” his mom said. She shoved Marty through the yard and spoke as she walked. The words were loud enough for Sadie and her mom to hear, and his mom cocked her chin but not her eyes toward the neighboring yard. “We aren’t allowed to associate with them. They’re too good for us. We’re trash, white devil-worshipping trash.”
“Sadie-love,” Sadie’s mom said. “Come on in, baby, come on, come back in.”
The last thing Marty saw before his mother shoved him under the carport was Sadie’s mom motioning for her to hurry up and turn her chair around as if a tornado might be coming.
Chapter 13 About Betsy Babineaux
“Let’s get back in the house,” Sadie’s mom said. Her face was flushed, which only made the green eyes stare out harder from the middle-aged sun-freckles on her cheeks and neck. Sadie felt her mom’s hands grab the wheelchair’s handholds, and the chair responded with the familiar lean-back tilt as her mom spun her away from the fence and pushed her rapidly through the back yard.
Her mom had once tumbled her during a footrace at church. All the other kids were running a three-legged race, two of them tied together skip-hopping to the finish line. Sadie was in her chair with her mom shoving her across the field behind the church. They had been winning when the front wheel caught on a hole or a rock or a stick or a stump. It caught something in the ground that wasn’t meant to be rolled over, and the back of Sadie’s chair launched skyward. Sadie flew out with her hands in front of her. Her chair landed on her, followed by her mother, and the three of them rolled to a stop. Everyone ran to Sadie as if she might be broken, even Preacher Dannison who had been in the dunking booth and was drying off behind a sunshade. Somehow, dropping a child in a wheelchair was far more catastrophic than dropping the other children, who had been tumbling to the ground and falling off the slides all afternoon.
Sadie had been all right after the fall. She and her mother had been scraped and one of her wheels had to be replaced, but afterward her mother never pushed her faster than what Sadie called a pansy push. It was a slow walk, a patient walk, a very safe walk.
Now her mom violated her own unspoken rule and hurtled Sadie through the back yard tilted on her two back wheels as if she might be running from some charging beast. Sadie gripped her sidearms and held tight to keep from bouncing out of her chair.
Beside the carport was a trenched waterline where the rainwater poured off the eaves. A walker might not notice the change in grade—they would step over it as easily and with as little thought as they stepped over an uneven floorboard—but Sadie knew about the trench because it was one of those parts of the yard that she had to lean back to cross. If she nosed her front wheels into the rain trench she would tilt forward and stick herself.
Her mom hit the trench at her panicked gallop and Sadie bounced and landed cockeyed in the seat. She managed to stay in the chair but something fell out and clanked into the packed pea gravel rocks beneath the carport. She felt a twinge of panic run up her spine when she realized what it was.
Sadie’s mom didn’t notice at first because she pushed her a few more feet and was almost around the minivan before she slowed and made an afterthought glance over her shoulder.
Her mom let go of the chair and left Sadie parked in front of the minivan, between it and her father’s old workbench and his old tools, all of it resting untouched since he died, all of it covered in a fine layer of rain-dust.
“What is that?” her mom asked.
Sadie didn’t answer. She was afraid to speak as her mom shuffled around the minivan and leaned over and picked up the broken-handled Bowie knife. It looked huge in her hand, almost like a sword, and if it hadn’t been clean when Marty found it, it sure was clean now. The blade was polished into a fine silver and bore scraggly spider-web