We are living in a housing project full of luckless poor whites. During the day we hear barking dogs and crying babies, squeaky screen doors, mothers yelling, “Git in here—it’s time for lunch!” At night we hear thumps from the neighbors who share our bedroom walls. “He’s drinking again.” The wife shrugs the next morning when Mother eyes her bruises.
I have one more memory from Blair Village, the earliest of all. For no good reason I have bitten Marshall, who immediately runs to the bathroom to tell Mother. “Send him in here at once,” she demands, and I creep slowly toward her voice. Marshall has left the bathroom door partly open and there I find my mother sitting in the bathtub with no clothes on, her glasses off, her dark hair loose. I have never seen a woman naked—all that rounded flesh made shiny by the soap. My eyes get very confused because I know I shouldn’t look.
“Come over here,” she says, stern as a cop. My legs go stiff. Her eyes narrow, her voice tightens. “Now!” My feet move one at a time closer to the sound, closer to the mounds of skin.
“Give me your arm,” she says. I hold it out and she bites it, hard, right above the wrist. Too shocked to cry, I look down at the line of tooth marks turning red. “Now you know what it feels like,” she says.
I stumble out the bathroom door, staring at my arm, having experienced something new and strange that I have no name for.
* * *
—
I grow up in a world of women. Men are scary, with their roughness, their silence, the hint of danger about them. I can’t tell what they’re thinking. Women usually let you know, one way or another.
In my fourth year a big change takes place. We are in Philadelphia, visiting my mother’s family, the Diems, when my fingers get smashed in a car door. “It’s your own fault,” Mother says when I wail. “You should have moved your hand out of the way.” I squeeze a rag around my fingers to stop the blood while she runs back inside the house for a bandage. How can something be my fault, when I’m the one hurting?
We drive to church and sit through a service that drags on for a million years. Afterward, as I am sulking in the back seat with my bandaged fingers, the car door opens. I see two saddle oxford shoes and two legs in milky-looking nurses’ stockings with seams up the back. Then a strange new person ducks her head inside.
“Marshall, Philip,” Mother says, “I want you to meet Aunt Kay. She’s going to live with us. She’s your new daddy.”
Just like that, I forget about my sore fingers. A new daddy? The stranger gets into our car. She has gray hair and green eyes and a face that has already started to wrinkle. She’s not really our aunt, we just have to call her that.
We head to Atlanta that very afternoon with Aunt Kay riding beside Mother in the front seat. Everything she owns fits into two cardboardy suitcases, now in our car’s trunk. I keep quiet, staring at the back of this woman’s head, mulling over the new arrangement. If she’s going to live with us, I need to find a way to win her over.
When we stop for the night at a motel in Virginia, I announce, “I want to sleep in Aunt Kay’s bed!” It works. She pulls me to her side of the bed and cuddles. No child, no person has ever asked to share her bed. A door to her heart swings open, and from that moment on, I’m her pet.
During the long trip, Mother explains that Aunt Kay is an answer to her prayers. “I promised your dad that I’d keep the two of you, but I just can’t handle things by myself anymore. I have my Bible clubs to teach. Aunt Kay will help with that and also with stuff at home.”
Kay’s own story spills out. Her father walked out when her baby brother was born. From then on, her mother moved the family from place to place, often in the middle of the night whenever the rent came due. Little Kay lost her favorite doll when an angry landlord locked them out of the house and threw away their belongings. They ended up living on a boat, with her mother making a living of sorts as a house cleaner. When Kay graduated from high school, an aunt told her she could either clean houses like her mother or, if she agreed to work hard, the aunt would pay her way through nursing school. Kay jumped at the offer, and after years of nursing, she decided to find some Christian service. That’s when the Philadelphia church pointed her to our needy family.
Aunt Kay’s arrival in our home changes everything. Worldly-wise, she knows how to use tools, deal with banks, even change the oil in a car, so Mother lets her take charge of such things. She has a gruff manner and a Pennsylvania accent that makes Georgians suspicious, though she usually gets her way. “Men take advantage of widows,” she tells Mother. “If you ever think someone’s trying to cheat you, let me handle it.” I think she has a grudge against men. Not little boys, though.
Aunt Kay lives with us for three years, and she does serve as a kind of new daddy. Since she’s a nurse, she always knows what will fix a bloody nose or a bee sting. My life brightens. I learn to play her off against Mother, because Aunt Kay usually takes my side. I prefer for her to bathe me—she has a gentle style with the washcloth, while my mother scrubs till it burns. Aunt Kay never seems in a hurry, even when I want to play with boats and soap bubbles.
Plus, she sometimes talks Mother out of spanking us. I’m guessing she didn’t get punished much as a kid.
* * *
—
Needing an extra bedroom, we move from Blair Village to a free-standing house in Ellenwood, a rural town south of Atlanta. We’re in farmland now, on a dirt road. Aunt Kay says we’ve gone from Charles Dickens’s world to Tom Sawyer’s. I’m not sure what that means, but I love our new place. Instead of quarreling neighbors, we hear birdsong and country quiet, interrupted only by the thrilling sounds from a nearby railroad.
I lie awake the first night, hardly able to sleep for the silence. Then comes the clickety-clack of railcars and the forlorn tones of a fading horn. The next morning my brother and I walk to the train tracks, silver with rain. We jump across puddles that shine like a rainbow from the fine film of oil on top. For most of the morning we stand spellbound as mighty, smoke-belching engines chug past. Squealing at the weight, the rails dip and rise as each long train passes. We count boxcars as they hurtle by…79, 80, 81. When the caboose appears, we wave wildly, trying to get the uniformed man inside to wave back.
Not long after we move in, a few boxcars derail, spilling hundreds of ripe watermelons beside the tracks. Some bounce on the ground and split wide open, and their moist red meat soon attracts a cloud of flies. Marshall and I sort through the sweet-smelling packing hay in search of whole melons small enough for us to tote home. A good watermelon goes for a dollar at the farmer’s market, and the next day several country folk set up roadside stands offering large melons for a quarter. We laugh at the dummies driving by who stop and pay money for watermelons they could pick up for free.
Railroads yield all sorts of treasures. Another derailment dumps a load of grand pianos in East Point, on our route to church. Detouring around the scene, we gawk at the jumble of legs, keyboards, and polished black wood scattered on the tracks. A few weeks later, Mother gets stuck at a crossing where emergency crews are cleaning up after a train-auto collision. The delay takes so long that she lets us out to wander, and alongside the tracks I find a pale white hunk of flesh hinged in the middle—surely someone’s elbow. I touch it and leave it there, but my reports of this find dazzle my playmates back in Ellenwood.
Mother judges country kids safer than the ones at Blair Village, so she lets us roam outdoors, where a new world beckons. Neighbor kids introduce us to candy cigarettes, which we dangle from the sides of our mouths as we walk. Chewing gum is forbidden in our house, but these kids give us jawbreakers the size of Ping-Pong balls to chomp on. Contraband has a secret pleasure, I learn—as long as I lick my teeth clean before heading home.
Our home has a rule against guns, which puts Marshall and me at a disadvantage among boys who wear cowboy hats and holsters with toy pistols. One kid steals a real bul
let from his dad’s closet, and we stare at the brass object as if it were an idol. He says you can shoot a bullet without a gun, by hitting the end of it with a hammer. Flush with the danger, we try again and again, but can never get it to fire.
Sometime around age five I awaken to my own body. I can’t resist biting my fingernails—until Mother coats them with hot pepper sauce. Even when asleep my body plays tricks on me. I dream of going to the bathroom and wake up to clammy sheets and a wet bed. I dream of jumping off a bridge and awaken to a spastic, jerking leg. Once, I dream of being shot, with blood pouring out of my stomach; it’s a gas attack from eating refried beans.
I return from each day’s play scabby kneed and covered with Georgia clay, the same color as dried blood. I drink out of the garden hose, waiting until the sun-warmed water turns cool and then letting the water with its strange taste—rubbery from the hose and metally from the well—spill down my mouth onto my clothes. I dribble it over my head, or cover the nozzle with my thumb and aim a jet at an anthill. Hearing a sharp rap on the glass, I look up to see the figure of Mother standing at the kitchen sink, watching.
The world comes alive in summer. Yellow jackets stagger around the fallen apples on the ground, drunk from the fermenting fruit, making easy targets for rocks or rotten apples. I chase fireflies at dusk. As the sky darkens, bats appear, and I toss a ball in the air that they follow jerkily to the ground.
It takes more than dark to drive me back indoors. It takes Mother: “Philip, I mean now!”
* * *
—
Around then, I discover that words have power. I test this knowledge by repeating lists of rhyming words—cape, gape, tape, rape—while watching for that knowing look between the two adults in my life. Usually, though not always, they crack a smile: “Careful, we don’t say that word.”
I realize I can frustrate, even infuriate Marshall by repeating every word he says. “Stop it.” Stop it. “I said stop it!” I said stop it! “Did you hear me?” Did you hear me? “I’m gonna tell.” I’m gonna tell. “You’re in big trouble, Philip.” You’re in big trouble, Philip.
And sometimes I am. I try to leap over a mud puddle, and fall in. I drop coins through the floor heating grate. Summers, the rotating floor fan begs to be tested. Reminding me of a giant mechanical insect, it turns its head back and forth, the blades spinning like a helicopter’s. I sing, and the fan chops up each syllable so that I sound like Woody Woodpecker. I shove cardboard in the blades, and stick my fingers as close to them as possible without getting them chopped off.
A whispering voice inside leads me to splash in puddles, to explore the woods until I get lost, to throw berries at passing cars. I am simply following that voice. I don’t mean to do those things.
“I have eyes in the back of my head,” Aunt Kay insists, and for a time I believe her, because she always seems to know when I’ve done something wrong. One day I walk into a room and Mother and Aunt Kay stop talking. They look at me and Mother says, “Little pitchers have big ears.” Huh? Baseball pitchers? I leave the room and plant myself just outside the door in case they start talking again.
I learn that the world has two sets of rules, one for adults and one for children. Children must do what big people tell them, whether it makes sense or not, whether they want to or not. Children must apologize when they’re wrong; adults never do. Like God, adults make all the rules—and according to my playmates, my God-fearing mother has way too many rules.
Only adults, not children, are allowed to keep secrets. “That’s for me to know and you to find out” shuts up my questions if I ask Mother why she whispered on a phone call. Yet if I have a secret, she stoops down to my level, stares right into my eyes, maybe into my brain, and demands to know what I’m concealing. “Tell me the truth. What happened? Don’t you lie to me!”
Kids can never make fun of adults, but the other way is fine. “Look at the pouty fish,” Mother says when I’m sulking. “Look at that ugly fish pouting with the big lips.” The lesson sticks. If you show your feelings, they mock you. If you don’t—well, how can you not?
* * *
—
Marshall and I have always assumed that food appears on the table like magic. In Ellenwood we actually see where it comes from. We buy our eggs from a neighbor, and Aunt Kay shows me how she discards the fertilized ones that already have a baby chicken growing inside. I avoid eggs for a while, especially fried eggs that run yellow all over the plate when I poke them. Could that be a liquid baby chicken?
That first summer, Aunt Kay fences in a plot for a vegetable garden, to keep the rabbits out. After a lot of hoeing and planting and weeding, we begin to see the results waving like colorful ornaments in the breeze: tomatoes, rattlesnake beans, bell peppers, okra, stalks of corn. I drink in the hot, moist smell of growing things. Vegetables require a lot of tending, I learn, except for the squashes and cucumbers, which grow like weeds.
Toward the end of the season, I uncover a giant cucumber at the edge of the garden. This monstrosity, hidden by weeds all summer, has grown to the size of a watermelon. It’s so fat that I can barely lift it. “We can’t eat that one,” Mother says. “Why don’t you feed it to the mule down the road.” With Marshall’s help I do just that, only to hear a few days later that the bony mule has died. For weeks I feel guilty about killing the poor mule, despite Mother’s assurances that something else must have caused its death.
Marshall and I have different eating styles. He insists on strict separation: Meatloaf cannot touch potatoes, which cannot touch a vegetable, which cannot touch a dinner roll. I carve out elaborate tunnels in the mashed potatoes and carefully pour in brown gravy before covering them up, adding some peas on top for decoration. We have to eat everything on the plate: “Think of all the people starving in China,” we’re told. I always begin with my least favorite foods and work up to the good stuff.
To me, tomatoes belong in a special class of food—pure slimy poison. According to Mother, my disgust began when Marshall announced, “I hate tomatoes,” after trying stewed tomatoes. Hearing that, I associated the glossy, firm fruit that grows in our garden with the maroon-colored goop that comes out of a can and decided to hate all tomatoes.
“I’ll never forget the day you threw a fit over tomatoes,” Marshall recalls. “I think you were four. Mother tied you to a chair, secured your arms with clothesline, and force-fed you.”
I don’t remember the clothesline. I do remember Mother saying, “I’ll teach you to like tomatoes!” I yelled and writhed and twisted my head back and forth as she forced tomatoes into my mouth—tomatoes with mayonnaise, tomatoes with sugar, tomatoes with salt and pepper. In my memory, red acid juice drips down my chin to mingle with the tears. I cry so hard that the sobs turn into choking, then coughing, until more tomato ends up outside my body than inside.
I still hate tomatoes.
* * *
—
Pets are the highlight of my childhood, my chief source of delight, and for them I have Aunt Kay to thank. When Marshall and I start begging for a pet, any pet, Aunt Kay backs us up. “The boys need one,” she tells Mother. “We have an ideal place out here in the country. What about a cat? You don’t have to housebreak them, so they aren’t nearly as messy as dogs.”
Mother, however, detests cats. After their wedding, she and our father lived for a time with her aunt Floss, who kept thirty-two cats in her Philadelphia row house. “They’re sneaky, and they get into everything,” she says. “They make my skin crawl.” If a stray cat meows at our front door, Mother boils water and throws it onto the cat.
Marshall, Aunt Kay, and I keep up the pressure. Finally, after weeks of pleading, we get a six-week-old kitten, solid black except for white “boots” on each of her legs, as if she has stepped in a shallow dish of paint. Naturally, we name her Boots. She lives on the screened-in porch and sleeps on a pillow stuffed with cedar shavings. A
unt Kay insists that Boots must learn to defend herself before going outdoors and fixes a firm date of Easter for the kitten’s big test.
At last the day arrives: Easter Sunday, the year I turn five. The Georgia sun, a white hole in the pale blue sky, has coaxed spring into full bloom, and the air itself seems to glow with color. Still wearing our short-pants suits after church, Marshall and I carry Boots outside. She sniffs her first blade of grass that day, bats at her first daffodil waving in the breeze, and stalks her first butterfly, vaulting high in the air and missing. She keeps us gleefully occupied until neighbor kids join us for an Easter egg hunt.
When our next-door playmates arrive, the unimaginable happens. Their Boston terrier, Pugs, who has followed the kids into our yard, catches sight of Boots. He lets out a low growl and charges. I scream, and we all run toward Boots. Already Pugs has the little kitten in its mouth, shaking it like a sock. We kids circle the scene, shrieking and jumping up and down. Helpless, we watch a whirl of flashing teeth and flying tufts of fur. Marshall grabs a stick and tries to hit the snarling dog. Finally Pugs drops the limp kitten on the grass and trots home.
In an instant, my happy world spins away from me. Boots has not yet died. She is mewing softly, and her eyes hold a look of terror. Blood oozes from puncture wounds, and her black coat is spattered with Pugs’s saliva. Adults arrive, who quickly shoo us kids away from the scene.
All afternoon I pray for a miracle. No! It can’t be! Tell me it’s not true! Maybe Boots won’t die, or perhaps she will die and then come back. Hadn’t the Sunday School teacher told us such a story about Jesus? I make vows and promises to God, and a thousand schemes run through my mind, until reality wins out and I accept at last that Boots is dead.
From then on, my childhood Easters are stained by the memory of that day in the grass. To make it worse, sometime later Mother tells us that Pugs didn’t really kill Boots. “The kitten was still alive, but she had a broken neck. So Aunt Kay put Boots in a sack and held her underwater in a deep part of the creek until there were no more signs of struggle.”
Where the Light Fell Page 4