A Place to Call Home (11 page)

Mama strode from the house and cut me off. Daddy and Grandpa nudged Roanie forward, but he stopped again under our oak trees, looking grim and uncertain. Our fat dogs gathered around as if he were a pork haunch at a barbecue. I planted myself beside Daddy and looked at Roanie squarely. But he refused to look at me.

“If you live in my house,” Mama said, “you live by my rules.”

“I come to say …” Roanie cleared his throat. “I come to say I ain’t gonna take no charity.”

“Glad to hear it. What else have you got to say?”

“Y’all paid for the doctor. Y’all paid for my tooth. Now I gotta live here.
But I ain’t gonna take no charity
.”

“All right,” Mama retorted. “How are you going to pay us back, then?”

My heart was beating so fast, I thought I’d explode. A red stain crept up Roanie’s face. “I’ll figure out something.”

“I’ve got twenty bucks!” I announced. “You can have it!”

“Claire,” Daddy said in a low voice. He pointed a warning finger at me.

“But, Daddy—”

“I … I’ll do some work for you, Mr. Maloney. Anything you want. However much it takes.”

Daddy sank his hands in his pockets and studied the ground. He squinted in thought and pursed his lips. I wound two fingers in one of his belt loops and tugged like a hungry trout. Daddy studied me somberly, then looked at Roanie. “You’ll stay in school, you’ll do chores just like
Claire and my boys, and you’ll work like a field hand. And I’ll pay you a salary. You’ll earn your keep.”

I searched Roanie’s face desperately. He looked stunned.

“Well?” Daddy said.

“Yeah. Yessir. You bet. Sure. Thanks.”

“It’s hard work. And I don’t stand for any excuses.”

“You won’t get no excuses from me. I swear to God.”

“Don’t swear,” Mama ordered. “That’s my first rule.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

For the second time in my life I saw a smidgen of real satisfaction in Roanie’s eyes. The first had been when he looked at me after knocking Neely Tipton down.

I waved him toward our grand, friendly house. When I set the puppy down, it ran straight to Roanie, tail wagging. “I
said
you’d be welcome!” I bellowed. I had a long memory regarding arguments. A Maloney family trait.

The expression in his eyes was half tragic, half hopeful. He just looked at me and shrugged.

Roanie came from the Hollow with so little. Just himself, a box with his clothes and shoes in it, a grainy snapshot of his mother, and a yellowed paperback book with lots of folded page tips. Mama gave him a bedroom downstairs, next to Hop’s and Evan’s rooms. She told him he’d share the bathroom across the hall with them. Clean up after himself, wash the tub, the same as them.

Before he set up housekeeping I left a little wicker basket on his bed, with a bottle of bubble bath in it and two of my personal soaps, which were shaped and smelled like rosebuds. It was my last chance to go into his room. I’d been forbidden to hang out there, the same as if he were a brother.

This rule had been established after I unearthed a stack of
Playboy
magazines under Hop’s bed and an even bigger stack under Evan’s. Whew. Naked women and jokes I didn’t understand. I was disgusted and enthralled for hours until
Mama caught me. The Playboys went in the fireplace, Hop and Evan were condemned to scrub every toilet in the house for a month, and they swore they’d hang me by my hair if I ever set foot in their rooms again.

So I loitered respectfully outside the door to Roanie’s room, watching him carefully place his ratty, cast-off clothes in the closet and the dresser, and my attention zoomed in on a book lying on the bed’s quilt.
The Power of Positive Thinking
by Norman Vincent Peale.

“Is that your special book?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You like to read?”

“Yeah.”

“Good! We’ve got lots of books. We read all the time. You can have all the books you want around here.”

“I know.”

“So what’s in that book of yours?”

“Deep thoughts.”

“Like what?”

“Like ‘Always look on the bright side.’ ”

“Of what?”

“Everything.”

“Good. Now you’re on the bright side, aren’t you?”

He stopped what he was doing, a pair of cracked leather shoes hanging in one of his hands, an oversize T-shirt with a torn sleeve hanging in the other. His face was pale, with blotches of red on his cheeks. I noticed the fine dark hair on his jaw and upper lip. “My old man is something else, ain’t he?” His voice was gruff. “Real concerned.”

“Are you sorry? Did you want to stay with him?”

“No.”

“Did you want to go on hidin’ at Ten Jumps?”

No.

“Okay. Then you’re gonna live with us. Okay? Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Forever.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know about that, Claire. I don’t know how to live with nice people. I don’t want to make no mistakes.” He paused. “I ain’t got noplace else to go if this don’t work.”

“Hey, boy,” I said with tears catching at my voice. “You’re doing fine. I’ll help you! You can ask me any questions you want to! I’ll help you figure out how to act!”

“Little peep,” he tossed back.

“Smile,” I ordered.

He did, slowly, awkwardly, because he hadn’t had much practice. He had his new tooth, and it was a fine tooth, straight and even with the rest. I studied him and tried to appear nonchalant. He looked great. Handsome. He had a better smile than Donny Osmond and all the Bee Gees put together. “Yeah, you look okay,” I pronounced casually. “Don’t get a big head over it.” But I was so pleased I couldn’t say another word.

Hop and Evan hooted when they found my bubble bath and soaps beside the can of manly Boraxo on their bathroom shelf. But when Roanie came to dinner he was suddenly, sparklingly clean. He’d cut his hair, and his cheeks looked as if he’d scrubbed them nearly raw. He had a rose scent, as if he’d washed himself, clothes and all, in girl soap.

He sat across from me at the dining-room table, stiff, quiet, his gray eyes alert and amazed. He handled the white stoneware dishes—which were just everyday china—as if breaking a piece would send him straight to hell. He laid one of Mama’s red-checked cloth napkins on his lap, watching me carefully as I placed mine on my lap, as if taking his cue. I think if I’d tied the napkin around my head like a scarf, he’d have done the same.

I learned later that the water pipes to his daddy’s trailer had frozen and burst one winter years before and Big Roan never fixed them. He’d slapped together a wooden outhouse behind the trailer. Big Roan didn’t have a washing machine, either, and he’d been barred from the laundromat
in town since the time he was caught pilfering socks from someone else’s dryer.

So I finally knew the reason behind Roanie’s shameful appearance and bad odor. That night I sat guiltily in my warm bubble bath in my personal boudoir with its frilly pink trimmings and heat lamp, thinking about all he’d been through.

If cleanliness was next to godliness, Roanie wanted us to know he’d christened himself.

By the way, he and I named the puppy. I think that puppy recognized the kindness in him the way I did. It was his dog, I decided. I asked Daddy for an okay and he agreed. So Roanie and I named it General Patton. Not Patton, not General, but General Patton. We conferred a high rank and a tough pedigree on it.

It was Roanie’s dog, after all.

N
ever argue with a drunk, a skunk, or a redheaded woman, Grandpa always said, probably because most Maloney women were redheads and he liked to annoy them. But I was proud to be taken seriously.

Now I had Roanie. Now he was safe, like a caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon. All he needed was peace and quiet and time to grow a set of wings. My poetic comparisons stopped there. I couldn’t imagine my personal, homegrown butterfly ever deserting me for open sky.

I loved my folks and my brothers and my grandfolks for treating Roanie with respect, because I could see him absorb our respect like a sponge. Mama was so good with him.

“Roanie! Would you do me a favor? Go through this closet and see if there’s anything you can wear. Every time Josh and Brady come home from school they leave behind so much it looks like we own stock in a department store. This closet’s gonna explode if you don’t clean it out.”

“Roanie! You need a wristwatch. Here, try this one on. I bought it for Hop, but he doesn’t like the band. If you like it, you keep it.”

Daddy and Grandpa supervised other parts of his education, talking to him about manly things like tractor maintenance and how to barbecue pork ribs just right. Hop and
Evan teased him the way boys do.
Man, you look ugly today
. And
Don’t let Claire boss you around. She’ll have you wearin’ pink sweatsocks
. At first his mouth tightened and he stared at Hop and Evan angrily, but then he began to realize they liked him. Boys insult one another to prove they’re on the same wavelength. The first time he grinned at one of their insults, I knew he’d figured it out.

But then he crossed paths with Renfrew.

Mama trusted only one other person to run her house—Sugar MacFarland, who was Old Maid Feather-stone’s younger, widowed sister. We never thought of her as our housekeeper because her loyalty was only to Mama. My brothers and I called her Miz Mac out loud, but after I saw a
Dracula
movie on TV I knew what her real name had to be, and it was the only way I could think of her after that.
Renfrew
. Dracula’s devoted, bug-eating assistant.

Renfrew was a short, thin, wiry-tough woman with no butt and no bosom and lips so narrow and flat you couldn’t have slid a penny through the slot. There was something about her that made me think of mushrooms and old newspapers. She wasn’t old, she didn’t have any gray hair, but what hair she did have was a thin cover of washed-out brown hanks and she skinned it up under one of those spidery mesh hairnets, which she stretched so tightly, the web’s hub made a dark splotch on the center of her forehead, like the hypnotizing ruby at the center of a swami’s turban.

She cleaned toilets and waxed floors; she shucked corn and plucked chickens. Mama paid her well, but she had a hard life, and she wasn’t going to take any nonsense from us kids. Renfrew wouldn’t bite us, but if she caught us on the wrong side of daylight she’d inform Mama instantly. Or as soon as Mama came out of the pottery room.

Mama had a pottery studio off the kitchen; it was a wonderful, earthy place, with brown potter’s clay staining the bare wood floor, the walls, the potter’s wheel, the kiln,
the old portable radio hanging from a metal hook by one window. The shelves were filled with finished pieces and greenware. Mama shut the door and turned on the radio and worked at her hobby there, and it was her sanctuary. When Mama was in her pottery room, no one was allowed to disturb her. Renfrew practically guarded the door.

And when trouble arose, Renfrew dealt with it.

“Gimme that underwear, you wild-eyed tomcat,” I heard her hiss one afternoon.

I ran to Roanie’s door. He was on one side of his bed, Renfrew on the other. He clutched a pile of dirty clothes to his chest. I hurried to him. “What’s wrong?”

“Ain’t no lady gonna wash my clothes for me,” he said angrily.

“Boy, you can’t keep hiding your dirty dainties under your mattress!” Renfrew retorted. “I’ll skin you and throw away your hide!”

He squinted at her. “I’ll wash ’em myself!”

“No, you won’t!”

I grabbed his pillow, tugged the pillowcase off, and handed it to him. “Put ’em in here and then Ren—Miz Mac can stick the whole bunch in the machine without looking at ’em.”

Scowling, he stuffed the pillowcase, clamped the open end shut, but couldn’t quite seem to hand it over. I eased my fingers under his, pried, tugged, and he finally let go. Renfrew snatched it from me, hissed at him again, and scurried from the room.

His shoulders slumped. “I cain’t get the hang of this.”

I whispered to him about my private name for Miz Mac, and finally he began to smile.

After that, she was Renfrew to him, too.

That was the kind of secret that made him feel at home.

My family was defined by food. Food meant competition and compliments. Every weekend we held our own
informal county fairs, with unspoken prizes judged by empty bowls and naked platters speckled with crumbs.

We had feasts: deviled eggs, baked chicken, roast beef, fried trout; heaping bowls of collards and peas and sliced yams swimming in butter; biscuits—an art form—and soft yeast rolls, and corn bread; bowls of homemade chowchow, casseroles steeped in Velveeta, and canned cream soup; coconut cakes, apple cobblers, pecan pies so rich they puckered the tongue, and molded gelatin salads filled with submerged green grapes and cherry pieces and pineapple chunks, as colorful as a stained-glass window. All of it washed down with sweet iced tea and hot coffee and soft drinks.

The women set it out on the kitchen table with practiced modesty and a quick, furtive darting of eyes—an “Oh, I just threw it together” coupled with the brass pride of secret recipes and personal techniques no gourmet chef could have bested. We all suspected, for example, that the quality of Aunt Lucille’s potato salad was defined by the exact, crisp, finely chopped celery in it—I swear she must have measured each piece with a ruler.