“Ain’t going to make much progress with that,” Daddy had said a few minutes ago—words slurring across his bare gums—before answering that bronze-tongued call hisself. Normally, the cinder shovel Bets swipes from the fireplace set goes unnoticed; it’s so small, she’s carried it outside three times this week alone, used and returned it, without once getting caught. Today, though, she’d misjudged. Thinking he’d already jammed a cap over his balding head, pocketed a few coins for the collection plate, and hustled off to Mass, Bets had snuck into the sitting room and lifted the tool. She’d made it down the hall, through the kitchen, and had just slipped her boots on when Daddy had come clomping up the back steps.
“Forgot my Hail Marys,” he’d mumbled. Reaching inside the door, he snagged a strand of beads off the key rack. Stopping long enough to deride Bets’ choice of shovel. Not to ask why she was digging. Or where. Or what she hoped to find. Not to make a better suggestion.
Only to offer another two cents out of an endless wealth of criticism.
“Reckon Mamma had the right of it,” Bets had muttered after him. “Without teeth, you sound just as stupid as you look.”
Now she waits for the bells to hush before setting out across the yard. Blue jays razz her from cedar bushes nearby. Further afield, nuthatches and robins chirrup between the stark cornrows, beckoning her with sweet promises of summer. Smiling, she wonders what tunes birds warble in the city, if their notes are smoggy, thick with tar and rust. She tosses the shovel over the low fence, clambers after it, then trudges round to the newest mound’s far side. In the field beyond, cheeping their hayseed chorus, a crew of brown-hooded sparrows scolds her for being late. Bold little buggers, they flit and hop and pip-pip-pip as Bets unearths a feast of worms.
Despite the harsh ground and harsher opinions, she has made decent headway. Kneeling in the groove she made yesterday, Bets digs into a hole already deep and wide as an apple barrel. The shovel’s cast iron pan shunts into cold soil, clanging against pebbles. Scoop after scoop of dirt avalanches down the mound beside her, slow but steady. A regular rhythm of progress.
Few more hours should do it, Bets reckons. Not quite so long as it’ll take Daddy to cycle through his Thorsday rituals. Reverend’s sermon always runs just shy of noon. Wine and bread comes next. Confession and penance after that. Once all tears have been sopped and hankies wrung dry, the congregation drags itself a half-mile north for a palate cleanser of donuts, cherry pie, and sweet tea. As afternoon shadows start reaching for night, folk dust the icing sugar from their laps, brush the crumbs from their whiskers, drain their cups. A short march through the diner’s parking lot and they’ve left the vinyl and Muzak, but not the sugar buzz behind them. After fetching cats and boars and billy-goats from pickup trucks on the way, they assemble in the Lady’s glade beyond the streetlights. Knives come out in the gloaming. Bowls.
By the time these gifts have been offered and accepted, the ale-horn passed round, blood and verses spattered upon ancient oaks, Bets is bound to be done digging. She’ll have made it through. And down. And out.
All by herself.
All with folks none the wiser.
Bets learned real young to keep any hopes to herself. Any efforts. To dream the same way she now shovels. Carefully. Quietly. Secretly.
It’s the only way to stave off collapse.
Bets must’ve been ten or eleven when she first recognized that sudden burn in her belly, that hot flutter above her liver, for what it was. Not instinct so much as a flash of true understanding, a gut-deep feeling of rightness, of knowing what she has to do, what’s to come. Call it a psychic moment. Call it divine intervention. Call it grit. When faced with important decisions—say, whether or not to sing at the Sunday school talent show—Bets felt a blazing hand gripping her innards. Twisting her resolve. Yanking her across the line between missing out and daring to try.
Silently telling her which path to choose, which future to follow.
Truth be told, the talent show was no big deal. A bunch of local folk and their kids gathered in the church’s back room, Reverend on steel guitar and Miss Shayanne on piano. There were no prizes, no ribbons, no certificates. All the same, it was a challenge for a shy gal like Bets. A chance to be seen. To be heard.
To be noticed.
So she’d picked “Song for the Asking,” a number she loved, one that ran well short of two minutes. A minute and a half, really. Next to nothing. In the lead-up she’d practically wore new grooves into Daddy’s 45 LP, replaying that tune on the spinner in her bedroom, memorizing the words. Singing quietly, ignoring the strain on her throat. Bets had never mastered any instruments—she could get through “Heart and Soul” on her plug-in keyboard, and the first few bars of “Stand by Me”—so she’d decided to sing a capella. She’d wondered what the phrase meant, so went to the bookmobile and looked it up. A capella. In the manner of the chapel. Arranged that way, the familiar letters felt foreign on her tongue. Strange and lonely. Fitting, she reckoned. After all, it’s just going to be her voice, open and vulnerable. Just her and whatever ears might listen.
Nerves jittered her down the gravel road to the church, then kept her standing in the small square room while most grown-ups sat on cheap plastic chairs, kids cross-legged on the floor. As other acts drew applause—for what, Bets can’t recall—she leaned against one of many pin-boards, sweater snagging on hymns and construction paper art. Gaze fixed on her boots, she strained to remember the first line of her song. Grasped for the verses dribbling out of her mind. Blanked at the whole melody.
When Reverend finally called her name, so many faces had turned her way, some clearly bored, some smiling. Jesus and all them other wooden gods frowned down at her from painted bricks on high. Breath coming fast and shallow, Bets had pushed herself away from the wall. Heels scuffing between rows of seats, she’d made it to the front of the room. Swayed there a minute. Searching the darkness inside her skull, desperate for the right words.
Thinking it over I’ve—
What?
So sweetly I’ll make you—
What?
Ignoring the burn, the twist, the knowing yank in her guts, she’d lifted her chin. Smiled at her audience. Chickened out.
“I still sang,” she’d told Mamma later. Her folks hadn’t known about the contest; it hadn’t been in her plan to tell them at all. Her plan, such as it was, had been to amaze the crowd with her talent. To blow them so far away, it’d take weeks to bring ’em back down to earth. We heard your gal the other day, they’d gush to Mamma and Daddy at the Holloway feed store or the Napanee auction house or the gas station at Miller’s Point. They’d brag on Bets’ behalf. What a set of pipes she gots! Swear to God, that child’s part canary.
The plan, such as it was, had been to surprise them into being proud.
Once it was over, though, Bets knew she’d missed the mark. Knew it but wanted to be told she hadn’t done half bad. That she’d come close, which wasn’t nothing. That she’d thunk on her feet, even, changing songs at the last minute, choosing a tongue-twisting choir tune folks could tap their feet to, instead of a two minute lullaby. That she’d done something, hadn’t she just, never mind that she was only a kid.