Mama shuffled us into the kitchen and around the corner. We cowered down on the plywood floor by the pantry and the door that opened into the utility room. There was another door in the utility room that led to the side yard. I fantasize now about her grabbing her purse and keys and getting us out of the house that way, back into the car and to somewhere safe, but that didn’t happen. She was probably too scared to even think of it. I don’t know when he started threatening to kill her, her parents, and us if she ever left him, but I think it was a running theme. Mama was trapped, silenced, and controlled by him. We were trapped with her. We sat there in the kitchen not knowing what to do but wait for him to calm down.
I had to go to the bathroom and couldn’t hold it. Mama got a bucket out of the utility room and told me to go in it because she didn’t know how to get me down the hallway to the bathroom without crossing Daddy’s path. I did as I was told and squatted over it. Adrenaline coursed through my veins and I was literally scared shitless. Mama expressed her dismay at my ill-timed bowel movement, whispering to me that she didn’t know I had to do all that. I just shrugged my shoulders and we sat there trying not to notice the freshly laid turd while we waited for the storm to pass. I wish I had a clue about what she was thinking.
Daddy patched the window the next day and wanted to take us all down to Mobile to go shopping. Mama cried and said she didn’t want to go.
“Well, just stay at home and rot yo’ ass, then.”
He finally either talked her into going or sulked until he got his way, so off we went to Mobile, trying to look some sort of normal. We never went to choir practice again.
“Shelly and Alice, two little dolls…”
W. T. Purvis never could get our names right. He was the emcee at the fiddlers’ conventions we’d enter every spring—usually a Saturday night in April. Most folks have no idea what a fiddlers’ convention is. When I talk about how we got started singing and mention them, I just say it’s a big talent contest, and it is. Prizes go to best fiddler, soloist, vocal group, and buck dancer. I decided one year that I could buck dance and entered that category of the contest. I couldn’t dance my way out of anything but trouble and just stood in one spot scraping my feet out to the sides—twice on the right, twice on the left—like a dumbass. Someone should’ve discouraged me. Buck dancing was not my talent. Singing, however, was no problem. Mama and Daddy would rehearse our numbers with us, and Daddy would never hesitate to tell us what and what not to say, how to stand, and sometimes even what to wear. Mama sat in the audience for our performances but Daddy lurked closer, as close to the stage as he could without actually getting on it. There was no backstage area other than the yard behind the school. Sissy and I would always take home either first or second place in the vocal group category. She would also always take a prize for her solo performances. We’d have to wait for hours to find out who had won because the night was so long—we’d usually fall asleep in someone’s lap and wake up to our names being called after the bake sale was finally over.
“T for Texas,” “When Will I Be Loved,” “Hound Dog”—Sissy took the lead, I took the high harmony.
We’d cash our checks the following Monday at Earl Johnson’s store and be thrilled about having a little pocket money. Hell, the twenty-five dollars apiece was more than would fit in our pockets. Sometimes we had to share it with Mama for gas money. It hurt to give it up but we always did. Of course we did.
Things seen through windows
Daddy gave Coal away but kept his copy of Water Dog. We drove to somewhere in Mississippi not too long after he decided a water dog wasn’t for him to get a Blue Heeler puppy. He was the softest, cutest, best puppy-breathed white fuzzball I’d ever seen. We named him Bullet.
Bullet looked more like a Red Heeler than a Blue. But who am I to say that Franklin Moorer might’ve been ignorant about something? Daddy said he was blue, so he was blue.
At the window one afternoon. Watching him work with Bullet when he was still just a puppy, teaching him commands for working cows. Bullet would sit when he was told to, but a back leg would stick out to the side. It infuriated Daddy. Bullet wouldn’t and couldn’t sit straight, with both legs pointed forward. No exceptions were made for his back legs being too long to do that. Daddy should’ve known that Bullet wouldn’t have wanted to displease his master. Among breeds, Heelers are apparently the tenth smartest.
I looked out onto the spot of yard at my favorite tree, the one with the perfectly rounded top like the trees in my storybooks, and watched Daddy and Bullet just to the left of it. Daddy got pissed at Bullet for the sticking-out leg or not responding to a command fast enough or I don’t know what. What I do know is that he picked him up and hurled him into the tree. Bullet’s leg was broken.
Mama said once that any man who beat his dog would beat his wife. I didn’t ask her what she meant. I think I knew what she meant anyway.
Daddy rushed Bullet to Chatom to the vet, Dr. Henson, who was Gus’s brother. Gus is married to Katharine, Daddy’s sister. Dr. Henson’s office was down below his house, where he lived with his wife, Betty Jean, who always put pretty ferns across their front porch. Dr. Henson fixed Bullet’s leg, but after that, Bullet always limped when he got tired from working in the heat with Daddy.
On the back of a square-format photograph of Bullet from the early 1980s there is, in Daddy’s handwriting, a notation. “Tough cow dog, Bullet—with summer wt. loss from heat.”
Bullet went missing during the time Mama ran the restaurant. We were gone so much he might’ve wandered off. Dandy thought someone stole him but Daddy never said anything about it at all. I’ve often wondered if he killed him.
There were three windows above the kitchen sink—the ones the lamp went through. I stood there on a Saturday afternoon when I was around ten or so. I could see the entire yard that separated the house from Daddy’s workshop. Mama and he were walking from the workshop toward the house and I was drinking a glass of water from the tap, watching them. We had a well so the water was always cold. Or maybe it was a bit of iced tea from the pitcher in the refrigerator. Who can say? I don’t recall. What I can say is they were arguing. I could tell by the familiar looks on their faces.
Daddy hauled off and kicked Mama. Hard. On her right thigh. I don’t know why other than it was because he was mean and probably drunk as usual. Mama grimaced and grabbed at the spot where his foot had landed. Sissy came up behind me just in time to see it too. I burst into tears and ran to the back of the house to my bedroom with Sissy following me. I flung myself onto my bed and cried. Sissy said it would be okay. I thought that Daddy had treated Mama like he would treat a dog. I thought that he would end up hurting her too bad for her to recover one day. That was the day I started to know. That was the day I started to expect what he would end up doing. That was the day I knew he had no regard for her.
Mama slept on the couch in her clothes that night. She was wearing shorts. I was the first to rise on Sunday and I found her on the couch asleep. I stood over her and looked at the baseball-glove-sized, eggplant-colored bruise that had formed on her leg.
Her face was sad. The corners of her mouth turned down. I thought about the old, hard barnacles on Daddy’s houseboat and decided that’s what I felt like.
I DON’T LIKE MAKING LISTS OF HURTS. THERE IS THE SUGGESTION that’s all there was when I go over thing after thing. It’s not true that hurt is all there was. But living life afraid makes you kind of crazy. You start to question everything. Can I speak? Is it okay to move? Can I ask for anything? Am I going to get thumped on the head if I’m too loud in the backseat of this car? Do I matter? Am I safe? Do they notice? Am I even here? Where can I go to get safe?
Counting
I think I started it the day after he threw the lamp through the window. The day he insisted we all go to Mobile after his ridiculous and furious outburst that sent glass flying everywhere and caused me to have to go to the bathroom in a bucket while sitting in the kitchen. It started with th
e mile markers on the road.
1 plus 4 plus 5 is 10.
1 plus 8 plus 7 is 16.
1 plus 9 plus 8 is 18.
Every mile provided a new sum for me to concentrate on.
When any harsh word was spoken or my world was thrown into upheaval I would start the counting. Letters in words, words on paper, books on shelves, buttons on clothes, numbers on mile markers. I even counted the number of times I would chew my food, always achieving an even and equal number on each side of my mouth before I would swallow. The same principle applied to gum or candy.
I would sometimes just bite the insides of my mouth or lips, only stopping somehow when I tasted blood or the raw, ragged tissue of the insides of my cheeks began to come off and roll around on my tongue. Those things were safe. No one could see them. Mama always bit her fingernails. Anytime Daddy saw her doing it he’d knock her hand out of her mouth. I kept my comforters hidden.
I didn’t know I was dissociating when I lay in bed one winter morning, still in the earliest stages of wakefulness, around the same time I started the counting. I don’t know which brought the other on. I felt as if I was drifting away from myself, like I was falling and would never hit the ground.
The Riddler came into my mind, flailing and plummeting in a never-ending ocean of black coffee. We used to watch reruns of Batman after school and I was scared of him. I knew I was lying there, but my mind and my body felt like they were flailing and plummeting too as the coffee rippled in soft waves over his body. I could even smell the coffee, which might have been coming from the kitchen.
The Riddler and the coffee then sank away from my mind’s eye until the vision became the size of the head of a pin but wouldn’t quite totally disappear. It got farther and farther away from me, as if the Riddler in the coffee and I were both lost in space and floating away.
I couldn’t have been more than five years old. I lay there puzzled and scared. I didn’t understand what was happening in my head or why I would wake up feeling like I did. The floating away from myself sped up at a seemingly exponential rate and was accompanied by a whooshing sound in my ears.
This was the opposite of counting. This was something I couldn’t control. I got it to stop, finally, when I squeezed my eyes shut so tightly that I gave myself a headache and a queasy stomach.
I got out of bed, wondering if I was going some kind of little-girl crazy, silently asking myself why I felt so panicked and what had happened to me.
I get panicky thinking about it now. It still happens. I still run away inside my own mind. Now I sometimes see myself as an inanimate object, falling farther and farther away from where I’m supposed to be, farther and farther away from close-up and connected. It still scares me and I think I won’t come back. I have to stop it. I close my eyes and shake my head to stop it these days.
I didn’t run to tell Mama about it when it first happened. How could I explain something that I didn’t understand? I knew it hadn’t been a dream, I knew that it hadn’t been really real, even if it felt like it had been. It was only in my mind. What did it mean? What necessity had mothered this invention? I didn’t know what was fragmenting or shattering inside me, but I didn’t feel whole.
Some Saturday mornings (The Backbone continued)
Sissy could make a batch of delicious cinnamon rolls by the time she was ten or so.
Make biscuit dough.
Roll it out with a rolling pin.
Spread butter and cinnamon sugar all over it.
Roll it back up, tightly, into a long cylinder.
Cut it into pieces.
Put them on a baking sheet.
Bake them in the oven at about 400 degrees for twenty or so minutes.
While they’re in there, make a mixture of confectioners’ sugar and water that your mama told you to make sure you got the lumps out of. Use a whisk if needed.
When you get the cinnamon rolls out of the oven, pour the liquid sugar over them while they’re still steaming hot. It will harden and make a glaze.
Sissy wouldn’t always make them, especially when the weather was warm, but when she did it delighted me.
We got up before Mama and Daddy did. Grabbed our cane poles. Went down to the pond below the house with Bullet in tow. Fished a little, caught mostly bream no longer than our hands. Put them in a five-gallon bucket filled with pond water to pick up later. Then headed down the hill through the woods to the fence that separated our property from Mammy and Dandy’s.
“Whooo!”
The Moorers had a special talent for calling each other with a holler. Dandy would hear us and within ten minutes or so come meet us at the fence with two paper sacks full of snacks. Vienna sausages (pronounced vie-EE-na where we lived), maybe some red-rind cheese and crackers, a Little Debbie or two if they had any, and always a cold can of Co-Cola. He fixed his in a glass with plenty of ice when he’d come home from the pasture or timber woods. Placed the glass on a folded napkin. Nervously folded and unfolded that napkin until it was a frayed mess, only slightly resembling the form it was in when he first folded it, especially if he had to talk to someone on the telephone.
“What’chall doing, babe?”
He’d ask us as he passed the sacks of snacks over the fence. We’d evade the questions about Mama and Daddy. Didn’t want to say they were probably still asleep. That would’ve brought a disapproving look. I think Mammy and Dandy knew something about what went on up the hill.
Mama always said to never say anything about any of it, but to run down to their house if anything ever happened. We never did either thing.
SISSY AND I DIDN’T TALK ABOUT IT MUCH. WE CERTAINLY never mentioned anything about what went on inside of our house outside of our house. What could we have said about all the trouble anyway? We were children trying to make sense out of something that made no sense. We were children just trying to get through our days, as everyone does, adapting to this or that, constantly adjusting ourselves to the current state. We bore it like a weighted blanket that provided no consolation, calm, or contentment, only the grave heft of what was. I think we’d both have done just about anything to change what was happening between Mama and Daddy, but we must’ve known we didn’t have any power beyond our well-honed distraction techniques. I would find out later that Sissy was a counter too, mostly of her footsteps.
Our parents, of course, were the common denominator in our lives. But we had music too. We were surrounded by it. We both sang before we could really talk. I didn’t understand until later how special it was, and that not everyone could sing three-part harmony and find their part by just listening to a few notes. I didn’t understand until later that not everyone’s Daddy had a reel-to-reel tape recorder set up in the house to capture us singing at every opportunity.
Those are sweet memories. I loved going over to the singings at Nanny and PawPaw’s house. Nanny would put the word out and everyone would gather to eat and drink, socialize, and ultimately congregate in her den. Most of her thirteen brothers and sisters could play at least a little; some of them could play quite well. Her brother Clyde had perfected a great G run on the guitar and sounded at least a little bit like Jimmie Rodgers. Her brother David had a booming baritone. Gene, her third brother and one of the youngest, had a gorgeous voice but he lived over in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with his wife, Rachel, so they didn’t get over to the singings very often, but it was a delight when they did. Most everyone could sing a part or two and they had their own language about doing it. If someone got on someone else’s part they were called a “wanderer,” and to protect your part you were told to “grab it and growl.” When their house burned down during Nanny’s childhood, she said the main things they were worried about saving were the old guitar and the records that her daddy always somehow found the money to buy.
“Come here, meat, let me beat ya.” What a thing to say to a child, but we knew Mammy meant she wanted to love on us. We’d go over to her chair in front of the wall of windows in the den that looked out o
ver the driveway and the two-lane road and sit in her lap awhile. She’d rock us back and forth and talk. Mammy had a biting tongue, but that was only because she was as smart as a whip and saw through bullshit like it was a glass of water. She simply had no patience for it. She was also generous and loved us, though she only saw her way to doing it by saying things like “let me beat ya” and buying us the school clothes we needed every fall plus something special every Christmas.
Sometimes I’ll do or say something that’s exactly like her and I have to laugh.
Everyone we grew up around was so definite. There wasn’t much wishy-washiness in any of our folks, not like there is in most people these days. Most people you meet now are spoiled for choice, so they end up making exactly no choices and just float around on the wind, going wherever it takes them. It must be miserable to have all that lassitude hanging about you. Sissy and I never got to be wishy-washy when we were little so we’re not like that now. We never got the opportunity to not know something, so not knowing something now makes for extreme discomfort. I intellectually know that sometimes you just don’t know. But “I don’t know” was never an acceptable answer when we were children.
WE WERE COUNTRY PEOPLE. WE WOULD SPEND FULL days out in the pasture, riding around in the truck, exploring the woods, going down the creek in the canoe, or swimming in it when it was hot. Sissy and I learned to swim in Dry Creek, what we called a particular part of the Santa Bogue that ran through the Moorer acreage. One of Daddy’s favorite things to do was to pick us up by one arm and one leg and throw us out into the water so he could see if we could swim. He got a kick out of it. That’s how he knew to teach us and it’s how we learned, despite his having been a lifeguard at the Jackson pool one summer. He swam beautifully. I think of noticing then how the water would roll off of his oily, beautiful olive skin in perfect beads. I thought he could and would do anything. His recklessness scared Mama to death. She thought you shouldn’t go in the water if you didn’t know how to swim and to my knowledge she couldn’t. Daddy thought you’d never learn if you didn’t.
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