Sugar and Spice
by Keti Shea
For MPS
Author’s Note: In a small rural town, two sisters keep close watch over their alcoholic father and embark on a mission to rescue him from his demons, culminating in a bloody showdown with a Catholic priest. “Sugar and Spice” fits with the life and work of Eagle Pennell as it delves into the fallout of alcoholism—and the fine line between love and violence that can turn sweet little girls into cold-hearted murderers.
Daddy’s throwing rocks at the Catholic church down on Water Street again. We hear him hollering and glass smashing as we turn the corner past the hardware store. My schoolbag digs into the small of my back and pulls me backwards. I quicken my step.
Best thing to do when he gets like this is to run right past him—I holler a “hey Daddy!”—not minding if he doesn’t hear me. I pump down the block, my bag slapping my back hard, and around the corner to the bank. Panting with my hands on my knees, I ask the teller lady for a sucker, a green one pretty please.
The teller lady hands over the sucker, plus a red one for me and an orange one for Jo. “He at it again, is he, little miss?” she asks.
I nod and flash her my serious eyes so she won’t be offended that I can’t stop for a chat. “Yes, ma’am,” I say. At the door I turn and yell, “Thank you, Mrs. Pierce!” She waggles her fingers in the air like it’s no thing at all. Jo likes me to mind my manners when it comes to Daddy business.
I slap back down the block to the church. Daddy’s pants are slung low enough for me to see his drawers and he’s stumbling around scanning for something on the ground. He shakes a fist at the church’s stained-glass windows set up high in the stone. He wants to smash all those windows up so they can’t show their scenes with Mary and Joseph. He’s the same way about the nativity scene at Christmas; he stomps the baby Jesus with his boot.
I unwrap the green sucker and wave it in the air in front of his face. He’s lurching and swaying side to side. “I’ll get you!” he yells. “Come on out here, and we’ll square this man to man!”
I steady him with a shoulder, propping him up so he doesn’t fall and bust his nose like he did the one time. He had blood gushing down his face and a big fat lip by the time me and Jo got to him. I tug at his hand to let him know I’m here now.
“Quit your hollering. Now look, I brought you some sugar.”
I tug him hard and wave his sucker to draw him toward me, just hoping he’ll take it so we can get him home. Once he’s in his chair and had a good sleep, he’ll get back to being our daddy who whistles along to the radio with a dish rag over his shoulder.
Jo’s in a squat, picking up the brown bag and bits of broken whiskey bottle he smashed on the ground. She plucks a shard of glass between two fingers and holds it to the light. Jo takes the glass bits and the brown bag and dumps it all in the trash can in front of the hardware store where a couple of women are standing around watching. They look away when Jo comes up.
I push the green sucker into Daddy’s fist, and he takes it and looks at it like he doesn’t know where he is or what year it is. “It’s me, Moxie. I gotcha green one, Daddy. It was the last one, too.”
He looks at me with his bloodshot eyes. His hair’s all matted up at the back of his head. The wrinkles around his eyes have set, like his forehead’s collapsed.
I lift his fist to his mouth, and he puts his sucker in, calmer now. Jo’s back, arms swinging. She pulls her backpack from the ground and shoulders it. We make it one block, just past the bank, before Daddy’s face pinches and he starts blubbering. His hand shakes when he covers his eyes.
“My girls,” he groans. “My sweet girls.”
Jo leads him by the hand, and I take him by the other, pulling his shaking hand down into mine. He’s still got his sucker tucked away in his cheek. Behind his back, I hand Jo hers, and I put mine in too. We walk on home that way, all three of us with a sucker squirrelled away in our cheeks.
At home we shrug off our backpacks and they hit the floor with a double thump. Jo puts Daddy in his chair in the living room, and I run to fetch him a glass of cool water from the tap. When I get back with the water, Jo’s curled up in his lap with her book, reading aloud to him. I tilt the glass to his lips till he drinks it all up, a trickle running down through his stubble. I watch the drips zigzag this way and that through his chin hairs. I dab his chin with my sleeve.
Jo turns the page, and I perch on the arm of the chair, kicking my heels. After less than a chapter, his mouth drops. I set the empty glass on the table next to him. I tug the sucker from his mouth by the stick, the green candy globe nearly half its original size. I pop it in my mouth—sweet springtime green mixed with whiskey spit.
At school the next day some older boys from Jo’s class cup their armpits to make farts and when we don’t pay them any mind, they yell that our daddy’s a fall-down drunk who hates the Catholics. I chuck the apple from my lunch at one of their heads. The boy ducks just in time.
“I’ll bite your ear off!” I call out.
We take our lunch sacks outside and sit on the swings. We scuff our shoes against the ground. I have to hop backwards onto my swing and scooch forward if I want to tap the ground. Jo starts pumping, and I pump my legs to match hers. We swing like that for a bit. Cruising forward, then backward, our toes pointing towards the clouds.
We both slow down and take out our sandwiches. I chew a few bites while I work out if Jo’s in a mood to answer my questions. She hands me her apple. “No thanks,” I say. “Jo, can I ask you somethin’?”
“Mmhm.”
I pump my legs hard to work up the nerve, then rocket from the swing. I land in a low squat with my sandwich in hand. I turn around to face her. “What’s Daddy got against the church on Water Street anyhow? I like the stained glass.” Lit up at night, the windows glow orange and green and blue and red. Those windows are pretty enough not to hate. I scuff over to the metal balance beam hotted up in the sun. I walk across it, left foot then right foot. I toss my sandwich into the mulch.
“Don’t know exactly,” she says. “Momma says it’s ancient business and we shouldn’t bother our little heads about it. Nothin’ we can do.”
I jump down. “Well, it doesn’t make sense to me. And what does she mean nothin’ we can do. There’s gotta be something.”
Jo clings to the chains of her swing, pushing herself with one toe. She’s got that faraway look again. I don’t like it. I don’t like when Jo keeps her thoughts from me.
The bell chimes.
“Jo,” I say. “Why’s Daddy have nightmares?”
She shrugs and hops down. We trot inside and dump our brown bags into the trash bin. Neither of us is all that hungry.
The afternoon passes like tar on an Indian summer day. Sticky slow. My eyelids press down. After we skip home and drop our backpacks--thump, thump—Jo goes straight to her room to put her nose in a book. Daddy’s got Ralph Stanley on the radio and he’s chopping up carrots for a roast chicken. His hair’s combed down in the back and at the sides. The comb left lines behind in his dark hair. I watch him from the doorway. He slaps a dish rag over one shoulder and pushes the carrot cubes into a pile of celery slices. A yellow onion sits on the cutting board.
He spots me and winks. “How’s your day, sugar?” He scoops carrot and celery in both hands and dumps it in the pan.
I pull a stool near the stove so I can watch the butter crackle in the scratched Dutch oven. “I did the most chin-ups in gym class today.”
He whistles. “Girl, lemme see them muscles.”
I bunch my fists so hard my fingernails dig half-moons into my palms.
He pinches my arms. “Now that’s something. I bet no one messes with you.”
“Nosir they don’t.”
He stirs the veggies some. I hold the wings while he strings the bird together. He holds the lid to the Dutch oven and has me lower the chicken in slowly. He slides the pot into the oven. Ralph Stanley fades and a banjo song comes on. The kitchen is warm and smells like fried onion.
At the sink after supper, me and Jo wash up the dishes. I dunk and scrub and Jo dries and puts away while Daddy and Momma slow dance in the living room.
I elbow Jo in her ribs. “You wanna stay up late and play runaways?”
We pretend we’re orphans who run away from a mean witch and live down under the bridge with the baddies. The farthest we ever got was to pack up a suitcase with some clothes and blankets and Jo’s books. Momma found it in the morning and cried from shock.
“Nah.”
“Wanna play go fish?”
She shakes her head. She’s got that sad look in her eyes again and I’m worried she thinks I’m a baby who plays baby games.
“Well then whatdoya wanna do?”
Jo sucks her bottom lip and shrugs.
The weekend comes and Daddy takes us to the lake to fish. He gives us lures. I whine till he gives me a live worm. I smash it onto the hook and cast my line. The sun falls onto the lake and makes it glow diamonds. Me and Jo get sick of waiting around so we climb over logs and kick at rocks looking for snapping turtles. We find a fallen log that’s hollow all the way through. I stand at one end and Jo stands on the other, shouting messages back and forth. I say things to make her laugh like “My tushy crack’s got chiggers.” Or “I got a wedgie where my butt gobbled up my drawers.”
When I run out of things to say, I make fart noises with my armpit.
Jo goes quiet. I pop my head over the log. She’s slumped down on the ground, picking at some old scab on her knee. I settle across from her, digging in the dirt with a stick. Jo keeps picking at her knee like it holds some answers to her questions, and I keep stabbing the dirt with my stick, turning up stones and wet dirt smell and a few creepy crawlies. I hit a fat juicy worm. I spear it on the stick and hold it up to Jo’s nose.
“Dare me to swallow it whole?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Would too.” I pinch it over my open mouth and make like to drop it down my throat.
Jo shoves me. “Moxie, you’re crazy.”
I hold the worm up to the sun so its insides go all see-through and I think I can see its heart and guts. I fling it as far as I can. Jo pushes off the ground and shoots me a look that lets me know I can hold her hand. We skip back to Daddy, and Jo fishes out the grape sodas from the cooler. We pop our cans and slurp the fizz while Daddy wades in deeper where the big trout live. He’s got two already. The grape soda bubbles up my belly and the afternoon light slants hard, the water glinting like mad, and I can’t hardly keep my eyes open.
Next thing I know Daddy’s got me in his arms and my face is buried in the leathery skin of his neck that smells like fire smoke and whiskey sweat and old flannel work shirt and is a smell I could just about sleep in forever and ever.
He makes it a full two weeks before he’s throwing rocks at the church again. He’s passed out on the road in front of the church when we turn the corner from school. Jo hoists him up under his arms and I grab his ankles. We pull and heave, but he’s too heavy. Jo’s forehead is sweaty.
“Come on, let’s try again,” I tell her.
She pulls him and I push and we manage to skid him backwards to the curb, but we can’t get him up and over. Anyway, there’s no way we can drag him home. I get the idea to get him his sucker and see if that revives him. Jo keeps watch over him while I run to the bank. The teller lady’s there, looking bored in her chair as she peers over the counter. The cup with the suckers is empty.
“He at it again?” she asks.
“He is, Mrs. Pierce.” I go shy, not wanting to ask.
She claps a hand to her chest. “Oh dear, we’re out. You hold tight, I’ll go get some more from the back.”
My arms grow gooseflesh in the air-conditioning. After a minute, she comes back with a fistful of suckers and hands over three. Green, red, orange.
“Thank you, ma’am.” Her fingers graze mine. Her skin is warm and soft like uncooked pie crust. My mouth waters at the memory of a rhubarb pie. I don’t know if it’s that that makes me ask her. “Do you know why my Daddy throws rocks at the church? I can’t figure it out and Jo’s not telling.”
She sucks in a big breath.
I make my case. “I wish I could help him, but I don’t know how. I don’t know why he does it. I figure if I know why he’s so sad I could help him.”
She shifts in her seat. “Moxie, dear, you’re a sweet thing. You’re too young to understand. It’s a shame what happened to your Daddy and those boys. Father Donnelly’s gone now, retired. It’s a real shame but there’s nothing you can do.”
Jo huffs up beside me, pulling at my shirtsleeve. She whips her head at Mrs. Pierce.
“We’re all sorry for it, believe me,” Mrs. Pierce goes on. “Your daddy’s a fine, fine man.”
I thank her for the suckers as Jo drags me from the bank. On the sidewalk, she yanks my braid lightly. “What took you so long?”
“I had to wait. They were out.”
Her eyes have gone faraway again. She’s working something out in her head. I dislike that look she gets, and I worry she’ll grow boobs and leave me soon to chase boys and pout. I’ve seen the older girls do it. I’m not ready for Jo to go to the grownups.
I skip down the sun-hot sidewalk to where Daddy’s sprawled out. His face is red from the sun. I pull my tee-shirt off and lay it across his head so he won’t get more scorched. I scratch at my chest. Jo kicks at the asphalt. The sun heats up my shoulders. I wave his sucker in front of his face, but he doesn’t move.
Mr. Mitchell pops his head out the door of the hardware store and calls up the block to us. “You girls need some help getting him home?”
We nod politely and say, “Yessir, we do. That’d be a help.”
He puts a sign in the window of the hardware store and a few minutes later he noses his car around the corner and leaves it idling at the curb. I take my shirt off Daddy’s face and put it back on. Mr. Mitchell grips under his armpits and drags him along the pavement on his butt.
Jo grabs one foot and I get the other, and we lug him into the backseat. Jo sits in front since she’s older. I perch on Daddy’s legs. The car jostles Daddy’s head every which way. One arm slumps to the floorboard. I drag it up and lay it on his chest and pin it there. All laid out like that I can’t help but see him dead and my head throbs with sadness and anger that he’s got a hurtness inside him that sugar won’t fix and I vow there and then to love him forever till he stays the Daddy who cooks with a kitchen rag over his shoulder.
Momma comes to the door when she hears the car at the curb. She and Mr. Mitchell wrestle him inside to the bedroom and lay him out on the bed. After Momma tugs his boots off, she and Mr. Mitchell stand in the doorway murmuring in quiet grownup voices. I get the aloe and rub it on Daddy’s forehead.
Mr. Mitchell says, “It’s no bother…least I can do….shameful thing.”
Momma’s voice burbles up in response: “Don’t know what…”
Mr. Mitchell is bobbing his head and saying warm soothing words to Momma while Jo peeps at them from the kitchen door, a tight look settling in her.
Jo doesn’t say much during our bath, just sweeps the bubbles this way and that and puffs some into the air too. They dance and float before landing on me.
While the water’s sucking down the drain, Momma comes in to comb my hair. “You’re sweet as can be, Moxie girl,” she says. She glances at Jo. “Both my girls are sugar and spice. You make me proud, how big your hearts are.” She rubs the cold aloe into my shoulders till my skin stings.
That night it takes Jo a long time to fall asleep. She lies in bed opening and closing the pocketknife Daddy gave her last year when she cleaned her first fish. She thumbs open and shut the knife, open and shut, as the moon gapes and sinks into nothing.
Next day is Saturday and straight away I jab Jo awake. She squints at me. Her golden hair is fanned on her pillow. “You keepin’ secrets from me?” I ask.
She rolls over in bed and drags the pillow over her face. I pull it off.
“Quit it, Moxie.”
“What’s your secret?”
Jo doesn’t say anything. I grab at the pocketknife that’s resting on the side of her mattress. She swats at me. I hold it out of her reach.
“Quit it!”
“Not till you tell me what secret you’re keeping and let me in on it. You promised.”
Jo pouts and swats at the knife. “I did not.”
“You did in your mind, and I heard it in mine. That’s a sister promise—no secrets about Daddy.”
She sits up on one elbow and stares at me. She keeps staring even as she lifts the covers and I slip in next to her. Her body warms up my toes so nice I close my eyes. She cups her hand to my ear and breathes on me. “I know where Father Donnelly lives. I’m gonna go over there later and give him a piece of my mind.”
My eyes open with a snap. “How do you know where he lives? And what’s he got to do with Daddy?”
She lays back on her pillow and stares at the ceiling. She holds out her hand. I hand over the knife. “Heard Mr. Mitchell talking to Momma about it,” she says.
“But what’s that got to do with Daddy throwing rocks at the church?”
Jo sucks her bottom lip. “You won’t get it cuz you’re too little. Hell, I don’t really get it. Father Donnelly did something to Daddy when he was a boy and now he’s not right in the head.” She looks at me. I put my hand over my eyes and peep out through my fingers at her to see if she’s serious. She is.
“I’m going too.”
“No, you’re too little. If I get in trouble, it’ll just be me.”
“Where’s he live?”
“Old white house down by the bridge.”
The bridge where the baddies live. Momma said we can’t ever go there. “I’m going too!”
Jo sighs, and I know I’ve beat her. “Fine, but you let me do everything. No backtalking. No sass.”
Momma fries us eggs for breakfast. I dip my toast into the jammy yolk and lick the yellow off my plate. She kisses us each on our headtops, tells us be good and take care of Daddy. Her stockinged feet go through the front door and off to work. We peer in at Daddy still snoring away in bed, one arm flung over his eyes. We have a few good hours before we got to get back to make him his sausage patties and scrambled eggs.
Jo says, “Come on, let’s go.” Her eyes look watery.
We walk three blocks and take a left toward the baddie bridge. I’ve been biting the inside of my cheek and counting cracks in the sidewalk so as not to pester Jo with my questions. Mostly I want to know what she plans to say to Father Donnelly. We scuff up a hill and crest an embankment where the creek gets wider to become a proper river. The bridge looms in the distance. I’ve only seen it at night, driving by with my chin on the window ledge. There’d been dark outlines huddled around a fire, casting giant shadows behind them.
In the daylight all I see is two tired old men crouching by the water, their backs to us. Jo grabs me hard by the wrist and pulls me under a storefront awning. She points across the street at a dingy white clapboard with paint peeling in big fat flakes.
She crosses the street and I follow, still unsure what two little girls could say to a mean old man but I’m curious. I glance over my shoulder at the old men at the water. Jo crunches over the gravel drive to a side door and knocks.
“Jo,” I whisper, “why we knocking at the side door?”
She shushes me. “No sass.”
We hear footsteps and a face appears at the glass. White mess of hair and light blue eyes that have the color bleeding out of them. I’ve never seen eyes so light in their blueness. He tugs open the door. “Can I help you?”
Jo nods. “Yessir, we’d like a church man’s opinion on a family matter. Mind if we come in for a chat?”
His eyes drift from Jo to me, back to Jo again. His hand on the door jamb has puffy veins that bring to mind the juicy worms Daddy uses for fishing. He stands back, but my mind keeps ticking to worms—worms inside his body, fixing to crawl out.
“I’m retired,” he says.
Jo’s eyes well up with one of her tricks. She can make herself cry if she thinks hard enough. “Please.”
He waves us in, and we follow him down a dark hallway. We pass through a small kitchen and down another dark hallway to a room with a desk and some chairs. He sits behind the desk. I want to tell him to open his blinds—it’s a nice day with a warm breeze and he could do with some airing out. Jo said no sass, so I bite my cheek.
He spreads his hands. “What troubles you then?”
Jo folds her hands in her lap. “Well,” and here she licks her lips. “What troubles me, Mister, is that my Daddy can’t sleep some nights. He gets these nightmares where he wakes up screaming. Ever since I can remember, he’s had night terrors.” She leans back in her chair, like she’s getting relaxed for story time. “We’ve been tryin’ to help him and set him right, but he keeps having these fits where he throws rocks at the church down on Water Street. The one with the pretty stained glass windows, you know it?”
Father Donnelly nods. A line of muscle jumps in his jaw, jumping and jumping like Daddy’s fishing line when he snags a trout.
“I couldn’t figure it out. For the longest time I’ve been readin’ books to see if they can explain it. Why my Daddy, a man everybody loves, has a problem in his head that makes him throw rocks at that church.” Jo scoots forward in her seat and shoves her hands in her pockets. “And then I worked it out. I’m smart, see.” She thumbs a finger at me. “This one here’s got gall. I got the smarts.”
Before I know what’s what, Jo stands and whips something from her pocket. She aims it at Father Donnelly.
“Jo—” She said no backtalk, but in her fist is Momma’s .38 special that she keeps in the car in case of trouble. My insides are all gunked up with fright and the backs of my knees go tingly.
“Shush.” She puts her other arm back to keep me away. “Father Donnelly, I worked out what you did to my Daddy when he was a boy. You got away with it for a long time.”
The old man pushes himself back in his chair and crosses one leg over the other. He rests his hands on his knees so I can see those worms wiggling under his skin again. He smiles. “I thought little girls were supposed to be sweet. My goodness, you’re coming in here waving a gun at me? A man of the church? Let’s call your Momma and have her come pick you up.” He stands. “I’ll make you some iced tea while we wait.”
“No.” Jo stomps her foot.
She’s acting tough right now, and I like this Jo, I like her an awful lot, except her eyes have that sad look again, and her hand is shaking, so the gun is squirming around, and I’m worried for Jo—that I’ll lose her to the grownup sadness, just like I lost Daddy, and I can’t lose any more people, and I get it I think, what happened to Daddy as a boy has got something to do with this old wormy-handed baddie right here. He did something to my Daddy to be giving him nightmares, and I decide right then I don’t care what he did to him, except it’s my job to set it right.
I watch Father Donnelly watch Jo’s shaking hand. It’s just like Jo to talk smart and lose her nerve just when the action’s hotted up. I snatch the gun from her so quick she can’t react. I take Momma’s .38 special and point it at the wormy man.
“Sit your butt down, Mister,” I say.
He does, his jaw working and working, like he’s chewing the worms up inside him. “What are your names again?” he asks.
“She’s sugar,” I say, “and I’m spice. Now shutyermouth.”
He tsks and shakes his head. “You’ll be in an awful lot of trouble if you don’t set that gun down soon.”
I squint and bite my tongue, sighting him down over the gun that Daddy showed me how to use. He took me and Jo out to some dusty junkyard and trained us up to shoot at old bottles. I figure shooting a baddie isn’t much different.
“Come on, missy.”
“You hurt my Daddy,” Jo wails next to me.
Father Donnelly lurches forward in a sudden rush of movement, and I squeeze the trigger slow like Daddy taught me, so that worm man can’t get his hands on us. I saw it in his eyes, that mean dog-hard madness that’d make him hurt a little kid. I bite my tongue and play pretend I’m shooting a bottle off in the distance with Daddy in my ear saying, “You got a steel arm, Moxie,” and whistling when my shot goes ping. Jo was never so good with the gun. Too twitchy.
Father Donnelly roars backwards and falls into the desk. He crumples forward onto the carpet, panting. He curls onto his side. I step closer with the gun still raised.
“Moxie,” Jo calls. She’s crying. I won’t let the worm man hurt her.
I kick him in the ribs, and he groans. He just lays there for a bit, a pool of blood seeping around him and oozing into the carpet. His panting gets softer and then he wheezes and goes quiet. I kick him hard, but he doesn’t move. I put my one hand over his mouth and feel nothing. We back out of the room, one step at a time, until we get to that small kitchen and then we race down the hallway. At the side door we pause. Jo’s next to me, shaky and white. She pulls the .38 special from my hand and puts it in her pocket.
She cups her hands to my ear and whispers. I nod. Sister promise.
We walk home the same way we came. The men at the water are gone. At the hardware store we wave inside at Mr. Mitchell. We stroll on past the church, quiet today, and skirt around the corner to the bank, where I trot inside and ask for three suckers pretty please. Then we head on home and switch on the radio in the kitchen to the music Daddy likes.
Jo puts the gun in the closet and gets the cast iron hotting up on the stove. I get the sausage out. Humming along to the twangy music, we set to making him some breakfast to soak up the booze. When he wakes up soon, I’ll call out to him, “Chow’s up, Daddy!” and smooch him on the cheek so he knows it’s alright now, he doesn’t need to have nightmares anymore because I fixed his worries.
Later I’ll question why Jo put the gun in the closet instead of in the car where she found it, and Momma will pull it from the shelf and holler our names in a strangled voice, and Daddy will go into the bedroom and not come out, and I’ll take the fall so Jo can keep on with her book learning, which is a thing I’ll never do, you never learn do you is what Momma will say, but until then, in the sweet here and now of our sister promise, while Jo is still mine, I hand Jo her sucker and I unwrap my red one—red red red like all that blood. I hold it to the light and look through it, lit up like the pretty stained glass on the church on Water Street.
by Keti Shea
For MPS
Author’s Note: In a small rural town, two sisters keep close watch over their alcoholic father and embark on a mission to rescue him from his demons, culminating in a bloody showdown with a Catholic priest. “Sugar and Spice” fits with the life and work of Eagle Pennell as it delves into the fallout of alcoholism—and the fine line between love and violence that can turn sweet little girls into cold-hearted murderers.
Daddy’s throwing rocks at the Catholic church down on Water Street again. We hear him hollering and glass smashing as we turn the corner past the hardware store. My schoolbag digs into the small of my back and pulls me backwards. I quicken my step.
Best thing to do when he gets like this is to run right past him—I holler a “hey Daddy!”—not minding if he doesn’t hear me. I pump down the block, my bag slapping my back hard, and around the corner to the bank. Panting with my hands on my knees, I ask the teller lady for a sucker, a green one pretty please.
The teller lady hands over the sucker, plus a red one for me and an orange one for Jo. “He at it again, is he, little miss?” she asks.
I nod and flash her my serious eyes so she won’t be offended that I can’t stop for a chat. “Yes, ma’am,” I say. At the door I turn and yell, “Thank you, Mrs. Pierce!” She waggles her fingers in the air like it’s no thing at all. Jo likes me to mind my manners when it comes to Daddy business.
I slap back down the block to the church. Daddy’s pants are slung low enough for me to see his drawers and he’s stumbling around scanning for something on the ground. He shakes a fist at the church’s stained-glass windows set up high in the stone. He wants to smash all those windows up so they can’t show their scenes with Mary and Joseph. He’s the same way about the nativity scene at Christmas; he stomps the baby Jesus with his boot.
I unwrap the green sucker and wave it in the air in front of his face. He’s lurching and swaying side to side. “I’ll get you!” he yells. “Come on out here, and we’ll square this man to man!”
I steady him with a shoulder, propping him up so he doesn’t fall and bust his nose like he did the one time. He had blood gushing down his face and a big fat lip by the time me and Jo got to him. I tug at his hand to let him know I’m here now.
“Quit your hollering. Now look, I brought you some sugar.”
I tug him hard and wave his sucker to draw him toward me, just hoping he’ll take it so we can get him home. Once he’s in his chair and had a good sleep, he’ll get back to being our daddy who whistles along to the radio with a dish rag over his shoulder.
Jo’s in a squat, picking up the brown bag and bits of broken whiskey bottle he smashed on the ground. She plucks a shard of glass between two fingers and holds it to the light. Jo takes the glass bits and the brown bag and dumps it all in the trash can in front of the hardware store where a couple of women are standing around watching. They look away when Jo comes up.
I push the green sucker into Daddy’s fist, and he takes it and looks at it like he doesn’t know where he is or what year it is. “It’s me, Moxie. I gotcha green one, Daddy. It was the last one, too.”
He looks at me with his bloodshot eyes. His hair’s all matted up at the back of his head. The wrinkles around his eyes have set, like his forehead’s collapsed.
I lift his fist to his mouth, and he puts his sucker in, calmer now. Jo’s back, arms swinging. She pulls her backpack from the ground and shoulders it. We make it one block, just past the bank, before Daddy’s face pinches and he starts blubbering. His hand shakes when he covers his eyes.
“My girls,” he groans. “My sweet girls.”
Jo leads him by the hand, and I take him by the other, pulling his shaking hand down into mine. He’s still got his sucker tucked away in his cheek. Behind his back, I hand Jo hers, and I put mine in too. We walk on home that way, all three of us with a sucker squirrelled away in our cheeks.
At home we shrug off our backpacks and they hit the floor with a double thump. Jo puts Daddy in his chair in the living room, and I run to fetch him a glass of cool water from the tap. When I get back with the water, Jo’s curled up in his lap with her book, reading aloud to him. I tilt the glass to his lips till he drinks it all up, a trickle running down through his stubble. I watch the drips zigzag this way and that through his chin hairs. I dab his chin with my sleeve.
Jo turns the page, and I perch on the arm of the chair, kicking my heels. After less than a chapter, his mouth drops. I set the empty glass on the table next to him. I tug the sucker from his mouth by the stick, the green candy globe nearly half its original size. I pop it in my mouth—sweet springtime green mixed with whiskey spit.
At school the next day some older boys from Jo’s class cup their armpits to make farts and when we don’t pay them any mind, they yell that our daddy’s a fall-down drunk who hates the Catholics. I chuck the apple from my lunch at one of their heads. The boy ducks just in time.
“I’ll bite your ear off!” I call out.
We take our lunch sacks outside and sit on the swings. We scuff our shoes against the ground. I have to hop backwards onto my swing and scooch forward if I want to tap the ground. Jo starts pumping, and I pump my legs to match hers. We swing like that for a bit. Cruising forward, then backward, our toes pointing towards the clouds.
We both slow down and take out our sandwiches. I chew a few bites while I work out if Jo’s in a mood to answer my questions. She hands me her apple. “No thanks,” I say. “Jo, can I ask you somethin’?”
“Mmhm.”
I pump my legs hard to work up the nerve, then rocket from the swing. I land in a low squat with my sandwich in hand. I turn around to face her. “What’s Daddy got against the church on Water Street anyhow? I like the stained glass.” Lit up at night, the windows glow orange and green and blue and red. Those windows are pretty enough not to hate. I scuff over to the metal balance beam hotted up in the sun. I walk across it, left foot then right foot. I toss my sandwich into the mulch.
“Don’t know exactly,” she says. “Momma says it’s ancient business and we shouldn’t bother our little heads about it. Nothin’ we can do.”
I jump down. “Well, it doesn’t make sense to me. And what does she mean nothin’ we can do. There’s gotta be something.”
Jo clings to the chains of her swing, pushing herself with one toe. She’s got that faraway look again. I don’t like it. I don’t like when Jo keeps her thoughts from me.
The bell chimes.
“Jo,” I say. “Why’s Daddy have nightmares?”
She shrugs and hops down. We trot inside and dump our brown bags into the trash bin. Neither of us is all that hungry.
The afternoon passes like tar on an Indian summer day. Sticky slow. My eyelids press down. After we skip home and drop our backpacks--thump, thump—Jo goes straight to her room to put her nose in a book. Daddy’s got Ralph Stanley on the radio and he’s chopping up carrots for a roast chicken. His hair’s combed down in the back and at the sides. The comb left lines behind in his dark hair. I watch him from the doorway. He slaps a dish rag over one shoulder and pushes the carrot cubes into a pile of celery slices. A yellow onion sits on the cutting board.
He spots me and winks. “How’s your day, sugar?” He scoops carrot and celery in both hands and dumps it in the pan.
I pull a stool near the stove so I can watch the butter crackle in the scratched Dutch oven. “I did the most chin-ups in gym class today.”
He whistles. “Girl, lemme see them muscles.”
I bunch my fists so hard my fingernails dig half-moons into my palms.
He pinches my arms. “Now that’s something. I bet no one messes with you.”
“Nosir they don’t.”
He stirs the veggies some. I hold the wings while he strings the bird together. He holds the lid to the Dutch oven and has me lower the chicken in slowly. He slides the pot into the oven. Ralph Stanley fades and a banjo song comes on. The kitchen is warm and smells like fried onion.
At the sink after supper, me and Jo wash up the dishes. I dunk and scrub and Jo dries and puts away while Daddy and Momma slow dance in the living room.
I elbow Jo in her ribs. “You wanna stay up late and play runaways?”
We pretend we’re orphans who run away from a mean witch and live down under the bridge with the baddies. The farthest we ever got was to pack up a suitcase with some clothes and blankets and Jo’s books. Momma found it in the morning and cried from shock.
“Nah.”
“Wanna play go fish?”
She shakes her head. She’s got that sad look in her eyes again and I’m worried she thinks I’m a baby who plays baby games.
“Well then whatdoya wanna do?”
Jo sucks her bottom lip and shrugs.
The weekend comes and Daddy takes us to the lake to fish. He gives us lures. I whine till he gives me a live worm. I smash it onto the hook and cast my line. The sun falls onto the lake and makes it glow diamonds. Me and Jo get sick of waiting around so we climb over logs and kick at rocks looking for snapping turtles. We find a fallen log that’s hollow all the way through. I stand at one end and Jo stands on the other, shouting messages back and forth. I say things to make her laugh like “My tushy crack’s got chiggers.” Or “I got a wedgie where my butt gobbled up my drawers.”
When I run out of things to say, I make fart noises with my armpit.
Jo goes quiet. I pop my head over the log. She’s slumped down on the ground, picking at some old scab on her knee. I settle across from her, digging in the dirt with a stick. Jo keeps picking at her knee like it holds some answers to her questions, and I keep stabbing the dirt with my stick, turning up stones and wet dirt smell and a few creepy crawlies. I hit a fat juicy worm. I spear it on the stick and hold it up to Jo’s nose.
“Dare me to swallow it whole?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Would too.” I pinch it over my open mouth and make like to drop it down my throat.
Jo shoves me. “Moxie, you’re crazy.”
I hold the worm up to the sun so its insides go all see-through and I think I can see its heart and guts. I fling it as far as I can. Jo pushes off the ground and shoots me a look that lets me know I can hold her hand. We skip back to Daddy, and Jo fishes out the grape sodas from the cooler. We pop our cans and slurp the fizz while Daddy wades in deeper where the big trout live. He’s got two already. The grape soda bubbles up my belly and the afternoon light slants hard, the water glinting like mad, and I can’t hardly keep my eyes open.
Next thing I know Daddy’s got me in his arms and my face is buried in the leathery skin of his neck that smells like fire smoke and whiskey sweat and old flannel work shirt and is a smell I could just about sleep in forever and ever.
He makes it a full two weeks before he’s throwing rocks at the church again. He’s passed out on the road in front of the church when we turn the corner from school. Jo hoists him up under his arms and I grab his ankles. We pull and heave, but he’s too heavy. Jo’s forehead is sweaty.
“Come on, let’s try again,” I tell her.
She pulls him and I push and we manage to skid him backwards to the curb, but we can’t get him up and over. Anyway, there’s no way we can drag him home. I get the idea to get him his sucker and see if that revives him. Jo keeps watch over him while I run to the bank. The teller lady’s there, looking bored in her chair as she peers over the counter. The cup with the suckers is empty.
“He at it again?” she asks.
“He is, Mrs. Pierce.” I go shy, not wanting to ask.
She claps a hand to her chest. “Oh dear, we’re out. You hold tight, I’ll go get some more from the back.”
My arms grow gooseflesh in the air-conditioning. After a minute, she comes back with a fistful of suckers and hands over three. Green, red, orange.
“Thank you, ma’am.” Her fingers graze mine. Her skin is warm and soft like uncooked pie crust. My mouth waters at the memory of a rhubarb pie. I don’t know if it’s that that makes me ask her. “Do you know why my Daddy throws rocks at the church? I can’t figure it out and Jo’s not telling.”
She sucks in a big breath.
I make my case. “I wish I could help him, but I don’t know how. I don’t know why he does it. I figure if I know why he’s so sad I could help him.”
She shifts in her seat. “Moxie, dear, you’re a sweet thing. You’re too young to understand. It’s a shame what happened to your Daddy and those boys. Father Donnelly’s gone now, retired. It’s a real shame but there’s nothing you can do.”
Jo huffs up beside me, pulling at my shirtsleeve. She whips her head at Mrs. Pierce.
“We’re all sorry for it, believe me,” Mrs. Pierce goes on. “Your daddy’s a fine, fine man.”
I thank her for the suckers as Jo drags me from the bank. On the sidewalk, she yanks my braid lightly. “What took you so long?”
“I had to wait. They were out.”
Her eyes have gone faraway again. She’s working something out in her head. I dislike that look she gets, and I worry she’ll grow boobs and leave me soon to chase boys and pout. I’ve seen the older girls do it. I’m not ready for Jo to go to the grownups.
I skip down the sun-hot sidewalk to where Daddy’s sprawled out. His face is red from the sun. I pull my tee-shirt off and lay it across his head so he won’t get more scorched. I scratch at my chest. Jo kicks at the asphalt. The sun heats up my shoulders. I wave his sucker in front of his face, but he doesn’t move.
Mr. Mitchell pops his head out the door of the hardware store and calls up the block to us. “You girls need some help getting him home?”
We nod politely and say, “Yessir, we do. That’d be a help.”
He puts a sign in the window of the hardware store and a few minutes later he noses his car around the corner and leaves it idling at the curb. I take my shirt off Daddy’s face and put it back on. Mr. Mitchell grips under his armpits and drags him along the pavement on his butt.
Jo grabs one foot and I get the other, and we lug him into the backseat. Jo sits in front since she’s older. I perch on Daddy’s legs. The car jostles Daddy’s head every which way. One arm slumps to the floorboard. I drag it up and lay it on his chest and pin it there. All laid out like that I can’t help but see him dead and my head throbs with sadness and anger that he’s got a hurtness inside him that sugar won’t fix and I vow there and then to love him forever till he stays the Daddy who cooks with a kitchen rag over his shoulder.
Momma comes to the door when she hears the car at the curb. She and Mr. Mitchell wrestle him inside to the bedroom and lay him out on the bed. After Momma tugs his boots off, she and Mr. Mitchell stand in the doorway murmuring in quiet grownup voices. I get the aloe and rub it on Daddy’s forehead.
Mr. Mitchell says, “It’s no bother…least I can do….shameful thing.”
Momma’s voice burbles up in response: “Don’t know what…”
Mr. Mitchell is bobbing his head and saying warm soothing words to Momma while Jo peeps at them from the kitchen door, a tight look settling in her.
Jo doesn’t say much during our bath, just sweeps the bubbles this way and that and puffs some into the air too. They dance and float before landing on me.
While the water’s sucking down the drain, Momma comes in to comb my hair. “You’re sweet as can be, Moxie girl,” she says. She glances at Jo. “Both my girls are sugar and spice. You make me proud, how big your hearts are.” She rubs the cold aloe into my shoulders till my skin stings.
That night it takes Jo a long time to fall asleep. She lies in bed opening and closing the pocketknife Daddy gave her last year when she cleaned her first fish. She thumbs open and shut the knife, open and shut, as the moon gapes and sinks into nothing.
Next day is Saturday and straight away I jab Jo awake. She squints at me. Her golden hair is fanned on her pillow. “You keepin’ secrets from me?” I ask.
She rolls over in bed and drags the pillow over her face. I pull it off.
“Quit it, Moxie.”
“What’s your secret?”
Jo doesn’t say anything. I grab at the pocketknife that’s resting on the side of her mattress. She swats at me. I hold it out of her reach.
“Quit it!”
“Not till you tell me what secret you’re keeping and let me in on it. You promised.”
Jo pouts and swats at the knife. “I did not.”
“You did in your mind, and I heard it in mine. That’s a sister promise—no secrets about Daddy.”
She sits up on one elbow and stares at me. She keeps staring even as she lifts the covers and I slip in next to her. Her body warms up my toes so nice I close my eyes. She cups her hand to my ear and breathes on me. “I know where Father Donnelly lives. I’m gonna go over there later and give him a piece of my mind.”
My eyes open with a snap. “How do you know where he lives? And what’s he got to do with Daddy?”
She lays back on her pillow and stares at the ceiling. She holds out her hand. I hand over the knife. “Heard Mr. Mitchell talking to Momma about it,” she says.
“But what’s that got to do with Daddy throwing rocks at the church?”
Jo sucks her bottom lip. “You won’t get it cuz you’re too little. Hell, I don’t really get it. Father Donnelly did something to Daddy when he was a boy and now he’s not right in the head.” She looks at me. I put my hand over my eyes and peep out through my fingers at her to see if she’s serious. She is.
“I’m going too.”
“No, you’re too little. If I get in trouble, it’ll just be me.”
“Where’s he live?”
“Old white house down by the bridge.”
The bridge where the baddies live. Momma said we can’t ever go there. “I’m going too!”
Jo sighs, and I know I’ve beat her. “Fine, but you let me do everything. No backtalking. No sass.”
Momma fries us eggs for breakfast. I dip my toast into the jammy yolk and lick the yellow off my plate. She kisses us each on our headtops, tells us be good and take care of Daddy. Her stockinged feet go through the front door and off to work. We peer in at Daddy still snoring away in bed, one arm flung over his eyes. We have a few good hours before we got to get back to make him his sausage patties and scrambled eggs.
Jo says, “Come on, let’s go.” Her eyes look watery.
We walk three blocks and take a left toward the baddie bridge. I’ve been biting the inside of my cheek and counting cracks in the sidewalk so as not to pester Jo with my questions. Mostly I want to know what she plans to say to Father Donnelly. We scuff up a hill and crest an embankment where the creek gets wider to become a proper river. The bridge looms in the distance. I’ve only seen it at night, driving by with my chin on the window ledge. There’d been dark outlines huddled around a fire, casting giant shadows behind them.
In the daylight all I see is two tired old men crouching by the water, their backs to us. Jo grabs me hard by the wrist and pulls me under a storefront awning. She points across the street at a dingy white clapboard with paint peeling in big fat flakes.
She crosses the street and I follow, still unsure what two little girls could say to a mean old man but I’m curious. I glance over my shoulder at the old men at the water. Jo crunches over the gravel drive to a side door and knocks.
“Jo,” I whisper, “why we knocking at the side door?”
She shushes me. “No sass.”
We hear footsteps and a face appears at the glass. White mess of hair and light blue eyes that have the color bleeding out of them. I’ve never seen eyes so light in their blueness. He tugs open the door. “Can I help you?”
Jo nods. “Yessir, we’d like a church man’s opinion on a family matter. Mind if we come in for a chat?”
His eyes drift from Jo to me, back to Jo again. His hand on the door jamb has puffy veins that bring to mind the juicy worms Daddy uses for fishing. He stands back, but my mind keeps ticking to worms—worms inside his body, fixing to crawl out.
“I’m retired,” he says.
Jo’s eyes well up with one of her tricks. She can make herself cry if she thinks hard enough. “Please.”
He waves us in, and we follow him down a dark hallway. We pass through a small kitchen and down another dark hallway to a room with a desk and some chairs. He sits behind the desk. I want to tell him to open his blinds—it’s a nice day with a warm breeze and he could do with some airing out. Jo said no sass, so I bite my cheek.
He spreads his hands. “What troubles you then?”
Jo folds her hands in her lap. “Well,” and here she licks her lips. “What troubles me, Mister, is that my Daddy can’t sleep some nights. He gets these nightmares where he wakes up screaming. Ever since I can remember, he’s had night terrors.” She leans back in her chair, like she’s getting relaxed for story time. “We’ve been tryin’ to help him and set him right, but he keeps having these fits where he throws rocks at the church down on Water Street. The one with the pretty stained glass windows, you know it?”
Father Donnelly nods. A line of muscle jumps in his jaw, jumping and jumping like Daddy’s fishing line when he snags a trout.
“I couldn’t figure it out. For the longest time I’ve been readin’ books to see if they can explain it. Why my Daddy, a man everybody loves, has a problem in his head that makes him throw rocks at that church.” Jo scoots forward in her seat and shoves her hands in her pockets. “And then I worked it out. I’m smart, see.” She thumbs a finger at me. “This one here’s got gall. I got the smarts.”
Before I know what’s what, Jo stands and whips something from her pocket. She aims it at Father Donnelly.
“Jo—” She said no backtalk, but in her fist is Momma’s .38 special that she keeps in the car in case of trouble. My insides are all gunked up with fright and the backs of my knees go tingly.
“Shush.” She puts her other arm back to keep me away. “Father Donnelly, I worked out what you did to my Daddy when he was a boy. You got away with it for a long time.”
The old man pushes himself back in his chair and crosses one leg over the other. He rests his hands on his knees so I can see those worms wiggling under his skin again. He smiles. “I thought little girls were supposed to be sweet. My goodness, you’re coming in here waving a gun at me? A man of the church? Let’s call your Momma and have her come pick you up.” He stands. “I’ll make you some iced tea while we wait.”
“No.” Jo stomps her foot.
She’s acting tough right now, and I like this Jo, I like her an awful lot, except her eyes have that sad look again, and her hand is shaking, so the gun is squirming around, and I’m worried for Jo—that I’ll lose her to the grownup sadness, just like I lost Daddy, and I can’t lose any more people, and I get it I think, what happened to Daddy as a boy has got something to do with this old wormy-handed baddie right here. He did something to my Daddy to be giving him nightmares, and I decide right then I don’t care what he did to him, except it’s my job to set it right.
I watch Father Donnelly watch Jo’s shaking hand. It’s just like Jo to talk smart and lose her nerve just when the action’s hotted up. I snatch the gun from her so quick she can’t react. I take Momma’s .38 special and point it at the wormy man.
“Sit your butt down, Mister,” I say.
He does, his jaw working and working, like he’s chewing the worms up inside him. “What are your names again?” he asks.
“She’s sugar,” I say, “and I’m spice. Now shutyermouth.”
He tsks and shakes his head. “You’ll be in an awful lot of trouble if you don’t set that gun down soon.”
I squint and bite my tongue, sighting him down over the gun that Daddy showed me how to use. He took me and Jo out to some dusty junkyard and trained us up to shoot at old bottles. I figure shooting a baddie isn’t much different.
“Come on, missy.”
“You hurt my Daddy,” Jo wails next to me.
Father Donnelly lurches forward in a sudden rush of movement, and I squeeze the trigger slow like Daddy taught me, so that worm man can’t get his hands on us. I saw it in his eyes, that mean dog-hard madness that’d make him hurt a little kid. I bite my tongue and play pretend I’m shooting a bottle off in the distance with Daddy in my ear saying, “You got a steel arm, Moxie,” and whistling when my shot goes ping. Jo was never so good with the gun. Too twitchy.
Father Donnelly roars backwards and falls into the desk. He crumples forward onto the carpet, panting. He curls onto his side. I step closer with the gun still raised.
“Moxie,” Jo calls. She’s crying. I won’t let the worm man hurt her.
I kick him in the ribs, and he groans. He just lays there for a bit, a pool of blood seeping around him and oozing into the carpet. His panting gets softer and then he wheezes and goes quiet. I kick him hard, but he doesn’t move. I put my one hand over his mouth and feel nothing. We back out of the room, one step at a time, until we get to that small kitchen and then we race down the hallway. At the side door we pause. Jo’s next to me, shaky and white. She pulls the .38 special from my hand and puts it in her pocket.
She cups her hands to my ear and whispers. I nod. Sister promise.
We walk home the same way we came. The men at the water are gone. At the hardware store we wave inside at Mr. Mitchell. We stroll on past the church, quiet today, and skirt around the corner to the bank, where I trot inside and ask for three suckers pretty please. Then we head on home and switch on the radio in the kitchen to the music Daddy likes.
Jo puts the gun in the closet and gets the cast iron hotting up on the stove. I get the sausage out. Humming along to the twangy music, we set to making him some breakfast to soak up the booze. When he wakes up soon, I’ll call out to him, “Chow’s up, Daddy!” and smooch him on the cheek so he knows it’s alright now, he doesn’t need to have nightmares anymore because I fixed his worries.
Later I’ll question why Jo put the gun in the closet instead of in the car where she found it, and Momma will pull it from the shelf and holler our names in a strangled voice, and Daddy will go into the bedroom and not come out, and I’ll take the fall so Jo can keep on with her book learning, which is a thing I’ll never do, you never learn do you is what Momma will say, but until then, in the sweet here and now of our sister promise, while Jo is still mine, I hand Jo her sucker and I unwrap my red one—red red red like all that blood. I hold it to the light and look through it, lit up like the pretty stained glass on the church on Water Street.
