Sweeping Up Glass (12 page)

While Saul was both moonshining and selling hardware, I stitched my quilts and sold a few. The next summer, he built me a stall where Farm Road One ends at the highway to Paramus. On weekends, I sat up there with a hat on my head and a few bills for change. From time to time, folks stopped their cars, and for four or five dollars they took home a quilt.

Although we never talked about it, or about anything else that really mattered, Saul and I raised Pauline the best we knew how. When she was three, he drove over to the county seat and filled out papers that gave Pauline his name. And he was good with Ida. He asked nothing from me except to fix his supper, which was fine because a terrible ache occupied my head and my heart, and rendered me useless in any other way.

Finally I walked up to Doc Pritchett’s and had him look me over, and much to my embarrassment, he pronounced me fine and said it was probably all in my head. I knew what he meant—
if my ma’am had been crazy, then I would be, too. I told Ida and Saul I’d had a case of the grippe, but was now right as rain. I never mentioned my hurting again—not even to myself. Instead, I planted twice as much squash in the mounds by the back porch, and cleared another patch for the sweet potatoes I’d drop in when the weather turned. I hoed till I couldn’t stand up straight, and at night I snipped fabric, squared corners, and stitched till I fell asleep with my head on the table.

After a while, Saul and I addressed the problem of Ida, how crazy she made me—and how hateful she was to Pauline, who was already wild as a March wind. Ida could no longer tolerate Pauline sleeping in her room, so nights we carried Pauline’s cot to the grocery and hauled it back to the bedroom in the mornings. Meanwhile, Pauline’s nightmares kept us up. Finally, Saul drove Ida’s pickup over to Buelton where he bought lumber enough to start work on a cabin across the yard. He built one room with a single window and a door on the south side. I dragged the cot out there, and paid Big Ruse fifty cents for a chair.

We moved Ida into the cabin on a fall morning. I think she was secretly pleased with the attention Saul had given her, and she came over for breakfast, lunch, and supper. She conversed with Saul and took her tea at our kitchen table. I served her in silence, but every night when supper was done, I sent her home. I reveled in the hours that I had without Ida underfoot. And in all those years, I never opened the cellar door.

Saul was covering up the tar paper on Ida’s place when at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, he had a heart attack and died. I wasn’t surprised, somehow, for he was too hard a worker, and he’d overly loved my brown sugar cakes. I buried him up in the foothills, right where the land starts to rise. I didn’t cry. I was weary of tears, although I hadn’t shed one in years.

Pauline, on the other hand, fell to pieces.

There was no handling her, and in my heart, I understood that, too. Without love, there is only a great empty space that we fill with whatever’s handy. By the time she was fourteen, Pauline had taken up with a crowd that traveled in an old jalopy from one juke joint to another. One night in spring, she left home.

Rather than figuring out where life had gone wrong, it seemed easier to think that what happens to us happens. Saul was buried on the hill, Ida was living in her tar paper shack, and somewhere Pauline was awash in gin. I, on the other hand, was stitching with a frenzy, and hoeing, planting, reaping, and canning. I raised two crops of new potatoes, turnips and mustard greens, beets and red and yellow peppers to sell in the store. I built a chicken coop and bought four more laying hens and a rooster. Sold eggs for a penny apiece and purchased two more layers. When the mule died, I bought another—Ida called him Sanderson Two—and I hitched him to a plow. There wasn’t a square foot of earth I did not turn up, except for Pap’s grave.

Along about October, when I’d worn myself to the nub, I laid down my hoe and spread out on the earth as I had on so many nights of my childhood. I longed for a change, but I couldn’t imagine what.

D
own at the Kentuckian, Miz Grace Harris apparently did not get on well—in fact, she got considerably sicker. Over the years, I heard through Love Alice that Wing drove her the length and width of the state in his Ford, looking for a doctor who might cure her. But it was some kind of double lung problem, they said, and there was no fixing it. Finally Wing sent her to the South of France to lie in the sun. He borrowed the money from Big Ruse to do it. But when she came home, the doctors recommended she be put in an iron lung. Miz Grace said that was no way to live out her days, with a machine to do her breathing. I could appreciate that. She stayed in the hotel. Wing fixed up two downstairs rooms for them and rented the rest.

I never went there to visit, but I listened when folks talked of her, and of him. And I begged Love Alice for news. He never played his trumpet, she said, nor left the hotel, for Miz Grace had taken to her bed. And she stayed there for a half dozen years.

Sometimes, in those days, Ida came out of her cabin and watched me hoe. To further irritate me, she stopped brushing her hair and never took a bath, wearing one flannel gown till it
fell from her body. She said I was loony, lying there on the ground at the end of every day, but I laughed and told her I could hear its heartbeat.

Then one day, Pauline showed up on my doorstep, a dirty blue blanket in the crook of her arm. It was like time had backed up, and this was my own child being handed to me. But it wasn’t. This was a brand-new life. I took that tiny thing, sat down on the floor of the grocery, and buried my face in it.

“He hasn’t got no name,” Pauline said. She wore shoes with high brittle heels, and her hair was oily. She looked tired beyond her years, and her no more than a child herself.

The baby smelled sour, like it hadn’t had a bath in its life, its scalp flaky with cradle cap, and altogether not much bigger around than my wrist.

“We’ll call him William Tate Harker,” I said. “After my pap.”

She shook her head. “Not Harker. He’s a Cross, like you and me and Daddy Saul.”

I nodded. “William Tate Cross, then.”

Her face was stained with grit. Or tears. So was the baby’s. I sat there rocking him. “He needs fattening up.”

“I know.”

“We’ll mix honey in some milk. Put in an egg.”

“You do it, Mama,” she said. “I can’t stay.”

“What?”

“I need you to take him.”

“Pauline—”

“I’m goin’ to California. Gonna be in motion pictures. I’m pretty enough, don’t you think? An’ I can’t be weighted down with a baby. He won’t be much trouble for you, he’s real good, don’t hardly cry at all.”

God love me—a small, wounded thing had come to my store. But I loved this one even before I unwrapped his blanket. I never felt so sad in my life as when Pauline left us sitting there, and went out the door and down to a car full of racketing young people that was waiting for her on the road.

A
t first I thought Ida was crazy as a loon. She stood outside her shack nights, even in the wind and rain, her hair blowing wildly about her head, an old horsehair blanket around her shoulders. Then I realized she was looking through the window, watching me and the boy with God knew what on her mind. Only once did I wonder if she was lonely, then decided on the spot that I had ached for my ma’am since the day I was born. It was her turn to hurt. Still, after that, when the weather was bad I bedded the baby down, went out, and led her into her shack and to her bed. From somewhere she’d gotten a corncob pipe. I brought her tobacco, and she smoked into the night.

In the house it was just me and Will’m, and it wasn’t long before he was crawling about and then toddling, and begging for sugar teats and other syrupy things.

I manned the store, worked on my quilts, and taught Will’m at the kitchen table. When he was six, I walked with him daily to the schoolhouse. I told him the only rule we lived by was to love each other and ourselves—which I had to say over and over, because Will’m was old enough to see that I did not include Ida. He loved her anyway.

Ida lived her life in her bed, reading her Bible and railing at
everything. She ate the food I brought her, and although she was allowed in our house at mealtime, she hardly ever came. As Will’m grew, I often sent him to take her tea, or a cup of coffee. Twice I eavesdropped and heard her conversation with him to be gentle and even wise. Will’m covered her when she fell asleep. More than once, he tamped out her pipe. At first it angered me that he could pull this from her while I could not. Truth was—Ida and I were a roller coaster of hurts, a runaway ride that would never stop.

Will’m grew tall, with a soul as straight and as right as any I’d seen. He had his mama’s yellow hair and great round eyes. He didn’t fear work, and in the absence of a gun, which I would not let him have, he devised clever traps in which he caught rabbits and possum, the latter being stringy and tough in the stewpot—but I was grateful for the meat. He didn’t bring home a single thing we couldn’t eat. He loved to read, and he read aloud nights until I had heard all of Mark Twain and William Faulkner, while I sat at the table embroidering squares.

Most of all, although I tried to steer him away from it, Will’m had an infinite capacity to care for hurt things. I suspect that, no matter how I worked at it, he could not separate them from himself. He was a quiet, generous child with a stubborn streak that I guess he got from me.

I was glad he never got a bee in his bonnet about the locked cellar door.

N
ow, however, Ida has gone and killed the wolf. While it’s still early, Will’m and I bury the gray on the north side of a boulder—the only place on the hill with earth soft enough to take her. Then I fire up the stove in the corner of the kitchen, and we find a piece of old plywood to block the cold that pours in through the open window. We sit at the table and drink tea and eat bread with the jam I’ve put back. In the corner stands Pap’s rifle that I ripped from Ida’s hands. I took her no breakfast.

“I guess there’s no use to go looking for the pups,” Will’m says, looking into his cup.

“None at all.”

I’ve never made bones about telling Will’m anything—about how poor we are, although he doesn’t seem to get the idea. He walks around like he owns something fine and is the richest man in these parts.

“We’re near down to our last dollar,” I say, turning away from the cubs.

He licks jam from his top lip. “I could take another job,” he says. “Work Dooby’s fountain once in a while, more than just sweeping up—or hire on at Ruse’s for Sunday dinner. Maybe Wing could use a hand at the hotel.”

At the mention of Wing, my thoughts break like pearls and run all over the table. “You got school—by the time you get off the bus, it’s near five o’clock, and you help out in the store. Then you got homework.”

Will’m runs his finger inside the neck of the jam jar.

I slap his hand.

He grins. “If Wing’s missus would go on and die, you and him could get married, and then we’d own half of the hotel.”

“Will’m!” By now I have figured out how to keep from reddening when he talks this way, but it bothers me mightily.

“Then we could go down there and live.”

“And do what with Ida? And what about the store?”

He rolls his eyes, drinks up the last of his tea, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He studies his second piece of bread, folds it in half, and stuffs most of it in his mouth. Then he gets up, and puts on his coat and cap and winds the scarf about his neck. “It smells like wolf in here,” he says, reaching for my tea to help get the bread down. “If we had those pups, I’d take care of them. I’d feed them, and be their regular ma’am.”

And without waiting for an answer, he goes to stand out front with his lunch pail and his rucksack. I watch him from the window. In a few minutes, the school bus sluices up on the ice. Will’m goes down the long front steps, climbs aboard, and the bus pulls away, taking him over to Buelton, to the new school there. He’s not happy; he’d rather be on the mountain, looking for cubs.

I’m not yet ready to put the Open sign on the grocery door. I wash up the few dishes, smooth my bed and the boy’s, study my face in the kitchen looking glass, wondering whether it’s the mirror or me that’s mottled and rusty. I brush out my hair and re-braid it down my back, and with a sigh so loud I’m sure Ruse can
hear it at the cafe, put on my cape and hat, and fold over my arm the blanket the gray slept on. Then without even a glance at Ida’s cabin, I set out for the mountain and the place we found the wolf.

It’s late in the morning, and the sun is high and weak. Both the silvers that’d been shot are gone, their carcasses dragged off by scavengers. Perhaps, I think, the meat has saved some other thing. In the daylight, the gray’s den is not hard to uncover. She’d settled on a small cave, about a hundred feet from where she lay wounded, and birthed her babies there. I imagine her, yesterday, leaving her hiding place, maybe drawing the hunters away from her children—six of them.

Their mewling is weak, and they barely stir. When I sort out the small bodies, three are dead, and the others whimper like field mice. They’re miserable and ribby with hunger. I dig a hole in the snow with my hands and bury the ones that are gone, for I can’t bear to think about vultures and hawks. Then I fold the others into the wool blanket that smells like their ma. They each weigh less than a silver spoon.

L
ove Alice hikes over to our place because today is Tuesday, and while I make tea with ginger and cloves, she looks around. She does this every week, like she’s never been in my kitchen before, and all the while, she’s humming—“Amazing Grace,” and “Come Down Lord.” Then her eyes settle on some piece of bric-a-brac, or a book, or the quilt I’m working on, and she tells me its truth. That’s what she’s always called it. Truth.

And that’s what she calls the wolf cubs. She loves them, each no bigger than her hand, and she sits on the floor and strokes them and says in her voice that sounds like birdsong, “Would you jus’ looky at these sweetie thangs.”