Silver in the Hacky Sack

The strap hung on a nail beside the kitchen door. When her uncle Vern took it down off the nail, Nell started across the yard, slow, because slow wasn't anything to look at. Frankie was on the bottom step with a jar of roofing nails in her lap, and Bobbie was on the step above her, the way Bobbie sat on the step above her. Nell got a hand on the little one's shoulder and moved her back against the wall of the house, and then stood in the yard in front of her. Roy, her father, had the hood of the truck up, his head under it. Her grandmother Ida was in the chair on the porch with her coffee. Darlene, her mother, had come as far as the step with a dish towel in her hands, and stopped there. "You want to tell me about that gate," Vern said. She had latched it that morning. She had latched it a second time, after two heifers went out through it onto the road, and she walked them back in past the neighbor's mailbox with the mail truck coming up behind her. He wasn't going to weigh any of that. He had the whole family in the yard to watch him do this, and the gate had been latched twice that morning and it was latched now. "I asked you a question." Nell looked at the strap and not at anybody. "Get in the house, Roberta," Ida said. Bobbie didn't move. She had Frankie turned with her face against her shirt, and she watched Vern the whole time. Ida could have gotten up and taken the child herself. She didn't. Vern said, "All right," and came off the porch at her. He swung flat and low across the backs of her legs, and the yard went sideways. Nell put a hand down in the dirt and stayed up on three points. Don't look at the steps. That was the work of the next minute, and she did it. "Get up," Vern said. She didn't. He caught her across the shoulders, and the buckle came around and laid her forearm open from the elbow down, and the blood came up fast and ran off her arm into the dirt. Darlene said his name from the step, once. Nothing happened after it. The next one came across the side of her head and put her face in the dirt. Frankie had started making a sound behind her, and Bobbie was telling her not to look. Nell's right hand went out across the dirt and closed on the end of the strap. The girl who had gone down in that yard was not in it anymore. Nobody there was going to look hard enough to see the difference. Then the yard went out. There was a ceiling over her with a brown ring on it the size of a plate, and the lamp was lit on the shelf, and the radio was going out in the kitchen. Night. She was on the pallet in the back room. The backs of her legs hurt, and her arm had been washed and wrapped in a strip of sheeting and tied off, and there was a place on the side of her head she wasn't going to touch. She remembered the gate. She remembered picking out a spot of dirt to look at while she waited for it to be over. The rest of the afternoon was gone — how she got in the house, who carried her, what the yard did when she quit moving. She lay there a while on that and got nothing back. She said Bobbie's name, just to hear it. It came out wrong. The vowel sat flat where hers went round, and the r sat too far back in her mouth, and it wasn't the way anybody in that house said Bobbie. She said it again in her head and got the same thing. She had never done that in her life. The door moved and Darlene came in with the basin and the rag over her arm. She set the basin down and got down on her knees slow, and put the back of her hand against Nell's forehead. "No fever," she said. "That's something." She turned the sheeting back and looked at the arm, and poured water over it, and watched what the water did. "You stood right there in front of him," she said. Nell looked at the ceiling. "One yes sir," Darlene said. "One yes sir and this doesn't happen." She wrapped the arm again and tied it. "Your grandma's going to ask you what happened. You slipped on the washhouse step and came down on your arm." She got up and came back with the tin cup and put it in Nell's hands. Nell turned the cup over and looked at the bottom of it. There was nothing on the bottom of the cup. She looked anyway. "What are you doing," Darlene said. Nell turned it back up and drank. Darlene watched her a while longer than the question needed, then took the basin and went out and pulled the door mostly to. Bobbie was in the doorway with Frankie up on her hip, which was too much of a load for Bobbie. "She wants to see you're not dead," Bobbie said. Frankie got down and came over and put her hand flat on the blanket over Nell's leg. Nell put her own hand on top of it. "Did you latch it?" Bobbie said. Nell nodded. Bobbie stood there a minute. Then she said, "You better not be out in that yard tomorrow," and picked Frankie up again and went, and pulled the door to behind her. The lamp got turned down as low as it went. The house went quiet by degrees — the radio off, the pump at the sink, somebody's feet on the stairs, Vern's voice out in the yard saying something to Roy about the truck — and then nothing. Nell lay and looked at the room. Her eyes went around it on their own and took it apart: which of it was old, which of it was only used up. Her grandmother's trunk. The shelf of cans. The tin box with the sewing in it. The picture on the wall of people she was supposed to have come from. She had no use for either answer, and nobody had taught her to see a room that way. She got her legs under her and pushed up off the pallet, and her right hand came down on something beside it that wasn't the floor — flat and hard, with a corner to it — and the heat came up through her palm into her wrist. It was the heat off a stove lid with the fire under it. She took her hand off and the heat went with it, all at once. Her palm wasn't red. She held it up in the lamplight and turned it over and there was nothing to look at on it. She reached down along the floor with two fingers and felt around for the thing. She couldn't find it in the dark, and she stopped looking. She stood in the middle of the room with her hand open in front of her, and after a while she let it down.