Recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for 2023, a great honor and a reminder to all us writers to continue to submit to literary organizations… more information can be found in my post, ‘The Grip of the Past.’ –Sallie
Dad wouldn’t haul it in from his truck along with all her bags and boxes. Said he never asked for no god-damned chandelier so Nola and I went out and dragged it in.
The chandelier lay in the corner of our big room for about a month till Dad said either hang it or haul it to the dump. By that time Fat Annie had her stuff more or less corralled behind the tablecloth strung across a wire to cut off where they slept from where the rest of us, all five, slept in the one big bed or on the floor. I liked the floor. With the heat from the wood stove it was warmer.
So it seemed like it was up to Nola and me to hang the chandelier. She wanted to put it in our big room but it I said it would never look right there. I don’t know how I knew that but I knew. The big room was a junkpile and the chandelier was not junk. So we fetched the ladder and the chandelier to the kitchen and Nola found a piece of bailing wire and we nailed that up to the ceiling beam and made a hook and hung the chandelier. It was made to hold twelve candles but we didn’t have no candles and weren’t likely to get any. It looked better plain than it would have outfitted with candles so I was satisfied.
Nola not so much. She was thirteen and starting to get weird and all the time missing our mom but I was eleven and didn’t miss Mom a lot. She’d gone off a long time ago with some guy, which was all Dad told us and we knew better than to ask questions except for Linc who’s only seven and he asked if she was ever coming back and got swatted across the room and she isn’t even his mom. His mom is Lolana and she’s already come and gone.
Dad felt bad after that. He usually felt bad when he sobered up. He took Linc on his knee and petted him and said he was named for a great man, a president, and had a lot to live up to. Linc looked up at him with his strange light eyes—his mom is a white woman—and I guess he felt better.
Can’t none of his women abide Dad for long. He’s rough as a cob when he’s drunk and we kids know to scatter but his women always tries to argue with him. I guess if I ever want to keep a woman I can’t get drunk and I’ve been nipping from Dad’s whiskey bottle since I was five so sober is going to take some doing.
But this is really about Fat Annie and the second thing I want to say about her after the chandelier is she wasn’t really fat. Just average with a moon face and big bazookas and a hind end to match which was the way Dad chose his women. She liked the baby and Linc because they were young and didn’t remember their mother and she didn’t bother me none but Nola took against her and wouldn’t eat her food. I was always hungry and didn’t see no profit in starving so when Annie was setting out the food, she and me got to talking.
That was during those long winter nights when Dad took off for Sheridan—no liquor allowed on the rez but Sheridan is only about twenty miles West—and wasn’t likely to come home till the next day. He’d sleep on the floor of the bar after closing if they’d let him or in his truck.
The first night he done that, Annie asked me if she’d drove him off. She was washing the supper dishes (she was some kind of great cook, even knew how to soften up the scrawny deer Dad sometimes brought in) and I was drying and putting away because Nola wouldn’t.
When Annie asked me her question, she was at the sink and she looked at me over her shoulder and the florescent bulb made her skin pure white. I found out later she was only one-fifth Shawnee which Dad didn’t like because he’s a pureblood. Us kids are all mixed anyhow. My mom and Nola’s is a white girl from Arkansas Dad met at a rodeo down there. Linc’s is the N-word and he’s mainly black. The baby has a Crow mother and I guess he’ll go back to live on her rez when he’s a little older. So for Annie to be one-fifth Cheyenne and the rest white didn’t come as any surprise to me but why she wanted Dad, a pure Cheyenne man mean as a snake was beyond me. I had to be growed myself before I got it.
After she asked, I saw her mouth purse up like she was going to cry and I said, “He always goes to Sheridan unless there’s a storm and the road’s too bad.”
“He did that with your Mom?”
“I guess.”
She was scrubbing the big pot from the stew. “Did he beat her?”
“If she went on arguing too long, he’d give her a whack and head out the door.” I knew that was his way.
“Women don’t understand men,” Annie said, setting the pot on the drainer. We’d had beef stew and eaten every scrap, Linc begging to scrape out the burned parts and she’d let him.
I dried the pot and put it on the shelf.
“We think they want to stay with us but they don’t,” Annie said. “Remember what I’m saying when you’re all growed up.”
“Uncle Jake stays with Auntie Lenora just about all the time,” I said.
“Well, he’s in a wheelchair. I expect when he was young and hearty he went to Sheridan with your dad.”
I didn’t say nothing. I reached for another plate and started to dry it and put it away. It had a chain of red flowers around the edge.
“What I don’t understand,” Annie said, lowering herself into the rocker by the stove, “is why we want them to stay. All the time bitching and moaning about them going off when we know good and well they always will. More peaceful anyway once they’re gone.”
I put away the last plate and went and stood by the stove. I’d loaded it up good with logs and the heat felt fine. I was waiting for Annie to go on but then Linc come bitching about something and she had to go see to him and change the baby and put them both to bed and by the time she got back to the rocker it was late and she told me to go on to bed and leave her in peace.
After that we got in the way of talking just about every evening after supper when Dad was off in his truck or out at the barn taking care of his horses. He rides saddle broncs at the rodeo and all three of his horses were broke and trained special. The rest of the kids were watching TV and I never have cared nothing for TV. So we talked or Annie talked and I listened while we finished the supper dishes.
I went back to where we broke off the night before. “Don’t some women run off before the men do?”
“The smart ones do,” she said. “Look at your mom. I seen from her picture she was young and pretty and would do all right anywhere.”
“Must be some others don’t want men hanging around.”
“Some so old they growed sense,” she said, “and lost their appetite too.”
I guessed what she meant from the groaning and hollering behind the tablecloth just about every night Dad was home.
Annie give me a pat on the shoulder. “You’ll know all about that in another two-three years. Now you just make sure you don’t marry the first one.”
I didn’t plan to get all weird like Nola who was putting Dad in an uproar staying out late with Randy in his pickup. She didn’t seem happy that winter and sure enough by spring she was showing.
“There’s lots of men help out,” I said next evening to get Annie started. “I mean bring home wages and stuff.”
“When there’s wages,” she said, “and stuff is just commodities. Beans and sugar and flour like I’m going to spend all day baking and stewing.”
“Dad trades ours for whiskey anyways,” I said.
“Now, that’s sensible.” She liked to drink with him at the start.
Annie lasted four years and it was only the last week that was bad. That’s when she started packing her boxes and bags and when I asked her why she was going, she said Dad told her he wanted more kids and she was too old. I remembered the one time I heard Dad and the other elders talking about how every man had to do his best to replace all the ones we lost to sickness and white killing and I knew if he was talking that way, there was nothing Annie could do. He’s kind of young still and sort of good-looking and he’s always had lots of choices.
One night later that week when Dad come home early from Sheridan and passed out on the floor of our big room, I watched Annie work his keys out of his jacket pocket and take off the one she needed. She got her coat and told me to help her load. On the way to Dad’s truck—it was snowing and the wind was up—she said, “Now don’t you tell your Dad nothing about this cause he’s not going to believe you and if you get a hiding you can’t blame me.”
By then she was in the truck and turning on the engine and starting to back out but she rolled down the window and said, “Now you remember what I told you. Don’t you go marrying the first one.” Then she was driving down the dirt road and I saw snow falling through the yellow of her headlights. “You keep that chandelier!” she shouted back at me.
Yes, I did get a whipping because of the truck and that was the last of many because I run off the next week. I was looking for something different and didn’t even know what it was but Dad had his new woman behind the curtain and the noise was terrible. Then Nola run off with Jake and landed somewhere east of here and so on and so on. There just didn’t seem to be any end to any of it that I could see.
Well, of course Dad come after me and found me sleeping under the old railroad bridge in Sheridan—that was how far I got—and would have beat me again but I was near as big as he was and he knew I could give him as good as I got.
“What in hell you trying to do?” he shouted. “Don’t I treat you good, plenty of food and now with Ruth Ann she’s some kind of a cook and you’re living high on the hog?”
“I don’t want food, I want my mom,” I said and old as I was I started to blubber. Never had thought of her before.
“She’s working in a house in Denver, I’ll take you to meet her,” he said and I remembered what Fat Annie had told me about her being still young and pretty.
That started me to blubbering again and the old son of a bitch put his arm around me and herded me to his truck just like a little sheep.
Next week he told me to pack some clean socks and we drove up through the mountains to Denver. The pass was thick with snow (they closed it next day) but Dad knew snow and the way he spurred that old truck through the drifts had me nearly amazed.
We got into Denver about nightfall and went to a place he knew that took people like us. It wasn’t too bad, the bed they give us was big and didn’t have no bugs in it. I got in and went to sleep and Dad hit the bars and didn’t get back till daylight and then had to sleep it off.
I walked around the city and saw all the sights and the big roads packed with traffic till I got so cold I had to go back to the place.
Dad was up and he said we was going to meet my mom and we started out walking. The place she was at was in the same part of town, a nice-looking house with a brass doorknocker.
The lady who let us in told us to wait on a bench in the front hall. Men came and went, stumbling over our feet, and Dad said hello to each other of them as if he’d known them forever, Natives and black men and white, he seemed to know them all.
Mom came downstairs. I didn’t know it was Mom till Dad stood up and cuffed her and kissed her and said, “I brung your son, run off last week looking for you or so he said.”
Mom was pretty as Fat Annie told me, blond long hair hanging down over her shoulders and a little pointy nose and a firmed-up mouth like a rose. She led Dad into the parlor and sat him in a big rocker and got on his lap and they rocked and giggled like a couple of kids.
“Your boy’s all growed up,” he said after a while and she looked at me and didn’t know me and I didn’t know her either.
“Hello, Son,” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
Then she asked Dad if he’d brought me to be plucked but he said he didn’t have the time. She said it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes but Dad wasn’t buying.
“Well, now you’ve seen her,” Dad said, herding me to the door. “Are you satisfied?”
“Goodbye, be good!” she called.
Dad didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t give him one and that was the first and last time I saw my Mom.
After that I didn’t have nothing to say about nothing. Ruth Ann was a good cook although nothing compared to Fat Annie and I went back to drying the dishes. I thought it was going to go on and on that way but lo and behold it didn’t.
The spring I turned sixteen I was helping Dad at the rodeo down in Albuquerque, cleaning his tack and feeding his horses and so on, and one evening when I was finishing up the chores this girl come walking by and stopped to talk.
I’m not going to say nothing about Kitty McFee because the way I feel about her ain’t nobody’s business. She come from Denver, was down our way just out of pure curiosity—nobody in her family rodeo’d and she’d never been to one before. We ended up talking every night of the five day event and she introduced me to her brother who’d driven her and the next day I got in the back seat of his Ram and rode to Denver with the two of them and started in at her high school and found out I could do more than just barely read and write.
Dad maybe found out where I was but by then he’d given up on me and didn’t cause me no trouble.
I sleep in the loft at Kitty McFee’s family’s house and eat with them and earn my way doing anything they need doing. Kitty and I sit in the kitchen and talk most evenings and I never have touched her though that time is coming and we both know it. She’s my first but she’s also my best and I didn’t think twice about what Fat Annie told me.
Not then anyway. Things change of course and five years and three babies later Kitty McFee turned on me and said it was all nothing but work and no fun and I was gone too much. I’d hooked a good job, foreman on a rig in the oil patch down south and didn’t get home till the weekend and it was a long drive and some Saturdays I just couldn’t make it. The money was good and I’d bought us a ranchette in a new development on the edge of Sheridan—no more rez for me—but it looked like that good house and all that went with it didn’t make no difference at all.
I tried to jolly her, telling her maybe she wanted a real nice chandelier for our kitchen—I’d seen one at Sears—but she swatted me across the face and that was the end of it as far as I was concerned.
Took the kids too and went to live with her folks in Denver. They never had anything good to say about me, called me “That damn cowboy.”
So I guess you could say I did learn something from Fat Annie but what I learned was when to let the woman call it quits.
Kitty McFee took my pickup too but I give her the keys so no hard feelings because she was my first but she also was my best.
Susan Munroe says
Like the story, Sallie. There’s a cadence to the writing that sweeps the reader on to the next thought and the story is sweet, despite the violence. One can believe the protagonist to be a good person though how long that will last seems uncertain.
Elizabeth Bergmann, Louisville, Ky. says
I hope you don’t mind me asking, Ms. Bingham, but is this story purely from your imagination? Or is there a germ from which it sprang?
Sallie Bingham says
There is always a germ but imagination does the work. SB
Laurie H Doctor says
I am inspired by your perseverance, and the leap you have made into imagination. I read your essay and am engaged all the way —, I want to know what will happen next…. I am so glad for this long deserved recognition as a writer you are receiving with this prize.
Pamala Ballingham says
You’ve made real flesh and blood from black and white words. They ring with rhythm and an authenticity that makes me want to know more. Good writing does this.
Sallie Bingham says
Thank you, Pamala. This is the first in a series of stories so there will be more. SB