by Jim Grimsley
At night, we lit the rooms with kerosene lanterns. Otis carried the five-gallon can to the Little Store whenever it emptied, and filled it, and bought wick or begged credit for what he bought, and came home. When school was in session, Nora did homework by the dim light; but she worked at it fitfully, without much hope. At thirteen, she was in fourth grade for the second year. Otis never studied or did homework at all. Being only in the first grade, I hadn’t much homework yet. But I was beginning to notice what was what about books and paper.
For days that winter we hardly ate. On the coldest days we stayed absent from school, and I, who had already learned to love the whole going away it involved, sulked in the corners. I had to hide my unhappiness from Mama, who had no tolerance for my pouty moods, as she termed them. “I never seen a child love school before, not in my life.”
She had caught me, crouched against a wall near the stove, a sour look on my face. I whispered, “It’s not that cold, I could’ve walked.”
“No, you couldn’t, missy, you shut your mouth.”
“You would freeze your hind end out there, Miss Smarty.” Nora opened the iron grate of the stove to poke the burning log. Bright embers shot high.
“You goddamn right you would.” Daddy’s voice re sounded. “You set your ass right where it is like your mama told you.”
Daddy and Carl Jr. were home a lot in those days; it was too cold for logging crews to form. Daddy was sober out of necessity: there was no money even for drinking.
Soon after New Year’s the yard covered with snow. Joe Robbie and I were delighted to see it, since we had never seen snow before. A softness, like white chicken feathers, only finer and stranger. Mama watched with a sour face as it blanketed the yard. Bitter wind blew up through the floorboards and streamed around the loose window frames. We stuffed summer clothes in all the cracks and wore everything else we had; we huddled near the stove, almost close enough to scorch ourselves. The wood burned faster than anybody could imagine, and we wondered if the fire would last till morning.
Nora and I went to bed wearing our clothes. We took the baby with us, because Daddy said him and Mama needed the bedroom to themselves. Corrine made soft noises and pedaled the air until the quilts and blankets settled over her.
“Keep her head above them covers,” Nora commanded.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“It was a baby in Smithfield smothered to death in the bed with his sister, and he died, and now his little sister hears him crying all the time.”
“Corrine can breathe, can’t you, Corrine?”
“But what about in the night when she gets twisted up in the covers?”
“She won’t.”
“Shut up,” Carl Jr. muttered from the other bed, “people trying to sleep.”
We kept Corrine between us and tucked ourselves around her. The three of us rested in our warm nest, listening to the wind howl through the house. Soon came the regular creaking of Daddy and Mama’s bed, across the thin wall, behind a door that barely closed.
What they did there was called fucking or screwing, and Otis knew a lot about it. One cold night, when the rhythm made noise, Otis said, “Goddamn, the whole house is rocking,” and Carl Jr. laughed.
Joe Robbie asked, “What is it?”
“Nothing, Joe Robbie. Go back to sleep.”
“No, tell me.”
“Ain’t no use to tell you, honey,” Otis said, “you ain’t got no peter no way.”
Carl Jr. said, “Hush that.”
From Otis’s descriptions, I understood that when Mama and Daddy were fucking, Daddy liked to lay on top of Mama and do it. “He lays all over top of her,” Otis revealed, “and then he does it and he does it till he goes real fast and then he can’t do it no more.”
“He don’t,” Joe Robbie whispered, because Otis made everything sound nasty.
“He does. I seen it. He lays all over top of her and he sticks his thing into her and he does it.”
“That’s not nice.”
“You don’t know what’s nice or not.”
“Hush,” Nora said, “don’t none of you have no business talking about it.”
“Mama loves to fuck him,” Otis said, red-faced, and Nora stood in front of him, squinted her eyes, and struck the palm of her hand across his face as hard as she could.
The fat in Otis’s face flushed bright red in the shape of her slap, and he shoved her hard, backward, across the bed.
“You goddamn bitch,” Otis said.
“Call me another bitch and I’ll slap the shit out of you again.”
From the bedroom, Daddy called, “You younguns better hush that fuss before I have to come out there.”
“Nora slapped the shit out of me,” Otis shouted.
“If I have to come out there to you, I’ll slap more than shit out of you, you little son of a bitch.”
Silence followed. The creaking of the bed began again.
We listened sometimes. All of us. The sounds took on an eerie edge, with us hearing and knowing, together. When Mama and Daddy reached their high peak of breathing and the creaks of the mattress ran together like a voice, we watched each other and, usually, someone laughed. The laughing choked us all, because we could not let Daddy hear us, at such a crucial moment. “You don’t want to mess him up at the end,” Carl Jr. noted, and Otis snorted, and Nora blushed.
Even Joe Robbie understood the joke, some. He laughed, and refused to look me in the eye.
Once the topic lodged in my mind, I learned about sex everywhere. One cold evening in the bedroom, Otis asked Carl Jr., “How does a snake fuck?”
“I don’t know. I never heard anybody who seen it.”
“A mama snake lays eggs,” Nora added, chipping the ice that formed over a bucket of water during the night. “A mama snake can crawl right over your face and lay a egg in your mouth, and then the egg will hatch and next thing you know you’ve shit a snake.”
“It’s a lie,” Otis says.
“Gramama Baker says it’s so.”
“You haven’t talked to Gramama Baker.”
“Yes, I have. Aunt Lucy wrote me.” Aunt Lucy was the only one of Mama’s sisters who could read or write.
“Did she tell you how they fuck?”
“No.”
“The man snake can’t crawl on top like a dog does,” Otis explained.
“Why not?” Carl Jr. asked.
“Cause it ain’t nothing on top of a snake.”
“How do you know? You ever been on top of a snake?” Carl Jr. and Nora laughed, and Otis blushed to his collar.
“No I haven’t. Smart-ass. But I know it’s no pussy on top of a snake.”
“You talk so nasty.”
“A snake got a pussy somewheres.”
“Well, Otis, you sure talk like you want to find it.” Carl Jr. reared back in the chair when everybody laughed, and I startled myself by laughing too, because I suddenly understood the joke was funny. That pussy word was nasty, and Otis was nasty for wondering about how to find one on a snake. Then I remembered that I too had a pussy, and I felt suddenly confused, as if I should sneer at the thought, the way Otis did when he said the word. As if I should sneer whenever I thought about my pussy.
One day Daddy said to Uncle Cope, while they were drinking sweet coffee and watching another snowfall, “Norbit Holland would stick his peter in a knothole if he wasn’t afraid of splinters.”
They were discussing a man who had recently broken a leg in a logging accident, working with one of the few crews that was trying to clear timber during the snow. Norbit Holland was Nina Holland’s daddy, and Nina was the only other girl in my class who came to school in dresses as faded as mine. I paid attention to the part about Norbit Holland’s peter, because of the way Daddy said the word. A slight curl to his lip, and a sharp glint in his eye. He sometimes said the word “dick” the same way, and it had begun to occur to me that peter and dick meant the same thing. The little baby peter I had watched flopping uselessly on
Madson’s stomach was the same dick that Norbit Holland was willing to stick into a tree.
“Norbit wouldn’t know if he got splinters in that ratty dick of his, he ain’t got enough feeling left in it.”
“I seen that boy fuck a goat one time.”
“You full of shit.”
“No, I seen it, I swear.”
Uncle Cope wrapped a quilt tight around his shoulders and shoved his feet closer to the stove. “Well, I reckon I’d as soon fuck a goat as fuck his wife.”
“That’s a fact.” Daddy’s eyes lighted on me and moved away, as if I had suddenly become invisible. I was scrubbing the biscuit pan with a cloth, because Nora said it was not clean enough. I had tucked myself, with the pan in my lap, into the corner behind the stove, a warm spot, but closer to Daddy than I liked to be. “That woman has got a dog pussy hung on her. I swear.”
“You ain’t seen it.”
“The hell I ain’t. It looked like a pussy you would see on a wolf. I swear before God, that woman had fur.”
“Shit you say, Willie Tote, you ain’t seen no such of a thing.”
“Hell, Cope, she’ll probably show it to you if you ask her to.”
Between my legs was smooth and dry. Even without my hand there, I could feel it. But when my daddy talked about Nina Holland’s mother, I felt a strange thing. I felt the nastiness of myself.
Mama sat with Daddy sometimes, wrapped in a quilt of her own. She rarely spoke, except to laugh at Uncle Cope’s and Daddy’s dirty jokes. Once in a while she would say something, like telling Nora not to sweep over Otis’s feet with the broom or else he would never get married, or asking Daddy what day the ration coupons came. We listened to the radio, about Eisenhower, the yellow devil, the Hun, and Roosevelt. At night we heard Little Jimmy Dickens and Grandpa and Grandma Jones, as long as the batteries lasted. Otherwise we sat in the echo that formed around our voices. We fought the cold, ate what we had, and waited.
WHEN I LOOK back there, turning over and over the memory of that hard winter in a house not fit for people, I amaze myself that my hatred does not burn me crisp. Even then, I must have begun to understand. Other children had already begun to teach me about living. Other children lived differently than we did; they did not have to gather wood in a picked-over forest in shoes too tight, with socks for gloves. Other families had sausage with the biscuit in the morning and meat in the beans at night. I could not have said these things, but I was beginning to know. I followed Nora through the dark rooms of the shack, through the barren woods with my arms full of branches, or to the cemetery at the edge of the churchyard. I followed Nora and carried Corrine and began to know.
MAMA SAID
MAMA SAID YOU should be careful when washing dishes to keep the front of your blouse dry, or else you would probably marry a drunk.
Nora washed dishes carefully, holding the flat low part of her stomach away from the wash pan. Sometimes she took a towel and tied it around her waist. She washed each glass, each dish, with careful, deliberate movements. Water rarely overlapped the edges.
When I began to wash dishes, with Nora as my teacher, I was careful as I could be, but sometimes I splashed water on my blouse.
Ellen will marry a drunk for sure, Mama said. Ellen can’t stay dry at the front to save her life. You’ll marry a drunk, Mama said, and blinked, and looked at Daddy who had fallen asleep with his feet near the stove.
Mama said if you drop the rag while you’re doing dishes, and the rag hits the floor before you catch it, you’ll have company before the floor dries. Mama said, I know we’re going to have company today, and I looked at the wet rag on the gray floor boards. This was the next house, Piney Grove, after we finally moved away from Holberta. Nora glared down at me as I picked up the rag. “I ought to slap you,” Nora said. “Get me a clean rag.”
Nora was angry at me, and I would marry a drunk. I was still staring at the wet spot on the floor when Aunt Tula knocked at the door with a bushel of butter beans.
“I brought the younguns something to shell,” Aunt Tula announced. “You can eat these. My beans is coming off good this year.”
When you go into a house, use the same door you came out of the last time, or else you’ll have bad luck the whole day. Mama said, “Tula, you can’t come in that door.”
“Hush, Louise, this is the right door.”
“No, you left by the front door last time.”
“I did not.”
“Yes, you did. You was talking to Cope about something anothers, and you dropped your pocketbook on his foot. His good one. You remember.”
“Lord have mercy.”
“You got to come in the front door. You don’t need no bad luck.” Aunt Tula remembered all of that and walked around the house to the front door. She thanked Mama, afterward, for her prudence.
We shelled the beans. All day we had been chopping cotton; it was easy work to sit on the porch and slide my thumbs along the edge of the pod, splitting it open to reveal the easy bean inside. Nora and I did the shelling. Corrine stood near Mama’s skirt with a fist full of biscuit, gnawing it slowly. Mama, swollen with another child, sat near us, chewing from the same bread.
Never sew on a Sunday, because for every stitch you make, you’ll shed a tear within a year. This was Aunt Addis’s house, and I was sitting on the brocade couch; Aunt Addis had handed me needle and thread, but I was watching for the cat. Aunt Addis kept a cat, mostly in the yard, and I was terrified of it; my hands trembled as I threaded the needle with a blue thread I had never seen before, both bright and dark at the same time. We were sewing on a Saturday but Aunt Addis repeated the wisdom she had learned. I never sew on a Sunday anymore, she said. Do, you’ll cry the whole year through. I sewed one time on a Sunday, she continued. It was the year my babies died.
I visited Aunt Addis because she was taking care of Daddy’s mother, Nana Rose. Nana Rose had shriveled to the size of a big spider and sat in Aunt Addis’s dark front bedroom, propped on pillows nearly bolt upright in the bed, wearing a checked bonnet, as if the sun were very bright. She chewed the inside of her lip and glared out the window, the curtains of which were kept open so she could watch the path at the side of the house. I helped Aunt Addis with Nana Rose’s bedpan, helped with the wash, changed the linen, helped Nana Rose in and out of bed. Now and then Nana Rose fixed on me with her eyes and knew me. Aunt Addis told her my name many times.
“Your daddy is a sorry son of a bitch.” Her thin, long hand with the sharp fingertips dug into my shoulder. She had slid out of bed and decided to speak according to whatever laws were at work inside her head. “I know. He’s my son. And he’s as sorry as that goddamn daddy of his.”
“Hush, Mama,” said Aunt Addis.
“Don’t tell me what to do.” Nana Rose arced a hand weakly toward Aunt Addis and caught her across the cheek with the softest of slaps. Nana Rose often slapped Aunt Addis like this, and sometimes she could manage a pretty good lick; Aunt Addis blinked, her jaw working. One day she would slap Nana Rose back, I thought.
When you have a bad dream, make sure you eat something before you tell the dream to anybody, or else it will come true; Mama said this too. Like the bad dream where Alma Laura was drowning and could not reach the top of the water. Or the dream I had so often, where Mama stepped down into the river, the skirt of her slip floating up around her legs, and the cold like a sharpness in the air. When you had a bad dream, you were supposed to eat something before you told the dream. But when you have a good dream, you should tell it before you eat anything. Then it will come true. Mama took me to the porch, early in the morning. The sun had begun to color the edge of the horizon; we stepped onto the porch that faced the chicken yard. This was years later, after Nora married and left the house. I was the oldest daughter now. Mama whispered, “I dreamed Carl Jr. was alive.”
Or the dream I had, later, that I was Frog Taylor’s daughter and June Frances’s sister; or the dream that Bobjay drowned in a flood; or the dream I still have sometim
es, that I hear a knock on the door and open it and there is Alma Laura, prim and neat in a sweet conservative dress, almost as old and stooped as I am. She holds the end of her string of pearls the way I do my diamond brooch. She grins as big as the full moon, and I invite her into the house. We have fresh sweet tea with lemon and I show her my garden. As usual, Alma Laura never speaks. She has grown to a handsome old age, her skin still strong and clear, her lids not quite as drooped as mine. But my hair is darker, she has more gray. We tour the garden and return to the kitchen. There, we step back and study each other. We are prosperous. We have lived to be old and comfortable. Alma Laura smiles with serene satisfaction. Vanishing then, always, after that moment of perfect contentment. Sometimes the dream continues past that point, and I am looking everywhere to see where Alma Laura has gone.
Or a hundred other dreams I could think of, that I would have wanted to come true, at least in bits and pieces, if I could have found someone to listen before I ate.
Mama said, when you see a blue bird make a wish, and if you see a red bird next, your wish will come true.
We were walking in the woods along the shore of the pond or the bank of the river. I heard the hollow echo of birdcalls over water. We were following Mama, and she walked faster than we. She carried a bamboo fishing pole over one shoulder. We were small, Nora and Carl Jr. and Otis and me. Carl Jr. carried me part of the way. We were headed to go fishing with Mama, who was hungry for fried perch. We walked so fast the branches whipped back at our faces.
Mama came to the riverbank and stripped her cotton dress over her head. When I remember this, it is suddenly too much like my dream. She wore the white cotton slip and in the heat the sides of the slip clung to her damp thighs.
She laid down the bamboo pole and reached into the can of worms she carried, that Nora and Carl Jr. had picked out of earth they had spaded in the backyard. Mama pulled out a fishing worm that stretched and popped in half. Over her head, a whir of wings, flew a blue bird that flashed through the clearing. See a blue bird, make a wish, Mama said, and closed her eyes.