My plea was cut short by a collective gasp in the crowd. I heard someone yelp, “Oh, my God, somebody stop him.”
Big Roan had joined the parade.
He limped up the middle of Main Street, apelike and huge, a necklace of garland hanging down his plaid shirt and baggy overalls. Greasy dark hair stuck out from his jowly face. He sashayed and twisted his butt. His mouth was screwed down in sarcastic contempt. He staggered through the Girl Scout troop. They dropped their troop banner and scattered like green leaves in a windstorm. Big Roan plowed ahead, waving a beer bottle. “Y’all want to see Santy Claus?” he bellowed. “I’ll drop my pants and y’all can kiss him on both cheeks!”
Then he threw the beer bottle. It hit one of the Wise Men’s nervous horses on the rump. The horse bolted and collided with Aunt Rhonda’s mule. Aunt Rhonda fell off. The mule jerked away from Uncle Dwayne and darted ahead. The high school band split down the middle, and my cousin Aster toppled over with her tuba. The mule raced by the fire truck and the firemen accidentally pelted it with a handful of candy, which made the mule accelerate. It careened past Aunt Irene and clipped one of her angel wings, and she spun sideways like an out-of-control airplane.
My feet were frozen to the windowsill. People were screaming. Daddy and some other men ran out in the street and grabbed Big Roan. He went down swinging and hit Daddy in the face.
I squealed with outrage and fear. Suddenly I realized that I was standing on the sidewalk, that Roanie had pulled me off the sill and set me there, and that I was by myself.
He’d melted into the shadows, or evaporated from shame.
The Atlanta newspapers and TV stations ran stories about the Dunderry Christmas parade. We were funny, small-town, mountain people. We were quaint. We were humiliated.
Daddy had a broken nose. Big Roan was sentenced to three months in jail. My whole family, both the Maloney and Delaney sides, swore no Sullivan would ever cross their doorsteps. I was the family goat after word leaked out about my hobnobbing with Roanie during the parade. Mama was widely advised to keep an eye on me, as if I might grow up to join the circus or vote Republican.
Cousin Vince went after Roanie full-bore this time and caught him before he could get to Ten Jumps. Uncle William signed the court order, and Aunt Bess sent him off to a state boys’ home in Atlanta. Aunt Bess told everyone it was a relief to know that Roanie Sullivan would be safe and well fed during Christmas.
Grandpa was right. Some brands of kindness are hard to abide.
Aunt Jane, who ran the Dunderry Library, said the finest writing grew out of terrible pain and suffering over the human condition. That must be true. I was desperate to console Roanie during the month he spent away, and the springs beneath my mattress were lined with letters, poems, and stories I’d scrawled since Christmas. I’d spent more time inside my room than out.
“Why, sure, you can send some of your writings to Roanie,” Mama said carefully, when I asked her. “But I’d have to check your letters for, hmmm, spelling and grammar first.”
I hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck yesterday. I knew what Mama really meant. My letters would end up looking like some of the ones Josh had written home when he was in Vietnam. Full of blacked-out lines and pruned thoughts. “I’ll think about it,” I told her.
I got the idea for my disastrous Roanie Sullivan poem by reading books that were bad for me.
Our house was filled with books. The ones that were good for me were downstairs in the living-room bookcases, the shelves crammed with encyclopedias, agricultural textbooks, and leather-bound classics like Shakespeare and Dickens. The coffee table nearly sagged with Mama’s huge picture books about art. But the real library was in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom.
Pyramids of paperbacks were stacked on the floor under their polished, cherrywood nightstands. Daddy’s side was wild territory inhabited by testy gunslingers and four-armed aliens and tough detectives who liked their gin cold and their babes hot. Mickey Spillane and Louis L’Amour. Robert Heinlein and John D. MacDonald. Man Stuff.
Mama’s collection was more varied but no less woolly—Tolkien and Vonnegut, Lillian Hellman and John Le Carré, and stacks of fat, luscious historical romance novels, bursting with adventure and passion, heavy on medieval England, which Mama, proud of Grandmother Elizabeth’s homeland, considered part of our family heritage.
I snuck their paperbacks into my bedroom and worked my way through the ones that were particularly shocking and not totally bewildering. So my imagination ran to hard-boiled detectives and space monsters and adventurous medieval ladies, all of whom, to my astonishment, were absolutely determined to have sex.
Sex was not spoken about in our house. It was not joked about, even by my brothers, not in front of me anyhow. Body parts and bathroom noises, yes. Merged body parts, no.
After my awful Steckem Road visit I demanded my older girl cousins explain exactly why everyone called it Stick ’Em in Road. They told me, and their description was so graphic, so gross, and made the whole sex thing sound so embarrassing that I looked at them shrewdly and said, “Anybody with more sense than a rock wouldn’t waste their time doing that.”
What I knew of romance I learned from watching old movies on TV and studying Mama and Daddy.
Mama had big blue eyes and a butt that was the envy of every woman in town—shaped like an upside-down Valentine heart. Daddy liked her fanny so much, he patted it whenever he thought nobody was looking. He would give her a wicked grin when we caught them doing stuff like that.
Daddy was one of those nearly fat-free men with ropy muscles and hands that could bend steel cable. He had long, lean arms and skinny legs, and he carried what little fat he did have in his belly, a hard little mound above his belt buckle. I would thump it. It felt like the rind of a ripe watermelon. Mama called it his spare gas tank, and she liked to rub it. When he was sitting at the table, Mama would walk by and trail one fingertip through the soft hair at the base of his neck.
The contrast was clear—sex was something sweaty and naked and embarrassing, not to mention highly regulated and often forbidden, but romance was lovely and polite and involved admiring each other with your clothes on.
So that was the kind of romance Roanie and I would have. I resolved to explain my intentions with a series of poems led by a polite ode to his worthiness.
I taped the first poem to our refrigerator in a prominent spot between the Farmers’ Bulletin calendar and a snapshot of Mama, Daddy, me, and my brothers in the lobby of the Atlanta Civic Center when we went to see the touring company show of The Sound of Music.
ROANIE, ROANIE,
HE’S NO PHONY,
GOT A PAIR OF BIG COJONES.
HE’D FIT RIGHT IN
WITH US MALONEYS.
BY CLAIRE
Cojones was a term I’d discovered in one of Daddy’s detective novels. I judged its impressive power by the way it was used in the book. I waited to see who’d notice the poem first.
Aunt Arnetta was as nearsighted as a mole. She wore thick glasses with bright orange rims or prescription sunglasses with Day-Glo blue reflecting lenses, which made her look like a big, blue bottle fly. She was a hefty woman, a no-nonsense woman with a fashion sense that favored brown with hints of more brown.
Her allegiances were rock-hard: God, church, children, job, bingo. I think thieving, weasel-inclined Carlton was an embarrassment to her, and probably the reason she was so hard on everyone else.
Uncle Eugene, who owned a local car dealership and was umbilically tied to a TV set in his spare time, was way down on her list of priorities. She worked for a state agricultural agency as a home economics expert.
She had come over to drop off a new brochure on no-salt cooking, because Mama was worried about Great-Gran’s blood pressure. Aunt Arnetta tromped into the kitchen, where I was lounging at the table pretending to read a Reader’s Digest. It was a freezing day in early January, and a streak of cold air seemed to follow her across the warm room.
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��You’ll ruin your eyes holding that magazine up like that,” she said to me. “You’re a bookworm. You better practice good habits, or you’ll end up with bad eyes and stooped shoulders.”
“Oh. Okay. Yes, ma’am.”
She breezed past me, and I was afraid she’d go through to the back hall and miss the refrigerator completely. But she zoomed in on my poem like a radar and halted. I watched her lean forward. She leaned back. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the lapel of her brown blazer, put them back on, and leaned forward. She quivered.
“CLAIRE KARLEEN MALONEY, what is this filth?”
Aunt Arnetta tore my poem off the refrigerator and whirled around and slapped the paper on the table. My mouth went dry. “It’s a poem!”
“You’re writing poetry about … about Roanie Sullivan’s privates?”
“What? Huh? No, it’s about his cojones!”
“Privates,” Aunt Arnetta repeated, shaking the paper under my nose. “Male organs. Gonads. Testicles.” Her voice rose on each word, and when I stared at her in blank horror, she finished loudly, “His balls.”
I shrieked. That’s what the men in Daddy’s books meant when they said somebody had big cojones? “I didn’t know! I thought cojones were muscles! Big, strong muscles.”
“Oh, I’ll just bet you didn’t know! A smart girl like you! Let me tell you something, Missy Claire, if you lay down with pigs, you’ll get up muddy! You don’t have the good sense to keep your distance from that lowlife Roanie Sullivan! Well, I’ll just put the lid on this pot right now! I’m telling your mama and daddy that that junkyard dirty-fingered hillbilly white-trash troublemaker is inspiring you to write dirty rhymes!”
I leaped up. “No! It isn’t his fault! I read about cojones in a book!”
“There’s not one book in this house that discusses the male privates in those sorts of lewd terms!”
Aunt Arnetta had no idea. “It’s not Roanie’s fault! Don’t say anything to Mama and Daddy! I was just trying to show everybody what I think about him!”
“You’re sweet on him! Lord have mercy, this is worse than I thought! Nine years old and running after white trash! Claire Karleen Maloney, you put that boy out of your mind! There’s no way on God’s green earth this family’ll ever let you take after that Sullivan boy! He’s bred to be thick-blooded and mushy-minded, and he won’t ever amount to a hill of beans! In another few years he’ll be lyin’ around on welfare breeding a shack full of younguns with some whiffle-tailed girl! Your folks’d just as soon lock you in the cellar and throw away the key than see you fall under his filthy-mouthed spell!”
By the time she finished I was over my shock and well on the way to a tantrum. Never talk back to your elders. Never. I knew that, but since I had a ruined reputation now anyway, I might as well go whole hog. “Go worry about Uncle Eugene’s cojones!” I yelled. “Daddy says he can’t find ’em anymore because you keep ’em in your jewelry box!”
No tomato ever turned redder than Aunt Arnetta’s face at that moment. She stuttered something and her eyes gleamed with magnified tears behind her glasses. She slapped the no-salt brochure down on the table and went to look for Daddy.
Oh, what a mess. I got lectured on all sides and punished—I lost my weekly allowance for the rest of the month and had extra work added to my regular household chores—but worse, everyone decided I had absolutely no sense at all where Roanie was concerned.
To top things off, Aunt Arnetta was mad at Daddy for months. Daddy told me not to ever repeat anything he said about her and Uncle Eugene again. Uncle Eugene’s missing balls—like my devotion to Roanie—was the kind of embarrassment the family swept under the rug.
I took all my writings outside and buried them behind one of the barns. A person can never be too careful with her privates. Especially if she isn’t certain what they are.
Roanie came home finally, along with Big Roan. We heard Big Roan stayed down on Steckem Road with Daisy McClendon most of the time. That’s why Aunt Dockey and Mama didn’t go over there the next Easter. They sent Uncle Bert and Daddy to deliver the Easter baskets.
I don’t know what kind of Easter Roanie had that spring; Hop and Evan saw him at school and said he was even more of a loner than before. I tried to talk Hop into giving him my Easter rabbit and a note I’d written; I wanted him to know I was sorry Aunt Bess had sent him away and that she’d meant well by it. But Hop said the family doghouse only had room for one Maloney at a time and he didn’t want to be stuck in it, too.
Hop did try to talk to Roanie for me eventually, but Roanie just stared at him as if he were an enemy.
I guess, at that point, we were all enemies to Roanie.
That September I finally learned, firsthand, why Sean and Bridget Maloney hadn’t had enough teeth for a smile. Love is hard on a smile. It will knock your teeth right out.
Our whole clan went to every high school football game but especially to the first one of each autumn. That night was one of those delicious, barely past summer evenings when the warm air has spicy currents in it and the moon rises full and ripe over trees flecked with the first few hints of gold and red.
Along with related families, such as the Kehoes and the O’Briens, Maloneys and Delaneys provided about half the team, plus a good portion of the marching band and the cheerleading squad, too. Josh had been a star quarterback in his day, and Brady a pretty fair place-kicker. Now Hop was a tackle, Evan was a tackle, Harold and Arlan were tackles. Maloney and Delaney boys were part of a long tradition of running over people.
The Dunderry High School stadium squatted solidly on the side of a hill facing a football field ringed with a slate-gray running track. Huge moths swarmed in the hot white beams of overhead lights and danced in the glow from the concession stand beyond the track’s far turn.
It didn’t take light to draw me down to the track. The lure of candy would do it. I was a moth after sugar. I flew with a small, flashy gang—we thought our wings were five feet wide and bright orange, but I’m sure to everyone else we were just giggling, nickel-size flutter-bys.
“I’m going to be a cheerleader when I get to high school,” Rebecca announced as we sashayed along.
“Me, too,” Violet chimed.
“Not me, I don’t care,” I said. I’d already flunked out of the small-fry-league cheerleading tryouts three years in a row. Something about wanting to add new moves each time I performed a routine. Cheerleading was serious, regimented business. They would take away your pompom license if you improvised.
“I’m not gonna be a cheerleader.” Tula Tobbler spoke up firmly. “I’m gonna be Alvin’s manager.”
We all looked askance at Tula. Elfish, with skin the color of chocolate, she stared back at us from under a stiffly styled cap of black hair with bangs and curved-under ends that wouldn’t so much as flex, even in a strong wind. No Afros for Tobbler children, because Tobblers were big on conservative traditions, just like Maloneys.
In fact, though nobody talked about it, Tobblers were Maloneys. The doors to our two worlds might be connected by no more than a single hinge, but we were connected nonetheless. When people looked at a dark-skinned Tobbler, they might not see even the hint of it, but he was there, deep in the Tobbler past, a great-great-uncle of mine, a red-haired, pale-skinned Maloney.
A roar came up from the packed stadium behind us and the band blared the Dunderry Panthers’ fight song, and we all turned to watch an enormous, long-legged receiver spike the ball in the end zone.
Alvin Tobbler, Tula’s brother, was the brightest football star, black or white, ever to carry a pigskin across green Dunderry grass. “See?” Tula said, grinning. “Alvin’s gonna play for a big college and then he’s gonna play for the grown-up teams one day. And he’s gonna be rich. And I’m gonna tell him what to do with his money.”
We all nodded solemnly and walked on. Any dream was possible for Tobblers, because they had some mix of African and Irish magic in them, and if you doubted that, all you had to do was go
where we were headed and see it up close.
Next to the concession stand, Tula and Alvin’s grandpa worked at a small card table piled with apples. This was something he volunteered to do at every game, his way of cheering for Alvin.
Boss Tobbler was an apple man. His orchards stretched across stair-stepped hills outside town, and every Tobbler in the county worked for him in the autumn, harvesting apples and selling crates filled with apples from a roadside warehouse, plus every homemade apple concoction known to humankind—cider and fried pies and bread and jellies and cookies, to name a few—there was no end to the Tobbler apple kingdom.
His first name really was Boss. He was short and muscular, with patches of tight gray hair on his thick forearms but not a speck on his head, and when he took off the limp fedora he wore year-round, his scalp gleamed like an eight ball. He’d been a sergeant in a black platoon during World War II, he’d won a Purple Heart, he had a year of divinity-school training, and he was a deacon of Dunderry’s African Methodist Church.
He and Grandpa Joseph had hunted and fished together since they were boys. They’d both served in the war, they both hated stupidity and meanness, and they were both as sweet as honey, once a person got inside their hive. Grandpa called him Boss T. Everybody else called him Mr. Tobbler, with an emphasis on the mister.
A fantastic aroma rose from the apples and the melted caramel bubbling in a stew pot on a hot plate. A small crowd watched, awed, and as we sidled up to its edges, a familiar sense of awe settled on us, too.
Mr. Tobbler rolled the crank handle on an apple corer. Curlicues of red apple peel dropped to a mountain of apple peelings that covered his shoes and climbed halfway up his pants legs. He popped the peeled apple from the corer’s clamps, deftly sliced it into pieces with a razor-sharp paring knife, spread the slices on a paper plate, and dribbled liquid caramel over them.
Then he presented the plate to a waiting member of his audience, a man who stood way back as he tucked a dollar into the coffee can on a stool in front of the table, a man who reached for his caramel apple very carefully, because nobody had the courage to stand inside Boss Tobbler’s circle of helpers.
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