by Leah Weiss
Marris stays this morning, and when I can’t hold it in no more, out pours the bucket of broke-down things in this old house I can’t fix. Marris listens careful while my fears fill the kitchen and my voice grows thick. I bout drown in my grief, and I let this woman see my insides. I tell her a lot of things cept I know when to stop.
“Gladys,” she says. She reaches her hand cross the table to touch mine. I snatch my hands back. Put em in my lap, grip em closed, and hold on to the familiar hurt. Pretty quick, the heat goes outta me and I’m spent. Like on those three stillbirth days when I worked so hard, and the babies come out dead.
I say to Marris, “Can’t change things, so don’t pretend you can.” I end with, “A body lives a life bout as good as she can. Then what?”
Marris stands and does what she does best: moves with purpose round my stillness. She slices vegetables and rolls the crust for shepherd’s pie, and while the pie cooks, she washes my dirty dishes and sweeps the floor, then sets the table for two and opens the window for fresh air. She steps outside and brings back a bunch of ironweed and puts em in a canning jar on the table. Then she sits and delivers comfort.
“A body lives a life as good as she can, Gladys Hicks, one day at a time.” She pats the back of my hand and I let her cause I like the warm. “And that’s enough. You done all right up till now. You’re gonna keep doing all right. And that’s that. Let’s eat.”
We sit at the table and let the pie cool, and Marris says, “I can’t believe I plumb forgot a piece of gossip you gotta hear. You was in such a mess when I come, I got distracted from it.”
“Go on. Spit it out. You know you’re dying to.”
“Okay, let me get to my start place.”
Got no choice but to wait for her to find her start place, when any place will do. I nibble at the shepherd’s pie. It’s good and I’m hungry.
“I was at the Rusty Nickel. You know how I like to go there on Wednesdays for Swap Shop Day. Mooney turns on his radio at noon, and whoever’s there gets to…”
I got no choice but to wait while Marris rambles, and I sip on coffee, feeling better now with that load off my mind and food on the table.
“…nicest voice, so sincere. Eddie Broom’s his name. I might make him a pie, but I don’t know how…”
I roll my eyes and finish my helping of shepherd’s pie. I use my fingernail to scrape dried egg off my vinyl tablecloth. Notice a new burn hole and wonder when it came to be.
“…Wednesday last, I sit there with Sadie and Fleeta and Jolene Dillard. Sue Sorrels showed, too, with a nasty case of hives…”
Marris talks to hear herself talk, and I spoon more pie on my plate. I switch it with her cause hers is cooled. It’s strange how some folks tell a tale. They go round and round cause the story is a little biddy thing that needs a lot of fluff to make it big enough to be told in the first place. I hate this part of gossiping.
“…the girl gone missing. That’s the mystery is what it is. Somebody say her name’s Darla or Darlene. One of them D names.”
What? I missed a piece of her talk cause my ears shut down.
Marris sips her cold coffee and puts the first taste of pie in her mouth.
I ask to buy time and get filled back in, “Who was her folks, this missing girl?”
“Nobody we know that I could tell. She must have been a looker. She worked in that hoochie place out at Danner’s Cove.”
“Well, no wonder she’s gone missing. She hangs with lowlife. The girl got what she had coming to her.”
“Well, that won’t the big news, Gladys. The big news includes you.”
I almost choke on my pie. “Me for pity’s sake? I never even heard of this girl, so how do my name get sullied? Who spreads lies bout me?”
“It won’t you, exactly. It’s sort of your grandgirl, Sadie.”
“Sadie! She a skinny thing turning mousy!”
“Well, it’s really bout Roy Tupkin.”
Marris stops to put a big spoon of pie in her mouth and chews, and I gotta wait. She swallows.
“The girl gone missing—Darla, Doreen, or Deena, nobody knows for sure—somebody says she was hooked up with Roy Tupkin for nigh on a month.”
• • •
What a day. All my tied-up worries that pulled me down this morning got let loose with that gossip Marris brought in my house like chicken shit on shoes, and my Sadie’s all caught up in it. At the end of the day, I sit on the porch glider, washed in a different kind of sadness from the morning. I sip sassafras tonic and smoke dried ginseng root Marris give me to ease my disposition and let the evening chill seep deeper in my bones. Like usual, I ponder disappointments.
It won’t Sadie I ponder, cause to do that scares me with a foreboding with this latest talk. It’s her mama—my girl, Carly—what comes to mind.
Carly is the only piece of me strong enough to make it into the world. I ain’t laid eyes on her since she left her baby, Sadie, behind with her husband, Otis Blue, and took off with a fancy man full of flashy promises and little else. Don’t need to hear what happened. Carly woulda delivered good news if she had any. Thought she was special that girl. Said we shamed her with our homespun ways.
Lord, she had a mouth on her. Could sass you with the cut of her eyes. What I saw when I looked at Carly was hungry. Won’t a thing in this place that could fill her up. Like she was starved for different and won’t settle for usual.
She’d laugh mean-like now. Point her finger at me, jab the air, and say, “You got what you deserve, Mama. A Big. Fat. Zero. And Sadie, left in your care after Otis died…look what you done to her. She’s in danger cause you won’t fit to be a mama or a granny. You a Big Fat Nothing.”
Truth always hurts and it’s extra hard to look at late in life.
What if Carly’s right about me being a big fat zero? Is she something so special? Or just a different kind of nothing?
I say out loud, “You still hungry, Carly girl? You ever find different? Do it taste as good as you hoped it would?”
I lay my head back against the metal glider, tired from a day with a new worry bout Sadie and old worries bout secrets that time don’t change. In a long-ago thought, I see Carly marching cross my yard, and she takes over my thinking cause she’s a bossy thing. Always was.
“What’s your skinny ass doing in my yard?” I stand on the porch, my young self, with hands on smaller hips and pissed as usual.
“Daddy here?”
“What’s it matter to you?”
“Is he or ain’t he?”
“Don’t use that tone, girlie.”
Carly marches right up to the porch, brushes past, and bumps my shoulder hard. She says in passing, “Need a place to stay, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s not gonna be here!” I say and half believe my words. “You breeze in here like you belong when you don’t. You done made your bed, girlie, and it won’t here.”
I raise my voice and follow after my only child, who heads straight back to the kitchen and noses around for something to eat. She finds a fried chicken leg on a plate under a drying rag. Leans against the corner of the table and eats it. She looks everywhere cept at me. The air between us is flinty.
When Carly finishes, she throws the bone in the sink, wipes her fingers on the rag, and says soft-like, “Mama, don’t jump all over me. I be gone by morning,” and heads upstairs to her room, and I hear the door close. She won’t say bout that belly up against her dress. Won’t say bout the muddy mark on her cheek or knot on her forehead at the edge of her hair.
Otis Blue don’t do that. Gotta be somebody else. Otis got a tender spot for Carly, and he loves her like a blind fool, though he’s twelve years older. I never seen a man push to please a woman like he does Carly. Maybe if he stood up against her strong will she’d settle down for a bit. That won’t likely happen cause Otis is a soft man who loves i
n all the wrong ways. The bruises on my girl came from somebody hard.
No mama wants to see signs like these. Fear grows behind green eyes. Only got the clothes on her back and a backbone that won’t bend.
I whisper, “Anybody can tell you about broke in two, Baby Girl. Nineteen years on this earth with promise already trampled down. You can starve in a world when you’re hungry and won’t settle for crumbs.”
I don’t follow her. I fix a pan of biscuits for supper to go with leftovers. Walter’s gone for two days at the still. Mash is bout ready to bottle and money will come in soon, so it’s me and Carly tonight. While the biscuits bake, I go upstairs. Stand outside Carly’s closed door. Reach for the doorknob.
“Leave me be, Mama,” Carly says strong, like she can see through the door. “You can’t fix it, so leave me be.”
I let my hand drop by my side. I don’t go where I ain’t wanted. Ungrateful girl, who looks for more when there won’t no more. She’s got lessons to learn, and life’s one bugger of a teacher.
I call out as I head downstairs. “Supper’s ready, girlie. Come if you want. Don’t matter to me if you don’t.”
• • •
I musta dozed cause I wake up in the glider in the dark with a nasty crick in my neck, light-headed. I’m chilled clean through, and I struggle to my feet when my knees forget how to help. Then I remember this morning’s nasty spill down the stairs. I clutch the doorframe and heave myself over the threshold and inch my way up the stairs, careful of the top broke step.
Carly’s a puzzle. She wanted more than was her right to have. I tried to tell her. Tried to ease her road the way a mama should. I told her a woman’s gotta learn to settle, stay in the middle, know her place. Carly never learned to settle, and it got her nowhere but gone. Now, after seventeen years, she forgot how to get home.
I settled for the middle all my life, swallowed my grief and kept it inside…and it got me nowhere but lonely. Marris is the only soul who tends to me, and for the life of me I don’t know why I throw vinegar on her every chance I find. Maybe I want her brought to her knees once and the cheer slapped clear outta her. Maybe I wanna know she feels just once where I live all the day long.
And Carly’s child, Sadie, is a different puzzle. She stayed close and settled too quick, and it got her nowhere but here. She had promise a while back, a sweetness she don’t get from her mama, then it all dried up and blew away when she tied her tomorrows to a devil of a man.
Sadie’s more like me than I wanna know. Like me, she got her a shitty man, but I did something bout my shit and keep the truth from the law. Don’t blab to nobody.
Sadie won’t made that way. She turns coward when Roy takes her down. Her weak will’s gonna get her killed. She needs her own perfect storm…and a piece of tin.
Marris Jones
I never sneak up on Gladys cause her ears don’t work good no more. When I walk in her front door, I call out, “Yoo-hoo, it’s Marris,” so she don’t get spooked. I saw her jump a time or two when a sound come too quick and she won’t ready. Old hearts like hers and mine don’t need testing.
Today she says, “You sound awful spry for the sun just up and frost on the ground.”
“Got reason to,” I say back and get her attention. She plays like she don’t care, but I see sorting behind her eyes, and she wonders what my reason is. I pour me some coffee and sit cross from her and grin.
“You look ugly when you grin like that,” she says to stretch out her asking.
I hold on to my news and sip coffee.
“When you grin like that, your wrinkles puff up and your eyes turn to sinkholes,” she says to get under my skin.
I stay easy.
“For Lord’s sake, spit it out,” she finally says. “You know you want to.”
I scoot to the edge of my seat and put both hands round my coffee cup. “Skeeter’s gonna come with his new bride for a visit on the first Saturday in October,” I say, so happy I can pop. “They coming at noon all the way from Asheville. How I know is Skeeter called Mooney, and Mooney told Preacher Perkins, and the preacher come by here on his rounds last Monday, and that’s how come I know.”
My hands shake when I try to drink from my coffee cup cause I’m so discombobulated.
“Last two times Skeeter say he was coming, he don’t,” Gladys reminds me, and that’s true. He got car trouble one time and had to work last minute the other, as I recall. Been two years since the last visit that don’t happen. Three years before that when he don’t come, but I don’t count when it comes to Skeeter.
“What’d he do with his old wife? She dead or throwed out?”
“Don’t rightly know. Preacher Perkins don’t give particulars and I don’t ask. I’ll know on Saturday. I feel good bout this time.
“His new bride, Gladys! That’s the best excitement. Getting to start again. Don’t know her name yet. She gotta be special if Skeeter picked her. Saturday will be here before you know it and I’ll get answers. I gotta cook chicken and dumplings for him or he won’t feel like he’s been home.”
“Don’t go killing no chicken yet on account of that boy, Marris.”
• • •
Skeeter’s coming soon to the only mountains he’s ever called home, but when I was born, my folks don’t live in Baines Creek in the highlands of North Carolina like now. Baines Creek don’t have coal to dig in its heart that breaks a man in two. When I come along, we live over Rock Bottom way in West Virginia, on the airish side of the mountain where coal dust sifted through slits round the windows, and spindly houses can’t be scrubbed clean. Where we lived looked the same inside as it did outside. Gray.
It was in the year 1898 I come to be, and everybody in the world knowed the name Mother Jones. Some got to see that lady hero for real. Mama and Daddy saw her once when she come through on the train in the rain. She stood at the back of the iron caboose and looked down on a passel of coal mine families washed in the rain that don’t stop, but the coal dust stuck to their skin.
Mama remembered everything Mother Jones wore right down to the line of buttons on her shoes. It got told so many times I thought I’d seen her myself. The long, black wool dress with a high bustle on her backside. A velvet fringed shawl worn bare in spots. A black straw bonnet tied with satin streamers. A thin leather purse hanging by a chain.
How she looked won’t the story though. It was what she did and how she talked. That little woman could fire up weary souls, call burly men cowards for taking scraps, pull em down to their knees, then raise em up in hope with just her words. Mama and Daddy knew that for fact, not recollect.
Mother Jones don’t like that coal miners put a pile of gold coins in rich men’s pockets and nary a penny in their own. If daddies got hurt, boys got sent into the mines. When bills won’t paid, then families got put out on the road—their stuff crammed in a paper poke. If a man was to say out loud That ain’t right, he’d be gone without a trace. When Mother Jones says That ain’t right, folks listen. For a pint-size woman, she got a gallon-size voice.
My daddy, Leland Earnest Jones, took extra pride cause we got the same last name as the bona fide champion of the workingman. “She’s something, that Mother Jones,” Daddy would say and shake his head and grin, his crooked teeth light in his dark face. “It won’t take a flea fart to snuff her out, but she won’t afeard of nothing. It’s like Mother Jones got angels all round her so she can sleep at night and fight all day long for working souls.”
Her Christian married name was Mary Harris Jones, and that’s where I come in.
That name got put on me in a fit of birthing pride when Mama had herself a girl after three boys and a long stretch of in-between. Mother Jones’s words—a woman’s words, no less—was the rage in all the papers, and on flyers folded over and passed on the sly from hand to hand. She come from Irish roots like my folks. When she outright called herself a hell-rais
er, all the men cheered and the women don’t mind. Said she abides where there is a fight against wrong, and for sure that was living dark in the mines. She was a gift from the merciful Lord is what she was.
Everybody was poor in Rock Bottom, and no amount of work changed it. Even when my three brothers went in the mines with Daddy, we can’t get ahead of the bills for medicine and sundries. They was grown men starting to court when Daddy was home with Mama and me cause of a broke arm. The mine blew up, and my brothers died, and so did all the men underground. Everything broke inside Daddy that day. He turned old and never found his strong self again.
Rock Bottom cut the heart outta folks and let em walk round thinking they was alive when they won’t. We left there with my brothers still in the belly of the earth. We left the only home I ever knowed, and the hard rains came and followed us on that journey away. The dirt road we trudged along turned to mud, slippery then sucking mud. With the heavens opened wide, mountain gullies spouted water that gushed swift cross the road we walked. We plodded with our heads down, thin clothes soaked clean through, downtrodden as anybody there ever was. The creek we walked by grew wide as a river and carried branches and rocks and danger.
Dark come early and we took cover in a dry pocket under a boulder. We shivered and held tight to one another, me in the middle. After all the losses we suffered those sad days, I pick that night to cry.
Mama felt me shake from more than cold and wet. With little sting in her voice she said, “What you crying for, Marris? You made of tougher stuff than this.”
I felt little in this storm that beat and battered my world gone strange. I whispered, “Are we gonna die?”
“From a storm? No, child. We’re safe here. We’ll head to Baines Creek soon.”
Daddy added, “If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.”
I slept for a spell, and when I opened my eyes, the good Lord had willed the rain to stop and tamed the creek like we wished for. Then the warm sun came up on as special a day as I’d ever witnessed.