“My Uncle Vertis asked me to give you this,” I handed Boo the sack without answering about the beggar-lice.
Boo pulled a switchblade out of his pants and snapped it open. Around the hilt was a dark rusty color that could have been dried-up squirrel or rabbit blood or even rust for all I knew. On the other hand, it could have been from whatever fight caused that slope of scar on his face. He ran a callused finger along the edge of the knife. Judging it sharp enough, he slashed the shoestring the bag was tied with, shaking a couple bills and some change into his hand.
Picking out a quarter, he handed it to me. “You girls look like you could use a pop. It’s hotter than a hound in heat today.”
Of course I knew the right thing to do.
Instead, I took the money.
With his black hair, bandana, and that knife glinting in the sun, Boo looked like a pirate. His wife started singing “Power in the Blood,” the baby still nursing at her breast. “There is power, wonder working power, in the blood of the Lamb,” her voice softly keening. “Power, power, wonder working power, in the precious blood of the lamb,” she sang, never once looking up or saying a word to any of us. The child unlatched from her breast and yawned, showing a full set of baby teeth. Milk dribbled down its chin.
“You tell your uncle it’s a pleasure doing business with him,” Boo said. “And tell him I’ll be returning that hammer of his next time I come down. Everything’s working slick as snot.”
Sissy and I had got ourselves into a situation. Practically getting yourself shot by a moonshiner wasn’t near as much fun if you couldn’t tell about it, fancying it up with each telling.
But we couldn’t tell a solitary soul.
Not about going on the Galway property. Or seeing the moonshine still. Or taking the quarter from Uncle Vertis or Boo either. We couldn’t even say we’d talked to Boo. Since either bragging or confessing was likely to get us in trouble with one or the other of them, I thought the best way to deal with our sins was to keep our mouths shut and put the money in the offering at church on Sunday. Before I could fully plead my case, Sissy took the quarters and threw them as far as she could into the weeds.
“What the heck did you do that for?” I asked.
“St. Mary’s doesn’t want moonshine money,” Sissy said, just like she had asked the Methodists about it the last time she was there.
I hoped she wouldn’t blab to anybody at church about us taking moonshine money from Boo. We’d disgraced ourselves enough that folks were likely still talking about it. A few weeks back the two of us had sung “Fairest Lord Jesus” for morning service, but the music was so loud I couldn’t hear Sissy and I doubted she could hear me. I know we sounded awful because Patty Greer told me so. She was one of my best friends, and that is something she would not lie about.
I was still fuming about Sissy throwing the money away. If she didn’t want to give it to the Lord, the least she could have done was give it back to me. I didn’t talk to her all the way home. She kept trying to get me to slow down, but I’d got it in my head that Boo had seen us snooping around at the Galway place. I kept looking back to make sure he wasn’t chasing us, waving a ball-peen hammer in one hand and a bloody knife in the other, lunging closer with every step he took.
When we got back to the house, Aunt Nalda and Uncle Vertis had been in a fuss over him buying moonshine from Boo right there in broad daylight with Grandma not much more than spitting distance away. Besides, the egg money Aunt Nalda kept hidden in her sewing basket was short two dollars and fifty-three cents. Uncle Vertis was a little drunk, but not drunk enough to admit he’d been into Aunt Nalda’s egg money and spent it on moonshine.
“Nobody but a sorry-no-good-for-nuthin’ would steal a good Christian woman’s egg money,” he said.
“That same no-good-for-nuthin’ better see it gets put back in there.” Aunt Nalda gave him a steely look. “Just to make sure, I’m keeping that saw you borrowed from Boo until it does.”
I’d heard Grandma tell Mother if Aunt Nalda wanted Uncle Vertis to quit drinking, she needed to stop nagging about it. “Nagging would drive anybody to drink,” she said. “And a man with a weakness for alcohol didn’t stand a chance.” Grandma took the boy’s side in most everything. “You get yourself right with the Lord and He’ll convict you of drinking that poison,” Grandma told Uncle Vertis. He hated to be preached at, so she snuck it in a little at a time like doses of medicine.
Uncle Vertis said maybe one day he’d up and quit cold turkey, but he didn’t feel the need just yet. Sprawled on a salvaged car seat that was part of a matched set being used for porch furniture, he put his head back, pulled his hat down, and closed his eyes against the sun.
We finished up the molasses making, the last a boiling of blackstrap, before we drove the few miles home, our plans for going to the pines abandoned because of the moonshine and the commotion about it. Aunt Nalda invited us back the next day to make up for it.
“I figure we might as well eat up that watermelon we got chilling in the springhouse,” she said. “Only the women going this time. Your uncle is likely to be a tad under the weather.”
I was real mad about that. If Uncle Vertis wasn’t there, who would kill a snake if I happened across one? Or carry me down the mountain if I broke my leg? The next day Aunt Lila and Vonnie decided to go with us, but Grandma stayed home. She said the strawberries needed tending, but I knew it was because of Uncle Vertis buying that moonshine. It wasn’t fair. Grandma was needed to keep me out of the poison ivy and to rub the fur off my peach. It was Uncle Vertis’s fault, every bit of it, and I wasn’t about to forgive him.
The next day Grandma made flapjacks for breakfast so we could try out the newly jarred blackstrap we’d brought home. Grandpa, who hadn’t had much of an appetite lately, managed to eat part of one. It was, he declared, the absolute best blackstrap he’d ever put in his mouth.
“Oh Clev, you always say that,” Grandma said.
Grandpa was having a bad day, he’d had a lot of them lately, and it dawned on me that was why Grandma was staying home. Once I figured that out, I was glad she wasn’t going with us, but it scared me too. It was the first time I ever thought the bellyaches could kill my grandpa. That he could actually die had never crossed my mind.
We drove back to Daniels and climbed up the mountain to the pines, all of us acting extra jokey. We ate our picnic of meatloaf sandwiches and watermelon, the women sitting on the ground and talking while me and Vonnie slid halfway down the mountain on cardboard we’d brought home from Calloway’s grocery store.
“Your uncle fixed up a surprise I’m supposed to show you girls.” Aunt Nalda walked us to a clearing where a swing hung from high in a lone pine tree.
Higher and higher I pumped. I could see the house and truck and make out the line the creek drew around the foot of the mountain. Flapjack, grazing in high pasture halfway up the mountain, swatted at flies with his hairless tail. But here, upwind of him, the air tasted of pine and of the cloyed sweet of decaying trees.
Higher and higher.
The mountain fell away beneath my feet.
26
All the Bells Were Ringing
There was a pall came over 211 Bibb Avenue the day my grandpa died. I don’t know how I knew, but I did, that life as I’d known it since I had memory was to change on that day. I was twelve years old.
The bellyaches that doubled him over had worsened. Finally, because the doctors didn’t know what else to try, they split him open gullet to guts. “Full of cancer,” they told Grandma. Nothing to do but sew the strangely crooked gash back together with a coarse dark thread. We brought him, weak and wounded, home to die.
Grandma put him in the guest bedroom downstairs, the one where his mother died years earlier, the one usually reserved for visiting preachers and missionaries. He lay in the big poster bed enduring pain that was unendurable.
I sang his favorite hymns. I talked to him about the almanac and the new kittens and Queenie and Bos
sy and the extra warm weather. I refreshed his pitcher of water and refilled his coffee cup. I read Scripture to him every morning and the Raleigh Register every afternoon, skipping the obituaries, of course. I sat in the dark of night and held his hand.
The truth is, I did none of those things.
I couldn’t bear to go into that room, not unless I had to. When I heard him moaning, I’d holler for Grandma. I’m not proud of that, but I just couldn’t.
Grandpa reached for the brown bottle of Hadacol on the bedside table. He unscrewed the cap and took a deep pull, shuddering as he swallowed it down. Hadacol was advertised everywhere—on the radio and in the newspaper and on signs along the road—and claimed to cure a whole bunch of ailments. Grandma said that Sister Wood said it helped her neighbor who was afflicted with crippling arthritis, so Grandpa agreed to give it a try. Since the Hadacol eased his misery better than anything so far, Grandma kept a bottle on hand, although the $3.50 price was sometimes hard to come by.
One afternoon Grandma was reading the newspaper to Grandpa when an article caught her eye. The makers of Hadacol were being forced to stop claiming it could cure everything from asthma to sinking spells because they couldn’t prove a bit of it. They’d got away with it by saying it was a tonic, not a medicine, and it did contain vitamin B and some other things that were supposed to be good for you.
But it was the next line that got them both stirred up.
Hadacol, she read, was twelve percent alcohol. Why, it was even being served up in shot glasses in some beer joints—it said so right there in black and white.
No doubt about it, my teetotaler grandpa was a boozer, albeit unknowingly.
And Lord help her, my teetotaler grandma was supplying him with the booze.
Even though a couple swigs of Hadacol gave him a blessed few hours of relief, from then on Grandpa refused to touch a drop. I watched Grandma turn the bottle upside down over the sink until it was empty, her mouth set.
During the warm spring evenings, we played croquet on the strip of lawn beside the house—me and Vonnie, Sissy, and the young couple from across the street. Sissy’s red-striped mallet hit the matching wooden ball and skittered my green one across the clipped lawn, ricocheting off the side of the house.
Thwack.
Mother came out on the porch and stood watching for a minute, her head stiff like it might fall right off her neck. Her green eyes were dark with suffering. I could tell she had The Headache. I capitalized it in my mind because it wasn’t just any old run-of-the-mill headache. It was the one that sent her to bed for three or four days, hunkered under the covers to escape the light.
“Y’all can’t be making all that noise. The racket’s bothering your grandpa,” she said, never mentioning that it wasn’t doing her headache any good either, but then she’d never been one to complain.
Although we were careful to steer the balls away from the house, before long another one would go astray.
Whomp.
And she’d appear again, green chenille robe clutched around her.
“Okay, that’s enough for tonight. It’s getting too dark out to see anyway.”
We’d have a molasses cookie and a glass of milk before heading up the stairs to bed.
“You two better get your britches down here and brush your teeth before you go another step,” Mother scolded, her face smeared white with cold cream.
We climbed onto the banister, saying, “Yes ma’am,” as we slid past her.
“You know your grandma’s gonna skin you alive if she catches you doing that,” she said, wiping her face with a clean white rag.
She bent over to brush her hair a hundred strokes, so we could tell her headache was easing off. We ran to the top of the stairs to slide down again.
“Okay, but that better be the last time,” she warned. “And don’t anybody come running to me if they break a leg,” she added without looking up.
“We can’t come running if we break a leg,” Vonnie said.
“Well, it wouldn’t do you any good if you could.”
At night, when the house was quiet except for the moans and occasional snores coming from Grandpa’s room, I’d lie in bed, eyes closed, and see him, peart and wiry, going about his day, me tucking along behind.
There we are, out hoeing the garden—him at one end of a row and me at the other. He steps off a ten foot square and puts a stake at each corner.
“That’s your garden,” he tells me, “and you can plant anything you want long as you tend it.”
I choose leaf lettuce and green onions, yellow tomatoes and little red tommy-toes. I dig and plant and weed and fertilize. When my garden comes in, Grandpa lets me pick the salad makings for dinner.
“Looky here what this little handful of girl did,” he says. “Why, them boys larping around over at the drug store can’t hold a candle to her.”
I see us sitting in the back yard, swigging lemonade from jelly jars.
When I say we’re larping around, Grandpa says oh no, what we are doing is way different from those boys. “Larping,” he says, “is aimless lazy, while ours is rest we earned by hoeing rows of beans.” And if anybody doubted us, we’d just show them our hands. “See there,” he’d say, opening my hand up in his, “me and you have the calluses to prove it.”
Next I’m plaiting a little braid in his hair, right on top, and tying it with a red ribbon. It’s soon time to leave for Wednesday prayer meeting, so he puts on his hat and we head out.
When he takes his hat off at the church door, Grandma’s face blanches. “For land’s sake,” she says, “what on earth will that child think of next?”
“I wouldn’t venture to guess,” Grandpa replies, shaking his head.
Grandma hurries to undo my handiwork before the red ribbon calls attention and she’s forever disgraced by my foolishness.
As the scenes slow to match my breathing, Grandpa is passing his hat for a visiting preacher. Sister Wood, Grandma’s best friend and the church treasurer, asks him why he takes collections for every preacher and missionary coming through when he won’t take a penny for himself, not even for gas money.
“We’ve got enough for all of our needs and some of our wants and plenty to share with those who don’t. Seems to me we’re making it just fine without it,” Grandpa tells her.
When I wake up, there is a change to the order of things. Grandma isn’t up to her elbows in flour. There’s no smell of ham frying and coffee perking on the stove. Mother and Grandma hover over Grandpa all morning, watching the quilt covering him quiver with each raggedy exhale. Time ticks by, unmarked except for listening for his next breath. There is a pause in the breathing, then another breath, a gasp really.
Then the breath I keep waiting for doesn’t come.
Doc Cunningham comes and goes, his worn stethoscope hanging limp from his neck, the black electrical tape Mother used to repair it for him months ago starting to come undone. Grandma and Mother come out of the bedroom crying.
“He’s dead,” Grandma says. The words strangle in her throat.
She wipes her worn face with a wadded-up handkerchief, then closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, straightens her back and walks to the kitchen and puts the coffee on the stove to perk. She pulls her mixing bowl and breadboard from the cupboard and begins the task that has started her days for the past fifty years. And while the biscuits bake, she waits for the funeral home to come for Grandpa.
The air is thin and sticky as spider webs. I can’t suck enough of it in to keep me breathing.
I reach for Vonnie’s hand and pull her outside.
We sit in the back yard, the place we call the park, bare toes pushing into the patch of earth beneath the swing to keep it going a little. I close my eyes and I’m sitting there with Grandpa, my feet scuffing the ground. “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you drag your feet,” he says.
Two of the neighbor ladies, ones I don’t know too well, come to the back door and start to knock. They notice us in the
swing and one calls out. “We’s just wantin’ to know how the mister is doing.” Her voice jars into the utter despair I have no words for.
“He’s dead,” I manage to answer, repeating Grandma’s words.
I remember feeling sorry for those women, dressed in their visiting clothes, ones that were not quite church-worthy, but still too good for every day. They probably said things meant to make us feel better, about how he’s in a better place now, or at least he won’t have to suffer anymore, but I don’t remember any of it. What I remember is how fast they managed to get away from our house, away from the scene they’d blundered into, away from death. I couldn’t blame them. I didn’t want to be there either.
When I close my eyes that night, there’s my grandpa again, squirting milk from Bossy, our Jersey cow, straight into my mouth, me squealing for him to stop—no, do it again!
We’re in the woods together. Grandpa’s chopping down a Christmas tree and dragging it to the car.
Next, he’s saying grace at the kitchen table.
“Lord, we just thank you for this food that we are about to receive and ask that you use it to the nourishment of our bodies. We pray in the blessed name of Jesus. Amen.”
It could have been dinner or supper, maybe breakfast, I forgot to notice what was heaped on the platters, but it doesn’t matter, because he said grace every meal.
Grandpa, smelling of Bossy and Old Spice, is walking me to school in a snowstorm, and without him saying so, I know he’ll be waiting there to walk me home.
There he is preaching at a revival, his Bible held up to the heavens, his voice reaching to the far corners of the tent. “Amen!” he shouts, his voice soaring over the congregation. “The Lord is raining down His glory as we’re gathered here to worship Him tonight! Yes sir! He’s raining down His glory! Let’s praise Him as we turn to page 384 in our hymnal and sing ‘There Will Be Showers of Blessing.’ ”
I see him with hobos or gypsy boys or with a bag of squirrels he’s brought home from a hunting trip, dumping them on the ground for me and Vonnie to pick the best tails to hang from our bike handles. “They’s a pair of red ones in there oughta match up real nice,” he tells us.
Running on Red Dog Road Page 17