The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (8 page)

The reverend said, “Pray through the night. When I come in your room at two o’clock, I want to see you on your knees; three o’clock, prostrate before our Lord; four o’clock, praying to Jesus for strength.” The reverend stepped back. Buckley heard his mother breathing. She’d risen, but only in time to see the reverend’s retreat.

This same year, Buckley’s mom got a job at Roger’s Gourmet Pork ’n’ Beans.

On her first official day, Tarry Quince, a coworker, showed Abigail where their boss’s office was located. She said, “The best thing about the man is we don’t never see his ugly face.” Mr. Peebles had hired Abigail. He’d seemed like a nice man, but it made no difference. She needed the money. “Drop your time card here on Friday,” Tarry instructed.

Downstairs, Tarry pointed to the women on the steel ladders, working the vats. The vats seemed larger today than last Tuesday when Mr. Peebles had asked, “When can you start?” Tarry shouted over the noisy compressors and vacuum sealers, “Sheila, Laurie, Katrina, and Tracie.” Sheila and Katrina noticed Tarry and Abigail over the rumble of the machines and waved, and one woman, Sandy Burkhaulter, who worked at the end of the line, climbed down. She wiped one hand on her tomato-and-bean-spotted smock before taking off her glove. She mouthed the phrase
good to meet you
and extended her hand to Abigail, who felt so overwhelmed, she left Sandy’s hand where it was. Sandy climbed back up the silver ladder to her vat.

Abigail was hired to work the line inspecting cans of Roger’s Gourmet Pork ’n’ Beans, an Arkansas favorite, and according to Mr. Peebles, a soon-to-be national favorite. “We’re going to put Hormel out of business.”

Standing at the conveyor belt, Abigail wore a clean but orange-stained smock and a hairnet, as did the other two women who worked the line alongside her. The three inspectors were to ensure that cans of Roger’s Gourmet Pork ’n’ Beans were filled to the third line (counting down from the top of the can, Mr. Peebles explained, as if she were an idiot), no more and no less, before they entered the sealer. “It’s the most important job,” Mr. Peebles had stressed. “Imagine: You’re about to feed your family dinner. You open up the can and there’s a white sticky mold because there was too much air in the can. It’s about consistency and quality. You work quality control.”

In the last year, Abigail had lost one hundred and twenty pounds. One year married, she was miserable. She wore long-sleeved shirts and long pants despite the Arkansas heat to hide her sagging skin, and she was determined more than ever to save enough money to leave John Whitehouse and her mother, Winter Pitank, behind. She was going to take Buckley and move away from Mont Blanc, Arkansas. She wanted to see the ocean.

When her mother asked her why she wouldn’t eat, why she’d lost so much weight so quickly—“Are you sick? Do you have a tapeworm?”—Abigail didn’t have the courage to tell her that it was John, that she had made a huge mistake—that watching him hoard tuna-noodle casserole, the noodles sopping and dripping down his chin, had made her nauseated. It just happened one day: She sat across from him at the kitchen table, and she lost her appetite. She looked down at her own plate of casserole, the noodles like fat white worms, and felt sick.

Working the inspection line at Roger’s, there was a lot of time to think about the mistakes she’d made, what she might have done differently. The past, like the slop she inspected, sped by, can after can and memory after memory, making her wonder if forgetfulness wasn’t a blessing. She remembered her wedding
night, John saying, “Tell me you like it. Tell me you like it,” and she whispered back, “I like it,” wishing the mattress springs wouldn’t creak so. He said, “I know your fat ass does. I know it.” Later, he said he’d been in the throes. He hadn’t meant nothing hateful by what he said. She hadn’t always had a fat ass, as John would say. She’d been slim before Buckley. Before Richard, Buckley’s biological father, went away to the University of Florida to play football and study medicine.

Buckley R. Pitank is Buckley Richard Pitank.

Watching the cans rush past, she thought,
John is not a bad man, not as far as I can tell, and I can stomach him on top of me, inside me, calling me “fat ass” and “big girl” in the bed, and he treats Buckley like a son
. But therein lay the problem: That first week after they married, John taught Buckley to shoot. He taught Buckley to drive his truck and to lay brick and to hang drywall. He told him that Job had betrayed God, that he got what he deserved. John had even thrown a football with Buckley in the Holy Redeemer churchyard. The churchgoers were watching the stepfather and son, and John was encouraging Buckley, saying, “You got a good arm, Buck.” When Buckley fumbled and dropped the ball, John said, “The boy’s hands are greasy from the chicken.” John’s face had turned red. Buckley had embarrassed him, and John carried the football away, tossing it in his truck.

Shifting her weight from left to right, her back hurting, Abigail remembered her mother’s face, pleased as punch, when Abigail told her that she was marrying the reverend. She would finally be somewhat respectable, a little less white trash. But now Abigail didn’t want the husband. She never had wanted him, but now she didn’t want the father for her son either. She had married John for Buckley and because John had proposed. He liked her cooking. He liked her fat ass, and he was quickly turning her only son into a young man doomed to lay bricks, hang drywall, shoot guns, drive pickup trucks, and probably pick up whores and gamble. She didn’t know where it would lead, but shooting and whoring was not what she’d
intended for her only son. She wanted him to go to college and read books and be a professional. She knew what John was about, and it wasn’t about God. It was about scheming and living lazy. Despite all his promises, they still lived in Winter’s pea green cinder-block house, and John’s congregation was fewer than thirty. She had hoped John might just up and leave, but he licked his fingers at the dinner table, put his boots on the furniture, and smacked her on the behind in front of Buckley and Winter. He wasn’t leaving any time soon.

The conveyor belt jerked and stopped. Pork ’n’ beans slopped the belt and Abigail’s smock. “Wake up,” said Linda, who worked the line, and who for some reason didn’t like Abigail. “I’ll get Horace. Clean that up.” Abigail tossed the nine slopped cans and wiped the belt with her rag. She wiped the sauce from her cheek with the back of her hand. Samantha, the other inspector, said, “I’ll be back.” She was going for a smoke.

Abigail’s own daddy had taught her that a man or woman doesn’t have anything if they don’t have their word.
If you can’t keep your word, you can’t keep nothing
. And she had certainly kept her word. Maybe that was a mistake. The line started moving again, and she was alone at the conveyor belt. Samantha took long smoke breaks, and Linda was always looking for an excuse to leave the line. Abigail knew from experience that Linda wouldn’t be back for at least twenty minutes. The balls of Abigail’s feet ached. She wished she smoked or had some reason to leave the line, but she couldn’t go anywhere with those two gone. It was two o’clock. She had three more hours to go. Mr. Peebles had reminded her this morning, “No break this afternoon. I let you leave early yesterday.”

“My son was sick. It was a half hour.”

He hadn’t answered.

It was a mindless job and so her mind wandered. She thought on Richard and the promise she’d kept, not even telling her own mother his name. When Richard had said, “You tricked me. My
daddy’s right about you. You’re a whore,” she had said, “I would never trick you. Never. I love you. I won’t ever tell anybody this is your baby if you don’t want me to.”

“How do I know it is?” He was handsome, with a golden crew cut. At his hairline, he had fine tufts of hair like a baby’s first hairs, and he had the shiniest green eyes. In one more year he was leaving for the University of Florida to play football. She remembered him saying something like
I should’ve known you’d try something like this. In another year, I’m getting out of here. Nothing you can say will change that
. That’s what she remembered, and she’d thought then, at three months pregnant, that despite what he said, he wouldn’t really leave. That if he did leave, his conscience would bring him back. He would want to know his child.

In her mind she could still see him there behind Moore’s Grocery. She remembered saying, “I was a virgin.” It was August 8, 1958. She remembered writing the date in her diary. She had left the whole page blank to fill in later when he changed his mind, when he said
I want us to be a family. That page is still blank
, she thought. It would remain forever blank.

What had she looked like then? She tried to picture herself, the two of them standing with their backs up against the bricks, him hardly looking at her. She kept moving in front of him, trying to make eye contact, to see into his heart. She was so naive.

“I’ll deny it’s mine.”

“No, you won’t.”
What did I look like then?
She let a can of Roger’s Gourmet Pork ’n’ Beans pass at the sixth line.
White mold. Some woman is going to be entirely destroyed in another year’s time when she opens this slop to feed her family. How terrible. Mr. Peebles won’t approve
.

I was thin then
, she remembered,
and I had on that white skirt I bought in Fayetteville, the one patterned with French ladies and parasols. I had washed and pressed it, and it got dirty against the
bricks. Stained forever. Pretty means pretty and nothing more. It doesn’t pay
.

“I gotta go” is what he’d said.

Didn’t he know Jiminy Cricket’s “Always Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”? If Richard doesn’t want to know Buckley, then Buckley doesn’t want to know him
. She let another can pass, this one at the tenth line.
Richard got out of here. No doubt about that
. He left Mont Blanc for good, but not before he saw Abigail wheeling her baby boy down Main Street. She remembered walking proudly, trying not to seem obvious, but eyeing him. He crossed the street. He hadn’t even tried to sneak a peek at his own son.
He’s your baby
, she’d thought. She wanted to scream,
He’s your son. You need to claim him!
But who was she to him?
A good time. An easy lay. What did her mother say? “Why pay for the cow when you can get the milk for free.” “Pretty’s just pretty. It doesn’t pay.”

When Buckley was four or five, she ran into Richard at Bronco Billy’s Drive-in. He was in town for the holidays, visiting his folks. She was fat then, and Richard hadn’t recognized her, but she knew him. He looked the exact same, except his hair was long down his back, which suited him. Had she been thinner then … had her hair been washed … had she been nicely dressed … had she had more confidence, she might’ve approached him then to tell him how amazing his son was. She wanted to say,
It’s me! Abigail
. She wanted to tell him about Buckley Richard Pitank.

Instead, she drove away with her cheeseburger and milk shake, her palms sweaty on the steering wheel.

Linda came up behind Abigail. “What the hell is going on?”

Abigail said, “I’m doing my job. I’m checking the cans.”

“Has Mr. Peebles seen this mess?”

Abigail shook her head that no, he had not, thinking that if Linda and Samantha weren’t always wandering off, this type of thing wouldn’t happen in the first place.

“Thank God,” Linda said. “And Horace didn’t come by?”

“No.”

“When the line started back up, did you check each can?”

“Not really.” Abigail didn’t lie. She kept secrets, but she didn’t lie.

“Why not?”

“My mind wandered.”

Grandma Edna goes to bed at quarter past nine. She unfastens her watch and drops it on the nightstand. She tucks the heavy knotted quilt under her arms and, anxious to dream, forgets what she should remember: forgets that tomorrow she has to buy tracing paper, red construction paper, snowflake paper, and tubes of silver glitter for the Sunday school Valentines; forgets to take her antacid (her stomach bubbled after supper); forgets the back porch light and the four pills in the white plastic Friday slot of her pill bin; forgets to defrost the chicken.

Tonight the February wind squalls. It clatters the chairs on the side porch and tears the wind chimes from their metal hooks. They clank on the concrete and thud to the grass. The wind rattles the storm windows. She thinks someone is trying to get in. She thinks,
Come on. I don’t care
. She has gone to bed to dream and so she does.

In the dream, her mother is young, washing petticoats in the sunlight. Wisps of hair fall from her bun and she catches them with the back of her wrist, pinning them to her face. She laughs. Edna smells lavender mixed with lye. Beneath the covers, Edna’s right hand opens and her fingers wiggle. She sees her mother’s teeth, including the chipped one, and her mother’s hands, wet and coarse from scrubbing clothes on the washboard. Her mother gathers her top skirt, drying her hands, calling, “Ed,” but Edna’s right there within reach. “Ed,” she calls again. Edna says, “I’m right here, Mom.” Every night her mother smiles or waves and
the dream ends, but tonight Edna feels the sunlight on her arms and after reaching for her mother’s skirt, feels the fabric. Both of her old feet kick beneath the tucked sheet. When Edna’s fingers touch the suds on her mother’s skirt, her right hand spasms under the covers. She hasn’t touched her before. She feels her mother’s wet fingertips on her forehead, sees the glowing red blur of sunlit skin. Her mother pushes a strand of hair from Edna’s eyes.