Betty

They arrive in Breathed, Ohio, where Landon’s old friend has given them a house. The house is considered cursed by the people in the town, but through Landon’s eyes, it’s perfect. Home from his Army tour in Japan, Leland meets them in Breathed and gives them each a small gift. They explore their new house, and Alka shakes her head at its dilapidated state.

When Betty starts playing catch with a young blonde girl in the neighboring yard, the girl’s father emerges and calls Betty “dirty” because she is not white. The girl’s mother comes out, too, and the parents worry out loud that the neighborhood will come to ruin now that a “colored” family has moved in. The father accuses Betty of trying to steal the ball, and the parents agree that they cannot keep the ball now that Betty has touched it. They decide that they can no longer keep the ball that the girls were playing with because it has certain germs on it.

The Breathanian reports that a window was shot out at a local store in the middle of the night.

Betty, her siblings, and Landon lie down in the garden in the sun. Landon explains to his daughters that to the Cherokees, the Earth is a woman named Selu. He tells them that Cherokee women were gardeners because they had a power that the men did not have. When Flossie asks why Landon can garden, he explains that his wisdom comes from his mother and her mother, but he does not have the same power. He builds a stage near the garden, explaining that this, too, is a Cherokee tradition. Cherokee women stand on such stages and sing songs to protect the garden. The sisters call the stage “A Faraway Place.” They dance, sing, and act there, sometimes until they fall asleep and wake up to the sunrise the next morning.

When Betty turns seven, her parents send her to school. Flossie says that she cannot be seen with Betty because she is too dark. Betty hides at home, but her father finds her and tells her that if she goes to school, she will see the Fantastical Eye of Old, made by the Cherokee people only for kids like her. He takes her to school, and the children laugh at them. Embarrassed, Betty tells her father to leave. Her classmates ask the teacher about her skin color, and the teacher tells the kids racist lies about Native Americans. She tells Betty that it’s unnatural that her parents had children together and that she and her siblings are spoiling their otherwise white school. At recess, Betty sits alone on the grass and notices a freshly carved eye in one of the trees, the Fantastical Eye of Old. As she looks at it, her classmates push her into the dirt and hold her down while a girl named Ruthis flips up Betty’s skirt and pulls down her underwear to see if she has a tail. Back in class, they all say that they saw one.

Betty runs home, and Landon takes her foraging for ginseng. He tells her about the trees, and each time he digs up a ginseng seedling, he performs a ritual in which he asks the plant for permission and then plants a seed to replace it. Betty follows along. Back in the barn, he gets a rattlesnake tooth and an arrowhead and makes a concoction. He tells Betty that if she leaves school, the racists will win. He promises that the drink he is mixing will make her a warrior. Despite his shattered knee, Landon jumps and asks Betty to do the same. When she doesn’t feel the spirit, he runs around the barn and then runs around the field. Finally, Betty feels powerful, like she can handle anything.

Lint experiences physical symptoms of mental illness, including constant shaking and a sensation of animals moving under his skin. Landon treats each symptom with care. He tells his kids not to talk about Lint with people outside their family because they’d take him away to fix him but instead would hurt him. He tells them to try to spend time with Lint so that the silence can’t fuel his pain.

They take Lint to the river, where he loves to cheer as Trustin dives and cannonballs off the trees and rocks and into the water. During one jump, Trustin slips and falls silently onto the rocks. They fear for his safety, but he simply stands up and walks away.

Flossie steals a dog from a man whom she mistakenly thinks is rich. She plans to ransom the dog and use the money to go to Hollywood to be an actress, but instead, the man just buys a pig to replace the dog. When Flossie brings Betty to the shed to check on the dog, they realize that rat poison has fallen into the water tin and killed it. Flossie begs Betty to help her bury the dog, so they take it to the train tracks and bury it with an ear of corn. Betty wonders if this death is just the beginning of the curse on their house.

For Halloween, Betty enters her mother’s room to be given a costume. She wants to be a princess with a dress made of cicada shells and wings made of violets, but her mother, who is experiencing depression, rejects this idea as out of touch with reality: “‘Even if you were beautiful, Betty,’ Mom said, ‘You could not be a princess. A Carpenter cannot afford a crown or a throne’” (102). Instead, she dresses her as a witch using a robe so old that Betty finds a mouse skeleton in one pocket. With an old match, she draws an eye on Betty’s forehead and then tells Betty that she drew a flower on her cheek.

Outside, Betty runs into the kids from school who laugh at her and tell her that her cheek says “hag.” Betty snatches the crown off Ruthis’s head and snaps it in half as the kids taunt her. Betty runs home, where Landon finds her crying and turns “hag” into a flower on her cheek. He makes her wings out of maple leaves and tells her that her blood makes her a Cherokee princess. When Trustin finds her, she sees that his costume is a box. He guesses that Betty’s costume is an angel.

The Breathanian reports that the gun used to shatter the window was also used in the disappearance of the Peacocks, the family that lived in the Carpenters’ house before them.

Alka gifts Flossie a bra, and Flossie wears it constantly. One day, Betty finds her mother seated on her bed with lemon peels pinned over the printed lemons on her dress and yellow cellophane tied around her head and neck, covering her nose and mouth. Betty is used to her mother saying that she wants to die, but she never follows through. Betty cuts off the cellophane, and as she leaves the room, she holds it up to her eyes to see the world through yellow and hears her mother’s scream. She returns to see that she has cut her wrists.

Betty sprints to the woods to get her father, and the doctor takes her mother’s limp body to the hospital. Landon tells the children that the blood was just beet juice. In Alka’s absence, Fraya takes up housework and carves two notches in A Faraway Place, telling Flossie and Betty that it will help their mother’s wounds heal. They sing a song for her.

Leland comes home after being kicked out of the military for stealing. When Alka comes home from the hospital, Landon plans a picnic. Once in the woods, he brings them to a place where all the trees bear lemons, and Alka says, “[Y]ou gave me my beautiful yellow world” (122). A red balloon rises up, and Betty explains that a white man named Cotton still writes letters daily to his wife who was lynched because she was Black. Landon gave him this idea to help ease his grief. Cotton places each letter inside a helium balloon and releases it into the world, and Landon surreptitiously places rocks in the trees to signal to Cotton that his wife has received the letters. Once, Betty found a balloon and read the letter recounting a life they never got to live and a child they never got to have. Alka says that Cotton would never write her those letters if she were alive; instead, they’d either be divorced or unhappy.

Flossie and Betty fight as they try to determine who is a witch, and then Fraya suggests that they steal a jar of moonshine from Landon’s stash. Betty distracts him, and he tells her a story about the Restless Star Catchers. Betty listens to the story about going up to the moon on the back of a magical lion, but she does not believe his stories the way she used to.

The sisters drink moonshine in the woods as Fraya shows them how to write their prayers so that an eagle will take them. When all the sisters have written their prayers, Fraya climbs a tree to place them in an eagle’s nest, barely finishing the task before the eagle returns. Betty watches as the eagle drops one of their prayers. In Fraya’s handwriting, it reads, “I want to be free. Please set me free from him, I pray” (135). Betty doesn’t know who the “him” in the prayer is, but she remembers a song that Fraya wrote recently about “a boy who had snakes for fingers” (135). On their way home, they wander into an empty church. They laugh at the stupidity of the church’s strict rules and patriarchal hierarchy. Fraya takes off her dress and sets it on fire, and then the church itself catches fire. Betty throws Fraya’s slip of paper into the fire as they barely make it out. They watch from a hill, and Betty hopes that the smoke will take Fraya’s prayer closer to heaven.

The sisters deal with the church fire differently. Betty finds comfort by running her hands through the drawer that contains her mother’s nylons, and one day, she reaches in deep enough that she finds photos of a scared young girl and an angry older man. Her mother admits that the photos are of her and her father. On her way upstairs, Betty finds Leland in Fraya’s bed and notices that his features are just like those of the man in the photos. Alarmed, she runs out to join Fraya, who is singing at A Faraway Place.

The Breathanian reports that the local preacher blames the devil for the gunshots heard around town.

Landon helps rebuild the church. Trustin asks Betty if she thinks someone burned it down, and she responds that everyone knows it was faulty wiring.

At school, kids and teachers bully Betty as Thanksgiving approaches. Betty tries to tell them that Cherokees did not wear headdresses or live in teepees, but her teacher tells her that she is wrong. When Ruthis accuses Betty of stealing her coin purse, Betty’s denial does not stop the teacher from hitting her on her backside with a ruler. Eventually, Ruthis finds the coin purse in her own desk. The teacher swiftly moves on. Hoping that her father will have something to heal her, Betty heads to the barn, but Lint is already there asking for help.

Trustin sees Betty check her welts in the mirror, and Betty sits at A Faraway Place to write poems and sing. When she comes back inside, Trustin has drawn birds on the wall above her bed, hoping to make her smile.

On Christmas, Landon gives Betty a box carved and painted with rivers, telling her that he had a dream in which she stood on a brightly lit stage and read a poem that sounded to him “like rivers tied up. Blue things. Things of curve that reach all the way around to the sea” (157). Flossie gets a picture of Elvis on which Landon has forged Elvis’s autograph. Lint gets an old horn-shaped fossil, Leland gets a new pocketknife, Fraya gets a notebook, and Trustin gets a squirrel skull with paint brushes.

A woman comes to pick up medicine from Landon, and when she tells him that she is constipated, he takes a piece of bark off a tree and tells her to boil it. Watching from the porch, Alka tells Fraya and Betty that the bark can also get rid of an unwanted pregnancy, but she knew a woman who once died trying this.

That night, Betty hears movement and walks downstairs to see a figure walk toward the barn and then to A Faraway Place. She listens as Fraya sings.

The Breathanian reports that a farmer was gored by a deer and blames the deer’s unusually aggressive behavior on the mysterious gunshots that have been heard throughout Breathed during the night.

The next morning, Fraya is vomiting and pale but begs her family not to call the doctor. When her mother sees that she is bleeding, they call him. As Doc Lad treats Fraya, Betty sprints outside and finds a piece of the same bark missing from the tree. When Betty tells them about the bark, Fraya admits that she put it inside of her and could not remove it. Doc Laden uses his tools to remove it, and they take Fraya away to give her penicillin. Alka takes the sheets and the piece of bark and buries them in the backyard.

The family waits for Fraya to come home. Ignoring Betty’s protests that it won’t work, Landon plants corn in the dead of winter. He says that as the corn grows, Fraya will heal.

Landon shows the kids how to put coals in balls of mud and throw them into the sky to look like bright cannons. When Fraya comes home, Betty and Flossie give her a jar of goodnights—all the nights they couldn’t say goodnight written on paper so that she knows they didn’t forget.

At night, Fraya asks Betty where the sheet and the bark are. They find them in the backyard, and Fraya wraps the bark in her finest fabric and treats it like a baby.

On Betty’s ninth birthday, her mother calls her to her room and begins to tell her about her own father as she drinks whiskey out of a bottle. She describes him coming home from work and her mother laying a wet rag on his neck, taking off his boots, and massaging his feet with a smile. One day, Alka’s mother lay Alka on their bed, rubbed cooking fat on her, and left the room. Then, her father entered and undressed. She was confused as he lay on top of her, suffocating her and hurting her by thrusting inside of her. As Alka tells Betty about this, Betty continues to try to leave the room and get Landon, but her mother forces her to stay. When she describes the rape, she holds Betty down and thrusts on top of her as her father did to her.

When her story is over, Betty cries in a corner and then takes a paper and pencil to A Faraway Place, where she writes down everything her mother told her, gets a shovel and a jar, and buries it deep beneath the earth.

The Breathanian reports that more people hear gunshots throughout the night in Breathed.

Betty understands why her mother told her about what she experienced—she needed to tell someone, but Flossie would tell everyone, and Fraya would become lost within herself. She tries to process the pain, but she is overwhelmed by sadness for her mother. She understands why she is the way she is.

Betty takes Lint out to look for rocks, hoping to distract him from his current ailment, lizards in his fingernails. He shows her each rock and explains why they are special. The lizards under Lint’s fingernails are chive seeds that he has placed there himself. Betty asks him why he pretends to be sick, and after he has a conversation with a rock, he tells her that he thinks if their father can fix his body, he can also fix his brain; he also isn’t causing harm. Betty tells Lint about the bird in their father’s glass heart and how the bird experiences every ailment that Lint creates. When Lint becomes scared of how he will fight the battles in his head, Betty promises to go rock hunting with him whenever he wants.

Betty sits on the front porch with Trustin as he draws the storm that’s happening around them. Trustin says that Fraya is the one with the shotgun—he saw her emerge from the woods the other day.

When Landon comes along, he tells stories about how the lightning is the sound of the devil knocking on heaven’s door. He says that he was no one until Alka found him and asked for his name. Betty used to think that her father was written for her by writers, who gifted him with his unique qualities, but as she grows older, she realizes that he is just a man. He’s worked hard jobs all his life, and he is starting to physically struggle. He asks Betty what she is writing, and she tells him about one night when he was working and they did not yet have money to eat. All the kids sat hungry on the kitchen floor, and their mother began to make donuts. She had nothing but air, but she made it seem so real that the kids laughed and ate them all. She ate not one donut herself. They both call her a good mother.

The Breathanian reports that a local World War I veteran has been experiencing traumatic memories as a result of the gunfire.

The kids help their father plant corn, beans, squash, okra, zucchini, and other vegetables in the backyard, and he tells stories to help them remember gardening tricks. Sitting at A Faraway Place, Flossie wonders if Elvis will get the letters she wrote him, and Betty asks Flossie to go fishing with her. Flossie first walks a short distance away, pulls her pants down, and squats to urinate. When Betty throws the line back, the hook gets embedded in Flossie’s butt cheek. Flossie, angry and in pain, accuses Betty of being jealous of her because she is beautiful while Betty is ugly. The two argue until Betty tells Flossie that Elvis just pulled up. Betty then goes to get Landon to help Flossie and wanders into the barn. She watches from the loft as Fraya sits in an old truck writing in her diary and Leland, home from his truck-driving job, approaches her. He asks why she followed him into the woods, and she says that she’s going to reveal what she saw him do to the eagle. (Near the end of the book, it is revealed that Leland caged the eagle and starved it to death and that Fraya witnessed this). Betty watches as Leland unbuttons his pants, shoves Fraya’s legs to either side, and wraps her hair around the window crank. He then rapes her. Fraya threatens to scream, but she stays quiet. Betty, terrified that people would blame Fraya instead of Leland, stays quiet, too.

Betty pours Fraya’s homemade sunflower lotion all over her hair and pretends to be blonde. Landon encourages Betty to love her brown hair and not to repeat or internalize the mean names that others call her. Betty does not know what to do with what she saw the previous day, so she writes it down and buries it near where she buried her mother’s story and then runs into the woods. She jumps off a cliff and into the river only to realize that Leland is there fishing. When she tries to leave, he pins her down to make her stay with him. She looks at him and doesn’t see evil despite what she saw the day before. He tells Betty that he saved Fraya from a bee sting, and Betty asks him to promise that he’ll never save her and then sprints away.

Back in the house, she sees that Fraya has all cut her hair off, leaving only an inch all the way around. Betty throws the jars of plums at the wall but stops when Fraya asks her to. Fraya follows her up to her room and says that they can give the hair to the birds to make nests. Betty cries as Fraya hugs her.

Betty has not spoken in days because her mind is spinning over what she saw. At school, she has to use tokens to pay for the school lunch, and Ruthis and her friends make fun of her and her father for having no money. When she gets home, she finds Landon carving a piece of wood into a turtle and asks him if he ever wanted to be rich. He tells her to meet him at the willow tree when it rains that night.

At the tree, he tells Betty the story of how trees came to have diamonds in them. A woman lost her children and cried for so long that her tears flooded the world. People could travel only by boat, but the trees sticking up out of the water made it hard to see at night, and many boats capsized. In anger, people cut down the trees, so the guardians of the trees were called, and they struck a deal with the men. If the men would give their diamonds to the trees, the guardians would stop the flooding. They placed diamonds in the bark of the trees so that they would shine on rainy nights and prevent people from crashing into them. They transformed the woman into a weeping willow so that no one would forget her mourning. In that tree, Landon has carved all their names, and whenever he feels like he might not be rich, he comes to look at those names to remind him of his diamonds. He gives Betty a carved guardian, and she runs inside to give it to Fraya.

Betty and Fraya say that they love each other, and when Betty asks Fraya if she loves Leland, Fraya avoids the question. Betty begins to explain what she saw in the barn, but Fraya slaps her until she says that she saw nothing. She tells Betty that she will die by suicide if Betty tells anyone and that it will be her fault.

The Breathanian reports that the sheriff’s office has been overwhelmed by reports of gunfire and that numerous chickens have gone missing from a local poultry farm, with feathers arranged as if for a ceremony in the yard from which they disappeared.