The Glass Castle (25 page)

"Stop the truck," I said. "We can make it on our own from here."

"Aw, now, I didn't mean nothing by that," he said. "And you know you ain't getting him home on your own."

Still, he stopped. I opened the pickup's tailgate and tried to drag Dad out, but the man was right. I couldn't do it. So I climbed back in next to the driver, folded my arms across my chest, and stared straight ahead. When we reached 93 Little Hobart Street, he helped me pull Dad out.

"I know you took offense at what I said," the man told me. "Thing is, I meant it as a compliment."

Maybe I should have thanked him, but I just waited until he drove off, and then I called Brian to help me get Dad up the hill and into the house.

* * *

A couple of months after Erma died, Uncle Stanley fell asleep in the basement while reading comic books and smoking a cigarette. The big clapboard house burned to the ground, but Grandpa and Stanley got out alive, and they moved into a windowless two-room apartment in the basement of an old house around the hill. The drug dealers who'd lived there before had spray-painted curse words and psychedelic patterns on the walls and the ceiling pipes. The landlord didn't paint over them, and neither did Grandpa and Stanley.

Grandpa and Uncle Stanley did have a working bathroom, so every weekend some of us went over to take a bath. One time I was sitting next to Uncle Stanley on the couch in his room, watching
Hee Haw
and waiting for my turn in the tub. Grandpa was off at the Moose Lodge, where he spent the better part of every day; Lori was taking her bath; and Mom was at the table in Grandpa's room working on a crossword puzzle. I felt Stanley's hand creeping onto my thigh. I looked at him, but he was staring at the
Hee Haw
Honeys so intently that I couldn't be sure he was doing it on purpose, so I knocked his hand away without saying anything. A few minutes later, the hand came creeping back. I looked down and saw that Uncle Stanley's pants were unzipped and he was playing with himself. I felt like hitting him, but I was afraid I'd get in trouble the way Lori had after punching Erma, so I hurried out to Mom.

"Mom, Uncle Stanley is behaving inappropriately," I said.

"Oh, you're probably imagining it," she said.

"He groped me! And he's wanking off!"

Mom cocked her head and looked concerned. "Poor Stanley," she said. "He's so lonely."

"But it was gross!"

Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. "Well, there you go," she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. "If you don't think you're hurt, then you aren't," she said. "So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you're stronger than that." She went back to her crossword puzzle.

After that, I refused to go back to Grandpa's. Being strong was fine, but the last thing I needed was Uncle Stanley thinking I was coming back for more of his fooling around. I did whatever it took to wash myself at Little Hobart Street. In the kitchen, we had an aluminum tub you could fit into if you pulled your legs up against your chest. By then the weather was warm enough to fill the tub with water from the tap under the house and bathe in the kitchen. After the bath, I crouched by the side of the tub and dipped my head in the water and washed my hair. But lugging all those buckets of water up to the house was hard work, and I would put off bathing until I was feeling pretty gamy.

* * *

In the spring, the rains came, drenching the valley for days in sheets of falling water. The water ran down the hillside gullies, pulling rocks and small trees with it, and spilled across the roads, tearing off chunks of asphalt. It gushed into the creeks, which swelled up and turned a foaming light brown, like a chocolate milk shake. The creeks emptied into the Tug, which overflowed its banks and flooded the houses and stores along McDowell Street. Mud was four feet deep in some houses, and folks' pickups and mobile homes were swept away. Over in Buffalo Creek Hollow, a mine impoundment gave way, and a wave of black water thirty feet high killed 126 people. Mom said that this was how nature took her revenge on men who raped and pillaged the land, ruining nature's own drainage system by clear-cutting forests and strip-mining mountains.

Little Hobart Street was too high up in the hollow to get any flooding, but the rain washed parts of the road into the yards of the people who lived below us. The water also ate away some of the soil from around the pillars holding up our house, making it even more precarious. The hole in the kitchen ceiling widened, and then the ceiling on Brian and Maureen's side of the bedroom started leaking. Brian had the top bunk, and when it rained, he'd spread a tarp over himself to keep the dripping water off.

Everything in the house was damp. A fine green mold spread over the books and papers and paintings that were stacked so high and piled so deep you could hardly cross the room. Tiny mushrooms sprouted up in corners. The moisture ate away at the wooden stairs leading up to the house, and climbing them became a daily hazard. Mom fell through a rotted step and went tumbling down the hillside. She had bruises on her legs and arms for weeks. "My husband doesn't beat me," she'd say when anyone stared at them. "He just won't fix the stairs."

The porch had also started to rot. Most of the banisters and railing had given way, and the floorboards had turned spongy and slick with mold and algae. It became a real problem when you had to go down under the house to use the toilet at night, and each of us had slipped and fallen off the porch at least once. It was a good ten feet to the ground.

"We have to do something about the porch situation," I told Mom. "It's getting downright dangerous to go to the bathroom at night." Besides, the toilet under the house was now totally unusable. It had overflowed, and you were better off digging yourself a hole in the hillside somewhere.

"You're right," Mom said. "Something has to be done."

She bought a bucket. It was made of yellow plastic, and we kept it on the floor in the kitchen, and that was what we used whenever we had to go to the bathroom. When it filled up, some brave soul would carry it outside, dig a hole, and empty it.

ONE DAY WHILE
Brian and I were out scrounging around on the edge of our property, he picked up a piece of rotting lumber, and there among the pill bugs and night crawlers was a diamond ring. The stone was big. At first we thought it was just neat junk, but we spit-polished it and scratched glass with it like Dad had shown us, and it seemed real. We figured it must have belonged to the old lady who had lived there. She had died before we moved in. Everyone had said she was a little loopy.

"What do you think it's worth?" I asked Brian.

"Probably more than the house," he said.

We figured we could sell it and buy food, pay off the houseMom and Dad kept missing the monthly payments, and there was talk that we were going to be evictedand maybe still have enough left over for something special, like a new pair of sneakers for each of us.

We brought the ring home and showed it to Mom. She held it up to the light, then said we needed to have it appraised. The next day she took the Trailways bus to Bluefield. When she returned, she told us it was in fact a genuine two-carat diamond.

"So what's it worth?" I asked.

"That doesn't matter," Mom said.

"How come?"

"Because we're not selling it."

She was keeping it, she explained, to replace the wedding ring her mother had given her, the one Dad had pawned shortly after they got married.

"But Mom," I said. "that ring could get us a lot of food."

"That's true," Mom said, "but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food."

* * *

Mom's self-esteem did need some shoring up. Sometimes, things just got to her. She retreated to her sofa bed and stayed there for days on end, crying and occasionally throwing things at us. She could have been a famous artist by now, she yelled, if she hadn't had children, and none of us appreciated her sacrifice. The next day, if the mood had passed, she'd be painting and humming away as if nothing had happened.

One Saturday morning not long after Mom started wearing her new diamond ring, her mood was on an upswing, and she decided we'd all clean the house. I thought this was a great idea. I told Mom we should empty out each room, clean it thoroughly, and put back only the things that were essential. That was the one way, it seemed to me, to get rid of the clutter. But Mom said my idea was too time-consuming, so all we ended up doing was straightening piles of paper into stacks and stuffing dirty clothes into the chest of drawers. Mom insisted that we chant Hail Marys while we worked. "It's a way of cleansing our souls while we're cleaning house," she said. "We're killing two birds with one stone."

The reason she had become a tad moody, she said later that day, was that she hadn't been getting enough exercise. "I'm going to start doing calisthenics," she announced. "Once you get your circulation going, it changes your entire outlook on life." She leaned over and touched her toes.

When she came up, she said she was feeling better already, and went down for another toe touch. I watched from the writing desk with my arms folded across my chest. I knew the problem was not that we all had poor circulation. We didn't need to start doing toe touches. We needed to take drastic measures. I was twelve by now, and I had been weighing our options, doing some research at the public library and picking up scraps of information about how other families on Little Hobart Street survived. I had come up with a plan and had been waiting for the opportunity to broach it to Mom. The moment seemed ripe.

"Mom, we can't go on living like this," I said.

"It's not so bad," she said. Between each toe touch, she was reaching up into the air.

"We haven't had anything to eat but popcorn for three days," I said.

"You're always so negative," she said. "You remind me of my mothercriticize, criticize, criticize."

"I'm not being negative," I said. "I'm trying to be realistic."

"I'm doing the best I can under the circumstances," she said. "How come you never blame your father for anything? He's no saint, you know."

"I know," I said. I ran a finger along the edge of the desk. Dad was always parking his cigarettes there, and it was ribbed with a row of black cigarette burns, like a decorative border. "Mom, you have to leave Dad," I said.

She stopped doing her toe touches. "I can't believe you would say that," she said. "I can't believe that you, of all people, would turn on your father." I was Dad's last defender, she continued, the only one who pretended to believe all his excuses and tales, and to have faith in his plans for the future. "He loves you so much," Mom said. "How can you do this to him?"

"I don't blame Dad," I said. And I didn't. But Dad seemed hell-bent on destroying himself, and I was afraid he was going to pull us all down with him. "We've got to get away."

"But I can't leave your father!" she said.

I told Mom that if she left Dad, she'd be eligible for government aid, which she couldn't get now because she had an able-bodied husband. Some people at schoolnot to mention half the people on Little Hobart Streetwere on welfare, and it wasn't so bad. I knew Mom was opposed to welfare, but those kids got food stamps and clothing allowances. The state bought them coal and paid for their school lunches.

Mom wouldn't hear of it. Welfare, she said, would cause irreparable psychological damage to us kids. "You can be hungry every now and then, but once you eat, you're okay," she said. "And you can get cold for a while, but you always warm up. Once you go on welfare, it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life."

"Fine," I said. "If we're not charity cases, then get a job." There was a teacher shortage in McDowell County, just like there had been in Battle Mountain. She could get work in a heartbeat, and when she had a salary, we could move into a little apartment in town.

"That sounds like an awful life," Mom said.

"Worse than this?" I asked.

Mom turned quiet. She seemed to be thinking. Then she looked up. She was smiling serenely. "I can't leave your father," she said. "It's against the Catholic faith." Then she sighed. "And anyway, you know your mom. I'm an excitement addict."

MOM NEVER TOLD
Dad that I'd urged her to leave him. That summer he still thought of me as his biggest supporter, and given that there was so little competition for the job, I probably was.

One afternoon in June, Dad and I were sitting out on the porch, our legs dangling over the side, looking down at the houses below. That summer, it was so hot I could barely breathe. It seemed hotter than Phoenix or Battle Mountain, where it regularly climbed above a hundred degrees, so when Dad told me it was only ninety degrees, I said the thermometer must be broken. But he said no, we were used to dry desert heat, and this was humid heat.

It was a lot hotter, Dad pointed out, down in the valley along Stewart Street, which was lined with those cute brick houses that had their neat, square lawns and corrugated aluminum breezeways. The valleys trapped the heat. Our house was the highest on the mountainside, which made it, ergo, the coolest spot in Welch. In case of floodingas we had seenit was also the safest. "You didn't know I put a lot of thought into where we should live, did you?" he asked me. "Real estate's about three things, Mountain Goat. Location. Location. Location."

Dad started laughing. It was a silent laugh that made his shoulders shake, and the more he laughed, the funnier it seemed to him, which made him laugh even harder. I had to start laughing, too, and soon we were both hysterical, lying on our backs, tears running down our cheeks, slapping our feet on the porch floor. We'd get too winded to laugh any further, our sides cramping with stitches, and we'd think our fit was over, but then one of us would start chuckling, and that would get the other going, and again we'd both end up shrieking like hyenas.

* * *

The main source of relief from the heat for the kids in Welch was the public swimming pool, down by the railroad tracks near the Esso station. Brian and I had gone swimming once, but Ernie Goad and his friends were there, and they started telling everybody that we Wallses lived in garbage and would stink up the pool water something awful. This was Ernie Goad's opportunity to take revenge for the Battle of Little Hobart Street. One of his friends came up with the phrase. "health epidemic," and they were going on to the parents and lifeguards that we needed to be ejected to prevent an outbreak at the pool. Brian and I decided to leave. As we were walking away, Ernie Goad came up to the chain-link fence. "Go on home to the garbage dump!" he shouted. His voice was shrill with triumph. "Go on, now, and don't come back!"