Mrs. Henry grimaced. “How is Jean?”
Flannery looked over her shoulder to the door. The sheriff’s wife grabbed hold of Flannery’s hesitation. “Maybe I’ll send the doctor out,” Mrs. Henry said. “I’m sure he’d like to see how she’s doing. Might have some tonic for her ailings.”
“Yes, ma’am, that’d be real nice. Mama’s been a little peaked. Well, I . . . I better get this food inside and check on her.” Flannery patted the casserole lid. “Smells real good. Thank you. We’ll return the dish soon.”
The doctor came by, but he didn’t seem concerned with Mama’s withering state. He told Flannery the rest would do her good, then left pills to help with her female nerves too. The doc peered over his thick glasses, studied Flannery, and said, “If yours act up some, you can take half a pill with your meals, same as her. Mighty fine for the female hysterics.” Then he wrote the instructions on the bottle and left.
Many times Flannery fell asleep on Patsy’s bed, hoping she would awaken to find her sister across from her. That Patsy would again be able to raise a fuss, telling her to get her lazy bones into her own bed. And Flannery would yell back at her twin for leaving, but then they’d make up, and everyone, especially Mama, would be happy.
Each morning Flannery awoke to silence, rousing to a startled hopelessness, her heart knocking her fully awake, her thin gown soaked in panicked sweat. Hollow, she’d beat the pillow and mattress with her fist, damning Patsy for abandoning her, screaming inside herself for her sister to come home. When Flannery wore out her bruising knuckles, she grabbed her baton out of the closet.
One morning in late August, Flannery stood breathless over the bed, slamming the short metal rod against the feather pillow, again and again, tearing the ticking, whacking until she couldn’t lift the baton another inch. Couldn’t drag another ugly fit across those silent sheets one more day.
She watched the feathers sail into the charged air for a good while, fearing she’d gone mad. Flannery thought about her sister crying in school for her when they were young. Clung to the one thing she could always count on Patsy for. Clawed to keep it. If she could hold on to that till Patsy came home, it would keep the insanity away.
Who would care for Mama if they toted Flannery away, locked her in an asylum like the one way out off State Road 80? Mama was already as good as there in her folly; Flannery knew folks were speculating, talking. How else would Mrs. Henry know to send the doctor around if they weren’t?
Flannery tried to fill her mind with sensible, calm things to keep her sanity, but soon it would all slip and she’d push her angry face into the pillow, or bark wretched sobs into a pile of bed linens, fearing Mama or anyone else would see she had caught the madness.
School started in September, and Flannery was more than ready to escape the house and Mama. Excited to push through her senior year, yet scared she would be doing it without her twin.
She had not done a single thing alone, Flannery realized, and with that thought her stomach grew queasy, and she had to run to the bathroom.
Flannery had barely slept the night before her first day back, up several times emptying her nervous stomach. She dreamed Patsy had come dragging in. Same ol’ Patsy, but in a new pink dress, all darling and dazzling, wearing her pearls and carrying schoolbooks. And Mama’d never said a word. Not one in her dream. Just sent Patsy off to school with a big piece of strawberry cake. The dream roused Flannery from her sleep, and it had felt so real she jumped up and checked the drawer where she’d stashed the pearls.
But it was only that, a dream. Flannery walked alone on the first day of school.
A carload of boys slowed just enough to toss out a jar and a curse. “Bootlegging floozy.”
“If you’re gonna drink ’shine, Luke Spears, at least make it better than that nasty cat piss your daddy sells,” Flannery yelled at them, booting the empty Mason jar of hooch out of her way.
Spears stuck his arm out of the window and raised his middle finger.
Flannery and Patsy were used to the kids’ teasing about moonshine, getting railed upon despite Honey Bee’s good reputation, his business license, and the hills being full of bad bootleggers like the Spearses. It wasn’t a big deal except to the kids whose parents had found other jobs, who thought they were better off finding a different trade that might make them richer: mechanic, shop owner, preacher, or such.
Most everybody in Glass Ferry had kin who were, or who had been in the whiskey business. It was a way of life here, food on the table, a roof over heads, a means of survival. And it had been that way for her parents in the ’20s and ’30s and their parents and those ancestors who’d started before them with the old, squatty turnip-pot stills.
Mama’d enjoyed the money from it until Honey Bee got sick and before the sheriff began taking more food from their table with his higher protection fees. The taxes.
Even Violet Perry’s preacher daddy was the son of a moonshiner, but he’d snuck and bought the best spirits off Honey Bee instead of from his kinfolk.
Some kids had lost relatives who’d been killed in moonshining raids. And more than a few teachers had husbands working at the legal distilleries downriver, and even more kin lighting illegal stills tucked way up in the hills—with one family going so far as to dig a room-sized cavern into the grounds of their family cemetery, then covering it with borrowed tombstones to hide their operation down there from the government agents.
“There’s a lot worse things a man could become in this dark, bloody Kentucky land,” Honey Bee’d said. “Kentucky without its whiskey men, its stills, would be like New York City without business suits and buildings.”
But everyone knew being a floozy—a mother having a baby out of wedlock—was the very worst a girl could become around here.
Flannery wished she had fixed the flat tire on her bicycle before school started. She picked up her pace and hurried down the road.
“Heard tell Patsy ran way.” The kids in the school lot pushed and poked for answers. “Heard she ran off to marry Danny,” they whispered. “Heard why, too.” They looked over their shoulders for teachers, snuck hands to their bellies and poked them and then one another for amusement.
Violet Perry perched on the rail leading into the school building. She wore a tight new sweater she’d pinched her falsies into despite the hot September day. Her friend Bess leaned in beside her. Violet pointed her finger and said under her breath, but loud enough for Flannery to hear, “Imagine we won’t be seeing Patsy again until that bread in the oven is good an’ done.”
Bess smirked. “Maybe a tad longer. Loaves from two bakers might need to bake extra long.”
“Don’t you know it,” another girl squeezed in and smarted. “What with two bakers there’s no telling how many are in that twin’s oven.”
“Humph, twins, have you ever?” someone else squeaked. “My mama said it ain’t natural for a woman to have a litter like that. Them’s circus freaks.”
“Dumb bootleggers,” Violet muttered.
“Like your kin,” Flannery said low.
Violet glared.
“She’ll come back a’toting,” the girls pecked. “Toting a double stack of diapers.”
“Ew,” one girl said. “My daddy hadn’t never seen twins ’fore the Butlers and says it’s bad luck for folks and only fit for beasts to birth more than one at a time.”
Flannery hated how they were the only twins around, the only ones that folks from around here had ever seen, despite Mama insisting it was doubly good.
“My girls have what others don’t,” Mama had told them.