Marigold Dreams

Dreaming of the dead and haunted by the living, the mythos of the marigold touches all our lives. The believing and the unbelieving alike. It all started with that dry dusty packet of seeds that Ma carried from place to place, waiting for her heart to tell her she was home so she could finally plant them. Eventually she gave up looking, and thoughts perhaps home wasn’t a place you find but something you create. So she broke open that seed packet hoping she could break open her heart, seeking new life for both.

She watered it with all her hopes and dreams, pouring more life into those desiccated husks than she ever poured into me. But the dustbowl eats up life, drying it out until it blows away. She toted water and fussed over those worn down seedlings, but the sun scorched away all her work except for one raggedy stubborn blossom, maybe two if you count me. But I don’t and I don’t think she does either.

I often wondered why she even bothered giving me my name, Marigold. It was clear from the start I was not her dream. I don’t think Pa was either. He was just a way to chase it. For Ma hadn’t found it anywhere in Mississippi, so when Pa came along promising to take her to new places she followed along waiting and watching for the adventure to begin.

I don’t have a middle name. All of Ma’s aspirations spent for me on just a first name. Ma had a sister that died before she lived. Her name was Mary. Could be she named me after her and not the flower. I think she misses her sister even though she said the babe never breathed a day of life. I don’t think Pa knows about that else he would have made her name me something different. Pa gave me my last name because he liked Miller better than Ma’s heritage of Smith. Said he married her and everything Smith about her was laid to rest with no intentions of it ever rising up again. He took her from per people and good riddance. Ma doesn’t argue a word against him. She never has and never will. Though sometimes she gets a far away look like she remembers being a Smith and misses it.

I just turned eighteen though I look no more than sixteen, all straight angles and no curves, not much height either. I haven’t bloomed into womanhood the way some do. Ma says I might never bloom. She didn’t. It’s nothing to worry over much. We all have our place in life, the pretty and the ugly and everything in between, or so she tells me. I thought that was true, until Billy Haddon took my hand and led me to believing life could offer more. I wonder if it was that way for Ma when she met Pa. Though I can hardly imagine Ma ever having any feelings like mine.

The prairie winds are always blowing, day and night from one season to the next. If it pauses it is only to catch its breath, building up for a bigger gust. Usually I feel untethered, standing fast against the earth hoping not to blow away with the next gale. Though it would hardly matter if I did. Ma and Pa might not even notice until they saw the eggs were left to rot and stink in the coop, the cow bellowing to be released from its milk, our garden untended, left to dissipate into weeds, no food on the table. Ours is not a family of love, but necessity, survival means work and they mean for me to do it and save themselves the trouble. Why should we all suffer?

I think I ought to feel ashamed by the thoughts chasing themselves around inside my head, but I don’t. Why should I be embarrassed by the truth? It seems like a waste of time. Lying to yourself or lying to others, waiting or wanting people to be different than they are. It all only causes pain, all unmet expectations do. Ma is proof of that, maybe Pa too. So I try my best not to have any.

Except maybe right now, in this moment I feel them starting inside my breast. I think that is why my heart beats so fast. It feels like it could pop at any moment and that would be the end of it all. I should step away. I do not. I should look away, but instead I look deeper into his eyes and try to see myself. See if I look any different to him than I do to myself.

A spare girl, with thin yellow-brown hair and too many freckles, green eyes that I wished sparkled like emeralds but only look like dull glass. I have a little pink bow mouth which Ma says is my best feature right up until I part my lips to speak, spoiling the effect. My skin was once soft and creamy, too many days in the sun has changed it, made it tough and hard like leather. I never minded before, soft hands were for soft girls. I never wanted to be soft before, but right now I wish I could be.

A part of me aches for him to say I am beautiful, to believe the words and not name them a lie. The stronger part of me can’t abide deceit and if he whispers them now I shall not believe him. I prefer he hold to the silence or only speak the hard truth I already know. If he lies to me now I will run away and not return.

I suddenly feel like I am becoming something new or perhaps just growing up in a way I never expected to. I wonder if I am like a snake shedding its skin. When I wriggle free will I be changed? I wish I were a caterpillar waiting to become a butterfly so I could flit away beating wings as fast as my fluttering heartbeat. But those are reckless thoughts, as I said before I am not soft or beautiful like that. God did not see a purpose in that for the likes of me.

I do not blink or look away as he stares at me, we breathe in the scent of one another while taking the others measure. His fans across my face warmly and I want to sink in closer. Still no new words pass between us, but even so I am speaking to him and he is speaking to me. Words don’t have to be uttered aloud in order for their meaning to be felt. Ma says I say more with my eyes than I ever do with my mouth. So I stand shock still as my eyes search him over waiting for what he has to say next or what I will say in return.

I have never been shy. Ma says it’s a sin the way I stare at a person instead of looking down. Why should I look down? I already know what the ground looks like. I want to see everything. I don’t think it makes me bold or forward, except in this moment where I am different from any way I have been before. I rarely talk to anyone. I usually just watch, taking in as much as I can.

I have been watching Billy for a long time and apparently he has been watching me. We’ve been learning each other for years it seems, but today was the first time he has ever said “hello.” From that first word and a nod of his noggin the world changed for both of us. He hitched his head to the right and bid me follow after him without a second word, but I understood just the same, or thought I did.

We climbed the steep ridge up to Bannock’s Bluff, the only place in the area that is not flat and covered in endless brown grass. I struggled at first until he held his hand out to me. When the way got easier he didn’t drop his hold of me as I expected him to. I liked the warm sweaty press of his palm against mine.

Ma and Pa don’t touch me, except with a switch across my backside if I’m late with supper or don’t finish my chores. Everyone pretty much ignores me and mostly I am okay with it. When I was younger I felt lonely some, but I grew out of it and learned that neglect and freedom go hand in hand if you make the most of every opportunity. So I work hard to complete my chores and see that they’re well done, leaving nothing to complain about.

If I’m not sitting at the table for dinner no one minds so long as the food is on time and as long as I am in bed before the sun sets. For Pa won’t abide it if I am late to waking before the sun rises to stoke the fire, heating his coffee, breakfast and our small soddie before his feet hit the floor. Says he has earned the right by giving me this roof over my head, except it’s not much of a roof, just sod cut from the earth, laid over some pole beams. Pa didn’t even cut the sod himself, found the place abandoned and claimed it for his own.

It’s hot in summer and cold in winter, though not as hot or cold as it would be with no solid walls to shelter us. It don’t keep out all the rain, but then it doesn’t rain often. When it does the bugs squirm and slither their way through and drop down on us. Sometime it feels purely biblical the way they invade upon us like a plague.

There’s a pump well 50 feet from the house and pit toilet out back. When it gets full we cover over it with dirt and dig a new one. If Pa weren’t so lazy or I weren’t so short we could build a proper outhouse, but I can’t dig any deeper than four feet and still climb back out of the hole on my own. Pa don’t see the point in anything more permanent, since we found the soddie we just pitch the tent we used to sleep in over the hole. That’s as much privacy as any man needs says Pa. The well is closer than the creek, but I wouldn’t call it a convenience, since I have to pump a long while just to get a trickle. It tastes metallic and doesn’t always run clear. Some days it’s just easier to tote all the washing down to the creek, and by the time the clothes and dishes are clean so am I.

Ma says it ain’t natural to bathe more than once a year, but since she doesn’t approve of me much I don’t let her judgement concern me. I like the way the water makes me feel, even when it’s cool and rushing, causing goosebumps to race across my skin. Even when it cuts across me sharply making me suck in a breath and freeze. And I certainly prefer my smell to theirs. It’s worth the hardship of breaking through the ice in winter and dipping a clean cloth in, rubbing the dirt from my flesh for as long as I can feel my fingers and make them work before they cramp up from the cold.

Most of the time I sleep outside in a little lean to I patched together against the side of our little house. I found a busted wagon and tore loose some of the boards, pitching them against the south side, farthest from the only door in or out. I enjoy having a space that keeps me away from them and them from me. It’s too cold to sleep out in by late fall. Though come spring as soon as the snow is melted I am back out to it as soon as I can be. Sometimes I pretend my room is a home of my own, a place well away from this claimed dusty earth that someone felt better off abandoning. I wished Pa had felt the same, but we happened upon it and stuck to it like a tick.

I am mostly a girl who believes in what is and never wastes too many thoughts on what could be, except when I allow myself to feel low and weak, which is not often. Too many sorrows and I would not be able to keep up with my folks demands. They have a heap of them. As if I had a choice in being born and now I owe them some reparation. If anything, they owe me, but the point isn’t worth arguing over since the circumstances aren’t likely to change.

Ma says the most I can hope for is a man to come along that won’t be put off by what she calls my peculiar ways. We could build us a home next to Ma and Pa’s and improve the land someday. It sounds like more work for their benefit and not my own and I told her as much. She is passed being shocked by my rudeness, only saying I best hide my ungrateful side long enough to snare a man before it’s too late because as a woman I can’t inherit the farm without a husband and without the farm I have nothing. I don’t want the farm, but the fear of having less than I have now worries me some, or it did before today. Now I have a new fear, a host of them really. All swirling around what comes next.

I have crossed over into a new world. I have never stayed out after dark. I have never touched a boy before or let him touch me. I’ve never had a secret either, never needed one until now. I know Ma and Pa will not approve of Billy and me, so I won’t tell them. We might be dirt poor but Billy and his father come from even less than that. None of it speaks to a bright future yet my soul has broken open like Pandora’s box and I can’t hold back the tide of awful desire. Wanting anything more than you have now is how you get your heart broke. Life speaks that truth to me everyday. I used to stand strong against it but hope has weakened my purpose.

The way he moves against me makes me tremble, though I do not know if it is more fear or longing, for I have never felt this way before and it frightens me. I hope he thinks I shake from the cold and not from being scared because I don’t want him to think of me as weak in any way, even if I am. I know not where he begins and I end, it is the first time I have felt like I belong anywhere. He doesn’t kiss me or grab at me the way some boys do with other girls. He isn’t rough or rushing through this moment to the next. He just hugs me against him gentle like. I don’t know if it’s a kindness for his sake or mine. I suspect Billy is as untouched except by whip and unkind words as I am. Each of our raw unmet needs calls to the other.

He hasn’t a Ma just a Pa, his worse than mine if you can believe it. I know he drinks though I don’t know where he gets the money to buy it. Some say he makes it himself, but I find it hard to believe that man would work that hard, even to serve himself. I don’t ask Billy because I don’t want to know about anything other than how he makes me feel right now.

I wonder if I’m starting to chase dreams like Ma once did. Wondering if I am the same as her and I just don’t know it yet. There aren’t any more marigold seeds left. I ate them when I was five, hoping they would grow inside me and make me beautiful. Then I could be Ma’s dream and we would all finally be home. A foolish hope that quickly proved wrong. I had never seen Ma so upset. Mostly life for her was a simple disappointment without much feeling. But that day she struck me for the first time then fell to her knees and cried more tears than I thought she possessed. It took me until just this moment to understand I had swallowed all her dreams and she had nothing left to hope for. I had shattered her without intending to and I didn’t know how to build her back up. Or myself for that matter, for surely this joy couldn’t last long . . . to be continued in Part 2.