Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

In my mind, she was the girl born on a staircase who then became a woman torn between taking a step up into the light or a step down into the dark.

I turned my attention to the town around us. We had lived in wildernesses before. Trees as tall as the men were not. Meadows as lovely as the women were. Yet there was something different about Breathed. It seemed to inhale and exhale as if it was not a town that had been created by humankind, but a place born unto it. I wanted to write Breathed into a poem. I would rhyme the words if I must, but speak them like I was throwing stones into a river. That seemed the only way to represent a place where the dirt lanes looked like brown diamond snakes laid out, the scales reflecting the sunlight.

The house itself was large and heavily guarded by dark evergreen bushes. It appeared to belong to the earth more than it did to man.

“Ground has three good years in it,” Dad told us. “First year will be a spectacular crop. The type you never forget. Second year will be a decent crop, but you’ll only recall certain things about it. Third year will be a crop you don’t remember at all. That’s the ground sayin’ it needs rest. So, you let that ground sleep for each of the years it gave you. Three years of gardening, three years of leavin’ it alone.”

“Everything we need to live a life as long as we’re allowed has been given to us in nature,” he’d say. “That’s not to claim if you eat this plant, you will never die, for the plant itself will one day die, and you are no more special than it. All we can do is try to heal the things that can be healed and ease the complaints of the things that cannot be. At the very least, we bring the earth inside us and restore the knowledge that even the smallest leaf has a soul.”

We shared one imagination then. One pure and beautiful thought. That we were important. And that anything was possible.

But seasons are hard for a home left all by itself. We did our best against the ruin. Despite its failings, I liked the house and I wondered if it liked us back.

Despite the stiffening pain in his right leg, he lowered himself to his knees because this is what he felt was required of him. It was all part of his ritual in asking the ginseng its permission before he could dig it up. I dropped to my knees beside him as he closed his eyes and started silently moving his lips. I

“A boy who falls that silently,” Dad said, “needs someone around to scream for him.”

What it boiled down to was a frenzied hope that there was more to life than the reality around us. Only then could we claim a destiny we did not feel cursed to.

In some ways, maybe Lint was merely just another plant Dad hoped he could ripen out of harsh conditions and against any adversity. For a good father, it is an awful thing to believe otherwise.

“God made us from the rib of man. That has been our curse ever since. Because of it, men have the shovel and we have the land. It’s right between our legs. There, they can bury all their sins. Bury ’em so deep, no one knows about ’em except for them and us.”

It was Agatha Christie who created the mystery within my father and Edgar Allan Poe who gave darkness to him in ways that lifted him to the flight of the raven. William Shakespeare wrote my father a Romeo heart at the same time Susan Fenimore Cooper composed him to have sympathy toward nature and a longing for paradise to be regained. Emily Dickinson shared her poet self so my father would know the most sacred text of mankind is in the way

we do and do not rhyme, leaving John Steinbeck to gift my father a compass in his mind so he would always appreciate he was east of Eden and a little south of heaven. Not to be left out, Sophia Alice Callahan made sure there was a part of my father that would always remain a child of the forest, while Louisa May Alcott penned the loyalty and hope within his soul. It was Theodore Dreiser who was left the task of writing my father the destiny of being an American tragedy only after Shirley Jackson prepared my father for the horrors of that very thing.

“Fraya says it means you’re a woman.” “Why we have to bleed to earn it?” Flossie slammed her fists on the mattress. “What happens when we get old and it stops? What then? We stop bein’ a woman? Ain’t the blood that defines us. It’s our soul.”

Her skin was the diary of her soul. All the springs she had watched the flowers bloom. The summers she had stood before the moon and kissed its face. The autumns she had grown wiser. The winters that had frozen the initials of her name. Each wrinkle was a record of this and of every hour, minute, and second she had lived. All her secrets were written in her skin. The things she had asked God for. The things she had cursed the devil about. In such age before me, I saw only beauty.

They don’t try to cure a woman who beds men. They pay her.

Funny thing is, my parents didn’t mind me bein’ with a hundred men. There was less shame in that than bein’ with one girl.”

Don’t ever be afraid to be yourself. You don’t wanna live so long only to realize, you ain’t lived at all.”

I stared into his wrinkles. They reminded me of ridges in sandstone. High on the sides, carved out in the middle like the soft stone it was. His face was becoming as ancient as the land. One day, I thought, I will wake up and he will have moss growing on his eyelids. His cheekbones will have pushed through his flesh, like rock pushing through the hillside. Erosion will turn him into something I barely recognize until I will have to lay him on the hills amongst the stone most like him.

The only numbers Landon Carpenter has in his head are the numbers of stars in the sky on the days his children were born. I don’t know about you, but I would say that a man who has skies in his head full of the stars of his children, is a man who deserves his child’s love. Especially from the child with the most stars.”

Bees’ wings are smaller than their bodies, so them flyin’ don’t make sense, at least in the matter of science. But the bees don’t care if their wings are too small. They believe they can fly. It’s their belief that allows them to. Without havin’ the trust in themselves, they’d never get off the ground. You should know a thing about trustin’ oneself. Hell, trust is in your name.”

“Why’s a girl gotta change when she wears makeup?” I leaned back against the porch rail and dug my nails into the wood. “Why can’t I be the same wearin’ lipstick as I am when my lips are bare? Shouldn’t it matter more what comes out of my lips than what is worn on them?”

The winter was something the hills had to bear. Something we all had to.

I realized then that pants and skirts, like gender itself, were not seen as equal in our society. To wear pants was to be dressed for power. But to wear a skirt was to be dressed to wash the dishes.

Because it didn’t matter to the Cherokee what women wore. It mattered what they did and what they spoke and what they thought.”

Old angers are mostly faded now. Guilt still remains. That’s something that refuses to be shorter than eternity.

The lizard would eventually regrow a tail as if losing part of oneself is no great burden after all. If only we could be like the lizards.

Anguish was my subject, but so, too, was love. My dialogue became an insanity that then evolved into a metamorphosis of soul. Risen against the odds, if only to oppose and defy the suffering, I plotted tales that commanded myself to survive.

I could either abandon the doubts I beheld and be free, or else dwell in the eye of the prejudiced, to be chained there. There are too many enemies in life to be one of yourself.

But in life, you either live in someone else’s house or you build your own. A man with hands like my father’s was a man who had built his home out of star and sky.

I understood the need to go beyond the fence. No matter how beautiful the pasture, it is the freedom to choose that makes the difference between a life lived and a life had.

“But the woman she becomes must decide if the blade will cut deep enough to rip her apart or if she will find the strength to leap with her arms out and dare herself to fly in a world that seems to break like glass around her. May you have the strength.”