A Place to Call Home (7 page)

“Roanie Sullivan showed up at school with a big knot on his forehead,” Hop told us one night. “I heard he caught Arlan and Harold knocking his mailbox again and they took a swing at him.”

“Do something, Mama,” I begged. “They’ll bust his brains out.”

Mama sighed and looked at her mother. But Grandmother Elizabeth insisted Arlan and Harold would have turned out gentler if their mother, Uncle Pete’s wife, hadn’t died young. They were her grandsons after all. “Men need a full-fledged mother in attendance throughout their childhood in order to refine them,” Grandmother Elizabeth said unhappily.

Great-Gran Alice snorted. “Pete’s a no-account, and you raised him.”

Grandmother Elizabeth began to cry. Mama patted her hand and eyed Daddy. “I’ve talked to Pete until I’m blue in the face. Will you try again?”

Daddy sighed. He was close with Mama’s other brothers but barely tolerated Pete. “He doesn’t listen. There’s not
much I can do if Roanie won’t name names, and Big Roan doesn’t care.”

“Roanie’s bound to drop out of school pretty soon,” Evan predicted. “Nobody could put up with the kind of crap he gets.” Evan almost wished he’d quit school, I believe, because Evan had had asthma when he was little and remembered being teased about his wheezy frailness. He could sympathize.

I was furious. At the next family get-together I went up to Arlan and Harold. “I hope you die and buzzards eat your guts,” I told them. “I hope you get sick and your peters fall off.” They laughed.

But Roanie hung on as tenaciously as bitterweed in a cow pasture. He had no money for nice notebooks or pens or field trips down to Atlanta for the symphony or the Fernbank science museum—the sort of things I and mine took for granted. He could never afford lunch in the school cafeteria, and he never had money for even the bare necessities to play a sport, although the coaches avidly wanted his big, aggressive self on their teams. He took as little as he could to get by. Some time later, when I got to know him, I understood.

“The only things you can count on keepin’,” he told me, “is what you think inside your own head.”

He dropped out of high school only once, in the early spring when I was nine, after Big Roan robbed Uncle Pete’s store.

The Auto Supply was in a low concrete building that Uncle Pete had erected on a back street in town, across from the lot where he sold used cars. We pretty much rolled up the sidewalks at six in town, so there weren’t many people around after dark.

Big Roan, drunk as usual, drove his truck through the Auto Supply’s big plate-glass window one March night, then loaded up with oil filters, radiator hoses, a CB radio, and a new set of tires. But the store had its own peculiar
alarm system—Dot and Rigby Boyles, retired Baptist missionaries who lived next door to the Auto Supply with their ten dachshunds.

The dachshunds barked, the Boyles called Sheriff Vince O’Brien—and Big Roan was in jail within thirty minutes. Uncle William Delaney sentenced him to two months. Since Roanie was only fourteen and had no other relatives, my Aunt Bess and a couple of other social workers went down to the Hollow to collect him. He sprinted into the deep forest on the ridge above and refused to come back. Daddy and Sheriff Vince tracked him for a few days, without any luck.

I walked over to Grandma and Grandpa Maloney’s house. “Roanie’ll starve,” I moaned to Grandpa Joseph.

He laid a finger to his lips. His eyes gleamed. “No, he won’t. I know where he is.”

Ten Jumps Lake had belonged to Maloneys for as long as anyone could remember. It was nearly a mile off an old paved road that intersected Soap Falls above the farm. The lake was small and rimmed with high ridges, and the only way to get there was by a narrow trail that crawled around steep hillsides and turned into a mud bog where it crossed creek-fed bottoms.

Grandpa said the lake was named for a Cherokee legend about a warrior who once crossed it in ten jumps, using the backs of giant turtles as stepping-stones. He had helped his great-uncle Harvey build a two-room hunting cabin there decades ago, and because Harvey was a retired navy man who owned a salvage business on the Georgia coast, the cabin was an odd, landlocked creation made of timbers from an old yacht, with a chimney of smooth, round ballast stones that Harvey collected from the wreck of an eighteenth-century schooner. One of Harvey’s nieces had inherited the land and the cabin from him, but she lived in Minnesota, and we’d never met her. Grandpa paid the property taxes for her every year.

Grandpa parked his truck behind a grove of thick green laurels and we crept along the lake’s edge. The cabin’s broken-out windows and the black rectangle of its doorless doorway gaped at us across the water through large oaks and ferns as tall as I was. “There’s nothing else like it in the county,” Grandpa whispered. “It’s a boat in a strange harbor, but it’s right where it belongs.”

“Is Roanie in there?”

“Yep.” Grandpa pointed. “He fishes for brim in the lake. I’ve come across his trail a dozen times since he was little. I’ve seen him out on the porch a time or two, but I never let him know.”

“Why?”

“It’s the only safe place he’s got, sweet pea. He’s like a wild animal in a burrow. If he thinks we’ve found his den, he might not come anymore. But I think he’s got more than he bargained for this time, with his daddy in jail.”

“Daddy and Cousin Vince’ll carry him off someplace if they find out!”

“I know. Maybe that’d be the kindest thing for him, but I just can’t abide it.” He touched the tip of a thick forefinger to my nose. “This is our secret. Your grandma’s the only other soul who knows.”

I nodded avidly. Then we went back to the truck, and Grandpa took out a big cardboard box packed with food, and we left it on the lake bank in front of the laurels. Grandpa tore a sheet of paper from a notepad in the pocket of his overalls and gave me a pencil, and I wrote,
Roanie, IT IS OKAY TO EAT. My GRANDPA says don’t worry. WE WON’T TELL. Your friend, Claire
.

“If he trusts anybody it’s only you,” Grandpa said.

When we went back the next day, the box was where we left it, but the food was gone and Grandma Dottie’s plastic serving containers were there, rinsed and stacked. I was so proud I put long letters to Roanie in every box after that.

We left food every day for a month—Grandma’s baked
hams and roasted chickens, casseroles, and slabs of cakes and pies. At first she sent the food in leftover margarine tubs, but as Grandpa proudly returned the washed tubs, she began substituting her good Tupperware. By the time Big Roan was released from jail and Roanie reappeared at school, he’d earned full Tupperware trust.

“Wherever the boy was hiding,” Daddy mused after he saw Roanie in town, “he looks like he lived off the land pretty well. I have to give him credit.”

“You should, son, you should,” Grandpa said.

Christmas in town was overwhelming and wildly uncoordinated and so bright it hurt my eyes, and I loved it. The Ladies’ Civic Association ran the Christmas festival, and Aunt Irene, Mama’s older sister, ran the association.

Every store owner in town put up decorations right after Thanksgiving. When I was little that meant miles of metallic garland, glowing plastic Santas, fake snow applied to the windows, and strings of lights that draped the big elm trees around the square as if some giant, addled spider had woven multicolored webs around them. At the center, on the lawn of the courthouse, sat a log manger with a life-size nativity scene cut out of plywood. If any civil libertarian had complained about the nativity being on public property, he would have been hunted down like Santa’s reindeer during bow season.

On a Saturday night in the middle of December, hundreds of people congregated on the square to listen to a choir from one of the churches and watch a parade and the arrival of Santa and the official lighting of the giant cedar tree beside the courthouse steps.

We Maloneys and Delaneys got there early and commandeered a whole corner where Main Street splits to make a loop around the courthouse. I stood, warm in my nice wool coat and pants in the crisp air, jostling excitedly against my brothers and cousins, as the choir of Mt. Gilead Methodist burst into “Jingle Bells” from their platform in
front of the Chamber of Commerce offices and the parade started coming toward the square, led by Aunt Irene dressed as an angel, her big wings made of chicken wire covered in white muslin. I looked behind me for no particular reason and met Roanie’s eyes. He was standing by himself in the shadows under the tin awning of the dime store. He was watching me.

I was nine, short and plump. He was fourteen, tall and lanky. His hair lay in thick, dark hanks pushed behind his ears. He looked ragged and grimy in faded jeans and a thin denim jacket with two of the brass buttons torn off. His shoulders were hunched against the night air. His eyes were cool and silvery, like the metal garland stapled to a store window behind him.

I pretended he was a young cowboy who’d wandered in off the range. Lonesome. So broke he could only spend a nickel with his silvery eyes. His grime came from dusty trails, not a dirty trailer. He had lost his buttons wrestling a rustler.

With that romantic image to bolster me, I wormed my way unnoticed to the back of the crowd and leaned against an awning post with my sweaty hands hidden in my coat pockets. He studied me with a slight wariness in his mouth and eyes. The mystery of the frontier made my heart race. “Howdy, pardner,” I drawled.

He could be the stillest human being, but it was the stillness of a cat watching a bird. I’m sure he weighed the consequences of speaking to a prissy, precocious little girl who had sadistic cousins and whose attention might get him in trouble with her overprotective parents and about another two dozen righteous Maloneys who might turn around at any second and see us.

“Funny little peep,” he said eventually.

“So are you,” I said back. “Funny
big
peep.”

“Look like a red-haired elf.”

I took that to be some kind of invitation, so I inched
closer. My head barely reached the chest pocket on his jacket. “I expect to grow.”

He stared straight ahead. “Aw, you ain’t too bad.”

“You aren’t either.”

“Sure know how to scribble words.”

I beamed at him.

The parade began. The big red hook-and-ladder truck from the fire department crept by, with a dozen volunteer firemen sitting on top. They flung candy into the crowd. A miniature bag of butterscotch drops bounced off my head and Roanie caught it. He cupped that little bag of candy in his palm, studying it, running his thumb over it as if it were gold. Then he offered it to me. “Hit you first,” he said.

“Huh? You caught it. It’s yours. I don’t like butterscotch.” Which was a he, but I wondered if that bag of candy was the only Christmas present he’d get. He shrugged but carefully tucked the bag in his chest pocket.

“I can’t see the parade,” I said coyly. “Think I’ll climb up on the windowsill.”

“You’ll fall off and bust something.”

“Nah. I’ll hold on to you.” I grabbed his sleeve and he stiffened. He stared at my hand on his arm, then looked furtively around as if to ward off anyone who accused him of provoking me. I clambered nimbly atop the wide wooden sill of the dime store’s window and perched there. I planted my hand on his left shoulder. “Now you don’t move and I won’t fall.”

“This ain’t so funny. Get down and let go.”

“It’s okay. It’s my idea. Look!” I pointed to Aunt Irene, who was passing the corner, her chicken-wire wings bobbing wildly. “My Aunt Irene looks like a big ol’ white goose!”

“Git down,” Roanie said again in a low voice.

At the front of the spectators, I saw Mama’s head dip. She searched for me around her legs, then pivoted quickly and looked through the crowd. When she spotted me with
Roanie, her eyes widened and her mouth popped open and she stared. She tapped Daddy on the shoulder and he turned, too. I grinned at them. His red brows arched, then he rolled his eyes. Mama frowned hard. He took her by one arm and spoke closely in her ear, and she exhaled with her lips pressed together. They faced the parade again.

“See?” I chirped to Roanie, whose shoulder felt like a clump of rock under my hand. “Nobody minds.”

After a moment he said darkly, “You don’t know nothin’.”

I thought I knew everything and started to tell him so, but the high school band marched by and drowned me out with “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” followed by Uncle Dwayne and Aunt Rhonda Maloney, playing Joseph and Mary. Decent people didn’t talk while Joseph and Mary were going past. Uncle Dwayne was dressed in blue sheets and looked biblical with his long red beard. Aunt Rhonda was dressed in white sheets and looked nervous, because she was trying to hold a baby-doll Jesus while balancing sideways on the small brown mule Uncle Dwayne was leading.

Next the Three Wise Men came along, riding skittish horses with their western saddles peeking out from under the Wise Men’s robes. I leaned over and whispered hotly to Roanie, “I know
plenty
. I know you oughta tell somebody when Arlan and Harold beat up on you. They’d get in trouble.”

“Rich boys ain’t never gonna get in no trouble.”

“They’re not rich! Uncle Pete spends all his money on stock-car racing.”

“You don’t know nothin’,” he repeated.

“You know what?” I said grandly, changing the subject. “You could cut some holly or mistletoe at the Hollow and bring it over to Mama, ’cause she uses it in her decorations, and she’d pay you with a box of homemade Christmas cookies.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“She would!”

“I ain’t been invited.”

“I’m inviting you!”

“
You don’t know nothin’.
”

“You say that one more time and I’ll pull out all your hair! If you still got those nasty lice, I’ll yank them out, too!” What a terrible thing I had blurted out. How thoughtless and cruel. His angry, accusing eyes shot to mine and I nearly swallowed my tongue. “I didn’t mean it. Roanie, I didn’t—”

My plea was cut short by a collective gasp in the crowd. I heard someone yelp, “Oh, my God, somebody stop him.”

Big Roan had joined the parade.