Secret Lives (4 page)

Kyle is sitting next to me as I write this,
helping me spell. We are sitting on a wide branch of a giant old
elm tree in our yard. From here we can see the house and a little
ways into the woods, but nobody can see us.

Kyle says I should write about how crazy
Mama is. We didn't know Mama was crazy til a few years ago when we
heard the other children at school talking about her, saying things
I guess they heard their Mamas say, like maybe she should be put
away. She should be locked up, they said. Til then I thought all
mothers talked to people who wasn't there and washed the sheets
every day and the same clothes she washed out the day before. Once
she got me out of my bed in the middle of the night to change my
sheets though she done it already just that morning.

Mama is also afeard of indians and until
Kyle convinced me that there wasn't any indians around here I was
afeard myself. Some nights I wake up and hear the rocker going real
slow on the porch. It creaks forward, then stops, creaks backward,
then stops. I know if I tiptoe to my window, I'll see Mama in the
rocker, her mouth part open like she's about to pray, her eyes wide
and staring off, and acrost her chest the shotgun. She stays up
like that all night sometime, watching for indians.

Mama cooks us dinner when she remembers but
most often Kyle or I cook. Daddy gets angry if there ain't nothing
to eat when he comes home from the mill and even though Daddy won't
hit, his anger is worst than Mama's. Kyle says that's because it's
real anger, not crazy anger. All I know is, when I'm in the back
room where Kyle and me sleep and I hear the floorboards creak
outside the door, my heart beats so hard it hurts and I hold my
breath, waiting for Daddy to throw the door open and holler or Ma
to race in with the strap.

If Kyle didn't live here too I would run
away.

Last year Mrs. Renfrew had us write about a
person we loved and most everybody wrote about their mother or
father. Kyle and me wrote about each other. I said how when we was
little he held my hand when I was learning to walk. (Mrs. Renfrew
said that is unlikley—he was not even a year older than me and
could barely walk hisself, but I remember this clearly.) I wrote he
was a calm person and nice and he wrote I was fun but did things
before I thought about what might come from them. Mrs. Renfrew said
sometimes it's hard to believe we're from the same family.

We live out farther than most of the other
children at school so Kyle and I mostly just stick with each other.
That's fine with me since I don't like our classmates. I tell Kyle
it's because they're stupid, but really I don't know what to say to
them. Seems like when I finally say something, they just look at me
like I'm as crazy as Mama. They like Kyle, though, and sometimes
after chores he goes off with one of them, fishing or whatever.
This is happening more and more lately and he always asks me to
come along, but I don't want to. I just go home and sit in the
tree, waiting for him. But once he gets there I pretend like I
hardly notice he's come.

I can't let Kyle read this journal after
all.

April 5, 1941

Kyle told Mama the dictionary was his.

We was in the kitchen eating the chicken I
fried for dinner when Mama said as soon as dinner was over I would
get my due. That's when Kyle said it was his, that he left it on my
bed the day before. Kyle's eyes was hooked fast on Mama's face, his
jaw was stiff like the day he told me Francie, our dog, died. I
couldn't talk. The chicken felt catched in my chest.

Mama pushed her chair out with an awful
scraping sound. Then she stood up and went to the pantry where she
hangs the razer strap. Kyle looked right scared sitting there.

Daddy coughed and pushed out his chair and
though his chicken was only half ate he took the shotgun and went
out the door, deserting us like he always does when Mama takes a
fit.

Mama come back in the room with the strap
held between her hands and stood next to Kyle's chair. She told him
to stand up and he lifted his chair a little off the floor as he
pushed it back so it didn't make that scraping sound.

“
Drop your pants,” Mama told him.

A red rash crept up Kyle's neck to the lobes
of his ears. “Can we go in the other room?” he asked.

She hit the strap acrost his hands where
they set on his belt buckle. “Now!” she hollered.

I tried to say, “Mama, it was mine,” but the
words came out only like a moan.

Kyle's hands was shaking as he undone his
pants and lowered them to his knees. Mama pushed on his back til
his elbows set on the table and his white backside stuck out and I
hated her for embarussing him that way. I stood up and grabbed her
hands.

“
Mama, it was mine. The dictionary was
mine!” I said.

She pushed me away and hit Kyle with the
strap. His body jerked and I could already see the red squares on
the back of his legs from the strap. I ran at her again, trying to
pull the strap out of her hands but she took ahold of my shoulder
and pushed me and I fell into the corner.

Tears was already starting down Kyle's
cheeks. “You're making her angrier, Kate,” he said.

I looked at Mama's eyes and they was hot and
firey, like a crazy dragon's eyes. He was right. I was making it
worst for him, so I ran outside and knelt in the garden with my
hands over my ears. But I could still hear the strap and I counted
to eleven before I vomited up the chicken. And she was still
hitting him and he was screaming. I wanted her to die, just to drop
dead right there in the kitchen. I hate her so much.

After Ma and Daddy was in bed, I fetched
some aspirin for Kyle. He was lying on his stomach and though he
was in bed since supper I knew he hadn't slept a wink. I knelt next
to him while he arched his back to drink the water. It was cool in
our room, but he was covered only by his sheet because he said the
blanket hurt too much.

I thought I should look at his legs, maybe
paint them with iodine, but he said no. He didn't want me to see
what she done to him in the whipping that was sposed to be
mine.

I sat on the floor watching his face in the
moonlight coming through the window. He looks like me, only people
say he's handsome and they don't say much about me, cept for how
beautiful my hair is. Our hair is the same color, like wheat, and
its real thick. But mine is very, very long, way past my waist.
Mama trims just a little off it each time the moon is full to make
it grow faster. People touch it sometimes like they can't help
themselves, but they never say much about my face. Kyle and I both
have blue eyes and too many freckles that look better on a boy than
a girl, and we both have real long eyelashes. I sat there on the
floor of our room, staring at Kyle's eyelashes while he fell
asleep. They was wet and clumped together into four or five little
points that made me cry. I stayed there next to him, my bead
resting against the edge of his mattress til I saw the first little
glimpse of dawn out the window, and I knew I better get back in my
own bed before Mama come for the sheets.

May 1, 1941

Today Mrs. Renfrew read one of my stories
out loud and then she said, in front of everybody, that I was one
of the most intellagent students and the best writer she ever
taught. Everybody stared at me and my face got hot enough to set my
hair aflame. At recess, Sara Jane called me teacher's pet and
everyone started saying it til they got tired and went off without
me, the boys to throw the ball around, the girls in their little
circle to talk about whatever it is they talk about. I took one of
the books Mrs. Renfrew keeps in the classroom and sat on the step,
reading. This is the way it is every recess.

After school, I ran home, not wanting to
hear them call me teacher's pet again. I clumb into the tree, where
I'm writing this right now, waiting for Kyle to come home. He took
his fishing pole today, though, so he's probly at the river with
Getch.

May 7, 1941

Today Mrs. Renfrew talked to me after school
to tell me she's not coming back next year. (There is a rumer she's
having a baby.) She said we'll have a new teacher, Miss Crisp, and
that Miss Crisp will not put up with me. “She will not tolerate
your antics as I do, Katherine,” she said. She told me I don't need
to get in trouble to get the attention of other students, that I
could get it in good ways, by writing my stories, by being a good
student. I wanted to tell her she's too old to understand. I wanted
to say that when she reads one of my stories to the class or says
something nice about me, they hate me more. I hope the new teacher
won't think I'm so good and will punish me when I'm evil. Mrs.
Renfrew gave me another book, this one on grammar and punctuation.
I thanked her and then took a deep breath and told her I lost the
dictionary. She looked at me funny but didn't say anything, just
got up and handed me her very own dictionary, the big one from her
bookshelf. It has her name, Madeline Renfrew, written on the inside
cover. I promised her that nothing would happen to this one. All
the way home I worried that I couldn't fit both books plus my
journal beneath the floorboards, but sure enough, they fit
perfectly, like that space was just waiting for them to come fill
it.

July 22, 1941

It is hard to describe how I feel tonight. I
am writing this by lantern light in a cavern I found this
afternoon. No one knows where I am, not even Kyle, and I'm afeard
to go home. Home is more scary to me than whatever might be hiding
in this cave.

I woke up early this morning with a strange
ticklish warm feeling between my legs and when I touched down there
my fingers come up covered with blood! I jumped out of bed and saw
a round red stain on my sheet that had gone clear through to the
mattress. A large red stain was acrost the back of my nightdress. I
thought I was dying, that maybe I had a tumor.

I shook Kyle to wake him up and told him
about the blood and showed him the stain on my nightdress and by
then I was crying. I always thought that if I died, I died. But
suddenly I thought about the dark nothingness of death and I was
terrified. Kyle set me down and told me I wasn't dying. He said he
knew what was happening to me and that it was normal. I still have
trouble believing this as I sit here with blood soaking into the
rag down there. I sure hope he's right' He said I am ministrating
(I'm not sure of that word. He wasn't either and I can't find it in
my dictionary). He said it happens to every girl once a month (!)
so's she can have babies. He knows this from talking to Getch, who
has three older sisters. I am sposed to wear a rag down there for a
few days til the bleeding stops. Kyle said he thought I knew about
this and I said how would I know? Mama would never talk to me about
such a thing and I have no friends.

“
You ought to have friends,” Kyle said.
“You deserve to have friends. But you have to try harder.”

He's been saying this a lot lately and I
wish he would quit and we could go back to the way things were
before he started getting popular. I don't want to be bleeding! I
don't want no babies. And every month! This is a life sentence as
unjust as I've ever heard.

As Kyle was talking to me about friends,
Mama come in our room for the sheets. We buttoned our lips and when
she saw my sheet she let out a scream like she was bit by a snake.
She quick pulled the sheet off the mattress and run out the door
and we watched her from the window, running off the porch with the
sheet bundled up against her chest. She carried it into the yard,
set it in a crumpled heap near the tiger lilies and lit a match to
it.

“
If the blood's normal, why is Mama
burning my sheet?” I asked, calm as ever.

But Kyle was at the dresser, pulling out my
overalls and a shirt and stuffing them into my arms.

“
Put these on and get out before she
comes back,” he said.

“
I need a rag,” I said. Blood was
trickling down the inside of my leg and two small red circles of it
was on the floorboards where I stood. Kyle stopped what he was
doing and looked at the floor.

“
Lord, Kate, I didn't think it would just
pour out of you.”

I started to cry again but he was ripping up
one of his old shirts, pressing the pieces of cloth into my hands.
I folded the cloth between my legs and leaned my hand on Kyle's
shoulder as I stepped into one leg of my drawers, then the other. I
pulled my nightdress over my head without thinking that it's been a
long time since Kyle has seen me undressed, that my body has
changed, the changes so slow that I had to look down at my own
chest to see what he was staring at. He blushed and I come near to
laughing at his embarrassment but I knew I had no time to waste
laughing.

Mama bust in the room again afore I could
get out but she didn't seem to notice me and Kyle was even there.
She caught ahold of one corner of the mattress and drug it off the
bed and out of the room. We heard it thumping down the porch steps
and when I looked out the window she was dragging it out in the
yard, with the round bloodstain already darkening in the sun. Daddy
ran out of the house and grabbed ahold of her hands when she tried
to set a match to the mattress. I was shamed that Daddy would know
what was happening in my body. He took the matches from Mama and
went back into the house while Mama sat on the ground and cried
into her hands.

By this time Kyle was helping me climb out
the window. “I'll meet you at the mill,” he said. (Kyle and I are
working at the mill this summer.)

I walked into the forest, looking for a path
that would not hurt my bare feet because I left so fast I forgot my
shoes! I knew I could not go to the mill today, not bleeding like
this and in bare feet. I was in a part of the woods I knew well
(the place where the woods drop down to the field by Ferry Creek),
so I was surprised when I come acrost the cavern. All my life it's
been here and I just now found it. I saw a squirrel disappear back
of some bushes and when I got closer I saw that the bushes blocked
the entrance to a cave. I pulled out one of the bushes with my bare
hands and there it was, a hole stuck in the side of the hill. I
walked inside as far as the sunshine would let me see and the air
was wonderfully cool. I called “Hello!” and the sound echoed all
around the walls.