Betty

Flossie puts on her version of Romeo and Juliet out by the willow tree, playing every role herself. Fraya, Landon, Lint, and Trustin attend. In the crowd, Landon claps and gives her flowers.

After the show, Betty sees that Flossie has gotten her period. Betty wonders why she isn’t excited to become a woman, and Flossie says that she’s in pain and didn’t choose this and that it doesn’t make her a woman. Betty makes her tea to help with the pain, and then Betty takes off the sheet from Flossie’s bed and draws over the blood stain looks so that it looks like a dress. She encourages Flossie to dance through it like their Cherokee ancestors, and they dance together.

Alka’s father dies, and to Betty’s surprise, they attend the funeral. The service is brief and nearly empty. Back at Alka’s parents’ house, Alka’s mother, Mamaw Lark, lets the children into her house for the first time. Alka finds some charcoal drawings of storms, and her mother explains that someone had been sending these drawings to Grandpa Lark regularly in the mail. She believes that the sense of doom implied by the drawings is what killed her husband. She says that he deserved a peaceful life. Betty knows that Trustin made the drawings and that she herself sent them. She wonders if her mother knows.

The children end up outdoors eating the cherries that they were forbidden to eat in all previous years. Leland simply squishes one and drops it to the ground. Mamaw Lark gifts the honeysuckle plants to Landon. Alka reads the mail, including a poem that Betty submitted to the Breathanian, and tells Betty that she did not win their contest because the poem is about rape. Alka tells Betty that when she was young, her mother did many small things to show love and care for her, but when her father started raping her, all those gestures stopped.

By gluing together fragments of images clipped out of magazines, Betty slowly builds the image of a woman whose features—blue eyes, blonde hair, fair skin—she wants. However, when she looks in the mirror, she can’t see why the beauty of her Cherokee ancestors does not translate to her.

Betty awakes from a nap to find that the stray cat that has been coming to their house has had a litter of kittens. Fearing that Mamaw Lark will be mad about the mess on the quilt, Alka picks up the cat and throws it out the window. Betty looks down to see that the cat’s skull has cracked. Then, Alka picks up the four corners of the blanket that the kittens are sitting on and carries it like a bag. She puts Betty’s hands between hers and the blanket and does not let her go as she slams it on the ground, slowly silencing the meows of the kittens. As Betty cries and begs her to stop throughout, Alka says that this is how she felt when her father hurt her. She was as innocent as these kittens, but he did it anyway and no one cried for her. By the end, the kittens feel like liquid. Alka orders Betty to clean it up, and when Betty says no, Alka tells her that she will tell Landon that Betty was responsible.

Betty puts the kittens’ remains in the ark that her father carved and rushes out the door to send it down the river. She sits on the train for a long time, and when she returns, Alka says that she buried the mother cat and asks Betty why she sent Trustin’s drawing of storms to her parents. Betty says that she did it because they put Alka in a bag and smashed it against the floor. Alka then gets honeysuckles for them to eat.

The Breathanian reports that a baby has been startled by the gunfire.

Betty writes at A Faraway Place, and Flossie comes up to her with hickeys on her neck, wanting to pierce Betty’s ears. As she does so, she tells Betty that she had sex for the first time—she told the boy no, but he did it anyway.

Betty finds her father and Cinderblock John sitting on the porch and tells them about her story called “Inheritance of Sin” in which a man kills a woman and then passes an indelible mark of her lips on his neck onto his son, who dies while saving a woman, having been released of his father’s sin.

Betty walks along the road hitchhiking, and a 13-year-old boy picks her up on his way to buy sweet corn for his mother. She suggests that they go to an empty road, where they kiss. He tries to feel her up and stops when she says no. When he asks why she was hitchhiking in the first place, she says that she wanted to see if “no” still meant something. She writes down Flossie’s story and buries it next to Fraya’s and their mother’s at A Faraway Place.

The Breathanian reports that a local hiker was frightened by the mysterious gunfire and then heard what sounded like a woman crying. When he went to investigate, he found the skeleton of an eagle that had been carefully buried in a shallow grave.

Betty gets a job in the summer as a live-in cook and housekeeper for Old Woman Slipperwort. In the middle of the night, Betty needs to urinate but can’t reach the bathroom without going through Old Woman Slipperwort’s room. She sees her sitting at the edge of the bed naked and is scared of her body, so instead, she urinates in the corner of the room and covers it up.

Betty runs small errands and cooks dinner, and Old Woman Slipperwort talks about how she used to be young and love nature. She tells Betty that she’ll want to leave Breathed one day.

That night, Betty again tries to go to the bathroom and finds Old Woman Slipperwort naked on her bed, massaging her legs. This time, she doesn’t feel scared—she sees that her body is like her history. Old Woman Slipperwort tells Betty to cherish her beauty, and when Betty tells her that she does not see herself as beautiful, Old Woman Slipperwort convinces her that she is. She explains that Betty’s mother only told her she isn’t because she’s jealous of her youth.

Betty asks Old Woman Slipperwort if it’s true that she used to have sex with men for money, and Old Woman Slipperwort tells Betty that when she was 17, she was caught naked with a girl named Lavannah. As punishment, her father beat her while Lavannah was sent away to men in white coats. She returned as a ghost of herself, and soon she walked into quicksand and died. Old Woman Slipperwort explains that she became a sex worker because she was terrified that they would send her away like they did Lavannah. Her parents would rather she sleep with hundreds of men than one woman. She urges Betty never to be afraid of being herself.

Betty and Flossie walk to the train tracks, and Flossie takes her shirt off as the train comes by, eventually succeeding in encouraging Betty to do the same. They laugh and spin, and Flossie says that she imagines that’s what fame is like. Flossie goes to her boyfriend’s baseball game, and Betty heads home, finding her father on the porch sewing pants.

She asks him what he wanted to be when he was young, and he tells her that when he was a boy, he thought he’d always be a boy. Betty asks why he does not make medicine to help his knee pain, and he responds that he never thought he deserved to be free from it. He now uses a cane to walk. On the cane, he has carved all his children, including Yarrow and Waconda, who died in early childhood, along with their passions. He talks about his insignificance and then sweeps dirt off the porch.

Betty goes with Trustin to sell his paintings and help deliver Landon’s treatments. They approach a woman named Ms. Pleasant who always wears a mask over her face. She invites Betty inside for cheese and jam, and when Betty asks what happened to her face, she says that she saw something terrible when she was young and did nothing about it, so God punished her.

Returning home, Betty throws a handful of rocks at Leland’s truck as he drives past. He skids to a halt and chases her into the woods. Eventually, he catches her, pins her down, and lifts her skirt up. She tries to fight back and tells him that she knows what he did. He responds that she is just as guilty because she did nothing about it.

At the sound of Landon’s voice, Leland releases Betty and drags her back to the house, telling her that she wanted him to touch her. When they return, she grabs her father’s knife and cuts into Leland’s nose where his soul should be. Landon spanks her as punishment. She breaks free, runs to Ms. Pleasant’s house, rips her mask off, and sees that nothing is actually wrong with her face. Ms. Pleasant grabs Betty’s hand and tells her to feel the scars and pus, but there is nothing there. When Betty insists that nothing is wrong with Ms. Pleasant’s face, Ms. Pleasant is so distressed that she destroys her own house, smashing furniture, breaking windows, and injuring herself in the process.

The Breathanian reports that a local woman believes that the ghost of her dead, abusive mother is responsible for the gunfire.

The sheriff comes to speak to Betty about Ms. Pleasant, who won’t press charges but wants Betty to stay away from her. When he asks Betty what her face looked like, Betty describes the horrible face that Ms. Pleasant saw in herself.

At the Covered Bridge Festival, Leland’s presence prevents Betty from dancing with Fraya, and she goes on a walk only to be picked up by her own family on their way home. Landon stops to pick up the free pony they saw on their way there. Nine years old and blind from working in the mines, the horse has been used by men for its whole life, and Betty cries for it.

When they return home, Landon asks Betty to come talk to him, and she refuses. As he and Lint grow their business, Betty feels less close to her father, unable to tell him about what Leland did out of fear for Fraya and herself. Alka comes out to the porch and tells Betty that her father counted each star in the night sky when each of his children were born and that Betty had the most. She tells her that he deserves his child’s love.

Betty, Flossie, and Fraya often go to the water tower to climb up the ladder and swim in it. Trustin always stays at the bottom and waits because he has been afraid of heights ever since he fell while diving as a kid. That night, Betty gives him oak leaves as wings like her father once gave her.

The sisters swim for a long time, and as they start descending, they see Trustin lying strangely at the bottom of the ladder. When they get down, they see that he is still and bleeding. Fraya sends Flossie to call their father and the doctor, and while she is gone, Trustin dies after telling Betty that he flew like an angel. When Landon arrives, he tries desperately to wake his son to no avail.

Betty tries to write about what happened, and all she can say is that she killed him. They have a funeral for Trustin as a family. Alka swings for the entire day, while Landon and the kids draw charcoal handprints on the coffin and then carry it themselves all the way to the cemetery. On the way, families in Breathed stand up straight and throw flowers to show respect.

At the cemetery, Landon asks Betty to speak. Soon after starting, she faints and falls into the hole. She wakes up in her bed.

The Breathanian reports that a teenage couple is scared by gunfire. The boy does not identify himself, but Flossie is the girl.