alta Bea said. “Mine’s fifty. She was thirty-eight before she had me.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t never thought of mothers having any particular age.

“I was a surprise,” Alta Bea said. This sounded like something she heard through the heat register. I wondered what it meant.

She asked me what was it like to live in such a big family. That near stumped me. What was it like? How would I know that, not knowing no different? I told her about shelling beans and scraping carrots, tending the fire, doing up the linens, looking after Dacia and Opal, and such things as that.

“When do you read?” she said.

I just looked at her. I never understood what she meant.

“I mean, what do you do for fun?” She laid out black buttons in a big circle on the floor, moving them in and out, back and forth. She kept staring at them and fiddling with them. But she never missed a word, seemed like.

“Me and Mama, we like to visit when we work, or sing.”

“What do you talk about?”

What did me and Mama talk about? The weather? The garden? The animals? The house? The children? Daddy? When Mama talked, it all seemed so much like her, I didn’t hardly pay no mind. It was just her. And Dacia alongside, chattering like a magpie, and me hardly getting a word in edgewise.

“Mama, her pies is awful good,” I said. “She peels the apples in one long string.” I pictured her bending over the flour sack, dipping out the flour with her hand. I never seen her use a cup. She just seemed to know how much flour to put in. “If she don’t have lard, she uses butter,” I said, “but she favors the lard.”

Alta Bea asked me about my brothers William and Buck, what was they like, and I told her how things was. “They almost sound like hired hands,” she said.

“They earn their keep.”

She cocked her head. “You, too, it sounds like.” She seemed satisfied, like she had reckoned something out.

I just set there. Surely she didn’t mean to be insulting, though it sounded like it. Just ignorant, I reckoned.

“How did your folks meet?” she said.

“Mama says, you know how some people just drift apart? Well, her and him just drifted together.” I smiled, remembering the time Mama’d said that.

Alta Bea stared at me. “What does that mean?”

That brought me up short. I pictured how things was back home, where people lived cheek by jowl in the hills, not in flat, laid-out squares like in Missouri, with roads. Back home, half the people you knowed was a relation, seemed like, and people spent a lot of time at other people’s houses. How could I make her understand? “You know. They—people just—they—”

“When I was a little girl, I used to squint my eyes and disappear. Did you ever do that?” She didn’t look at me.

“You what?”

“I would stretch out flat, like a piece of paper, and I would just slip underneath the wall, or a picture on the wall, or the paint.”

“Underneath?” I said.

“Oh, it’s handy. You can see people, but they can’t see you.”

I was tired of her making fun of me like I was ignorant. “Do it now. I want to see you disappear.”

She shrugged. “Don’t be silly.”

“You’re the one that said it. Go on.” I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t no fool.

She sighed. “Don’t be so serious all the time.”

“Sounds like witchcraft to me.”

Now she screamed laughing. “I was only pretending!” She slapped her hand on the rug.

“But you said—”

“I was only pretending to disappear, I mean. I knew I wasn’t really invisible.”

I thought about it. “How come you to do it, then?”

She leaned over close to my face and spoke like she was out of breath. “Don’t you ever just want to be invisible? When it feels like things are closing in on you? And people are looking at you like you’re crazy? Your lips feel like they’re about to crack open, they’re so dry? Just disappear? You know what I mean.”

I pulled back.

She let loose a big sigh. “I never know if it’s just me. I never know what people are thinking.”

I heard footsteps, and I started putting the buttons back in the box. I was getting the willies. I didn’t want to be with her no more, tell the truth.

Alta Bea leaned over and lifted my chin to look me in the eye. “Why is everything such a big Goddamn secret? Don’t they know, if they just told you what they want, you’d do it? Don’t they know that?”

“Who? Know what?”

“They don’t tell you, and then they get mad when you just—”

“Who?”

“People!”

I looked at her. “I don’t have no notion what you’re talking about.” How come she seemed so mad all the sudden?

“That’s what I mean!” She was hollering now. “The big Goddamn secret!”

Just then a man come walking into the room holding a newspaper, a white-haired man dressed in a suit but with his collar off. His face was scarlet red. You could see his scalp through his white hair, and it was a red shade of pink.

“What did I just hear you say?” he said, one word at a time. Cold.

“Dad,” Alta Bea said, quiet and breathless, like all her peculiar emotions of a minute ago had dissolved. I felt her knee tremble against mine.

Now her daddy blinked and looked at me. Evidently he hadn’t noticed I was there. He looked puzzled, like he couldn’t work out who I was.

“Dad,” Alta Bea said, “this is B—”

“What’s all this?” His eyes swept the paper scraps and buttons on the floor. He flung the newspaper around like he was swatting flies.

“I’m sorry,” Alta Bea said.

The look he give her was so withering I couldn’t stand it, and I dropped my eyes. He snorted air out of his nose and stomped out of the room without another word.

Alta Bea’s face was pale. “I didn’t realize how late it was,” she said to me. “He reads the paper in this room.” She reached out her hand and scooped up some buttons. But instead of putting them away, she dropped all but one, which she worried with her fingers.

I looked at her—slumped over, her stomach pooching out, her face crumpled. There wasn’t no tears, only a look of pain that felt like a burn. It come to me how the Bible talks about the poor in spirit, and I felt like I was looking right at one of them poors in spirit. My skin felt prickly.

Alta Bea said, “He doesn’t like things to be . . . unexpected,” and she shrugged like she didn’t reckon I would understand, any more than I understood her other odd notions.

I felt like I had to make up my mind all on my own, without Mama nor nobody there to talk to. So I done it. “My daddy, sometimes in the mornings I find him passed out on the porch.”

She was sitting cross-legged, and now she leaned her elbows on her knees and laid her face in her hands. “Is he sick?”

I shook my head. “Drunk.” I felt myself blush. Mama wouldn’t like me telling something so personal, and Daddy, he’d like to’ve blistered me if he’d knowed. It felt like Alta Bea was pulling things out of me.

“Oh, that.” She shrugged.

“He stinks,” I said in a low voice. “Sweet and sour, like day-old potato scrapings.”

She wrinkled her nose but didn’t look up, so I took a breath and said, “Well, one time, he . . .”

“What?” she said.

“Don’t tell nobody.”

Now she straightened up and looked at me. “I won’t.”

I scooted closer. “Daddy’s people believes in handling serpents. If you get bit by a poison snake, it won’t kill you. Mama’s, they don’t hold to that.”

“Oh.” Her eyes brightened.

“Daddy, he took me one time. When I was real little.”

“In Kentucky?”

“I never told nobody before.” I had goose bumps. Memories—no, not memories, feelings—come to me in a rush, flooding me. I hadn’t thought about that time with Daddy and the serpents since the day of the hog killing, the day Timmy died, when one of the women brought it up and I had a memory light on me like a moth, and Mama hushed me. Now I wondered—was I feeling those feelings again like when it happened, or had Daddy told me about it, and I was feeling my feelings about his story? Had Daddy told me about it? I couldn’t remember. All I knowed was, I felt full to overflowing with feelings that made me shiver inside and out.

“Tell me—go on.” She was staring at me like she could see through me. Like she could see my feelings.

I closed my eyes. “It wasn’t in church, it was in somebody’s house. I remember, my hair stuck to the ceiling. Daddy was holding me on his shoulders, and my hair, it rose up.” I opened my eyes. “You know, like your hair sticks to a penny balloon if you rub it.”

She nodded. “Static electricity.”

“Made my whole face itch.” I swallowed. “Anyhow, there was this man, light-colored hair, all greased up, rippling off his forehead like ladies’ hair. And he had this wooden box he kept the snakes in.” I was seeing all this in my mind like it was just now happening.

“What kind?”

“Not great big, just regular size. But poison.” Seeing the look on her face, I said, “I’m not lying.”

“Oh, I know.” She picked up some buttons and started making a circle of white ones inside the circle she’d made earlier of black ones. She acted like she was only half listening, but I could tell by the cord on her neck she was taking in ever word.

“He spread out his arms, and the snakes, they crawled up and down them, and one crawled around his neck.” I was trembling. It was like them snakes was on me.

She kept fishing out white buttons, adding to the circle. “You sure they weren’t just garter snakes?”

Well, that galled me, sure enough. The spell was broke, and the story was ashes in my mouth. I stood up and brushed paper scraps and buttons off of my skirt. “I don’t like you,” I blurted out.

“I don’t care.” She kept playing with the white buttons without dropping a one.

“You’re stuck-up.”

“I don’t care,” she said again.

“They was poison.” I wanted her to believe me, though I couldn’t have told you why.

She shifted so her feet was flat on the rug and her knees was bent and close together. She laid her forehead on her knees for a moment, and then she brought up her head and hammered her face against her knees, hard, four or five times. “I told you.”

It hurt to look at that. “Quit it.”

“People! People! People!” With each one, she again smacked her forehead on her knees.

“I said quit it.” I dropped back down on the floor and grabbed aholt of her arm.

Now she blinked and looked around. I let go her arm and scooted a ways away. We both set there, breathing hard.

After while she said, “I don’t know what makes me act this way.”

There was a red place on her forehead. I pictured her daddy’s red scalp. “Me neither.” I shivered.

She sighed and rubbed her forehead.

“I’ll help you clean up,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Well, I reckon I’ll go on home then.”

She never said nothing more, and she never got up. I found her mother and told her I had a nice time. Mama always had us to say that.

Walking home, I went through it all in my mind. I worried I had told Alta Bea things that might come back on me. I asked myself how come I was such a blabbermouth to her, somebody I hardly knowed. She was trouble, a blind man could see that. Seemed like I had invited trouble to walk right into my life. Something there in that house was off, like spoiled pork, and now I had let myself get drug into it.

For sure I hadn’t never met nobody like Alta Bea. I never knowed nobody that had that look in their eyes like she could see into you. It made a person tired and jangled, like somebody was shining an oil lamp in your eyes, but it also give you a feeling of glittering, fluttery things you couldn’t hardly not look at.