Bastard out of Carolina (17 page)

I set my teeth and tried to ignore everything but what was right in front of me. I talked to no one and kept my face buried in books. At night, I lay in bed with my clasped hands pushing up against the tender place between my legs, listening to the radio and trying not to think. My shoulder had healed quickly under Mama’s patient, watchful care, but I felt as if something inside me would never be all right. I woke up so angry my throat hurt. My teeth felt ground down to the nerves. I would go look in the mirror, expecting to see blood in my mouth, but there was nothing, only my teeth small, white, and sharp. Mama kept me close to her. She even let me get up at dawn to sit with her during her most private moments, the hour when she sipped coffee and watched the sun rise.

“Never have been able to sleep past sunrise,” she told me. “No matter how little sleep I’ve had, I just come awake.” Her face was haggard. She hugged me to her hip and laid her chin on the top of my head. It was as if I was her mother now, holding her safe, and she was my child, happy to lean on my strong, straight back. I closed my eyes, wanting time to stop, wishing the moment would go on forever, the day never begin. But inevitably Daddy Glen would get up, or Reese, and Mama would rinse her coffee cup and go put on her uniform.

Afternoons after school, Mama insisted Reese and I go over to Aunt Alma’s and stay until she came to get us. I’d help Aunt Alma with her garden or her canning, and while we worked I would make up stories in my head. My cousins loved my stories—especially the ones that featured bloodsuckers who consumed only the freshly butchered bodies of newborn babies, green-faced dwarfs promising untold riches to children who would bring them the hearts of four and forty grown men. Grey told me that I had “a very interesting mind for a girl.” But Aunt Alma came to the porch one day when I was telling one of the boys’ favorites and got so upset she looked like she would piss herself. If she had heard it all she would probably have beaten me harder than Daddy Glen. My stories were full of boys and girls gruesomely raped and murdered, babies cooked in pots of boiling beans, vampires and soldiers and long razor-sharp knives. Witches cut off the heads of children and grown-ups. Gangs of women rode in on motorcycles and set fire to people’s houses. The ground opened and green-black lizard tongues shot up to pull people down. I got to be very popular as a baby-sitter; everyone was quiet and well-behaved while I told stories, their eyes fixed on my face in a way that made me feel like one of my own witches casting a spell.

“Girl,” Cousin Grey told me, “sometimes your face is just scary!”

“Bone’s gotten almost mean-hearted,” Aunt Alma told Mama. “Something’s got to be done.”

Mama started taking me with her to the diner. There I could earn my own money washing dishes, money Mama didn’t make me save for clothes but let me spend as I pleased, mostly on secondhand books from racks at the thrift store that I could then trade in at the paperback exchange. Reese complained that I never played with her anymore, that I was always working or reading or sleeping. When school let out for the summer, I found a hiding place in the woods near Aunt Alma’s where I could camp for hours with a bag of Hershey Kisses and a book. The librarian gave me
Black Beauty, Robinson Crusoe,
and
Tom Sawyer.
On my own I found copies of
Not as a Stranger, The Naked and the Dead, This Gun for Hire,
and
Marjorie Morningstar.
I climbed up a tree to read the sexy parts over, drank water out of the creek, and only went home at dark.

Mama was still worried about me, I could tell. “Honey, are you all right?” she asked me one morning. I just shrugged and went back to the paperback copy of
The Secret Garden
I’d never returned to the school library. She pushed the book down and took it away, making me look at her. Her face was thinner, her skin rougher, and there were shadows under her eyes that never went away. People no longer talked about how beautiful she was, but about how beautiful she had been.

“I want you to do something for me.” She looked down at the book in her hands, at her fingers tracing the cracked spine and tape-wrapped cover. I gritted my teeth, afraid of what she might ask.

“Your aunt Ruth isn’t doing well, you know. She’s gotten a lot weaker this summer, Travis says.”

That surprised me. I had thought Mama would want to talk about how withdrawn I had become, how I never watched television with them now, or played with Reese or talked to anybody. Besides, Aunt Ruth had been sick so long everybody took it for granted. Could she really be that much worse?

“Now that Deedee and Butch are gone, Travis worries about Ruth when she’s home alone. He asked me if you might not be willing to stay out there for a while, at least until she’s better.”

Mama opened
The Secret Garden
to the place where I had slipped my bookmark, a piece of ribbon embossed with the Piggly Wiggly logo. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said automatically. I hadn’t seen Aunt Ruth in a while, not since the day after Christmas, when Mama had taken us over to Aunt Alma’s for dinner with all her sisters. Even then Aunt Ruth had been thin and weak, her fingers blue and swollen where they lay in her lap. What would I do if she got worse while I was with her? What if she were to die?

“Well ...” Mama closed the book and passed it back to me. “I want you to go out there for a while, at least a week or so, while Travis gets a little time for himself.”

I nodded.

“Good.” Mama sighed as if something difficult had been settled. She reached over and pushed my hair back behind my ears. “Oh, Bone, why are you always letting your hair hang down in your eyes like that? You’ve got such a pretty face. If you’d let me give you a permanent, people could see your eyes and your smile.”

I grinned at her and shook my head. Her face relaxed a little, and she smiled back at me. “You are so stubborn.” Her fingers trailed lightly across my brow, smoothing back a few loose strands of hair. “Even more stubborn than your mama, I think. ”

 

Aunt Ruth had changed in ways I had not imagined possible. Her hair, once thick and dark red, was almost all gone. What remained had paled to orange straw that she covered with a green-checked cotton scarf when she went out. She had grown so thin that I probably could have lifted her all by myself, though she would never allow me to try. But the greatest change was in how she moved and talked. She had always been the slow, soft-spoken aunt, the quiet one who thought a lot and said little. Now she talked continuously, moving her fingers in constant little jerking motions and shifting her eyes around all the time as if she were afraid she might miss something. Birdlike, she lifted her head and craned to see out the windows while her fingers picked at the afghan she kept across her lap no matter how hot it was. She lived on the couch now, with occasional forays to her rocker on the porch, and had made Travis take down the curtains so that nothing blocked her view. She watched the sunrise and the sunset and napped whenever she chose, and between naps she talked. After the first few days of refilling her juice glass and watching her make her slow, careful way to the bathroom, I began to suspect that my main purpose was to provide Aunt Ruth with an audience, someone who would nod at appropriate moments and not interrupt.

“When we were kids, we pretty much never saw our daddy,” she told me one afternoon. “He was always off working or drinking or traveling somewhere. I got the idea that men weren’t expected to hang around much. Now, when Travis is too much with me, he gets on my nerves, even when I’d almost like to have him here to help. It’s good I’ve got you to stay with me, Bone. You don’t get on my nerves at all.”

Aunt Ruth lay back on the couch, hugging her belly with both arms, her eyes narrowing as her cheekbones caught the light pouring in the open door. The bones in her face stood out sharp and high. Propped on the couch with her legs drawn up so that her bare feet were against my thigh, she looked almost like a girl, a witch girl with a narrow gray face. Nobody should be that thin, so thin the pulse in her throat made the skin over her collarbones vibrate. She shaded her eyes for a moment, looking down the couch at me.

“You know, when you close your eyes, you look just like your mama when she was a girl.”

I nodded. I wasn’t paying much attention. Aunt Ruth had been talking a lot about Travis for the two weeks I’d been staying with her—about Travis and her daddy, about Uncle Earle and her brothers and sisters, about things that had happened long before I was born and she imagined no one had told me yet. I should have been glad to hear it all, finally, and to ask all the questions I had saved up for years. But for the first time in my life, I couldn’t think about all those old stories. All I could think about was going home. When was Mama going to take me home? Did I want to go home?

I bit my lips, took a careful breath before I let what I had been thinking come out of me. Aunt Ruth looked over at me expectantly.

“Daddy Glen hates me.” There, it was said. I drew my knees up and wrapped my arms around them, just waiting for her to say it wasn’t so. She was looking directly at me, her face still, calm, open. I knotted my hands into fists.

“Tell me, Bone.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “You think I’m dying?”

My stomach lurched. I looked out the door. Of course she was dying. I looked back at her and then away again. “Naah, you’re just awful damn sick.”

“Bone.”

I shook my head. The light coming in the screen door was too bright. Tears began to run down my face.

“Bone?”

“Auntie, don’t ask me.” I looked up. Lord, she was so thin!

“Well, can we talk to each other or not?” Her voice sounded tired. She closed her eyes and brought one hand up to rub the soft skin at her right temple. It looked slightly bruised, a blue shadow on the parchment gray.

“I don’t know.” I took the skin of my forearm between my teeth and sucked at it. I didn’t know what to say to her at all.

“Well.” She was quiet for a moment, then dropped her hand and kind of pushed herself up a little.

“I think we can. I think we have to. There’s a lot of things I can’t do anymore, but hell....” She reached out to me, her fingers beckoning. “You slide over here.”

I hesitated and then moved down until I could fit my hip between her legs. My back was against one thigh, and I draped my knees over the other. She put her arm around me and pulled me to her breast. “Honey,” she whispered, and just held me for a moment.

“You’re right, girl. Glen don’t like you much. He’s jealous, I think.” She ran her fingers over my face, flicking away the tears and stroking my cheeks. “There’s a way he’s just a little boy himself, wanting more of your mama than you, wanting to be her baby more than her husband. And that an’t so rare, I’ll tell you.”

I looked up at her. Her mouth was drawn into an awkward grin.

“Men,” she said solemnly, “are just little boys climbing up on titty whenever they can. Your mama knows it as well as I do. We all do. And Glen ...”

She was still for a minute, her eyes moving around the room as if she were looking for something. They came back to me. She pulled me tighter.

“Bone, has Daddy Glen ever ... well ... touched you?” Her gray cheeks developed matching streaks of pink. “Has he ever hurt you, messed with you?” Her hand dropped down, patted between my legs.

“Down here, honey. Has he ever hurt you down there?”

I searched Aunt Ruth’s face carefully. I knew what she meant, the thing men did to women. I knew what the act was supposed to be, I’d read about it, heard the joke. “What’s a South Carolina virgin? ’At’s a ten-year-old can run fast.” He hadn’t done that. Had he? I felt my tongue pushing against the back of my teeth. Aunt Ruth’s cheeks got a brighter pink, almost red. I dropped my head.

“No,” I whispered. I remembered his hands sliding over my body, under my blouse, down my shorts, across my backside, the calluses scratching my skin, his breath fast and hard above me as he pulled me tighter and tighter against him, the sound of his belt pulling through the loops of his pants in the damp stillness of the bathroom. I shuddered.

“No.” I said it louder. “He just looks at me hard. Grabs me sometimes. Shakes me.” I hesitated, looking up at her flushed, sunken cheeks. “You know, when I’m bad.” Tell her, I thought. Tell her all of it. Tell her. “But the way he looks at me, the way he twists his hands when he looks at me, it scares me, Auntie. He scares me.”

Aunt Ruth rocked me against her breast.

“Oh, honey,” she breathed. “What we gonna do with you?”

 

Afternoons, while Aunt Ruth slept in snatches, I scraped at the old paint on her front porch, keeping an eye on her through the screen door in case she needed me. Uncle Earle had promised to repaint the porch and the front of the house, and said he’d pay for my school clothes in the fall if I would get the wood all clean and scraped down for him. Every few days he’d stop by at lunchtime to talk quietly with Aunt Ruth and check on my progress. Half the time, Aunt Ruth would be asleep when he came, and he would sit out on the porch with me, smoking Uncle Travis’s tobacco and telling me stories while I worked. It seemed to me that Aunt Ruth’s illness was making him remember her when she was young and well, when they had all been kids together living out in the country north of Greenville, and when the two of them had first married and started their families—Aunt Ruth with Uncle Travis, and Earle with Teresa. He talked like Aunt Ruth did, as if he were continuing a conversation that was going on in his head all the time, musing, reminiscing, talking on and on.

“Your mama ever tell you about our daddy?” he began one afternoon, rolling a cigarette. “Man was something, all right. People called him ‘that Boatwright boy’ till the day he died. Took better care of his dogs than his wife or children—not that Mama needed much taking care of. Your granny is tougher than all her sons put together; she sure never seemed to expect much out of Daddy. Thing is, I think all of us, we’re just like him. Your uncle Beau is a drunk. You know that, but so is your uncle Nevil, and so am I, I suppose. But an’t none of us as shiftless as our daddy was, or as pretty, so we don’t get away with it the way he did. It’s why Teresa left me. She always said she wanted a man like a long, cool drink of water. Go on about it like women do when they’re laying in your arms all soft and wanting to talk, talking about that crystal spring, that pure essential liquid.”