Bastard out of Carolina (39 page)

“Ruth’s, Mama,” I breathed. “Take me to Ruth’s.” If I could get my hands on that gun, I’d never let it go. Maybe I could just pretend I needed it the way Alma had needed her razor, just to hold it like a doll or something, so that they’d tell the cops, “We never thought she’d use it.” Never.

“We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Mama said. No. Ruth’s. But she wasn’t listening to me. Was I saying it or just thinking it?

“Anney. Oh, Anney.” Daddy Glen was right beside us, blood on his face. From her or me? I wondered. Something had hit him. I stared at his face like it was a road map, a route to be memorized, a way to get back to who I really was. After I shot him, there would be nothing left, no way back.

All right.

“Please, Anney.” He sobbed like a child, and she pulled me tighter into her armpit. Her free hand snaked out and slapped him, drew back, made a fist, and punched him full on.

“
Ohhh
,” he howled. “Don’t, don’t.” He staggered back, tripping on scattered dishes.

“Anney!” he whined like a little boy. “I don’t know what happened. I was just gonna talk to her, darling. I just wanted you to come home, for us all to be together again!”

Mama kept moving, dragging me with her, using her hip to open the door, half-carrying me down the steps. Not a pause, not a hesitation, across the yard toward her car.

“Anney, please! I didn’t mean it. I went crazy. I went crazy. Honey, listen to me!”

I was dizzy. Everything hurt, but it was better, better. Strength was coming back, and with it thought. My muscles felt weak but no longer severed from tendons and bones. I could move now. There would be a way. Look how hurt I was. There would be a story we could tell. It would be self-defense. It would be justifiable. I grinned to feel the blood trickling down my neck. Look how hurt I was! Thank you, God.

“Anney!” He was following us. “Please, Anney!”

Keep moving, Mama.

Across the sparse grass and dirt, up to the car. Mama gasped into my ear, holding me against her trembling rib cage. She opened the door, eased me down onto the front seat, lifted my legs. He was still crying her name. I was thinking fast and slow at the same time. How could I do it? No shotgun here, not even a butter knife.

“Anney, please. Talk to me. Love, please. Please, Anney.” She dodged him, ran around to the other side of the car, and got the door open. He was right beside her, sobbing and wringing his hands. He pushed the door almost shut while she struggled to open it again.

“Anney, you know how I love you. I wouldn’t have hurt her, darling, but I went crazy. I just went crazy!”

I pulled myself across the seat, trying to reach her and help, but it was back to being hard to move. The air had become thick as jelly. I had to push through it. I gritted my teeth and inched forward until I was leaning against the steering wheel, watching them struggle with the door.

“Mama.”

She looked toward me, her face empty and strange.

I said it again. “Mama.”

Mama slapped Glen again, with her open hand and then with her cupped fist. The sound of her blows was dull and horrible, but not so horrible as the mewling grunts he made as she struck him. “Let go,” she said. He staggered, sweat streaming into his eyes. His mouth worked uselessly, all his features seemed realigned. “Let go,” she said again. He wailed and dropped to his knees, his hands still clinging to Mama and the door. He bowed his head and whispered, “Kill me, Anney. Go on. I can’t live without you. I won’t. Kill me! Kill me!”

Mama jerked away from him, and the door slammed shut. “Oh, no,” she whimpered. Her face became the mirror of his, her mouth as wide, her neck as rigid.

“Kill me,” he said again, louder. “Kill me.” He butted his head into the metal door, pulled back, and rammed again. He shouted every time his head hit, the thuds punctuating the cries. “Kill me. Kill me.”

Mama was so close I could have touched her, but her head was turned away, turned to Glen. I could not reach her. “Oh, God,” she cried, and I let go of the steering wheel.

“No,” I whispered, but Mama didn’t hear me. “Glen!” she said. “Glen!” She moaned and covered her face with her hands. Her body shook as she sobbed. Mine shook as I watched her.

“Glen, stop,” she said. “Stop.” She grabbed his head, wrapping her fingers over his forehead to block the impact of his blows.

“Stop.”

There was blood on her fingers. She was crying. He was still. I closed my eyes. “No,” I said again.

He spoke once more, drowning me out. His voice was very calm, very soft. “Kill me, Anney. Kill me.”

I tried to reach her with my right hand but the pain made me gasp. “Mama,” I pleaded, but she still wasn’t looking at me.

“Lord God, Lord God, Lord God.” Her cry was low, sibilant, painful. She was holding him, his head pressed to her belly. His bloody hairline was visible past the angle of her hip.

“Mama,” I whispered.

“Help me, God,” she pleaded in a raw, terrible voice. “Help me.”

I could see her fingers on Glen’s shoulder, see the white knuckles holding him tight. My mouth closed over the shout I would not let go. Rage burned in my belly and came up my throat. I’d said I could never hate her, but I hated her now for the way she held him, the way she stood there crying over him. Could she love me and still hold him like that? I let my head fall back. I did not want to see this. I wanted Travis’s shotgun, or my sharp killing hook. I wanted everything to stop, the world to end, anything, but not to lie bleeding while she held him and cried. I looked up into white sky going gray. The first stars would come out as the sky darkened. I wanted to see that, the darkness and the stars. I heard a roar far off, a wave of night and despair waiting for me, and followed it out into the darkness.

A
unt Alma has a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, with a few wedding invitations, funeral announcements, and baby pictures pasted down beside page after page of headlines. “Oh, we’re always turning up in the news,” she used to joke when she’d show people that book. Her favorite is the four-page spread the
Greenville News
did when Uncle Earle’s convertible smashed into the barbershop across the street from the county courthouse a few months before it burned down. There are pictures of the front end of the car propped up on a barber stool just a few feet short of splintered silvered mirrors, another of Earle sitting on the curb leaning forward with his head in his hands, and a series of the barber picking through the remains of his shop with the help of a highway patrolman and Granny Boatwright. The barber looks funny, holding up his shaving brush and cup in fingers that blur a little so that you can see he must have still been shaking.

HE DIDN’T COME IN FOR A SHAVE, the headline reads under the picture of the car on the stool.

BOATWRIGHT captions the close-up of Earle’s numb face.

In those pictures, Uncle Earle looks scary, like a thief or a murderer, the kind of gaunt, poorly shaven face sketched on a post office wall. In that washed-out gray print, he looks like a figure from a horror show, an animated corpse. Granny, my mama, uncles, aunts, cousins—all of us look dead on the black-and-white page.

“We look worse than other people ever seem to look,” I once complained to Aunt Alma.

“Oh, piss,” she said. “Watery ink and gray paper makes everybody look a little crazy.” I think she was annoyed that I didn’t take more pride in her scrapbook, but it seemed to me nobody looked quite like my family. Worse than crazy; we looked moon-eyed, rigid, openmouthed, and stupid. Even our wedding announcement pictures were bad. Aunt Alma insisted it had nothing to do with us, that Boatwrights weren’t bad-looking seen head on.

“We just make bad pictures,” she said. “The difference is money. It takes a lot of money to make someone look alive on newsprint,” she told me, “to keep some piece of the soul behind the eyes.”

I’m in Aunt Alma’s book now.

As soon as I saw the picture of me on the front page of the News, I knew it would wind up in her scrapbook, and I hated it. In it, I was leaning against Raylene’s shoulder, my face all pale and long, my chin sticking out too far, my eyes sunk into shadows. I was a Boatwright there for sure, as ugly as anything. I was a freshly gutted fish, my mouth gaping open above my bandaged shoulder and arm, my neck still streaked dark with blood. Like a Boatwright all right—it wasn’t all my blood.

 

Coming back to myself at Greenville General, I kept my teeth clamped together, not even screaming when the doctor rotated my arm in the bruised shoulder socket, put a cast on my wrist, washed out the cuts, and then wrapped the whole tight to my midriff. Mama had been there, had carried me in from the car and made the doctor look at me right away. The nurse took me out of her arms, and Mama stepped back, her bloody knuckles still outstretched, touching my cheek lightly. I looked into the nurse’s face and then looked back for Mama, but she was gone. Before she could give her name or mine, she had disappeared.

“Come on, honey.” The soft-voiced nurse ran her fingers through my hair, then stroked lightly all over my head. I looked for her nametag but saw none. “Don’t jump, now. You’ll hurt yourself.” Her fingers smelled of alcohol and talcum powder. She seemed kind. I wondered if she had children.

“Feeling for bumps or cuts,” she told me while the doctor was still busy with my wrist. There was just the scrape on my temple and the cut along my ear, but those had bled all down my neck and shoulder. It was hard to believe all that blood had come from so few cuts. The nurse was gentle and slow. I let her touch me as she pleased, turning my head to follow her smile like an infant watching the nipple. I watched, but didn’t speak. I didn’t tell her how much I hurt. I figured she could see the bruises on my throat and my torn lips. She could certainly see the look in my eyes. The one glance I’d got at my face in the mirror-black pane of the examining-room door scared me. I was a stranger with eyes sunk in shadowy caves above sharp cheekbones and a mouth so tight the lips had disappeared.

“That shoulder’s gonna ache for a while.” The doctor didn’t look at me when he spoke, just made notes on a clipboard. “And that wrist is badly sprung. It’ll be a couple of months healing completely.” The nurse was washing dried blood from my cheek with an alcohol swab. I watched her instead of him.

“We’re going to have to wait a while before we give you anything.” The doctor’s eyes wandered up from the clipboard and down my body, pausing at the bruises on my thighs and sliding down to the swollen knees, one of which was scraped raw. He put his palm on my hip and squeezed slightly. “You tell me now if anything else hurts you.”

It might have been a question. It might not. I looked up at him with no expression. I kept wondering where Mama had gone. What had happened to Daddy Glen? I didn’t remember the ride in from Alma’s place, didn’t remember Mama saying anything to me. Had she told them what had happened? Did anyone know? Where was Mama, and why wasn’t she with me?

 

The deputy leaned against the door until the nurse brought him a folding metal chair he could prop back against the wall. He was a red-faced boy with sandy hair cut so short you could see his pink scalp under the fuzz. He reminded me of the twins when they came back from the county farm, stiff-backed, crew-cut, and proud of themselves. This one was proud of himself too; kept smoothing down his uniform shirt and pulling at the material so the sweaty wrinkles under his arms wouldn’t show. His mouth was soft and his chin small, but when he looked at me, he would poke his lips out and try to make his face stern. Watched too much television, probably thought of himself as some public defender type. I tried to feel dangerous, but my eyelids were damp and swollen, my neck itchy, and my mouth too painful for me to frown. He kept fiddling with his shirt and looking over at me. After a while I began to feel more and more like a child, a girl, hurt and alone.

By the time Sheriff Cole came in, walking stiffly as if his big wide belt weighted him down and hurt his back, I felt so small I didn’t know if I could talk.

“Ruth Anne.” He greeted me by name.

He pulled a stool over beside the hip-high table I was propped up on, grunted as he shifted his butt onto the stool, then rolled his head so that his neck made a loud cracking noise. At the sound he grinned and put both hands flat on his thighs.

“You want to talk to me? Tell me what happened?”

I swallowed. Olive complexion, big nose, bigger ears, strong chin, and thin gray hair combed straight back off his face—Sheriff Cole didn’t look like anybody else I knew. People said he came from Maryland and that he would never have made sheriff if he hadn’t been such a churchgoing Baptist, a deacon, and well-off even before he married a Greenville girl. He looked more like a frycook than a sheriff, big-bellied, greasy, and soft.

I looked up into his wide, dark eyes. His voice was soft, almost lazy, his tone both polite and respectful. He made me wish I could talk, tell him what had happened, what I thought had happened. But it all seemed so complicated in my head, so long and difficult. How could I begin? Where would I begin? With Aunt Alma going crazy? With the moment Daddy Glen grabbed me and tore my shirt? I thought of that moment in the parking lot so long ago, waiting to find out about Mama and his son.

“You’re not hurt too bad,” he told me. “Doctor says you’ll be fine.”

I lifted my head, knowing fear showed in my face.

“No concussion, the doctor says.” He took the little notebook out of his pocket, opened it. “You’re a little shocky, need to be careful for a while. Some of your people are out there. I got the doctor talking to them.”

“Mama?” My voice was a hoarse croak.

“I an’t talked to your mama yet. Your aunts are here, though. We’ll let you see them soon.” He flipped pages, took out a pen, and looked at me. “Now, we need to know what happened, Ruth Anne. I know you’re not feeling too good, but I want you to try to talk to me.” His mouth softened, as if he were trying to look comforting. “You tell me what happened and we can work on getting you home soon.” He put the point of the pen to the paper.