Bastard out of Carolina (2 page)

“It’s only when you bring it to their attention that they write it down.”

Granny said it didn’t matter anyhow. Who cared what was written down? Did people read courthouse records? Did they ask to see your birth certificate before they sat themselves on your porch? Everybody who mattered knew, and she didn’t give a rat’s ass about anybody else. She teased Mama about the damn silly paper with the red stamp on the bottom.

“What was it? You intended to frame that thing? You wanted something on your wall to prove you done it right?” Granny could be mean where her pride was involved. “The child is proof enough. An’t no stamp on her nobody can see.”

If Granny didn’t care, Mama did. Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground. The stamp on that birth certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they’d tried to put on her.
No-good, lazy, shiftless.
She’d work her hands to claws, her back to a shovel shape, her mouth to a bent and awkward smile—anything to deny what Greenville County wanted to name her. Now a soft-talking black-eyed man had done it for them—set a mark on her and hers. It was all she could do to pull herself up eight days after I was born and go back to work waiting tables with a tight mouth and swollen eyes.

 

Mama waited a year. Four days before my first birthday and a month past her sixteenth, she wrapped me in a blanket and took me to the courthouse. The clerk was polite but bored. He had her fill out a form and pay a two-dollar fee. Mama filled it out in a fine schoolgirl’s hand. She hadn’t been to school in three years, but she wrote letters for everyone in the family and was proud of her graceful, slightly canted script.

“What happened to the other one?” the clerk asked. Mama didn’t look up from my head on her arm. “It got torn across the bottom.”

The clerk looked at her more closely, turned a glance on me. “Is that right?”

He went to the back and was gone a long time. Mama stood, quiet but stubborn, at the counter. When he came back, he passed her the paper and stayed to watch her face.

It was the same, identical to the other one. Across the bottom in oversized red-inked block letters it read, “ILLEGITIMATE. ”

Mama drew breath like an old woman with pleurisy, and flushed pink from her neck to her hairline. “I don’t want it like this,” she blurted.

“Well, little lady,” he said in a long, slow drawl. Behind him she could see some of the women clerks standing in a doorway, their faces almost as flushed as her own but their eyes bright with an entirely different emotion. “This is how it’s got to be. The facts have been established.” He drew the word out even longer and louder so that it hung in the air between them like a neon reflection of my mama’s blush—
established.

The women in the doorway shook their heads and pursed their lips. One mouthed to the other, “Some people.”

Mama made her back straighten, bundled me closer to her neck, and turned suddenly for the hall door. “You forgetting your certificate,” the man called after her, but she didn’t stop. Her hands on my body clamped so tight I let out a high, thin wail. Mama just held on and let me scream.

 

She waited another year before going back, that time taking my aunt Ruth with her and leaving me with Granny. “I was there,” Aunt Ruth promised them, “and it was really my fault. In so much excitement I just got confused, what with Anney here looking like she was dead to the world and everybody shouting and running around. You know, there was a three-car accident brought in just minutes after us.” Aunt Ruth gave the clerk a very sincere direct look, awkwardly trying to keep her eyes wide and friendly.

“You know how these things can happen.”

“Oh, I do,” he said, enjoying it all immensely.

The form he brought out was no different from the others. The look he gave my mama and my aunt was pure righteous justification.
“What’d you expect?”
he seemed to be saying. His face was set and almost gentle, but his eyes laughed at them. My aunt came close to swinging her purse at his head, but Mama caught her arm. That time she took the certificate copy with her.

“Might as well have something for my two dollars,” she said. At seventeen, she was a lot older than she had been at sixteen. The next year she went alone, and the year after. That same year she met Lyle Parsons and started thinking more about marrying him than dragging down to the courthouse again. Uncle Earle teased her that if she lived with Lyle for seven years, she could get the same result without paying a courthouse lawyer. “The law never done us no good. Might as well get on without it.”

Mama quit working as a waitress soon after marrying Lyle Parsons, though she wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. “We’re gonna need things,” she told him, but he wouldn’t listen. Lyle was one of the sweetest boys the Parsonses ever produced, a soft-eyed, soft-spoken, too-pretty boy tired of being his mama’s baby. Totally serious about providing well for his family and proving himself a man, he got Mama pregnant almost immediately and didn’t want her to go out to work at all. But pumping gas and changing tires in his cousin’s Texaco station, he made barely enough to pay the rent. Mama tried working part-time in a grocery store but gave it up when she got so pregnant she couldn’t lift boxes. It was easier to sit a stool on the line at the Stevens factory until Reese was born, but Lyle didn’t like that at all.

“How’s that baby gonna grow my long legs if you always sitting bent over?” he complained. He wanted to borrow money or take a second job, anything to keep his pretty new wife out of the mill. “Honey girl,” he called her, “sweet thing.”

“Dumpling,” she called him back, “sugar tit,” and when no one could hear, “manchild.” She loved him like a baby, whispered to her sisters about the soft blond hairs on his belly, the way he slept with one leg thrown over her hip, the stories he told her about all the places he wanted to take her.

“He loves Bone, he really does,” she told Aunt Ruth. “Wants to adopt her when we get some money put by.” She loved to take pictures of him. The best of them is one made at the gas station in the bright summer sun with Lyle swinging from the Texaco sign and wearing a jacket that proclaimed “Greenville County Racetrack.” He’d taken a job out at the track where they held the stock-car races, working in the pit changing tires at high speed and picking up a little cash in the demolition derby on Sunday afternoon. Mama didn’t go out there with him much. She didn’t like the noise or the stink, or the way the other men would tease Lyle into drinking warm beer to see if his work slowed down any. As much as she liked taking pictures, she only took one of him out at the track, with a tire hugged against his left hip, grease all over one side of his face, and a grin so wide you could smell the beer.

It was a Sunday when Lyle died, not at the track but on the way home, so easily, so gently, that the peanut pickers who had seen the accident kept insisting that the boy could not be dead. There’d been one of those eerie summer showers where the sun never stopped shining and the rain came down in soft sheets that everybody ignored. Lyle’s truck had come around the curve from the train crossing at a clip. He waved at one of the pickers, giving his widest grin. Then the truck was spinning off the highway in a rain-slicked patch of oil, and Lyle was bumped out the side door and onto the pavement.

“That’s a handsome boy,” one of the pickers kept telling the highway patrolman. “He wasn’t doing nothing wrong, just coming along the road in the rain—that devil’s rain, you know. The sun was so bright, and that boy just grinned so.” The old man wouldn’t stop looking back over to where Lyle lay still on the edge of the road.

Lyle lay uncovered for a good twenty minutes. Everybody kept expecting him to get up. There was not a mark on him, and his face was shining with that lazy smile. But the back of his head flattened into the gravel, and his palms lay open and damp in the spray of the traffic the patrolmen diverted around the wreck.

Mama was holding Reese when the sheriffs car pulled up at Aunt Alma’s, and she must have known immediately what he had come to tell her, because she put her head back and howled like an old dog in labor, howled and rocked and squeezed her baby girl so tight Aunt Alma had to pinch her to get Reese free.

Mama was nineteen, with two babies and three copies of my birth certificate in her dresser drawer. When she stopped howling, she stopped making any sound at all and would only nod at people when they tried to get her to cry or talk. She took both her girls to the funeral with all her sisters lined up alongside of her. The Parsonses barely spoke to her. Lyle’s mother told Aunt Alma that if her boy hadn’t taken that damn job for Mama’s sake, he wouldn’t have died in the road. Mama paid no attention. Her blond hair looked dark and limp, her skin gray, and within those few days fine lines had appeared at the corners of her eyes. Aunt Ruth steered her away from the gravesite while Aunt Raylene tucked some of the flowers into her family Bible and stopped to tell Mrs. Parsons what a damn fool she was.

Aunt Ruth was heavily pregnant with her eighth child, and it was hard for her not to take Mama into her arms like another baby. At Uncle Earle’s car, she stopped and leaned back against the front door, hanging on to Mama. She brushed Mama’s hair back off her face, looking closely into her eyes. “Nothing else will ever hit you this hard,” she promised. She ran her thumbs under Mama’s eyes, her fingers resting lightly on either temple. “Now you look like a Boatwright,” she said. “Now you got the look. You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl. This is the way you’ll look till you die.” Mama just nodded; it didn’t matter to her anymore what she looked like.

 

A year in the mill was all Mama could take after they buried Lyle; the dust in the air got to her too fast. After that there was no choice but to find work in a diner. The tips made all the difference, though she knew she could make more money at the honky-tonks or managing a slot as a cocktail waitress. There was always more money serving people beer and wine, more still in hard liquor, but she’d have had to go outside Greenville County to do that, and she couldn’t imagine moving away from her family. She needed her sisters’ help with her two girls.

The White Horse Cafe was a good choice anyway, one of the few decent diners downtown. The work left her tired but not sick to death like the mill, and she liked the people she met there, the tips and the conversation.

“You got a way with a smile,” the manager told her.

“Oh, my smile gets me a long way,” she laughed, and no one would have known she didn’t mean it. Truckers or judges, they all liked Mama. Aunt Ruth was right, her face had settled into itself. Her color had come back after a while, and the lines at the corners of her eyes just made her look ready to smile. When the men at the counter weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell.

 

Reese was two years old the next time Mama stopped in at the courthouse. The clerk looked pleased to see her again. She didn’t talk to him this time, just picked up the paperwork and took it over to the new business offices near the Sears, Roebuck Auto Outlet. Uncle Earle had given her a share of his settlement from another car accident, and she wanted to use a piece of it to hire his lawyer for a few hours. The man took her money and then smiled at her much like the clerk when she told him what she wanted. Her face went hard, and he swallowed quick to keep from laughing. No sense making an enemy of Earle Boatwright’s sister.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, handing half her money back. “The way the law stands there’s nothing I could do for you. If I was to put it through, it would come back just like the one you got now. You just wait a few years. Sooner or later they’ll get rid of that damn ordinance. Mostly it’s not enforced anymore anyway.”

“Then why,” she asked him, “do they insist on enforcing it on me?”

“Now, honey,” he sighed, clearly embarrassed. He wiggled in his seat and passed her the rest of her money across the desk. “You don’t need me to tell you the answer to that. You’ve lived in this county all your life, and you know how things are.” He gave a grin that had no humor in it at all. “By now, they look forward to you coming in.

“Small-minded people,” he told her, but that grin never left his face.

“Bastard!” Mama hissed, and then caught herself. She hated that word.

 

Family is family, but even love can’t keep people from eating at each other. Mama’s pride, Granny’s resentment that there should even be anything to consider shameful, my aunts’ fear and bitter humor, my uncles’ hard-mouthed contempt for anything that could not be handled with a shotgun or a two-by-four—all combined to grow my mama up fast and painfully. There was only one way to fight off the pity and hatefulness. Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt. She got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant. No one knew that she cried in the night for Lyle and her lost happiness, that under that biscuit-crust exterior she was all butter grief and hunger, that more than anything else in the world she wanted someone strong to love her like she loved her girls.