A Piece of Mine (3 page)

She was telling him that as he was undressing her, he was already undressed when he let her in the back door. She was also taking a drink of her Coke and whiskey as he laid her down and was kissing her beautiful body all over, loving its
smoothness and softness. He excited her body and she put the drink down tho she wished he wouldn’t hurry so! They were moving up an old road for him and a new and unfamiliar one for her.

BAM!
The window next to the door was broken in and Mrs. Hammon looked through the opening! “Andy! Open this got-damn door!” She screamed, looking like a crazy woman in a frame. Mr. Hammon was speechless and could only stare at the broken window and shift his gaze to the door as she kicked it! He wished he could stop moving on top of Lida Mae, who was trying to push him off, but he couldn’t. Lida was scared and wanted to run but he wouldn’t stop and she began to have a climax just as Mrs. Hammon came through the window and lifted her knife and started trying to cut Lida Mae’s face (which Lida hid with her arms) but cut her arms instead; then her husband was reaching for her, trying to stop her and hollering to Lida Mae to run! Get her things and run! Which Lida Mae, wide-eyed and frightened nearly to death and bleeding from numerous cuts, tried to do! She had to grab clothes, dodge the knife, open the door all at the same time. She was crying too and couldn’t always see. Finally she got the door open and there were all those people who had heard the noise and come to see what was happening. Lida was naked and bleeding … what a sight! She had just begun to run when the knife flicked across her buttocks and she screamed as she ran into the arms of Smokey who “just happened” to be standing there with what looked like hate in his face. He grabbed her and helped fight Mrs. Hammon off because Mr. Hammon couldn’t stay outside long with no clothes on, til he hit her on the chin, knocking her out, and put Lida Mae in his car to take her to the hospital.

They were almost there when he stopped the car near a wooded area. He slapped her already bloody face saying “Whatcha wanna go with that sucker for? I’m glad I told on you cause that’ll keep your ass away from there!!!” She was
in shock, so she couldn’t say nothin as he wiped the blood away from her face and kissed her as he removed the clothes from her, laying her back. She started to struggle and he said “I just saved your life, bitch!” He slapped her again so hard her ear ring flew off through the window. He made sex with her, dirty as she was, and bloody, then drove her to the hospital and helped her go in. Needless to say she carried those scars the rest of her life, the ones outside … and the ones inside.

Lida Mae didn’t get to her graduation. She did not want anyone to see her again, ever. The doctor had sewn her up; 72 stitches on her arms and buttocks. They had also decided to fix her insides (since she had already started trouble so young) so she would not be bothering the state with bills for children. She didn’t know it, no one but the doctor and the nurse did.

When she went home, she was so unhappy there, her mother sent her to live with a sister of hers about 15 miles away in another little town. Lida Mae was glad to go. She packed her new long-sleeved blouses and the rest of her things and left without looking back.

She was very quiet the first month or two she lived in the new town. Going to church with her aunt who was very religious. School was out, so she helped around the house and with the few animals they had. Everything was fine and Aunty was pleased cause Lida was no trouble at all and she must be a good person cause the preacher started stopping by two or three times a week to visit and he never had before. He was watching his flock … he said.

Lida Mae knew why he was coming by cause he was always touching her when it was accompanied by words of the Lord. But, she wasn’t having any of that! She thought about the graduation she had missed and her future that had stopped. She didn’t want to be a domestic or a waitress so she had to think of going back to school or something! Well, “something” came up first, in the person of a friend of her
uncle’s. A nice older man about 55 years old, James Winston. His wife had passed on and he had a house, car, some land and some money and even tho he had another girl friend, Josie B., he was falling in love with Lida Mae. He wanted to marry her.

Lida Mae took about a week to think about it. She kept picturing the house and the car. She could have her
OWN!
Her aunt kept urging her by saying, “
HOUSE, HOUSE, HOUSE
.” Her uncle kept saying, “Money, money, money.” So Lida Mae took her young, inexperienced, naive self and married him and went home to her house!

Now, in the country, if you don’t work or have something to do, the time stretches out long, long, long. You fill the days with eating, gossip or making love. Lida Mae’s largest outlet was gossip! She didn’t really know she was gossiping, she thought she was just telling a friend the truth about what she thought. But people can take your truth and stretch it, twist it, tear it apart, turn it inside out and when you get it back, you are making enemies and when you try to straighten it out, you talk a whole lot more and give the people new ammunition to shoot back at you and then you have made more enemies! So the days come to be filled with stinky shit and then you don’t feel so good (unless it’s natural to you) and you don’t always know why. Then, you go to church and sing and shout and get a little off your chest and then feel better all day Sunday … for awhile.

It wasn’t long before Lida Mae was going with the preacher. She just seemed to move naturally into situations without much forethought, but she really hadn’t ever known anyone who gave her any idea of how or why this was done; only a few teachers in school regarding the future through education, and there was so much in her life that diluted those urgings to wise decisions.

Lida Mae was kind tho, she was good to her husband. The house was clean, his meals were cooked, his clothes were clean, but he drank quite a bit now and was usually sleeping
it off nights. She was drinking more now and with some kind of confrontation at least three times a week on account of her mouth, she naturally turned to the preacher. It made her feel the affair was O.K. with God. It wasn’t O.K. with God and it wasn’t O.K. with Mrs. Preacher either cause one night she came over to see Lida Mae and when Lida Mae came to the door, Mrs. Preacher threw a pot full of lye water in Lida’s face. It was a good thing her aunt was there; she cared for Lida’s face and got her taken to the doctor. Lida’s skin was young and healed well but her eyes were affected and they were cloudy and dim when she came from the hospital. I went by to see her and she said to me “Well, here I am, still young, done been cut up and now almost had my eyes burnt up! I can see, but not much. Not the things I want to see. Not the pretty world outside and not my pretty clothes. I don’t want to go anywhere again. But, this is my house! I have given up a lot for it and done a lot to it and I don’t want to leave it again ever, tho I do want to leave this town. I don’t want no more of Mr. Preacher either! Oh he calls, and comes around! But I wouldn’t open the door and if my husband let him in I went in my bedroom and shut the door til he was gone!”

But time passed and soon everything was back to “normal?” Lida Mae thought of school only briefly, just couldn’t get the grit up to go. Thought of eye operations, but since she had to go out to some big city and she didn’t want to do that either and her husband didn’t want to spend all his money (course they wasn’t his eyes) she didn’t go. She seem to be seeing a little better every day anyway.

Time went by and this Josie B., who used to be Lida’s husband’s girl-friend, came to be friends with Lida Mae. I could have told Lida she didn’t mean her no good cause Josie B. was still mad bout losing that house and money and a man. But Lida Mae seem to listen to you, then when she talked back to you seem like she ain’t heard nothing you said! Anyway they became friends and they started going
out together to these juke joints that they have round here. Between that gossip and liquor and backbiting, Josie somehow got things fixed so one day when Lida Mae was high and sitting on a stool in one of those joints, Leella and Bertha jumped on her and beat Lida up! Even busting a bottle cross her mouth so that she lost four or five teeth right there in front. Well Lida Mae went right back in the house again and stayed there and in church for three or four months. She was about 20 years old now, but drinking so heavy (used to send her husband to the liquor store every day!) she looked like she was 50! Skin still smooth and all but them eyes and that mouth and them scars! Lord have mercy!

Then, one day, her husband stepped on a nail and only soaked his foot and in two weeks he was dead! Josie B. and Bertha came and sat outside the cemetery and laughed, drinking in their car with hatred in Josie B.’s eyes. I went to see Lida after the funeral, she was sitting on the screened in front porch still in her black dress with a record playing real loud saying “The sun gonna shine in my backdoor some day!” I talked to her awhile and she said one thing; she say “You know, I got this house, I got some money and a car … but I keep trying to see, in my mind, would I rather have my eyes, and my teeth … and my looks back and all these scars off … I believe I rather have nothing if I could just have myself back.
OR SOME REAL LOVE!
Ain’t nothin left for me but love. I’m all gone.”

She was young, but she was old! And through! But somewhere inside of me I didn’t think she had to be.

Something good happens to everybody and about a year or so later a man came back to this town who had grown up here. He came to see his mama and saw Lida Mae at church (that’s the only day she sobered up) and gave her his heart and stayed longer than he had planned. She took him in, used him, abused him … just tried to use that poor man up! She seemed to be mean, mean, mean! He was a neat, clean person with a little money, I guess, cause he was always
running to the liquor store for Lida or bringing her candy, flowers and sweaters and things. Got her car fixed and all the work in her house that needed a man’s touch. But she put him out every day when she through needing him for that day, cussing him. Now, she was playing that record bout the sunshine was coming in her back door some day and here the sunshine was coming in her front door and she didn’t see it! Well, she was making him eat shit and nothing but a fool want to eat the same thing every day so he finally kissed his mama good-by and left, looking back, but leaving anyway! Lida Mae say “He’ll be back! I put some of this good stuff on him! He be back!”

But he never came back.

The years have passed and we have really sure nuff got old. Lida Mae looks like she is 150 years old and she is only 45 or so. I stop over to see her on my way to my son’s house to get my grandchild sometime and she still be setting on the porch, drinking and she say things I don’t know if I believe them. She say, “Life ain’t shit, you know that? It ain’t never done a fuckin thing for me!!”

When I leave, thoughts be zooming round in my head and I think of those words I got on a 15¢ post card go like this:

Then I go on over to pick up my grandbaby and thank God, ugly as I may be, I am who I am.

W
ITHIN
these times there lived a man named Mr. Rembo and his wife, Teresa. Mr. Rembo was a 57-year-old, white-looking black man, square of torso, thick stumpy legs and wispy grey hair, rheumy light brown eyes and a stomach that overrode his belt. Mr. Rembo was the kind of man who, when he found himself alone with little girls, sat them on his lap, squeezed their thighs, tickled their titties, pinched their arms and slapped their little behinds. Consequently, he shelled out many nickles and dimes. Mr. Rembo also tore up his wife’s Bible books and laughed at her as she would struggle to retrieve them. He would pull her down in bed on Sunday mornings, when she was going to church, to have sex, when he wasn’t too hung over and sick from being drunk. Her only relief was when he went to his job as a night watchman.

Mrs. Rembo was a nervous, thin, 49-year-old, brownskinned, church-going woman always looking over her shoulder for an attacker, perhaps because Mr. Rembo often struck her for no good reason except he felt she was his to do with as he liked. Now, Mrs. Rembo wasn’t really a fool, just kind.
She knew Mr. Rembo’s mother had died after being kicked by a cow she was trying to milk during her ninth month and she gave birth to her son, Mr. Rembo. His father had married someone else rather soon, someone who did not like to take care of other people’s children. Mrs. Rembo thought Mr. Rembo had been hurt enough.

The Rembos had lived in the same neighborhood twenty years or so and some neighbors didn’t like him but couldn’t put their finger on just why, just didn’t! Mrs. Ginny, the next-door widow of two husbands did like Mr. Rembo, though, and spared no effort to show him, often asking him over for a drink or two of gin, while they laughed at Teresa’s church-going ways and her fearful demeanor, talking about sex as Mrs. Ginny leaned over near him so he could slap her on her fat ass as she leaned back with laughter.

Mrs. Ginny didn’t really like Mr. Rembo either; as a matter of fact, she just needed a regular sex life and since she didn’t look too good, anymore, had to take what she could get and she didn’t see any reason she couldn’t get Mr. Rembo! When she needed him, that is! She had tried going to the church house for a while after that good-looking preacher had laid her mister to rest for the last time, but that talk about sin, adultery and hell and goodness and hell and heaven had drove her crazy with boredom and the preacher didn’t pay any mind to her anyway … well, that was, in her words, “Enough of that shit!” In short, Mrs. Ginny was the type of woman to say, “Mercy Jesus! Got-dam! Amen!” as she orgasmed under someone else’s husband.

Mr. Wellington, the grocer, had been the neighborhood grocer about four years before they moved into the neighborhood. His wife, Angie, had been sick for her last ten years and had been dead already for two years. He had loved and taken care of her till the last day. He missed her. He saw, in Teresa Rembo, the same sweetness and gentleness his Angie had had. He had, also, seen her change from a neat, good-looking woman into a thin, nerve-wrecked,
deep furrow-browed, old, unhappy woman. Once when the store was empty he had pulled her to him and pressed himself to her and held her out of his own desperation, for he was a faithful husband. She had not moved away, only looked sad as though thinking of something long, long ago, and gone. He had kissed her and though she had kissed him back, she had not come into the store for a long time. He had never done it again, but they seemed to have a delicate bond of some sort.