Our life had a settled routine to it, and while I can’t say that we were happy, we made do with what we had. At night, sometimes we would hear people beeping their horns as they crossed into Alabama, and Mama would get a wistful look on her face. She never said anything, but I remember the first time I saw that look I got a pain in my gut as I realized that maybe Mama wasn’t happy, that maybe she didn’t want to be here with me and Daddy. Like most things, this passed, and soon we learned to ignore the honking vacationers. Around about the middle of summer, every supper would go something like, “Pass the—” Honk-honk. Or, “Can I have some—” Toot-toot.
Daddy was a long-hauler, driving semis across the nation for this company or that, and he would be gone for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Mostly when he was home I slept on the couch, but when he was gone, I would sleep with Mama in their bed. We would stay up at night talking about him, both missing him. I think these are the happiest memories I have of my mother. At night with the lights off, there was no work to do; no floors to scrub, meals to fix, shirts to iron. Mama had two jobs then, one cleaning the restrooms at the welcome center on the Alabama side, the other working nights at the laundry. When I would lay with her, I could smell an odd mixture of Clorox bleach and dry-cleaning solvent. I often think if that knife had not killed her, the chemicals she used would have sent her to an early grave.
About a week before she died, Mama had a talk with me. We had turned in early, just as the sun was dipping into the horizon, because Mama was due at work around four the next morning. A hard rain was sweeping across the tin roof, making shushing noises to lull us to sleep. I was just about to nod off when Mama rolled over in bed, nudging me awake.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Shh-shh-shh,” the rain warned, none too softly.
Mama spoke over the hush, her voice firm. “We need to have that talk.”
I knew what she meant. There was a boy at school, Rod Henry, who had started to pay attention to me. With no encouragement from me, he had gotten off the bus at my stop instead of his, which was three miles down. I had no particular interest in Rod Henry other than in the fact that he was an older boy, about sixteen. He had what could on a generous day be called a mustache along his upper lip, and his hair was long enough to pull back into a ponytail. When he pulled me behind the pecan shack in our front yard, I did not stop him. Out of curiosity, I let him kiss me. Out of curiosity, I let him touch me.
“That Rod Henry,” Mama said. “He’s no good.”
“He has a tattoo,” I told her, because I had seen it. “I don’t like him much.”
“I didn’t like your daddy much when I met him, either,” Mama said. “But things happen.”
I knew that I was the thing that happened to her, the thing that took her out of school at the age of fifteen, the thing that put her in the welcome center cleaning toilets instead of working at the Belk over in Mobile like she had planned to do when she got out of school. Her sister Ida worked there as a manager, and it had been lined up for years that Mama would go over and help Ida as soon as she finished school. She would live in Ida’s apartment and they would save their money and one day they would meet nice, respectable boys and settle down. The plan was perfect until Daddy came along.
To hear Mama tell it, there was no romance in the way Daddy got her. It was a night of firsts that changed her life. Her first cigarette, her first beer, her first kiss, her first time having sex.
“That’s all it takes, baby,” Mama said, her fingers digging into my arm, her stubby nails like slivers of hot metal. “Just one time is all it takes.”
I closed my eyes, crying for no reason, thinking about what it must have been like for Mama, back when she was just a little bit older than I am now, to feel my daddy on top of her for the first time. He was not a gentle man, and he was large, six four at least with a wide chest and arms so big around he had to cut the sleeves of his T-shirts just so he could get into them. Daddy was twenty-two when he first met Mama, and he had tricked her, she said, with his worldly ways.
“The pain,” Mama said, mumbling. “He about ripped me in two.”
I nodded my understanding. She was a small woman, with delicate wrists and a thin waist. There was a look of fragility to her that had fooled more than one person. Daddy liked to say that she was skin and bones, but I thought she was more like skin and muscle. I reached out and stroked her arm, which was wiry and hard from working. A sliver of light came from the window. With the weight of the day off her, her face was relaxed, and I could see the young woman she was before Daddy got to her. I could see how beautiful she must have been to him, and how she was totally the opposite of me. I felt like a monster next to her.
Her head turned suddenly, the slackness gone, a furrow set into her brow. “You listening to me?” she demanded, her tone low and sharp in the small room.
“Yes, Mama,” I mumbled, drawing my hand back as if from a snake. She kept that look on me, paralyzing me momentarily with the sudden flash of anger and fear I could see brewing inside of her. Though she had never hit me, I felt violence radiating off her, like she might lunge and throttle me any minute.
“Don’t be me, baby,” she said. “Don’t end up in this house with your daddy like me.”
Tears came in earnest now. I whispered, “I won’t, Mama.”
Her look said she didn’t believe me, but that she knew nothing could be done about it. She turned her back to me and fell asleep.
Of course, Mama’s warning had come too late. Neither of us knew at the time, but I was pregnant.
After she died, Daddy sat me down at the table. He leaned his elbows on the table, his hands clasped in front of him. I noticed that together, his hands were bigger than my head. He smelled of pipe tobacco and sweat. His beard was growing in, though he was a man who liked to be clean-shaven. Mama’s passing had been hard on him.
“Now that your mama’s gone,” he said, “you gotta be the woman of the house.” He paused, his broad shoulders going into a slight, almost apologetic shrug. “The cleaning, the cooking, the laundry. They’s just necessary things a woman’s gotta do.”
There was true regret in his voice that sent shivers of pain through me. I ran from the table and vomited into the kitchen sink. Looking back, I don’t know if it was the baby or Daddy’s words that brought such a rush of bile up from my gullet.
Daddy was on a long haul about six months later when I started to have pains. It was just me in the house and had been that way for the last three weeks. I had stopped going to school and nobody had bothered to find out why. Being big anyway, carrying my weight in the front like I did, nobody remarked upon the fact that I was showing. I had no idea that I was pregnant and had taken the stop of my monthly flow as a gift from God rather than a sign of impending childbirth. I was fifteen by then, same as Mama when she had me, and with her gone, I was still naïve to the ways of nature.
The two hundred dollars Daddy had left for food was gone by the third week of his absence. I was a child and did not know how to buy groceries. There were bags of cookies and chips in the cabinets and sweet tea was in the fridge but no nourishment to speak of lined the shelves. We were in the middle of an unseasonably hard winter, and except for the pecan shells I was burning in the fireplace, there was no heat. Between the cold and my hunger, I think I brought on the worst for the baby. I take responsibility for it.
That morning, I had taken Daddy’s .22 rifle and shot a squirrel, but the meat had been sparse and I don’t think I cooked it long enough. The pain hit me hard around six that night. At first I thought it was cramps from the bad meat, but soon the sharp contractions took hold. I thought I might die. I thought of Mama, and that seemed okay to me.
Night passed, then another day, then another night. Pain seized me so hard at one point that I broke a chair trying to get into it. We never had a phone in the house, and even if we did, I would not have known who to call. I didn’t know where Daddy was and I had no friends from schoo
l.
The baby came around one in the morning on the third day. She was a tiny little thing with only one arm and a knob where her left foot should have been. When I pried open her eyes, they were a deep blue, but that can be said of most babies. The cord was wrapped around her neck, which I suppose is what made her pass. I said a prayer over her head, begging God to accept her into His house, even though she was deformed and had no father.
The ground was too cold to bury her. I wrapped her in an old blanket and set her behind the cauldron in the pecan shack. At night sometimes I would wake, thinking I heard her crying, realizing it was only me. Two more weeks passed before the ground thawed and I buried my baby next to Mama in a tiny little grave out behind the house. I put a stone on top of the mound and I prayed on my knees for them both to forgive me. I took it as a sign that they did when Daddy came home the next day.
I made him chitterlings out of a pig he had kept off the back of his truck.
“These’re good chitlins, baby,” Daddy said, scooping a forkful into his mouth. “Just like your mama used to make.”
His eyes watered, and my heart ached for him at that moment more than it ever had. He had loved my mama. No matter what the drink made him do or where his temper brought him, he had loved her.
“I remember you made these when your mama—” His voice cracked. He managed a smile for me. “Come sit on my knee, Peanut. Tell me what you been up to since I was gone.”
I did not tell him about Laura Lee, my baby girl that lay in the back field alongside Mama. I made up stories for him about classes I had not attended, friends I had not made. He laughed with me, smoking his pipe, and when I put my head on his shoulder, he comforted me.
After a while, he shifted me to the floor, and I sat at his knee as he spoke. “Listen, honey,” he began, using the same phrase he always used when there was something difficult that he was about to say. I remembered he had used those same words with me that first time. I was laying on the couch, Mama asleep in the next room, and Daddy came in, shaking me awake. “Listen, honey,” he had said then, just as he said now.
“I met this lady,” he said, and my heart dipped into my stomach. “She’s gonna be coming by some.” He gave a low laugh. “Hell, she might even move in after a while if things work out. Take some of the chores off your shoulders. What do you think of that?”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand as I sat back on my heels. I remembered Mama in the kitchen that day, washing her hair at the sink. I remember how angry I had been, hearing them the night before. He had promised me that he wasn’t with her anymore, said the only reason he needed me was because she wouldn’t let him touch her. And then I had heard them together in bed, snorting like pigs. And then I had walked into the room, and watched him working his mouth between her legs until her body went taut and her hand snatched his hair up in a tight fist.
I clenched my hands now, and I could feel Mama’s hair between my fingers as I jerked her head back. Daddy was due back that night, so I had acted fast, knowing even as small as she was that her hands were stronger than mine. The blade was sharp, but cutting a person’s neck is a lot like cutting up a chicken. You have to whack it good in just the right place or it won’t slice all the way through. I hacked six times before her neck separated.
By the time I had taken off her head, the knife was dull, but not at the tip, and when I used it to cut out between her legs, the flesh folded in on itself like a piece of liver. I used the cauldron to fix dinner that night, giving Daddy the same thing to eat as he had had the night before.
Daddy scratched his chin, giving me a tight smile. “With Mama just taking off like that,” he said, shrugging. “No note, no goodbye.” He sat back in the chair, smiling apologetically. “I got needs.”
“I know, Daddy,” I answered, buttoning my blouse with shaking fingers.
“I mean, nothing’s gotta change with us. You know you’re still my girl.”
“I know, Daddy,” I mumbled back.
“That okay with you, baby?” Daddy asked, zipping himself into his pants as he stood.
“That’s fine, Daddy,” I said, forcing some cheer into my voice. I looked up at him, giving him my best smile. “Why don’t you invite her over next Sunday? We can have her for dinner.”
Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line
(annotated)
DISPATCH: Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia
SUBJECT: Remmy Rothstein, “the Cajun Jew”
DATE: August 11, 2012
ATTEMPTED RECORD: Longest Tongue in the World (man)
WEATHER: 99 degrees with 89% humidity
ADJUDICATOR: Mindy Patel (badge #683290)
Dear Robert:
Again, I’d like to thank you for this assignment and your continued faith in me after the domino debacle. Not many Adjudicators would be able to survive the fallout (too soon?) from such a scandal, and your advocacy on my behalf is much appreciated. I promise you I’ll do everything I can to earn my Senior Adjudicator badge back—no matter what it takes.
Now, as to my report:
I’m writing to you from the bottom right-hand quadrant of the state of Georgia, which offers a bucolic setting with the most delicate, birdlike mosquitoes. The swamp is a pleasant locale filled with many interesting characters, including the landlord of my B&B, Alexander Wooten (who looks remarkably like Delbert Jebediah Long1). Wooten is seemingly at my beck and call. Just last night, I woke to find him standing over my bed asking me if I needed a drink of water. You don’t find service like that in New York City! Robert, thank you again for sending me to such a warm and welcoming place.
In fact, Wooten is not the exception to these friendly swamp people, but the rule. I’m not sure if I told you that I lost my bracelet on the drive down from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.2 You can imagine my relief when a nice local boy found it under the driver’s seat of my truck. I could hardly complain about the gas tank being empty after that! And I’m sure the scratches in the paint will be covered by my Amex card. Who wouldn’t want a Confederate flag carved into their driver’s-side door? Not this Punjabi! It’s practically a sin not to show your pride down here. And the food is exquisite—I’ve never tasted blackened crawdads before. Yum! Thank you, again, for this wonderful opportunity. The World Record Adjudicator’s first love has always been adventure.
Yours,
Mindy
PS: Just a note: I saw Kaitlyn on the Today show this morning with Matt Lauer, certifying the fewest pogo-stick jumps in under a minute. (Sorry, Biff!3) She looked fantastic—I wish I had her looming height. Lauer was like a dwarf next to her (though certainly no Gul Mohammed4). Please tell Kaitlyn I said she looked fantastic in that plaid suit. She hardly looked overweight at all.
1 Long skinned the most squirrels (1,238) in a one-hour period.
2 At 92,365,860 passengers a year, Hartsfield is the busiest airport by volume in the world.
3 Biff Hutchison, 39 jumps.
4 Mohammed, 22.5″, is the shortest man ever recorded.
DISPATCH: Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia
SUBJECT: Remmy Rothstein, “the Cajun Jew”
DATE: August 12, 2012
ATTEMPTED RECORD: Longest Tongue in the World (man)
WEATHER: 101 degrees with 99% humidity
ADJUDICATOR: Mindy Patel (badge #683290)
Dear Robert:
As per the Manual of Adjudicator Conduct on the Road (rev.), Rule #14, I spent more of the day getting a lay of the land and talking to people who might know Mr. Rothstein, our possible World Record Holder for Longest Tongue (man).
The Okefenokee Swamp, as you know, is the largest in North America; it is over 6,500 years old and formed on the edge of an ancient Atlantic coastal terrace. The name itself comes from the Cherokee word for “Land of the Trembling Earth,” an obvious reference to the unstable peat “islands” that pass for land in the black waters. The swamp is approximately 438,000 acres in size and is home to many wading birds, amphibians, ca
rnivorous plants, and American alligators (full list of native species and wildlife attached). The Honey Prairie Wildfire, which started in April of last year, has still only reached 65% containment and has left a swath of barren land in its wake. Amazingly, the wildlife seems to have thrived under these conditions, especially the mosquitoes. It’s the burden of the Adjudicator to be extra wary of these flying beasts,1 though of course the locals find it hilarious when I swat at these creatures, which are capable of pinning down small animals. I wish I was exaggerating, but no one was laughing when that cat was taken away. Poor Squeamy.
Not many people appear to know Mr. Rothstein, though he seems to have lived in the area all of his life. On the Application for World Record Form 29(E), he listed his occupation as “certified VCR repairman” (a surprisingly popular occupation among our Record Holders [male]). While locals seem reticent to discuss Mr. Rothstein, the subject of his mother is easily bandied about. By all accounts, she is a strong woman who raised two sons on her own during a time when these things were not done. For many years, the family seems to have held itself apart from the community, and more than one old-timer has described Mrs. Rothstein as the “Whore of the Oke.” Thankfully, this is not a commonly uttered phrase (even down here, time seems to have inched forward, though one need only refer to the county census data to find that one in every three girls has experienced a pregnancy by the time she turns sixteen). Still, one can assume that the Rothstein family is no stranger to scandal (again, another attribute many of our Applicants [male] and Record Holders [male] share).
The research I did prior to flying down here had led me to believe that all residents of the swamp (“Swampers”) had been removed shortly after the cypress-mining period initiated by the Hebard family (who could forget Oberlin Elton?2). You can imagine my surprise as I drove around the sandy Swamp Perimeter Road to find many Swampers still living in dilapidated shacks. No running water. No electricity but for the occasional diesel generator. Certainly not a lot of teeth!