Little Hobart Street was too high up in the hollow to get any flooding, but the rain washed parts of the road into the yards of the people who lived below us. The water also ate away some of the soil from around the pillars holding up our house, making it even more precarious. The hole in the kitchen ceiling widened, and then the ceiling on Brian and Maureen’s side of the bedroom started leaking. Brian had the top bunk, and when it rained, he’d spread a tarp over himself to keep the dripping water off.
Everything in the house was damp. A fine green mold spread over the books and papers and paintings that were stacked so high and piled so deep you could hardly cross the room. Tiny mushrooms sprouted up in corners. The moisture ate away at the wooden stairs leading up to the house, and climbing them became a daily hazard. Mom fell through a rotted step and went tumbling down the hillside. She had bruises on her legs and arms for weeks. “My husband doesn’t beat me,” she’d say when anyone stared at them. “He just won’t fix the stairs.”
The porch had also started to rot. Most of the banisters and railing had given way, and the floorboards had turned spongy and slick with mold and algae. It became a real problem when you had to go down under the house to use the toilet at night, and each of us had slipped and fallen off the porch at least once. It was a good ten feet to the ground.
“We have to do something about the porch situation,” I told Mom. “It’s getting downright dangerous to go to the bathroom at night.” Besides, the toilet under the house was now totally unusable. It had overflowed, and you were better off digging yourself a hole in the hillside somewhere.
“You’re right,” Mom said. “Something has to be done.”
She bought a bucket. It was made of yellow plastic, and we kept it on the floor in the kitchen, and that was what we used whenever we had to go to the bathroom. When it filled up, some brave soul would carry it outside, dig a hole, and empty it.
O NE DAY WHILE Brian and I were out scrounging around on the edge of our property, he picked up a piece of rotting lumber, and there among the pill bugs and night crawlers was a diamond ring. The stone was big. At first we thought it was just neat junk, but we spit-polished it and scratched glass with it like Dad had shown us, and it seemed real. We figured it must have belonged to the old lady who had lived there. She had died before we moved in. Everyone had said she was a little loopy.
“What do you think it’s worth?” I asked Brian.
“Probably more than the house,” he said.
We figured we could sell it and buy food, pay off the house—Mom and Dad kept missing the monthly payments, and there was talk that we were going to be evicted—and maybe still have enough left over for something special, like a new pair of sneakers for each of us.
We brought the ring home and showed it to Mom. She held it up to the light, then said we needed to have it appraised. The next day she took the Trailways bus to Bluefield. When she returned, she told us it was in fact a genuine two-carat diamond.
“So what’s it worth?” I asked.
“That doesn’t matter,” Mom said.
“How come?”
“Because we’re not selling it.”
She was keeping it, she explained, to replace the wedding ring her mother had given her, the one Dad had pawned shortly after they got married.
“But Mom,” I said. “that ring could get us a lot of food.”
“That’s true,” Mom said, “but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food.”
Mom’s self-esteem did need some shoring up. Sometimes, things just got to her. She retreated to her sofa bed and stayed there for days on end, crying and occasionally throwing things at us. She could have been a famous artist by now, she yelled, if she hadn’t had children, and none of us appreciated her sacrifice. The next day, if the mood had passed, she’d be painting and humming away as if nothing had happened.
One Saturday morning not long after Mom started wearing her new diamond ring, her mood was on an upswing, and she decided we’d all clean the house. I thought this was a great idea. I told Mom we should empty out each room, clean it thoroughly, and put back only the things that were essential. That was the one way, it seemed to me, to get rid of the clutter. But Mom said my idea was too time-consuming, so all we ended up doing was straightening piles of paper into stacks and stuffing dirty clothes into the chest of drawers. Mom insisted that we chant Hail Marys while we worked. “It’s a way of cleansing our souls while we’re cleaning house,” she said. “We’re killing two birds with one stone.”
The reason she had become a tad moody, she said later that day, was that she hadn’t been getting enough exercise. “I’m going to start doing calisthenics,” she announced. “Once you get your circulation going, it changes your entire outlook on life.” She leaned over and touched her toes.
When she came up, she said she was feeling better already, and went down for another toe touch. I watched from the writing desk with my arms folded across my chest. I knew the problem was not that we all had poor circulation. We didn’t need to start doing toe touches. We needed to take drastic measures. I was twelve by now, and I had been weighing our options, doing some research at the public library and picking up scraps of information about how other families on Little Hobart Street survived. I had come up with a plan and had been waiting for the opportunity to broach it to Mom. The moment seemed ripe.
“Mom, we can’t go on living like this,” I said.
“It’s not so bad,” she said. Between each toe touch, she was reaching up into the air.
“We haven’t had anything to eat but popcorn for three days,” I said.
“You’re always so negative,” she said. “You remind me of my mother—criticize, criticize, criticize.”
“I’m not being negative,” I said. “I’m trying to be realistic.”
“I’m doing the best I can under the circumstances,” she said. “How come you never blame your father for anything? He’s no saint, you know.”
“I know,” I said. I ran a finger along the edge of the desk. Dad was always parking his cigarettes there, and it was ribbed with a row of black cigarette burns, like a decorative border. “Mom, you have to leave Dad,” I said.
She stopped doing her toe touches. “I can’t believe you would say that,” she said. “I can’t believe that you, of all people, would turn on your father.” I was Dad’s last defender, she continued, the only one who pretended to believe all his excuses and tales, and to have faith in his plans for the future. “He loves you so much,” Mom said. “How can you do this to him?”
“I don’t blame Dad,” I said. And I didn’t. But Dad seemed hell-bent on destroying himself, and I was afraid he was going to pull us all down with him. “We’ve got to get away.”
“But I can’t leave your father!” she said.
I told Mom that if she left Dad, she’d be eligible for government aid, which she couldn’t get now because she had an able-bodied husband. Some people at school—not to mention half the people on Little Hobart Street—were on welfare, and it wasn’t so bad. I knew Mom was opposed to welfare, but those kids got food stamps and clothing allowances. The state bought them coal and paid for their school lunches.
Mom wouldn’t hear of it. Welfare, she said, would cause irreparable psychological damage to us kids. “You can be hungry every now and then, but once you eat, you’re okay,” she said. “And you can get cold for a while, but you always warm up. Once you go on welfare, it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You’re scarred for life.”
“Fine,” I said. “If we’re not charity cases, then get a job.” There was a teacher shortage in McDowell County, just like there had been in Battle Mountain. She could get work in a heartbeat, and when she had a salary, we could move into a little apartment in town.
“That sounds like an awful life,” Mom said.
“Worse than this?” I asked.
&nbs
p; Mom turned quiet. She seemed to be thinking. Then she looked up. She was smiling serenely. “I can’t leave your father,” she said. “It’s against the Catholic faith.” Then she sighed. “And anyway, you know your mom. I’m an excitement addict.”
M OM NEVER TOLD Dad that I’d urged her to leave him. That summer he still thought of me as his biggest supporter, and given that there was so little competition for the job, I probably was.
One afternoon in June, Dad and I were sitting out on the porch, our legs dangling over the side, looking down at the houses below. That summer, it was so hot I could barely breathe. It seemed hotter than Phoenix or Battle Mountain, where it regularly climbed above a hundred degrees, so when Dad told me it was only ninety degrees, I said the thermometer must be broken. But he said no, we were used to dry desert heat, and this was humid heat.
It was a lot hotter, Dad pointed out, down in the valley along Stewart Street, which was lined with those cute brick houses that had their neat, square lawns and corrugated aluminum breezeways. The valleys trapped the heat. Our house was the highest on the mountainside, which made it, ergo, the coolest spot in Welch. In case of flooding—as we had seen—it was also the safest. “You didn’t know I put a lot of thought into where we should live, did you?” he asked me. “Real estate’s about three things, Mountain Goat. Location. Location. Location.”
Dad started laughing. It was a silent laugh that made his shoulders shake, and the more he laughed, the funnier it seemed to him, which made him laugh even harder. I had to start laughing, too, and soon we were both hysterical, lying on our backs, tears running down our cheeks, slapping our feet on the porch floor. We’d get too winded to laugh any further, our sides cramping with stitches, and we’d think our fit was over, but then one of us would start chuckling, and that would get the other going, and again we’d both end up shrieking like hyenas.
The main source of relief from the heat for the kids in Welch was the public swimming pool, down by the railroad tracks near the Esso station. Brian and I had gone swimming once, but Ernie Goad and his friends were there, and they started telling everybody that we Wallses lived in garbage and would stink up the pool water something awful. This was Ernie Goad’s opportunity to take revenge for the Battle of Little Hobart Street. One of his friends came up with the phrase. “health epidemic,” and they were going on to the parents and lifeguards that we needed to be ejected to prevent an outbreak at the pool. Brian and I decided to leave. As we were walking away, Ernie Goad came up to the chain-link fence. “Go on home to the garbage dump!” he shouted. His voice was shrill with triumph. “Go on, now, and don’t come back!”
A week later, with the heat still holding, I ran into Dinitia Hewitt downtown. She had just come from the pool and had her wet hair pulled back under a scarf. “Brother, that water felt good,” she said, drawing out the word. “good” so it sounded like it had about fifteen Os in it. “Do you ever go swimming?”
“They don’t like us to go there,” I said.
Dinitia nodded, even though I hadn’t explained. Then she said. “Why don’t you come swimming with us in the morning?”
By. “us” I knew she meant the other black people. The pool was not segregated, anyone could swim at any time—technically, at least—but the fact was that all the black people swam in the morning, when the pool was free, and all the white people swam in the afternoon, when admission was fifty cents. No one had planned this arrangement, and no rules enforced it. That was just the way it was.
I surely wanted to get back in that water, but I couldn’t help but feel that if I took Dinitia up on her offer, I’d be violating some sort of taboo. “Wouldn’t anybody get mad?” I asked.
“’Cause you’re white?” she asked. “Your own kind might, but we won’t. And your own kind won’t be there.”
The next morning I met Dinitia in front of the pool entrance, my thrift-shop one-piece rolled inside my frayed gray towel. The white girl clerking the entrance booth gave me a surprised look when we passed through the gate, but she said nothing. The women’s locker room was dark and smelled of Pine-Sol, with cinder-block walls and a wet cement floor. A soul tune was blasting out of an eight-track tape player, and all the black women packed between the peeling wooden benches were singing and dancing to the music.
In the locker rooms I’d been in, the white women always seemed embarrassed by their nakedness and wrapped towels around their waists before slipping off their underpants, but here most of the women were buck-naked. Some of them were skinny, with angular hips and jutting collarbones. Others had big pillowy behinds and huge swinging breasts, and they were bumping their butts together and pushing their breasts up against each other as they danced.
As soon as the women saw me, they stopped dancing. One of the naked ones came over and stood in front of me, her hands on her hips, her breasts so close I was terrified her nipples were going to touch me. Dinitia explained that I was with her and that I was good people. The women looked at one another and shrugged.
I was going on thirteen and self-conscious, so I planned to slip my bathing suit on underneath my dress, but I worried this would only make me more conspicuous, so I took a deep breath and stepped out of my clothes. The scar on my ribs was about the size of my outstretched hand, and Dinitia noticed it immediately. I explained that I had gotten it when I was three, and that I’d been in the hospital for six weeks getting skin grafts, and that was why I never wore a bikini. Dinitia ran her fingers lightly over the scar tissue. “It ain’t so bad,” she said.
“Hey, ’Nitia!” one of the women shouted. “Your white friend’s got a red bush coming in!”
“What did you expect?” Dinitia asked.
“That’s right,” I said. “Collar got to match the cuffs.”
It was a line I’d heard Dinitia use. She smiled at it, and the women all shrieked with laughter. One of the dancers bumped her hip up against me. I felt welcome enough to give a saucy bump back.
Dinitia and I stayed in the pool all morning, splashing, practicing the backstroke and the butterfly. She flailed around in the water almost as much as I did. We stood on our hands and stuck our legs out of the water, did underwater twists, and played Marco Polo and chicken with the other kids. We climbed out to do cannonballs and watermelons off the side, making big geyserlike splashes intended to drench as many people sitting poolside as possible. The blue water sparkled and churned white with foam. By the time the free swim was over, my fingers and toes were completely wrinkled, and my eyes were red and stinging from the chlorine, which was so strong it wafted up from the pool in a vapor you could practically see. I’d never felt cleaner.
T HAT AFTERNOON I WAS alone in the house, still enjoying the itchy, dry feeling of my chlorine-scoured skin and the wobbly-bone feeling you get from a lot of exercise, when I heard a knock on the door. The noise startled me. Almost no one ever visited us at 93 Little Hobart Street. I opened the door a few inches and peered out. A balding man carrying a file folder under his arm stood on the porch. Something about him said government—a species Dad had trained us to avoid.
“Is the head of the household in?” he asked.
“Who wants to know?” I said.
The man smiled the way you do to sugarcoat bad news. “I’m with child welfare, and I’m looking for either Rex or Rose Mary Walls,” he said.
“They’re not here,” I said.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twelve.”
“Can I come in?”
I could see he was trying to peer behind me into the house. I pulled the door all the way closed except for a crack. “Mom and Dad wouldn’t want me to let you in,” I said. “Until they talk to their attorney,” I added to impress him. “Just tell me what it is you’re after, and I’ll pass on the message.”
The man said that someone whose name he was not at liberty to disclose had called his office recommending an inquiry into conditions at 93 Little Hobart Street, where it was possible that dependent children mig
ht be living in a state of neglect.
“No one’s neglecting us,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure, mister.”
“Dad work?”
“Of course,” I said. “He does odd jobs. And he’s an entrepreneur. He’s developing a technology to burn low-grade bituminous coal safely and efficiently.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s an artist,” I said. “And a writer and a teacher.”
“Really?” The man made a note on a pad. “Where?”
“I don’t think Mom and Dad would want me talking to you without them here,” I said. “Come back when they’re here. They’ll answer your questions.”
“Good,” the man said. “I will come back. Tell them that.”
He passed a business card through the crack in the doorway. I watched him make his way down to the ground. “Careful on those stairs now,” I called. “We’re in the process of building a new set.”
After the man left, I was so furious that I ran up the hillside and started hurling rocks—big rocks that it took two hands to lift—into the garbage pit. Except for Erma, I had never hated anyone more than I hated that child-welfare man. Not even Ernie Goad. At least when Ernie and his gang came around yelling that we were trash, we could fight them off with rocks. But if the child-welfare man got it into his head that we were an unfit family, we’d have no way to drive him off. He’d launch an investigation and end up sending me and Brian and Lori and Maureen off to live with different families, even though we all got good grades and knew Morse code. I couldn’t let that happen. No way was I going to lose Brian and Lori and Maureen.
I wished we could do the skedaddle. For a long time Brian, Lori, and I had assumed we would leave Welch sooner or later. Every couple of months we’d ask Dad if we were going to move on. He’d sometimes talk about Australia or Alaska, but he never took any action, and when we asked Mom, she’d start singing some song about how her get up and go had got up and went. Maybe coming back to Welch had killed the idea Dad used to have of himself as a man going places. The truth was, we were stuck.