If the Creek Don’t Rise
Leah Weiss
For Paul, the brighter star
For Glo, the wind in my sail
For Dave, the honey in my days
Sadie Blue
I struggle to my feet, straighten my back, lift my chin, then he hits me again. This time I fall down and stay down while he counts, “…eight, nine, ten.” He walks out the trailer door and slams it hard. The latch don’t catch, and the door pops open. I lay on the floor and watch Roy Tupkin cross the dirt yard and disappear into the woods.
My world’s gone sideways again.
“Sadie girl.” Daddy’s spirit voice comes soft from behind my open eyes. “You got yourself in a pickle this time. No two ways about it. That husband of yours won’t stop till you and your baby draw your last breath. You don’t even look like yourself no more. He broke bout every piece of sweet in you. You gonna let him break your spirit, too? You gonna do nothing?”
I’m tired, Daddy. Wore out. Roy Tupkin don’t just beat me, he beats me down. Let me rest a spell. I don’t know if I can lift my head just yet.
Now Daddy’s voice comes from the yard where a lone wind rattles late-summer oak leaves and sounds like hollow bones. “If I could follow the bastard and kill him for you, I would, sweet girl, but it don’t work like that.” His voice drifts toward the rusty red truck up on blocks. “Don’t lay there too long, Sadie. You don’t need rest.” His words fade. “You need…”
What, Daddy? What do I need? I listen but he’s gone.
Percy scampers in from the hunt with a dead chipmunk. He drops his gift by my hand. When I don’t move, he nudges it close till I raise a finger and touch fur that’s still warm. Then he crawls on the rise of my belly and curls up. Purrs vibrate clean through to my spine.
I gotta get away, Percy, but don’t know how. Gotta be careful.
Percy listens good but he’s short on advice. I can’t think what to do right off with my brain muddled from this morning’s beating, so I gather strength to move. Shadows grow longer, and cold air glides across the doorjamb, giving me goose bumps. I roll over gentle to my side, scattering pieces of the green plastic radio I got working at Mooney’s Rusty Nickel. Little Percy slides off without complaint. I put my palms on the floor and push to my knees. My arms tremble. My heart pounds in my ears. A bloody smear on the floor marks where my head landed. I brush sticky hair off my temple, hold on to the counter, and pull up, dizzy, one hand on my baby bump. I don’t know I’m crying salty tears till they sting the cut on my cheek.
“You know what you gotta do.” Daddy’s voice is back burrowing inside my ear.
I do? Tell me and I’ll do it.
“You’ll figure it out. You got smarts you don’t even know bout yet.”
Daddy loves me better in death than he ever did in life. In life, when I was ten, with my hair in crooked braids, me sitting on a overturned bucket in a corner of the kitchen, watching the men round the table gamble, he throwed a night with me in the poker pot instead of five dollars he don’t have. Granny and Aunt Marris never heard what he done, and I don’t say cause they’d take a belt to him and take me away from him when he needs me. Daddy won the hand. Said he counted on it. But he woulda made good on his bet if he’d lost. He won’t go back on his word.
Daddy hung bones on the walls inside our house like some folks hang giveaway calendars or pictures of Jesus. They was mostly bleached-out skulls he found hunting or tending the still. He ran twine through their empty eyes and wound the twine on a tenpenny nail high on the wall. He had the skulls of a fox, bear, bobcat, and panther, and the rib cage of a bear. Daddy even had a man’s skull in the lot. Found it in a cave near a rockslide that pinned the poor soul down till he wasted away. Said it was likely a miner and a dreamer looking for rubies and stones. At night, under moonlight streaming through the front window, those bones glowed like pieces of ghosts.
Granny won’t set foot in our house cause of Daddy’s bones. Said it was a heathen thing to do. Said it won’t natural. I asked Daddy why he brought such things inside when nobody else did. He grinned and said, “One time these bones was wrapped in flesh and muscle and brains. They mighta fought a good fight to the end. But in the end, even the smart ones is just bones with all the fight gone out. Looking at em makes me think different bout power and petty things.”
I hear he don’t start hanging bones on the wall till Mama left.
Some folks say Daddy was a peculiar soul. Some say he was a thinking man. He was funny, gentle, and always a pinch of sad the years I knew him, cause the pitiful truth is he got nothing from loving Mama cept me left behind.
I think it was a broke heart that killed him, mostly cause Mama left him with a baby girl who lately looked too much like her. I don’t remember her face cept from a faded picture in a dresser drawer in a back room at Granny’s. Mama had hair the color of mine, and she was built thin like me. Aunt Marris said she had gumption in her eyes and a slice of selfish that won’t pretty.
That night Daddy ended up dead, he stumbled in my room on wobbly legs and fell on top of me sleeping in my iron bed. “Carly, my Carly Blue.” He cried out Mama’s name next to my ear, slobbering like a sorry fool. I never liked it when Daddy don’t know me cause he tried things. So I pulled up my knees and pushed, and he fell off me and hit his head on the edge of the bed with a thud. I jumped over his body and run into the woods, wearing a thin nightgown that snagged on brambles that scratched my arms, a ghost girl on bare feet. I hid under the weeping willow at the creek, shivering till the moon went away and morning come shy on the mountain.
When I walked through the door, I saw death claimed Daddy. His body lay on the floor where I had left him. The color was drained, and his skin was like ash in a fire gone cold. His eyes stayed open, and a fly crawled on his cheek. He puked like drunks do, and it dried in his beard and over his ear and puddled at his neck. Daddy died cause I won’t there to turn him over.
I wanted to stay at Daddy and my place on Bentwood Mountain, down the road from Granny and Aunt Marris, but Preacher Eli said to move in with Granny so she could help me through a sad time. Granny don’t do my heart any good, but when the roof on Daddy’s house caved in the next big winter snow, I was glad to be outta the rubble. Then that summer, vines started to crawl up the sides and through the broke windows, and over and around those pointy teeth and skulls on the wall. Nowadays, five years since, the vines claim it all.