Sweeping Up Glass (18 page)

“I know what you did, Olivia,” she says.

I’m suddenly so tired I could slump over the steering wheel and go to sleep.

“What have I done?”

“You wanted me to leave.” At first her voice is thin and wavering, but it strengthens, fueled by a new accusation. “You followed me. You made sure I lost my boots.”

I work at keeping my eyes on the road.

“I didn’t lose them at all!” she says. “You stole them!”

There’s nothing for me to do but keep driving, although I want to leap from the truck and watch it carry Ida across the field and into the creek. What possible debt are we laboring under that makes us think we must care for old people?

I stop at Dooby’s to say that I’ve found her, and I’m grateful that he asks no questions. Although my breath turns to ice on the inside of the windows, I’m not cold at all. There’s a burning in my stomach, and in back of my eyes. I take her home. There’s no point in talking to her—she’s concerned only about her boots, and not much about them.

In five minutes, I’m taking off the cape, setting the tub in my bedroom, heating water for her bath. Outside the door, Will’m is weighing out two pounds of peanuts, from time to time blowing his nose and talking with a customer. Ida steps into the tub and sits, and I take a washcloth and soap to her, scrubbing as if she’s a great stubborn stain, until she winces. I lather her hair, and pour from a pitcher, telling her, for God’s sake, to hold still.

“You have no right to do this,” I say when I’m toweling her off and she’s gotten lost inside one of my flannel gowns. “It’s not right, after all the misery you’ve dealt me, to be this needy.”

Ida looks at me, her hair white and flying off in seven
directions. At least it’s clean. She smells better than she has in a long time.

“Olivia,” she says darkly, “I am not just a beggar off the street. God will punish you for the way you treat me.”

Although I’d cut out my tongue before I’d say it out loud, she might be right.

I
t is almost five o’clock by the time Ida’s had supper and is tucked in her bed. I turn up the electric heater in the corner, and set Will’m’s old boots inside her door in case she needs to go to the outhouse. I don’t know what else to do. The basement’s too cold, the alcove belongs to Will’m—and if the four-poster were a half mile wide, it wouldn’t hold both Ida and me.

Still, I stand looking around at her sagging paper boxes, the unpainted walls, the rag rug. Perhaps we should have done more, Saul and I, built shelves and cupboards, unpacked her things. Back then I could not. I had needed to remove her from the house, and that much I had done. I turn out the light.

Will’m’s worked hard in the store today, and I imagine he’s worn out from his cold. I’ll bring from the bin two of the biggest potatoes I can find, light the oven, and bake them for supper. But he’s standing on the back porch. I wave him inside.

But he’s not seeing me, and I can’t make out what he’s looking at, for the sun’s going down. I stomp on through the snow. When I come upon the thing that lies in the snow, I cannot focus, can’t draw a breath. Here at the foot of my back steps is a small silver-face, shot in the forehead, its snout still lathered with red foam. The right ear has been cut off, and there’s a long smear of blood
to show for its dragging. Couldn’t have been more than six months old. I am sickened in my heart and soul.

“Will’m!” I shout, as if he isn’t ten feet away. “Hand me down a goddamn shovel!”

“Gran—”

“I’ve got to bury it, don’t want things comin’ in our yard to get at it.”

“Somebody already came in our yard,” he says, handing me the spade. “Gran—how many do you think are left?”

I search the hills. “Don’t know. If they’re smart, they’ve gone farther up. Anyway, it’s late. I’m gonna take him a ways and bury him deep, so you go on and light the oven, put in two potatoes, then get into bed.”

“I’ve got to feed the cubs,” he says, shivering.

“All right, but I’ll take the night feeding. Now get in out of this weather.”

I set out, dragging the wolf by a hind leg. One of the hunters has taken home a fine silken ear and my anger could fill all of Pope County. A terrible truth comes to me then: I’m sliding into a place as bitter as the one in which Ida lives.

A
new morning. I milk the nanny, feed the goats, scatter corn. Chop the ice on the water pans. Four more eggs. Last fall I had Will’m tack a horsehair blanket to the walls and floor of the coop, just in case. I’m glad I did.

When I come in, he’s rummaging the larder. He finds an apple and while I boil water for the oats, we talk about Ida, and Miz Grace Harris, and the funeral being at eleven o’clock.

It was not until the middle of the night that I remembered the poultice for his throat, and, in my boots, by the light of the stove I mixed dry mustard and water, slathering it between layers of flannel to lay on his chest. It seems to have done the trick, and my worry over him settles.

“Put the apple back, Will’m,” I tell him. “Breakfast is coming.”

He looks into the box where the cubs are sleeping, their bellies still full of the vegetable broth I fed them before daylight. “I’m sorry I said what I did, Gran.”

“What’s that, boy?”

“That if Miz Grace would go on and die—you know. You and Wing.”

“It’s all right.”

“After the funeral, I’ll go on over to Dooby’s and get in my hours.”

“You feel up to it?”

He nods, and doesn’t say another word, not even later when we sit at the table over our breakfast, pretending the wolf’s blood has not stained our window frame and the wall underneath.

There are no shots in the hills today. The cubs are moving around in their box. Will’m picks them up and holds the soft things, stroking them, forcing oats in their mouths with his little finger. I tell him what Miz Hanley said about broth. For a minute he looks hopeful, so I hurry and remind him that there isn’t any meat, not so much as a chicken beak.

“I could kill a rabbit if I had a gun,” he says. “I bet I could keep us in meat all winter. I know I could.” But he’s half pouting because he knows the answer.

“We’ve got a while before the funeral. Go on out and check your traps if you’re feeling like to it. You might’ve caught something, and when I’ve put it in the pot, you can have some of the gravy.”

He nods, and I know what he’s thinking—the cubs could also have his share of the meat. I lace up my boots and fetch my cape. “I’ll take Ida’s tray across to her now.”

“What if she’s not there?” he says. “What if she’s gone off again?”

It’s a fear I have, too. But I can’t tie her up.

Fortunately, Ida’s sleeping. When I wake her, she turns away. She’s still mad at me for ransacking her place, although I’ve put everything back and done up the boxes.

She says, “Where’s my glass of milk?”

I let in some daylight and sit on the edge of her cot. “There’s no milk, Ida. I’ve put honey in your tea.”

“Well,” she says crossly, “Doc Pritchett says I should have my milk.”

“So should Will’m.” I tell her about Miz Grace Harris, and that I’ll be in town awhile.

“It’s time that Wing Harris was punished,” she says, folding her arms across her nightgown. “Don’t think I didn’t see what the two of you were doing.”

She’ll drag up every sin I’ve committed. No point in being embarrassed about it, all these years later. Still. “You followed us?”

“As any decent ma’am would. I knew when he stuck his business in you and made you bleed.”

“I’m starting a new quilt,” I say, to change tracks. “Another wedding ring, in blues and violet. Love Alice tells me—”

“Alice Hanley is an addlepated half-wit,” Ida says. “She talks like a screech owl.” She flaps her arms for effect, and frowns at her bowl, but does not eat. I wonder why I hold out hope for Ida, thinking someday she might fall down and hit her head the way Junk once did, and it will change her forever. I hate that I do that, that I keep coming back to her, whining like a child, wanting my mother. “Ida—”

She smooths her flannel gown. “Don’t say anything that will give me a headache, Olivia. You’re so mindless about that.”

It’s a long time since I’ve looked directly in her face, into her eyes, and what I see is dreadful—dried cheeks and chin, like grapes left hanging too long. She’s bone thin, and her eyes are dark, not blue like Pap’s or mine, but sunk into bottomless sockets.

I want to ask her if she’s sorry, if she ever feels pain at what went before—not wanting me, the accident that put me in the hospital, Pap’s death, his unmarked grave.

“These oats are cold,” she says. “I really wanted coddled egg.”

“Ida, please.”

She sighs. “What?”

“You must remember something good about Pap.”

“Lord love us,” she says. “Not this again. There at the end, you spent more time with him than I did.”

“He’s been gone thirty years—”

“Well, you went and kilt him,” she says, reminding me.

“What was he like when you married him?”

She looks away to the frosted window, but she’s seeing something farther out. “William Tate Harker was a handsome man. A fine dancer, and all the girls made eyes at him. They threw elegant parties, and we were invited to them all. Tate would twirl me out on the floor. Oh, I was a picture in fluted organdy and pink ribbon bows.”

I can’t imagine anyone having money to put on elegant parties. Nor can I picture Ida, who came from a dirt-poor family, dressed in such. “Tell about
him
,” I say.

She lifts her chin. “He was so taken with me, at first I was blinded to his faults.”

“He had no more faults than anyone else,” I say, although being taken with Ida is fault enough.

“He kept you poor, and he dressed you in ugly clothes.”

“We weren’t poor. He worked at two jobs. People paid what they could for his doctoring.”

“He’d come dragging home those flea-bitten beasts. Or he’d go to them. Sometimes he’d be gone for days, come home bloody to the elbow, wantin’ me to scrub the blood from his clothes. And all he’d have to show for it was a handful of carrots and rutabaga. He thought himself to be a fine, fancy doctor.”

“How did he know what to do for hurt things?”

She shrugs. “That first year, he asked if he could take a few
things from the cupboards. So I gave him needles and thread, a scissor, spoons. But it was never enough. He’d call up to me—‘Ida Mae, bring me a saucer, fetch me an egg yolk, throw down a blanket.’ Thought if he snapped his fingers, there’d I be. I bet he’s sorry now.”

If Ida were any more wicked, she’d burst into flame. “Tell about when I was born.”

“Oh, that,” she says. “I don’t see how those primitive women had babies in the field and then went back to hoeing corn. You had a big head—and arms and legs like a monkey. The whole thing was a shock to my nervous system. And your father did nothing but hide out in his still and play in the basement with those filthy creatures. Later, he dressed you in trousers and left you to run. You hadn’t the slightest idea how to be a lady. When I came home, I had my work cut out for me.”

I gather the things for the tray. Someday, when she tells me what an ugly, wild child I was, I will slap her silly, maybe even throw her down on the floor and put a pillow over her face. But today I asked for this. I get up.

From the door, I say, “One more thing. Tell me, again, about when Pap died.”

Her sigh is enormous. “That night, they carried him home.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t remember, Olivia. Whoever came along and found the two of you. He was all busted up. They laid him out on the bed, and I washed him proper and put his best suit of clothes on him.”

“Was there a service? Did anyone come to say a prayer over him?”

“They did not. Nobody cared. The next morning I sent for a coffin, and I dug a hole and buried him.”

“And that was that.”

She draws her blanket up around her face.

I take myself off up the hill behind Ida’s cabin, and find a shady spot with little snow. It’s not as easy to fling myself facedown on the earth these days, but I do it with a cracking of knee joints, and grunting like an old hog. It’s good to have my arms and legs spread out on the ground. But it’s winter, and a slow freeze comes to the left side of my face while I take stock of things.

Wherever this bitterness in Ida is coming from, it’s driving her clean out of her head. Wing’s wife is dead. The boy has cottoned to creatures we can’t save, and wolves are dying almost every day. Further, if I freeze to death here, the world will go on without me. Ida will, one day, wander from her cabin, drop into the creek, and be swept off to a better place. Wing might even marry again. But what would the boy do? And what would become of the wolves?

“Gran?” says Will’m, whose boots I now see, and who was, at one time, accustomed to finding me like this. “You all right, down there?”

I raise up on my knees, brush off the snow. “I am fine, boy.”

He’s still in his nightshirt and coat and hat. Perhaps he is more like me than I think. “Well, I’ve caught us a squirrel and two rats.”

I reach for his hand. “Good. Give the rats to the goats, we’re not ready to eat them yet. Go on and skin the squirrel, put it in the pot, and bury it by the back step. I’ll cook it this evening.”

He grins and nods and treks off to the house. I am not far behind. I’m not looking forward to the funeral, and just thinking about it sours my mood.

W
ill’m has taken care of the squirrel, lopping off its head and feet, gutting and skinning it. In my kitchen, I wash dishes. He comes in and dries them without a word, pours a little honey and milk in a pan, and feeds the cubs with the dropper. The pups’ ribs heave when they swallow. I’ve thought every day that another one would surely give up. But their tummies are growing rounder. Their eyes close, and Will’m tucks them back in their box while I put the dishes away.

In the alcove, he pulls his nightshirt off over his head, and when he’s standing shivering and leggy in his underdrawers, I realize he’s not a little boy anymore. He buttons on the freshly pressed shirt I’ve laid out.