Kathryn Magendie (23 page)

Reverend Seth raced back and forth on the stage, pounding his Bible, yelling about God and Jesus and Sweetie’s mother’s sin of the flesh and magic and the devil and afflictions and evil.

The healer looked out over the crowd. “You, there.” He pointed to a woman wearing a big flowered hat. “Come up here.”

As the woman stepped up to the stage, I felt as if I was trapped in the scariest nightmare I’d ever had, one that I was so glad to wake up from and see I was really in my soft bed. A trickle of sweat fell into my right eye, stinging. The guard-dog man’s fingers hurt my arms. I imagined I felt and smelled the fire and brimstone I used to hear about at an old church long ago. It was as if Sweetie and I were really in hell and not in a church at all.

The healer said something to the woman. She woman reached into her hat and then handed the healer a long sharp hatpin. My stomach fisted and reared up. I was afraid the hard knots of my secret shame would come flying out of my mouth and land on the platform for everyone to see.

The healer pushed against the hatpin woman’s head. She fell back, just as Marie St. Cloud had done. A gang of women crowded around her, helping her back to her seat, some of them speaking the gibberish again.

The healer held the hatpin out for the crowd to see. “Behold the affliction of this young child.” He went to Sweetie, grabbed her hand, and stuck the hatpin deep into her palm.

I screamed, and my screams were mixed with other screams in the crowd.

The healer lifted his Bible. “Hush! Hush! There is not cruelty here. See how the child doesn’t flinch? See how she stands unharmed?”

Sweetie wasn’t fighting anymore as blood trickled onto the wood platform. I thought she would curse, scream, and fight more, but she didn’t. She turned to me, kept her bright burning eyes pierced into mine.

Through the thick clogging in my throat, I shouted, “Leave her alone!” I struggled against the man holding me, but he didn’t let go.

Sweetie didn’t blink and her marble colored eyes glowed brighter, burning just as Grandmother Rosetta’s had in the painting. I saw a burning in the pupils, saw the fire there, leaping up, hot and full of rage. She gritted her teeth and I swore I could hear them grinding together above all the noise.

The healer held up Sweetie’s palm and prayed over it.

Reverend Seth was about to foam at the mouth, lips covered in white spittle, his eyes wild and glazed. He was still pounding his Bible, telling people they best get right with the Lord, confess their sins, tithe the church, be children of God.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I didn’t know or care if she could hear me. My voice croaked out, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry—”

The healer slowly shook his head. “You see? Do you see brothers and sisters?” He put down his Bible, grabbed Sweetie’s other palm.

She didn’t try to stop him. She lifted her chin and stood with her feet apart.

The healer drove the sharp point deeper, kept it there, held up her palm to face the crowd. The pin had gone all the way through her hand. He then slowly withdrew the pin.

The tent people shouted and screamed. A woman fainted and someone carried her outside. A man called out, “This ain’t the Lord’s work! Hurting a child!” And another man cried out, “That’s right! This looks more like Satan’s work than Jesus’ work!” People were rushing out, others rushing forward.

The healer quieted the crowd, pushing his palms towards them in a
hush hush hush
move. “Do you see how she doesn’t feel the thrust of the weapon?” He lifted Sweetie’s palms and wiped the blood with his robe. The white robe had an angry splotch of red and he showed it to the crowd. “She bleeds, but feels no pain. Her mother has kept the secret from all but your good reverend, who could no longer bear the secret alone. Her mother has held all the shame from whence the affliction was birthed; her dirty deeds with men. Her own father’s blasphemy. Her own mother’s witchery.” He took both of Sweetie’s hands and held them out to the tent people. “Stigmata! From her family’s unnatural appetites! A generational curse upon the child for the sins of her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother before her! Her father and his father and his father before him!”

The crowd rippled noises, took in gasps of breath.

Sweetie kept her lifted chin, her feet wide. She stared out into the crowd with her burning barn eyes.

Brother Seth pointed to Sweetie, shook his head oh so sadly. Oh so sadly. He said, “Yes, this child’s mama revealed to me how she sinned. And in her sinning, this poor child bears hell’s affliction and Satan’s torment. A freak of nature. How has she coped so with her burdens on such small shoulders?” He wagged his head as if he was the most sorrowful of sorrowful men, patted Sweetie on the shoulder, wiped his sweat with a handkerchief.

The healer nodded, nodded, oh so sadly nodded.

Sweetie stayed still, as if she’d left the earth and gone somewhere else. As if she were a shell of a body and what made Sweetie herself was hovering above looking down on everyone and everything.

I twisted in the man’s grip, feeling my own white-hot anger bubble up my blood. “It’s not true! Her mother is beautiful. Her mother is an angel. I saw her. I know it. I know it. And Sweetie isn’t a freak.
Let her go
.” I turned my head around to face the man holding me. He looked down at me with his mouth turned down. I thought he had to be good inside somewhere. “Please, mister. Please help my friend. Please.”

He lowered his head, said, “This is just a job. Just a job.”

The healer spoke, looking at Sweetie as if she were a stray kitty in the gutter. “Today, I will heal her affliction. I will release her from Satan! Brothers and Sisters, do you Be-
lieve
?”

“Yes! A-men!”

Sweetie turned her face to the healer, then spat at him, a big fat ball of spit that landed on the healer’s face, dripped onto his lips. His spit-on lips tightened together, his face wet and red and blotchy. Without wiping off her spit, he kissed the cross again, drew it back, and struck Sweetie on the head. Someone in the crowd screamed or maybe it was only me.

Sweetie narrowed her eyes and I thought she was going to spit at him again.

The healer shouted, “Spare the rod, and spoil the child, it is written. This girl’s mother has let her grow wild and wanton, just as the mother was.”

Then, out of the sky it seemed, so that at first I thought it might be God, a booming voice rose over the crowd releasing only one word—“
ENOUGH
!”—and a big man with broad shoulders jumped up to the platform in a long leap and faced the healer with his hands balled into fists. “Let her go!” The guard-dog men holding Sweetie looked at each other and let Sweetie go.

The man holding me said, “I wasn’t paid to get beat up.” He let go of me and I ran to Sweetie. She had lit into the two who’d held onto her, kicking and hitting them as if she’d lost all the rest of her mind. “Sweetie!” She didn’t hear me, didn’t care.

The broad shouldered man turned to me, and when I looked up at him, he had the most beautiful green eyes I’d ever seen. Familiar eyes. “Get Sweetie out of here.”

I stared at him as if I didn’t understand anything in the world anymore.

The crowd had grown quiet, watching with widened eyes, as if they’d just awakened from the same bad dream I had. The healer and Brother Seth were trying to get them riled up again, but they began to walk out of the tent.

Green Eyes stepped close to me, and he smelled like pipe smoke. “Get your friend and go. Hurry now.” He strode over to the healer, grabbed the cross, and ripped it from his neck. When the healer tried to take it back, Green Eyes punched him in the nose. The tent people who hadn’t yet left began praying and swaying. Someone jumped up on the platform. Someone shot a gun in the air. A woman shrieked.

I ran to Sweetie and pulled at her arm. She was working on Reverend Seth, hollering and pounding him with her fists. Little blood prints from her fists were on the healer’s white robe and on Reverend Seth’s white shirt. Reverend Seth stood as if he was made of wood, taking her blows. I pulled her harder and she turned, socked me on my ribs before she saw it was me. She was breathing in and out so hard, I thought she might die if I didn’t get her out of there.

“Come on, Sweetie! We got to get back to your mother!”

That did it. Her burning eyes went back to her regular Sweetie eyes.

We jumped off the platform, ran toward the way out. Hands reached out to us as we dodged and charged down the aisle. I didn’t know if they were trying to help us, or grab us, or maybe just touch the freak of nature. When I glanced back one last time, Green Eyes stared after us, still holding the healer’s cross in his fist, the healer flat on the floor.

We didn’t stop running until we were to the split off by the creek. I leaned over into the bushes and vomited everything out. It was bitter-sour and nasty. Sweetie patted me on the back, took a palm of water and splashed the back of my neck. I wiped my mouth and couldn’t look Sweetie in the eye.

“You got it all out now?”

I lowered myself to the ground and put my head in my hands.

“I got to go to Mama.”

Without lifting my head, I said, “You go, don’t—”

She took off running before I finished.

I listened for the sounds of the crowd coming to get us. I felt wet on my back from her blood and the creek water. There were only the birds singing and squirrels chattering, and the wind causing two limbs to rub together. The sounds were of a normal day, as if nothing strange had happened at all. As if the day were nothing but a bad dream and soon I’d wake up in my own bed, with the breeze pushing through the window.

I wondered how grown-ups could be so mean to kids. How they felt as if they could do whatever they wanted just because we had no say-so. I saw Sweetie on the platform again, how she fought the men, hitting, screaming, and spitting, and how brave she was. I hadn’t been brave enough at all, vomiting in the bushes. Miss Mae would be angry with me for messing up the job she’d given me. I hadn’t watched after Sweetie at all. Sweetie was right about me always having to know too much about what I didn’t understand.

I sat in the woods with the animals and when I could get up without feeling dizzy, I found my way on the trail back to Whale Back, and from there the yarn led me back to Sweetie, the map left at Sweetie’s house.

I wondered what Father would have to say about all that happened in that tent. I wonder what he’d think about his biological machines.

TWENTY-ONE

I climbed the hill to Sweetie’s, ran into her little house, and straight to Miss Mae’s room where Sweetie stood over her mother’s bed. There was wet on her pillow and Miss Mae’s lips were caked with white.

Sweetie looked up at me, her face a world of sorrows, a universe of sorrows, a whole galaxy where everything happy and good was sucked into a big black hole of space. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. Her voice croaked when she finally said, “She is gone. She left me.”

I could only blink.

“I orter not gone off.” Sweetie reached out and touched her mother’s hair. Sweetie’s hands were bandaged in white cloths and a bit of blood stained the palms.

I made my legs work, forced them to stand beside Sweetie. Miss Mae lay still, and she looked as if she were sleeping. But in that stillness, I knew. All I could think about was the time Father drove around a curve and accidentally hit a cat. When I jumped out to see what happened to it, the cat was lying on the ground. There were no blood or marks at all that I could see. Just the cat lying there still and quiet, its eyes staring, empty. It was just as Miss Mae was, the way her body didn’t move at all, the way she lay there empty-looking. I tore my eyes from her and looked at Sweetie. “Close her eyes, Sweetie.”

“Huh?”

“Close her eyes.” I reached, but could not touch Sweetie’s mother.

Sweetie covered her mother’s face with her left hand, and closed her mother’s eyes. She kept her hand there for a while, and then slowly pulled it back to let her arm dangle at her side. Sweetie looked at me then, and I wanted to lower my eyes, but I didn’t, I couldn’t. She said, “We will bathe her with them herbs and put some sweet oil on her. I already wiped up where she got sick.” She stroked her mother’s hair. “I done it all wrong.”

I swallowed, and tried to think of something to say, but I remembered how I had been at Grandmother Rosetta’s memorial. How nothing anyone said helped, and how sometimes what they said made me feel worse. I could only say, “You did everything right. Everything you could.” It was me, I thought. Me, who did it all wrong.

Sweetie leaned over and kissed her mother right on the lips. She touched her lips where she’d kissed them, and then stroked and smoothed her mother’s hair. I backed out of the room and waited in the kitchen.

When Sweetie came out, she almost looked like a ghost herself, and I understood that part of her. The way I’d felt as if I were floating when my nonna died. The way everything was dark and strange and cold. Sweetie lit the stove and put the kettle of water on to heat, as if it was a normal day and she was going to make some tea. From the cupboard she took a wide pan that was bent and dark from many uses over many years. Into the pan, she sprinkled herbs from a bowl, root shavings from a tiny burlap sack, and flower petals from a small basket.

On the counter was a glass bottle with a stopper. Inside was what looked like the yellow liquid that she’d poured onto the twigs the day we became bound-sisters. Floating in the liquid were more flower petals, and dark spicy-smelling cloves. When the water heated, the steam rising up like a misty ghost, she poured it over the dry mixture, and then added a bit of the yellow oil to the water. From a drawer, she took two small cotton towels and put them in the water. With a wooden spoon, she stirred it all around. The whole time she didn’t say a word, and for once, I didn’t say anything at all.

When she finished stirring, she at last turned to me. “I will go undress Mama. You don’t have to come.”

“I’ll help you.” I followed her back into the room, holding things in as tight as I could. If I didn’t hold things tight, everything would release into the air, all the thoughts and feelings swirling inside of me. How I tricked Sweetie. How I’d been the worst friend in the world. I’d start babbling away and wouldn’t be able to stop. The words and feelings would crowd the little house, fall on our heads and shoulders and weigh us both down until we’d never be able to crawl out from under the mess I’d helped make.

We undressed Miss Mae. She was heavy. I always pictured people who died as being lighter, since their souls were out of them. But the body was heavy and the skin was cold. It was like touching something that wasn’t real. A doll in a bad dream.

Sweetie went to a big trunk and from it took out clean white sheets. She said, “She got to lay on clean sheets after we bathe her.”

I nodded.

Sweetie left the room. I followed her again, as I didn’t want to be alone with Miss Mae. What if she suddenly woke up and pointed and said, “I asked you to watch out for Sweetie and look what you did. Now I’m dead. Dead dead dead! And Sweetie is all alone. All alone all alone!”

In the kitchen, Sweetie took from the counter the pan of herbed mixture, and headed back to the bedroom, with me on her heels. I was like a puppy slinking. She set the pan on the side table, took one of the cotton cloths, wrung it out, and handed it to me. She wrung out the other, and with it began washing her mother’s body. She was gentle, but used strong sure strokes. I copied her from the other side of the bed, washing her arms, hand, stomach, hip, leg, foot. We’d dip our cloth every so often and wring it out again. I tried not to stare at her mother’s body as I washed her. It was as pale as the belly of a catfish, and there were no marks on her. Miss Mae was the opposite of Sweetie with all Sweetie’s scars. I thought how weird that was, how strange, that Sweetie’s mother felt all that pain and wore no scars to show it, but Sweetie felt no pain and had many scars.

When her whole body was cleaned, we took off the dirty sheets. I sweated, but Sweetie had no trouble, since she’d done it many times when her mother was too sick to rise. She’d done it alone, without anyone to help her. When Miss Mae lay on her clean sheets, Sweetie took off the wet bandages on her hands. She looked at her palms and I did, too. They weren’t bleeding and the small holes were right in the center of her palms. She then took the bottle of sweet oil, poured a drop into her palm and rubbed her hands together. She put the oil in her mother’s hair. I smelled the clove and the perfume from the flower petals. Sweetie poured a bit more onto her palm and again rubbed her hands together. She put more oil on her mother’s hair, then touched her eyelids with it, and massaged her neck with it.

As Sweetie perfumed her mother, I watched one single tear drip from the corner of Sweetie’s eye, and make a slow trail all the way down her cheek, down down until it found her chin, and it stayed there, hanging onto her face, until finally, in slow motion it dropped onto her mother’s cheek. There it made the same kind of track, down her mother’s face, until it disappeared. I watched Sweetie as she tried to keep herself from crying. As far as I knew, she never cried.

I thought how Sweetie had stood in that tent and begged to trade places with her mother. That she’d sacrifice her special ways and all she was so her mother would be well. She’d become a plain old girl so her mother could be a mother again. Mothers were supposed to take care of daughters, not the other way around. Wasn’t that the way things were supposed to be?

Sweetie hitched her breath, went back to the trunk. From it, she took a long white dress with lace around the sleeves and hem. It had pearl buttons, and white on white embroidered flowers around the neck. We dressed her mother in it, then Sweetie tied the bracelet I made Miss Mae around her wrist, and clasped a pretty silver necklace in the shape of two hearts together around her neck.

She said, “Her own mama’s necklace given by my grandpaw.” Sweetie then took a hairbrush lying on the table next to the bed, and began brushing her mother’s hair in long strokes. From the roots down to the end, she brushed her hair until it shone. Miss Mae looked even more like a beautiful sleeping angel. Sweetie put a Bible in her mother’s hands. “She loved her Bible. I hate it, and won’t ever read one again, but Mama loved Jesus and she believed in all this book says. And it did not do her a bit of good.”

I reached out and touched Miss Mae’s face, drew back. It was even colder and harder. She was turning into stone. One of those Greek goddesses that stood forever in the museums.

“We got to wrap her up in the sheet. I don’t want no dirt on her face. She’d hate that.”

“Dirt on her face?”

“From when we bury her.”

“Oh.”

We wrapped her in the clean white sheet, and Sweetie tucked it just so, then she hugged her mother tight. “They’s kilt her. Or maybe I done it. Maybe I do got the devil in me.”

“That’s not true. It’s
not
.”

Sweetie leaned into me, put her head to mine. “I thought she would get well. I thought I was doing things right.”

“You tried the best you could all the time. You took good care of her every day.”

She said softly into my ear. “We’ll bury her under the dogwood tree up there behind the house, where she let me read to her before her headaches come on her so bad. She loves it up there. When I was real little, we’d set ourselves down under the shade and she’d tell me stories.”

I saw them there, sitting together, Miss Mae’s hair blowing in the wind and mixing with Sweetie’s. Their hair was like cotton candy whirling together. Miss Mae telling stories while Sweetie listened with a little smile on her face. The birds were singing, the tree leaves waving, the squirrels and coons and even the bears stopping to listen.

She looked down at her mama, and her face wrinkled in on itself. Then she fell over her mother, tore at the sheets, ripped them away from her face, pushed her face into her mother’s hair. I heard her muffled, “Mama. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave. Don’t leave. Don’t leave.”

I ran out of the room and stood in the middle of her little house, turning around, seeing everything I’d come to love and wanted to know more about, seeing Sweetie’s home that wouldn’t be a home anymore. My throat and chest ached with all the tears that wanted to come. I willed them back, willed them sucked back into my body. I had to be strong, for Sweetie.

She was in there a long time before she came out. She sat at the table and I did, too. She looked down at her hands. I looked down at mine. The minute hand on my watch circled four times before Sweetie said a word.

“It’s time.”

I swallowed, looked up at her.

“If you don’t got the stomach for it, you don’t got to help.” She eyed me, in that way she had.

“I’m helping you.”

She stood and went out of the front door.

I stared out at the woods. The leaves were waving in the wind as they always did. Except they were waving goodbye to Miss Mae. I imagined I saw her spirit in the trees, watching over Sweetie. I wondered if Grandmother Rosetta would see Miss Mae. If the two of them would meet and come to love each other. And they’d both watch over Sweetie and me for as long as we needed them to. Forever.

Sweetie soon was back with two shovels. She held one out to me.

I took the shovel.

We went up behind the house to a grassy spot where the dogwood tree grew.

As Sweetie looked up at the waving leaves, she hummed a song but didn’t sing it aloud as she usually did. Every so often she’d sing a word, like, fare you well, and leaving a home, and distant roam.

An image of my mother lying still, hard, and cold, rose up like a scary shadow. It made me want to scream and tear out my hair, so I thought maybe I didn’t hate her as much as I thought I did. I was afraid I’d be punished, that I’d go home and my mother would be gone, too. Or Father. Or both of them. And, I’d be an orphan. They’d have to put me in an orphanage. I sweated, my heart thumping out of my chest. I wondered what would become of Sweetie, without a mother or a father. My breath panted out in puffs and I was lightheaded. I swallowed back the vomit, and it burned my throat.

Sweetie dug the shovel into the dirt, pushed it in the ground with her foot, and pulled up a clump.

I did the same.

Without looking up from shoveling, she said, “Thank you.”

I swallowed every last bit of my spit. I swallowed down the bad feelings I had. The feelings of how I made her leave her mother, so I could feel important. So I could see what she’d do next. I’d wanted to see her next trick, had treated her like a circus act, just as her grandfather said people would do. And I was her blood bound sister. I began digging harder and faster. The only sound was the shovel hitting the dirt and our hard breathing.