Authors: BRET LOTT
Though Leston hadn’t approved of Burton’s moving, still deep in my husband the clouded and hopeless dream of his sons following him into a lumberyard of his own someday, Leston carried that lighter with him to work every day, filled it every morning whether it needed it or not with lighter fluid from the thin blue and yellow can he kept on the mantel.
It was a beautiful lighter, and I wondered often enough how much money Burton really made out there in all that sun and in amongst all those cars. But mostly I wondered when my husband was going to roll over and give in to what was so clearly best for my family, so clearly best for Brenda Kay. That lighter, I figured, was a fine start, a piece of California in his coveralls every day, there in his hand with every cigarette he lit.
That same resolve in Burton was what made James a good example of what you could do when you took hold of your life, made it do what you wanted of it, he was in veterinarian school at A&M now, would be out next summer, practicing on his own. And I had a grandchild, too, baby Judy, after Eudine’s mother. A baby girl with fiery red hair and green eyes yet again, and who I hadn’t yet held. It was a baby they’d planned on having, Eudine’d told me when they’d first called to let us know we’d be grandparents and aunts and uncles, and that notion made me shine inside, the idea one could plan on a child and be smart enough to determine what would happen to your future.
When we’d gotten the phone call near three A. M. one morning ten months ago, James breathless on the other end, the line crackling with interference at some point between here and Texas, I’d said right off to him, “Count em up. Count up her fingers and toes, make sure there’s ten of each, ” but right then I’d felt the hollow promise that measure really meant, my Brenda Kay’d had ten of each.
Every time I asked one of my children again how the burn had happened, I could see Cathe ral giving out the story, saw her stone still except for the small words she formed, eyes half-opened, her face all straight as she gave to them what she reckoned was God’s will in this situation, she’d been sweeping, and heard Brenda Kay scream, dropped the broom right there, ran downstairs to see Brenda Kay in her blue corduroy overalls and white shoes and white blouse, standing in front of the hearth with fire swarming up her legs. Brenda Kay screamed and screamed, then took to running. Cathe ral chased her through the front room and on into the kitchen, managed to pull her down from behind and lay on her a moment until the flames’d gone out.
When the story came to this point I always closed my eyes, tried to imagine the scene and what that warmth, that heat was like, Cathe ral herself ended up with blistered skin on her right thigh, her thin cotton dress scorched, her heavy leggings keeping her skin from burning any worse.
But I couldn’t imagine that heat, couldn’t feel that pain. I couldn’t feel what it was like for Cathe ral, because it was blame I was putting on her how could she leave Brenda Kay untended at the hearth? How could she? and I wanted no piece of me feeling sorry for her, feeling there was any way she couldn’t be the one to fault here.
Instead, all I could hear were the words Cathe ral told my children Brenda Kay was screaming, “My momma! My momma! ” even as she lay flat on the floor, Cathe ral rising, finally, and going to the sink, filling with water the first thing she could find, a pan I’d cooked that morning’s grits in, then rolling Brenda Kay over onto her back, her calling out my name even louder, finding inside her own self that new deeper and stronger sob and scream as Cathe ral poured cold January water over my daughter’s burned legs.
Then Cathe ral laid blankets over Brenda Kay, laid as many as she could find, and ran out to the road, started to waving down any car passing by out there.
At this point, too, I closed my eyes, imagined what it was somebody’d see if they were driving by at that moment, a crazed nigger woman, arms up in the air and hollering, that Cathe ral, the one we all knew spoke in tongues and was given to holy fits for the Lord. That’s what they’d think, I knew, and so it was God’s blame, too, Him giving her that reputation, and me the first to have seen it come upon her that day out back of Missy Cook’s mansion. Now the end result, not one car stopped for a half hour, seven cars passing her by as she screamed and hollered and waved.
It was a nigger, finally, to stop for her, Eleazer Campbell the insurance salesman, one of only three niggers in the county who had a car to drive. He’d been the one to pull over, follow her into the house, lift up Brenda Kay and all the blankets heaped on her. My baby’d passed out by then from the shock and the pain, Eleazer Campbell the one to drive her to this hospital, Cathe ral in the back seat with Brenda Kay’s head in her lap, stroking her hair, stroking it.
They got to the hospital, and when the nurse at the desk saw what was on, she’d called two nigger orderlies, who took my baby daughter from Eleazer Campbell’s arms, him standing just outside the hospital doors, knowing enough not to even try coming inside. And Cathe ral behind him, her own burns tended by somebody else later on.
But first she told the nurse who my daughter was, told her Wilman was a junior at Purvis High, that he should be called first, that he could handle it all from then.
She drove with Eleazer Campbell back to the house to clean things up.
To get ready, she told my children. And the first thing she saw when she came back in the house was that thin blue and yellow can of lighter fluid, empty, scorched, the paint bubbled like the skin on my baby’s legs, around it scorched black bricks, the black leading a trail into the fireplace, the fire now only embers. Brenda Kay’d reached up to the mantel, and’d pulled the lighter fluid down, and’d squirted it all over everywhere, and’d been taken up by flames jumping out the fireplace. It was a wonder, “A blessing from God above ” were the words Cathe ral’d ended the story with each time she’d toid it to my children, that our home didn’t burn down to the ground.
Why didn’t she call me? I wondered every time I heard the story. We had a telephone there in the house, too, why didn’t she call?
But I never asked that out loud, because I knew the answer, blame had fallen square on her, and she’d known it.
Cathe ral hadn’t tended properly to my child, hadn’t kept her out of reach of the lighter fluid. Hadn’t called me away from ladling out dumplings and gravy to children at Bailey Grammar School while my own retarded child burned at my home. Blame was hers, hard and pure and cold.
CHAPTER 18.
DOCTORS SPOKE AT ME, WHISPERED AT ME, WALKED THE HALLS WITH me, nurses smothered me, hugged me, touched me, members of the congregation cried on me, prayed for me, fed me and my family with an endless parade of covered dishes, my children held my hands, brought me flowers, brushed my hair, my husband held the brim of his hat in his hand, and turned it.
I stayed in that hospital room with Brenda Kay for a month, through all the changing of the dressings on her legs, through all the whimpering and crying, through the stench rotten skin gave off. I stayed for a month in the hospital room, doctors saying she’d take pneumonia, that she’d not walk again, that she’d be lucky if gangrene didn’t settle in.
Dr. Beaudry came in to check on her every other day or so, and each time Brenda Kay let out a scream, her eyes gone open wide, her red mouth a perfect O as she turned her head from him, the memory of his face and the shots still heavy with her, though Dr. Basket’d stopped prescribing them a year and a half before, when it’d come clear to him her bones were as strong as she needed.
Because Brenda Kay had walked everywhere, fearless, it would seem, but not that. She just knew no better, she’d left the house on more than one occasion without any of us knowing, just’d walked. She never got far, always to the edge of the woods out the back door, or a few yards from the road out the front before one or another of us would holler out, take off through the door and turn her back inside.
But we’d been thankful for the walking, because it meant no more carrying her, no more toppling of chairs as she tried to pull herself up, no more climbing of the stairs up to Dr. Beaudry’s office, where we still went once a month for him to have a look at her. The pall of carrying her everywhere had become so a part of our lives that when suddenly she’d took to walking and that gray shroud’d been lifted, I’d seemed to see more daylight, find better colors in the sunset, hear rain outside where I’d heard nothing before. Brenda Kay was growing up, and it seemed there might be some sort of light at the end of this long tunnel.
One morning late last August, not long before Burton moved out and long enough after she’d learned to walk she was eight now, eight years old she’d simply left the breakfast table and her plate of eggs and bacon, and gone to the back door. Every one was out the house except Burton and me, Billie Jean already to work at the bank, Leston in the woods, Annie already done with the morning chores and now in town with her girlfriends, Wilman to summer football practice at Purvis. Burton was at the table, shoveling in his food like always.
Brenda Kay had on denim overalls and a pale blue blouse with a little lace collar, these as everything else she wore old clothes from Annie, who’d now started in to wearing some of Billie Jean’s old things, except that she’d get out the scissors and sewing basket and make her own changes to those clothes. She’d sheer off a few inches from an old skirt, fuss up the shoulder seams of a blouse so the sleeves looked fuller, puffier, all of this without a word to me. She was learning on her own, me thankful for that, though sorrowed at it, too. Every day I felt there’d been years lost to my children growing up, there were things I’d have loved to teach Annie, even if it was just the trick of cherry Lifesavers and lips I’d shown Billie Jean a Christmas morning too long ago.
Burton had on only a T-shirt and blue jeans, his face puffed and tired and needing a shave. He worked the four to midnight shift over to the ice cream plant, and so I never rousted him out of bed, only let him come on down when he’d finished his sleep. The three of us here in the kitchen was no different than any other morning spent in our house.
The radio was on, too, like every morning, turned to my favorite program, “Sunrise Serenade” out of New Orleans. It was a program I’d listened to for years, had even on occasion danced a little to in the kitchen with Annie when she was smaller, Brenda Kay in her high chair and watching, mouth open for a while before she’d smile at us, wave her arms. Every care of a day fell away when I’d listen to that program and the gospel songs by the The Stamps Quartet and Mother Maybell Carter, everything from instrumentals of “Amazing Grace, ” violins thick and sweet filling the air, on down to “Jesus Loves Me” on a simple, lonesome guitar.
Maybe it was because for a moment or two on that morning it’d seemed somehow that things were on the mend, that the world and this child we’d been given weren’t so very heavy a load. Maybe it was the music, or the good knowledge my children even my Brenda Kay were healthy, as far as I knew happy, and that I had a grandchild. There was one more life on the face of this earth that I could lay claim to, and I knew I’d never be a grandmother like the only grandmother I ever knew. And maybe, just maybe, the good feeling was because my second son was here at the table, his plans to move to California already laid clear to us all. He was our foot in the door, even though Leston still sat across from me late nights, his face blank while I still tried to persuade him we had to move to California. For the good of us all.
Maybe it was all that together the music, my children, the prospect of California suddenly shinier than it’d been in a long time that made me let Brenda Kay walk out the back door. I just watched her from the kitchen window as she made for the woods, her arms loose at her sides, her steps careful and precise in a delicate way, strange steps that involved her lifting one foot, placing it flat on the ground before her, then lifting the next foot and doing the same, steps so gentle I couldn’t imagine she’d break eggs walking like that. I let her walk.
“Momma? ” Burton said behind me, and I heard his chair scrape against the floor. It was still August, the morning air heavy and thick, edged already with a piece of the heat that would descend on us later in the day. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was seeing my baby daughter, Brenda Kay, making for the woods in her awkward orthopedic shoes, shoes that cost twice as much as the shots had, shoes she grew out of every few months.
She was on her own out there. Brenda Kay was outside, surrounded by that green, that sweet smell, that heavy air. Walking on her own.
“Momma? ” Burton said again, and stood next to me at the sink, watching.
From the corner of my eye I saw him turn to me once, then look back out at his sister.
I said, “You do me a favor, honey, and you go out there and follow her.”
I smiled, but didn’t turn to him, didn’t want to take my eyes off what I saw. “You hang back aways, ” I said, “and you just watch her. See where she goes. Watch out she don’t tangle up in any poison ivy.” I paused. “I just want to see where she goes, is all.”
He didn’t move for a moment, and I saw him turn to me again. Then he kissed my cheek, a small little peck, but enough.
He went to the back door, quick put on his workboots without even tying the laces, and he was out the door.
I watched them both now, two of my children, one about to take out to California and a new world out there, the other into a world just as new for her, just as strange and different. Burton did as I said, hung back ten yards or so from her, and as a huge pipe organ played through “Onward Christian Soldiers” on the radio behind me, I smiled. Burton was walking slow, looking down at the ground, hands in his pockets, his steps easy. Brenda Kay was at the edge of the woods on the old trail now, her arms still at her sides, still with her gentle steps. Then she disappeared.
Burton made it to the edge, and stopped. He tapped his toe to the ground, turned to the house. He waved at me. I waved back, and he was gone.
A half hour later here they came, hand in hand, Burton huge and strong, his black hair still tossled with sleep, his face still in need of a shave, but his eyes suddenly brighter than I’d seen them before. And for all the size Burton’d seemed to take on in those thirty minutes, Brenda Kay’d seemed to grow as well, suddenly a little girl and no more the baby I’d had here for eight years. She was smiling the biggest smile I’d seen on her, her top two front teeth missing, most every other tooth showing.