Bastard Out of Carolina

by Dorothy Allison

  “I an’t gonna throw it up no tree.” Grey looked disgusted. “I’m gonna use it to pull myself right up the side of the house. I’m gonna wave at you from the roof, and then you can tell me I’m crazy.”

  He did it too, tied a good long rope to the chain dangling off his hook and swung it around and around until he got it high enough, and launched it at the house. The barbs dug right into the wood below the roofline and gouged deep enough to support Grey’s weight, though once he climbed up there, he couldn’t swing around to get a leg over the roofs edge after all. Garvey tried it next, forgetting that they had been arguing, but he had the same problem. He did manage to hang on to the ridgepole while he worked the hook loose and tossed it down. Then he slid down after it, by some miracle not breaking any bones. Neither of them saw me grab Garvey’s abandoned hook and start edging toward the side of the house.

  “We’ll aim it at the roof this time,” Garvey told us. “Get it on the roof itself. Then we’ll be able to climb over the top by pulling up on the rope.”

  “You’ll do no such thing!” Aunt Raylene had come up behind me while we were all looking at Garvey. She grabbed one hook out of my hands and the other from Grey. “You trying to kill one of these children?” She looked up then and saw the holes the hook had gouged in her wall.

  “Oh my Jesus!” Her left hand snaked out and slapped first Grey, then Garvey. “You digging holes in my house! You planning to just walk off and leave it like that, I suppose. No matter that it’s gonna let the rain in and rot my wall.” The chain dangling from one fist knocked against the skirt of the print dress she’d worn to go into town. “I’m surprised you an’t killed each other already. No.” She shook her head and spat snuff juice to the side. “No. What’s surprising is that I an’t killed you already.”

  “It an’t that deep a hole,” Grey tried to tell her. “It an’t gonna let the rain in.”

  The color rushed into Aunt Raylene’s face, and her eyes went glassy. I thought for a moment how Uncle Beau said Aunt Raylene moved out to the river after she got in trouble on the carnival circuit and cut a man up for trying to mess with her. Now she looked like she was going to swing one of those hooks at Grey’s belly. The other kids took off at a run, and Grey stumbled back out of her reach.

  “Aunt Raylene,” he pleaded, sweat breaking out on his face, “Aunt Raylene, now, Aunt Raylene, wait ...”

  “You crazy little bastard,” she hissed at him. She caught his arm in one hand and shook him back and forth like a fish on a pole. “All of you. Don’t you know what this is?” She waved the tines up close to Grey’s face. “You think this is a big old fishhook? Well, it an’t. It’s for trawling, for dragging. You go down in the river and they’ll use something like this to pull you up in chunks. Pull you loose from the junk in that deep mud. Pull you up in pieces, you hear me? Nasty slices of you, little boy, for your mama to cry over.”

  Aunt Raylene’s tale didn’t really scare us. When I tried to imagine my flesh in pieces it was like a cartoon, completely unreal, but in the night stringy terrible pieces of meat loomed in my dreams. The hooks got in my dreams too, dripping blood and river mud. Maybe it hadn’t been fish parts I’d cleaned out of them. It could have been anything. I made up stories about where those hooks had come from, who had lost them, until Patsy Ruth got nightmares. She dreamed that she had drowned in the river and the morticians had to sew pieces of her back together to look like somebody. Only they had to sew different people’s pieces together just to make up one reasonable body to bury to show her mama. When she told Aunt Alma, Alma told me to stop making up such gruesome stories.

  Aunt Raylene put a lock on her cellar door to keep all of us away from the hooks, and everyone seemed to forget them. But a few weeks later, I started to dream about them again. This time their razor points whistled when the wind blew, and the steel edges reflected light where there was none. I would wake up from those dreams with my teeth aching, my ears throbbing as if there were a wind blowing on me, stinking, cold, and constant. I wanted one of those hooks, wanted it for my own, that cold sharp metal where I could put out my hand and touch it at any time.

  I started going over to Aunt Raylene’s place every chance I got, hanging out and being helpful. I pulled weeds and picked tomatoes, corn, and peppers. When canning started, I was there to boil the mason jars and melt the wax while Raylene cut and chopped at her kitchen table. I brought the fruit jars up from the cellar. I brought up the wax, the rubber seals, and the metal racks, and when Aunt Raylene went out to put her neck under the old water pump on the far side of the house, I brought up one of the hooks. I hid it under the porch before anyone could see, laughing because it was so easy to do, but when I got back to the kitchen, Mama was standing there over the bubbling vats.

  “You want these peaches to boil over?” she asked me. “You got to watch this stuff close. You can’t be running off in the yard with a fire under these pots.” She planted me on a stool by the stove. “You sit here and keep your eyes open, little girl.”

  Aunt Raylene came in laughing, and pinched my shoulder. “Ah, Anney, Bone’s the best you got, works like a dog, she does, just like you and me.” I dropped my shoulders and stared into the simmering pot of peaches.

  For three days running then, I sat at that stove while Aunt Raylene and Mama gossiped and cooked.

  “How’s Glen doing?” Raylene’s voice was polite, as if she didn’t care much whether Mama answered or not.

  “Oh, he’s fine. His dairy routes don’t seem to have worked out the way he hoped, and I think he and his daddy were fighting for a while there. But lately he’s been working more in the processing plant itself. He don’t talk about it. Don’t think he wants me to hear him complaining about his daddy, but at least it’s full-time again. Just wish he made more money.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “You do, don’t you? When you first worked at the mill, you didn’t make enough money to spit at.”

  “Oh, they never wanted to have me do what I knew how to do best. Wanted me to work on the line rather than fix their machines. Never could accept that I was a better mechanic than a mill worker. After a while I just gave up fighting them about it. Couldn’t stand being that poor anymore, specially since my creditors couldn’t hardly stand what I wasn’t paying them.” Raylene’s grin was wicked. She poured herself some hot coffee and leaned over closer to Mama.

  “Remember that time Alma wouldn’t let the sheriff take her furniture?” she asked. “That time she started screaming for the neighbors how they were trying to rob her?”

  “God, yes,” Mama laughed. “And that sheriff like to peed in his pants when he saw her throwing clothes out the window and yelling, ‘Take it all, why don’t you? Take the kids too, take it all.’ Oh, my sweet Jesus, yes.”

  “Wade always said she threw her housedress at him, and then just stood there in her underwear, and he wasn’t gonna go near her after that.”

  “Oh no, girl. That’s just what people tell. She didn’t really do that. She just threatened to do that.”

  “It’s a better story if she had done it, which is probably why they say she stripped down to her panties, huh?”

  “Just like her, too. Alma an’t scared of hell or high water.”

  “Not like her girls.”

  “No.”

  Mama looked over at me. “Give that rack a jiggle,” she told me. “You don’t want them jars to settle too much.” She stretched her neck to look over without getting up. “I don’t think those jars are setting deep enough in that pot.”

  Aunt Raylene poured mama some more ice tea. “Oh Anney. Bone’s doing a good job. When she grows up, she’s gonna know all she’ll need about canning and cooking and gossiping in the kitchen.”

  Mama spooned a little more sugar into her tea. “Raylene, you’re spoiling her. You should have had some of your own, and then you’d watch them all a little more sharply.”

  “Well, for not birthing any, it sure feels like I’ve rai
sed a crowd. Seems like I’ve had somebody’s kids under my feet for years now. An’t nobody in this family ever been selfish with their children. Why, I’ve got up many a morning to find a porch full of young’uns somebody’s dropped off in the night.”

  “Most often Alma’s.”

  “Oh, don’t go on about Alma. She’s got a good heart, for all that temper of hers, and maybe because of it. And damn, but she’s had a hard time, especially with her girls. It don’t surprise me that this sick baby of hers is a girl. She’s had no luck with her girls. Ever since Temple left home she’s gone as sour as bad whiskey.”

  “Everybody says Temple takes after Alma, but I can’t see it,” Mama said. “I’d swear the girl was never easy in her body. Never gave a hoot about nobody or nothing, except her pride.”

  Aunt Raylene started giggling over the lip of her tea glass. “You know, she was standing in the yard that time the sheriff came and all the yelling started. Stood out there and tried to pretend wasn’t nothing going on, wasn’t no sheriffs in the yard with a warrant, no beating on the door, nobody throwing clothes out the window. The girl’s purely amazing.”

  “What’d she do, offer him a glass of water?”

  “Hell no, she tried to get Alma out of the house so she could give up the furniture quietly. She didn’t care what happened, didn’t care that the furniture-store man really was trying to rob her mama, just didn’t want the neighbors to think they couldn’t keep up the payments.”

  “As if everybody didn’t know it already. You can’t keep secrets like that.”

  “Well, you and I don’t even try. And certainly Alma don’t. She knows who she is. But it’s different for the kids. Seems like they’re all the time wanting just what they can’t have, and they’ve got such a funny dose of pride.”

  “No pride at all or too much, I can’t tell sometimes.”

  “Different from us is all, maybe.” Aunt Raylene’s face went slack and her voice dropped. “Look at your girls too, Anney. I’ve seen it in them. Not like Temple. No. But something. Something hard and angry that only shows now and again.”

  They went quiet and looked over at me. I tried to pretend I hadn’t been listening, concentrating on waving the steam away so that I could see down into the pot. But if I slanted my eyes sideways, I could still see them clear. Through the steam they both looked older—two worn, tired women repeating old stories to each other and trying not to worry too much about things they couldn’t change anyway. It struck me then how young they both were to be looking so old, neither of them as old as Madeline, Mama not yet twenty-six and Aunt Raylene less than ten years older. Still, they seemed so different from me, almost as if they had come out of another century. I wished then that I could be more like them, easier in my body and not so angry all the time. Too much pride or too little? What was wrong with me? I wondered.

  After all the peaches had been canned, the tomatoes and the snap peas, Aunt Raylene did the rest of the fruit, the plums and the apples and the blackberries. The days were full of sweat and steam and boiling pots. I spent every minute I was not in school planted on a stool in her kitchen, peeling or scrubbing or watching pots while Aunt Raylene told me stories and my neck cramped with worry. I was afraid somebody would find my hook under her porch, but I couldn’t get it out of there until the canning was done. If one of the uncles found that hook, I knew Aunt Raylene would figure out that it was me who had brought it up out of the cellar.

  One early evening when we were almost finished putting up the canned fruit racks, Grey came into the kitchen, his face so bright it jumped out at me. His grin was spread so wide I gave him a shove before Aunt Raylene could see.

  “You found it!” I hissed at him.

  He stared at me for a long minute and then grinned wider. “You, huh, Bone? You the one been going in and out the cellar all this time, huh? Slick, girl, slick.”

  “Just keep your mouth shut or Aunt Raylene will hide it where we’ll never find it.”

  “I an’t gonna tell nobody.”

  “You looking like that, she’ll know something is going on.”

  Grey laughed and twirled a finger in a smear of blackberry juice I hadn’t had time to clean up. “You talk any louder and she’ll hear it from you.”

  I looked down the center hall into the room at the end. Aunt Raylene was folding towels and humming to herself. I pushed Grey back out onto the porch and looped my arm around his neck. I knew that if I got bossy, he’d just run off with the hook and I’d never see it again. I thought about the way Mama was always gentling Daddy Glen, and I deliberately made my voice soft and slow.

  “I got an idea,” I whispered into Grey’s ear. “Got a plan to use that hook for something nobody else would have ever thought of.”

  Grey grinned at me like I’d grown an extra set of teeth. “Something good, huh?”

  “Something amazing, and I want you to help me.” I tried to rub his neck, but he shook my hand off.

  “Tell me.”

  I hesitated, looking back toward the door where Aunt Raylene might appear any minute. Grey’s face was bland, showing nothing but patience. He wasn’t like his brother. Of the two of them, he was the one who did things, who rarely told secrets even when he was trying to impress someone. I gritted my teeth and then shook my head. I might as well tell him and find out what he would do. I stepped away from him and shoved my hands down in my shorts.

  “I want to get up on the roof of the Woolworth’s one night. I got an idea how to get in there without anybody knowing. ”

  Now Grey turned his head, looked back at the door. “You’re serious, an’t you,” he whispered. It was not a question. I stood still, waiting.

  “Well, hellfire, Bone! You got past Aunt Raylene’s suspicious mind, but grand theft’s a different matter. What makes you think you can get away with it?”

  I rocked back on my bare feet, trying to look confident. “There are things I’ve done you don’t know nothing about, cousin. Stuff I an’t never gonna tell you. Just like I won’t never tell nobody what you and me are gonna do.” I tried to narrow my eyes the way Uncle Earle’s would shrink down when he played poker.

  Grey pursed his lips, whistled, and leaned over the side rail of the porch. “All right, Bone, all right. But if we get caught, I’m gonna tell ’em it was your idea. You just better know that now.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud. Grey grinned back at me, looking only a little puzzled. “Don’t worry, cousin,” I told him, “we get caught and I’ll tell ’em. I promise.” I didn’t mention that there wasn’t a chance in hell anyone would believe such a tale—not with Grey older than me and a boy besides. If we did get caught, I’d be in trouble, he’d be in more, but I had no intention of getting caught. I let him get the hook out from under the porch while I stayed up in the kitchen and kept Aunt Raylene busy.

  “Just don’t you tell nobody,” I insisted.

  “Won’t tell a soul, Bone,” he promised. “Not a soul.” He grinned so wide I had to believe him.

  That night I slept over at Aunt Raylene’s place. After she was asleep, I snuck out to get the hook. I took it back to my room, pried the chain off, and cleaned and polished it. When it was shiny and smooth, I got in bed and put it between my legs, pulling it back and forth. It made me shiver and go hot at the same time. I had read in one of the paperbacks Daddy Glen hid in the garage about women who pushed stuff up inside them. I held the chain and thought about that, rubbed it against my skin and hummed to myself. I wasn’t like the women in those books, but it felt good to hold that metal, to let those links slip back and forth until they were slippery. I used the lock I had found on the river bank to fasten the chain around my hips. It felt sun-warmed and tingly against my skin, as shiny as the sweat on Uncle Earle’s freckled shoulders, as exciting as the burning light behind my eyes. It was mine. It was safe. Every link on that chain was magic in my hand.

  I put my head back and smiled. The chain moved under the sheet. I was locked away
and safe. What I really was could not be touched. What I really wanted was not yet imagined. Somewhere far away a child was screaming, but right then, it was not me.

  13

  I carried my hook home in a croker sack with the last of the zucchini and cucumbers from Aunt Raylene’s garden. I didn’t trust Reese enough to risk taking it in the house, so I hid it in one of Mama’s packing boxes tucked up in the rafters over the washing machine. Up there it was safe and out of sight, a talisman against the dark and anything that waited in the dark. It made me stand taller just to know it was there, made me feel as if I had suddenly become magically older, stronger, almost dangerous. I would look up every time I helped Mama with the laundry, look up as if I were lost in thought or dreaming of the future.

  “You’ve changed, Bone.” Mama pulled towels and sheets out of the washing machine and dropped them into the basket I was holding.

  “No ma’am, not really.” I dropped my head down.

  “Yes, you have. I’d say you were even a little taller. You hold your head up more. I can even see your eyes now and then.” Mama grinned at me and dropped the last of the towels in my basket. She had to reach over the machine for her bag of clothespins, an old T-shirt she had sewed closed at the bottom and hung on a coat hanger. While her face was turned, I looked up and made sure my box was still securely in place.

  “Reese tell you that Shannon Pearl called?”

  I was already going out the door toward the clothesline, but Mama’s words stopped me. “She did?”

  “Uh huh. I didn’t talk to her, but Reese said she just asked if you were around. You might think about calling her back.”

  “I don’t know, Mama. I don’t know if I should.”

  “Well, I an’t telling you that you have to, but you should think about it, Bone. An’t no sense in being hardhearted, and talking to her won’t kill you. She might want to apologize, you know.”