~ Becoming Sarah ~

by

Claire Bocardo

One

Sarah Jane MacAuley, called Sissy ever since she was five years old, stood at the kitchen sink skinning a chicken breast for her daddy’s supper. Years ago, before Sissy was ever born, somebody had told her daddy, "Why, my mother-in-law is such a bad cook, she even cooks the chicken with the skin on!" And ever since that day, Stewart James MacAuley had looked on chicken skin as the telling mark of a bad cook. Never mind that the flavor’s in the skin, Sissy thought. Life wouldn’t be fit to live if Daddy’s piece of chicken hit the table with its skin on!

A solid pounding noise intruded from outdoors, and she wondered where it was coming from.

Sissy rolled the chicken pieces in seasoned flour and set them aside while she heated grease in Mama’s old iron skillet. The skillet, a wedding gift in 1939 from Mama’s Aunt Pearl, had outlived Mama some eighteen years now. This must be the five thousandth chicken Sissy herself had fried up in it. It was a good skillet; she only wished Mama had lasted as long. The grease spit when a drop of water fell from her hand, and she jumped.

What in the world was that pounding?

She turned off the stove, wiped her hands on the narrow seat of her britches, and followed the sound, which had moved from the far side of the house around the front and was now coming from outside the dining room. Passing through the entry hall, she saw boards covering the front-room windows, the front door and its sidelights, and the big dining-room window. Now the noise was coming from the side door. Brushing back a lock of ashen hair, Sissy crept to the door and peered out behind the curtain.

Lord, have mercy! Whatever can he be thinking? Boarding up the house, and her in it!

She ran up the stairs two at a time, raced to her bedroom at the back of the house, raised the window, and crawled out on the roof to look. The Texas sun glared down on her, and the roof nearly fried her bare feet. He had moved around to the back now and was boarding up the back porch.

Sissy lowered herself into the huge bur oak that brushed the roof, climbed down to the ground, and slipped silently around the corner. The old man was working hard, muttering as he pounded ten-penny nails into the one-by-sixes he’d laid crosswise over the doorframe.

"That’ll fix you, Missy! Now we’ll see who goes skyhooting all over Hell and half of Georgia!"

Skyhooting, was it! Church on Sundays and St. Anne’s Guild on Wednesday nights were the only places in the world she ever went, not counting the library and grocery store. Skyhooting! As he continued to scold and pound, Sissy quietly climbed the porch steps and stood behind him.

"What’re you doing, Daddy?" she asked. Her voice was mild as milk.

The hammer flew skyward as the old man whirled to face her. It hit the underside of the porch roof and bounced back down, grazing his knee. Sissy flinched in spite of herself.

"Now look what you’ve done!" he yelled. "I won’t be able to walk good for a week!" He rubbed the knee and glared at her. "Sneaking up behind me that way--you’d ought to be ashamed, Sissy MacAuley! It’s enough to scare a man flat into the next world!"

Wouldn’t that be exciting! She bent to pick up the hammer and offered him its handle.

"Sorry," she said. "You’re working awful hard here, Daddy. Need any help?"

He glowered, bushy gray eyebrows knotting over fierce, deep-blue eyes that went black when he was angry--most of the time, any more. He kept on getting littler all the time, she thought, but he made up for it in meanness.

"What’re you doing out here?" he demanded. "I thought you were inside, fixing my supper!"

"I was. I just wondered what all that pounding was about and came looking."`

Stew slammed the hammer onto the porch, barely missing her right foot.

"Pull these boards offa here," he ordered. "They ain’t no good." Pushing past her, he stalked off toward the tool shed. Halfway there, he turned to glare at her again.

"Mind you stack ‘em up neat, too," he said. "I got a purpose for them boards!"

"I can’t wait to see what," she answered, too softly for his ears. Well, she couldn’t get back inside till the boards came down. Shaking her head, she inserted the hammer’s heavy claw behind the topmost board and pried up first one end, then the other. A tendril of heavy-scented honeysuckle hanging off the trellis caught in her hair, and she brushed it back. The vine needed trimming. Daddy never did pay any mind to the flowers, only his vegetables. The nails creaked as she jerked the boards off and tossed them into the yard behind her.

Daddy’d always been hard to live with. Bad enough before Mama died, and since he retired from the cotton gin a few years back it seemed like he’d only been getting worse. She never knew from one minute to the next what he’d be up to.

She sure would be glad when the sun went down. Hotter than Hell’s hinges for a week now, and the air so wet you could wring bathwater out of it. It kept trying to rain, but they hadn’t felt a single drop in more than a month. Radio kept saying this summer of ‘75 would break all kinds of records. She pulled the last board off the doorframe and tossed it into the yard with the others.

Stack ‘em up yourself, old man, she thought. I’ve got a meal to cook.