Austin Downtown Arts Magazine

Fiction

Alive

by Marlo Bennett

Scientifically speaking, blood isn't any thicker than water. They're about the same. But you try telling that to my grandmother, who once had four generations of us living under her tiny roof -- and loved it.

My brother James was the first one I remember who tried to break away -- and the first to come home with his tail between his legs. Granny just smiled and put his bed back in my room -- carried it all by herself, too. The fact that he'd come back with a wife in tow didn't phase her one bit, but it sure got to me on the cold winter nights when I had to listen to James and Carrie "keep each other warm," as he put it. Having spent the past twelve years in a house where there were always a half-dozen stray dogs underfoot, I knew there was a bit more to it than that.

Granny didn't care too much for Carrie, but then she didn't have much use for women at all. Flighty, she called them, and shallow. And most of 'em wouldn't know a good day's work if it came up and bit them on the backside, she'd add with a half-laugh, half-frown that made it impossible to tell which emotion was real.

She was a good woman, though, and she gave Carrie plenty to do -- shell the peas, watch the baby, do the laundry. There was a laundromat just up the street, and a store where we could and occasionally did buy peas for less than the plants actually cost, but I suspect that Granny was trying to make Carrie into a "real woman," the kind who took care of men rather than needed one to take care of her. My mama, Granny's only daughter, lived with us too, but they'd long ago given up on trying to change each other. I guess Granny was looking to start over with Carrie.

Or maybe she was just mean. Maybe she liked watching Carrie's blue-white hands -- hands that have probably never lifted anything heavier than a hairbrush, Granny grumbled when she first met her -- turn red and crack when it was cold outside. Sometimes, if there was enough laundry to do, tiny hair-like rivers of blood would flow from Carrie's knuckles and palms.

But Carrie was a pretty good woman herself. She was a much more agreeable woman than my mama, may God forgive me for saying that, and she worked harder than anyone in the house except Granny. She certainly worked harder than James, who thought -- probably because Granny did -- that putting in three shifts a week at the plant meant he could spend the rest of his time sitting around playing blackjack and poker with our uncle. Sometimes Carrie would even bring their meals out to the porch if they didn't want to stop a game. I cried the first time I saw her do that, not because of what she did, but because James didn't bother to say "Thank you," or even to look up; he just grunted and glared at his cards. I never did understand what she saw in him, although they certainly did keep each other warm.

Carrie made me ashamed of what I was, and I started getting up hours before I had to be at school and trying to find some household chore to be doing when she woke up. I never did manage to get up before Granny, though, and she was always shooing me out of her way.

"That's what we're here for," she'd say. "You should be doing your lessons. I don't want anyone saying I didn't raise my boys right."

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About the only thing she would let me do was watch the baby -- my neice, the child of a sister who'd not only disgraced the family by having the kid but had then gotten herself killed in a car wreck last Thanksgiving. Granny wasn't very attached to the baby; she said she could already tell it was going to turn out to be just like its mother. Carrie fiercely loved it, though, and she spent the few breaks she got from her chores cuddling it and singing to it. The proudest moment of my whole year was the morning I finished dressing the baby and looked up to see Carrie watching me, a sweet smile glowing on her face.

I spent a lot of time trying to make her smile that way again. I helped her shell the peas, but she just looked sad when we got finished so quickly. I brought her flowers -- weeds, really -- that I plucked from the gravel on the roadside as I walked home from school, but she always had tears in her eyes the next day when they were brown and crumpled and she had to toss them out. Once I even tried to bring her a little baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, but I didn't know much about fragile animals then and I tucked it into my pocket to carry it home. After that I stopped trying to bring her things that were alive -- I never want to see someone's face turn that pale again.

Our next door neighbor, a woman of about my grandmother's age who had no kids, no dogs, and no pea plants, would often ask me to run down to the store for things like milk and bread. Granny grumbled, but I was always happy to do it. She would tap on our back door -- she was the only one who ever went around back -- and I would quit whatever I was doing, stand regally, and announce "Miss Jenkins needs me for an errand." Then I would dash out with all the grace of my twelve years, find my shoes, run to the store as if God himself was timing me, and run back in the same way. You see, Miss Jenkins let me keep the change if I got back quickly enough. (Or so she said. She never actually took it back.)

That fall I scrimped and saved all the change from those trips, even occasionally knocking on Miss Jenkins' door to see if I could convince her that she needed something, anything, that would require a trip down the road. She must've remembered what it was like to be young, because she could usually remember something she'd forgotten to add to her list.

I figured my problem was that I was always bringing Carrie things I found, which anyone could do. So on the twenty-second of December, I slunk away from my buddies as we shot out of the school. It was pretty easy to do; no one notices the absence of one body when they're full of the knowledge that they don't have to see a chalk board, a teacher, or a text book for two weeks -- an eternity to a twelve-year-old boy with the world at his feet. They ran off to play ball and I slunk into the local drugstore.

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Old Mr. Johnson glared at any kid who came into "his" drugstore, especially if he stayed for longer than it took to buy a pack of gum, or if he strayed from the area that held the gum, comic books, and baseball cards. So I spent what felt like hours, but was probably about fifteen minutes, trying to avoid his eyes and peering over the top of a comic into the aisle marked "Hair and Nails."

When I saw the glistening pink ribbons, I knew they were more beautiful than any flower I could pluck from the dirt. I had trouble breathing when I pictured them holding Carrie's golden hair out of her shining face, and I had to hold my breath as I pulled them anxiously from the rack and took them to the counter. Mr. Johnson grumbled and huffed, but he didn't refuse to sell me the ribbons. I must've checked my pocket twenty times on the way home.

I wrapped the ribbons in a tiny piece of tissue I'd slipped out of Granny's sewing basket and hid the package under my mattress, where I kept the collar of the dog that had died when I was six, the only picture I had of my father, who'd left when I was seven, and the first pea-pod I had ever seen Carrie remove the peas from. I don't think I slept a wink for two nights. I just laid awake picturing how Carrie's face would glow when she sat beside the Christmas tree and opened her present. How her eyes would change as looked from James to me and realized what she had -- and what she didn't. How her lips would twitch as she turned toward James, trying to figure out what to say.

On Christmas Eve, after we returned from church and everyone said goodnight, I crept into the barn to wait out the darkness. I knew I couldn't spend one more night in the same room with Carrie and those ribbons and not wake her up.

I waited until the sun had cleared the horizon -- which was the earliest Granny would let us get up on Christmas, even though she was up earlier than that every other day of the year -- and tripped over the barn ladder, over a pile of old rusting farm equipment, and even over my own feet as I dashed into the house. Ordinarily I would run in screaming, but this year I decided it would be more gentlemanly to stroll in and wake each family member individually. So I gasped to a halt at my door, took a deep breath to steady myself, walked in -- and stopped short. James was fast asleep, and his bed was ice cold.

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