A Gracious Plenty

  Also by Sheri Reynolds

  BITTERROOT LANDING

  THE RAPTURE OF CANAAN

  Copyright © 1997 by Sheri Reynolds

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by THREE RIVERS PRESS, New York, New York. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland www.randomhouse.com

  THREE RIVERS PRESS is a registered trademark and the Three Rivers Press colophon is a trademark of Random House Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reynolds, Sheri.

  A gracious plenty / by Sheri Reynolds. 1st ed.

  I. Title.

  PS3568.E8975G72 1997

  813′.54 dc21 97-21544

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78890-0

  v3.1

  For Amy Liann Tudor

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my buddies—Amy Tudor, Allyson Rainer, Glen Turner, Dave Hendrickson, Lori Hamilton, Leaf Seligman, and Elizabeth Mills—for editorial advice, support, and friendship.

  Thanks to Grandma Mary, Angeline, Aunt Dora, and Uncle James for teaching me about burns.

  Thanks to my sweet family—to my Mamma, Daddy, Grandma, Genie, Chris, Caroline, Sammie, Jimmy, Paul, Mary Beth, Granny Gladys, Robert, Wanda, Glenn, Michelle, Julianne, and Granny Mary Jane.

  Thanks to my new editor, Shaye Areheart, who believed in this book, and especially to my agent, Candice Fuhrman, who always did.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  First Page

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Firefly Cloak

  AIN’T YOU GOT NO RESPECT for the Dead?” I holler. “Get outta here. Ain’t you got no shame?”

  But I’m wasting my breath. The children are running before I open my mouth, squealing and hightailing it around tombstones and trees, racing for the edge of the cemetery. A boy without a shirt dusts his belly on the ground and scrapes his back wiggling fast beneath the fence.

  “You hateful old witch,” he cries, but not until he’s in the shrubbery on the other side. “You damn-fool witch.”

  I raise my stick and shake it at him.

  By the time I get to the plot where they were playing, all that’s left is a striped tank top and a bottle half-full of soda that they were throwing like a ball. They’ve cracked the plastic, and the liquid drizzles out dark. Fizz runs down my arm as I pick it up.

  I apologize to Sarah Andrews Barfield, 1897–1949, and wipe the soda off her dingy stone with that child’s shirt. It doesn’t look like rain. Ants will come.

  I stuff the shirt through the hole in the fence and then find a brick and a few fallen limbs to block off the space until I can get it patched.

  On the way back to the house, I stop to visit with Ma and Papa for a spell. Overhead, the wind creaks oak, and beneath me, thick grass bends. Tomorrow I will bring out the lawn mower, but today I catch a nap between them, the way I did when I was small, when their hands were warm and could touch me back.

  I HAVE BEEN OLD all my life, my face like a piece of wood left out in snow and wind.

  I was four when it happened. Papa had gone to get the grave diggers and bring them home to eat. He did that sometimes when it was hot and they were busy. Ma didn’t mind cooking for a crowd.

  But she had that day’s meal fixed and waiting. She was already cutting apples for the next day’s pie, and I was riding the broom in circles around the table.

  “You getting too rowdy, Finch,” Ma said. “Calm down.”

  “I’m playing circus,” I told her. “I’m a pony rider.”

  “You’ve worn that pony out,” she said. “Let him rest.”

  So I plopped down on the floor with the broom pony, ran my hand over the bristles, and pretended to rub his mane. Then I decided to get the pony some water. I needed a bowl. Ma had a bowl, but it was full of apples.

  “I need a bowl to put some water in. My pony’s thirsty.”

  “Give him some apple peels instead,” Ma said. “He’ll like that even better.” She was good at playing along.

  I was sitting beside the brown paper bag where Ma was dropping the peels. I reached in, grabbed a curled strand of red, and fed it to the pony. Then I looked up and saw the handle of a pot on the stove.

  “You still want some water?” I asked the pony, and when he said yes, I reached for the handle of that pot. I reached for the shine.

  “Lord, Lizzie,” Papa whispered later, “ain’t right for this child to be widowed by her own skin.”

  Ma shivered off oxygen soap, hard and brown, mixed it with honey and flour, and tried to paste my skin back on. She broke aloe fingers and doused my face, my shoulder and arm. She whispered, “I told her to stay away from that stove,” her voice choking out. She brushed my hair away from the places where skin bubbled up.

  They thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t. I was dazed and drunk on honey water, lost in the buzzing of the burn. I thought they were washing my hair, but it was just blisters breaking and Ma crying, and water spilling from the cup they held to my mouth. I thought I might wash away.

  They took me to the clinic for a day and a night, where my veins drank sugar water as nurses watched on.

  At the time, it seemed like all my howls got lodged in my throat. I thought I was too stunned to make a sound. But Papa said I howled plenty, said I howled at the hospital and howled when I came back home.

  Ma washed the shirt that Papa had cut away with his pocketknife. She kept it in the drawer, where it got buried by report cards and pictures. Discolored and tiny, it still smelled of grease when I threw it out. There’s a stain in the bottom of the drawer where that shirt rested for thirty-odd years.

  Not long after it happened, the grave diggers helped Papa screen in the porch because gnats kept landing on my body and drowning in my watery skin. Papa joked that he didn’t want to claim ordinary bugs as family, and I had no choice but to sit outside. It was hot in the house, and I needed all the breeze I could get.

  A man from the funeral home brought me a swing and hung it on the porch beam. He was a friend of Papa’s, and Papa never forgot his kindness. Years later when his big heart broke open, Papa gave him the plot he’d been saving for himself. His daughter still brings flowers, and I straighten them after storms.

  For a while following the scalding, people brought salves and remedies, sacred lards from beloved pigs. With baking soda and water, they made me masks and casts that stung the air out of my lungs. They baptized me in vinegars. They patted my thighs and said, “God bless.”

  For a while, parents slapped their children when they pointed. For a while, teachers punished the ones who called me “Granny Finch.” But later, they all gave up. They all turned away. The ones without scars, they kept their secrets, hid their losses, lied in ways that only the living world does.

  But you cannot hide the scars from a burn. Not with mud, the way I tried to when I was young, playing by the riverbank and smoothing clay into the dents on my shoulder and chest, filling it even until it dried white and broke. Sometimes I’d clay my face, splashing it wet to keep it smooth. In the water, I could almost see what I’d look like normal—my big dark hair curling wild and mushroomed around my head, my dark eyes, my face clay-smooth and drying white, then cracking into an old woman and washing off to leave me the same.

  You can’t hide burn scars, and th
ere’s no point in trying. I live in a world without secrets. That’s why the children throw rocks. That’s why the cordial adults smile and go back for one more stick of butter, one more box of Brillo pads when I enter the checkout line at the grocery. They never hold my gaze or stand too close.

  I still live in the same house. At sundown, I lock the cemetery gate, honeysuckle and ivy growing around cast-iron posts. I cook myself supper, a piece of meat, something from the garden. I sit on the porch in the evenings, listening to the crickets, to the howling alley mutts. Sometimes the phone rings. Usually it doesn’t. Sometimes I turn on the radio, but more often I hum. And when I’m tired, I sleep.

  At sunup, I feed the animals, make coffee, read the paper. At seven, I open the gates. I speak with the funeral homes if there’s a burial scheduled, nod to the workers coming in on bulldozers, and I’m civil with all the preachers who pass through. But mostly I trim hedges, straighten arrangements, pick up trash, and cut the grass. From time to time, I find new homes for spiders who’ve built webs in the armpits of crosses overlooking timid souls.

  I tend this land. This land and the things that grow here are the only family I have left. With my scarred face and scarred neck and one scarred arm, I stake plots with wood and string, a room for you, a room for you. I bury the ones who died noisy in quiet, the ones who died lonely in family plots. The ones who died young, I cradle in boxwoods. Foes kiss here. Fears decompose. And in death, all the wounds begin to heal from the inside out.

  So it don’t matter when they call me “witch,” and it don’t matter when they turn away. Not too much, anyway. I have inherited what I remember. I am curator of this place.

  IT’S A HOT day, mid-June, and I’m waiting for the sun to go down. I’m sweating from every pore and smelling ripe, smelling like sharp apples and mud, and waiting for an evening rain that probably won’t come, and won’t last long enough if it does.

  I make my rounds at the cemetery, walking the perimeter, checking to make sure that all the cars are out, and I end up at the gate. Just in time.

  “You gotta quit doing that, Finch,” Leonard calls, kicking up dust as he walks toward me. He’s pulled his blue squad car next to the cemetery gate, but I’m on the inside, locking up. I’m the one putting him behind bars.

  “Doing what?” I ask him. “Have I done something to you?” Me and Leonard go way back. We went to school together, but we were never friends.

  Leonard just shakes his head and takes a step closer. He’s too fat for his policeman shirt, his belly leaning over his belt. His eyes are weak, blue, and afraid of mine. He scuffs his hard black shoes in the gravel, planting himself.

  “I just talked to the preacher. He said Lois Armour had called him up crying. Said you’d paid her another visit.”

  “That ain’t right, exactly,” I explain. “I saw Lois on the street when I was walking to the mailbox.”

  “Well, okay. Then you saw her on the street. But, Finch, you gonna have to quit scaring people. You know as good as I do that her dead girl ain’t sending messages from the grave. How come you want to addle that woman’s head? Don’t you reckon she’s got troubles enough?”

  “I got nothing to say to you,” I tell him, and turn away, walking easy. The air feels damp, and I think we might get that shower after all.

  “People’s saying you crazy,” Leonard hollers out.

  “Can you arrest me for that?”

  “Leave her alone, Finch,” he says, and shakes the gate to let me know he’s serious. And mean. He tries so hard to be mean.

  But Leonard’s guts quiver whenever I’m around. Everybody knows it. He’s been scared of me since the day he walked into first grade and found the desk assigned to him, the one with “Leonard Livingston” written in block letters on red construction paper and taped to the wood. He was short for his age even then, and already shaped more like an egg than a boy. He placed his theme book in the space beneath his chair, his pencil in the groove cut into the wood, and then he turned my way.

  I have a picture of the way I looked that morning. Ma had cut my curly hair short, parted it in the middle, and pulled it back with clips to either side. I had on a new blue dress with smocking at the top, and I was smiling—at least in the picture. But one whole cheek and jaw dripped into my neck, which dripped into my collar, and dribbled down my arm. It must have looked that way to Leonard the first time he saw me.

  For when Leonard saw me, he startled, and his face dissolved, too—into a slow pout—and then he jumped back and was crying and running toward the wall.

  I just stared at him. I knew who he was already. He was the mayor’s oldest son. Every Christmas, we got a card with a picture of his family on the front. Ma had shown me the card that morning before I left for school so I’d recognize somebody.

  “His name’s Leonard junior,” she’d said. “I can’t remember the baby’s name, but he’s a boy, too.”

  The teacher didn’t move him on the first day, and Leonard cried until his eyes swoll shut. But on the second day, his mother came into the room, and then Leonard got a new seat, next to the windows, with the students whose last names began with A’s and B’s. I also recognized his mother, except in the picture, like Leonard, she smiled.

  It was years before I looked back into Leonard Livingston’s face. By then, I hated him.

  He told me when we were nearly grown how sorry he was about that first day of school. I should’ve had pity on him. He was an outcast, too—fat, short, whiny—everything the mayor wouldn’t want in a son. He was already destined to disappoint, almost as rejected as me. You’d think I could have sympathized. But I didn’t.

  And I don’t sympathize with him much now, cranking up his old police car. He needs a new line. He comes by saying the same thing almost every day.

  IT WAS BACK four years ago when we first got word of Lucy’s death. The whole community grieved when they heard how she’d been shot, how her body was being flown home for burial.

  “Why, I remember that little girl,” Papa said. He was still alive then, but withered with arthritis and age. He sat in his special electric chair and fiddled with the buttons, moving up and down as he reminisced. “Lord, she was pretty, with that curly blond hair. You remember her, Finch. She won ever beauty pageant around when she was small.”

  “I don’t think I know who she was,” I answered, rubbing his twisted feet with Penetrol.

  “Oh, sure you do. Remember the time the Vice President came to town—after the tornadoes came through? She was the little girl who sang the national anthem. Stood right up on the overturned trunk of that big oak in front of the library and sung like a lark. I’m sorry she met such a miserable end.”

  National anthem. National anthem. I couldn’t remember ever hearing a little girl sing it.

  “You say she’s been murdered?” Miss Ashley Dugan asked me. She was visiting her husband’s grave on the same day Lucy’s was being dug. “I taught that child back fifteen, twenty years ago. I believe I had her for third grade. That just breaks my heart—she had such promise. And oh, she was funny, too. She wore tap shoes all the time. She danced every-where she went.”

  I tried to remember the shoes. It seemed like I should remember the shoes.

  “Oh mercy.” The funeral director sighed. “It’s a sad day when you close the eyes of somebody as sweet-natured as that girl for the last time. Why, I remember when her mother came around asking for sponsorships to send her to a dance competition. She could clog like nobody’s business, but her family didn’t have much money to spare. She came home with a trophy from that contest, too, and she brought it to us to keep in our family lounge. Bless her soul.”

  “You’ve seen her picture, Finch,” one of the grave diggers insisted. “When she first ran away from home, they stapled flyers to all the light poles and ran her senior picture in the paper for a week. You had to see it. Everybody thought she’d been kidnapped.”

  “Shoot,” another one said. “I can’t believe she’s gone,”
and he wiped a tear from his red cheek. “I went to church to sit next to that girl. I got saved six times just so she’d hug me. She was so pretty, the flowers bowed their heads when she went by.”

  But I didn’t know her, and what I heard about her, I didn’t like. I couldn’t remember her at all. I recognized her house over on Glass Street. I reckon I must have seen her the way I see the other children, playing handball in the streets, or roller-skating down the sidewalk, and later, when they’re teenagers, pushing around baby carriages or, maybe if they’re smart, toting armfuls of library books. I must have seen her when she was small. She grew up a few streets away. But she was younger than me, a baby when I was in my teens. And she was unscorched. If I ever knew her, I paid her the same attention I pay all these other brats who scream and fight and light their cherry bombs in the streets. Which is to say none.

  I have never invested much in beauty or trusted in sweetness. By the time she actually arrived, I was fairly unhappy about sharing my cemetery with her. It seemed for a while like people just loved her too much.

  According to her marker, she was born on Christmas day in ’69. According to her marker, her name was Lucille Armour. Lucille Armour the beauty queen.

  I had her pictured all wrong.

  “I never liked that name,” she told me the first time we talked. “I hated the way it clanked off my tongue. All those sharp angles—”

  “But Lucy Armageddon?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said whimsically. “Lucy Armageddon. Now that’s a name I can wear.”

  She told me that she’d changed her name legally five years before she died, but her family didn’t like it. “I wanted to be somebody else,” she said. “I wanted to be somebody less lovely, more authentic.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her family hadn’t told the engravers about her new, authentic name.

  Her stone is small and new—just two years old—because a temporary marker kept her plot for the first couple of years after she came here. I have it in my garden, the small copper plaque with her name, buried in jonquils. Lucy only got a permanent stone after the adult men’s Sunday school class took up collections. Her mother won’t work for fear of seizures and her father is bad to drink.