A Place to Call Home (13 page)

My heart melted. “Okay, I won’t laugh at you. But I
—
I go anywhere I want to around here, and I don’t want Mama coopin’ me up because she’s scared.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, she’s just a worrier. But I know you’re not gonna grab me or knock me in the head or something.”

He went as still as a statue. “She thinks I would?”

I inhaled sharply and choked on tobacco juice. “Uh, no. No, no, she just—”

“I ain’t ever hurt a girl,” he said furiously. “I ain’t ever done nothin’ to a girl. I don’t want no girls hangin’ on me. I ain’t gonna end up bein’ a daddy to babies I don’t even want to take care of. Somebody sticks you with a baby, you gotta do the right thing. Any man don’t do right by a baby, he’s not worth spit.”

“You’re talkin’ about my Uncle Pete,” I said slowly.
“That’s what you mean, isn’t it? It’s true. Sally McClendon’s baby belongs to him.”

He was silent. His jaw worked. Then he said, “I’m talkin’ about
any
so-and-so that lets a baby grow up without a good daddy. Hey. I ain’t the kind your mama ought to worry about. Go on now. Go back to the house ’fore somebody catches us and thinks ol’ nasty Roanie Sullivan’s fixin’ to eat you alive.”

“Oh,
shitfire
,” I said. I marched away a couple of steps and hiked up the legs of my jeans a couple of inches and spit a stream of tobacco juice to prove I could do it.

Don’t ever try to spit tobacco juice when you’re upset. Inhaling and spitting are mutually exclusive. It felt as if the whole wad went down my windpipe and got stuck there. I gagged and choked, clutching my throat, struggling to breathe. I thumped my chest. Watery goo spewed from my nose and mouth. But no tobacco.

“Take a breath!” Roanie yelled.

Well, I would have, if it had been that simple. Bright firefly lights speckled my vision, and I sank to my knees. Something hit me hard between the shoulder blades. Roanie stood over me, one hand drawn back. “Breathe!” he ordered hoarsely.

I tried frantically, shaking my head.

Roanie picked me up and ran toward the house, me kicking and flailing in agony. When he reached the edge of the backyard, we both fell sprawling on the lawn. Mama and Grandma Dottie ran out. Grandmother Elizabeth and Great-Gran Alice peered excitedly from the back windows. Anyone might have misinterpreted the sight of Roanie Sullivan covered in chicken litter and pounding my back except he hit me one more time, knocked me flat, and the clump of tobacco popped out. I sucked in deep gulps of air.

“Undo her jeans!” Grandma ordered. “Get some air into her belly! She’s purple!”

Mama dropped beside me, rolled me over, and yanked at the fastenings. The next thing I knew, Roanie jerked my
jeans over my shoes and flung them—and my tennis shoes—behind him.

Total humiliation. I lay there in a sweatshirt and pink panties. Roanie turned his back.

He, undoubtedly, was a gentleman.

And I, undoubtedly, was not.

Mama sagged. “Where did you get that tobacco?” she demanded.

I coughed and gasped. “From H-Hop’s dresser drawer.”

Roanie pushed himself to his feet and said with his back still turned, “ ’Less you need me to do something, I’ll go on back to work, Miz Maloney.”

“Hold on.” Mama flipped a dishrag over my panties and went to him. “What were you doing out here when you were supposed to be working?”

“I just … just come outside for a minute.”

“Then you can just come in the house and wait for Mr. Maloney. Explain to him why you can’t follow simple instructions.”

“Mama,” I tried, my head and stomach reeling, “Mama, it was my—”

“Be quiet, young lady. You’re in enough trouble.”

I began to cry, small, choking sobs of frustration. It was all my fault.

Nat, drawn by the noise, hovered a few yards away, shifting from one foot to the other and shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Miz Maloney, I shoulda gone with her to get them coveralls for Roanie.”

Mama looked at me shrewdly. “I see,” she said. She marched Roanie and me indoors.

Still woozy, I lay on the living-room couch with an afghan over my legs, and Roanie sat gingerly on the edge of a straight-backed cane chair beside the piano, moving his big-boned bare feet occasionally, as if the softness of the Oriental rug beneath them was a remarkable sensation.
Mama had made him leave his dirty galoshes on the back porch.

I watched his tense gaze travel slowly around the large room, taking everything in as if he might be seeing it all for the last time. It was home to me; I tried to picture it through his stunted view—the handsome, plush furniture, the crammed bookcases, the wide stone fireplace, the fine lamps, and the console TV and stereo case stuffed with record albums. Astonishing luxury.

Mama had draped a soft blue bath towel over Roanie’s knees, and he wiped his big hands on it. They were smeared with some of my regurgitated tobacco. I thought of that intimacy as a sort of bonding ritual, my bile-soaked embarrassment drawing the misery out of him.

But his eyes were bleak.

Mama entered the room. He stiffened, staring straight ahead. She laid a folded heap of brown material on the piano bench. “Those are the coveralls I wanted you to try on,” she said.

He looked at her incredulously. “But—”

“Mama, he didn’t do anything wrong.” I was begging.

“Oh, I’ve already figured out who’s to blame.” Mama squinted at me.

I held my breath. Mama studied Roanie with a kind of sad, thoughtful frown between her slender brows. “You go take a bath,” she told him. “Change into those coveralls. All right?”

“You mean I ain’t in trouble, ma’am?”

“Good lord, no. Claire’d probably be a lot worse off if you hadn’t been there to help her. Thank you.” She gave me a look that said,
If you weren’t already sick
 …, then strode from the room, flicking her fingers across the front of the slim denim skirt she wore, as if shooing her own doubts away.

I said cheerfully, “See? Mama doesn’t think you’re gonna eat me alive.”

“I hope not. You’d stick in my craw if I tried.”

“Then I’d just whack you on the back until you spit me out.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, I could tell. I smiled with smug confidence.

We were giving each other breathing lessons.

A
fter that, against the advice of everyone else in the family, Mama and Daddy trusted him in my presence unwatched. So I rambled around with him every day, talking his ears off. I gained a certain mystique in the fourth grade at school. To my female cousins and girlfriends Roanie exuded danger like a musk; I basked unafraid in the shadow of his reputation, so I was widely admired and gossiped about for taming him, as if I’d adopted a wolf.

Aunt Lucille eventually relented and let Violet wander outside with me, and so I coaxed her down to the equipment shed one Sunday, where Roanie was rebuilding a tractor engine. He was great with mechanical things; he’d had to learn in order to keep Big Roan’s truck running.

Violet was stiff with apprehension. Red hair stuck out from under her sock cap, as if she’d been electrified. I led her into the huge, oil perfumed building. Roanie’s face and hands were streaked with grease. He looked positively wicked, with a camouflage army coat pulled back from his chest and his gray eyes glinting in the raw glare of two work lights clamped to the tractor’s steering wheel. Sitting among engine parts on a tarp, with General Patton curled up beside him, he surveyed me and Violet somberly. I pointed at him as if I’d trained him. “Say something,” I commanded.

“
Boo
,” he deadpanned.

Violet ran all the way back to the house.

“You scared her,” I said furiously. “I wanted you to make a good impression!”

“You wanted to show off,” he corrected smoothly, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “But if you go get her and bring her back, I’ll tell her I was just kiddin’.”

“Why don’t you come with me and say so in front of everybody? Then you could get something to eat. You could sit at the kitchen table.”

“No, I couldn’t. That’s for family. Besides, I don’t want a bunch of people starin’ at me and whisperin’ about me.”

“They won’t do that. I won’t let ’em.”

“I wish you was in charge of the whole world, Claire. I really do.”

“Please come to the house,” I repeated wistfully.

“Boo.”

“Oh, boo yourself. You don’t scare me at all.”

“You scare me,” he said darkly. “How about that?”

“I do not. How?”

He didn’t answer immediately. He wiped greasy wrenches and rearranged engine parts; his gloomy and unfathomable silences were as deep as a well. Then, “ ’Cause you’ll grow up one day and be like everybody else.”

“I will not.” I had no idea what he meant, but I was certain of my uniqueness. “I’ll never be scared of you, and when I grow up, I’ll have my own house and you can sit at my table anytime you want.”

He looked at me seriously. “I’ll have a house, the best house in the world, and you can sit at my table.”

“All right. Whatever. Shake on it.” I stuck my hand down. He encased it carefully in his tough, greasy fingers, and we closed the deal.

I never understood my feelings about Sally McClendon. She gave me the creeps, and I was jealous of her because
she had breasts and I didn’t yet, but I also felt sorry for her. The collision of emotions left me nearly tied in knots.

I saw her again, up close and personal, one autumn afternoon. I was sitting on the counter at Uncle Eldon Delaney’s hardware store, waiting for Daddy to come out of a back room, where he and Uncle Eldon had started debating saber saws and ended up debating politics. It had been a subject of fine controversy all fall, since our own Governor Carter was known to have aspirations for the White House.

I could hear their exasperated voices from the back of the store.

“I’m still a Talmadge Democrat,” Uncle Eldon thundered. “Carter’s so far off center he’s not much better than a socialist.”

“Oh, hell,” Daddy shot back, “you wouldn’t know what a socialist was if one walked in here and hit you with a hammer.”

“I know the damn Democrats don’t say anything worth listening to anymore.”

“Are you telling me you’d vote
Republican
?”

“You bet I am!”

“Good lord!”

I shivered. Vote Republican? We’d have to do a lot of cleanup work at the family cemetery plots—all those Maloneys and Delaneys knocking up clumps of grass as they whirled in their graves.

So I sat there, frowning, idly drumming my heels against the counter’s thick, sturdy side. I liked being different, but I didn’t like startling changes. This store and this counter were over a hundred years old. The counter was built of burnished slabs of extinct chestnut, each one two feet wide, from a tree that must have been majestic to behold. The cash register that sat at the opposite end of the counter had belonged to Great-Grandfather Thurman Delaney. It was the Victorian cathedral of cash registers, decorated in brass curlicues, with tall price tabs that popped up
smartly, like wooden targets at a carnival shooting gallery, when Uncle Eldon pressed the enameled keys.

But I sat on the counter among stacks of magazines with slinky Cher on the cover and a wooden bowl filled with smiley-faced Have A Nice Day pins, and a tray of mood rings. I slid one on my finger, scrutinized the murky oval plastic jewel against my skin, and waited to see what my mood was.

I was just murky.

One of the broad wooden doors swung open so hard the windowpanes rattled. Sally marched in, her thighs bulging in tight jeans, her bosom bulging in a tight sweater, her red platform shoes thudding unevenly on the wood planks. Her hair had grown blonder and bigger every year, her mascara heavier, until at eighteen she looked like a big-haired yellow raccoon.

She teetered right up to me and stared into my eyes. “What’s a little pink sugar baby like you gonna do for a boy like Roanie?”

“Well, I got him a good home and a straight front tooth, for one thing. And he doesn’t belong to you anyhow.”

“He will when he’s a little older. You’ll see.”

“You’ve got enough boys. Big and little. What do you need with another one?”

“There ain’t any others like him. Y’all are just gonna mess him up, give him big ideas and then knock him flat.”

I had a horrible thought and immediately gave voice to it. “Mind your own business! He doesn’t want to make babies with you or anybody else!”

“Babies.
Babies
? Little queen, I don’t want no more babies. One lap rat from your kin is enough.”

“That baby doesn’t even look like my Uncle Pete! You better watch it. If my mama knew for sure, she’d come get him.”

“If your mama knew the whole story, there’d be hell to pay that you ain’t got no idea about.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She leered and leaned closer. “Your folks are blind as bats when its suits ’em. Roanie’ll be sorry he trusted ’em, someday. He’s just playin’ along to get money. That’s how people like him and me get what we want.”

I picked up a Have A Nice Day pin, bent the pin out, and thrust it under her chin. I whispered to Sally, “You want a prick? I’ll give you a prick.”