Unto These Hills (30 page)

Why, Muffin’s vulnerable. She actually needs family.
A tiny, tiny glimmer of hope swam lazily upward.

I held it back.

Time will tell.

~~~~~

When Libby drove up from Summerville for Walter’s MRI, she came straight to Spartanburg Regional Medical Center. I’d had a moment’s tension about how she’d react to Muffin, after the Christmas ordeal.

Muffin wasn’t at the hospital but later, after the procedure, met us for lunch at Ryan’s Buffet. Muffin strolled into the local restaurant’s lobby, on the surface confident. Her blasé ‘hey, sister
number two,’
didn’t fool me for a moment.

After a brief pause, Libby retorted, “Like
heck
you say! I’m
numero uno.”

“Hey! I got a two-year, head start!
Nyahnyahnyahyah
!”

Then, they were in each other’s arms. My eyes misted. A small corner of my microscopic world righted itself.

Thank you, my precious forgiving Libby.

~~~~~

“What all did the MRI report say?” asked Muffin later that afternoon back at home, genuinely worried. Walter now shuffled to his room to lie down. His limited energy had bottomed out.

I gazed at my oldest daughter. Time, drugs, and fast living had tarnished Muffin’s stunning beauty. Having passed that great equator, forty, she was a shadow of her youthful, vibrant self. Stick-thin, she still moved in a predatory, feline gait. Her blue eyes, once clear as a mountain spring, were lackluster and more knowing and cynical than ever.

Oh, she could dress up and, with make-up artfully applied, still attract men. But the radiance was dulled. Libby had just departed to drive back home. She’d come to be with us for the MRI procedure.

“Nothing,” I replied, taking off my toast-colored coat and gloves, soaking up the warmth of indoors. The December weather outside was brisk but not as arctic as the previous winter’s Yule season. Now, rather than pine trees and spicy cider aromas reminding me of happy Christmases past, they triggered memories of the ER and a comatose Muffin.

Has it been really been nine years since Muffin’s suicide attempt?

“Whadda you mean,
nothing?”
The old familiar edge crept back into her voice. Little had changed in the past years. Except that I’d distanced myself even more from my daughter.

I did it for survival. Muffin? Well, she still abdicated her role as my daughter.

Over the years Muffin had lived with first one man and then another. Nothing ever came of the relationships. She always ended up back home, with Walter and me. Muffin cocooned herself against anything that whiffed of depth and substance.

She still, I suspected, collected prescription drugs from any source possible, and continued to ingest them; because she had episodes of sleeping the days and nights away for no apparent reason, followed by days and nights of being away and doing God only knew
what.
Somehow, she’d managed to avoid a repeat of the long ago ER experience.

Miraculously, she kept some real estate deals funds trickling in. Oh yes, Muffin was — if not wise —
intelligent
. Having realized, years ago, that my coffer was perpetually bare, she’d set out to generate at least a modicum of an income.

Muffin,
inspired
, is still, to this day, brilliant. She is the most dazzling charmer and persuader on the face of this earth.

“Dr. Crow suspects its some balance problem, perhaps an inner-ear thing that goes off occasionally. Nothing that shows up on the x-ray. Gave him some anti-vert pills for
when he has an episode. He doesn’t want him driving at all. Too dangerous. “ I walked away, busying myself, putting emotional space between myself and Muffin, a tactic she seemed happy with. We had, to an extent, managed to coexist under the same roof, virtually isolated from each other.

“Why doesn’t she move out on her own?” asked Libby during the past Thanksgiving visit. “She’s able-bodied enough. Besides, I hate to see you get stressed out with her shenanigans.”

“It’s okay, Libby,” I reassured her. “We rarely speak anymore so there’s little chance of clashing.”

At times, I wondered why she didn’t move out? I suspected that Muffin, strong as an imposing Goliath on one level, remained an insecure little girl on another. She simply refused to grow up. Walter’s accident marked not only the disappearance of her daddy as she knew him but the death of her emotional development.

Me? Any dream of a magical mother-daughter closeness transformation died long ago. I moved about in a vacuum, sealing out anything troublesome.

It seemed an eternity since that day Daniel and I spent together at the hospital, followed by Muffin’s vindictive revelation to her father. Thank
God
for Walter’s childlike forgiveness and trust. An added blessing was that without much history, his brain and emotions had less to deal with.

With age, my senses flattened out more and more. My blonde hair slowly turned platinum. My emotions seemed dulled by Novocaine.

Secretly, I waited for death to come. Life’s pleasures no longer lured me forward. Life had, in fact, stripped me of emotion. Even the animal-me was no more. I no longer felt anything remotely akin to sexuality.

Good.

Maybe Daniel and I can be simply friends, after all.

Part Three

“Strength and honor are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.”
Proverbs 31:25

The present

Chapter Sixteen

In the nineties, the mill came down.

“Dear merciful God
.” I covered my face as the sprawling red brick structure, that stalwart symbol of life and culture as I knew it, crumpled impotently before my eyes. The sight challenged pictures I’d seen of World War II bombings. Most things I could ignore and shrug off. Even my Mama’s forty-odd years absence dredged up no real emotion. Nor my Daddy’s death. Not even Nana’s drew sentiment.

But this did. Just as the riverbanks lay naked and exposed, so did I.

I could no longer pretend things were the same.

After the demolition and clean-up crews finished, an area spanning at least five acres lay stripped and defenseless along the riverbanks.

In coming days and years, I groped for meaning. For essence. For justification of
being.
For something to stamp out that dark blob on my life — one spawned in the sooty black of night in Doretha’s bedroom. At first, with Muffin’s birth, I’d felt a small sense of vindication. I’d brought forth a life, nurtured and loved my child. Then — another tragedy robbed me of even that.

If only Muffin had turned out like Libby…just half as good as Libby.

Heck, I’d have settled for just a
tenth.

Always,
when my thoughts drifted so, I would snuff them out.
Muffin
was not my problem. She’d not asked to be born. And it was wrong to compare her to Libby. Dead wrong.

Just as I’d not asked to be raped. She, too, was a victim, as surely as I. So, setting her out on her fanny, as so many folks told me I should do, was out of the question.

Because life had not dealt fairly with Muffin.

And, in causing her father’s accident, neither had I.

~~~~~

The idea came unexpectedly. Writing had always been my friend. I’d kept journals all through the years, filled with my every thought and deed.

“You sure write purdy stories,” declared Lee Roy DeWitt, our longtime neighbor. Lee Roy, whose age could’ve been anywhere from thirty to sixty, sported a bristly, coarse, mud-colored beard that never saw scissors. Likewise, his frizzled mud-toned hair, that, instead of growing down, migrated outward as in Bozo. His wiry, medium frame moved slowly, as did his words.

His mind, however, was another thing.

Years back, he’d one day simply moved in with the woman in the two-story house across the street and never left. A divorce marked his past. He shunned the responsibility of alimony payments like the plague. He simply stopped working at ‘real’ jobs. “Can’t git blood outta a turnip,” he was fond of saying.

When in the mood, Lee Roy earned spending money doing occasional odd chores. Seemed he could do most anything, according to many folks. Neither did Sally King’s two adult children, who also resided there, work. Sally’s waitress and house-cleaning jobs kept them all afloat.

Walter, who moseyed over to visit Lee Roy on occasion, described the scenario in the two-story as an on-going sleepover event. Lee Roy never really ‘went to bed.’ He simply snoozed in front of the TV, wherever he happened to be sprawled when slumber fell. No bed-down or get-up times existed in those walls. All occupants seemed programmed to time clocks set by a whimsical Mother Nature so no one could say for sure
if
or
when
Lee Roy and Sally cohabited.

I always gave them the benefit of a doubt. Muffin huffed and took little digs at them for sport. Walter? His mind never wandered in off-color directions. Like me, he simply enjoyed Lee Roy.

Lee Roy was Walter’s best friend. He spent endless hours hanging out with Walter, talking about everything under the sun. When Walter didn’t understand a complex TV plot or an evening news issue, I would hear Lee Roy patiently explaining it to him. His renderings often doubled me over with laughter. Course, I did that in private. Wouldn’t hurt Lee Roy’s feelings for the world.

Though I shared Walter’s bed much of the time, I dubbed the entire bedroom enclosure ‘his.’ Even had a little sign over his door that read
WALTER’S ROOM
. He loved that. I’d bought him his own television with remote and easy chairs, so he could entertain his crony. Their TV menu consisted of westerns and detective plots, anything with a gun, while mine ventured toward Oprah and old romantic and musical films. So my TV docked in the den.

“You two already solved the world’s problems for today?” I carried two dessert plates of apple cobbler and ice cream and set them on the coffee table in Walter’s room.

“Nah,” Lee Roy drawled. “Jus’ the one ‘bout the president’s wife. Now, me’n Walter, we don’t like to see Hillary stealin’ the show like she does, do we Walter?”

Walter chuckled to avoid answering. Walter, for harmony, went along with most of Lee Roy’s notions. And while the pre-accident Walter had glibly used wit to ‘size-up’ and ‘dress down’ folk, it was nigh impossible to prod the new Walter to bad-mouth anybody. Mostly Lee Roy entertained Walter with tall tales and colorful narrative.

Over the years I’d discovered Lee Roy’s intellect to be surprisingly sharp. He’d asked to read some of my own little anecdotes about Gracie and Jared and had become a fan. Today, he surprised me with a suggestion.

“Say, since that feller with the Spartanburg Herald Journal either died or left — you know, the one that wrote that newspaper thang where he talked to people ‘bout ever’thang under the sun?”

“The columnist who wrote ‘The Stroller?’ “ I injected, curious as to where this was going. “Seymour Rosenberg was his name. Yeh?”

“Anyways,” he stroked his mid-chest level beard, “I been a’thinkin’. You oughtta do a column fer ‘em. Somethin’ like his was.”

“They’ve already found a replacement.” I dispersed napkins with their coffee.

Lee Roy, not to be outdone, pondered for long moments as he nibbled his cobbler. Lee Roy subsisted mainly on cigarettes and coffee, the blacker and hotter, the better. Food, to him, seemed beside the point. But he always politely made a dent in my hospitality servings. “There’s ‘at Tyger River Times…y’know, the one comes out ever’ week.”

“The weekly paper,” I murmured.

I ran it through my mind as I tidied up the bed and dusted the old dresser and chest of drawers. Writing
was
something that took me from the heaviness that daily weighted me down. Maybe there was room for another storyteller in a local weekly.

“Something like, ‘Things Old and New’?” I ventured half-heartedly.

His mud-brown eyes rounded. “Yeh, at’s it. You could let folk bend yer ear ‘bout thangs a’goin’ on they like or don’t like. Then you could —”

“Do my nostalgia bit about things from the past. And satire about the present.”

“Zack’ly.” He nibbled his fruit dessert almost daintily, with a pleased look on his grizzled features. “You’d make a good’un.”

“You
are
kidding. Right?”

“Naw. Ain’t jokin’ a’tall. Thank about it, Sunny. At’s all I’m a’sayin’. Jus’ thank about it.”

I did. And the more I thought, the more I warmed to the idea. What else was I doing to make a difference? At one time, my aspirations to touch lives had shot right out the ceiling, spanned the skies, and spread into infinity.

At one time the little-girl-Sunny had known beyond doubt that she could leap up and touch the clouds. Even after Mama left, Sunny’d felt that she and Daniel,
together,
could conquer all the ghosts of their combined lifetimes. We could, I was convinced then, accomplish
anything
we set out to do

I never got that chance.

My spark of enthusiasm fizzled.

Too late.

~~~~~

Lee Roy was a danged
tick.

“You thank ‘bout doin’ ‘at newspaper thang?” Lee Roy asked the next day as he settled himself in his rust-gold easy chair angled in conversational favor toward Walter’s matching one.

“Mmm.” I muttered, non-commitally, hoping he’d let it go for now. I wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination in the mood to make decisions.

“Well, you oughtta,” he prodded, picking up his fresh hot coffee I’d deposited on the time-worn coffee table positioned halfway between their roosts. “Don’t put thangs like ‘at off, Sunny. You know you’d like it. Why, your story-tellin’s the best I ever heard.”

I scooped up one of Walter’s comic books from the floor and put it back on top of the chest-of-drawers. After his brain injuries he’d relearned to read with my help and comics were his favorite because of the accompanying colorful pictures. I’d also taught him to drive again. He liked to drive on short treks, made him feel ‘like everybody else,’ he said, which meant ‘normal.’ I chauffeured longer ones, like the one to Summerville to visit Libby’s family.

Lee Roy took a long, lusty slurp of steaming java, placed it back on its saucer, and returned it to the faded spot on the table. With dramatic deliberation, he angled his Bozo-head in a thoughtful stance to peer into space, stiff beard pointing straight ahead, meeting the stroke of grubby fingers. And though he wore the same old pants and shirts every waking hour, his ‘woman,’ Sally, found some way to get them off him and laundered at least often enough that he never gave off an offensive odor. If you didn’t count the sharp smell of nicotine, that is.

I swept the floor with one eye on him, wary, edgy even on this particular afternoon, having earlier survived a small crisis with Muffin. Her high jinks left me overdosed on adrenaline,
on-your-mark,
poised for flight.

Lee Roy’s arms dropped suddenly to the armrests and I tensed, knowing he wasn’t through with me. “You need t’do it, Sunny. I’ll bet ever-body in these here parts —”

“
Okay!”
I said sharply, palms out in supplication. Then softer, “Okay, Lee Roy. I’ll check into it.”

He grinned hugely, baring gapped, tobacco and coffee-stained teeth.

I sighed and handed Walter his remote. Presently,
William Tell’s
Overture
burst from the screen, punctuated by “
Hi yooo, Silver”
as I dust-panned collective dust bunnies from the doorway.

Yeh, I thought, I’ll check into it.

~~~~~

My first column appeared the week before Christmas of the next year. It took that long to find a vacancy for a new column. I discovered in myself a penchant for satire:

Something mystical happens to me every year from Thanksgiving till December 26. Christmas music sets it off, making long-ago memories pop to the surface like soda fizz. Each ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ or ‘I’ll be Home For Christmas’ transports me deeper and deeper into a rhapsodic trance that has Walter shaking his head, wondering ‘why Sunny sorta loses it’ every year at Yuletide. My biggest symptom is that I end up cooking enough goodies to feed all the starving pygmies in New Guinea. I glare at him and continue stirring my wonderful walnut fudge.

“Why do you want to spoil Christmas for me?” I grouch. He just doesn’t GET it.

“I just hate to see you work yourself to death,” says Walter, munching spoils from my fudge heap.

“Hey! I LOVE working myself to death,” I retort, while something deep inside me concedes that I DO actually go a little mad. It’s like this hypnotic flailing inside me won’t let up until I do thirty pounds of walnut fudge, fifteen pounds of mound candy, five gallons of Rice Crispy/Snickers balls, ten dozen peanut butter balls, twenty pounds butterscotch fudge, and though I SWEAR each year I’ll not do them again, I cannot resist doing several batches of yummy chocolate-toffee bars.

“But why so much?” asks party-pooper Walter, as he snatches a couple chocolate-toffee bars and crams his mouth full.

I roll my eyes at his duplicity.

“Tradition,” I say. And, dear Lord, on one level it is. I’ve done it since I was a teen practicing high school home ec recipes. The ritual evokes childhood memories of Grandma & Grandpa Acklin’s fragrance filled house during holidays, tables sprouting delectable treats. On another level, I remind Walter again, it was Grandma Acklin’s GIFT to me. I never felt more loved than there, in her home, knowing in my child’s mind that she’d prepared all this in honor of ME. She celebrated ME with all those goodies.

“Now, it’s my turn to celebrate my loved ones,” I tack on. I must mention here that once my bake-off pantry is filled, Walter is first in line to package up ‘love gifts’ for special ones. Too, whenever moved, we bless those outside our family circle.

So, here I am, five weeks later, ten pounds heavier, crash-landed back to sanity.

I’m also exhausted.

“Y’know,” I tell Walter, swollen feet propped on coffee table, “I’m getting older. And…maybe I AM a little excessive. I think next year, I’ll just kick back and not do the cooking thing.”

“That’s a good idea, hon.” He winks at me. And I know he’s patronizing me.

He doesn’t believe me.

But I’ll remain staunch in this decision. Immovable.

Until next Thanksgiving, when I hear the first strains…”I’ll Be Hooome For Chriiiistmas…You can Cooount ooon Meeee…”

After the Middle Tyger Times came out, calls, letters, and e-mails (doing the column required my purchase of a computer) bombarded me, folks joking that they wanted to be some of those ‘outside the family’ to be treated with my compulsive goodies.

My next column evolved from a letter-to-the-editor in the Spartanburg Herald. A local man wrote a letter placing mill hill folks in an extremely unflattering, redneck genre. The response was livid and proud. One e-mail I printed said:

In response to Mr. Greene’s Mill Hill Mentality letter: I thought it was very rude and classless. If Spartanburg County is not cultured and classy enough for him, I’m sure Greenville would welcome him with open arms.

Let me remind him that Spartanburg was the heart and soul of textiles for many generations. Change is very difficult. Thank God for the huge corporations like BMW and others for locating here. They’ve helped replace many lost textile jobs.