Easter Miracle
by Janice Daugharty
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Janice Daugharty
First published in the Georgia Journal
I won the lottery, Eileen keeps saying to herself, stoking coals of happiness in her head. Also, she says it to get in the practice of thinking I and not we won the lottery. But she can't help imagining the twist of newspaper headlines when it's official: DUCK AND EILEEN DIXON OF CORNERVILLE, GEORGIA, WIN MEASLY MILLION FOLLOWING THE BIG 83 MILLION FLORIDA LOTTERY OF LAST WEEKEND.
For the hundreth time, she places the winning ticket alongside the correct combination of numbers in the newspaper column: 8, 21, 47, 16, 22, 11. Exact match.
One problem--among many--though: who owns the winning ticket, Duck or Eileen?
On Friday evening, they had bought twenty-five LOTTO tickets each out of their own personal money; by Saturday evening, count-down to drawing time, Duck could lay hands on only twenty-four of his, and Eileen could scrounge up only twenty-four of hers too, and the winning ticket later turned up on the floor before the tv set.
Eileen, not Duck, had found it and matched the numbers called out on the midnight news. So, by rights, she'd argued, the winning ticket was hers and he had lost his twenty-fifth ticket, which she refuses to search for in their stuffed mobile home, because holding the lost losing ticket in her hand now might be taken as an admission that it is hers.
He likewise refuses to look for it for the same reason, she supposes.
Earlier, they had got up in the cool Easter sunrise and gone to the Delta for cigarettes and bought a newspaper to double-check the numbers, then went straight home without a word to anybody. Eileen's silence stemming from shock, and Duck's from stubbornness. Besides, Eileen knows, he intends to turn in the ticket eventually by himself.Sunday noon finds her still holding the winning ticket, crumpled and soft as a scrap of cloth, sitting on the couch among her flea market junk in the run-together living room/kitchen.
Her eyes stray to the span of jalousies framing the back yard where Duck is at last building his dream garden with a waterfall of fake stone. Beyond the strip of yard, an open field of red bitter weeds, like tilled clay, is bordered by hardwoods sprouting tawny leaves that downplay the starkness of the blue Easter sky.
Shoveling dirt from the narrow pit, Duck eyes her, short legs stretched from bank to bank as if he's digging out a cesspool. He wears his long brown hair in a Willie Nelson ponytail. The biggest kick in his life, he'd told Eileen earlier, would be not showing up for work tomorrow at Occidental Phosphate Plant in Live Oak, Florida, and not even calling in to say he's not coming.
He has spent fourteen years operating a backhoe, working from can to can't, the last two of which that bunch of Japs have been threatening to lay him off.
The phone above the kitchen table rings and Eileen gets up to answer it. Duck bangs on the metal wall of the trailer and shakes his head.
"Duck!" she pleads.
"Nope," he hollers back. "We ain't talking to nobody yet." He peeps through the dusty screen, left then right, until his eyes fuse to the ticket in her hand.
"Duck, we've got to call the lottery people," says Eileen.
"Nope, I'll call `em when I'm ready. Money ain't going nowheres."
The phone keeps ringing, has been ringing all morning.
"Just let me answer it," she says. "If it's some of your kin, I'll get rid of them."
"Hell, no," he says, trudging across the pile of marbled dirt and styrofoam stones that look like turtle shells. "Always looking for a handout, that bunch," he mumbles.
"Duck, they don't even know yet, nobody don't. Besides, it could be Nell calling and I want to tell her."
"Ain't none of your mama's business."
"I reckon it is," shouts Eileen. "She's the one let me have the twenty-five bucks for this week's tickets."
"Ain't you forgetting something?" With both hands, he lifts one of the stones high and looks like Sampson before Delilah got hold of him.
"I ain't forgetting nothing," Eileen says.
"Huh!" He beads in on her over his shoulder as he sets the stone into the nap of velvety gray dirt.
And suddenly it comes to her that he could be planning to get rid of her. The way things have been going for the past year--they've been married four years, second marriage for her, third for him--it wouldn't surprise her.
She turns and gazes out the window on the other side of the ten-wide trailer. The little town, sharpened by the bright Easter light, is quartered by the crossing of two major highways. Post office, convenience store, courthouse, library, and three churches, with small fifties' houses branching out to flatwoods.
She knows that these good people, once they hear about her winning the lottery, will never come visit now, will never let on that they know she's rich. A matter of pride--We never visited you before, so we won't visit you now. Not that it's their fault. Duck could kill Eileen and nobody would ever know. He's made it a point since he and Eileen moved to Cornerville to let the neighbors know he doesn't want to be bothered. He likes to come home from work, watch Wheel of Fortune and go to bed. Separate beds now, same as their money. Every bucket's got to set on its own bottom, Duck always says. No problem usually for Eileen: when her flea market fails to bring in enough cash for cigarettes, beer and food, she plays Bingo and wins some.
Well, in truth, she plays Bingo when her flea market does bring in cash too. Just got back from a big game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she lost fifty some-odd bucks, down to her last dime. And that's why she'd had to borrow from her mama to buy lottery tickets. A necessity as real as food. But now that she has won the lottery, she will never have to go begging again.
Actually, if she was so inclined, she could buy a thousand-thousand lottery tickets. And Bingo! How far would a million go playing Bingo? She could travel to every game in the United States, maybe even overseas.
She watches Duck set fake stones in the garden of weeds.
Sometimes he wears a small shoulder bag, to rebel against the good ole boys in Cornerville as much as for convenience. He lays one stone and stands back with his hands out as if to make it stay. Then he cuts his eyes at Eileen again.
She crosses the room down a pathway of old florist's vases and opens the front door to let out the cigarette smoke.
While the telephone rings fresh she stares out at the white concrete block church across the highway, the parking lot full of sun-glittered cars, and tries to figure how to slip off without Duck and call in her winning ticket. She suspects he's trying to figure the same thing, as well as how to get the ticket away from her.
She feels dizzy-groggy from staying up all night, guarding the ticket in her bosom. Just before dawn, she'd dozed and woke to find Duck trying to steal it out of her bra. She sat up and slapped his hand, and he let out a strange solitary grunt then slunk from her room to his own at the other end of the trailer.
For the time being, she'll just have to go along with his waiting, out-waiting him, and hope he doesn't try to kill her before she gets the money. Or maybe they should split it; might be the only way. Then she could leave, though she'd like to stay and make neighbors here--too many big towns behind her.
Duck will go, no doubt about it. He's the one who hates Cornerville. She might stay after all and go to church across the highway, get respectable in her old age and give up gambling. She's fifty-two now and Duck's five years younger, which makes her mad. He has longer to enjoy the money.
When she turns around to get another cigarette from the pack on the couch, she sees him peering through the window with a raised garden hoe.
Yes, he would kill her if he got the chance; he'd never believe that she's willing to share the million and probably even believes that she knows exactly the right procedure for cashing in the ticket (she doesn't, has always been too mad about losing to pay close attention to how the winners on tv do it). But Duck doesn't know that. He's always let her take care of business, phone calls and paying bills, handling things in general. And he would think she knows her way around--makes her drive him everywhere but work--how to manage such particulars as cashing in lottery tickets.
She glares at him to show she knows what he's thinking, and it comes to her that she could kill him, though she knows she won't, but at least she'll make him wonder. She's taller, stronger, a big-boned redhead going bad-apple brown.
But Duck seems to have made up his mind to split the money.
He asks Eileen if she wants to go out to eat barbeque in Valdosta. We can afford it now, is how he put it. Eileen agrees to go because she intends to stop by Nell's on the way home. No mention of the lottery ticket on the twenty-mile drive into town, and while they stand in line at the barbeque buffet behind the Sunday church crowd, for once Duck doesn't even fuss and shuffle or poke fun at religion.
And though his clay face turns the color of cement when Eileen heads her beat-up white Chevelle down Lee Street, after Easter dinner, he just sits there in his brown plaid western shirt and stares out the window.
At Nell's small,low house on Lee Street, they have to go around to the back to wake her up. Knocking and waiting on the moldy concrete stoop, they slap at mosquitoes teeming from the head-high azaleas that hug the green asbestoes siding.
Nell in a pink chenille robe comes to the door with a Chihuahua yipping at her fuzzy blue mules and a cigarette clamped between her lips.
"Oh," she says when she sees who it is and ambles through the nicotine-yellow kitchen to the dim, stale living room at the front of the house.
Duck and Eileen follow, Eileen first and Duck second with the leather-colored dog pinned by its teeth to the left cuff of Duck's blue jeans.
At first he tries to shake it free, but gives up and drags it like a leather pouch attached to his ankle to the dog-hair napped green chair by the front door.
"How you, Nell?" says Eileen, nesting in heaped pillows and clothes next to her mama on the couch.
Ever since Duck broke off with Nell and took up with Eileen, Nell has refused to let Eileen call her Mama.
"What y'all out and moving on a Sunday for?" Nell holds a metal ash tray in one hand and thumps her cigarette on the side.
"Come by to tell you the good news," says Eileen.
"Hope you ain't making me no grandma," says Nell and snorts.
Eileen laughs, fishing the ticket from her bra.
Duck sits pale and stiff in the chair across from the couch with the dog's teeth snagged in the cuff of his jeans.
"Guess who won the lottery?" Eileen says.
Nell's dyed black hair is splayed in back and shows seams of gray. She holds her cigarette between her wrinkled lips and squints at the ticket, which Eileen still hasn't turned loose.
Nell's eyes light up, her cigarette wiggles. "You sure?"
"Where's your Sunday paper?" says Eileen.
"Outdoors I reckon."
"Go get it, Duck," Eileen says.
He gets up, dragging the dog, and wrests open the stuck front door. He steps out on the concrete stoop and comes back with the paper but no dog.
"Let Tippy in, nut," says Nell.
He opens the door and the dog comes bouncing back inside, yipping and nipping at Duck's slobbered pants leg.
Eileen unfolds the newspaper and lays the ticket alongside the column with the winning numbers.
"Well, I be damned!" says Nell with an ash half the length of her cigarette. "I'd done about give up, hadn't even checked mine."
She stares at Duck, grinning, and then at Eileen. "Reckon y'all shitting in high cotton today."
They laugh.
"Whose ticket is it?" Nell says, serious suddenly.
"Mine," says Duck and Eileen at the same time.
Duck jumps up, kicks at the dog. The dog yawps and dodges and lunges into Nell's lap, and she curses Duck while he paces the room and Eileen tells the story of the missing tickets.
Finally Eileen calms Duck by saying she guesses they'll split the money.
"Not if it's a ticket bought with money I loaned you," says Nell, dumping the dog. "Which by rights makes it mine."
Eileen tucks the ticket in her bra again. "I'm gone pay you back, Nell. Don't I always? And you know I'll do right by you."
"Bunch of crazies!" yells Duck and heads out the door, closing it just short of the dog's pointy muzzle.
When Eileen and Nell get to the car with Nell's changing of clothes in a paper sack under one arm and the dog under the other, Duck is puffed up and slumped down on the passenger side.
Nothing will do Nell but for Eileen to take her to the Florida line for beer, and once they get there, in the midst of midget slot machines with perfect colored fruit pictures, Nell sets in to play up her tip money from waitressing at Shoney's the night before.
Despite being rich, Eileen and Duck have to stand around watching and get high on the knowledge that they're the ones who have won the most recent million, the owners of the advertised missing ticket: NO WINNER YET IN EASTER WEEKEND LOTTERY. GET YOUR LOTTO TICKETS NOW AND WATCH THE MONEY GROW.
Eileen can feel the ticket in question against her right breast, like a strip of tape, and can't wait to be rid of it, to present it to the male cashier with a rooster cone of sandy hair. But if she cashes it in now, she'll have to split the loot with both Nell and Duck. And she can feel them thinking the same thing: all three sweating out whether they're waiting too long in trying to outwait one another. When is too late? Eileen would like to ask the cashier.
But what she'd love is to put up a couple of thousand on the sprouting lottery, though even if she had the cash handy, she'd probably give it a couple of weeks and wait for the winnings to multiply. Somehow a million doesn't seem like much anymore, and somehow she doesn't believe it's hers or even hers and Duck's, because Nell keeps hinting to everybody in and out the chromy open gas station that she is the one who won last night's haul. She doesn't come right out and say it, but she wears a smug look on her drooped earthen face, and Eileen figures the only reason her mama is keeping mum is because she hopes to claim the prize alone as soon as she gets hold of the ticket.
Once, while Nell is pulling the lever on one of slot machines, Duck calls her "Ma" in front of a couple of drop-chested, middle-aged men and she flares up, threatening to slap him.
By four o'clock, Eileen is so groggy and overwrought that she doesn't care if she's won the lottery or not and even feels close to Duck, sorry for him. She doesn't really know whether the winning ticket is hers or his and almost doesn't care. The feeling is wearing off. Besides, knowing Nell, she'll end up with the ticket regardless.
And it is Easter.
Eileen looks out the plate glass window at the new-green grass on the median of the I-75 exit ramp. Sun glaring off the white macadam. She's missed so many Easters in the dim moldy house on Lee Street with its surround of overgrown azaleas, watching other children in pastel clothes and white Easter baskets with fluffy green moss hunt eggs in the park, next lot over.
Not that she blames Nell, she really doesn't; Eileen would be the same kind of mama if she'd had children, holed up sleeping or smoking while Easter blooms around her with the profusion of fuchsia azaleas.
Maybe gambling and drinking and men are in both their blood.
But the smoke inside and the rattle and clank of slot machines and singing tires on the interstate remind Eileen that somewhere there is peace and purpose and money can't buy it. She has never thought about that before; she has always believed that if you have enough money you can buy anything and live happily ever after. But now she knows that what money will buy for her is a spot before a slot machine on Easter Sundays. Just like Nell.
Duck is roaming around the counters of magazines and medicine with his arms crossed, maybe pondering how long he has to turn in the winning ticket before it's too late, how to get it from Eileen, how to get rid of Nell. Now and then he glances over at his mother-in-law and ex-girlfriend, whose eyes are pealed on the bulb monitor of fruit that won't match.
Down to her last quarter, she nudges the arm of the man at the next slot machine and says, "Ain't that some shit! Here I am, a new millionaire and ain't got a red cent to my name."
"Yeah, sister," the man says, "and I'm Ross Perot."
Duck goes over and tries to steer her away from the slot machines, and she elbows him in the gut.
"Weasel!" she says to him and then to Eileen, "Let's get the hell out of here."
Duck is driving, with Nell and the dog and the beer in the back, taking a dirt road home through the woods. The tiny leather-colored dog alternates between perching on top of Duck's seat, yipping in his right ear, and squatting on the ledge of the back glass like one of those toy dogs with floating heads.
Nell's really fired up now, and when she gets done with Duck, she starts in on Eileen.
"I've worked my fingers to the bone for you," she says, pausing to slue an empty beer can out the window and pop the tab on another, "and what thanks do I get? A grown gal taking her mama's last twenty-five bucks."
"I said I'd pay you back," says Eileen, turning in the seat to view Nell's sagged face. "Soon as I can come up with the cash."
"Ha! I've heard that before. Last time it was a month and me setting on my lectricity bill, them bout to turn my lights off."
Eileen says, "Duck, let me have twenty-five dollars, will you?"
"The devil I will!" He growls with his head tilted away from Eileen to keep from staring into the fanged mouth of the yipping dog. "I got one mission is life, way I see it--unload you broads, get my lottery ticket, and hit the road."
"Your ticket!" pipes up Nell and swipes at his neck. "I'm the one put out the cash."
And it all starts over again, the case of the missing tickets, all of them talking at once while the little dog hops about the car.
Eileen feels she's told the story till it's worn out, and she'd give anything just for some peace, to be out of this cycle of fighting with Duck and Nell, trying to come up with gambling money week to week. Yes, she would give anything.
She plucks the ticket from her bra and tosses it up and back, and it flutters about the car while Nell scrambles after it, sloshing her beer, and Duck curses and wrenches round, driving along the shoulder of the dirt road with the car's wheels rimming the deep carved ditches.
He brakes under a dogwood, shedding petals like snow to the dun dirt, gets out and starts feeling under the front seat, and then searching the back, bumping heads with Nell on her knees and shouting, while the dog hops out of the car and scurries along the road with its possum tail scutted.
Eileen just sits there.
Nell cackles out and pops up, waving the ticket, then gets out and hikes off down the sandy open road striped with shadows of pines that are swallowing the Easter sun.
"Now, look what you done," says Duck to Eileen, at once flushed and pale around the gills, green eyes narrowed to slits.
He gets in and starts the car and backs along the road till he gets to Nell and the dog. Nell trotting in the ruts, with her blue shirt tail flapping, and making him again edge the ditch with the car tires. So close he could touch her, he sticks his head out the window, still backing to keep up.
"Nell, get on back in the car and let's talk," he says.
"Ain't no talking to it, buster."
"You know I'd of been on the square with you about the money, you know that?"
"Ha!" She walks on, dodging the wheels of the wiggling car.
"Come on and get back in," he pleads. "Me and you ain't been on the best of terms since we broke up, but we can talk--we always talked."
"You ain't got nothing I want, Duck Dixon."
"Well, you got something I want, Nell, and it ain't your money. Me and you's got a lot in common."
Eileen rests her head on the seat back and closes her eyes, thinking behind and ahead. She'd taken Duck from her mama, true, but he was going anyway, and now it's only fair that he should go back to Nell. Eileen can't wait.
Sun setting behind the oaks and casting a penumbra of dusty shadows over the field of red weeds, Duck again works on his garden while the dog scamps over the rocks and dirt.
Nell is reared back in Duck's stuffed recliner, watching him through the window and smoking, with the toes of her navy canvas shoes sticking up on the footrest. She looks like a poor queen.
Eileen, on the couch, watches tv on low volume and listens to the silence, the purling of crickets outside.
Duck spreads a blue plastic liner in the grave-like pool and stands back to view the plinth of stone. One on top rolls to his feet and he lifts and resets it in the dry waterfall. He brushes his hands and smiles through the window at Nell.
"Nell," says Eileen, "I know it ain't none of my business, but you oughta give up gambling now. You got you some money and..."
"I don't gamble." Nell cranks the recliner to upright position, twitching her toes. "Everybody plays the lottery--more taxes for education."
"I was just thinking," says Eileen. "You could buy that little place on Lee Street stead of renting, be set in your old age."
"Huh!" snorts Nell. "You set and knit if you want to."
"You ain't got to knit."
"I ain't never tried to sell myself off as no homemaker."
"Or mama." Eileen regrets saying it before the words fade from hearing.
"You just hot about Duck," Nell says.
"I'm not, I'm really not; we was breaking up anyhow."
Nell studies him through the window. "He's got his ways." She pauses, smokes. "Spect I'll pick up and move to Florida."
"Florida's pretty."
"You could come too, you know."
"Naw, I'm gone put down roots right here, I've decided."
Nell gazes sideways out the front span of windows at the twilit white church, the parking lot full of cars come for evening preaching. "I ain't never been the small-town type," she says. "You ain't neither."
"We'll see," says Eileen. "But I'm glad you asked me to go with you to Florida."
"You're my best friend," says Nell, looking everywhere but at her friend, the enemy. "Always been my buddy."
A youngun needs a mama, thinks Eileen. But Nell's done what she knew to do. "You've been a good mama," Eileen says.
"Shit!" Nell puffs on her cigarette and snorts smoke, watching the aftersun light over the west woods change from rose to gold to pewter. "What you reckon makes some women mothery and some not?" she adds.
"I don't know," says Eileen. "Maybe it's like gambling and drinking...."
"In the blood, huh?"
"Or just plain giving into weakness," says Eileen.
When Duck comes in, caked with dirt and grinning, he gets a glass of water and drinks it standing next to Nell on his throne.
"Well, I think I'll see what I can scare us up to eat for supper," Nell says and rachets the footrest down and struggles to her feet.
Duck follows her to kitchen, opens a can of beer for her and one for himself. "Reckon you know the ins and outs on how to cash in that ticket, Nell?"
"Ain't nobody don't know that."
Eileen leans forward on the couch, thinking how she and her mama have talked, the most they've ever talked, and how sad.
She watches Nell and Duck for a few more minutes, making eyes and plans, then gets up and starts for her bedroom to pack.
As she passes Duck's recliner, she spies the white edge of a ticket, his ticket, shimmed between the cushion and the chair arm, and picks it up, intending to show him. But she knows it'll all start over--she's paid a million bucks for peace, and who wouldn't? She can imagine Nell and Duck, back together, figuring how to get rid of each other and still keep the cash.
She slips the ticket back where it came from and starts away as the little dog scamps into the chair and sniffs it, then nabs it between its needle teeth. Hops down and takes it to Nell at the stove, scraping her leg with it.
"What the hell!" she says, reaching down to take it from the dog's mouth.
Duck looks at the ticket, then back at Eileen. "Where'd it come from?"
"The couch," she says, "he found it on the couch, right where I lost it."
"So the winning ticket is mine then." Duck sits at the table, grinning at them both.
Nell stands over the stove with a frying pan raised, shaking her head, lost in the twist of the ticket mystery.
"Guess so," says Eileen and goes out the front door to watch Easter end.
No need to pack now; Duck will go. And she'll ask her mama to stay here with her. Maybe ease her into a settled life before she dies.
In the church across the way they're singing "He Arose," and Eileen thinks again with regret of all the unholy and ignored Easters, and even of the relative peace before knowing about the winning ticket, what little peace there is on earth, the simplicity of poverty. Her new-found knowledge, an Easter blessing.