The Noah Confessions (5 page)

• 4 •

By the time I got home my dinner was cold and my father was glaring.

“I was about to call the police,” he said.

“No, you weren't.”

“Yes, Lynnie, I was. I called Jen's parents and they said she wasn't surfing. So I knew you weren't either. Because surely you wouldn't do anything that stupid.”

“Am I branded as a troubled kid now? I skipped one day of school.”

“It worries me to see you acting this way.”

“Hey, the big letter was your idea.”

He stood very still and said, “This is about the letter?”

“Maybe.”

“How much have you read?”

“Not much.”

He shook his head and said, “Maybe it was a mistake.”

“Too late now.”

“Lynnie, I only have my own judgment. I don't have a partner to run it by.”

“I went to see Mom. In the cemetery.”

This gave him the slightest pause. He knew he couldn't argue, but he had to say something.

“You should have left a note.”

“I was in a hurry.”

“Hurry? What hurry?”

“I had to catch the bus. As in I don't have a car. Remember?”

“My God, is this about the car?”

“No, actually, it's about the letter. Did you think it was going to be easy for me?”

“No,” he said.

A minute passed of us staring at each other. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “Maybe it's for when you're older. I should take it back.”

“You can't.”

“You're right,” he said. “It's done.”

“I'm going to bed,” I told him.

“You have to eat.”

“No, I don't.”

“Let's not throw anorexia into the mix, all right?”

“Stop reading magazines. You can lose your appetite without having an eating disorder.”

“Lynnie…”

“Dad. Stop. It's okay.”

He looked at me and I smiled at him and I saw his shoulders relax. I felt for him. I wouldn't want to be raising me alone.

I got ready for bed and got the letter out again.

Before I started reading I paused to think of Mick standing in the graveyard, smiling at me. I wondered if he was really cute or I was just desperate. We weren't around boys much at Hillsboro. Sometimes they threw us together with the Loyola boys at a lame dance, where we all stood on opposite sides of the room. Two or three couples would venture to dance right before it was all over. The more sophisticated girls would actually get phone numbers or e-mails. The rest of us sat near the refreshments and gossiped or mocked.

The point is, I was boy-experience impaired. And I might have been giving Mick some qualities he didn't possess. But then I remembered his smile and I knew I wasn't entirely making it up.

The memory of him made me feel strong. So I took a yoga breath and read.

         

September 27

Dear Noah,

English class was boring today. We had a quiz and spent the rest of the class reading silently. I admit that I stole looks at you but you never noticed. It's just as well.

Sometimes when I look at you, I imagine us getting acquainted and even going on dates. I'd love it, but it's not going to happen. And that's why I keep writing. My whole life I've been watching the happy children, accepting that I can't be one of them.

And, then, knowing what I know about you.

So back to where I left off. Well, I left off in several places. I left off at the history of me and my father, as well as the history of Union Grade right after Reconstruction. I suppose history of the place should come first.

Imagine the shape this town was in right after Reconstruction. That brings us up to the late eighteen hundreds. The South was defeated, in spirit and economy, but Reconstruction was over and Union Grade was trying to establish itself again. The industries were trying to find foot, the slaves were freed and trying to figure out how to live, the battle-worn families were trying to reclaim their dignity, defeated and terrified and suddenly poor.

Now let's travel a bit down the road to Hadley Creek, an area that fared a bit better in Reconstruction. Somehow, the farmers held on to their land—rumor had it they made deals with the devil or worse, with the carpetbaggers.

Let's start with Mom's side. The rich side.

The Brodies of Hadley Creek.

Meet my mother's father, my maternal grandfather, Grandpa Will Brodie, of remote Scottish descent. He was born to a wealthy landowner, a gentleman farmer, John Brodie. Will was the youngest of several sons and was impatient to have his portion of the land handed down. He somehow earned the money and bought his share of the farm as well as a brother's share.

This was a deal with the devil, by all accounts. The money probably came from bootlegging, and he took advantage of his family's debts during a period of drought. So he got the money but was disowned by the family. All shrouded in a mystery we don't need to solve right now. That brings us up to the turn of the century. Grandpa Brodie was in possession of a small farm and was looking to have his own family. He was inventive, wealthy, and a bit of a rapscallion.

Now the rumors really run wild. Some say he married a distant relative, the beautiful olive-skinned Nancy Jukes, heir to a distant North Carolina fortune. Other stories say that he met Nancy in a bar in North Carolina, where she was earning a living as a lounge singer. Nobody really knows anything except that my grandmother, Granny Nancy, was exotically lovely, darker than any self-respecting white girl should be. A no-nonsense girl who was happy to marry “up,” which is Southern for improving her circumstances. She took easily to being a wealthy farmer's wife.

They quickly had three children—my mother, Fern, first. She was black-haired and black-eyed, gorgeous and petulant and wild. My aunt Rose second—blond and fair-skinned and fair-natured, no trouble at all. And then my uncle Joseph, dark like my mother and nothing else to recommend him except that he was a boy.

Grandpa Will didn't care for the girls. He only wanted a boy, and as soon as he got one he forgot all about the sisters. Mama Nancy did her best with the wild girl and the shy one, but as soon as they were free to marry she let them. Fern got married first, before she even left high school, to the handsomest boy in town, named Gerard Wyatt.

Fern became my mother. So that's what we'll call her from this point on.

Mama always said she married right away to get out of her house. I don't know what that means; I don't ask her. She was happy in her marriage at first. Gerard made a lot of money as a tobacco salesman, and it wasn't long before they had a son, my much older brother, Gregory. Their style of high living calmed right down after that. Whereas they used to run around the Southeast, taking vacations and going to parties, Mama was forced to stay at home with Gregory. Her husband kept running around.

Not long after one of his “business” trips, Mama received a pair of shoes in the mail. A note accompanying the shoes said, “Mrs. Wyatt, you left these in the hotel room during your last stay.”

“They weren't even my size,” Mama told me when she related the story. My sister and I used to laugh very hard at the tale and Mama laughed too, just to keep us company. But I could see she didn't find it funny.

Mama moved out of her married home and back in with her parents. Only, they didn't want her. My grandfather had spent his whole life trying to get the girls out of the house—damned if he was going to take the difficult one back in. My grandmother always sided with him. She said, “No way, Miss Sister, you made your bed, you've got to lie in it.”

It was 1952. Mama was all alone in the world with a little boy, barely four years old. She didn't know how to cope. Grandma suggested that she move to Danville to find a job. They would look after Gregory until she situated herself. When she found herself a job and a husband, she could have her son back. My mother agreed. There was nothing else she could do.

“Looking back, I should have seen how it was going to go,” Mama used to say to me. “But I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have anybody to teach me.”

She got all dreamy when she said things like that, as if she had somehow missed her own life.

She doesn't talk about it much anymore. This was when I was little. These days she just sits and smokes and drinks iced tea and writes letters to Sandra in college. When she sees me it's like she's a little confused as to why I'm still around.

Don't go feeling sorry for me—that's not the point and I've done nothing to deserve it. I'm just telling you how it is in my family.

When my mother went off to Danville to look for that job, she was still young and beautiful and all full of hope. She had made a mistake but she hadn't ruined her life. Ruining your life takes time and work and one wrong decision after another. She hadn't done it yet, but she was on her way.

That's where we leave our heroine, my mother, in a boardinghouse in Danville, working as a receptionist at a newspaper, and maybe for the first time in her life feeling strong, with a sense of purpose. But missing her son. Always missing him.

         

Now back to Union Grade. My father's side.

The Pittmans of Union Grade.

My father's family is from the town of Competition/ Union Grade as far back as anyone can remember. They actually lived in town, which meant there weren't any wealthy landowners in sight. They were workers. They worked for wages, the men and the women alike. When there was no work, they were hungry. After the war, during Reconstruction, their situation was “no better than the Negroes,” my Grandma Lucille used to say. She was my father's mother, the crazy one. The genuinely crazy one; we had to visit her in the psych ward when I was little. A guy with keys would come to let us in. She would sit in her room and wring her hands. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

They were no better off than the freed slaves, these workers, my father's family, and that was a reality they just couldn't get their heads around. Before the war they at least had someone to look down on. I'm telling you this because that's how it was explained to me, not because any of it is justifiable. It's just how my father was raised. On the lowest rung of the social order. Maybe you've heard of white trash as a joke, but back then it was a real thing. On the social scale, they were below the freed slaves. Which is why they were allowed to starve.

My grandfather, Russell Pittman, who was a decent, nondrinking man, struggled to keep the family's head above water. All his brothers were drunks. Some of them had gone to jail. But he was going to keep his family respectable if it killed him.

He worked in various handyman jobs and eventually found his way to fairly steady work at a sawmill. His wife helped out by sewing for people. When the children were born, my father Clyde first, his sister Margaret second, my grandfather said no to Grandma Lucille working anymore. It was a pride issue, though they were nearly broke. A decent man in those days did not let the mother of his children work.

They got by. They were poor. The Depression came and some days they didn't eat. Neighbors helped them out. My father's memory of this time was so bleak he could hardly talk about it. He would never let us put popcorn on the Christmas tree because he said that was something born out of the Depression and it made him too sad. For the same reason we could never eat beans in my house—that was all they had sometimes growing up. He had a list of things like that. My mother was impatient about it. She couldn't understand the trauma of poverty because she had never had to confront it. “My people always had money,” she would whisper to me.

My father's memory of his life growing up was spotty and irregular. Sometimes he recalled pure happiness, simple things that made him giddy and sentimental. His parents were loving and pure, easy to understand. Hard work was rewarded and they all believed in God. He played sports and looked out for his sister, and in the evenings they sat around and told stories rather than watching television (which they didn't have, obviously). Everything was elemental and no one pondered his purpose on earth. They just lived, from day to day, and it all worked. Sometimes he did recall and would remind me that it was nothing more than their “good reputation” that kept them from starving. His father taught him how to build things and how to garden, while his mother taught his sister Margaret how to cook and clean. They knew how to take care of themselves and each other.

It was a nice, idealized vision, but it didn't strike anyone he told as particularly true. My father was too tense, too worried, too tortured to have come from the family that he described. And he knew, as we all did, that my grandmother's hold on sanity was not entirely secure. It never had been. She had been in and out of reality for as long as anyone could recall.

When my father was a mere eight years old, he had been out in the yard playing baseball when he started to get a little bit tired and achy. His mother called him in, sent him to bed, and then called the doctor. The doctor came (the only doctor in town who made house calls back then) and examined him and decided that he had rheumatic fever, one of those strange diseases of the heart common in those days. For an entire year after that, my father stayed in bed. Not in his room, mind you, in bed. An entire year. He read comic books and learned how to draw, but he did not leave his bed. As a result, he missed a lot of things, like learning how to swim or ride a bike. From that moment on, his mother watched him like a hawk. He was barely allowed to play with the other boys in town. When he was a teenager, he would attempt to go to the movies with his friends, but if it happened to thunder, his mother would suddenly appear at the theater and drag him back home.

“She was crazy,” my mother told me. “And she was determined to make him crazy, too.”

I tried to imagine it. The best, most permanent image I had of Grandma Lucille was of her sitting in her room in the locked quarters of the psych ward, wringing her hands and crying. I tried to imagine my father, my strong, tall father, trying to become a man under her watch. It was almost impossible to picture.