Chapter 1: The End

t is the 1930s, the year doesn't matter to Clary. She only remembers that her son left home at seventeen and joined the Army. That seems like years ago—but it couldn't have been, because her daughter, Sue, is fifteen and wasn't she born only three years after him? Her own age isn't important nor is the age of her husband.

What is important today is the sun is cheerily coming through the kitchen window. So, why is Sue screaming again? Why can't she just get along with her daddy? Is this too much to ask? Well, Clary will get the brunt of this for sure. They both will take it out on her and what can she do about it, pray tell? Didn't she take her own whippings silently? Why does Sue think she’s so special? Well, here she comes a'cryin', right into Clary's kitchen before she's gets this chicken cut up! That girl is going to make supper late.

“Be careful leaning against that hot water heater; you'll tip it over,” Clary says, head bent to her task. If she cut herself with this knife, could she tell? Her hands are red as blood.

“I don't care! Why don't you stop him?”

“Don't get me involved. He's your daddy.”

“Look what Daddy did!”

Clary involuntarily looks up—curiosity kills the cat she thinks. Red stripes from a switch on Sue's legs. Too much leg showing, for Clary could see stripes all the way up to Sue's knees. “Dress is too short. He warned you. Peel some potatoes.”

It'll be hard to swallow this food with these two pouting. Best to get outside for some fresh air. Clary shuffles to the door. “I'm going out to feed the chickens. Don't forget to set the table.”

“I'm leaving some day—you'll see!”

Clary wants to slap her daughter herself, if she had the energy. But she is just too tired. She closes the door to the sobbing behind her.

“Girls are so needy,” she mumbles. “Just like these chickens I’m feeding. They just peck, peck, peck at you 'til you have nothing left to throw at them.” She scatters more seed. “Why can’t Sue be like her brother? He just took his whippings quietly and then joined the Army.”

The screen door slams behind her. She knows what it means to jump out of your skin because she sees her skin flinch again, like so many times before when he came up on her like that.

“There’s not a damn soul around here who cares about what you're saying, woman, so speak what’s on your mind and stop your muttering.” Her husband brings his cap down further over his eyes—but not before she sees the storms there; red lightening streaks through the white, his brown iris dark and ominous.

He’s not going to rain down on me, she reassures her tense muscles. “You’re right,” she nods to the chickens. “Just wishing here that Sue would do as she’s told.”

He walks away from her, yelling over his shoulder. “You’d better do something with her, Clary. I’m sick and tired of her not minding me!”

Her muscles relax and the sun comes out again. It shines so bright it catches the chrome of a car pulling into the yard, flashing a blinding light she blinks away from. She shields her eyes to see two girls step out, friends of Sue’s, gallivanting about like loose women, legs exposed, breasts protruding. They head to the front porch scattering chickens like royalty around peasants. Clary doesn’t like the looks of them at all. She remains motionless, hand still at her forehead in a shield from the late day sun, watching them herd with Sue by the porch railing. Their heads shake back and forth and nod up and down. Sometimes a pair of eyes shoots over to her and then bounces back, like they are afraid of what they see. They disappear through the front door. Clary is drawn to their whispering; people listen best when you whisper, she reckons. It means you have secrets. She enters through the side door, walks through the kitchen and meets them in the front room.

She ignores the intruders and addresses Sue. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing,” Sue says. “They’ve just come to borrow some of my clothes to go to…the dance.”

“Don’t let your daddy hear you say that. You ain’t allowed to dance and he won’t want your clothes going dancing, either.”

“It’s not a dance,” the brown-haired one says. Her hair hangs as limp as the mane on their work horse, Clary thinks. “It’s just a…get-together, not a dance or a party or anything.” Her wide eyes don’t meet Clary’s.

Sue makes a big show rolling her eyes. She licks her lips and squares her shoulders. “Mommy, I’m going out with them for a ride. I’ll be back before dark.”

“Better ask you daddy or he’ll just get all mad at you again.” And at me, Clary adds silently. “What about supper?”

“Save me a piece of chicken, will you?”

“No need. You ain’t going.”

“You girls stay here,” Sue says, “I’ll go get some clothes.”

Clary follows her to Sue’s room. She recognizes her daughter’s stubborn chin. “You’re not going until your daddy says you are, or I’ll…hear from him.”

Sue throws a blouse onto the bed. She clenches her hands and walks toward Clary, stopping within an inch of her nose. “I’m sixteen,” she spits through clenched teeth, “and I’ll do what I want!”

Clary slaps Sue’s face hard. She doesn’t know where the hand came from; it had a mind of its own. She looks down at it, red, chapped, and now stinging from its attack. She tucks it into her apron pocket.

“No one in this house will hit me again!” Sue says, sounding to Clary like an announcement is made.

Well, loddy-dah, who made you special? Clary wants to yell but doesn’t. She wishes she hadn’t come to Sue’s room at all because nothing good came from it—just her hand acting up. She feels her insides caving in a bit.

“Well, go out for a little while,” and here that hand comes again, wagging its finger at Sue, “but don’t come crying to me, if he catches you.”

“It never did me any good to come to you before, why would I do it now?” Sue says, wiping tears from her eyes with the back of her hands.

She’s looking at me kind of in a hateful way, Clary thinks.

Sue turns to the bureau mirror and wipes at her eyes again, the blue is misty but no more tears are falling out at least. Sue fluffs her sandy-brown hair, curls still intact from sleeping in bobbypins every night. It seems a waste of time to Clary and she had told her so, often.

Clary returns to the kitchen, without another word to any of them. She has a chicken to fry.

 

lary sits staring at her hands clasped together on the table, her plate of half-eaten food over to the side, no longer the main attraction. That was hours ago. She picks at a chipped nail. A fist slams down beside her hands, her fork bouncing out of her plate with a clang onto the table.

“Are you listening to me?” he shouts.

“I’ve told you what happened. She’s gone out for a ride is all.”

“It’s past sundown, woman!”

“I told her to be back before dark. Don’t blame me.”

“I’ll blame you alright!” He grabs her by the hair of her head and forces her up from the table, through the front room, and into Sue’s bedroom. He pushes her onto the bed where she lands softly on her stomach. “You let me know when she comes home!” He slams the door.

She stands up and rubs the back of her neck. Her eyes land on a folded paper nailed into Sue’s wardrobe door.

“Sue's daddy will tan her hide again when he sees she put a nail in his own homemade wardrobe,” Clary mutters. She pulls out the nail with a squeaky complaint coming from the wardrobe’s wooden door. She looks at the note closer. It is addressed to ‘Mommy and Daddy’. Should she go get him before opening this, she wonders. She's reading it before she can think of an answer.

The note says, “I’ve run away from home. I moved into town. I have a job. Don’t come get me, cause I’ll just run away again. Sue.”

She stands there until her thoughts come back. Tell him, go tell him, you have to tell him, is all she heard, over and over. She walks through the dark passage of the hallway to the front room. The storms come and lightening strikes her over and over.

He is raining on sand as far as she is concerned.

 

he stands at her kitchen window and waits until the dust settles from the tires of his truck driving away before she can think about it seriously. Two weeks and no word from Sue and he wouldn't go look for her. He only said, “Let her come back crawling on her hands and knees. She'll be back begging in two weeks.” Well it had been two weeks and there is neither hide nor hair of her anywhere around here.

Can she really do what she is thinking about? Her eyes remain fixed on the road beyond her kitchen window. “Best to look outward, not inward,” she mutters. She doesn't want to turn around and see where she is. It looks like too much sameness yet the furniture is all laughing at her because they know nothing is the same anymore.

Can she sit her heavy body on that old bike and pedal it into town? Better than walking, she decides. Just don't turn around and look back. Just head for the kitchen door. Your purse is there waiting for you. You got five dollars.

You'll never find her, a thought says to her, and this grips and stops her in her tracks. Peel some potatoes, she throws back and her mouth curves up on one side into a half smile. How many times had she said that when she didn't know what else to say? She touches the other side of her mouth; the side that doesn't work right anymore and wonders what folks in town will think of her - a half-wit? No different than here. Clary grabs her purse.

 

n the corner of a street, she stops. She likes this street and besides, she can go on no more. She'd been on this bike for more than half the morning, she reckons. She lifts her sore buttocks from the seat and looks down the street. Toward her come four girls walking. Sue is one of them. Clary can't believe her luck. She leans her bike against a tree trunk in the corner yard and waits for Sue to come around the corner.

Sue stops suddenly at the sight in front of her. “What are you doing here?”

“I want to talk to you,” Clary answers.

“I don't. I'm running my own life now. Stop crying, you're embarrassing me.”

“Please don't walk away!” Clary cries, but away Sue walks. Clary cries some more and then dries her tears with her dress sleeves. She looks up at the house where she's standing. There in the window is a sign that reads, Housekeeper Wanted.

“What a better place to be?” she mutters. “She'll walk by here again and here I'll be, working. She'll talk to me someday.”

The house is dark inside, the woman is blind and says little, but she hires Clary right on the spot. She can't see I'm a half-wit, Clary thinks, giving herself a half smile in the mirror in her tiny bedroom. She likes her tiny bedroom. It's smaller than the one at home but here she sleeps uninterrupted. The best part is the window faces the street where Sue walks every day to and from work.

Soon, Clary follows her to the grocery store and watches her work as a cashier. She waits a few more days and approaches her on the corner with a hand-written note.

“I read your note when you left, now read mine,” she says and sticks out the paper to Sue.

Sue is softer this time, and skinnier. She doesn't look like she is eating well to Clary. “Sure, Mommy, I'll read it. You came into town again? Does Daddy know where you are?”

“No.” She wonders why she hasn't seen him but most of all she wonders if the chickens have been fed.

They meet for lunch a few days later and have the most delicious meal Clary can remember. It isn't the grilled cheese sandwich—she's made better at home. It's what Sue says to Clary that Clary chews on for many days afterwards.

“I like the note, Mommy. It made me cry. You write sweet. I didn't know you had such thoughts. I thought you only cared about what Daddy thought. I hated you for that. I hated you for not helping me when he got mean and mad. Now I know better.”

Yes, Clary had put her heart on that paper. She even wrote it in red ink to symbolize her heart's blood. She memorized the note before she wrote it down. She plays it over in her mind now.

Dear Sue,

I only knowed one kind of love, the love that flowed between me and you and me and your brother. I knowed no other, I gave no other. My love flows to you as natural and as necessary as a river flows to sea. I know it's not coming back to me right now but if I try real hard to be with you, the tide will turn and you will return and it may not be the river I give to you but if you'll forgive me, that will be enough to satisfy my thirst. The Bible says, Let him that is athirst come and whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. Now that I live in town, I can be a better mommy if you let me.

Love, Mommy.

 

Chapter 2: The Beginning

In the 1960s, I came upon an old wardrobe in an antique shop. Roughly made, I could easily imagine the wardrobe’s creation from the workshop of someone's backyard. Layers and layers of lacquer and stain shone as if someone were trying to make up for the workmanship. The cap on top was its only ornate piece, with scrollwork etched in the wood in lazy S's and an afterthought of a leaf here and there. It reminded me of a woman whose bulky body could not be hidden, but makeup added to the face would at least detract and give her a semblance of pretty. I related to this wardrobe and bought it.

Heavier than it looked, nails and hinges squeaked loud warnings that it wasn't built for travel. The dust on and under its resting place told me the antique hadn't been moved from the shop in a very long time. The wardrobe became all the more endearing for I too had just recently moved from my home of twenty-five years.

My treasure continued to complain on the truck ride home and, finally, on my front lawn, it partially collapsed. One side buckled and a piece of the backboard dangled like a broken arm. I groaned from the loss, not just of the money I paid, but I had a fondness for this piece and found myself stroking it, like one might pet an old dog.

I walked behind and attempted to push the panel back into place and that was when I spotted an antiquated envelope sticking out from the bottom. I peeked inside and saw other envelopes, tucked in between the shelves and backboard, not in bundles, but scattered in different angles, different shapes and sizes, their varying shades of white telling me that some were much older than others. In my eagerness to get to them, I bent the panel back more than it could tolerate and the entire piece released from its nail grip and landed on my toe. “There, that will teach you!” it seemed to say but I paid little mind to its pain or mine. Now I understood it held secrets. That's what its groaning was about; secrets it didn't want to let go.

These were letters from a mother to a daughter. Dated but not postmarked. No address on the front; just the name Sue. All had been hidden here from her husband. Letters that I read in order of date, the last one asking a simple request.

Whoever reads this, you have to tell my story and pretend it's true. Because the truth is too sad and there’d be no story to tell. For you see, I never left my life at the farm house so I lost my chance to ever lay eyes on my children after they left home, except in my dreams of course. They’re always there in my dreams. I don’t have any courage but loads of burdensome regret so I kept writing all this down for Sue, to someday take to her, to prove to her that she's there in my heart always, whether I showed it or not, whether she knowed it or not. I pass this on to you to tell her, for now I'm dying and will write no more.

 

[END]

© 2003 Vanessa Russell - Contributor's Bio