Bastard Out of Carolina Page 7

  “Now they understand.” He tapped his forefinger on Reese’s nose happily and made her giggle. “They know how it’s gonna be now, for sure.”

  Two weeks later Grandma Parsons showed up late Sunday afternoon while Daddy Glen was over at his brother James’s new office helping the painting crew put up shelves. “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” she told Mama quickly when she got out of Matthew’s truck. He’d driven her down to see us but wouldn’t get out himself. “It’s due you since Lyle was in the army for six months before they found out he had bad feet. Like I told your husband, they sent it over to me and wouldn’t make it out to you unless you filed those papers. But I’ve brought it down to you in cash. I never should have got it, but Lyle still had me listed as his only family, just never got around to changing it, I suppose. I told them it should rightly go to you and Reese. I did, but they never paid me no mind.” She looked up once at Mama and then down at Reese, who had run up to grab her around the hips. Her face was tense, and her fingers shook as she raked them through Reese’s curls.

  “You gonna get a lot of money then, Grandma?” Reese asked her.

  “No, child. And I don’t care.”

  “You come on in, Mrs. Parsons.” Mama looked embarrassed, her fingers pulling at the belt loops of her shirtwaist dress. “Let me get you some ice tea, and you can sit with your grandchild a while.”

  Mrs. Parsons looked like she was going to cry. “I thought maybe you weren’t gonna let me see her no more.”

  “Oh God!” Mama took Mrs. Parsons by the shoulders and pulled her into a quick embrace. “I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t let nobody else do that either. You can see Reese anytime you want. You know how much she loves you.”

  The two of them swayed slightly, Mrs. Parsons stiffly as if she was still unsure of her welcome and Mama as if she could barely hold in all the other things she wanted to say. Grandma Parsons’s brother kept his face turned away, smoking out the window of his truck. I kept close to Mama and watched the muscles in his neck jump as the two women sniffed and cleared their throats.

  “Well.” Mrs. Parsons licked her lips. “Maybe I’ll just come in a minute, have a little water before we start back.”

  “You could stay for dinner.” Mama’s face was flushed red and getting darker as I watched.

  “Well, no, we couldn’t do that.” Mrs. Parsons glanced over at her brother’s shoulder, but he didn’t turn to look at her. “We do have to get back. I’ll just stay a minute or two.”

  It wasn’t until she was sitting on Mama’s Sears sofa, with Reese drawn up between her legs and the envelope with the money “from the insurance” passed over to Mama, that Grandma Parsons relaxed a little. She got her brush out so she could pull the tangles out of Reese’s white-blond hair and keep her hands busy. “Your hair was red as fire when you were born,” she told Reese. “Now it’s as white as your daddy’s was.”

  Reese liked being told she looked like her daddy, and she kept his picture hidden in her underwear drawer where Daddy Glen wouldn’t see it and get his feelings hurt. Now and then, I’d go get it out myself, look into that grinning boy’s face that had nothing to do with me, and get all hot and tight with jealousy. Lyle had been as pretty as a girl and so white-blond he could have been a model in magazines. Reese had hair as fine as Lyle’s and a smile that came easy and fast, but she had too the Boatwrights’ narrow face and long skinny neck. Still, I envied the way she could look from that picture to Mama’s face to Grandma Parsons’s bent shoulders and guess how she might still change before she grew up. She had another family, another side of herself to think about, something more than Mama and me and the Boatwrights. Reese could choose something different for herself and be someone else altogether.

  “Oh, Reese’ll likely go dark.” Mama spoke hesitantly, as if she didn’t want to argue but didn’t want to chance any misunderstanding. “Might even go red again.”

  “She might, but she might not. Among our people hair stays blond sometimes.” Mrs. Parsons tried to smile at Mama, but her face didn’t soften until she looked down at Reese. I was sitting on the arm of the sofa next to Mama, where I could look out the window to see the waiting truck and the empty road all the way up to the next intersection. I kept listening for the sound of the Pontiac, hoping not to hear it. Daddy Glen might come home while Mrs. Parsons was still here, and I knew Mama was worried about that, her hands pulling again at her belt loops nervously.

  Mrs. Parsons looked over at Mama’s hands and then spoke carefully. “That money’s all there’s gonna be, I’m afraid. My property an’t worth much, and truth is I signed it over to Matthew just after my boys died. Matthew’s promised to take care of me, and I trust that he will. Thing is, Lyle didn’t have no title to the land and no other insurance as far as we know.”

  Mama shook her head once and looked up directly into Mrs. Parsons’s face. “I know he didn’t have nothing,” she said. “I knew that when he died, and it’s never mattered to me. Didn’t expect his death benefit, to tell you the truth. Thought he wasn’t entitled to nothing from the army.” Her face looked sad but not so stiff as it had. Mrs. Parsons’s face was a match for hers.

  “I wish you would get lots and lots of money from the insurance.” Reese wiggled happily in Grandma Parsons’s arms and beamed at all of us.

  “Oh, I don’t need no money, child.” Grandma Parsons laughed and pushed herself up off the couch. “I’m afraid I’ve got to get going, Anney. It’s a long trip for me to get home.” I looked closely at Mama to see if she had heard the old woman say her name, but Mama was already up and reaching for Mrs. Parsons’s glass.

  “Don’t you want more?” Mama was saying as she headed for the kitchen. Mrs. Parsons shook her head and said no while hanging on to Reese. I saw Mama’s shoulders relax a little as she turned to come back to us. The road outside was still quiet.

  Grandma Parsons bent over to hug Reese tightly one more time. “You just remember, honey, I got the best of Lyle when I got you,” she told her. That sounded strange to me, as if she’d hatched my baby sister herself off her boy’s dead frame. But Reese grinned like a princess and wiggled her toes into the nap of the rug. She followed Grandma Parsons out to the truck begging her to stay over.

  “Reese, be good,” Mama told her. “You can see your grandma next month when we go up to her place. ”

  “You will come?” Mrs. Parsons looked sad and nervous all over again.

  “We’ll come.” Mama’s voice was emphatic, but I saw her eyes flick once up the road as she spoke. Mrs. Parsons nodded brusquely and climbed in the truck. Her brother never said a word, just started the engine and put it in gear. Reese was waving fiercely even before Matthew gunned the engine. I saw Mrs. Parsons wipe her eyes as the truck pulled away, and then I saw the Pontiac come around the corner of the intersection up the road. Mama’s hands curled into fists and pulled up in front of her belly. I leaned in close to her and watched the Pontiac as it edged slowly past the truck. When it reached us, Daddy Glen leaned out the window. He looked back up the road and then over at Mama.

  “You didn’t sign nothing?” he demanded.

  “No, Glen.” I felt Mama’s hips shift awkwardly as she spoke. I looked up to watch her face as her mouth shifted into an equally awkward stubborn smile. “You know I wouldn’t sign anything that you hadn’t looked at first.”

  Daddy Glen smiled as if that satisfied him. I let my air out carefully. Reese went on waving though the truck was long gone. I hooked my thumbs in the belt loops of my jeans and stood by her until Mama and Daddy Glen went back into the house.

  “He’s quiet, but you make Glen mad and he’ll knock you down,” Uncle Earle said good-naturedly. “Boy uses those hands of his like pickaxes.” If they thought we weren’t near enough to hear, Earle and Beau would go on about Daddy Glen’s other parts.

  “He gets crazy when he’s angry,” they laughed. “Use his dick if he can’t reach you with his arms, and that’ll cripple you fast enough.” I was too young
to understand what they meant, why they laughed so mean and joked that no woman would ever leave Daddy Glen, or roared and spat comparing the size of his nose to his toes to his fingers.

  “Man’s got a horse dick,” Butch boasted to other boys, and that I understood. But it wasn’t Daddy Glen’s sex that made me nervous. It was those hands, the restless way the fingers would flex and curl while he watched me lean close to Mama. He was always watching me, it seemed, calling me to him whenever Mama and I would start talking, sending me to get him a glass of ice tea or a fresh pack of cigarettes out of the freezer, where he kept his cartons so they wouldn’t go stale in the summer heat. Mama told me I should show him that I loved him, but no matter how hard I tried, I never moved fast enough for him.

  “That child an’t never gonna love me,” he complained tearfully to Mama one afternoon.

  “Oh, Glen, don’t say that.” Mama’s voice was thin and shaky, as if she were afraid he was right. “Bone loves you, honey.” She kissed his cheek, put her hands on either side of his face, and kissed his lips. “She loves you. We all love you.” Daddy Glen pulled her down to him and sighed softly as she kissed his eyelids and then rubbed her cheeks against his.

  I ran outside. Dinner would be late, or we’d wind up going out for hamburgers. Whenever they started kissing on the couch, they’d go in the bedroom and shut the door for an hour at least. When they came out Daddy Glen would be smiling and easy in his body. Mama would be sleepy-eyed and soft all over, the pink in her face fresh and delicate.

  “They sure like to do it a lot,” Reese told Alma disgustedly. But Alma just laughed.

  “Everybody does, girl, everybody does.” She swatted lightly at the seat of Reese’s jeans and hugged me to her side. “Don’t make no mistake about that. Love is just about the best thing we’ve got that don’t cost money or make you sick to your stomach. You’ll see. Wait till you get a little bigger. You’ll see.”

  Reese grimaced and wiggled uncomfortably. “Mushy stuff,” she yelled as she ran off. “All that mushy stuff. I an’t gonna have none of it.”

  Aunt Alma laughed carelessly. I pulled away from her and went after Reese. It was mushy. Mama and Daddy Glen always hugging and rubbing on each other, but it was powerful too. Sex. Was that what Daddy Glen had been doing to me in the parking lot? Was it what I had started doing to myself whenever I was alone in the afternoons? I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone set the dry stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.

  Daddy Glen didn’t do too well at RC Cola. He kept getting transferred to different routes or having to pay for breakage, and no matter how hard he and Mama worked, there never seemed to be enough money to pay the bills. He kept telling Mama that sooner or later his brother would pay him for all the work he’d done, but even after the offices of James Waddell, D.D.S., were open and busy, James never mentioned it.

  “Maybe you better ask James for that money he was gonna give you,” Mama finally suggested the day Daddy Glen came home to say he’d been laid off.

  “I can’t do that.” Glen’s face seemed to squeeze in on itself as he ran his hands down from his hairline to his neck, wiping sweat off the shadowy stubble on his cheeks and then resting his chin on his fingertips as if he were praying. “Oh, Lord God, no, I can’t do that. I’d rather starve.” His eyes looked shrunken and his chin stuck out. He looked everywhere but over at Mama where she sat. Instinctively I put down the glass I’d been rinsing and stepped out of the kitchen into the hall where he couldn’t see me without turning around.

  “Glen, honey.” Mama leaned forward. “I know it’s hard, but James is your brother, and baby, we’re just about broke. We’re not gonna have the rent if you don’t get it from him.”

  “Anney, you don’t understand.” Daddy Glen brought his hands up to cover his face completely. “James never said nothing about paying me at all. Hell, he never even asked my help. I just went over there, just did it. I never talked to him about money. I couldn’t. Hell, I don’t even think he wanted my help nohow.”

  Glen brought both his fists down hard on his thighs, pounding them half a dozen times before he lifted his hands and held them in front of him, open and extended. “I’m sorry, Anney. God, I’m so sorry.” Tears pooled in his eyes and slid down his cheeks. His hands began to shake. “But it an’t just hard. It’s impossible. I can’t ask James for nothing. I can’t ask none of them for shit. It would kill me.”

  Mama sighed and looked away. “Well ...” She hesitated and then reached out to take the hands that still hung in the air. “Well, we’ll just see, then. There’s other jobs, other things we can do. We can get Earle’s help to move, maybe stay with Alma. Something.” She looked into Glen’s face, but whatever she hoped to see there didn’t come, her eyes kept shifting away, then back.

  “Oh, Glen. Baby, it’ll be all right. We’ll do what we have to do. Don’t you worry.”

  After that things seemed to move irreversibly forward. We moved and then moved again. We lived in no one house more than eight months. Rented houses; houses leased with an option to buy; shared houses on the city limits; brick and stucco and a promise to buy; friends of friends who knew somebody had a place standing empty; houses where the owner lived downstairs, next door, next block over, or was a friend of a man had an eye on Mama, or knew somebody who knew Daddy Glen’s daddy, or had hired one of the uncles for a short piece of work; or twice—Jesus, twice—brand-new houses clean and bought on time we didn’t have.

  Moving had no season, was all seasons, crossed time like a train with no schedule. We moved so often our mail. never caught up with us, moved sometimes before we’d even gotten properly unpacked or I’d learned the names of all the teachers at my new school. Moving gave me a sense of time passing and everything sliding, as if nothing could be held on to anyway. It made me feel ghostly, unreal and unimportant, like a box that goes missing and then turns up but you realize you never needed anything in it anyway. We moved so often Mama learned to keep the newspapers in the cardboard dish barrels, the pads and cords and sturdy boxes.

  “Don’t throw that away. I’ll need that again before long.”

  The lines in Mama’s face sank deeper with every move, every failed chance, every “make do” and “try again.” It got to where I hated moving worse than anything, and one hot summer day I took a butcher knife and chopped holes in Mama’s dish barrels, though all that came of it was a swat across the seat and the same old line.

  “Don’t you know how much that cost?”

  I knew to the penny what everything cost. Late on Sunday afternoons, Mama always sat at the kitchen table counting change out of her pocketbook and juggling bills, deciding which could not be paid, not yet, anyway. Rent was eighty dollars a month, too much by far when Daddy Glen had been bringing home only sixty dollars a week. Groceries ran as much as the rent, and that was only because we got vegetables from my aunts’ gardens and discount meat from the man who sold ground beef and chicken to the diner. Then there were the clothes Reese and I were always needing, uniforms for Mama and Daddy Glen, and shoes. Shoes were the worst. Dresses could be passed on from cousins or picked up now and then at church rummage sales. But shoes wore out or were outgrown at a frightening rate. Until the ringworm got so dangerous, we went barefoot all summer long.

  Though I had never complained before, suddenly I wanted new shoes, patent-leather Mary Janes—not the cheap blue canvas sneakers I was always getting at $1.98 every seven months or so. I wasn’t a baby anymore, I was eight, then nine years old, growing up. In one year I went from compliant and quiet to loud and insistent, demanding shoes like the kids at school wore. I wanted the ones with little tassels behind the toes but was willing to settle for saddle oxfords. I knew there was no chance of getting
a pair of those classy little-girl patent-leathers with the short pointy heels, but I looked at them longingly anyway. Mama just laughed and bought me penny loafers.

  “Who do you think we are, girl?” she said. “We an’t the people who buy things for show.”

  I couldn’t help it. Just for a change, I wished we could have things like other people, wished we could complain for no reason but the pleasure of bitching and act like the trash we were supposed to be, instead of watching how we behaved all the time. But Mama’s laughter shamed me. I wore the penny loafers with only token protest.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mama’s friend Mab told her. “Children are happier with dirt between their toes.” But I noticed that her girls turned up for school in saddle oxfords, and at church in patent-leather pumps, and sniffed at Reese and me in our discount loafers. I wasn’t sure what Mama noticed, what she could afford to notice, but when I sat with her on Sunday afternoon and watched her run down her columns of figures, I suspected that she saw everything and hated it all. She’d look out at my flushed and sweating stepfather muscling the lawnmower around the edges of the yard and sigh into her coffee cup.

  “We an’t gonna be able to stay here,” she’d say, and I knew it was about time to move again.

  One winter we spent three months staying over with Aunt Alma, who had bought a new house on no money down. None of us expected her to keep it, and the bank filed papers on it almost as soon as we’d arrived. Something happened to me, something I had never felt before and did not know how to fight. Anger hit me like a baseball coming hard and fast off a new bat. The first day at the district school the teacher pursed her lips and asked me my name, and that anger came around and stomped on my belly and throat. I saw tired patience in her eyes, a little shine of pity, and a contempt as old as the red dust hills I could see through the windows of her classroom. I opened my lips but could not speak.