Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  When we pulled up, the metal door of Meemaw’s trailer slapped open, and she leaned out like a lady waving on a departing train, shook her fresh perm at us in the Land Rover, and barked, “Back up! Y’all shadin’ my light!”

  “Yes, ma’am, sorry,” I called back, putting it in reverse.

  The door slammed shut again, and that was that.

  Mac and Daddy were waiting on the porch swing for us. Mac was wearing a pair of clamdigger jeans and a flowered blouse, shelling a big bowl of peas. She had a smaller bowl for the shelled peas, and she was tossing the hulls in a pile on the concrete porch floor.

  My children, bless their little OCD-brainwashed hearts, stood with their mouths hanging wide open big enough to catch a horsefly colony, staring at that pile of pea hulls on the porch floor as if it were a pile of soiled unmentionables from Mac’s personal boudoir collection, they were so shocked and scandalized at the mess.

  Daddy sat there wearing a pair of denim coveralls, no shirt, and the biggest pair of beat-up old boots (with no laces, and no socks) you ever saw. He had a sack of Hershey’s Mixed Mini candy between his legs on the swing, and he picked up the sack, held it out to the kids.

  “Hey, y’all want a candy?”

  Their eyes shot to me in horror. With a false cheeriness, I blurted, “Yes, sir, they just love candy to the last one of them. Don’t y’all?”

  The kids stood there like a circus show of conjoined triplet deer stuck in blazing white blinking headlights, and I nudged them forward. “Go on, y’all can have some. Y’all remember Ms. Mac and Mr. Daddy, don’t y’all? Be sweet now and say thank you!” I chirped like a fool.

  They timidly took one each, then stood there eating their candy, each one to the last folding the wrapper into smaller after smaller tiny squares, not knowing what to do with their trash. Daddy noticed and laughed and said, “What kinda crazy children are y’all? Just throw them wrappers down there on the heap with the hulls.”

  They did, dropping the wrappers onto the hull pile as if they were dropping single long-stemmed roses into an open grave. And then it was silent. The children leaned in it seemed as one, like a gate listing toward muddy earth. You could hear their need to pick up the wrappers, feel the tension of their fear in the air. Tick-tick-tick, while we all stared at the pile of hulls and wrappers. And stared some more.

  And then we laughed. Hard. We laughed and carried on until our sides nearly split and the kids had chocolate mustaches and chocolate fingertips and I’d nearly peed my panties and shed a bunch of crack-up tears that threatened to expose my two blue-black shiners and all the peas were hulled and the kids had left their saltwater sandals (although in a perfect little row, bless their hearts) at the edge of the porch and were running through the vegetable patch and picking random tomatoes and squash and who knows what all else and eating them—it would’ve been the death of them, had their father known it—directly off the plant!

  These were children who’d taken two baths a day their life entire. Children who’d never been allowed to shake their own salt onto their organic steamed collard greens. Children who couldn’t leave the house without a combed-sore straight pink part in their hair and fingernails groomed to the hilt; who weren’t allowed to have their photograph taken if they had a scratch or a—Lawd forbid—filthy mosquito bite on a visible stretch of skin. Landing on that front porch was like giving a poor child a million dollars cash and setting ’em free at the gates of Walt Disney World Orlando.

  With chocolate bars and a pile of pea hulls and candy wrappers, bare feet kicking up tufts of dust in a four-acre garden of fruits and vegetables free for the picking, dirty and delicious, this was their first taste of freedom, their first chance to jump under the rope, into a life double-dutching with happiness and abandon.

  Only after all the candy and running and fun (after Mac filled our bellies good with some boiled peas smothered in butter and cooked with bacon and served with some leftover casserole and some deer steaks Daddy grilled out back, away from the house) did they walk us over to the trailer. Lana’s brother’s house sat on a lower patch of land and had flooded out in the storm. The slab from Meemaw’s float-away house sat below his. Somehow, Lana’s brother was lucky (or connected) enough to get one of the first FEMA trailers that came rolling into town on the trains.

  FEMA trailers, if you have never been in one, are not anything close to what you think of when you think of a trailer you might borrow from a neighbor to go RV-ing.

  FEMA trailers are thirty-foot boxes of chemical-scented ripe tin walls and roof—a formaldehyde palace on wheels. Lana’s brother, being the handy type, with a big family and lots of good friends and support, got back into his house within about twelve weeks.

  He tried to get FEMA to come get the trailer as soon as he was finished with it. And he tried. And he tried again. No luck.

  He even tried to get them to at least let one of the families living in the tent city at D’Iberville High School or at the makeshift campground at the Biloxi Buddhist Temple to come out and live in the FEMA trailer where it was on his land, but that apparently broke some sort of official government emergency management bylaw.

  So while scores of people scraped by in tents and in cars and in homes with no water or power or plumbing, that next-to-new FEMA trailer sat on his land without a fine how-do-you-do from FEMA. The Mannings were happy to set me up in it.

  They simply jury-rigged the power back up, filled the tiny fridge with groceries, put sheets on the bed and toilet paper in the latrine, left a pile of picture books and playing cards on the table, and wished us sweet dreams. I couldn’t help but feel that we were breaking the law. I’m sure we were. But frankly, I was happy to be somewhere that Liam couldn’t—wouldn’t—think to look. The one time I’d convinced him to come to Lana and Kurt’s house for dinner, he’d nearly had a nervous breakdown in the germ-ridden environs outside of the city limits. And I was relieved to be out of the shelter, freeing up space for another family, happy to have a place to rest.

  There really wasn’t anywhere but the trailer to stay. The big casino hotels were all in ruins on the mainland, pulled off their pilings and thrown across the highway by the surge. The small motels were the kind with a front parking lot and doors that open straight to the highway; I was afraid to stay in one, terrified Liam would find me and I’d open the door and he’d finish what he started in a quick lick. Besides, every motel between Bayou La Batre, Alabama, and Natchitoches, Louisiana, was booked up with government officials, contractors, news folk, church volunteers, and upper-echelon coast trash waiting to get back into their storm-drenched McMansions.

  Certainly none of our friends were willing to take us in. Most of my girlfriends did make a pilgrimage out to Latimer, bringing all kinds of entertainment for the kids and food for us to pile on every available surface of the trailer. They’d seen my too-thick makeup, my ever-present leopard scarf wrapped around the handprint-bruise-blossomed neck; I’d even lifted my shirt a few times to show the scrapes and puncture wounds where knife met skin. They were good girls, but no one wanted to put their own family in peril. As in every small town, word spread fast. Liam was at this point universally agreed upon to be a lunatic with high probability of danger spillover.

  That night, when we broke through the barrier of the west end of the vegetable patch and the kids saw that FEMA trailer, a great cheer went up in the hush of an April night in Latimer, Mississippi. “Camping!” they screamed.

  Aidan was literally—not figuratively, but in the absolute, bouncing sense of the word—jumping up and down, his by-now-heavy tee-tee-soaked diaper hanging low between his sweet, chubby thighs.

  “Camp! Camp! Camp! Camp!” the three of them chanted. “Yaaaaaaay, camp!”

  I’m not sure how they even had a notion of what camping was. Certainly the Anderson-Rivers family had never been on a camping vacation, unless the Ritz-Carlton offers a “Deluxe Ultimate Camping Package” complete with butler and two-bedroom linen tent suite. Maybe I’
d explained, somewhere along the line, what campers are used for when they’re put to use for temporary housing after a natural disaster? Maybe the cat family goes camping in one of the Richard Scarry books? I’m not sure, but the kids were beside themselves and three seats down when they saw that FEMA trailer waiting for us to move on in.

  They didn’t care that they’d left nearly everything they owned back at our house. They didn’t worry that “Dada was going to get mad and get us” again. They didn’t worry about a thing.

  They stepped up on the metal step of the trailer and vaulted themselves into the wretched bed as if they were the luckiest children in all of Mississippi. Daddy handed me a scrap of paper with his cell phone number on it, barely uttering under his breath, “Use it if y’all need it. Comes to it, just holler loud; I’ll hear ya.”

  And he was gone.

  We had several days’ reprieve, thanks to Mac and Daddy and the whole Manning clan, not to mention the stunningly inefficient workings of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It was a moment in time to catch our breath, laugh, have our bellies filled, get good and spoiled, and rest.

  We were safe.

  * * *

  Every day Lana would drive me to town for a meeting at Addison’s office. As we got to town, I’d scrunch down in the seat and we’d pull around to the back door. You never knew who’d see me, and Liam had lots of friends’d mention in a hot minute that they saw me riding around with Lana Manning.

  We’d go over Addison’s latest legal documents, make corrections, change the wording, and prepare for court. We were filing a motion to extend the emergency motion for protection and temporary custody of the children. I knew from Addison that Liam had hired an attorney, and I was terrified at the thought he’d get word of our motion and show up to contest with Liam in tow.

  Along with extending the order of protection and custody, we were asking that I be given sole use of the “marital residence” and that the Jackson County Sheriff forcibly remove Liam from the premises.

  In other words, shit was getting real.

  Addison explained that the judge would decide one way or the other and that the motion would be granted solely on my testimony. If the motion was granted, the first Liam would hear of it would be when the county sheriff showed up out our house on Magnolia Moonlight Drive, delivered all the court paperwork to him, and escorted him (immediately) off the premises.

  Addison assured me this was business as usual in a divorce that initiated with a domestic violence incident, but I was terrified to imagine what Liam’s response might be.

  But nothing was usual. I imagined that I was likely in a very small club of women who leave their husbands after the first incidence of violence, and Addison said it was true. Each and every time I went to her office, she asked me the same question first.

  I’d sit down, the ever-loving same leopard silk scarf around my neck to hide the handprint bruises, across from her at the desk. She’d look me in the eye; tap a pen on the desk.

  “Do you still want a divorce?”

  “I do.”

  It’s funny how the same phrase that got me into this mess was about to get me out of it.

  Because once was enough. I didn’t believe I had the luxury to see what might happen the next time around. Maybe I’d have given him another chance if he’d have given me a single black eye. Or pushed me into a wall.

  Still, it wasn’t easy. He’d broken me down for so many years I was almost afraid to escape.

  In a darker place in my heart I wouldn’t admit to a soul, I didn’t believe at that time that I deserved to live in that house on my own with the children with Liam paying for everything, no matter what horrendous act he’d committed. I didn’t believe I deserved peace, or safety, or that Liam had a responsibility to take care of me—if not as his wife, then as the mother of his children.

  He’d been telling me three things every single day of our marriage for the last nine years.

  “You’re stupid. You’re fat. You’re ugly.”

  Somewhere about the third year of hearing that daily mantra, I bought in.

  Since the storm, it had become much worse. He had it in his mind that I might be thinking of leaving, and so he’d included another lucky three daily pronouncements.

  “If you leave, I’ll take your children from you and you’ll never see them again.”

  “If you leave, I’ll have you locked up in a psych ward and you’ll never see the light of day again.”

  “If you leave, I’ll have you good ol’ boy’d right out of Mississippi so fast you won’t know if you should scratch your watch or wind your ass.”

  If ever I dared argue that his threats might not come to pass, he’d simply refer to plan B.

  “Plan B?” I asked the first time.

  “Plan B.” He leveled his eyes at me, smiled.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is I’ll kill you. Without one second thought.”

  From the first time he said it, and for the next six months, he told me every day he was going to kill me. That’s why we’d started seeing the specialist in New Orleans. It was actually a fairly common thing for those suffering severe OCD to have obsessions about killing their loved ones.

  But something inside me told me this was different.

  I should have listened.

  As the day of the motion grew near, I grew more and more quiet. The kids were transformed overnight into “normal” kids—going barefoot, making mud puddles, feeding chickens, building forts with sticks and old floral sheets, falling fast to sleep with contentment and slap-happy exhaustion the minute their heads hit the FEMA-issue mattress. With each day closer to the motion to remove Liam from the house, I grew more tense, more scared, a wounded bird with broken wings, backing up into the corner of an abandoned garage, shafts of light pouring in, providing not hope but instead exposure to every raw spot, shining a harsh light on my deepest fear, illuminating my shame-soaked soul.

  SO HELP ME GOD

  Finally, we had our day in court. Lana drove me down to the Waffle House, where we met Addison in her little cream-colored Mini Cooper. I was wearing the same clothes I had on when I left home days before.

  We drove across the bridge in Gautier, to the Jackson County Fairgrounds, where the City of Pascagoula had set up headquarters in a series of plain white FEMA trailers scattered across the dusty grounds.

  Inside the FEMA trailer Courthouse A, there was one folding table for the judge, one for the court reporter, and metal folding chairs in off-kilter rows. The Honorable Hank “Bubba” Taylor presided. Tall, with movie-star handsome looks, he had the face of a country preacher. In fact, Addison told me he’d once been one; he’d started his own congregation in Green County when he felt the Southern Baptists had fallen too far left from the Word.

  That detail sent a shock of fear straight to my very soul.

  I was sworn in, and Addison began to outline her motion to have Liam (referred to always as Dr. Rivers in court) removed from the family residence and the order of protection continued. She briefly referred to the violence inflicted on me and asked Judge Taylor if he would like to view my injuries in person or in photographs.

  “No, Ms. McClanahan, I’d like to hear from your client, if that’s okay?” he said.

  “Yes, Your Honor. Mrs. Rivers is prepared to speak. What would you like her to speak to, Your Honor?”

  “I’d like to hear,” he said very gently, “in her own words, exactly what happened on the night in question. Can you do that, Mrs. Rivers?” he asked me with a kind of gentle coaxing.

  “Yes, Your Honor, I can.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Rivers, you can start whenever you’re ready.”

  I took a breath and began.

  The night before I sat on the metal step of the FEMA trailer and whispered the whole story to the South Mississippi moon.

  It was an ordinary night, really.

  Liam, I mean Dr. Rivers, was coming home from work at his clinic—he comes home ear
lier now since there isn’t much business because of the storm. I mean, with everyone evacuating and not coming back, you know. He drinks, my husband, and has been drinking more and more in these last months. He also has obsessive-compulsive disorder, so all the debris and dirt and disarray, well, it’s really a nightmare for someone like him and stresses him out something terrible.

  “Yes, Mrs. Rivers, I understand folks have been under a lot of stress, but can you stick to what happened that night?” Judge Taylor asked.

  Yes, Your Honor, I’m sorry.

  I took a deep breath, straightened my spine, and started over.

  So, that night. Well, I was making dinner, like I said. I make a big dinner every night. We’re pretty old-fashioned that way. We sit down to dinner every night. My husband tends to like ethnic foods like Thai or Vietnamese or Italian or Indian, so that’s what I usually make for him. But the kids just had been after me the way kids do for fried chicken, so that night I made a big Southern dinner—the fried chicken and coleslaw and baked beans and potato salad and yeast rolls and snap beans. You know, the usual stuff. I had the table all set with a cloth and dinner ready when he got home, even though it was only four o’clock. I was waiting for him to come inside. He gets a beer or two from the fridge in the garage and cleans his car every night when he gets home; that’s part of his obsessive-compulsive disorder. I don’t think he’s been taking his medicine for it.

  “What happened next, Mrs. Rivers?”

  Well, he came in and right off he was unhappy about the dinner. He said it was “trashy” food and he wanted something different. I don’t know what came over me, but I said that I wasn’t going to make anything different. It was all ready and the kids were hungry and there was a time, a while back, when Dr. Rivers would eat that kind of dinner. I didn’t think he’d mind it. But he’s been on a big health kick this last few years, going to the gym at 5:00 A.M. every day. But one day shouldn’t matter, right? I mean, it was just one day. And the kids were all waiting to eat, and the baby, Aidan Lake, was muddy, if you know what I mean, so I quick took him upstairs to change him. When I came to come back down with the baby, Dr. Rivers was at the top of the stairs. He was mad. He said he was going out for dinner and he was taking the baby with him. By that time, the other kids had come upstairs. And that’s when it started.