And Yesterday Is Gone (13 page)

She handed me a dripping ten-dollar bill and some plastic.

“Get me a screwdriver, damn it to hell.”

The jacket that I had protected at the risk of my life, my stash that had bought me a car, put money in my jeans…and now the remaining three empty bags were floating in soapy water, the green stuff plugging the drain.

I could just hear Alfie's booming laugh, hear him say, “Well, your ma sure kept that shoe salesman straight and that machine will run for a year without electricity.” I missed Alfie.

“What is this stuff?” Ma demanded. “Sis says it's marijuana, but I don't believe that. I didn't raise you to be a dope fiend. And Sis, I don't know where she gets these crazy ideas. Caught her reading
True Confessions
again. Better bring the hammer, too.”

“Ma,” I said, “You know Sis has always been jealous of me. Don't believe a word she says. She gets it all from that magazine.

“I've been learning to cook and we used a lot of oregano. I guess some of it got into my pockets. Why don't you go get a cup of coffee and I'll fix the drain.”

Sis appeared and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that sounds pretty reasonable. I've heard those hippies are pretty heavy on the oregano. S'pose they take those cooking classes wearing their jackets, too. With any luck, that might slide by.”

She grinned as I brushed past her in the doorway.

•  •  •

I had just finished when she poked her head around the door and giggled. “Still here? Guess that oregano can plug a machine pretty bad.”

I tried to give her a frosty stare, but I couldn't quite pull it off. I had to grin.

“You think you skidded by with that fairytale? Wanna bet?” she challenged.

That thought had been nagging at me all the time I'd been cleaning that miserable machine. Leave it to Sis—she'd zeroed in, right on target.

After dinner, Ma said, “Bring the potato fork, Stevie. I'll get a pail and let's dig some potatoes.”

Sis rolled her eyes at me and said quickly, “I'll do the dishes—my turn.” I knew my time had come.

With the pail rattling in cadence beside us, we walked to the garden, her hand in mine, my heart bursting with love for her. I knew I was going to catch hell.

“Stevie, you can't know how I've prayed for you to come home.”

She would never know of those horrible nights at the ranch when I had so fervently prayed the same prayer.

We worked a couple of rows; the only sounds were of the potatoes clunking in the pail and Ma humming one of those old hymns under her breath. “Amazing Grace,” I think it was.

When she stopped and wiped her face on the sleeve of the old work shirt, I knew where the needle pointed.

I turned to face her.

“You lied to me, didn't you, Stevie.”

“Yeah.”

“You know I can always tell.”

“Yeah.”

“If that dope is so important to you that you have to cover it with a lie…well, that breaks my heart.”

“Aw, Ma. It's just a little marijuana. Just a little something for relaxation. Slows the mind, puts the brakes on…” I coaxed.

“You were an honor student, Stevie. God gave you a quick, sharp brain, a beautiful working tool, and you've chosen to dull it. For what? That's like pissing in the pure, clean water of a well.

“You've changed, Stevie.”

“Yes, I've changed, Ma. And so have you. Why are you using such bad language? That's not my mother talking, and I hate it. And encouraging Sis to kill? Not that the bastard didn't deserve it.”

She looked surprised, opened her mouth to speak, but then silence hung between us. I stood there leaning on the fork and waited, almost holding my breath. We never talked back to Ma.

“Well, Stevie,” she said thoughtfully, as though she was searching her mind, weighing her words, “I don't rightly know how this is happening. I don't seem to hear it. I've always abhorred that kind of talk. I cringed every time your stepfather opened his mouth and now I'm doing the same thing. I'm so ashamed.”

Her face screwed up and gut-wrenching sobs pounded out.

I dropped the fork and pulled her to me. I was surprised to realize in the past year that I had grown a head taller than Ma. With my arms around her, she felt so frail, so thin and vulnerable.

I begged, “Please, please don't cry, Ma. You can swear all you want—I'll get used to it.”

Between sobs came halting words. “I'm crying because I've done so poorly for you and Sis. I know I haven't been a good mother. If I'd taken more time with you kids, if I'd stood up to him the first time he hit you… It's my fault—I've driven you to this, and now you're a dope fiend.”

I pulled her face out of my shirt and made her look at me. “Ma, stop, stop. For God's sake, I'm not a dope fiend, Ma,” I blurted out, shocked and indignant.

But she would not be comforted; the tears still flowed.

Finally I said, desperate, that good brain she said I once had in overdrive, “Ma, I promise—I promise—never to smoke a cigarette of any kind ever again.”

She looked up. “Promise to God?”

“Yes, yes, promise to God.”

“I'll promise, too. I'll never swear again and I'll never again tell Sis to shoot anyone. Honest to God.”

And so our pact was made, with our arms around each other, standing in the freshly turned earth of the potato patch.

Neither of us has ever violated it.

•  •  •

Sis lay in wait for me. At the first opportunity, she asked curiously, “What happened down in the garden? Ma was on to you, wasn't she?”

Evading her question, I asked, “What happened after I left, Sis?”

She hesitated. It wasn't like Sis to be slow to answer.

“Well, that about killed her. That morning when she fixed breakfast and realized you were gone, she just turned around, closed the door and went to bed.

“I hoped you'd be gone only a couple of days and come back. When I got home from school, old what's-his-name said Ma had reported you missing to the police, but he told them you had just run off to join the hippies in San Francisco so, of course, they didn't get excited.

“Ma was still in bed when I got home. I told her I was hungry and asked her what's for dinner, but she didn't take the bait. Not that day or any of the following days. She came out of that room only to use the bathroom and days later, not even then. She didn't wash or comb her hair. Finally, I bathed her in bed. I cooked for us and forced her to eat, but that was almost nothing.”

“Where was he?” I asked. I felt rage and overwhelming shame building as I visualized my mother and my sister—the ones I love and had abandoned.

“Oh, he only came home to sleep on the couch. Guess he hung out with his buddies somewhere.

“I signed Ma's name to her check and bought what we needed. I signed my own report card—I was glad she didn't see it because I dropped from straight As to Cs. I missed a lot of school, going only part time. I tried to study at home…”

“How long did she stay in bed? Didn't she say anything at all?” I asked, hardly daring to trust my own voice.

“Only if I coaxed her. She stayed in bed a couple of weeks and got so thin. Then one night, she sat straight up and asked, ‘Is that Stevie? I hear Stevie.' I was so scared, I thought she was dying. I called the pastor, but she wouldn't talk to him, turned her head to the wall. Another three weeks went by…”

Sis choked on her sobs and I smothered mine as I held her, smoothed her hair, and begged, “My God, Sis—how can you love me or ever forgive me?”

She continued as though she hadn't heard me.

“Then early one morning, when it was still dark, she woke me up screaming, ‘Stevie, Stevie, try.'

“I don't know how she ever made it to my bed. I pulled her down beside me and said, ‘You know, Ma, Stevie isn't here.'

“Then she said, ‘I see him. I see him plain as day and he's in trouble.'

“We held each other in my bed and she shook so bad it rattled.

“Then I knew she'd die if I didn't do something, so I called Dr. Burnham. You remember him—he delivered both of us, took my tonsils out, cured your pneumonia. He said she was having a nervous breakdown and called an ambulance. They kept her in the hospital for three weeks and fed her through a tube. She weighed less than a hundred pounds. They did a lot of other stuff, too. I was there every day.

“Dr. Burnham told her if she didn't get up and stay up, I'd have to go to a foster home. Seems like those were the magic words.

“She was awful shaky when she got home, but followed the doctor's orders and ate what I fixed. She did get better, but then she started talking bad—imagine Ma swearing. Then night sweats left her wringing wet. She swore the heat was coming up through the floor. You know she always hated ketchup, but now she was pouring it on her cereal. Then she hid the iron in the refrigerator. I was afraid she'd go back to bed, so I called the doctor again. He came out and gave her a shot and a bunch of pills, telling her they were vitamins and making her promise to take them. You know how she is about promises. More pills and tranquilizers. He told me she was having a premature change of life. You know, she's only forty-four. Now she's gotten almost back to her old self except for the cussing but, for some reason, it seems like she just stopped that, too.”

Ma walked in and caught Sis and me hanging on to each other and bawling our heads off. She looked scared and asked, “Why are you two blubbering like babies?”

I said, “Because we're happy, Ma.”

So she put her arms around us and we all cried. She looked up at that ceiling and the cardboard patch and said, “Thank you, God, for my children.”

•  •  •

The next few days I worked on that ceiling. Ma said we couldn't afford to do the whole thing, so we had to patch it. All I knew about carpentry was when you had a hammer in your hand, you were supposed to look for a nail. I was a lot better at digging postholes.

I stood on a shaky ladder and sawed the ends off the jagged lath, trying to keep the crumbling plaster in place. Finally, I managed a square hole and filled it with strips of wood and sheetrock. The kitchen was a mess when I made my last trip down the ladder.

“Well, Ma,” I said, “that's the best I can do.”

I saw Ma look sternly at Sis, who was trying to smother her giggles. She was looking up at the ceiling when she said, “Ma, we can wallpaper right over those bumps—they'll never show.”

Ma started mixing something in a big pan and my mouth watered. Biscuits and gravy, my favorite, I thought. But when we sat down for dinner, I discovered that Ma had been mixing flour and water for paste. I guess my disappointment showed.

“Tomorrow, son,” Ma said.

•  •  •

The next night as I was wolfing down those golden, crusty biscuits submerged in gravy, I looked up at the daisy-patterned ceiling. There wasn't a bump to be seen.

I bragged, “Guess I'm better with a hammer than I realized.”

Ma laughed and Sis sure had that eye-rolling bit down to a science.

“Son, I think you might do better in another line of work. Have you ever given any thought as to what you might want to do with your life?”

I had thought a lot about what direction my life was going, more than a few times this last year. When I was freezing my ass off at the ranch, I knew for sure what I didn't want to do—posthole digging and sheepherding were tops on that list, and now I felt I could safely add carpentry.

“I'd loved to have gone to college, Ma. I think that journalism would have been my major since I've always loved to write. Some history courses, too. But we can't even afford a new ceiling and your washing machine ate up all my ill-gotten gains, so we'll put college on hold for a while. I'm going to talk to the manager down at the market—maybe I'll find something there.”

Sis interrupted. “Yeah, you were the editor of the school paper for three years. Don't you remember the principal, Mr. Wills, talked about a scholarship for both of us? Of course, that was after
I
won that big spelling contest,” she emphasized as she stuck her elbow in my ribs.

“Put the pot on, Sis, and let's sit a minute.”

Ma seated herself at the table. “I've got some news for you kids. When you were born, Stevie, we took out an insurance policy for your college. It matured when you were eighteen, so you've got one thousand five hundred dollars that the machine didn't eat. Sis, you've got a while to go yet, but we did the same for you.

“Stevie, I hope you didn't offend Mr. Wills because I'm going to talk to him about that scholarship. Also, I think I can swing a few votes with the minister. I taught the kids and sang in the choir for seven years. They owe me.”

On Sunday morning, Ma picked up her Bible, put on her hat and went to church—on time.

Then came the bad news. The principal had conferred with the minister and they had agreed that a scholarship would not be forthcoming because of my ongoing disciplinary problems, which apparently included an irreverent attitude, questioning the Bible, cartooning the prophets, and last, but surely not least, I had graduated from church school with an unsigned diploma.

A week before graduation, the banker's son and teacher's pet had made fun of my clothes in the cloakroom. So I swung around with a wire coat hanger, catching him across the face. His blood flowed.

I found myself in the principal's office almost before I could replace the “weapon,” facing an ultimatum: “Apologize or be expelled.”

I couldn't force myself to apologize, even over Ma's tears.

I suppose she had to go on her knees to persuade the principal—at the last moment—to allow me to walk across the stage to accept an unsigned diploma.

Of course, no mention was made of my four-point grade average or any other accomplishment.