was a girl, she could trample on his heart, and he would swear on a stack of Bibles that it didn’t hurt.
The sisters put their coppers in their pinafore pockets and skipped back through the woods.
Midway Cleo stopped and pointed to a towering oak. “You all want to bet me a copper I can’t swing by my feet from up in that tree?”
Lily clapped her hands to her eyes. “I doesn’t want to bet you,” she implored. “I ain’t fixing to see you fall.”
Serena said severely, “You bust your neck, you see if Mama don’t bust it again.”
Charity said tremulously, “Cleo, what would us do if our sister was dead?”
Cleo saw herself dressed up fine as Josie Beauchamp, stretched out in a coffin with her sisters sobbing beside it, and Pa with his Sunday handkerchief holding his tears, and Mama crying, I loved you best, Cleo. I never said it when you were alive. And I’m sorry, sorry, I waited to say it after you were gone.
“You hold my copper, Charity. And if I die, you can have it.”
Lily opened two of her fingers and peeped through the crack. “Cleo, I’ll give you mine if you don’t make me see you hanging upside down.” It was one thing to hear Cleo tell about herself. It was another thing to see her fixing to kill herself.
“Me, too,” said Serena, with a little sob, more for the copper than for Cleo, whom she briefly hated for compelling unnecessary sacrifice.
“You can have mine,” said Charity harshly. Her sweet tooth ached for a peppermint stick, and she almost wished that Cleo was dead.
Cleo flashed them all an exultant smile. She had won their money without trying. She had been willing to risk her neck to buy rich Josie Beauchamp some penny candy. Now that it was too late to retrieve Josie Beauchamp’s lost hours of anxiety, Cleo wanted to carry her a bag of candy, so that when Josie got through with being glad, and got mad, she wouldn’t stay mad too long.
She held out her hand. Each tight fist poised over her palm, desperately clung aloft, then slowly opened to release the bright coin that was to have added a special sweetness to the summer day.
Cleo couldn’t bear to see their woe-begone faces. She felt frightened, trapped by their wounded eyes. She had to do something to change their expressions.
“I’ll do a stunt for you,” she said feverishly. “I’ll swing by my hands. It ain’t nothing to be ascairt to see. You watch.”
Quickly, agilely she climbed the tree and hung by her hands. Wildly, wildly she swung, to make them forget she had taken their money, to let them see how wonderful she was.
Then a boy came by, just an ordinary knotted-headed, knobby-kneed boy. He looked at her and laughed, because to him a girl carrying on so crazy cut a funny figure. She wanted to kill him. He made her feel silly. She climbed down, and she knew he was watching her, watching the split in her drawers.
When she reached the ground, she whirled to face him, and found his feet waving in front of her. He was walking on his hands. And her sisters were squealing with delight. They had seen her walk on her hands a thousand times. What was there so wonderful about watching a boy?
She flung herself upon him, and they fought like dogs, the coppers lost irrecoverably. Her sisters circled them, crying and wringing their hands. She had to win, no matter how. She bent her head and butted him in the groin, where the weakness of boys was — the contradictory delicacy.
The fight was knocked out of him. He lay very still, his hands shielding his innocent maleness from further assault, and the blood on his lips where his anguished teeth had sunk in.
Her sisters fluttered around him. They felt no pride for her victory. Instead they pitied him. She watched them with wonder. What was there to being a boy? What was there to being a man? Men just worked. That was easier than what women did. It was women who did the lying awake, the planning, the sorrowing, the scheming to stretch a dollar. That was the hard part, the head part. A woman had to think all the time. A woman had to be smart.
Her sisters weren’t smart. They thought Pa was the head of the house. They didn’t know the house was run by the beat of Mama’s heart. There was an awful lonesomeness in Cleo when Mama went across the river to Grandma’s. She did not want to be bad then. She wanted to be good so God would send Mama back safe. But she was wildly bad again the moment Mama returned. She could not bear the way she felt inside, like laughing and crying and kissing Mama’s face.
She never kissed Mama. Kisses were silly. Pa kissed Mama when he came home from work. There was sweat on him from his labor, but Mama lifted her mouth to his. His mustache prickled against her lips, but Mama did not pull away.
Looking at her sisters, standing above the suffering boy, she saw in each some likeness of Mama — in Charity the softness and roundness, the flush just under the thin skin, the silver laughter; in Lily the doe eyes, liquid and vulnerable, the plaited hair that kept escaping in curls; in small Serena the cherry-red mouth, the dimpled cheeks. She knew that she looked like Pa. Everyone said so. Everyone said she was a beauty. What was wrong with their seeing? How could looking like Pa, with his sweat and his stained mustache, make anybody a beauty? Sometimes she would stare at herself in Mama’s mirror and stick out her tongue.
Now, seeing her sisters, with their tender faces turned toward the boy, a terrible sorrow assailed her. Some day they would all grow up. They would all get married and go away. They would never live together again, nor share the long bright busy days. Mama, too, would go. Mama would die. Didn’t she always say that her side of the family were not long livers? They were dead before they were fifty. Dead with their loveliness alive in their still, smooth faces. When Mama was gone in a last luminous moment, there would be the look of her and the silver laughter in the children she had blessed with her resemblance.
So long as her sisters were within sight and sound, they were the mirrors in which she would see Mama. They would be her remembering of her happy, happy childhood.
She flung herself down on the ground, and her torture was worse than the boy’s. For hers was spiritual suffering and immeasurable frustration. All her terror of the future, all her despair at knowing that nothing lasts — that sisters turn into wives, that men take their women and ride away, that childhood is no longer than a summer day — were in her great dry sobs.
The boy staggered to his feet in complete alarm. He thought he had hurt her in some dreadful way mysterious to girls, her breast, her belly where the babies grew. Her father would skin him alive. He made a limping dash across the road and the trees closed in.
Then her sisters knelt beside her, letting their soothing fingers caress her face. Her sobbing quieted. She jumped up and began to turn cartwheels. A wildness was in her. She was going to turn cartwheels all the way home, heretofore an impossible feat.
Mama was in the doorway, watching her hurtle down a dusty road, seeing a girl eleven years old turning upside down, showing her drawers. Mama got the strap again and laid it on hard and heavy. Cleo just grinned, and wouldn’t wipe the grin off, even with the whole of her on fire and hurting. Mama couldn’t bear such impudence from her own flesh and blood. She let the strap fall and sat down and cried.
Mama didn’t know what made Cleo so wild. Cleo got more of her attention than all of her other children put together. God help her when she grew up. God help the man who married her. God help her sisters not to follow in her footsteps. Better for her sisters if Cleo had never been born.
