Hazard Page 9

  A hot flush came over me. I felt my lungs, like two huge petals, curl inward. She said something to me but I didn’t hear. Her limb flung outward, sending her five fingers, which were pink and fluid, swimming in the air, like little eels. Rummaging around in my head, I felt for the right word and then hauled it up from a deep, muddy place. Deformed.

  “Supper first, Sarah. Then you can show the girls your room,” Mrs. Gooding said in a smooth and liquid-y voice, as if nothing were raw and sore in the room.

  I looked for Barbara Ann, but only caught the back of her brown curls as she fell into step behind the grownups, heading to the dining room. Still holding Roddy’s hand, I hung back as Sarah swiftly moved in front of me. She was a head shorter than I, though her mother, only minutes before, said she would turn thirteen on her next birthday. Down below, her legs and feet moved just like mine, carrying on as if nothing were amiss, and her one good arm, the left one, swung a good rhythm by her side. But everything else looked crunched and cuckoo, as if she were being silly, bent sideways like that, like a broken stalk.

  I thought suddenly of the stonings in the Bible. How they bent people over. It was as if one of those stones had reached out of the sky and stricken Sarah; not a bull’s-eye, as if God had aimed well, but off to one side, just enough to hurt her. From all I could tell, He had missed her brain but had still made a mess of her.

  As I slipped into my supper chair, I held my eyes on my plate, relieved to feel Barbara Ann settle in by my side. The beefy aromas comforted me. Aside from a mound of pot roast steaming on the table, I smelled the smokiness of shucky beans and the buttery warmth of Sunbeam rolls. I knew my father was happy; he loved these foods. The Goodings were Baptists, too, and “Our Heavenly Father” resonated over the table in Mr. Gooding’s deep voice. I was grateful for grace, for the few moments of blindness.

  When I opened my eyes again, I caught my breath. There was Sarah’s arm, inches from mine. She’d sat in the chair on my left and was passing a bowl to me filled with white fluffy potatoes.

  “Mother mashes a good potato,” she said, giggling. “That’s what my dad says.”

  The bowl looked massive and fragile, like a baby in her arms. She squeezed it like a vise, her shriveled limb and hand turning blotched and blue as they braced hard against the bowled glass. Twisting my ribs toward her, I shoved my palms beneath the bowl. My breastbone bumped her head with a soft bop.

  “Oops,” she said.

  She didn’t let go even though her was head was torqued sideways and around the bowl, as it had to be, and her nose was nearly smothered in the pillow of potatoes. She angled her eyes upward, toward the top of her head, wrenching them high in her eye sockets until they caught hold of my face.

  “Take a big scoop. We have lots!” she said.

  Quiet settled around the table, the sound of people paying attention while pretending not to. I couldn’t seem to move. My head felt dumb with confusion. Should I do as she said? Let go of the bowl and scoop out a helping? I didn’t know how to be around her. I wasn’t her sister, growing up beside her. I knew all about Roddy’s affliction, which was inside. Hers was outside, where I could see it. It was like a bright hot light that stunned me, making me wide-eyed and stupid.

  “Time’s a wastin’,” Sarah said, her voice still light but with a slight twinge.

  My armpits felt damp. I’m not sure how many seconds passed before, finally, from the far end of the table, my father’s voice stirred.

  “Hurry up that bowl. I cain’t eat ’em if they’re cold.”

  Chuckles fluttered in the air. Though I blushed, I felt something unlatch. The Southern ease in my father’s voice, the drawl he rarely used, brought Kentucky into the room. I heard my mother’s girlish laughter. Though I was too young to know why, I sensed a lightness in my parents, as if they’d both shed heavy coats at the door, the heaviness they usually wore by being the only ones with an afflicted child.

  I drew one hand from under the bowl and hurried it to the spoon, scooping a blot of potatoes onto my plate. In the next moment, Sarah released the bowl into my hands, and I narrowly had time to pass it on to Barbara Ann before the rolls came at me from Sarah’s side, and then the hot bowl of gravy. Sarah chattered and ate as fast as anyone, spearing her beans, cutting her roast, pulling apart her cloverleaf roll and buttering it with swift swipes of her knife. She was vivacious and confident and she hadn’t a drop of shame. I thought, She doesn’t know she’s crippled.

  When Sarah asked to be excused to show us her room, my armpits felt dry and cool again. A kind of relief moved in, and I slid easily off my chair and up the six stairs to where she slept. Barbara Ann and Roddy came, too, and we clustered down the hall into her room.

  It was light blue, like a pale western sky, with two windows dressed in white curtains, each trimmed in deep ruffles. In the shy way of girls, Barbara Ann and I made our way to her bed and perched on the edge. Sarah flitted about to all the surfaces, plucking glass figurines from her bureau and sea shells from her windowsill, bringing them over one by one. She liked having us there. The air warmed with her chatter as we turned her treasures in our hands. Then, she brought out her box of sixty-four Crayolas and thick pads of paper.

  Barbara Ann drew a Palomino mare, the horse she kept wishing for. I, on the other hand, drew a seahorse and a funny tangle of lines that was supposed to be seaweed.

  “I like that blue. It’s a fishy blue,” said Sarah, looking at my paper. “You don’t have to go to the ocean to see the ocean.”

  I looked at Sarah’s creature-hand flying over the paper, her wrist curled, her fingers tangled around the crayon as if she’d captured some prey. The white surface of her paper blossomed with intricate flowers and lacy vines, her colors, like nature, all in their place, neatly within the lines. Not five inches away, Roddy’s soft, perfect fingers gripped the red crayon, all five pads choked up around the red knob. He was scribbling, senselessly, his page growing into a muddy blot.

  “Wow,” said Sarah, glancing at Roddy’s page. Her face was full of wonder. “That’s a whole bunch of colors.”

  Roddy’s eyes cut sideways. The ends of his mouth hopped in a smile.

  My hand felt suddenly leaden. A thought rose like a web of heat, prickling up through my arm and into my face, wrapping around my head. It felt like it grew from deep inside my nerves. There around the table, in all of our crayons, in all of our arms, even mine and Barbara Ann’s, I saw something startling, something yawning and wide. I’d known it for a long time. I had been spared.

  I felt a hot panting in my chest, as if a puppy were in there. I had never asked why. I looked over at Barbara Ann, her head bent over horses and dreams. Smartly, her fingers entwined brown and red crayons, tips together, brushing the rump of her mare with an arty chestnut blend. Did she know she had been spared?

  I faltered then. I knew what it was to be the sister of a damaged boy, but this was something altogether different. I had a strange feeling inside of me, an inkling that I was seeing something I shouldn’t, that wasn’t good for me or for my family. Something I suspected and didn’t want to know. I felt sick to think of it. Maybe God didn’t have a plan. Maybe we were all just accidents.

  The room stretched away from me, as if I were no longer seated there at the table, but streets away, looking into the window of this house and into this room with four children sitting here together, two of us with God’s bruises.

  I didn’t like thinking this way. I blew out my cheeks and stood up, moving to the door, hearing my father’s words: “If you see a supercell comin’ at you, pick up your heels and run.” Barbara Ann looked up, and Sarah, too, following me with their eyes. I was nearly to the stairs when I heard Sarah coming after me with all her might.

  “Let’s play tag!” she called out, rushing past me to the stairs. “Follow me!”

  I didn’t know why I’d been spared, and why Roddy hadn’t. I didn’t know the words “arbitrary” or “fluke,” but I didn’t need to know. I sensed t
hem and was frightened by what they insinuated: God was either out of control or careless or just plain mean.

  As I ran out after Sarah into the evening light, I ran away from my troubled thoughts. Thankful to pant hard and run fast, feeling my legs speed me along, around the swing set and through the baby aspen trees.

  By the time we got back into our car, night was upon us, deep and unbroken. Sarah ran to the end of the driveway, waving, her good arm stretched high overhead, her small hand open and rippling in the moonlight. Her other limb stuck out like a wing, balancing her, keeping her upright.

  In the darkness of the car, my hand lifted from my lap and touched Roddy’s knee, like a soft cloth, patting just enough times so he knew I was there. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, not knowing if he heard me.

  I didn’t know, as we drove away, that Sarah, years from then, would eventually marry and have a child. I didn’t need this knowledge. Already, I sensed from the blossoms on her paper, her quick smart wit, and her small happiness hopping there in the driveway that she might have a chance for a full life.

  Between her and my brother, I knew who was the luckier. On the way home, I prayed hard for any baby about to be born. If you must, God, if you must smite a baby, then please aim poorly: strike bone, knock the neck sideways, shrivel the arm. Amen.

  Chapter 11

  Mercy

  On the hot slab of our driveway, a snake looped its sheathed muscle into a triggered pile, ready to fire. It was a small rattler, diamond-backed and delicate, its tail-tipped rattle barely larger than my toenail. I was eleven years old on that cloudless, blue-lit morning, and dressed for worship in a blue gingham sundress and pearl-button sweater. I had never seen a live viper, and I gazed down at its fluid fury, struck with wonder. My father held out a long-handled hoe, pausing long enough for me to curl my small fingers around the handle, then stepped back.

  “Aim behind the head,” he said.

  The snake hissed and flared. Its dry, husked sound scraped in my ears. Moments ago, its beaded back had been stretched along a crevice in the concrete when I’d stepped from our patio to the car, clipping its tail. Each of us, reptile and child, had flinched and reeled, wondering what in tarnation the other was doing there. From the far side of the yard, my father had lifted his head, dropping the hose and moving toward me as if he were meant for this moment, hoe in hand.

  “Don’t dally,” he said.

  My hands gripped the wooden shaft. A dry breeze fingered the edge of my dress as if plucking it off my knees and out of the way. If bitten, I knew what to do: scalpel a crosshatch over the wound, suck venom into my mouth, spit.

  Days before, I’d unfolded these instructions along with a bevy of snake bite tools out across my bedspread, fingering the tiny cutting blade and suction pump. They felt clever and important—part of my new life. We’d just moved from the outskirts of Denver deeper toward the mountains, and our new home sat on a raw, unsettled tract of land tucked behind the Devil’s Backbone, a sharply crested ridge of earth shoved violently upward fifteen million years before. The neighborhood was largely untamed, vastly treeless, with stretches of prairie short grass broken by iron-stained rock formations pushing to the sky.

  Though I’d always lived in the country, I knew this was a wilder place. I felt its intersecting and conflicting desires. The high-pitched cries of bobcat and coyote pierced the night outside my bedroom window where, barely a century ago, Ute and Apache hunted elk and deer. Within sight of our back patio, a natural wind-carved cave of rock reached three hundred feet skyward and once sheltered the Ute Indian Chief Colorow and his band of braves hiding out from government troops. Just beyond the road’s curve to our lot, ruins of a stagecoach stop lingered among the scrubby pines and newest crop of cheat grass.

  I felt my father’s eyes on my back, urging me to act. If I hadn’t been afraid someone could die—Barbara Ann, who steadied my world, or Roddy, who couldn’t help who he was—I might have refused. I didn’t know the coiled creature at my feet would as soon slither off into the weeds than strike me. Or that I was a bulky and inedible enemy, largely a waste of hard-won venom. In that moment, I felt only the adrenalin of survival laced with a dread of snakes.

  Beware the serpent in the Garden. I heard Pastor Bill’s voice fill my ear, as if I weren’t here, but instead surrounded by our Baptist sanctuary, and these rustlings were not from a snake’s tail but the pages of my Bible parting beneath my fingertips. Be ever mindful of the Devil’s disguise.

  The hoe in my hand flailed upward and dropped. The blade struck hard, dinging the concrete, at once shooting back into my palms a repellent mixture of hard surface and soft, violated tissue.

  “Don’t let up,” my father said, behind me.

  I clung to his clarity. His words held a certitude that came from deep in the Appalachian Mountains, where he was raised and slaughter wasn’t pondered. In the depths of winter, when ice and floods wrapped the mountainside, sealing off my grandparents’ dirt farm, the act of slitting a pig’s throat or gunning an egg-thieving weasel was second nature. It kept the family fed and stirring. Eliminating predators and foragers, even raccoons and stray dogs, added up to another month of provisions. Coexistence was not something my father could imagine.

  White-knuckled, I bore down, blade pinning the spine just back of the jaw. The body writhed and flicked. I squeezed my eyelids. Sourness seeped onto my tongue. I didn’t know things fought so hard to live. Apart from flies and biting sweat bees, and one black widow spider that died with a swift clomp, I’d never assaulted a life before. Please, I whispered to myself, sensing, even as the tendons knotted in my hands, that releasing now, mid-death, would mean a harsher suffering. When finally the hoe pulled away into my father’s hand, I opened my eyes.

  “Stay back from the head,” he ordered, propping the handle against the garage door and moving purposefully inside.

  At my feet, the body lay blunted and unfurled. The head was gone. For a hurried moment, I scuffled along in a half crouch along the edge of concrete, brushing my fingers over the tender sprouts of grass and weeds, soiling the ruffled hem of my dress as I dragged along, searching for the triangular skull. At last I found it, cloudy-eyed and open-fanged, in the outlying gravel where my father had kicked it. Its jaws, I knew, could still bite, so I pressed my hands, tightly curled, to my chest as I bent over. I saw right away that it was no longer interested in me. Bone-white and covered in dust, it was already part of the ground.

  “Young lady, what on earth are you doing? I can see your underpants.”

  Springing up, I blushed and yanked at my hem.

  At the edge of the patio, my mother stood in a lavender suit and pillbox hat, a slender hand folded around her Bible, surveying the mess. From behind her shoulder peered Barbara Ann, leggy at thirteen, brunette and soft-curled. She was a girl of serious expression and she chewed at her cheek, moving her dark eyes from me to the hoe to the chopped snake. Partially hidden in her shadow, Roddy tilted his ear to one side, whispering to himself.

  “Well, I declare,” my mother said.

  In the next instant, my father stepped from the garage, toting an old broom handle and a two-by-four. Wordlessly, he tweezed up the beheaded snake and gaited off to the field. I watched him go, striding by himself. He didn’t call for Roddy to come along, the way a father might with his son. Roddy wasn’t a boy who scampered to his dad, or toddled after him out to the garage, or tromped off with him to do away with snakes.

  Barbara Ann’s glassy-bottomed shoes racketed across the concrete and she came up beside me. Together, we watched as my father crested the distant rise, paused, and flung. The lithe loop of tissue, for a brief moment, revived, arcing with a languid twist through the air, as if it might sprout feathers and soar off to the nearest peak of Colorow’s Cave. When, instead, it dropped to the weeds, my lungs slumped inside me.

  “Oh,” Barbara Ann said, her voice soft and startled.

  “Well now,” my father announced, striding back, “she kille
d her first rattler.”

  For a half second my mother looked pleased as she clipped around to the driver’s side, opening the car door and steering Roddy inside. Stopping before me, my father held out his two curled fists and said for me to choose. When I tapped the left, his fingers opened to a scaly bundle: three horny rings, neatly necklaced, capped with a tiny fourth, the end button every rattler has at birth. Gently, I lifted the rattle with my thumb and forefinger, transferring it into my palm like an eggshell, afraid I’d crush this last part into powder.

  “Hurry up now. You can wash your hands when we get to church,” my mother said.

  Cupping my hand and holding it chest-high, I climbed into the back seat. Part of me thrilled at bravery, facing down a fanged creature and coming out alive. I imagined a half hour from now, holding up my treasure in Sunday school, the boys fidgeting and reaching for it. I knew I’d keep it close to my ribs as I told my story.

  Barbara Ann retrieved and slid my pocketbook onto the floor at my feet, then handed me a hankie from hers before getting into the front. My door clicked shut and my father turned from the car, his shoulders swaying from lanky strides as he moved back across the yard, taking up the garden hose and his quiet hour of chores before joining us later, for sermon.

  As we drove from the driveway, I cradled the rattle in my lap. It was airy and weightless, like a bone.

  “Remember what God calls this, children?” I could hear Mrs. Desmond say, her hand on my shoulder. “What does God say we have over animals?”

  Dominion.

  I whispered the word, its syllables riding over my tongue and through my lips like an echo, as if coming from a distant past and part of the world. It sounded like “kingdom,” and “chosen,” and “everlasting.” Ringing words that held sway and made sense of suffering.

  Still, something shadowy shifted in me. Pulling my eyes from my lap to the window, I gazed at the ditch grass and sage blurring past, and beyond, to the hogback, its long spiny backbone of rock rising and twisting alongside the car. Lately, I couldn’t sort the questions bothering me, ones I didn’t know how to ask. If I’d been older, I could have turned from the window, opened my mouth and said, “But why? How is slaughter godly?” Young as I was, I could only wad my worry inside my ribs and let it tumble there. The Bible seemed more and more to me like a book of blood, with animals and people falling alike. Even Noah seemed a sorry keeper of life. His big-bellied ark shut against slashing rain, bobbing in rumpled waters, stuffed with two of every beast, dry and breathing inside. What of the others? I wanted to know. The unchosen? Those threes and fours left behind, soft-nosed and bumping against the bow. Why all of those deaths? I’d dreamed of those animals, hooves splish-splashing. When I turned once to a center spread of cow bodies in Life magazine, bloated and floating down the Ganges, I thought of Noah and his ark. The way life looked when it was discarded.