The Sisters of Glass Ferry

Instinctively, Flannery raised a hand to shield her face, shrinking back against the door.

Her ex-husband behaving like that and worse, countless times, surfaced like a striking rattler. It didn’t matter that she had long since left him. It didn’t take much to rise the fear. She had struggled mightily to shed that history. But no matter how much she tried, something as harmless as the unexpected slam of the door from a burst of wind or a dropped dish or the pop of a bottle cap brought it screaming back, the terror, the overriding fear of what would come next. It’d been many years, but it felt as raw as yesterday.

“H-Hollis,” she tried to breathe.

“Shut up about old history,” Hollis ordered with a final thump to the dash. “That’s nothing but school-yard shit, and ain’t half of it true.”

*

The summer of ’52 came and lingered in Glass Ferry with no word of the missing teens, and nary a peep from Patsy.

Flannery longed for any sense of normalcy, for school even, looking forward to September. She and Mama barely slept, keeping at least one ear cocked for the telephone to ring, a window to open, or a door to shut. Hoping.

During the day, Mama kept the curtains drawn tight. She wouldn’t let any of her canasta-club ladies come visit, telling Flannery to send them away when they tried. Keeping her teen daughter inside, refusing to let her walk to town or see anyone herself.

If Flannery argued to go out, Mama would cry, scaring Flannery into silence. When the twins’ birthday rolled around, Mama surprised Flannery and pulled back the drapes. Then Mama baked Patsy a strawberry cake, the first one.

Flannery had been so relieved to see Mama up and moving, lit up like that, she’d passed on Mama’s offer to make a birthday pie for her own celebration.

Mama was sure the birthday cake would summon Patsy home. And soon the house was festive with their chatter. “Go bring up my music,” Mama said, sending Flannery down to the cellar for the old records she’d stored after Honey Bee’s death.

Flannery scampered downstairs. She remembered how scared Patsy was of the dark cellar. How her sister would cry if she had to go down there alone. How Honey Bee’d used busted tombstones for the cellar floor because concrete was so expensive. He’d collected and hosed off the crumbly gravestones to “keep you from carrying the dirt upstairs to Mama’s nice rugs.”

Honey Bee and Uncle Mary had gone over to Pleasant Hill to see the folks called the Shakers. The religious group sold pieces of spent and busted tombstones, the ones that were old and broken, erecting new ones for their dearly departeds. Honey Bee covered the entire cellar floor with the Shaker gravestones.

But in order to turn on the light down here, you had to stand on Polly Meachum’s headstone, the pitted slab rugged under the dangling bulb at the bottom of the stairs.

Patsy’d claimed her legs pricked with a rash, darn near buckled, every time she yanked on the light chain. That the young girl, Polly, was reaching up to snatch her away to the dead. Patsy mused Polly’d surely died of boredom, same as the rest of those boring deceased folk in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, after Honey Bee had come home talking about the ways of the peculiar folks.

Honey Bee and Uncle Mary told Mama that the Shakers didn’t believe in getting hitched. They thought God was both a man and a woman, so all folks were made the same as Him. “All of us are brothers and sisters,” the Shakers proclaimed to Honey Bee and Uncle Mary that day, and they’d insisted it would be a sin to marry your relations like that. Have babies with your kin.

Honey Bee’d said the Shakers were simple folks, smart farmers, but for all their religion, and it was indeed mighty, they sure knew how to put a fever in their feet and kick up a heel or two.

“Saw ’em grab the Hallelujah in their bones and shimmy like the devil with its tail caught under Heaven’s porch rocker,” Uncle Mary’d said. “Shakers they be.”

At the bottom of the cellar steps, Flannery reached a hand down and scratched furiously at her itching leg, snagging her nylons. Sighing, she yanked on the light, eager to get Mama’s records. She thought about the Shakers’ simple life, and how Patsy liked to make fun of them.

Flannery knew her sister didn’t want simple, didn’t want to be a farm wife, Patsy wanted a smart businessman, tall, red dance heels, fun friends, and a fancy Sears Modern home in a pretty place that didn’t stink of bourbon. Flannery worried that Patsy might never come home.

“Flannery,” Mama called from the top of the steps, “don’t forget Jelly Roll Morton.”

“Found it,” Flannery said, spotting it atop the stack of albums on the shelf. Honey Bee had picked up a lot of records in his business travels downriver.

Happy for Mama’s changed mood, Flannery toted the records up from the cellar for the birthday celebration and plopped them on Honey Bee’s old cellarette in the parlor. She cranked up the Victor record player in there and put on all of Mama’s favorite music. Spun Cab Calloway tunes for her, played Joe Turner’s “Low Down Dirty Shame Blues,” and watched Mama light her itchy soles with some fancy footwork when Slim Gaillard’s “Palm Springs Jump” swept through the room.

It was the very best birthday present Flannery could’ve had, seeing her Mama living and the life lit in her feet like that. The first of many of the false celebrations.

And a week later when the cake still sat on the counter, Patsy’s sixteen white-striped candles cemented in the pink icing, Mama’s mood changed, the curtains were drawn again, and Flannery pleaded with Mama to call the doctor. “Mama, I heard the doctor can fix all kinds of ailments, and he has medicine—”

“Will his pills bring Patsy home?” Mama said, saddened, tamping the discussion.

Sylvia Jenkin came over three times that summer and probably snooped a lot more that Flannery didn’t know about. Twice with her husband, Davey. Mama looked at Flannery and pulled her into the dark hall, tapping a hushing finger to her mouth as the neighbors knocked on the front door. In a moment, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkin went back to the kitchen door.

Flannery poked her head around the corner. Slinking up to the windows, the Jenkins cupped their hands to the glass, peering inside.

Mr. and Mrs. Jenkin were troublesome neighbors, “busybodies,” Mama and Honey Bee told the girls long ago. Meddlesome folks who worried and wormed their way into other people’s affairs, pretending to be helpful. Until no one was looking. Always doling out advice with a Bible in one hand and a gun-cocked finger in another, the Jenkins had a need to feel almighty.

Childless, the Jenkins would yell at the twins if they wandered onto their property, chase Flannery and Patsy off, or scold Mama if the girls’ laughter carried too high a pitch. Once the neighbors sent a note to the girls’ teacher, complaining about their tomboyish ways after they’d climbed the chinaberry tree down the road.

Honey Bee was sure the difficult neighbors had poisoned his beloved cattle dog after the old pooch dug a hole in their flower bed to escape the heat on a summer day.

“There’s a name for those kind of folks,” Honey Bee’d said, “a name good folks don’t say but they all know, and it comes from the most disgraceful part of a foul person.”

Then Honey Bee would mutter under his breath, “Liddle dirty diddle-dicks,” until Mama had to shush him, run him out of the room with a snapping dish towel she always had stuck in her apron pocket, taking halfhearted licks to his tucked hip and head.

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