Bastard out of Carolina (20 page)

More than anything in the world, I decided, I wanted to be one of the little girls in white fringed vests with silver and gold embroidered crosses—the ones who sang on the revival circuit and taped shows for early-morning television. I wanted gray-headed ladies to cry when they saw my pink cheeks. I wanted people to moan when they heard the throb in my voice as I sang of the miracle in my life. I wanted a miracle in my life. I wanted to be a gospel singer and be loved by the whole wide world.

Jesus, make me a gospel singer, I prayed, while Teresa sang of what might have been God and then again might have been some black-eyed man. But Jesus must have been busy with Teresa, because my voice went high and shrill every time I got excited, and cracked hoarsely if I tried to croon. The preacher at Bushy Creek Baptist wouldn’t even let me stand near the choir to turn the pages of the hymnal, and without a voice like Teresa’s or June Carter’s, I couldn’t sing gospel. I could just listen and watch the gray-headed ladies cry. It was an injustice I could not understand or forgive. There had to be a way to stretch my voice, to sing the way I dreamed I could. I prayed and practiced and stubbornly hoped.

Driving from Greenville to the Sunshine lot on Highway 85 past the Sears, Roebuck warehouse, the air base, the rolling green and red-mud hills—a trip we made almost every other week now that Daddy Glen was working for his father—we would sometimes get to singing like some traveling gospel family. While
I was sleeping somebody touched me, while I was sleeping, Oh! Somebody touched me ... musta been the hand of the Lord ...

Full-voice, all-out, our singing filled the car and shocked the passing traffic. Reese howled and screeched, Mama’s voice broke like she too dreamed of Teresa Brewer, and Daddy Glen made sounds that would have scared cows. None of them cared, and I tried to pretend I wasn’t that bad. I put my head out the window and wailed for all I was worth. The wind filled my mouth and the roar obscured the fact that I sang as badly as any of them.

Once I got so carried away that I went and sang into the electric fan when we got home. It made my voice buzz and waver like a slide guitar, an effect I particularly liked. Mama complained it gave her a headache and would give me an ear-ache if I didn’t cut it out.

“What the hell is she doing?” Daddy Glen acted like I was singing just to make him mad. “She trying to take the paint off the walls or just sour the milk?” He reached past the fan for me with one of his big hands.

“Glen.” Mama’s voice was soft, but it stopped him. He looked at her like she had stuck a needle in his heart.

“You shouldn’t encourage her,” he told Mama. “Gonna have her thinking she can do any damn thing she pleases, and then where will we be? Hell, she’s out running the county every afternoon as it is.”

Mama put her arm around Daddy Glen’s waist. “I know you worry, but trust me, honey. I know where Bone is every minute. I wouldn’t let nothing happen to my little girl.” Daddy Glen relaxed under Mama’s touch until he was almost smiling.

“Bone, get your daddy some ice tea,” she told me. “And put some extra sugar in it like he likes.”

I got the tea and then a washcloth so Mama could cool Daddy Glen’s neck while they sat together. Mama didn’t look at me once the whole time, but Daddy Glen did, his eyes sliding over me like I was a new creature, something he hadn’t figured out yet how to tame. It had been a long time since he had caught me alone, and sometimes I could almost convince myself that he had never held me tight to his hips, never put his hands down inside my clothes. I pretended it had all been a bad dream that would never come back, but I was careful to stay away from him.

I ran off before Daddy Glen could ask for anything more and took the fan out on the back porch. I sang to myself as softly as I could, humming into the motor, thinking about how gospel singers were always on the road. Even if I didn’t get to be the star, I might wind up singing background in a “family”—all of us dressed alike in electric-blue fringed blouses with silver embroidery, traveling in a big bus, and calling home from different cities. But it would be better to be a soloist and be in demand all the time. All I needed was a chance to turn my soulful black eyes on a tent full of believers, sing out the little break in my mournful voice. I knew I could make them love me. There was a secret to it, but I would find it out. If they could do it to me, I would find a way to do it to the world.

 

“Bullshit and apple butter,” Granny laughed cruelly when I finally told her about watching the morning gospel singers and wanting to be like them. “You got to be joking, Bone! You can’t sing, girl. You can’t sing at all.”

“Not now,” I admitted grudgingly. “But I’m working on it. I’m gonna get better. And think about it, Granny. Think about what it would be like.”

“Oh, I know.” Granny’s expression became gentle, her voice careful. “I know the power of gospel singers. Some of these Christian women will believe anything for the sake of a gospel singer.”

“Anything.” I loved the way she said that. Granny’s “Christian women” came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.

“Anything,” I echoed, and she gave me her toothless, twisted grin. We were sitting close together in Mama’s lawn chairs in the backyard. Granny always complained about Mama not living in houses with porches and rocking chairs, but she liked Mama’s reclining lawn chair. Now she reached out, put her hand on the back of my neck, squeezed, and laughed.

“You got a look like your granddaddy sometimes.” She pinched me and laughed again. “Bastard was meaner than a snake, but he had his ways. And didn’t I love his ways? Lord Christ!” She leaned back and rolled the snuff around in her mouth.

“Man had only two faults I couldn’t abide. Wouldn’t work to save his life and couldn’t stay away from gospel singers. Used to stand out back of revival tents offering ’em the best homemade whiskey in Greenville County. Then he’d bring me that slush they cleaned out of the taps. Bastard!” She stiffened and looked back over her shoulder, afraid Mama might be listening. Mama didn’t allow anybody to use that word in her house.

“Well, shit.” She spit to the side. “You got a little of that too, don’t you? A little of that silliness, that revival crap?”

“Cousin Temple says you a heathen.”

“Oh, Temple, huh. Temple’s a pure damn fool.”

I said nothing. Granny wiped her chin.

“Don’t you go telling your mama everything you hear.”

“No ma’am.”

“And don’t go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It’s nice to clean you out now and then, but it an’t for real. It’s like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with a pain.” She wiped her chin again and sighed like she’d taken to doing lately. I hated that sigh. I liked her better when she was being mean. When she started sighing, she was likely to start crying. Then her face would squeeze down on itself in a way that scared me.

“I an’t no fool.” I rocked back and forth in my chair, pushing off hard with my bare feet. Granny’s face twitched, and I saw the light come back into her eyes.

“You know how your mama feels about that word.” It was true. Mama had given me one of her rare scoldings for calling Reese a fool. She hated it almost as much as “bastard.”

“An’t no fool and an’t no bastard.” I rocked steadily, watching Granny’s face.

Granny laughed and looked back over her shoulder nervously. “Oh, you gonna be the death of your mama, and won’t I be sorry then.”

She didn’t look sorry. She looked better. I said it again.

“An’t no fool and an’t no bastard.”

Granny started laughing so hard she choked on her snuff.

“You’re both, and you just silly ‘bout that music just like your granddaddy.” She sounded like she might strangle from laughing. “And goddam, he was both too.”

 

My gospel thing did get on Mama’s nerves after a while, but Aunt Alma reassured her. “It’s obnoxious but normal, Anney, and you know it. Every girl in the family gets religion sooner or later.” Mama nodded absently. She wasn’t so sure it was that simple. Mama almost never went to church, but she took God and most issues of faith absolutely seriously.

“Oh, Anney’s a Christian woman,” Uncle Earle told Aunt Alma the morning after the night Mama threw him out for puking liquor on her kitchen table. “But she wears me down being so stubborn all the time. You’d think she never took a drink of whiskey or chased no good-looking man in her life.”

“She’s just as stiff-necked as she can be,” Cousin Deedee agreed. She was supposed to be with Aunt Ruth but seemed to be over at Alma’s or Raylene’s more than she was home. “You know, Bone, your mama’s the kind gets us all in trouble to begin with. Like something out of one of them stories they tell in Sunday school, supposed to be a lesson to the rest of us.” She smirked at me. “Ask for nothing, trust in God. Do the right thing. Right! And he’ll send you bastards and rabies before he’s through.

“I hate,” Deedee swore, “the very notion of a Christian woman with her hard-scrubbed, starved-thin, stiff and scrawny neck!”

“She hates herself,” Mama told us when Reese repeated what Deedee had said. “And I don’t know that God has much of anything to do with it.” She gave me one of those sharp, almost frightening looks she seemed to have developed over the summer. “People don’t do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn’t make sense if you don’t.”

I no longer accepted everything Mama told me as gospel, but I knew what she meant. Doing the right thing shouldn’t have anything to do with like or love or goodness or Jesus, though most people swore Jesus had something to do with everything. I knew Mama believed in Jesus well enough, even though she wouldn’t talk about it, and I decided that deep in her heart she understood exactly what I was doing. I gave myself over to the mystery of Jesus’ blood, reading the Bible at the kitchen table after dinner and going to the Wednesday-night services for young people. Mama said nothing, Reese teased me, and Daddy Glen sneered.

Aunt Alma thought the whole thing was funny. “Well, at least she an’t copying Bible passages out and hiding them in your drawers like my Temple did. You just got to let her ride it out. When Temple got it, I teased her a little and the girl nearly took my head off. Almost had the preacher out to talk to me—as if I wasn’t a good Baptist—just because I don’t see no reason to go to church every Sunday of my life.”

“But you should go to church,” I told Aunt Alma imperviously. She made me mad talking like I wasn’t serious about my faith. “You should witness your faith and get Uncle Earle to go with you. He thinks the world of you, and he’d listen to you if you talked to him right.”

“If I started talking to Earle about Sunday-morning church services and witnessing for our faith, he’d think I’d lost my mind.” Alma laughed and pinched my chin. “You go for us, girl. You witness. If the world really is gonna end tomorrow, I’d rather save you than any of those drunken uncles of yours. And don’t you even try to talk Jesus to Earle. The man is impossible to talk to about God and religion.”

I took Aunt Alma’s warning as a challenge and started talking to Uncle Earle about faith and good works. I played him Mama’s most tearful gospel country music and repeated all the most dramatic soul-saving stories I’d found in the pamphlets the Christian Ladies’ Aid Society passed out. Earle loved the whole thing, my sincerity, the Bible verses, and the thinly veiled threats of perdition. But most of all he loved the argument. While I tried to prove to him that God was love and Jesus saved, he set out to prove to me that the world was irredeemably corrupt.

“Never mind the ninety and nine, let’s talk about the poor lost sheep in this county,” Uncle Earle would start off. One shot glass of whiskey and a tall glass of beer and he was ready to address the issue of Jesus, only occasionally reminding me of his wife, Teresa. He blamed the loss of Teresa on Jesus, naturally—Jesus who made Catholics, Catholics who were so particular on the subject of fornication and made it so hard for a decent Baptist man to get a divorce. He was funny about Catholics, damning them for making his life so difficult and admiring them at the same time.

“At least,” he told me, “Catholics are interesting, got all that up-and-down stuff, chanting, velvet carpet on the pews and real watered wine for communion. What the hell Baptists got? Grape-juice communions, silly rules against dancing and movies, self-righteousness by the barrelful, damn-fool preachers in shiny suits, and simpleminded parishioners! Baptists could learn something from the Catholics.”

Sometimes in his arguments, Uncle Earle would get Teresa, the Catholic Church, and the county marshals a little confused. Given enough whiskey, he’d start talking about the way they had all united to blight his life. If there was a God, Earle had decided, He was on the side of Teresa, the Catholics, and the marshals. But there was no God, Earle told me, no God and no hope in churches. People were better off learning to rely on themselves and each other, instead of running around praying for what they weren’t going to get.

“I gave up churches—all churches—because I saw what they were,” he told me. “Take a look at those oil color paintings on the wall of every Sunday school in South Carolina. Jesus in the mountains. Jesus in the desert. Jesus against the night sky. Jesus got the lost one in his arms. Jesus wants you, each and every one of you. He’ll climb mountains, walk the hot sands, brave the night winds, search among the many for the one not found. And you are never so valuable as when you stand outside the fold, the one God wants. Oh, don’t I know! Don’t I know?

“They want you, oh yes, they want you. Till they get you. An’t nothing in this world more useless than a hardworking religious fool. It an’t that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won’t let you drink a little whiskey. Won’t let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won’t let you do a damn thing except work for what you’ll get in the hereafter. I live in the here and now, and I need my sleep on a Sunday morning. But I’ll tell you, Bone, I like it that they want me, Catholics and Baptists and Church of Gods and Methodists and Seventh-Day Adventists, all of them hungry for my dirty white hide, my pitiful human soul. Hell! None of them would give two drops of piss for me if I was already part of their saggy-assed congregations.”