Chapter 12
12
Bliss
1897
Bliss kept expecting to wake up, but the dream went on.
And on.
By the third day, she had begun to hope she would never wake up.
She considered the possibility that she might be dead, and caught in some kind of afterlife—not like heaven or anything, because there were no angels flying around playing harps, and no pearly gates or streets of gold, like Gran always said there would be.
Plus, when she pinched herself, it hurt.
It was all so weird, but not in a scary way.
In most ways, this place was like the one she remembered from before—the sky was blue, there were trees everywhere, the ground had substance under the soles of her feet, and so did the floorboards in the house.
The bed she slept in was solid, and the food she ate—that was almost the best part, that there was always plenty to eat—filled her stomach and made her feel stronger.
She wasn’t homesick for the camper or Duke, that was for sure, and she’d pretty much gotten over missing Mona, but she did wish she could go back—wake up?—just long enough to tell Madison she was okay.
If, that is, she was okay.
There was no telling whether she was or not; already, this dream world seemed far more real than the other one, where she’d been so lonesome so much of the time, so hungry, so tired of living in that filthy old wreck of a camper, of wishing Mona would come back and be a real mother, and that Duke would change.
Here, she had a whole room all to herself, and around that stood an entire house , with windows and ceilings, floors and a sturdy roof. There was a really cool hiding place in the book room, which the family referred to as the library—Jack had shown her the secret space and made her swear never to tell anyone about it, ever .
His pa had built that room special, Jack told her, before he died in a mining accident, when Jack himself was still a baby. And there were others like it in other parts of the house, too, though he refused to reveal them just yet. A cubbyhole like that might just save all their lives sometime, he’d added in a raspy whisper, in case of a raid by outlaws or Indians.
“Native Americans,” Bliss had corrected him at the time, but he’d just rounded his eyes at her and shaken his head.
“Never mind that,” he’d said. “You’ve got to keep this a secret, like Ma and me do. If everybody and his Aunt Bessie knows about this place, it won’t make any sense to hide here, now, will it?”
Bliss had had to admit that it wouldn’t.
That had happened the day after she wound up in this place, and two more days had passed since then.
Now, it was Sunday morning, and Mrs. Bettencourt made Jack put on pants, a shirt, suspenders and a jacket, though it was hotter than blue blazes out, even before breakfast.
Jack’s mom had cut down one of her own dresses to fit Bliss, calling it a “calico,” which made Bliss wonder if it had something to do with California. Mrs. Bettencourt had been busy sewing up more girl clothes for her, too, whenever she got the time.
Her shorts and shirt had disappeared as soon as the cut-down dress was ready to wear, and Bliss suspected that they’d probably been burned in the kitchen stove.
She’d had a bath, too, and Mrs. Bettencourt had scrubbed her down good, from head to toe. Her hair was shiny clean now, brushed and braided, and her fingernails—and toenails—no longer looked as though she’d been digging holes in the ground with her hands and feet.
Only her sneakers remained, and she figured those wouldn’t be around long, either, since every time Mrs. Bettencourt looked at Bliss’s feet, she sighed and shook her head and said, “Lord have mercy.”
The woman had a list going, and a lot of what was on it was about Bliss.
She was never still, it seemed, except when she read her Bible in the early morning and late at night, always sweeping, cooking, mending, weeding the vegetable patch, making butter in a big wooden thing she called a “churn,” carrying laundry to and from the clothesline, after washing everything in a machine that didn’t plug into the wall. After all that, when the shirts and blouses had been dried by the sun and the wind, she started pressing out the wrinkles with a big metal iron—not the kind that plugged in, though, because there weren’t any wall sockets, anywhere. This thing had a big wooden handle and had to be heated up on the stove, along with the tea kettle and, most times, a pot of soup, simmering away at the back.
Yesterday, Mrs. Bettencourt had baked bread, first mixing flour and salt and other stuff in the biggest bowl Bliss had ever seen—she’d had to stand on tiptoe to peer inside—and then pushing up her sleeves and washing her hands to knead and knead and knead the dough.
After that, she set the goop in bread-shaped pans to “rise.”
Bliss hadn’t really understood the idea behind that, but she’d been fascinated by the whole process, just the same.
And when that stuff went into a hot oven to bake, the smell was so delicious that Bliss couldn’t bring herself to leave the kitchen, even though it was sweltering hot and Jack had invited her to go down to the creek, where it was cool and shady, and fish with him.
The only thing better than the scent of that hot, fresh bread was smearing it with butter and eating as much of it as she could hold. Mrs. Bettencourt kept chickens, but she bought milk and cream from the neighbors just down the road. She’d had a cow once, but the critter kept getting loose and making straight for the garden, where she’d eaten her fill of vegetables and trampled the rest, so she’d sold it.
Back in the Other Place, which was all Bliss could think to call the different-and-yet-the-same world she’d come from, bread came from a rack at the dollar store, if there was bread, and nobody ever cooked anything that smelled that good, either.
She was making notes in her mind all the time, because if she got lost from this place, she wanted to remember everything about it.
So she paid attention.
Jack and his mom lived alone in that wonderful house, since Mr. Bettencourt was gone, and as far as Bliss had been able to see, there were no men coming around the house to flirt with Katherine.
That seemed strange to her, since Katherine was so beautiful, but it was a relief, too, since Duke was pretty much the only grown-up man she knew, and she sure didn’t miss him, not one bit. He was too unpredictable, quiet one moment, loud and angry the next.
Nope. Men couldn’t be trusted, and it was safer to stay out of their way.
“Are you two ready for Sunday meeting?” Mrs. Bettencourt asked, there in the kitchen, next to the stove, which was so hot it gave off little mirages, shifting and shimmering in the thick air.
She was adjusting Jack’s collar, which was white and stiff and had already chafed his neck, leaving red marks that looked itchy.
“Yes, ma’am,” Bliss said eagerly. She wanted this strange adventure to keep right on unfolding, uncovering new and interesting parts of itself.
Today, for instance, they were going to town, where the church was.
They’d be traveling in an actual buggy , drawn by a huge gray horse named Solomon.
Sure enough, when the three of them, Jack, Mrs. Bettencourt and Bliss, were squeezed together on the single narrow seat, and Mrs. Bettencourt had taken up the reins and then slapped them down very gently onto the horse’s back, at the same time making a click-click sound with her tongue, they were off to Painted Pony Creek. Or the edge of it, anyhow.
Bliss took it all in—the smell of leather and horse sweat and dust, of laundry soap and clean cloth, the deep and cloudless blue of the sky, the twisty road, with its deep ruts and patches of grass growing in the middle.
In places, there were trees lining their way, so tall that they blocked out the bright sun for a few moments and cooled the damp skin at the nape of Bliss’s neck and under her chin.
When the trees gave way to open fields, the buggy, with its spindly wheels, cast a skinny, spidery shadow that rippled and flowed alongside them, fast and fluid, reminding Bliss of the heat mirages in the kitchen.
She was enchanted.
And a little confused.
There was no figuring out what was happening to her, or if it was real or not.
The hard seat of that buggy sure seemed real enough, since, with all the bouncing the rig did, as the wheels bumped over rocks and ridges of packed dirt, it was already making her bottom sore.
The church was small and white, with a wooden cross on top, and it sat in a big field, right at the edge of the town.
There were more buggies there, and wagons, too.
There were horses and donkeys, tied up under shade trees.
And there were people—too many to fit into that little church, it seemed to Bliss—all of them dressed like actors in a Western movie, except their clothes, though clean, were scruffy, and the colors were plainer.
The men looked like cowboys, mostly, and their hats weren’t fancy. The women, like Mrs. Bettencourt, wore long skirts, blouses and high-button shoes that probably hurt their feet.
There were kids, running and shouting in the grass in front of the church, dodging between wagons and grazing horses, now and then tipping over a water bucket that had to be refilled so the animals could drink.
Jack leaped out of the buggy before it came to a full stop and raced off to join the others.
“That boy,” Mrs. Bettencourt muttered, not sounding mad. “I swear, it will be the death of me, teaching him simple manners.”
Bliss barely heard. She sat spellbound, staring hard, memorizing the sights and sounds.
Katherine—Bliss thought of her as Katherine, or “Jack’s mom,” though she had soon figured out that calling her by her first name wouldn’t be a good idea—found a shady spot so Solomon could wait out what promised to be a very long sermon, which Jack had warned Bliss about earlier, without getting too hot.
Jack’s mom pulled an empty bucket from beneath the seat and was headed toward a stone well with a little roof over it when a man stepped up, tipped his hat, and took the bucket from her.
Bliss tried to stay close without getting underfoot.
She wasn’t scared, exactly, but there were a lot of people around, and they were dressed all weird, and she didn’t want to answer a bunch of questions.
And there were questions.
Bliss could see them in the eyes of girls with long finger curls and big bows in their hair. These were the kids who stayed close to their parents, instead of chasing around with the others.
She wasn’t fooling them; they knew she was different somehow.
They just didn’t know how different.
The man who’d taken Katherine’s bucket had filled it by then, and carried it back to Solomon so he could drink from it.
Bliss wondered if Katherine knew the guy wanted to be her boyfriend, or even her husband. She’d smiled and thanked him for his help, but had she really noticed him?
Bliss didn’t think so.
After a few minutes, when everybody seemed to be talking at once, and nobody seemed to be listening, a bell began to ring, slow and deep.
Bong—bong—bong—
Katherine took Bliss’s hand in her gloved one and started toward the church door, the two of them jammed into the funnel flow of people.
Someone—an older boy or a man, Bliss thought—gave a long whistle, so shrill that it hurt her ears, and the kids who’d been running wild were suddenly quiet.
The inside of the building was simple, but it amazed Bliss, just the same.
It looked nothing like the church Gran sometimes attended.
No stained-glass windows, no big wooden cross, no altar, no choir in matching robes, hymnals open, mouths ready to sing.
There were rows of long benches instead of folding chairs or polished pews, some with backs and some not.
The walls and floors were rough, unpainted, and splintery-looking.
People seemed to know where they belonged, though, and they found their places.
A lot of shuffling and whispering happened while they did so.
Katherine led Bliss to a seat on one of the benches with no back, and they both sat down.
Jack came out of the crowd, dragging his feet a little and looking like he had an attitude, but he made his way toward them and sat down next to Bliss without saying anything.
The hard heel of his right boot made a thumping noise as he bounced it off one of the legs of the bench.
“Jack,” his mom hiss-whispered.
Jack stopped kicking the bench leg.
Bliss, though she’d noticed this, was too busy looking around to care much what Jack Bettencourt did. He was nice enough, but he was still a boy.
She straightened hard when a thunderous note of music filled the crowded space, echoing off the ceiling and the walls.
A thin, happy-looking woman was playing an organ, up near where Bliss expected the preacher would stand.
Looking back, Bliss decided she’d liked going to church, but that was before Gran and Duke had a falling-out over him not working a job, like a good husband and father ought to, and he stopped letting Bliss visit so often.
Gran had ranted like crazy the day they got into that fight. She’d said she hadn’t raised him to be a no-good, waste-of-skin bum.
Duke had been angry, too, accusing Gran of nagging him half to death, every moment of his life.
After that one fight, which certainly wasn’t the first, trips to Gran’s place had gradually tapered off to nothing.
The organ made a wheezy sound between storms of pounding notes, and brought Bliss back from Gran and Duke and their yelling. She sat up even straighter, trying to get a better look at the tiny woman up there thumping away at the keys.
The preacher appeared, coming in through a side door, and the gathering of people settled down a little.
The last notes of the organ tune banged their way into silence.
Bliss took in the man standing up front, dressed in an old-fashioned movie suit that looked too tight for him. Like Jack, he had on a high, starched collar that came up to his chin. Unlike Jack, he had sideburns and a big ole mustache that looked as though he’d sprayed it with WD-40.
He tugged at his collar with one finger, like it was choking him, and cleared his throat.
Here we go , Bliss thought, bracing herself. The man is getting ready to holler.
Gran had always favored preachers that hollered. Said it was because they meant what they said, and they wanted to get their point across.
Beside Bliss, Jack gave her a nudge and whispered, “If you see me fall asleep, don’t you go wakin’ me up for anything.”
Bliss made a face at him.
If Jack Bettencourt wanted to sleep, he could do it at home, in his own bed, because if she had to listen to a long and probably boring speech, so did he.
It was only fair.
Five minutes into the longest prayer Bliss had ever heard anybody offer up—not that she’d been around much praying—Jack’s head fell forward.
Bliss elbowed him.
He straightened up quick, and glared at her.
There was some singing, and more organ playing along with it.
Bliss knew the songs were called hymns, but she didn’t know the words to any of them.
They were all about God, she’d figured out that much.
He sounded nice in some of the songs, and real mean in others. Nobody she’d want to cross, that was for sure.
Bliss didn’t believe or not believe, actually, but Katherine seemed to take in every word, every note, every silence, her expression earnest and happy, in a soft way.
The speech was, as Jack had warned, very, very long. Somewhere in the middle, Bliss left off jabbing Jack in the ribs to wake him up and struggled hard not to fall asleep herself.
She was glad— real glad—when the whole thing ended, at least two hours after it started, and she and Jack and Mrs. Bettencourt made their way back to the buggy and patient Solomon, who was twitching his tail when Jack stepped up to collect the water bucket and pat the sweaty horse on the neck.
People lingered everywhere, chatting, discussing the sermon, making plans for the afternoon and the week ahead, but Katherine didn’t pause to join in. She greeted the others in passing, and took up her place on the buggy seat.
This time, Jack didn’t ride with Bliss and his mother.
He straddled Solomon, harness and all.
Bliss’s mind was full of wonder as they made their way back to the house; on the inside, she was sorting out the experience and trying to make sense of it.
Nothing made sense, however.
And that figured, she decided later, because that night, when everyone else was sound asleep and the big house was quiet, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock near the front door, Bliss went back to the Other Place.