Black Heart, Ivory Bones

Rosie’s Dance EMMA HARDESTY

Emma Hardesty lives in the American Southwest and does quite a number of satisfying things, of which writing is second to gardening. She was surprised to learn only a few years ago that lots of other writers have long reworked and newly phrased all the classic fairy tales, because she’s been writing such stories since she was a kid. This is her first published work of fiction.

“Cindy’s all right but her butt’s too big.”

They all had a really good laugh at that. I don’t know why. Clyman, and most of the others, had known me about all their lives. I wasn’t any kind of surprise to them. It seemed that every day of my life I had heard some boy yell “Hey, Hardcastle. Get on out here.” They never meant me, of course, the only girl in a family of overgrown boys, who were also mean. Not that I would have ever answered them. I was used to hearing their stupid names for me, especially because of my wild hair, but this was a new one about my big butt. It kind of gave me the creeps because all of them were younger than me.

My name isn’t Cindy. That’s just something my father started calling me after he saw me down on my knees scrubbing the bathroom floor, like you-know-who, for my stepmother. My real mother named me Rose, but just about nobody remembers that. Serafima remembers it, though.

This story here is something I am ready to tell and to forget.

I finished wiping down the counter that day, while the boys were still laughing at my expense. That kitchen counter was mostly bare plywood, full of jagged holes. It was a real job to keep clean, but I always tried. I cared if the house was clean because it made me feel better, even if the boys didn’t care at all. I think the only thing they ever noticed was whether their pants were zipped or not. Trying is everything, it seems to me, and I didn’t mind trying anything I thought I could handle. I wiped the crud off the cracked wood, pulled all the big splinters out of the rag, and left the kitchen so those boys could make their jokes without me.

I pretty much felt sorry for Clyman, but not his friends, and I was a little bit sorry for the other two boys. I still viewed as lucky the one that had died. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, though. Serafima told me I had the world on a string, but I knew that the other women in the neighborhood didn’t think much would come of any of us. After being scared, twice, that I might be pregnant, and then being talked about afterward, I decided to make sure the neighborhood women were wrong. At least about me.

I wasn’t as happy to stay ignorant as my brothers seemed to be. I had my mother’s books, lots of books, and I got my own library card when I was seven, the year before Mama died. Books meant the whole world to me, they were my whole world, except for the times I gave those lover boys a tumble. But that kind of thinking is long past me now. I started reading Mama’s books when I was just young. I didn’t understand most of those books, but they gave me something more than my brothers had, I could see that, and it taught me the world was mean but it didn’t have to be ugly, too.

The boys, Clyman, Duane, and Jeffrey, weren’t really my brothers at all. My father, R.I.P., had shoved them and their mother, R.I.P., into my life, after my mama died, and we moved out here from Arkansas. It seems like I never did a thing except clean from that time on. I still like cleaning a house, I like the results, but even then I knew it had its place.

Clyman, the oldest boy, seemed like a poor creature to me. I think he missed his real father too much. His father’s name was Royale. I never knew if he was really dead or still alive somewhere, because Clyman talked about him as if he was both. Clyman talked real loud, as loud as anybody could possibly talk, but he would always speak really quiet and gentle when he was around little kids. I think maybe Royale had been that way with him, once upon a time. As loud as Clyman talked, though, he didn’t talk often, but every time I thought maybe he was beginning to think about his life and the fact that he wouldn’t be a kid forever, he would prove me wrong and I realized he just didn’t talk much.

Duane was about two years younger than Clyman but he got away with acting like they were the same age. I never trusted Duane for a minute. He did cruel things that were so bad I’m not even going to talk about them. Duane was pretty good, though, at helping me keep things fixed around the house. He did this for his own sake. He just blew up when something broke, like the water heater, and he couldn’t take his hot showers. He fixed anything that directly affected his own existence, but when the old car engine sitting on the back porch fell through and splintered a bunch of wood planks, Duane didn’t even notice. It didn’t matter to him that it blocked the side of the house where I had my garden. He only cared about things that gave him immediate satisfaction.

Jeffrey was on his way to becoming a criminal, pure and simple. He hit or kicked everything in his path. He was only two years old when the baby was born, and he missed that little boy more than anyone when he died. I was the only one who seemed to know that. I don’t even think his mother knew. Jeffrey never talked to me unless he absolutely had to, not even when Laverle was still with us.

I was oldest, having hit the big age of fourteen when Laverle left, and I’m almost nineteen now. I tried to keep the house clean. I read a lot, mostly at night. I took walks, mostly in the little forest behind the neighborhood that was later turned into a bowling alley. It wasn’t really a forest, but there had been a little pond there, with bullfrogs and perch and crawdads, and all the kids loved to go there before the bulldozers came. I had a few jobs, now and then, cooking, but I didn’t want the benefit checks to stop and I thought they might if I got some kind of real job. Besides, what sort of résumé could I have put together?

The boy that died was my genuine half brother, Roscoe. Laverle got pregnant right after she started going with my father. I really loved that little boy. He had the same deep brown eyes as Mama. Mama’s eyes were like a dove’s, an orange-brown color ringed with black. It seemed to me that Roscoe really came from her instead of being Laverle’s baby. Also his name had my name in it. I believed for a long time that my loving Rocky too much is what made him die. Then my father died, and Laverle took off. I was left with those boys, and it wasn’t easy. I knew what that town thought of me. I thought the same of it.

For a while Laverle’s sister would come by on Laverle’s birthday, and she would show up a few days after Christmas, but I can’t say she was anyone I looked forward to seeing. She would always pick up the book I was reading and say, “Why do you read stuff like that?” but I never answered her.

Some social-worker-type people came around a few times at first, once with Laverle’s sister. Duane and Clyman just sat there with their knees together, and lied about their ages and everything else, and I’ve been told I look older than I am. Jeffrey took off when the welfare folks showed up, and they didn’t even seem to know he existed. I doubt that Laverle’s sister remembered him either. When they asked the boys, “Are you kids going to school?” I answered for them, “Yes ma’am.” I don’t know why I did that but I did, and I suppose the piles of books I always had sitting around were proof enough for the social workers. That was the one and only time the boys and I were in cahoots with one another. After a few visits, the welfare folks didn’t come around anymore. I was glad. There’s a lot of kids around there who needed them more than we did. Besides, what they had to offer didn’t look like help to me, anyway, which was probably dumb of me, but that’s how it worked out at the time.

We did get money, not much, but it was regular and directly deposited into my father’s account. I knew enough never to ask what that money was all about, ’cause I figured it would stop. My father and I had the same names: Frances Rose Hardcastle, that’s me — people confuse Francis and Frances all the time — and those checks went right into his account and I just drew on them, little enough as it was. Being able to do that gave me some control over the boys. I can handle money. I always made sure that the lights and the gas and the water bills were paid on time. We didn’t need a phone. If your gas gets turned off, they send someone out to do it, and I didn’t want any strangers coming around who would notice how we were living, since we were really just kids. Besides that money, the boys were dealers and thieves, with natural good luck it seems, because they were never officially caught at those things.

It never crossed my mind to stop cooking and cleaning, and see what education I could get for myself. I was waiting for the right moment, I guess, but I knew it was all up to me. I had read enough fairy tales to know that Prince Charming was about as exciting and gainfully employed as my brothers, and also way too soft and pale for a girl like me. Besides, he didn’t live anywhere near the area. That was clear.

Maybe I should feel sorry for my brothers, but I don’t think so. Serafima said they had their own choices to make, just like I did. She said the hand of fate is a helping hand, no matter how hard it slaps sometimes. She said you could give that hand a high-five and laugh, and that was okay. Or you could slap it ’cause it didn’t seem good enough. Or you could grab it by the wrist and pull yourself up one more notch. Serafima said no telling how many notches a person would need pulling up, but that was always better than no notches at all. Yes ma’am. Sometimes Serafima was as corny as the day is long. She said salvation comes in small packages and you needed the hand of fate to untie them. I didn’t always understand her.

Serafima was my friend. She was just an old woman, I guess, but it was the biggest thing to me, just to know that there was someone like her. She called me Rosie. She was like a godmother to me, but I’m not going to say much about her ’cause she doesn’t like that. Some people called her Ms. Fimmy, but her name was Serafima, and that’s what I called her. Seems like everybody wanted to change your name around there. She once told me there would come a day when I would forget about her, that I would vanish, but I don’t think I will ever forget her. This story is for her.

Serafima was a gardener, not the kind that goes and buys little potted plants, but the kind that has seeds growing from her grandmother, and probably the grandmother before that. Her garden was all over her yard, it never stopped anywhere, except at the ends of her lot and the little paths that ran all over so you could get by. She had the biggest yard in the neighborhood, and part of it backed onto the little forest. Serafima said her yard was all that was left of 160 acres her parents used to farm. She had comfrey plants covering the ground under her apple trees that I especially liked. The leaves were like the soft ears of a rabbit, flopped over the big rocks she had all around the yard. That’s what she called those plants, her bunnies. Serafima used a shovel, and an ax, and a hoe that was made from a cow bone. That’s all she had and she said it was the best. She used her hands for everything else. She pretty much smelled like fresh dirt, and I just loved that. Her flowers grew all among the vegetables and there weren’t any straight rows anywhere. She used to tell me, “I’m gonna plant me a rose someday,” but she never had any rosebushes. I know now that she meant me. I was her one and only Rose, and I did get uprooted and I did get replanted.

One day, long ago it seems to me now, a lady knocked on the door and gave me something she said was a ticket out of there. She was good-looking, held herself straight, but wasn’t pushy about it. She didn’t ask to come inside but, still, I was grateful the boys weren’t around. Duane was capable of crawling up the steps and sniffing around her legs. I’d seen him do that. He didn’t have a clue how to act around a real woman. The lady told me about a program for people like me, who just needed a little help. Well, she didn’t say that, but that’s what she meant. She told me that I should put on good clothes and go to a certain place, on a certain day, before noon. I would then have the opportunity to take a simple test. She did say that. Nobody had ever used the word opportunity to me before, and hearing that word made me listen to what she said.

She gave me a brochure and left, and I took it with me into the kitchen. I heard Clyman’s car pull up, fast, into the yard.

We lived in an unfinished tract house that was foreclosed before it was even finished being built. My father and Laverle got it cheap because of that, and in fact it was paid for. Luckily, the whole neighborhood went to pieces at about the same time, so our house didn’t stick out like the sore thumb it really was, but the car frames scattered around it made it a little different from the others. Clyman and his buddies always pulled up right in the front yard, which was just dirt and junk. The curb was chipped away and there was too much stuff in the driveway to park there. I never even tried to clean the yard. My garden was on one side of the house, which was penned-in by a chain-link fence in the front and that old engine in the back. I had to get to my garden by going through the bathroom window, which wasn’t as hard as it sounds, and it made it real private. Every so often some smart aleck would lock me out there and then a whole other thing would go on. There was a mean dog on the other side of the fence, that was sometimes out in the yard. I had to be really careful not to let it see me, but that dog only had a dog’s brain. I pretty much thought like a cat and so I always outsmarted him.

I grew real food in that garden and I was a good cook. When the boys got too nasty from just hanging around doing nothing day after day, I would make lentil stew, which I knew they hated to smell. I don’t know why. They wanted to eat meat all the time, and they hated the smell of my stew full of celery and garlic. That was another way I had of controlling those boys. They would whine all the way out the door. We never talked about it.

I had my own room, right off the kitchen. It was meant to be a laundry room, I guess, so there weren’t any windows in it, but it had a metal door and I could lock it real securely when I needed to. I felt safe there and in fact I loved that little room, and that’s where I read. Not one of those boys had ever been in it, but I used to read stories to Roscoe there. My bed was a big shelf I had nailed up, which went from wall to wall, and it was good enough, and cozy. On the opposite wall were more shelves running, just like my bed, wall-to-wall, and filled with books and my clothes, folded up. I had an old mirror in a black wood frame of Mama’s that still had traces of gold and pink roses painted on it. It was big enough and reflected my lamp. When I was in bed with my book, I could look over and see myself reading, and I liked that. Half of the ceiling was covered with bunches of dried flowers that Serafima had given me. I really liked how the ceiling light showed through them. It smelled good in there too. Serafima was the only person besides Roscoe who had ever been all the way inside my room, but there were some mice that visited me there, regular, ’cause I fed them oats and celery, and I found out mice don’t especially like cheese. I loved those little mice about like I loved Serafima, and Mama, to tell you the truth.

There was only one thing I wished for then, other than to not live there at all, and that was a picture of my real mother. She was big, like me, I knew that, but that was about all I remembered, except that she used to tell me stories about everything under the sun. The only time I had been out in the wilderness was when I was with Mama, but I can’t really talk about that now. I still remember when Laverle burned all the pictures of her. I think my father started his dying from that moment, ’cause I could see he still missed Mama. I didn’t much care how my father was feeling, at any time, with good reason, but I know I felt a stab in my body when I saw what Laverle had done, and I knew he felt it too.

I can kind of understand why Laverle left this family when her baby died, and I can even see why she thought it would be okay to dump her big ugly boys on me, but I can’t bring myself to understand why she needed to burn the pictures of a dead woman. I hope I get over that someday.

It seems to me that forgiveness is something that you give, real easy, to the people you love, no matter what they’ve done, it just goes without saying, but the ones who can’t be forgiven are the ones who’ve never said they’re sorry, the ones who never asked. Laverle never asked. Neither did my father. It didn’t have to be with words, but they never did. When I figured that out, I knew I must have cared for both of them more than I thought.

Clyman was someone I could forgive. He sort of helped me keep people out of my room. There were even times when he seemed to know I had reached a point with all the work I did, and with all the filth I put up with in his friends. Clyman seemed to know when that was, and he would shove all the boys out of the house. They would all leave me alone for a while, for days. Pretty soon, Jeffrey got so he seldom showed up at all, and Duane always acted any way that Clyman did, but it was an act. If Duane was sitting around, doing nothing at all, you could bet it was because Clyman was doing nothing at all either. If Clyman said something sounded like a good idea to him, Duane would say it sounded good to him too, only Duane would keep on talking about it, just to make it sound like it was his own idea all the time. If I ever find any of this funny to think back on someday, it will probably be memories of Duane copying Clyman.

That day in the kitchen, after that lady had given me the brochure, I was standing there looking through the window over the sink, knowing the boys would be barging in any minute. The window glass was held together with duct tape but it was clean. A dog I’d never seen before was chained outside. I only noticed that because my dishpan was beside it for a water dish. Jeffrey always kept a dog out there in the filth, but never for more than a few weeks at a time. I always heard him say he was training those dogs and selling them. I started to go outside and get my dishpan back when I heard the Coons stomp into the house.

Clyman and his friends were a sort of gang, and they called themselves the Coons, because they thought that was funny and because they were so hot for killing those scared little animals. But I thought it meant that someday, somebody was going to tree them all and maybe blow their heads off. Serafima said I shouldn’t talk that way. She said it was very similar to a prayer to say things like that. I told her I really thought it was something that would be a blessing for everybody, including the boys themselves.

Clyman clomped into the kitchen that day and called out in his loud voice, “Who’s that?” He must have seen the lady’s truck pull away. Things often turned out better if I didn’t answer Clyman at all. I waited and he said, “What’s that?” and grabbed the brochure out of my hands. I knew he could hardly read, and he ended like I thought he would. “Shit,” he said, “probably some religion thing.”

Lately Clyman had started acting like he was the oldest, so none of this surprised me, but then he said something unusual for him. “Was he white or black?” I just looked at him and didn’t say a thing. He hadn’t even thought of red. He put the brochure in his dirty jeans pocket and left the room, and that was the end of that.

I didn’t care that Clyman had taken my ticket to opportunity. I knew I wouldn’t do anything with it anyway. I didn’t believe in magic, but Clyman did. Later I saw him and Ada using rolled-up pieces of that brochure to snort coke.

The rest is pretty easy to tell. Maybe Serafima was right and I never will see her again because I am surely not going back, and I know she understands. At least I want her to know she was the one who gave me the ticket out of there.

Clyman left the house with Ada, and Jeffrey hadn’t been seen in days. Duane later came in, ate something in the living room, which was also his bedroom, and left. Duane always did things sneaky so I never really heard him leave. That night the dog began to bark when it was late so I let it go. Nothing was new.

The next day nobody came home, which was a holiday for me because it meant they would probably be gone for days, so after my gardening I went over to Serafima’s. We had her usual weak tea, and I told her about the lady who had come by, and about her saying I should get all dressed up, that this was an opportunity. Serafima got serious for a minute, as we both knew I didn’t have any decent clothes. Then she told me, “You look in your mama’s stuff.” I didn’t answer. I had looked through those old things before, of course. My mother’s special smell was long gone, and I didn’t look anymore. Her clothes were in some moldy boxes in the garage, although that was just a beat-up shed full of junk and spiders. Laverle had thought those boxes were full of outgrown things of her boys, but I always knew they were Mama’s, and I didn’t say anything.

Sometimes I had gotten those clothes out, but they were too big for me. I thought they were old-fashioned, but I had liked the colors and the way they moved. Mama had been a thrift-store shopper and so her clothes were even older than they might have been, but I went home and tried them on again. They fit good enough now, and I knew those old clothes were considered cool, and I knew they looked pretty good. I took a pair of pants, some shirts, and I put my own stuff into her old shoulder bag.

The clothes were wrinkled and I didn’t have any iron, but I knew how to steam things in the shower to straighten them out, so I did that. One thing we had was plenty of hot water for Duane’s boiling hot showers. I’d had to steam clothes in the shower when I went to my little brother’s funeral, so I knew how that worked. I had figured it out. Later I hung my mother’s clothes on the bar that was directly over the bed in my room.

That night, sitting on my bed, looking up at those particular clothes, it seems like I knew I had to have them ready, and I thought about that. I also cried that night but I don’t know why.

A few nights later, I guess, all the boys came in around sunrise, loud and drunk, and it woke me up. Something made me get dressed fast and see what was up. They were all giggling, like they had done something bad. But they hadn’t done something bad — they were getting ready to do it. I didn’t like how everything felt. There were two derelicts with them I had seen before, and all of them were mighty drunk. I stood in the doorway of my room and heard Jeffrey outside yelling that somebody stole his dog. Clyman stumbled into the kitchen but he wouldn’t look at me. That worried me. He didn’t seem as drunk as the others, and I knew he wasn’t as mean as the rest of them could be. They all sort of rolled and punched their way through the kitchen, and it filled up with the smell of mud, and beer, and pee, and noise. I saw then that the two homeless men were struggling to hold onto something alive. I heard a high-pitched whine and my stomach lurched. I felt like I needed to run, but I also didn’t want to leave. I wanted to help what made that noise but I couldn’t move. They had a live raccoon, a young one, and that poor, bloody creature looked right into my eyes.

They dropped the little animal on the table, its feet all tied up, knocking its backbone against the edge. I thought I was dying then because I felt everything in my body come to a stop. I heard myself saying, Oh, no, oh no, over and over. “No, Clyman, oh no.” Somebody had grabbed my wrists and he was taller than I was. I looked and it turned out to be Jeffrey who was so tall. I hadn’t even known that about him, he was such a stranger to me. He’s the one who said to Clyman, “Let’s take it outside.” He didn’t even look at me when he dropped my arms. I’m big, as I said, but I don’t fight. Serafima had taught me how to work out life so that it wasn’t necessary to do things that way, and I had seen she was right.

I saw right then that Clyman had made his choice to join in on the meanness, and in my mind I said goodbye to him, but I hope he stops that someday.

I won’t tell you what happened out in the yard that night. I don’t really know. I filled the dishpan full of hot water and took it into my room and bolted the door. My hands weren’t shaking at all. I took off my clothes and washed up, trying not to listen to what was going on outside. They were making plenty of noise. I brushed my hair careful, back and away from my face in a way I’d never done before. I put on my mother’s clothes and put some of my favorite books in her shoulder bag. I did all that, quick and smooth. I put on the most decent pair of shoes I had, opened the door and walked through the house. I felt like I didn’t have any feet at all. The house smelled bad to me, my own food smells, and I remember thinking I would never cook another lentil again, and I think that’s going to be true.

I stood there in that ugly front door of Duane’s bedroom, and I could smell the early morning there. I realized this was the day, the day hanging out in my memory, the day I had to be somewhere before noon, like the lady had said. I heard a police siren not too far off and I knew it had to be on its way to the house. I pulled at a box of matches that were stuck in the wax of a dusty melted candle and ran back to my bedroom. I got that box of matches blazing and threw it on my bed. I figured the clothes and books would catch fire easy, and all of Serafima’s flowers. I grabbed up the little pumpkin she had grown and dried for me, and put it in my bag.

I walked through the house fast, and out the front door, and even though I lost one of my shoes on the steps, I didn’t look back. I felt like I was breathing for the first time in my life, and I felt like I was floating. I remembered just exactly where the lady had said to go, and I heard later that I had a big smile on my face. I felt like I was some kind of queen. I felt like I was going to the ball.

“Reading a husky poem by Anne Sexton, and seeing a tough and tender drawing by Terri Windling, both about Cinderella, got me going on a grand consensus of the different versions of the tale that I had written over the years. I’m pretty sure Cinderella wasn’t a fool.”