“What the hell is that girl doing in the bathroom so long?” Daddy Glen was irritable as only a man who’d been drinking the night before can be. I turned the lock against him and tried not to listen when he yelled through the door.
“Bone, you get out of there and come help me with these potatoes.” I washed my face and went out to Mama, still in her waitress uniform and flat white shoes. She smiled and passed me a pot. “Cut the eyes out but leave the skins on. We’ll make mashed potatoes like your daddy likes them.”
From the living room came Daddy Glen’s grunt and then the sound of the side door opening and closing. Mama put her hands on my shoulders and hugged me close. “I want you to go over to Alma’s after school for a few days. I’ll pick you and Reese up when I get off. I want you to keep those kids for Alma so she can get some time to spend with Ruth.” Mama paused, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter.
“Daddy Glen’s worried about Christmas and money. He’d like to do something special. Last night he was talking about how we’ve never had his brothers to dinner in all these years.”
I looked down into the pot of potatoes, remembering the last time we had gone out to the Waddells’, the way Daddy Glen had stuttered when his father spoke to him. That old man was horrible, and working for him must be hell, even I knew that. Mama leaned in so that her mouth was close to my cheek.
“I don’t know. I just don’t understand why his daddy treats Glen so bad. Glen’s always trying to please him, and that old man takes every chance he gets to make Glen look like a fool. It just eats Glen up, eats him up.” She sighed.
“Let’s be careful for a while, Bone. Be real careful, baby.” She hesitated as if there were something more she would say, but instead gave my shoulders another squeeze and went to change out of her uniform. I watched her walk away, her head bent forward. How long had it been since I had seen Mama not tired, not sad, not scared? Forever. It seemed like forever.
I kept looking for something special in me, something magical. I was growing up, wasn’t I? But the only thing different about me was my anger, that raw boiling rage in my stomach. Cherokee maybe, wild Indian anger maybe, like Shannon’s anger, bottomless and horrible. I pulled my lips back so my teeth showed. Every third family in Greenville might have a little Cherokee, but I had been born with a full head of black hair. I’ve got my great-granddaddy’s blood in me, I told myself. I am night’s own daughter, my great-grandfather’s warrior child. I pushed my hair up high on my head and searched my pupils for the red highlights that sparked in the depths, dark shiny red like rubies or fresh bright blood. Dangerous, I told myself. I could be dangerous, oh yes, I could be dangerous. Let Daddy Glen yell at Mama again, let him hurt her, let him hurt me, just let him. He’d better be careful. He’s got no idea what I might not do. If I had a razor, I would surely cut his throat in the dead of night, then run away to live naked and alone in the western hills like someone in a Zane Grey novel. All I had to do was grow a little, grow into myself.
Daddy Glen yelled at me at dinner. “That bathroom’s a sty. Way your mama has to work, least you could do is clean up now and then, help out some around here.” Mama sighed and pushed her plate away. Reese ate with her head down, and I said nothing. Mama had said to be careful. Carefully, I kept my head turned, watching lights from the highway reflect off the kitchen curtains, not looking at Daddy Glen.
After dinner, I scrubbed the tub and took a long, hot bath. I looked for black hairs in my navel and felt for fuzz between my legs. I was smooth and clean. I took up Mama’s hand mirror and propped it at an angle between my legs. My chin was pink and dimpled, my neck pale underneath, so that I could see the blue lines of veins threading up to my ears. I put my palms flat on my cheeks, pushed back and slanted my eyes. My face remained unreadable, my eyes blank and silvery. My face told nothing. It was scary, stern and empty. I bent my head back, looking down to my reddish-brown nipples, my puckered belly button, long thighs, and bruised knees. My neck ached, my teeth, my lower spine and ass. All of me was ugly, pasty, and numb—nothing like Uncle James’s girls in their white nylon crinolines and blue satin hair ribbons. They were the kind of little girls people really wanted. No part of me was that worshipful, dreamy-eyed storybook girlchild, no part of me was beautiful. I could see why Daddy Glen was hateful to me. At dinner when Mama had gone back to the bedroom to get her sweater, he had made a point of telling me that I didn’t have anything to be so proud of.
“You think you’re so special,” he’d jeered. “Act like you piss rose water and honey. Think you’re too good to be straightened out. Your mama has spoiled you. She don’t know what a lazy, stubborn girl you are, but I do. I know you. I know you, and I an’t gonna have you turning out like your useless cousins, not growing up under my roof.”
“Hateful man,” I whispered. “I don’t care if his daddy does treat him bad. I don’t care why he’s so mean. He’s hateful.”
I rolled over and pushed my face underwater. I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen’s eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid. But at the bottom, at the darkest point, my anger would come and I would know that he had no idea who I was, that he never saw me as the girl who worked hard for Aunt Raylene, who got good grades no matter how often I changed schools, who ran errands for Mama and took good care of Reese. I was not dirty, not stupid, and if I was poor, whose fault was that?
I would get so angry at Daddy Glen I would grind my teeth. I would dream of cutting his heart out, his evil raging pit-black heart. In the dream it felt good to hate him. But the horrible thing was how I felt when I was awake and wasn’t burning with anger. The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. It must have been like what he felt when he stood around his daddy’s house, his head hanging down.
Love would make me beautiful; a father’s love would purify my heart, turn my bitter soul sweet, and lighten my Cherokee eyes. If he loved me, if he only loved me. Why didn’t he love me? I drummed my fists on the porcelain walls of the tub, shook my head and howled underwater, came up to breathe and went under to whine again. If anyone had come in, they wouldn’t have known I was crying, and I was sure even God couldn’t hear me curse.
Over Christmas holidays at Alma’s house, I spent my time organizing the cousins to act out complicated stories, half of them drawn from television programs. As long as everybody did what I told them, I was the best baby-sitter Aunt Alma had ever seen.
“You can be Francis Marion,” I told Little Earle. “Reese and I will be Cherokee warriors, Patsy Ruth can be the British commander, Garvey will be the cowardly colonist, and Grey can be a colonist on our side.”
“Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, where have you been?” Little Earle began singing, but Patsy Ruth cut him off. “Why do I have to be the British commander? Why can’t you be the bad guy and let me be a Cherokee?”
“’Cause you don’t climb trees worth a pig’s ass. Everybody knows Indians can climb trees.”
“Then I get to ride the horse, and I want to ride Grey’s bike, not Little Earle’s old one.”
“If she gets to ride my bike, then I want to wear your cap.”
“We don’t use my cap in this one. We only use my cap when we play Johnny Yuma.” I was losing patience, and I certainly didn’t want to give up my rebel cap, the one Uncle Earle had brought back from the Fort Sumter general store. It was beautiful—gray, soft, with a slouched brim, and the Stars and Bars stitched in yellow thread.
“Johnny Yoo-ma,” Little Earle started singing again, trying hard to imitate Johnny Cash’s deep voice, “he roamed through the west ... Johnny Yoo-ma the rebel ... he wandered
alone ...”
“You always wear it.” Grey swatted Little Earle’s rear end and turned back to me with a look of sweet reason. “Don’t matter if we’re playing Frankenstein’s monster, and you know didn’t nobody wear no cap like that in the Frankenstein movie.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” I let Grey wear my cap, but I lost interest in the Swamp Fox. Who’d ever heard of him before he showed up on Walt Disney?
Grey and Garvey would only play with us about half the time. They had taken up smoking and were busy practicing pitching pennies. When school started again, they planned to wipe out the lunch money of half the sixth grade. Meanwhile, they kept their distance unless I proposed a plot they really liked.
“Let’s play Dalton Boys again,” Grey kept suggesting. He’d perfected the trick of diving off his bicycle after pretending to be shot, and he loved to show it off.
“It’s the Dalton Girls,” I insisted. Reese and I had seen the movie and had told everybody the plot in such detail that the cousins would argue over just what did and did not happen even though they’d never seen it. All of us girls loved the idea of the gang of sisters who had robbed banks and avenged their dead brothers, but the boys preferred to play at Jesse James or the Younger Gang.
“In that movie maybe, but everybody remembers the real Dalton Boys.” Garvey had seen the movie too, and hadn’t gotten over how the Dalton brothers were killed off in the first scene so the women could learn to shoot guns and rob banks. “I don’t think that movie was real anyway. I bet you their sisters never robbed no banks.”
“What you want to bet?” Reese challenged. She’d loved that movie. “You think a girl can’t beat your ass? You think I can’t beat your ass?” She snatched my cap off Grey’s head.
“You couldn’t scare a chicken off a nest of water moccasins!” Grey tried to get the cap back, but Reese kept running and twisting out of his reach, yelling at him over her shoulder.
“You’re the one scared of water moccasins. Aunt Alma said you pissed your pants when she took you blackberrying, all ’count of you stepped near a little green snake thinking it was some old water moccasin.”
“You shut your chicken-piss mouth.” Grey jerked the cap back.
“You shut yours!” Reese kicked at his ankles.
“Girls!”
“Boys!”
“You give me my cap.” I pulled it out of Grey’s hands as he tried to hop out of the way of Reese’s hard little feet. I was hoping she would really hurt him when Aunt Alma broke the fight up. She sent the boys to play in the backyard and told us girls we’d have to stay in front.
“If you can’t play together, I’ll keep you apart.”
“I don’t want to be around no stupid boys anyway.” Reese spit in Grey’s direction. Sometimes I agreed with every word out of my little sister’s mouth.
“But what we gonna play now?” Patsy Ruth whined. “We can’t ride the bikes in the front yard. We can’t do much of nothing in the front yard.”
I spun my rebel cap on my fist and had a sudden inspiration.
“We’re gonna play mean sisters.”
“What?” Patsy Ruth kept wiping snot off her lip. Mama swore Patsy Ruth had had a runny nose since she was born. “She’ll be wiping snot the day she’s married, wiping snot the day she dies.” I gave Patsy Ruth the handkerchief I’d sneaked out of Daddy Glen’s drawer for a bandanna.
“We’re gonna play mean sisters,” I told them all again, and I could see in my mind’s eye Shannon Pearl’s twisted mean face. “First we’re gonna play Johnny Yuma’s mean sisters, then Francis Marion’s mean sisters, then Bat Masterson’s. Then we’ll think of somebody else.”
Reese looked confused. “What do mean sisters do?”
“They do everything their brothers do. Only they do it first and fastest and meanest.”
Reese still looked confused, but Patsy Ruth whooped.
“Yeah! I want to be the Rifleman’s mean sister.”
Patsy Ruth ran off to get Grey’s old broken plastic rifle.
All afternoon she pretended it was a sawed-off shotgun like the one on “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Reese finally got into it and started playing at being shot off the porch. I took Aunt Alma’s butcher knife and announced that I was Jim Bowie’s mean sister and no one was to mess with me.
I practiced sticking Aunt Alma’s knife into the porch and listened to the boys cursing in the backyard. I was mean. I decided. I was mean and vicious, and all I really wanted to be doing was sticking that knife in Daddy Glen.
That evening, Patsy Ruth entertained Alma and Wade by running up and down yelling “Ten-four, ten-four” until she knocked over Aunt Alma’s glass.
“What in God’s name are you playing at, child?”
“I was being Broderick Crawford’s mean sister,” Patsy Ruth wailed, wiping her nose.
“His what?” Uncle Wade started laughing into his glass. “His what?” He rocked back on his cane-bottom chair and ground his cigarette out on the porch. Aunt Alma shook her head and looked at Patsy Ruth like she had gone crazy.
“Broderick Crawford’s mean sister! My Lord, what they don’t think up.”
Patsy Ruth was humiliated and angry. She pointed at me. “She told me about it. She told me I could.”
Wade reached out and slapped my fanny. “Girl, you got a mind that scares me.” He swatted me again, but lightly, and he kept grinning. “Broderick Crawford’s mean sister.”
I didn’t care. I played mean sisters for all I was worth.
15
Mama let Aunt Raylene take Reese and me along when she went to visit Uncle Earle at the county farm. Aunt Raylene said he would be there another three months and he was lonely to see his nieces and nephews.
“Why don’t you take Grey and Garvey?” Mama asked her. “Show them what’s gonna happen to them if they keep breaking into telephones.”
“The hell with that.” Aunt Raylene was sensitive about Grey and Garvey, who had been picked up by the highway patrol for drag-racing in Uncle Beau’s truck when they were supposed to be staying the night at her place. Alma got mad at Raylene for not keeping a more watchful eye on them, and Raylene came close to slapping Garvey when he boasted that they were the youngest in the family ever to be arrested. Now Aunt Raylene folded some of Uncle Earle’s clean underwear and put it in a paper sack while her face flushed red with anger.
“They get into any more trouble, the law won’t have to send them away. I’ll send them so far they’ll never find their way home.”
“Shit you will.” Granny slammed a basket of food down on Aunt Raylene’s kitchen table. “You’ll visit them every month and take them sweet cornbread, just like you do Earle.”
“You’ll see what I’ll do.”
“I’ve seen it already.”
I waited for them to really start fighting, Instead Granny leaned over and kissed Aunt Raylene right on the mouth, her lips pressing Raylene’s with an audible smack. Aunt Raylene gaped in surprise, and Granny laughed until the tears came.
“Oh! Oh! Look at you. Raylene, I finally got you. Oh Lord! I enjoyed that.” She dropped down on a kitchen chair and wiped her eyes. “Well, never mind, you just tell Earle that I love him. And then tell him if I’d beat his ass more when he was a boy, he wouldn’t be where he is today.”
“Nothing you could have done would have stopped Earle from his fighting.” Raylene was trying to recover from the shock of Granny’s kiss. “Earle had a spirit of meanness in him when he was born.” I watched Aunt Raylene push her gray hair back up into her hairpins. Did I have a spirit of meanness in me? I wondered. It felt like it. It had felt like it for weeks. Maybe I hadn’t been born with it, but I’d come to it, as Granny would say. I’d come to it soon enough.
Earle was a little skinnier and a little grayer around the eyes. His hair had grown back some, into a short black brush that stuck straight up all over his head. He kept running his hands over the top of his head as if he couldn’t believe his thick wavy hair was g
one. Still, when we settled down on the grass for our picnic, he had gifts for everybody—key tags and belts for all the boys and coin purses and hair barrettes for the girls, all of them hand-tooled and elaborately decorated. Aunt Raylene got a handbag as big as her lunch basket. For Mama he had a leather wallet stenciled with rose vines.
“You give her that, and tell her I think of her all the time.” He laughed his black laugh. “I think of her biscuits. These cooks here can’t make a biscuit a man can eat.”
I played with the wallet and watched the other families on the grass. All the women had leather handbags with stenciled roses. Little tooled leather vines wrapped around the shoulder straps, the edges of the wallets. I ran my fingers over Mama’s wallet and wondered how it was done.
How did they tool the leather?
I opened Mama’s wallet and stroked the unfinished leather. Around us, women were feeding children and keeping close to their husbands. The glaring hot yard smelled of spoiling food, sweat, and sour baby diapers. I looked up at Uncle Earle and saw he was watching the women, sweat running down into his eyes.
Bastard Out of Carolina Page 22