After the Flag Has Been Folded (16 page)

M
AMA WAS DETERMINED THAT
F
RANK WASN'T GOING TO GET HER TOSSED FROM ANOTHER TRAILER
court. To begin with, there just weren't that many decent ones in town, and moving a trailer cost money, something Mama didn't have. Frank and I didn't hang out much anymore. Probably because I was the kid sister but partly because he was continuing to run the streets, and I didn't want to. When he was out drinking, I stayed home watching over Linda.

Linda and I tried as best we could to help out. We cleaned house and we cooked meals. We entertained each other and ourselves. On the rare times when Frank was around, he was bossing or beating us. Linda and I were both a little bit scared of him. Dealing with Frank was like playing a game of hot potato. You can't hold it too long or too close because it'll burn you for sure. His anger was scorching.

I didn't know who his friends were or where he was getting all the beer he was consuming or how he paid for it, but Mama knew. Frank was taking money from her purse, along with her car keys. He'd wait till she was asleep, then steal her keys and anything else he wanted. Then he and his pals would go for joy rides down Manchester Expressway. They were invariably caught by the police and marched home. The juvenile judge was getting to know our family on a real intimate level.

Things came to a full boil early one morning, real early, about 1
A.M.
Mama had come home from wherever she'd been. Out clubbing with her girlfriends, or on some date. Linda and I were already in bed, but I wasn't asleep and I don't think Linda was either. “Where's your brother?” Mama asked, standing in the doorway to my room.

“I don't know,” I replied. “Out with his friends, I guess.”

Mama walked back into the living room. She didn't turn on any lights. She just sat there, on the couch, in the dark. The only light was the red ember of her cigarette. She was smoking one tobacco stick after another, patiently waiting for Frank.

When he finally stumbled through the door at about 2
A.M.
, she was still there.

SMACK! BAM!

I heard what sounded like a clap of thunder and then Frank, yelling,
“What the hell!”

He was sprawled out on the floor. Not from being drunk, which he had been when he walked through the trailer door, but from being sucker-punched. Mama had heard him fooling with the front gate. So she'd stood up and planted her feet firmly by the door, angling herself so she could get in a solid right punch. When Frank stepped inside, she clobbered him with a quick jab to the jaw. He'd been drunk enough that he didn't know what hit him.

Mama didn't say a word, and she didn't offer to help him up, either. She just picked up her cigarette and walked off to bed. I turned over and fell fast asleep, grinning at the thought of Frank sprawled out on the living room floor.

 

M
OST OF THE TEENAGERS
who lived in Crystal Valley didn't have daddies. The men were off in Vietnam fighting, or they'd run off with some other woman, or maybe they'd been chased off. I didn't have any friends in the trailer park who had both parents around.

Wesley and Angie Skibbey's father had abused their mother, so she divorced him. Vicki Hart's mama had been married and divorced a
couple of times. I always thought it strange that while we kids hung together, our mamas didn't. They didn't get together to talk kids, to get the skinny on the single guy up the road, to moan about the increase in the school-lunch fee, or to seek advice about that whine in the car engine. It was as if they had all they could handle just getting up in the morning and getting through another day alone. They seemed to live for Friday and Saturday nights.

The ritual was the same for most of our families. The mothers would come home from work, dog tired. They'd discard their work clothes, put a hair cap on, shower, rummage through four or five outfits before finding something just right. They'd apply lotion, talcum powder, perfume, red lipstick, and a shot of hair spray to hold those updos, then they'd skinny into that perfect outfit. And with a kiss on the cheek or a pat on our heads, they'd be off in a rush.

Often when they returned, they weren't alone.

Whenever I awoke and heard the slip notes of Floyd Cramer's “Last Date,” I knew that Mama had brought someone home for more than just a late-night drink. I would stuff the pillow over my head and try to go back to sleep. But sometimes the strains of Cramer's music and Mama's laughter could not be shut out, nor could any other noise. I heard the sounds of lovemaking drifting from Mama's room long before I ever understood what its crescendoes meant.

When Floyd lived with us, it didn't bother me that she was having sex with him. But I'd never actually saw or heard them engaged in lovemaking. By the time I was a seventh-grader I was onto Mama's promiscuous behavior. Once I was so upset by it that I packed my bags and told all my friends I was going to run away to a better home.

Mama got wind of my threat, which is what I was hoping would happen when I told all my friends I was running off. She called me into her bedroom and tried to talk to me. I told her that she embarrassed me. She had come home the weekend before with some man, whose name I don't recall and maybe never knew. I'd heard the two of them stumble down the hallway to her bedroom. Then I'd listened
to them carrying on while Floyd Cramer played in the dark. That night was the first time I remember being totally aware of what Mama was up to. The knowledge angered me.

Mama talked me out of running away that day. But she didn't make any empty promises about trying to be a good girl or anything like that. Mama's nocturnal guests were often gone by the next morning. I would only catch glimpses of these nameless, faceless shadow men as they stumbled down the hallway toward her bedroom, but I harbored a seething fury against each and every one of them. I wanted to take the cord of the vacuum cleaner and strangle each one as he lay sleeping next to Mama.

It seemed to me that I knew what she didn't. These men were taking advantage of her, just like that Kirby salesman who'd sold her that worthless armor of steel that cowered nightly in the hallway closet. Mama seemed incapable of protecting her pocketbook or her heart. I figured she'd quit caring about almost everything, except us kids, and I worried obsessively that she might walk away from us one day soon.

M
Y EIGHTH-GRADE YEAR FLEW BY PRETTY UNEVENTFULLY, CONSIDERING
F
RANK WAS BARRELING
down a path of perdition. Mama's right-hand blow had sobered him only for a moment. He continued stealing her booze, her loose change, and her car keys, and he continued getting caught.

I'd gotten messed up in a situation or two myself. Mama liked to beat the dickens outta me one afternoon when she discovered I'd been tossed off the bus for refusing to sit with a girl whose personal hygiene was, well, wasn't.

“Find a seat and plant it,” the bus driver had ordered, as he eyed me from the mirror above his head.

“There aren't any seats left,” I said. I was standing in the narrow aisle, searching for a friendly face and an empty seat. The only empty seat was right next to a tall, skinny girl named Naomi. She wore calico-print dresses and bobby socks with loafers. Her hair was frizzy, like frayed ends of a thick rope. What curls she had were all mashed into complex knots. Naomi wasn't ugly. She was simply unkempt. Her legs were coated with thick, dark hair. Some fundamentalist churches didn't allow girls to shave their legs or underarms, and I figured Naomi must have belonged to one of those. She had so much underarm hair she could've worn matching armpit pigtails. Europeans might find that attractive, but folks who live in the heat and humidity of Georgia figure it
to be a breeding ground for maggots and other nasty things. Worst part of all, by the end of the day, Naomi's underarm fluff was dripping with moisture, causing her to reek something awful. The pungent stench could singe nose hairs for kids sitting three seats back, so there was no way in hell I was sitting near Naomi and I told that to the bus driver.

“Get off this bus!” he yelled as he yanked on the handle that opened the bus doors.

Flabbergasted, I stood there. “Are you crazy?” I demanded. “You can't kick me off this bus. How am I supposed to get home?”

“By God, I can and I am!” he replied. “I said get off!”

I stood on the curb and watched the bus pull away. I couldn't believe the driver had tossed my butt off. I guess he figured there was nothing uglier than one white-trash gal putting on airs around another one. I tried to call Mama for a ride, but she wasn't home. I didn't know anybody else to call, so I started walking.

The trek home took me nearly two hours. I wasn't even sure I knew the way. I just lit out Manchester Expressway and followed the bus route as best I could, cursing the bus driver between sobs. When I came to the end of the expressway, I wasn't sure which way to turn. I spied an elderly couple getting into a car outside a little country church and approached them. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Do y'all know which way Macon Road is from here?”

“Where you headed, little lady?” the gray-haired fellow asked.

“Home,” I replied. “My bus driver kicked me off the bus, sir. I called my mama but she wasn't home.”

“Oh! Mercy me!” the woman exclaimed. “And you've been walking this whole way?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“Well, I'll be,” she added. “Get in the car, sugar. We'll take you home.”

Mama was at home when I climbed out of the backseat of the Lincoln Continental. I thanked the kindly couple for bringing me home safely.

In those days all the stylish girls wore falls, hairpieces that were held in place by a comb over the top of a girl's bangs. Mama had bought me a beautiful frosted-brunette fall for Christmas. It had a Dutch-boy cut just like the cut the Supremes wore.

When I walked inside the trailer and explained to Mama why I was so late, she ripped that fall straight off the top of my head and began to whack me with it. She went into a flipping rage, screaming and slapping me with that hairpiece. I covered my head with my arms and tried to run from her. She chased after me, screaming about disrespecting elders like my bus driver. Between slaps with the fall, she'd smack me with her hands. I fell onto my bed bawling and kicking back at her, until we both were give out. Mama threw the hairpiece at me and left the room.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both. It doesn't hurt to get beaten with a wig, but I'd never made Mama so mad before. That scared me.

An hour later, Mama came to my room. “I'm sorry,” she said. She was standing in the doorway. “I shouldn't have lost my temper like that.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I shouldn't have talked back to the bus driver.”

“Karen,” Mama said, pausing for effect, “if that had been a baseball bat, you'd be dead right now.”

“Good thing it was only a wig,” I replied with a chuckle.

“Yeah, good thing,” Mama said. She wasn't laughing.

“Mama?”

“Yeah?”

“If it had been a baseball bat, you'd have stopped on the first swing, right, ma'am?” I asked.

“I hope so,” she said. “But don't test me again.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I think the incident convinced both Mama and me that sanity is like a roach with wings—hard to corner and even harder to catch. Just when you think you've got it securely cupped in your hands,
it takes flight again. You're momentarily relieved to be free from it, but afraid of what's going to happen now that it's out of your control again.

There is one significant difference, however. Flip on a light, and flying roaches will flee toward a dark corner, whereas sanity makes no distinction between night and day. It scurries about at will. Mama and I were trying our darndest to hang on to it as best we could. I suspect we all were.

 

T
HE SUMMER OF
1970, Mama fell in love again. It shocked us all and nearly sent Granny Leona plunging over the ravine.

At first we kids didn't think anything of it when Mama said she was going to fly out to San Francisco and meet Uncle Hugh Lee, who had just completed a tour of duty on a Navy ship parked off the coast of Guam. They were going to take a couple of weeks to drive back across country together. Mama took us kids to Tennessee to stay with Granny Leona before she left.

Mama had been dating another fellow pretty steadily, a redheaded guy named Lewis Jones. Lewis drove a fancy car with leather seats, and he owned his own home, a three-bedroom brick house across the Chattahoochee in Phenix City, Alabama. Lewis drove Mama to the airport, knowing full well that she was going to be traveling across country with her brother-in-law. I don't know if he suspected any hanky-panky or not, but Granny sure did.

Poor Granny. She was fit to be tied over Mama's shameful, immoral, appalling, floozy, bohemian ways. Shelby was taking up with a dead man's brother—both of 'em Granny's boys. I could hear the disapproval in the swish of Granny's wheelchair as it moved across the floor—“For shame, for shame, for shame.”

It didn't occur to Mama that there was anything inappropriate about her falling in love with Hugh Lee. It seemed natural to her that if you love a man, you might love his brother, too. “In the Bible, widows marry their dead husbands' brothers all the time,” Mama said to
me one afternoon as we drove out Macon Road. “That's the way it's supposed to be. You'd think being a Christian woman and all, your granny would like the idea.” But Granny made it clear that no son of hers was going to marry her wayward widowed daughter-in-law. She didn't care what kind of foolish things folks did back in Bible times.

All of us young girls were smitten with Hugh Lee. He had this way of studying folks when they spoke. It didn't matter if a person was twelve, twenty-two, or seventy-two, he was eager to scoop up the spills of people's lives. One of the world's best listeners, Hugh Lee would nod in agreement, raise his eyebrows in surprise, or cock his head to one side and turn his ear to hear a person better. His gray eyes locked in. They never strayed to watch passing traffic or the next commercial. Whenever I spoke with Hugh Lee, I always knew I had his full attention.

Hugh Lee was not handsome like Daddy. Nobody in the family was, really. But he has an endearing grin. He turns it up slowly, like it's on some sort of dimmer switch, and in a few moments it's gleaming brightly. He's always been as skinny as a cane pole. We kids loved to sit next to him on the couch and watch his Adam's apple move up and down when he talked. Sometimes he'd let us press our fingers to it. He'd purposely bob it around by taking big gulps from his coffee. We'd giggle; he'd grin and poke at our sides until we giggled even louder. Hugh Lee loved kids better than anything in the world. I think that's one of the reasons Mama loved him. She knew he cared about us kids just as much as Daddy did.

Hugh Lee knew Mama was falling in love with him. That was one of the reasons why he had signed up for that second tour of duty. He was not in love with Mama, but he was youthful enough to be captivated by her sensuality.

The other reason Hugh Lee re-upped was for the sign-up bonus. He wanted to buy Pap and Granny Leona a home, and he did. It wasn't one of the grandiose homes that line the streets of Rogersville, but it was a nice place. It had a sunny spot out back where Pap could
grow cukes and 'maters. And it had hardwood floors, so Granny could scooch along just fine in her wheelchair. There were lots of windows for watching the world and the neighbors go by, and a little cottage out back where Hugh stayed. Everybody in the family was proud of Hugh Lee for buying his parents their own home.

Initially, Hugh Lee had intended for Mama to bring us along on the trip. But Mama decided it was better to leave us with Granny. The trip would be too long. Surely, we'd be bored and whining long before they crossed the Colorado River.

Hugh had been the only family member who consistently looked after us. He did the job that Daddy had asked Uncle James to do. I think Daddy would have been proud of Hugh Lee for that. And I don't think he would've minded if Hugh and Mama had ended up married.

Mama never felt guilty about running off across the country with Hugh Lee, but I did. I knew they were violating some moral religious code that ate away at Granny's gut. Granny acted as if somebody was forcing her to swallow a bar of lye soap, chunk by chunk.

Hugh's attraction to his dead brother's wife was purely carnal. He lusted after Mama enough to ignore his own mother's code of propriety, and dismissing all the social mores of that time and place, Hugh and Mama engaged in sexual relations without benefit of marriage.

While Mama and Hugh Lee traversed the country, I tried to distract Granny with stories of the school year. I told her about the wig spanking Mama gave me. I told her about chewing out the nun. I told her about the troubles Frank was causing. Every afternoon, I sat by her bed and rubbed her hands and watched
The Merv Griffin Show
with her.

We chortled loudly one afternoon after watching an interview with Dr. David Reuben, author of the then-shocking book
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).
I was sitting in a chair next to Granny's bed, which was in the living room. Reuben was blabbing away on the television set across the
room. Granny shook her head. “I've had eight kids,” she said. “I don't care what that doctor says, as far as I can tell, there is only about four ways to have sex.”

Just hearing Granny say the word
sex
startled me. I had spent the better part of my visit trying not to think of all the sex Mama and Hugh Lee were likely having. I certainly didn't want to think about any sex Granny and Pap might have had over the years. I could feel a bright red blush color my freckled cheeks.

Granny leaned over my chair, put her face up next to mine, and laughed. I laughed back at her.

I never did read Dr. Reuben's book, but I spent a great deal of idle time during my teen years trying to figure out the four positions Granny was referring to that day. I knew one of the four positions had to be that burrito-wrap straddle that I would later witness my naked mother engaging in.

I made the mistake of walking into Mama's bedroom once when she was in the middle of a lovemaking session. At the time, I didn't know what was going on for sure, but it didn't take me long to figure it out. It was late afternoon and I needed something—I don't remember what. The bedroom doors in the trailer didn't have doorknobs or locks but were attached to a slide track at the top. They were made of hollow wood, so a toddler could push one open. I went barreling down the hallway hollering for Mama, about something, yanked open the door to her bedroom, and found her naked, wrapped like a burrito in a sheet, up on all fours, straddling some fellow.

She reached for her glasses on the bedside table and asked me what I wanted.

Embarrassed and confused, I told her to forget it and hurriedly shut the door.

The flashback of Mama wrapped up in that sheet, reaching for her glasses, spread-legged over some fellow, has haunted me for decades. Perhaps all kids who witness their parents making love are disturbed
by it. I suppose it's even more troubling for kids when they see their mamas making love to men who are not their fathers; in this instance, it was my father's brother.

Hugh Lee would never return to Georgia after I barged in on him and Mama that afternoon. He ended their relationship that very day. He refused to come down even when Mama called him late one night, and, in a drunken stupor, threatened to kill herself if he didn't come right that very minute.

“Shelby said she had a shotgun in the closet and that if I didn't come, she was going to kill herself,” Hugh Lee recalled years later.

Mama did keep a shotgun in her closet and a handgun in her bedside table. Many nights she came home reeking of sour beer and sweet tobacco. But I remember one night in particular when she came home shit-faced drunk. She could barely walk down the hallway. It was the summer she was seeing Hugh Lee. Her stumbling had awakened me, and I heard her crying in the bathroom. I went to check on her and found her sitting on the toilet, dropping a cigarette butt between her legs. “I'm gonna be sick,” she said.