The Beginning

The year Emma was five fingers old, she spent most of her waking hours under her mother’s bed. She would have remained there at night as well had Pa not wrestled her out. He would lie on his stomach, grab an arm or a leg and pull until her fingers, curled tightly around the steel springs, could no longer bear the pain of holding on.

But for sleeping, eating and peeing, the twig-boned girl lived under her mamma’s bed among the dust motes she came to pretend were her pet mice. There were plenty of real mice in that hovel of a house but none her mother allowed her to play with. Her pa set traps for them; and sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would hear the steel jaws clap shut accompanied by small, sorrowful shrieks.

“Why do you kill them, Pa,” she asked. “They can’t do us any harm being so small aside of us.”

“They get into the food,” was his answer—a five-word sentence being among the longest Pa ever spoke.

But Emma had wondered how much a critter that tiny could eat anyway? Not enough to make a difference, she reckoned. She didn’t know then that mice carry diseases. She knew only that she liked them. Pa wouldn't allow her to have a pet.

"Most animals are nasty, dirty creatures," he said, "unless they've been cleaned and gutted."

On holiday, he shot cats in the field for sport, not understanding the connection between the ever increasing rodent population and the dwindling census of cats. He left the cat carcasses to rot in the fields, but the gray squirrel and rabbit he brought home for mother to clean and cook. On those nights, the girl picked at her food, viewing squirrel and rabbit and anything else with fur as potential pets. She did not possess the same affection for creatures with feather or fin. Those she ate. Using roofing nails, Pa hammered the gutted pelts to the wall of the mudroom like a row of headless trophies; and Emma averted her eyes whenever she passed by.

That year, the pretend mice under Mamma's bed kindled the girl's imagination. In a stupor of half sleep, she saw a ball of dust rise to its haunches and twitch its nose. She smiled and gave it a name, made it the hero of a short story she made up in her head. The story grew and grew until it was volumes long. This is how she passed the time the year she plucked the springs until blisters and then knobs hard as upholstery tacks toughened the ends of her fingers.

By sheer repetition, she became enslaved by the mantra of the discordant twanging the way other children grow obsessive about avoiding the cracks in sidewalks for fear of breaking their mother’s back. She believed as long as she continued to strum the springs, as long as she served sentry beneath her mother’s frail body, she could will her to go on living. And even if there was no real sorcery to the ritual, the steady metronome was comforting somehow, and it seemed to the girl that her mamma’s breathing grew less labored and more regular.

While other children grew excited as the first day of school approached, Emma dreaded it. For her, kindergarten meant she couldn't attend sentry below her mother from 12:30 to 3:30 each afternoon. Would Mamma remember to breathe without the cadence of the springs to urge her on? Emma considered telling Pa’s sister Aunt Trudy about the magic springs. She cared for Mamma everyday until Pa got home from the mines.

But Emma realized portly Trudy would never fit under Mamma’s bed. She imagined her getting trapped there and Pa having to hoist up the bed with his car jack to get her out. The very thought of Aunt Trudy’s belly and puckered backside wedged between the springs and floor made Emma giggle, and she clapped her hands over her mouth reflexively. Pa distained laughter after Mamma had fallen ill. But then Pa was pretty much against laughter in general.

“Is that you, Emma? Are you playing me a tune again?” Mamma asked one morning, dropping a blue, mottled hand from the side of the bed. “You should be outside getting some fresh air,” she said, and the hand punctuated her meaning. “It isn't necessary for you to be with me every second, you know.”

Pa said the cancer had invaded Mamma’s lungs, and Emma imagined heinous little soldier bugs attacking her insides--plunging flags of victory in soft, pink tissue. In her dreams, the bugs smoked fat, ugly cigars and flicked dirty ashes on the floor of Mamma's stomach. (Pa smoked cigars.) On those nights, Emma woke up with a seering fire in her belly--a pain so bad it folded her. When she could stand again, she'd run to Mamma's room, flick on the light, grab the mirror on the dresser and hold it to her mouth to see if she was still breathing.

“Will you get me a glass of water, Dear?” her mamma asked her. “I’m so thirsty. It feels like there's a fur coat at the back of my throat, like maybe I swallowed a squirrel."

Mamma ate less than the mice during the last weeks of her illness. She had no appetite, and swallowing was a labor. The doctor said towards the end, her stomach would bloat and there'd be a foul odor. Emma imagined a zeppelin-sized mother lying on the bed belching sewer gas.

Emma broke free from the spell of the springs and slithered from beneath the bed. Anemic, molting mice rode the back of her blond head as she raced to the kitchen sink. She stood on the balls of her feet and turned on the faucet, holding the glass below the cool stream of water. When the glass was nearly full, Pa slammed through the back door banging his metal lunch bucket on a small table in the mudroom. Emma's hand began to tremble, and the glass crashed to the bottom of the sink spewing shards and splinters over the edge.

She winced, locked her knees and braced herself for the onslaught of Pa’s hand, which was the size of a snapper and quicker than a mountain snake. Later she would run her fingers over the welts palpable as a mountain range on a relief map. But Pa did not strike her on that day. On that day, Aunt Trudy, who'd been pinning a row of socks to the clothes line in the backyard, heard the glass shatter and hurried to the kitchen.

“Don’t just stand there looking foolish,” she’d scolded Emma. “Go run your pa a hot bath.

“Mamma wants water,” said Emma.

“I’ll get her water after I clean this mess. Now scoot!"

She scratched her fulsome belly and surveyed the slivers of glass that littered the floor like silver minnows.

“Such a clumsy child,” she said as she reached for the broom.

“Get her water first,” pleaded Emma her own hand clutching the broom as well, yanking it from Aunt Trudy with a vengeance the woman didn’t know the child had. “She needs it real bad. Says she’s got a whole squirrel in her throat, maybe even a porcupine.”

“All right, all right,“ Aunt Trudy waved her aside. “Now do as you’re told. Run your pa's bath. Can’t you see he’s exhausted?"

Aunt Trudy was Pa’s older sister, his only sibling. She maintained Mamma’s illness was hardest on Pa. He’d been the one that had taken her to the doctor when her foot swelled. He’d been the one to finally break the news to her and the rest about the black dot on her ankle.

Pa said what a twist of fate it was that he came home from the mines each day covered with black soot enough to bury him only to have Mamma pronounced incurable from a single, black freckle on her ankle—a dot no bigger than a radish seed. The doctor called it malignant melanoma. Even the name of Mamma’s illness was ugly.

“It’s your pa who’ll suffer most when she’s gone,” Aunt Trudy said to Emma and Irene to explain away his sudden fits. “Why you girls will grow up, get married too young like your sister Rose, have a whole flock of kids and barely recall how your Mamma looked. And your pa, he’ll be a lonely old man living a hermit’s life, not eating right, not taking care himself. You’ll desert him, hardly ever pay him the time of day. I know how it goes.”

Emma listened to these words and felt guilty ahead of time. She ran Pa’s bath like Aunt Trudy asked. Running Pa’s bath was something Mamma used to do, and she felt guilty somehow for doing it in Mamma’s stead. It was like saying Mamma was useless, or worse, already dead.

Most of the chores fell to Emma now. Her next oldest sister Irene waitressed all day at a greasy spoon, and her oldest sister Rose was gone for good. She got knocked up (Pa’s words) in high school and married young. When Pa found out she was pregnant, he called her lots of names Emma would have been slapped for saying. He said it was lucky Rose was with child, or he’d have slammed her to the moon.

"I got principles," he said. "I ain't never struck at women with child, and I'm not about to start now." And it was true that after Mamma fell ill, he never laid a hand on her.

“Turn your back,” Pa said to Emma when he entered the bathroom. “I’m not decent.”

She turned her back but not quickly enough to miss a glimpse of his peeter. It bobbed ahead of him as he walked, it’s mauve skullcap winking at her behind the towel. He lowered his bulk into the tub, and the water sloshed over the sides. Emma took the rag and suds it with the bar of soap that bobbed like a white raft over his belly. Then she scrubbed his back.

“Get all that black soot off me,” he said. “I want to be smelling like a rose when I kiss your Mamma hello today.”

Up until a few weeks ago, Pa would go into Mamma's room still wrapped in a towel after his bath, close the door behind him and yell for Aunt Trudy to hold dinner. Sometimes he’d forget that Emma was under the bed and the steel springs would bong her on the nose. And between the twanging and bonging, Emma would hear her father moan.... and her mother cry.

When Emma finished scrubbing Pa’s back, she handed the washcoth to him and left the room so he could wash his privates. Then he dressed and walked across the wood-planked floor to Mamma's room. He bent to kiss her on the mouth and then stopped abruptly. He placed a kiss on her closed eyelids instead and pulled the quilt to just below her chin.

Emma standing outside the door saw the glass of water Aunt Trudy brought earlier. It stood untouched on the small table at the side of Mamma’s bed. She tried to get a closer look at Mamma, but Pa waved them away. He kissed Mamma again, this time softly on the forehead and walked out of the room closing the door behind him. The hinges of the door growled like a lion, but Mamma did not wake up.

Chapter Two

In the second grade, Emma met the girl that would impact her life more than any other being on the earth. On that day, the teacher seated the new girl in the desk across the aisle from Emma who fell in love with her the minute she saw her. She was instantly in awe of her auburn hair and had to resist an impulse to reach over and stroke it. She pinched her hands between her knees to make them obey.

Even Mamma hadn’t had such beautiful hair, which Emma only remembered now the way it was when Mamma was the sickest--thin and dry as tassels on over-ripened field corn. Before that Pa said it was nearly as bright as a maple leaf in autumn. Emma couldn’t remember back that far.

Through the school window the sun’s fingers played with the new girl’s hair coaxing out hues of amber and copper nearly as brilliant as a newly minted penny. It made Emma ashamed of her own hair, pale and dull as bleached wheat, short and straight as dry pine needles, just like Pa’s.

It was the girl’s unabashed physical beauty that captured Emma's heart. It would be her unabashed passion for life, her indomitable spirit that would make her a life-long friend, the missing ingredient, the Technicolor in Emma’s monochromatic existence. Her name was Sharlee.

She was without question the prettiest girl Emma had ever seen. Had Emma met her during puberty, she might have avoided her, chosen another best friend knowing the comparison people were bound to make when they stood side by side. But they met and became fast friends in the second grade, years before either of them would seriously size each other up as rivals for boys’ attentions.

Emma stared at her now but this time not at her hair. Mrs. Palin was writing sentences in long hand on the chalkboard for the class to copy. Her penmanship was delicate and precise like fancy stitches on an embroidered pillowslip.

She turned from the board to face the children. “I’ve always said cursive writing is a mirror to the soul. If it is neat and precise, it reflects an orderly mind and a pure soul. If it is ragged and unclear, well it reflects another thing altogether. The mastery of Zaner Bloser is as important as learning one’s number tables. I myself, have always received praise for my penmanship.”

The children stared at the letters they’d written thus far on their wide-lined paper, and most of them decided their souls were impure and their minds disorderly. Sharlee studied the board, a wrinkle of consternation between her eyes as she tried to duplicate the teacher’s beautiful script. And as she wrote, Emma stared at the girl’s hands. For the first time she noticed how they trembled, how her sentences resembled a barbed wire fence full of sharp, angry points, dangerous peaks and valleys. And then it occurred to Emma that the girl wasn’t writing so much as she was stabbing at her paper.

And then Emma noticed the girl’s tears. They scurried down her cheeks like transparent beetles leaping from her small round chin to the flimsy beige paper until there were black smudges and soggy holes along the barbed wire fence. Emma figured out that this was the girl everyone had been jawing talking about.

When the recess bell rang, Sharlee bolted from the room crumbling the sheet of paper in her hand and tossing it on the floor. Emma found her outside, standing alone just around the corner of the school building choking the fingers that couldn’t hold a pencil steady enough to form a simple cursive ‘c’ or ‘l’ or ‘e’. The front of her drab yellow dress was damp with tears, her eyes red and swollen, her nose so stuffed up from crying the girl could barely breathe. Emma remembered she hadn’t cried at Mamma's funeral, and, how it wasn’t until weeks afterward, that the grief spilled out in buckets all night long.

Emma touched the girl's arm softly, and the girl startled.

“I’m real sorrowful about your daddy, how he got killed in that mine accident. I know how you must be sufferin’ inside."

The girl with the plugged-up nose nodded. It was all she could manage.

“Sometimes it just all comes pouring out of a sudden. Happens at the oddest times when it seems you haven’t even been thinking about it. Happens that way to me.” She said all this in her slow, measured way of speaking.

The girl wiped the strings of snot with the back of her arm and brought Emma’s face into focus through her tears.

“They found him with his own pick ax stuck in his heart,” she finally managed to say.

“Is that why you stab at your paper so,” said Emma. “Cause you’re mad like I was when my mamma died.”

“Your Mamma died?”

“A year ago. You got hair almost just like hers only prettier even,” she said as she stroked Sharlee’s hair.

“What did your mamma die from? Was it an accident?”

“No,” answered Emma. “She was sick.”

“What kind of sickness was it?”

“Cancer. I was supposed to bring her water, and I didn’t bring it soon enough. She died then,” She saw in her mind’s eye the full glass of water sitting untouched next to the bed where Mamma laid.

“She died cause you didn’t bring her water?” Sharlee said her eyes wide like doorknobs. “You poor thing, you must feel a heap remorseful, causing your mamma to die like that!”

“No,” said Emma shaking her head violently now as though to throw off her own guilt. “Aunt Trudy says it was just a coincidence. She said it didn’t have anything to do with the water. Pa said it was her time. He said people have something to say about the timing of their death. He knew all through supper she was dead and never said a word.

“If you want to, you can come by after school and see the bed she died in,” Emma continued. “Pa ain’t moved a thing in the room. He ain’t even changed the sheets on the bed.”

“Is your ma still in it?” Sharlee’s eyes widened further, bulged out like shooter marbles.

“Not her body. But Pa says her soul and spirit are still there. That’s why he won’t allow anyone in that room. But I can show it to you, cause he won’t be home yet."

---

Emma opened the door to her mamma’s room and the hinges whined. She stood so the toes of her shoes stopped just short of the threshold. Pa had forbade her to set foot in the room. She assumed Sharlee would follow her lead without knowing Pa’s rule, but she brushed past Emma and began to explore the room. When she reached for Mamma’s hairbrush on the small white vanity with the oval mirror, Emma yelled at her.

“Don’t touch anything. Pa knows when something’s been moved ever so slightly. He has the whole contents of this room memorized like his own face in the mirror. Once I accidentally kicked Mamma’s slippers out of line, and when he saw what I’d done he asked how I thought Mamma was going to find them when she got out of bed. He said just because we can’t see her doesn’t mean she isn’t here. Do you believe in ghosts?”

Sharlee put the hairbrush precisely where she'd found it next to Mamma’s small bottle of Ashes of Roses toilette water.

“When my pa was still of this earth, he told me ghosts are the souls of people who’ve passed on and want to be with Jesus. He says they hang around like a bad smell in the air.”

The statement made Emma stop and sniff, and she thought she noticed a dank, thick odor mingled with the sweet fragrance of fading roses. She decided Mamma’s ghost was hovering about her at that very instant and drew a breath so quickly it made her cough.

“Why do they hang about?” said Emma when she swallowed past the logjam in her throat.

“Pa said they want to leave but can’t cause someone still livin’ is clutchin’ onto them too tight. Their souls are forced to hang around on earth until the person is willing to let them go. He told me this when I'd spied my grandmother’s ghost lolling about in the corner of my room. I’d been sleeping every night since she’d died with her housedress bunched up at my nose. When I finally gave the dress to the Salvation Army, the apparition disappeared."

“So you think my mamma’s ghost is hanging around here ‘cause someone still livin’ refuses to let go?”

“Probly.”

“Someone like Pa and me?”

“Who else would it be?”

Emma thought about her mamma needing to bathe in the sweet, warm light of Jesus but stuck in this stuffy room with only one window and the curtain drawn against the sun. She looked over at Mamma’s bed. She could almost imagine her still propped against the pillow. She thought about her mamma’s ghost not in pain from the cancer any more but impatient to be with God.

“How can I let Mamma know it’s okay to leave? If I tell her, will she hear me?” She scanned the room as though Mamma could be almost anywhere.

“It’s a sin to try to contact the spirit world. A grave sin. But I imagine if you did something to show your Mamma she could leave, she might understand your meaning.”

Even before she’d said this, Sharlee had formulated a plan. She looked at the bed with the neatly folded-down covers and the pillow propped up against the headboard. She slipped off her shoes so she stood in her dingy, white socks worn thin at the heels. She’d always wanted to jump on a bed with honest-to-goodness steel springs under its top mattress.

She climbed without compunction on the sheets and blankets and began to hop and jump from one foot to the other like a jackrabbit drunk on corn whiskey. She accomplished this with such tenacity; it was easy for Emma to believe she was doing the thing that needed to be done. Sharlee was laughing so hard, Emma worried she might wet herself.

She climbed on the bed with Sharlee. They joined hands and giggled so hard, Emma had to let go of Sharlee’s hand so she could pinch her privates to keep the water from running out. They bounced in a circle until the springs screeched like a flock of geese. Pa could hear them even before he reached the front steps.

He entered the small clapboard house without being heard. He marched to Mamma's room, and the bulk of his frame clogged the doorway. The fire in his eyes and the snarl of his lips made Sharlee draw in a frightful breath. She froze on the landing of a jump and the color drained from her face. Emma knew without looking what Sharlee’s eyes had found.

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