“Patsy.” Mama held up a shaky finger and trailed it lightly over the bow. Tears leaked from Mama’s eyes. “Dear Lord, my Patsy girl. I’m going to have to bury her. Bury a child again,” Mama cried, collapsing into Flannery’s arms, rocking her daughter with sobs until they both crumpled and slowly sank into a tangled heap on the kitchen floor.
On the bright yellow counter above them, Patsy’s strawberry birthday cake sagged under the weight of the afternoon hours, its thick, pink icing cemented, the berries shriveling in the dead air of Mama’s earlier festivity, a soured decay rising into the rot of heartbreak and despair.
A burst of wind pushed through the screen door, rippling curtains, smacking at the bones of the old house and its weeping mistresses.
CHAPTER 24
Sometime during the night while the Butler women slept, Hollis and his deputy returned Flannery’s car.
The next afternoon, Flannery lit out on foot to Ebenezer with a shovel in hand while Mama tried to rest back at the house.
Flannery knew she would have to see what was buried there with her own eyes to believe what Hollis had told her about Patsy.
She dug under the elm for an hour with no luck, the roots bigger, thicker, and spread out more than twenty years back. Knee-walking around to the next spot, scratching in the dirt in another, looking over her shoulder all the while doing it. She moved to the back of the tree and stood. As she cut the dirt with the shovel, the metal hit something hard. Flannery dug around it and unearthed an old distillery bottle, tossing it over her shoulder, shaking her head at all the holes she’d made when she saw it snugged next to a root.
Flannery tugged and pulled up some elastic and tattered bits of a thick nylon fabric. She poked the shallow grave with a stick and brought up another tiny piece of material with a faded imprint of pink polka dots, then pulled out another bigger section attached to dirty, limp elastic. Scratched at the fanning threads.
For a moment she tried to believe it could be anyone’s from anywhere. From a bird’s nest, a passing stranger, or a dog?
When she was little, a farmer’s collie had gone around stealing folks’ shoes and boots from their porches and would carry ’em all back to its master’s steps. The farmer could never break the dog from doing that and spent many mornings trying to find out whose shoe was whose. Most times, understanding folks just stopped by the farmer’s home to collect them quietly from his porch. Then someone, robbed of his working boots and time, up and shot the old collie.
It was no use. This was a different type of dog who’d done this. “Her shamelessness is right out there under the elm,” Hollis had told her. “Do you hear me, peaches? Hear what I’m trying to tell you?”
Flannery knew these underwear belonged to Patsy, identical to the matching ones Mama had bought Flannery long ago, the twins both begging for them in the fancy department store. She remembered how mad Patsy got because Mama had purchased the same pair for Flannery.
Hollis had been there, watched her sister take them off. Likely even had a hand in getting them off.
He had to be part of it. A big part of something, something ugly that he knew a lot more about and was hiding.
“Tramp,” he’d called her sister. Hollis’s words lit Flannery’s skin like someone had poured turpentine all over her and struck a match. She raised her head, belling the winds with her cries. With a heavy heart, she stuffed the pieces of Patsy’s panties back into the dirt, and slowly, unrelentingly, a cold revenge began to nest deep, padding her bones, and for a horrifying second it took her breath. The urge to avenge her sister struck hard, held fast.
*
Almost a week had passed since Patsy had been found in the Kentucky, and her mama still wouldn’t toss this birthday cake into the trash.
They both knew it would be the last cake, the final birthday for Patsy. Flannery didn’t have the heart to fight her mama for it, though she did manage to battle the fruit flies for the strawberries, picking them off and dumping them when Mama wasn’t looking.
Mama mostly sat slumped at the kitchen table, staring out into nothing and nowhere.
“How about I fix us a sandwich?” Flannery offered one afternoon.
Mama didn’t say anything. Flannery pulled out the skillet. “I’ll make us a peppery egg sandwich just the way you like it.” She set out plates, placing one in front of Mama, and topped them with slabs of bread.
Flannery fried an egg sunny-side up just the way Mama liked hers, then slid it onto the plate and passed her the ketchup. Mama always poured it on her eggs. Flannery liked mustard on hers, same as Honey Bee, and she set the jar of French’s beside her own plate.
“Go ahead and try to eat, Mama. Don’t wait for me.” Flannery went back over to the stove and cracked another egg into the skillet.
Flannery winced when she saw the double yolk. She let it cook a few seconds and stabbed at it with the spatula, flipping the egg over. Then she carried it in the skillet over to her plate.
Mama pulled herself back from where her mind had wandered and stared at Flannery’s open-faced egg sandwich. “Oh, look. Look, Flannery. There’s still hope,” Mama whispered.
“Mama, please.” Flannery shook her head and put the skillet back on the stove.
“But it’s right there, baby girl. We’re gonna have twins again.”
“It’s just an egg sandwich. Don’t.”
“Oh, Lord, Flannery, Gramma Lettie would turn in her grave if she heard you talk like that. Double yolk always means a birth coming—twins a’comin’.”
“Mama.”
“I’ve had double yolks only twice in my life, and look at my babies. You, Patsy, and—” A gloom passed over Mama’s face, and she cut herself off with a soft “God bless.”
Flannery wrung her hands in her lap. Her brothers were born five years before her and Patsy, and had lived only a short life.
Flannery’d never told Mama she’d carried twins or how she’d lost them. Never told a living soul. Mama knew there’d been a miscarriage, and only that. Knew what Mark had told her mama and others: “I put my wife in the asylum when she wouldn’t obey me, couldn’t dry herself out from the whiskey.”
Any talk of Mark Hamilton, as much as a peep or mention, and Flannery’d light up a shushing hand to the person prying.
“Maybe you’ll remarry someday, Flannery. You’ve been teaching in Louisville a long time now. I thought there would . . . Well, I bet there’s lots of good men who—”
“No, Mama.” Flannery pinched her lip. She didn’t have the strength for that again. Could never take away the hurt soaked inside her. She felt like one of those dogs that had lost its wag. She was sure she’d never trust another marriage.
“Look at the time. I better call Mr. Flagg’s office,” Mama said, and pushed back her plate.
Mama’d been anxious, calling the coroner every day, hoping for word of the remains. Twice she’d sent her pastor to inquire.
Flannery picked at her own sandwich before tossing it still whole into the garbage.
A few minutes before nine on Friday morning a state trooper pulled up to the Butler house.
Flannery and Mama met him on the porch.
“Mrs. Butler,” he said, “I’m Trooper Claymore Green. I’m sorry to call so early, but I wanted to speak directly with you. Ask you a few questions, if I may?” He tipped his uniform hat and nodded toward Flannery. “Mrs. Hamilton.” He fumbled with a notebook.
“Come in . . . come on in, Trooper,” Mama said, pulling the young man into the house by his arm.
Flannery thought Trooper Green was all but twenty, still wet behind the ears from high school, still full of boy, the smelly lockers, red-eared crushes, passing notes, classroom chalk that sticks till the world grows the boy up into something tougher, machined.
She knew the man from somewhere, but couldn’t place it, and wondered if he was kin to one of Mama’s friends. Flannery shrugged it off.