One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  Mildred was jumping up and down.

  “Thank you, sir, I want to thank you for that, I sure do.” Sarah held the telephone up against her mouth with both hands.

  “You are mighty welcome. Be sure to go by Welborn’s Shoes on the square and tell them that Marshall Gaillard at WAIM radio declared you this week’s Shoe of the Week winner.”

  “Yes sir, I will, I sure will as soon as I get me some gasoline money.”

  An advertisement for the store came on. Sarah thought she might faint and backed up to the wall. Mildred took the receiver from her and said, “Let’s go!”

  Sarah saw the woman’s eyes on her forehead.

  “Why, dear, did you fall?” Mildred asked.

  “Kind of, but I’m on my feet again.” Sarah lifted the netting all the way around.

  Mildred drove them to town and parked in front of Woolworth’s. They crossed Main Street and walked inside Welborn’s Shoes, where Mildred introduced Sarah to the clerk as this week’s winner. He motioned for Sarah to have a seat in one of the chairs, and then he scooted a stool for himself her way. It had a ramp up the front and on it a large measuring plate, which his manicured hands held in place. Sarah removed her shoe and placed her foot there. The metal felt cool. She hoped her foot didn’t smell. She’d not taken the time to wash her feet that morning, only under her arms and her neck and face. But her stockings were clean.

  The clerk moved a bar down to meet her big toe, and then from the side, he moved a second bar against her little toe. “Would the lady prefer black or brown?”

  Sarah thought of the dress she was wearing. “Black, please sir, if you don’t mind.”

  He nodded as if bowing and went to the back and soon returned with a pink box and from it lifted one of the shoes. It was shiny black and set up high. A double line of white stitching followed the rounded curve on top of the shoe, with a double line running down the wedged heel. He placed it on the ramp. A shoe horn at her heel glided her foot in. Across the top came two thin straps, which he buckled. He did the same with her other foot, and then he held out his hand. Sarah took it and rose to her feet. She felt tall. For the first time in her life, she felt tall.

  “Do they fit?” Mildred asked, and Sarah told her, “Like they had my name on them.”

  “Why, they did,” Mildred said, and they began to giggle.

  People in the store looked their way. “We’ve got our giggle boxes turned over,” Mildred said.

  “Giggle boxes, we sure do!” Sarah wanted to wear her new shoes home and asked the clerk to throw her old ones away. But when he walked away with them, she called him back. She might need them again. But she looked at her feet and her new ones. She motioned him on.

  Outside, she saw Mildred’s reflection in the window. For a second, Sarah wondered who the woman was beside Mildred. There was a smile on the woman’s face that connected to a body that was not fat.

  Sarah was looking at herself.

  Mildred needed to go inside Woolworth’s. Sarah remained outside beside a mechanical horse and sneaked glimpses at herself in the big window and grinned.

  “Got another surprise for you,” Mildred said when she came from the store, holding a paper sack high. She got inside her automobile, and Sarah followed, the bottoms of her new shoes slapping against the concrete like they were clapping.

  From the sack, Mildred pulled two long runs of shiny fabric in swirls of bright red and yellow and white. They were kerchiefs. “We’re movie stars,” she said and tied one around her head.

  Sarah removed her hat, brought the silky cloth down her face and tied it beneath her chin. Two little girls stood near the horse now. They looked to be friends. One of them climbed on, and the horse began moving. The little girl trusted it to take her somewhere good. “Them words you said to me in that store about our giggle boxes being turned over, that other friend I had that one time, Mattie, it’s what she used to say to me when we had fun.” Sarah pressed the bottoms of her shoes into the floorboard and then lifted up her feet, bringing them together and holding.

  “We’ve got more fun!” Mildred took out matching sunglasses, large with thick white frames. They looked like the outside of eggs prepared sunny side up. Both women put them on.

  Their giggles turned into full on laughter, enough to blast through the confines of the automobile to the rest of the world that surely could hear them.

  But, then, just as hard as Sarah had been laughing, she began to cry.

  “Oh, dear. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Mildred said and dabbed at Sarah’s face with the ends of her kerchief. “We don’t have to wear these.”

  But Sarah shook her head. “No, it ain’t that. It’s just that all this time I’ve been thinking it was my husband, Harold, that cheated on me. But it’s just come to me that it was Mattie, too. She cheated on me, too. And that was worse. She was supposed to be my friend.”

  Mildred reached for Sarah’s hand. Mildred was not wearing gloves, only bringing forth her skin, her bare skin.

  Sarah wanted that. She removed her glove and took away any cloth between them.

  …..

  Luther Dobbins did not let his boy ride the bus to school that morning. Luther drove him there himself, let him off at the front door and leaned across the truck seat. He wanted to kiss LC good-bye. But his boy was out the door. It slammed so hard, the jowls of Luther’s cheeks shook.

  He had made a list of what he could do to show he was good. One was taking his boy to school. But kissing him was not on the list. That had come freely.

  He lit a cigar and put it in his mouth and wondered what life would have been like if he’d always treated his boys this way. Mildred, too. He had pretended to be someone he wasn’t when he first met and married her. He’d quit school when he was fifteen, hitchhiked to the next town over, Greenville, answered an ad for a Fuller brush salesman and in two years became the leading salesperson, and, as such, could treat himself to any restaurant he wanted. The finest in town was at the Poinsett Hotel, where he took himself one day after a sales call he knew had gone too far. He’d talked a woman into buying bubble suds, when she didn’t have a tub in her house. He considered resigning and wanted to mull it over at the Poinsett, where he sat at his favorite table along the far wall, positioned so he could best study the way people spoke and dressed and behaved, such as this one young lady who sat at the table next to him. She was cutting her eyes over at him like she wanted him to ask her out, but Luther had lots of girlfriends and thought she wasn’t pretty enough to join his herd.

  “Yes, good sir,” Luther told the waiter, “I’ll have the roast beef with new potatoes and steamed green beans with the slightest slivers of almonds and pimentos.” Luther didn’t know what pimentos were the first time he ordered the beans, but he’d heard others do so.

  The girl ordered the exact same. “And put that gentleman’s charge on Daddy’s bill, too,” she said and looked Luther’s way.

  “I can pay for my own,” he told her and pulled out his billfold and showed her a stack of money, a half inch thick.

  The girl smiled. “You’re rich like my daddy, then.”

  He broke out in a sweat.

  “I’m going to be a movie star one day,” she said and held her head at an angle, as if someone was making a photograph of her.

  Their food came, and an older man, dressed in the finest of suits, joined the girl at her table. “Daddy,” she said and pointed towards Luther, “that gentleman there is rich like you.”

  The man extended his hand. “George Hampton here, good sir.”

  Luther rose from his seat. “THE George Hampton who owns this hotel?”

  The man nodded.

  “Luther Charles Dobbins,” Luther told him.

  “Dobbins. Dobbins. What business are your people in?”

  Luther felt moisture bead up around his mouth. “Agriculture, sir. The agriculture business.”

  “Smart man, your father must be. Nothing more valuable than land, especially pasture
land.”

  Luther asked the girl out. Her name was Mildred. On their first date, she told him her father’s hotel had suites, and Luther thought she meant candy and asked, “What kind of candy?” She laughed at him. He thought about not asking her out again, but she was a rich man’s daughter.

  They married within six months at the Poinsett under a chandelier that cost more than Luther’s father had made in a lifetime. He did not invite his family.

  Within two years, Luther made enough money to buy his own farm, seventy-one acres of pastureland. When he did, his father and mother surprised him with a late wedding present, the dust bowl cow the Allgoods had given his father, the cow a year and a half old and on the cusp of fertility. “Get you a herd started with her, son,” his father had said and laughed. His father had the nerve to laugh. After all those years, laugh. They smelled of smoke that day, the sooty kind, the worst kind, smoke from a tiny house and woodstove and his mother’s outside black iron pot she stayed bent over, boiling water to wash their filthy clothes, stirring with a throwaway stick from the mighty Allgood yard. “Get the by God out of my clean yard,” he had told them that day. He’d not seen them since.

  Luther pulled air through his cigar, lighting its end in fire, then took it from his mouth and flung it out his window onto the dirt of the school yard, where echoes of children’s laughter from years past skipped and bounced. But never from Luther when he had gone to school there, because Emmanuel had not been there with him. He was not allowed to go. Luther wondered if LC ever laughed there, with friends, maybe even the Creamer boy. He put his hands on his steering wheel, wrapped them around the large round ring and squeezed. He couldn’t add Cletus and Ethel Dobbins to his list. They were both dead. But the dust bowl cow, Old Splotchy, was still alive, as far as he knew. Her calf, the Creamer steer, might be another matter. He thought about driving out to the Creamer place to check on it. That was on his list, the steer’s welfare. He was afraid his going, though, would be too obvious and point to him as the likely heavy. That’s what villains were called in cowboy movies. But he was the heavy. And a coward. He drove home.

  Thrasher was waiting on him by his truck. He was on the list, too. The man had his arms folded across his chest and his head hung low. “Good morning to you,” Thrasher said in a flat voice. “I’ve come to tell you something.”

  But Luther cut him off, not for reasons of before, but because all he could see was LC’s face if the steer died. “How’s that Creamer steer doing?”

  “Don’t reckon I know.”

  Luther found that hard to believe. He’d never known this man to lie.

  “But, listen,” Thrasher said, “I need to speak with you.” He talked as if he was trying to gather steam to get up an incline.

  “You need to come with me.” Luther did something he never thought he’d do. He grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him towards his truck. “Bloat’s serious.”

  They started to the Creamer place. Luther told himself he would let the man blabber on about what he always blabbered about, the latest cowboy movie he’d seen. But the man said nothing, just sat against the door and stared out the window. And he was not wearing his cowboy hat. It lay in his lap.

  “You sick?” Luther asked him.

  Thrasher shook his head. Luther had never seen his full head of hair, only the bottom curls that always hung beneath his hat. His hair looked like the waves of an ocean. Luther was glad he had his hat on. He would keep it on.

  He turned into the Creamer driveway and drove past the house to the barn, pulled up to the fence, and there was the steer on its feet with its head down. He was eating. The steer was alive. Luther had been spared again. His fingers, numb from squeezing the steering wheel, relaxed. “He looks good,” Luther said and waited for Thrasher to say the same. Luther needed him to, not because Thrasher knew anything about cattle, but because Luther believed him to be a good man.

  But all Thrasher did was look the opposite way towards the house. A Model A sat in the yard. That must be the vehicle Mrs. Creamer was driving Saturday night.

  “I’m hanging up my spurs, Mr. Boss Man.”

  Luther turned his head so fast, his neck popped.

  “Yes sir, I’m quitting. That’s what I come to tell you. Ain’t cut out to be no cattleman. Maybe I’ll dust off my Bible and do some preaching again. “

  Luther had thought he would want to do cartwheels if he’d ever heard these words. No more pushing people off from visiting his ranch on Mondays for fear they’d see this wannabee cowboy, who would surely announce he was Luther’s hired hand. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the little man, huddled against the door like a child, scared of his father’s hand. And what came out of Luther’s mouth both surprised and embarrassed him. “What you believe about salvation?” Luther’s voice was quiet, just up from a whisper.

  Thrasher put his arms under his knees and brought them up in the air. His boots were no longer shiny. “Once saved, always saved. At least I hope so.” He kept his head towards the window. His words left a fog on the glass. Luther watched it disappear the way his own breath had disappeared when he was a boy and would breathe on that one window in their tenant house. After Emmanuel left, Luther was scared the boogey man would come get him in the nighttime, and no one from the outside would be able to see in, only the other family, and they were as helpless as his. The day he learned to spell “help” in school, he’d come home and breathed on the window and written that word. Then he watched it disappear.

  “But how do you know if you’re been saved once?” Luther asked. “What if you get that part wrong?”

  “A person knows his heart. If it’s clean or filthy.”

  “Then or now?”

  “Both.”

  “Then,” Luther said, “I was a just kid.”

  “Reckon you’re saved.”

  Reckon you’re saved. Reckon you’re saved. Reckon you’re saved. And this came from a preacher. Luther wanted to make a fist and slap it against the man’s upper arm like men do, but he might knock him out of the truck. He was more delicate than Mildred.

  But he’d also said “now.” Wasn’t his heart getting a little cleaner now? Having a preacher around would help keep it that way.

  “You can’t quit,” Luther told him.

  “Yes sir, I’m quitting.” The man’s knees shook. His cowboy hat bobbed up and down.

  “No, sir. Ain’t going to let you. You’re really coming along as a cattleman, and we’ve got big doings today, got a weaning.” Luther knew his voice was getting loud but not in that mad way.

  Thrasher turned his head Luther’s way. “You mean that?”

  Luther swallowed. “Yes, I do.” He’d told a lie and that was wrong, but he did it to try to make the man feel better. Luther turned his head away. He wanted to wipe his coat sleeve across his eyes, but doing so would signal that he needed to wipe his eyes.

  He brought up his arm and wiped.

  “You mean doggies,” Thrasher said. “You mean we’ve got to wean them doggies today.”

  “That’s right, doggies,” Luther told him and cleared his throat. Calling cows that name wasn’t a lie.

  He looked back at the man. He had restored his hat to his head. It sunk low over his ears, making the vaulted top seem higher, a kind of dome, but not as round as a ladybug with its protective shell. Or was it a shield that God had given them to protect? After all, they were little.

  …..

  LC hid in the bushes along the back of the school. It couldn’t have worked out better for his father to bring him that day. If he’d ridden the school bus, it would have been harder for him to hide.

  When all got quiet inside the building, LC bent low and ran across the yard. He was headed to earn some money to give to Emerson Bridge, and LC needed a family who did not know his father. He’d heard him speak of an elderly couple who lived near Drake’s Store, people his father called Catholics, a kind of church his father didn’t believe in. Their last name was Spinharney.


  LC knocked on their back door. A woman answered. “Hello, ma’am. I’m needing to earn some Christmas money and was wondering if y’all’ve got anything I can do?”

  The woman wiped her hands on her apron. “You’re not in school today?”

  “Need to earn some money.”

  A gunshot sounded behind him.

  “My husband’s killing a hog today. He’s got some of the colored helping him, but you might go ask him if there’s anything you can do.”

  LC grabbed on the railing beside him and called up in his mind Emerson Bridge’s shoes.

  He headed to the barn, where he saw the animal being hoisted by ropes tied to its back legs. Blood ran from an open slit in its throat and puddled onto the dirt below.

  LC wretched.

  He collected himself and asked for work. His first job was to keep enough wood beneath the big black pot to keep the water boiling. And, after the hog bled out and was placed in a large wooden barrel, his job shifted to delivering buckets of the scalding water for the men to pour over the animal to loosen its hair.

  The work took until early afternoon. Mr. Spinharney gave him a silver dollar. LC wondered how much a pair of boy’s shoes would cost. He held the coin in the flat of his hand and told the man, “Golly, this is a lot. I sure thank you, sir.”

  “What you give is what you get. And you gave a lot today, son.”

  LC’s father killed hogs when the weather got cold, too. He’d not done it yet this season. Or rather, Uncle hadn’t. Uncle always used his father’s pearl-handled .32 pistol. It always looked little in Uncle’s hands. LC was surprised that his father had a gun that small. But even little guns can kill.

  LC took himself to the man’s pond and walked out in the cold waters to its deepest point, almost shoulder high. And then he began to move his hands over his body, full of blood and scalded hairs.

  He washed himself clean.

  …..

  Mildred pulled into the Durham Shopping Center on North Main and parked in front of Martin’s Children’s Shop. Straight ahead, in the big glass window, Sarah saw boy’s shoes displayed.