Chapter 21
In 1925 Daddy died, and Alta Bea, she went with me to Kentucky for the funeral. Sam was busy working, and Opal, she wouldn’t go. Said she didn’t hardly remember Daddy anyways, she was only a child when we broke up the family and moved to Kansas, and she was only a baby when we left Kentucky, and she didn’t know none of them people, and how come was we burying him in Kentucky anyhow, with Mama in Missouri. It was a shock for me to hear all this. The older ones and younger ones in a family, it’s like they have whole different lives.
I told her, Daddy bought that plot back home years ago, and maybe he was too cheap to take Mama home, but we was too stubborn to do like Daddy done. And I told her, you only got one daddy and he’s only going to die once, and you can’t go back and do it over again when you get older and understand why you have to go to your daddy’s funeral. And I said, what about the twins, and William and Dora and Buck? Didn’t she want to see them again?
She told me, I ain’t a child, stop preaching, and there wasn’t no more time to argue with her. The train come when it come, and you had to catch it or wait another three days.
Only when me and Alta Bea was on the train did I recollect Opal had been sick on the ride to Kansas as a child. I wondered how hard it must have stuck in her mind, that even now she wouldn’t complain about it but let me go on and on like I done, and her making up excuses. With Opal, if you wasn’t careful you could just forget she even existed.
* * *
Buck and William and Dora, they’d already rode with Daddy’s remains to Galena, and they met me and Alta Bea at the train when we got there. At first we all stood in the spitting snow and looked at each other, not being huggers. Then Dora broke away and come and throwed her arms around me and started dancing me around. The two of us started crying, and then she let go of me and everbody took a turn. Alta Bea, she stood off to the side. After William embraced me, he offered his hand to her, and she shook it and smiled. “You remember me,” she said, like she was surprised.
Then everbody was talking at once, smiling and crying. Something happens when you see your beloveds you last seen years ago, and you see the age on their face, but at the same time you also see them like you remember them. It’s like the years come and go on their face even as you’re standing there.
Buck, he took Daddy’s death hard. He never did get married, and him and Daddy’d lived together over the barbershop for nine years. It’s a mystery to me how Buck got along with Daddy like he done, and me and William never did. I will say, Buck was always sweet and patient like that. Opal takes after him, sure enough.
William and Dora had the twins with them, who of course I hadn’t saw since we moved to Kansas. They was fifteen now, and both just alike. William had them to look me in the eye, and I babbled on about taking care of them when they was little, but of course they just stood there red-faced and dropped their eyes to the ground like boys does. It was more like they was nephews or cousins than brothers, which I knowed would happen, which is how come I cried bitter tears when we moved. But they was good-looking boys, healthy and sound, and they done William and Dora proud. Them two also had four of their own, two boys and two girls. You could see the Winslows and the Sweets in them.
I’ll never forget that trip, and not just because we was burying Daddy. Seems like it was the first time in my life I had the feeling people was looking at me and saying to each other, “That’s her.” It turned out, I never knowed how notorious I was back home, nor what for.
* * *
Seeing Daddy in his coffin made me remember washing Mama. I recollected what she looked like, gray like he was now, and I thought about the sound of the water trickling into the bowl as I wrung out the cloth. The memory of it pierced me. But Daddy’s death never hit me like Mama’s. I thought, Well, like everbody else, he won’t suffer nor cause suffering no more.
It was a relief when they closed the lid and my brothers and a couple of cousins carried the coffin out of the church. We had the funeral in Mama’s church because most of Daddy’s people had scattered hither and yon, and the few that was left wouldn’t set foot in our church. Besides, they never had no church, they met in people’s houses.
“You ready?” I said to Alta Bea, and we headed to the basement for the funeral dinner. Halfway down I smelled pork and game and corn and greens and meringue. I was back home, sure enough. A girl again, six year old.
They had four long tables for people to set at, and two tables set end to end filled with food. Lines of people was moving along either side. People was talking, laughing, crying. They was putting their hands on either side of people’s faces, staring at them like they was looking at a picture.
A heavyset woman, about sixty, trotted up to us, her hands fluttering. “Albertina, Albertina!” she hollered. “Come set with me!”
I cocked my head to one side.
“I’m Ina, I’m a cousin of your mama, I’d know you anywhere, you look just like your folks, I remember you like it was yesterday, you won’t remember me, you was too little, but I remember you like it was yesterday, who’s this?” She didn’t talk fast like people in Kansas, but she did talk continuous.
“This here’s my friend Alta Bea,” I said.
Ina grabbed me like a prize and set me down in a folding chair. Then she started in naming our relations and enumerating where each one fit on Mama’s side. Behind Ina’s remarks I overheard a man’s voice. “I walk in the door, and she says, ‘If that’s a box of candy, you can just throw it in the trash.’ So I walked outside and throwed it in the trash.”
“Good thing the ground ain’t froze yet,” a second man said.
“Third funeral we been to this month. Hope Flora don’t catch a cold like last time.”
I turned back to Ina, who was talking about Daddy and us moving to Missouri, and I said, “Daddy decided to take his hand to farming, but—”
“Horsefeathers!” Ina said. “Albert Winslow never had no desire to be no farmer, nor wanted to leave here neither. It was your mama made him. Said, it’s a shame when relations only see each other at funerals.” She looked around. “Now, your mama, why, she thought the sun rose and set on you, and that’s the truth. Spoilt you rotten.”
“She did?” I wondered, did she have me confused with Dacia. I remembered Mama saying when I was a baby I was stiff, saying I was colicky and sour and looked plain like a Winslow.
“We’ve always thought Bertie was spoiled,” Alta Bea said, sarcastic. She must’ve snuck a drink already.
Ina pursed her lips. “Well, if you want to know, it had to do with the serpents. Your daddy’s kin was serpent handlers, but you know that.”
“They was?”
“That’s something our side don’t believe in, of course, never did. Now your mama said she didn’t care if he went to them meetings, but she nor any of her children would never go to no serpent preacher or poison drinker. They drink poison, too.” She squinted at Alta Bea like Alta Bea might be one of them heathens. “She made him promise on a solemn oath he wouldn’t expose none of the children to that,” Ina went on. “A child don’t know no better.”
“Amen,” Alta Bea said. I poked her in the side.
“Like I said,” Ina went on, “your mama give you any little thing your heart desired.” She laughed. “She used to tie your hair up in rags and made the prettiest ringlets.” Now I knowed she thought I was Dacia, but I never said nothing.
“Your daddy, I reckon he wanted to show you off, you was so pretty.” Ina looked around and leaned close. “Sure enough, one day he took you to a serpent meeting.”
She may have confused me with Dacia before, but now I knowed it was me she meant. “I was on his shoulders, I remember,” I said. “My hair rose up.”
“Static electricity,” Alta Bea said. When Ina’s eyes got big, she added, “She told me, when we were girls.”
Ina turned back to me. “Well, do you remember what happened? Do you recollect, one of them struck you?”
“What?” said me and Alta Bea together.
“I didn’t think so.” Ina’s chin trembled. “Well, your daddy, now he was drunk in the Lord, and he walked up there, and he grabbed your little knee and stuck your little foot out and waved it in front of them snakes.” She stuck out her hand, wiggling it, to show how Daddy done my leg.
“Drunk in the Lord?” Alta Bea said.
“But you ain’t heard the best part!” Ina cried. “When that snake struck you, Albertina, its fangs—I don’t know what kind it was, rattler, copperhead, cottonmouth, Clyde Oberle would know, he knows all the serpents—”
“It bit me?” I said.
“Well, that’s just it! The fangs went in between your toes! It sprayed its poison but never broke the skin!” She pulled up to her full sitting height. “And you never spoke a word, not one word. Never cried or nothing. Just set there in your daddy’s arms, a-lookin’ around at everbody like nothing happened, happy as a pig in slop.”
For a moment the hair on my arms stood up, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“Your daddy and them, they saw it as a sign,” Ina said. “There was rejoicing in the Lord, and they say a lot of people got saved from it.”
A shiver went up my spine. Me, anointed? Could that be? As a baby? And the Lord, him just waiting all this time for me to answer the call?
“I don’t know if their salvation took,” Ina said. “Like I said, our side don’t believe in the serpents.”
The dinner noises went on—people talking, shoes clomping on the floor, somebody laughing.
“That snake, it never kilt you like it should have,” Ina said. “By the grace of the Lord, them fangs fell in between your toes. He spared you on your daddy’s faith, if not your mama’s, though of course we always thought it was your mama’s.”
“In between your toes, Albertina,” Alta Bea said. Her tone was sarcastic, and the look she give me had in it all the things her and me ever said to each other, all the books she ever read and lent to me, all her schooling. The time she told me how a watch worked.
Then I knowed, just knowed like I knowed there was dirt in the ground, that this snake story, or anyway the part about my toes, was malarkey. Maybe there was a scrap of truth to it, maybe people around there thought they seen something, but Daddy, he’d done it up into a whole song and dance for his kin and Mama’s. Just like all of his stories—embroideryed on or slanted, if not made up out of whole cloth. Fairy tales.
I felt let down and sad. “If that don’t beat all,” I said, to be polite.
Ina perked back up. “Well, by the time your daddy come home with you that night, your mama, she’d heard all about it, and she met him at the door with the long rifle. Told him to put you down and leave the premises, or she was going to shoot him like a dog.” She arched an eyebrow. “And she wouldn’t let him back, neither, till he promised to take you-uns away and never have nothing to do with his kin no more. And bless his heart, that’s what he done.”
Now, I knowed I was only a baby when this happened, maybe three year old—little enough I was perched on Daddy’s shoulders. And little enough that, if somebody hadn’t mentioned it at the hog killing, and if I hadn’t told Alta Bea the story to fix it in my mind, why, I might have forgot what few things I remembered about it. And little enough I never noticed nothing about no toes.
And I knowed I was nine when we moved away from Kentucky, after Daddy took me horse-trading and done some foolish wicked thing and got beat up in an alley next to the trash cans, just like he didn’t have a young girl with him to take account of. I reckon Daddy never told nobody that story. That story never made him look good, like the snake story done, in his eyes. And the two stories had got mixed up in Ina’s mind, and only me still alive that knowed better. But I still didn’t see no need to say nothing. The less said about Daddy, the better.
Now Ina sighed. “Oh, you’re well known around here. Everbody knows about Albertina Winslow and the serpents.”
“If that don’t beat all,” I said again. “Beats anything I ever heard tell of.”
* * *
Me and Alta Bea stayed in Galena for four days. We spent most of the last day just saying goodbye—who knowed when us Sweets and Winslows would ever see each other again? And me getting my picture took. My favorite is the one with me, Buck, William, Dora, and the twins standing in front of our old house. It was a shame Opal and Dacia wasn’t there to complete the family circle. Mama would have liked that. The house, it seemed awful small, like they does.
There’s a picture with me, Buck, and William at Daddy’s grave, too. As we was standing there I couldn’t help but think about Mama’s service, with just us children and Daddy lined up there and a few neighbors, and nary a one of Mama’s people. Me and William and Buck look old in Daddy’s graveyard picture, more like we was in our forties than our twenties. Buck, his eyes is burning right off the paper, seems like.
* * *
Later on that day, me and Alta Bea got on the train for home. “I bet your girls is missing their mama,” I said to her when we settled in. She had four by then. Harold kept wanting to try for a boy.
She got a cigarette out of her bag. “How are you feeling, Bertie? All right?”
“Wore out, tell the truth.”
“I’ve noticed you putting your hand on your belly, if you don’t mind my saying so.” She lit the cigarette, leaning her head back to blow the smoke high in the air.
“Eat too much, I expect. Seems like when we get together, all we do is eat.”
“You certainly have interesting relatives,” she said.
We never said nothing for a while. I looked out the window at the scenery passing by. It’s awful pretty in the Kentucky hills. Not like the Flint Hills, where the beauty is in the huge Kansas sky, and the sun washes everthing else out, and the land don’t seem like much. Oh, the land’s pretty, in a brownish way, with miles of knee-high brownish prairie grass dotted by brownish rocks and bushes. And the longer you live there, the more you see the million tiny differences in the dun shades. But the sun—seems like you’re exposed to the sun’s very eyeball, it glares down at you. Makes you feel little, like you might disappear and never be missed. But them Kentucky hills, why, the sky there’s a lot smaller, peeking at you through the trees, the sunbeams broke up among the leaves, and in that paler light, the colors is real strong, deep, rich—blues and greens and purples and reds and oranges. After you’re in Kansas for a while, seems like the colors of Kentucky look like an oil painting up close—too loud to be real. Kansas, everthing’s real, no matter how close you look at it.
Alta Bea jolted me out of my thoughts. “You know who I think about every so often? Little Will.”
It took me a second to register what she meant, and then everthing flew from my mind except the memory of me throwing Will on the floor. Felt like I had lightning running from the top of my head to my gut, and then back up into my teeth. I tasted acid.
Alta Bea frowned and put her hand on my arm and said, “I’m sorry, Bertie. I always say the wrong thing.”
A boy come down the aisle selling things from a box. Alta Bea asked me did I want anything, but I said no. She boughten some crackers and a package of cigarettes.
Me and her never said nothing for a while. Finally, I said, “Did I ever tell you, when Daddy was a boy, he heard somewhere that riding on a train would kill you? He thought if you moved thirty mile an hour, like a train does, why it would make your insides explode.”
Alta Bea smiled.
“I said to him once, said, ‘People’s been riding on trains since before you was born, Daddy,’ and he says, ‘You just wait. Ever one of ’em’s gonna die from it sooner or later. You mark my words.’”
“Mark my words.” She laughed. “What I remember is him sitting up on your roof, singing. We could hear him at our place.”
I always wondered, could they hear him. Now I knowed. “Drunk,” I said.
She give me a doubtful look.
“You was in town the day he hung John in the tree for a joke, and I stabbed him with the hay fork.”
She nodded, her eyes big.
“Everbody . . .” I looked out the window but didn’t see nothing I was looking at. “All them things they said about what a good husband and father he was? At the funeral? Hogwash. Drink, sleep it off, drink some more, that was Daddy.” Now that I got started, seemed like I couldn’t stop. “After we moved to Obsidian? Never worked hardly. Me and my brothers, we growed ever onion and radish that was growed on that place, we took care of the animals, we hired ourself out, we brought in all the money was brought in to that house. We seen to it the rent was paid, we kept up the bill at the store, as best as we could.” I wiped my nose. “And Mama, she’d say, ‘Your daddy’s asleep on the floor, mind you don’t step on him as you go by.’ It was like, he’s your daddy, he can do any fool thing he wants to. He wasn’t asleep—he was passed out.”
“We never knew,” she said, which was a lie she was offering as a friend, and I just took it. I knowed she meant well.
We each had our thoughts for a while. She got out her silver flask and sipped from it.
“My father’s going to die one of these days,” she said.
“He sick?”
She shrugged.
“Oh. You mean someday,” I said.
“Now my father never drank.” She give a bitter laugh. “Maybe it would have been better if he had.”
I sighed. Seemed like she couldn’t see herself through nobody else’s eyes, but that was Alta Bea. “I never seen him very much,” I said. “Whenever I did, he was dressed up. For the bank.”
She lifted the flask and, with it pressed on her mouth, said, “I don’t think he ever wanted children.”
I felt a chill, and I batted away a thought of Mama.
You could hear the metallic echo of her swallow. “Or anyway, not a girl,” she said. “He’s never expressed any feeling for me except disapproval. Disappointment. He was always disappointed in me.”
“He was?” I remembered when she told me, the first day I met her, I was a surprise. At the time I didn’t know what she meant. Then I pictured her daddy walking into the room where we was at, carrying a newspaper, wroth because Alta Bea’d swore. Even wroth, he’d seemed cold. My daddy, you wouldn’t ever say he was cold.
“I tried so hard,” she said. “I tried. I tried.”
I pictured her as a girl, smacking her face on her knees.
“My father doesn’t love me,” she said. “There. I said it.” There was a kind of awe in her voice.
I reached over and petted her arm. “I don’t reckon it’s in their nature—not like us.” I was thinking of my daddy and hers and most of the men I’d ever knowed. Then it dawned on me, the thing about all the men I knowed—they was afraid. Of what, I didn’t know. Not of us, not of women, of course not—but what, then? They was running from something all their lives, seemed like, running as fast as they could. What was they afraid of?
Then I pictured Sam—and his kind, sweet, gentle ways—and I realized he wasn’t afraid like other men was. I wondered, how come? I pictured him the first time I seen him at the dance years ago, and I felt heat in the skin of my arms.
I looked over at Alta Bea and seen tears on her cheeks, and I knowed how lucky I was, even with all I had lost in life, to have Sam. He had loved me for years now, and I just now understood—you have to have somebody to love just as much as you have to have somebody to love you. Maybe more.
I was glad we was on our way home, and I couldn’t hardly wait to get there.
* * *
Wasn’t long after Daddy died that Opal saw an advertisement in the Wichita paper for a used sewing machine, one of them heavy factory kind. She bought it out of her own money she had been saving for two years, and she give Kirby Hess six dollars and a half rent for the first month in the corner of his hardware store. Me and Sam was worried would she make out. I asked her, “How’re you going to pay the second month?” and she told me she already had a customer—Mrs. Whiteside. She wanted Opal to make her a dress to wear to Kenneth’s wedding. Opal never said so, but I think Mrs. Whiteside give her extra money to get started. Her husband had died a few months before, and seemed like Mrs. Whiteside wanted to spend money while she could.
Opal never had no doubt she would make out. Seems like it never come into her head she wouldn’t.
She got one of them dress dummies, the kind you can adjust their parts to match the person you’re sewing for. Then she’d cut out muslin pieces and pin them to the dummy. When she finished the muslin pattern for Mrs. Whiteside’s dress, she had me to come in to the shop and look at it.
“I don’t see nothing but pieces,” I told her. “I can’t picture what it’s going to look like done up.”
“You don’t think it’ll be pretty?”
“I bet it will,” I said. “What did Mrs. Whiteside say?”
“I ain’t showed it to her. I wanted you to see it first.”
It touched me she asked me first, though I wasn’t no help.
Well, of course when the dress was all done Mrs. Whiteside liked it fine, and then the bride asked Opal to make the wedding dress, too. Opal, she told me she figured the mother’s dress was a test, and that just goes to show you how smart she is. Something like that never dawned on me, and that’s why I never owned no business but dressing chickens and ironing, which is just chores.
When the wedding picture come out in the paper, Opal never had an idle minute after that. Next thing we knowed, she moved her shop to the whole top floor over the Arbogost store. Soon she had two girls working for her.
Sometimes I helped out when they got too busy. I loved going in there. It smelled like sizing, a pasty smell that always makes me happy.
One winter day in early 1926 I was setting there in the shop doing some handwork when Opal’s helper Corinne said, “My gracious, what’s that?”
I looked up, and she was pointing at the little chair I was setting on. There was a big red splotch underneath of me. Then I felt the cramping start. “I’m sorry, Opal,” I said. “Corinne, get a pan of cold water, would you? Rags? Towels? I’m sorry, I never thought—”
“We need to fetch the doctor,” Opal said.
“Don’t need no doctor. Don’t take but ten or twenty minutes, then it’ll—”
“You need to lay down! Don’t get up! Lay down!” Her voice rose up high, and I could tell by looking at her face that she was scared half to death.
“It’s my own fault,” I said. “I was feeling puny this morning. Should’ve stayed home. I always think, this time—”
Corrine come running in with towels. “Should I get the doctor?” she said to Opal.
“Help me lift my skirt up, will you? Opal, put them towels there—right there. Oh. Oh.”
“Christ!” Opal said. Corinne run out of the room.
“Don’t fret yourself,” I said to Opal. “Looks bad, I know, but—”
“Jesus Christ,” Opal said.
That’s the last thing I remember. When I woken up, why, I was in a hospital bed. I seen stripes of yellow light on the ceiling from the blinds. I was scared. I’d knowed people that went to the hospital, and not a one of them’d come home alive.
“She (something) (something).” That was Alta Bea’s voice.
Sam leaned over me. His face was pale.
“I feel heavy,” I said. “Like I can’t lift my head up.”
“Don’t move. Just (something).” Now Alta Bea leaned over. I smelled cigarettes on her.
“(Something) operation,” Sam said.
“What?” My throat hurt, and my mouth was dry. My lips felt cracked. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.
Next time I woken up, the doctor was standing there talking to Sam. Their voices sounded like horseflies buzzing.
I heard the doctor say, “(Something) she (something)?”
“Well, she (something) the boy (something). She (something).”
“She (something)?”
Seems like all I kept hearing was “she,” “she,” “she.”
“She (something),” Sam said.
“I mean she (something). How many?”
There was a silence.
“Sometimes they (something), like a cat,” the doctor said. “Just (something) and act like (something). She.”
“She,” Sam said.
“Well, she won’t (something) (something),” the doctor said.
I kept hearing “she” over and over again all the time I slept. Seemed like I slept a long time. In my sleep Mama come to my bed and kept saying, “Shhhh, shhhh, shhhh.”
* * *
Some days later the doctor come in with Sam. “How you feeling?” the doctor said.
“Tolerable.”
“You hurting anywhere?”
“In the belly down low.”
“Let’s have a look.” I flinched when he pulled back the blanket—it’s surprising how just sliding a piece of material across stitches makes your belly scream—and lifted off the bandages. He looked at the wound and then retaped it and covered me back up.
I caught my breath. “When can I go home?”
“Don’t you like the service here?” he said, like it was a joke.
“I got things to do. You know.”
“We’ll see how things look in a week or two.” He wrote something down. Then he nodded to Sam and walked away.
“How you feeling? Really?” Sam said. He set down on the bed, and I felt an itchy pain. He jumped up and the bed bounced, and it felt like I’d got kicked by a mule.
I motioned with my hands for him to ease himself onto the bed. “How’s things at home?”
“Don’t worry about that. You just get well.”
“I’ll thank you not to tell me what to worry about,” I said.
He sighed. “Opal, I don’t hardly see her no more. When she ain’t here, she’s at the shop all day and half the night.”
I nodded. “You getting enough to eat?”
“Mrs. Whiteside sends food down ever little bit.” He looked at me. “You in pain?”
I shook my head.
“You look like it.”
I closed my eyes and laid my head back, acting like I was falling asleep. I had something to say to him, but I hadn’t figured out how. I felt him touch my hair, smoothing it with the back of his fingers.
Pretty soon he said, “Had to call Hollis Laird over to the house. Bluebell, she throwed a shoe.”
“Is that right.”
“Got a letter—”
“I’m barren, Sam,” I blurted out. Waves of shame rolled over me.
I felt him startle. The bed was thrumming. “I know,” he whispered.
My face felt so tight it hurt. “You can divorce me,” I said. “You got ever right.”
“Open your eyes,” he said.
I shook my head. “Marry somebody that can give you children.”
“Goddamn it, open your eyes.”
I gritted my teeth, tasting salt. I opened my eyes and looked at him.
“Don’t you never say that again long’s we live,” he said.
“Sam.”
“Don’t you know we almost lost you?” Now he covered his face with his hands and broke down.
“Go on home,” I said. “I’m wore out.”
He drawed his arm over his face to wipe the tears off. “You just get well.” He petted my shoulder.
I pressed my hand against my stitches and heaved myself over on my side, facing away from him.
“You just get well,” he said again.
“I’m wore out.”
He sighed. Pretty soon I felt the bed rock a little and then settle. He laid a hand on my hip for a second, and then I heard his boots on the slick linoleum floor.
There’s punishment, and then there’s punishment. I felt like I could endure God’s wrath for the things I done, but for one thing—I couldn’t bear the look I seen on Sam’s face. Pity. Pity like I used to feel for Mama, even as she turned her bed into her coffin.
Now I felt afraid. I wanted to believe Sam still loved me like he done before, but I never had the courage to. Besides, there was things he didn’t know I done—to Timmy, to Will—things I never told him, coward that I was. I felt like there would be a lot to go through coming up, and I couldn’t see how things could ever be the same between us again.