Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  “Great, huh, Junior?” Ben demanded. “It’s why you haven’t been seeing much of me lately.”

  Raymond couldn’t speak.

  “I realize now,” confessed Dred, stroking his red beard, “that I came to Tatro Cove thinking I had all the answers. Well, I know now these people have plenty to teach me. I want to help them preserve their culture and transmit its strengths to the American mainstream.”

  “What’s wrong, Junior?” Ben asked in a worried voice. “Don’t worry about him.” Dred gave Raymond a look of contempt. “He’s just jealous he didn’t think of it first.”

  That night the skies opened. Rain gushed down like fluid from a uterus at the onset of labor. Raymond sat on his porch and watched in the lightning as the topsoil from his garden washed into the creek. He felt nothing. Ben had betrayed him for a handful of silver. Well, he would just have to revise his plans. How, he had no idea. He’d just have to wait until new means were revealed to him.

  The rains kept up for several days. When they stopped, the creek was choked with silt from the soil bank left by the strippers. Water rose over the creek bank and began flooding his yard. With a shovel he dug a new channel. The next rain brought down more silt and filled in the channel. Every few days Royal and Lem and Lyle and Cor Four and Raymond were all out in the creek in front of their houses with shovels.

  Raymond climbed the hill to get some idea how much more silt would descend. He discovered the graveyard had sunk, the ground having collapsed into auger holes. Looking down the backside, he saw that a mud slide off the soil bank had dammed the valley through which the creek ran. Murky reddish water was building up behind it.

  At Thanksgiving dinner, M.G. said, “Lord, we got so much to be thankful for here in Tatro Cove.” Raymond reflected that M.G. sure did. He’d branched out into helicopters, was selling dozens to strippers. “We known hard times, which makes our present good fortune that much sweeter to partake of.”

  After everybody amened, while the women served, Raymond told about the mud slide, about his concern that the wall would break and flood the cove, about the need to get together and do something about it.

  “If it breaks, it breaks,” said Lem, shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth.

  “Son, you can’t stop progress!” announced M.G., folding his hands over his stomach, which bulged out over the white patent leather belt that matched his loafers.

  Royal said, “I figure it’s worth the worry so them folks in the valley can run their factories.”

  Raymond felt the gnawing start up in his stomach. Here he was, telling them something essential for their immediate physical survival, and they wouldn’t listen. How could he have expected them to grasp something as subtle as their mission? He’d been living among them for over a year, and they still hadn’t recognized his function, still avoided, ignored, or patronized him. There was a limit to how long you could sustain patience in the face of unremitting ignorance. Just as everyone had always done, it appeared the people of Tatro Cove were bound to betray him. He looked around at the flushed smiling Tatro faces with their similar features. All these people were interested in was shoveling the maximum amount of poor-quality food into their babbling mouths.

  After dinner M.G. ushered his relatives into the living room to inspect his new 23-inch Motorola color TV console. They all sat and watched “Hee Haw.” Two men in straw hats were dancing and playing banjos and making faces:

  “This old hillbilly, he watched this nurse get into this elevator. The Doc, he comes up and says, ‘Clem, why, what’s wrong with you, son?’ ‘Doc,’ he says, ‘that girl, she climbed in that there box. The doors shet. And when they opened again, she’d plumb vanished!’”

  Canned laughter roared. So did the room full of Tatros. Raymond tried to calm his stomach, reminding himself of the brutalization his relatives had endured—their land, their culture, their very bodies exploited, maimed, and destroyed to produce profits. It wasn’t his kinfolks’ fault that they were incapable of accepting the message Raymond was offering. He noticed Ben across the room, staring at him, perplexed. The others could have another chance, but it was too late for Ben.

  A commercial came on. An earnest engineer in a construction helmet and work clothes knelt with a pine seedling in his callused hand and explained with a sincere blue gaze about how the multinational oil company he worked for was restoring the hillsides it had stripped until they were more attractive and more hospitable to wildlife than when God Himself first fashioned them.

  Two men in overalls lay in the yard of a tarpaper shack, a coon dog sleeping beside them.

  “You reckon we outta mend that roof one day, Pa?” one drawled, his eyes closed and his hand reaching for a brown jug.

  “Why, son, I declare, I …”

  Raymond’s hand grabbed a heavy glass ashtray. He hurled it as hard as he could at the TV screen, which shattered, throwing glass around the room.

  Everyone stared at him.

  “Don’t yall see what the capitalists are doing? Portraying us as stupid and lazy. Not human. Just like they do blacks. So they don’t have to feel guilty about destroying our land and our people and our culture for their own goddam profit!” He was screaming.

  M.G. said in a quiet voice, “Son, you just wrecked my brand-new Motorola 23-inch color TV. You some kind of Communist nut or something?”

  Raymond knelt by his stove in front of Ben, who’d hurt his knee in ball practice that afternoon. Raymond had persuaded him to let him rub some homemade salve on it. Ben was sitting in his underwear, while Raymond rubbed the swollen knee.

  “I reckon M.G. is pretty annoyed with me?” He felt grateful to Ben for coming to see him. Everyone else was avoiding him.

  “To tell you the truth, Junior, he ain’t real happy.”

  “I reckon I ought to find some way to get his set fixed.”

  “It might help.”

  “I feel bad about it. I lost my head.”

  They heard a car pull into the yard. Red lights flashed through the window. Two state troopers and M.G. rushed through the door. They sniffed around the room like dogs looking for a spot to pee in.

  M.G. said, “It’s just like I thought. All right now, I want to know, Junior, what you doing to my son. Teaching a seventeen-year-old boy to knit. It’s downright un-American!”

  Raymond sat back in his chair and rubbed the salve from his palms onto his jeans.

  “It ain’t normal for no man your age to live all alone like this. How come you ain’t got you no wife?” Raymond looked at him.

  “Come on, Ben. I’m taking you right now to Doc Dalton for a check-up.”

  “What for, Pa?”

  “You know what for, son.”

  Ben looked at Raymond, who was starting to get sick to his stomach.

  “You’re wrong, M.G.,” Raymond said.

  “What?” asked Ben.

  “Come on, son. And don’t think I ain’t gon have you locked up, Junior. We may share a last name, but a Commie faggot like you ain’t no kin of mine.”

  “You’re making a bad mistake, M.G.” Raymond was unable to move from his chair.

  “We’ll see what Doc Dalton has to say about that.”

  “What, Pa?”

  Lyla arrived on Raymond’s doorstep the next afternoon and handed him a note.

  “Thanks, Lyla. That’s real sweet of you.”

  Lyla held out her grubby little palm.

  “What, honey?”

  “Tip please.”

  “Would you settle for a slice of whole wheat bread with some fresh butter and honey?”

  “Cash only.”

  The note, from Ben, read: “Pa says I can’t come down there no more. It ain’t true, is it, Junior, what they’re saying you wanted from me?”

  That night Raymond set a fire in the woods below a new strip site in the next hollow. While the watchman was checking it out, he broke into the shed and stole some dynamite. The next day in town he bought some batteries and a couple of win
d-up alarm clocks. That afternoon he heard about Jed’s death and went down to Newland.

  He walked to the front of the church with Lem, Lyle, Ben, Royal, M.G., and several others. Dodging the wreaths and bouquets, they shouldered the casket, looking at each other and nodding to coordinate the effort. Apparently death was the only thing Tatros could agree on. Brought them all together like a nest of rats. Well then, when he got back to the cove, maybe he’d just put his bombs under the mud dam so the inhabitants of Tatro Cove, clinging to the coffins of their forebears, would be flushed into the Big Sandy River. The only solution appeared to be to clear away all that human debris and start from scratch, like Noah.

  They proceeded slowly up the aisle, while the organist played a dirge. Various people in the congregation wept and sniffled and eyed Raymond’s overalls with disapproval.

  Suddenly it occurred to Raymond that he bore his brother’s dead body on his shoulder. Anguish swept through him like a brush fire, and he staggered, the coffin sliding off his shoulder and continuing up the aisle on other shoulders. As he caught up, tears dribbled from his eyes. Skinny little Jed, using every ounce of his strength to haul himself to the top of the Castle Tree. Raymond had loved him and hated him, but in both cases had spent a lot of his time preoccupied with him. And now he was gone. And there was a void in Raymond’s life where a pain-in-the-ass kid brother, a hulking idiot of a jock, a bigoted loudmouth redneck used to be. A sob shook Raymond. Everyone in town was watching. He didn’t know which was worse—to have them think he was fabricating this grief because it was appropriate to the moment, or to have them know it was genuine.

  They slid the casket into the hearse like a shell casing into a gun. Raymond climbed into a black limousine from Creech’s Funeral Home, which was being driven by Billy Creech. Billy gave him a somber nod, which he returned. Raymond had known Billy in high school. He wore big round glasses, and they’d called him Creech Owl. He used to sign everyone’s annual on the page his old man had taken out for an ad, penciling in the slogan, “Let us be the last to let you down.”

  Chapter Three

  Donny

  It felt real strange being back in Pine Woods after such a long time. But probably stranger for Pine Woods than for him, Donny realized. His grandmaw looked at him in his black leather jacket and Afro like he was from Mars. “Now, what you spoze to be, nigger?”

  “I ain’t spoze to be nothing. I am a black man.”

  “Honey, you done been one of them your whole entire life, without growing no bush out of your head.”

  “No, I ain’t. I ain’t been neither in my own mind. But now I’m both. And proud of it.”

  “Humph,” she said. “You reckon you too proud to run up the hill to the Princes’ and fetch me my Christmas tree?”

  Donny didn’t want nothing to do with no Princes. The reason it took him so long in the first place to understand what was coming down was because he hung out in that motherfucking tree with those honkies all those years. Put it in his head they was all one big happy family. But he did want to help out his grandmaw. She looked so pitiful setting over her kerosene heater, all bony and bundled in a raggy old quilt. Used to tell him all the time he had to learn to be “clever.” Where had all her cleverness got her to?

  “How come you got to go fetch it? Ain’t they always brung it down?”

  “Ain’t you heard? That poor little old Jed went and got hisself killed in a car wreck.”

  Donny stared at her. “Where at?”

  “Out on the Chattanooga highway. Run over by a big old truck.”

  What was that cracker to him, man? Why should he care? “Yeah, I’ll go fetch the tree.”

  He put the kids in the back seat of his mother’s car, which he’d borrowed to drive Rochelle and them down here in. They drove down the highway, under the railroad bridge, past the red brick mill. Shit, had he changed since he used to push a broom through that place, grinning at all those white motherfuckers. Man, he didn’t know what he thought he was doing back in those days. It was like he was in some kind of a trance or something. Prince wanted him to be grateful for the chance to mop his floors, so he was grateful while he mopped the floors. Rochelle wanted him to buy her a ranch house, so he felt bad cause he couldn’t. His mother wanted him to Make Something of Himself, so he worked until he was so tired at night that he couldn’t hardly hold his head up to watch the TV. His grandmaw wanted him to love the Lord, so he loved the Lord, not knowing nothing about the cat But now didn’t nobody tell Donny Tatro what to do.

  Of course he went up North in the first place to try to get Rochelle her ranch house. Felt like he owed her that much after busting her up so bad. Plus which he now had all those doctor bills to pay, on top of everything else. They both appeared around Pine Woods with their faces all stitched together like softballs. One of her front teeth was broken. A few days later she miscarried. Nobody had been able to believe that Mr. Junior Church Usher could of done that to his own wife. He couldn’t believe it himself. He’d become a different person for a few minutes there. He lived with his grandmaw for a while, all upset and confused. One week he’d be at church on Wednesday night and twice on Sunday. The next week he’d hang out in front of Dupree’s every afternoon after work, and so late in the pool hall on Saturday night that he’d sleep through church. At church they’d tell him to shoulder his yoke. In front of Dupree’s they’d tell him to split. All he knew was that he wanted Rochelle back, but that she’d look the other way when he passed her on the street. Eventually she let him move back in, but she wouldn’t have nothing to do with him. “I feel sorry for your grandmaw having you around all the time, is all,” she growled. She slept on the couch with Sue and Billy, while he slept in the bed with Nicole and Isaac.

  Anyhow, he figured people who went up North usually came back with a bunch of money, and if they could, he could. Just a question of working hard and living right. If you didn’t make it, you just weren’t trying hard enough. He applied for a job at the Ford plant in Metuchen, New Jersey, and they put him on a wait list. Down here you couldn’t join no union, up there you had to. He didn’t much like neither situation. He just wanted a job that would earn him some bread, so he could buy Rochelle her ranch house, so she’d want to get next to him again. Sometimes being around her was like one of those fairy tales his mama used to read The Five—where you had to go through all these impossible trials to win the hand of the princess.

  When he told his grandmaw he was leaving, she looked at him and said, “Lord, Lord.”

  “But I’ll be back to visit you, Grandmaw.”

  “You’ll come back, honey, but you won’t be my Donny no more.”

  He laughed. “Course I will. Who else I gon be?”

  She shook her head and spat tobacco juice across the room.

  They’d taken him on a tour of that auto plant. He watched the men, some colored, running those big machines. If only he could run one that put in the rivets to hold the chassis together, he’d be stone living. The notion they’d pay him to do this was almost more than he could handle.

  While he waited to be summoned by Ford, he hiked cars in an eight-floor underground garage near the United Nations. One day a white woman in a chinchilla coat drove in in a chocolate-colored Mercedes-Benz. She smiled at him as he slid behind the wheel. He drove off slow, to show her how careful he was. Two levels down he turned on the radio loud and floored it. On the fourth level he swung into a space between a Coupe de Ville and a Buick Riviera, spinning the wheel with one hand. Slamming on the brakes, he stopped the front fender an inch from the concrete pillar. He ran his hand over the brown leather seat and wiped the wooden dashboard with his shirt sleeve. He could smell that woman’s perfume. Made him want Rochelle real bad.

  He walked to the stairway whistling. He’d parked that mother perfect on his first try. Sometimes he had to stop and back up to pull in at the right angle. Monty, who mostly sat in the office collecting money and picking his nose, called Donny “Cowboy.” He kept war
ning Donny that one day he was going to bash in one of those big cars, and then where would he be? (On the line at the Metuchen Ford plant, he hoped.)

  Sometimes when Monty went out for coffee, Donny would climb into a Rolls or a Continental Mark IV, back it up, then pull it in. He’d do this several times, thinking about driving out the exit for a spin. But he was chicken shit.

  What he’d buy next, after Rochelle’s ranch house in New Jersey, was a Chrysler Imperial. Man, whenever he parked one of those mothers, he felt like he was in heaven. Every now and then colored men would drive in in big cars. And Leon had him an El Dorado. Up here anything was possible. It was up to Donny to make it happen, and, baby, he would. He kept meaning to borrow his mother’s camera and get Monty to take his picture behind the wheel of an Imperial to send down to Rochelle. Maybe she’d get the idea he was on the right track. He hadn’t sent her much cash yet, but if he got on at the Ford plant, they’d be minting it. Before long, he’d bring her and the kids up. They’d have their own place in a development near the Ford plant, with a yard all their own that the children next door couldn’t trample. He’d buy him a self-propelled lawn mower like the Princes’ and mow the grass every week. It’d be a pleasure once it was your own grass.

  He grabbed a straight chair and carted it up the inclined driveway to the sidewalk. Leaning it back on two legs against the brick wall of an apartment building, he sat down with his feet on the rungs and his arms folded across his stomach. The spring sun felt good. It was so weak, though, filtering through the exhaust fumes and dodging all those huge buildings. He told Monty people up here didn’t know what sunlight was all about. Monty told him sunlight was about the onliest thing niggers from down South knew anything about Donny told him he also knew how to stop big mouths from talking jive insults. It tickled him when Monty actually shut up. Nobody up here knew Donny as Good Boy Tatro or Mr. Junior Church Usher. They didn’t know what he might do. If Donny wanted to be somebody else altogether, wasn’t nobody else’s opinions to stop him. The exhilaration inspired by this thought rapidly faded into uneasiness. Nobody could box him in, but nobody knew the good stuff either—about him being a big basketball hero in high school, or being Ruby Prince’s grandson, or being the first colored man on at Benson Mill. Even if he told them, wouldn’t nobody care.