by Mary Karr
Daddy takes a few swipes at the mallard to get everybody’s eyes back on him before he starts up again. “That evening we head down through them woods back home, and here comes Momma. She’d got her apron pulled around and tucked in her skirt so the brush don’t catch it. And she always wore a old blue-flowered bonnet.” Daddy fans his hands behind his head to show the bonnet. “The sun was going down to the west, which was her right side. So that bonnet th’owed a shadow across’t her face. Kept us from seeing her. But I could tell by how she was stomping through those weeds that she was mad. Plus she’d already cut herself a piss elum pole about as long as she was tall. Like she’d got it in her head already to whup us. I whisper over my shoulder to A.D. not to tell her we went in. Just to say we watched the other boys. And he says okay.
“Not a minute later she stops square on that path in front of me. ‘J.P.,’ she says, ‘you go in that river?’
“‘No’m,’ I says, ‘we just watched them other boys.’ And she says fine. Then she reaches that pole around behind me and taps A.D. on the shoulder. Just light enough to get his attention. ‘A.D., did you go in that river?’ And damned if he don’t say, ‘Yes’m. I went in, and he come in with me,’ And I thinks to myself, you sorry sonofabitch.”
I watch Ben draw a cake pan of biscuits out of the oven. He uses a pointy bottle opener to pop a triangular hole in a brand-new yellow can of sugarcane syrup. I like to poke a hole in a biscuit with my thumb, then fill it with that syrup so it gushes out the sides when you bite down. I figure on doing that, which fills the back of my mouth up with longing for the sweetness of it. I’m still holding that sweetness like a thirst when Daddy starts up.
“Lemme tell you fellas, my momma at that time wasn’t no bigger than Mary Marlene here.” He jerks his thumb at me so I can prove his mother’s tininess. I ignore this by faking big-time interest in slitting open the fat belly of this goose. “Probably didn’t weigh ninety pounds with boots on, my momma. Anyways, she took us out on the screened-in back porch—we slept out there in the summer. Started in on him with that pole and like to have killed him. Brought it down on his back in one narrow swatch, like she was trying to cut a groove through his flesh. I’d laugh like hell every time his eyes caught mine. I figured she was getting wore out on him. So’s my turn wouldn’t be as bad.”
Shug says, “My daddy beat me and my brother thataways. Taking turns, so one watched the other.”
“Now you’re interrupting!” Cooter says, slapping the table. “Why don’t nobody stop him interrupting?” The veins are standing out on Cooter’s neck. Ben tells him to get the plates down and stop feeling sorry for hisself.
Daddy drops the mallard in the tub like he’s all of a sudden exhausted by thinking again about that whipping. The whole burden of it seems to fall on him full force. His shoulders slump. The deep lines of his face get deeper. Then he gets an unfocused look at the middle distance like the beating’s happening right in the room, and all he has to do is watch it and report back to the other guys. “That pole of hers cut the shirt right off my back in about four swipes.” His head drops lower, as if under the weight of that pole, which is getting easier by the minute for me to imagine. “I’ve had grown men beat on me with tire irons and socks full of nickels and every conceivable kind of stick. But that old woman shrunk up like a pullet hen took that piss elum pole and flat set me on fire from my shoulders clear down past my ass. And every time she said a word, she brought that pole down. ‘Don’t—you—lie—to—me—Don’t—you—run—from—me!’ Hell, I broke loose from her a couple of times. And I run to the screen door. But the pine boards on that old sleeping porch was swole up from that rain. The door was swole. So I couldn’t pull it flush all the way, couldn’t get the latch unhooked. I’d just about get it wiggled tight in the frame, and then that pole would find my back again. You could hear it come whistling through the air just a heartbeat before you felt it. And Momma behind it just hacking at me like I was a pine she was trying to knock over. I was scared to fall. Scared I wouldn’t live to get vertical again. I promise you that. You think she was wore out on A.D.?” He squints at us, then picks up the mallard again and picks at a few of the quills like he’s winding down. “Hell, she just warmed up on A.D.”
“They hate that when you run,” Ben says. He’s sliding the last egg onto the platter. “My grandma was the same exact way. Running just dragged it out.” Of course, I am famous for running in the middle of a spanking. It makes me proud that Daddy used to run too. I always figured only a dumbass would just stand still and take it. I have maneuvered my way over by the stove and am eye level now with the plate of biscuits, which have plumped up nice and brown on top. The slightest blink from Ben saying okay, and I will snatch the first one.
“I finally broke straight through the middle of that screen,” Daddy says. “Left a outline of myself cut clean around the edges as a paper doll.” Shug winks at me over the unlikeliness of this. He always keeps me posted as to the believability quotient of what Daddy’s saying, even though I’m a kid, and a notorious pain in the ass as kids go.
Daddy sets down the duck again, and a smile stretches across his face, his eyes crinkle up, and his shoulders go square like the best part of the story just bubbled back up in him. “And old A.D. had hell to pay. Don’t think he didn’t.”
“Wasn’t Uncle A.D. a lot bigger than you, Daddy?” I am always trying to figure a way around my own skinniness. Uncle A.D. is a big oak tree of a man, white-headed and strong. In all the pictures of the Karr boys lined up, he stands close to Daddy and stares down his nose, like he’s lording something over him.
“Don’t make no difference, bigger,” Daddy says. “Bigger’s just one thing. They’s a whole lot of other things than bigger, Pokey. Don’t you forget it. Bigger’s ass, was what I thought.
“I head out behind the shed,” Daddy says, “and there’s old A.D. hunkered down on the ground. ‘Say, brother,’ I says to him.” Daddy’s voice as he makes out talking to Uncle A.D. is smooth and sweet as melty butter. “‘I believe you made out pretty bad back there.’ I tell him I got some burn salve may take that sting out. And A.D. he bends over. Starts picking at that shirt on his back where that fabric’s stuck down in them sores. He’s a-hissing between his teeth. Gets that old cotton blouse pulled up over his shoulder blades, then asks me does that look bad. And I say, ‘Poor old you.’ Course she cut the shirt slap off my back. ‘Pull your shirt off your neck a little higher,’ I says to him. ‘I don’t want to get this here salve on it. Piss Momma off any worse.’ So he bends way over further. Gets bent double-like. His arms all hung up in them shirtsleeves till he’s stuck like a snake in a sock. That’s when I grab hold to him. Pour that old turpentine horse liniment down in them sores. Was a deep, purple-black liniment Momma made from tar. I held him still and smeared it in with the flat of my hand. And him wrassling me to break loose.”
Shug stops wrapping bird carcasses a second. He tilts his head at Daddy, then says that his momma cooked up some horse liniment back then out of a tar base. See, Shug’s from up in the piney woods too. “Hers was tar and pine sap, I remember right. Maybe she put some lemon grass in it, one of them stingy herbs.” Shug’s momma knew Daddy’s momma. They were both pretty good country doctors, and every now and then Shug and Daddy ride back toward their mothers into that place to get to something like this liniment, or some other doctoring recipe. The looks on their faces grow so vaguely soft that I feel tears start in back of my eyes. I am verging on lonesome myself for these women I never knew.
Daddy says that sounds like the exact stuff. He stands from the washtub of feathers and sidles over to the sink to wash up. He seems pleased. Shug’s knowing the very liniment proves that the world Daddy’s telling exists. But Shug’s brow has grown a furrow like it bothers him. He claims to Daddy that you couldn’t get that stuff off you, not out of a cut or something. And Daddy says that was the very idea, to scald Uncle A.D. down to the bone for tattling on him.
This sets m
e wondering. I hear about Daddy doing this kind of meanness, and I see guys shy away when he strolls over to a pool table, but he handles me like I’m something glass. Even his spankings are mild enough to seem symbolic. When I got up cold this morning before we set out for the bayou, he warmed my socks over the gas heater before I pulled them on. (Lecia was sleeping over at a friend’s that morning, having outgrown Daddy somehow, having also gotten agile at worming her way into families quieter than ours.) My daddy buys me whatever I ask for and laughs at my jokes and tells me he loves me better than anybody about fifty times a day. I’ve seen him fight, but I’ve never seen this sneaky meanness he talks about at the Liars’ Club. I look at him scrubbing the blood out from under his fingernails with a pale blue plastic brush and wonder about it. He’s laughing like hell over what he did to A.D. Daddy pats his hands dry on a dish towel. “I left old A.D. squirming on the ground. Scrabbling to get away from hisself.”
Ben upends the pan of biscuits, which fall out of the tin in a perfect steaming circle. They’re crusty brown on the bottom. He nods at me to tear one loose, and I do. But I have to hot-potato it hand to hand to keep it from burning me. Finally, I drop it on the counter and cup my hands over it in a little igloo that I blow on. When I look up from that, I see that Ben also has a dark look on his face, like he can’t get away from the meanness of this story fast enough either.
Maybe it was Daddy’s hint of low-lying meanness that kept me from asking him about Mother overmuch while she was in the hospital. His silence on the subject was a fence I wasn’t supposed to cross. But I’d shoved past no-trespassing signs before.
So it was that one day when Daddy and I were riding home in his lizard-green truck my mind swam back to the night of the fire. By then, I had blotted out Mother holding the butcher knife. I had even blotted out the fire itself and her burning our clothes. All my mind hung on to was Dr. Boudreaux with his caterpillar mustache asking me where were the marks. I knew he’d checked Mother into a psych hospital. So I ventured out to ask about this place and why we couldn’t visit. Daddy said that kids weren’t allowed, being as how little bitty kids who saw their mommas on a locked ward with a flock of other folks in their pajamas just got scared. He turned away then, and shook a Camel loose from his pack and pushed in the cigarette lighter. That lighter was like the period at the end of a sentence. It was supposed to shut up my questions. I could feel my hair twist around on my head in the hot wind. Through my window, I watched the rubber factory slide by.
For some reason, though, I pushed past that moment. We were heading home from the Farm Royal, where the carhop always leaned against Daddy’s window while I drank my cherry freeze. She never brought a check, either, even though Daddy downed at least three cans of beer. Maybe the beer might make him more apt to talk. I asked if he wasn’t scared when he went to see Mother. Folks in that place, he said, didn’t seem so much fullblown crazy as in really sad moods. They sat around over board games a lot, he said, not moving their tokens real often.
That one detail about the game tokens turned the hospital real for me. All of a sudden, some black fury I’d been hiding boiled up. I finally told Daddy I didn’t want Mother to come home if she was gonna go crazy all over again, just because we hadn’t cleaned our room.
Then he did something so apart from all I knew him to be that it immediately became the gesture that defined him most in my head. He turned the truck wheel sharp, so we bumped off the road shoulder into gravel. He slammed on the brakes. The truck fishtailed to a stop. Daddy didn’t even turn to look at me. His eyes stayed pinned off to the side, either fixed on his own face in the side mirror or on the towers in the distance. This let me take in his profile—the sharp cheekbones and hawk’s-beak nose. His eyes narrowed when he finally spoke. He said that if I kept talking about my mother thataways, he would slap my face clear into next Tuesday. We sat there in the violence of that threat a minute, for he had never slapped my face, nor even threatened to slap it. My face got overhot at the prospect. But I didn’t make a chirp. After a second or so, he depressed the clutch and shifted back down into first gear, and we started back up the road.
Daddy did finally take us to the hospital, a low brick building that sat in a scrubby field, in blazing sun with no scrap of shade for acres in any direction. We didn’t go in, but stood outside what must have been the dayroom. He’d arranged the time with Mother in advance. As we walked up, I could make out through the screen and the extra layer of chicken-wire mesh stapled to the window—to keep folks from running off, I guess—the wild tropical print of her lounging robe. Daddy had to hoist me up by my waist to reach that window. Even then, only my nose fit over the bottom sill. Mother put her hand on the chicken wire. It was very white, and I put my hand to match up with it, careful that I touched as much of hers as I could. The screen gave a little to let our palms actually meet through the chicken wire. Her face in the deep shadow of the room was just a pale oval without any features, but I could hear the crying in her voice when she said she missed us. She dabbed at that oval with a Kleenex and made snotty noises in her head. We took some more turns saying we missed each other.
Then I said something that caused Lecia to pinch my ankle: “I’m sorry you’re all locked up,” I said, which made her laugh. “Shit, honey,” she said, “you-all are locked up, too. You’re just in a bigger room.” No sooner had she said that than from a far corner of the room, where I hadn’t looked at all, there came a whole flock of giggly laughs that chilled me to the core. Peering over toward those laughs, I could see a vague knot of lady patients in blue nightgowns sitting at a large round table in a low gray cloud of cigarette smoke. It struck me that those were the other crazy people. But instead of being scared by their facelessness, I just felt disgruntled that they got to hang out with my mother all day. They ate meals with her and played gin rummy with her while I only got fetched up to the window like I was a big load of something she could hardly bear to see. My seeing them seemed to prompt Daddy to lower me back down from the window. I said, “I love you,” and snubbed a little. Mother did the same, then gradually she slid out of my sight.
Lecia was taller, and so Daddy was able to heft her up higher. He locked all his fingers together into a kind of stirrup, then straightened his back so she rose to fill the whole window. It rankled me to see Lecia and Mother talking all whispery. I’d had to poke my nose over the window ledge like some kind of bandit or peeping Tom. Lecia had her whole face up next to Mother’s. Plus I couldn’t hear a word they said. Secrets had always moved between them. Nights, when Lecia was mixing her martinis or changing record albums for her, Mother usually fell silent when I came into earshot. Lecia also had the habit of shooing me away when the two of them conspired. She’d flap her hand at me as if I were some horsefly to get rid of. They had some special hookup to each other, those two, some invisible circle of understanding that they stood in together, while Daddy and I were exiled to a duller realm with which Mother had no truck.
Anyway, that day at the hospital when the white figure of the nurse finally came to stand behind Mother, the signal for her to go, I guess, Lecia craned up her head for a good-bye kiss. She pressed her lips right up against the chicken wire. I wanted to smack her on the ass of her cut-off Levi’s, especially when Mother’s lips appeared through the honeycomb mesh to meet hers.
When Daddy was backing his truck out of the gravel parking lot, the tropical print Mother wore came to fill another window. And she put her hand flat up against the mesh. It made me think of a very white orchid I had found once sprinkled with some powder and mashed between the pages of Hamlet. That one visit was the only time we saw her all that month.
That night I fell right to sleep for the first time in weeks. And the worst dream came to play itself on the back wall of my skull like it was wide-angle TV. In it, Daddy was hacking up some large, dead animal on the plywood table in the kitchen. I was walking across the dining room toward him, watching him through the rectangular window between the two rooms. I c
ouldn’t make out what kind of creature it was—deer or boar, something big. Plus, Daddy usually cleaned his kill on the back patio over a washtub, so he could hose the blood off the bricks when he was through. His T-shirt was spattered with blood. The veins on his hands were raised up from the strain of the work. At one point in the dream, he lifted the cleaver and brought it down hard. Then he wiggled it to get through some gristle, which he did with a click. I heard the cleaver thump clear through the bone onto the table’s wood.
About that time, Daddy caught sight of me and said to go back to bed, he was busy. “Get on back to bed, Pokey” was how he put it. He hardly looked at me at all. I turned to go, but felt compelled to look back, as if magnetized by his task. He held up a part of the animal to study. Then the light changed. And he was holding an actual human arm, hacked off at the elbow. At the end of that arm was Mother’s hand wearing Grandma’s wedding band. The wrist was bent so the hand was at a right angle to the arm, as if Mother had held up the hand to say stop and it had frozen that way. I gasped up from sleep, my T-shirt pasted to my chest, snails of sweat collecting on my upper lip.
It occurs to me from this distance that Mother’s chopped-off hand from the dream was in the same position as the hand she’d pressed to the hospital screen. But there was another hand from that time that also got seared into what I can remember. It was the hand of Bugsy Juarez’s wife. It was covered in flour one morning she came to our back door. She pressed that white hand onto our damp breakfast table while she said to Daddy, Please come quick, Bugs has shot hisself. She’d been making biscuits when she heard the shotgun blast. He’d taken special care, she said, to cover over the garage floor with the plastic tarp they used for their lawn furniture, so it wouldn’t be such a mess, and didn’t we think that was kind of thoughtful, she said, as a last thing to do. She had a very dim smile on her face, thinking of it. Daddy didn’t answer, of course. He was too busy dialing the sheriff. Anyway, I remember that white handprint of Mrs. Juarez stayed on that table all day like a ghost had touched it. It put me in mind of Mother every time I passed by, till Lecia finally sponged it off just before supper.