Bastard out of Carolina (5 page)

“That Earle’s got the magic,” Aunt Ruth told me. “Man is just a magnet to women. Breaks their hearts and makes them like it.” She shook her head and smiled at me. “All these youngsters playing at being something, imagining they can drive women wild with their narrow little hips and sweet baby smiles, they never gonna have the gift Earle has, don’t even know enough to recognize it for what it is. A sad wounded man who genuinely likes women—that’s what Earle is, a hurt little boy with just enough meanness in him to keep a woman interested.”

She pushed my hair back off my face and ran her thumb over my eyebrows, smoothing down the fine black hairs. “Your real daddy ...” She paused, looked around, and started again. “He had some of that too, just enough, anyway, to win your mama. He liked women too, and that’s something I can say for him. A man who really likes women always has a touch of magic. ”

 

There weren’t any pictures of my real daddy, and Mama wouldn’t talk to me about him—no more than she would about the rest of the family. It was Granny who told me what a pissant he was; told me he lived up near Blackburn with a wife and six children who didn’t even know I existed; said he sold insurance to colored people out in the county and had never been in jail a day in his life. “A sorry excuse for a man,” she called him, making me feel kind of wretched until Aunt Alma swore he hadn’t been that bad, just pissed everybody off when he wouldn’t come back and ask Granny’s forgiveness after she ran him off.

“Eight days after you were born,” Aunt Alma told me, “he came around while Granny was over at the mill to settle some trouble with one of the boys. Anney wasn’t sure she wanted to see him at all, but Raylene and I persuaded her to let him see you while she stayed in the back bedroom. That boy was scared shitless, holding you in hands stained dark green where he’d been painting his daddy’s flatbed truck. You just looked at him with your black Indian eyes like he wasn’t nothing but a servant, lifting you up for some air or something. Then you let loose and pissed a pailful all down his sleeves, the front of his shirt, and right down his pants halfway to his knees! You peed all over the son of a bitch!”

Aunt Alma hugged me up onto her lap. Her grin was so wide it made her nose seem small. She looked like she’d been waiting to tell me this story since I was born, waiting to praise and thank me for this thing I didn’t even know I had done.

“It’s like you were putting out your mama’s opinion, speaking up for her there on his lap. And that boy seemed to know just what it meant, with your baby piss stinking up his clothes for all to smell. He passed you right over to me like you were gonna go on to drown him if he didn’t hurry. Took off without speaking to your mama and never came back again. When we heard he’d married another little girl was already carrying his baby, Earle joked that the boy was just too fertile for his own good, that he couldn’t plow a woman without making children, and maybe it’s true. With the six he’s got legal, and you, and the others people say he’s got scattered from Spartanburg to Greer, he’s been a kind of one-man population movement. You got family you an’t ever gonna know is your own—all of you with that dark dark hair he had himself.” She grinned at me, reaching out to push my midnight-black hair back off my face.

“Oh, Bone!” she laughed. “Maybe you should plan on marrying yourself a blond just to be safe. Huh?”

 

Granny wouldn’t talk much about my real daddy except to curse his name, but she told me just about everything else. She would lean back in her chair and start reeling out story and memory, making no distinction between what she knew to be true and what she had only heard told. The tales she told me in her rough, drawling whisper were lilting songs, ballads of family, love, and disappointment. Everything seemed to come back to grief and blood, and everybody seemed legendary.

“My granddaddy, your great-great-granddaddy, he was a Cherokee, and he didn’t much like us, all his towheaded grandchildren. Some said he had another family down to Eustis anyway, a proper Indian wife who gave him black-haired babies with blue eyes. Ha! Blue eyes an’t that rare among the Cherokee around here. Me, I always thought it a shame we never turned up with them like his other babies. Of course, he was a black-eyed bastard himself, and maybe he never really made those other babies like they say. What was certain was my grandma never stepped out on him. Woman was just obsessed with that man, obsessed to the point of madness. Used to cry like a dog in the night when he was gone. He didn’t stay round that much either, but every time he come home she’d make another baby, another red-blond child with muddy brown eyes that he’d treat like a puppydog or a kitten. Man never spanked a child in his life, never hit Grandma. You’d think he would have, he didn’t seem to care all that much. Quiet man, too. Wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t barely talk. Not a Boatwright, that’s for sure.

“But we loved him, you know, almost as much as Grandma. Would have killed to win his attention even one more minute than we got, and near died to be any way more like him, though we were as different from him as children can be. None of us quiet, all of us fighters. None of us got those blue eyes, and no one but you got that blue-black hair. Lord, you were a strange thing! You were like a fat red-faced doll with all that black black hair—a baby doll with a full head of hair. Just as quiet and sweet-natured as he used to be. You didn’t even cry till you took croup at four months. I’ve always thought he’d have liked you, Granddaddy would. You even got a little of the shine of him. Those dark eyes and that hair when you was born, black as midnight. I was there to see.”

“Oh, hell,” Earle laughed when I repeated some of Granny’s stories. “Every third family in Greenville County swears it’s part of Cherokee Nation. Whether our great-granddaddy was or wasn’t, it don’t really make a titty’s worth of difference. You’re a Boatwright, Bone, even if you are the strangest girlchild we got.”

I looked at him carefully, keeping my Cherokee eyes level and my face blank. I could not have said a word if Great-Great-Granddaddy had been standing there looking back at me with my own black eyes.

Mama wore her hair cut short, curled, and bleached. Every other month she and Aunt Alma would get together and do each other’s hair, rinsing Aunt Alma’s in beer or lemon juice to lighten it just a little, trimming Mama’s back and bleaching it that dark blond she liked. Then they’d set pin curls for each other, and while those dried they would coax Reese into sitting still long enough that her baby-fine red locks could be tied up in rags. I would tear up the rags, rinse pins, strain the juice through a cloth happily enough, but I refused the perm Mama was always insisting she wanted to give me.

“Stinks and hurts,” I complained. “Do it to Reese.”

“Oh, Reese don’t need it. Look at this.” And Aunt Alma tugged a few of Reese’s springy long curls free from the rags. Like soft corkscrews, the curls bounced and swung as if they were magical. “This child has the best hair in the world, just like yours, Anney, when you were a baby. Yours had a little red to it too, seems to me.”

“No.” Mama shook her head while she pulled more rags out of Reese’s curls. “You know my hair was just blond. You had the red touch, you and Ruth. Remember how you used to fight over whose was darker?”

“Oh, but you had the prettiest hair!” Aunt Alma turned to me. “Your mama had the prettiest hair you ever saw. Soft? Why, it would make Reese’s feel like steel wire. It was the softest hair in Greenville County, and gold as sunlight on sheets. It didn’t go dark till she had you girls, a little bit with you and all dark with Reese. Hair will do that, you know, darken in pregnancy. An’t nothing that will stop it once it starts.”

Mama laughed. “Remember when Carr first got pregnant and swore she’d shave her head if it looked like it was gonna go dark?”

Aunt Alma nodded, her dark brown pin curls bobbing. “Rinsed it in piss, she did, every Sunday evening, Tommy Lee’s baby piss that she begged off Ruth. All ‘cause Granny swore baby-piss rinses would keep her blond.”

“Didn’t she stink?” I bit at the rubber tip of a hairpin, peeling the coating off the metal so I could taste the sweet iron tang underneath.

“Baby piss don’t stink,” Aunt Alma told me, “unless the baby’s sick, and Tommy Lee wasn’t never sick a day in his life. Carr didn’t smell no different than she ever did, but her hair went dark anyway. It’s the price of babies.”

“Oh, it an’t that.” Mama pulled me up onto her lap and started the arduous process of brushing out my hair. “All us Boatwrights go dark as we get older. It’s just the way it goes. Blond goes red or brown, and darker and darker. An’t none of us stays a blond once we’re grown.”

“’Cept you, honey,” Aunt Alma grinned.

“Yeah, but I got Clairol, don’t I?” Mama laughed and hugged me. “What you think, Alma? Should I cut this mop or not? She can’t keep it neat to save her life, hates me pulling on it when I try to brush it out.”

“Hell yes, cut it. I’ll get the bowl. We’ll trim it right down to her neck.”

“Noooo!”
I howled, and wrapped my hands around my head. “I want my hair. I want my hair.”

“But you won’t let us do nothing with it, honey.”

“No! No! No! It’s my hair and I want it. I want it long and tangled and just the way it is.”

Aunt Alma reached over and took the hairpin out of my mouth. “Lord, look at her,” she said. “Stubborn as the day is long.”

“Uh-huh.” Mama put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed. She didn’t sound angry. I raised my head to look at her. Her brown eyes were enormous close up, with little flecks of light in the pupils. I could almost see myself between the flashes of gold.

“Well, what you expect, huh?”

I looked back at Aunt Alma. Her eyes were the same warm brown, deep and shining with the same gold lights, and I realized suddenly that she had the same cheekbones as Mama, the same mouth.

“She’s just like you.”

My mouth wasn’t like that, or my face either. Worse, my black eyes had no gold. I didn’t look like anybody at all.

“You, you mean,” said Mama.

She and Aunt Alma nodded together above me, grinning at each other in complete agreement. I loosened my hands from around my skull slowly, letting Mama start brushing out my hair. Reese put her pudgy little fingers in her mouth and stared at me solemnly. “B-Bone,” she stammered.

“Yes,” Aunt Alma agreed, hefting Reese up in her arms. “Our stubborn Bone is just like her mama, Reesecup. Just like her aunts, just like a Boatwright, and just like you.”

“But I don’t look like nobody,” I wailed.

Aunt Alma laughed. “Why, you look like our Bone, girl.”

“I don’t look like Mama. I don’t look like you. I don’t look like nobody.”

“You look like me,” Mama said. “You look like my own baby girl.” She put her fingers delicately on my cheeks, pressing under my eyes. “You got the look, all right. I can see it, see what it’s gonna be like when you grow bigger, these bones here.” Her fingers slipped smoothly down over my mouth and chin. “And here. You gonna look like our granddaddy, for sure. Those Cherokee cheekbones, huh, Alma?”

“Oh yes, for sure. She’s gonna be another one, another beauty to worry about.”

I smiled wide, not really believing them but wanting to. I held still then, trying not to flinch as Mama began to brush relentlessly at my knotted hair. If I got a permanent, I would lose those hours on Mama’s lap sitting in the curve of her arm while she brushed and brushed and smoothed my hair and talked soft above me. She always seemed to smell of buttery flour, salt, and fingernail polish—a delicate insinuating aroma of the familiar and the astringent. I would breathe deep and bite my lips to keep from moaning while my scalp ached and burned. I would have cut off my head before I let them cut my hair and lost the unspeakable pleasure of being drawn up onto Mama’s lap every evening.

“Do I look like my daddy?” I asked.

There was silence. Mama brushed steadily while Aunt Alma finished pulling the rags from Reese’s hair.

“Do I? Like my daddy, Mama?”

Mama gathered all my hair up in one hand and picked at the ends with the side of the brush. “Alma, get me some of that sweet oil, honey, just a little for my palm. That’s enough.”

The brush started again in long sweeping strokes. Aunt Alma started to hum. I dropped my head. It wasn’t even that I was so insistent on knowing anything about my missing father. I wouldn’t have minded a lie. I just wanted the story Mama would have told. What was the thing she wouldn’t tell me, the first thing, the place where she had made herself different from all her brothers and sisters and shut her mouth on her life?

Mama brushed so hard she pulled my head all the way back. “You just don’t know how to sit still, Bone.”

“No, Mama. ”

I closed my eyes and let her move my head, let her pull and jerk my hair until she relaxed a little. Aunt Alma was humming softly. The smell of sweet oil on Mama’s fingers hung in the air. Reese’s singsong joined Aunt Alma’s hum. I opened my eyes and looked into Mama’s. You could see Reese’s baby smile in those eyes. In the pupils gold flecks gleamed and glittered, like pieces of something bright reflecting light.