The Sisters of Glass Ferry. Kim Michele Richardson

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СКАЧАТЬ ago they pulled out Web Sloan’s garden tractor that had gone missing in the ’20s. A partial human skull and one leather boot were wedged between one wheel’s rusted metal spokes. Mr. Sloan claimed his mama had reported his daddy and the tractor missing in 1921, but no one could find any records of such a report.

      Quickly, Flannery poured Mama a glass of water and knelt in front of her. “Mama.” She nudged the glass gently. “Here. Drink some water. Come on, have a sip; you’ll feel better.”

      Mama took a trembly breath and nodded.

      “Did you take your medicine this morning, Mama?”

      Mama took a gulp and shook her head.

      “You know Doc wants you to take it. Especially today. Let me go get it for you.” Flannery patted Mama’s knee and stood.

      “It’s in the cabinet,” Mama said, and bobbed her gray head toward the hall bathroom. “Get dressed. You need to drive me to Sheriff Henry.”

      Flannery hurried into the bathroom, opened the mirrored medicine cabinet, and searched the stacked glass shelves. Her daddy’s old razor fell out, and she knocked over a bottle of amphetamine salts the doctor had prescribed for Mama years ago. “No longer effective to boost her mood, or keep her mild depression at bay,” he’d said to Flannery back then. “Let’s try something new. For both of you.”

      Flannery scattered a few more half-empty pill bottles, iodine, old brown glass containers with rust-encrusted tops of dried-out paregoric and castor oil, and then snatched up the one that was new. It slipped from her grasp, and she bent over the soft-rose-tinted sink, trying to still her nerves bumping against the porcelain. That Patsy might be coming home, and like this, was something Flannery’d never dreamed, well hardly ever.

      Flannery picked up Mama’s medicine, read the instructions on the bottle, and pulled out two yellow pills. Her fingers buttered, and she dropped those too. Scooping the Valium out of the basin, she knocked Mama’s frosted-glass bottle of rose toilet water over, spilling the pink liquid everywhere.

      Pink. All this cupcake-pink. Mama and Patsy had insisted on smothering the room in it. The hue was everywhere, reeking from the tub to the sink, onto the commode and its matching roll of toilet paper, the blossomed wallpaper and rosy curtains. Flannery had begged Mama over the years to at least add some green, or a burst of red even, to break up the noxious crawl pink left under her skin.

      It reminded Flannery of what she’d read about Jayne Mansfield and her Pink Palace with its pink champagne-flowing fountain and heart-shaped tub.

      Mama and Patsy had fussed that the color was sophisticated, lovely like the silkiest nylons, or a pretty lacy slip worn under a dowdy duster. It fit Patsy and Mama fine, but for some reason, Flannery felt she hadn’t, nor would ever live up to the expectations of that strong, womanly pink.

      “Flannery?” Mama said faintly from the kitchen.

      “Just a small spill, Mama. I’ll clean it up,” Flannery called back, dropping a towel onto the mess. “Be right there.” She hovered over the sink, taking in tiny breaths of rose-filled air. She had to collect herself. Grabbing a washcloth, she pressed it to her nose.

      Flannery looked hard at the bottle of pills. She’d been leaning on them, same as Mama. Years of this new medicine, that old new, and yet, better new, all the doctors promised, but never new enough to fully nip the pain from Patsy’s leaving, from Flannery’s losses, or to calm the shakes from what had happened back in the city.

      She’d been a divorced woman for decades now, fancy-free in the fifties at that. Even though divorced meant the same as disgrace, a damnation in the eyes of small-town folks, being single suited Flannery just fine. Still, she couldn’t talk about the marriage, not to anyone, ever.

      Last year when she’d returned home to Louisville from “Patsy’s birthday week,” Flannery had stopped taking the pills. She’d cleaned herself up with the help of a nice psychiatrist, after having swallowed one too many and once again landed in Saint Anthony’s. That hospital had kept her for two weeks. Two whole weeks. Luckily, it hadn’t affected her teaching position at the elementary school because she had been on summer break, and the school was never the wiser. In some ways, bigger, more important ways, cities provided a shelter that no small town could.

      Flannery hung the pink, wet towel over the tub and opened the window to air out the sickeningly perfumed bathroom.

      Leaning over the sill, she looked out past the trees toward Ebenezer Road, inhaling the percolated winds from the nearby Kentucky River, forcing the calmness to root inside her. Mama and the news would have to wait until she pulled herself together. On a windy day like today, the river stole most of the angels’ share, the old distillery’s scent—lifted the sleeping bourbon’s vapors from its aging oak barrels and carried the breaths down the river. Her daddy and granddaddy and most of the men in Glass Ferry had worked the bourbon all their lives. The Butler family had owned the finest stills in the land, and they had all breathed and worn that angels’ share on their flesh and in their bones.

      River breezes slapped against the house’s brick façade, softly fanning Flannery’s face. More than anything she wished to escape to the mud banks of the Kentucky—escape to the sweet times before her losses had started to pile up. Step onto her daddy’s old ferryboat like when he was alive, sip the glass-eyed silence of the winding, stretching river, let the sweetness of its perpetual summer lap at her dangling bare feet and calm the tangled thoughts. Hear the lazy putting of the boat’s engine as it scooted down the river. Going down there now for anything as horrible as that car, that Mercury dredged out of there—she couldn’t bear it.

      A cardinal landed on the willow tree in the yard, singing to its mate. Sunlight cast soft bands across the bird’s black-masked eyes and standing red crown. A wonder lit Flannery, and she found herself holding fast to each rippled note, each light, painfully aware of the earth’s workings. Its comings and leavings and pulling sighs. Patsy’s and hers and others. It was as if she had suddenly knocked her funny bone against the sharpest corner of the world.

      Flannery smarted at the realization that she, like the bird and those others who’d left the earth, maybe Patsy now too, were just blurs in a passing fury.

      She could see it now and could almost welcome it without fear, and thought this would have been something fine to share with Patsy—a meaningful conversation like they’d had after Honey Bee died, a pledge given to each other before they’d given up on sisterhood.

      “A dear sister,” Patsy had called her, “my best friend. Always,” on the eve of their daddy’s funeral.

      How she missed them both. Wished she could say those words back to Patsy, wished for so many lost years.

      Plucking up the pill bottle, Flannery tapped it onto the ledge, dulling the marvel of clarity. She lifted it higher and shook the pills. Looking at the new like that had her thinking about the old and that last day with Patsy, Danny, and Hollis, and their final moments on Ebenezer.

      She shuddered as she remembered standing in the dirt just outside this very window, right there by the long-legged willow in 1952.

      * * *

      That night, Patsy and Danny’s double dates for the big prom canceled. Carol Jean’s mama called at the last minute and told Patsy she had put her daughter to bed after her girl fell ill with a nasty rash.

      Hollis and Danny pulled up to their house to collect Patsy a few minutes after Mama pulled away. СКАЧАТЬ