Betty Read online

  Trustin and Flossie were in the backyard using sticks as guns to shoot one another, while Fraya sat on the grass chewing on a dandelion.

  Pretending I would turn to stone if any of them saw me, I snuck out to our Rambler station wagon parked in the yard. I made sure to slap the raccoon tail hanging from the car’s antenna like I did every time for luck.

  Quietly, I climbed up on the bumper and crawled through the open tailgate window. I hid beneath some blankets and waited. I didn’t make a sound as Mom came out of the house, letting the screen door slam after her. She had her tatty frame purse open under her arm and was using her free hands to undo a bobby pin to hold the blondest side of her hair back.

  “Fraya?” Mom’s voice was a harsh shout.

  Fraya quickly got up and ran around to the front. She stopped halfway up the porch steps, her bare feet overlapping.

  “Yes, Mom?” Fraya asked.

  “Watch Lint.” Mom pulled her purse out from under her arm and snapped it shut. “He’s in the kitchen. If he starts cryin’, show ’im a rock. I have to go pick up your father. Jesus Crimson. If it’s not one thing with him, it’s another.”

  Fraya walked sideways up the steps, giving Mom room to pass.

  “Now, I don’t wanna come back and hear Lint callin’ you Momma again,” Mom told Fraya. “Understand me, girl?”

  “He does it on his own.” Fraya looked down. “I don’t teach ’im to say it or nothin’.”

  “Don’t you act all innocent with me. I know what you been doin’. The way you cradle ’im and call ’im baby. You best straighten up and start actin’ like a damn sister. Y’hear me, girl? You’re fifteen now and I still gotta keep after you like you was four.”

  Fraya kept her eyes down as she nodded and walked up the rest of the stairs.

  “I might as well count this day ruined,” Mom said as she got into the car.

  She tossed her purse to the dash and rubbed her hands before putting the key into the ignition. After three tries, the engine started. Mom took a sharp turn in the yard to pull out onto the dirt road.

  “The man don’t think I got anything else to do,” she spoke aloud to herself, gripping the steering wheel with one hand, only to slap it with her other. “Never mind the wash and the dishes and the raisin’ of his children. Naaaaw. I got all the time in the world to be on the road.”

  She turned on the radio. About midway through a song, she started to sing along. Hers was a voice that if you heard it you would say, “Gee, I bet she’s a swell mother.”

  As we got closer to the mines, I covered my ears from the noise of the trucks rolling past. Mom turned off the radio and slowed the car as she made the turn into the office lot. I planned to pop out and surprise Dad, but when I peeked from beneath the blankets to look out the window, I was frightened by what I saw approaching.

  “The mine monster,” I whispered to myself.

  His skin was black from coal dust. He was limping, dragging his right leg behind him. I knew he was in pain from the way he leaned forward, his arm resting against his stomach as if his ribs were done in. His bottom lip was cut open and there was a deep gash above his left brow. Though the injuries were fresh, it was hard to believe the blood and hurt weren’t things he’d always been.

  I wondered why he was coming toward us, but as he got closer, I could see his eyes. I realized the bent man was not the mine monster. He was my father.

  “What in the world?” Mom put the car in neutral and engaged the emergency brake with a quick jerk.

  She was about to open her door, but Dad waved for her to stay inside.

  “C’mon, Landon.” Her eyes darted around her, reminding me of a deer in an open field.

  Dad cradled his stomach as he lurched forward. I could tell his ribs hurt. I had seen my father blackened by coal before, but this time, the color seemed to be layered. There were streaks on his left cheek where the layers had been smeared. I looked at his forehead. Someone had dragged a wet finger through the coal and written a word. I’d heard others call my father that word before. I mouthed it at the same time Mom said it aloud in a hushed whisper as she, too, stared at his forehead.

  I sank my teeth into the blanket so I wouldn’t scream.

  How dare they do this to him, I thought. Didn’t they know who my dad was?

  He was a man who knew to plant a seed as deep as the second knuckle on your finger. And he knew never to stand corn so close.

  “Makes for weaker stalks,” he’d say. “The ears will be smaller. The kernels not as full.”

  Didn’t they know this about him? That he was the wisest man in the whole damn county? Possibly the whole world?

  I hid deeper beneath the blankets and listened to Dad groan as he lowered himself onto the front seat, keeping his right leg out.

  “They smashed my knee like it was glass,” he said as he lifted his leg into the car.

  Mom was trying to get him to close his door faster.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Hurry up before they come to finish the job.”

  Once he was inside the car, she quickly put it in gear. She drove a stick better than most, but her nerves caused her to pop the clutch. The car lunged forward, pressing me up against the back of the seat as the engine stalled.

  “Easy now, Alka. Easy.” Dad tried to keep his voice from shaking. “We’re okay. Start her up again.”

  “Oh, Jesus Crimson, lock your door.” Her voice came out high-pitched as she turned the key, praying for the engine to start. When it did, she thanked God. She forced herself to lift her foot slowly from the clutch.

  “Thatta girl.” Dad looked out his window at the men staring at us. The men were black from the coal, too, but when they removed their goggles, I could see the white skin around their eyes.

  “Let’s leave this empty place,” Dad said.

  Mom drove fast, stirring up dust with our wheels. When she made the turn onto the main road, she took it so sharply, I thought we were going to flip over.

  “Not so fast, Alka.” Dad looked at the speedometer. “If we get stopped by the law, it’ll only make things worse.”

  When she was going the legal limit, she looked over at him and asked what the hell had happened.

  “I’d rather just go home and not talk about it,” he said.

  He saw coal dust on the car door. He became aware of how dirty he was. He leaned forward as if trying to save the seat.

  “I wanna know what the hell happened,” she said.

  “Ain’t nothin’ new, Alka. Same old shit.”

  He told about how, from his first day at the mines, the other men would not call him Landon. They named him things like Tonto and Featherhead.

  “Other names, too,” he said, looking up toward his forehead.

  He spoke more about how the men refused to ride in the shaft elevator with him.

  “Get inside with ol’ Landon Carpenter and you’ll get yourself scalped.”

  He described how they hooted and slapped their mouths in an Indian war cry they had most likely seen in a western movie of studio tepees and scripted culture.

  “You would think that down in the mines,” he said, “where each man is blackened by the coal, that there would be no separation among us. That we would work together.”

  “You’ll never be one of them.” Mom kept her eyes on the road. “All they need is soap and water to be better than you.”

  “Is that what you think?” he asked.

  “It’s what the world thinks, Landon. Don’t you understand? You can’t wash it off.”

  “I don’t want to,” he said. “I just want to be able to work in peace and without fear.”

  Dad kept his face toward the window.

  “They held me down until I couldn’t move. One of ’em, the fella who laughed the most, spit on my cheek. He just spit on my ch
eek like I was nothin’. Then he used the spit to write on my forehead. Write what they all said was my true name.”

  Dad carefully touched the word written on his forehead as if it were something that was cut into his flesh. My heart whispered to my soul, and my soul whispered back, Help him. But I could not move. I was frightened by the story he was telling. By the way his voice got quieter as he spoke more of the men’s laughter and of how their grips had tightened on his arms.

  “You ever been pinned down before, Alka?” he asked. “Can’t stop what somebody is doin’ to ya? That ever happen to ya?”

  Her jaw tightened as she drove in silence before pulling off to the side of the road. Dad put his hand on the door handle. He must have thought he was supposed to get out of the car.

  “Stay put,” Mom told him as she opened her purse.

  She pulled out a clean white hankie. She spit on the end of it before dabbing it against his cheek. He jerked away.

  “You’ll ruin your pretty things,” he said.

  She pulled his face back to her and rubbed his cheek harder, wiping the coal and blood from his face. She looked up at the word on his forehead. Rolling down her window, she banged the handkerchief against the outside of the car. Much of the coal was ingrained, but the top layer of dust shook off. Then she wiped his forehead until the word was gone. Afterward, she stretched the handkerchief out before her. She frowned as if she could see the letters of the word on its fabric.

  “I never much cared for this silly ol’ thing anyways.” She tossed it out the window before putting the car in gear and turning back onto the road.

  I slid my hand into my pocket. Squeezing the red crayon, I pulled it out and used it to write on the metal bed of the tailgate. I wrote about my father slaying the cave monster with a thousand arrowheads pulsating from his forehead. I wrote until the crayon was so short, I had to hold it pinched between my two fingers, pressing it until I was able to write the happy ending I wanted to give him. Then I closed my eyes, knowing my birthplace was a bitter chapter in the story of my father.

  For the next two years, we wandered across America. We learned history from the mouths of old-timers and foreign languages from the mouths of drunks. There was the hitchhiker we picked up in Colorado. She taught us science lessons on Newton and his apple. We met an ex-con at a diner in Arizona who taught us the laws of the world and the laws of prison. Most of all, we learned the names of states by looking at cars.

  “I call Alaska,” Fraya said.

  “Idaho.” Flossie spotted a red Ford. “I bet the trunk is full of potatoes.”

  Lint looked to see for himself.

  “It’s Texas.” Trustin waved to the car. They did not wave back.

  “There’s home.” Mom gestured to the Ohio license plate of a black Ford Thunderbird speeding past. “I wanna go home, Landon.”

  Part Two

  King of Kings

  1961–1963

  4

  Thy words were found, and I did eat them.

  —JEREMIAH 15:16

  It was 1961 and I was seven when Mom said she wanted to go home. Home was Ohio because that was where her roots were.

  “Roots are the most important part of a plant,” Dad would say. “It’s through roots that a plant is fed and it’s the roots that hold the plant in place when everything else gets washed away. Without roots, you’re just flappin’ in the wind.”

  Enough time had passed for our parents to forgive the Buckeye State.

  We were piled in our fern-colored Rambler, which hauled a small flatbed trailer. The raccoon tail on the antenna flew back as Mom and Dad took turns driving. Come night, Mom was behind the wheel. I counted her yawns until Dad directed her to pull off into the woods, pointing toward a pair of gum trees.

  Once Mom turned the engine off, Dad got out with a jar of moonshine as company. He was going to comb the forest floor for more plants even though we already had several herbs in bunches drying from various spots in the car like behind the seats and from the window frames.

  After his foraging for the night, I knew Dad would make a bed on the hood of the car. Mom always got the front bench seat to herself. Trustin would fold down the tailgate and dangle his legs in between the trailer and the car while Fraya and Flossie lay on the backseat, their heads together, their bodies pointed in opposite directions, their feet protruding out of each of the back windows. Lint would lay on top of Fraya like a lap cat while she petted the top of his head. I was left to sleep on the backseat floorboard or sometimes the tailgate if Trustin decided to stretch out on the ground.

  That night, the Rambler felt especially crowded, so I left in search of Dad.

  Every tree I passed, I stopped long enough to write on its trunk with my finger. I thought if I wrote the trees something nice, they would be my map through the woods.

  Dear great big oak, your bark is like my father’s singing. Help me find my way. Dear beech, don’t tell the oak, but your leaves make the best bookmarks. Help me find my way. Dear maple, you smell like the best poem. Help me find my way.

  I was stepping from one tree to the next when my bare foot caught on a raised root. I fell and scuffed my knees. I sat on the ground and cried, not because I was hurt, but because I was lost.

  “My, my.” Dad clicked his tongue as he stood over me. “I’ll be rich and famous for a find like you. They’ll put me on the front page of every newspaper in the world with a headline that reads, LANDON CARPENTER FINDS MYSTERIOUS CREATURE IN WOODS. First, I gotta ask ya.” He met my face with his. “Are you of God or the devil?”

  “You’re not funny, Dad, and you won’t be on the covers of any newspapers,” I said.

  “Oh, no?” he asked.

  “No.” I frowned as hard as my little brows could. “I’m lost and now that you’re here you’re sure to be lost, too. You can’t be on the cover of a newspaper when you’re lost unless it’s a story ’bout you bein’ lost. In which case no one would write that story ’cause no one would care to read it.”

  I remembered back to the way the men had beat my father at the mines.

  “You’re not important,” I said, as they must have. “You’re Landon Carpenter.”

  He leaned back with a flick of anger.

  “You’re too little in the mouth for such mean talk,” he said before taking a drink of his moonshine and stepping over to sit on a fallen tree trunk partially covered in brush and heavy moss.

  I picked up a leaf and used it to wipe little spots of blood from my scuffed knees as I stood. Studying the woods around me, I decided I was not brave enough to test the darkness by myself so I sat beside my father. I stared at the jar in his hand. He had painted small black stars on the outside of the glass.

  “Why you always paint stars on your moonshine jars?” I asked.

  “Because the stars belong with the moon,” he said before setting the jar on the ground by his feet.

  He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his pouch of dried tobacco leaves. I watched him put a pinch onto a piece of rolling paper.

  “Why don’t you care we’re lost, Dad?” I asked.

  “You’re the one lost, girl. I know exactly where I am.”

  He let me lick the edge of the rolling paper so he could wrap the tobacco. He then struck a match against the ribbon of sandpaper on his hat. As he lit the cigarette, I stared at the scar on his left palm. The way his skin curled and burled was as if his palm had almost melted away. He looked at the scar himself, studying it from all angles. When he started to frown, he turned away and took his hat off. He put it on me, then puffed on his cigarette.

  “Ain’tcha scared we’ll always be lost?” I asked. “I am. I’m scared.”

  When he exhaled, he blew toward the stars.

  “Did you know that smoke is the mist of souls?” he asked. “That’s what makes it so sacred and ab
le to carry your fear up to the clouds, which is the home of the fear eaters.”

  “Fear eaters?”

  “Good little creatures who will devour all that frightens you so you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

  He gave me the cigarette and told me to hold the smoke in my mouth before quickly releasing it. The best I could do was cough out the smoke. I went to inhale again, but Dad said to save my lungs.

  “To run the fields with,” he said, taking the cigarette back.

  We watched the smoke drift away and disappear.

  “I still feel lost,” I said.

  Dad looked at me before turning his eyes back out onto the darkness of the woods.

  “You know,” he said, “one time I come upon a devil-damn patch of woods. I’d gone out for some plant huntin’, but fell asleep. When I woke, I lost my bearings.”

  “A bear ring?” I asked. “Ooo, how pretty. A bear give it to you? Does it have sparkly things on it? Lemme see it.”

  I started to dig through his pockets, but found only his loose ginseng beads. He laughed and held me back with his arm.

  “Calm down now, Betty,” he said, still laughing. “Not bear ring. My bearings. My knowledge of direction. I flattened the grass in front of me and I was lost. I flattened the grass behind me and I was lost still. By the time evenin’ fell, I reckoned those woods would be my eternity.”

  “What’d you do, Dad?”

  “I took some small rocks and spelled my name in the dirt so folks would know I had one. Then I laid down and looked up at the stars in the night sky. That was when I realized I knew right where I was.”

  “Where were you?”

  “South of heaven.”

  “Where’s that at?”

  “Look up, Betty.”

  He gently guided my face to the sky with the back of his hand under my chin.

  “Somewhere up there is heaven,” he said. “And we’re a little to the south of it. That’s where south of heaven is. It’s right here.” He stomped the ground beneath us. “It doesn’t matter where you are or where you’re goin’ because you’ll always be south of heaven.”