Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  The Tatro family sat in a pew in the red-brick Methodist church in the mill village. Mr. Tatro, his perpetually grease-stained hands clasped between his knees, was next to Mrs. Tatro in her white gloves and aqua linen suit. Then Jed, arm extended along the pew back. Then Raymond, hunched in the corner trying to pretend he wasn’t there. Each Sunday he’d announce he wasn’t going. His father would reason with him about the state of his soul. Raymond would reply that he didn’t believe in God. His mother would burst into tears. Jed would threaten to squash him like the insect he was. His father would command him to put on his suit. Raymond would throw himself onto the sofa and stare at them. Eventually he would stomp into his room and get dressed.

  The deacon Mr. Boggs was intoning the lesson from Luke in a pious nasal whine: “‘But which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, “Go and sit down to meat?” And will not rather say unto him, “Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken.” So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, … “we have done that which was our duty to do.”’”

  Mr. Marsh ascended to the pulpit and leveled a stare fraught with significance at his flock. He asked quietly, “How many of us here in this church this morning can look our neighbor in the eye and truthfully say, ‘I have done that which was my duty to do?’ How many of us? Let ever person in this church who feels he has a right to say these words turn to his neighbor right now and do it.”

  There were uneasy rustlings as everyone tried to figure out what behavior Mr. Marsh wanted from them. All finally concluded correctly and remained silent.

  Mr. Marsh crowed, “Not one person in this church, friends! Not one! ‘I have done that which was my duty to do.’ That one little phrase and not a one of us can claim to have fulfilled it. Now, what are our duties, friends? Before we can fulfill them, we got to know what they are. In general our duties pertain to what we owe other people—what we owe our ancestors, what we owe parents, what we owe our children, our spouses, our bosses, our town, our state, our nation. And most especially they pertain to what we owe our God …”

  Raymond watched Mr. Marsh closely, mentally framing each pose for his photo series on religion in the South. He smiled with delight as Mr. Marsh twisted his pudgy frame so his head blocked out a candelabra on the altar. The candlelight cast an aura around his bushy grey hair. The brass cross seemed to grow out of his head like an antler. He stretched out his arm in a Nazi salute.

  Tiring, Raymond watched a wayward honey bee explore the vivid reds of Jesus’s blood in the stained-glass window next to him. It buzzed around, alighted briefly, then flew on to the next droplet. Mr. Marsh was ranting about duty. Do-wah-ditty ditty dum ditty do. Do-wah duty duty dumb duty do. Raymond considered the topic. What was his duty, and was he going to do it? School would be out in a few weeks, and he still had no clue about what to do for the rest of his life. Last week he’d taken a tour of the mill. Room after barnlike room full of deafening machines doing things to cotton fibers. Warm moist air, hazy with lint, which coated the machinery like thick frost. His father was a foreman in the roving room, which was filled with rows of frames, each supporting a couple of hundred spindles. He demonstrated how to balance the tension so that the rovings, as they wound on to the bobbins, neither broke nor snarled. Raymond was amazed at the enthusiasm his father could summon after twenty-five years for the topic of the constantly fluctuating number of rpms required to keep the winding speed equal to the front delivery speed. He watched as his father scrawled calculations in a small notebook.

  His father pointed out the small clocks on each frame. “You divide the hanks by the size of the roving to determine the pounds per spindle. Then you multiply that by spindles per frame to get your total production per frame. Multiply by the number of frames per operative …”

  Raymond nodded. Bobbins were whirling and whirring as fluffy white bundles of fiber were twisted, stretched, and wound. Watching them was making him dizzy. Men and women in work clothes or coveralls tended the frames. Some spindles had halted, and people were removing full bobbins, packing them in boxes on wheels and replacing them with empty bobbins. The place was a giant sewing machine.

  Raymond had always loved figuring out how things, anything, worked. But now that he had the picture, could he spend his life at it? He glanced at his father’s face and read enthusiasm. His father kept glancing anxiously at him—eager for approval? This thought unnerved Raymond. He’d spent his whole life wanting, and failing to earn, his father’s approval. And now here his father was wanting approval from him? Did his duty require that he follow in his father’s footsteps?

  On the other hand, his father had left Tatro Cove, hadn’t gone into the mines like his own father. Leaving places was practically a family tradition. Maybe his duty lay in upholding this folkway?

  After visiting the mill, he’d gone to the newspaper office to ask about a job. The photo editor praised his work but said they couldn’t use more staff. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait for me to die, Raymond,” Mr. Monroe quipped.

  While he was standing there, word came of a murder on Cherokee Shoals. A mother had shot her son for putting a lighted cherry bomb in her roast chicken. As Raymond snapped pictures of the corpse, he wondered what a lifetime of this would do to him. Was there some way to make a living from playing chess or sorting stamps? A job in the post office? He could steam off exotic stamps. But who in Newland got letters from exotic places?

  If he went to New York, took the job at the print shop, left behind everything and everyone familiar—he might fail, and be stuck in a strange city all alone. It seemed like a non-choice. Newland or New York City. Suffocation or terror.

  Mr. Tatro was also pondering Duty. To do his duty to his parents, he maybe should have stayed in Tatro Cove, They were old and feeble now, and his brothers and sisters had to tend them without his help. But his duty to his unborn children had required that he leave. He glanced at his handsome healthy family, contrasted them to his gaunt brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews still in Tatro Cove. His glance lingered on Junior. He just didn’t know what to make of that boy. Never had. He used to whip him black and blue with a belt almost every week trying to make him mind—say “yes sir,” instead of “uh huh.” Now he was talking about going off to New York City. “What you wanna go up there with a bunch of Yankees for? You’re never gonna mount to nothing without you find you a steady job and work your way up.” Junior had seemed interested in the mill at first, but he got bored real quick.

  It all began to come back—what he’d gone through getting used to mill work. He’d always done exactly as he pleased in the cove. Mostly he was around the house tending the garden. But even when he was working at the mine, he took off to go hunting when he felt like it. And all of a sudden, he was having to wait until a whistle blew to eat his dinner, having to watch those hundreds of spinning bobbins. He remembered thinking he’d go crazy the first few weeks, between being homesick and turning cross-eyed. But then those checks started coming in—one ever week, as regular as that noontime whistle. And they rented him his house at fifty cents a room; it seemed like a palace. And the current Mrs. Tatro started making eyes at him. The war came, and off he went to Guam. When he got back, all he wanted was to settle down someplace safe and comfortable.

  Gratitude. That’s what he felt toward the Princes. Something Raymond Tatro Junior had never felt in his whole entire life, cause he’d never known what it was to wonder where his next meal was coming from. He remembered up in the cove going to the Presbyterian mission school every day he could just because they served a hot lunch. Once a year the sponsors would come down from Philadelphia on a train. The students would line the tracks on the night of their arrival, holding lighted candles. They would go to the mission and do folk dances for the sponsors, watching them shyly and feeling—gratitude for those hot lunches.

 
; Shoot, it would be easy for that boy just to walk into the mill and do the job. He was town raised, used to schedules and being indoors. But he didn’t have a coal mine dogging his heels. Mr. Tatro felt a rush of affection. The boy was earnest and restless and ambitious—that way he sat, like a coiled spring. Mr. Tatro had been like that at eighteen himself. His own father had helped him leave without more than a normal helping of guilt, and he’d do the same. That was his duty to his oldest son.

  Mr. Marsh had folded his hands atop his ample stomach. Mr. Tatro tried to pay attention. Marsh usually had some pretty important messages.

  “Our boys in grey came home to find their houses burnt, their crops destroyed, and their animals run off. It was a turrible, turrible time, friends. The little towns like ours was just jammed with starving farmers down from their gullied patches of mountain soil. Jammed with freed slaves who didn’t know what to do with theirselves. We poor vanquished Southerners milled around like latter-day Jobs, in sackcloth and ashes, bewailing our woes and invoking heaven for assistance.”

  Jed was trying to decide whether to take Sally water skiing or to play miniature golf that afternoon. Miniature golf was over quicker. A couple of fast games and they’d be out at the quarry. But if they was to go water skiing, she’d already be wearing a bathing suit. And if it was hot enough, she might take a few sips of beer…. Or should he play hard to get, not even kiss her until she was begging for it? But would Sally be likely to beg? Probably not. And would he still want her if she did? Also probably not. Betty Boobs would sometimes beg, and it disgusted him. The fun was getting them to go along even though they didn’t really want to.

  Yesterday after working out at the gym, he’d taken a whirlpool bath. It had felt so good just to lie there as the swirling water made him hard. He lay on his back, with his knees open and his eyes closed, until he came. That was probably what it was like to be a girl. They really had it easy. Sometimes he thought he should use the money he spent taking Sally out, hoping she’d repay him with a lousy little peck on the mouth, to buy his own whirlpool bath.

  He glanced around. He knew almost everyone in the place, had been coming here all his life. He’d been baptized in the pool on the stage behind Mr. Marsh, would probably settle down back here himself and go to this church with his own kids. But first he figured he’d go to some college—Alabama or Tennessee—on a football scholarship. Then what he’d really like to do was play pro ball. He saw no reason why not. He’d always done everything he set out to do. Turned himself from a skinny little kid into a varsity left tackle. He could press two hundred pounds easy. It ran in his family. His father got hisself out of Tatro Cove and was now a foreman at the mill. Tatros did what they set out to do. Except maybe his faggot older brother over there, who’d been moaning around the house for months over what to do with hisself. Jed couldn’t have no sympathy for somebody like that, all wishy-washy, like some damn girl. Balls on him like a Boy Scout. You picked something, and you did it, and you shut up about it. Like Coach Clancy always said, “Either shit or get off the pot.”

  “… well, the Lord looks after his own, friends. Yes, he does. Hit is writ in Isaiah 41:17, ‘When the poor and needy seek water and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.’ And in our day of travail, friends, he sent to the people of this town the means for their salvation. He sent them a group of concerned citizens—names we all recognize today, like Barnes, Johnston, Benson, Prince, Tatro. These fine socially concerned gentlemen decided to open them up a cotton mill. People flocked down out of the hills for jobs—the parents and grandparents of you folks setting here today. The Lord sent them the means for their salvation. They had only to do their duty to the fine men who hired them, and they need never go hungry again. Our Lord came through! Like it says in Psalm 107, ‘He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into water springs.’ Them that does their duty, they don’t have to worry about nothing, friends, cause their Lord God He …”

  Mrs. Tatro was wondering about the duty other people owed her. If it wouldn’t of looked like bragging, she’d of turned to her husband and exclaimed, “I have done that which was my duty to do!” Goodness knows she hadn’t enjoyed much of what she’d done in her life, so it must have been duty that kept her at it—washing and ironing, cooking and cleaning, on top of full-time work—first at the mill, now at Sutton Insurance. She remembered the night Raymond Tatro walked into her mother’s house wearing faded overalls and a suit jacket, and holding everything he owned in a brown paper sack. She had stifled a giggle. But as the days went by and she chatted with him walking to work and at suppertime, she realized he wasn’t no ordinary dumb lazy hick like most of the mountain boys who turned up at her mother’s. He had plans and energy. Seemed like that nothing could stop him. They both expected he’d be a foreman before long, then a superintendent. Who knew—maybe even vice president? Seemed like that when he came back from the war, though, some of that drive had left him. He was content just setting around the house.

  Mr. Marsh married them in this very church. His family came down from Tatro Cove for the ceremony and embarrassed them both to death, looking like something out of ancient history.

  Tatro had been on the hoot-owl shift, and she’d worked days, and they hardly saw each other, except long enough to conceive two sons. She’d get up and get the boys off to babysitters or to school. As she went out the door, he’d come in. When she got home, she’d wash and iron and cook. She’d wake Tatro up for supper, then he’d rush out to work. For a long time she didn’t mind. She’d done mill work for a couple of years before her marriage. Her friends were there. You could chat as you wove. But seemed like that the machines, the new models as they come in, just got louder and louder till, before you knew it, you was reading lips rather than hearing. And your quotas kept getting put up until you didn’t hardly have time to catch a breath.

  They used to lie in bed and dream about moving to a new ranch house in a development—with a brick patio out back and an electric barbecue grill. He’d be earning enough money so she could stop working and raise their sons up proper. But he’d bogged down at foreman, and they were still here in the mill village. He was always exclaiming about how far he’d come since Tatro Cove. She tried to point out how far he had yet to go. She met Melanie Prince in the street the other day. Looked like a million dollars—silk dress, high heels, a hairdo straight out of a beauty parlor. She could of passed for thirty. But in high school she’d been homely, nothing but a brain. No one wanted to date her. Rose Tatro had been a sponsor for the marching band, and every boy in that school had wanted to go out with her, including Melanie Prince’s current husband. And she had to go pick Tatro here…. She exchanged a wry smile with him.

  Each spring he turned up the soil in the back yard and planted huge crops of vegetables, which she canned come harvest. Each spring she suggested he grow just enough for fresh eating, with canned and frozen so cheap in the supermarket. He explained he wanted to be sure his family wouldn’t never have to go hungry like up in Tatro Cove. She’d point out he was in the Benson Mill village now, earning regular wages, and not in Tatro Cove with no job. Each spring he’d reply that if you’d grown up hungry, you didn’t never get over it.

  Junior heaved himself around. That boy had never been anything but difficult, ever since his first month home from the hospital when he drove his daddy out of the house with his screaming.

  “Chew your food, Junior.”

  “Why?”

  “Look both ways when you cross the street, Junior.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  Restless. Whenever he was home, it was like there was a turbine throbbing in his room. Now he was talking about going off to New York City. Every time he brought it up, she left the room without speaking.

  She glanced at Jed. Her baby. Big and strong, but so gentle and affectionate. He loved his mama, loved his home. No problems with Jed. He’d do
ne her proud. He’d take up where his daddy gave out, go to college, come back to the mill, start off in management … She pictured him, dressed in a suit and tie as he was now, seated behind a big desk in a carpeted office, instructing his secretary to send his mother some flowers, as she sometimes did for Mr. Sutton.

  “… so we have these reds from up North coming in here ever oncet in a while—telling us how to run our jobs. Say what we need is to start us up one of these here unions like they got em up North.

  “Now I say to you, friends, if things is so great up there, why is these Commie agitators all the time coming down here? I’ll tell you why, friends. We got us a good thing going. And them folks, they know it! We do our duty here, friends. Do better work for less cost, and we’re stealing away all their bidness. They stay in the plushest rooms the Howard Johnson Motel has to offer. They eat big old steak dinners down at the Corral Restaurant. We sit home and we eat hot dogs. And they want us to pay them dues? Why, we’d have to demand higher wages just to get the same take-home as before! Mr. Prince would have to raise prices, and we wouldn’t be able to win so many jobs away from the Northern mills. Which is exactly what our Yankee organizing friends want!”