“I’m paying my own rent, thank you, Mr. Wade Yarnall.” She looped a curl around one ear and grinned over at Mama proudly. “I don’t need to listen to your complaints about my life, your nonsense about my children. They’re clean and fed and happy where they are. Nobody’s messing with them. Nobody’s messing with me, and nobody’s gonna.”
“But it’s a scandal! She can’t stay there.” Aunt Carr was on Uncle Wade’s side, but she always had been, Mama told me. Carr had come down from Baltimore to stay with us on her yearly summer visit. “Your aunt Carr was always sweet on Wade,” Mama confided to me one afternoon when we were hanging out laundry. “Back when we were still girls, she thought she’d marry Wade. Never got over him picking Alma. ”
“Hellfire, Anney. Carr an’t never gotten over anything. Girl remembers every wrong anybody ever done her or thought of doing her. Bet you she recites them out loud each night before she goes to sleep, just to keep them straight in her mind.” Uncle Earle was standing at the end of the clothesline with a big paper sack in his arms and a wide grin on his dark tanned face. He put the bag down and hugged me when I ran to him, laughing at Mama’s annoyed expression.
“Come on, Anney. You know what I say is true. Don’t you be giving me that old angry look.” He nudged his sack. “I got enough papershell pecans to make two dozen pies. Why don’t you let me and your baby here pick them out for you while you roll out a bunch of pie crusts?”
Mama put the last pin on a pair of Daddy Glen’s worn jockey shorts and gave a shake to one of his shirts so that the sleeves hung down straight. “Some days, I don’t know how anybody stands you, Earle Boatwright, always saying the worst about everybody. I think the one who sits up nights is you, just thinking of evil-hearted things to say about people.”
Earle laughed again. “Oh, you’re right, baby sister. I spend all my spare time making notes on things people have done that they don’t want no one to talk about, and I make sure I talk about just those things.” He hefted his bag on one hip and me on the other. “Tell me, Bone, has your mama told you yet how your aunt Carr come to live so far away in Baltimore City and come home so rarely we barely recognize her when she does?”
“Oh, Earle!” Mama put one hand over her mouth and grabbed the pecans with the other. “Don’t talk bad about Carr. Come on in and I’ll get out my Karo syrup and pie pans.”
Earle swung me up high so that I straddled his shoulders, my legs hanging down on either side of his neck. “Yes, ma’am. I got a taste for pecan pie the way you make it when you’re mad.” He tickled my bare foot till I grabbed his ears to make him stop.
“When your mama’s pissed at me, Bone, she chops the nuts up fine the way I like them. Otherwise she don’t bother, and if the nuts an’t chopped small they don’t sweeten up right for my taste.”
At the screen door he paused, and I pulled his ears again. “But what about Aunt Carr? An’t you gonna tell me how she moved to Baltimore?” He turned his head to look up at me and gave his famous slow grin. “You know your mama don’t want me to tell you that story.”
I kicked my feet against his chest. “But an’t you gonna tell me anyway?”
Earle laughed and swung me down. He pushed the screen door with his hip and took a quick look inside to see that Mama had gone on to the kitchen. “Well.” He lit a cigarette, striking the match one-handed.
“Your aunt Carr was a sensitive girl, tender on the subject of how pretty your mama and Alma were when she wasn’t much to look at herself. Carr wanted to be beautiful so much it made her mean. She used to talk so awful about Raylene it was a shame, insisting Raylene had to learn to use makeup and fix her hair, start working on getting herself a man. But I always thought she just went on at Raylene so she could boast about how hard she worked at looking good. Raylene and Alma and your mama used to just laugh at her about it, make her so mad. I an’t saying Carr didn’t love her sisters, but sometimes you could tell she didn’t much like them. And oh! She did have a thing for the young Mr. Wade. The girl just plain wanted him, and maybe she could see that he wasn’t giving a minute’s notice to her when Alma was around. It wore on her bad.
“Then one Thanksgiving Wade joked where everyone could hear that Alma was the younger, sweeter version of Carr—the blossom next to the windfall, I think he said. Carr’s face was a study right then. You could see every thought running across it, none of them pretty. And by Christmas, I swear that girl had snapped up old Baltimore Benny like he was new bait in a cold spring. Had her first baby by the next fall, and got Benny to move back up with his people right after that. It took Wade and Alma another five years to marry themselves, though Alma’s twins waited barely long enough for the preacher to stop talking before they pushed their way out of her belly.”
Earle rolled his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “Seems like after that we were all grown up and everything was different. It’s the way of things. One day you’re all family together, fighting and hugging from one moment to the next, and then it’s all gone. You’re off making your own family, scared of what’s coming next, and Lord, things have a way of running faster and faster all the time.” He looked off across the yard as if he were seeing a lot more than his oil-green Chevy parked on the street.
“Well, where are you?” Mama called to us from the kitchen. “I an’t gonna make no pies all by myself when you two can help.” I ran inside while Earle followed slowly behind, dropping his lanky form into a kitchen chair turned around so he could rest his chin on the back of it.
“You just don’t want me telling stories where you can’t hear, little sister.”
“Lies, you mean.” Mama passed me the sifter and a bowl of flour, then poured out a mound of pecans between her and Earle. She took her big butcher knife and started rocking it back and forth across the nuts, chopping them fine. “You know, Bone, Earle’s hair was a dull brown when he was a boy and started school. It just got darker and blacker every year.” She looked over at her brother with a crooked smile. “What you think, Earle, was it school or sin that made your hair so black?”
Earle palmed a mouthful of pecans, tugged on the lock that hung down over his forehead, and sighed a long mournful moan. “Oh, school, little sister. That’s why I had to quit, you know. I had to stop the process before it went too far. If I’d gone on, my hair would have turned so black it would have started to absorb all the sunlight in Greenville County. Crops would have failed and children gone hungry just because of my selfish need to learn algebra and geography. I had to quit and take that job building the new runway out at the air base. It was the only thing to do to save us from starvation and the cold cold night.”
“Oh, you!” Mama slapped Earle’s shoulder lightly. “I can’t say nothing without you telling your awful lies.” She pulled in her rolling pin and leaned on it as she crushed a couple of cups of pecans down to mealy bits. “God’s keeping track, Earle Boatwright. One of these days your stories are gonna come back on you. You an’t gonna know what to say then, I swear.”
Uncle Wade and Aunt Alma fought for weeks, with Aunt Carr and Mama stepping in now and then, until Aunt Carr had to go home to Baltimore and Daddy Glen got laid off from his new job at the Pepsi plant and Mama started working too hard to go visiting Aunt Alma much. It didn’t look like they would ever make up, but then again, nobody acted like it was any big deal. Aunt Alma had sworn she wouldn’t have Wade back in her life till he crawled the length of Main Street singing what a dog he was, but when the baby got sick and the boys started running around at night, she gave it up and moved back in with him.
“I knew what he was like when I married him,” Alma told Mama. “I guess he an’t no worse than any other man.” But she was still mad enough not to move back into their bedroom for a few months. She treated Wade as if he were a tenant in his own house, barely speaking to him until he apologized to her. At first Uncle Wade was indignant, swearing that Aunt Alma would go to hell for treating him like a stranger. He did apologize eventually, though
he wouldn’t admit he had done anything wrong.
“A man has needs,” he kept telling everybody from Daddy Glen to the gas-station attendants on White Horse Road. “A man has needs, and she was pregnant. Was I gonna take the risk of hurting my own baby in her womb?”
Wade’s woeful complaint was a joke to all the aunts. “A man has needs,” they’d laugh each time they got together. “So what you suppose a woman has?”
“Men!” one of them would always answer in a giggling roar. Then they would all laugh till the tears started running down. I wasn’t at all sure what was so funny, but I laughed anyway. I liked being one of the women with my aunts, liked feeling a part of something nasty and strong and separate from my big rough boy-cousins and the whole world of spitting, growling, overbearing males.
7
“Don’t you ever let me catch you stealing,” Mama commanded in one of her rare lectures, after Cousin Grey got caught running out of the White Horse Winn Dixie with a bargain quart of RC Cola. “You want something, you tell me, and if it’s worth the trouble we’ll find a way. But I an’t gonna have no child of mine caught stealing.”
I took Mama at her word and hung around with my cousins Garvey and Grey, planning not to get caught and not to tell Mama. But one afternoon after I produced Tootsie Rolls for Reese and me, Mama took my hands in hers like she was going to cry.
“Where’d you get them?”
“Uncle Earle,” I suggested.
“No.” Mama dropped down a little so her face was close to mine.
“Aunt Alma.” Carefully, I made my face a mask.
“Don’t lie too.” The lines in her face looked as deep as the rivers that flowed south toward Charleston. “Tell me the truth.”
I started to cry. “Downtown with Grey and Garvey this morning, at the Woolworth’s counter.”
Mama used her forefinger to wipe the tears off my cheeks. She wiped her own. “Is this all of it? How many did you take?”
“Two others, Mama. I ate one, gave Reese one.”
Mama leaned back in her chair, dropping my hands. She shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it carefully. I sat still, watching her, waiting. Tears kept collecting in the corners of my eyes, and I had to turn to wipe them away on my shoulder, but I kept watching Mama’s face as she sat and smoked without looking at me. The fingers of her right hand rubbed together steadily like the legs of grasshoppers I had seen climbing up the long grass at Aunt Raylene’s place. Her lips moved steadily too, as if she were sucking on her teeth or about to speak, but she was quiet a long time, just sitting there looking off through the open window smoking her cigarette.
“You know your cousin Tommy Lee? Aunt Ruth’s oldest boy?”
I frowned, trying to remember their names. There was Dwight, I knew, Lucius, D.W., Graham, yeah, Tommy Lee, and Butch. Aunt Ruth had only two daughters and six boys, most of them married with boys of their own. All of them were so alike that I never could keep track of anyone but Butch, and I rarely saw him anymore since he had gone to live with Ruth’s oldest girl, Mollie, in Oklahoma. The younger boys turned up occasionally to wrestle Reese and me, give us candy, or tell us stories. The older ones had the sunken eyes and planed faces of men, and they never gave us anything except nasty looks. I couldn’t have said which of the older ones was Tommy Lee, though I’d heard people talk about him enough—about what a hardass he was, about his girlfriends and his dirty mouth, his stints in the county jail and the fights he got into.
“He’s bad,” Mama said, her eyes still looking out the window. “He’s just bad all the way through. He steals from his mama. He’s stolen from me. Don’t dare leave your pocketbook around him, or any of your stuff that he could sell. He even took Deedee’s green stamp books one time and traded them off for some useless thing.” Her eyes drifted back to my face, the stunned brown of the pupils shining like mossy rocks under water.
“I remember when we were just kids and he was always stealing candy to give away. Thought people would like him if he gave them stuff, I suppose. Now he’s always saying how he’s been robbed, and he’s got a story to account for everything he does. Beats his girlfriends up ‘cause they cheat on him. Can’t keep a job ’cause people tell lies about him. Steals ’cause the world’s been so cruel to him. So much nonsense. He’s just bad, that’s all, just bad. Steals from his mama and sisters, steals from his own.”
I dropped my head. I remembered Grey telling me how he learned to break locks from Tommy Lee, that Tommy Lee was the slickest piece of goods in Greenville. “Boy knows how to take care of himself for sure. Never owes nobody nothing.” Grey’s face had flushed with respect and envy when he said it, and I had felt a little of the same—wishing I too knew how to take care of myself and could break locks or start cars without a key or palm stuff off a counter so smoothly that no one would know I had done it. But to steal from your mama! My face felt stiff with shame and anger. I wasn’t like that. I would never steal from Mama.
Mama’s hand touched my chin, trailed along my cheek, and stroked my hair. “You’re my pride. Do you know? You and your sister are all I really have, all I ever will have. You think I could let you grow up to be like that?”
I shook my head. The tears started again, and with them hiccups. Mama went and got a cool washcloth to wet my face. “Don’t cry, honey. It’ll be all right. We’ll take care of it, it’ll be all right.” She put the Tootsie Rolls in a paper bag and gave me a handful of pennies to carry. She kept talking while she brushed my hair and then hers, called Reese in and told her to stay on the porch, turned the heat down on the beans that were cooking on the stove, and walked me out to the car. She told me about when she and Aunt Raylene were girls, how they had worked for this man out past Old Henderson Road, picking strawberries for pennies every day for weeks, going through the rows and pulling loose the red ripe ones for him to sell in his stand by the side of the road.
“Only the ripe ones, he kept telling us, but it was so hot and the dust was so thick, sometimes we’d pull up the ones that weren’t quite ripe, you know—green ones, or half-green anyway. We’d hide them under the ripe ones when we set them up for him. People would buy a box and then get home to find those half-ripe ones, call him up to complain. He’d get so mad, but we were just kids, and his yelling didn’t bother us so long as he kept paying us for the work.”
“What’d he pay you?”
Mama waved her hand as if that didn’t matter. “Not enough, you know, not enough. Strawberry picking is terrible work, hurts your back, your eyes. You get that juice all over you, get those little prickers in your hands. An’t enough money in it even for children, even if you eat as many as you can. After a while you don’t want any anyway.” She laughed.
“Though Raylene sure could eat a lot. Faster than you could see, she’d swallow handfuls of berries. Only proof she’d been eating them was her red red tongue.”
She stopped the car in front of the Woolworth’s, cut the engine, and sat for a moment, her hands resting on the wheel. I looked out at the big display windows, where stacks of plastic picnic baskets, little tin office waste cans, and sleeveless cotton sundresses on hangers were squeezed behind ratty stuffed animals and tricycles with multicolored plastic streamers on the handlebars. The thought of going back in there with Mama made me feel sick to my stomach and almost angry at her. Why couldn’t she just let me promise never to do it again?
Her hand on my shoulder made me jump. “Your granny found out what we’d been doing, ’cause we got lazy, you know, and started putting more and more green ones in the bottom of the boxes. Grandpa laughed about it, but your granny didn’t laugh. She came over there one afternoon and turned half a dozen boxes upside down. Collected a bucket of green strawberries and paid the man for them. Took us home, sat us at the kitchen table, and made us eat every one of them. Raylene and I puked strawberries all night long.”
“You must have hated her!”
Mama was quiet, and I got scared. I didn’t want her to think I hate
d her. I didn’t even want to be angry at her. I clamped my teeth tight and tried not to start crying again.
“There an’t no other way to do it,” she said quietly. “I hate it. You hate it. You might hate me for it. I don’t know, and I can’t say what might happen now. But I just don’t know no other way to do it. We’re gonna go in there and give the man back his candy, pay for what you ate, and that will be all there is to it. It will be over, and you’ll be glad it’s settled. We won’t ever have to mention it again.”
Mama opened the door briskly, and I followed her numbly. There was a flush on her cheeks as she walked me back to the candy counter, waited for the salesgirl to come over, and stood me right in front of her. “My daughter has something to tell you,” she said, and gave me a little push. But I couldn’t speak. I held out the bag and the pennies, and started to cry again, this time sobbing loud. The girl looked confused, but Mama wouldn’t say anything else, just gave me another little push. I thought I’d strangle on my tongue when the manager walked over to us.
“What’s this?” he said in a booming voice. “What’s this? You got something for us, little girl?” He was a big man with a wide face and a swollen belly poking out from under a buttoned-up vest. He stooped down so that his face was right in front of me, so close I could smell the sharp alcohol scent of after-shave.
“You do, don’tcha, honey?” He looked like he was swallowing an urge to laugh at us. I was suddenly so angry at him my stomach seemed to curl up inside me. I shoved the bag at him, the pennies.
“I stole it. I’m sorry. I stole it.”
Mama’s hand squeezed my shoulder, and I heard the breath come out of her in a sigh. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying hard not to get as mad at her as I was at that man.