Sweeping Up Glass (2 page)

When we were young, Wing and I had not a secret between us. But for over twenty years, we’ve crossed the street to avoid each other. Now we share only howdies at Ruse’s Cafe.

All in all, I have a crazy ma’am who owns a hundred dusty Bibles, a leggy boy with a too-soft heart, and no man to bed down with. And an Alaskan silver dying on my kitchen floor.

Out in the dark, Will’m works the ax from a log. “You think we could at least sew up her ear?”

Damnation. Years ago, Ida buried Pap by the boarded-up privy. Since then, I’ve trod over him ten times a day. I pass over him now on my way to the wellhouse. Pap was a self-taught veterinarian, and a truly loved man, but there’s not so much as a stick to mark his grave. Someday I’m going to move him to the hillside near Saul, and set a real marker.

For near thirteen years, I was married to Saul. When he died, I paid Junk Hanley a dollar to come up and lay a flat paving stone that said Saul Cross was a beloved husband and father. Not that I loved him all that much.

My boots break through the dark snow crust, and chunks of ice cling to my skirt. I push the door open, set the lantern on the ground, dip feed in one bucket, fill the other with potatoes. I cut down a string of onions. In the morning, I’ll take stock of the bins and shelves in our store, line up the last cans of lima beans and baking powder. If folks don’t start paying their bills, I may not be able to order again.

I let myself into the goat pen, throw the peelings to them, use a hoe handle to crack ice on the water trough. It’s so dark out here, I can just make out the squatness of Ida’s cabin and the donkey tethered in her sideyard. In spite of Ida carrying on about her supper, I’m sure she’s eaten it and fallen asleep with her pipe lit. One of these days she’s going to burn us to the ground, and when she does, I hope she takes the donkey with her. Across the yard Will’m splits kindling.

I chip through the ice on the shallow pans, too, but the half dozen hens would rather die of thirst than budge from their nests.

Will’m follows me inside, shrugs off his coat, and sits letting snow melt from his boots. I set the potato bucket under the sink.

Hell. Maybe I’ve brought the wolf home as a favor to Will’m—or because of Pap, whose old clinic still lies under this kitchen. I haven’t been down there in years, nor do I want to go now. But I bring the lamp from where it hangs on the porch. Will’m’s eyes grow round when I take the keys from the hook and open the cellar door.

My boots make hollow sounds on the stairs, but the floor at the bottom is hard-packed earth. There’s no electricity, and as Saul would have said, it’s moldy as molly hell down here. No wonder Saul stayed out of the place, mildewed and spun with cobwebs and dust. Saul said Pap needed his head examined, damned near living down here with his beasties, and the rest of the time running the still in the toolshed.

It’s the first time in years this room has seen light. It smells bad, like things died and rotted here, although Pap hardly ever lost a patient. The rot is in the tunnel he built from the cellar to
the shed. It kept him from trudging through four feet of snow just to get to his still. Now both ends are boarded.

I look around at the bunks of old straw, the table running the length of the room, rusty wire cages and carriers with bent handles, buckets, a pitchfork and shovels, crates, a pair of broken lanterns. Seeing the long caged runs and water bowls, I have a minute or two of bone-deep sickness. It’s not Pap’s memory that I fear under this house.

“A body could die of the damp down here.” I select from a shelf a dusty brown bottle and other things—long-nosed scissors and a pack of curved needles—then we go up the steps into the light. I lock the door and slip the keys back on the hook.

From my sewing basket I fetch white thread, tear squares of clean cotton for bandages and long strips for binding. The chloroform has lost its strength, but it’s all we have. I pour three drops on a rag. We wash our hands with hot water and soap, then sit on the floor. When the gray’s as far under as I can get her, I cut the matted hair from her haunch. She jerks and twitches, and her eyes roll white while I shave a patch of fur and dig in the wound. My face feels painfully tight, and my eyes water something terrible.

“Who d’you think did this?” Will’m says.

I withdraw my fingers. In my palm is the metal shot. I pour peroxide in the wound and watch it boil. Spin off a length of thread, snap it with my teeth, and hold the needle to the light. Curse under my breath that my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I show Will’m how to draw the edges of the wound, and while he pinches her skin between his fingers, I take a half dozen stitches. We do the same with the ear, cleaning blood from her eye the best we can. She flinches and whines. Under the men’s britches
I’m wearing—plus the cotton dress, cardigan, and longhandles—I’m damp with sweat.

Will’m offers to say a prayer over her.

“You do that,” I tell him. “And while you’re at it, pray for the hunters. I’m going to make them sorry they were born.”

I
have nothing to give the wolf for her pain. It wouldn’t do to crush up a Lydia Pinkham’s or a Carter’s liver pill, and I dare not chloroform her again. I’ll ask Dooby, the pharmacist, what will help her to heal—if by morning she has not torn the kitchen to pieces and eaten us in our beds. She breathes thready and light, and her eyes, when she opens them, are yellow and rolling with fear.

God help me if she dies in the night, and it be upon my head. A good Samaritan, after all, is not always a beneficent thing. Folks die every day in the name of love.

Between the kitchen and the grocery I have hung a curtain. The only bedroom is in the front of the house, separated from the grocery by a door. I fear for Will’m, sleeping in his kitchen alcove with nothing but eight feet of space and another hung bed-sheet between him and the gray, so we take our supper and sit in the middle of my four-poster. I love this high-ceilinged room with its feather mattress bed, an old wardrobe, and a cricket rocker. What used to be a closet now contains a toilet, a cracked mirror, and an electric light. No matter that we have to come through the grocery and the bedroom to get to it.

I tell Will’m about how my pap could soothe a jackrabbit with
a leg so busted the bone stuck through. In our nightshirts, Will’m and I tear bits of bread to dunk in our bean soup, and we talk about Ida, and the gray, and what we will do in the morning.

“Gran?” Will’m says. “Her pups’ll die without her, won’t they?”

“If they haven’t already.”

“Think we could go up in the morning and look for ’em?”

“You’ve got school, and even if we found any of them alive, she’s too bad off to nurse them.”

“We could make up some way to feed them.”

“No, we could not.”

Daylight will tell us whether the mama wolf lives or dies. And Lord help us if Ida rises from her bed and wanders over in the morning looking for her tea and oats.

I tuck the boy in beside me. We lay in the dark looking at each other. Toward morning, I drift off till something brings me hard awake. I shove my feet in boots and wrap myself in a flannel robe. I move through the grocery and peek around the kitchen curtain. Bits of gnawed rope lay on the floor, and bloody strips of sheet. Blood streaks the linoleum and the windowsill. Glass has exploded out onto the snow. The gray is gone.

“Sweet Jesus.”

I open the back door and go through the porch and down the steps, mindful of the ice. The sky is leaden and holding its breath. Bloody tracks lead to the shed and around, past the iced-over pickup and out to the barn. And there’s the gray—one leg stretched out and lying on her side. From under her belly a circle of blood spreads dark on the snow. Twenty feet away, Ida stands in her nightgown. Pap’s old Winchester is at her shoulder, and her head’s still thrown back from the force of the shot.

I
want to kill Ida. It’s not the first time. When I was thirteen, Dooby told me something about her I wish I’d never known.

When I was first conceived, it was Dooby’s pap down at the pharmacy that sold Ma’am the powders with which she tried to empty her womb. The first child she spat out like an unripe persimmon, but the second was me, and I would not go. I clung to her dark inner lining until she grew round in the belly and was sick most of the time from the bitter German beer the doctor ordered to make her gain weight. Later folks told me I was delivered sputtering, squalling, and already starved.

In the months that followed, while Pap ran the store and doctored dogs and cats, Ma’am lay dying of this or that. Her nerves, she said, were frazzled at the ends like burnt matches. Although I squealed like a nest of mice, she would not take me up, nor change me, nor feed me, until Pap, coming from his work, snatched me out of my crib. He stripped off my diapering, soaped me, and rinsed me till I was fit for company. He fed me all the supper I could hold, and although he rocked me into the night, he could not stop my crying.

The racket was too much for Ma’am, and even though Pap
tried to put me in the crook of her elbow, she wouldn’t take me, but preferred to sit rocking an empty blanket. In short order, Ma’am slipped into an abyss from which no one could save her. She walked the length of the house, wrung her hands, and cried, causing the last of our customers to speak in low voices. They wouldn’t have come at all, but they loved Pap dearly.

Sometimes Ma’am vomited into a bucket in the kitchen. Most of the time she lay in the big four-poster while a succession of ladies from Aurora came and went with covered dishes. Pap brought her the bedpan and changed her sheets, for she would not set her feet on the floor nor raise her head. Doc Pritchett gave her powders and enemas, liver tonic and sulfur with sugar and molasses, but nothing worked. She would not even swallow soup, and she was no bigger around than a stick horse. Finally, Pap sent for a doctor from Buelton. He came one Saturday afternoon, applying an assortment of poultices to Ma’am’s belly and chest, and finally leeches to the palms of her hands. Nothing helped.

Shortly thereafter, Pap gave up trying and hitched the neighbor’s horse to our wagon, for our mare was old and in need of being put down. He wrapped Ma’am in a blanket and laid her gently in back, with pillows around her so she would not roll. They say I stood on wobbly legs at the door of the grocery, and watched them go off down the road. Nobody remembers if I cried or not.

What came after, I remember well.

Folks came to shop. They bought packets of yeast and slices of cheese, rhubarb in summer, sweet potatoes, and cans of yellow waxed beans. There was only Pap to wait on them, running up and down the stairs with me under his arm. Time went by, one day melting into the next like warm candle wax.

Folks we’d known, and a number we didn’t, came to the store
and stayed to visit, to pat me on the head, and to remember, suddenly, that they also needed a pound of headcheese or two ham hocks. Pap tore off sheets of butcher paper and penciled signs for the front window—three bundles of collards for a nickel, six eggs for a dime. We took in money. I scrapped with the chickens for their eggs, and every morning I milked the goats. Pap brought home three more nannies, and twice a week he sent the warm milk to Mrs. Nailhow, who made cheese and kept a portion for herself. We sold the cheese for an outrageous eight cents a pound. Before I went to school, I knew the grocery business backward and forward.

We were also the unofficial postmasters. From a small metal box I sold penny stamps. A man in overalls and a blue cap came Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, delivering letters that I sorted into bundles, for I’d already learned the names—Sampson, Ruse, French, Andrews, Phelps. Harker, that was us. I knew which were bills to be paid to the dairyman. At six, I could tuck the money into an envelope, address it, and drop a penny from the cash register in the box for a stamp. In all that time, there was never so much as a postcard from Ma’am, and that was fine with me.

One century became another. Pap initiated me into the world of home doctoring—the mysteries of mange and foot rot, and the damage a motor car could do to a slow bluetick hound.

Finally, our old mare stumbled and broke an ankle. Pap dug a hole and shot her at an angle so that she’d fall right in. Then he set a fire of leaves and sticks, and stunk up the air with her cooking. He covered her bones with loam, and for years, cornstalks planted there grew ten feet high. Pap bought a cantankerous mule by the name of Sanderson, and we hitched her, braying and bellyaching, to the wagon. Evenings, we delivered groceries, and
picked up sweet hominy at the Daymens’ farm, watermelon and pumpkins from the Sylvesters’. Early mornings, we hauled bales of hay from one field to another. Pap was a good hand at turning a dime.

I went with him nights when he carried brown jugs to the outlying farms, and I kept watch by the road while men came for a trade. We raked in haunches of rabbit, fresh vegetables, apples, and tomatoes. We piled them in bushel baskets in the store—and we ate like kings.

After school, I ran the grocery. Coloreds came on Wednesdays; whites bustled in on Tuesdays and bought up stuff like it would be a month before Thursday came around.

Miss Dovey was one of our Wednesday shoppers. She was black as night and so bony you could have scrubbed clothes on any part of her. She kept her hair in a rag, and under her long dress she was barefoot, like most of her kin. She shuffled in one morning while I was sitting on the floor, trying to stitch two hankies together. I had just uttered a swear word my pap had forbidden, when she looked over the counter.

“What in the world you doin’ down there, Miss Livvy?” she said. Her glasses were thick as Mason jar bottoms and the same celery-green.

“I’m tryin’ to sew a dress for my dolly, Miss Dovey,” I said. “But my thread won’t stay still.”

She took my work in her hands. “Hand me that needle, and I’ll show you how to knot that thread.”

And she did, the two of us sitting cross-legged on that wooden floor, her instructing me in the ways of gathering and hemming, lining up edges, and sewing on buttons. I often had to scramble up to box groceries and make change. The coloreds finally collected in great numbers to watch. I remembered my
manners and jumped up, saying, “You-all stay here, and I’ll get refreshments.”