“Look what I bagged, Lib!” Richard shouts way too loud, and Emma and I both jump out of our skins all over again at the sound of his raised voice. “Got us some dinner!”
Momma shakes her head at us as we’re marched up the rickety front steps.
Richard’s still poking our backs with the gun so we go inside, even though I don’t want to.
“Momma—” I reach out to her as I pass through the screen door, but she flinches and backs up like I’ve got cooties. I feel the tears boiling across my cheeks.
“Uh-uh-uh,” Richard says in that singsong voice grown-ups use when they wag their finger at you if you’ve done something wrong. “You do not talk!” he shouts. “You hear me? You shut your dirty little mouth!”
Momma floats away and a sick feeling churns in my empty stomach. A feeling I won’t be seeing her ever again.
“Do not stop! Go right on through,” he says, but this time it’s not a shout at least. “I want you to see what you’ve done. You see all these things waitin’ to be packed up? You see this?” Shouting again. “’Cause I had to go looking for you it ain’t done. Now I’ve got to be up all hours of the night doing shit that would have been done by now if it hadn’t been for you, little Miss Caroline and little Miss Emma or whoever the hell you are. I don’t even know you! You ain’t my blood. Y’all ain’t shit. ’Sfar I’m concerned you don’t exist. Go on—” he shoves us again with the gun “—go on out back. I got a surprise for you.”
Where’s Momma?
Out back is our shed that’s been locked since I don’t remember when and our clothesline that’s empty for the first time in ages, probably because the clothes are all packed up and ready to move. And there, right smack in the middle of the clothesline and the shed, sticking up out of the packed dirt like a metal tree that’s trying to grow, is a stake like someone would use to kill Dracula. Snaking out of it is a fat chain.
“Git on over there and sit down.” He shoves us one last time, this time toward the end of the mean-looking chain. “You little shit.” The boot comes fast and hard. This time it takes a little longer for me to get the air back into my lungs. Next thing I know he’s kneeling over us like he’s going to gut us and skin us. Instead the chain clinks and I jump when the cold touches my neck. It circles around just like one of the serpents we saw a preacher hold up at church, but this feels much heavier than that looked. It’s not quite resting on my shoulders. Once the two ends meet I hear a click and I know deep down where you just know things, I know I’m locked to this chain. I look to my right, which is not easy to do with this fat metal necklace I’m wearing, and he’s fitting the same contraption around Emma’s neck. Click. She’s locked in, too. But there’s a big difference I now see between Emma and me. This chain is weighing the top half of my body down, toward my crossed legs, and Emma, even with her being smaller and all, is sitting bolt upright and acting like someone’s fastening a diamond crown to her head, like she’s proud to be chained up. With me all hunched over like Igor I can smell the bitterness of the number one in my pants. The dirt from the ground is caked on the inside of my jeans and I shiver, even though it’s hot out here in the blazing sun.
And that’s how we sit for the next I don’t know how long. Me hunched over and Emma straight as an arrow. Every once in a while from inside the house I hear a door open and close and a thump here or there, like a full box hitting the ground. The sun that’s baking us moves to the side and—finally!—behind the shed so it’s getting late, that much I can figure out. Emma and I stay quiet. What is there to say, anyway?
* * *
“Where’s my girl?”
“I’m up here, Daddy!”
“Come on down here and give your ole pa a hug—we’re celebrating tonight!”
Daddy could catch me from any stair I jumped from—even the seventh one halfway up. When he did he’d grunt and say, “Whatchoo been feedin’ this child, Lib? You tryin’ to fatten her up for the fair?” But he’d laugh and hug me real tight and I’d sniff the carpet smell right out of his shirt.
“We got ourselves a bloodhound, that’s what we got,” he’d say. “What’d I put down today, sugar?”
I’d breathe him in again to make certain.
“Industrial!” I’d proclaim, and Daddy’d get this surprised look on his face.
“I’ll be goddamned! You’re exactly one hundred percent right! Did you hear that, Lib? Our girl nailed it again!”
And he’d squeeze me real hard and set me down careful like he was lowering me onto a bed of cotton.
When Daddy was in a good mood like that, he’d swirl Momma around the front room like they were at a dance hall. She looked so pretty in Daddy’s arms, swirling under him, her dress puffing out on the air like a doll on top of a cake.
Then he’d spin me around and I’d feel like a ballerina, soft and delicate, tall and graceful.
“You’re my little princess,” he’d say. “Daddy’s little princess.”
* * *
It’s dark now and I’m lying flat on my back in the dirt, staring up at the stars. The same dirt that was cooking up real good in the sun is iron cold right now. It’s quiet inside the house but the lights are still on.
“Psst,” I whisper across to Emma.
“What?” she whispers back.
“What’s going to happen now, you think?”
“How should I know?”
“You think Momma’ll come out here?” I ask.
“No.”
“You don’t?” It never occurred to me that Momma might not visit. I’ve been pinning my hopes on it, to tell you the truth. “Why not?”
“If she’d let him chain us up like this, she’d let him do just about anything.”
She’s got a point here.
“What about food?” I ask her. Like I said, sometimes Emma’s like the older sister, what with her knowing stuff I don’t. Richard she knows.
“Don’t count on it.”
“So they’re gonna let us starve?”
“Anything’s possible.”
After about three shooting stars I whisper over to her again. “We’ve got to think of a plan. There’s got to be some way out of this.”
Emma doesn’t answer me.
“Emma! Listen to me. We can get out of this if we just put our heads together.”
Silence.
“What’re you thinking about?” I ask her after a little while longer.
Still nothing back.
“Em?”
“Why don’t you just hush up,” she says, and I have to say, she doesn’t say it nice at all.
“You thinking of a plan?”
“No-I-am-not. Planning’s what got us in this fix in the first beginning. Planning’s what’s gonna do us in for good. You and your big ideas. Let’s run away. We can do it. He’ll never find us. I wish I’d never listened to you, that’s what I’m thinking if you want to know the God’s honest truth.”
“You were the one who started packing to leave!”
“Only because you wanted to run away!”
“No one forced you to go along with it. Besides, I was just doing it for you.”
“Well I was doing it for you,” she says through her tears.
“So you’d have been just fine staying here with Momma and Richard. Whispering your little secrets behind his door. I should’ve figured you’d take his side—”
I can barely get this out when a big weight drops on me and starts pulling my hair and hitting my face. I hit her back and roll her over to pin her down but the chain is all tangled up and starts choking me and her both. We’re coughing and I’m clawing at my neck, trying to pull some space between the metal links and my throat when a huge triangle of light cuts across us there on the dirt.
“What in the hell is going
on out here?”
I feel myself going number one in my pants all over again, but at least it’s warming me up. Emma and I are real still, hoping he goes away.
* * *
“You have to lie still if you want her to come. Tossin’ and turnin’s what’s gonna scare her away.”
“But how will she know I lost it?”
“The tooth fairy always knows when little kids lose their teeth,” Daddy said with a smile and a wink. “It’s in the tooth fairy handbook.”
“Honor bright?”
“Honor bright,” he said, tucking the quilt right up under my chin how I liked it.
“So be still and go right to sleep and when you wake up there’ll be a bright shiny nickel under your pilla where your tooth is now.
“Good night, Princess.”
“’Night, Daddy.”
* * *
The cold water knocks the breath right out of us. It soaks our clothes like Daddy’s blood seeped across the floor he died on.
“That’ll teach you to keep it down out here,” Richard says, letting the now-empty tin pan clank to the cement kitchen steps. “Next time it’ll be my fist that shuts you up.”
I start shivering before I hear the kitchen door slam shut and it keeps up for a whole long time. I can tell by the sound of the chain links Emma’s shaking, too.
* * *
* * *
Richard came along when Momma’s tears had just about dried up. He rolled into town from “nowhere in particular.” You might not think that’s an honest-to-goodness place but it must be, since that’s what Richard answered back when folks asked him about his roots. Momma caught his eye like a bee locks on a flower and he never let her out of his sight. He came by the house every single day, bringing weedy wildflowers he picked from the side of the road, that tin can of nails, a jar of half-eaten jam (he said he just wanted to taste it first to make sure it was good enough for Momma), and once, a pot full of spoons—something no one could make heads nor tails of. Momma took all his presents with her mouth fixed into a smile, but her eyes stayed cold and sad. Richard didn’t know what Momma looked like when her eyes smiled, too. When she left the room to put the flowers in water or the jam in the icebox, Richard fixed us with a mean stare that disappeared the minute Momma came back.
“Your momma’s gonna get hitched to the beggar-man,” Mary Sellers called out to me during recess one day. I didn’t even have a chance to think of anything to say back, Emma flew at her so fast, pulling her hair and walloping her in the stomach until she ran crying to Mr. Stanley, who was recess monitor that day.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Momma’d remarry but once Mary mentioned it, it kinda figured. The piles of clothes that’d been growing all over the house were shrinking. The trash was being sacked and carried out. The dishes were scrubbed so good they looked shiny new. It was like Momma was trying to prove she could keep house.
“We can’t go on like this,” she said one day out of nowhere. “The money’s gone and I don’t have training to do anything that’s of any use. I can’t even multiply. And I’m not winning a spelling bee anytime soon, either, let me tell you.”
It’s true—Momma never reads. Not to us at bedtime or to herself. She canceled the daily paper right after Daddy died.
“We got no options,” she said. And that was that.
Momma married Richard two days later at the Town Hall, wearing the same dress she buried Daddy in.
I couldn’t look Mary Sellers in the eye for a whole week after that.
* * *
“Rise and shine!” The metal pan slides from the tip of Richard’s foot to about one Barbie-doll length from me, two from Emma.
There, heaped into a smelly mound still in the shape of a can, is a wet brown mess of dog food.
I blink over at Emma. She looks worse than I do, I’m sure. Dirt forms a birthmark along one side of her face and sticks are stuck in her sappy hair.
She blinks back at me and sidles over to the pan, dragging the chain with her. Then she cups her hand like she’s about to drink from a crystal-clear stream and scoops out some of the mush and eats it out of her hand.
I don’t know if I’m hungry enough to do it. Then again, I’m too hungry not to do it.
“He must’ve gone and gotten dog food special, just to torture us,” I say more to myself than to Emma while I work up the courage to eat it. Just thinking of touching it makes me sick.
“Where’s Momma, you think?” I ask her, but she’s too busy eating breakfast to answer.
She looks up at me while her mouth works on what’s inside and then reaches her dirty hand, filled with dog food, over to my face and holds it real gently for me to sniff and, eyes closed and careful not to breathe through my nose, I nibble and swallow. I don’t chew. No sirree. I barely let it touch my tongue. I just swallow it and then gulp the air to try to get the smell and taste out of my mouth. She scoops another handful and feeds me again. And again. After I move away she licks the pan clean.
* * *
I must have dozed off in the sun ’cause I jump awake when I feel a shadow staring down at me. It’s Momma.
It’s strange that it’s her right eye that’s black and swollen ’cause Richard’s right-handed so left sides are usually the sore ones in this family. Her top lip is twice as big as it should be so now I know what all she’s been busy with this past night.
“Why you doing this?” she asks, her hands hanging useless down to her sides. She looks like she’s got a chain around her neck, too. “You bring this on yourself, you realize.” She bends down over my head and I think she’s about to stroke my face but her hand goes to the chain gripping my neck. Her hand pulls back when she feels the hot metal cooking against my skin.
“Don’t fight him,” she whispers, easing her fingers into the links to pull a bigger gap between the chain and my neck. “Why you gotta fight him? Why you gotta sass all the time?” She’s still whispering, but I can tell she’s not waiting for an answer. “You just bricks weighing me deeper into the river.” She stands back up, looks across I guess at Emma, who’s still sleeping. “I’ll be right back,” she says.
My head’s too heavy to lift so I lie there waiting on her to come back. What’s going to happen then I don’t know, but I got nothing else to do so I close my eyes against the sun and I cook a little longer. Next thing I know the chain’s rattling and I turn my head to see her squatting in the dirt, fitting a key into the padlock at the stake, freeing the two ends of the chain. Even with the chain gone my head feels too heavy to lift and my eyes feel like they aren’t getting all the way open even though I’m no longer squinting. I think they’re swollen.
“Get up,” she says quietly. “Take care you don’t use none of your back talk today.” She walks back into the house and leaves us to stand on our own.
“Em? You standing yet?”
“Yeah,” she whispers back to me. “Here.” She’s holding out her arm to help me up and it’s all I can do to reach for it. I’m sore all over.
“Where’re we going to go?” she asks. “We can’t go inside. For all we know he doesn’t know we ain’t tied up anymore.”
I’m aching to sit back down in the shade of the tree in the corner of the back, but Emma’s got a point. We better be scarce today.
“What about Miss Mary?” I say. Emma nods.
“I’ll leave a note so they don’t think we’ve run off again,” I say. I creep over to the kitchen door and listen for signs of life, and when I hear the ticktock of the clock that’s still left hanging on the empty kitchen wall I sneak in. It takes me a minute to find a pen, and then on the top of a cardboard box marked Kitchen I write “At White’s. Be back later. C and E” and then I let myself back out the screen door.
Slowly, slowly we walk down the same dirt road that looked so long
and magical in the middle of the night last night. It’s shaded with freckles of sunlight on the two lanes leading us away from the house on Murray Mill Road.
* * *
A few doors down from White’s, I see Charley Narley, but when he catches sight of us, for the first time ever, probably in the history of Toast, he turns away. He doesn’t follow us and call out what all we’re doing. He just turns away and looks off in the distance at what I don’t know.
“Oh, my dear Lord in heaven,” Miss Mary says when she sees us. I haven’t looked in a mirror yet so I guess we appear as wrung out as the dishrags Momma hangs from the clothesline after cleaning. “What in the world happened to you? Mr. White! You better come on out here right away.” She’s frowning all scary-like. Instead of patting her lap like she usually does, she comes over to us, kneels down and reaches out to touch my face like I’m made of glass.
“Oh, honey, what he do to you?” is all she says. I look into her eyes and I see they’re filling up with tears.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m just worried about Emma, is all.” Emma’s neck is ringed in red burns and her face has dried dog food on it from licking the pan like she did, so I bet she just looks a whole lot worse than she actually is. It’s just that she’s wavering on her feet like a tall daisy on the side of the road when a big truck races by, pulling it almost out of the soil.
“Oh, my God.” Mr. White’s kneeling in front of us, too. He stands up then and says, “I’ll get the towels and ointment, Mary. Will you go and fetch the witch hazel so we can clean it out?”
And they’re all busy, racing to fetch the things we tidy up along the edge of the shelves. Miss Mary grabs a box of Band-Aids even though Mr. White hasn’t asked for them and then she leads us over to behind the counter and to the back room where it’s darker and cooler ’cause the air-conditioning unit’s on full blast against the burning-hot sun. The witch hazel goes on first and stings a bit but dries quickly and knocks out the burning feeling I have at the base of my neck, which I realize now must look just like Emma’s. Mr. White dabs gently at other spots on my face and forehead and then he opens a small metal tube that squeezes out clear jelly. That feels so good on my skin I want to throw my arms around him.