Sweeping Up Glass (6 page)

Pap tended animals that belonged to the Simpsons, Mr. French,
the Daymens, and the Sylvesters. He fixed up Doc Pritchett’s cats and pulled Mrs. Nailhow’s calf. Up and down the valley he mixed pastes and poultices, ointments and powders. In exchange, he brought home poke salad and green peas for shelling, sweet corn, and once a leg of wild turkey.

Pap and I ate almost no meat, for we couldn’t afford to buy it. But we did have chickens, and Pap was a master at wringing their necks. Aside from that—and a sampling of salt pork for working on somebody’s mule—we ate vegetables and fruit and yellow corn cakes. Mostly it was cabbage soup with onions, and flat bread for dunking. Potatoes roasted with sage and rosemary. Molasses that we spread on hotcakes like butter. We loved rhubarb boiled with white sugar and wild honey on our oats, and we drank milk fresh from nannies in the yard. When it came to eating, we were two of a kind. But in other things we had our differences.

Pap was the quiet one—I was the talker. Folks often said, “Hush up, Olivia. Don’t yap so much.” But he listened. Some-times he’d put down what he was doing and look right at me till I was through. Like maybe he believed I had something to say.

In preparation for Ma’am’s arrival, Pap began to whitewash the house—five gallons that he’d gotten for pulling a foal—and although the bare wood showed through in a dozen places, and our roof still sagged from years of snow, I could tell he felt grand.

I, on the other hand, would not help. Pap could not make me. I argued and stomped. For the first time ever, he sent me to my bed to think things over. With the covers pulled to my chin and the sun not yet set, I thought it over, all right. Ma’am’s leaving us
had been a mercy. And even if she had bosoms like Junk’s mama, I didn’t want her back.

From my bed in the alcove, where I had drawn the curtain, I heard Pap in the kitchen, pouring water, stoking the stove. I smelled corn bread warming, heard the rattle of dishes. I listened to him eat his supper, his fork stabbing the plate, and I hurt all the more. After a time he pulled back the curtain and stood there with a square of corn bread and a cup of milk.

I sat up. “Miss Dovey says Ma’am’s a loony bird.”

“That’s foolish talk.”

“She says that’s why you never went to visit her. And if you haven’t seen her, how do you know she’s getting better?”

He came in and sat down beside me. “Her doctor says so.”

“I don’t want her here, Pap. I like it being just you and me.”

“I remember,” he said, “when she was young and pretty. Full of spunk. Olivia, why do you hate her so?”

My shrug was the truth. I did not know.

“Well, I need her to help out,” he said. “Keeping this house and the clinic and store and watching after you is one hell of a job.”

I felt my face tighten. “I want more corn bread.”

“She’ll be home in three weeks. I need you to be kind to her when she gets here. And there’s no more corn bread.”

I licked crumbs from my palm. “Then can I have a dog?”

“What?”

“If I had a dog, I’d feed him every day.”

“Olivia, please …”

Across the kitchen, the window was now dark. I laid down in my bed, and turned to the wall. It was enough to study my face every day, making sure I looked like Pap and not one bit like her. I could not take her in the flesh.

“If I had a dog, I’d call him Spot.” I pulled the quilt under my chin and closed my eyes. I pretended Pap had gone away, too, that I was alone and fixing to starve but nobody cared.

Pap got up and I heard him pull the curtain behind him.

I lay looking through hot tears at the cracks in the wall plaster and listening to Grandpap’s wolves call down another night.

I
t was September. School had commenced, and in two more weeks, Ma’am would be home.

On Tuesday afternoon, as had been our custom all summer, Love Alice and her friend Mavis Brown came to call. We made tea from hot water and milk, them remarking that the house looked spanking new with its whitewash outside and double wax on the floor. I lifted the iron burner so we could toast bread over the fire, and we sat at the table with our cups raised and our fingers crooked.

“Miss Harker,” Mavis Brown said to me, “I’ll have anudder spoon of sugar in my tea, uh-huh. This a nicer eatin’ joint than Mr. Ruse’s.”

Love Alice hiccupped. “How you know that, girl? You ain’t ever been to Mr. Ruse’s place.”

I said, “Everybody who’s
any
body has been to Ruse’s.”

I had not seen the back door open, nor Pap come in. He must have caught my words because he stood staring at me like I was somebody else’s child.

“I’m sorry.”

Pap hung his coat on a porch nail.

“How you, Mr. Harker?” Love Alice burbled.

He sat down at the table, poured tea into a saucer, blew on it, and drank. “Fine, Love Alice. You? And Junk?”

“We well,” she said, showing her big white teeth.

“I’ve got deliveries to make, Olivia,” Pap said. “I won’t be long.”

Here was a chance to repair the damage I had done. “Take us with you! Please, Pap.”

He shook his head. “Not to the Phelpses’.”

“We’ll stay in the wagon, and we won’t be any bother.”

“Olivia, I got to put my foot down over this.”

“But—”

“Them Phelps boys are mean as whipped weasels. In fact, today I’m cuttin’ off their supply. What goes on out there—” Pap got that pinched look on his face like he’d said too much. “I’ll be back in a while.”

Soon as he’d gone out, I said rudely, “You-all got to go, now.”

“Uh-oh, O-livvy,” Love Alice said. “You up to sumpin’.”

“I’m gonna hide in the wagon. You can come.”

“Not me,” Mavis said, backing out the door and down the steps. “Us ain’t allowed to go out there.”

In the end I hunkered alone between two bales of hay, under the old woolly blanket Pap used to cover the jugs. Pap licked the mule lightly.

I had once asked him how he knew the number of jugs to deliver. He told me to pay attention—a man might ride by our house, take off his hat, and wave it three times. “It’s a sign, Olivia. You got to learn to read the signs.”

With me bouncing along in the back of the wagon, we headed east to where the hills evened out. I knew a few things about the Phelps boys. They were a lot like their land—gone to seed and thorn since their pap had died. I never knew their ma’am, but I’d
seen the old man. For a while, his three sons hung around Ruse’s Cafe.

But then Ruse’s boy took sides with the Phelpses till Big Ruse throttled him with a flapjack turner and locked him in the outhouse. The Phelps boys had a good laugh over it, but after that, they left Little Ruse alone, and kept pretty much to themselves.

Then one day old Mr. Phelps went and died, and the two bigger boys turned mean, James Arnold being barrel-chested, bragging, and always the leader. Alton was in the middle, smart-mouthed and hateful. Booger was the baby, puffy-eyed, white-faced, and light in the head. He walked hunched over, with arms hanging like a monkey’s, and the other two beat the living tar out of anyone who made fun of him. Booger quit school after the third grade because his teachers couldn’t do a thing with him. One day the sheriff came to get the three from school, and none of them ever came back. A few weeks later, we heard that their ma’am ran off with a traveling salesman.

Today, I wanted a close-up look at Booger. We angled in at a falling-down gate, and drove up to the big house. Pap whoa’d the mule, and I heard him call, “Hey in the barn!”

I turned back a corner of the blanket, and peeked out at James Arnold Phelps in his overalls and no shirt. He was as big across as he was tall, and his beard was matted with food and twigs. He asked if Pap had brought the drink.

Pap climbed down, and when he flipped back the blanket, uncovered the corked jugs, and saw me there, fire came to his eyes, and I feared for my life.

“Looks like you boys got into it early,” he said, but his eyes were still on me.

James Arnold’s lip curled like a dog that’s been trifled with. “Yessiree, Mr. Harker. These is hard times.”

“Well,” Pap said, lifting out the jugs. “Drink up, boys. These two are on the house.”

James Arnold shook his head. “Two ain’t gonna do us, no way. How many jugs you got in ’at wagon?”

Alton came out of the barn. Alton wasn’t near as big as his brother, but he swaggered even when he was standing still. “I hear you refusin’ to sell us whiskey, Mr. Harker?”

“I am, Alton,” said Pap. “You boys drink half the night, and then go scaring the hell outa folks. Last week you ran old Bristow’s horse flat to death. Took my shovel up there, and helped bury him—Bristow had that animal a long time.”

Alton grinned at his brother.

Pap shook his head. He turned to climb up on the wagon seat.

But James Arnold was fast for his size, and he fisted Pap’s jacket and spun him around. Slammed him hard against the wagon so that his hat fell off. James Arnold put his face close to Pap’s. “We ain’t gettin’ no new supplier, Mr. Harker,” he said. “You cut us off, and we’re gonna tell the sheriff over to Buelton that you’re crankin’ the meanest hooch in these parts.”

Pap said, “Sheriff likes my liquor, too, boys. Tell him what he already knows, and see if he don’t bring a federal marshal to your barn on a Saturday night.”

I clapped my hands over my mouth and heard Pap draw a breath. “I’ll leave you-all now. You got things to take care of—your daddy’s ranch, your brother Booger—how’s he doin’ anyway?”

James Arnold drew back his fist, and he hit Pap hard across the cheekbone. I saw Pap’s head snap around sideways, and if James
Arnold hadn’t put a hand flat on his chest, Pap would have gone down. A wide red gash had opened on his cheek.

“Booger’s dead,” James Arnold said between his teeth. “Drank your fine corn liquor, Mr. Harker, then went and shot hisself, that’s how he’s doin’.”

Pap put up a hand to touch his face, and I threw back the blanket and leaped to my feet.

Alton Phelps grinned in that toothy way dogs sometimes do when they’re dying. “Well, lookee here, what we got in this wagon.”

I clenched my fists. “Filthy pig men!” I shouted. “You-all got pig faces, an’ you’re wearin’ stinkin’ pig britches!”

Alton came around and gathered me up by the overall straps, his breath and his bad teeth sour in my face. “Little girl,” he said, grinning, “your mama let you talk like that?”

“My ma’am don’t live with us yet.”

“Olivia,” Pap said. “Don’t say any more.”

“Well,” Alton drawled, “seems I heard about her. ’Em crazy-house whores set a man on fire. When she comes home, girlie, you tell her Alton Phelps be up to pay his respects.”

I couldn’t collect spit fast enough, but delivered a gob to his eye so that he yelped and jerked back and I near fell over the side while he wiped it away with the heel of his hand.

“Little bitch!” he swore at me. “Who d’you think you are?”

“I’m Olivia Harker, and you’re nobody!”

“Wrong, girlie. I’m Alton Phelps. And this here’s my brother, James Arnold Phelps. You’ll want to remember our names. Devil sure knows I won’t forget yours.”

Then Pap head-butted James Arnold, knocking the wind clean out of him.

Alton came between them slow, like he was thinking things over and was no longer in a hurry to settle this hash. He brought out a square of scarlet cloth and wiped his face with it. “Well now, Mr. Harker, you goin’ to sell us more jugs? To help ease these troubled times?”

Pap shook his head slow. “I am not. But I’m real sorry to hear about Booger. I know you boys loved him. If I can help with the burying—”

James Arnold said, “Already done. Hard goddamn ground, boy’s half gone to dust.” He lifted Pap by the shirtfront and said, hot in his face, “I know what you’re doin’ around here, Harker, and I want you to stop.” Then he hit him again.

I heard Pap groan, but he got to his feet. Picked up his hat and slapped the dust from it. With great effort, he climbed up on the seat and pulled the hat low. Hawed the mule and eased the wagon around the barn. I stood in the back, staring down Alton Phelps till he disappeared in shadow.

“Sit down, Olivia,” Pap said at last.

Then we lumbered onto the road and drove back the way we’d come.

After a while Pap said, “We get home, you’ll need to take needle and thread to this cheekbone—”

“Yessir. Pap, what happens in their barn on Saturday night?”

He took out a rag and held it to his face, looked at the blood. “Olivia, you heard things you shouldn’t have. I need you to forget we were ever here.”

T
he week before Ma’am came home, Love Alice leaned across the table and chirped, “I never said this to you, O-livvy, but I’m goin’ to tell it now. Sometime I know thangs.”

“What things? Like times tables and stuff?”

“No,” she said in a whisper. “Stuff I oughtn’t to know—like when a body’s goin’ to die. Or if some woman’s man is slippin’ around.”

“You’re making that up.”

“It ain’t right, I know,” she said. “God gonna punish me. Gonna say,
Love Alice, you can’t come into heaven ’cause you peeked in folks’ heads an’ you know they secrets
.”

I shook my own head till my braids danced. “Love Alice, nobody knows what other people are thinking.”

“You ought to believe me.”

I held my teacup in both hands. “Then what’m I thinking right this minute?”

Love Alice tilted her head so that her freckles slid downhill. She looked like a robin listening for worms. “You thinking ’bout your mammy. You goin’ to have heartache, an’ I’m sorry for that. God’s own grace, O-livvy, it’ll be a long time befo’ you happy.”

“You’re just saying those things ’cause I told you about Ma’am coming home.”

She shook her head. “You scared a her, and she ain’t even here yet.”

She was right; I was afraid. Not only of Ma’am, but scared that maybe Love Alice really could see the future. I was glad to hear Pap’s footsteps on the porch.

“And, O-livvy,” Love Alice said in a whisper, “someday you goin’ to have a little girl of yo’ own.”

“Not me, I’m never going to marry. I’m gonna stay right here and work with Pap till I’m an old, old lady.”