“Don’t!” I grabbed her, pulling her back, doing it as gently as I could so I wouldn’t break the stitches from her operation. She had her other arm clamped across her abdomen and couldn’t fight me at all. She just kept shrieking.
“That little bastard just screams and screams. That little bastard. I’ll kill him.”
Then the words seeped in and she looked at me while her son kept crying and kicking his feet. By his head the mattress still showed the impact of her fist.
“Oh no,” she moaned, “I wasn’t going to be like that. I always promised myself.” She started to cry, holding her belly and sobbing. “We an’t no different. We an’t no different.”
Jesse wraps her arm around my stomach, presses her belly into my back. I relax against her. “You sure you can’t have children?” she asks. “I sure would like to see what your kids would turn out to be like.”
I stiffen, say, “I can’t have children. I’ve never wanted children.”
“Still,” she says, “you’re so good with children, so gentle.”
I think of all the times my hands have curled into fists, when I have just barely held on. I open my mouth, close it, can’t speak. What could I say now? All the times I have not spoken before, all the things I just could not tell her, the shame, the self-hatred, the fear; all of that hangs between us now—a wall I cannot tear down.
I would like to turn around and talk to her, tell her . . . “I’ve got a dust river in my head, a river of names endlessly repeating. That dirty water rises in me, all those children screaming out their lives in my memory, and I become someone else, someone I have tried so hard not to be.” But I don’t say anything, and I know, as surely as I know I will never have a child, that by not speaking I am condemning us, that I cannot go on loving you and hating you for your fairy-tale life, for not asking about what you have no reason to imagine, for that soft-chinned innocence I love.
Jesse puts her hands behind my neck, smiles and says, “You tell the funniest stories.”
I put my hands behind her back, feeling the ridges of my knuckles pulsing.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “But I lie.”
Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee
My Grandmother Mattie always said my Great-grandmother Shirley lived too long.
Shirley Wilmer, of the Knoxville County Wilmers, married Tucker Boatwright when she was past nineteen, and he was just barely sixteen. Her family had a peanut farm off to the north of Knoxville, a piece of property they split between the five sons. Shirley was the only daughter. Her inheritance was a cedar chest full of embroidered linen and baby clothes that she and her mama had gotten together over the years—that and sixty dollars in silver that her daddy gave her, a fortune in those days. Granny Mattie swore that when Grandma Shirley died, those silver coins were still tied in the same cloth in which she had gotten them.
Two of Grandma Shirley’s children died of the flu after gathering melons on a frosty fall day. People swore you could cure the flu with a bath of hot oil and comfrey, but Shirley wasn’t the kind to gather herbs and certainly not the kind to spend her silver on someone who would. She’d never wanted children anyway—not really—and hated the way her body continuously swelled and delivered. She called the children devils and worms and trash, and swore that, like worms, their natural substance was dirt and weeds.
Shirley Boatwright believed herself to be one of the quality. “The better people,” she told her daughters. “They know their own. You watch how it goes; you watch how people treat me down at the mill. They can see who I am. It’s in the eyes if nothing else.”
Mattie, the oldest girl, watched the way her mama’s lips thinned and tightened, the way her sisters and brothers held their own mouths pinched together so their lips stuck out. Shirley Boatwright was proud of getting on at the mill and of how much she earned there, as proud of that as she was ashamed that Tucker still worked in the coal mine.
“A tight mouth,” Tucker Boatwright was heard to say. “A tight mouth betrays a tight heart, and a shallow soul.” His wife said nothing, but pulled her lips in tighter still, and the next day Tucker found the doors locked against him when he came home from the mine.
“Woman, what do you think you’re doing?” He beat on the front door with a swollen dirty right fist. “Woman, open this door!” He spit and shouted and kicked the base of the doorjamb. “Kids, do you hear me? Shirley? Woman?”
Inside, Shirley Boatwright sat at her kitchen table sipping hot tea and staring straight ahead of her. Mattie stood at the sink with her hands flat to the nozzle of the pump. She stood still, unsure of how she could get past her mama to let her father in the door, and absolutely sure that if she tried it, she’d find herself locked out with him before either of them could get inside.
“Put on another kettle,” Shirley told her, looking directly in front of herself and using only her right hand to smooth her hair behind her pristine white collar. “Make me up another cup of tea.” Outside, Tucker went on screaming and kicking. Mattie made the tea while the other children sat quietly on the stairs to the second floor. After a while, the shouting let off and Tucker stomped off the porch. Shirley fed the kids sidemeat and grits, and then put them to bed.
When they got up the next morning, Tucker was sitting at the kitchen table drinking cold water and looking like someone had tried to pull out all his hair. He said nothing, but at the end of the week, he quit his job in the mine and took a position at the JCPenney textile mill.
“A machinist is a higher class of man,” Shirley told the children.
Tucker never got the hang of fixing the big bobbin gears. He’d had a fine talent for the winches and pumps at the mine, but the cables and wheels of the spinning machines confused him. After a few weeks, he found himself standing in front of a wheeled cart, pulling off full bobbins and popping on empty ones. His ears rang with the noise and his eyes watered from the dust, but Shirley just shrugged.
“Mill workers are a better class of people than miners. I never planned to live my life as a miner’s wife.”
Tucker Boatwright took to slipping whiskey into his cold tea, while his blue eyes faded to a pale gray.
The Boatwright children had bad dreams. After supper they were all required to wash again while their mama watched. “That neck don’t look clean to me, Bo. You trying to grow mold in those armpits, Mattie? Why are you so dirty and stupid?” The children scrubbed and scrubbed, while Shirley rubbed her neck with one hand and her bulging belly with another.
“I’d kill this thing, if I could,” she muttered.
Her five sons and three daughters dreamed often of their mother, dreamed she came in to wash their faces with lye, to cut off the places where their ears stuck out, to tie down their wagging tongues, and plane down their purplish genitals.
“You won’t need this,” they dreamed she told them, as she pulled off one piece or another of their flesh. “Or this, or this.” They dreamed and screamed and woke each other in terror. Sometimes Shirley beat on the stairs with a broom handle to remind them how much she and Tucker needed their sleep. She hated the way they cringed away from her. After all, she never hit them. A pinch was enough, if you knew how it should be done. But more than their shameful fear of her, she hated the way Mattie would stare back at her and refuse to drop her eyes.
“You think you’re something, don’t you?” Shirley would push her face right up to her daughter’s flushed and sweating cheekbones.
“You think God’s got his eye on you?” She would pinch the inside of Mattie’s arm and twist her mouth at the girl’s stubborn expression. “Wouldn’t nobody take an interest in you if you were to birth puppy dogs and turtles—which you might. You might any day now.”
She sent them all to bed early and came up to beat the foot of each bed with her broomstick until the children squeezed up near the top. “Boatwrights, you’re all purely bred Boatwrights. My side of the family don’t even want to know you’re alive. I look at you and I swear you an’t no kin
to me at all.”
It was true that Shirley’s family took no interest in her children. Once a year Shirley would go alone to visit her mother, but neither her parents nor her brothers ever visited her. The only thing the children knew about their grandparents was Shirley’s stories about their house, how big and clean it was, how the porch shone with soapstoned wood and baskets of sweet herbs that Grandma Wilmer used in her cooking, how the neighbors admired her mother and looked up to her daddy. By contrast, their father’s father, a widower, was nothing but a drunk.
“Vegetables . . . hell!” That man sells whiskey out of that roadside stand, whiskey I tell you, not tomatoes and squash. He just has those runty old tomatoes there to keep the law off.”
“Now Shirley, you know that an’t true,” Tucker always protested.
“I know what’s true, Tucker Boatwright, and I won’t have these children spared the truth. You want them to grow up like their grandfather? Like those lazy sisters of yours in their dirt-floor cabins? I surely don’t. They grow up to live in dirt and I’ll renounce them.”
“That woman hates her children,” the neighbors all said. They did not say that the children hated her. It was not possible to know what those children thought, so quiet and still they were. They all had the same face, the same pinched features, colorless hair, and nervous hands. Only their eyes varied in shade, from Bo’s seawater blue to Mattie’s grapeskin hazel. In the warmer weather, they all took on the same shade of deep red-brown tan, a tan acquired from staying away from the house as much as they could, and from long hours spent weeding and picking at their mama’s direction in a half a dozen farmers’ fields.
“Money is hard come by,” Shirley told them, pocketing eight cents a week on the boys, and three on the girls. “Dreams are all that come free, dreams and talk. And that’s all lazy people know about. You should see those bent-necks down at the mill, trying to pretend they’re working when they’re dreaming or talking. Talk about how badly they’re used. Trash don’t know the meaning of use. Just like you kids.”
She tucked the pennies in her kerchief and that in her apron. “The way you eat, you’d think you didn’t know the cost of boiled rice.”
“Two cents a pound.”
When Mattie spoke, all the other children dropped their heads, though Bo and Tucker Junior always turned their faces so they could look up from the side. They knew Mattie was crazy, but they worshiped her craziness and suspected that without her they might have all curled up and died.
“You little whore!” Shirley gripped the fabric of her apron in twisted fingers. Her voice was an outraged hiss. “You an’t worth two cents a night yourself.”
Mattie’s tanned features paled, but she kept her mouth closed and her eyes level with her mother’s. They stared each other down, while Tucker wiped his forehead and licked dry cracked lips.
“It’s got to be suppertime,” Tucker pleaded finally.
Shirley nodded slowly.
“Let the whore cook it.”
“Whores and thieves and bastards,” she cursed them when she went into labor that last time. She cursed steadily for hours till Tucker sent all the children off to one of his sisters’. “I never wanted no man to touch me. I sure never wanted you to touch me. You put death and dirt in me every time. Death, you hear me? All I’ve got out of you is death and mud and worms.”
“It’s just the pain,” the midwife told Tucker, but neither of them really believed that. Tucker believed this was the time when Shirley told him the whole truth. The midwife did squeeze Tucker’s arm once and say, “Do you notice how she don’t really scream?”
The baby finally came in two pieces covered in a stinking bloody scum. Tucker borrowed a car and wrapped Shirley in three blankets to take her to the county hospital. The midwife wrapped up the baby in flour sacks to carry in with her, but Shirley became hysterical when they tried to put it in the car. They had to put it in the trunk before she would calm down.
“Don’t you think I knew it was dead?” Shirley curled her fists around Tucker’s wrists so tight he thought the little bones would crack. “I told you. You put death in me.”
“No telling what causes this kind of thing,” the doctor told Tucker. “But she’s had her last child, that’s for sure.”
“You’ve had your last poke at me,” Shirley whispered to Tucker when she could talk again. “I never wanted it, and if you come to me for it again, I’ll cut your thing off and feed it to these damn brats you pulled out of me.”
Tucker said nothing. The doctor had told him he’d have to be very gentle with Shirley for a while, that she was gonna be weak for a good long time.
“You don’t know Shirley,” Tucker told him. “She might be sick, but she an’t never gonna be weak.”
It was October when the baby was born dead. Shirley Boatwright would not go back to work till May. The pennies saved up over the summer were gone by then, as were the canned goods Tucker’s sisters had sent over in the fall. By February, half the Boatwright children were wearing strips of sacking tied around their broken shoes. Every morning they’d stand still while Shirley directed Mattie in tying the sacking correctly. It was Bo’s birthday, the eleventh of that month, when she caught hold of Mattie’s sleeve as she headed for the door with the other children.
“No,” Shirley said. “You’re thirteen now, no need to waste your time in school. You either, Bo.”
All the children stood still for a moment, and then Mattie and Bo stepped back and let the others go. It took Shirley half an hour to get herself dressed, shaking off Mattie’s hand when she came to help. It took them all another hour to walk the eight blocks together to the mill. Neither Bo nor Mattie spoke. Both of them just kept looking up to their mother with swollen frightened eyes.
Mattie had small quick hands and a terror of the speeding shuttles. She kept her lower lip clenched in her teeth while she worked to untangle the bunched and knotted threads. Bo was clumsy and spent most of his time crawling underneath frames to grease the wheels that turned the bobbin belts. Sometimes he would crawl right up under Mattie’s hands and hiss up at her to get her attention. Both of them avoided their father. When their mother came to work in May, they avoided her too, but that was easier. Shirley had been transferred from the carding room to finishing. Safely separated from the rest of the mill by a wire-and-glass wall, Shirley and twelve other women ran up towels, aprons, and simple skirts from the end runs of same-fabric bolts.
“You see what I mean?” Shirley’s mouth had grown so tight she seemed to have no lips at all. “Quality always shows, always finds its place. That foreman knows who I am.”
Mattie sucked her gums and thought of the women at the mill who stepped aside when her mama passed. Everybody said Shirley Boatwright believed her piss was wine. Everybody said she repeated whatever she heard to the foreman on the second shift. And if Shirley Boatwright pissed wine, then there was no doubt that nasty son of a bitch pissed store-bought whiskey.
“When we grow up . . .” Bo started whispering every night, and each child would finish the line in turn.
“I’m gonna move to Texas.”
“I an’t never gonna eat tripe no more.”
“I’m gonna have six little babies and buy them anything they want.”
“Gonna treat them good.”
“Gonna tell them how pretty they are.”
“Gonna love them, love them.”
Sometimes, Mattie would let the youngest, Billy, climb up onto her lap. She’d hug and stroke him and quietly sing some gospel song for him, making up the words she couldn’t remember. “When we grow up,” Bo kept whispering. “When we grow up . . .” That too could have been a song.
None of them knew what they might not do. Only Mattie had an idea that it was possible to do anything at all. Walking to work every morning, she passed the freight siding where James Gibson pulled barrels off his father’s wagon. The Gibsons ran a lumber business and most of the cane syrup shipped out of Greenville went out in
their barrels. If he was there, James stopped and watched her walk by. Every time he saw her pass, he smiled.
“I’ve got nine brothers,” he told her one morning. “But not one sister. Lord, I do love to look at pretty girls.”
It was the first time anyone had ever suggested Mattie might be pretty. She started leaving home earlier so she could walk slower past the railway siding. On the mornings when one of the other Gibson boys was there, she felt disappointed. They tended to giggle when they saw her, which always made her wonder what James said about her to them.
“I told them to keep an eye on you.” James smiled wide when she asked him. “I told them to keep their hands off and their eyes open. What you think about that?”
“I think you talking a lot for nothing having been said between us.”
“What do we need to say?”
But Mattie could not answer that. She didn’t know what she wanted to say to anybody. She only knew she wanted to start finding things out. She felt as if her eyes were coming open, as if light were sneaking into a dark place inside her. At the dinner table Mattie watched how her mama spooned rice out of the bowl, all the while talking about how only trash served food out of a cooking pot.
“Quality people use serving dishes.” Shirley slapped Bo’s hand. “Quality people don’t come to the table with grease under their nails.”
“I washed.”
Mattie watched rice grains fall off her fork. She hated butter beans with rice. White on white didn’t suit her. Black-eyed peas with pork and greens—that was better. Red tomatoes on the side of the plate almost spoke out loud. Best of all was pinto beans cooked soft and thick with little green bits sprinkled on at the last and chopped collards laid round the sides of the plate. Color. When she had her own kitchen, there would be lots of color.
“If you’d really washed, you would be clean,” Shirley was saying. “Nobody in my family ever came to the table with dirt under their nails. You go wash again.”
Trash: Stories Page 4