With a Hammer for My Heart

by George Ella Lyon

  …

  The Friday right after my visit with Mamaw, I decided to talk to them about college, share the brochures and catalogs I got in the mail. I waited till the ruckus of supper was over, suggested Mom go watch TV while I cleaned up the mess. Then I asked them if we could talk. Dessie was off with a friend. Ray was trying to teach Jeff a card trick. It seemed like the right time.

  It wasn’t.

  “What’s this all about, Lawanda?” Dad asked. And no matter what I told them, how I explained scholarships and applications and my plans, all they would say was, “What’s this about?” Oh, they used different words—money and home and not rushing into things—but it all came down to them pretending this was some strange new idea I had. Like we’d never talked about me going away to school, making something out of my life. After an hour, I felt hopeless. It would take a million years to get them to where we could start talking. Ray might as well try to teach Jeff to play bridge.

  Finally I just gathered my pile of dreams and said, “You all are tired. Let’s talk about this another time.” I felt like their mother.

  …

  The only way I could get myself to sleep that night was to think about showing it all to Garland. He’d understand. As much as he’s read, he might even know the best place to go.

  So after breakfast and chores the next morning, I set off up the hill. I borrowed Dad’s jeans jacket with the flannel lining. The grass was spiked with frost and besides, his jacket felt like good luck.

  Garland was drinking his second pot of coffee. He poured some in the Hardee’s mug he keeps for me. “Fast food,” he said. “Don’t stay with you long.”

  We sat in our usual places in First Bus and I slid my material out of the big Clinch Valley College envelope. Had to use his knees and mine to hold the catalogs. It felt good, like we were conspirators. Then I finished.

  “Now see here, Lawanda,” Garland began, “I’d like to know what you think you’re doing, talking about going to school somewheres far off. We got schools here. You can go to that community college. Jobs is scarce, but you’re smart, Lawanda. They’d give you money to go to school. What’s got you so stuck-up you think you have to leave us?”

  “You know it’s not that,” I told him.

  “I don’t know nothing but that you’re looking to haul your fool self over the ridge.”

  “Garland …” I looked at him, trying to find what I might say that he’d listen to.

  “Well?” All of a sudden, I didn’t see him fierce and barrel-chested. I saw an old, hairy baby.

  “Everybody leaves when they get out of high school if they mean to make something of themselves.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing you’ve said yet.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “Oh, yeah, I know. They roll right out of here like them high-piled coal cars, and that’s one more load of heat and light we ain’t got.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t come back.”

  He glared at me, tightened his full red face.

  “Nobody has to spell sun to me, Lawanda. I know what comes up of a morning.”

  Well, I’d just about had it. Dad, Mom, everybody was on me. And now Garland. I thought he’d be on my side. What did he have to do with it anyway?

  “What the hell has it got to do with you?”

  When I said that, something snapped in the air like the recoil from cutting tight wire. Garland grabbed the wheel of the bus and pulled his weight around to stare out the windshield. All he could see was a wall of sky and the rear end of Second Bus. I waited. He sat there, stony as the mountain.

  I was still mad and at the same time I wanted to get up and put my hands on his shoulders, to take it all back. “You are two people, Lawanda,” I said to myself. “Theirs and yours. If you ever expect to get out of here, stay put.” So I did. But I apologized.

  “Okay, Garland, Pm sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. But you don’t know how it is. Every time I open my mouth, somebody’s onto me. Every idea I have, they wad up like so much trash. Pm fifteen years old—did you ever think of that? I can’t stay with Mom and Dad forever. I can’t spend my life with Mamaw. I’ve got to be going somewhere.”

  “This bus don’t roll.”

  “I know that.”

  “So don’t think if you go away you can just come back.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m alive, Lawanda. ” He was still facing the windshield.

  “I know that too.”

  “You can go off and leave a bus but a person needs tending to.” He closed his eyes.

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?” I was getting mad again. I stood up. He just sat there. “Come on, Garland. Pm not a well you can drop your thoughts into. What are you talking about?”

  Nothing.

  “Look at me!” I was practically screaming.

  “All right, goddamn it! Sit down.” He turned around. “You!” he said, like it was a filthy thing rolled to the front of his mouth. “Fifteen years old! Baby Moses going to crawl to the Promised Land. You make me sick.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t get sassy with me, Lawanda Ingle.”

  “You’re not my daddy.”

  “How do you know?”

  He leaned forward in his seat, the leather cracking. A woody smell of whiskey rode his breath. I leaned back. Dad had said he was dangerous. Was he crazy?

  “My daddy’s Howard Ingle. You know that.”

  He narrowed his hard blue eyes.

  “You make me want to puke.”

  “It’s your bus,” I told him.

  “Yeah, and you’re in it. The best thing in it. And that’s how I like it, Lawanda.”

  Fear went through my stomach like a knife.

  “And I like to be here,” I said. “But I’m not a book, Garland. Not something you can order and keep.” He belched. “I’m not a bottle either.”

  I stood up. So did he. I started to turn toward the door, but his hands came down on my shoulders. He hardly had to push at all and I sat down.

  “Listen to me, Lawanda.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I can’t stay long.”

  “Ain’t that what we’re talking about?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re scared,” he said.

  “Maybe.” I stared right into his cold red-threaded eyes. “Not as scared as you.”

  “Aarrglch!” He made this sound like he had the worst chest cold in the world. He put one big hand over his face.

  “Garland?” Oh God, I thought, he can’t be going to cry. He took his hand down and looked at me.

  “Baby girl,” he said, “I’ve lost more than you’ve ever heard of. Go on home now. Come back when you’ve got something to say besides good-bye.”

  TWO

  JUNE: Something’s bothering that girl. Now she’s gone off up the hill with Mommy. What a pair: Lawanda, who thinks the world will open its arms, and Mommy, who believes God already did. I don’t know what to think about it.

  Now I have always loved my mommy, and not just because I had to. But it’s not been easy. Kids teased me from the time Mommy got churched about her being crazy and traipsing off to heal people.

  “Junie thinks God lives at her house!” Eddie Duff would holler.

  “And wears an apron!” somebody would throw in. I never mentioned it to Mommy.

  Pap said to pay them no mind. “World’s full of people who can’t tend to their own business.” I wanted to ask him what he thought about Mother Jesus, but I knew better. That was between him and Mommy. He’d never let it out.

  So I still wonder. Pap’s not had it easy. Been rode hard and put up wet most of his life. Mommy was what he had, his comforter. Sharing her with us younguns—well, we didn’t rob what she gave him. Leastways, that’s how it’s been with Howard and me. Love for my kids just makes me love their daddy more. But if I got crazy over God like Mommy did—why, it’d be worse than if I took up with some other man! Who could go to bed with the
Lord there between you? I never could reckon it.

  If they fought over this, I didn’t hear it. Maybe Pap was out plowing down angels in the field; maybe they wrestled after they packed us all off to school. Ada and John. Set out tobacco together, suckered it, hoed and weeded and topped it. Raised com and beans and potatoes, kept a cow and pigs, raised hay. Worked sunup to sundown and then some. “And still not past going,” Pap says.

  Which is true, but sometimes I think he’s getting close. Not in the body. He’s kept moving, so he’s not froze up like a lot of folks his age. It’s his mind that worries me. Like the other Sunday when we were setting on the porch, talking about how pretty the leaves were, about Ray out squirrel hunting, and out of nowhere Pap said, “That would have been in the Great War.”

  “What, Pap?”

  “The way it was with phone books. Well, you wouldn’t remember.”

  “No,” I said, my insides seized up. I waited a minute or two and he just gazed off at the gold-and-red hillside. Then I said, “Pap, we weren’t talking about the war just now.”

  His eyes flickered at me. Did he know he’d gone off?

  “Two sides to a conversation,” he said.

  When I brought this up to Mommy, she laid it on work. “He’s tired is all,” she said. “I try to get him not to work so hard, but I might as well tell winter not to come.”

  So there you are. Pap and Mommy are as closed off from me as when I was a little girl. And Lawanda’s found her own world, too. You belong to yourself and your husband, I guess. Can’t expect much else. You’re lucky if you’ve got that. Sure looks promising when you have those babies, though.

  Now here’s Lawanda reaching out to Mommy. What does Mommy know about the world Lawanda lives in? Can a feather scare up college for Lawanda? Can it save her from her own foolishness? Where smart don’t get to, Lawanda’s real stupid. And stubborn! Stubbornest creature ever born, except Mommy and Howard Ingle. Her and Mommy are a good match in that.

  Lord knows what they’re doing up there, roaming the ridge like it was May, not November, Mommy with only a rag of a sweater. Lawanda never thinks of that. She never thinks how Mommy’s no spring chicken. Mommy don’t either. She’ll drop dead canning or cleaning fencerows or driving these hills at night, calling her headlights Mother Jesus’ eyes.

  I don’t know what to do with either one of them—except put on some coffee to thaw them out when they get home.

  LAWANDA: I have to tell you I was shook up about Garland. I’m not sure what I was scared of except that he might not let me get away from First Bus. I was mad at him too. Why did he have to spoil things?

  At the same time, somehow I hurt for Garland. He wasn’t like I thought, strong and sealed off in himself. No, he was suffering and I didn’t know why.

  I couldn’t ask him. I was scared to go up there again.

  For days I kept turning this over. I could just stay away, but I missed his company. I could tell Mom and Dad, but that would be the end of that. Who could I talk to? Finally I settled on Mamaw.

  I didn’t see her again till right before Thanksgiving, when she came over to take my cousin Trula to the dentist and I put it to her.

  “Mamaw, let’s take a walk.”

  “On this road? The coal trucks’ll run us down.”

  “No, up the hill behind the house. I want to show you something, see what you think it is.”

  That pleased her. Mamaw is our plant namer.

  Halfway up the path, she asked, “This thing a tree or a herb?”

  “Neither one.”

  “What’s on your mind, Lawanda? You’re looking peaked.”

  “It’s a long story. Let’s go on up to the laurel rock and sit down.”

  We did. Mamaw has this amazing way of sitting with a big hand turned palm up on each knee. She looks like she’s waiting for something from heaven. Probably is.

  “I’m listening,” she said. And the story coiled so tight in me unrolled like a lock of hair.

  Mamaw’s face didn’t change. Once or twice she put a hand up to shade her eyes. Then when I was finished, she said, “You been praying about this?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then I reckon it must be him.”

  “What?”

  “Doing the praying.”

  “Garland? He wouldn’t ever—”

  “Hush, Lawanda. First off, you’ve just proved you don’t know this feller. And second, praying don’t have to mean getting on your knees.”

  “What does it mean then?”

  “Prayer is whatever you do in the direction of God.”

  “Mamaw …” This wasn’t helping a bit.

  “You know how a plant you set in a window will grow toward the sun?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “That’s prayer.”

  I studied on that a minute. And on Mamaw, fierce and soft, sitting on the rock slab, her blue housedress faded as the sky.

  “When it came right down to it,” she went on, “your friend turned toward the light.”

  “Came down to what? I thought he’d be glad for me.”

  “Amos Garland is an old, old man.”

  “Amos? He said his name was Garland, first and last.”

  “Well, it’s Amos.”

  “And he’s not much older than you, is he?”

  “I’m not talking about years, Lawanda. I’m talking about how much a person has been worn away.”

  She took off her glasses, blew on each lens, then cleaned them on her dress tail.

  “I never really knew Amos, but I was friends with his sister Chloe. She kept store at Redbird when I was a new-married woman. Lord a mercy, Chloe was pretty. Men would come plumb across Pine Mountain just to look at her. Then they’d feel foolish and buy a sack of nails or a little box of peppermint sticks.”

  Mamaw stopped to collect her thoughts, and a cardinal called down the ridge. Who’s here? Who’s here?

  “Ain’t that pretty? Who’s here? Who’s here?” she called back. Then she was quiet.

  “Mamaw?”

  “What, Junie?”

  “It’s Lawanda. Mamaw, are you getting cold?”

  “I reckon I am. This rock’s found my rheumatiz.”

  “Let’s climb up a ways farther and walk the ridge in the sun.”

  Helping her up, I felt ashamed that I’d been troubling over Garland while my grandmother sat listening, stiff with cold.

  “Amos was in the war,” Mamaw began when we were up in a little clearing. “ ‘In heavy fighting.’ That’s all he wrote to Chloe. His wife said he was wounded, decorated, and sent right back to the front. I don’t recall which ocean he crossed. He wasn’t a young man either. Amos had been a schoolteacher, married, with his own younguns. Most likely, the army wouldn’t have called him, but for some cause he wanted to go.

  “I remember when Chloe heard he was coming home. She had a flag in the window, put streamers up in the store. ‘Welcome home, hero!’ she printed on butcher paper, made a banner to go above the door.

  “Nora was his wife, and Chloe went with her to Cardin to meet the bus. After they watched everybody get off and didn’t see him, they asked the driver if there was a soldier asleep on the bus.

  “ ‘That there’s our only soldier,’ the driver told them. And he pointed to a heap of rags leaned against the wall.

  “Garland?” I asked her.

  “Chloe said he was skin and bones and he stank. ‘Like a dog in a cage.’ And he acted wild, too. Tore Chloe’s banner down with one paw, shouting, ‘Hero? Then tell me why I ain’t dead.’

  “Drunk was what he was, drunk and dirty. And when she bathed him, Nora said he was all over scars.

  “What happened to her?”

  “Chloe or Nora? Nora was a wife to him for as long as she could be. He was sweet sometimes, but he was crazy, Lawanda. Couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t let the kids out of his sight. Once Nora came home from the store and found Delbert chained to the bed. Eight years old and his daddy had him in
chains.

  “Finally, Nora took the younguns and left.”

  “Left him crazy?”

  “Not before he tried to kill her. Thought she was the enemy sneaking up in his sleep.

  “After she was gone, it looked like he’d come and live with Chloe. Then she got shot—”

  “I can’t believe this,” I told her.

  “Nobody else could either. A man who’d been driving from La Follette just to buy cornmeal shot her in the head. Said she’d promised for years to run off with him. Nobody even knew his name. That’s when Amos went to live in the bus.”

  “Where did he get the buses?”

  “Second one’s a ruined city bus. The first one, the school board sold him cheap.”

  “And he had children?”

  “Lord, yes. Let’s see, there was Ardith and Delbert and Nancy Catherine, and then a baby who came after the war. I remember Chloe being so scared for that baby. …” Mamaw shook her head. “He’s probably got grandchildren by now. Could be your age. Amos is only a year or two older than me.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t know if anyone does.” She stopped a minute. “I reckon that’s why he claims you.”

  MAMAW: I didn’t say this to Lawanda, but I knew after our talk I’d have to go see Amos. I just told her to wait, give me time to think.

  Driving back to Little Splinter Creek I wished for the old road, gravel path alongside the creek. I like to ride rough when I’m doing hard thinking. Like the wheel to pull against. That smooth tongue of a road we got now can sail you along like you was singing and you headed down the gullet of a big mistake.

  Trula was numb and sleepy. She’d had her sweet tooth silvered.

  For some cause, what came to me was the night Lawanda was born. Noonie and Ray had both been struggles—one big-headed and the other one backward—but a couple of hours’ solid work and Lawanda was here. June couldn’t believe it.

  “You sure it’s all done?” she kept asking Doc Combs. “Afterbirth and everything?”

  “All’s left for you to do is name her, and you can wait on that.”

  But June had already settled on Lawanda, “with no middle name to mess it up.”

  That baby was a sight—long-legged, smiling, and hungry for the world. Hasn’t changed a bit.