Let Me Die in His Footsteps (17 page)

“What in the name of our good Lord have you been doing here?” he asks, looking at me and not Juna.

I press my hand to Dale’s head. He was warm this morning, too warm, when I finally insisted we send for the doctor again. Juna had said it was the stuffy room and not enough fresh air. She said he’d finished a nice breakfast and was needing his sleep. Get on with your work, she had said, but still I insisted. He’s no longer warm; he’s hot. So hot I jerk my hand away.

“Juna said he was better,” I say, turning to Juna, who has taken to her corner. Her hands are clasped in that troublesome way. “I kept saying he didn’t look well. But he was sleeping, always sleeping. Juna said he was well.”

“Has he been eating?” the doctor says, again to me.

“Tell him, Juna,” I say. “Tell the doctor he’s been well and eating and sleeping.”

“It’ll be a poison in his blood,” the doctor says, not waiting for an answer from Juna. “A poison deep in his blood and on into his bones.”

I run to gather water straight from the well. And when I draw it up and it’s not so cool as I would like, I yell for John to go to the river.

“Go and bring it back quick. Bring enough we can bathe him.”

The doctor stays on through the day. Juna makes the biscuits, which turn out hard and blackened on the bottom. She tries to lace the greens but pours too much vinegar. I pick the tomatoes and have her slice an extra for the doctor, and while they gather at the table for an early supper, I sit with Dale.

In such a short time, he’s withered. I should have seen. I shouldn’t have been so tired as to fall asleep straightaway each night. I should have sat with him, tended him, seen that he wasn’t well. Mary Holleran told me to keep an eye, and now Dale’s nose is sharp and pointed, the plump, rounded tip gone. His forearms where I would grab hold if he tried to run from a washcloth have been whittled to bone. There is no softness left for my fingers to dig into. His eyes have settled deep into their sockets, and if he were to open them again, ever again, I’m sure I’d see they’ve turned a watery blue.

John Holleran’s mama comes again and this time brings rhubarb that grows in a thick cluster behind her house. It’ll be the last of her crop. Out in the kitchen, I hear her tell Juna to cut off the woody ends and that it’ll make a fine pie. She looks into Dale’s room, presses two fingers together, and taps them to her heart. She is shaking her head when she turns to go.

Daddy, John, and the doctor sit at the kitchen table, waiting. Juna sits with me, every so often fetching fresh, cool water. Someone strikes a match and lights the lanterns in the front room. John comes into the bedroom and lights the one at Dale’s bedside. The yellow glow throws deep shadows under Dale’s eyes and his chin, making him look all the more like Daddy.

“Come,” John says, taking my hand in his, rubbing the tips of my fingers. “Step outside. Get a bit of fresh air.”

I know John is happy, happier than ever in his life. Even with Dale lying here in this bed, burning with fever, John is happy and wants me to himself. He wants me to step outside so he can rub my arms, brush the hair from my face, kiss me when Daddy isn’t looking. I jerk my hand from him and push him away.

The hole is dug by morning. Daddy, jamming the shovel into the ground one last time and wiping the dirt from his hands, asks John if he won’t fetch the preacher.

Juna has never said it out loud, but I see it in the way she looks at me now. It’s in that odd way she has of tilting her head just off center. That day, that first day, she told me it wasn’t time for her to go to the fields. She had known because she has a way of knowing. She knows a thing will come before it has come. She told Daddy and me both it was the day for her to pick berries. She told us both, but I had an ache for Ellis Baine, and now Dale is dead.

I pull on a gray sweater and draw my hair up, bind it tightly at the base of my neck. Juna wraps her head in a dark scarf. And then we sit with Daddy and the doctor at the kitchen table as we wait. We all stand at the sound of tires on the gravel road. John’s engine shuts off; his door opens and slams closed. Footsteps, one set, cross the porch.

“Won’t come,” John says. “Says it’s best he not come.”

Some folks have always believed. I know because when Juna and I were children and would walk through town, there were those who would drift to the far side of the road. They wouldn’t look at us, and some would cover their mouths to keep Juna’s evil from snaking its way inside of them. And then there were folks who sure felt bad for Daddy and those three little ones with no mama. Nothing in this world went Daddy’s way, but life was like that for some. Some folks had a higher calling. Other folks had a harder calling.

But then times turned hard for everyone. The dirt started to blow. The crops wilted in every field and not just Daddy’s. Children cried for being hungry, and a man couldn’t find work. Strong men with good backs and skills in their hands took to standing in lines when never in their lives would they have thought to lower themselves to such a thing. Day by day, the curse that had once loomed only over the Crowleys’ place stretched itself out over the whole of the city and then the county, and by God, if it hadn’t taken over just about the whole of the country.

The doctor is the next holiest among us, so he speaks the final words as Daddy and John lower Dale into the ground. The doctor reads from the Bible, his words seeming to damn the soul instead of blessing it. Near the end of the drive, leaning against a lone fence post, is Abigail Watson. She wears her white cap tied off under her chin and her long-sleeved gray dress. Her head is bowed, and her hands pressed together as if in prayer, as if she can hear the doctor’s words, though I know she can’t.

As the doctor continues to read, John jams his shovel into the pile of dirt and tips it over the open hole, letting it dribble onto Dale. John takes his time with every shovelful, one after another as the doctor continues, verse after verse. Daddy stands on one side, Juna and I on the other, the doctor at the head of the grave. John digs and throws, digs and throws, and an hour passes as he fills the small hole until it’s no longer a hole but instead a mound of dirt that will slowly settle as Dale rots away beneath.

When John is done, Daddy kneels where the doctor had been standing and, with a hammer, pounds a small cross into the ground. The doctor must have brought it, probably has a crate full of them in his truck. John leaves quietly, without a good-bye or a kiss he sneaked when Daddy wasn’t looking. Juna walks slowly toward the house, and the doctor gathers his hat from the porch.

“That one’s with child, you know?” he says, nodding off toward the house.

Then he climbs inside his truck, slams closed the door, and fires up his engine before I can ask him to repeat himself please, because maybe I didn’t hear him quite right.

1952—ANNIE

AS ANNIE HAS
sat here on her bed, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, the cicadas have gone silent for the night, and the buzzing and clicking of the cricket frogs have filled in behind. The breeze blowing through her window has turned cool with the setting sun, and as the light outside has slipped from white to orange to a dusty gray, the sizzle Annie has been feeling all these many days has swelled up inside her again.

Ryce Fulkerson came pedaling up to the house after supper. While sitting with the rest of the family on the porch, all of them full from the meal celebrating Annie’s day, she had heard him, the whining of his bike’s front tire, long before he appeared, and she excused herself. Too much supper, she had said, or perhaps she was coming down with whatever had sent Mama to bed for most of the afternoon.

For two hours, Ryce has sat on the porch with Daddy and Abraham Pace, each of them taking a turn cranking the ice-cream maker. Every so often, Daddy gives it a whack and bangs it on the ground to loosen the ice when it freezes up on him. Since Ryce arrived, Daddy and Abraham have been drinking whiskey, and the more they drink, the louder Abraham’s voice grows. They’re mostly talking about Ellis Baine. Daddy thinks he made a damn fool of himself when the man stopped by. Abraham says Daddy is only a fool if he doesn’t keep a gun close at hand, because that’s what Abraham damn sure plans to do. And when Abraham goes so far as to shout out Goddamn right I’ll keep myself a gun near at hand, the hinges on the screen door squeal and Miss Watson asks that Abraham please keep his voice down. The third time Abraham lets out such a laugh, he riles that dog of his. She lunges against her chain, lets out a yelp, and starts barking. Abraham and Daddy both shout at her to quiet herself down, but it’s Ryce who finally tends the animal.

Peeking out the window, Annie watches him jump off the porch, not bothering with the three steps, squat with the dog and scratch at Tilly’s ears until she walks in a small circle and drops down on the ground. When Ryce stands and it seems he might look up at Annie’s window, she drops down too and sits there, leaning against the wall, until the top step creaks, which it always does when someone sits on it.

Once it’s quiet again, Miss Watson closes the door, letting it slap the way Mama does when she catches Daddy smoking, and Daddy tells Abraham a man is only as happy as the wife he raises. Mama wouldn’t like it if she heard Daddy saying that, and Daddy would never say it when Mama was near enough to hear.

“Ain’t my wife, yet,” Abraham hollers.

Miss Watson doesn’t do any more shouting from the kitchen.

•   •   •

TWICE MAMA CALLS
upstairs for Annie to come on down. The third time, Daddy does the hollering. She has company, and it won’t do to be so rude. Annie walks to the top of the stairs and, with a hand resting on her stomach, says she sure doesn’t feel well. Please give Ryce my apologies. It might be the start of school, a long three months away, before Annie is able to bear looking Ryce Fulkerson in the eyes again.

As the three of them sit down there, the sun falling below the horizon, Daddy and Abraham Pace do most of the talking. Every so often, there is a slap, one of them swatting a mosquito, or a creak as someone stands to stretch his legs. In the kitchen, silverware rattles as Grandma drops it in a sink of soapy water and cupboards open and close as Mama puts away the supper dishes. Someone, probably Miss Watson, fans a deck of cards and taps it three times on the kitchen table. The smell of coffee bubbling up in the percolator drifts upstairs. Mama is brewing it to be served with the spice cake and ice cream.

There was no talk of Mrs. Baine over supper or how she died, and no talk of Aunt Juna coming home, but Jacob Riddle has been sitting out back all evening on a folding chair Mama brought out from the spare bedroom. He’s there just in case. Just in case it was Aunt Juna up there smoking cigarettes. Just in case it wasn’t old age that got the better of Mrs. Baine. Just in case Ellis Baine comes again.

Most of the night, Caroline has been out there with Jacob Riddle. Before supper, she changed into her favorite yellow dress, the one folks say looks so lovely against her dark hair, and snuck into Mama’s lipstick.

“He’s the one,” Caroline whispered to Annie as they were eating hamburgers and creamed corn. “He’s the one I saw in the well.”

It’s nearly nine thirty when Ryce’s bike wobbles back down the drive. The screen door whines as it opens and slaps closed, chairs scoot across the linoleum, someone shuffles and taps a deck of playing cards on the table again. Daddy hollers out for Caroline to get herself inside and sends Jacob Riddle on home, and a few moments later, Annie’s bedroom door opens. With her back toward the light that spills into the room, Annie closes her eyes and doesn’t answer when Caroline whispers her name.

“You awake?” Caroline says.

Annie draws in deep, full breaths and lets them out long and slow so Caroline will think she’s asleep. It also helps to calm the sparks racing around her stomach. She wasn’t scared last night about going to the well, not really, not the way she’s scared tonight. The first night she went, she had been certain Daddy was with her, somewhere, watching over her. Even though she’d never crossed over onto Baine property, she’d not been afraid. Not really. But tonight will be different.

She’s lied plenty to Caroline about having crossed over the rock fence, but in truth, she never had until she went to the well. When Annie was younger and already tired of folks telling her she was a lucky young lady to be growing up with a girl as fine and lovely as Caroline, she had lied and told Caroline she’d crossed over onto the Baines’ a half dozen times and not a thing bad had happened. She dared Caroline to do the same. Leaning against the rock fence, Annie had told Caroline she was a sissy for being scared, all in hopes Caroline would finally hoist her skirt and crawl over. Eventually, Caroline would start to cry, and Annie would stop teasing because she didn’t truly wish for something bad to happen to Caroline. Annie never truly wished for that.

The bedroom smells differently with Caroline in it. Even at the end of the day, after sitting out on that back stoop with Jacob Riddle and listening to him talk about all those old games, Caroline takes over the room with her sweetness and pushes Annie aside.

“I know you’re awake,” Caroline says.

There’s the long, slow hum of a zipper being unzipped and then the rattling of wire hangers. There are a few pats and a hand brushing lint from the lengths of a skirt as Caroline grooms her dress before closing the closet door.

“I know you’re awake, and I know you’re mad.”

“Ain’t mad.”

“Then why’d you hide up here all night?”

“Don’t feel well, is all.”

“I’ve been thinking about the fellow you saw in the well,” Caroline says. “I been watching out for him. And been thinking we could trim your hair, if you want. And if you lather it up with some mayonnaise and then wash it good, it’ll lay smoother for you.”

“Don’t think I’ll put mayonnaise in my hair,” Annie says.

“You think Jacob Riddle is the boy you saw in that well, Annie?”

“What if I said yes?”

Caroline nudges Annie with one knee, pushing her over, and lies next to her on the bed. She’s warm up against Annie, and as sweet as she smells, that’s how soft her skin is.

“I’d believe you,” Caroline says. “But I’d sure be sad about it.”

“He ain’t got blue eyes,” Annie says. “You thought about that? You said the boy had dark hair and blue eyes.”

Caroline lifts her head long enough to pull all her hair over one shoulder and smooths it by drawing it through her two hands.

“I did think of that.” Her hair smells like rose petals, which is altogether unexpected on a lavender farm. “They were blue when he was born. That’s what he said. Blue until he got older, and then they turned brown.”

“Did they ask you about last night?” Annie rolls on her back and lays her head off to the side so she can see Caroline. The moonlight coming through the window throws a tiny glare in her blue eyes. “Daddy and Sheriff Fulkerson, did they ask you questions?”

Caroline lays her head off to the side too so their noses nearly touch.

“Yes,” she whispers, her breath sharp and salty with the smell of the baking powder she uses to brush her teeth.

“What did you tell them?”

“Truth.”

“Which is?”

“That I followed you up there when you told me not to.”

“Why’d you tell them that?”

Annie hadn’t wanted Caroline to follow because she always gets the better of things. She doesn’t mean any harm, doesn’t have the gumption to be harmful, but she has a way. Sheriff Fulkerson and other folks wouldn’t understand about sisters who have a way and always get the better of things. They’d think Annie asked her not to come because Annie’s evil like Aunt Juna and had evil things in mind.

“Because it was true,” Caroline says. “Told them I followed you anyway. Even told them I stole from you, took your flashlight.”

There she goes again, even trying to get the better of Annie’s guilt.

“They don’t care about no stolen flashlight,” Annie says. “You tell about the cigarettes?”

“I did, but Daddy said they didn’t find any. Said maybe we saw something else. Asked was I sure.”

Annie shifts around until she’s looking at the dark ceiling. “And?”

“Said I was sure. Said maybe I was sure.”

“I’m going again,” Annie says.

Caroline rolls on her side, lifts up on one elbow, and looks down at Annie. “Going where?”

“I think it was Aunt Juna up there,” Annie says. “Thinking she’s the one who left those cigarettes.”

The smile Jacob Riddle had put on Caroline’s face fades. “You shouldn’t be wishing for something like that, for Aunt Juna to come home.”

Mama and Daddy didn’t have to sit Caroline down the way they sat Annie down. The next year, when Caroline reached the third grade, Mrs. Johansson called her off the playground, walked with her to a shady spot near the swing sets no one used because the bolts were nearly rusted through, and after that, Caroline didn’t jump rope anymore.

“Ain’t wishing for it,” Annie says.

“Then why would you go? Why do you care? Tell Mama and Daddy. They’ll see to it.”

“Mama would tell her to stay,” Annie says. “I’m going to tell her to leave.”

“You can’t go,” Caroline says, sitting up. “I won’t let you. I’ll wake Mama right now. I’ll wake Daddy too.”

Only one time did Mama say those nasty cigars of Daddy’s reminded her of her own daddy. She waved a hand as if to rid the house of the sweet, smoky smell, and when that didn’t work, she walked out the door, letting it slam behind. Daddy had snubbed out the cigar and hollered after her that he was sorry. That smell in Mama’s own kitchen brought something to mind, brought it too near. Whatever memories Mama had of her childhood, she could manage them until they were resurrected by the smell of that cigar. That’s how it is with Aunt Juna. Annie can manage the thought of her when she is at a distance, is strong enough to keep her own evil nature from taking root, but if Aunt Juna were to get too close, she’d be like the sweet, smoky cigar. She’d bring to life things Annie would rather leave dead and buried.

“Do you promise?” Caroline asks. “Do you promise you won’t go?”

“Sure, Caroline,” Annie says, knowing Caroline never suspects folks of lying. “I promise.”

Caroline keeps staring at the side of Annie’s face, waiting for her to say something more. Or maybe she knows Aunt Juna is Annie’s real mama too. Annie never thought about that. Caroline doesn’t like hearing about the pigs Abraham slaughters every year or the chicken on the table being so fresh it practically walked itself into the oven. Instead she likes the smell of lavender and cleaning the bristles of her best hairbrush. But because of the way she’s staring at the parts of Annie just like Ellis Baine did when he was sitting at the kitchen table, because her eyes travel from the top of Annie’s head down to her chin and back up to her yellow hair, if Caroline hadn’t considered it before, she’s considering it now. She’s thinking about Ellis Baine’s visit to the house and understanding now why he came to see Annie. Caroline is being forced to see what’s behind the supper being served. Annie and Caroline aren’t real sisters.

“It wasn’t Jacob Riddle I seen in that well,” Annie says, tired of trying her best to be angry at Caroline. As much as Annie can’t help being taller than most any other girl, Caroline can’t help that life is so much easier for her. “But I expect he’s the boy you seen.”

•   •   •

MAMA AND DADDY
and the others were supposed to play cards, but not thirty minutes after Caroline falls asleep, Abraham Pace and Miss Watson say their good-byes from the porch and climb into Abraham’s truck. The engine sputters and rattles and fades as it drives toward the road. Grandma is all the time saying how fragile Miss Watson is, so most likely, she was still angry with Abraham for shouting out and that’s probably why they didn’t stay for cards.

Another thirty minutes and the last lamp is switched off and the springs in Mama and Daddy’s bed creak as they crawl in. Their muffled voices travel down the hall and through the small crack where Annie and Caroline’s door isn’t quite shut. Then they fall silent, and lastly, Grandma’s quiet snores float up the stairwell from her downstairs bedroom.

Abraham’s dog is gone, same as the last time Annie made this trip, and even though there’s no moon, she’ll know the way. She passes through the kitchen, the light over the stove helping her to walk around the table without bumping the chairs. She pushes the door open only enough to slip through and holds on until it settles in its frame.

She ran up the hill last time and had a candle and matches that she knew would light her way once she reached the top. She has neither this time, and she walks instead of runs through the rows of lavender.

She’s feeling bad for lying to Caroline. She always feels bad when she lies, but most especially when she lies to her sister. Caroline never lies, probably doesn’t even understand the inclination. She has no need for lying. She never does anything wrong, so no need to lie to cover up. She always does well in school, so no need to lie about grades to Mama and Daddy. She doesn’t understand about people who have to lie just to make their way.