Violet doesn’t remember why she was burned. This is partly because she never knew and partly because there is no why. If a hypnotist or witch doctor were to make Violet remember what immediately preceded the roar, Violet would be able to tell him that Shaquoia was cooking the fish patties, like she did at least once or twice a week, and that Fat Daddy had come over. She would be able to tell him that she was sitting on the floor in what Shaquoia called “the den,” which was really just the open middle space of the tiny camper, putting together a puzzle that had belonged to Shaquoia’s son before he died. She could tell him about an angry shout, and how she’d looked up in the shout’s direction. That was it. One second her eyes were fixed on the puzzle. Mickey Mouse hugging Pluto. A piece was missing, right at the bottom of Pluto’s tongue, and each time Violet (Alma) took apart the puzzle and put it back together, she harbored the vague hope that the piece would suddenly appear, though it never did. The next second she looks up. Then the roar.
What happened is that Fat Daddy got angry at Shaquoia. There is no why here, either. Fat Daddy got angry a lot. Fat Daddy was missing some essential piece of his humanity. He got angry, and before he could even register his intention, he was grabbing the hot skillet and flinging its contents at the child.
Then the roar.
Violet doesn’t remember exactly how old she was that night—which was seven, barely, her birthday passing just a few days earlier without her or any other living person’s knowing—or how long the formless, all-encompassing pain lasted after the burn: months. She doesn’t know that Shaquoia spent her meager savings paying one of her regulars, a logger named Teddy, to steal some burn salve and antibiotics from his company’s infirmary, how she did her best to scrub Violet’s (Alma’s) wounds clean, the way Flat Rock’s harried med-tech instructed her to, but the child’s screams threatened to draw down on them Fat Daddy’s wrath all over again, and so an infection set in, and that was why Violet lost her eye. She doesn’t know that the salve ran out, and there was no money to get more, and so the healing tissue grew hard and contracted, and Shaquoia despaired because there was nothing to be done, short of slathering the child with lard, and Fat Daddy and Big Mama kept telling her to just let them put Alma out of her misery (as if the two of them knew how to do anything but create misery), and she had just about resolved that this was the right thing, the kindest thing, when Teddy offered to get the child out of camp and hand her over to someone who could help her.
Violet doesn’t know that Teddy, who’d acted in offering to help Shaquoia on a vaguely well-meaning impulse—he was a devout Pentecostal, had always felt guilty about patronizing the Flat Rock camp, though not guilty enough to stop—panicked shortly after smuggling Violet out. What on earth was he going to do with her? Why hadn’t he thought this through? So he’d given her one of his night-night-sleepy-time pills (there went five credits down the crapper), driven a few kilometers off his path back to the logging camp, and walked the child into the woods a little, to a nice, quiet spot where no one would bother her. Like many people who derive their sense of goodness from their religious affiliation rather than their actions, Teddy was able to soothe himself with the belief that this was part of God’s plan, and if the child were meant to survive, God would protect her. If she didn’t—well, paradise would be her reward.
—
Violet, since moving out of June and Roz’s place eight years ago, kept a bed at Central Bunkhouse. She had at least a decade (close to two, in some cases) on the building’s other seven habitants, who all worked the flower crop during the growing season and spent the off-seasons on production. Violet was treated by this group with reverent disinterest, like a dotty old aunt who kept changing the names in her will. This was fine by her. The bunkhouse’s list of occupants changed over time, but its attendant passions and dramas did not. They fell in and out of friendships, in and out of one another’s beds (tipsily cavorting in the early a.m. hours under the bedsheets, as if a thin layer of cotton soundproofed their fucking). Eventually, they fucked around enough to start thinking about settling, then paired off, moved out, and some new seventeen-or eighteen-year-olds would take their place. The bunkhouse had slept as many as twenty at a time. Eight, the current number, was as low as Violet had ever known it to be.
Still, she preferred the bunkhouse to June’s place—she was too old, had long been too old, to keep playing the child, the daughter. June had offered to build Violet her own little cabin—even up in the woods a bit, if what Violet wanted was some privacy and distance—but Violet had turned her down. She wasn’t good with other people. Other people weren’t good with her. But she couldn’t function alone, either. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t turn off her mind. Her parade of bunkmates—young, unblemished, caught up in their absurd romances, their petty grievances—were harmless. Sleeping among them was a bit like sleeping among one of Roz’s litters of pups. They were loud and messy, liked to roll each other, liked to get into pointless tussles, but they didn’t know how to inflict real hurt. Not even when they whispered things that Violet could overhear (“Shh, you’ll wake up ol’ Candleface”). They seemed to assume that her ears didn’t work because she was missing an eye. Or that her brain didn’t work. Violet wasn’t motivated to change their minds. She used them, hid behind them. A wall of good fortune. Nothing could reach her through them.
Wednesday morning, she rolled over, turning her back to the others, and listened as they rose, dressed, heated the teakettle to whistling. There was a rustling behind her. “Violet, I’m putting your tea over here on the table. OK?” Meg, it sounded like. A nice girl. The oldest in the bunkhouse, after Violet.
“OK,” Violet said. “Thanks,” she remembered to add.
“Are you sick? Do you need anything?”
“I’m fine,” Violet said. “Just another headache. I’ll be up soon.”
“All right,” Meg said. “Find me if you need me.”
Violet didn’t reply. In a few more minutes, the bunkhouse cleared and she finally had some quiet.
She rolled onto her back and stared at a water stain on the ceiling, blinking until its familiar shape (like a four-fingered hand) came into focus. The vision in her eye was weakening. Slowly, but noticeably. What would she do if—when—it worsened?
No. She wasn’t going to think about that right now.
She waited.
Twenty seconds. Sixty. Two minutes. There. It happened again. She hadn’t dreamed it.
The sensation was both intimate and distant. It was like a single piano note in a large, empty auditorium. A flare of light across a night sky. A crackle of static across dead air.
Her baby. Moving.
She never smiled. A smile sat stiffly and uncomfortably on her face, pulled at the tendons of her neck. She felt lit from within, though: a secret smile, one that touched her eyes if not her lips. My baby. Mine. She had been walking around for the last three months in a daze of disbelief and terror that occasionally verged into wonderment, though never for very long. Her first clue hadn’t been morning sickness—she’d not once thrown up. Her breasts had knotted like fists. Then, shortly after, she noticed a funny twisting sensation in her abdomen, as if hands were gently but firmly wringing her insides. Doc Owle had made her wait another full week before giving her one of his precious supply of pregnancy tests, and the results had been decisive. As soon as her urine traveled up the stick, the pregnancy indicator line blazed bright purple, darker than the control line.