Leaving Eden (7 page)

When I felt lonely like that, I tried to imagine the future and the day I would come home from Hollywood. It’d be in the summer, maybe, and I’d be on a short break from filming a movie that was opening at Christmas. The
Eden Times
would do a story about me and take a picture that they’d feature on page one. People would ask for my autograph and I’d sign one for everyone.
Taylor Skye.
I’d write it out in serious blue ink, not something tacky like purple. And I’d be extra nice to everyone, even Elizabeth Talmadge, who’d have grown fat by then, have a head full of split ends, and no longer be queen of anything except the cash register at Winn-Dixie.

I pulled on my old swimsuit from last year, which was too small and rode up my butt. There wasn’t much in the cupboard so I made myself a PB&J and grabbed a can of Coke. I considered taking a beer, but by the time I got around to drinking it, it would be warm. Warm soda tasted a sight better than warm beer. I was flipping up the kickstand on my Raleigh when a blue DeSoto pulled up. Wiley Bettis. For once without Will.

“Hey, Tallie,” he said. He opened the door and got out.

“Hey, yourself.” It was strange to see him without his twin, like half of him was missing. “Where’s Will?”

“At the pond.”

“Why aren’t you there?”

“Didn’t feel like it. Where you off to?”

“Swimming. The creek.”

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

Wiley had this decrepit ’57 DeSoto someone had stripped the plates off and left for dead in the Winn-Dixie parking lot. He’d towed it home and spent the entire previous summer rebuilding the engine. Wiley’d gone through grammar school in the slow reading group, but he was some kind of genius when it came to engines.

“I’ll bring you home, too,” he said, staring at the ground where his toe was busy working a hole in the grass.

For heavens sake, Wiley Bettis, I wanted to say. Straighten up and look at me. One thing I knew I would demand in a boyfriend—not that I ever
considered
Wiley boyfriend material— was that he be able to look me straight in the eye. Mama said you couldn’t trust someone who didn’t, and I put that in my notebook, too.

“Okay,” I said. A girl didn’t have to worry about how she was dressed when she rode in an old DeSoto with a front seat patched with duct tape.

When we got to the creek, we headed straight for the water, both of us grateful to be getting cool. Wiley didn’t do any of the dumb things boys usually did, like splash you, or dive under water and try to lift you on their shoulders or swim between your legs, their hands brushing against your tits like being in water gave them permission to touch you in a way they would never try on dry land. After a while we got tired of swimming and we spread out my blanket and sat down. Then I split my sandwich with him. He refused the Coke, to my great relief, since I didn’t know how I’d drink it after his germy lips touched the rim. Then we swam again. We’d been coming to the creek every summer since we were old enough to go without our mamas. Will and Wiley were our only neighbors, and the three of us had played together as long as I could remember, mostly riding bikes or building forts in the field behind their house. Being without Will changed everything, like Wiley was someone new. Course, any fool could see he liked me. I wished there was a way I could switch his deep affection for me with Spy Reynolds’s apparent indifference. It was a mystery to me why things like love couldn’t be equal. Why, when someone loved you, you couldn’t just accept that love and return it in equal measure. My theory was that one person always loved the other more. Even if they were both in love, one person was more the lovee and the other the lover. Like my daddy and my mama.

I was lying on the towel, conscious of the way my bathing suit was riding up my butt and wondering if I should pull it down or if that would only serve to draw Wiley’s attention, when he started talking.

“What’re you doing after high school?”

“Haven’t decided,” I said. “We still have another year of high school.” Of course, I knew all right. Like I said, I was running off to Hollywood. I planned on leaving the day after graduation, not that anyone would be missing me. Certainly not a daddy who’d clean forgotten I was alive. “What about you?” I asked, like I didn’t already know he’d end up working at Chaney’s Garage, fixing cars for his uncle. Just like Will would continue on at Winn-Dixie, where he bagged groceries on weekends. Spy Reynolds and Elizabeth Talmadge and all the others who lived over by Carlton’s Way in two-story houses with screened-in porches would go off to college. Someone like Ashley Wheeler might have the gumption to open a little bed-and-breakfast and hope to get the business of the tourists on their way across to the Blue Ridge. The rest—even the smart ones—would be teachers and accountants, bank tellers and store clerks, and would get married and have children and start the cycle of life in our town all over again.

People in Eden didn’t have one stick of imagination. They couldn’t picture a life beyond the present circumstance or geography. Mama was the only one I knew who had the capacity to dream.
A person’s as big as her dreams
, she used to say. Her scrapbook was full of actresses who’d come from humble beginnings and transformed themselves into famous stars. Joan Crawford was born poor in San Antonio, Texas, and was once a telephone operator before she became an actress. Her real name was Lucille Le Sueur, which Mama thought sounded like the name of a stripper. Mama said we could learn a lot from the glamorous stars of the thirties and forties. She said those women knew how to invent themselves before people like Cher or that awful Madonna were even born.

No one I knew had the imagination to dream. Or to even think of reaching for the sky. A perfect example of this was the school play. Just before school closed for the summer, we held a big meeting to decide what next year’s play would be, which was a complete waste of time as far as I was concerned since we all knew it would be
You Can’t Take It with You.
As long as anyone could remember, there were only two plays ever done at the high school. That one and
Our Town
, which we had just performed. This year Mr. Nelson, who taught driver’s ed and civics, was the Drama Club adviser because Mrs. Franklin, our English teacher, was pregnant. So he held this meeting and made us have this big vote for something already set in stone. Which shows you what happens when you’re a civics teacher. Like you have to prove “democracy in action,” which was his favorite phrase.

I guess that was what made me raise my hand. “Why don’t we do something else?” I asked. “Do you have a suggestion, Tallie?” Mr. Nelson said, as if he were going to actually consider it, even though it came from me. He made a big show of pretending to be fair—
democratic
—but he had his favorites and he made it clear I wasn’t on that list. Every time I got an A on a test— which was most of the time, truth be told—he handed me back my paper and said, “Tallie Brock, an A,” with this great surprise in his voice, like
How did that happen?
He was the only one who didn’t treat me special ’cause I didn’t have a mama.

As a matter of fact I did have a suggestion. I wanted us to do
Spoon River Anthology
, this really great play about all these dead people in a cemetery who get to talk and tell their stories. The character I liked the most was this old woman who talked about dancing in Chandlerville and raising children and living a full life. “It takes life to love life,” she said. I just loved that line. It sounded exactly like Mama. I decided it would be my motto forever. I was thinking about that when I offered my suggestion to Mr. Democracy in Action.

“What’s it about?” said Elizabeth Talmadge, who, wouldn’t you know, was the president of the Drama Club as well as Queen of the Universe. When I explained, someone said, “Dead people. How creepy,” and Elizabeth said, “Morbid,” and then the whole room got quiet. “Let’s put it to a vote,” Mr. Nelson said. He made a big show of counting hands and then announced that next year’s play would be
You Can’t Take It with You
.

Wiley had stopped talking and the sun was directly overhead and I thought about dragging the blanket over beneath a willow to get some relief, but it seemed like too much trouble so I lay back and closed my eyes. It was funny being there without Will. Wiley stretched out on his stomach on the other side of the blanket, and I inched way over on my side so we wouldn’t touch by accident. Even quiet, men take up more space. Not just on things like blankets and chairs. It was like they required more air.

I lay there considering this and after a while—in that dreamy space where you’re not quite asleep and not totally awake—I started pretending it was Spy Reynolds lying there. It’s funny how the power of wanting something can slip right over into believing that it is. Once, I heard Mama tell Martha Lee that it was the things we were denied that we wanted the most. And, judging from the way I wanted Spy, that was surely true. After a while I could picture him being there so clear that when I felt a shadow block out the sun, when I felt a hand touch my arm, I believed it actually
was
Spy. As his fingers traced down to my hand and then interlinked with mine, my stomach got that nervous feeling like before a swim meet or when I had a big test in school. But not exactly like that. Then, still holding my hand, Spy reached over with his other hand and turned my face toward his. I knew he was going to kiss me, and at that moment—stuck in my dream—I knew I’d let him. Judging from the talk in the girls’ locker room, I was the only one in the class who’d never been kissed. Practicing on your own hand isn’t the same. Then I smelled peanut butter and heard Wiley’s asthmatic breathing and knew it wasn’t Spy at all. I sat up and pulled away.

“I got to be getting home.”

“Okay,” Wiley said, not looking at me.

Neither of us said a word all the way to my house.

Martha Lee called after supper. When I heard her voice the receiver turned slick in my hand. I opened my mouth to tell her how I was sorry about taking the money and how I really had planned on telling her about it and how I’d pay her back before the end of the summer, but before I could open my mouth she was saying how bad she felt about not being there for my driving lesson and asking how about next Monday, would I like to do it then, and so I said yes and we hung up before I could even mention the fifteen dollars.

That night I had trouble falling asleep. All mixed up with the funny feeling I had about taking the money from Martha Lee and my disappointment about not learning how to drive was how I’d felt lying on the blanket at the creek, expectant and, I don’t know, open in a way, and believing that it was Spy with me and then the disappointment of Wiley, the peanut butter smell of him. Being a wild girl wasn’t as easy as I’d expected.

When I finally fell asleep, I had the old dream about the carnival magician. Except it was Spy Reynolds, and he was holding out a deck of cards for me to choose from and when I did, it turned out it wasn’t cards he was holding but all the photos of Mama and Martha Lee. And Daddy was there, too, pointing me out to Wiley Bettis, who had a badge on his chest and a pistol on his belt and had come to arrest me for stealing.

Tallie’s Book

Drinking alcohol before twelve noon is a sign of trouble.

You can’t trust a man who won’t look
you in the eye.

Alcoholism runs in families.

It takes life to love life.

A person’s as big as her dreams.

It’s the things we’re denied that we
want the most.

five

It was “Seniors’ Day” at the Klip-N-Kurl. Back in January, when things were slow, Raylene decided to offer a 5 percent discount on Tuesdays to customers over seventy. The shop filled every week, crowded with old ladies like Miss Easter Davis, who barely had enough hair to fiddle with in the first place but who believed growing old was no excuse for letting yourself go. The main topic of conversation was disease and digestion. Brittle bones. Plumbing problems. Incontinence. Hattie Jones, who was usually first in line waiting at the door for Raylene to open, was an expert on that problem. “I always peed my pants when I got to laughing,” she’d say, “but now all it takes is one good sneeze.” It gave me the creeps.

Raylene didn’t mind Tuesdays. She preferred them to lice season, when half the kids in the grammar school came in for treatment and she’d have to get all armored up with gloves and a full-length plastic gown like she was in some sci-fi movie. “You can’t be too careful,” she’d tell me. She said lice could jump amazing distances. She said they actually preferred clean hair ’cause they lay nits on the hair shaft. Raylene knew everything about lice, but it made me itch just watching her go to work on some kid’s head. De-licing was almost as bad as doing perms. She hated the tediousness of rolling all of those tiny curlers, but more than perms or lice season, Raylene hated repairing the damage customers did at home. “Kitchen beautician,” she’d say when someone called in wanting her to fix a home cut or color. Once she got a panicky call from Ruth Evans, whose head was smoking. I’m not kidding. Smoke was actually rolling off in waves. “Serves her right,” Raylene said before she calmed Ruth down, explaining how the chemicals in the drugstore coloring kit had mixed with the minerals in the Evanses’ well water and that was what caused the smoke.

At least the pace was slow on Tuesdays. None of them wanted their hair blown dry. They wanted to sit under the dryer and talk. They were there for conversation as much as anything. For sure they weren’t there for speed. One thing about old people, they weren’t in any hurry. Not like Saturdays, when everyone was in a rush and we’d have to grab a sandwich and eat it in five minutes flat, swallowing without allowing time to chew.

Old people acted like they had all the time in the world instead of like their sand was almost through the glass. Slow as snails, most of them. And
small
. People shrink when they get old, have you noticed? As if life were leaking out of them inch by inch.

I couldn’t picture Mama old. Not Mama who brought music with her wherever she went and could stand on her head and turn cartwheels like a cheerleader. Couldn’t picture it any more than she could picture herself losing her beautiful hair to chemo. When it was clear she wasn’t going to do anything the doctor or Daddy wanted, everybody accepted the fact that Mama wasn’t going to fight. That’s when I knew I’d have to battle for her. First thing, I went to the Eden library and read every book they had on the subject of cancer, which wasn’t much. Then I talked Martha Lee into driving to Lynchburg and buying bottles of vitamins. A multi and all the antioxidants. One thousand milligram capsules of C. Smaller ones of A and E. I mixed up so much juice for Mama it was amazing she didn’t turn orange. And I cooked up all the food Goody said Mama’d craved in childhood—things like grits and whipped potatoes, sweet potato pie and milk toast—made them even though she couldn’t eat much anymore. “That looks so good, sugar,” she’d say when I carried in a plate of cheese grits. “Just put it down and I’ll try it later.”

One of the books I read said prayers held the power to cure, so I started going to the Baptist Church, the one out on the back hill, thinking maybe that was what was needed. Elijah Baptist was so different from the Methodist Church, it was like going to Disneyland. To begin with, everyone dressed up. The little girls wore party dresses with frilled lace on their socks, and the boys wore ties, every one of them from the youngest to high school seniors. The ladies wore hats and sang loud, like each one thought she was Aretha Franklin. They called each other “brother” and “sister” and all through the sermon shouted out things like, “That’s right,” and, “Thank you, Jesus.” There was a large choir, too, and when they sang, you just wanted to rise right up out of your seat and dance, even if you were in church. One man played the drums and another blew a trumpet. The preacher’s name was Reverend Tillett and he was tall as a tree and sounded exactly like Jesse Jackson. Sometimes, right in the middle of the sermon, he’d march straight from the pulpit and parade down the aisles like he was the drum major of the Eden High School Band. I was the only white person there. They were all nice to me, though, and when the Reverend Tillett found out about Mama, he included her in the healing prayer, calling her “sister” and asking the Lord to cure her. The ladies hugged me. Real hugs, too. Not fake. They held me close like I was kin.

None of it made a g.d. bit of difference. Not Mama’s comfort food or the vitamins or the prayers of the Reverend Tillett and the people at Elijah Baptist. Mama kept fading right before my eyes. I was desperate by the time I thought of going to see Allie Rucker.

Allie lived outside of town, and everyone in Eden knew she was a witch. Once, Wiley dared us into riding our bikes out to her cabin, where people said she made moonshine in a genuine copper still. We planned on shouting things about her being a witch and throwing eggs at her house, but when we got there we were so spooked that we just turned around and came back. According to what folks said, Allie knew everything. She could tell whether a pregnant woman was carrying a boy or a girl. She knew how to get rid of a baby you didn’t want, or how to get a baby if you wanted one and weren’t having any luck in that department. She knew spells and how to put the hex on a person. How to make a man crazy with loving you, if that’s what you wanted. Maybe Allie Rucker was a witch, like people said, but with everything else failing, a witch was exactly what was required.

A move this bold required backup, so after school I found the Bettis twins and made them swear on spit not to tell what I was about to reveal. Then I told them about Mama’s sickness and how she wouldn’t take medicine because she didn’t want to lose her hair and how I needed to go out to Allie Rucker’s. Wiley, reliable as rain, agreed at once to help, but Will said, “Jeez, Tallie, I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to go,” I told him, but before we’d gone ten feet, he was right there with us, pedaling off to see the witch before we all got cold feet. It took us close to a half hour to reach the woods west of town out by the holler where Allie Rucker lived.

“Jeez,” Will said when we got there, like that was the only word he knew.

Allie’s shack made Martha Lee’s place look like Buckingham Palace. It was worn gray, like it had never held even passing acquaintance with a coat of paint. Out front there was no path, just hip-high grass that looked like it could be hiding
anything
and nearly stopped me in my tracks. “It’s for Mama,” I whispered to summon my courage. “Wait here,” I told the twins, and gave my Raleigh to Wiley, who immediately turned it facing out in case we needed a quick getaway. As I walked toward the shack, I felt them watching me. I hoped I could count on them.

I climbed the steps, my palms all sweaty on the tree branch Allie had fashioned into a railing. Before I could even raise my hand to knock, the door swung open. I expected Allie Rucker to be short, about my mama’s size, and all bent over like most old folk, but she was about ten feet tall, with this colored rag wrapped around her head that made her look even taller. She looked strong, too, like—old or not—she could swat you down like a flea if she had half a mind to.

“Hello,” I stammered. “I’m Tallie Brock.”

“I knows who you be,” she said, causing my insides to jump halfway to my mouth.
She knew who I was?
Like she’d been keeping an eye on me for years. I didn’t like the idea of that one bit. Part of me was saying,
Get the hell out of here,
and the other part was saying,
Maybe this will work.

“You be the spittin’ image of your daddy,” she said. She knew my daddy, too? “What you be wantin’ here?”

“Mama’s sick,” I said, stammering out the whole story, how she had lung cancer and wouldn’t take chemo or have an operation. She motioned for me to come in. I looked back at the twins.

“Those be the Bettis boys?” she said, squinting out to where the twins sat on the bikes, ready to take off. “Twins, they got powers.”

Did she know about all of us? The idea was so creepy, I couldn’t think about it. I paused for a minute, trying to remember when I’d had my last tetanus shot. Then I remembered Mama and went on in. The door slammed shut behind me.

“How long your mama be sick?” she asked.

“Since spring.” Inside was one big room with these giant plants growing everywhere, like I’d fallen into a jungle. She didn’t ask me to sit, and I couldn’t have even if she had. Every chair was piled with junk. Broken things: cooking pots with no handles; magazines you wouldn’t want to even consider holding in your hands; stuff most people would throw away. It smelled of mildew and some other, slightly sweet, odor. I held my arms close to my sides to keep from touching anything. If the twins left me here, I was going to kill them.

“Last year,” Allie repeated to herself.

“That’s right,” I said. I wished I knew more about witch stuff. Should I have brought along something of my mama’s? Some of her hair? I wouldn’t have to cut it. Just take a few strands from her brush.

“Your mama, she be puffing up or turning to bones?”

I thought of Mama’s thin arms, the weightless heft of her Pick Up–stick hands. “She’s lost a lot of weight,” I said.

Allie crossed to a cupboard that, I swear to God, had cobwebs hanging from the top. Inside, the shelves were crammed with old jars and discolored plastic containers, each one filled with things that even from across the room I could see looked like nothing you’d ever want to be putting inside you in a million years. It made the idea of chemo look like a grammar school picnic.

She took down about ten of the jars and opened each one. Once, she put back one jar and selected another. She crossed to a chair and dug around until she came up with an old plastic bag, the kind store bread comes in, and started filling it with stuff from the jars.

Eye of newt
, said this scratchy voice inside my head from this play in our English class text, and I had to bite my cheeks to hold back from laughing, the nervous kind of laughing I’d do when we still went to the Methodist Church and Mrs. Duval sang in that thin old crackly voice of hers. I used to get to giggling so that my mama’d have to squeeze my hand to make me stop.

“Here,” she said, holding out the bag.

I didn’t take it right away.

“For your mama,” she said.

“What is it?”

“This here be the Queen of Cures.”

“What’s that?”

“The Queen of Cures. That’s all you be needing to know.” Then she told me to dump the stuff in the bag into a big pot and stir in five cups of water. Boil it up good, she instructed, and after ten minutes, strain it off. Then I was supposed to boil it again with another five cups of water. “This time you be putting a lid on it and letting it cook for two hours,” she said. Then she told me to strain it again and put the two batches of liquid together. She made me repeat her directions twice.
Eye of
newt
, sang the crazy voice inside my head.

“You be givin’ your mama a full cup,” she said. “Every night. Right before she be goin’ to sleep.”

Believe me, I didn’t even want to
touch
that bag, but I grabbed it and got out of there. I was so glad to escape, I didn’t even say thanks. I ran all the way to where the twins were waiting.

We rode like the devil himself was at our back. I gripped the plastic bag against the handlebar, and it swung back and forth madly like some creature inside was trying to break free.

We got so out of breath, we had to stop after we’d gone no more than a mile.

“What was she like?” Will asked.

“A witch,” I said. “And tall. And she knew who I was. And you, too. She knew who you were. She said twins have
powers.
”

“Jesus Sweet Christ,” Wiley said.

I knew exactly what he meant.

Will was looking at the plastic bag. “What the hell is that?”

“Stuff I’m supposed to cook up and give to my mama.”

“I don’t know about that,” Wiley said.

“She said it’s the Queen of Cures,” I said.

“Jeez,” Will said. “That sounds like a curse.” He made his voice all spooky and thin like the Wicked Witch in
The Wizard of
Oz
. “The Queen of Cures, my pretty.”

“It’s probably poison,” Wiley said.

Well, poison was what Mama said they gave you to get rid of cancer. Maybe one poison was as good as another, though I hoped it wouldn’t make her hair fall out. I couldn’t picture Mama without her black hair curling round her face.

When I got home, Mama was sleeping, so I got right down to boiling up the cure, emptying the bag into the stew pot she used for making soup, measuring out the water, precisely as Allie Rucker had instructed. Mostly the stuff looked like dried grasses and some chunks that resembled wood or mushrooms, but I didn’t look too close. If there was something in there that had ever swum, walked, or flown, I didn’t want to know.

The stuff hadn’t even come to a full boil when it started to smell. A sour stink that clouded the kitchen.
Eye of newt
. I shut the door before it could escape to the rest of the house and opened the back door and the windows. It smelled like something that would do a lot worse than make a person’s hair fall out. It smelled evil. I grabbed the pot holders I’d made Mama when I was nine and snatched that kettle right off the stove. I carted it out some distance behind the house to a spot where the grass grew in patches and dumped it. Then I got Mama’s garden spade and buried the whole mess. When I got back to the house, the kitchen still reeked, so I flipped a dish towel around in the air, then put a pot of water on with some cinnamon in it. By the time Mama woke up, the evil smell was almost gone.