The Daughter-in-Law
by Larry D. Harwood
Quinton Striker fell off Rockknob Hill backwards, shattering the bottle in his left hip pocket. The broken pieces cut as his body weight rolled downhill, and after slamming into a split boulder and a half hour of convulsing and thrashing about on wet ground, he finally bled to death. The undertaker found in Quinton's front pocket the New Testament his wife had given him three weeks earlier. The Testament was spotted with Quinton's blood and soaked in the wetness and smell of spirits. The undertaker called on the wife of the deceased and questioned why a drunk bothered to carry a Testament.
Susie Striker said she would pick up anything of Quinton’s, but when Quinton’s mother Minnie heard about the accident, she ran to the new widow and urged her not to bother, before Minnie called on the undertaker and offered to pay for the burial. The older woman told her daughter-in-law she should never have married the good for nothing, as Minnie habitually referred to her youngest son. Minnie was headed out of town to see her sister up in the Cities, and curtly told the new widow and the undertaker before she left that Susie Striker should count her blessings now that Quinton was dead.
“I told her what anybody woulda said. Honey this too will pass and it ain’t much. He left you with nothing, because he was nothing to begin with. I know how that girl got mixed up with him—I ain’t stupid. You know how they is; think they can change Satan, if’n they a mind to, but she never did nothing with him, not the least thing. And no wonder. Most kids leave when they turn eighteen if their parents ain’t done right by them. Him—him I couldn’t dread purgatory after my time with him. Then he got up with her, her young and stupid, and him of no account, and she fell for him anyway, never mind me talking till I was blue in the face.”
Minnie said all that before she had crossed the threshold of her sister’s house, while Martha her sister stood flabbergasted, but asked her to come in anyway.
He had change in one front pocket, forty cents, and the Testament in the other. There was nothing else, at least not anything the undertaker produced. He told her Quinton’s body would lie in a plot kept for those needing no ceremony for the hell awaiting them.
“Want a preacher?” he asked her, with little care for the tone of his question.
Susie didn’t say much, and she said nothing now. She stood absorbed with thoughts about Quinton’s soul more than anything about the corpse next to her. She had answers for the cruder questions, but she answered none and went back home after she identified the body and kissed the hard cheek before she left the building. Quinton’s Testament she kept and carried in her bag, though it was sloping wet and reeked with the smell of alcohol. The small book she wrapped in newspaper the undertaker’s cleaning man provided.
“That girl beat anything I ever seen,” Minnie said to her sister. “Heaven knows I don’t know what she saw in that good for nothing, but I wondered, after they’s married, what he wanted with her. He never said that I knew, but she weren’t like him, thank the Almighty. When he turned about thirteen he just started floating like a mindless river buoy, and I suspected then he’d not amount to much. Surprised me afterward he’d work at all, or that he could keep him and her up, but I guess he did. They never come to me for money, not that I’d give them any anyways. Maybe she did some trapping out in them woods for meat while he was gone off to work. I never did see a lot of victuals around that place. I’s just glad at the time that she took him off my hands, though understand I weren’t wishing him on nobody, and I tried my bestest to talk her away from him. I thanked the Almighty the minute I heard that He took the good for nothing off her hands. Maybe she’ll show some gumption now.”
Susie couldn’t sleep her first widowed night, and two hours after midnight she got up and placed the couple’s framed picture from the dresser on Quinton’s pillow in their bed. Quinton had little expression on his face, but he was holding her hand in the picture, and he did have on a shirt and tie. They had the picture made one week after marrying, and she kept it first on the mantle in their main room and then on the top of a secretly borrowed dresser from her sister.
The bed she lay in alone he always took care of in the mornings. Susie got up with Quinton on the days he worked and she cooked him breakfast, and while she did he remade the bed and then got dressed. Neither task took him long, and he would walk into the kitchen and sit at the table until the food was ready, and then they would have their meal together after she said grace.
He never complained that Susie remembered, and for her that meant Quinton Striker had managed to change one thing about his life, maybe because that was nearly all his mother did.
The first time they visited her after the wedding, Minnie laid into Quinton about his drinking, and after they left he asked Susie if she wanted to go back sometime. She said they should, but Quinton just shook his head as if to say no, and the subject never came up again and they never visited again. They endured her visits when the woman made her rounds and ranted at her son without invitation, calling him good for nothing, and without fail she told Susie what a mistake the girl had made marrying him. Usually Quinton would escape outside if the weather was decent—when he was not too intoxicated—while the two women stayed inside, and the elder woman would talk down Quinton to Susie.
“I once tried to reason with him, when he was younger. Done no good. He sat staring at me with nearly closed eyes and a body practically falling over from drinking. He weren’t like his brothers, no not a bit like ‘em. His brothers done something with themselves, and they had dabbled with that bottle too, like their pappy, but when they saw what it did, how it killed him, they ran from that drinking like it was Satan himself. The good for nothing, he was too young to see much of that, so when he started drinking there was nothing to stop him or break him. I told him his daddy could have been sitting in the chair beside him that day if’n he had laid off the liquor, but he didn’t hear me, couldn’t, passed out before I’s finished. And then that crazed girl shows up and gets him to marry. Least she got him off me, that I’ll give her credit for.” Minnie paused, as Martha looked on, and then Minnie took more tea.
Susie fell asleep after the sun came up at six and slept until noon. She felt no appetite for food, but she wandered toward the tiny kitchen anyway and spotted Quinton’s Testament on the bureau, in the decorative plate they got for a wedding present from Susie’s sister.
Susie had given the Testament to Quinton three weeks earlier. She presented it to him before, three times, but she found it in the trash every time. When she saw the print of the book in his front pocket after her fourth attempt, she resisted asking questions and started to pray.
She pulled the book closer, as the faint smell of spirits wafted toward her nostrils. The spine and pages had dried in the stifling heat of the house, and now every page lay warped and stiff between the covers.
Quinton was private and hardly talked, even when you talked to him. He talked more before they married, and his “I do” seemed almost the last significant interaction she had with him besides intercourse. She reckoned after a while Quinton must be depressed real bad. He rarely smiled, and he showed no difference around children, even very small ones. She figured then her dream of having children must go, knowing that they should not be in this marriage.
He went to work most every day, except those days that he had too much to drink the day before. On such days, he mostly lay in bed. If it was nice weather, he might stumble outside and sit in the sun, usually on the ground, and rarely in the one outside chair they owned. She would walk out sometimes just to be with him, but she usually never asked him if he wanted to talk because then he might say nothing. Little about Quinton seemed to change, except for the fact that he had kept the Testament for three weeks, and he didn’t complain like his mother.
“Yep, Jack and Shepherd did something with themselves, but the good for nothing--he never did. I was hoping she could do something with him, but she couldn’t, and the only good thing he ever did for her was dying. I hope she’ll use her chance now. I ain’t gonna say I’m expecting much though.”
Minnie reached for a cookie from the plate that her sister had laid on the table.
Susie’s eyes moistened after she saw Quinton’s name scribbled in the front of the Testament.
She rarely saw Quinton read or write, though she knew he could. She never had a letter written in his hand, because they had lived close enough before marrying to converse in person, but he had made his signature on their marriage documents, because she did everything to accord with the laws of God and man. She rubbed her finger over the letters in Quinton’s name. That last name—Striker—it had frightened her at first, until she met Quinton.
Though Quinton hardly talked, Susie never reasoned that it was her. She partly surmised she had put the man to thinking and that when Quinton was thinking he didn’t talk. She had seen in his eyes that he wanted something, but she refrained from badgering him. She thought that one day he would simply open up and talk incessantly. If that never happened, she prayed he might at least talk to God.
She turned to the Testament’s inside back cover. Quinton’s name stood there, printed handsomely and upright, almost proudly, like he wanted to make sure his name stayed permanently in the book. She was never sure if Quinton’s ears worked more than his tongue, and she had doubted if what she said to him went in or stayed out.
She rubbed her finger over his name and started to weep.
“How did he appear to you?”
“Himself.”
“And how was that?”
“He was standing behind me.”
“Did anybody else see him?”
“Don’t anybody live there but me.”
“Nobody saw him?”
“I saw him.”
“No one else?”
“Not unless he showd himself to them.”
“Did he say anything?”
“His face did.”
“What?”
“He saw hell—where he could a gone.”
“What did hell say to him?”
“Hell don’t talk to ya, its torment.”
“What kind of torment?”
“Separation from God.”
“Can he adapt there?”
“Adapt?”
“Did he want to go there?”
“Nobody wants to go there.”
“What did it look like?”
“Hell.”
“He didn’t like it there?”
“Don’t nobody like it there.”
“Why does anybody go?”
“You don’t go. You get sent.”
“Do you think he’ll be going back, I mean to see it again?”
“No, he got snatched back.”
“Does he regret that?”
“Regret?”
“Will he miss seeing it?”
“Don’t nobody miss it.”
Dear Martha,
I said I’d let you know how things was when I got back down here, and I’m keepin my promise. I’m sorry she interrupted my visit like that—I guess I made the mistake telling her before I left where I was going. And so she musta told them. Anyways, that’s what they said when I got back down her. She’s got nobody here that bothers with her. When she married the good for nothing, her whole family so far as I know, because they knowd better than she did about him, disowned her, for marrying his kind. They knowd better than her, but she kept saying to them that all things was possible with God. I had told her before, and then her family told her, that she weren’t God. But she wouldn’t listen. Near as I can tell, she’s not listening to any of them doctors either, least none that has talked to me. I’m still not figuring how they got her, or if she’s got them because they can’t make heads ner tails of her. I laughed. I told em, join the crowd. They ask me where she came from, and I told them just down the road from my place, but they just look at me stupid. I guess they not used to a lot of variety. Course with what she may have told them and all, don’t know that I’d not be wondering about her too. She better give up thinking about him and listen. He’s past and she better forget him. I told her that when I left to come up there. You better move on I said, but I expect she ain’t for a while. She never would listen to anybody, like I told you.
Your sister,
“Is he in your dreams?”
“He ain’t in my dreams.”
“Where is he?”
“In heaven.”
“Heaven?”
“Heaven.”
“Where’s that?”
“Where you want to be after you die.”
“Does he see God?”
“God sees him. And everything else.”
“How does God see everything?”
“He might tell you, if you really wanting to know.”
“Do you ever ask God anything?”
“I asked Him right before I saw Quinton, why he took Quinton.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say. I turned around and I saw Quinton.”
“Which do you love most?”
“What you mean?”
“God or Quinton?”
“The Good Book says you to love God with all your heart mind and soul, and that daughter-in-law and mother-in-law may not be at peace because of Christ.”
“Did Quinton come between you and God?”
“God brought Quinton to me. Ain’t nothing right in what you say.”
Dear Martha,
They’s talking about puttin her away. I mean just lettin her be and quit trying to talk sense to her. Just shut her up someres and let her talk herself hoarse. It don’t appear to me that they knocking even a dent in her. I told um you couldn’t tell this girl anything, and when I said that, they wanted to talk to me more. I reckoned they figured I might clue them or something. She does seem happy, and heaven knows she oughta be, she got rid of him. I never seen her quite like this with him. Before she’s just composed. Maybe I was looking at him too much.
“With your husband dead, you’ll want to get on with your life.”
“He was dead. I got no worry now.”
“Will he be with you now?”
“He’s with God.”
“Who will be with you?”
“God. He’s always been with me, since I was little.”
“But your big now.”
“God’s bigger.”
“Maybe you should think less about God.”
“God came to me long time ago, saved me. You don’t forget nothing like that.”
“But God took Quinton.”
“I thanked God for what Christ did for Quinton.”
“Quinton’s gone now.”
“God gives and He takes. Don’t call God to account. That’s backwards.”
“He took your husband.”
“He did. Someday He’ll take you.”
Dear Martha,
Pardon my putting off writing to you. I’m hoping you’ll get down here to see me soon, soon as things settle down some more here. They really don’t much need more settlin though, that’s taken care of mostly. It’s the newness of the whole thing. I ask her to come here cause the girl for all her ways was right for him, and I think she’s tryin again. She went over to her peoples, and near as I know, made her amends with em. As you know, her family was mostly put off because they didn’t want her marrying the likes of him. I’m wishin now I could take back some things, but I’m not gonna be frettin anymore like I was for a few days when she first come. Truth is I wouldn’t felt anything if it weren’t for her. You know how I felt about Quinton. Seems they couldn’t get her to stop over at that place they was keepin her. She didn’t ask me to come here. I ask her to come, mostly not for any pity for her, cause the girls got more than I’d gave her credit for. I ask her here cause I’m grateful now. You mayna never heard such as this outa me, but I am.
© 2006 copyright
