Elizabeth Massie: Wire Mesh Mothers

The orphaned cotton bits, blown loose from the butchered fields of December, scattered themselves across the chipped blacktop of the county roads outside the small town of Pippins, Virginia. They danced their ice dance, dodging automobile tires, winding up for the most part dead along the roadsides and wrapped like suicidal ghosts about the bases of splintery mailbox posts. Sometimes kids played in the harvested fields, picking the remnant fiber, stuffing it down the fronts of their shirts to make big boobs like Miss Carole, the Sunday School teacher down at the Riverside Church of Christ of Nazareth, or making light-weight snowmen by rolling the pieces together into big balls and then pinning the pieces together with thistle thorns. It didn’t snow much in Pippins, and real snowmen were hard to come by in the winter.

Usually, though, the kids found other places to play because the plant stubble was so thick and so harsh sneakers couldn’t keep out the pain. And so the cotton bits were alone to explore their small world on their own, disguising themselves as things they weren’t, playing dress-up, playing make-believe.

Looking like snow. Or turkey down.

Or thick white ashes from a distant crematorium.

Mistie Dawn Henderson wore her nightgown to school. It was a light weight pink acetate nightie, with torn lace at the sleeves and neck. Mistie liked the gown; it was pretty and it felt good on her skin. So when she woke up December tenth and found her father snoring face down on the carpet and her mother leaning over her ashtray on a stool in the kitchen, one hand clutching the Winston, the other shading her face from the light that crept through the thin window shades, Mistie had slipped on socks and shoes and her winter coat, then gone out to wait for the bus down at the entrance to the trailer park.

Mrs. Colvin, who lived in the trailer next door to Mistie, saw her trudging past. She’d slammed up her storm window and called out, “Mistie Dawn, you tell your daddy I’m sick and tired of his music late at night. I didn’t get one speck of sleep and now what am I supposed to do? My windows was shut and even then I felt like I was rocking on the damn sea. I got nerves! He knows it! What am I supposed to do, answer me that? You hear me, Mistie Dawn? Say something!” Her voice cracked and went up a few notes. Mistie stuck her hands into her coat pockets, tucked her head, and kept walking, down the graveled road between the mobile homes. To either side she could see painted plaster and concrete lawn ornaments, staring at her with their pupil-less eyes. Tiny gardens were dead and brown; it was winter, after all. Bits of cotton from nearby fields had snagged themselves on rose branches and azalea twigs. The few trees between the lots were as naked as those women in the movies Daddy rented on weekends. There weren’t any other kids out of their trailers yet; it was still early.

“I’ll have the law on him quick as a dog, and we’ll see how much music he can play behind bars?” Mrs. Colvin shouted. “You want your daddy behind bars? What you think of that, huh?”

Mistie didn’t think much of that. People were always threatening to call the cops on her daddy or her mama for one reason on other, but most of them didn’t do it because, as Daddy said, two could play that game and most neighbors had something under their sticky ole carpet if he decided to do a little digging. On the few occasions police did pay visits on the Hendersons, Daddy was polite and agreeable and the cops would say, “Well, okay, then, don’t let it happen again.” Whatever the “it” was at the time. Cops were rubber-dicks, Mistie’s daddy would laugh. It was the social services that stuck in Daddy’s craw. Social services had chased Mistie’s family across a few state borders in the past two years when they got the idea that the Hendersons didn’t take good care of Mistie. Mistie didn’t really know what being taken care of was exactly, except that in each place they’d lived, ladies in skirts and heels had eventually come around to their trailer or their apartment or their rental house to talk to Mistie about her Daddy and what he was up to. But the Hendersons would pack up and leave once those ladies started sniffing about. At least social services gave up easily, Daddy said with a smile. Not enough workers, Mama would laugh. But, damn, they sure were a bother.

When Valerie died back in Kentucky, Daddy had taken her way away from their apartment and buried her somewhere. He said nobody best find her because he said if the cops and social services got into it, they’d make it seem like Valerie being dead was the family’s fault and then everybody would go to jail, even Mistie. If anybody asked, Valerie’d had a bad liver, Daddy’d said. Wasn’t his fault she had a bad liver but somebody would try to make it his fault like they did everything else. Mistie had promised never to talk about Valerie so the family wouldn’t have to go to jail.

Mistie had been five when Valerie had died; since then they’d lived nine months in Tennessee, a half-year in North Carolina, and then Virginia. Most of Mistie’s memories of her sister had disappeared with the body; all she had now was a coloring book Valerie had colored in, one with Teletubies in it. Sometimes, Mistie dreamed of her sister playing with a little cloud of black flies in the summer sun, but she never saw Valerie’s face in those dreams.

When the Hendersons got themselves settled in MeadowView Trailer Park in Pippins, Virginia, Daddy had gotten a job working on a cotton farm in the summer and spring and fall. He stayed home at the trailer in the winter. Mama started selling sweet-smelling soap and shampoos from a catalog. Mistie liked the soap and shampoo but Mama never let her buy any and then after a month she threw the catalog in the trash and said nobody wanted that junk anyway. Just a few weeks after that the baby Mama was going to have came out too early. Mama showed it to Mistie as it floated in the toilet, a red blob with a tiny head-like thing and stringy stuff hanging off it, swirling in the water as Mama let Mistie push the lever to flush it away.

Mistie sat on the bank beside the road. She pulled up a dead weed and wrapped the stem around the base of the spiky seedpod.

“Mama had a baby and its head popped off,” she said to herself. She pulled the bent stem forward, and the little pod popped off and up into the air. Mistie smiled. She picked another weed and popped off the seedpod.

A few minutes later, other trailer park children began to gather by the road. They threw gravel back and forth at each other. Mistie got hit on the head and arms a couple times, but she didn’t throw any back. It didn’t really hurt. She stopped playing with the weeds and sat with one fist inside the other.

A high school boy in t-shirt and no coat in spite of the freezing temperature took out a pack of cigarettes and lit two, one for himself, and one for his seventh grade girlfriend. He leaned on the gray split rail fencing separating the mobile park from the grassy bank by the road and sucked on the cigarette. The morning sun caught the smoke and strummed it like a silent guitar.

“Hey, girl,” he said.

Mistie said nothing.

“Hey.” He held the cigarette in his teeth, picked up a bit of gravel and tossed it at Mistie. It bounced off her chest. “I said hey, girl. You look nasty. Don’t your mama care nothing about brushing your hair?”

Mistie said nothing.

“You all’s white trash, don’t you know? My grandmama says you Hendersons as white-trashy as they come. Says why don’t you go back to Tennessee or Mexico or wherever the hell you come from.”