My Drowning

by Jim Grimsley

  “You shut up about my brother.”

  “Cripple bastard. Cripple son of a bitch. Walks on them crutches like some crawly bug. Sleeps in my kitchen like a white worm. I hate him.”

  “You better shut up, I said.”

  The raising of his voice brought quiet. Mama paced. She glared at me. “What are you looking at me for, you little strumpet?”

  I studied the floor but listened for where she was. I could feel that she was watching me, I could hear her breathe. I slid along the wall toward the door but at once she said, “I told you to keep your ass right against that wall, and you better do like I say.”

  “Is that Ellen?” Nora called.

  “Tend to your business,” Mama said.

  “Cope ain’t bothering a goddamn soul,” Daddy spat.

  “The younguns is scared of him.”

  “They is not.”

  “They is. Nora is scared to get up in the morning, for fear he’ll bother her. Ain’t you? Them crutches scares her.”

  “He can’t walk without them crutches,” Daddy said.

  “They still scares people. I don’t want him in my house no more.”

  “This is my goddamn house.”

  “He ain’t got no business scaring my younguns around here. And now the sheriff is after him. And you can’t do nothing but sit there and take his side.”

  “I ain’t taking nobody’s side. You don’t make a goddamn lick of sense.”

  “I make plenty of goddamn sense. I don’t want that cripple bastard sleeping in my kitchen.” She loomed over me now; I could bring myself to watch her face for only a moment. “I hate him. He ain’t got the sense God gave a rat. And now the sheriff is looking for him.”

  “Louise. I have told you, you better shut your mouth, right now.”

  “Was you with him?”

  He pushed back his chair, and stood. His footsteps echoed.

  His silhouette in the doorway was taut like a wire. “Do you want me to take my goddamn belt off again? Or do you want me to get the buggy whip this time?”

  I could feel the fierce heat of her glaring on the top of my head.

  “You better answer me.”

  “I ain’t going to say nothing else.”

  “Are you goddammit sure?”

  She took short, sharp breaths, silent, except that her whole body heaved. “Yes.”

  “You better be. Because I don’t want to hear another word.”

  As his footsteps receded, she made a sharp cry and turned to me with eyes like needles. She pinned me against the wall and kicked me, and her hands struck my face from both sides. I gasped and fought for breath. She slammed my head back against the plaster wall. Sharp pains succeeded one another like forks of lightning. I heard footsteps from somewhere but I was dazed. “I told you to set still.” She kicked me again but not so hard.

  “Leave her alone, Mama,” Nora pleaded, I could not see where she was, “she didn’t do nothing,” and this distracted Mama long enough. I slid past her faded skirt and ran for the door.

  I hid under the house, behind one of the outer pillars. Daddy kept dogs chained up further under, I could see their shadows moving. They were restless, thinking maybe I was bringing them biscuit crusts and fatback rind like Carl Jr. did. If Alma Laura had not been with me I might have been afraid of them, but she sat beyond the post, silent as always, a comforting shadow. The dog chains softly murmured. I kept between the dogs and the brick underpinning. I stayed in sight of Alma Laura. Upstairs, voices flowed and ebbed. There was sunlight and heat in the yard, but where I waited I hardly felt those things.

  SOON MANY MEN arrived at the house, including Uncle Cope, with blood in his hair. From under the house, where I remained, I studied the green truck, the blue car, in which the men raised clouds of dust on the road and in our yard. Uncle Cope struggled out of the back seat of the car, his loose leg dangling, him hopping on his good foot till he could get the crutches under his arms.

  The dogs came alert and set to barking, straining at the chains. Upstairs Daddy’s unmistakable footsteps crossed the porch. Voices greeted him and he shouted, “You sons of bitches is in trouble, the deputy’s already been here.”

  Uncle Cope thwacked one crutch across the back of a cat that crossed the yard in front of him. I could see Cope’s shoulders but not his head; he had come close to the porch now.

  He lowered his voice. “You ran, you shit ass. Ain’t nobody seen you, did they?”

  “You know damn well I ran.”

  Uncle Cope hovered on the crutches. The limp foot dangled. “And now my ass is going to jail and you’re going to sit right here.”

  “I can’t help it, Cope.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “I ain’t going in no jail just to please your ass.”

  Then, other footsteps from the house.

  Mama’s voice rose suddenly. “Is that Cope? You goddamn cripple son of a bitch.”

  “Louise, you better shut your mouth.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, you one-leg shit-ass. I wished you was dead. I wished the sheriff would shoot you when he catches you.”

  Uncle Cope swung round on the crutches.

  “I hope they keep your cripple ass in jail till you rot.” She must have been leaning forward, I could see her shadow. “I wished the deputy would find you right now. I wished he would drive up right now.”

  Uncle Cope and the others slid into the car. Other men were climbing onto the back of the truck. A line of dust rose as they fled along the road.

  I CRAWLED OUT from under the house when things above were quiet. My belly was empty and groaning. Creeping up the steps, I entered through the door that led to the narrow hall.

  From the bedrooms I heard no sound. Daddy sprawled across the bed, big boots pointed toward the ceiling, mouth slack, and eyes closed. The other room was empty.

  In the kitchen Nora and Otis were sopping biscuit. Madson and Joe Robbie slept on a blanket by the stove. I rubbed my eyes and tiptoed to Nora. “You can have a biscuit too,” she whispered.

  Mama stood on the back porch. She had shoved her fists against the fabric of her skirt, the dress taut along her back. Soft hairs had come loose at the back of her neck, where the flesh was tender and smooth.

  “Did she hurt you?”

  I shook my head. I ate the biscuit to ease the pain in my belly.

  “I’m keeping an eye on Mama, I think she’s about to run off somewhere. Like the time she took us to the river.”

  I must have remembered. I guess I did, but I dreamed about the river too, her sliding down into it, and I could not always tell the difference between the dream and any memory there might have been. When Mama moved off the porch, Nora and I followed.

  Mama muttered as she descended from the porch and crossed the yard. She headed into the woods behind the house.

  She walked far enough to stand out of sight of the house, and we stopped short of her. She stood in a patch of sun falling down from on high, a dappling of her arms and of the dress she wore. Her hands rose up. It was as if they were separate things and they were rising away from her. She never made a sound.

  Mama rises out of the river gasping, throwing water from her hair. Her breath rises up in trails of steam. The surprise of seeing her move so freely still echoes in me now. Her large, flat breasts lift, the yellowed bodice of the slip clinging to the high flesh. She says something, I can’t remember what it is, something about the cold. But she addresses someone above my head, not me. Someone else is here, I can’t remember who.

  I was seeing this again in my vision as Nora and I shivered in the cold shadow of a tree. Mama stood in light, but it was as if she were drowning again, throwing up her arms as she sank into the golden sun.

  She steps ashore. She is standing over me, shivering and dripping, and I can see the outline of her heavy belly, her rolling thighs. I am so in love with her, every part of me aches. She scoops me up, and her arms are strong but soft; I burrow into them. I weigh
less than the wet slip.

  But this time she does not set me onto the riverbank, gently, as before. She glares at me coldly, as if I am some fish she has dragged off the end of her line, and she takes me by the shoulder and flings me high, end over end, into the middle of the river, and I sink into the cold, and I am falling forever, and I never look down.

  Mama made no sound in the sunny woods. Her hands sank slowly to cradle her belly. After a while she headed back to the house. When she passed Nora and me, hidden behind a tree trunk, she had no expression at all on her face.

  DEPUTY FLOYD TALKED to Daddy for a long time, on the front porch, and Mama waited in the kitchen. She had paled and hardly moved. We waited in the kitchen with her. Daddy closed the door when he went outside and now spoke in hushed tones; we could hear his voice but not his words.

  “He’s going to jail,” Mama said, and twisted her hands in her skirt.

  But the sound of the voices remained cordial and clear. I retreated to the corner, out of sight. Joe Robbie sat with Alma Laura and me. I felt safe.

  “I won’t have anybody,” Mama whispered.

  “How are we going to eat?” Otis asked.

  No answer followed. Mama touched the doorknob once, but Nora said not to open it. After a while Deputy Floyd drove away and Daddy came back inside. He fixed his eyes on Mama, and they glittered. “Haden says they picked up Cope in Luma. Got him in the jail. He’s headed there now to bring him back to Kingston. He says they ain’t going to mess with me, so you can wipe that look off your face.”

  “Cripple bastard,” Mama said, and a tear streaked her cheek.

  He looked at her and blinked. They were looking each other eye to eye. For once they did not say anything.

  WE VISITED UNCLE Cope in Johnston County prison. Mama refused to go. She was getting big with the new baby and swore it would be a hex to be in a prison.

  I had gotten the prison confused with the war, somehow. I was certain that all the people I saw there were soldiers, that this was the army, these strangely dressed people behind the cage-shaped windows where we talked. Daddy sat with Cope and asked him what it was like in prison, and I wondered if Uncle Cope would go to the war with the rest. Daddy and Cope talked about the Japs, as they often did; but I was nervous because I feared the Japs might lurk somewhere very nearby.

  Uncle Cope said the food was good and the people were nice. He was talking to his own daddy, my grandaddy Tote, and to my daddy, and to their sister Tula. They stood closest to the window and the rest of us were bunched behind, and because I was little, I could only glimpse a patch of the bald of Uncle Cope’s scalp. But I could hear his voice, sometimes. “They treat us real good. They got us making things. I can read books if I want to, but I don’t want to. I think I’m going to learn how to make license plates. You can pass the time right well. You-all don’t worry about me.”

  I searched for the faces of the enemy, the slant eyes, the yellow skin, of which I had heard so much on the radio. But the sad faces in the room were all the same color as mine, some browner, some more freckled. When the time was up someone lifted the little ones to kiss Uncle Cope’s cheek. I was barely old enough and large enough to escape brushing my lips against his pale cheek. I could almost taste the clammy skin.

  WE RODE HOME in Uncle Bray’s truck. Aunt Tula and Grandaddy Tote sat in the front, and Daddy declared he was stuck in the back with the rest of the niggers, and laughed at his own joke. I sat between his legs because he made me sit there, and dug his fingers into the space between my ribs. Nora stared at him and me. I felt a strange sickness in the pit of my stomach with him so close. The speed of the truck made a wind that whipped my hair across my eyes, but I sat perfectly still and never made a sound.

  We ate at Grandaddy’s house near Smithfield. Grandaddy lived with his oldest son Erbert, who hated Uncle Cope as much as Mama did and also refused to visit him in jail. Grandaddy’s house was even dirtier than ours, and plainer, with chickens wandering in and out and dropping turds on the floors. But the kitchen overflowed with things to eat, everything from ham for the biscuit to canned vegetables from the summer garden. Nora drank bowl after bowl of clabbered milk and stuffed her face with cornbread. I ate my souse meat and biscuit with the same relish. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

  Before we left, with Uncle Bray yawning and Aunt Tula complaining about prison, Uncle Erbert slipped something into Daddy’s hand. It was a paperback book, and I glimpsed a woman with naked titties on the cover before Daddy slid the smooth rectangle into his pocket. He caught me watching. His eyes sparkled.

  “All right Willem,” Aunt Tula said, “Get them younguns of yours in the truck and let’s get headed home.”

  SOMETHING HAPPENED to Uncle Cope while he stayed in prison. One morning Miss Ruby summoned Daddy to the Little Store to answer a phone call, and when he came back he told us the story. Grandaddy Tote had called him. Uncle Cope was cut up by a Mexican man, and he nearbout bled to death, according to Daddy, right in the prison yard. First the Mexican cornholed him, and then he cut him with a homemade knife. “He couldn’t run, because he’s crippled.”

  “Did they hurt him bad?” Mama asked.

  “What does it sound like, Louise? Jesus. They cut him across the stomach. Nearbout spilled his guts out. You can kill a man like that.”

  “What is a cornhole?” Joe Robbie asked.

  “It’s when a man does it to another man in the ass,” Otis explained.

  We were in awe, Joe Robbie and I, and we watched one another.

  “You younguns shut up asking them nasty questions,” Mama ordered.

  But Nora and Otis giggled, and Mama and Daddy hid smiles.

  “I’d ruther die,” Daddy said.

  “But I’m sorry he got cut,” Mama said, still snickering.

  UNCLE COPE RETURNED to live with us when he had served his time. By then his stomach had healed up and his guts were back in place. I tried to see his behind where the cornhole was, because the word had stayed on my mind ever since I heard it, but nothing showed through his britches.

  We had been told to keep our mouths shut about what we heard, but the very first night Otis got mad about Uncle Cope taking the bed in the kitchen again, and he called Uncle Cope a gimp-legged cornhole shit-ass. The whole story was out after that, and Uncle Cope, redfaced, screamed at all of us and waved his crutches till he collapsed on the bed. Because the bed was in the kitchen we could hardly leave him alone, so we blinked as he lay there in a spasm of fury. Otis laughed and Uncle Cope hurled a crutch at him.

  Later we would tell the story this way: Mama laughed so hard she went into labor and had Corrine almost on the spot. The truth was close to that; Mama’s labor did come on her during the laughter and at once the pains became clear and intense. She told us to find the colored midwife in Holberta and Otis headed toward the community of black people on an old, half-repaired bicycle he used to get back and forth from the Little Store. We still owed the white midwife for Alma Laura.

  Uncle Cope’s humiliation lay forgotten in the confusion of Corrine’s birth. But I remember him, curled up like a ball of spite in his bed, red-faced, glaring at every shadow in the room.

  I SAW THOSE EYES again, years later, when he caught me bathing when we had moved to another house down the road. Carl Jr. was working on an egg farm and we lived in the house rent free, in front of four long chicken houses full of white feathers and rivers of turd. Uncle Cope had a narrow bed in the back room with the boys, and one day instead of heading into that room to lie down he lumbered into the bedroom where we girls slept. I was naked except for my step-ins and socks, washing in the washpan. He shoved open the door and peeped in. He saw me and ducked his head. I laid down the white bar of Octagon soap and pulled the towel over my breasts, afraid. “Get away,” I said, and Uncle Cope tottered a little on the crutches. His eyes were rimmed with red, a line of fire. He looked me all over with his tongue hanging onto his lower lip. I couldn’t breathe. He hung on those crutches like he me
ant to come in the room. But I said, “You get out of here, Uncle Cope,” and I held that towel against me. After a while, he backed out the door.

  I told Mama that he had peeped at me while I was washing, and she slapped me sharp across the face and told me never to mess with that one-leg bastard again.

  I had a dream about that look in his eyes. Mama was calling him a cripple cornhole bastard; they were in the kitchen and they were arguing, and she called him a hundred names I couldn’t remember, and when I went in the room she was laughing at him and he was curled on the old, big bed, Uncle Cope curled up in a tight little knot with his eyes nearly swollen out of his head.

  Later, I warned my own daughter never to be alone with him. I warned her right to his face.

  UNCLE COPE VARIATIONS

  SOMETIMES THE MEMORIES come even and pace themselves one by one, neatly. Sometimes there are harder places, like rapids in the river, where I am dashed from one side to the other in my little boat. Sometimes there is one thing that I fix on, that I see again and again.

  Uncle Cope returned to live with us when he had served his time. By then his stomach had healed up and his guts were back in place. I tried to see his behind where the cornhole was but nothing showed through his britches.

  This much is true, but there is more, rising from inside me, wherever it had been hidden. I can remember the day even more vividly, if I choose to release more of the pictures. He came home on a June Sunday when a storm blew in. He rode the Trailways bus to Kingston where there was a small station, and then he hitched a ride to the Jarman store, and hobbled on his crutches across the bridge. The truck driver threw his box off the back of the truck and it landed near one of the round-eyed gas pumps, propped against the thick gas hose. Uncle Cope reflected on it, then swung on the crutches up the dirt road.

  The gash across his stomach had never been all that bad. The blade had failed to pierce the abdominal muscles, despite the stories, and his guts had always been right where they should be. The wound hurt him some, you could tell that much, as he crept up the road.