Abandon

TWENTY

W

hen she opened her only Christmas present of 1893, Harriet McCabe ran shrieking in circles around the ten-by-ten cabin where she lived with her parents. It was by leaps and bounds the most extravagant gift she’d ever received, her mother having skimped on their family’s last three food orders so she could purchase the doll from the general store’s window. Samantha was sixteen inches tall, came with two dresses and a little comb to brush her luxurious red hair.

“Now I understand why we been eatin pooch and splatter dabs for supper, ‘stead a meat,” Billy grumbled, still stretched out and hungover on the lumpy straw-filled mattress.

Bessie said, “I’s fine to make the sacrifice. Look at your daughter, Billy. You ever seen her so happy? Don’t it warm your heart even a little?”

Harriet sat on the dirt floor by the sink—just a washbasin on an upended packing crate—whispering secrets to Samantha.

“Fire’s gettin low,” Billy said. “Go on, bring in some wood from the porch. This shithole’s drafty as hell.”

“Billy! That mouth! It’s Christmas mornin, and your daughter—”

“Get goin, I said!” So Bessie wrapped every available blanket around her underpinnings and stepped into Billy’s arctics. When she’d gone outside, Billy sat up in bed and raised his arms over his head. At twenty years, he was small and looked young for his age, with jittery eyes that caused most men to treat him like a boy. He was handsome until he opened his mouth. His front teeth had resembled jagged canines ever since his father had broken them when Billy was nine. He got up, the dirt floor freezing, his head pounding. He could feel the morning cold slipping through his stained and threadbare long drawers.

He staggered to the table, covered in oilcloth and a few airtights of rarities they’d saved for Christmas. Billy pried open a tin of mustard sardines, crammed a handful into his mouth. He went over to the cabin’s only window and swept back the curtains Bessie had sewn out of an old lace-edged petticoat—nothing to see of the outside world, condensation having frosted the inside of the glass.

A whiskey bottle filled with tiny seashells sat in the windowsill. He ran a finger across the glass and thought of his big brother, Arnold, missed him so much in that moment, he felt his throat close up, went short of breath, like someone had punched him in the gut.

Billy turned around, looked at his daughter.

“Merry Christmas, girl,” he said.

The six-year-old glanced up at her father, and he saw the wariness in her eyes, and it shot him full of sadness and vexation.

“Got a present for your mama,” he said, and he reached under the bed and lifted something the size of a small loaf of bread, packaged in newspaper. He walked over to the spruce sapling they’d uprooted from the hillside above their cabin. Bessie had potted it in a lard bucket, kept it watered, but the needles had begun to brown at the tips. Billy placed the package on the flour sack wrapped around the base of the Christmas tree.

“Y-y-y-you like that doll?” Billy asked, blushing as he always did when he stuttered, no matter that he was conversing with his six-year-old. He’d never had a speech problem before coming to Abandon.

“Yessir.”

“That’s good. It cost a damn sight more than we can afford.”

He lifted the lid and peered into the graniteware pot on top of the stove. The snow had finally melted, tiny bubbles rushing up from the bottom. He took his tin cup down from one of the newspaper-lined shelves above the washbasin and poured the hot water over the old Arbuckle’s grounds. “Christmas mornin, ain’t even got a decent cup a coffee to sip. This is belly wash.” The front door swung open and Bessie stumbled in with two armloads of firewood and a draft of bitter cold. She dropped them on the floor, opened the iron stove, shoved in three logs. “Guess it’s still snowin,” Billy said, noticing the streaks of white in Bessie’s yellow hair.

“Comin down like it got no mind to stop. Dust me off, will ye?”

Billy walked over, brushed the snow off her blankets.

“W-w-w-well, looky what’s under the tree,” he said.

Bessie saw the small package on the flour sack and smiled. “I didn’t think you’d got me nothin.” Bessie draped the blankets over the rocking chair beside the stove and approached the dying spruce.

She lifted the present. “Heavy.”

“C-c-c-c-come over to the bed.” Bessie sat down on the mattress. Harriet crawled over, crouched at her parents’ feet.

Bessie ripped off the old newspaper.

“Holy God, Billy.” What lay in Bessie’s lap amid the torn newspaper was inconceivable, a dream.

“I weighed it,” Billy said. “Twenty-two pounds.”

“Mama, let me see.”

Bessie hoisted the bar of solid gold, the metal freezing cold to the touch, marred with scrapes and tiny chinks, a dully gleaming bronze.

“How much?” she asked.

“Gold’s at twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents a ounce, so you’re holdin more’n seven thousand dollars right there.”

It was more money than Bessie had ever heard of. She began to cry. Billy put his arm around her.

“Where’d you get this?” Bessie asked.

Billy sipped his coffee. The grounds had been used and reused so many times, they barely even colored the water.

“Look at this place.” He waved a hand at their shanty. “We live in squalor,” he said. “Ain’t ye tired of it yet? This floor turnin to mud ever time it rains? Chinks fallin out. They’s goddamn drifts in the kitchen from snow blowin through the walls.”

“Where’d you get it?” Bessie asked again.

“I-I-I-I don’t think ye need to know. We’re rich, Bessie. Concern yourself with that. Oh, and this ain’t the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

He grinned. “That bar’s got a whole mess a brothers and sisters.”

Bessie dropped the bar on the bed and stood up. With her hands, she framed Billy’s acne-speckled face. He’d been trying for a mustache the last six months, but it looked patchy and ridiculous.

“I need to know right now what you done,” she said.

He swatted her hands away.

“What you mean, what I done? I’m providin for my fuckin family.”

“Billy, when you brought the high-grade home from the mine, I didn’t like it, but I let it go. Next thing I know, we got a half ton a ore in the root cellar. I said nothin. But that.” She pointed at the bar of gold. “You take it from the Godsend?”

“What if I told you I found it and—”

“I’d call you a black liar.” He jumped to his feet and grabbed Bessie’s arms and shoved her toward the kitchen.

She crashed into the washbasin and the shelves. A can of condensed milk fell on her head, jars of sugar, long sweetening, flour, and salt shattering on the dirt floor. When Bessie looked up, Billy stood over her, eyes twitching, face bloodred.

Harriet had disappeared under the table, but her crying filled the cabin. Billy ripped the oilcloth off the table, glared at his daughter. “Now you shut that fuckin yap, Harriet! I’m speakin to your mother, and I don’t wanna hear peep one out a you!”

The little girl buried her face in her dress to muffle her sobs.

“Your daughter, Billy!” Bessie screamed. “That’s your—”

Billy grabbed his wife by the ankles and dragged her toward the bed. He picked her up and slammed her onto the mattress, climbed on top of her, pinning her underneath his weight.

“L-l-l-l-listen, you ungrateful cunt,” he whispered, straining to hold her down. “By God, I’ll make you be still.” He slapped her twice. Bessie quit struggling. They lay pressed together, panting, Bessie trying not to gag at the fishy reek of Billy’s breath.

“It’s Oatha, ain’t it?” Bessie said. “He got you into somethin. You changed since you taken up his company.” Billy pressed his forearm into his wife’s neck and leaned into her windpipe.

“M-m-m-m-make no mistake,” he whispered. “One word, I’ll fuckin kill ye. Simple as that.”

“And your daughter, Billy?” she wheezed. “Gonna kill Harriet, too?” Bessie saw it happen. The madness spilled over in Billy’s eyes and she knew he would suffocate her. “All right, baby. All right.” She’d been digging her fingernails into his biceps, but now she let go and ran her fingers through his greasy sandy-blond hair. “Billy.” She couldn’t produce anything louder than a whisper. “Billy, I can’t breathe.”

It passed. He let up on his wife’s neck, but he still lay sprawled on top of her as she coughed and gasped for air.

“You gonna make me kill you one a these days,” Billy said.

All Bessie could do was stare into his twitching eyes. It wasn’t anger she felt toward him. Not anymore. Only fear and profound sadness, because so little about him resembled the person she’d married in West Tennessee at fourteen. That sweet and tender boy felt as distant as her father, long dead from stone on the chest.

Her eyes caught on the bottle of seashells in the window. She thought of that happy summer in ’89 when they’d taken a steamboat down the Mississippi to visit Billy’s brother on the Gulf Coast. It was the first and last time she’d seen the ocean, but she’d never lost the smell of it or forgotten the cool shock of salt water running under her feet that morning she and Billy had walked the beach together collecting those shells.

Billy rolled off of her and sat up.

Bessie touched the swelling knot on top of her head.

“You never beat me in Tennessee.”

“When’d you give me cause? Now . . . this gold. We got a problem?”

“No, Billy.”

“W-w-w-w-well, all right, then.”

He sighed and got up from the bed, walked back over to the table, knelt down. Harriet still had her head buried in her gingham dress, so all he could see of her was a battery of black curls.

“Come on out a there now, girl. Me and your mama is all right. Sometimes adults have to talk things out, find a remedy for a situation.” The little girl lifted her head, eyes still brimming with tears. “Come on now, honey. Your doll’s over there on the floor all alone. She’s upset, too. What’s her name?”

“Samantha.”

“You just gonna leave Samantha over there to cry by herself? Ain’t you her mama now?” As Harriet crawled out from underneath the table, Billy said, “Well, how’s about we crack open a can a oysters. It’s Christmas after all, ain’t it?” And Billy flashed Bessie his broken-tooth smile, Bessie thinking, I don’t know if it’s this town or Oatha that done it, but you ain’t the same. This thin air’s poisoned you. Ain’t my Billy no more. I’ve lost you.