“I don’t care if you do or not. I was talking about your crush on Cecilia.”
“She don’t mean nuthin to me.” I raced her to the smokehouse, but stopped short when I heard a man laugh behind the building. It was just a short bark, but I recalled Uncle Stan in the woods after he made the hogs burst out of their haystack.
Rienzi won the race, tapping the door half-heartedly. I shushed her before she could ask why I’d quit.
A voice sounding like Mr. Turner’s said, “At least you don’t have a daughter who hid your pickled hand somewhere.” He giggled a little drunkenly.
Uncle Stan’s tone chilled me more than the fresh breeze on my sweaty neck: “I don’t got a daughter.”
“Hey, Stan, simmer down. Bless your heart, you get fuzzed up faster’n—”
“I won’t drink with a man that runs down my family.”
“I didn’t say anything about ’em.” After a pause, Mr. Turner said, “We better get back.”
“Checkin your watch like a damn city slicker. Can’t even look at the sky like normal folks. It’s quarter to one; gimme five minutes on both sides and I’ll bet your flask it is.”
“Thirteen ’til.”
“Ha! See what happens when you buy them fancy things? You stop noticing. Down the hatch!” In a few seconds, he sighed. A thump and dragging sound followed, as if he’d leaned hard against the building and slid onto his rump. “Only thing I’m good for, Walter. Tellin time without a watch.”
“That ain’t true, Stan. C’mon, let’s go.”
“Couldn’t even do that, I reckon, if I’d gone in the service. Chickened out.”
“Lots of married guys enlist. Why didn’t—”
“Arzula. Said she’d take rat poison if I ever left her, even for a night.”
“Jeez. We better go.” There were shuffling sounds, and Mr. Turner said, “No, no, you won it fair and square.”
“I did leave her one time, Walter. Just for a Saturday night, a little escape.” Footsteps rounded the back of the building and walked along the side. Both men dragged their feet a little.
I pulled Rienzi inside the smokehouse and closed the door. Small, contained fires glowed in orange pools; otherwise, the building was absolutely dark. The smell of curing meat and sweet smoke calmed my fear. I tried to think of sausages and ham instead of haints and rat poison.
Mr. Turner said, “And see how women make a big deal and then nuthin happens? You left and she didn’t kill herself.”
Voice cracking, my uncle said, “Arzula poisoned Eliza Jean.”
“What’re you talkin about?”
“She killed my baby girl.” He sobbed and banged his fist against the wall.
I almost cried out. Inhaling hard, I began to choke on the smoke.
Uncle Stan continued, “Oh Christ, Walter, she had Eliza propped up in a chair, facin the door for me to find on Sunday mornin. Blue in the face, her little hands too. A teaspoon by her on the chair.”
“Shit, Stan, really? Where was Arzula?”
“In bed, curled up with the rat poison bottle. It’d tipped, spilled all over her and the mattress. So help me God, I wanted her to be dead. But she was fast asleep.”
I sank to my knees as the tickle in my throat became a harsh scratching, like some creature tried to climb up into my mouth. Breathing slowly through my nose didn’t help. My TB-weakened lungs heaved as I covered my lips with both hands. The longer I held in the cough, the louder it would be.
Mr. Turner said, “What did you do?”
“Buried my baby. Along with the spoon and that rat poison. I buried Eliza’s clothes and anything else she’d touched. Almost erased her.” He snapped his fingers. “Gone. When Arzula woke up, she yelled at me for spillin poison on her and the sheets and went to look for our girl.”
Tears streamed from my eyes. I let out small, nasal coughs but it wasn’t enough. Rienzi asked in a whisper if I was all right. My throat burned. I longed to lie down and hack like the consumption had returned.
Stan replied to a question I’d missed, telling Mr. Turner, “She said I did it: poisoned Eliza, tried to kill her too.” He pounded the wall again. “She began to wear lots of clothes, like she was dressin more’n one wacko. Startin throwin food on the floor ’cause she thought our baby was still crawlin around somewhere.” Another sobbing fit overtook him as he said, “Ten years I been livin with—”
I coughed hard and that led to louder and longer coughs. I fell on my side, giving into it, trying to shove out every wisp of smoke from my chest and head. The door swung open.
Sunlight cut through the haze of smoke. A man stood there in silhouette; his left arm ended in a stump. Mr. Turner said, “Bud, what’re you doin in here?”
As I writhed and gurked, Rienzi said, “I’m sorry, sir. Um, we were getting a snack.”
“What are you, buzzards? Let the meat cure for God’s sake.” He dragged me outside and laid me on the dirt.
Uncle Stan leaned against the corner of the building, pointing at me. “You get all that, Roger? Think you know everything now? You don’t know shit.” Mr. Turner shielded me until my uncle shambled away, heading toward home.
CHAPTER 22
We slaughtered twenty-two hogs that day. By evening, I could wring blood from my clothes. My fingers ached from stripping intestines and repeated dunks in chilly water. For many reasons, I couldn’t stop shivering.
Cecilia helped me and Rienzi overturn and rinse out the huge galvanized washtubs of bloody water. The thirsty sand swallowed every drop, though wherever the water touched the ground, rosy patches remained like port-wine stains on the earth.
Mrs. Turner had gone inside to heat water for her family’s baths. I judged that I could get home and wash with a wet rag before Uncle Stan returned from even more drinking. If there were signs that he’d stayed home, I could always jump in Spring Creek and dry off beside a campfire. I tucked my filthy hands in my overalls, careful not to touch the buckeye, and told Cecilia, “I gotta clean off. I’ll come back with my uncle tomorrow to get our share of the kidneys, livers, and all.”
Rienzi pointed at one of the remaining washtubs covered with a towel. Flies scrambled over the thin cotton that protected a pile of hog organs. “I can help you carry it. Sometimes you treat me like a girl.”
Cecilia laughed and said, “At least you’ll grow up big and strong. Boys got it made. You just try being a girl sometime.”
“No thanks!” Rienzi wiped a bloody sleeve across her cheek. Red streaked her skin like war paint. “Let’s hurry. Granny says she’s fit to be tied about me always staying out so late.”
Slowly, we made our way off the farm and down Hardscrabble Road. The sun had set, leaving a pink haze to the west. On the wind, smells of chimney smoke and roasting meat darted around us. We made less and less progress as our arms needed longer periods of rest.
For the first time, I talked about overhearing Uncle Stan and Mr. Turner. “When my uncle was strangling me that one time, Aunt Arzula hollered ‘You’re killing the baby again.’ I thought he’d wrung Eliza Jean’s neck.”
“Maybe he did and he told Mr. Turner a lie.”
“Why bother? Why not keep his mouth shut about it?”
“I’ve never been around drunks—I don’t understand them.” Rienzi put down her end and we switched sides. “The way he looked at you scared me worse than getting chased by the spirit li—I mean, that luminescent phenomenon.”
I didn’t even try to puzzle that one out. A car trundled down the road, kicking up cold dust. The headlights swept over Rienzi, and I remembered how she had looked when she took off her hat and uncoiled her braid for Papa. I said, “Cecilia thinks you’re cute. Will you tell her your secret?”
“No need, she won’t see me for a while. This is my last day; my daddy came home to Texas and wants me back in San Antonio. Will you write to me this time?”
“I will, I triple-promise.”
We had to drag the washtub the final twenty yards to the porch ste
ps. I told her I needed to rest before hauling the tub into the kitchen. My arms trembled and I couldn’t flex my frigid fingers without pain.
Uncle Stan had left the house open. Before he went, though, he’d built a fire in the bedroom hearth that still cast a bright glow. I saw from the blaze that it hadn’t burned very long—we’d have some time to warm up before he returned.
Putting my freezing hands and feet near the flames was like dunking them in boiling water; they felt scalded, not singed. I closed my eyes, enjoying the heat on my face. Soon, I was aware of how much colder my back felt than my front. When I turned around to warm my shoulders and spine, I saw Rienzi leaning against the bedstead with an open box in her lap.
“Hey!” I said, “Put that back under the bed. You can’t snoop through other folks’ stuff.”
“Take a look at these photographs.” She fanned out a number of sepia images like she was going to ask me to pick one. “You won’t believe it.”
I took the seven snapshots from her. In the first one, my younger-looking aunt and uncle stared back at me. She wore only one dress and kept her hair under a bonnet. Uncle Stan touched her hand but didn’t hold it; even then, his face showed resignation, like the last of the hogs about to be butchered.
Grandma Elrod was in the next photograph holding a baby whose face was too small and blurry to see. I glanced at the back of the picture. Someone had written “Ma and Eliza Jean.”
My aunt and uncle posed at the old home place in the next shot. Aunt Arzula held the baby this time, but again her daughter’s face was too hard to make out. The fourth photograph showed them with Eliza Jean and an older couple in front of an unpainted house. A tree must’ve been blocking the sun because a portion of the older man’s face was in shadows. On the back, the same faint brown handwriting: “Arzula, Buddy, Eliza Jean, and Mister and Missus Borden.”
I explained that Uncle Stan’s surname was Borden, and Rienzi said, “I thought his first name was Stan.”
“Maybe it’s a nickname my aunt had for him. He told me there was lots of Buds out there; that’s why he likes Roger better.”
“Who gave you your nickname?”
“Mama. Why?”
“Keep going.”
Two more stills showed Stan, Arzula, and Eliza with his parents, once on the porch and once by a pond. I said, “I can’t ever make out Mr. Borden’s face. The same side is always dark, no matter where the sun’s at.”
She touched my right temple with fingers like firebrands. “Have you ever seen a picture of yourself?”
Instead of answering, I quickly revealed the last photograph. It was a group shot in front of the old home place: Arzula, her many sisters, a few husbands including Stan but not Papa, some young children, Grandma holding Eliza Jean, and Grandpa Elrod, who’d died before I was born.
The handwriting on the back identified everyone. Mama’s name was missing. I flipped over to the picture. She wasn’t there. Then I looked at the careful school-girl printing again and recognized it from letters I’d seen written to far-off cousins and old friends. It was hers. I said, “Mama took all these snaps and wrote on the backs.”
“Would she have called your uncle ‘Buddy’?”
“Maybe so.” I told her that when Mama abandoned me at Uncle Stan’s door, she’d used that name. I’d thought she was talking to me.
Rienzi went into the kitchen, and I yelled, “Hurry, we have to go!” She rummaged among the cupboards and brought back a thick-bottomed jar and a brown-tinted bottle. She pointed at the bottle label and said, “Rat poison. They have six more.” Setting the poison aside, she said, “Let me show you a neat trick.” She took the pictures from me and held one of the shots of the Bordens beneath the jar. I looked down into the glass: the photographed faces appeared wider and a little larger. My uncle’s father had a port-wine stain.
She said, “I heard that it can skip a generation sometimes.” She held the snapshot of Grandma and Eliza Jean behind the crude magnifier. I saw it in the yellow firelight: Eliza Jean had a birthmark that marred her cheek and jaw and all of her neck that showed above the blanket.
I said, “Uncle Stan passed it on to his baby girl?”
“That’s right, and Buddy passed it on to his baby boy.”
I held my head and moaned, “So my aunt and uncle are my real parents?” Even as I said it, I knew the truth was worse.
Rienzi didn’t spare me. “No, Roger. Your mother and Stan.”
I covered my ears, rocking on my haunches, but still I heard her say, “When we hid behind the truck, he said he doesn’t talk to her anymore. He said that he was banned from your granny’s home about eight years ago. How old are you now?”
“Stop it!” Every harsh thought I’d ever had about Mama screamed for attention. Papa had called me a sonofabitch bastard. He was right on all counts.
I bolted out the backdoor, slamming it behind me. A brutal gust of wind chilled the sweat that had sprung out on my face and neck. I spun around, wondering where to go. Run to the old home place and ask Mama if it was true? Should I go see Jay or Chet?
From the front yard, Uncle Stan bellowed, “Git outta there!” I heard a scratching like claws on tin as I ran to the barn. “Blasted coons! Roger, damn it all—you left the meat out here.”
I’d just closed the barn door behind me when his mule Viola snorted from her pen. The sudden noise almost drove me outside again. I found a rickety ladder and climbed to the loft. Burrowing into the scratchy hay, I thought of gopher holes. Papa knew I wasn’t his, even if he didn’t know for sure who to blame. Other than Mama.
Now that I knew, I wish he’d really found me in the woods. I’d rather have been an orphan than a bastard. And I’d rather have had a mysterious daddy than either Papa or Stan—an unknown father would’ve been far better than an unknowable one.
Rienzi dashed in and eased the door closed. She whispered, “Bud, I saw you come in here. Where are you hiding?” She walked around the barn. From the muffled footsteps and bumping of tools, it sounded like she checked every square foot, maybe the way a scientist would. She mounted the ladder and was soon kicking through the hay.
Not wanting a toe in my eye, I murmured from my den, “Here. Near the back.”
She sat beside the straw hideout I’d made. “I’m sorry I upset you. Sometimes I forget that finding out new things can hurt.”
A long, wailing shout came from the house. I hunkered deeper into the hay while Uncle Stan called my name and cussed me. He’d found the open box.
Rienzi said, “It’s empty. I have the pictures here.”
“He knows…that I know everything now. I wish I didn’t. I wish you’d left things alone.”
“It’s always better to learn than be ignorant, even if it makes you sad.”
“That so? I thought I was a orphan for a long time. Then I was sure where I belonged.” Uncle Stan continued to rage inside the house; I kept talking so I couldn’t listen to him. “Now Jay and Chet are only half-brothers. Darlene’s just a half-sister. I was born because Mama cheated—I’d thought she was a little better than Papa. Now I wish I could be that orphan again.”
“But then you wouldn’t know your true father.”
I said, “Anybody could be him. A nice uncle, a perfect stranger. I could pretend where I belonged.”
“That’s all make-believe, like living in a storybook. At least you can talk to your mother and father. I never knew Mommy.”
A thump outside preceded a crash of wood on the back porch. Uncle Stan must’ve tripped while trying to bring in more fuel for the bedroom fireplace. He cussed, but in a sobbing, self-pitying voice. I said, “Listen out there. You think I can talk to that?”
“You can when he’s not drinking.”
Outside, Uncle Stan shouted, “Arzula—dammit, gimme a hand with this wood.”
My aunt said, “Just look at the mess you made.”
I brushed hay off my blood-encrusted clothes. “She came back at a bad time; he’s gonna pop her. I
f I can lead ’im away with the snapshots, you get her in here.” I took the photographs from her and went to the ladder. Pressing the sides with hands and feet, I slid down without touching the rungs and scampered outside.
Aunt Arzula’s kerosene lamp cast a dim yellow light on the porch. Uncle Stan crawled on the floorboards, pushing the scattered wood into a pile. I hollered, “I’ll help you. Aunt Arzula, could you please check in the barn, ma’am? Viola’s acting up.”
Uncle Stan pointed a stick of kindling at me. “Thanks to you, we got half-chewed livers and lights all over the yard.”
I pictured the torn-up hog lungs and other organs coated with sand, like they’d been battered and were ready for the fryer. My aunt said, “You two are impossible. Can’t you do anything right?” Instead of going into the barn, she shuffled in her brogans around the side of the house. Soon she called to us about how ruined each piece was.
“Git over here, son.” Uncle Stan held on to a porch post. “Guess I can call you that now.”
I dragged my feet as if I wore my aunt’s oversized shoes. Before me, I held the photographs. “I’m sorry I snooped. I won’t tell.”
“Tell? Shit, I reckon everybody in the family knows but you and Mance.”
“I won’t tell him, sir. I promise.”
“It don’t matter.” He rested the side of his face against the post and said, “God, I’m so sick of it all, Roger. So tired. You ever feel like you wanna sleep forever?”
“Yes, sir.” I offered him the snapshots, and he took them. For the briefest moment, his finger brushed mine.
He glanced down at the pictures fanned out in the starlight. “I wish I had one of your mama. Reva won’t let herself get trapped in a snapshot or anywhere else. Go to her, Roger.”
“I live here now.”
My father pawed at the tears in his eyes. “’Member what you told me she said? There ain’t no here anymore, son. There ain’t no us.” He turned away, snapshots in hand, and staggered to the back door. “Your friend’s waitin behind you. Go to your mama. Hide from me one last time.”
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