Chapter 5: The Sack and the Doorway

She was still against the kitchen wall when they came into the yard.

“Grandma fell.”

“She’s got blood on her. There’s blood on her head.”

Feet moving in a circle out there, not settling. “We can’t lift her.” That was the little one, up high, the way she went when she was scared. “Bobbie. Bobbie, we can’t lift her.”

Nell didn’t move. Through the crack between the door and the frame she could see the pump and the corner of the shed and the two girls’ backs bent down over something the door wouldn’t let her see.

“Go get Dad.”

“He won’t come.”

“He’ll come if it’s Grandma.”

Then the feet went out, and the wire gate dragged its bottom over the dirt and clicked up over the worn place, and after that there was nothing out there but the hens.

She counted a hundred in the quiet. Then she came out from behind the door.

The old woman was lying on her side along the fence, at the low spot where the water stood black in the shade all year, one hand in it. Her face was turned away. The back of her head was wet, and it had run down and gone dark in the collar of her dress. She was making a sound, not words. Nell listened to it long enough to know it wasn’t going to turn into words, and then she stopped listening to it.

The front room was on the other side of the house from the yard, and the house was empty the way it was empty in the middle of a morning. Nell went to the place she had been walking toward when the gate went. She knew what was there before her hand got to it, the way she knew the pump and the gate and the worn spot in the wire, and she left it wrapped. She carried it out to the kitchen, took the sack off its nail by the door, and set it in the bottom.

Nobody was ever going to put that on her. She was the one who did what she was told and got knocked down for it. But being seen cost her nothing, and she meant to be seen.

She went out the back, so she came on the lane above the house instead of through the yard.

Any other morning she’d have gone up the hill for hog greens and been back before the heat. Today she stayed down where the road was and cut along the ditch by the county road, where the grass was thin and everybody went by, and she cut it sloppy — whole handfuls, roots and dirt with them, nothing a hog was going to thank her for.

A truck came up the road and she stood straight with the sack under her arm until it had gone past. The man driving lifted two fingers off the wheel without turning his head. That was one.

Then the woman at the third house was out with a line of wash, and Nell said good morning and the woman said good morning back and asked if she thought it would rain. That was two.

She was nearly home when she heard them, before she even got to the corner where the lane met the road. Two women with their arms folded, not troubling to keep their voices down.

“…at it again over there.”

“What now?”

“Ida Vance went down in the yard and cracked her head open. Roy’s telling it the middle girl did it. Says he’s going to beat her till she can’t stand up.”

“Bobbie? That one hasn’t got the nerve. Somebody put her up to it.”

“Faye, then.”

“Faye.”

Nell walked on past them. They went quiet when they saw her and picked it up again behind her, and she didn’t need the rest of it.

Bobbie hadn’t touched that old woman. Nell knew that better than anybody alive.

She came in the gate and Vern already had the stick up.

It was a piece out of the harness shed, thicker through than Bobbie’s arm, and Nell did the arithmetic on where it would go if it landed.

Darlene had Bobbie back against her with both arms around her, crying so hard she had to stop in the middle to get the air. “She’s twelve years old. How’s she going to knock an old woman down? Look at her, Vern. Look at her.”

“It doesn’t matter whether she pushed her or not.” Vern said it the way he said everything, like there was a porch full of people listening, and there was. “The old woman was in her care and she was running the yard instead. Somebody’s got to answer for it, or the next one won’t learn either.”

“Roy,” Darlene said. “Roy. Say something to him.”

Roy was down on his heels at the wall with a cigarette between two fingers, which was where he did his best work. He stayed down.

“Vern’s right,” he said. “You don’t let a sapling grow crooked. She’s got to learn.” And then, when Darlene didn’t move out of the way: “Let him get on with it.”

Bobbie said into Darlene’s arm, “I didn’t touch her.” Nobody answered it.

Frankie was crying, not the way Darlene was crying but the way a little kid cries when it hasn’t figured out yet that nobody is listening. “We didn’t push her. We didn’t. When we came in the gate she was already down, she was already lying there—“

Frankie was telling the truth. Nobody in that yard had any use for it.

Vern got Darlene by the arm and pulled, and Bobbie came loose, and the stick went up over his shoulder.

Darlene screamed and went at him and got her body over the girl. The stick came down on her instead.

She went down in the dirt and stayed down. Blood came up through the gray cloth over her shoulder, slow, and then it kept coming and made a line down her sleeve.

Nell was standing inside the gate with the sack under her arm and one hand on the wire. She had not moved.

“Dad,” she said. “Are you going to stand there while he beats my mother to death?”

Roy came up off the wall. He hadn’t got up for the crying, or for the screaming, or for the sound the stick made, and Nell marked that down, because it was going to be worth something.

“What do you know about it?” he said. “You’re a girl.”

Then he looked at Darlene in the dirt and found the thing to say about her. “Nobody told her to get in front of it. She had to go and do that her own self.”

Vern had both hands on the stick now, leaning on it like a man finished with a job.

“Darlene,” he said, friendly. “You didn’t keep an eye on Mom and you didn’t teach that girl to mind. So this—“ he tipped the stick down toward her shoulder—“counts against that. Call it paid.”

Vern was her father’s brother. He wasn’t thirty yet, and the strength in this house was his. She couldn’t take him.

She set the sack against the fence and knelt down by her mother.

Darlene’s eyes were open and going around and landing nowhere. Her shoulder was wrong. The arm lay out from under her in the dust at an angle an arm doesn’t take, and when Nell put two fingers on her hand her mother pulled a breath in through her teeth and said something that wasn’t a word.

Her own hand came away wet.

“Bobbie. Frankie. Sit with her. Don’t move her, and don’t let anybody else move her.”

She stood up and got the sack off the ground with her other hand.

“I’m going for the doctor.”

“I said get back here.” Roy was in front of her with his chin up. “There’s no money in this house for a doctor. Wash that off.” He tipped his chin at her hand. “Put some dirt on the shoulder.”

Nell went around him without running, in case running turned into something a man had to stop. Then she was through the gate, and then she ran.

She went up the road with her hand held out from her side so she wouldn’t wipe it on her skirt.