All the Forgivenesses

by Elizabeth Hardinger

Having music in the house made it seem like someplace you wanted to be, not just someplace to eat and sleep. Someplace special.

And then I felt myself break to pieces inside. Thoughts come through that’d been hidden in me for a long while. It seemed like the very flesh of my children bore God’s rebuke. There was plenty of reasons. I stabbed my own daddy, I wished him dead, and I was short with Dacia, impatient with her ways, and most of all, jealous of how Mama’d ruther spend time with her, even as a baby, than me. And Mama, how come I left her and went to the backhouse, and her all alone when she died? Worse yet, I never kept the family together. On her deathbed she’d give me a sacred task, to look after the children, and I failed it—I let things get worse and worse till there wasn’t nothing to do but everbody go different ways. And Will, when his cold face touched me I throwed him on the floor. And Timmy, I hadn’t thought about him for a long time, Timmy who I let wander off and drown in the Tenmile, wedged in the rocks. And then in spite of all I done wrong, God had give me Sam, who loved me more than anybody ever had, and now I’d lost two of Sam’s children, and who knowed when he would come back from the war so we could try again? Or if? I wondered, would I ever have children of my own, and the very thought made me lose all my breath.

Guilt is so difficult to live with

She knowed where my sore places was, seemed like, and she delighted in poking them. Or not so much delighted as wondered what would happen and had to find out.

I looked over at Alta Bea and seen tears on her cheeks, and I knowed how lucky I was, even with all I had lost in life, to have Sam. He had loved me for years now, and I just now understood—you have to have somebody to love just as much as you have to have somebody to love you. Maybe more. I was glad we was on our way home, and I couldn’t hardly wait to get there.

Oh, I was afraid all right, and broody and mean. I knowed I was taking my wrath toward Dacia and trying to wrap it around my shame like a thin, scraggly shawl, just like I always had. Didn’t seem like I could help it.

Finally, I asked Sam, “How come she done it? How come her to send them here, do you think?” “Turn around. I said, turn around.” I sighed and turned to face him. “Same reason your Mama give you her children.” Now he took my face in his hands and looked at me and said, slowly, “To save their lives.”