Bastard Out of Carolina Page 8

  “What’s your name, now, honey?” the woman asked me again, speaking slowly, as if she suspected I was not quite bright. The anger lifted in me and became rage.

  “Roseanne,” I answered as blithely as if I’d never been called anything else. I smiled at her like a Roseanne. “Roseanne Carter. My family’s from Atlanta, just moved up here.” I went on lightly, talking about the school I’d gone to in Atlanta, making it up as I went along, and smiling wider as she kept nodding at me.

  It scared me that it was so easy—my records, after all, had not caught up with me—that people thought I could be a Roseanne Carter from Atlanta, a city I had never visited. Everyone believed me, and I enjoyed a brief popularity as someone from a big city who could tell big-city stories. It was astonishing, but no one in my family found out I had told such a lie. Still, it was a relief when we moved that time and I went off to a new school under my real name. For months after, though, I dreamed that someone came up to me and called me Roseanne, that the school records finally exposed me or one of those teachers turned up at my new school. “Why’d you tell such a lie?” they asked me in the dream, and I could not answer them. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.

  One month, Earle announced that he had finally sold that old wallhanger Beau had foisted off on him to some fool from Greenwood who couldn’t tell the difference between a decent shotgun and a piece of corroded junk. He insisted on loaning Mama a little money, telling her that she was better than a bank for him. “You know how I am, Anney,” he said. “If I keep cash, I’ll just throw it away on nothing at all. If I give it to you, then come the time when I really need it, I know you’ll give it to me if you got it, and if you don’t, well then, at least you’ll feed me. Won’t you, little sister?”

  Daddy Glen got mad at Mama for taking the money, as if she had done it just to prove he couldn’t support us. He screamed at her that she had shamed him. “I’m a grown man,” he yelled. “I don’t need your damn brother to pay my way.” He spent a week not speaking to any of us, and when Earle dropped by to visit, Daddy Glen grumbled that he didn’t have time to shoot the shit, and drove off like he had work to do.

  “Too much pride in that boy,” Earle told Mama mildly. “If he don’t lighten up a little he’s gonna rupture something. Hell, we all know we got to help each other in this life.” He winked at me, hugged Reese, and teased Mama till she giggled like a girl and made him a fried-tomato sandwich. When he got ready to leave, he gave Reese a quarter and me a half-dollar.

  “You’re growing up, honey,” Uncle Earle told me. “You’re gonna be as pretty as your mama one of these days.” I smiled and rolled that half-dollar in my palms. Earle had lived alone since his wife left him, and he spent most of his evenings either out drinking or over at one of his sisters’ houses. Before Mama had decided she was going to marry Daddy Glen, Uncle Earle was always around, but we saw less and less of him all the time. For a moment then, I wished we lived with him so Mama could take proper care of him and he could give us coins and make Mama laugh.

  When Daddy Glen came home late that night, he refused to go to bed even though he had to work the next day. He sat out in the living room with the radio on, his expression fixed and angry. Mama sat up with him and tried to get him to talk, but he still wouldn’t speak to her. When we got up the next morning, his face looked thin and white, and his blue eyes were so dark they looked black.

  The strained silence lasted for weeks, and even after it seemed to ease, Daddy Glen was different. His face took on a brooding sullen look. At dinner one night I watched him shove his plate away angrily. “Nothing I do goes right,” he complained. “I put my hand in a honey jar and it comes out shit!”

  “Oh, Glen,” Mama said. “Everybody has trouble now and again. Things will get better. Just give it time.”

  “Shut up!” he screamed at her. “Don’t give me that mama shit. Just shut up. Shut up!”

  Mama froze, one hand still lifted to reach toward the bread basket. Her face was like a photograph, black-and-white, her eyes enormous dark shadows and her skin bleached in that instant to a paper gloss, her open mouth stunned and gaping.

  Reese dropped her head down into her hands and gave a soft thin cry that turned immediately to sobs. Without even thinking about it, I locked my fingers tight to the edge of the table and pushed myself up to a standing position. Daddy Glen’s face was red, swollen, tears running down his cheeks. Mama’s eyes swept over to me like searchlights, and his followed.

  “Oh, God,” he moaned, and Mama shuddered. Daddy Glen stumbled around the table, his hip thudding against the edge, shaking the bowls and glasses. “Oh, Anney. I’m sorry. Oh, God! I don’t want to be yelling at you.” He kissed her forehead, cheekbones, chin, his hands pressed to the sides of her face. “Oh, Anney, I’m sorry!”

  “It’s all right,” she whispered, stroking his arms, and trying to push him away. “It’s all right, honey. I understand.”

  Reese went on sobbing while I stood gripping the edge of the table with no idea what I had been about to do. I looked down at my hands, my fingertips flattened and white, my nails bitten off in ragged edges. My hands were still, but my arms were shaking. What had I been going to do? What had I been going to do?

  Daddy Glen looked at me standing there. “I know how much your mama loves you,” he said, putting his hand on my arm, squeezing tight. When he let me go, there was a bruise, and Mama saw it right away.

  “Glen, you don’t know your own strength!”

  “No.” He was calmer now. “Guess I don’t. But Bone knows I’d never mean to hurt her. Bone knows I love her. Goddammit. You know how I love you all, Anney.”

  I stared up at him, Mama’s hands on my shoulders, knowing my mouth was hanging open and my face was blank. What did I know? What did I believe? I looked at his hands. No, he never meant to hurt me, not really, I told myself, but more and more those hands seemed to move before he could think. His hands were big, impersonal, and fast. I could not avoid them. Reese and I made jokes about them when he wasn’t around—gorilla hands, monkey paws, paddlefish, beaver tails. Sometimes I worried if he knew the things we said. My dreams were full of long fingers, hands that reached around doorframes and crept over the edge of the mattress, fear in me like a river, like the ice-dark blue of his eyes.

  6

  Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food—not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother’s milk singing to your bloodstream. When I got hungry my hands would not stay still. I would pick at the edges of scabs, scratch at chigger bites and old scars, and tug at loose strands of my black hair. I’d rock a penny in my palm, trying to learn to roll it one-handed up and around each finger without dropping it, the way my cousin Grey could. I’d chew my fingernails or suck on toothpicks and read everything I hadn’t read more than twice already. But when Reese got hungry and there was nothing to eat, she would just sob, shiny fat tears running down her pink cheeks. Nothing would distract her.

  We weren’t hungry too often. There was always something that could be done. Reese and I walked the side of the highway, picking up return deposit bottles to cash in and buy Mama’s cigarettes while she gave home permanents to the old ladies she knew from the lunch counter. Reese would wrinkle her nose and giggle as she slipped the pack of Pall Malls into Mama’s pocket, while I ran to get us a couple of biscuits out of the towel-wrapped dish on the stove.

  “Such fine little ladies,” the women would tell her, and Mama would pat her pocket and agree.

  Mama knew how to make a meal of biscuits and gravy, flour-and-water biscuits with bacon-fat gravy to pour over them. By the time I started the fourth grade, we were eating biscuit dinners more often than not. Sometimes with the biscuits Mama would serve a bowl of tomato soup or cold pork and beans. We joked about liking it right ou
t of the can, but it was cold because the power company had turned the house off—no money in the mail, no electricity. That was hunger wrapped around a starch belly.

  One afternoon there was not even flour to make up the pretense of a meal. We sat at the kitchen table, Reese and I grumbling over our rumbling bellies. Mama laughed but kept her face turned away from us. “Making so much noise over so little. You’d think you girls hadn’t been fed in a week.”

  She got out soda crackers and began to spread them with a layer of dark red ketchup spotted with salt and pepper. She poured us glasses of cold tea and told us stories about real hunger, hunger of days with no expectation that there would ever be biscuits again, how when she was a kid she’d wrestled her sisters for the last bacon rind.

  “We used to pass the plates around the table, eight plates for eight kids, pretending there was food gonna come off the stove to fill those plates, talking about food we’d never seen, just heard about or imagined, making up stories about what we’d cook if we could. Earle liked the idea of parboiled puppies. Your aunt Ruth always talked about frogs’ tongues with dew-berries. Beau wanted fried rutabagas, and Nevil cried for steamed daffodils. But Raylene won the prize with her recipe for sugar-glazed turtle meat with poison greens and hot piss dressing. ”

  After a while Reese and I started making up our own pretend meals. “Peanut butter and Jell-O. Mashed bug meat with pickles.” Mama made us laugh with her imitations of her brothers and sisters fighting over the most disgusting meals they could dream up. She filled our stomachs with soda crackers and ketchup, soda crackers and mayonnaise, and more big glasses of tea, all the time laughing and teasing and tickling our shoulders with her long nails as she walked back and forth. Reese finally went outside to chase the dogs from next door and yell insults at the boys who ran them. But I stayed back to watch Mama through the kitchen window, to see her fingers ridge up into fists and her chin stand out in anger. When Daddy Glen came back from fishing with my uncles, she was just like a big angry mama hen, feathers up and eyes yellow.

  “Soda crackers and ketchup,” she hissed at him. “You so casual about finding another job, but I had to feed my girls that shit while you sat on your butt all afternoon, smoking and telling lies.” She shoved her hands under her arms and sucked her lips in tight so that her mouth looked flat and hard.

  “Now, Anney ...” Daddy Glen reached out to touch her arm. She slapped his hand down and jumped back like a snake that’s caught a rat. I backed away from the window and ran around to the side of the house to watch from the open door to the driveway. I had never seen Mama like that. It was scary but wonderful too. She didn’t seem to be afraid of anything.

  “Not my kids,” she told Daddy Glen, her voice carrying like a shout, though she was speaking in a hoarse whisper. “I was never gonna have my kids know what it was like. Never was gonna have them hungry or cold or scared. Never, you hear me? Never!”

  She went in the bathroom and washed her face, her under-arms, and her neck. Mama was pulling her hose carefully up her legs when I ran in to stand beside her, too scared and excited not to stay close. She paused to hug me briefly. “Go call and have your uncle Earle come by here to pick you up when he gets off. You and Reese better stay at your aunt Alma’s place till I get back.” I ran out to the kitchen, where the phone was, but didn’t call. Instead I hung back in the doorway and watched her reflection in the mirror down the hall.

  Mama put on a clean bra and one of the sleeveless red pullover sweaters she’d gotten from her friend Mab down at the diner—the one Mab joked was made to show just how high her tits could point. Daddy Glen came to the doorway and stood watching her with his throat working but no sound coming out. Mama outlined her mouth in bold red lipstick, combed back her dark blond hair, and hung her big old purse on one arm. She glanced up the hall and saw me leaning against the kitchen doorway.

  “Did you call Earle?”

  I nodded, uneasy at lying, but not wanting to upset her. It would be hours before Earle would be free to come get us, and I’d already decided not to wait for him.

  Mama paused, shook her head, walked back to the bedroom, and reached under the bedframe to pull out the box where she stored her shiny black patent-leather high heels. When she stood up in those, she looked like a different person, older and harder, her mouth set in a grim little smile. Her blond hair looked even brighter, her eyes darker, her complexion paler. She was coldly beautiful. Daddy Glen was still standing in the hall, but Mama stepped around him as if there wasn’t really anyone there, as if cocking her hip and swinging to one side were just a normal part of walking down the hall. Daddy Glen swayed a bit as she passed but did not move to stop her. His hands hung along his pockets while he breathed through his mouth like he was going to be sick. Her heels clicking on the floor were almost as loud as the cracking of his knuckles where he stood. I followed closely behind Mama, afraid to look back at Daddy Glen, afraid my glance might break the spell that seemed to be holding him in the hallway. Mama said nothing, just gave me a hug and a kiss, and slid behind the wheel of her Pontiac.

  When the car engine roared, the spell broke. Daddy Glen ran out and stood on the tarmac watching Mama drive away. His face was rigid. He didn’t even look in my direction, but my belly crawled up tight against my backbone. I felt as if the grass had turned to ammonia and was burning in my throat, as if Daddy Glen’s skin was radiating red heat and waves of steamy sweat. Around the narrow straps of his sleeveless T-shirt I watched the muscles in his shoulders roll and bunch. I knew he could easily break my arms as methodically as he was cracking his knuckles, wring my neck as hard as he was wringing his hands. I backed up carefully, then ran around the house, climbing the fence between our yard and the neighbor’s so I couldn’t be seen.

  Reese was jumping rope with the MacCauley twins and didn’t want to go with me, but she cheered up when I told her we would walk to the highway and hitchhike instead of calling for a lift. Reese loved flagging down strangers on the highway and begging a ride the four miles over to where Aunt Alma lived. She had promised me she would never do it without me, but I worried that as soon as she was a little older she would be hitchhiking all over the county. So every time we hitched a ride, I made up a new horror story. The habit was so strong in me that nervous as I was, I automatically started another one, this time about the phantom driver who went around picking up girls and skinned them like young deer, eating the meat and tanning their hides to make coin purses and pocketbooks.

  “He’ll never get us,” Reese laughed. “We just have to be careful never to take a ride with a man alone.” I thought about that for a moment.

  “Well, it an’t so easy to know who the phantom is,” I told Reese. “Sometimes he catches a married couple first, hiding in the back of their car while they’re in the gas-station bathroom.

  When they drive off, first he murders them and then he props them up so you’d think they were the only people in the car. That way he catches lots of people who would never get in a car with a man alone.”

  Reese chewed her lower lip and stared up the highway. I could see she was thinking this new information over carefully. She examined the people in the truck that stopped for us, an elderly woman in a dark blue shirtwaist dress, and a younger man in khaki work clothes. Before climbing in back she slapped the side of the cab hard enough to see both of them jump in their seats. I bit my tongue to keep from laughing.

  The old lady scolded us for catching a ride on the highway. “You could get killed or worse,” she told us through the back window. “Young girls on the roads are an invitation to the wicked. Anything could happen to you.” We both nodded solemnly and thanked her politely when we jumped off just down the road from Aunt Alma’s place.

  It was past midnight when Mama came for us. Reese was asleep in Aunt Alma’s bed, but I was sitting up with Uncle Wade, nodding over the picture puzzle he worked at when he couldn’t sleep.

  “Girl, your mama,” he said, giving me a little push. I jerked
fully awake when Mama touched my shoulder. Her hands were heavy and smelled faintly of Jergens Lotion.

  “Come on, Bone,” she whispered. “We’re going home.” She thanked Uncle Wade in a tired voice. Her hair was limp and her face scrubbed clean. She was still wearing that pullover sweater, but she’d added a loose white shirt and changed back to her waitress flats.

  “Don’t talk,” she told me. “Just get Reese’s shoes and come on.” She lifted Reese without disturbing Aunt Alma and carried her out to the car. I followed her, holding on to her right side while Reese leaned into her left shoulder. At the car, she paused and looked up into the dark night sky. In the light from the house, her face was all hollows and angles, her eyes sunken and glittery.

  “Damn!” she whispered softly, and leaned her forehead against the cool metal above the car door. “Damn, damn.”

  “Mama,” Reese whimpered. I pressed my cheek against Mama’s side and kept still. There was a long cold moment while we waited, and then Mama pushed herself back up straight and opened the door.

  “All right,” she said, as if she were wrapping up some long conversation with herself. “All right.”

  I looked back to Aunt Alma’s house. Uncle Wade was standing in the kitchen looking out at us, his face stern and his mouth hard. Why was he angry? I wondered. What could have made him look so terribly angry?

  “Cook you some eggs,” Mama said as she steered us into the kitchen and sat us at the table. There was flour in a can, a jar of jelly, butter in a dish, a bag of tomatoes, fatback in a sealed package, and a carton of fresh eggs all speckled brown. She put most of it away and then whipped the eggs up with sweet milk, laying slices of green tomato to fry around the sides of the pan before she poured the eggs in.