A Place to Call Home (5 page)

Grandpa patted my shoulder. “We’re not jinxed. We just live on the opposite side of the fence. We’re as strange to him as he is to us.”

I turned toward the woods again. “You come over and see us!” I yelled. “I’m leaving a gate open for you!”

• • •

When I was in the second grade, Neely Tipton made my life a constant, daily hell. He was a year ahead of me, the third-grade bully—a walking, talking stereotype of a future football gorilla—and he made a game of slipping up behind me, hissing “Bony Maloney,” yanking my hair so hard, my eyes watered, then running before I could turn around.

I knew, of course, that Evan or Hop would cheerfully strangle Neely if I asked them nicely, but one of the lessons I’d already learned, being the only girl in a house full of brothers, was to keep quiet and get even. I was both a girly-girl and a tomboy—the first because Mama was so pleased to have a female child that she exaggerated my differences, the latter because—poor Mama—Hop and Evan treated me like a baby brother who just happened to have long hair and an innie.

The only problem with Neely was that he moved too fast for me to smack him. I began to get twitchy about it, always looking over one shoulder with a fist curled against my stomach.

But he learned his lesson one day and he never laid a hand on my hair again.

It started like every other Neely-dreading encounter. At recess I edged warily out a doorway to the playground. He was lurking behind the open door, and the next thing I knew my head jerked and I flew backward like a calf hitting the end of a rodeo rope. I landed on my back on a concrete stoop and lay there, gasping for air, my jumper hiked up to my panties, the crown of my head burning as if I’d been scalped.

“Bony Maloney, I
gotcha
,” Neely yelled. Dazed, I propped myself on my skinned elbows just in time to hear Neely’s footsteps crunching quickly on the graveled rain-drip bed beside the building. Then I heard a
whump
and looked over to see Neely bounce off the brick wall and sit down hard.

Roanie towered over him, cool as a cucumber. “You mess with her again,” Roanie told him calmly, “and I’ll jerk your butthole through your mouth.”

I stared at Roanie with stunned wonder. Neely began snuffling. I got up, wobbled over proudly, and punched him in the side of the head. Personal revenge, better late than never.

Roanie looked down at me with his eyes half shut and glittering. Maybe he expected me to ignore him or insult him or run like a squirrel. “Thanks, Roanie,” I said very carefully, because I couldn’t quite forget those head lice he’d had the year before.

“I seen you, and I heard you, that time at the Hollow,” he said. “You ain’t like nobody else in the whole world.” Then he just shrugged and walked away.

That was the day I began to love Roanie Sullivan.

    The realization that I was in love was something I weighed against Maloney romantic tradition, which, to me, was majestically powerful but might be bad for a person’s teeth.

Sean and Bridget Maloney. Romantic Irish names. But there was nothing romantic about the two old people, my great-great-great-grandparents, who stared down at me from massive portraits that hung in the main hallway of our home. I was afraid of them—that gray-bearded Irishman and the solemn, thin-faced Irishwoman with her hair in white ringlets who had birthed twelve children and buried six of them with her own hands.

Daddy assured me people just didn’t smile for pictures back then. Smiling wasn’t proper, and besides, a lot of old people were missing a couple of their front teeth. But I was convinced that my ancestors thought I wasn’t up to the job of being a Maloney. They’d crossed an ocean. They’d carved a thousand-acre farm out of the Estatoe Valley wilderness. They’d named a town and helped build it. They were giants.

And they were still close by, under timeworn tombstones on a knoll behind the house, surrounded by their lost babies and surviving children, the wives and husbands of their children, their grandchildren, and assorted others—a sprawling, granite town of dead Maloneys. On Halloweens my brothers and cousins and I huddled among them, telling one another ghost stories that seemed all too real. Uncle Bert jumped out of the shadows one Halloween, wearing his preacher’s robe and a Nixon mask.

Most of us, me included, wet our pants.

So a person was better off keeping romantic information to herself around other Maloneys, because the dead ones had stern, unsmiling expectations and the live ones might scare the tea out of you when you least expected it.

What took place the next spring later became known among my relatives as The Day We First Saw It Coming. It had to do with me, Roanie, the McClendon sisters, Easter, and evil.

T
he McClendon sisters lived in a cluster of shabby little houses and trailers in the woods north of town, on a dead-end dirt lane named Steckem Road. I had access to a spectrum of lurid, half-baked gossip, so I’d done my share of snickering over Steckem Road’s whispered nickname.
Stick ’Em in Road
.

I knew it involved men and women and their private parts, plus I had a vague idea about what was being stuck where. I also knew, from remarks I overheard at home, that if any of my brothers ever so much as set foot on Steckem Road, Mama and Daddy would skin them alive.

Mama would have skinned her brother Pete if she could. It was a well-known fact, even among us kids, that our Uncle Pete Delaney spent half his time with the McClendon sisters on Steckem Road. I had heard enough about his notorious habits to know he was the shame of the Delaneys. That might explain why his boys, Harold and Arlan, were so mean. Embarrassment makes some people use hatefulness as a protection.

There were four sisters—Daisy, Edna Fae, Lula, and Sally. Daisy was the oldest, about thirty-five when I was seven, though her bleached yellow hair and the hard lines around her mouth made her look older. She had a husband, but nobody had seen him in years. She had two nearly
grown sons who’d already run away from home and two scraggly, half-grown girls whom my Uncle William Delaney, the county judge, and my Aunt Bess Maloney, the county social worker, had sent to live elsewhere for reasons nobody explained to me.

Daisy spent most of her time with Big Roan Sullivan. In some strange way I think she loved him.

Edna Fae and Lula had had a whole pack of husbands, and the latest models looked like stray dogs waiting for a better offer. “You could throw a handful of marbles at Edna Fae’s and Lula’s tribe of children and not hit two that have the same daddy.” That’s what Grandpa said.

Sally McClendon was sixteen, the youngest of the sisters. She’d already dropped out of high school, and her main hobby was stealing makeup and perfume from my Aunt Jean’s Dime to Dollar Store, and I couldn’t fathom why she didn’t just buy the stuff, it was so cheap. But worst of all, Sally had a baby. A son. I couldn’t understand where she’d gotten him, with no husband around. I had heard that Sally was Uncle Pete’s favorite McClendon sister.

My Aunt Dockey Maloney said the McClendons were
evil
.

“Evil exists to teach us the difference between right and wrong.” That’s what Aunt Dockey told us, and she, being Uncle Bert’s wife, and him the minister of Mt. Gilead Methodist, was as good as a preacher herself, so she ought to know.

“God presents us with choices,” Aunt Dockey lectured at Sunday school and family get-togethers and any other time she had an audience. “He says, ‘Now here’s this path and here’s that path. Here’s a sin and here’s a virtue. And if we choose according to His commandments, we never go wrong.’ ”

Aunt Dockey made righteousness sound like comparison-shopping at a mall. So I understood why our town needed the McClendon sisters. They were a lesson in what happened when people ignored God’s shopping list. They
survived on welfare checks and odd jobs, doing laundry and cleaning houses for people in town, supplemented by what they earned from the men who visited them. Uncle Pete, I decided, was just plain strange for wanting anything to do with such women.

When I was older, I understood that the McClendon sisters were poor, uneducated, and abused. But at seven I only understood that they aroused both pity and disgust in my family. Polish those feelings with well-intentioned religion and you get charity.

That’s how Easter got tied in with the whole mess.

I’m ashamed to admit that I already thought of Easter in terms of goodie baskets and egg hunts and frilly new dresses, not of solemn celebrations of Jesus ascending to Heaven. The mountains were speckled with white dogwood blossoms and the soft green palette of new leaves, the yards around our house burst into patches of yellow jonquils and red azaleas; the air smelled sweet and warm-cool, and the bugs hadn’t come out yet. There were calves and chicks and kittens and puppies to play with, and a whole new clan of wild, gray Peter Cottontails bouncing across the long driveway between the front fields, and the fields began to trade the empty brown surface of winter for a primer coat of green stripes.

I couldn’t be solemn. I was Mama and Daddy’s only daughter; I was the Easter princess. Everybody got new clothes to wear on Easter Sunday, but mine were special. Mama bought me a pale pink dress with imported lace at the neck and a skirt so ruffled that it stood out from my waist like a shelf. I had new white patent-leather shoes and sheer white knee socks with pink roses embroidered on the ankles and a broad-brimmed white straw hat with a pink ribbon that trailed halfway down my back.

The Saturday before Easter was egg-decorating day. If there’s one thing you have on a chicken farm, it’s eggs. The Monday after Easter, by the way, was egg-salad day.

We spent the whole Saturday in the kitchen, boiling eggs and dipping them in vinegar-scented pastel baths. Josh and Brady were too old and serious for egg decorating; Hop and Evan hung around but wouldn’t admit they wanted to participate, but Mama, Daddy, the old folks, and I decorated up a storm. No Fabergé designer for Russian royalty was ever more intense about egg art than we were.

We put some of the eggs in a dozen small Easter baskets along with candy and Bible pamphlets. Those baskets were for the poor McClendon children of Steckem Road. Aunt Dockey and Mama and some other church ladies delivered the baskets to them every year.

I raced downstairs in my nightgown on Easter morning. And there, in the center of the library table in the living room, sat my personal huge, pink Easter basket exploding with pink cellophane and pink bows and a soft pink poodle doll. Mama and Daddy peeked at me from the doorway.

I said dutifully, “Thank you for the poodle doll,” then shoved it aside and went for the good stuff—foil-wrapped marshmallow eggs, and marzipan chickens, and a giant chocolate rabbit with yellow marzipan eyes, all nestled in a bed of green cellophane grass. I tore the rabbit from his plastic wrapping and examined his molded perfection with my fingertips. I could already taste his richness, imagine his hollow innards, his delicious shape.

Evan strode into the room dressed in his blue Easter suit and white silk tie, his red hair slicked down, his white Bible in one hand. He was only twelve, but he was going through a holier-than-thou phase.

“This isn’t what Easter is about,” he announced. “I think we should wait.”

“Evan’s right,” Mama allowed. “Claire, don’t eat that candy until after church.”

I had the rabbit halfway to my mouth. Oh, temptation. Oh, interrupted greed. Oh, the sin of chocolate lust. Oh, bunny.

“Claire,” Daddy warned, drawing my name out.

“Oh,
dammit
,” I blurted out.

Doomed. Doomed the second that word passed my lips. The Lord had not risen so that Claire Maloney could say “dammit” over a chocolate rabbit.

Which is why I had to sit out the Easter egg hunt and donate my beloved basket, chocolate rabbit and pink poodle and all, to the McClendon children of Steckem Road. And I had to go there, too, with Mama and Aunt Dockey and the other ladies, on Easter afternoon, to see why I should be humble.

The McClendon place reminded me of Sullivan’s Hollow, with paper trash littering a bare-earth yard shared by a half circle of tiny, dilapidated houses and rust-streaked trailers. There were no flowers and no shrubs, and the forest cast long shadows on two ancient sedans with bald tires and duct tape plastered over their broken windows. Skinny dogs crept around, shy and standoffish, like the children. The porches sagged with junk. Edna Fae’s latest husband was stretched out on a couch under a tree. His mouth was open. He snored. His shirt was unbuttoned and he had one hand jammed down the front of his jeans.

“May the Lord bless us for our bounty and help us help those who cannot help themselves,” Aunt Dockey said as she pulled up the parking brake of her Cadillac.

“Amen,” Mama said.

“Please wash this place clean of sin,” intoned Sarah Kehoe, Mama’s first cousin, from the backseat.

“And please punish men who have ten dollars to waste,” added Mama’s older sister, Irene.

“That’s all it costs Pete each time?” asked Ruby O’Brien, Daddy’s cousin-in-law. I adored Cousin Ruby. She ran a dress shop and let her children draw on their bedroom walls. She was a little flighty and always blurted good questions in front of us kids.