From a mysterious, fading, historical tapestry to a fish that speaks to a confused, grief-stricken boy, author Christy Burkley offers wickedly comical tales of eccentrics who collide with the limits of reality in The Faded Tapestry: A Collection of Short Stories. In "The Escape" an old woman must find a way out of her miserable existence. At first she thought that living with her forty-seven-year-old daughter Virginia in St. Louis, Missouri, would be better than a nursing home, but the brick apartment building where she now resides is no better than a prison cell. Her only wish is that she be buried in Tennessee, a wish that her daughter deems too expensive. "Mexican Invasion" tells the story of May Sanderson, a loyal cleaning lady for the well-to-do, charitable Mrs. Taylor. May begins to have doubts when Mrs. Taylor brings a Mexican family on board to help revive the farm. When something bad happens to one of the children, May isn't sure how to react. A compilation of eight fictional tales, The Faded Tapestry: A Collection of Short Stories presents casts of characters who come alive through their words and actions.
The Faded Tapestry
A Collection of Short StoriesBy Christy BurkleyiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Christy Burkley
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-4601-0Contents
The Escape................................1The Talking Fish..........................17Mexican Invasion..........................37One Thousand Trains.......................69The Poem..................................83The Jackpot...............................89The Belated Awakening.....................107The Faded Tapestry........................117
Chapter One
The Escape
The old woman did not want her daughter's hand touching her forehead; there was something miserable and at the same time suffocating in those wild eyes beyond her trembling hand.
"I already done told you I don't have no fever," the old woman said with undisguised disgust. "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, I'm fine."
"Well, I gotta go." She repeated the phrase to the old woman six or seven times a day, but Virginia never left. She puttered, fidgeted, straightened things that were already straight, dusted things with a big pink feather duster that were not dusty, moved things to one spot and then moved them back to the original spot, but she never left. The old woman sat in her worn rocking recliner, which had once been sky blue but was now steel gray, and watched her through narrowed eyes.
"Go then!" the old woman said a little louder than she meant to. Nothing would have pleased her more.
Virginia had stopped smoking a month ago, cold turkey, and she was always on edge. Her hands shook badly, and she cracked her knuckles every few minutes. It sounded like rapid fire from a cap gun. Crack! Snap! Crack! Snap! Crack!
"You keep crackin' your knuckles like that and they'll be as big as Lulabelle Oats's. She used to do that and she wound up with rheumatoid arthritis in both her hands. One minute you're fillin' your lungs with poisonous gas and the next you're ruinin' your hands," the old woman said.
Virginia went into the kitchen, which was only a few feet away from the living room, and started slamming cabinet doors open and shut. She flew to the edge of the living room.
"I don't know what to make of you, Mom. I do everything I can for you, and you seem to hate me more and more every day." Virginia thought she was "young," and forty-seven years old did sound young to the old woman, but she secretly thought Virginia looked ten years older than her age. Virginia was the spitting image of the old woman's third husband, a dago cheater. She had black hair, olive skin, and high cheekbones, and she was deceptive, just like her father.
"I know you're mad at me."
"Damn right I'm mad at you!" the old woman barked back, making Virginia wince. The old woman was old—facts had to be faced. There was only one thing she wanted, and her daughter wouldn't give it to her. She knew what the problem was, but she wouldn't talk about it, and she knew Virginia wouldn't either. The problem was that the old woman had given birth to two daughters—Virginia and Sara Jane. Sara Jane had always been her favorite, and the old woman had never been one to hide her feelings. The old woman always thought it would be Sara Jane that would take care of her in her old age, but Sara Jane was gone.
The old woman had been surprised when Virginia offered to take her to her apartment in St. Louis. Virginia had never shown her any kindness. It wasn't long before the old woman realized that it had been a trick. Virginia always had ulterior motives. In this case, she was trying to impress her new friends in her smoking cessation class. She wanted to tell the women at her support group that she was taking care of her mother so she could gain their sympathy.
At first, the old woman thought living with Virginia would be better than going to a nursing home, but she had been very wrong. All the old woman wanted was to go home, but Virginia and her useless husband kept her locked up in their small, airless apartment like a prisoner of war.
"I heard what you said to Larry the other night when y'all thought I was sleepin'." The walls were very thin in the tiny apartment.
Virginia had already moved back into the kitchen and was slamming shut cabinets and banging pots onto countertops. She liked to release her anger on inanimate objects. The old woman knew her habits well. The old woman believed in cursing. It was healthier and cheaper.
"I've only askt you for one thing, and you've denied me—seemed happy 'bout denyin' me as a matter of fact, but I stand firm that I will be buried in Tennessee. If you're not a takin' me back there, that's one thing, but I swear by all the heavens above, if you don't bury my corpse there, I'll haunt you for the rest of your life."
The pots and cabinets and scraping noises came to a sudden halt. Virginia was a very spiritual woman. If there was one thing that could get to her, it was the subject of ghosts and the afterlife.
The old woman had overheard the couple's bedroom conversation the night before. She had distinctly heard Virginia tell her husband, Larry, that she thought it would be too expensive to send her mother's body back to Tennessee and bury it in a coffin. Her idea was to have her cremated in St. Louis and throw her ashes in the river. That way the river could carry her down to Tennessee. Her husband had agreed with her and said that sounded like a good idea. He said, "The old woman will never know the difference." But the old woman had heard, and she was not about to be incinerated in the state of Missouri.
The old woman knew what was really going on. Virginia was getting her revenge. The old woman had spoiled her sister, and now Virginia was getting her payback. "Would you rather I go check you in a nursing home?" she stood at the edge of the living room where the old woman sat in a recliner. "You wouldn't get the kind of food you get here. You wouldn't get the view."
The old woman replied quickly, "I wish to hell you would put me in a nursing home, but it better be one in Tennessee!"
Virginia shook her head. "There's no use talking to you when you're like this."
The old woman had never felt so confined in all her days, and she had told her daughter that at least once a day. The window she sat by had bars on it, bars—just like a prison. And the "view" was of the arch—the world's largest croquet wicket—and could not be seen from that window. In order to see that "view" she had to climb twelve flights of steps and walk up a shaky ladder to the rooftop. Her "great view" from her barred window was barbed wire and trash in the alley—barbed wire just like the kind the Nazis had used in concentration camps. There was something fundamentally wrong with this lack of nature, something that seemed to open up a kind of void in her heart, twist the energy from her body, suck up the desire to get out of bed in the morning.
The food wasn't good. Virginia's excuse was that she never had time to cook or the money to buy good ingredients. She was a beautician and had to stand on her feet all day, and all she was able to do at the end of the day was toss things in a pot of hot water and fall down on the sofa with her bare feet stuck up in the air. Then she would jump up and take the food off the heat too soon. The old woman told her that she wasn't cooking it long enough, and Virginia replied, "I may not have much money, but at least I don't boil the taste out of my food."
Sometimes Virginia or her husband would come in the door carrying strange little boxes containing Chinese food, but foreign food wouldn't pass properly through her stomach. China was very close to Japan, and it seemed that everybody had forgotten that it was the Japanese that bombed Pearl Harbor, and she could never eat the food without thinking about those slant- eyed barbarians. So she sat in her recliner all day feeling cramped-up and starved. The brick apartment building was no different from a prison cell. If she could have stuck her hand through the bars, she could have touched the other brick building beside them.
Sometimes the old woman could not stop herself from pointing out certain facts. "I don't know what you think this is, but this ain't no kinda life. This ain't no place to live and this ain't no way to live. This ain't livin'—I don't think there's a word made up for it. This must be how them prisoners of war felt when they were put in them tiny cells."
Virginia cracked her knuckles and put her hands over her ears. "I wish you would listen to yourself—just sit back and really listen. You repeat yourself over and over like a broken record. I wish to God you would just for once say something new. Just once I wish you would say, `Thank you for taking care of me so good and not putting me in a nursing home or show an ounce of gratitude for all I've done."
Sometimes the old woman would talk about people from Tennessee, and Virginia would say, "He's dead! He's been dead twenty years!" in a smart aleck, high-pitched voice like she was so smart, like the old woman didn't already know that person was dead. The old woman would turn to her and say, "Well, who do you know? Who do you know? You don't even know the names of your neighbors!" and that would hush her up good.
Yesterday, after Virginia had thrown frozen vegetables in the pot and put her bare feet up in the air, the old woman began to speak.
"All I want," the old woman's voice broke into bits as she slowly said the words, with a pause in between each one, "is to be buried in Tennessee, my body whole and not burnt up. And," she pointed her finger to the ceiling for emphasis, "it would probably be askin' too much for you to bury me in the same cemetery as my second husband. He was the only one of the four that wasn't a fool. He could think ahead, and he bought me that lot right beside him. He was the only one that cared about me. That's all in the world I want, and you gotta go make false promises to me and go behind my back and talk about burnin' me up and throwin' me in the river! Well, let me tell you this," she could feel the tears spring from her cloudy eyes and fall off the end of her face, "I don't believe your promises anymore. You'll say anything to get me to shut up, and after everything I did for you—"
"Stop!" Virginia put up her hand as if she had heard the story too many times, but the old woman was not about to be interrupted. Virginia the fetus had been in a breech position and hadn't wanted to come out into the world. The doctor had tried to turn her around in the womb so she would come out in the right direction, but Virginia had been stubborn—a sign of what was to come—and had tried to walk out, and that had ruined the old woman's insides, and she was never able to have any more children. Then the complaints, burdens, and disappointments would flow out in their regular pattern. Virginia wouldn't take breast milk like Sara Jane had—another sign that she was going to turn out to be finicky—and the old woman had been forced to buy expensive formula. Virginia had colic. She woke up every two hours and seemed never to stop crying, and the old woman never got another full night's sleep. Virginia had had one illness right after another, until the old woman would have lost her mind if it had not been for her older sister, Sara Jane, who helped her out. Sara Jane could do everything Virginia could not, and she could do it all ten times faster and ten times better. She was a blessing, not a burden. She helped the old woman take care of Virginia.
The cremation conversation was not all the old woman had overheard. Her son-in-law, a chiseled, pale-faced Yankee whose idea of "going to work" was some mysterious job in a cubical office, had once said to Virginia, "All she does all day is sit and stare out that window and talk about people with crazy names."
"She likes to look up at that patch of sky. She can see it if she strains her neck. She's waiting for it to turn blue instead of gray."
Larry laughed. "She's crazy as a loon. Why don't she turn on the TV?"
"She don't like television. She says it's a form of mind control."
He continued to laugh in a girlish cackle. "Why don't you take her out? Take her to the art museum or the zoo or something."
"She won't go. She claims she can't walk. What she wants is to go back to Tennessee, and that ain't gonna happen."
"What's all this talk of hers about barbed wire?"
"I think whatever's wrong with her is causing her to have hallucinations. Next time we're at the doctor's, I'm going to mention it. She'll see a picture in one of those magazines of a concentration camp, go to sleep, dream about it, wake up loopy, and think she's seeing it out the window."
"Maybe you should take those magazines away from her."
"I can't do that! That's all she asks for. It's the only thing that interests her, and she believes they're keeping her mind sharp. She likes to look at the pictures, and it keeps her out of trouble." Virginia thought of the variety of magazines that she picked up daily: National Geographic, Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens, People, Newsweek. Her mother would look at them all. "Why, one day I came home and she had run out of magazines, and can you believe she lifted herself out of that recliner, walked all the way up the stairs, and climbed up that flimsy ladder to the roof just to look at the sky! She could have easily fallen off."
"That might have been the best thing that could've happened," Larry muttered under his breath.
"What did you say?" Virginia asked, but the old woman had heard. She had better ears than her daughter, and she could have gotten out of bed right then and told that empty-souled man that she did not hallucinate, but she didn't want to waste her breath on him. She needed every ounce of energy to escape.
"I said if she fell off the roof, no one could accuse you of not doing your duty."
Virginia did not answer him. The old woman knew that if it was up to him, she would be sent back to Tennessee for good. He never said a word in her direction and avoided looking at her. When he had to, he looked at her as if she were a piece of old furniture he wanted to pull out to the curb.
Let them talk, let them make false promises, the old woman thought. I'm busting out of this prison as soon as I get my strength up. All she had to do was get up—that would be the hardest part—and then put one foot in front of the other until she walked herself out the door. Then she would have to go down one flight of steps, open the front door, step onto the sidewalk, hail a cab, and tell the driver to take her to the nearest bus station. She already had her money saved up. It was in a big wad in the bottom drawer of her dresser, wrapped in an old nightgown. She would go to sleep on the bus, and when she woke up she would be past the Mason-Dixon Line. The sky would be bluer, the grass would be greener, and her smile would find its way back to her face. Her strength and good health would return.
The old woman had almost finished running through everything she had done for her daughter and was getting ready to run through her list of complaints when Virginia, still standing on the edge of the living room with her hands on her hips, interrupted, "Who dresses you every day?"
"I don't need nobody to dress me." The dressing issue had been an ongoing battle. The old woman wanted to stay in her long, loose cotton nightgown all day, and Virginia had insisted that she change clothes. Finally, tired of arguing, the old woman allowed Virginia to dress her, but she wasn't about to make it easy. She lay as limp as a wet dishrag on the bed while her daughter muttered and sweated and placed her limbs in some of the stupidest clothes she had ever laid eyes on. The clothes themselves seemed to cover her like a cement shroud. The old woman was trying to make a point, but her daughter was stubborn, and she had a point of her own to make.
The clothes were from Goodwill and were a collection of mismatched fabrics that the old woman wouldn't be seen dead in. The shoes were the worst. Instead of slippers, Virginia placed her cold feet in a type of rounded-toe ankle boots with heavy treads that made the old woman feel like she had grown hooves.
"Who takes you to the doctor?" Virginia asked, stepping closer to the old woman.
"When I'm dead, who gets the deed to my property? YOU! And you have the nerve to stand there and lie to me through your teeth!"
"You ain't dead yet," Virginia said slowly, through the cracks between the fingers covering her face, but the old woman could recognize the meaning behind the words. Virginia would be relieved if the old woman died.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Faded Tapestryby Christy Burkley Copyright © 2011 by Christy Burkley. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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