Bastard out of Carolina (15 page)

“Can’t we go home now?”

“No, James wants to show Daddy his new lawnmower.”

“I thought he got a new one last year.”

“This one’s the kind that you can ride on while you cut the grass.”

“Don’t seem the yard’s big enough to need that.”

“Well”—Mama gave a short laugh—“I don’t think James buys anything just ’cause he needs it.” She brushed herself down carefully before going back in, though there wasn’t a speck of ash on her. “You girls play nice, now.”

We sat still, wonderfully behaved, almost afraid to move. “Yes, ma‘am. No, ma’am.” We kept our backs straight and never spoke out of turn, trying to imagine that Daddy Glen would look out and see us and be proud. His people watched us out the windows. Behind them, shelves of books and framed pictures mocked me. How could Reese and I be worthy of all that, the roses in their garden, the sunlight on those polished windows and flowered drapes, the china plates gleaming behind glass cabinets? I stared in at the spines of those books, wanting it all, wanting the furniture, the garden, the big open kitchen with its dishes for everyday and others for special, the freezer in the utility room and the plushy seats on all the dining-room chairs. Reese tugged at my arm, wanting me to talk to her, but I couldn’t speak around the hunger in my throat.

From behind the rosebushes, I heard Daryl and James talking. “Look at that car. Just like any nigger trash, getting something like that.”

“What’d you expect? Look what he married.”

“Her and her kids sure go with that car....”

I pushed my black hair out of my eyes and looked in at one of my wide-mouthed cousins in a white dress with eyelet sleeves looking back at me, scratching her nose and staring like I was some elephant in a zoo—something dumb and ugly and impervious to hurt. What do they tell her about us? I wondered. That we’re not really family, just her crazy uncle’s wife’s nasty kids? You’re no relative of mine, you’re not my people, I whispered to myself. New and terrible words rolled around in my head while the air turned cool on my neck.

To Reese’s surprise, I got up, shook out my skirt, and strolled off for a walk through Madeline’s rosebushes. I put my hands out and trailed them lightly along the thorny stalks and plush blossoms, scooping buds off as I passed. I pulled the buds apart, tearing the petals and dropping them down inside my dress. I even pulled up my skirt and tucked some in my panties, walking more slowly then to feel the damp silky flowers moving against my skin.

Trash steals, I thought, echoing Aunt Madeline’s cold accent, her husband’s bitter words. “Trash for sure,” I muttered, but I only took the roses. No hunger would make me take anything else of theirs. I could feel a kind of heat behind my eyes that lit up everything I glanced at. It was dangerous, that heat. It wanted to pour out and burn everything up, everything they had that we couldn’t have, everything that made them think they were better than us. I stood in the garden and spun myself around and around, pouring out heat and rage and the sweet stink of broken flowers.

I
was ten, a long-boned restless ten, when we moved to West Greenville so Daddy Glen could be closer to the new uniform plant where he’d gotten a job as an account salesman. Boxing up dishes and pots in the utility shed, Mama found the remains of the love knot Aunt Maybelle and Aunt Marvella had given her. It had been reduced to scraps held together by dust and seemed to have survived only because it had fallen between the bottom of one flower pot and the bowl of another. Mice had picked the ribbon apart from the hair, and bugs had carried off most of the herbs and blood. Even so, the knotted core of the old lace scrap had somehow held all that time. Mama recognized the thing from the color of the ribbon.

“That was a wedding present from your Eustis aunts,” Mama told me, but I already knew what it was from Granny’s stories. As Mama carefully tried to gather it up, the whole thing fell to dust. My stomach cramped, and I wrapped my arms tight around my middle. Impatiently, Mama swept out the shed and packed up her laundry baskets. “Root magic,” she muttered to me.

That week Marvella woke up in the night after dreaming her hair had turned to barbed wire, and Maybelle woke up in the morning sure the rabbits had eaten all their beans. They found instead that a dog had dug up the honeycomb and torn right through the lace. Neither of them told the other what they thought it meant.

The new house in West Greenville was so far from any of the aunts’ houses that there was rarely time to stop by and see them. Granny was still keeping Reese for Mama when she could, but it was out of the way to take her to Alma’s and pick her up, and Mama decided maybe it was time to start trusting me to keep us both alive while she was at work. After that we only saw Granny on the Sundays when Mama would let Daddy Glen sleep and take us over to visit with Aunt Ruth or Aunt Alma. “Hate you being so far away,” her sisters would complain, but Mama would just smile and tell them how nice our new house was, how hard Daddy Glen was working. And it was a nice house, with a big wide yard, but it also cost more, which meant Mama had to take on a few extra hours to bring in a little more money. It didn’t seem as if Daddy Glen’s route was working out as well as they had hoped.

“Your daddy’s having to work awfully hard these days,” Mama told us. “You girls be quiet when he gets home. Stay out of his way and let him get his rest.”

“He loves you,” Mama was always saying, and she meant it, but it seemed like Daddy Glen’s hands were always reaching for me, trembling on the surface of my skin, as if something pulled him to me and pushed him away at the same time. I would look up at him, carefully, watchfully, and see his eyes staring at me like I was something unimaginable and strange. “You don’t look like your mama,” he said once, “except when you’re asleep.” Sometimes when I ran by him, his hands would suddenly catch me, half-lift me, and pull me back to him. He would look into my face, shake me once, and let me go.

“Don’t run like that,” he’d say. “You’re a girl, not a racehorse.”

Reese and I joked about that and played racehorses when we got home from school every day, running through the empty house and jumping on the big hassock that sat in front of his chair. One day we chased each other into the house as always, not noticing the car out back, not seeing Daddy Glen until he caught my shoulder in one big hand.

“What did I tell you?” he shouted, and lifted me high, shaking me back and forth till my head rocked on my neck. “You bitch. You little bitch.” My body slammed the wall, my heels knocking hollowly a foot above the floor. I saw Reese run away through a shimmering wave of dizziness, and then I was under his arm being carried down the hall to the bathroom. He kicked the door shut behind us and dropped me.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I was so frightened I stuttered.

“Not as sorry as you’re gonna be.” He pulled his belt free from the loops and wrapped the buckle end around his palm. “I’ve waited a long time to do this, too long.”

His face was pale, his jaw rigid, his eyes almost red in the glare of the fluorescent light over the mirror. I stumbled back against the tub, terrified, praying Mama would come home fast. Mama would stop him. His left hand reached for me, caught my shoulder, pulled me over his left leg. He flipped my skirt up over my head and jammed it into that hand. I heard the sound of the belt swinging up, a song in the air, a high-pitched terrible sound. It hit me and I screamed. Daddy Glen swung his belt again. I screamed at its passage through the air, screamed before it hit me. I screamed for Mama. He was screaming with me, his great hoarse shouts as loud as my high thin squeals, and behind us outside the locked door, Reese was screaming too, and then Mama. All of us were screaming, and no one could help.

 

When Daddy Glen unlocked the door, Mama slapped him and grabbed me up in her arms. He held one hand to his cheek and watched as I hiccuped and cried into her neck. “You son of a bitch,” she cursed him, and ran water to wash my face.

“She’s my girl too,” he said. “Someone’s got to love her enough to care how she turns out.” His face was sullen, swollen and empty, like he had woken up from a long, long sleep.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Mama yelled, pushing him out the door. She put me on her lap and washed my face, my neck, the backs of my swollen thighs.

“Oh, my baby,” she kept saying. I lay still against her, grateful to be safe in her arms. The air felt funny on my skin, and I had screamed so hard I had no voice left. I said nothing, let Mama talk, only half hearing what she was whispering. “Baby,” she called me. “Oh, girl. Oh, honey. Baby, what did you do? What did you do?”

What had I done? I had run in the house. What was she asking? I wanted her to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. I held on to her until she put me to bed, held on to her and whimpered then. I held on to her until I fell into a drugged, miserable sleep.

I woke up to the sound of them talking, their words echoing through the closed door of the bedroom. I heard everything he said, heard Mama crying in his arms. Daddy Glen told her I had called him a bastard, that I had come running through the house knocking things over and called him that name. He cried and swore he hadn’t meant to beat me so bad, he didn’t know what had made him do it. He sobbed and then beat his fists against the mattress so hard the springs squeaked.

“She told me she hated me,” he said, “told me I would never be her daddy. And I went crazy, Anney. I just went crazy. Do you know? Do you understand how much I love you all, love her?

“And—oh, God, Anney! They laid me off today. Just put me out without a care. And what am I going to do to feed these girls now?”

Reese lay on the bed with me, her fingers in her mouth, her eyes enormous. She said nothing. I lay still, listening to Daddy Glen’s lies, wondering if he thought he was telling the truth. I kept looking into Reese’s face, her baby face, smooth and empty and scared. The sound of Mama crying grew softer, faded. In the stillness that followed I heard Daddy Glen whispering, heard a murmur as Mama replied. Then there was a sigh and the creak of their bed as he comforted Mama and she comforted him. Sex. They were making love, Mama sighing and sobbing and Daddy Glen repeating her name over and over. I looked into Reese’s eyes, and we listened to the small sounds they were making.

“You made him mad,” Reese whispered. “You better be careful. ”

I tried to be careful, but something had come apart. Something had gotten loose like the wild strands of Aunt Marvella’s hair unraveling in the dust. There was no way I could be careful enough, no way to keep Daddy Glen from exploding into rage. Dr Pepper took him on as a route man, but at less pay than the uniform service. He had one of the short routes, not much money to be made on it, and not enough work to make it full-time. He came home at odd hours, early and late. Mama started working later and later, for whatever money she could get, and I stayed out of the house as much as I could. If I went home when he was there and Mama wasn’t, he was always finding something I’d done, something I had to be told, something he just had to do because he loved me. And he did love me. He told me so over and over again, holding my body tight to his, his hands shaking as they moved restlessly, endlessly, over my belly, ass, and thighs.

“You’re just like your mama,” he’d say, and press his stubbly cheek to mine.

I would stand rigid, ashamed but unable to pull away, afraid of making him angry, afraid of what he might tell Mama, and at the same time, afraid of hurting his feelings. “Daddy,” I would start to whisper, and he would whisper back, “Don’t you know how I love you?” And I would recoil. No, I did not know.

He never said “Don’t tell your mama.” He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me and still made me stand, unmoving and desperate, while he rubbed against me and ground his face into my neck. I could not tell Mama. I would not have known how to explain why I stood there and let him touch me. It wasn’t sex, not like a man and woman pushing their naked bodies into each other, but then, it was something like sex, something powerful and frightening that he wanted badly and I did not understand at all. Worse, when Daddy Glen held me that way, it was the only time his hands were gentle, and when he let me go, I would rock on uncertain feet.

Daddy Glen smelled of sweat and Coca-Cola, of after-shave and cigarettes, but mostly of something I could not name—something acid, bitter, and sharp. Fear. It might have been fear. But I could not have said if it was his fear or mine. I could not say anything. I only knew that there was something I was doing wrong, something terrible. He said, “You drive me crazy,” in a strange distracted voice, and I shuddered but believed him.

I became even more afraid of Daddy Glen, the palms that slapped, the fingers that dug in and bruised, the knuckles he would sometimes press directly under my eyes, the hands that shook and gripped and lifted me up until his eyes would stare into mine. My own hands were so small, my fingers thin and weak. I wished they were bigger, wider, stronger. I wished I was a boy so I could run faster, stay away more, or even hit him back.

Grey gave me a rubber ball, hard rubber, black and small enough to hide in my hand. I cupped it in my palms so no one would see. I worked that ball with passion, rolled it between my fingers with determination, squeezed it stubbornly, clenching each finger against my thumbs. One day my hands would be as strong as Daddy Glen’s were. No matter the size, I told myself, one day my hands would be a match for his. Some days I thought I was working that ball so that I could grow to be more like him; other days I knew that wasn’t why.

 

That spring, Earle and Daddy Glen argued over some tools Daddy Glen swore he had loaned Earle and never gotten back. Earle took offense and stopped coming over to visit. After that Daddy Glen started talking bad about the Boatwrights all the time, glaring at me if I asked Mama anything about what he now called “that trash.” He made fun of how often the uncles would get blind drunk and shoot up each other’s trucks, he talked dirty about Mama’s nieces who were always sneaking off to the Rhythm Ranch to sip whiskey and dance with men older than their fathers. No matter what Daddy Glen said, Mama never said much at all. Her face was tired all the time.