“But, where, Dad?” Junior insisted.
“Right down there at the beach. You know, over there next to the pier. Down that road where you park. There’s where she started her flyin career.”
“Is she hurt? Bad?” I asked.
“Shit, how can you tell? She’s always pissin’ and moanin’ with some pain or other but she did land in soft sand. And she was so drunk she couldn’t possibly a hurt herself bad. Limp as a noodle. She’s over to the doctor’s now. Her and Milly. Come on.” He was going around to the driver’s side of the car and Junior and I piled into the front seat next to him. “For Christ’s sake see that fuckin’ door’s closed proper.”
“That’s public property there, isn’t it Dad?” I asked. “I mean the beach is the town’s?”
He chuckled. “You wonderin’ who she’s goin’ to sue?” He looked at me and grinned. I grinned back. “Lord only knows. She might even sue me.” He laughed. “That’ll be the old blood from a turnip story.”
Mom was supporting Aunt Dell by holding onto her elbow when they came out of the doctor’s office. Aunt Dell was giving one of her more convincing performances. It was a shame she had such a small audience—just the four of us. The street was deserted. Her head rolled weakly as though she were going to faint, her knees were obviously unable to support her more than a few steps. Junior was out of the car and had her by the other arm as I ran up to her making inadequate gestures of helping maneuver her to the car. She was moaning quietly but most effectively.
“Oh my God, Milly,” she mumbled. “I think I might just a done it this time.” She tried to straighten her back and her face was a mask of pain.
“Just take it easy, Dell, the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong. There’s nothing broken.”
“There’s always the insides, Milly. Internal injuries.” She said it pathetically, but there was a gleam of hope and even optimism in her eyes.
Mom crowded in next to Aunt Dell in the front seat as Dad started the motor. “For Christ’s sake, Milly,” Dad said, only half joking. “Don’t you take up flying.”
“I’m holding on for dear life, Woody,” Mom said.
“It’s that damned door,” Aunt Dell declared. “It don’t close tight.”
“Now, I suppose you’re going’ to sue me,” Dad said drily.
Aunt Dell shot him a quick look. “Are you insured?”
“Relax. Down, Rover,” Dad teased her. “You know we don’t have …”
“Well, everybody ought to have insurance.”
“I’ll write F.D.R.”
There was some sort of shot the doctor had given her—to calm her after her jolt, Mom said—and after taking some pills and resting during the afternoon, she was to return at five-thirty with a urine specimen. I never did understand why, but Junior said it was probably to see if any damage had been done to her kidneys— she had landed on the flat of her back and if pain continued, it could be kidneys.
We unfolded the daybed and put her to bed where Mom gave her the pills and then we all tiptoed around for the rest of our ruined afternoon.
“I could have clocked up four or five hours work this afternoon anyway,” Dad said, “if we didn’t have to take her back to the doctor.”
“Woody, I’m worried,” Mom glanced at me reading in the corner and leaned across the table toward Dad. I heard her whisper, “Dell wants me to do the specimen.”
“Do what?”
“Ssssh.” She glanced at me again. “She says she’s been drinking too much and she thinks it’ll show up in her urine.”
“It’s probably pure bourbon.”
“Then, if she has hurt herself, they’d—whoever they are—would just dismiss it on the grounds that she was drunk … intoxicated— under the influence or something.”
“Who the hell does she think she can sue? The hoboes livin’ down there under the pier?” Dad had always been embarrassed by his sister’s blatant and transparent racket although not even he had come right out and accused her of fraud. “She probably just wants to get this doctor’s report that she hurt herself or that she had some injury from such-and-such a date and then claim she fell down the stairs in the Greyhound Bus Station or some such nonsense.”
“Well, do you think I should?”
“Do the specimen? I don’t know. It won’t do you any harm and it might save her some embarrassment. Do whatever you think’s best.”
Aunt Dell was merry as a grig the next day. She was outside picking oranges for our breakfast at seven in the morning. Our vacation was over—back to school for us and work for Dad. “Look at her,” Dad said over his coffee. “Swingin’ through them trees like a goddam monkey. If she falls down here and tries to sue Logan and Alligator Ranch, I’ll kill her.”
“Then she’d probably hand St. Peter a subpoena at the Pearly Gates against you, Dad,” Junior said.
“And then trip over the entrance and sue St. Peter,” I added.
“And that is just about enough of that,” Mom said. “A little more respect for your elders, please.”
Junior picked up the results of the urinalysis during his lunch hour and brought it home on the school bus. Junior was always the last one home so we were all there when Aunt Dell opened the envelope, read it, turned the color of the paper and swooned onto the day bed.
“Oh, Christ,” Dad said. “What’s the matter now?”
“Oh, my God!” she said faintly, the back of one hand resting dramatically on her forehead. “That’s all I need.” All of a sudden she sat bolt upright, eyes round with fright, her hand on her cheek and mouth open. “I’m not even married, for God’s sake. What’ll the girls say? Mavis’ll die.”
“I give up,” Dad said. “All the marbles are gone now.”
“Dell,” Mom sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said as though she were announcing cancer.
“But can you be?” Mom asked. “You’re over forty-five …”
“Not only can be. Am.” She shook the paper in Mom’s face.
Mom grabbed it and read. Then she slumped back onto the cushions. “Well, I’ll be damned … She looked up at Dad and burst into laughter. “Well, Woody, are you ready for the good news?” Dad looked puzzled for a minute and then the corners of his mouth began to twitch. Mom nodded her head. “Un-huh. I was beginning to wonder …”
“Goddamnit,” Dad was laughing, “whose piss was it?”
“Mine,” Mom fairly shrieked.
“Oh, thank God,” Aunt Dell murmured. “I’d forgotten.”
“You have all, each and every one of you, gone stark raving mad,” Junior said in what he thought was an English accent. “Come on, Tots, let’s vamoose from this nuthouse.”
Aunt Dell threw her arms around Mom’s neck. “Oh, thank God it’s you and not me.”
“I’m not so sure I’m all that delighted.” Mom was looking up at Dad with a questioning look. “What do you think, Woody?” Dad’s eyes twinkled and he grinned, “Shit, we can’t afford to feed the mouths we got. Why not have another one to starve along with us.”
Mom jumped up and threw her arms around Dad’s neck. She kissed him on the cheek and whispered, “It’s your fault, you know.”
He drew back. “I sure as hell hope so!”
Junior cleared his throat to get attention and continued in his silly voice, “As I understand it, this lady flew out of a speeding car, falling into some soft sand and doing herself no great damage but in the course of events too strange for me to remotely comprehend, her trip to the doctor has made this lady,” pointing at Mom, “pregnant. My knowledge of the science of reproduction of… of the human species is … well, limited, but somehow or other I had the impression that it was more or less impossible for ladies to make each other pregnant.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mom was choking with laughter. “Will you please just stop.”
“I’ll have you know,” Dad was imita
ting Junior’s prissy manner, “that as this lady’s husband, I can say he didn’t need any help whatsoever in … well, making …”
“He’s his papa’s own boy,” Aunt Dell bounced up and hugged both Mom and Dad. “Like Papa, like son.”
“Were Grandpa and Mrs. Youngblood making a baby?” I piped up.
“Oh dear, Woody,” Mom said, mock-serious. “It’s birds-and-bees time. You’ve got to do it.” She beamed with happiness and clutched her tummy. “I’ve got enough on my mind.”
Dad discussed the birds-and-bees in roughly the same manner he discussed the combustion engine and curiously enough, they were not dissimilar—by that I mean, he knew the names of the parts and their inter-reaction but he couldn’t make me completely understand it. Junior seemed to understand fully while I grasped only basic working principles; that valve pumped oil into that cavity, keeping it lubricated while this piston moved to create a friction which ignited that mechanism, causing a fusion which in turn … What it really boiled down to was what the silly Wilkins boy had said—only the names were more genteel, as Mrs. Jones might say. Seeds were mentioned a great deal—sexual intercourse was the same as having sex. Come was also called semen or the seed and so forth. After a private session with Junior, I really did think I understood. It all seemed remarkably simple. If you could come, you could make a baby. It was that seed, that diabolical little seed, that could get in there and cause all the trouble. That’s why men wore rubbers.
“Can you come?” I asked Junior, taking the bull by the horns and this God-given opportunity to get that burning question answered.
“That’s a very private and personal thing.”
“But Dad said that anybody who said they hadn’t masturbated was a liar.”
“You asked me if I could come, you didn’t ask me if I masturbated.”
“Well, how can you come if you don’t?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he shrugged. “It can just happen.”
“Just happen? You mean without doing anything?”
“Sure. Wet dreams.”
This was really new. “Wet dreams? That sounds like wetting the bed.”
“In a way it is. It just happens when you’re asleep. When you don’t know it.”
“What causes it?”
“It’s just in the body, I guess. And when there gets too much, well … I guess it just comes out.”
So much for Gino’s theory that you had to swallow some to make more. “Are you sure?” If I told Vic this would he stop sucking my cock?
“Sure, I’m sure.” I just stared at him. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”
“Thinking it doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“You mean like you and Mary Lou?”
Mary Lou? Talk about kid stuff. I was thinking of Vic, Ronnie and, not necessarily wanting to, Uncle Roy. “Yeah,” I nodded. “Like me and Mary Lou.”
We all but put Aunt Dell on the bus on a stretcher. Not because she had really hurt herself, but to keep her from having another chance to hurt herself. Junior told me that he thought it best since she was so accident prone to be always near her lawyer. Not her doctor. And since he was Mavis’ husband, there was no difficulty.
By the time school was out in June, Mom was beginning to show a bit. Until then, I’d almost forgotten that we were expecting a baby in the house. Now that I could actually see it, the idea fascinated me. Mom would let us put our hands on her bulging middle and we could feel movement! It was spooky and marvelous. There was a little brother or sister growing in there. I couldn’t take my eyes off her belly. Mom and the baby became my special concern. I’d grab chairs for her to sit down. I didn’t moan about doing all the dish-washing. I scrubbed the house, made beds, washed the woodwork (a special mania of Mom’s—she could spot a finger-mark through a solid wall) until the paint started to come off. I took over the family laundry—the sight of Mom leaning over the washboard trying to keep her middle from bumping against the tub was more than I could bear. I’d heat up the big black pot out in the back yard under the biggest avocado tree and have the white things boiling before she’d finished her morning coffee. I’d have her chair placed just so, away from the smoke of the fire under the big pot and she’d sit and talk while I poked the boiling sheets and towels with a fat stick that was bleached as white as the clothes. She’d tell me stories of her family, how she and her sisters would do the laundry on the weekend when she came home after a week’s work of teaching, boarding out with some family or other. It was her favorite time, she’d say, her momma was there, running the country store, her papa running the sawmill and the blacksmith’s shop. She’d get misty-eyed and sometimes tears would come into her eyes when she talked of her momma. How she’d loved her. And her papa! He was quite simply a god.
Mom taught me how to lift the clothes out of the pot and into the tub so they wouldn’t lose the heat or the water and how to keep the article being scrubbed submerged all the time for the same reason. No picking the towel up and holding it in the air, that just cooled off the water and didn’t do any good except for you to admire your work. You had to bunch it up with your fingers, one hand-length at a time, rubbing it on the board about three times to each bunch until the whole thing was bunched painfully in your hands. My hands were small but doing that laundry every week had made them strong and I was beginning to notice I had to lean further over to reach into the bottom of the tub. I was growing taller too! Maybe I’d begin to look my age—’way over twelve. Practically a teen-ager.
Then something happened—an insignificant incident in itself— that took my joy at watching the new little Woods growing and replaced it with a premonitory fear that threatened to drive me crazy.
The Scrits stopped by one Sunday morning on the way back from mass—an always welcome invasion—for a visit and strong hot coffee Mom had brewing every Sunday just in case. Gino and Junior promptly started throwing balls around. Bert was, in Gino’s words, chasing skirt in El Centro. Vic was holding little Maria who promptly came to me. She and I had a special relationship—I adored her and she seemed to recognize the adoration and knew she could do anything she wanted with me. I’d watched her since she was born and hoped for a little sister just like her.
The insignificant incident that changed my life happened in a flash and is there in my mind like a familiar photo: The Scrits were at the table with Dad under the big avocado tree, the two youngest boys were up it, Vic had joined Junior and Gino. Mom walked over to where I was seated with Maria on my lap, bouncing on my knees, holding onto her hands, laughing into her dancing eyes when she suddenly threw her head back with terrific force, hitting Mom squarely in her bloated belly. Baby bashes baby. Mom let out a choked cry and bent over double. At this point, the picture becomes jagged and jerky as though it were running through a projector at the wrong speed.
Somehow the Scrits were gone, Mom was stretched out on the bed and I was putting cold cloths on her brow.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” she kept mumbling. “It’ll be fine. It was just such a shock. And painful!” She attempted a laugh. “My goodness that child has a head like a cannon ball.”
“Should I go get the doctor?” Dad asked from the foot of the bed.
“Good heavens, no. It’ll all pass in a bit. Don’t make a fuss about it.”
It did pass in a bit as far as Mom was concerned but it didn’t for me. From that moment on I was obsessed. I was haunted by fears of what might happen to the baby—or to Mom. Pathetic nineteen year old Clementine’s withered little body was fixed in my head, overlaying everything I looked at with the image of her boneless legs and arms. She’d been born like that. Nobody’s fault, they said, it just happened. And poor Brad with his flaw—born with a flaw, the captain had said. And then Mrs. Scrit had had one baby born dead! All the things that could possibly go wrong became possibilities—almost certainties—in my mind. How could I have been so dumb and complacent about something so serious. It isn
’t just a simple normal everyday thing, I told myself. What about the cripples, the maimed and twisted—all born that way. Only recently there was a big story in Life about a little girl born with no arms. She ate, wrote, cut out paperdolls with her toes. I’d turned away from the smiling pictures of the distorted little creature. And there, right there, inside Mom could be some sort of monster or a cripple or … I was tormented. Every waking moment, every nightmare night was filled with horrors. I was convinced that even if everything had been all right at the beginning, the blow of Maria’s head would leave some bruise, some little wound, perhaps undetectable at birth, but would come out later, as Brad’s flaw finally cracked open into madness.
I wasn’t just obsessed, I was possessed. There was no one to talk to. I didn’t dare voice my fears to Junior—he’d just say I was being silly. I actually hoped I was being silly—that my wild anxieties would just go away, but they didn’t. Weeks went by, I went on doing more and more for Mom. I watched her like a mother hen.
“You’d think it was Tots who was having the baby,” Dad joked.
It was no joke to me. I did feel responsible. If I could only do something, anything to make sure that the baby would be all right. I prayed with a fervor that would have put Aunt and Uncle Ed to shame. I begged, pleaded and bargained with God. I made every sacrifice I could think of. I even quarrelled with Vic—on purpose—cutting off that physical pleasure. I made a sort of sacred oath or vow like Bert and Gino had done for Lent. I forswore anything to do with sex. I told God that I wouldn’t touch myself except to pee and then only absolutely minimally if he’d see to it that all went well with the baby. I was doing all I could do.
The baby was due in either October or November. In September, we were back on the road. September was working out to be moving time. Always the question of getting us into school. We’d had word from Mom’s brother, Ernest, that work for dad on Friant Dam was almost assured—he was safely employed himself— but he wouldn’t know for sure until about October or November. Babies and jobs both due at the same time. Both, please, God, safe, sound and secure.
In Tall Cotton Page 27