Let Me Die in His Footsteps (4 page)

It’s a slender arm. That’s the thing she is first certain of. And as she lets the flashlight slide up that arm to the shoulder and the tangle of wiry long hair spread across what must be the side of a face, the smell is the next thing Annie is certain of. She gives Caroline another yank, nearly knocking her from her feet, and they run.

1936—SARAH AND JUNA

I’M STILL LACING
my boots as I walk out the door. Hunched over and moving with an awkward gait, I tug those laces tight, tie off the both, and glance back at the house. It stands already in the shadows, though the sun has barely risen. No one watches me from the doorway or from the window. Not Juna or Dale. Not Daddy. No one is watching, so I walk faster and faster still. I take deep breaths of clean morning air to flush the smoke from the cigars Daddy is all the time sucking on. I fan my blouse and my skirt because the stink of them clings to my clothes, and I walk faster and faster until I’m running.

Ellis Baine always gets an early start. He and his brothers will be driving by on their way north of town to check the land passed down through their mama’s side of the family. They always do it first thing and leave the youngest two to see to what needs doing. If they spot me walking alongside of the road, they’ll offer me a ride. They do it for Juna most mornings. She tells me this at the end of each day, even knowing what an ache I have for Ellis. She tells me how they hoist her onto the back of that truck, talk with her and smile at her until they drop her wherever she’s going. Sometimes Ellis hops down ahead of her, reaches up, and lets her fall into his arms as she hops down too. She tells me even though I have such an ache.

Up ahead, the lay of the hills is such that the sun breaks through and the shadows end. The hollyhocks are in full bloom here. They’re waist-high already, and by July, they’ll be covered in mites. I run on toward that sunlight and toward the road and hope like hell Ellis and his brothers didn’t already pass by.

There was a woman in my childhood, Mary Holleran, and I know her still, who knew I was a girl when I was no more than a sickness that woke Mama every morning for six weeks. On Sundays, after the preacher finished preaching, Mary Holleran and the other women would gather around Mama, all of them congregating on the worn, dry grass outside the church’s double doors, and Mary would close her eyes and lay her hands on Mama’s belly. The women would cackle, Mama would say, debate the height of the bump in her belly, the flush in her cheeks, the thickness of her hair. They would pat Mama’s damp face with a kerchief, lead her into the shade thrown by a cluster of red maples, and sit her on a stump or the tail end of a wagon.

As Mama’s belly grew and the leaves shifted from green to red to gold and the winds swung around to the north, the gathering moved into the church basement. The women would sip hot coffee, and always, every Sunday, they settled on my being a girl. You’ll name her Sarah, Mary Holleran said. Mary, same as Juna, has the gift, the know-how.

Mama liked the name Sarah, liked it even more when Mary Holleran said it meant I would be a princess. Mama clung to the idea of giving birth to a princess. The thought of me made my mama want to sweep the wooden floors in her small house, even the corners. The thought of me made her want to wash her clothes in hot soapy water, cut away dead branches, and weed the garden. The thought of me lit up the years ahead. As the women sipped their coffee and dropped napkins at Mama’s feet to foresee the date of my birth, Mama would smooth the strands of hair that poked out from under her white cap, stroke her full belly, and try to lose the sound of her own husband’s voice among all the other voices. A princess would bring some light, some joy, into her home.

Mary Holleran and the other women shied away when next Mama was pregnant. A few mornings, early on, before Mama’s belly began to swell, they laid their hands on her. A boy, they said, again in agreement. All of them except Mary Holleran. She said nothing. After that, the ladies didn’t cackle. They didn’t run their fingers through Mama’s hair or tap their kerchiefs to her cheeks. Mama asked what she should name her baby boy. Is there a name that means prince, she had asked. The women shook their heads and looked to Mary Holleran. Again, Mary said nothing. When Mama’s second was born a girl, the women would not speak to her. They didn’t look down into the face of my sister and coo about her sweet pink nose or the tenderness of each finger. Only Mary Holleran pulled aside the blanket and looked into my sister’s eyes. “I’ve no intent to be unkind,” Mary had said to Mama, “but be wary of this child. Take extra care.”

No one would tell Mama what to name her new baby, not even Mary Holleran, who had named me, and since Mama had been preparing for a boy, she struggled for days. She wondered how to hold this new baby, how to feed it and change it and swaddle it for the night. Daddy wanted no part of the child, wanted no part of giving it a name. He knew he was cursed by this baby who was meant to be a boy. He and his whole life . . . cursed. Because Mama had no one to help her or to tell her what to do, and because my sister was born in June, Mama named her second child Juna.

Mama’s thirdborn, Dale, killed her. After giving birth, Mama lived three days. She lived long enough to hold her boy, touch his slender nose, kiss the tips of each finger, and give him a name. For those three days, Daddy was happy. The whole house was happy. Dale was a boy, and that meant Daddy would live on. He’d live on forever. Dale being a boy made him most precious, but the relief of him being born ended when Mama died. Daddy had been right. Right all along. He had been cursed by the birth of a girl who was meant to be a boy, and then with Mama’s death and the nine, almost ten years that followed during which no woman would agree to take Mama’s place, and year after year of crops that faltered and failed. Daddy was right. Juna was a curse.

As I near the main road into town, I slow to a walk. I take a deep breath in through my nose, pucker my lips, and blow it out through my mouth. I do this several times over to calm myself. I tip my face toward the sun. I’ll have a new place to live one day, God willing. Someplace where the sun shines from sunup to sundown, and I’ll clean the windows every day because always there will be sun.

The road ahead is empty as far as I can see. I jog another few steps until I reach it, settle back into a walk, tuck my blouse into my skirt, straighten the cap on my head, and feel for the strands of hair I plucked loose before leaving the house. I wrap one around my finger like I’ve seen Juna do, hold it there as I keep walking—slow now so when they pick me up, my ride will be long—and then let that strand of hair go and hope it pops into a soft curl falling alongside my face.

There is a rattling. It’s a tailgate with a latch that doesn’t close up so tight and side rails grown loose from someone all the time leaning on them. The rattling grows louder. I don’t look back, but I know they’re coming. Hope they’re coming. The pitch of the engine’s hum drops, and brakes squeal.

“Hop on,” one of those brothers hollers at me.

I lift a hand to shield my eyes from the sun. “Sure will,” I say.

First thing this morning, the coffee had been boiling and the biscuits were nearly done, their spongy white centers firm to the touch, when Daddy first made mention of the horsemint and crabgrass taking root in the lower field. I had already sliced through one tomato, one of the first good ones we’d taken from our garden, and was cutting the rotten spot out of a second. Dale was sitting next to Daddy and chewing one of those tomato slices. As quick as a dribble of juice ran down his chin, Dale dabbed at it with a napkin he held wadded up in one fist. I didn’t have to ask if he’d washed because his hands, nails, face, are always clean. Dale being that clean has always troubled Daddy. Juna was standing at the window, waiting on the coffee and soaking up the only bit of sunlight we’d get in the house all day.

I always do the cooking. Juna is never allowed. Daddy fears her sinful nature might bleed into the pone if she were to mix it or taint the slivers of ham if she were to brown them. Instead, I do the cooking and Juna is, every day, sent out of the house first thing in the morning with chores enough to keep her busy until sunset. Busy and far from home. This makes Juna the harder of us two sisters, and me the softer. Dale too is soft because Daddy has always figured Dale is safer if he spends his days with me. Being soft was tolerable when Dale was young, but now that he is almost ten years old, being soft has started to be something that might carry on into manhood. It has started to be something shameful.

Daddy sat at the kitchen table, his plaid shirt hanging open. Wiry black hair dotted with gray formed a small triangle in the center of his sunken chest, and beneath it, his skin was white. His face had gone a week without seeing a razor, and the stubble and tufts that had managed to fill in were streaked with gray. As he did every morning, he was blinking and staring at the fingers on each hand and counting them as best he could, trying to decide if he could see them as clear today as he did yesterday. He was making sure the whiskey hadn’t worked on his eyes while he slept. Seeing Daddy doing his counting reminded me to put out the lamp we leave to burn through each night. Daddy never wants to wake to blackness. He worries that if the kerosene burns out, his eyes will burn out too.

“Take a hoe on over there, and Dale should take one too,” Daddy said, reaching for a second biscuit before swallowing the first. “Should take the better part of the day.”

He was talking to Juna. I didn’t know this because he was looking at her. He never did. Daddy is afraid of Juna. She has the know-how, but that isn’t what frightens Daddy. He has always been certain there is evil living inside Juna and that it makes its home in her eyes. Those eyes are dark, almost black. A person as fair as Juna should have pale-blue eyes or maybe soft hazel, but hers are black. Daddy never looks Juna square on.

“You’ll see to the fields today,” Daddy said, and using his fingers to tear off a piece of that biscuit because his teeth aren’t rooted solid enough to do it for him, he popped it in his mouth. “And I want Dale going too. About time the boy did some real work.”

Daddy had seen the same as me. He’d seen Dale swiping away those dribbles of our first good tomatoes before they could reach the tip of his chin and those clean nails of his and smooth knuckles. And Dale had been wearing a freshly washed shirt buttoned up under his chin and he’d been smiling. Smiling for no reason. Daddy couldn’t do much about poor land and little rain, but he could damn sure see to raising his boy to be a man.

After first pouring herself a cup of coffee, Juna swept past Daddy, close enough her skirt brushed his knees. He jerked his legs aside, and she sat opposite him, where she shielded her eyes with one hand as if the sun were too bright. But it wasn’t. She was playing with Daddy’s fear, making him worry his eyes were fading.

“Thought to gather blackberries today,” she said, squinting into sunlight that wasn’t there. “Hadn’t planned for tobacco.”

She laid her head off to one side at an awkward sort of angle that made a person wonder what she was looking at. It made a person think Juna could see things others could not.

“Too early for berries,” Daddy said.

“Come early this year.” It’s part of the know-how, having a knack for knowing where the best berries will be found. “Don’t think today is the day for tobacco. I have a feeling.”

And then she tipped her head in that way she does and gave me a nod too. She sometimes catches me watching her while she sleeps or staring at the fire when she walks into the room to see if it sparks and hisses as she draws near, and so she knows I sometimes worry Daddy might be right. Sometimes, I’m afraid of Juna too.

Two hands reach down from the back of that truck. With the sun hitting me full in the face, I can’t be altogether certain whose hand I’m grabbing, but I make my best guess and I guess right. I can feel it the instant his hand wraps around mine. It’s a large hand, strong, tight grip. It’s Ellis’s hand I’m holding on to.

He gives a tug, and I pop up onto the back of the truck. One of those brothers pulls the gate closed, and as the truck starts up again, the sound of the engine growing louder and the side rails rattling all around us, that same brother hollers at me to hold on.

A flatbed trailer of sorts takes up most of the back of the truck so that everyone is leaned up against the edge and holding on to those railings as we bounce over the deep ruts cut into the road. Two metal tubs, both covered over with tarps and tied off with thin rope, sit on top of the trailer. Two brothers, one to each tub, are holding them in place so they don’t bounce about or slide off altogether, and another brother is shuffling things around, stacking tin buckets, one inside another, tossing a pair of leather gloves to each man.

“Where’s the pegs?” Ellis hollers over the sound of the truck and the wind rushing past our ears.

I stand directly at his side and can feel his one arm brushing against my shoulder as the truck knocks us about. I lean up against the railing that wraps around the truck’s bed just like all the brothers are doing, my arms stretched back behind so I can hold on.

“God damn it all,” Ellis says as the brother who was stacking pails continues digging through all that’s piled up inside the truck and not finding those pegs.

Ellis Baine has thick, dark hair, nearly black, and tanned olive skin. He’s broad through the chest in a way few men are anymore. Though he’s not the oldest of the Baine brothers—that would be Joseph Carl, who doesn’t live here anymore—he’s definitely the most solid.

I loosen my grip as the truck gains speed, and I wait for a deep rut in the road to come along. When it does and the truck lurches to one side, I fall forward in a way I hadn’t intended. I had planned to fall into Ellis Baine so he would wrap me up in his arms, hold me, and tell me to be careful. Our faces would nearly touch. I’d be close enough to smell the lye he’d have washed up with this morning, the icy-cold water he’d have splashed on his face. But the truck is going fast and the ruts in the road are deep, and I fall forward and not into Ellis Baine. My arms fly up. I let out a squeal I’ll later wish I hadn’t let out, crack a shin on the flatbed trailer, and nearly fall into the tubs of seedlings headed to the field.

Someone grabs me by one arm and hauls me back, and I’m hoping it’s Ellis and it is Ellis. In one smooth motion, he yanks me back to right, swings one arm across the front of me, and grabs onto the railing, one hand on each side of me, trapping me between himself and the side of the truck. With my face pressed up against the center of his chest, pressed so close my cheek warms and I can feel his beating heart, I close my eyes.