Sweeping Up Glass (7 page)

Love Alice smiled sadly. “Yo’ little girl, she have hair like the sun. An’ you goin’ to call her Pauline, uh-huh.”

O
n a hot Monday afternoon, Ma’am came home. She rode in a fancy buggy that Pap had hired. He had baked her a lopsided brown sugar cake from eggs I gathered in our henhouse, and he talked of building an indoor privy. There were fresh-laundered sheets on the big four-poster. And he planned to give her the new mule Sanderson for her own. He would buy her a saddle if she wanted one. That day, we closed the store early and put a sign in the window, but nobody needed telling.

Pap met Ma’am on the road, and lifted down her carpetbag. She took his arm, and he led her up the long walk and the steps, into the grocery where she stood looking at the shelves of canned goods and pickles. Golden curls were piled on top of her head, and her body was slender and curved like a willow branch. Then she spotted me peeking from behind the curtain. Pap went to the kitchen to make coffee.

She came right to me—I was almost as tall as she was—and said, “Filthy, that’s what this place is. Well, I’ll never work a single day here. And you—you stay clear of me. Don’t do anything to get on my nerves. No laughing, no crying, no raising your voice.”

In the kitchen, I could hear Pap setting out cups and cutting
cake. Ma’am ran a finger around the edge of the potato bin, like what dirt she found there was my fault. Then she studied my face. “You’re so plain,” she said.

I knew then that whatever illness had befallen her, it had not been bad enough.

Pap called us to coffee, but she declined and took to her bed for a “stretching out.”

I tried to tell him, said, “She’s too fancy, and anyway, she doesn’t like us.”

But he laughed in a tinny way, and told me to go ahead and start supper. We’d leave her alone, and she’d settle in. He went down to the cellar where he made not one sound, and I wrapped the cake in a cloth and put it in the larder. Then I washed a cabbage with salt to kill the bugs, and took great comfort in whacking it hard with the butcher knife. I threw the core to the goats and went off to the outhouse, banging the screen door three or four times. The more noise I made, the better I felt. But my belly was tied in a knot.

I cut up a potato and a scrap of yellow pepper, added a handful of green peas, and stirred up beaten biscuits that I set to rise. Went out to sit on the back porch steps and shaded my eyes, looked out across our place, past the dried-up creek to the first slope of Big Foley. I wondered what Ma’am would say when she heard the wolves howl—or if they knew she was here, and were right now up there, tiptoeing around.

Before long, I announced loudly that supper was ready. Pap came up first, looking anxious around the mouth, and he straightened the forks and set out salt and pepper shakers. The bread turned out decent. Ma’am didn’t come, and Pap and I stood looking at each other until I marched to the bedroom door and
knocked lightly. There was no answer, so I turned the knob and looked in. The curtains were drawn so there was not one bit of light to see by, but I heard Ma’am say in an aggravated voice, “What is it?”

“I’ve got supper on the table.”

She sighed and sat up. Put a hand to her back like the bed had given her an almighty crick.

Pap was at the table when she came in, but he jumped up like he was on fire, and pulled out her chair. He tucked her into her seat, brought the dish towel, and laid it in her lap. When I set his soup on the table, he gave it to her, cut open a biscuit, handed her a knife, butter knife he called it. I brought two more bowls.

Ma’am took one look at the cabbage soup with fresh peppers and peas, and she curled her nose. “This is a sorry enough welcome supper.”

“Ida Mae—” said Pap.

“I should have known she wouldn’t be handy in the kitchen. Swear to God, children do nothin’ but set the nerves on fire.”

I waited for Pap to tell her cabbage soup was his favorite, and the bread the best yet. But although he moved his mouth, no words came out.

“Well,” she said, “you can’t expect me to take over the kitchen. I’ve forgotten everything I knew about cooking, and I don’t care to learn again.”

“Olivia will do better,” Pap said, looking at his bowl.

I stumbled from my chair, turning it over and upsetting my milk glass. I didn’t know which of them I hated more. “I didn’t make it for you, you crabby old loon!” I shouted. “I made it for Pap on account of he likes it! I wouldn’t cook for you if you were
starvin’ on the steps of hell. I don’t know why you came back here anyway. I hate you—and I hate that damned ol’ donkey, too!”

It was far more than I’d meant to say, but I guess some dams needed to be broken.

She flew out of her chair and jerked me by the arm. She was amazingly strong, bending my head over the sink, shoving a bar of lye soap in my mouth. I came up, gagging and wheezing, pleading for Pap to make this stop. But he just sat there, looking at his supper and saying nothing. In his need to keep the peace in his household, he slid sadly from my grace.

I spent the night in my alcove, with the curtain drawn, listening to her sobbing and Pap promising her the moon. He would tear down the still, stop his doctoring, and pay more attention to the store so that she would not have to. He’d take on more of the cooking—she needn’t turn a hand.

She sobbed on, whining and whimpering about being stuck out here in the boondocks.

Pap told her he would get a loan from the bank and buy a car so that she might take frequent trips into Buelton. He would see to it that she lived a life of comfort. He spoke to her as if she was that pretty young thing that he remembered, and I realized then what had happened—my birth was the cause of her nervous condition. I wondered, in those whispered moments, if he apologized for my plainness.

Later, I heard him lead her off to bed. A few minutes later, he rustled around in the kitchen, groaning and shifting things so that I knew he’d bedded down on the floor. It was then that I decided to call her Ida, and although I prayed nightly for God to take her away, he never did.

Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, I envisioned Pap and me moving our things to the cellar, where Ida could not touch us. We would cook our dinner over a candle flame and bathe in the tub he used for surgeries. We’d tend to our patients and never have to see Ida again. If we were lucky, sooner or later, someone would come down and tell us she was dead.

For the most part, I ignored her. On Saturdays and Sundays I made paper patterns for fancy aprons and sun bonnets, cut fabric I’d taken from the store, and stitched them up. Early mornings on my way to school, I’d carry them to Dooby’s where he let me line my things up in his window. My business was booming, but Pap’s was something else. As time went by, fewer wounded things came to our house. Folks seldom called him to deliver their breech calves or bind up a wound, and we missed the greens and fried apple pies. Daytimes, he minded the cash register, but even that wasn’t the same. Folks hurried through their shopping and cast anxious eyes on the kitchen curtain.

That fall, Pap brought back a man who installed electric lights in the grocery, one in the bedroom, and a dangling cord for a bulb over our kitchen table. He ran a roll of black wire from our house to one of the electric poles that had been put up along our road. Pap gave him four boxes of groceries, and signed an IOU for the rest.

After school, I minded the store and did my stitching there or under the kitchen light while Pap went up the mountain to cut cordwood that he delivered in the wagon. It brought us a dime or two. He came home after dark, ate whatever I’d left on back of the stove, and slept in his blanket on the kitchen floor.

From my cloth I cut spike-roofed houses and round red apples,
and stitched them onto bleached muslin. I sewed gingerbread boys on dish towels and embroidered their eyes and mouths. Twice a month, on Sundays, I went around Aurora collecting scraps. Angus Sampson’s wife, rolling up toweling for my bag, said I was the prettiest sheeny man she’d ever seen.

Food was getting scarce, and there was an electric light bill to pay. With so little business, we could not order more canned goods or tooth powder, and we stopped taking from the dairyman and lived on goat’s milk. At the end of the week, there were few coins left over to drop in the kitchen drawer. In the dark of night, men sometimes came to our back step, asking for a bottle of Tate Harker’s swill, but Pap wagged his head and warned them off. But he could not resist going out on a call when a horse bruised a hoof or a calf insisted on coming into the world by its hindquarters. These trips to the country brought us summer squash, melons, and ripe tomatoes, which, he said, would help restore Ida.

I carried my lunch to school in a tin—bread with no butter and a salted boiled potato. In summer a peach or an apricot. Nobody else was any better off.

Before long, Pap and I ate corn cakes and brown beans five nights a week. Ida stayed mostly in her bed, picking at yellow waxed beans and hard-boiled eggs that Pap ordered me to send in on a tray. She curled her nose at everything and drank mostly weak tea with a bit of sugar. Fruit, she said, blistered her tongue and overworked her kidneys. Meat made her blood dark, milk tied up her bowels. She complained that her legs cramped, and her head pounded. She was in danger of collapsing. When Pap questioned her, she called him an ass, and screamed for me ten times a day, just to tell me I’d
gotten on her nerves. We were, she told us, the reason for her demise.

Doc Pritchett, examining her, said there was nothing wrong, and no death was imminent. She should, in fact, get out of bed and find something to occupy her time. Ida called him a quack of the first order.

F
inally Ida asked Pap to find her a Bible, for which he paid ninety-five cents at a store in Buelton, and she began to read aloud. But the scripture was heavy, running over me like a logging wagon. The beatitudes affirmed I was going to hell. One day I said so. Ida put on her coat and, taking a bread knife, ventured out on the narrow length of our land—as far as the first incline, where she cut a switch from a green willow tree. Thereafter, she used it to whip me regularly in the name of the Lord.

I fervently wished she’d climb on Sanderson and ride off preaching to somebody else. Meanwhile—if she lashed me for my cooking one more time, I was going to put her eyes out with a fork.

Christmas morning, Pap killed one of our last three chickens, and I stuffed it with bread and baked it, gizzards and all. I made custard with eggs and a little sugar, and threw the shells to the chickens, which made me think about how all things come around. That, after all, must be why Ida’d come home.

Pap stayed in that day. Mid-morning, while Ida was in the outhouse, he slipped me a sweet red apple and two spools of thread—one silver, one gold. I had never seen anything so beautiful. In the afternoon, while we sat at the table and burned wood
in the stove, the precious thread rode in the pocket of my apron. Pap and I recalled funny Christmases and other holidays from years gone by while Ida held her Bible and looked off out the window. I fetched the pair of lace hankies I’d been stitching, sat working them by the light of the bulb, and for a while things felt almost good. It was the closest the three of us had ever been.

And then, in January, it was Ida’s birthday, and Pap was treating us to supper at Ruse’s. I suspected he didn’t trust me to cook that night, and he was right not to. A pinch of nightshade, sprinkled on her potato, would’ve put Ida away forever.

She and I were to meet Pap at the cafe at six o’clock, him coming from the settlement of Lansing.

Several large families lived there, growing their own food, raising and butchering hogs so that they seldom needed to come to town. When they did, however, and we’d pass one of them on the street, Ida’d call loudly, “Would you
look
at the weight of that woman. Good Lord!”

Tonight Pap was out amongst them, delivering a stubborn litter of kittens. He told me later how Mrs. Nailhow had wrung her hands and wept, three or four of the children bawling with her.

But at five-thirty in our kitchen, Ida was ready. She wore her best cream-colored linen, with a bow at the collar and pearl buttons at the wrist. Her hair was rolled back on both sides and hung in a wheat-colored froth down her back. She had not gained a single pound in the time she’d been home, and was as fine-boned as a bird.

She shoved me into the closet Pap was converting to a toilet stall, and put me in front of the mirror. I was as tall as she was, my hair was thick and coarse, a red-brown color. Ida said it looked like I’d been dipped in red ink and left to dry in a nor’easter. She rolled it in her hands now, and stuck a comb in the back. Then
two more to hold it, and turning me around, she pinched my cheeks. Then she looked down.

“Olivia Harker, you get out of those trousers, now!” she said. “Young ladies do not wear men’s britches under their skirts.”

Ida jerked up my dress and unfastened my britches as quick as that. I held on to them and pulled free of her hold, but in another instant we were on the floor, she tugging on my trouser legs, grunting and swearing. I ripped the bow from her dress, and we tumbled around the bedroom—me whacking my head on the footboard of the bed, and Ida yelling, “Dammit, Olivia, you are a heathen child—act like a lady for—
my goddamn birthday
!” To be so little, she had a mighty wrath, and she rolled on top of me, pinning my legs. At which moment I slapped her good.

But she had me by the hair, and banged my head on the floor. I heaved her off, and we lay glaring and red-faced, breathing heat into each other’s mouths. My trousers may have been tangled around my knees, but her hair had come loose, and two buttons were ripped from her dress. Somehow, all that struck me as funny. I’d given as much as I’d got.

“I will wear my hair down,” I said.

“The trousers come off.”

“I’ll freeze to death.”

“You will not freeze. I’ll give you stockings to wear.”

“I hate stockings,” I said.

But I got them anyway, skinny-legged brown things with ribs that bristled and pinched at the crotch. She changed into a brown plaid dress that hung a size too big on her, but it didn’t matter. Ida looked like a picture in any damn thing. She fluffed out her hair and tied it with a brown grosgrain ribbon. Now she was the child, and I the old woman.