“I hit all the notes, got all the words,” Bets had said. Standing stiff in her bedroom doorway, she’d admitted failure to her mother’s back. High up on a barstool, Mamma was hanging wallpaper she’d got on clearance: Christmas green spattered with cream-colored hearts. Bets had wanted navy, plain and dark and classy. Mamma had said it was too boring. Too mature. Too expensive. It was hearts or Holly Hobbie. Her choice.
“Everyone was right kind. Clapping and whistling like that.” Bets had paused, grasping. “Still, I wish I’d done the other song.”
“Guess you should’ve practiced more,” Mamma had said, without so much as a glance over her shoulder. Cocking her head, she ran her palms over the strip she’d just hung, checking for bubbles. Glue smacked underneath each blister she’d found. The paper bulged, resisting each poke, each prod.
“Hand me a pin,” Mamma had said.
The hole’s waist-deep when Bets breaks for water and a piece of cold chicken. She swigs out of a dented plastic bottle. Gnaws fried flesh straight from the bone. Sweat’s collecting above her lip, trickling down her temples and back, so she unzips her jacket and lets the breeze whisk the salt from her skin. Better that, she thinks, than going underhill like a living salt-lick. Practically begging ghosts to rasp their dry tongues across her damp places when, really, she’d rather they didn’t.
Nanna Teenie has only done it the once, drawling a long cow-slurp across the cheek, after Bets had crawled into her grave that long-ago Sunday, determined to sing that goddamn tune from start to finish. Never said nothing, did Nan, but neither did she discourage. As a rule, she nodded way more than ever she shook that veiled head of hers. Like Mamma, she wasn’t all that keen on hugging, but showed affection in other ways. She paid attention when Bets read aloud from her library books: atlases, mostly; outdated encyclopedias; dictionaries, so she’ll know what’s what. While Bets twanged through the entries, Nanna Tee placed a cold hand atop her warm one, squeezing support. And just that once, licking.
“Thanks, Nan,” Bets had said, always meaning it, even while inching away. Far as she’s concerned, it was a lucky bolt of storm-light that had cracked the middle mound’s shell. A garden trowel Bets had wielded just so built on that god’s work, widening a gap between the metal struts and scaffolding that held the burial chamber up, keeping the space below clear if not always dry. Most times Bets visited Nanna Tee—dropping through dirt, then dank air, then a hole torn in the soft-top of a ’57 Buick—she wound up shivering on the car’s oversized front seat, wet as clay.
Stuck behind the wheel of her finned casket, the old revenant really listens. Teenie doesn’t agree with Bets just for the sake of it, but doesn’t patronize. She’s there for Bets, body and spirit. She’s present.
She understands.
Mamma pretended not to know about the tunnel Bets had followed into her grandmother’s chamber, nor the tarp she’d taken from the garage to cover it. She and Daddy never did care much what Bets did with her time, so long as she kept to herself, and kept that sameself here. After seventeen years under their roof, she’s still cheaper than hiring seasonal labor and, in the long run, easier to manage. Though Winston and Queenie once thought it grand indeed, their farm’s really too small to support many hands; the annual yield’s not worth the price of extra mouths nor fancy machinery to replace ’em. A full pantry come winter relies on Bets helping with the spring planting, the harvest come fall. If she chooses to burrow into the dead lands in between, so be it. No reason the girl shouldn’t always be covered in dirt.
Whenever Daddy was away dusting crops, doors were best kept closed at their place. Eyes lowered. Sketchpads held close to the chest. Notebooks scribbled in at night, under cover. Songs breathed, not even hummed. Unseen, unheard, Bets listened while Mamma grumbled on the phone about the sorry state of her house. Her marriage. Her life.
Sure as sunrise, the Aunties would come over next morning, armed with bottles and casks, to float Mamma out of her funk. They’d have Dolly on the turntable, a glass in each hand, smokes burning between chapped lips. The lot of ’em hooting and hollering, having such fun, it never failed to entice Bets into the living room. Soon as she peeped round the jamb, they’d call her in, put her on the spot, ask after her drawings or beg for a ditty, using words like clever and perceptive and dark-horse when she’d finally relent and pass her rough pictures round. Clutching her calico skirt, she’d creep in closer, passing the couch and coffee table, the uncomfortable rocker, and step up on the cold stone hearth to watch the hens peck and cackle. Searching for falsehoods in their flattery. Condescension in their comments. Finding none.
When they put the sketches aside, Bets saw their honesty, generous and plain. They wanted nothing from her but delight, maybe a song. Puffed as a robin, she’d sing ’til her face was pinker than theirs.
“Enough showing off,” Mamma always snapped too soon, shooing Bets out.
“Let her stay, Gayle,” said the Aunties, but by then Bets was already gone. Back down the hall, back to her books and paints. Back on her lonesome.
The cinder shovel’s small but sturdy, the worn handle a good fit for Bets’ grip. The blade’s got some new notches and the shaft is bending, but it’s holding up, keeping pace. Shunt, spill, shunt, spill, shunt, spill. Bets grunts as she digs, conserves energy by tipping the dirt gently beside her instead of tossing it like a stupid cartoon character. Folk who don’t turn soil for a living have some highfalutin notions about work like this—suburbanites and city slickers pay top dollar to visit hobby farms, to crouch in their chinos and pull weeds for a spell, to shove their manicured hands in manure for a weekend and call it a Zen experience. Being in the moment. Focusing on the now.
Horseshit, Bets thinks, shunting, spilling. There’s nothing relaxing about the pain in her lower back, the crick in her neck, the afternoon sunlight glaring off the dregs of water left in her bottle. With every spadeful, she’s time-traveling. Imagining herself elsewhere. The past. The future. Anywhere but the present.
Anywhere but here.
There had to be someplace to start, she’d thought. Some first step she could take. Some way to catch a break.
“Maybe I could get a gig at the Sugar Spoon,” Bets had suggested after dinner one night, when Mamma was mellowing on the couch with a cigarette and a bit of cross-stitch. There’d been an ad in the paper the day before, a local ragtime band looking for backup vocalists. Black and white, no pictures, the opportunity had been crammed in a few lines of text, printed between a psalm and a call for pageant judges.
She’d run the idea past Nanna Teenie that morning; the old ghost had nodded, squeezed, flapped her mouth enthusiastically. No harm in trying, Bets believed Nan’d said. So she’d dusted off the grave-dirt, gussied herself up, gone down to the saloon and auditioned before she could overthink herself out of doing it.
This time Bets performed the song she’d intended. Start to finish. And she’d done all right, maybe more than all right, her voice trembling only when she wanted. They said they’d call her tonight or tomorrow.
They’d smiled and said she was good.
Every time the phone rang, her belly squirmed.
“I hear they might be looking for singers,” Bets had said, aiming for aloof, managing something more like half-contained fidget. Now that she’d already gone and done it, it was safer to broach the topic. Mamma couldn’t ruin it after the fact. “Maybe I could try out,” she said.