JULY 1972
“Don’t joke about stuff like that,” I said. Jesse didn’t respond and I sat up. “Your mother’s really dead? When? What happened?”
She put a hand on my chest and pushed me down. “Shhh. Be quiet and listen, okay?”
I watched her face, a thousand questions forming. Before she could speak, I said, “I heard her talk to you. The first day I came to your house.”
She nodded. “She was okay then but she got worse. She’d been sickly before, but every time she bounced back. This time her cough got deeper and she couldn’t catch her breath.”
I tried to wrap my head around her words. What would I have done if my mother had died? I wouldn’t be holding it together like Jesse and I wouldn’t have kept it a secret. I also wouldn’t have been as alone as she was.
“Why didn’t she go to the hospital?”
“I wish she had. I wish I would have called somebody.”
“My dad would have given her a ride. Or my mom.”
“I know. Your family is good people. I wanted to get to a phone but Mama said no. She said people who go to the hospital die quicker.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, it’s what she believed. I doubt they could have done much for her, as far gone as she was. Maybe they could have helped her breathe. I don’t know. It was bad, Matt. There at the end it was awful.” She crumbled and put her hands over her face. This was another thing about Jesse—she rarely smiled or cried. Most of the time her face was like those pictures you see of people living in the dust bowl, stoic and hard.
I couldn’t think of anything to say except for “I’m so sorry, Jesse.”
She wiped her nose on her sleeve and stared at the sleeping bag, another tear running down her cheek. “We live and we die. Simple as that. It happened to my sister. Remember the day I bought the bike—the man talked about my sister?”
I nodded. It had been a question I wanted to ask but couldn’t.
“Her name was Eva. They think she got it at the pool.”
“Got what?”
“The polio. Daddy was still around. And they had her in the hospital in this big iron case. It took about every cent we had to treat her. Then they brought her home. She would smile with these stubby teeth. Daisy Grace looks like her. I don’t remember Eva, but I have pictures.”
“What happened?”
“She just slipped away. She’s buried out at the cemetery at the back of the road. I go talk to her sometimes. That’s one reason I wanted a bike, so I could go back there. It’s a long walk. Now I got more kin to talk with under the ground than above it. Ain’t that something?”
I was interested in Eva and Jesse’s mother and where her father might be. I was interested in everything about her, but I couldn’t process the information.
“When did it happen—with your mom?”
“You can’t tell nobody, Matt,” she said with urgency.
“I’m not going to,” I said, then wondered how I would ever keep that secret.
“A couple weeks ago. Before your birthday.”
“That’s why you brought Daisy Grace to the party.”
She nodded. “That’s why I’ve had to take her everywhere. I can’t leave her. She wanders.”
“Who’s with her now?”
“She’s sleeping. When she finally nods off, she sleeps so hard thunder don’t wake her. Kind of like Dickie without the log sawing. It’s really the only time I get to myself. I haven’t gotten much sleep since Mama passed. I see her walking through the woods. I hear her talking to me.”
“Your mother?” The thought gave me a shiver.
“You think that’s normal? You think the tiredness plays with your mind so you think you see her? Or do you think maybe there are ghosts? You know, dead people walking through the woods?”
I looked at the tree line and wondered what I’d do if I saw Jesse’s mother. The prospect frightened me more than the Mothman. “I don’t think people become ghosts, Jesse. Maybe you should talk with somebody.”
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“I mean a grown-up. Somebody you can trust, like a pastor. Do they have a counselor at the school?”
“I done told you, I can’t tell nobody.”
“Why not?”
“You got to believe me. Here’s what’ll happen. I tell somebody and first thing they’ll do is go to the authorities. Next thing you know, the law comes and takes Daisy Grace. She’ll get put in with relatives. And I ain’t having that.”
“If you don’t want your family to help, there’s someone at church who can.”
“You seen how church people treated Dickie and me.” She shook her head. “And if the government gets involved, they’ll split us up. I’ve seen it happen.”
I looked away and took a deep breath. I was not as adept at the spiritual life as my parents, but I lifted a prayer for wisdom, asking God to give me words.
“I been wondering how I’m going to do school,” Jesse said, “with Daisy Grace not even in kindygarten. If she was in school, I could probably work it out, but I’m up a creek.”
“You can’t drop out and stay home,” I said.
“That’s not the worst idea. But the truant officer would come knocking. I can’t have that.”
I sat up again but this time she couldn’t push me down. “Jesse, you have to tell. You need help. There are programs, there’s government assistance—”
“I don’t need no help.” She set her jaw. “I promised Mama I would care for Daisy. And when I make a promise, I keep it. She’s staying with me.”
I saw her resolve and decided to go a different direction. Then another thought crept in. A thought so morbid it surprised me.
“Jesse, if your mother is still in the house after two weeks—”
“You think I’m stupid? I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I know you can’t keep a body around like that.”
I decided to ignore the turnip truck reference and asked with equal amounts of horror and fascination, “What did you do?”
“Mama died of a night. She was coughing a lot and I tried to get Daisy to bed, but she put up a fuss. She wanted to sit with Mama and I told her no, that Mama was sick and she could sit with her in the morning.” Jesse stopped for a minute and looked away. “I wish I’d have let her say good-bye. Just let her sit there. She wasn’t hurting nobody.”
“You didn’t know what was going to happen.”
She nodded and wiped at another tear. “I got Daisy to bed and Mama went into this spell where she couldn’t catch her breath, big gobs of blood coming up. I would have run to the Blackwoods’—that’s how bad it was. But she grabbed hold of me and looked me right in the eyes. ‘You got to promise me you’ll take care of her. You got to promise you won’t let them take her.’ I told her they’d never get Daisy Grace. That seemed to calm her.
“She told me she loved me and then her eyes got kind of glassy. And then it was over. She just laid back, staring up at the ceiling, and I heard the rattle. I felt for a pulse and pumped on her chest like they do on Emergency! trying to get her to breathe, but there wasn’t no bringing her back.”
“What did you do then?”
“I just set there. I held her hand and told her we would be okay. Told her I loved her. Promised her I wouldn’t let them get Daisy Grace. And that Old Man Blackwood wouldn’t get the farm. She was afraid of that, too. After my daddy left, she signed the deed over to me. Had it notarized and everything. And I been looking, but I can’t find it.
“I probably said all that stuff more for myself than her. I want to believe I can do everything I promised.” She rolled onto her back and looked at the stars. “Then I closed her eyes. I seen them do that on TV. Put coins on her eyelids. And then I cleaned her up as best I could. It was a mess, I’ll tell you that. I always asked Mama if we could get carpet and I was glad right then we never did. Of course you can’t get blood out of the couch, but I wiped it down and put a pillow over it and told Daisy somebody spilled Kool-Aid.”
I had never seen Jesse’s mother or the inside of their house, but I imagined the couch and Jesse with a wet washcloth, on her hands and knees scrubbing, her dead mother there, her sister sleeping in a back room.
“I knowed I couldn’t call the funeral home. They’d report it. You have to promise me, now that you know. You can’t tell nobody, Matt. That would be the biggest hurt you could ever give me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Jesse. I want to help. And I won’t tell. But at some point somebody is going to find out.”
“No, they’re not. I got it figured. I just need help.”
I stared at the moon. The secret about my brother was the biggest problem in my life and it weighed terribly. Jesse’s problem felt like a thousand pounds and she was asking me to get on the other end and lift. I realized she was agreeing. She couldn’t do this alone, and she had brought me into the struggle.
“I knew if I was going to keep my promise to Mama, I had to act quick,” she continued. “I lit the lantern and found the shovel out back and went into the field. The ground was soft from the runoff of the rain and I started digging. It took most of the night to get down far enough so the critters wouldn’t come along and dig her up. I couldn’t let that happen. I hit rock a few feet down and that slowed me. But I used that later to put on top of her to protect her.”
I nodded, unable to do more.
“I wrapped her in her favorite quilt. Mama, she loved that old quilt because she said it came from the old country. Her own mama had used it and the smell of it reminded her of home. It’s funny what a smell like that can do, just take you back to something better.”
I think it was then, with Jesse telling her story, that I moved from pity to something deeper. I’d been attracted to her from the moment we met, drawn by her cocksure attitude, her quick wit, her toughness of skin and spirit, and the way she accepted me. Drawn by those blue eyes and the shape of her and the way she moved. There was something primal about the way she processed her life. I couldn’t help being pulled into her orbit, like the moon clinging by gravity to the Earth. Part of me wanted to be Jesse. Part of me knew I never would.
There are some people who take. They sap energy and make life about them. Other people leave you richer. They come at empty times and fill. Even in the loss, Jesse was giving, though I wasn’t sure what.
“Eva’s death nearly killed Mama,” Jesse said. “I don’t think she ever got over it. I was little, but I remember the life going out of her. I wonder if she might have met up with Eva.”
“So you do believe in heaven?”
She frowned at me. “Mama believed like you do, about God and all. That Jesus was waiting to welcome her. I guess, if she’s right, she’s an angel looking down on us right now. You think so?”
I knew enough about what the Bible said regarding heaven to know people don’t become angels. My father had discussed this with us after my grandfather died and someone said we had another angel looking down. But there are times for correcting a person’s theology and times for listening, and I didn’t think Jesse needed a lesson right then.
I looked up at the moon hanging above us. “It sounds like she’s in God’s presence. And that’s a real comfort.”
“Yeah. If there’s a heaven, Mama’s there. If God don’t accept her, he won’t accept none of us.”
I also hesitated to correct Jesse’s view of salvation. I wanted to say you don’t earn your way to heaven, but lying by her pool of pain wasn’t the place.
“She did everything she could to give us a good life after my daddy ran away.”
“Are you angry he wasn’t there to help?”
“Angry enough to spit. But if he’d been there, he’d have probably been drunk. So I’m glad he’s gone.”
“Why did he run away?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Maybe he was still upset about Eva dying.”
She put her hands behind her head. “That ain’t no excuse. If you got a wife and two little kids to take care of, you don’t run off.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t rightly know. He probably got killed somewhere in a card game or drank too much and fell onto the train tracks again. I asked Mama once why she married a man who never cared about her and she said he wasn’t always like that. I don’t believe it. I think people are the way they are and there’s no changing them, as much as you want to believe they can.”
“What about Daisy? How is she taking your mom’s death?”
“She don’t know.”
I closed my eyes, trying not to react too strongly.
“I couldn’t tell her. It would have broken her little heart. And she’d up and blab about it to everybody. I told her Mama went away for a spell and we have to get along without her. I told her to keep picking daisies until Mama gets back and we’ll put them in the jar by the front window so she can have them. I’ve been picking out the dead ones and throwing them away. And Daisy Grace just stands at the window lookin’ out. It’s pitiful. She’s called to me, ‘Here she comes!’ It just breaks your heart.”
Jesse shook the emotion away and put her head on my shoulder, moving closer, and I let her, my body tingling from her touch, her reliance on me.
I gave my handkerchief to her. It was something my mother said, that a gentleman always has a handkerchief, and I had carried it out of obligation for so long but never used it. Right then, under the stars on that hill behind my grandmother’s house, I gave thanks to the God of a persistent mother who had insisted on me being a gentleman.
Jesse blew her nose and put her head down in the crook of my arm, her tears falling on my T-shirt, and I felt grown-up, like the story she had told had called up strength I didn’t know I possessed.
“Why me?” I said.
“Why you, what?”
“Why did you choose to tell me and not somebody else?”
“Why not you?”
“You don’t know me like you know Dickie. And there has to be some girl you could tell.”
“People in this town compare themselves with my family to make themselves feel better. I can’t talk to nobody here.”
“Do you compare yourself to another family to make you feel better?”
“It’s a useless exercise. Some people look like they don’t have anything, but the truth is, they’re richer than folks who seem to have everything.”
“Not rich in stuff, though.”
“Right. Rich in the heart. People would feel sorry for me if they found out about my mama and they would bring food for a while. Then everybody goes on their way. But Daisy and I will always have each other. And we’ll remember our mama’s love. Some folks don’t have that.”
“But why me?”
“I don’t know. I reckon it was something I could tell about you.” She sat up and looked at the tree line while she talked. “Here you was, riding alone, coming from a far-off city, and you were the one to see that horse. Most people would have rode right by. She was probably stuck there a day or so before we got to her. But you crawled up there. And it was scary to come to my house, not knowing anybody and Carl barking. You didn’t run. I made my decision about what kind of feller you was right then. You’re the kind who won’t let anything stop you from doing good.”
Her words felt like water to a dying man in the desert.
“Okay, let’s think this through,” I said when she was quiet. “Somebody’s going to come looking for your mama. A relative. A bill collector. It’s bound to happen. She doesn’t show up for some appointment and people will ask questions.”
“I got that figured. She gets her Social Security check each month and I cash it over at the bank. They let me do that. So I keep paying bills. We own the property, so we don’t have no rent or whatever you call it.”
“Mortgage.”
“Right. Mama says all we have to do is keep up with the taxes. Now I don’t know how I’m going to do that, but they don’t come due till next summer.”
“What about school? What if a teacher wants to talk to your mom about something?”
She cursed. “Mama never went to them parent-teacher things. They’d probably faint if she showed up. I’ll just say she’s sick. Half the kids’ parents don’t come to those meetings.”
“And what about when Daisy Grace starts school? You going to handle all that?”
“I ain’t figured it all out yet. I’m going to take it a step at a time. And the first step is me going to school in the fall.”
“I still don’t understand why you won’t take help. There’s a verse in the Bible that says the truth will set you free.”
“The truth will get your sister taken away is what it’ll do. Sometimes you got to work your way around the truth.”
“But what would be so bad about you and Daisy going to live with a relative you trusted?”
“If my mama had any living kin, we’d go. But she don’t. The only people I got is my daddy’s side. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I let them take Daisy.”
“Why?”
“First of all, if Blackwood finds out my mama passed, he’ll get the land. He’s tried all kinds of tricks and she fought him tooth and nail. Second of all, they’ll take Daisy over to the Branches. We used to go there when I was younger. And my cousins are boys who . . . do things to you. There ain’t no little girl safe at that place. Do you understand?”
I swallowed hard and nodded, trying to take in what she had just revealed.
“I can fend for myself but Daisy can’t. She’s not strong enough. I got to figure out a way to stay at my house.”
“But what if there was a way to keep Daisy safe and keep you two together?”
She stood so fast it took my breath away. “If you’re gonna sit there and argue me about something I know, then you ain’t helpin’.”
“Sit down,” I said, holding up my hands for calm. “This is just like the horse. You’ve got barbed wire wrapped around your leg and we’re trying to figure a way out without somebody bleeding to death.”
I regretted using that analogy after what she’d gone through with her mother, but the words calmed her and she sat.
I took a deep breath. “Okay. You can get by the rest of the summer. I can help. But when school starts, it’s a new ballgame. We have to have an adult.”
“I told you—”
“Just listen. We have to pool resources. We bring Dickie in, for instance.”
“No, Dickie can’t keep a secret. Plus, if you and I can keep it from Dickie, we can keep it from anybody.”
I thought about it for a moment and something percolated deep inside. Something scary to think and say, but I did. “What do I get out of the deal?”
She furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”
“You haggled with the guy over the bike. I’m haggling with you over this.”
“Are you serious?”
“Look, if I’m going to put my neck on the line, if I have to keep this from my parents and everybody who would want to know about it and to help, I want to know what’s in it for me.”
Jesse’s face fell. “I never thought you’d stoop that low.”
“It’s not stooping. It’s just the way things work. You do something for me, I do something for you.”
“What do you want?”
I wasn’t prepared for the question, partly because I had been taught that wanting was forbidden. I couldn’t express my desire to stay in Pittsburgh because that was selfish. I couldn’t even want my brother back or talk about him because of all that had happened. I had lived beating down the feeling of wanting anything. But Jesse’s question opened a door and soon an impetuous thought waltzed through my mind. It was meant to be funny, and coming on the heels of her admission, it was sophomoric. But when you’ve just turned fourteen, you tend to blurt whatever comes to mind, whether it makes sense or not.
“Marry me,” I said.
She shook her head like a dog with a tick in its ear. “Say what?”
“Not now. Just promise that someday you’ll marry me.”
A look came over her face like she had just seen the Mothman and her mother playing Rook on a tree stump. “Wouldn’t that be something?” she said. “Somebody on my side of the tracks marrying somebody on your side.”
“What do you say?”
She shook her head again like it was so far out of the realm of possibility she couldn’t consider it. Then she set her jaw. “All right, then. I’ll marry you someday.”
“You gotta promise,” I said.
She dipped her head with a frown. “Tell you what, Matt. You keep my secret and help me with Daisy Grace, let her keep picking daisies and bringing them home, and one of these days I’ll say, ‘I do.’”
“Cross your heart and hope to die,” I said.
“Stop it.”
“No. If you want my help, you have to do it.”
She thought a moment, frowned again, then raised her hand and with fingers crossed swished them across her chest. “There. Satisfied?”
I spit in my hand and held it out. She shook with me, stood, and dusted off her shorts.
“You’re disturbed, you know that?” she said.
“Yeah, but a promise is a promise, Jesse. I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll plan. School will start before you know it.”
“Come to the house,” she said.
She walked down the hill into the darkness. I spent the rest of the night wishing that instead of spitting in my hand I had kissed her.