Apron Strings (29 page)

“Well, maybe just us. We can pour it in glasses. He won’t notice,” my mother said.

The party was poorly attended. There were only the three of them and it didn’t last long. Miz Chambers or my mother kept going into the kitchen and pouring themselves more beer. “Dennis do you want some more ginger ale?” they asked. Even I could tell the difference in color. Uncle Dennis didn’t seem to care much that my mother had named her new baby after him. He barely looked at Denny when she had Ethel paraded us all out to meet him. He left early, but before he did he said, “I heard my old buddy CL Dabney lives somewhere around here. You don’t know where, do you?” My mother looked as if someone had punched her in the stomach. She slowly shook her head like she had no idea in the world. I was about to pipe up that the Dabneys lived right next door, but she silenced me with a look that would have melted rock. After walking Uncle Dennis to the door, my mother didn’t even kiss him goodbye. They both just stood there looking at each other before he turned and walked away. She shut the door awfully hard after him and clucked to herself as she joined Mrs. Chambers on porch. “That ungrateful son of a bitch,” she said. “Sallee, what are you doing here? Get to bed.” My mother lit a cigarette as I was coming over to kiss her good night and waved me away. “Tell your brother and sister to go to bed too. Good night.” I could hear
them talking about Uncle Dennis being in the hospital for drinking as I took my time climbing the stairs. But there seemed to be more to it than that because before I got to the top of the stairs they were whispering. As far as I heard, there wasn’t another mention of Mr. Dabney.

My uncle’s little black station wagon had been parked in our garage for a couple of months. Whenever I asked about the car, I got hazy answers. “He’s away,” my mother said once. When asked where, she all of a sudden thought of something else she had to do. Another time she said, “He left it here because he didn’t need it anymore.” Asking why only garnered a vague scowl and an exasperated sigh.

The signs indicated that there was far more to my uncle’s hospitalization than anyone was saying. All my years of questioning had taught me what kinds of questions I could ask and how much I could push for an answer, but even my hard earned detective skills were running up against a brick wall when it came to my Uncle Dennis. No amount of finesse could keep adults from shutting down when I broached the topic. I was beginning to realize that people were afraid of my questions. And on some level, I was realizing that questions have power.

“How come Uncle Dennis was in the hospital?” I asked Stuart casually one afternoon when the two of us were lounging on the back porch.

“Can’t tell,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Don’t know?” I asked.

“Yeah, I know, but I’m not supposed to tell.”

“Me?”

“Anybody.”

“But I heard you talking to Ethel about it.”

“She already knew, and she’s not going to tell anybody.”

“Neither will I.”

“Yeah, right, you little brat. You’d ask somebody some question and then they’d figure out I told you.”

I involuntarily shuddered. “Must be somethin’ big.”

“It is. It’s really gross. You’d die if you knew.”

“Tell me.”

She’d been lazily flipping through a magazine, but she closed it now and set it down beside her. “What are you going to do for me if I do?”

“I won’t tell that you sneak out at night.”

“Old news; I already promised I wouldn’t anymore.” Stuart, ever so casually, readjusted herself on the chaise and started to pick at her thumbnail.

A few days earlier, Stuart had had an argument (now that they were such fast friends I was always corrected if I referred to them as fights) with my mother about sneaking out. That same night Helen and I, lying in bed, too hot to sleep, were humming and singing softly to each other. While we were speculating on who might move into the new house down the street, a tinny jangle outside our window caught my attention. I got up and peered around the curtains to see what it was. It sounded like someone was on the kitchen porch and had bumped up against Ethel’s stack of roasting pans. I knew the sound well.

Ethel used that porch as a staging area for her to-do list and overflow storage for the kitchen. On the floor she parked baskets of unfolded laundry, drying racks, wet mops, and pails of water. On tables and stacks of old newspapers she perched plants to be repotted, piles of coat hangers, and an array of oversized kitchen equipment. Originally, it was just the turkey roaster that was stored on the porch, but over time Ethel had created an amazingly fail-safe burglar alarm. Even in the daytime, it was hard to negotiate her ever widening array of kitchen sprawl.

What I saw was Stuart quietly closing the screen door and creeping down the very far edges of the steps as close to the handrail as she could get. When she reached the bottom, she sprinted off into the neighbor’s yard, disappearing into the darkness. Minutes later I heard a car engine start up.

“I not only saw you, I heard you,” I said. “It’s a wonder Mama didn’t hear you. You made such a racket.”

“When?”

“Two nights ago. You went out the kitchen door at around eleven-thirty. You bumped into Ethel’s tower of pans, and then you went through the Dabneys’ yard. And a couple of minutes later I saw Judy’s boyfriend’s car drive past our house.”

“Can’t prove it,” She said with a smirk. “Ethel really does booby trap that porch, doesn’t she?” We both laughed. “OK. Do not tell anyone!”
she said, enunciating every word for emphasis. Then she leaned closer and in hushed tones began, “He was in the state hospital for sexually abusing a little kid, a boy. It’s so gross. I didn’t tell Judy the whole story. I wouldn’t tell anybody. It’s just too gross.”

“Sexually abusing? What’s that mean?”

“Having sex with, you dummy.” She sighed a huge sigh and rolled her eyes.

“But he was a boy!”

“Duh, that’s the point.” She got up, clearly exasperated. “If you tell anyone what I told you, I’ll dismember you. You got that?” Then she turned and left in a huff.

Later that day Gordy and I had a conference in his room. He lay on his bed while I draped myself across the other bed on my belly, elbows propped up and head cradled in my hands. From his third story window, we had an excellent view of our front yard. We watched someone walking by on the sidewalk across the street. “She must have been kidding. Boys can’t do it with each other,” Gordy said.

“She wasn’t. I could tell. She was telling the truth.” I kicked my feet together, trying out different cadences. “Maybe sexual abusing means something different than doing it.” I was way out of my depth. “We could look it up in the dictionary.” The dictionary was my best friend. I could find the meanings of words I didn’t understand without asking anyone. The dictionary never told me it was none of my business or chastised me for eavesdropping. “There’s all kinds of words in there,” I said, “like sex and penis and stuff. I even found shit in the big dictionary downstairs.”

“Na,” he said, dismissing my idea with a wave of his hand. Gordy was never one for reading or looking up words. I decided that I would look up
sexual abusing
. “Remember when his car was here? Remember we found those pants that we thought were mine in the back of his car?”

“So what?” My feet tapped in time to the pedestrian’s footfalls.

“So maybe they belong to that kid. Maybe if you told Stuart about the pants she’d tell you more, like what sexual abusing means.” Gordy insisted.

“Hey wait, I just remembered, a while back I heard Leola tell Ethel something about CL living next door. She said he r-a-p-e-d a colored boy.
Remember when Uncle Dennis came to that party Mama had for ‘em? He said that CL Dabney was a good buddy of his. Mama looked liked she’d about puke when he said that. Like she didn’t know or I don’t know.”

Gordy looked stricken. Do you know what r-a-p-e-d means? He asked.

I shook my head, “no. Maybe Ethel might...” I tried to get the beat of a trot.

“No way. Whatever you do, don’t ask her.” He made his eyes go out of focus and pretended to take off the lid of a trashcan.

“Yeah, I hate it when she starts rooting around in the trash.”

Gordy and I had known for some time that, though Ham Bone had taken to avoiding the house after our mother scolded Ethel for his visits, he hadn’t stopped delivering gin to her. He’d put the bottle in an empty trashcan at the bottom of the driveway on trash day. She only brought the trashcans up from the curb when there was a bottle in it.

“I know, I’ll ask Mama,” I said, my feet tapping now at a fast trot.

“Are you nuts? She’s not going to tell you anything,” Gordy announced with an incredulous look and a shake of his head that implied that I might become dangerous any minute.

“I’m not to ask about r-a-p-e-d. Leola spelled it. It’s gotta be bad. I’m going to ask...Watch.” I jumped up and ran down one flight of stairs and mounted the second floor banister sidesaddle, sliding down to the front hall. I heard my mother thank the paperboy as I landed. After I pushed open the door to the porch, I flopped into a wicker chair across from her.

“Can I have the comics?”

“Well, hello to you too. Here.” She handed me the local section of the paper.

I checked out the comics and then scanned the front headlines looking for any article that might have the word abuse in it. I couldn’t find one, but decided to go ahead with my plan anyway.

“Mama?”

“Yes, dear?”

“What does ‘abuse’ mean?” The screen door slammed. Gordy plopped down in the chair beside me. He sat back in his chair resting his elbows on the armrests and steepling his fingers. He looked like a prim old lady.

“Why do you ask?” She responded, not looking up from her paper.

“It’s in the paper. I don’t know what it means. I just wondered.”

“Where? What’s the article about?” She leaned forward as if to take the paper from me. I pretended not to notice.

I casually continued with my interest in an article that didn’t exist.

“It means different things. How is it used?”

Gordy started to giggle.

“What’s so funny?” she asked him.

“Nothin’.”

“Let me see what you are looking at,” she said to me. “Give me the paper.”

Gordy started to laugh.

“What is so funny, young man? It’s not nice to laugh in front of others and not share the joke. What was the word? Abuse? The paper…here…give it to me.”

“Nevermind,” I said, deciding it wasn’t worth it. “I guess it just means hurt. Right?” I folded the paper neatly, slipped out of my chair and said to Gordy, “Wanna swing? I’ll race you.”

“Wait. Show me where you saw it. Abuse means different things in different contexts. I need to know the context.”

“It’s OK. I don’t care. I don’t even know what context means.”

Gordy looked like he was going to pop from stifling his glee. He got up and went into the house. He didn’t slam the door this time. He just sort of vaporized through it.

I handed my mother the paper. As she opened it, I saw a headline I’d missed before.
Garden Week: This Week Gardeners are Abuzz
.

She seemed relieved. “That’s ‘abuzz.’ When people are excited; making lots of noise about something like a bee buzzing—not abuse.”

“Oh.” I too vaporized off the porch.

Gordy was on the swing when I found him. “Pshew, that was close,” I said.

“‘I’ll ask Mama. Watch,’” he mimicked as he hurled himself off the swing into the air.

Chapter 16

Ethel
1930

F
ive whole years had flown by since Early and me first met. I never worried much ‘bout gettin’ pregnant—didn’ much want no children. I liked things the way they was. Slowly, though, I started to suspect that somethin’ wasn’t quite the way it had been. Mama wasn’t all that free on giving up information. I ‘spect she figured I’d work it out on my own, or Roberta would tell me what I needed to know. You could count on Roberta for tellin’ what needed to be told. I somehow missed that tellin’. So when I didn’t bleed for a time I didn’ pay it no mind. I never had paid it much attention.

If I live to be a hundred, I ain’t never gon’ forget the mornin’ I knew for sho’ I was pregnant. The last cow was milked. I was washin’ up out at the pump tryin’ hard to keep breakfast down. Thought I would die sloppin’ the hogs; they smelled clear to heaven. Early had slipped into letting me do the mornin’ chores since I had to be at work just before daybreak. Miz Nancy had begun grumblin’ ‘bout my being late most days. I went about getting the stove lit and haulin’ water. My head was swimmin’ and my stomach was churnin’ like a storm at sea. Not like I had ever seen one, but I heard they was mighty rough, and that was how I was feelin’—rough. I had a terrible pain. It felt like a claw had grabbed my belly and commenced to squeeze, like to crack it, and wouldn’t let up. It hurt so bad, it knocked me down. I was hanging on to the well pump, sweatin’ wit’ the chills, my teeth chatterin’ and my knees knockin’. I
couldn’t stand up. Ever’ time I went to move, I felt like somebody had punched me in the gut so hard it knocked the air outta me.