The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (29 page)

She’ll be on the school bus now, going home. She doesn’t know that I’m not at the house. She’ll run into our room and find it empty, the bed unmade. She’ll wander the rooms looking for me then sit on the front steps and poke at the ground with a stick. The shadows will grow long, and a chill will come down. The street lamps will blink on, and her cheeks will grow cold and still she’ll wait. She’ll know that I am coming because I always come; my sweet girl, she’ll be frightened but she’ll wait. I’ve never let her down and I won’t start now.

I stumble on a piece of blown-out tire. A truck pulls onto the shoulder of the highway and rolls slowly toward me, horn honking. A man leans out of the window as it passes, “You all right, honey?” I think I hear the trucker and his passenger laughing. My chest burns. I turn toward the wood. A ditch runs the length of the border between highway and forest. It is filled with traveler’s detritus: beer cans, potato chip bags, cigarette butts. I step down into it. A few feet away something hisses, something alive and wounded—a cat that someone abandoned. Its paw is twisted at an odd angle and its fur is matted and stretched across its rib cage. “Here, kitty,” I say. “Here, kitty.” It hisses as I approach. Poor thing, poor thing gone mad with fear. “Okay, kitty,” I say. “Okay.” Its good paw scratches at the air. It does not have the strength to lift its head when it hisses, but its eyes dart from side to side. “Pretty, pretty,” I say. “Shh.” I turn my pockets inside out looking for something to give it. I look down at the trash in the ditch. I don’t want to touch that filth, but I comb through the garbage with my hands. “I’m coming, pretty,” I say. “It’s going to be alright.” I don’t want to scare it, so I take tiny steps toward its limp body. The mud in the ditch sucks at my feet. It is slimy and lumpy and cold. I kneel next to the poor wounded cat. It lifts its head from the dirt and sticks out the tip of its tongue and then, with the last of its strength, scratches my wrist. Blood pearls up through the perforated skin. Poor thing. I crouch next to it. “Shhh shhh, pretty, pretty,” I say. The Banshees urge me onward, “Go on,” they say. “Get, you’d better get.” But I don’t think anything should die alone, so I stay on my knees next to the cat and wait for it to draw its last breath. I whisper to it until it lets me stroke its matted fur. It mews.

At the mouth of the ditch two pairs of boots appear. Two policemen look down. One says, “Ma’am, you come on out of there now. You gave your parents a scare. You come on out of there.”

“Who sent you?” I ask.

The Banshees are in a rage. They are shrieking, “We told you. Now look, now look what you’ve done, you stupid woman. You miserable bitch.”

I hear everything now: the kitten’s shallow breathing, the men bending over the ditch, the cars whooshing by, the tree branches crackling in the woods, the tires against the road, the birds tweeting, the sandpaper sound of the air against my skin, the grass blowing, my labored breathing. All of it rushes at me, horribly articulated. I put out my hand to steady myself against the onslaught. The police officers are speaking again. It is impossible to hear them over the cacophony. I concentrate. I stare at their lips. One reaches for me, and I am lifted up and out of the ditch.

The roadside is a circus of police cars and flashing lights. Some of the motorists stop, and an officer waves them along. My father’s car is parked with the passenger door open. Mother is talking to one of the policeman. I am led toward her. The Banshees say I should make a run for it, but I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Nonononono.” I thought I’d said it very quietly, in the voice I use to talk to them inside of my head, but I must have spoken aloud because Mother and the officer turn and stare. My father leans against the car with his head in his hands.

A policewoman takes my elbow and guides me to a squad car. She opens the door, and I perch on the edge of the seat while she squats in front of me. I am so tired. I am too tired to hear anything or understand anything. If only The Banshees would stop shouting, but they won’t give me any peace now. My mother gestures toward me and then to Daddy’s car. The officer shakes his head.

Paramedics arrive. They lead me to the ambulance, and I step up quietly. This morning The Voice told me to go gently. My parents sit in their car; blue and red lights flash on their windshield. The paramedic doesn’t fasten the restraints on the stretcher—and she’s given me a blanket, for which I am grateful. I try to look for the beauty in things. I remember Mother in her apron all of those years ago, the water splashing over the greens in the double sink. I can see the amber twinkle of the cordial in her glass. The afternoon is warm and sun dazzled, pulsing with music only she and I can hear.

Sala

1980

S
ALA WOKE AT
sunset. Cold seeped through the window next to her bed. The sheets were too tight. Sala’s grandmother had tucked them around her, pulled them so taut the girl’s arms were pinned and she had to strain to straighten her feet. She didn’t know how long she’d been sleeping. Outside, the trees and houses, wires and telephone poles were black silhouettes against the red-orange sunset. A few drooping leaves hung like sleeping bats from an oak’s bare, black branches.

Sala’s mother had been taken away the week before. Gone were Cassie’s suitcase and bobby pins, her wide-toothed comb and maroon sweater, the tube of almond-colored concealer she dotted under her eyes.

In the backyard the light snapped off in Sala’s grandfather’s toolshed. He walked onto the lawn and paused, his body turned toward Sala’s window. “August!” Hattie called from the kitchen. “August, supper!” Her grandfather’s face was hidden in shadow. He leaned forward, as though trying to see into her room. He was not so steady on his feet these days. Sala was afraid he would fall. The back door squeaked open, and a rectangle of light fell across the grass. Hattie came out into the yard, wearing her apron. August walked toward Hattie with his hand outstretched. She took his hand and helped him climb the back steps. The door closed behind them, and the yard fell to darkness.

The wood behind the house was black and still. Goodnight, trees, Sala thought. She waited for her grandmother to come and turn on the bedroom light; she pulled at the sheets, squirming in her swaddling. She was afraid she might vomit. Sala had been sent home early from school that day. At mid-morning she’d felt a sudden vertigo. Her stomach churned, and the classroom brightened into a cube of light so white and disorienting that, though she willed it to, her body would not stay in the chair, and she slid to the floor. A huge fuss followed. There was talk of an ambulance. Sala was carried to a cot in the nurse’s office, where the adults talked about her as though she were not there. “I think there’s something going on at home,” they said. “She’s been distracted in class,” they said. The school nurse’s face loomed above her. “We’re calling your mother to come and get you.” Twenty minutes later August arrived.

A pot lid banged. Hattie was in the kitchen, cooking and displeased. Sala struggled out of the sheets and sat up in bed, determined to appear well when her grandmother came to check on her. She would come in and see that Sala had recovered—she would realize people could will themselves healed and she’d bring Sala’s mother back. Sala’s eyes were gritty, as though there was dust under the lids. She picked up a pillow and hugged it to her chest, it smelled of her mother’s hair-dressing oil. She drifted off and jerked awake again. Sometime later, two hands shifted her downward and tugged the covers up to her chin. A calloused palm passed over her cheek. “She asleep,” August whispered to Hattie. He walked out of the room whistling a tune softly.

TWO DAYS BEFORE
they took her away, Cassie dug up the front yard in the middle of the afternoon. Sala came home from school to find the lawn pocked with holes and scattered with clumps of browned grass and mounds of gray scraggly roots. There was dirt strewn on the slate pathway that led to the front door, dirt piled on top of the gravel in the driveway, dirt in Cassie’s hair. Hattie’s winter flowers, purple thick-leafed things that looked like open heads of cabbages, were hacked apart and wobbling, roots up, in the center of the ruined flower beds. Cassie kneeled next to the maple tree. She held a shovel by the blade with both hands and jabbed it into the ground.

“Mom?” Sala called. “Mom?”

Cassie raised her arms above her head and drove the shovel into the earth. Her leather gloves were ripped where the shovel’s blade cut into them. The neighbors on either side of the house watched from their porches. Sala’s grandmother stood in the doorway with both hands pressed against the screen, palms flat, as though she could push the scene away.

“Sala!” Cassie said, breathless. “Help me pull up this root.”

Sala didn’t move.

“Come on! Help me.”

“What are you doing?” Sala asked.

Cassie set the shovel aside and used her hands to dig into the hole she’d made.

“Can’t we go inside? Let’s go inside,” Sala said.

She bent over her mother and tugged at the back of her jacket with one hand. She began to cry.

“Mom, please let’s go inside.”

“Inside!” Cassie said. “Now?”

She glanced at Hattie standing in the doorway. She leaned into Sala and whispered, “We have to be careful with Grandmom and Grandpop. They’re putting something in our food. But,” she said, examining a clump of weeds, “there are plants out here that I can use to cure us.”

“There’s people watching,” Sala said.

“Don’t mind them. They’re all in on it.” Cassie looked at a neighbor woman standing on her porch. “I know what you’re up to!” she shouted.

Hattie ran outside, “Cassie! Cassie, come on in now. That’s enough.”

Cassie sifted through the dirt with her hands.

“At least let me take Sala inside. You don’t want her out here like this.”

Sala tugged again at her mother’s coat, but Cassie had gone back to her shoveling and swatted Sala’s hand as though it were a fly. Her grandmother led her inside and the two of them stood side by side in the doorway watching Cassie move across the yard scooping clumps of dirt into bags. They shivered in the chill afternoon air coming in through the screen door. Sala wondered if she ought to stand so close to her grandmother, if Hattie wasn’t transmitting something poisonous through her clothes. She wondered if there really was any poison and then she worried that she’d betrayed her mother with her doubt. Cassie didn’t have anyone but Sala, but Grandmom and Grandpop had each other and Sala’s aunts and uncles. Sala tallied these bonds, calibrated the scales of defenselessness and need; she always concluded that her mother needed her more than anyone else. Sala sidestepped away from her grandmother. She decided she could stand next to her as long as there were a few inches between them. In this way she could satisfy everyone involved. In this way she would not lose anyone’s love.

Cassie came inside at sunset. She hurried Sala into the bedroom they shared and locked the door behind them. She set a pack of razor blades and a pair of yellow rubber gloves on the bedside table. Cassie emptied the bags of pulled roots onto newspapers and sliced them with the blades. Sala watched from the bed.

“Don’t cry!” Cassie said. “Remember that song about the Lord’s army? That’s us, the Lord’s soldiers. He’s taking care of us.”

Sala did not feel taken care of. Cassie had not changed her clothes—her knees were grass stained and muddied, dirt streaked her face, her fingernails were black. She hardly glanced at Sala as she sliced the roots. She cut her finger, and the blood dripped onto the newspaper. Under her breath Cassie sang,
I’m in the Lord’s army.

“Sing it with me, Sala:
I may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery
 … Come on, Sala. Sing it with me.
I’m in the Lord’s army. Yes, sir!
”

There wasn’t anything to do but sing along. When she was like this, Cassie never tired; she could go on all night singing and slicing. There were times Sala would wake with the first light and find her mother sprawled across the bed, or lying on the floor, or sometimes, and this was much worse, awake and praying in the armchair near the window. Now, Sala sang, so that her mother would be comforted, and Sala would not feel so separate from her and so alone.

By the third round, Sala and Cassie were shouting. Maybe, Sala thought, there was medicine in the roots her mother had pulled from the yard. Mom knows lots of things, Sala thought. I’m only ten, what do I know about anything?

“Don’t mind all of that noise,” Cassie said. Sala’s grandparents were knocking on the bedroom door. They wanted them to stop singing, to come out and talk. “Let Sala have her supper, at least,” August said. Cassie ignored them. Sala didn’t dare say she wanted to eat dinner with her grandparents. As the night wore on, the telephone in the kitchen rang with increased frequency. Long after the hour at which the house was usually silent, Sala heard her grandparent’s voices and the shirr of their footsteps against the carpet.

Cassie covered the bedroom floor with grocery store sales circulars piled with chopped roots. Sala sat in the middle of the bed with the quilt pulled around her shoulders. “Have you ever been in a boat?” she asked her mother. “This bed is a boat, and the papers are the ocean. See?” Sala said, bouncing on the bed to simulate the motion of waves. She drew her knees to her chest.

“Mom,” she said. “Mom, I don’t feel well.”

What she meant was, what is happening? What she meant was, please stop this.

“Mom?” she called again.

“Sing some more,” Cassie said without turning from the roots she was cutting up.

“I don’t want to.” Sala had tired of singing. She wanted her mother to wash her face and comb her hair. They could sit in the family room watching television and eating grilled cheese sandwiches if Cassie would only return to herself, but this other wild woman wouldn’t let her go.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Mom? Did you hear? My stomach hurts. I’m hungry.”

Cassie put down her razor blade. She crossed the room and sat at the foot of the bed. Sala kicked at her hand.

“Get away. I don’t know you,” Sala said.

Cassie crawled forward on the bed, trying to get a grip on some part of her daughter’s body, but Sala flailed and bucked. Cassie grabbed both of Sala’s feet and held on, head down, while the girl pummeled her shoulders. “Get off! You get off!” Sala shouted. She struck her mother with her knees and wheeled her arms. She slapped at Cassie’s face and neck. Cassie lay on top of her, pinning Sala to the bed. Sala wriggled beneath her, winded from the weight of her mother’s body on top of hers. Cassie kissed Sala’s forehead and her cheeks and her tears. “It’s me, Sala. It’s me, it’s me,” Cassie said. These were the first words she’d spoken that were free of the shrillness that came into her voice when Cassie had one of these episodes. Exhausted, Sala allowed her mother to pull her into her lap and rock her.

The next morning when Sala woke, Cassie had cleared the room. The chopped bits of roots were in brown bags on the windowsill. It was very early; the sky was tinged orange. During the night, Cassie had undressed Sala and put her pajamas on her. Cassie’s hair was combed and the bits of grass were gone. She had put on red lipstick, which had smeared, giving her mouth a bloodied, just-punched look. Still, she had tried, and Sala, waking up to the sun and finding her mother groomed, could try to forget the night before. There were lots of things Sala tried to forget; sometimes she succeeded, for an hour or a day. More often, Cassie wearied and bewildered her. Sala moved through the days in a kind of fog of unknowing—it had grown impossible to know what was real or true, and Sala was afraid all of the time. She learned to put aside things that were too confusing or too painful. And so she set aside the previous evening and hopped out of bed and asked her mother if she could wear her purple corduroy pants to school that day.

SALA WOKE
in the deepest part of the night, when the furrowing, burrowing creatures are still in their dens and the night hunters have eaten their fill or given up the chase. Her grandmother was sitting in the armchair next to the bed. She’d turned on a nightlight. Sala wanted to go out into the stars and the silence. She wanted some sort of enchantment. Her grandmother lifted her head and squinted at the bed.

“Let’s go outside to see the owls,” said Sala, half in a dream.

Her grandmother reached for the thermometer and shook it with two swift snaps of the wrist.

“Open up,” she said.

“There’s owls in the woods, right, Grandmom?” Sala asked.

Hattie sighed.

“All I know is you fainted at school and now you’re talking craziness in the middle of the night. Open up.”

“Didn’t you ever want to go outside at night?”

“I’ve been outside at night. It’s just like the day, only darker.”

“Did you ever see an owl?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

“Goodness, Sala, I don’t remember.”

“Was it pretty?”

“I’m not playing with you, child. Open your mouth.”

“Where’s my mother?” Sala said softly.

Hattie’s hand dropped to her lap. She leaned back in her chair.

“She’s alright. She’s alright where she is.”

“Are they nice to her there?”

Hattie didn’t answer.

“Are they nice to her?” Sala repeated.

“I think they are. I called all around for the best … I hope so.”

The two of them sat in the dark and the quiet together. When Sala began to cry, Hattie didn’t hug her or take the girl’s hand or rub her shoulder, but she didn’t shush her either. After a while Hattie said, “They’re kind of silver with the moon shining down on them. There were a lot of owls in Georgia when I was a girl. One time I saw one with a little rabbit in its mouth.”

Hattie sighed. Here she was, seventy-one years old, and there had been no end to sick children. Now this, and who would care for this little one if Cassie didn’t get better? God help her. When Hattie’s children were young, they’d called her The General. They thought she didn’t know, but she knew everything about each one of them. She could feel their vibrating souls. When he was a boy, Floyd joked that she had superpowers, “Use your Spidey-sense, Ma,” he’d say because Hattie always knew which children were upstairs, which were out on the porch, which had gone down the block to the corner store. She’d be in the kitchen and get an odd sensation on the back of her neck, like someone was tapping her there. She’d look up from whatever she was doing and call out to one of the girls, “Go tell your brother I said to stop fooling around up there in the attic.” Sure enough, that’s where he’d be, about to fall through the trapdoor onto the second-floor landing.