by Lee Smith
ORA MAE
If I hadn’t of been like I am, Parrot never would of loved me, and if I hadn’t of been like I am, he never would of left me neither. And I don’t know to this day which one was worse—the loving or the leaving—and I don’t care. He picked me a-purpose to fit his needs, never knowing he fit mine, too. But you do what you have to do, I say. It’s not a lot of choices in the world.
I wisht I didn’t know what-all I know, nor have to do what-all I have to. Seems like it’s been that way ever since I can remember, I’ve been working my knuckles straight down to the bone taking care of Cantrells.
Since I was a little girl and I come here with Mamaw, all them years ago but it don’t seem that long to me, I swear it don’t. It’s like you close your eyes and its five years gone, and you blink again and it’s ten.
But I remember that day just as plain. We come up the trace and it was raining, and I started hanging back. “Come on, Ora Mae,” Mamaw said, yanking at my hand at first and then switching my legs when I wouldn’t come. So I come on—nothing else to do, me naught but a little girl—and the farther I come, the more I felt these mountains closing in, and by the time I got up to the house it was like they had closed up in a circle around me. Even before he opened the door and I seen him, I knowed we was there to stay. I knowed I would never leave, and I won’t, I’ll be right here to the end of my days in Hoot Owl Holler. I know what I know but I wisht I didn’t, I’ve got the gift you don’t never want to have. Rhoda said it when I was not but nine or ten, and she was right. I didn’t want it then and I don’t now. There’s folks think they’ve got it, like Ludie Davenport, say, but by and large they don’t know a thing.
Rhoda called me to her oncet a long while back when she was laid up in the bed sick and there was a baby up on Snowman Mountain that had the thrash.
“That baby has not been able to suck for three days running,” Rhoda said. “Its mouth is naught but a sore.”
“Don’t tell me,” I told her, but Rhoda said, “I am. I have knowed you since you was a girl, Ora Mae, and we both of us knows what you know. It’s high time you got a move on. Now I am a-laying here in the bed with a foot swole up like a pun-kin, and somebody has got to go on up there and do it. Its daddy is waiting outside.”
I went over and looked out the door and sure enough he was out there, smoking cigarettes and stomping his feet in the mud with his horse tied up to a tree, didn’t look hardly old enough to have no child.
“Get Rose to go,” I said for meanness, and Rhoda said, “Don’t talk like a fool.” Rose was in the next room slobbering and mumbling, Rhoda had to keep her in the house by then.
I walked around looking at Rhoda’s house and all the stuff people bring her, and looking out the door at that boy by the tree. Rhoda had a little old monkey that smoked these trick cigarettes, somebody had brung it back to her from a trip. Another thing she had was a red velvet cake, which I have always been partial to. I got me a piece and sat down in the chair by the bed and ate it.
“You are a hard one, Ora Mae,” Rhoda said, watching me eat that cake. Then she sighed a long rattling sigh, trying to make me feel sorry for her, but I was wise to her tricks, I know all the tricks there is, from dealing with Cantrells. I got me another piece of cake and some apple cider.
“If I was to go up there,” I said, “just supposing I was, what-all would I have to do?” Of course I didn’t have no intention of going.
“It takes a woman that never knowed her daddy,” Rhoda said, “and that is you, and you breathe in its mouth while you say the three most powerful names, and that’ll get it. It ain’t hard.”
“And I ain’t a-gonna do it neither,” I said, getting up. “And don’t you send for me no more, neither. I ain’t a-gonna do it now and I ain’t a-gonna do it never,” I said. “You can just forget it.” And I went over and yelled out at that boy he could ride on home. He whooped and hollered and said his baby would die, but I said it wouldn’t. “You can just relax,” I said, and when he wouldn’t leave, I closed Rhoda’s door and locked it for good measure, and finally he rode on off, and it didn’t die, neither, just like I said. But I wouldn’t of gone if it had.
When I went back in where Rhoda was, she was sitting straight up in the bed with little old spots of red on her cheeks like rouge on a whore.
“Sit down,” she said, and I said I had to go, and she said it again and I sat.
“You are courting damnation,” she said. Old Rhoda was a pitiful sight sitting up in the bed with her veins showing blue in her forehead. “You know what Jesus said of the talents,” Rhoda said.
“Don’t talk religion to me,” I said. “I don’t believe in no heaven, or no hell. I don’t believe in a thing,” I said, and Rhoda said, “Then I’m sorry for you. Because you’ll end up one of the damned, Ora Mae, as sure as we’re a-sitting here in this room. Now listen to me. If you’ve got a gift and you don’t use it, it’ll turn on you, mark my words. If you keep it inside it’ll eat you alive from the inside out.”
“You’re a crazy old woman,” I said. “I know where Rose gets it now.”
“May God have mercy on your soul.” Rhoda rolled her eyes up to the ceiling like she was dying, but I know every trick in the book.
“Ain’t no God,” I said. “Because ain’t no God can account for Rose nor Mary, nor what I have to put up with day by day. What-all I have to do.”
“Ora Mae, Ora Mae!” Here old Rhoda got all wrought up and stretched out her hands to me over the covers. “You’re young, Ora Mae, you’re just a girl, and you’re a pretty girl, too”—that was a lie, Dory was the pretty girl—“and it ain’t never too late to change. Honey, come here,” Old Rhoda said, but I throwed my apron up over my head and run straight out of the house, wouldn’t say another word to Rhoda from then on until she died. Because already I knowed what I knowed, and I knowed what I had to do. If it wasn’t for me those Cantrells would of fell apart years and years back, and Mamaw couldn’t of made it without me, she’s said it again and again and it is true, I’m the only one she favors, you see why. Still, in my dreams some nights I’d see old Rhoda holding out her hands and saying “Honey,” and I’d wake up all in a sweat and directly I’d git mad as a wet hen.
Rhoda didn’t seem to understand that I had my hands full.
Parrot, come to think on it, didn’t neither.
I had my hands full of Cantrells.
You might think it was Mary, since she was so sick, or Jink who was naturally bad, but it was Dory that was the worstest one of them all. Dory was born without a lick of sense and I’ll swear it, I don’t know what would of happened to Dory if I hadn’t come along, not a brain in her head. And stubborn! You can’t tell Dory a thing and you never could. In one ear and out the other! All you can do is foller her around and pick up the pieces, all you ever could do. Not a notion of how the world is, or people, I’ve told her a million times. Took up with that schoolteacher, and I said not to, and look where it got her. Two loaves of bread in the oven, I said, and the cook is out to lunch. Ha! I said, but she never listened, or anyway she never listened to me, and now her and Little Luther’s got two more besides and she won’t listen to me any moren she ever has, I don’t know what she’d do if I wasn’t here to help out. Spoil them rotten I reckon, giving them bubblegum and painting their toenails, and taking up with whatever comes by wearing pants, like she always has, and expect Little Luther to put up with it which he always does. It makes me sick.
“You’ve got a good man,” I told her the other day, she wasn’t even listening, looking down that road, I’ll swear she’s a sight in the world.
“If I had a husband like him,” I started, and all of a sudden she fired back right sharp.
“You could of.”
“What?” I said. We was stringing beans out on the porch in the late afternoon, over at her and Luther’s.
“Yes, you could of,” Dory said. “You could’ve married Parrot and don’t say you couldn’t’ve, you know it’s true,
Ora Mae.”
She turned to me then with the beans in her lap and her eyes got so blue they were awful. Mostly it’s like Dory’s got something else on her mind all the time, no matter what-all she’s doing. “Why didn’t you?” Dory asked.
Just like her!
Parrot asked me the same again and again. “Why not?” he’d ask over and over. People like Parrot and Dory don’t know a thing. Why not? they say, instead of Why? They don’t understand that there is some people in the world that can’t just go around doing whatever the hell they want to. It’s like I said to Rhoda, way way back: it’s not any heaven, and it’s not any hell. All it is, is what you have to do, and you have to do what you have to.
But Parrot—Lord God. I’ve been thinking on Parrot ever since last week when we was stringing them beans and she brung him up again outen the years between now and then, where he’d be better off kept.
Well, Parrot. Things was not clear in my mind before Parrot, in a crazy way it is like he done me a favor and now I know what it was. Anyway when I met Parrot I was twenty-four years old, no spring chicken by a long shot, and every day was like the one before it and the one that would come after that, and it suited me fine. Almarine dead, and the boys gone and Dory pregnant—I didn’t want no more surprises. Oh, I knew they’d come along anyway, Cantrells being what they are, but right then I had my hands full taking care of Dory, and me and Mamaw was working the garden, we had too much to do already.
I went down to the store for seed and there he stood.
Parrot Blankenship was the unlikeliest-looking man, you never saw the beat of him. When I come in the store, he was leaned up against the counter with a catalogue open between him and Old Man Poole, talking a mile a minute. Old Man Poole was rubbing his glasses on a rag and shaking his head no, well you might as well have said no to the wind.
“Let’s just ask this little lady right here!” Parrot said.
I didn’t have time to take in a thing but that curly yellow hair and the mustache that didn’t hide the crooked mouth, nor all of them teeth, you never saw so many white teeth on a white man.
I stopped dead in the floor where I was.
“Howdy, Ora Mae,” said Old Man Poole.
I started to turn around and go right back out that door, but Parrot had grabbed me by the elbow and gotten me over to the counter where the catalogue was.
“Now if this store was to carry a real pretty line of ready-to-wear,” Parrot said—he had a voice just like a preacher—“wouldn’t you come in here and buy something from time to time?”
“He means dresses and such, Ora Mae,” said Old Man Poole.
I didn’t say nothing. Parrot and me was as different as night and day. I looked down at that catalogue and saw those fancy ladies in fancy dresses and one of them, I’ll never forget it, down in the right-hand corner standing with her hand on her hip in her underwear! And Dory made all of our clothes.
“No,” I said, “now let go of my arm or I’ll shoot you.” I made like to go in my purse.
“This is Ora Mae Cantrell and I guess she means it,” said Old Man Poole.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Parrot.
“Let go of my arm,” I said, and he let go but he throwed back his head and laughed that big laugh like he didn’t give a damn. And then he turned and watched me go, I could feel his eyes drilling holes in my back all the way out the door, I was mad as fire. I knew he’d come courting me as sure as I was born, and he did.
He come up the mountain the next day bringing me some flowers—did you ever see the beat of a man like that?—and Mamaw a calendar, and Dory a green glass necklace, and the kids a sack of rock candy. You could tell he’d found us out from Old Man Poole. I took the flowers and throwed them to the hogs, I said, “You’ll have to do better than that.” Which he did. The next time he brung me a brand-new hand mixer. “It’s better than nothing,” I said. Oh I was just as mean as I could be. “You’ll not make a fool out of me,” I told him right to his face, and ever time he’d come, I’d have something I had to do, I wouldn’t talk to him hardly, or talk to any of them people he sent up here to talk to me. Why you would of thought Parrot was born and raised up right here, the way he settled in and took up with them all. Talk? Talk you to death. Wore a checkered suit and a yellow tie.
Finally I took a walk with him just to shut him up—it was getting spring by then—and we went up Grassy into the woods and when we got up there far enough he grabbed ahold of me and started kissing me like crazy, that mustache all over my face. I knowed what he was after, all along. I didn’t care by then, neither. At least when he was kissing, he’d shut up. I hadn’t ever had a man then neither, or not really a man, you can’t count Nun and Bill and how you just fool around, nor even Hutch that time on the hayride over at the Breaks and he didn’t know which hole to put it in. I didn’t know neither.
Well, this was not a problem for Parrot. We laid down by the bend of the creek and he went right to it, and it weren’t too bad nor was it nothing special, and when we got done, I said, “Well, I guess you got what you was after. I guess you can go on back to wherever you come from, and get on back to doing whatever it is you do, and quit bothering me to death.”
“Hell fire, Ora Mae.” Parrot sat up and started putting his clothes on. He had real white skin with freckles all over, and thought he was God’s gift to women. “Don’t you feel a thing?”
“Nope,” I said. This was not quite true, but I was not about to let on to Parrot.
“I can have any woman I want,” Parrot said. He was stomping all around like a bantam rooster, getting dressed. “I don’t have to fool with you.”
“Then don’t,” I said.
“Goddammit, I won’t!” he hollered, and took off, but you know he kept coming back.
I was the only one that didn’t want him, he told Wall. He said to them all that he’d never get over me. This was why he was so taken with me, and the only reason, because Parrot Blankenship had had women all over the place and I was the only one he’d run acrost he couldn’t have. Oh I fucked him, I’m not saying that, I liked to fucked his eyes out as a matter of fact, but it didn’t mean to me what it means to most and that riled him up. I came around some, I got to where I liked it alright, but I would just as soon not do it as do it, and he knowed that.
“You’re driving me crazy,” he said. We was up in the room he rented from Mrs. Smoot and she was in Bluefield at a Baptist Ladies Auxiliary Convention. It was pouring the rain outside, June rain, steamy, it smelled like grass. “You know that, girl?” Parrot said. He laid in the bed smoking and I just laid there. “It’s like going on some kind of a trip with you.”
“What kind of a trip?” I said. Parrot had crazy ideas, they just popped out all the time he talked so much.
“The kind of a trip where you keep going and going and you never get there,” Parrot said, and then I understood. I know a lot more than I want to, I said it already, it’s true. And I knowed that Parrot Blankenship had got so took up with me because he was a traveling man, and I wasn’t going noplace. As soon as I got it straight I turned my face to the wall in Mrs. Smoot’s house and started crying. For one goddamn time in his life, Parrot didn’t say a thing. He put out his cigarette and rolled over to me and kissed me all over my body.
“Come on and go to Charleston with me,” Parrot said after while, still kissing me. “I’ve got some irons in the fire over there,” he said. He said he had to see a man about a prospect—Parrot was always dealing in prospects—“Let’s get out of this hick town,” he said. “I’ll get you some clothes.”
I kept on crying because it was like I seen the mountains all around me open up there for a minute, and I seen Charleston, and me over there with him and all dressed up, I knowed I could go if I wanted. I knowed he would take me, he really would, but iffen I’d of gone over there with him, I knowed he would leave me later, as sure as the world. I hate what-all I know. I kept on crying, but I laid there just as still while he kept kissin
g me on my shoulders and my breasts and my belly, every damn place, I laid there just as still while he did it, and every kiss burned like fire on my skin, I can feel them kisses yet if I’ve got a mind to.
Which I don’t. I’ve got my hands full of Cantrells who can’t do a thing without me. At least since Mary died and Jink left, it’s two more gone. But I’ve got plenty left to contend with. Mamaw down in the bed, poor Little Luther down in the mine, and Dory off down the road half the time with whatever the cat drags in, those children would of been dead by now if it wasn’t for me and that’s a fact. And Mamaw now she’s so old acts just like a baby again, big strong woman like she was, you wouldn’t believe it. Poor old thing has gone as mealy-mouthed as the rest of them. Lays in the bed and I have to bring her everything, she has to have a glass of water right there on the night table just so, if you put it on the wrong side she’ll yell and you have to get up and go move it. And if you fill it up too full you have to get up and go pour some out. Well I could go on but I won’t, you have to do what you have to. But it seems like it’s no time passed since she was out there killing them hogs and working the field, and not a streak of gray in her long black hair. Nobody fooled with Mamaw then, and nobody fools with me now. That’s the way it is. And Parrot Blankenship is someplace loose in the world, and he never got over me. I know it, but knowing it don’t help a bit. Still sometimes I think and I wonder, well what if I had give Dory that note, and what if she had gone off to Richmond? She wouldn’t have had her such a fine husband she don’t deserve, for one thing. Or what if I had gone off with Parrot, even knowing what I knowed? Who would of took care of Mary and Mamaw and all the rest? I’m all they’ve got.