Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Trash (1988)

  Days, I went to training sessions, memorized codes, section numbers, and memo formats. Nights, I wrote my stories. I would pull out scraps of paper at work to make notes about things I wanted to write about, though most of those scraps just wound up tucked in my yellow pad. What poured out of me could not be planned or controlled; it came up like water under pressure at its own pace, pushing my fear ahead of it. By the end of the month, I’d taken to sitting on the motel roof—no longer stoned, but still writing. By then I was also writing letters to all the women I really didn’t expect to see again, explaining the things that writing my stories had made real to me. I did not intend to mail those letters, and never did. The letters themselves were stories—mostly lies—self-justifying, awkward, and desperate. I finished that month, got assigned to a distant city, put away my yellow papers, and moved—making sure no one who knew me from before could find me. I threw myself into the women’s community, fell in love every third day, and started trying to be serious about writing—poems and essays and the beginnings of stories. I even helped edit a feminist magazine. Throughout that time I told stories—mostly true stories about myself and my family and my lovers in a drawl that made them all funnier than they were. Though that was mostly a good time for me, I wrote nothing that struck me as worth the trouble of actually keeping. I did not tuck those new stories away with the yellow pads I had sealed up in a blanket box of my mother’s. I told myself the yellow pages were as raw and unworked as I felt myself to be, and the funny stories I was telling people were better, were the work of someone who was going to be a “real” writer. It was three years before I pulled out those old yellow sheets and read them, and saw how thin and self-serving my funny stories had become.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Their discreet steward had meanwhile made up several beds in different parts of the little valley, surrounding them with drapes of French cretonne and bedecking them with canopies, and the king gave leave to those who so desired to retire for their siesta; and those who had no desire to sleep were free to amuse themselves to their hearts’ content in the various ways to which they were accustomed. In due course, when the time came for them to address themselves once more to their story telling, they all got up and proceeded to seat themselves on rugs which, in accordance with the king’s instructions, had been laid upon the grass beside the lake, in a spot not far away from where they had breakfasted. Then the king ordered Emilia to open the proceedings, and with a broad smile, she gaily began to speak, as follows: FIRST STORYGianni Lotteringhi hears a tapping at his door in the night; he awakens his wife, and she leads him to believe it is a werewolf, whereupon they go and exorcize it with a prayer, and the knocking stops. My lord, I should have counted myself very fortunate if you had chosen some person other than myself to introduce so splendid a topic as the one on which we are called upon to speak; but since you desire me to set a reassuring example to the other ladies, I shall willingly do so. I shall endeavour, dearest ladies, to say something that might prove useful to you in the future, for if other women are no different from myself, we are easily frightened, and in particular by werewolves.1 Heaven knows that I am unable to explain what these creatures might be, nor have I ever found any woman who could, but we are frightened of them just the same. However, if you should ever encounter one, you will henceforth be able to drive it away, for by listening carefully to my story you will learn a fine and godly prayer which is tailored to the purpose. There once lived in Florence, in the quarter of San Pancrazio,2 a master-weaver whose name was Gianni Lotteringhi, a man more successful in his calling than sensible in other matters, for although he was a simple sort of fellow, he was regularly elected as the leader of the laud-singers at Santa Maria Novella, and had to conduct their rehearsals, and he was often given other such trifling little duties, so that all in all he had a mighty high opinion of himself; yet the only reason these functions were entrusted to him was that, being comfortably off, he frequently used to supply the friars with a good meal.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  How I wished that was truly what I was doing. My friend’s boyfriend, who had been kicked out of high school, was waiting for us up the street in his busted-up car. We jumped in. A pair of fuzzy dice hung from the rearview mirror. I’d never been in a car with fuzzy dice. No good can come from this, warned my knowing. What does it matter if you lose face now by backing out? Ask them to drop you off. Now. I was still angry at my stepfather, and at my mother for supporting him. Whatever happened, she took his side. She didn’t want to see what was really going on. What good was it to know anything anyway? I argued at the knowing. The more you knew, the more you endured. My classmate pulled out beers hidden under her jacket. We drank. Her older, slick-haired boyfriend drove us farther and farther out from the city, beyond my circle of familiarity. The beer calmed my anxiety. Soon we were at the lake, at a huge party. The music pounded. Drunken strangers, mostly guys, surrounded me. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to go home at all. Hell, I reminded myself, I had no home. So I drank. The prickling anxiety that constantly haunted me in my waking moments slid to my feet. The more I drank, the more I didn’t care that I couldn’t sing in the house anymore or try out for the play. I drank more to fly above the rude story. I drank to obliterate my life. My classmate and her boyfriend disappeared. They left me alone without a ride home. I panicked. I had to find a way back by my stepfather’s curfew. If I were to show up late and drunk, I feared I could be beaten to death. I found a ride and paid for it without money. I had nothing else, and I was desperate and out-of-my-mind drunk. I left part of myself behind. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] After that, I drank intermittently, usually on weekends. I discovered that each kind of alcohol has its own spirit. Drinking the sticky-sweet Southern Comfort associated with the singer Janis Joplin evoked violence. The whiskey was born in a New Orleans bar in 1874, in the wake of my people’s removal. After I pulled down the front door of my apartment in my very early twenties, in a frustrated anger born of drinking Southern Comfort, I never drank it again. Tequila was closer to its plant origins. I could see the agave plant at the edge of my consciousness. It was a medicine. I sensed the plant as a mothering being. It would bend over me to take care of me even as it would punish me, like a fierce, protective mother. All of these plant medicines, like whiskey, tequila, and tobacco, are potent healers. There’s a reason they’re called spirits. You must use them very carefully.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Furious, she called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who in turn alerted Kenyon’s probation officer, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. “Ken discovered he’d bit into the wrong bone this time,” Lena says. Upon learning he was wanted by the law again, Kenyon fled south with Gwendolyn and their kids to his old hideaway, Colonia LeBaron. Back in Mexico, Kenyon married a third wife, who happened to be Gwendolyn’s half sister. He departed Colonia LeBaron soon thereafter with both wives and all their children, and lit out across Central America. Over the years that followed he had four more children with each wife. He supported all these dependents, after a fashion, by doing odd jobs, selling natural foods, working as a massage therapist, and running petty scams. “He got money lots of different ways,” says Evangeline Blackmore, the oldest of the kids Ken had with Gwendolyn. Now a tall, blond, exotic-looking eighteen-year-old who speaks English with a trace of a Mexican accent, Evangeline explains that Kenyon “would buy and sell gold once in a while. When we were in Mexico he made saddles and other leather goods for Mexican cowboys. But mostly he would con people. My dad is a very good con artist.” Kenyon Blackmore had always subscribed to weird religious views, but they became notably more extreme after his release from prison, when he disappeared into the shadows of Central America with his two LeBaron wives. “The LeBarons seemed to encourage Dad’s strange beliefs,” says Lena. “They were convinced he possessed God-like qualities. They would feed his fantasy, and he would feed theirs.” As he dragged his young wives and their pack of semiferal children back and forth across Central America, Kenyon received a series of revelations in which God told him that he was “the last prophet before the return of Jesus Christ.” God told him, in fact, that Jesus would come back to earth in the form of a child born of Kenyon’s pure seed and his daughter’s virgin womb. Heeding the Lord’s commandment, in June 1996, on Evangeline’s twelfth birthday, he took her as his wife—that is to say, he began raping her on a regular basis. According to Evangeline, her father believed that he should start having sexual intercourse with her when she turned twelve “because this is when Mary, the first mother of Jesus, was impregnated.” Kenyon was convinced, she says, that “nobody else’s blood was good enough” to sire the Son of Man. When Kenyon forced himself on Evangeline, she remembers him telling her that “I was going to hell because I wasn’t being submissive.” As she continued to resist, “he would throw me on the ground, punch me, and cover my mouth when I would try and scream.” Eventually, to keep from being beaten, she started yielding passively to her sixty-year-old father’s incestuous assaults. “I was barely twelve years old,” Evangeline states with astounding composure.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The servant did as he was bidden, and the maid, having seized the clothes from his hands, and recognized them, turned pale with terror, strongly suspecting, in view of what she had been told, that they had murdered her. Scarcely able to prevent herself from screaming, she burst into tears, and, the scholar having now departed, she immediately set off at a run towards the tower, with the clothes under her arm. That same afternoon, a swineherd from the lady’s estate had had the misfortune to lose two of his pigs, and, searching all over for them, he arrived at the tower shortly after the scholar had left. Peering into every nook and cranny to see whether his pigs were anywhere to be found, he heard the unfortunate lady’s despairing moans, and climbing as far up the tower as he could, he called out: ‘Who is it that is crying up there?’ Recognizing the swineherd’s voice, the lady called to him by name, and said: ‘Alas! go fetch my maid and tell her to come up here.’ ‘Oh my God!’ he exclaimed, seeing who it was. ‘How ever did you get up there, ma’am? Your maid has been searching high and low for you the whole day. But who would have thought of looking for you here?’ Seizing the ladder by the two uprights, he set it in the proper position and began to tie on the rungs by means of withies. As he was doing this, the maidservant arrived on the scene, and on entering the tower, no longer able to hold herself in check, she clapped her palms to the sides of her head and cried out: ‘My poor, sweet mistress, where are you?’ On hearing the maidservant’s voice, the lady called to her with all her strength, saying: ‘Here I am, my sister. Up here. Don’t cry, but just bring me my clothes, and quickly.’ No sooner did she hear the voice of her mistress, than her fears were almost entirely dispelled, and climbing the ladder, which by this time was all but repaired, she succeeded with the swineherd’s assistance in reaching the platform, where, finding her mistress lying naked on the floor, utterly broken and exhausted, looking more like a burnt log than a human form, she dug her nails into her face and burst into tears, as though she were gazing down upon a corpse. However, the lady implored her for God’s sake to be silent and help her to dress. And having learnt from the maid that no one knew where she had been, except for the swineherd and those who had brought her clothes, she felt somewhat relieved, and begged them for God’s sake never to breathe a word about it to anyone.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  late afternoon sun. Who was after whom? I wondered. “Lupita, can you move your admiration society outside?” It was Mrs. Wilhelm. I had briefly forgotten about her. She motioned me into her office with her determined German chin and sharp gray eyes. Suddenly I was afraid again. The door shut with a precise click. She motioned me to sit at the table I had shined with lemon wax just that morning. My work detail was to clean her office after breakfast before I went to class. I did so diligently, with respect and fear. “I have something I want to show you,” Mrs. Wilhelm said. Here it is, I thought. I expected her to pull out the weekend’s report on the ditch episode, or at least to point out an uneven wax job. Instead she put a letter in front of me. It was addressed to her, and it was from my stepfather. I had no idea why my stepfather would write to Mrs. Wilhelm or any administrator at the school. I had never seen him write a letter to anyone. His routine was to come in from work at four, find a reason to hit my brothers or me, then open and read the evening paper. My mother would hide in the kitchen cooking dinner, though she was tired after waitressing all day at the diner for the old lady from back East who ran the place. One time I lost it. My mother was exhausted from working a double shift. My stepfather sat in his huge chair barking out orders. He yelled at my mother to cut his meat, to bring him another glass of iced tea. Then he snapped at her because she wasn’t moving fast enough. “Hurry up, bring me some more ice! What’s taking you so long?” He had just asked her for something at the other end of the house a few minutes before. I had to say something. “Why don’t you buy her a pair of roller skates so she can get around faster?” I was belted. I was grounded forever. But it was worth it. The envelope had been opened neatly by Mrs. Wilhelm with the electric letter opener I dusted every morning. I took out the letter. He had used my mother’s drugstore stationery and had written with blue ink.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  One night after a long, exhausting day of studying for finals, I lay down and fell into sudden deep sleep. But sleep didn’t last long. I felt demons grab hold of me and tug me with them into their lower world. I wrestled, struggled, and fought to get free. I got loose, leaped up, and turned on the light by the bed. I kept it on all night to keep them away. They didn’t like light. I could see their cold stares at the edge of the lamp. In the weeks that followed they began appearing even before I closed my eyes. I didn’t know what to do. Not long after, some Navajo friends and I had driven back together from a native rights conference in Oklahoma. They were crashing at my place before heading back to the reservation. I woke up my guests with my noisy struggle with the demons. The next day one of my friends drove me to get help up near Farmington. A Navajo roadman took care of me with prayers and the spirit of the peyote plant. The demons disappeared. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] Though on the surface I continued as a student who garnered scholarships and made excellent grades and was now beginning to publish my first poems in the university student magazine, I continued to struggle with panic. I considered all the possible reasons: the mother-in-law witching, tribal history, the strangle of jealousy from others, the banishment from my home, faltering into territory and offending spirits there. But no matter the reasoning, it remained a fact of my life. I recalled how the dream of the chase began around the time our father left home. It would begin with the sound, just like the panic, like whirring bullroarers making an eerie echo that traveled across time. And I would begin running. One night after writing my last paper for a class, I struggled in a sweaty, anxiety-ridden sleep. I was running, and then I was cornered in a white room. I could not find my voice. In all the years of the chase, I had never come to this place. I heard a congested, snuffling breathing. The monster rose up before me. I saw him for the first time. The horror transfixed me. I had no room in my mind for such a being. I realized how tired I was of the chase, of all the years of the chase. Just when I was about to give up, the knowing reminded me that I knew how to fly. I thought fly, and I leapt to the ceiling of the white room. I felt safe. Then the monster flew up. There was nothing else I could do. With a sudden, unexpected grace, all the fear within me escaped. There was no panic. I was a lightness I had never experienced before in my life. The monster put his hand to me. It did not touch me. He disappeared.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  Though my stepfather was a house painter, our house was peeling and appeared ragged and in need of repair. The yard was barren and wild. Our house was noticeably the shabbiest house on the block. I could have taken initiative with the yard, but I always lost energy when I stepped into the aura of the house. I struggled with lethargy and often had to force myself through chores and obligations. I felt a warning in my gut. My stepfather’s car was in the drive. I tried to disarm the knowing. The knowing was a powerful warning system that stepped forth when I was in danger. Still, I often disregarded it. I’d been asked by a boy a few years older than me to go for a walk behind the grounds of the teen recreation center. My knowing said to me in a loud, distinct voice, Do not walk alone with this boy. To do so would put you in danger. I must be imagining things, I said to myself. I walked with him. He knocked me down and attempted to rape me. Someone came on us and I leaped up and got away. The knowing was always right. It could never be disarmed. It stood watch over me. Still, I tried. I told the knowing to remember that my stepfather could be nice sometimes. He sang show tunes to my mother. The knowing didn’t respond. Truth does not lower itself to small-time arguments or skirmishes. But, I argued with myself, you never knew what would happen. He could uncover or invent a transgression of weeks or months before and off would come his belt if he needed an excuse to hit you. Or, once when I thought I would get in trouble for climbing into the space between the ceiling and the roof and falling through into the living room, he just laughed. I hugged my bag under my arm, to protect the play pages. When I opened the door, he stood, smiling, with his belt in his hand. He yanked me into the house, out of view of the neighbors. “This isn’t fair. My mother told me I could go!” I cried as he swung the belt. Because I protested, he hit me for a long time. He grounded me for a month and forbade me to try out for the school play. I had work to do at home. I had to take the bus with everyone else. I didn’t care anymore what happened to me. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] It wasn’t long after that I was invited by a classmate to go to a party. I barely knew her, and I didn’t have a good feeling about her or the situation. But I wanted to go. I wanted to have some semblance of a normal teenage life. I lied to my mother and said I was going to my friend’s house to study for the evening. I didn’t want to lie.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  fter we lost my father when my parents divorced, my mother and our family of four children kept going, though we floated in the chaos of unknowing. Our mother worked several jobs. When word got out that our beautiful mother was single, men began showing up to court her. Most she dismissed. We children liked the Indian bull rider missing two fingers best. He showed us how to loop a rope, throw a lasso. We loved the twangy beat of his country guitar, his kind shine. There was an angular preacher who wore black. He smelled sour and lonely. He carried a switch for beating behind his back. My mother did not invite him to return. In fact, she hadn’t invited him at all. The last man who courted our mother was seventeen years older. He charmed her and us. He gave me a pair of skates. He took us for rides that ended in hamburgers and shakes. He sang songs and smiled with his eyes. He’d been watching our mother for some time. He married our mother in a ceremony without us. We moved from our childhood home with its familiar trees, plants, and creatures. We left our friends, our school, and the memories that were rooted there. As we drove away from the house we had known as our own, I disappeared into a cloud of sullen mourning. We moved to a house with four bedrooms that my mother and stepfather found together on “Independence” Street. What irony. In that house I had nightmares and premonitions of evil. The first night there, with unpacked boxes surrounding me in the room I was to share with my sister, I woke up in the midst of a struggle with a dark being. I cried out for my mother. No one came. I remember being reprimanded by my stepfather the next morning. I was never to disturb their sleep in the night again. Any pretense of nice ended there. The next Saturday morning I followed my five-year-old sister’s cries to the kitchen and found her being held aloft by one leg by my stepfather. I froze in terror. My brother closest in age stood with me. “This is what will happen to you if you misbehave.” He swung our sister around. He unbuckled and pulled off his belt in one slick motion. I still see the sweat

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now, it so happened that one Friday morning towards the beginning of May,2 the weather being very fine, Nastagio fell to thinking about his cruel mistress. Having ordered his servants to leave him to his own devices so that he could meditate at greater leisure, he sauntered off, lost in thought, and his steps led him straight into the pinewoods. The fifth hour of the day was already spent, and he had advanced at least half a mile into the woods, oblivious of food and everything else, when suddenly he seemed to hear a woman giving vent to dreadful wailing and ear-splitting screams. His pleasant reverie being thus interrupted, he raised his head to investigate the cause, and discovered to his surprise that he was in the pinewoods. Furthermore, on looking straight ahead he caught sight of a naked woman, young and very beautiful, who was running through a dense thicket of shrubs and briars towards the very spot where he was standing. The woman’s hair was dishevelled, her flesh was all torn by the briars and brambles, and she was sobbing and screaming for mercy. Nor was this all, for a pair of big, fierce mastiffs were running at the girl’s heels, one on either side, and every so often they caught up with her and savaged her. Finally, bringing up the rear he saw a swarthy-looking knight, his face contorted with anger, who was riding a jet-black steed and brandishing a rapier, and who, in terms no less abusive than terrifying, was threatening to kill her. This spectacle struck both terror and amazement into Nastagio’s breast, to say nothing of compassion for the hapless woman, a sentiment that in its turn engendered the desire to rescue her from such agony and save her life, if this were possible. But on finding that he was unarmed, he hastily took up a branch of a tree to serve as a cudgel, and prepared to ward off the dogs and do battle with the knight. When the latter saw what he was doing, he shouted to him from a distance: ‘Keep out of this, Nastagio! Leave me and the dogs to give this wicked sinner her deserts!’ He had no sooner spoken than the dogs seized the girl firmly by the haunches and brought her to a halt. When the knight reached the spot he dismounted from his horse, and Nastagio went up to him saying: ‘I do not know who you are, or how you come to know my name; but I can tell you that it is a gross outrage for an armed knight to try and kill a naked woman, and to set dogs upon her as though she were a savage beast. I shall do all in my power to defend her, of that you may be sure.’ Whereupon the knight said:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Some people, pursuing what was possibly the safer alternative, callously maintained that there was no better or more efficacious remedy against a plague than to run away from it. Swayed by this argument, and sparing no thought for anyone but themselves, large numbers of men and women abandoned their city, their homes, their relatives, their estates and their belongings, and headed for the countryside, either in Florentine territory or, better still, abroad. It was as though they imagined that the wrath of God would not unleash this plague against men for their iniquities irrespective of where they happened to be, but would only be aroused against those who found themselves within the city walls; or possibly they assumed that the whole of the population would be exterminated and that the city’s last hour had come. Of the people who held these various opinions, not all of them died. Nor, however, did they all survive. On the contrary, many of each different persuasion fell ill here, there, and everywhere, and having themselves, when they were fit and well, set an example to those who were as yet unaffected, they languished away with virtually no one to nurse them. It was not merely a question of one citizen avoiding another, and of people almost invariably neglecting their neighbours and rarely or never visiting their relatives, addressing them only from a distance; this scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them. Hence the countless numbers of people who fell ill, both male and female, were entirely dependent upon either the charity of friends (who were few and far between) or the greed of servants, who remained in short supply despite the attraction of high wages out of all proportion to the services they performed. Furthermore, these latter were men and women of coarse intellect and the majority were unused to such duties, and they did little more than hand things to the invalid when asked to do so and watch over him when he was dying. And in performing this kind of service, they frequently lost their lives as well as their earnings.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  On learning that Egano had woken up, and hearing his own name being mentioned, Anichino made several attempts to withdraw his hand so that he could make good his escape, for he strongly suspected that the lady was going to give him away. But she was clasping his hand so firmly that it was impossible for him to retrieve it. ‘I’ll tell you why,’ said the lady, in reply to Egano’s question. ‘My own opinion of Anichino was the same as yours; I too considered him the most faithful of your servants. But he has undeceived me, for yesterday, when you were out hawking and he stayed behind, he had the impudence, thinking it a good opportunity, to propose that I should minister to his pleasures. And so that I should have no difficulty in providing you with tangible and visible evidence of all this, I gave him my consent and told him that I would go into the garden, shortly after midnight, and wait for him at the foot of the pine-tree. I personally have no intention of going there, of course: but if you desire to know what a trustworthy servant he is, you can easily slip into one of my skirts, cover your head in a veil, and go down there to see whether he turns up, as I am certain he will.’ ‘I must certainly look into this,’ said Egano. So he got out of bed, and, groping around in the darkness, he struggled into one of his wife’s skirts as best he could and covered his head in a veil. Then he made his way down to the garden and stood at the foot of the pine-tree, waiting for Anichino to turn up. As soon as she heard him leaving the bedroom, the lady got up and bolted the door from the inside. After experiencing the biggest fright that he had ever had in his life, and struggling with all his might to free himself from the lady’s grasp, and silently heaping a hundred thousand curses upon the lady and upon himself for loving her and trusting her, Anichino was positively overjoyed when, at the end of it all, he saw what she had done. As soon as the lady had returned to her bed, she urged him to strip off his clothes and get in beside her, and there they lay for quite some time together, to their mutual pleasure and delight. When the lady thought it was time for Anichino to go, she persuaded him to get up and put on his clothes, saying: ‘My darling treasure, find yourself a good stout stick and go down to the garden. Make it appear that you were putting my fidelity to the test, pretend to think that Egano is me, shower him with abuse, and give him a sound thrashing4 with the stick. Just think of the wonderful joy and amusement it’ll bring to us both!’

• From Trash (1988)

  When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman’s hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I’ve come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes. I was too young to imagine my own death with anything but an adolescent’s high romantic enjoyment; I pretended often enough that I was dying of a wasting disease that would give lots of time for my aunts, uncles, and stepfather to mourn me. But the idea that anything could touch my mother, that anything would dare to hurt her, was impossible to bear, and I woke up screaming the one night I dreamed of her death—a dream in which I tried bodily to climb to the throne of a Baptist god and demand her return to me. I thought of my mama like a mountain or a cave, a force of nature, a woman who had saved her own life and mine, and would surely save us both over and over again. The wrinkles in her hands made me think of earthquakes and the lines under her eyes hummed of tidal waves in the night. If she was fragile, if she was human, then so was I, and anything might happen. If she were not the backbone of creation itself, then fear would overtake me. I could not allow that, would not. My child’s solution was to try to cure my mother of wrinkles in the hope of saving her from death itself. [image file=image_408.jpg] Once, when I was about eight and there was no Jergens lotion to be had, I spooned some mayonnaise out to use instead. Mama leaned forward, sniffed, lay back, and laughed into her hand. “If that worked,” she told me, still grinning, “I wouldn’t have dried up to begin with—all the mayonnaise I’ve eaten in my life.” “All the mayonnaise you’ve spread—like the butter of your smile, out there for everybody,” my stepfather grumbled. He wanted his evening glass of tea, wanted his feet put up, and maybe his neck rubbed. At a look from Mama, I’d run one errand after another until he was settled with nothing left to complain about. Then I’d go back to Mama. But by that time we’d have to start on dinner, and I wouldn’t have any more quiet time with her till a day or two later when I’d rub her feet again.

• From Trash (1988)

  Standing and waiting for his orders while staring at the thin black hairs on his balding head, I would imagine his scalp seen through bloodstained plastic, and smile wide and happy while I thought out how I would tell that one to my sister in our dark room at night, when she would whisper back to me her own version of our private morality play. When my stepfather beat me I did not think, did not imagine stories of either escape or revenge. When my stepfather beat me I pulled so deeply into myself I lived only in my eyes, my eyes that watched the shower sweat on the bathroom walls, the pipes under the sink, my blood on the porcelain toilet seat, and the buckle of his belt as it moved through the air. My ears were disconnected so I could understand nothing—neither his shouts, my own hoarse shameful strangled pleas, nor my mother’s screams from the other side of the door he locked. I would not come back to myself until the beating was ended and the door was opened and I saw my mother’s face, her hands shaking as she reached for me. Even then, I would not be able to understand what she was yelling at him, or he was yelling at both of us. Mama would take me into the bedroom and wash my face with a cold rag, wipe my legs and, using the same lotion I had rubbed into her feet, try to soothe my pain. Only when she had stopped crying would my hearing come back, and I would lie still and listen to her voice saying my name—soft and tender, like her hand on my back. There were no stories in my head then, no hatred, only an enormous gratitude to be lying still with her hand on me and, for once, the door locked against him. Push it down. Don’t show it. Don’t tell anyone what is really going on. We are not safe, I learned from my mama. There are people in the world who are, but they are not us. Don’t show your stuff to anyone. Tell no one that your stepfather beats you. The things that would happen are too terrible to name. Mama quit working honkytonks to try the mill as soon as she could after her marriage. But a year in the mill was all she could take; the dust in the air got to her too fast. After that there was no choice but to find work in a diner.

• From Trash (1988)

  Her five sons and three daughters dreamed often of their mother, dreamed she came in to wash their faces with lye, to cut off the places where their ears stuck out, to tie down their wagging tongues, and plane down their purplish genitals. “You won’t need this,” they dreamed she told them, as she pulled off one piece or another of their flesh. “Or this, or this.” They dreamed and screamed and woke each other in terror. Sometimes Shirley beat on the stairs with a broom handle to remind them how much she and Tucker needed their sleep. She hated the way they cringed away from her. After all, she never hit them. A pinch was enough, if you knew how it should be done. But more than their shameful fear of her, she hated the way Mattie would stare back at her and refuse to drop her eyes. “You think you’re something, don’t you?” Shirley would push her face right up to her daughter’s flushed and sweating cheekbones. “You think God’s got his eye on you?” She would pinch the inside of Mattie’s arm and twist her mouth at the girl’s stubborn expression. “Wouldn’t nobody take an interest in you if you were to birth puppy dogs and turtles—which you might. You might any day now.” She sent them all to bed early and came up to beat the foot of each bed with her broomstick until the children squeezed up near the top. “Boatwrights, you’re all purely bred Boatwrights. My side of the family don’t even want to know you’re alive. I look at you and I swear you an’t no kin to me at all.” It was true that Shirley’s family took no interest in her children. Once a year Shirley would go alone to visit her mother, but neither her parents nor her brothers ever visited her. The only thing the children knew about their grandparents was Shirley’s stories about their house, how big and clean it was, how the porch shone with soapstoned wood and baskets of sweet herbs that Grandma Wilmer used in her cooking, how the neighbors admired her mother and looked up to her daddy. By contrast, their father’s father, a widower, was nothing but a drunk. “Vegetables . . . hell!” That man sells whiskey out of that roadside stand, whiskey I tell you, not tomatoes and squash. He just has those runty old tomatoes there to keep the law off.” “Now Shirley, you know that an’t true,” Tucker always protested. “I know what’s true, Tucker Boatwright, and I won’t have these children spared the truth. You want them to grow up like their grandfather? Like those lazy sisters of yours in their dirt-floor cabins? I surely don’t. They grow up to live in dirt and I’ll renounce them.” “That woman hates her children,” the neighbors all said. They did not say that the children hated her.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Accordingly, her husband being gone out at one door, she went out at the other and betook herself as most secretly she might straight to the wood and hid herself in the thickest part thereof, standing attent and looking now here and now there, an she should see any one come. As she abode on this wise, without any thought of danger, behold, there sallied forth of a thick coppice hard by a terrible great wolf, and scarce could she say, 'Lord, aid me!' when it flew at her throat and laying fast hold of her, proceeded to carry her off, as she were a lambkin. She could neither cry nor aid herself on other wise, so sore was her gullet straitened; wherefore the wolf, carrying her off, would assuredly have throttled her, had he not encountered certain shepherds, who shouted at him and constrained him to loose her. The shepherds knew her and carried her home, in a piteous plight, where, after long tending by the physicians, she was healed, yet not so wholly but she had all her throat and a part of her face marred on such wise that, whereas before she was fair, she ever after appeared misfeatured and very foul of favour; wherefore, being ashamed to appear whereas she might be seen, she many a time bitterly repented her of her frowardness and her perverse denial to put faith, in a matter which cost her nothing, in her husband's true dream." THE EIGHTH STORY [Day the Ninth] BIONDELLO CHEATETH CIACCO OF A DINNER, WHEREOF THE OTHER CRAFTILY AVENGETH HIMSELF, PROCURING HIM TO BE SHAMEFULLY BEATEN The merry company with one accord avouched that which Talano had seen in sleep to have been no dream, but a vision, so punctually, without there failing aught thereof, had it come to pass. But, all being silent the queen charged Lauretta follow on, who said, "Like as those, most discreet ladies, who have to-day foregone me in speech, have been well nigh all moved to discourse by something already said, even so the stern vengeance wreaked by the scholar, of whom Pampinea told us yesterday, moveth me to tell of a piece of revenge, which, without being so barbarous as the former, was nevertheless grievous unto him who brooked it.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  It skipped us and tore up trees and cars on the next block, tossed them into the sky as if they were toys. We were uncertain what this hurricane would do. It had lost force as it traveled north. We listened to reports on the radio as to the storm’s progress and sang along with the radio to songs we knew. Suddenly a ball of fire sizzled and crackled as it flew from the roof of the kitchen through the house. It disappeared down the hall, and then it was gone. I felt a panicked doom. The sign was ominous. Then my stepfather drove up, and my mother didn’t have to remind me to hurry to my room. We would both have been in trouble if I had been up past bedtime. And he did not like us spending time together. I escaped to my room just as the front door opened. The water monster lived at the bottom of the lake. He didn’t disappear in the age of reason. He remained a mystery that never happened. In the muggy lake was the girl I was at sixteen. The story at the surface said she got there by car accident, or by drowning while drinking. Whatever it was, they’d say, it was an accident. The story was not an accident, nor was the existence of the water monster. It lived in the memory of the people as they carried the burden of the myth from Alabama to Oklahoma. Each reluctant step on the trail impressed memory into the broken heart, and no one ever forgot it. When I walked the stairway of water into the abyss, I returned as the wife of the water monster, wearing a blanket of time decorated with swatches of cloth and feathers from our favorite birds. The stories of the battle of the water monster were forever ongoing. Those stories seeped into my blood since infancy like deer gravy, so when the water monster appeared as the most handsome man in the tribe, or of any band whose visits I’d been witness to since childhood, how could I resist? The first time he appeared I carried my baby sister on my back as I went to get water. She laughed at a woodpecker flitting like a small red sun above us, and before I could deter the symbol we were in it. My body was already on fire with the explosion of womanhood as if I were flint, hot stone, and when he stepped out of the water he was the first myth I had ever seen uncovered. I surprised him in a human moment. My baby sister’s cry pinched reality. The red bird was a warning of disjuncture in the brimming sky. What I had seen there in the body beyond the water needed the words of holy recounting. I ran back to the village drenched in salt and sky.

• From Trash (1988)

  I had felt thick and strong beside her, thick and strong and sure of myself in a way I have not felt since. That March when my sister called I felt old; my hands felt wiry and worn, and my blood seemed hot and thin as it rushed through my veins. My sister’s voice sounded hollow; her words vibrated over the phone as if they had iron edges. My tongue locked to my teeth, and I tasted the fear I thought I had put far behind me. “They’re doing everything they can—surgery again this morning and chemotherapy and radiation. He’s a doctor, so he knows, but Jesus ...” “Jesus shit.” “Yeah.” Mama woke up alone with her rage, her grief. “Just what I’d always expected,” she told me later. “You think you know what’s going on, what to expect. You relax a minute and that’s when it happens. Life turns around and kicks you in the butt.” Lying there, she knew they had finally gotten her, the they that had been dogging her all her life, waiting for the chance to rob her of all her tomorrows. Now they had her, her body pinned down under bandages and tubes and sheets that felt like molten lead. She had not really believed it possible. She tried to pull her hands up to her neck, but she couldn’t move her arms. “I was so mad I wanted to kick holes in the sheets, but there wasn’t no use in that.” When my stepfather came in to sit and whistle his sobs beside the bed, she took long breaths and held her face tight and still. She became all eyes, watching everything from a place far off inside herself. “Never want what you cannot have,” she’d always told me. It was her rule for survival, and she grabbed hold of it again. She turned her head away from what she could not change and started adjusting herself to her new status. She was going to have to figure out how to sew herself up one of those breast forms so she could wear a bra. “Damn things probably cost a fortune,” she told me when I came to sit beside her. I nodded slowly. I didn’t let her see how afraid I was, or how uncertain, or even how angry. I showed her my pride in her courage and my faith in her strength. But underneath I wanted her to be angry, too. “I’ll make do,” she whispered, showing me nothing, and I just nodded. “Everything’s going to be all right,” I told her. “Everything’s going to be all right,” she told me. The pretense was sometimes the only thing we had to give each other. When it’s your mama and it’s an accomplished fact, you can’t talk politics into her bleeding. You can’t quote from last month’s article about how a partial mastectomy is just as effective.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  heard my stepfather grilling her. I heard my mother protesting and weeping. My sister slept peacefully beside me. My brothers were in their room. I wondered if they heard anything. “Who were you with?” my stepfather demanded. “I was partying with my girlfriends. You know I don’t have anyone else.” “If you want to party, we’ll have a party right here.” I wound tighter, ready to leap to save her. I heard him methodically popping open beers with a church key, one after another, and pouring beer down her throat and over her clothes. I heard ripping. My mother kept saying it wouldn’t happen again. It won’t happen again. It won’t happen again. Then it was quiet. It was quiet until dawn, and then I got up for school. After that, my mother’s few girlfriends called or came by only when my stepfather wasn’t around. She never went out except for work or to do errands he had specifically approved. He watched and marked her every step, her every word. In those times there were no domestic abuse shelters. If either my mother or I had been brave enough to report him, the authorities would have accepted his word over ours because he was an employed white man. We would have been forced back with no protection, and he would have been given tacit permission to keep us in line. I never heard my mother sing much anymore. Her singing used to fill the house. We would turn up the radio and dance to rock-and-roll together. Our house now was quiet with our labor to keep it in order. My sister and I had the bulk of the duties, because we were female. I was in charge of cleaning, doing laundry, including the ironing for the family, washing dishes, and child care. Our brothers emptied the trash and mowed the lawn. I tried making a case for rotating duties. I didn’t feel it was a fair distribution. There was no negotiating. Our mother worked hard and long hours in restaurants, either cooking or waitressing or both. Our stepfather contributed only his share of the mortgage. Our mother paid for everything else. She bought all groceries, food, and clothes. Our father could not be found for child support. The last and only time I saw my mother sing publicly was shortly after she and

• From Trash (1988)

  She wrapped one hand in my hair, the other around my left breast. “I’ll cook you . . . just you wait. I’ll cook you a meal to drive you crazy.” “Oh, honey.” She tasted like fry bread—thick, smoked, and fat-rich on my tongue. We ran sweat in puddles, while above us the salted eggplant pearled up in great clear drops of poison. When we finished, we gathered up all the eggplant on the floor and fried it in flour and crushed garlic. Lee poured canned tomatoes with basil and lemon on the hot slices and then pushed big bites onto my tongue with her fingers. It was delicious. I licked her fingers and fed her with my own hands. We never did get our clothes back on. In South Carolina, in the seventh grade, we had studied nutrition. “Vitamin D,” the teacher told us, “is paramount. Deny it to a young child and the result is the brain never develops properly.” She had a twangy midwestern accent, gray hair, and a small brown mole on her left cheek. Everybody knew she hated teaching, hated her students, especially those of us in badly fitting worn-out dresses sucking bacon rinds and cutting our names in the desks with our uncle’s old pocketknives. She would stand with a fingertip on her left ear, her thumb stroking that mole, while she looked at us with disgust she didn’t bother to conceal. “The children of the poor,” she told us, “the children of the poor have a lack of brain tissue simply because they don’t get the necessary vitamins at the proper age. It is a deficiency that cannot be made up when they are older.” A stroke of her thumb and she turned her back. I stood in the back of the room, my fingers wrapping my skull in horror. I imagined my soft brain slipping loosely in its cranial cavity shrunk by a lack of the necessary vitamins. How could I know if it wasn’t too late? Mama always said that smart was the only way out. I thought of my cousins, bigheaded, watery-eyed and stupid. Vitamin D! I became a compulsive consumer of vitamin D. Is it milk? We will drink milk, steal it if we must. Mama, make salmon stew. It’s cheap and full of vitamin D. If we can’t afford cream, then evaporated milk will do. One is as thick as the other. Sweet is expensive, but thick builds muscles in the brain. Feed me milk, feed me cream, feed me what I need to fight them. Twenty years later the doctor sat me down to tell me the secrets of my body.