Fig (12 page)

“What do you think of the John Deere?” Uncle Billy asks.

He looks at the tractor the way Mama looks at art. The tractor reminds me of a grasshopper, and even though it's nowhere near as pretty as the old red one, I'm happy to have something else to look at while Mama eats Daddy. Gran and I nod our heads, and we tell him we like the tractor.

dis·in·te·grate:
v.
1. To separate into pieces; fragment. 2. To decay or undergo a transformation.

November 6, 1983

I'm in the third grade, and we're supposed to choose a fairy tale and make our own book at home. Mama is excited. I don't tell her I want to do
Rapunzel
, because she's already decided on
Little Red Riding Hood
.

My mother took a multimedia-art class when she was an undergraduate at Cornell, before she met Daddy, and this is where she learned to make pop-up books. She thinks it'll be fun to make one for the assignment, and laughs.

“You'll be the only kid who does,” she says, as if this was a good thing.

Mama buys tubes of paint, an X-acto knife, and two variety packs of Sharpies from the Hobby Lobby in Topeka. Not just black, but all the colors of the rainbow—one set of regular markers, and one set of fine-tip. And she buys two new scissors, a pair for me and a pair for her.

Back home, before we begin, she takes all the cereal outside. She dumps each box—opened or unopened—into the yard and laughs. The crows Daddy tries to keep away with faceless straw men come, and for days will peck the dead grass for cornflakes and Cheerios.

My scissors are meant for paper, but Mama's are for cloth—they're expensive, stainless steel. The shine is dangerous.

She does most of the cutting because my scissors don't make it through the thin cereal-box cardboard. I make the axe for the woodcutter. I use a toothpick for the handle and a scrap of cardboard for the blade. It starts out silver, but Mama says, “Add more red.”

I use a red paint pen, and it's leaky—hard to control.

Mama forgets to have us write anything, but the pictures say enough. There is red paint all over the kitchen table, all over me, and on Mama, too. Daddy comes in for dinner and studies Mama's face. She talks to him in a shrill voice that doesn't sound like Mama. Daddy takes Mama into the guest bedroom that is also Daddy's office, and where he sleeps these days. And I am left alone with my dinner. The spaghetti is from the night before, still cold.

Instead of eating, I carefully separate the red-soaked pages and don't tear a single one. The woods pop up, then the wolf, the house, the grandmother herself, and finally the woodcutter, his axe springing upward. I look at the wolf's belly, the damage already done, and little Red's head poking out from the slit that Mama made.

I can hear them through the heating vent in the floor—their voices tinny. Daddy says, “You have to try to let go.” A pause. “Are you having any of those
other
thoughts?”

Mama yells at him. She says she's perfectly fine. Then she says she's stifled. She says it like it's Daddy's fault. And then I hear the sound of Mama leaving. The front door slams, and then her Volvo spits out gravel because she's driving too fast on the driveway.

Little Red Riding Hood looks at me. Because she's made from cardboard, her neck is stiff.
Why did you cut me out?
she says.
I didn't want to be saved.

I study Little Red Riding Hood. I think about telling her,
I didn't ask to be born
, but I don't. I don't say anything.

*  *  *  *

The next morning, the pop-up book is gone and Mama hasn't yet returned. I wonder where she is. Daddy keeps me out of school for the day. He needs my help on the farm. They are weaning all the baby lambs by taking them away from their mothers. And the world is loud with the sound of crying sheep.

The following day, I go back to school and Mrs. Jefferson takes me aside during free time. She says not to worry, that she's talked to my Daddy and she understands.

She says, “Don't worry about turning the assignment in,” and then she pats me on the head.

When school is over, I don't get on the school bus like I normally do. I've been told to wait outside for Gran to pick me up. Before I left the farm, Daddy said, “Your mama needs some time to rest.” In the back of my grandmother's Buick, I find my suitcase. Gran packed it for me. She packed it with everything she thinks I need. This includes Turtle and the unopened package of baby bottles.

*  *  *  *

Every house on Gran's block looks the same only painted three different colors. Gran has one of the baby blues, but there is also beige and red. And everyone has a paper accordion turkey in their picture window, and some people have dried corn hanging on their front doors.

Come Christmas, the turkeys will be replaced by Christmas trees, and plastic Santas will drive sleighs across the tidy yards, but it still hasn't snowed and that's all anyone ever wants to talk about.

Uncle Billy comes over every night after Gran and I have finished eating dinner—only Gran calls dinner “supper.” He brings chocolate malts in tall foam cups from the ice cream parlor in downtown Lawrence, where he's been working a construction job. My uncle can do almost anything, and even Daddy refers to him as a “jack of all trades.”

For three nights in a row, the three of us watch television, but on the fourth night Uncle Billy persuades Gran to play cards instead. Even though the dining room table has already been cleared, my grandmother insists on using the card table. “That's what it's for,” she says.

Uncle Billy slides it out from where it's kept behind the sideboard. As he unfolds each leg he says, “Ma is a stickler for tradition and the simple comforts that come from the basic security of a good, solid routine.” And he doesn't wink until after she's turned away to collect the deck of playing cards from the junk drawer in the kitchen.

Jesus Christ hangs on the wall as we play Kings on the Corners. Daddy carved it from a block of blond linden, before I was born. He made it for Gran after my grandfather died so she wouldn't get lonely. Once upon a time, this Jesus hung from the wall above the fireplace. He hung in the same spot where
Christina's World
now hangs. This is Mama's favorite painting, but it makes me feel sad. It makes me feel stuck, like I need to climb out of my body.

Daddy is not just a farmer. He made my old rocking horse and all the new cabinets in the kitchen. He made Mama's rocking chair and her easel, and I'm pretty sure he's responsible for Turtle's cradle, too. But I haven't seen him making anything new for a long time.

I look at Jesus, who cannot return my gaze because his head lulls forward.

This Christ is only eight inches tall, and yet my father mastered every single detail: each tiny thorn along his ragged crown, the nails piercing through his palms, the trickle of blood, his nostrils flared in pain, and even the wrinkles of his loincloth. But the perfection of these details is nothing compared with the sense of suffering my father managed to express with nothing more than his hands, a chisel, a set of carving knives, a piece of wood, a chunk of beeswax, and his imagination.

It's like Daddy was suffering too and found a way to use his pain to form the figure of this man—this holy son.

I ponder Jesus, and I wonder what my father could have suffered. And then I do the math. Daddy was nineteen years old the day his father died.

Nineteen.

I will be nineteen in eleven years.

*  *  *  *

When I first met Mrs. Jefferson, she was greeting the class. Wearing a neck brace, she stood at the door, ushering us into the classroom. We went single file, and she took the time to introduce herself to us individually. One by one, she even shook our hands and said, “Pleased to meet you.”

After we were seated, she stood at the front of the class and explained the brace around her neck—only she called it a soft cervical collar. “Whiplash,” she said, and this was the first time I saw her perform the ritual of sighing and then biting her lower lip.

I felt sorry for her. Her head seemed stuck, and she looked miserable. Whenever she sat down or leaned over to pick something up, she clenched her jaw and grunted like a pig. Two weeks later, she came to school without her brace. I could see her neck and the necklace she was wearing—a simple gold chain. While the class was getting settled, I approached her desk and asked if she was feeling better.

“Will you still have to wear your soft cervical collar?” I asked, and when I did, Mrs. Jefferson looked like she was going to cry. And she never did answer my question. Instead, she sighed and bit her lip and twisted her wedding ring around and around her finger. Then she looked me in the eye and said, “I can't believe you remember what it's called.”

Third grade is about becoming more self-sufficient. We are supposed to get used to doing homework, only Mrs. Jefferson takes me aside and says I'm to do mine at school from here on out. While everyone else is reading, I work the assignments at my desk and hand them in at the end of the day. Phillip Booth, who has carrot-red hair, buck teeth, and bad breath, never reads. He sits behind me, but even if he didn't, I'd still be the target for all his spitballs. His aim is impeccable. It always draws attention to what I am doing.

Candace Sherman sits to my right, across the narrow aisle. Spitball number three bounces off my shoulder and hits her foot. She's wearing a pair of purple Jellies, and when she kicks the spitball away, her eyes land on me. She watches me forever before she raises her hand. Candace raises her hand even higher, but Mrs. Jefferson is lost in her own novel. To break the spell of
Sense and Sensibility
, Candace clears her throat.

“I think it's totally unfair,” Candace Sherman says now that she has the teacher's undivided attention. “Why does everyone treat Fig like she's a princess?” Candace asks. And once again, Mrs. Jefferson sighs and bites her lip.

“Fig is very gifted,” my teacher says, and I wish she wouldn't.

Candace Sherman glares at me while Mrs. Jefferson tells everyone how incredibly high my IQ is. She takes one of my truest secrets and shares it with the entire world. While Mama appreciates my IQ, Daddy says, “Intelligence can't be measured.” And every time the school tries to get me to skip a grade, he refuses. My father says I need to be a little girl. “Childhood is more important.”

Mrs. Jefferson stands next to my desk while she defends the reason I'm doing my homework at school. She rests her hand on my shoulder and lies to the entire class, and I have to cross my fingers for her. And because I'm already crossing them, I decide to hold my breath as well, because maybe I can make her stop. Mrs. Jefferson uses my IQ as an excuse even though everyone knows the real reason. They might not know all the details, but they do know about Mama—sometimes I think they know more than I do.

Daddy says Mama isn't crazy.

“She's sick,” he says. “It's a disease.”

But Candace Sherman seems to disagree. Later, during recess, Candace uses all the words Daddy says are cruel or wrong or outdated, and because she does I decide not to tell him or anyone else—especially not Mrs. Jefferson. Gran talks about how everyone in Douglas County thought my father was going to marry Candace Sherman's mother. Had this happened, neither Candace nor I would exist today. I think about this a lot, and I wonder if Candace ever does.

I want Candace Sherman to forget I exist right now, so I continue holding my breath and crossing my fingers. I hold my breath and cross my fingers to make Mrs. Jefferson go back to treating me like she did before the stupid pop-up book that never even got turned in or graded.

Gran is not the only one who desires the security that tradition and routine bring. I, too, wish everything could be the way it was before Mama went to the hospital: simple, uncomplicated, and a little bit boring. This is what I want. I hold my breath and cross my fingers.

*  *  *  *

While I was staying with Gran, wild dogs got into the chicken coop and killed two hens; they injured the rooster, and Daddy had to put Mr. Cocky down with his twenty-two.

Uncle Billy looks at me and says, “That is called mercy.”

And there is still chicken-noodle soup when I come home, and when I look at it, Daddy says, “Waste not, want not.” But I know he knows I won't be eating it.

Our neighbor Frank McAlister trapped one of the wild dogs and called Animal Control to come and pick him up. They put the dog to sleep, and then they studied his body and reported back. The dog had hundreds of lead pellets imbedded in his skin from years of trespassing. I want to ask what color eyes he had. To see if he is related to the other dog, the mama dog I used to feed. I want to ask, “Was one eye dark and the other a cloudy blue? And did they glow yellow in the dark?” But I don't. I don't say anything at all.

Mama was the one to come and get me from my grandmother's house, and this time she only apologized once. And this made her seem way better than when she kept saying sorry over and over again after she came home from the hospital. But she's still afraid of the wild dogs. Daddy says this fear is different from the other kind. This fear is different from the kind that's caused by her disease. He tries to explain: “Those dogs are very real,” he says. “They're not just in her head.”

The first snow of the year finally falls, leaving a thin layer of white on the land. Daddy finds tracks going from the farmer's ditch to the paddock where the sheep are kept. And even though the tracks trespass through the orchard, he doesn't make the connection. He doesn't once stop to consider the possibility that Mama and I were actually chased that night.

I spot three German shepherds on my way to meet the school bus; they look nothing like the dog I used to feed. They stand in the pasture—dark compared with the snow. The cottonwoods are bare, the branches a tangle of black against the gray expanse of morning sky. From the nests secured to the treetops, hundreds of meadowlarks lift only to settle back into the branches seconds later, but the dogs don't look up. They stare at me, and I stare back—and I almost miss the bus.