Bastard out of Carolina (3 page)

 

“Now, you got to watch yourself with my sister,” Uncle Earle told Glen Waddell the day he took him over to the diner for lunch. “Say the wrong thing and she’ll take the shine off your teeth.”

 

It was a Thursday, and the diner was serving chicken-fried steak and collard greens, which was Earle’s excuse for dragging his new workmate halfway across Greenville in the middle of a work day. He’d taken a kind of shine to Glen, though moment to moment he could not tell what that short stubborn boy was thinking behind those dark blue eyes. The Waddells owned the dairy, and the oldest Waddell son was running for district attorney. Skinny, nervous little Glen Waddell didn’t seem like he would amount to much, driving a truck for the furnace works, and shaking a little every time he tried to look a man in the eye. But at seventeen, maybe it was enough that Glen tried, Earle told himself, and kept repeating stories about his sister to get the boy to relax.

“Anney makes the best gravy in the county, the sweetest biscuits, and puts just enough vinegar in those greens. Know what I mean?”

Glen nodded, though the truth was he’d never had much of a taste for greens, and his well-educated mama had always told him that gravy was bad for the heart. So he was not ready for the moment when Mama pushed her short blond hair back and set that big hot plate of food down in front of his open hands. Glen took a bite of gristly meat and gravy, and it melted between his teeth. The greens were salt-sweet and fat-rich. His tongue sang to his throat; his neck went loose, and his hair fell across his face. It was like sex, that food, too good to waste on the middle of the day and a roomful of men too tired to taste. He chewed, swallowed, and began to come alive himself. He began to feel for the first time like one of the boys, a grown man accepted by the notorious and dangerous Black Earle Boatwright, staring across the counter at one of the prettiest women he’d ever seen. His face went hot, and he took a big drink of ice tea to cool himself.

“Her?” he stammered to Earle. “That your sister? That pretty little white-headed thing? She an’t no bigger than a girl.”

Earle grinned. The look on Glen’s face was as clear as the sky after spring rain. “Oh, she’s a girl,” he agreed, and put his big hand on Glen’s shoulder. “She’s my own sweet mama’s baby girl. But you know our mama’s a rattlesnake and our daddy was a son of a gun.” He laughed loud, only stopping when he saw how Glen was watching Anney walk away, the bow of her apron riding high on her butt. For a moment he went hot-angry and then pulled himself back. The boy was a fool, but a boy. Probably no harm in him. Feeling generous and Christian, Earle gave a last hard squeeze to Glen’s shoulder and told him again, “You watch yourself, son. Just watch yourself. ”

Glen Waddell nodded, understanding completely the look on Earle’s face. The man was a Boatwright, after all, and he and his two brothers had all gone to jail for causing other men serious damage. Rumor told deadly stories about the Boatwright boys, the kind of tales men whispered over whiskey when women were not around. Earle was good with a hammer or a saw, and magical with a pickax. He drove a truck like he was making love to the gears and carried a seven-inch pigsticker in the side pocket of his reinforced painter’s pants. Earle Boatwright was everything Glen had ever wanted to be—spe—cially since his older brothers laughed at him for his hot temper, bad memory, and general uselessness. Moreover, Earle had a gift for charming people—men or women—and he had charmed the black sheep of the Waddell family right out of his terror of the other men on the crew, charmed him as well out of his fear of his family’s disapproval. When Earle turned that grin on him, Glen found himself grinning back, enjoying the notion of angering his daddy and outraging his brothers. It was something to work for, that relaxed and disarming grin of Earle’s. It made a person want to see it again, to feel Earle’s handclasp along with it and know a piece of Earle’s admiration. More than anything in the world, Glen Waddell wanted Earle Boatwright to like him. Never mind that pretty little girl, he told himself, and put his manners on hard until Earle settled back down. Glen yes-ma’amed all the waitresses and grabbed Earle’s check right out of Anney’s hand, though it would take him down to quarters and cigarettes after he paid it.

But when Earle went off to the bathroom, Glen let himself watch her again, that bow on her ass and the way her lips kept pulling back off her teeth when she smiled. Anney looked him once full in the face, and he saw right through her. She had grinned at her brother with an open face and bright sparkling eyes, an easy smile and a soft mouth, a face without fear or guile. The smile she gave Glen and everyone else at the counter was just as easy but not so open. Between her eyes was a fine line that deepened when her smile tightened. A shadow darkened her clear pupils in the moment before her glance moved away. It made her no less pretty but added an aura of sadness.

“You coming over tonight, Earle?” she asked when he came back, in a voice as buttery and sweet as the biscuits. “The girls miss you ‘bout as much as I do.”

“Might be over,” Earle drawled, “if this kid here does his job right and we get through before dark this time.” He slapped Glen’s shoulder lightly and winked at Anney. “Maybe I’ll even bring him with me.”

Yes, Glen thought, oh yes, but he kept quiet and took another drink of tea. The gravy in his stomach steadied him, but it was Anney’s smile that cooled him down. He felt so strong he wanted to spit. He would have her, he told himself. He would marry Black Earle’s baby sister, marry the whole Boatwright legend, shame his daddy and shock his brothers. He would carry a knife in his pocket and kill any man who dared to touch her. Yes, he thought to himself, oh yes.

Mama looked over at the boy standing by the cash register, with his dark blue eyes and bushy brown hair. Time was she would have blushed at the way he was watching her, but for that moment she just looked back into his eyes. He’d make a good daddy, she imagined, a steady man. He smiled and his smile was crooked. His eyes bored into her and got darker still. She flushed then, and smelled her own sweat, nervously unable to tell if it came from fear or lust.

I need a husband, she thought, turned her back, and wiped her face. Yeah, and a car and a home and a hundred thousand dollars. She shook her head and waved Earle out the door, not looking again at the boy with him.

“Sister Anney, why don’t you come over here and stand by my coffee cup,” one of her regulars teased. “It’ll take heat just being next to your heart.”

Mama gave her careful laugh and pulled up the coffeepot. “An’t got time to charm coffee when I can pour you a warm-up with one hand,” she teased him back. Never mind no silly friends of Earle’s, she told herself, and filled coffee cups one at a time until she could get off the line and go take herself a break.

 

“Where you keep that paper, Ruth Anne’s birth certificate, huh?” they’d tease Mama down at the diner.

“Under the sink with all the other trash,” she’d shoot back, giving them a glance so sharp they’d think twice before trying to tease her again.

“Put it away,” Granny kept telling her. “If you stopped thinking about it, people would too. As long as it’s something that’ll get a rise out of you, people’re gonna keep on using it.”

The preacher agreed. “Your shame is between you and God, Sister Anne. No need to let it mark the child.”

My mama went as pale as the underside of an unpeeled cotton boll. “I got no shame,” she told him, “and I don’t need no man to tell me jackshit about my child.”

“Jackshit,”
my aunt Ruth boasted. “She said ‘jackshit’ to the preacher. An’t nobody says nothing to my little sister, an’t nobody can touch that girl or what’s hers. You just better watch yourself around her.”

You better. You better. You just better watch yourself around her.

Watch her in the diner, laughing, pouring coffee, palming tips, and frying eggs. Watch her push her hair back, tug her apron higher, refuse dates, pinches, suggestions. Watch her eyes and how they sink into her face, the lines that grow out from that tight stubborn mouth, the easy banter that rises from the deepest place inside her.

“An’t it about time you tried the courthouse again, Sister Anney?”

“An’t it time you zipped your britches, Brother Calvin?”

An’t it time the Lord did something, rained fire and retribution on Greenville County? An’t there sin enough, grief enough, inch by inch of pain enough? An’t the measure made yet? Anney never said what she was thinking, but her mind was working all the time.

Glen Waddell stayed on at the furnace works with Earle for one whole year, and drove all the way downtown for lunch at the diner almost every workday and even some Saturdays. “I’d like to see your little girls,” he told Anney once every few weeks until she started to believe him. “Got to be pretty little girls with such a beautiful mama.” She stared at him, took his quarter tips, and admitted it. Yes, she had two beautiful little girls. Yes, he might as well come over, meet her girls, sit on her porch and talk a little. She wiped sweaty palms on her apron before she let him take her hand. His shoulders were tanned dark, and he looked bigger all over from the work he had been doing with Earle. The muscles bulging through his worn white T-shirt reminded her of Lyle, though he had none of Lyle’s sweet demeanor. His grip when he reached to take her arm was as firm as Earle’s, but his smile was his own, like no one else’s she had ever known. She took a careful deep breath and let herself really smile back at him. Maybe, she kept telling herself, maybe he’d make a good daddy.

 

Mama was working grill at the White Horse Cafe the day the radio announced that the fire downtown had gone out of control, burning the courthouse and the hall of records to the ground. It was midway through the noon rush. Mama was holding a pot of coffee in one hand and two cups in the other. She put the cups down and passed the pot to her friend Mab.

“I’m going home.”

“You what?”

“I’ve got to go home.”

“Where’s she going?”

“Trouble at home.”

The cardboard box of wrinkled and stained papers was tucked under the sheets in the bottom of Aunt Alma’s chifforobe. Mama pulled out the ones she wanted, took them into the kitchen, and dropped them in the sink without bothering to unfold them. She’d just lit a kitchen match when the phone rang.

“You heard, I suppose.” It was Aunt Ruth. “Mab said you took off like someone set a fire under you. ”

“Not me,” Mama replied. “The only fire I got going here is the one burning up all these useless papers.”

Aunt Ruth’s laughter spilled out of the phone and all over the kitchen.

“Girl, there an’t a woman in town going to believe you didn’t set that fire yourself. Half the county’s gonna tell the other how you burned down that courthouse.”

“Let them talk,” Mama said, and blew at the sparks flying up. “Talk won’t send me to jail. The sheriff and half his deputies know I was at work all morning, ‘cause I served them their coffee. I can’t get into any trouble just ’cause I’m glad the goddam courthouse burned down. ”

She blew at the sparks again, whistling into the phone, and then laughed out loud. Halfway across town, Aunt Ruth balanced the phone against her neck, squeezed Granny’s shoulder, and laughed with her. Over at the mill, Aunt Alma looked out a window at the smoke billowing up downtown and had to cover her mouth to keep from giggling like a girl. In the outer yard back of the furnace works, Uncle Earle and Glen Waddell were moving iron and listening to the radio. Both of them grinned and looked up at each other at the same moment, then burst out laughing. It was almost as if everyone could hear each other, all over Greenville, laughing as the courthouse burned to the ground.

G
reenville, South Carolina, in 1955 was the most beautiful place in the world. Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth’s matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars. Weeping willows marched across the yard, following every wandering stream and ditch, their long whiplike fronds making tents that sheltered sweet-smelling beds of clover. Over at the house Aunt Raylene rented near the river, all the trees had been cut back and the scuppernong vines torn out. The clover grew in long sweeps of tiny white and yellow flowers that hid slender red-and-black-striped caterpillars and fat gray-black slugs-the ones Uncle Earle swore would draw fish to a hook even in a thunderstorm. But at Aunt Alma’s, over near the Eustis Highway, the landlord had locked down the spigots so that the kids wouldn’t cost him a fortune in water bills. Without the relief of a sprinkler or a hose the heat had burned up the grass, and the combined efforts of dogs and boys had reduced the narrow yard to a smoldering expanse of baked dirt and scattered rocks.

“Yard’s like a hot griddle,” Aunt Alma complained. “Catches all the heat of that tin roof and concentrates it. You could just about cook on that ground.”