A Place to Call Home (10 page)

“Oh, her smile, her
smile
,” Mama cried. “When I get my hands on Roanie Sullivan—”

“Woanie!” That was the best pronunciation I could manage, as I struggled upright.

I saw him not far away, hunched on his knees with his arms braced on the ground in front of him. Grandpa and Mr. Tobbler squatted beside him, holding his shirttail—the tail of Grandpa Maloney’s own cast-off flannel shirt—to his mouth. Blood soaked it, trickling slowly down his chin and
falling in terrible, bright red splatters on the legs of his jeans.

Grandpa and Mr. Tobbler were talking to each other in low, grim voices, nodding like horses pulling a heavy load in tandem. Roanie lifted his head and looked at me. Above the shirt’s crimson material, inside the grimace of his lips, I saw the dark gap where his snaggletooth had been.

So we’d both had the smile knocked out of us.

“Your toof,” I said sadly. Half fainting and hurting from the nose down, I opened my mouth and showed him my more humiliating gap, but the horror in his eyes shut my mouth and brought tears down my face. “Woanie dida dah anythang wong,” I announced loudly. “Carltoh dah it.”

Mama dragged me against her and wrapped her arms around me. “Hush, honey, hush.”

Daddy ran up the hill, dropped to his heels, and thrust a paper cup filled with ice into Mama’s hands. His face was as red as his hair; his eyes flashed furiously. “Dathy,” I begged, “Carltoh started it. He gwaffed me. Woanie hif him. Carltoh knoffed me in tha mouf.”

“Hush,” he soothed. “You’re not making any sense, baby.”

Daddy pivoted toward Roanie and snatched him by one shoulder. “I don’t care how bad hurt you are. You tell me why you got my daughter into a brawl, or I’ll break what’s left of you.”

“Dathy!”

Roanie’s eyes flared. He shook his head. Flecks of blood flew everywhere. He wheezed, banding one long arm around his ribs. “I ain’t never gonna let nobody hurt her—”

“Not let anybody hurt her?” Daddy shouted. “What do you think you just did to her?”

“Son, back off,” Grandpa ordered. “It wasn’t Roanie’s fault. It was Carlton’s, goddammit. Boss T saw the whole thing.”

Daddy sat back, his mouth flat with concentration. “That right, Mr. Tobbler?”

Mr. Tobbler barked out the truth. He told him about Carlton’s insults, and when he said the words “white nigger,” laying them off his tongue with the military dignity of an old warrior, Daddy’s shoulders drew back. “That Carlton, he punched your little girl in the mouth,” Mr. Tobbler added grimly. “He did it deliberately, too. Holt Maloney, you want to break heads, go break your nephew’s.”

I felt Mama catch her breath. She and Daddy looked at Roanie. Daddy lifted a hand toward him. “I … I … listen, boy, I—”

But Roanie shrugged away, tried to get up but sat down hard, wiping his mouth with one hand, the other clamping harder across his ribs. He swayed. “None of you got to worry about Claire when I’m around. I ain’t gonna hurt her somehow. I know what you been thinkin’ and I ain’t that way. I wouldn’t a-laid a hand on nobody ’cept Carlton was hurtin’ her. I … I won’t let nothin’ bad happen to her. Not ever. No matter how it looks to y’all.”

“
Woanie
,” I mewled.

He tried to get up again. He couldn’t without help.

Daddy took him by one arm, Grandpa by the other. Help was what he got, whether he wanted it or not.

Hurt, distrustful, and trapped, he had no choice. Neither did I.

So that was the night, that warm, yellow-jacket-charmed night in September, when Roanie began to be part of my family.

We were taken to my Uncle Mallory Delaney’s office. The doctor. Nothing wrong with me except busted teeth and some bruised fingers, nothing wrong with Roanie except a busted tooth and a cracked rib.

Then, at Uncle Cully Maloney’s office—the dentist—my two teeth were painfully cemented back in place, and Roanie’s gap was measured for a permanent bridge.

Finally, we took Roanie under our own roof, at the farm. Mama put him in a spare bedroom. Daddy tried to phone Big Roan but couldn’t find him, either at the Hollow or at Steckem Road. He was off drinking somewhere. Big Roan wouldn’t have cared, anyway.

There was a haunted, awestruck glimmer in Roanie’s eyes that night. It wasn’t easy for him to trust good luck or Maloneys. In the morning, the bedroom window was open and Roanie was gone.

I took a strong leap of faith myself and told Mama and Daddy about Ten Jumps. Daddy and Sheriff Vince caught him there.

C
arlton was in the hospital in Gainesville with a broken jaw, a few stitches here and there, an ice pack on his testicles, and a bandage on the back of his neck.

Aunt Arnetta was determined to punish Roanie. She filed charges.

“I’m sorry,” I heard Sheriff Vince tell Mama and Daddy that night. “I caught him, and I’ve got a job to do as sheriff. He just can’t run around loose anymore. Big Roan doesn’t want to take responsibility for him, and there’s nowhere for the boy to go.”

“Bring him here,” Daddy said. “We’ll take him in.”

Faith
. It had worked. I was awestruck.

“Holt, I won’t have that boy around Claire!” I heard Mama from my crouched vantage point outside the living room’s double oak doors, despite their being closed. Hop and Evan squatted beside me like big, redheaded chimps. We traded spooked glances. I shivered and leaned closer to the crack between the doors. “We still don’t know much about him,” Mama went on. “Claire has some kind of foolish crush on him. Oh, God, Holt, what if he’s a pervert?”

“Then he’ll be a
dead
pervert,” Daddy answered firmly. There was a long silence punctuated by Mama’s sniffling sounds. I peered through the crack and saw Daddy hugging
her. Then he said, “If I thought there was anything sinister about the boy, I wouldn’t let him set a foot on the place.”

“How do you
know
there isn’t?”

“Because he’s never laid a hand on any of the girls at school. Never spoken badly to any of ’em. That’s what Evan and Hop say.”

Evan whispered behind me, “Yeah, but they won’t go near him. He stinks.”

“
You shut up
,” I whispered back.

“There are other females besides the ones at school,” Mama said. “There’re those McClendons.”

“Roanie doesn’t hang around his daddy’s women. Believe me, I’d have heard about it. Sex talk travels, Marybeth.”

“Uh-
huh
. I guess you and your brothers discuss something besides the weather during those Saturday gabfests at the feed store.”

“Hoo! I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you and your sisters get together. My ears’d burn and fall off.”

More silence. My face felt red-hot. Sex talk. Burning ears. Perverts. My feelings for Roanie. It wasn’t fair to connect all that together. I knew Roanie was no pervert, because I had a clear definition of what one was. Long before I was born, Great-Uncle Victor Delaney moved away to Ohio and married some woman the family never got to meet. Great-Uncle Victor died young and left her all his money, and decades later, when she got old and sick, a doctor undressed her and found out she was a
man
.

Great-Uncle Victor was a pervert, everyone said. Or else really dumb.

“What’re we going to say to the family?” Mama’s voice again. Calm or resigned. “Irene still cries when anybody mentions the Christmas parade.”

“Don’t visit the sins of the father on the son. That’s what we’ll say. Roanie can’t help what he comes from. I feel bad for the boy. I think you do, too, hmmm?”

“Of course I do.”

“We should have stepped in when he was born, Marybeth. Or when his mother died.” Daddy’s voice was low and serious. “All that noble talk about Big Roan having a right to raise his own son—hell, Big Roan hasn’t
raised
him, it’s a miracle the boy’s not a thief or a dope addict. I say the boy’s got something good inside him, something strong enough to give him a chance. We can’t turn our backs on him again.”

“But, Holt, no child grows up around that kind of meanness without learning meanness himself. He’s got no solid foundation. Push him and he might fall the wrong way. I just don’t want Claire in his path if he does.”

“Claire’s a little girl. He’s fourteen years old. He’s got bigger fish to fry. Good lord, hon, when a boy’s that age he’s looking
up
the female ladder, not down it. I can’t see any sign that Claire’s anything but a pesky little kitten to him. Same way she is to Evan and Hop.”

Pesky little kitten
. I was crushed.

“Besides,” Daddy continued, “I’ll read him the riot act. ‘You act like a gentleman around the ladies on this farm, or I’ll break your neck.’ ”

“All right,” Mama answered, sounding tired. “But I’m going to figure out some way to clean him up. Start with the outside and work my way in.”

I gasped. This was unbelievable. This was wonderful. This would split the responsibility for Roanie among me and Mama and Daddy, because what they’d offered would upset every Maloney and Delaney in the county.

“Claire, Claire, what do you look so worried about?” Mama asked that night as she sat beside me on my pink-ruffled bed in my pink-ruffled bedroom.

“Mama, Roanie isn’t a pervert.”

“Somebody,” Mama said darkly, “was listening outside the living-room doors.”

“I know he’ll do fine. Big Roan can’t take him back, can he?”

Mama looked at me sadly. “Big Roan said he doesn’t care where Roanie lives as long as Roanie sends him some money.”

A mixture of sorrow and relief burst from me in a long breath. “Big Roan doesn’t want him,” I said. “He never wanted him.” I perked up. “But I do!”

“When Roanie gets here,” Mama said slowly, eyeing me, “I expect you to treat him the same way you treat your brothers.”

I whooped. Brother, my hind foot, I thought, but didn’t say it. I told her about Roanie knocking Neely Tipton down for me when I was just a kid. She mulled it over with a troubled expression in her blue eyes, one hand stroking the tiny gray streak in the swath of hair splayed over the shoulder of her silk robe. She had Delaney hair, glossy brown, fine and straight, and she wore it pulled back with headbands or tiny barrettes. She was deceptively delicate-looking, like her mother, and loved delicate things. She always wore a pair of diamond-stud earrings Daddy had given her, even when she was dressed in jeans and an old T-shirt, hoisting heavy pots in the kitchen or digging in her flower beds or herb garden.

“Claire,” she said finally, gently. “What is it you see in him?”

“He’s my project. Nobody else likes him. He’s different. So am I.”

“How are you different?”

“I gotta
move
all the time. I gotta think. Everybody else is like, ‘Well, that’s just the way things are.’ But
why
are things one way and not the other? Why are there so many rules?”

“So decent people can live together in peace.”

“Why? We’ve got lots of peace around here. More than enough.”

Mama sighed. She bent over me and smoothed the backs of her work-hardened fingers down my cheek. “Try to understand something. You’re a very pretty little girl. You’re a perfect little girl, and before long you’ll be a perfect
young lady. And I want you to grow up that way and go to college and get some perfect job and marry a perfect man and have perfect little babies. Now that’s a good row to hoe, but it’s a straight row, and you can’t look away from it for a minute.”

“You think I wanta marry Roanie? Ugh! I don’t want to marry anybody! I don’t even want to kiss a boy!”

“Okay.” She smiled and blew out a long breath. “That’s fine with me.”

“So don’t worry about me liking Roanie that way. I just think we can hoe along together.”

That set her back. She stared at the pink-carpeted floor for a while, rubbing her jaw and sighing. She cleared her throat and looked at me solemnly. “He’s hoeing in a whole separate garden.”

“Huh?”

“You’ll understand when you’re older.” Frowning, she kissed me good night and turned out the light.

I dreamed fitfully. Hoes. Rows. Gardens. Roanie. And how I would not act like a girl anymore, perfect or otherwise.

He was coming to live with us. That was all that mattered.

I had plans.

Daddy and Grandpa went up to town the next morning and got Roanie out of jail. Then they gathered up his belongings at the Hollow and brought him to me.

I’m sure that’s not how they looked at it, but that’s how I saw the situation.

Coming back to Maloney territory as our charity case must have been the hardest thing he’d ever done. When I spotted Daddy’s car from my writing roost in the loft of the main barn, I nearly fell over the loft stairs hurrying to get down. Roanie eased out of the car and stood defensively at the end of the dirt drive between the front fields, where the hired hands were loading bright orange pumpkins onto the
tractor wagons. He stood with purpose; he stood with stern self-respect, as if he expected even the pumpkins to carve themselves into gaping jack-o’-lanterns as he passed by.

I brushed hay from my jeans and sweater with one hand, checked my sore, reset teeth, and picked up a curly-tailed black puppy as I ran out of the barn. Puppies are always good conversation starters.