Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [144]
Mr. Stillwater speaks in the quietest possible voice to his boots. “I was afraid to death, when they took her to Tulsa. That boy beat up my daughter. She was in the hospital twice with a broke jaw.” He clears his throat. “I should have gone and got her. But my wife was dead, and I didn’t have the gumption. I should have. I done wrong.”
There is a very long silence, and then a yellow leaf falls off the rubber tree. All three of them stare at it.
“I’ve let her down too,” Taylor says. “In different ways. I made her drink milk even though I should have seen it was making her sick.” She continues looking at the curled leaf on the floor, released from its branch. “Since all this came up, we’ve been living on the edge of what I could manage. I had to leave her alone in the car sometimes because I couldn’t afford a sitter. We didn’t have enough money, and we didn’t have anybody to help us.” Taylor tightens and releases her grip on the wadded blue tissue in her hand. “That’s why I finally came here. Turtle needs the best in the world, after what she’s been through, and I’ve been feeling like a bad mother.” Her voice breaks, and she crosses her arms over her stomach, already feeling the blow. How life will be without Turtle. It will be impossible. Loveless, hopeless, blind. She will forget the colors.
She feels Annawake’s eyes turned on her, wide, but no words.
When Taylor’s own voice comes back to her, she hardly recognizes it or knows what it will say. “Turtle deserves better than what she’s gotten, all the way around. I love her more than I can tell you, but just that I love her isn’t enough, if I can’t give her more. We don’t have any backup. I don’t want to go through with this thing anymore, hiding out and keeping her away from people. It’s hurting her.”
Taylor and Annawake gaze at each other like animals surprised by their own reflections.
Suddenly two shadows are at the door, tall and short. Annawake jumps up to lead them in. Turtle is hanging so close to Alice’s knees they bump together like a three-legged race. Her eyes are round, and never look away from the man in the corner.
“Turtle, I want you to meet some people,” Taylor says through the hoarseness in her throat.
Turtle takes a half step from behind Alice, and stares. Suddenly she holds up her arms to Cash like a baby who wants to be lifted into the clouds. She asks, “Pop-pop?”
Cash pulls off his glasses and drops his face into his hands.
32
The Snake Uk’ten
“WWHERE’D YOU GET A PRISSY name like Lacey from, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Cash tells Alice, keeping his hands on the wheel and his eye trained ahead. “It was Alma thought of it. I think she liked that TV show with the lady cops. Lacey and somebody.”
“Oh, if that don’t beat all.” Alice jerks herself around in the seat, facing away from him. She was more or less stuck for a ride home, since Taylor and Turtle had to go straight over to Cherokee Headquarters to see the man in Child Welfare. Annawake said her car was broken down and she was waiting for her brother to pick her up. That left Cash. She should have walked.
“She’s so big,” Cash says. “I can tell just how she is. The kind to keep her mind to herself, like her mother did.”
They pass by fields of harvested hay that is rolled up for the winter in what looks like giant bedrolls. A barn in the middle of a pasture is leaning so far to the east it appears to be a freak of gravity.
“Are you going to go ahead and get enrolled, and get your voting card?” he asks.
“Might as well,” Alice declares to the passing farms. “So I can get my roof fixed.”
“Don’t start talking to me about Indians on welfare.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Well, don’t. My people owned mansions in Georgia. They had to see it all burned down, and come over here to nothing but flint rocks and