Unto These Hills (3 page)

Uggh! I hated Buck Edmonds. His interest crawled over my skin like a passel of loosed snakes. I shivered.

“Hey, ya’ll.” Fizhugh waved to us, sending me an especially sympathetic look as he slid his tight, toned form onto a red/chrome swivel stool at the counter for his daily coffee and chat with Abb, his buddy and our other father figure who always had time to hear our problems.

We waved back and Daniel leaned impulsively and kissed my cheek, encouraging my angry venting.

“Then — then she ran out on ‘er kids,” I added. “Tallied up in mill hill math, Emaline, Mama’s worth is a big fat
zero
. And I see how the men’re looking at me.”

“Who?” Daniel was instantly alert, like a jungle beast sniffing danger.

Uh oh
. Back pedal. “Nobody in particular. Just — oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just imagining it.”

But I knew I wasn’t. I just didn’t want Daniel going and getting in trouble over something I couldn’t even prove if I wanted to. Besides, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Fair or not, some folks would think I’d done something to attract the men. Everybody in the village didn’t consider
me
as
family,
either.

Daniel, sitting next to me on the inside, settled against the wall. He grew quiet and still as death. Yet, I felt this subterranean wildness churning through him, sizzling, one peculiar to him, one that stands out till this day in my memory. And I knew not to say something to send him tumbling over the edge.

“Poor Sunny,” Doretha murmured, oozing with sympathy and her own brand of otherworldliness that she wore like a rare deep South fragrance. Emaline looked at her in wonder, awed.

A waif-like creature, a mill hill,
poor
version of Audrey Hepburn, Doretha effortlessly exuded power. She gave me one of her long, assessing looks. Seemed she could read things nobody else could —
see
things. “You think her whorin’s gonna drag you down, too, don’t you? Like — ‘cause you’re
her’s,
folks’ll think you’re like’er.”

I nodded. “The stinking feeling just
clings,
y’know?” I lolled against the red leather booth backrest. “Look — I know it don’ make sense to
feel
somebody else’s shame. But a mama’s not just
somebody
else
. She’s the person who
spawned
you, who knows the feel of your skin and your smell — I can’t wash it away.” Tears puddled along my lower lids and I sat up straight and swiped them away. I swallowed a couple of times before speaking again. “I’m
not like her.”

Daniel grunted assent and shifted sharply, his anger palpable. I knew it took giant effort for him not to bellow with frustration and rage.

“ ‘Course you’re not.” Emaline grasped my hand across the table and squeezed, blinking back tears.

“Daggum right!” I nodded, gazing at her. “I — I thought when Daddy came home from the war, things would change. I once thought the divorce thing was like a square block of wood being hammered into a round hole. Divorce on the mill hill just — wasn’t done. And now,” I splayed my fingers at the ceiling, “My
own Mama and Daddy
are
getting divorced
.” Anger surged through me. “I hope Mama’s satisfied!”

“She can’t help it. That’s just who she is,” Doretha said, coming around to sit beside me as I scooted over against Daniel to make room. She wrapped an arm around my skinny shoulders. “But she stole your childhood away from you, Sunny,” she said quietly, in her gentle, assured way. “She oughtta be ashamed of that, if nothin’ else.”

I looked at her in amazement. How could she know? But she did. That was the magic that was Doretha. “Remember you once’t told me you smell lemon-drops when you’re real happy?” She looked at me with the saddest eyes.

I nodded, wiping a tear from my cheek, and heard Emaline snuffle.

“Well, you don’ smell ‘em now, do you?”

I felt Daniel’s strong fingers come up under my upper arm and squeeze and I gazed up into his solemn face. “No,” I said hoarsely, “I don’t smell ‘em anymore.”

His hand slid down my arm till his big, callused fingers clasped mine. “You will,” he murmured fiercely, nostrils a’flare. “I promise you, Sunny. Someday, you will.”

~~~~~

We Acklins each dealt with Mama’s unsavoriness in our own way. Daddy escaped up north to job-hunt, leaving us in Nana’s care.

Francine barricaded herself in our upstairs room, pulled hidden Camel cigarettes from beneath her mattress, threw open the window and inhaled like the smoke was water and her guts were on fire. Her nightly vanishing-out-the-window act increased.

I’d begun hearing asides about Francine, too, more lewd ones, but I’d pushed them away. They always made my insides squirm like a hooked-worm, even as I lifted my chin in defiance. I would
not
be like Mama. Or Francine.

Timmy and Sheila became my appendages, echoing my own erratic emotions during those first months. The Sunny they’d known before Mama’s abandonment had gone away inside herself. I’d always played with Sheila and Timmy, as into
play-like
as they were. Waif-like skinny, I’d have passed for a twelve-year-old any day of the week.

“It’s your eyes that give you away,” Doretha told me one night as we sat around on the Acklin couch next to the white plastic Philco table radio, listening to Our Miss Brooks. “They’re the eyes of an old woman,” she insisted in her insightful way.

“
Yuck,
” groaned Francine as she polished her fingernails.

Aunt Tina, Mama’s sister with whom she shared a mutual love-hate association, stuck her head in the front door, “Alvin wanted to stay here while I go to the company store for a few things,” she shrilled, announcing her son’s indolent entrance to join us. They lived down Maple Street, four doors away.

Alvin is the most un-animated person I’ve ever known. Compared to his Mama, he’s dead.
Rigor mortis
stage. This evening, he shrugged and exchanged a half-hearted, gauntlet-tossing gaze with Francine. Then he plopped, bored, down onto the sofa, whistling through his teeth as Francine dismissed him with a mere toss of thick, tawny mane.

I noticed, however, that one thing did hook his attention. Doretha.

Doretha never missed a beat extracting me from Francine’s talons.

“Never you mind, Francine,” Doretha gently scolded, “Sunny feels things deeper’n most folk.” Being her kind self, Doretha didn’t add ‘
deeper’n you. “
I don’t mean she
looks
old. It’s just — her eyes show her hurts.”

“Mama used to sing and dance for us,” Sheila piped in, desperate to change the sad subject and, I suspected, to gain the spotlight. I was hoping that her flair for fabrication to get attention wouldn’t burgeon with the turn of events.

“Yeh.” Longing rode Timmy’s soft voice. “She was good, too.”

Emaline smiled and sighed. “She was sooo pretty in her white and black hotel maid’s uniform and apron. And that little triangle hat that tied like a nurse’s to her head. Shoot, she coulda been Betty Grable or Alice Faye singing and tap dancing across that big ol’ silver screen.”

“
Shhh!”
Francine snapped. “I can’t hear.” She pretended inordinate interest in Arnold Stang’s dialogue with Our Miss Brooks.

Alvin stared baldly at her, scrutinizing her audacity.

Ignoring her, Sheila gushed. “When she saw us watchin’ ‘er, she’d grab Grandpa Dexter’s old cane from the closet. He’d left it when he run off with that girl younger’n Mama.” Oh, how Sheila loved to repeat gossip and purse those little lips importantly. That
always
drew attention. “ Mama’d sing
Pennies From Heaven
, making pennies fall through the air and land at our feet. Wouldn’t she, Sunny?”

I could still hear throaty belly-laughter erupt from Mama as she watched us scuttle about on our knees to scoop up the money and pocket it.

That was the blinding-fun side of her wildness.

“Yep,” I smiled at Sheila, “Mama
was
enchanting.”

“You sure use purdy words,” Doretha said thoughtfully, impressed. Because of her limited education, she thought I had the smartest brain wedged between two ears.

“
Enchanting?”
I laughed out loud and shrugged. “She
was
enchanting.”

Plain and simple, despite her careening excesses and self-absorption, we missed Mama’s magic.

“Huh,” Francine disparaged while examining her wet fire-red nails, blatantly refusing to reverence our nostalgia. “She wudn’t around long enough to make too much of a splash. Always gone somewhere or ‘nuther, ‘doin’ her own thing. Everything was about
her.
Always
her.
”

But then, Francine wasn’t inclined to enchantment. Except of her own making. And I thought how Francine had, to a tee, just described her own self.

~~~~~

More religion. That’s what I needed.

December sunlight warmed our faces and shoulders while an arctic breeze chilled our other parts as Daniel and I strolled, hand-in-hand, to the village outskirts. The hilly terrain was as much a part of me as the air I breathed. It undulated under and around me, securing me like a fortress. How I loved those gently sloping hills, whose paved avenues led to everything of joy and sustenance. To family and friends.

Today they led to church.

I’d finally talked Daniel into going with me to the little village Pentecostal Church, where I found respite from the hellish hopelessness that plagued me day and night. As I look back, I think it was my desperation, on that particular occasion, that overrode his aversion to anything remotely emotional.

Inside the church, Daniel and I sat with Gladys Kale, our friend and neighbor, at whose nearby house we frequently hung out. That is, when her sorry, no-good husband, Harly wasn’t home. I learned that descriptive term from Gladys and, with reference to Harly, used it without fail:
sorry, no-good husband.

Today, Daniel was a mite uncomfortable but I didn’t feel guilty a’tall that I’d finagled him into coming by telling him I needed him to go with me to church, that I needed something strong to keep me a’going, what with Mama’s shenanigans and all.

I knew what buttons to push in Daniel. He hated what both our mamas represented. So here he was, as uncomfortable as a long-tailed cat on the hotel porch with its endless creakin’ rocking chairs. I looked around. Emaline, my pal, was not there. She’d apparently decided to attend Tucapau Methodist Church with her mama, daddy, and grandparents.

My disappointment evaporated when the music cranked up and exploded, filling that little tabernacle till the walls seemed to expand and throb in time. Today’s service was especially lively, everything spiritual my daily, dark existence denied.

Daniel did okay until later, when an altar call issued forth.

“Come to
Je-sus
!” Pastor trumpeted like a bull elephant. “
To-daaay!”

When folks started spilling down the aisle a’weeping and travailing and collapsing into heaps of agonized repentance at the rail, my heart tripped into a syncopated song of ecstasy. I clasped my hands to my flat bosom and just grinned and grinned. That Daniel stood beside me rigid as an oak, and that his hands clamped onto the back of the pew turned his knuckles whiter’n new snow did not disturb my bliss.

He grew more and more jittery as the pastor’s penetrating gaze swept the congregation for guilt-stricken countenances. Daniel’s poker face gained him a temporary reprieve.

Having weeks earlier done the long aisle walk, I now gaped at the spectacle around that altar, grinning,
enraptured
by all the hullabaloo, with its backslapping and admonitions to ‘
hang on’
and
‘let go.’
.

When Daniel grabbed hold of my elbow and steered me outside quicker’n you could say ‘scat’ I didn’t worry. I just smiled and smiled as his brow furrowed and he propelled us down that village street faster’n two startled bobcats.

I knew.

Daniel would one day give in. And we’d have the best daggum marriage on the face of this
earth!

~~~~~

One April night, we walked to our favorite retreat, the village park. The lush setting was deserted except for the two of us.

“Daniel,” I can’t believe it.” I was beside myself with joy. “You hit Ol’ Tom!”

I settled beside him on the bench. “Yeh. I let ‘im have it right between the eyes.” He didn’t look proud. That wasn’t Daniel. Just at peace that he’d finally, after all those years, settled it with the old man.

“What did Walter say about you hittin’ his daddy?”

“Said I shoulda done it a long time ago. ‘Course I’ve just now got enough size on me to give ‘im back as good as he gives.”

I laughed with delight. Walter, Daniel’s twenty-something foster brother, was okay.

“Huh. He won’t be bothering
you
anymore, I’ll bet.”

Daniel draped his arm around my shoulders as we snuggled together on the wooden bench, one of several that marked the expanse of grassy knoll punctuated by fir, maple, and oak trees.

I knew of the beatings Ol’ man Stone gave Daniel. Doretha had whispered of them to me. It broke my heart. Daniel never spoke of them, defiantly ignored them. Tonight, he broke that trend when he said, “I’d a’run away from that sorry trash before now, but I can’t leave you, Sunny.”

“So you just did what you had to do,” I said, grinning. Then I sobered. “Too bad you couldn’t trust him to treat you fairly. You deserve respect, Daniel.”

“I lost trust in
adults
long ago,” he said softly, almost to himself.

“I haven’t completely given up on ‘em,” I assured Daniel. Somehow it seemed important that one of us believe in humanity’s good. “I don’t exactly
not
trust. I just no longer live in a world where adults make everything all right. Y’know?”

Trust had begun to morph away from absolute.

Daniel gazed at me with pain-glazed eyes. Then he slowly shook his dark head. “You’ve got somethin’ in you I don’t have, Sunny. After what we saw your mama —” He stopped, squeezed his eyes shut and held out a hand in appeasement, then ran fingers through his thick hair. “I’m sorry, honey. I shouldn’t’ve said that.”