Chapter 7

One day about a month after Mama died, with fall coming, me and the girls was sorting through school clothes when little James come running in all out of breath. “Slow down,” I said. “You’re like to—”

“Come quick! John’s a-hangin’ from the tree!”

“What?” Opal cried, but me, I was out the door and running fast as I could to where James was pointing to—where the road met our place, next to the bent cottonwood. Halfway there I seen John hanging in the tree by the neck. I screamed fit to die. Dacia and Opal, behind me, they started up screaming, too.

When I got there, I throwed myself at John and started pushing him up by the legs. “Dacia! Help me! Opal! Run to Alta Bea’s house! Get somebody! Fast as you can!”

I looked up and seen John’s eyes was closed, and without a thought I started in praying. “Lord, save this boy! Save this boy! Dacia, grab his feet!”

Me and Dacia, we neither one was quite tall enough just to raise him up and hold him free of the rope, so we inched him up the tree trunk. We got him up high as we could, with our hands on the very bottoms of his feet. It felt like his neck was free a little bit, but we neither of us could see good enough to tell for sure.

“Bertie, Bertie, save me! Lord, save me!” come a high-pitched voice, and my heart about busted out of my chest.

John’s body started buckling, and Dacia let out a terrible scream.

“Hang on, don’t let him go!” I said to her. “We got him! Just hang on! Help’s coming! Opal’s getting help!”

Then I heard giggling. “Dacia!” I hollered. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Wasn’t me,” she said.

“What?”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait just a Goddamn minute.”

Now I heard more laughing, and I knowed that whinny. “Daddy?”

“ ‘Hang on, don’t let him go! Help’s a-comin’! ’” Daddy stepped out from behind the tree.

I choked back the curse words that come to me. Me and Dacia, we was still leaning there, holding John by his feet. I felt the bark digging into my arms.

Now Daddy started laughing his fool head off. I felt John laughing, too, at least I thought it was laughing, I felt it in his feet. James, I heard him back behind us sniffling.

Daddy laughed a good long time. Several times he started to say something and then laughed so hard he couldn’t get the words out.

Dacia, she let go of John and pulled back. I felt him slip a little bit and held myself where I was. I felt a moan go through him. I smelled where he had wet his pants.

Finally, Daddy grabbed aholt of a fruit crate hid in the grass, and he leaned it up against the tree. When he stepped up onto it, it wobbled. I thought he might fall—I halfway hoped he would—but he steadied it, pulled the knife out of his pocket, and cut the rope. John come down on top of me, and we both skinned up our knees and elbows in the loose sand.

I got John on his back and knelt next to him. I lifted up his shirt and seen that the rope was tied around his chest, and there was some slack in it before it looped around his neck. There was a red rope burn from his underarms up his shoulders where his weight had pulled on him. His eyes was big with fright, and he was crying. James, he was standing there bawling, too. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine how Daddy’d painted them boys a picture of how funny this trick would be. But if they ever did think it was funny, which I doubt, they didn’t no more.

Daddy was laughing so hard he like to lost his breath. Tears was on his face.

“What happened? What happened?” Alta Bea’s mother come running up with Opal, and one of the hired men followed, carrying a hay fork. Her and Opal was out of breath, and the hired man looked pale and shooken.

I petted John’s face. I seen the heels of my hands was skinned and bleeding, with bits of sand buried in them, and now I felt it.

Daddy leaned over and closed one nostril with his finger and blowed snot onto the ground. “You!” He pointed at me. “You should see your face!”

I got to my feet, speechless with wrath.

“What happened here?” Alta Bea’s mother said. “Is everyone—”

Now Daddy left off laughing and bent over coughing for a while, finally letting go a glob of spit. He straightened up and wiped his face with his hand. “This ’n—this ’n—she ain’t never in her life knowed how to take a joke!”

“Daddy, he hung John for a joke,” Dacia said to Alta Bea’s mother, who got a bewildered look on her face.

Daddy looked down at the ground and shook his head. “Her mother, now, that one, she had a sense of humor.”

Shame, burning shame, swept over me, and fury. I run and grabbed the hay fork from the hired man and turned toward Daddy. He took a couple steps back, and I held up that hay fork like a spear and run at him, aiming it at his heart. Drunk as he was, he still managed to step aside, and it got him on the arm, leaving a long red gash. You could see the bone and the meat, and I was surprised how much blood. Daddy yowled and fell down, grabbing at his arm like it had a two-day tick on it. He kept on yowling.

“Die, you old fool! You Goddamn goat!” I hollered. “Die!” I screamed like a banshee, rageful.

The children hollered, Alta Bea’s mama hollered, and the hired man wrapped his neckerchief around Daddy’s arm.

Daddy started bellowing at me, and I bellowed back, and Alta Bea’s mother took aholt of me and drug me down the path into the house and pumped up a pitcher of water and had me to drink some, me and Dacia and Opal all three. Directly the twins come in, hanging their heads and bawling. Alta Bea’s mother wetted a towel and wrapped it around John’s chest. Dacia, she told her the whole story of what happened, and then she told it again. When she started to tell it a third time I told her to hush, and she give me a hateful look and went into the bedroom.

Grateful as I was for our neighbor’s help, I suffered wave after wave of shame. Not for stabbing Daddy—I despised him, and I felt like I could never in this life forgive him—but for how bad things had gotten for the children who Mama had give me charge of. I knowed I had fell short of my duty to them. I was relieved when Alta Bea’s mother left the house, which I never would have imagined I would feel. I was glad, too, that Alta Bea wasn’t home and never seen what happened, though I imagine she heard plenty about it.

The hired man, he took Daddy into town and got him sewed up. Fifty-two stitches, I heard. One thing I knowed—I couldn’t leave them children with their own daddy. No telling what kind of fool drunken thing he might do.

* * *

We didn’t see Daddy around the place for four-five days. When he come back, he had William and Buck with him, sent for from Kansas. Out the front window I seen them walking up to the house, and I went out on the front porch. I stood there with my arms folded. Daddy stopped a ways from the porch and said he was sorry, it was the drink made him do it, he was still grieving Mama, he knowed better, he wasn’t going to drink no more. He never looked me in the eye.

“There’s work needs done around this place,” I said. “You mean to do any of it?”

“You got a mouth on you. I’ll thank you to remember who—”

Buck stepped in front of Daddy. “He said he ain’t going to drink no more. All’s he can do, Bertie.”

William, he just frowned.

“Me and William, we’ll be staying home for a while,” Buck said. “We talked it through. Daddy can sleep out in the barn with us. We’ll keep an eye on him.”

I looked at William, but his eyes was cast down.

“He gives you any trouble, he answers to us,” Buck said.

“William?” I said.

He nodded, still looking down.

“He gives me any trouble, he better hope he don’t answer to me,” I said.

Daddy, he squinted in my direction and snorted like a bull, but he didn’t say no more.

“You hear me?” I said.

The look he give me was pure bile, and I give it right back. Couldn’t help it, seemed like.