Daddy named me Billie Jo.
He wanted a boy.
Instead,
he got a long-legged girl
with a wide mouth
and cheekbones like bicycle handles.
He got a redheaded, freckle-faced, narrow-hipped girl
with a fondness for apples
and a hunger for playing fierce piano.
Now Livie’s gone west,
out of the dust
on her way to California
where the wind takes a rest sometimes.
And I’m wondering what kind of friend I am,
wanting my feet on that road to another place,
instead of Livie’s.
I ask Ma
how,
after all this time
Daddy still believes in rain.
I wish she’d give me a little more to hold on to than
“I knew you could.”
Instead she makes me feel like she’s just
taking me in like I was
so much flannel dry on the line.
He ran into the storm,
his overalls half-hooked over his union suit.
“Daddy!” I called. “You can’t stop dust.”
But Ma says, “Can’t you see
what’s happening, Bayard?
The wheat’s not meant to be here.”
And Daddy says,
“What about those apple trees of yours, Pol?
You think they are?
Nothing needs more to drink than those two.
But you wouldn’t hear of leveling your apples,
would you?
Daddy was just seventeen
when he fought in the
Great War off in France.
There’s not much he’s willing to say about those days, except about the poppies.
He remembers the poppies,
red on the graves of the dead.
I looked at Ma
so pregnant with one baby.
“Can you imagine five?” I said.
Ma lowered herself into a chair.
Tears dropping on her tight stretched belly,
she wept
just to think of it.
Daddy called to me. He asked me to bring water,
Ma was thirsty.
I brought up a pail of fire and Ma drank it. She had
given birth to a baby of flames. The baby
burned at her side.
But the grasshoppers ate every leaf,
they ate every piece of fruit.
Nothing left but a couple apple cores,
hanging from Ma’s trees.
I couldn’t tell her,
couldn’t bring myself to say
her apples were gone.
I never had a chance.
Ma died that day
giving birth to my brother.
“Billie Jo threw the pail,”
they said. “An accident.”
they said.
Under their words a finger pointed.
My father will stay, no matter what,
he’s stubborn as sod.
He and the land have a hold on each other.
But what about me?
My father used to say, why not put those hands to good use?
He doesn’t say anything about “those hands”
anymore.
Only Arley Wanderdale talks about them,
and how they could play piano again,
if I would only try.
I think about Ma
and how that birth went.
I keep the kids out and listen behind me,
praying for the sound of a baby
crying into this world,
and not the silence
my brother brought with him.
And the cry comes
and I have to go away for a little while
and just walk off the feelings.
My father and I,
we can’t soothe each other.
I’m too young,
he’s too old,
and we don’t know how to talk anymore
if we ever did.
My father has a raised spot
on the side of his nose
that never was there before
and won't go away.
And there’s another on his cheek and two more on his neck,
and I wonder
why the heck is he fooling around.
He knows what it is.
His father had those spots too.
No one talks about fire
right to my face.
They can’t forget how fire changed my life.
But I hear them talking anyway.
Don’t forget us, they say.
But there are so many leaving,
how can I remember them all?
Mad Dog scooped a handful of dust,
like a boy in a sandpit.
He said, “I love this land,
no matter what.”
I looked at his hands.
They were scarless.
I thought maybe if my father ever went to Doc Rice
to do something about the spots on his skin,
Doc could check my hand too,
tell me what to do about them.
But my father isn’t going to Doc Rice,
and now
I think we’re both turning to dust.
My father’s digging his own grave,
he calls it a pond,
but I know what he’s up to.
How I slip under cover of darkness
inside a boxcar
and let the train carry me west.
Out of the dust.
My father is waiting at the station
and I call him
Daddy
for the first time
since Ma died,
and we walk home,
together,
talking.
We both stared in wonder
at the pond my daddy made
and she said,
a hole like that says a lot about a man.
Sometimes, while I’m at the piano,
I catch her reflection in the mirror,
standing in the kitchen, soft-eyed, while Daddy
finishes chores,
and I stretch my fingers over the keys,
and I play.
