Mama is always putting me to bed. In summer, I have to lie down for a two-hour nap when I am not the least bit sleepy and really much too old for such things. I lie on the glider on the screened-in porch, listening to blue jays bickering and to the voices of the afternoon radio shows coming in over the hum of the fan placed so as to blow across the length of my body as I lie there. I watch the red mud daubers building their odd little mud-dauber nests under the eaves, I make up stories about the Girl, who has a lot more nerve for adventures than I do. Sometimes Nathan comes and sits in the bushes, trying to talk me into sneaking down to the creek, saying they will never know, but I am too afraid of getting caught, so he goes off to have fun somewhere else.
Then I rock the glider screeching and banging back and forth and back and forth at an increasingly furious rate until May-May hollers at me to stop. So then there’s nothing to do but you know what. Sometimes it seems like that is the only thing I have to keep me company.
No rain all July. Too many grasshoppers, scorpions, tarantulas, grass turning brown, and by the end of the month there is talk of water rationing and drought. Mama and May-May talked about polio, about ringworm, about rabies. On the radio, there’s talk about a rabid dog somebody shot out near Josey Lane.
Nathan’s mom sits us down and tells us to not catch wild animals, to report dogs who are strange-acting, Frothing at the mouth, biting at things. We listen in awe, then run to Bob Lynn’s house, and he tells us that if you do get bitten, there are shots where a long needle is punched right into your stomach every single day! We run to the Breards’ house to check this out, and they know all about it, as well.
“Mad dog! Mad dog!” We ran around yelling “Mad dog!” all month.
I also have to go to bed early at night, even in summer, when it is still light outside, and I hear other kids running around catching lightning bugs or playing out until they can’t see the ball anymore. I argue, but still have to be there lying in bed half-nude in the heat, with nothing to do but listen to the sounds of the neighborhood and the house, where later during the long, hot nights each person rises, silent, feverish, to stand in the shower and then stand under the attic fan, wet sleepwalkers, each in turn stumbling back to bed.
Nathan comes and sits on a wide ledge outside my window, his wiry body a hunched shadow against the blue light gradually turning dark. As the light goes down, the crickets come up, and we listen as each kid is called in. We whisper just above the crickets and fans and dogs barking, and in spite of the heat, I start shivering like something is about to happen. All I want in the world is for the two of us to run away to live in the woods, be night creatures with nobody’s rules, wear paint and feathers and rove the countryside until dawn, when we’d withdraw to our secret burrow hideouts to sleep.
The fear is in us as one night we try to open the window so Nathan can hide under the sheets with me, all tickly and strange, but we can’t get the screen off without making too much noise.
Mama comes in, and she is mad!
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Nathan scrambles down and runs home.
The next night, I am lying in bed the same, and he appears at my window ledge again.
“Nathan!”
“I just came to say I can’t do this anymore.”
“But why not?”
“Momsi found out, and she says I can’t.”
“But just come when they don’t know it.”
“I can’t. I have to be good.”
“But why?”
“Because I’m being adopted.”
Summer Legs
In a room that is not your room, in a house that is not your house, you lie at the edge of thought, at the edge of sleep.
Your tongue can’t leave it alone, that place where a tooth came out, finally, after days of wobbling and hanging by a thread. Now your prowling tongue keeps going back to that itchy, pain-pleasant, dull, bloody sore spot in your mouth.
Moonlight falls through blowing curtains and through the room, across the sheets, your summer-child legs, your feet still dirty from the day. A fan rotates. Buzzing things buzz.
You lie half-dreaming of the long-fingered elf sandman dusting sand between your toes in the night. And you know that winged tooth fairy’ll come in the window for your tooth, will slip the silver Mercury angel-head dime between pillow and sheet. You smile imagining it, believing it, drifting off with it.
Without a sound, a person comes and stands in the room, a boy shadow, who seems different in the dark from when you’ve seen him sitting around this house beautiful and bored, and no matter how much you may follow him and copy him, and taunt and tease him, he is always refusing to play with you or to even crack a smile.
But now here he is in the dark.
You can’t see his face, but it can only be he who leans over you, across you, alongside you, where you lie suddenly alert to smooth warm boy arms and legs, boy cheek to yours.
So he does like you after all. And it’s nice.
He speaks in a whisper, saying, “Lie still” and “Turn this way” or “Turn that way,” and something warm and rubbery is rolling and rubbing in a friendly way down there against you. Nothing breaks into you, nothing bad happens, and the whole thing is nice as puppy bodies, an unexpected warmth of being together in a breezy summer night half dream.
The window. The moon. The curtains. The dark. The smooth arms and legs. Some time passing. There may have been sleeping. This is secret. You know this is perfectly secret. But now you seem to live with an awakened longing that looks for more of this, agitated, shy, but on the alert for what is no longer remembered as much more than a dream of heat.
The Heart of Texas
There’s a map of Texas with a big red heart in the middle on a billboard as we drive into town. The billboard says BRADY, THE HEART OF TEXAS.
“Will Daddy be there when I get back home?” I shout over the hot wind roaring through the car.
“Maybe,” Mama says, looking at the road, throwing her cigarette out the window, slowing, braking, turning, bumping over the rattling cattle guard at the gate, the dirt road leading left across blowing fields to the white-painted wood-frame farmhouse, the giant oak tree.
Aunt Lee comes out wiping hands on her apron to greet us.
“So you’ve come to see the country mouse,” she says.
There’s nothing mousy about Aunt Lee. Electric and comfy at once, she’s got Indian-wide cheekbones, dark hair in a loose bun, and excited dark eyes that grab and hold you, eyes that love the world and love you. And love us. We all hug. She stands back, looks at me.
“Oh my goodness, you’re growing too fast! We need to put a brick on your head!”
“I thought you’d fixed that cattle guard last year,” says Mama. “I’ll bet you hear that loose pipe banging for miles around.”
Aunt Lee winks at me. “It warns me somebody’s coming,” she says, laughing, leading us into the kitchen. I smell pie.
Uncle Edward comes out from town for lunch and to see Mama before she leaves. He walks in the back door, joking, and Aunt Lee acts excited he’s here, reaching way up to kiss him, joking about the pair of them being “Mutt and Jeff.” He’s tall and thin, with white hair and blue eyes in a face that looks like Founding Fathers hung on the walls in school.
Lunch is the main meal on the farm, and they call lunch “dinner.” We sit down to pork chops, corn on the cob, turnip greens, warm rolls and butter, and the pie turns out to be peach cobbler, my favorite! Before we can eat, Uncle Edward says a long “grace” so fast that the only word I can catch is sanctify; then he winks at me, and we pass our plates around the table.
Nothing’s wrong at their house. Everything’s just fine. Mama’s smiling. They’re nice all the time at Aunt Lee’s, talking, joking, making things fun. For some reason, I feel like laughing out loud.
After lunch, while they’re having coffee, I fold my napkin and excuse myself, the way I’ve been taught, and I go outside to look aroun
d. They say I’m staying here for a month.
I find a horned toad in the side yard. I know horned toads. He plays dead and lets me scratch his flat belly. I let him go, and he skitters around the big tree. There’re other oak trees around the house, but this one’s the oldest, a giant of a tree. I can’t put my arms even halfway around it, and the first crotch is too high up for me to climb. The ground’s crunchy with acorns old and new all around underfoot, the branches full of nests. You can watch squirrels, scissortails, and mockingbirds busying in and out all day.
They call me in to say good-bye to Mama, “Be good, be nice, and do what Aunt Lee says,” she tells me. Watching Mama’s dusty Cadillac drive out the dirt road, across the cattle guard, onto the main road, and then speed away, I wonder what will happen at home while I’m away.
Have I been sent away? Why am I here right now? I don’t want to miss seeing Daddy come home.
I walk around the big tree, remembering how last year the newly hatched mockingbird babies were falling all summer out of nests and onto the ground, peeping for rescue. I tried so hard with shoe boxes and eyedroppers, and cried and prayed to Jesus, trying to get the prayers right, but I could never save them before their trembly pink heads would droop and die. Aunt Lee was right when she said you couldn’t save them. And Jeff, the youngest son, still at home, Mama’s cousin, was right when he said the cats would get them. He said the weak ones get pushed out of the nest by the stronger ones. I see a gray-striped cat now, waiting, crouched, across the yard.
Out in Brady, they kill and eat everything all the time anyway—pigs, calves, deer, rabbits, and especially chickens—and almost every day, things are born and things die, so they don’t think that much about baby birds getting eaten by cats. Cats have to eat, too.
I go over the fence to the barnyard and walk farther out back. There are changes. The Mexican workers whose kids I used to play with are gone, as are the shacks and outhouses they used out there. The pigs are gone, too. Last year, there was a huge sow that was so fat, she could only lie in the mud, eat, and let her piglets nurse. The pink piglets were so cute, I wanted to take one home. Uncle Edward talked in a big voice, telling me to stay away from the pigpen because pigs were dangerous, and then he and Jeff told a story about a man they knew who fell into a pen and the pigs killed him and ate him! Then they both shook their heads. Then Uncle Edward said they were going to have them all butchered or sold and be finished with pigs.
Wild cats are all over the farm, mainly coming around the barn early for the cow milking. Jeff says they really do have nine lives, so my Kitty could die and come back as a girl cat to have babies, if he wanted to.
At home, they’re not happy if I bring back animals. I remember the way they cooked my black lamb for dinner one night, Daddy laughing as if it were the funniest joke, his smirking face as he said, “What do you think we’re having for dinner tonight?” and me looking away, not wanting to admit he was joking about what they had done to my poor pet, tied to the clothesline in the backyard for weeks, Baaa, baaaaaa, baaaaaaaaaaa, all day and all night, neighbors calling, complaining, after I’d brought him back from the farm, summer before last, after they’d decided out here to be finished with sheep.
The men had come up all sweaty from the fields on a late afternoon in June, straw and dirt and bits of wool sticking to glistening tanned arms cradling the sweet-legged baby lambs, tumbling the wobbly lambs onto the grass where I was sitting with Aunt Lee, snapping beans into her lap in the shade of the oak tree full of mockingbirds and quarrelsome blue jays that year.
The lambs had wobbled across the grass, bleating for their mothers, and Aunt Lee had smiled that smile she could pour on you like honey, her hands never stopping with the beans in her lap, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, and she’d nodded toward me, saying, “Give the black one to the girl.”
The black one, the black lamb, the black sheep—that’s what I heard someone in Mama’s bridge club say about Daddy one time. So is that kind of like being the goat?
So I’m here again now. The first night, I’m awake, with whining mosquitoes getting into the tented sheet with me until I’m finally too sleepy to care.
Things are happening at the farm every day. Every morning, I wake in the attic dark, hearing Aunt Lee calling Jeff to get up and milk that cow. I hear him getting up, getting dressed on the other side of the attic, going down the stairs. I hear the rooster crowing, birds chirping, and I fall asleep again.
I wake up smelling bacon, and it’s light out. I’m up here, where the whole bed fits into this oversized attic dormer window that looks out onto the big tree. On the inside there’s a curtain across, so you can dress and undress and hide inside your own bed-size tree house room. It’s my favorite place. I look down onto the tree full of nests and the yard where Aunt Lee’s hanging towels on the line, as if she’s been up for hours. She speaks without looking up at me.
“Don’t you want to get up now? Breakfast is ready. Come down.”
They milk the cow, feed the chickens, and gather the eggs first thing in the morning, and I do this with them some days. Sometimes Jeff wrings the neck of a young one to fry, or an old one past laying to roast, and I watch Aunt Lee clean it over the sink. She shows me the parts that make the eggs and tells me all about them. Aunt Lee loves to talk, and I love to listen. They have many more chickens than we had, most of them white and exactly the same, with one big bossy rooster, and three or four other type of chickens, small and speckled. And there are many chicks, yellow puffs darting and tumbling and pecking.
On the second day, I see the bull, brownish black and mean-looking, but penned up in a field. I think he must be watching and waiting to come after me the way a bull went after that boy in a movie I saw. It was a sad movie, but it had Uncle Remus, which I liked. But there was that bull, so I don’t wear red out there.
On some days, Aunt Lee makes biscuits, and she gives me some dough to make tiny biscuits of my own. I set them out on a stone bench in the hot sun; then I wander through Aunt Lee’s garden full of fancy lilies, snapdragons, sweet peas, “glads,” “pinks,” “flags” (She talks about her flowers a lot.), lavender, “Peace” roses with thick thorns, petals everywhere on the ground, towering hollyhocks and sunflowers at the back, also with tomatoes, onions, carrots, okra, beans, cucumber and squash vines, honeybees and bumblebees buzzing, hummingbirds hovering, butterflies fluttering, spiders, grasshoppers, lizards zipping away, once in a while a rabbit or a wild kitten or a field mouse to chase. I spend hours in Aunt Lee’s garden, where the Girl can be a princess in a flowing dress, or a silvery fairy with dragonfly wings.
Flies are buzzing all over the scrawny wild kittens I already chased all morning, and they’re all lying limp under the porch, where it’s not so hot. Even then they’re not so easy to catch as I thought they’d be after seeing them crazy-wild in the barn when I first got here at the farm, and I spotted that one yellow one I’ve gotten to where he’ll almost come to me. When he does come to me, I’m going to do what the hired man said and cover him all over with bacon grease, which he will hate, and will run from in circles all over the farm, and the other wild kittens will wonder what is wrong with him, since they won’t have to have grease on them, but the thing is, the grease will smother his fleas, then he’ll lick it all off, and then he can come sleep on the bed in my room and have a name and be mine. And those other kittens will grow to rove the countryside, skinny-wild and youthless, diseased and hit by trucks, belonging to no one. Even when we see them, they will not be seen, like rats and squirrels, for any one of them seems like all the others, giving birth and dying young and never having names. When I go near, they all run back up under the house, even that yellow one I have chosen to be the one that’s going to be mine, and they look out at me with their little eyes. The one that’s going to be mine has one blue eye and one green, both eyes looking out like they’ve never seen anything like me before.
A big dog runs into the yard one day acting crazy, with a neighbor boy c
hasing him. Uncle Edward and Jeff help him catch that dog and they all talk about how it’s full of quills and it just can’t seem to leave those porcupines alone, and they all laugh about dogs that mess with skunks, dogs that try to eat armadillos or terrapins or try to catch roadrunners or jackrabbits, and they try to get some quills out, but the dog gets away, the neighbor boy goes home, and everybody laughs about it during dinner, and we have fresh peach ice cream we made that afternoon, taking turns cranking the hand crank until your whole arm hurt.
After a big lunch-dinner of fried chicken and boiled potatoes, Aunt Lee throws a cloth over the whole table. Then later, she mashes the potatoes, makes a salad, takes off the cloth, and we eat the cold chicken left from lunch. Then they take the rest out to the pigs. Some days they have soup or corn flakes for dinner, and they call that “supper.”
One day after about two weeks, I’m digging through a deep drawer where Aunt Lee said there were toys, and I find a small glazed skunk, shiny and perfect, black, with a white stripe. Aunt Lee said it was made by my mama, and that Mama’d wanted a pet skunk when she was a kid like me, which doesn’t seem to fit with the Mama I know.
When Aunt Lee’s not cooking or cleaning or working in the garden, she’s crocheting something to be added to the many doilies on chairs and tabletops, about a million doilies sewed together into a spread on her bed. Also around the house are candy dishes like hens sitting on nests. You take the hen top off, and you might find peppermints in the nest.
There are also things around that were made by “the boys,” who are all grown and gone now except for Jeff, whom Aunt Lee calls “Emasie,” They tell the story of how Jeff came home after his first day of school saying “Why did you name me Emasie?” and declaring that from now on his name was Jeff. It’s actually spelled Emisa. They all have funny names. One named Gaddis is a painter in Mexico and has long red hair; another, named Conrad, stayed in the Philippines after the war to live. Another one, named Campbell, has gone to New York.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 16