I loosened my jacket. When I spoke my voice was as flat and careless as hers. “Mama always said Earle lived from woman to woman. Told Daddy Glen that Earle had become a cradle robber, that there was nothing solid left in his life but whiskey and family.” I paused, surprised to hear myself mention Daddy Glen. It felt suddenly hot on the porch.
“Well, I told him he should get himself a widow next time, some fat old girl to iron his shirts and wash his back. But Earle likes them young, likes them openmouthed and gawky. He’s like all men, I suppose, loves a grateful woman, specially one that he don’t have to do nothing to impress. And the girls he finds—my Lord, it about hurts my heart, these little strays he brings around. All Earle has to do is speak gently to them and they fall all over him. They’re just like fruit in the sun, heavy and ripe for someone to pick.”
I squirmed a little on my stool. “Uncle Earle told me he’s sure there an’t no woman ever regretted giving herself to him.”
“Christ Lord, you love him just like one of them, don’t you?” Aunt Raylene frowned at me. “You don’t think it’s cruel the way he takes up with these children? He’s never divorced a one of them, never stays with any of them more than a few months. God knows how many babies he’s planted.”
“None.” I bit my lip.
“You know that, do you?”
“He told me he took care not to make children anymore, said he didn’t think he had no business making any more babies than he had already.”
“Well, isn’t he thoughtful!” Aunt Raylene ground out the stub of her cigarette on the side of one of the flats. She walked over near me and picked up one of the glass window frames leaning against the wall. Carrying it back, she set it down so that it covered two of her flats. Two more windows completed the task, leaving the mix to heat in the sun. She didn’t look at me, and her lips were set in a thin straight line. I knew that meant she was mad at me.
“He only marries them ’cause they want it so bad.” My eyes stung, as if the tears I had refused to shed on the long walk out were burning me now. My hands balled up into fists. “He loves them,” I yelled. “He loves them more than they deserve. ”
“Bone.” Aunt Raylene turned to me and shook her head. “Girl, you are seriously confused about love. Seriously.”
“Oh?” I drawled at her sarcastically, and rocked to my feet. “And whose fault is that? Huh? How am I supposed to know anything about love, anyway? How am I supposed to know anything at all? I’m just another ignorant Boatwright, you know. Another piece of trash barely knows enough to wipe her ass or spit away from the wind. Just like you and Mama and Alma and everybody.” I spit to the side deliberately. “Hell,” I said softly to her face. “Hellfire. We an’t like nobody else in the world.”
Her dark eyes glittered at me, but I wasn’t afraid. My insides were boiling, and my skin burned. My hatred and rage were so hot I felt like I could have spit fire. When she put her hand on my wrist, I felt the hairs on my forearm tingle and stand up. A cold electric current ran up to the back of my neck.
“People are the same,” she said in a whisper. “Everybody just does the best they can.”
I took a long breath and let it out in a rush of bitter words. “Other people don’t go beating on each other all the time,” I told her. “They don’t get falling-down drunk, shoot each other, and then laugh about it. They don’t pick up and leave their husbands in the middle of the night and then never explain. They don’t move out alone to the edge of town without a husband or children or even a good friend, run around all the time in overalls, and sell junk by the side of the road!”
Aunt Raylene crossed her arms over her breasts and looked at me. “I don’t like being yelled at, never have.” Her hands gripped her upper arms so tightly I saw the fingers tremble.
“And I don’t know about other people, but I’ve always believed everybody does what they have to do in this life.” She stopped and started again. “When you’re thirty years old and supporting your own children and doing the best you can when you don’t know where your next dollar is coming from, then you can yell at me. Maybe.” She shook her head, and turned away, brushing loose dirt off her thighs.
“It’s almost suppertime,” she told me. “And you’re filthy. You go get yourself cleaned up and I’ll see whether I feel like feeding you or not.”
“You don’t have to feed me.” I couldn’t look at her and say it. My head dropped down and I wiped my nose on my sleeve.
“I know what I have to do and what I don’t. You think about it, and you’ll see that the biggest part of why I live the way I do is that out here I can do just about anything I damn well please.”
I looked up at her hesitantly. Aunt Raylene’s face was beet-red, and her eyes were not on me. They were looking out past the highway. She seemed like she wanted to cry almost as much as I did, but like me, wasn’t going to let herself.
“I said, go wash yourself.”
I went.
The stories I made up for myself changed. In the half-sleep that preceded full sleep I began to imagine the highway that went north. No real road, this highway was shadowed by tall grass and ancient trees. Moss hung low and tiny birds with gray-blue wings darted from the road’s edge to the trees. Cars passed at a roar but did not stop, and the north star shone above their headlights like a beacon. I walked that road alone, my legs swinging easily as I covered the miles. No one stopped. No one called to me. Only the star guided me, and I was not sure where I would end.
I stayed at Raylene’s for three days, and then Mama called to say I either had to come back or start school out there. I’d heard about the country school from Garvey years before, and knew I would hate it. They didn’t even have a library. Reluctantly, I went back to the apartment over the Fish Market. Mama bought me a new pair of sneakers to replace the ones I had worn out, but said nothing about me running off in the first place. Several times I caught her watching me with a painful concentrated expression, but I didn’t ask her what she was thinking. Reese told me that she had been crazy-angry when I turned up gone, and was ready to call the police when Aunt Raylene called.
“They talked about you a long time,” she said. “Aunt Raylene told Mama to let you get it out of your system, and Mama told Aunt Raylene to mind her own business. I thought they were gonna yell at each other like they used to, but Mama just gave in. She said she didn’t know what to do with you, didn’t know what to do with nobody, and Raylene could keep you if you wanted to stay.”
Reese grinned at me almost sweetly. “I didn’t think you’d come back at all. I was all ready to take over your side of the bed for good.” Reese’s biggest complaint was that she was in the middle and Mama and I were both restless sleepers. “I wouldn’t want Mama to be mad at me the way she’s been mad at you,” she added. “I don’t see how you can stand it.”
I didn’t either.
It felt as if the world was falling apart in slow motion. Two days after I came back, Aunt Alma’s baby girl finally died, her heart stopping the way everyone had been expecting since she was born. Fay called Mama to tell her, and Raylene came to stay with Reese and me while Mama went out to see Alma. “You’ve always been the one closest to her,” Raylene told Mama, “and she’s not handling this very well at all. You’d think we hadn’t all known it was coming.”
“You know how Alma loved Annie,” Mama said. “Maybe she knew Annie was gonna die, and maybe she didn’t, but she wanted her baby girl to live.” I heard her from inside the apartment even though she was already out on the landing.
Her voice was pitched low, but the words sounded so intense I came to the door.
I watched Mama go down the stairs while Reese led Raylene inside to see how well she’d done her paint-by-numbers clown face. Once Granny had told me how Mama carried me down to the courthouse after I was born and fought with the man there about the way they had made out my birth certificate. Telling me that story, Granny’s eyes had glittered and her mouth had turned up in a fierce smile
. “You don’t know how your mama loves you,” she had said. “You can’t even imagine.”
Like Alma loved Annie, maybe, like Ruth loved her sons D.W. and Dwight and Tommy Lee, so much that she made Travis swear not to bury her until they got home. I chewed on a fingernail and watched Mama walk away, wondering if she still loved me and what I would do when we went back to Daddy Glen.
Raylene had brought some of her home-canned blackberries with her. She and Reese made a skillet cobbler the way Raylene said she had learned when she was with the carnival. She dropped lots of little butter slices on the bottom of the skillet, sprinkled brown sugar over that, then poured her blackberries, more butter, and a handful of white sugar over everything. Unsweetened biscuit dough made the top crust, and the cobbler was ready to eat in half an hour. It wasn’t as good as Aunt Fay’s pies, but Reese gorged on it, eating almost half the pan by herself. Afterwards, she leaned forward lazily on the table, almost asleep, her blue-stained lips slightly parted.
Aunt Raylene looked through the paintings and picked up the Japanese mountain scene I had not bothered to finish. She waved it at me. “Reese tells me you won’t give this to her, even though you don’t want to finish it.”
“It’s mine. I might finish it sometime.”
“Uh-huh.” Raylene put the cardboard drawing back. I waited for her to say something more, but she turned away and started cleaning up the kitchen.
It was still early. I went out on the landing to watch the cars pass by, people from the nearby housing development on their way out to the new discount grocery, a few trucks with men coming home late from work, a bus from Bushy Creek Baptist with flat-faced children pressed against the windows staring at me hatefully. I glared back at them. Anger was like a steady drip of poison into my soul, teaching me to hate the ones that hated me. Who do they think they are? I whispered to myself. They piss honey? Shit morning-glory blossoms? Sit on their porches every Sunday morning and look down on the world with contempt?
“I hate them,” I told Aunt Raylene when she came up behind me, waving at the bus as it passed. “Looking at us like we’re something nasty.”
Aunt Raylene was picking blackberry seeds out of her teeth, looking off into the distance, and she surprised me when she reached over and slapped my shoulder. “They look at you the way you look at them,” she told me bluntly. “You don’t know who those children are. Maybe they’re nasty and silly and hateful. Maybe not. You don’t know what happens to them when they go home. You don’t know their daddies or mamas, who their people are, why they do things, or what they’re scared of. You think because they wear different clothes than you and go by so fast, they’re rich and cruel and thinking terrible things about you. Could be they’re looking at you sitting up here eating blackberries and looking at them like they’re spit on a stove—could be they’re jealous of you, hungry for what you got, afraid of what you would do if they ever stepped in the yard.”
She reached down and pulled her string bag from her pocket and began to roll a cigarette. “You’re making up stories about those people. Make up a story where you have to live in their house, be one of their family, and pass by this road. Look at it from the other side for a while. Maybe you won’t be glaring at people so much.”
I looked up at her sourly. “People say you ran off to the carnival with a man, but you never say nothing about him. How come he didn’t marry you?”
The paper in Aunt Raylene’s hands shook. “People say? People will say anything. I ran off to the carnival, yeah, but not for no man. For myself. And I an’t never wanted to marry nobody. I like my life the way it is, little girl. I made my life, the same way it looks like you’re gonna make yours-out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you’re mad at. You better think hard.”
She licked the cigarette paper and smoothed it closed. She lit it and tucked the dead match back in her pocket. She smoked carefully, watching me as if she expected me to talk back to her, but I held still. When she finally spoke again, her voice shook a little. “It’s not so cold tonight, not so cold. Smell of spring in the air.”
I turned my face away and said nothing. After a minute Raylene shrugged and went back inside. I squatted down and hugged myself until I was as small as I could get, watching the cars pass and listening to Reese fuss as Aunt Raylene took her off to bed. I closed my eyes and tried to make up a story for myself. I pretended we were back in that house over in West Greenville that Mama had loved so, pretended that Daddy Glen had joined the Pentecostal Church and gotten a cross-country trucking job that would pay him lots of money but keep him away from home. I imagined Mama getting a job where she could sit down all she wanted, where the money was good and she never got any burns or had to pull her hair back so tight off her face that she got headaches. Maybe she could be a teacher? Or one of those women behind the makeup counter at the Jordan Marsh? I bit my lips and let it all play out under my eyelids—Reese in a new dress for Easter, me with all the books I wanted to read, Mama sitting in the sun with her feet up, Daddy Glen far away and coming home only often enough to make Mama smile. I fell asleep there dreaming, loving the dream.
19
That spring the storms were astonishing, torrents of water that sheeted down and flooded everything from the sagging old houses on Old Henderson Road to the warehouses and cafes out on White Horse Road, but the day Aunt Alma went crazy it was perfectly clear, hot and dry with the mud standing up in stiff peaks, and ruts off every driveway. It was Monday, the day Reese had gone over to Fay and Nevil’s when she got out of school, to go shopping with their girls.
“She’s almost nine,” Fay had told Mama. “She’s old enough. Can’t be too protective, you know.” After Reese drove her crazy begging, Mama agreed reluctantly.
I was walking home slowly, trying to keep my skirt from blowing up in the wind and thinking about the luxury of an hour or two before Reese would get home, a solid piece of time when I would be able to lie around on the couch, listen to the radio, drink Coca-Cola, and read the paperback of The Group I had finally managed to sneak out of the library. Walking up past Woolworth’s in the fresh spring breeze, I was carrying my shoes and tugging at my hem when I saw Mama running down the stairs from the apartment. She was still wearing her hair net and flat white shoes, so she couldn’t have been home very long. From the way she was moving, something had to be wrong, so I picked up and ran, reaching the car just as she did. Even so, she had the Pontiac engine roaring by the time I grabbed the door handle. I jumped in and threw my books in the backseat before she could stop me, but I was still surprised when she didn’t tell me to get out, just gunned the engine so that the wheels spun as we pulled out onto the highway.
“It’s your Aunt Alma,” she said. “Little Earle called. Sounded terrible. Couldn’t even get out what had happened, so don’t ask.” Mama looked stern—scared and angry at the same time. I wondered what was wrong, if it was something Uncle Wade had done, or maybe one of the cousins. It could be anything with the way Aunt Alma had been since Annie died.
“Don’t we just lead charmed lives?” Aunt Alma had said the last time we saw her. “Bad things seem to be happening all the time.”
I concentrated on gripping the door handle while Mama roared out toward the West Greenville Highway. She took the Old Henderson Road turnoff, past the gas station where Uncle Wade had been working before his accident, and turned onto the dirt road that cut through open country where the interstate was supposed to go in next year. Aunt Alma had gotten a deal on one of the condemned farmhouses out there, and had moved in after Ruth died.
Little Earle was waiting for us beside the cow grate down near the mailbox, his face white and his shirt streaked with muddy brown stains. There was snot all over his upper lip, and he kept wiping his hands down over his middle where the worst of the mud had smeared. Mama didn’t get out of the car, just stopped for a minute and leaned out the window. “You all right?” she yelled, and he n
odded. He sure didn’t look all right to me.
“She’s up at the house,” he whispered, as if he were afraid to talk too loud. “I tried. I tried, but she wouldn’t let me do nothing.” He hugged his shoulders tightly. “She’s up there by herself. I got the girls away and called you.” There was a pause as he gulped air between every few words. “And then Uncle Earle. Uncle Earle said not to go back, and anyway, she scared me. Mama scared me.” He stopped and looked back up the dirt drive that wound to the side and disappeared into the pines. “Oh God, Auntie, she’s gone crazy as a milk cow, just like Daddy said she would!”
“Wipe your face and keep quiet,” Mama told him fiercely. “I’ll send Bone down for you in a little while, and I don’t want you scaring your sisters. You wash your face and get some of that dirt off yourself.” She sounded almost hateful—a way I had never heard her talk before to any child. I turned from watching Little Earle to look at her and almost rolled across the seat when she started the Pontiac racing up the drive again, Behind us I heard another engine, and looked over my shoulder to see Uncle Earle’s flatbed truck trailing a cloud of red dust, a rattle of tools bouncing around. He yelled something, but Mama didn’t stop, just sped into Aunt Alma’s yard and nearly knocked over her garden barrels before killing the engine and jumping out of the car. I pushed over to the driver’s side to follow right behind her, but Mama yelled at me to stay there without even turning around. I froze where I was while she ran toward the porch and Aunt Alma’s hunched still figure.