What Happened to Hannah (19 page)

Jeremy was maybe eleven. He had a wiry frame with thick sandy blond hair in a bowl cut that hid his eyebrows but let his mischievous mud-colored eyes shine through. He looked too scrawny for the load but Hannah was sure she was younger when she started bringing the Mason jars up from the cellar every summer to help her mama can everything from strawberry jam to apricots and zucchini.

She could almost feel the sweat break out on her forehead and neck as she remembered those long hot summer afternoons in her mama’s kitchen. Kettles of water boiled from dawn until suppertime, a stationary black fan blowing air up off the floor. Scalding and cooling peaches and tomatoes to peel them; coring pears by the dozens, picking through crates of cherries and snapping millions of beans.

Ruth particularly liked the sweet watermelon-rind pickles Mama used to make, and it was Hannah’s particular job to skim the crock of sauerkraut in the backyard every morning after breakfast because the smell didn’t upset her stomach like it did Ruth’s.

Looking back, she knew the elephant’s load of the work had been her mother’s, particularly when she and Ruth were young—and yet she always gave them a lion’s share of what little praise came their way from their daddy.

And, of course, it became a way for her to keep all three of them safe and out of the way, hidden in the kitchen . . .

“Hi, Mama.” Hannah hung her backpack on the hook just inside the back door, noting the tiny scratches on the back of her hands that she’d gotten from Old Mrs. Phillip’s rose garden. When she had her own garden there would be no roses in it. The last place anyone should feel any kind of pain was in their flower garden, and she didn’t care how good they smelled. “Sorry, I’m late.”

“You’re late?” Her mother turned a frantic eye to the clock on the wall. The air in the small kitchen was thick with the steam from canning and summer humidity. It smelled of at least one batch of burnt sugar, Mama’s sweat, and the Ivory soap she used to wash the jars.

“Only a few minutes.” She’d planned it that way so her parents wouldn’t guess that she’d taken another ride home with Grady Steadman.

A strange boy—Grady. She wanted to like him but she knew better. She hadn’t spent the last ten years growing up a weed in the lush garden of Turchen County children without having been picked at, teased, attacked, and in general made the brunt of every trick in the book—including false friendships. He didn’t seem like the sort of boy who would be so unkind as to pretend to be her friend, but how could she tell? How could she test him?

And did he really think he was making her life easier by getting her home an hour and fifteen minutes before she was expected?

Still, somehow she hadn’t been able to refuse him, climbing into the cab of his cherry red truck like most any girl in Clearfield might.

The bird he’d wondered about in his barn turned out to be a common indigo bunting and he’d feigned disappointment that she’d already marked the specimen in the book he returned to her. He asked if they were nesting in her barn as well; and when she said she didn’t think so, that she’d spotted her buntings in the scrub field on the other side of the cow pond, he set about making up a ridiculous—and sort of amusing—story about the probability of their sightings being of the exact same buntings—Sherry and Jerry Bunting, maybe; and that perhaps flying around in his barn made them hot so they flew the short distance across their family farms to her cow pond to cool off. He emphasized the
short distance
between their farms and planted a seed about the size of an avocado pit as to how easy it would be for
them
to meet at the pond sometimes, too. To talk. About other birds.

A bemused smile softened the line of her lips. Really. She couldn’t believe he expected her to fall for that kind of nonsense. It wasn’t like she was known for her quirky sense of humor. What was he up to? Why was she so eager to find out? And what if—

“I’m going to slap that stupid look straight off your face if you don’t snap out of it, girl.” Her mother’s angry voice startled her. Anger in her house came in varying degrees and disguises and it wasn’t always what it might seem to be at first. This particular irritation was fear based—she could tell, and should have noticed sooner her mother’s sudden frenzied awareness of the time. “You picked a fine day to dawdle. Your Daddy’s been with Buzz Weims all day. They’re up in the barn and they’re both spittin’ mad about somethin’ or other, and if you don’t help me clean this mess up and get dinner on the table he’s gonna take it out on me.” She took the time to look pointedly at her daughter. “And it’ll be your fault this time.”

Hannah was always hard-pressed to see the connection between her mother’s beatings and it being her fault but it didn’t matter, they were a team—Mama, Ruth, and her. They shared the beatings and the pain and the fear and the fault and that was the way it was, the way it had always been. Besides, she knew from experience that blaming someone else was all you could do when there was simply no more room to blame yourself for anything else.

“I’m sorry, Mama.” She went for the large kettle of boiling water first—more heat and nervous sweat was the last thing they needed in the room. “What are we having? You can start it while I clean up. Where’s Ruthie?”

“Cramped up again. We’ll be lucky if we can get her to the table.” Hannah set a half-empty crate of peaches on top of a full crate and looked up in time to see her mother’s stricken gaze and the blood draining out of her flushed face. “I don’t think I got anything out for supper.”

To most everyone else in America the answer to that would have been a call for pizza or Chinese takeout or at the very least frozen dinners. In the Benson house it was enough to make your mother’s hands tremble before she could get a good grasp on the counter to keep herself from tumbling to the floor. It was enough to make the thoughts in your head whirl, to hurl every notion of Grady Steadman into the wind and every theory of peace, happiness, and normalcy into cosmic nothingness.

They stood staring at each other—paralyzed, petrified—her mother’s eyes already welling with tears.

“What . . . what about eggs?” Mama scowled but before she could speak Hannah went on. “Not breakfast eggs, not fried. An omelet. Old Mrs. Phillips taught me how to make them for her lunch because she likes oatmeal for her breakfast and she needs the protein and . . . well, there’s lots of different ways to make them, with cheese or vegetables or a little breakfast ham mixed in. I . . . I could make one for each of us with just the things we like in them. Something special for everyone. I’ll make a little one for Ruth with only eggs and cheese so she can leave the table sooner. And you can make the toast—”

“How many eggs?”

“I use two for Old Mrs. Phillips, I’ll use the same for Ruth. Three for us and four for Daddy to make it look more like a supper. A dozen?”

The look they exchanged was not mother to daughter or vice versa—it was prisoner to prisoner on the verge of escape, telling each other that from this point on they were each on their own.

“Do it and pray, girl. Do it and pray.”

“There’s like a hundred-batrillion jars left down there.” Jeremy Long’s young and uncommonly sarcastic voice brought her back to the here and now. “Plus those there on the shelf that she did last summer. Anna said to empty those.”

“Ah, no. Let’s not. I’ll pack those up myself and take some of them with us.” She had a sudden hankering for her mama’s canned peaches . . . and watermelon-rind pickles, if she still made them. And she knew for a fact there were just two shelves of jars left. “Is your brother down there with you?”

He arrived at the top of the stairs. “No, ma’am. He’s up in the barn smashin’ cans which’ll be
my
job tomorrow ’less he smashed ’em all today, which’d be just like him cuz he always gets all the good jobs.”

“I didn’t realize there were good and bad jobs in this nightmare.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, leaning the box of canning jars on the counter for a moment so he could take his time talking. “If I don’t get to smash cans tomorrow I wanna ride with Cal when he takes them to the recycling place so we can throw them all in this big container, and then when there’s enough they smash ’em again into one big square of smashed cans. It’s awesome. They collect all sorts of things there. Copper, steel, bikes. Metal ladders. They have a place that’s just for batteries, some are gigantic, man . . . and wire, too. Tons of it.”

Why had she never before noticed how cute eleven-year-old boys could be? His brother Sam was a year older but likewise as chatty and friendly, with lighter-colored hair and a wiser, more experienced elder-brother look in his eyes. She could have gobbled them both up with a spoon, and wondered how on earth their mother had manage to raise
two
such pleasant children.

Granted, she didn’t have much experience with families, but she had the impression that in the event of there being more than one child, that one of them had to be . . . a problem, at the very least. Even in Grady’s fairly normal-looking family, Cal appeared the calmer, less rash child. And God knew in her own family, Ruth had been the kind, sweet natured, tolerant Benson sister.

Nature or nurture? She’d heard people debate the question before . . . they always had good arguments for both theories—good exceptions to both, too. Her mother believed, and had taught Hannah to believe, that anger and violence were her nature, part of her DNA and inescapable, though Joe and Dr. Fry alleged that, barring any physical anomalies—namely a brain tumor or a severe chemical imbalance—it was purely nurture, a pattern passed from one generation to the next
like
a gene. But without the intrinsic character to back it up, it was unwelcome and easily broken. Who to believe?

She’d long ago decided to err on the side of caution with her genetic makeup and take it to her grave untapped. Fortunately, she’d been spared the sort of wild longings to procreate she’d heard some women get and, of course, had never started a relationship with any man with the intent of making it a permanent affiliation. Too many traps on that path—power, trust, truth. Love. The potential for life as horrific as her mother’s? No, overall it was safer, less worrisome to keep her genes to herself, shun serious relationships and protect the life she’d created for herself.

But who knew kids could be so . . . fun?

She gave Jeremy a smile and nod not knowing how to respond to his obvious delight with the recycling center except to enjoy it. “You’re still stacking those on the front porch, right?” She motioned with her head to the jars.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Your mother’s here to pick you up. I’ll go up to the barn. Tell her Sam’s on his way, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Hey, Jeremy?” She turned to him from the doorway—he did the same from the hall. “Thanks for your help today.”

His grin was big and bright and easy. “Well, don’t tell my mom but it is kinda fun. I never seen so much junk in my life.”

She laughed. “Me either.”

She stepped out into the early evening air thinking of what little time she’d spent out of doors that day. She inhaled deeply, closing her eyes, picking out the scents of new moist earth and something sweet from the woods—bloodroot or Virginia bluebells maybe—and freshness.

She’d spent most of her day with a Mr. Clayson from Charlottesville, who specialized in vintage magazines, the appeal there being not only the age but who was on the cover. His eyes twinkled over her mother’s cardboard boxes of nonsequential copies of
TV Guide
and the occasional
McCall’s,
Time,
and
Life
taken, Hannah suspected, from some waiting room. He was less enthusiastic by the time he got to her father’s ancient hunting and fishing periodicals—also pinched, no doubt—that were not only dull and faded but falling apart, yet he took them, too, leaving a room full of dust with much less to settle on.

The odd thing was, neither of her parents had been big on reading. Mama didn’t have the time and Daddy found it frustrating.

She followed the stepping-stone path through the backyard that ran parallel to the rotary clothesline that still stood like the skeleton of an umbrella waiting to be draped with clothes in every season of the year, thanks to the stepping stones. Her mind flashed once more on her mama rubbing Corn Huskers Lotion into her red, cracking fingers and hands like a body balm from Saks. Hannah’s lips curved in an ironic smile as she wondered how long it had taken her to buy a dryer after daddy’s funeral.

The barn loomed ahead of her, its familiar lines seen in a hundred million other barns across America; the big sliding doors still closed against the winter cold. Where the old farmhouse had weathered from white to gray, the barn had bled from red to brown to the same shade of dirt surrounding it.

She approached the smaller, hinged door closer to the house, thinking of those omelets she’d made so long ago—light, fluffy, colorful with diced tomatoes, bell peppers, and cheddar cheese—sweat beading on her forehead, hands shaking, her stomach so nervous she was terrified she’d throw every tasteless mouthful right back up.

Until her daddy finished, leaned back in his chair, and nodded.

His voice always echoed in a room, filled it to the corners, but it wasn’t half as unnerving as having him look straight at her . . . which he did, his pale, icy blue eyes narrowed and speculating. “She says this meal was your doing.”

She glanced at her mama, who kept her eyes on her plate. “Yes, sir. Old Mrs. Phillips taught me.”

His gaze slid toward his wife and back again. “I suspect someone should be teaching you something in the kitchen by now.”

“Oh, but she’s very helpful in the kitchen, Karl, I’ve taught her everything my mama—”

“Shut up, woman!” Hannah watched her mama cringe and brace herself for a slap that didn’t come.

When she looked back at her father, he was staring at her again. “Didn’t I say you could learn a thing or two from that old woman? She ain’t as weak and feeble as she lets on, is she?”

“No, sir. Not feeble but she is—”