Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  I wished my father was there, but I knew better than to say that out loud. He would know what to do. Even my mother had said so many times. “I can’t do this alone,” she would say. “Every home needs a man.” Or, if I resisted going outside to play ball, “If your father were here, you would go. Your father was an excellent athlete. He could teach you how to play ball if he were here.” My father, I decided after listening to Mother, was good at all the things that I didn’t know how to do.

  “How did you and Daddy meet?” I liked asking questions when I already knew the answers, just as a means of keeping my mother talking about something besides me. So far she hadn’t caught on.

  “He saw me singing in the choir in Great Falls. I was teaching there, and he saw me. I should have listened to my daddy. You know, Randy Hinson wanted me to marry him, and I wouldn’t do it. He asked me more than once. Of course, if I’d done that, then I wouldn’t have you, would I, sugar?” This always puzzled me. Why couldn’t this Randy Hinson, whoever he was, be my father? Would I look the same? Where would they live? Would he make me play ball and eat things I didn’t like?

  “I will say this for Mack,” Mother said, “I think he truly did love Buddy. You know, Mack didn’t have much of a father, and Buddy was the closest thing to a daddy that your daddy ever had. He was a fine man.”

  “Daddy?”

  “No, honey, Buddy.”

  I waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t, I said, “I’m hungry.”

  “Didn’t you eat lunch back there at the crossroads?”

  “I had some ham.”

  “‘I had some ham,’” she mimicked. I thought I was going to get the food lecture, but all she said was, “We don’t have time to stop now.” I opened the book I’d brought and read some more about Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. The book was small, with orange covers, and it was one in the series called “Childhood of Famous Americans.” I had just gotten to the part where young Samuel learned to play the piano by watching his mother’s hands on the keyboard. This seemed like an impossible feat. I thought about asking my mother how she thought he could have done that, but that would open the door to the piano-practice lecture.

  “How did Uncle Buddy die?” I asked.

  “I told you, he had a heart attack.”

  “Like Leenie.” My oldest aunt, my mother’s oldest sister, who looked old enough to be my grandmother, had suffered two strokes years before I was born that left her paralyzed down one half of her body. She used a walker to get around and wrote all her conversation out on a pad, and if you were sitting close to her, you had to read out loud what she wrote to whomever she was “talking” to. She spent half the year living with her grown daughter and the other half with her grown son, and I hated visiting either family when she was in residence, because she hogged the TV and wouldn’t let any of us change the channel.

  “No, Leenie had a stroke.”

  “Aren’t they the same?”

  “No.” I suspected that she didn’t know herself and I was sure of it when she changed the subject. “It’s such a shame about Leenie. If they had found her sooner, she could have been cured. If they had taken her to Duke, they could have given her therapy. But they kept her in the hospital in Charlotte and they didn’t know anything there. I think Tom and Melita had something to do with that. They might as well be Christian Scientists. But she could have gotten therapy. You know now you can get therapy and be just fine.”

  “What’s therapy?”

  “Like exercise. But with machines.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “What?”

  “Leenie’s strokes.” I liked this story.

  “She was staying at Aunt Mat’s, and she was upstairs and she couldn’t get to the phone. She lay there for two days before they found her.” Aunt Mat was one of those vaporous relations I had heard a lot about who had died long before I was born. She had reared my grandmother and I was never sure if she was a real aunt or just called that. I wondered if my grandmother was adopted. Aunt Mat ran a rooming house next door to where my mother had grown up in Kershaw. Aunt Mat’s house was sort of scary, because in my memory it had never had a coat of paint, and it sucked light out of the atmosphere like a black hole. I liked it, though, because it was always cool and dark in the downstairs and no one had taken the furniture away even after no one lived there. The summer I was six, my mother and I had gone to live at my grandmother’s, and my cousin and her three children had come and lived in Aunt Mat’s house because my cousin’s husband who was in the Air Force was stationed in Saudi Arabia. Aunt Mat’s house belonged to Leenie now, and she was there too that summer, but it was big enough in the house to get away from her. Sometimes I would go upstairs to the room where she had the last stroke and try to imagine lying there for two days. The rooms upstairs were hot, right under the roof, and there were numbers still on the doors from when it was a rooming house. My cousin Billy had fallen out of one of the upstairs windows when he was a baby, and somehow landed unhurt. I knew which window that was, too, and I liked to unlatch the screen and lean out and imagine falling to the ground, an experience made all the more harrowing because down below, not three feet from Aunt Mat’s house, was a picket fence separating her property from the house on the corner. I imagined how easy it would have been to fall on the fence instead of the ground.

  “Shorty Clyburn had to climb in the window and rescue her,” Mother was saying. This was my favorite part of the Leenie story, the rescue through the window. I played the moment over and over in my head like a movie and in the process always remembered too late to ask how Shorty knew to climb in the window in the first place since Leenie couldn’t talk anymore.

  I got tired of reading and started staring through the corroded hole in the floorboard, watching the road go backward between my feet. I had long since polished off the second Coke, and now the bottles were clinking together under the seat.

  “Will you please get those bottles and do something with them,” Mother said, and the tension in her voice warned me that she was still angry. I knelt down on the floor, found the bottles and returned to my seat.

  “What do you want me to do with them?”

  “Just hang on to them. I don’t know. What on earth made you buy two drinks?”

  “I told you, one was for you.”

  “And I didn’t get a sip nairn,” she said with a wan smile. This was her way of teasing, talking like her country relatives. I looked at the bottom of the bottles to see where they came from. One was stamped Valdosta, Ga., and the other one came from a bottling plant in Greenville, S.C.

  “Buddy really loved me,” my mother said, almost to herself. “Nobody loved me like Buddy did.” I knew she meant no one else on my father’s side of the family. “I hope you never know what it feels like to be abandoned.”

  “I love you.”

  “This world is made for couples.”

  “Like us.” On the trip down that morning, my mother had commended me for being mature lately. “You’re my little partner. My little man,” she had said.

  “I’ve worked hard at this marriage, which is more than Mack Jones can say, if he’s telling the truth. The day we moved out of Lancaster, Mary herself told me that Mack’s problems weren’t my fault. I’ll always remember that. But it takes two people to make a marriage work, and Mack just won’t work at it. He had a good job out there at the bleachery when we lived in Lancaster. But he won’t think about us. No sir, not Mr. Big.”

  “We’re a team, right?”

  “Umhm.”

  The patrolman motioned the Plymouth forward. Putting the car in motion, my mother stripped the gears shifting out of first.

  “Every time he gets in trouble, he goes running back to Lancaster. And they take him in. I’ll never forget, him lying there drunk in the bed when we lived on French Street and Mother Jones back there in the bedroom saying, ‘You come on home, honey. Annie and me will take care of you.’ Buddy was the only one who
understood. He told me himself that Mack was the baby of the family all his life. Buddy knew what I went through.”

  The car was moving fast enough now that the road through the hole at my feet was just a white blur. The heat of the day, unabated even now, mixed in with the heat of thousands of automobiles slowly crawling forward, and cast the whole landscape into a miragelike shimmer. My back was stuck to the car seat, and my feet hurt. I tried to wiggle my toes inside the hard black shoes.

  A car went by with the radio loud, playing a country-and-western song.

  “What sort of trash goes to these things?” my mother wondered aloud.

  “What things?”

  “This race, or whatever it is.” I stirred uneasily in my seat. For a brief moment, I felt a flash of terror, and what terrified me the most was that I wasn’t sure why I was afraid. My mother was not herself, that much I knew. What I didn’t know was what was going to happen next, what she might do. All my life, she had been the dependable one in our family. She lost her temper. Sometimes she cried. But day in and day out, she managed to pull it together. My father was the one who went off the rails. I expected that, or at least was not surprised when it happened. But I had never seen my mother like this. Underneath her anger, she seemed frightened of something, and I had never seen her frightened before, and that scared me.

  Up ahead, swimming in the air like a fairy castle, the orange tiled roof of the Howard Johnson’s.

  “Can we stop for ice cream?” I was surprised by the words that came out of my mouth—no, not the words, but the tone. I was almost pleading. Again, I felt the flash of terror.

  “Honey, we have to get home. Somehow I have to get up and teach tomorrow.”

  “We’re not going anywhere now.”

  “Well, we can’t be later than we already are. And when we get home, I want you to start putting those stamps in the album. That would be what Buddy wanted. He was so good about sending you those stamps. You don’t want to let him down.”

  “No, ma’am. But you said it was late.”

  “Tomorrow then, right after school.”

  “Yes’m.”

  I knew better than to argue, although by now I also knew that even if Uncle Buddy were still alive, he would not be “let down” if I did not keep up my stamp album. Right then, when I tried as hard as I could to remember what he had looked like, all I could see was the waxen face in the open coffin that looked more like a store mannequin than a real person. He always seemed delighted by my mere presence, as if breathing on my part were enough to please him. Uncle Buddy was one of several members of the family who gathered to eat the noon meal every workday at my grandmother’s apartment. She lived in the center of Lancaster, in a second-floor apartment reached by a staircase that ascended the outside of the big two-story white-frame house that had once been a single residence, when the town was smaller, before people moved out to the fringes into the newer neighborhoods with their split-levels and modest colonials. Her front porch was the roof of the porch below and was covered in tarpaper. Promptly at noon, her grown children and a couple of their spouses—those who worked in the town and so could get away at dinner—would ascend the stairs (I learned to recognize their individual footfalls before their heads appeared on the stairs) and troop back to the kitchen and eat the chicken and the lima beans and the turnips and potato salad and the sour-tasting cornbread and the iced tea in sweating glasses and then gather in the living room to talk softly and play a few hands of solitaire with the worn deck of cards that always sat out on the little glass-topped coffee table, leaving my mother behind in the kitchen, still trying to finish her meal.

  “They eat so fast, those Joneses,” Mother always complained after our visits. “They’re country people. They don’t like to talk at the table. All they do is bolt it down as fast as they can and get up and leave. Charlie said it right to my face once. ‘Margaret, you sure like to talk, don’t you?’ To my face. They’ll say anything to you. They’re strange people. Just because I like to be civil at the table. I’ll tell you this, Mama wouldn’t have thought of letting any of us leave the table at meals until everyone was finished.”

  Maybe I’m a Jones, too, I thought, because I liked it best after the eating at Grandmother’s, because that was when Uncle Buddy would call me over and give me a hug and slip one of those heavy silver dollars into my hand. Once, when I got straight A’s, he gave me a dollar for every A, pulling them out of his pocket one by one. It was like watching a magic trick, but better, because I got to keep the money. I kept the coins in the top drawer of my dresser, as though they were prizes or trophies and not real money. My uncle never asked me what I was doing with the stamps that showed up in the mail at home now and then, and I knew that the only person who cared at all about them was my mother. It was merely one of the growing list of things, like the coins I didn’t care about collecting, or the Catechism that I couldn’t learn, that disappointed her about me. I hated disappointing anyone, especially my mother. The last time my father had left—his sister had come up from South Carolina to fetch him home so he could enter a home for alcoholics somewhere down in South Carolina—he had drawn me down beside him on the sofa and hugged me close—not too hard, the way he did when he was drunk—and told me that I would be the man of the house now and to take care of my mother, and I promised. That was my responsibility now, I had decided, although I wasn’t sure just how to go about it. I finally decided that the best way was to make her happy any way I could, by making good grades, by cleaning my room and by not doing anything to make her upset.

  I was still in the midst of trying to remember my uncle’s face when I became aware of a pounding inside the car. When I looked over at my mother at the other end of the broad bench seat, she was hitting the big beige cracked-enamel steering wheel with her fist as hard as she could. “Alone, alone, alone,” she said in that same scary voice I had heard earlier.

  “Who—?”

  “I am alone! All alone. Alone alone alone alone alone.” She made it into a little melody and sang it again and again in a thin soprano. “I have no help. I have tried and tried and worked and worked and what does Mack Jones do? He runs off to South Carolina and hides behind his mama’s apron strings. And now the one of them that ever took up for me is gone. And I am alone.”

  “You’re not alone,” I said, and felt foolish. There were, after all, two of us in the car. But I felt compelled to say something, because while I never knew quite what to do when she got upset, I knew that it was now my responsibility to get her to calm down.

  She looked at me as if she had just noticed I was there. And then she burst into tears. This was the worst that could happen. I hated to see her cry, because it made me feel utterly helpless and embarrassed. I glanced through the windshield and was relieved to see that traffic was moving faster. For something to do, I rooted in her pocketbook on the seat between us, searching for the tissue.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  I knew I was never supposed to go through a lady’s pocketbook. But this was an emergency.

  “Looking for the Kleenex,” I said in what I hoped was a matter-of-fact, man-of-the-house sort of tone. I found a piece wadded up at the bottom, smelling of hand lotion and wintergreen Life Savers and handed it to her.

  “Thank you, honey.” She wiped her eyes and then examined the tissue to see if she’d wiped her makeup off. Then she looked in the rearview mirror. Then she turned back to me.

  “Why won’t they give us a chance? They never did when we lived in Lancaster and I guess they never will.” She was gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white. I could see that she was getting ready to have another fit. So I said the first thing that came into my head that I was sure would convince her that I was on her side.

  “I hate Mother Jones,” I said, deliberately using what I thought of as the grownup version of my grandmother’s name. The sentence hung in the air, awkward and raw, like a shop sign that blinks on when it i
s still daylight out.

  In the silence I could hear us both breathing. Then she relaxed her grip on the steering wheel and simply sat there, not untense but not quivering any longer as she stared ahead at the endless stream of cars shining in the late slanting sunlight. There was time to hear a nearby car rev its engine, once, twice, and for a second there I thought things were going to be all right. Then I saw the thin, humorless smile, and I knew better.

  “Shame on you,” she said quietly.

  “I mean it. I—”

  “Shame on you for trying to upset me at a time like this.”

  She waved her hand in front of her, taking in everything that lay before her, the cars and their noise and their music and their trashy people, the sort who would go to something as close-to-nothing as you can imagine. “My husband doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. His mother does everything but come right out and blame me for his drinking. Now we’re going to get home in time to get up for school. And all you can think about is yourself, how to find the one thing you can think of that you could say to hurt me and then dig it in. Dig it in. Dig it in! That’s what everybody does to me. There’s Margaret, let’s dig it in. Again again and again.” Her voice had risen slowly, inexorably, as she spoke, until it was almost a screech, a sound like metal scraping on metal. Watching her, listening to her words fill up the space between us, I, like some feral animal trapped in an alley, had wedged myself into the right angle created by the seat back and the door, bracing myself with my foot against the dashboard. I thought at first that she was going to hit me, but all she did was go on screaming. I don’t know how long she went on like that, or what she said. It was just sound that battered me. I don’t know when it stopped. I don’t know when the traffic broke up for good and cars began moving smoothly up the highway again. I did not see night come on, nor do I remember falling asleep. All I remember is my mother’s shaking me awake in the parking lot outside the apartment, saying, “Wake up now, come on. You’re too big now for Mommy to carry. Big boys have to get themselves to bed.”