Now you’re gonna tell me where all you been.” “Just down the road a ways,” I mumble. “Just down the road a ways where?” “Where’s Momma?”
“Don’t you be asking them questions. I’m asking the questions round here,” he says, taking a swig off the bottle and then swallowing it and belchin’ real loud. “You been tomcatting round these woods since we landed here and I got a right to know where you been. You answer me or I’m gonna have to find out the hard way.”
I cain’t believe he could hear me. I’s talkin’ real low, just to myself. I didn’t mean for him to hear. It’s just that he don’t have a right to know where I been. We’re studying the difference between rights and privileges in school and when Richard knows where I been it’s aprit -ilege, not a right.
“You sassin’ me? ‘S that what you doin’?”
The boot kick comes hard and fast and before I know it, I’m flat
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out on the floor, doing the one stupid thing I should know better ‘bout by now.
“Momma!” For a second I feel like I’m on the ceiling, lookin’ down at myself. My voice doesn’t sound like my own, it’s a hollow holler that comes out before I can help myself.
See, calling Momma is bad in two ways. One, she never comes but if she happens to, she just gets mad at me and Emma for hollering for her like she’s a dog so then they’re both mad and that’s never good. Two, it just makes Richard worse off if he thinks we’re being whiney little babies.
Sure enough, he’s got a handful of the backside of my pants and pretty soon I’m lifted off the ground and shoved to the stairs.
“You git on upstairs, you little shit.” Even though I’m sure he’s
right behind me, his voice sounds like it’s coming from far away. “Emma?” I cry out.
“She ain’t here,” he says, kneeing my backside up the next stair. “Where is she?” I’m whispering ‘cause talking louder will need more air in me and to get more air I’d have to take a deeper breath and that just plain hurts around my middle.
“Emma?” I tilt my head up and whisper as loud as I can, so the sound can float past Richard.
“I done tole you,” he says. By now he’s got me cornered in my room, blocking the doorframe. “She ain’t here.” He tilts the beer bottle all the way in the air to get the last drops from it. “Now come ‘ere.” He motions with the bottle for me to come up close to him but I don’t wait any longer.
Like a bullet from Mr. Wilson’s gun I shoot out toward him, pushing him off balance to the side so I can get past him to the stairs, which I leap down, almost three at a time. The door slams shut after me so
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I can have more space ‘tween me and him if he comes after me, which he is ‘cause from the trail that leads to the Diamond River I hear him hollering.
“Git on back here, girl!”
I tumble over a tree root.
“You better watch out,” he yells. “I’m gonna git you when you come back here!”
I’m not even out of breath, jumping over rocks and the fallen tree in my way. Funny how the pain goes away when you got the chance to be free.
“Emma ?” I call ahead so she doesn’t run from the sound of footsteps, thinking it’s Richard, like I would if’n I heard someone running at me.
At the edge of the creek I bend over ‘cause now I am out of breath and bending over seems like the best way to catch it without causing too much trouble to my insides.
“Here I am,” a little voice carries over to my ears.
My head jerks up at the sound. But I don’t see her at first. “Where?” “Over here.”
And there, on a smooth rock that’s half in the water, half out, is my baby sister, hugging her knees and rocking to and fro. At first the bruisin’ doesn’t look so bad, but when I come closer I see there’s dried blood caught up in it and my stomach does a nosedive.
So before I reach her I squat down and hold the end of my shirt into the water so I can clean her up.
“I couldn’t find you,” she says, not even wincing when I dab at her forehead.
“I’s over at Wilson’s,” I say. “Hold still. Where’s this comin’ from?”
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I’d started from the bottom of the dried trickle and traced it up into her hair where there’s a round patch of darker blood. It’s up above where the worst of the bruisin’ is. That’s when she does flinch when I dab at that.
“Hold on, lemme git some more water,” I say, jumping off the rock and picking a fresh part of my shirt to get wet.
“You okay?” I ask her when I get back close,
She’s as still as the rock she’s sitting on. Her shoes have come uned
so I tie ‘em back up, double knotted the way she likes it. “Say something.” But she won’t.
I cain’t run my fingers through her hair to make her feel better
‘cause her bait’s all knotted up so instead I stroke her arm.
“He lost his job,” she says quiet-like,
“What’d you say?” I lean closer to her mouth so I can hear better. She’s being that quiet.
“I said, he lost his job.” “Richard?” “Who else?” “Why?”
“How’m I s’posed to know?”
“Does Momma know?”
Emma shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t even know where Momma is.”
“Me neither. How’d you know he lost his job?”
She doesn’t say anything so I guess it isn’t important how she come to hear.
“Guess we’ll be stayin’ up here at the Diamond River a whole lot more” is all I can think of to say.
E LI ZAB E T I] F LOC K
And then it comes to me. “What if we write to Gammy?” ,’VChat?” Emma raises her head a bit.
“We could write Gammy and ask her to come out here for a
while,” I say. As I talk it sounds ike a better idea than when it first popped into my head a second or two ago. “She might like it better’n
where she is now and then she could live here with us.”
“But what about Auntie Lillibit? Gammy’s already takin’ care of
her,” Emma says.
Auntie Lillibit is Momma’s little sister, whose real name is Elizath
but everyone just calls her Lillibit after what Momma nick-nared her when they were kids our age. Gammy lives in a room in her house near Asheville and does all her laundry and cleaning for her, like she’s sick or something, which she always seems to be. When they were little Auntie Lillibit started wheezing when she ran out to plY and the doctor told her momma, Gammy, she wouldn’t live
long if she overdid it, so from that day on she underdid it. And she’s lied ever since. Momma and her never did get along on account of
the fact Momma says Gammy spoils her rotten and she doesn’t like to be around rotten things. So Momma’s steered clear of the both of them for as long as I can remember. Gammy came to visit us a few tithes when we were little, but when I close my eyes I cain’t even remember what Gammy looks like, it’s been that long.
Still, I cain’t think of a better idea so I’m clinging to it.
“Gammy could help Momma the way she helps Auntie and then ylomma’d be a whole lot happier, I bet,” I say. Emma’s head’s stopped bleeding, but if you look hard you can see a big bump right past here her hair hits her forehead.
“I’m gonna do it,” I say. “I’m gonna write her.”
“Where’re you gonna get a stamp?”
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“H1 ask Mr. Wilson where the post office is and I’ll go in and buy one, stupid,” I sass her. “That’s what you do when you want to mail something. You go to the post office.”
“What about her address? You don’t know where she lives.”
“I know for a fact she lives on Sycamore Street,” I tell her, “‘cause she used to say she was sick-a-more streets popping tip around town and I remembered it that way. I don’t know the number but Avery Creek is a small town—the mailman’ll know her for sure.”
“She’ll never come,” Emma sighs, and goes back to hugging her
knees. “Not in a million years.” “She will, too.” “We’ll see.”
We stay by the stream until it’s hard to see to the other side and then we know it’s time to go on back home. Standing up and stretching feels good—my bottom is sore from the rock I was on.
The floor of the forest is spongy and I wonder why it never occurs to us to sit on it instead of hard rocks.
“Okay, so this is what we’re gonna do,” I say to Emma from over my shoulder since she’s walking slower behind me. I’ll go in first to see where he is and find out if the coast is clear and then I’ll whistle for you to come in. If you don’t hear a whistle, don’t come in, I’ll take myself out the back door and meet you there and we can come on back to the stream. Got it?”
“Yeah, okay,” she says in a whisper. “I don’t feel so good standing up and walking.”
“Dust get to the house and then you can lie down.”
“My head’s swimming.”
“I know,” I say. And I do. My head swims like that when it gets hit, but after I sleep for a spell it’s all better.
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“I can’t go any farther,” she says.
“Stop your whining and hurry up,” I say. “We’re almost there.” I don’t whine half as much as Emma is after this whipping. Most times she’s good and keeps it to herself, but I guess tonight’s not one of those times.
There’s a light coming from the back of the house, the kitchen, so it’s anyone’s guess who’s in there. Momma, okay. Richard, not okay.
“Remember to listen for the whistle,” I hiss back to her. I hope she hears me, she’s pretty far behind me.
I slow way down when I get to about a hundred Barbie lengths from the back door. I listen for a clue to who’s in there but I don’t hear a thing. A few steps more and I can make a dash for the bottom of the window where I can peek in. One. Two. Three…and I’m there, below the kitchen window that’s right above the sink.
I didn’t think about the fact that the window’s set up higher than my head, so I have to push…this.., rock.., aah…to a spot right here so I can stand up on it. There. Perfect. The edge of the windowsill is so dusty and dirty my fingers slip off at first but then I grip on and slowly.., slowly raise my head up to the corner of the window.
I can see the table with the smooth metal edges in the middle of the room, Momma’s ashtray’s in the middle, and, right in front of me, the flies licking up the leftover crumbs on the plates stacked up for cleaning. I think Momma’s waiting for more soap slivers to go in the can ‘cause the dishes’re been piled in there for a few days now. The flies dart from one to another, stuffing themselves. The bigger ones are the ones that bite real hard and leave red marks on my skin.
Strange that the light’s on but no one’s in the kitchen. Momma’s always after us to turn them off—wait! Here she is. She’s coming straight at me and I duck, in case she sees the top of my head. I hear
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clinking that’s probably her shifting things around in the sink and after it goes quiet for a spell I inch back up to see what’s what.
Scrape. The chair’s being pulled back at the table and there’s Momma, lighting up another cigarette. She takes in a deep breath and blows the smoke up to the ceiling. I’m about to turn to give Emma the whistle that the coast is clear but I stop when I hear the floorboards rattle with the weight of Richard coming into view. He’s standing in the doorway, taking a swig of his bottle, like he did with me earlier.
“Just go on,” Momma says. I can hear her clear as day.
Richard looks over the top of Momma’s head and for a second I think he’s caught me in the act of spying, but then I see he’s looking to the sink.
“When you gonna start acting like a real woman an’ git to cleanin’?” he says. When he does his top lip curls up toward the bottom of his nose.
Momma says something I cain’t quite make out since she says it ‘fore she takes another breath of her cigarette.
“Whut?” Richard looks back over to her with the top of her head resting on the palms of her hands, her cigarette in the fork of her two first fingers on her right hand.
“About the time you fix the hole in the roof over our heads,” she says to him, raising her head up to his.
“You’re lucky I’m goin’ out or I’d put a hole in your head the size of my fist,” he says. He tilts his bottle up, drains it and throws it through the air right toward the sink…toward me. It shatters onto the top of the heap, hits of glass clink against the windowpane. I duck down just in case it breaks through, and while I’m squeezing my eyes shut the picture of Momma, sitting at the kitchen table smoking, is
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burned against my eyeballs. She didn’t even flinch when his arm hurled the bottle across the room. Or when it hit the sink.
The front door slams shut and I feel the wall I’m leaning up against rattle. Now, at least, the coast is clear. His truck rumbles up and coughs away from the house.
I turn away from the house and whistle into the air, but I cain’t make out any bushes moving where Emma’d be pushing through, so I whistle again. Nothing.
She probably fell asleep waitin’ on me like she was.
“Hey, Em!” I whisper-yell to her. It’s quiet all around so I follow the cut of light on the ground outside the window to the edge of the woody trail. “You can come up now!”
“Hmm?” I hear a tired little voice from practically under my feet. “Where are you?”
“Here,” she says. My eyes adjust to the dark and there, curled up like a dog, is Emma, about three Barbies from my foot.
“C’mon.” I crouch down to help her up. I know her head’s throbbing so it’s making her more tired than she is in the first beginning. Last time my head was hit, anytime I stood up too fast it throbbed like my brain was going to beat its way out of my skull. So I know what she’s feeling like right about now. “C’mon and put your arm over my shoulders and I’ll help you in.”
She does as I tell her and we wobble back up to the house, breaking sticks under our feet along the way.
I don’t get worried until her head rolls back onto my arm that’s holding her across her shoulders. Now I’m scared.
“Momma!” I call out to her while I try moving Emma sideways through the front door, propping it open with my foot at the same time.
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“Momma, help!” And then we both collapse inside the door, our arms tangled up like they were when we were standing. After a few minutes that seem like hours, I try to get my arm out from under Emma, but her deadweight makes it near to impossible so I just leave it be.