A Place to Call Home (14 page)

Her eyes widened. She backed off. I think she wasn’t so much scared as amazed.

The shop’s door opened again suddenly and Big Roan glared inside. I heard footsteps coming from the back room. Daddy and Uncle Eldon.

“Get your ass out here,” Big Roan said to Sally in a low voice. “Truck with my money and I’ll take it out of your hide.”

“Roanie’s money,” she retorted, but she slunk away, throwing dark looks at me over her shoulder and bitter ones at Big Roan. I stared as he slammed the door behind her. As they walked off, I ran over and watched through a window, him limping, her wiggling. He dug one hand under her fanny and squeezed so hard she nearly fell off her shoes.

“Who was just in here?” Daddy asked, marching up to me with a red-faced Uncle Eldon still muttering about politics behind him.

“Sally McClendon.”

Daddy scowled. “What did she want?”

“Uh … uh, I guess she’ll come back later. I think she was looking for a screw.”

That just popped out. I froze my face in neutral innocence. Daddy squinted hard at me, but Uncle Eldon started pounding the counter and talking about Governor Carter again, so Daddy was distracted.

I dragged the mood ring off my finger and stuck it back on the tray.

The plastic stone had gotten darker, a lot darker.

• • •

I tracked Roanie down as soon as we got home. He was in a storage shed, stacking sacks of fertilizer. I tiptoed up behind him, latched a thumb and forefinger in the seat of his jeans, and pinched hard muscle with all my strength.

He dropped a sack and whirled around, one fist rising like a sledgehammer. When he saw who’d attacked him, he dropped his arm by his side, but his dark brows drew together in a formidable V. “What do you think you’re doin’? You keep your hands to yourself!”

“
You
keep your hands to yourself!” I yelled. “Don’t you mess with ol’ big-tittied Sally McClendon, or the next time I’ll sneak up on you with a pair of pliers!”

“Who says I done anything like that?”

“She says you belong to her!”

“Well, she’s lyin’!”

“Did you … did you … have you ever …”

“No, I ain’t, not ever! And I ain’t talking about this kind of stuff with you! Now haul your little monkey fingers out of this shed!”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said sweetly. “Because I do believe you.”

“Well, thank ya so much. You got a nasty mind for a little girl.”

Oh, this was war. “Sally’s busy, anyhow!” I taunted. “She was with your daddy and I saw him squeeze her on the butt!” The look on his face. Oh, the awful shame that colored his rawboned cheeks. I willed my mean-spirited news back into my mouth the instant it left, but it was too late. He sat down on a stack of fertilizer bags and stared at the dusty floor.

“I … I … maybe I made a mistake,” I lied quickly. “Yeah, I, uh, I didn’t see—”

“Yeah, you saw.” His voice was so low.

“Well, he was just being friendly, I guess. I mean, ’cause Sally’s not his girlfriend or anything. I mean, he’s like, uh, a daddy, and she’s kinda young, uh, and besides,
Daisy’s his girlfriend.” I halted and studied him miserably. “Isn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you … you’re not, uh, upset ’cause you like Sally? Like she’s
your
girlfriend—”

“Claire, for God’s sake,
she ain’t my girlfriend
.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay.” I swallowed sickly. Then, in a small voice, “Is she Big Roan’s girlfriend, like, uh, Daisy is?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, oh, my, oh,
shit
.” I sat down on the floor by his feet. “It’s all right,” I said finally, and I patted the toe of his workboot. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“Everybody knows.” He just sat there, staring into space.

I kept patting the toe of his shoe. Small caresses, careful ones, through the hard leather.

No wonder he didn’t want anything to do with girls who were old enough to do it with. Big Roan might have gotten there first.

Every year I made the mistake of naming the newborn calves and making pets of them, and I always picked a favorite, and the next year, without fail, we ate him. My bad luck was uncanny.

That fall the future contents of our meat freezer was a steer I called Herbert. Herbert the Hereford.

I knew, of course, that the cute red-and-white Hereford bull calves had one purpose—to grow up, grow fat, be castrated, and be killed before their meat turned tough. Either we ate them or someone else would. When they were stocky yearlings, Daddy sold them to a slaughterhouse broker, and they were loaded into huge stock trucks and disappeared forever.

Herbert was like all of our de-balled bovines—placid and unsuspecting, with dark, gentle eyes and the sweet scent of ruminated grass on his breath. He’d been spindly when he was young. I’d helped feed him special formula
from a big, rubber-teated bottle. I’d scratched him between the eyes when the summer flies were after him. I’d laugh and tell him, “Herbert, you’re gonna taste good.” Because I admitted that after Herbert was dead I’d stop thinking of him as Herbert. He’d become a steak.

So I understood the facts of a steer’s life completely and could joke about it with the same bawdy humor as my brothers, except for the countdown hours on the day of the butchering and then I was grief-stricken.

On Herbert’s execution day I hid in the loft of the main barn and cried my eyes out.

Roanie found me up there, lying flat on my stomach between pyramids of baled hay, my head buried in my arms. He carried General Patton up with him and set him down next to me. General Patton snuffled my hair and whined. I sat up quickly, wiped my eyes, and looked at Roanie sadly. “Daddy’s fixin’ to shoot Herbert. I can’t watch.”

“That’s what I figured. Grandpa Maloney told me that’s why you went running out here. I told him I better keep you company.”

“Thank you.”

“I gotta go down in a minute. Supposed to help with the skinnin’.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“You, too?”

My mouth trembled, but I shrugged. “I’m not a sissy.”

He nodded solemnly. “Yeah. I know.”

“I’ve seen all sorts of dead things. I’ve seen Grandpa chop off chickens’ heads. Boy, do chickens flop around. Then you dunk ’em in hot water and pick all the feathers off, and you clean ’em out and cut ’em up, and pretty soon they look just like chickens in the grocery store.”

“Yeah. Then you don’t have to think about how they got that way.”

“Josh shot a bunch of squirrels once. We ate ’em. He gave me their tails. I made a necklace out of ’em.”

“Squirrels are tough to eat.”

“Aunt Arnetta hunts. She sits up in a deer stand and shoots at anything that moves. Daddy says Uncle Eugene won’t even go outside in the fall. ’Fraid she’ll plug him.” I studied Roanie carefully. “You go hunting?”

“Yeah.”

“Grandpa doesn’t hunt anymore. Josh quit after he came home from Vietnam. And Daddy stopped because Mama said he couldn’t put any more stuffed deer heads on the living-room walls. She said it was getting to where she couldn’t read in there. It felt like she had an audience.”

“I don’t much like to hunt myself.”

“Then why do you?”

He rubbed General Patton’s head and didn’t answer right away. Then, “Got used to it. It was better than eatin’ cereal and bologna sandwiches all the time.”

I started to say,
Well, we don’t feed you any bologna
, but the distant pop of Daddy’s pistol threw me down on the floor again. I pressed my hands to my ears. “Herbert,” I moaned.

Roanie put a hand on my hair and stroked it very gently. “It’s done with so quick,” he offered in a low voice. “Herbert didn’t feel no pain.” He paused. “So I’d say he had it pretty good.”

Roanie had a low standard for happiness. All he asked was that things not hurt.

Daddy loaned him a deer rifle and he went hunting with Evan and Hop, and he shot a sixteen-point buck at dawn in the woods of Old Shanty Pass.

That buck made him a celebrity. To deer hunters, bagging a sixteen-point rack of antlers—which means there are eight prongs on either side—is like bringing home the crown jewels. It had been so long since anyone had seen anders that big that even Grandpa Maloney had trouble remembering one.

A parade of men and boys stopped by our farm to gaze longingly at the giant spread on the buck’s glassy-eyed
head, which sat in a place of honor on a workbench outside the barn. “Gut shot or through the heart?” they asked Roanie with the solemn interest of doctors consulting on a patient.

“Through the heart,” he answered.

I got my Instamatic and took a picture of Roanie sitting beside the buck’s head. I had connections with Mr. Cicero, the publisher of the
Dunderry Weekly Shamrock
; I was secretary of the 4-H Club at school, and Mr. Cicero ran my two-paragraph articles about the club meetings and gave me a byline. So I had established myself as a bona fide member of the press.

“You’ll be in the paper next week,” I told Roanie proudly.

“Gut shot or through the heart?” he said back. I didn’t understand his morbid humor, but I smiled anyway.

Uncle Cully arrived shortly afterward. His expression mournful and awed, he examined the buck’s head. Uncle Cully had twenty deer heads on the wall of the waiting room at his dental office. Uncle Cully loved deer heads even more than he loved teeth. “Oh, that’s beautiful,” Uncle Cully said to Roanie as he caressed the buck’s antlers.

Roanie looked at Uncle Cully. “Will it pay the bill for my tooth?” We all stared at him. There was a wave of disbelieving murmurs among the envious hunters.

Uncle Cully’s mouth fell open. “Your bill’s been paid.”

“I know. Will you give Mr. Maloney his money back?”

“You don’t have to do that,” Daddy said, frowning. “I said you could pay me out a little every week from your salary.”

“This tooth thing’ll take me forever. I want to get done with it.”

Daddy studied him shrewdly. “Don’t like to be in anybody’s debt, hmmm?”

“No, sir. Ain’t nothing personal. Just don’t like it.”

“All right. I respect that. Cully, is it a deal?”

“Oh, lord, yes,” Uncle Cully replied. Five minutes later he left with the buck’s head in his trunk.

“I’ll still get your picture in the paper,” I promised Roanie. “And when we go to Uncle Cully’s office, you can say hello to your deer.”

He nodded. But I don’t think he cared if he ever saw that prize rack of antlers again. It had served its purpose.

“I give the boy credit,” Mama said that night, with no small amount of respect in her voice. “He knows what he wants.”

I felt proud. Roanie was always smarter than anyone but me expected. He was the only person I’ve ever known who got Uncle Cully to fix a tooth for one buck.

G
randmother Elizabeth and Great-Gran Alice weren’t afraid of Roanie like the aunts were. They weren’t afraid of anything except each other’s opinion. They hated the idea that whichever of them died first wouldn’t get the last word on the other.

On a frosty Saturday not long before Thanksgiving, Roanie was thrust into the middle of the granny wars.

It started at breakfast. Our family meals, even the most ordinary ones, were crowded events, and breakfast was eaten at the long oak table in the center of the kitchen, which was a kingdom of its own, big and sunny and cluttered, with squeaking wood floors and tall white cabinets and scarred Formica counters. This was a room of serious purpose; there was an industrial-size, steel-doored refrigerator and broad, squat freezer, two huge stoves, pots and skillets hanging from a wrought-iron rack over the table, a double sink deep enough to bathe a calf in, and Mama’s only concession to frivolous convenience—a freestanding dishwasher that sat in one corner, rumbling and swishing in almost constant service from dawn until bedtime.

The basic group that morning included me, Roanie, Hop, Evan, Mama and Daddy, Grandpa and Grandma Maloney—who often walked over for meals—and, of course, Grandmother Elizabeth and Great-Gran Alice, plus the field
hands, who could count on sausage biscuits and coffee, which Mama dispensed to them on the back porch off the kitchen.

We were contentedly eating a huge country breakfast of sausage and fried eggs, biscuits, gravy, and slices of the very last of the cantaloupes from the household vegetable patch. I was sleepy, still wearing my pajamas and robe. I sat between Grandmother Elizabeth and Great-Gran Alice, who were still in their robes, too. One of my duties was to pass platters of food between them, so we could avoid their having to utter even a single word to each other.

“I’m going shopping today,” Great-Gran announced suddenly. “I’m going to Atlanta. I’m going to Rich’s.”

This was not a request. It was a decision. It meant someone would be pressed into chauffeur service for a four-hour round-trip drive, and it meant venturing into the seedy, aging heart of downtown Atlanta, because no matter how many bright new Rich’s popped up in the suburban malls, there would always be, for Great-Gran, only one true Store.

Grandmother Elizabeth piped up. “I believe I’ll go as well.”

Forks stopped moving. Coffee cups and juice glasses halted midway to lips. Hop’s pet squirrel, Marvin, peeped over the table edge from his perch on Hop’s thigh. Marvin sensed trouble. He froze. Roanie was the only one who didn’t understand. But he stopped eating, too, and watched warily.