One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  After we ate, he drove us somewhere and pulled off the road and reached over and kissed me right on my lips. I’d never been kissed before.

  Before I knew it, he was touching where he liked to look. I thought about stopping him, but I didn’t. It felt good to be touched, Mama Red. And I didn’t stop him when he dropped his hand lower than that and not even when he did something to me boys wasn’t supposed to do, not until you’re married. It wasn’t my first choice to have done what we did, but I told myself that Harold Creamer loved me.

  He come back to see me that very next Saturday and next two after that, and we put it all on repeat.

  But then I missed my monthly. And one night, when I was in bed, I felt a warmth come over me, and I knew I had a baby inside of me. I put my hand on my belly and felt a little spark growing off to my right side. It was like a tiny bubble, and it was trying to get my attention and say, Hey there, Mama.

  When Harold come back that next Saturday night, I told him. He went to beating the steering wheel.

  In a couple of weeks, he sent me a letter. Said he wasn’t the kind of man to run out on me but he didn’t love me. Said he’d be over to get me that next Saturday, would pick me up at four o’clock and for me to find us somebody to marry us. I filled up a pillowcase with my clothes, and just before four o’clock, told Mama, “I’m marrying Harold and moving over to South Carolina.”

  “Ain’t no man would have you,” she told me.

  “One did, and that’s all it takes,” I said.

  I was almost down the front steps when Mama called my name. She was at the door holding out a black hat and gloves. “A lady always wears a hat and gloves,” she said.

  I ran back to her and wanted to hug her for being so nice, so I leaned in, but she pulled back from me.

  I put them both on. The hat had black netting with little squares that fell all around my face. I put my mama in one of them squares to try to catch her and keep her.

  I started down the hill and couldn’t be sure, but I was thinking I’d seen tears in Mama’s eyes, and I got to tell you, Mama Red, that about made me turn around and go back and tell her You know what? I believe I just might stay.

  But I kept on walking.

  Harold pulled up. I got in. A stranger married us. We crossed the state line and come right to that house I’m still living in. He went to work, and I set up housekeeping. I found a photograph of him and a girl, a pretty, skinny girl, in the bottom of his chifforobe. Harold had a big smile on his face. On the back was the names Harry and Ellen. When he came home that day, I asked him who that girl was.

  “Ellen,” he said. “The girl I wanted to marry. Built this house for.”

  I asked him why the name Harry was on the back. “That’s what she called me,” he said. “And it was good that she backed out on me, because I’d have had to pay a colored woman to help her out. She’s not handy like you.”

  OCTOBER 18–19, 1951

  Sarah went to her room, to her chifforobe, and took from the baby-blue blanket a rock. It was one of several she had seen her boy play with. She’d been practicing with it. So far, she had managed to toss it as high as three inches and still catch it. But she would risk more this time. She tossed it twice as high, and with her hands cupped like a bowl, she caught it and giggled, so much that she fell onto her bed and kicked her feet like a schoolgirl. At that moment, Sarah was young again and watching other children on the playground tossing a ball at recess. She had no ball herself, but one day she thought of her mother’s pin cushion and hurried home and took it from her mother’s sewing table and tossed it hard, up high. It slammed into the ceiling at the same time her mother walked into the room. Her mother whipped her hard with her hand and told her, “If I ever catch you playing again and with my belongings, I’ll get me a hickory and leave marks on you that you won’t never forget.”

  That morning, Sarah stopped kicking and giggling. She got off of her bed and put the rock away.

  …..

  Sarah was on her way to the road to get the mail when she heard Mama Red call to her from the lot. “Why, hello there yourself,” Sarah said and walked to the separating fence, where, down about ten feet, Mama Red and Lucky stood near each other, the wire running between them, Mama Red bent to the grass, while Lucky splashed water in the big wash tub he now drank from. That was another thing Mr. Merritt had advised they do, give each a bigger drinking container. “Look at you playing, making a mess.”

  Mr. Merritt had sent two men to run the fence the same day he’d separated Mama Red and Lucky. Both were Mr. Merritt’s friends from church. They wouldn’t take a dime from Sarah.

  Mr. Thrasher’s truck pulled up to Sarah’s house. He came every day now to check on Lucky. He had retrieved the mail for her, one piece, from the Farmers Cooperative Exchange, the FCX, a bill for $22.55 and marked Past Due in red. Buying all that Mr. Merritt had advised had cost more than her dress money brought in. Mr. Thrasher had put their entire purchase on credit.

  “I got eight dollars and a penny,” she said.

  …..

  The FCX sat in a low place near town. Sarah was the only woman in this place of business. Two men stood behind a long, wooden counter. The young one glanced at her but went back to sorting papers, laid out on top. The other man, much older, stood behind the cash register, holding onto the sides with hairy hands as if he loved it. He never looked Sarah’s way.

  She carried the letter in her hand. “Excuse me, sir.” The younger man raised his eyes. He wore black glasses like Harold, but the glass in this man’s was thick, making his eyes look as big as fifty-cent pieces. “I come to see about paying some on my bill here.” She set it on the counter and unsnapped her change purse and took out a silver dollar. A teacher at the school that week had paid her that way.

  “Creamer,” the man said and looked to be studying the bill. “Route 2. You’re not the Creamer that Luther Dobbins sold that old mama cow to, are you?”

  “I have a mama cow from Mr. Dobbins, yes sir. Mama Red.”

  He pressed his middle finger against the bridge of his glasses. His eyes looked even larger now. “She got funny markings on her face?”

  Sarah didn’t like how interested this man was. She squeezed the silver dollar in her hand. Telling a lie was not something she liked to do, but she felt she had to. She shook her head.

  “Must be another Creamer, then. You’d know what I mean by funny markings.”

  Sarah felt her body flush, especially her head, where she imagined her jowls flashed shiny spots of red.

  “That’ll $22.55, ma’am.”

  Sarah showed him the large coin that lay in the palm of her hand. “It’s all I can part with at present.” The silver stood out bold against the black cloth of her gloves.

  He didn’t reach for it. Instead, he appeared to look around the store, she assumed for the older man, who must be his father, who no longer stood at the counter.

  Her change purse carried two more silver dollars and a folded five dollar bill for Mr. Scarboro. She needed a dollar for food. She’d begun buying cans of Vienna sausage for her boy for twenty-one cents each, along with saltines for twenty-eight cents for a good-sized box. On Sundays, she served a can of “star quality” Treet, which always set her back forty-seven cents. She could offer one more silver dollar. She set one on the counter.

  But he did not pick that one up, either. He looked around the store again.

  In his eyes, in their largeness, Sarah saw something small, like he’d been hurt before. She wondered if his father had done that. “What’s your name, sir?” she asked.

  “Allgood.”

  “That your given name?”

  “No ma’am, it’s Jeremiah.”

  “Jeremiah. Sounds old, like it comes from the Bible.”

  “It does.”

  “Mine don’t,” she told him. “It’s Sarah.”

  “That’s in the Bible, ma’am.”

  “My name? My name come from the Bible? My mama give me a
Bible name?” Sarah was talking loud.

  The man nodded.

  She wrapped her arms around herself. “About that mama cow,” she said and wished she could take those words back. His niceness had made them slip out.

  He pushed on his glasses again. “She’s part of my boyhood.” Across his face came a grin. “One hot summer day in ’34, I was a boy of eleven then, Pop brought me to town, to the train tracks over there.” He pointed out the side of the store. “They were unloading cattle, skinny as a rail, a heap of them from the state of Oklahoma, where they’d had bad dust storms and no rain for months, so all the pastures had dried up. President Roosevelt paid the farmers out there a dollar a head and brought the cattle east in carloads. Five hundred and fifty came here to Anderson. Pop took thirty of them and got paid fifty cents a head per month to pasture them until just before Christmas when the government slaughtered them and then canned them for the poor people to eat.”

  The word “slaughter” cut through Sarah.

  “That mama cow I was asking you about come off that train. She’d just been born before they left out there, but her mama didn’t survive the train ride. Left her a bum heifer.”

  Sarah felt her stomach knot up. She didn’t know what “bum heifer” meant, but she knew it wasn’t good.

  The young man removed his glasses. His eyes were no longer large. “I’ll never forget her face. The white of it was the prettiest white I’d ever seen, whiter than Pop’s cotton. I begged him to let me bring her home, promised to bottle feed her and raise her up.”

  Sarah pictured the mother cow’s face. The white on it had a gray tint to it now. Her calf’s face, though, still carried that pure white the young man had seen.

  “But when it came time for them all to go to slaughter, the government spared her, said they’d give twenty-five of the cows to poor people. I begged Pop to tell them to please make one of them that calf. And they did. She wasn’t but four months old.”

  The thought of almost missing Mama Red made Sarah tremble. She’d thought she didn’t like his father much, but now she did.

  “So y’all was poor, too?” Sarah said.

  The young man shifted his body. “No ma’am, we weren’t, but we had people, tenants, that were. Pop finagled somehow to give that calf to one of the families on our place.”

  “Then how did Mr. Dobbins get her?” Sarah asked.

  The man did not answer. He put his glasses back on and rang up the cash register. A big “2.00” appeared at the top.

  Sarah had been on the verge of telling him that the mother cow was at her place now, and she was living out her days in love. But all she said was “Thank you, kind sir.”

  She would go now and pick up her boy, and they would go home. All Sarah wanted to do was place her hand on the mother cow’s face, let it rest in her hair, already thick for the long haul of winter.

  The mother cow and her calf stayed close, their heads bent to the earth almost in concert. Occasionally, the calf tried to stick his head between the rows of barbed wire that separated them and grab onto a teat. Their bawling back and forth had continued for two days, but, by the third, their sounds had started to fade, and after one week, they had all but stopped.

  Buttons, little buttons of red, an inch and a half apart, lined the inside of the mother cow’s membrane sack, snapping it onto to her womb, where the baby now lay, the buttons holding the sack in place and allowing the mother’s food to pass to her baby, now about a foot in length and weighing close to two pounds.

  “By now, boys, you should be seeing a pretty good poundage gain on your steers—two, even three pounds a day.” Mr. Merritt was talking as though LC did not know that. LC started to tell the county agent that they weren’t babies, but, first, he’d look around to see if anybody else had a frown on their face like him.

  He stopped on the Creamer boy, whose face carried not only a grin but a contentment, even though he sat by himself off to the side. Either he was shy, or he thought he was better than the rest of them. And he sat with his shoes off. The top part near the toes had an opening, like a knife had been taken to it, the shoes directly beneath his feet like he didn’t trust that they’d stay safe. His feet hovered over them like a mother cow, the way they protect their young. The boy’s socks were a dingy white and looked to be too big with extra cloth bunched up at the end. LC wondered if he wore them like that on his own or if his mother had wanted him to have that extra. He believed his mother wanted him to have extra. He’d seen the way they looked out for each other. Yeah, that Creamer boy must think he’s better than anybody else.

  “Boys, it’s time now to step up your mixed grain feeding by another pound or two this month,” the county agent said. “Do it gradual now. Too much too soon can make your steer sick.”

  “We already know all this,” LC said, his words whistling through the open space in his teeth. He’d lost a tooth that morning but didn’t tell anyone. The tooth fairy was for babies. He’d thrown the tooth in the trash can.

  Mr. Merritt cleared his throat. “Not everyone does, LC.”

  LC looked at the Creamer boy and hollered out, “Hey, when are you going to give us that paper?”

  But all the man did was talk fast and loud. “I’m especially pleased with the quality of the cattle this year, boys, and believe they’ll all be well-finished for the show. All are shooting towards that down-the-road prime category, instead of a canner.”

  LC didn’t believe for one minute that everyone’s steer was looking good. He wondered why the agent didn’t talk like a man and tell the truth. LC would ask the question again, but he would wait for the right time. Maybe when the Prater boy opened his crybaby mouth. Since he had messed up so bad the year before, he might try to offer some real competition this year. But probably it would last year’s winner, the Glenn boy, a twelfth-grader now, who would really turn it on and try to make it two years in a row. The others in the room mattered not. There was no fire in their eyes.

  Except for the Creamer boy, who held his eyes wide like he wasn’t afraid, like he was free to go stand in a field, since there was no one there holding a gun. But it was dangerous to hold your eyes that way. No, the Creamer boy was going nowhere. Besides, he’d named his steer. LC knew better than to do that this year. He’d heard Charles talk of boys that named their steers what they would soon become. “T-Bone is my steer’s name,” LC called out.

  Snickers broke out around the room, all except from Emerson Bridge.

  The county agent shot him a look and in a loud voice said, “Part of your job of finishing your steer, boys, is getting him to do everything you’ ask him to do over the next few months. I’m talking about building trust.”

  LC had begun rolling his eyes, but when the man said “trust,” LC stopped cold.

  “We already have that,” the Creamer boy said. “He lets me throw a rock up in the air right beside him.”

  LC felt a rush of heat rise through him.

  Mr. Merritt cleared his throat. “Like I was saying, the first part of building that trust is with your steer’s food, by feeding him in the same place and at the same time every morning and every night.”

  Before now, LC had been thinking that what had made him so sad about losing his steer in March was that he’d named him. But Mr. Merritt had just put his finger on the rest of it. LC had gotten his steer to trust him.

  “So, boys, this next part is getting him to trust that you are going to take care of him. I’m talking about brushing him, touching him every day. You want him quiet in the ring, because I got to tell you a quiet disposition goes a long way with the judges. In fact, the ideal words from the judges are ‘Quiet and broken to be led.’”

  LC ran from the room and out into the hallway. He moved down a ways in case anyone came after him. But no one did. He no longer had any friends. The air smelled of sweaty children, know-it-all kids who liked to ball up their fists and hit something. Like himself. And even from days past, like his father, who had attended Centervil
le, but that is all he knew of his father’s early days.

  He thought he smelled his father now and balled up his fist, which he wanted to ram down his father’s throat and make him choke like he had done at the Cattleman’s Supper the day he’d made LC kill that deer. LC was glad he’d choked. He hit the wall. It was made of wooden boards running the way he was not, towards the front door, where there was light.

  The door to the classroom behind him opened. The boys were coming his way. He crossed his arms over his stomach and bent forward like he was sick. A couple of boys laughed as they passed.

  He waited until he heard no more footsteps and then freed his arms and started for the front door himself.

  “Hey,” he heard at his back. “You all right?”

  It was that Creamer boy. LC turned towards him. He had his shoes on.

  LC nodded and watched him pass. Then he called out at the boy’s back, “Hey, my dad’s got y’all’s automobile at our house.”

  “I know,” Emerson Bridge told him and kept walking.

  “And my steer’s going to beat your’s tail.” LC brought his fist up to slam the wall.

  “No, he’s not,” the Creamer boy said and stepped out into the light.

  LC ran after him and found him walking towards an automobile parked in front of the school. It was the same one from before, and the boy’s mother stood beside an open passenger door. She wasn’t nervous like his own, but appeared anchored like a rock that couldn’t be moved. She saw him, he thought, and even smiled at him.

  LC smiled back. He did it easily.

  “Hey!” he called out and ran hard towards Emerson Bridge, who looked back at him. LC was glad. He was afraid the boy might not. LC wanted to tell him in a strong voice, Don’t name your steer, but what came out of his mouth in a whisper was, “I named mine last year. I named him Shortcake.”

  “I like that name,” Emerson Bridge said.

  “I like it, too.”

  “We supposed to keep their names a secret? That why we’re whispering?”

  LC knew he should tell him to get rid of the name altogether, that calling him a name would make it hurt even more when he had to say goodbye. But LC couldn’t do that. Not now. It felt like he was visiting someone he used to be, and that felt good. “Yeah, a secret,” LC said.