Free Sweeping Up Glass by Carolyn Wall Page B

death with a frying pan. Sitting there in the warmth of the Nailhows’ kitchen, it occurred to me, further, to ask Pap about this home for wayward girls. But I held my tongue. And I watched the cat. One thing was sure—if having babies amounted to this, I’d never let a man have his way with me. He could keep his trousers buttoned. And it was all the same to me if he swelled up and exploded all over Pope County.

15
    O ne night toward the end of winter, Pap came home, banging his boots on the porch and shouting for Ida.
    “Lord love a duck, Tate Harker, what’s the matter with you?” She came out of the bedroom with a wool shawl around her and her hair mussed from sleeping.
    “Put your coats on,” he said, looking from one of us to the other. “Come on out and see this.”
    “I can’t see nothin’ in the dark,” she said.
    But Pap shooed us down the steps and around the house, and there, pulled up against a snowbank, was a pickup truck. Its front end was beat in so bad, it looked like the Phelps boys had used it to pound out their meanness. Only one headlight worked, laying its beam crookedly across our yard. The passenger door was roped shut.
    “Sweet Sonny Jesus,” said Ida. Then her hands flew to her face. “Look what you’ve gone and made me do—taking the Lord’s name in vain. This thing is an abomination.”
    “No, it isn’t,” Pap said, running his hand down the fender. “It’s just been rode hard.”
    “Well, I will not ride in it—do not ask me.”
    “I’ll ride,” I said, and I got in on the driver’s side.
    He ruffled my hair.
    “It’s the devil’s machine!” Ida shouted after us. “And the ugliest one I ever saw!”
    Pap loved the truck, and was prouder than anything when he drove to town, or out to a farm to pay a call. He was still selling firewood and again peddling moonshine on the sly. After that I grinned ear to ear when we rolled into a yard, the window wound down and my elbow stuck out like I was the Queen of Sheba.
    For a long time, Ida would not ride, but after a while she put on her coat and instructed Pap to back the truck out onto the road. Then she climbed in and sat up straight as a rake. The county had cleared the highway of snow, so with me in the middle, Pap drove us up north to Paramus and back. He was smiling so wide I thought his face would split. By then he’d lost two teeth on the right side, but it did not spoil his handsomeness, and after that we drove into town on Saturdays and parked in front of the cafe while Ida shopped. I sat in the truck and looked at the empty buildings up and down the street. Then Ida would come out, and Pap, who’d been watching, would trot up from the hardware on the corner, and we’d arrange ourselves on the seat and go home. We did this week after week while the icicles melted from our eaves and the grass came up thick and green in the yard.
    By early summer I was begging Pap to let me get behind the wheel of the truck. In the matter of driving, Ida was the opposite, and it created a constant argument between them. Then one morning, she tired of the fight, buttoned on her sweater, and took the truck out by herself. She came home in a fume.
    “Tate Harker!” she called from the top of the cellar stairs. “I nearly kilt myself, and it’s all the doing of that infernal vehicle!”
    Pap came upstairs wiping his hands on a rag. “God sake, Ida, I got a pair of sick piglets sleeping. What have you done?”
    “Your truck near did me in, is what!”
    Pap looked out the kitchen window. “Where’ve you parked it?”
    “I didn’t park it nowhere,” she snapped. “It parked its own self in the ditch over to French’s place.”
    “God sake,” Pap said again. He took his coat down and shrugged into it. “You get Henry French to bring you home?”
    “I did not. I don’t want folks knowing Tate Harker turns his wife out in a killin’ machine!”
    Pap swore loudly, words I’d never known to come out of his mouth. It was a