Bastard out of Carolina (37 page)

“Oh, but that’s why I got to cut his throat,” she said plainly. “If I didn’t love the son of a bitch, I’d let him live forever. ”

 

“Woman takes it in her head to go crazy, you just might as well stand back.” Uncle Earle was joking to Grey and Garvey out on the porch in the dark, the three of them standing close together smoking and sharing a beer. They’d wanted to get in the house so bad Mama had finally let them move some of the broken furniture, insisting they do it quietly so that Alma could sleep.

“Oh, women,” Garvey grunted. “They’re not that hard to handle. ”

“You think!” Uncle Earle laughed. “I’m telling you, boy, you never can predict what a woman might not do. You remember that little girl from Nashville I brought around two summers ago, sweet little thing not any bigger than Bone and all pasty-faced, blond, and giggly?”

“Tiny, yeah,” Grey almost laughed. He sounded like he remembered her well. “She was so shy nobody got to know her.”

“Well, that little thing,” Uncle Earle drawled, “that little thing just about cut my balls off with a pair of scissors one night. Got me by the short hairs and tried as hard as she could. If I hadn’t been twice her weight and six times as scared, she’d have left me a eunuch.” He laughed like the idea still made him nervous. “I’m telling you, women are dangerous. You need to keep it in mind.”

I leaned my face against the screen door. It creaked slightly, and they all looked over toward me. I must have been silhouetted against the kitchen light like some ghostly night creature, because they all jumped. Earle’s face went stiff.

“Bone,” he said, “you better get back in there with your mama. She might need your help.” Grey stood there quietly beside Earle, his hand still holding a beer can. I waited a minute, looking at him, remembering when he swore he would never forget what we had done. He lifted the beer can, drank deeply. He looked so proud to be standing on that porch drinking with Uncle Earle.

“Didn’t you hear Earle?” Garvey’s tone was harsh. I looked at him directly and snorted. Little boy pretending to be a man didn’t scare me, but I backed into the kitchen anyway. I remembered that Nashville girl perfectly well. She had been so shy she stuttered whenever she tried to answer a question, and she was terrified of bugs of any kind. We’d teased her until she cried and went running to Earle like he was her father, not her supposed-to-be husband. She hadn’t looked to me like the kind that could do any damage at all, or even think about it. Not like Aunt Alma, who was, after all, a Boatwright, and dangerous as any man even when she wasn’t crazy.

But you can’t tell with women, I thought. I looked down at my hands in the dim light of the lamp Mama had set up on the counter near the sink. My hands were small, the tendons blue and fine under pale skin, like Alma’s and Mama’s. We all had small hands. I looked back down the hall to the bedroom. I could just see the smashed and tumbled bed frame.

No, I thought, you just can’t tell with women. Might be you can’t even tell with girls.

 

“I never realized before how much you look like Alma.” It was so late it was almost morning. Mama’s voice came out of the darkness from the direction of the doorway. “But when we were sitting on those steps together and you were standing in the yard, I saw it so clear. I saw what you’re gonna look like when you’re full-grown. You’re gonna be as pretty as Alma was when she was a girl, prettier than you can imagine.”

I said nothing. I was wrapped in a blanket, sitting on Little Earle’s mattress up against the wall where we had dragged it earlier in the evening. Aunt Alma had finally gone to sleep, and
Mama
had decided
it was safe for us to try to get some
rest. But for an hour she had been sitting propped up on her pillow, smoking, and I had been staring into the dark, listening to the cows move around in the pasture near the house.

Mama shifted restlessly, turning toward me. “Bone,” she said softly. “What is it you think about all the time?”

“Nothing much.” I looked at the cigarette’s burning tip. My eyes had adjusted to the dark so that I could make out the shape of her body, her shoulders pushed up on the pile of old pillows, her arms lying on top of the blanket. “Nothing I could explain. ”

“You’re always so quiet, always watching,” Mama’s voice was soft, and sounded more relaxed than I had heard in a long time. “I can tell when you’re mad, you know. You get that storm-cloud look on your face, and you’ve had that enough lately.” She shifted in her blanket, put the cigarette out in a saucer on the floor.

“The thing is, if you’re not mad, I can’t tell what’s happening inside you. You never look happy. You look like you’re waiting. What are you waiting for, Bone?”

For you to go back to Daddy Glen, I thought, and hugged my blanket tighter around my shoulders.

“Bone?”

I touched the backs of my fingers to my throat, felt the warmth there, the pulse in the hollow beneath my chin.

“Bone? You’re not asleep?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to talk to me?”

My fingers were wet, my chin, the edge of the blanket. I remembered Aunt Alma’s direct look this afternoon when she’d talked about loving Wade, about wanting to kill him. I didn’t understand that kind of love. I didn’t understand anything. I swallowed and tried not to make a sound.

“You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?” Mama sounded like she wanted to cry. I bent forward and pressed my mouth to the blanket edge. “Not gonna tell me anything?”

One of the cows moaned out in the dark pasture. I swallowed again. “I’m waiting for you to go home,” I said. “I’m waiting for you to go back to Daddy Glen.”

There was a long silence. “You think I’m going to?” Mama whispered finally.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Oh, Bone.” She sat up, took another cigarette out, and lit it with a match. In the glow I saw her cheeks pale and shiny. “You want to come over here and sit by me?”

“No.” I didn’t move. I felt as if I had become hypersensitive, as if I could hear everything, the cow’s hooves in the damp grass, the dew slipping off the porch eaves, Mama’s heart pounding with fear.

“Bone, I couldn’t stand it if you hated me,” she said.

“I couldn’t hate you,” I told her. “Mama, I couldn’t hate you.”

“But you’re sure I’m gonna go back to him.”

“Uh-huh.” I coughed and cleared my throat.

“Oh God, Bone! I can’t just go back. I can’t have you hating me.”

“I an’t never gonna hate you.” I took a deep breath, and made myself speak with no intonation at all. “I know you love him. I know you need him. And he’s good to you. He’s good to Reese. He just ...” I thought a minute. “I don’t know.”

We were quiet for a while. When Mama spoke she sounded almost like a girl, unsure of herself and scared. “Maybe he needs to talk to somebody. Raylene said maybe he needed a doctor.”

I wiped my face and shrugged. Now I felt tired, aching tired, so deeply tired it was hard to pull air all the way down into my lungs. “Maybe,” I said.

“I won’t go back until I know you’re gonna be safe.” Mama’s voice was determined. “I promise you, Bone.”

“I won’t go back.” The words were so quiet, so flat, they didn’t seem to have come out of me. But once they were said, some energy seemed to come back to me.

“I wouldn’t make you, honey.”

“No. I know. It’s not that, Mama. I know you wouldn’t.” I sat up, rocked my head forward, and heard my neck bones make an odd cracking sound as the muscles stopped straining. When I spoke this time, my voice was strong, the words clear. “I know you’ll go back, Mama, and maybe you should. I don’t know what’s right for you, just what I have to do. I can’t go back to live with Daddy Glen. I won’t. I could go stay with Aunt Carr for a while or move in with Raylene. I think she’d be glad to keep me. But no matter what you decide, when you go back to Daddy Glen, I can’t go with you.”

“Bone.” Mama got up from her mattress so fast I felt myself push back against the wall nervously. Her hands came down on my shoulders, squeezed gently. “What are you saying to me?” she asked.

I could see her face. The moon must have risen. In the dim reflected light from outside, her cheekbones and shadowy eyes were ghostly. She was afraid.

“I love you,” I said, “but I can’t think of anything else to do.”

She gripped me hard. I could feel her fingernails biting in, the intensity of her fear. She shook her head and pulled me to her neck. “Oh God, what have I done?” she cried.

“Mama, don’t,” I said gently. “Please.” She let go of me but still knelt there close. I wondered if she could see me as clearly as I could see her. If so, what was she seeing in my face?

A rain began to fall outside. With no wind, it came down in a sweet, sprinkling whisper, little drops flicking through the tender new growth on the trees and bushes. Mama put her palms flat against her eyes. “All right,” she said. “All right.”

I swallowed. I wanted to reach for her, to say I was sorry, to say that I hadn’t meant it, that I would go back with her, but I didn’t move. After a minute she got up and went back to her pallet. She didn’t smoke anymore. She pulled her blanket up and lay still, so quiet she might have been asleep as soon as she lay down.

 

Much later, in the early dawn with the blanket pulled over my head, I heard Mama start crying, trying hard not to make a sound and almost succeeding. Only her breath catching every little while gave her away. My own eyes were dry. I didn’t feel like I was going to cry. I didn’t feel like I was ever going to cry again.

I
t was peaceful out at Aunt Alma’s. The spring ripened until the yard and surrounding woods were lush green and full of singing birds. The three surviving puppies ran in stumbling leaps and falls, rolling over each other and digging between their mama’s titties. The clothes scattered across the yard had to have the dirt shaken out before they could be washed. The washer itself worked pretty good, though Earle could not figure out how to fix the wringer. I hung the soggy clothes out on a line that Grey put up between the porch and the black walnut tree, though none of them came truly clean and some of them Mama set aside as garbage. I made a big pile off the porch of the things that were broken beyond repair, and Uncle Earle hauled it away.

Alma came back to herself slowly. She didn’t want to talk much, but then neither did I. Mama came out every afternoon for a while, then every other day, and finally every few days.

She’d bring Alma some little treat, some sweet corn succotash, or chow-chow and biscuits, or once even a little blackberry cobbler. For me she brought books, paperbacks she traded for down at the book exchange, or magazines she got from the women she worked with over at the Stevens mill. One afternoon, Alma passed her the razor she’d been keeping in her apron pocket.

“You’ll feel better if you take this away,” she said to Mama. They both looked at the deadly thing.

“You sure you don’t still need it?” Mama ran her fingers over the smooth polished handle and the dull outside edge. “If it makes you feel better, you should just keep it.”

“No.” Aunt Alma sighed and combed through her hair restlessly with her fingers. It had gone full gray in the weeks since she’d wrecked the house, and she had cut it off short with that razor the afternoon before. “I an’t got the urge no more. I still don’t want to see Wade yet, but I an’t thinking about cutting his throat no more either.”

“It’s just as well,” Mama told her. “Leave him alive to suffer. He’s been staying over at Fay’s, and Carr’s been with him every minute. She says she don’t dare go home again until she knows Wade’s gonna be all right. But between his leg itching him and her nagging and whining at him, Wade looks like he’s liable to shoot himself again any minute.” They both smiled.

Nobody said anything about me having to go to school out in the country. Mama had brought me a list of books to read and a note from my teacher, saying that so long as I wasn’t gone more than a month everything could be made up. I wondered what Mama had told her, but I didn’t ask. It was such a relief not to have to sit in those boring classes, to be able to read as much as I wanted, sit up late with Alma, and get up when I felt like it. Mama and I were being a little easier with each other but still tender. I heard from Reese that Mama had seen Daddy Glen a couple of times and they were talking again. I tried not to worry about the future, not to think too much about anything. I worked in Alma’s garden, saving what I could of her herbs and flowers, and put in some seedlings and cuttings Raylene brought by. The days were a gift, long and warm, the nights quiet and cool. I slept dreamlessly and woke up at peace.

 

The afternoon Daddy Glen showed up, Alma was out in the garden by herself, putting in the tomato seedlings Raylene had brought over the day before. I planned to go off on a picnic, had packed a cloth bag with a bottle of tea and lemons, and was spreading bread with peanut butter to go with it. The puppies had gotten in the kitchen and were tumbling over themselves to beg me for treats. I gave them each one teaspoon of peanut butter and dragged them out on the porch to watch them chew and yawn and try to lick the tops of their mouths.

I was giggling at them when a Ford pulled up into the yard and Daddy Glen climbed out. He looked the same, though there was a scar over his left eye and he seemed to limp slightly as he walked toward the porch. He wore his work clothes, khaki trousers and white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His brown shoes were scuffed and dusty. There was a little beard showing, as if he had shaved the night before and not this morning. I stood and watched as he came up the steps, not knowing what to do.

“Bone,” he said. His voice was hoarse and deep. I wondered if Aunt Alma heard it out in the garden behind the house. His eyes looked bright and intent, his jaw tense. “Your mama an’t here, is she?” he asked.

I shook my head no. I put my hands behind my back and clasped them tightly. He stepped up on the porch and looked me over, up and down, and back up to my face. His lips thinned out.