Bastard out of Carolina (25 page)

When Raylene was young, Uncle Earle told me, she had been kind of wild. At seventeen she had run off with a guy who drove for the carnival, but she never married him. She came home two years later to take a job in the textile mill and rent the house where she still lived. Before he went off to Oklahoma, Butch told me that Raylene had worked for the carnival like a man, cutting off her hair and dressing in overalls. She’d called herself Ray, and with her short, stocky build, big shoulders, and small breasts, I could easily see how no one had questioned her. It was astonishing to imagine running off like that, and I would think about it with wistful longing. Grey or Garvey would talk about how they intended to go traveling once they got out of school, but a girl couldn’t go roaming so easily. But Raylene had done it, and I loved to think how I might too. If I cut my hair real short, learned to smoke and talk rough, maybe I could. Still, Aunt Raylene had a couple of ugly scars behind one ear that she wouldn’t talk about, and a way of looking sad and thoughtful that made me think her travels hadn’t been the romantic adventures the boys described. If I followed her lead I might come back with worse scars, or not come back at all.

She’d come home to live her life alone, quit the mill after twenty years, still kept her gray hair cut short, and wore trousers as often as skirts. She had only a few friends, all equally quiet private people. Her only social activity seemed to be a weekly card game with the widowed choir director and two of the local schoolteachers. Deedee had called her a lonely old woman once, but Ruth had shushed her, saying a woman was only lonely who wasn’t happy with herself, and Raylene was probably the only person any of us would ever meet who was completely satisfied with her own company. Not that anyone left her alone. The uncles were always dropping by around dinnertime, and Grey and Garvey seemed to be out there as often as they were home.

Raylene was said to be the best cook in the family and earned steady money by selling her home-canned vegetables and fruit. “Woman makes the best chow-chow in the state,” Uncle Beau boasted. “And the second-best home brew.” I had never tasted her whiskey, but Mama took as much of her chow-chow as Raylene would let her have. It had a smoky peppery taste like nothing else, sweet and spicy at the same time. When I started going out to her place I figured I would make Mama happy by talking Raylene out of a few extra jars. I never imagined that out on the river I would suddenly find myself as fascinated with my reclusive old aunt as I had ever been with gospel music.

 

“Trash rises,” Aunt Raylene joked the first afternoon I spent with her. “Out here where no one can mess with it, trash rises all the time.” She laughed loud, with great enthusiasm, and spit to the side in a way I had never seen a grown woman do before.

On summer nights Raylene kept old truck tires from the county dump smoldering in the yard to drive the mosquitoes away. The smoke rose in a thick stinking brown fog, drifting toward the river, where the men came to fish in the cool of the evening, and where Aunt Raylene kept the weeds cut back to discourage bugs and give her a clear view of the banks.

“I like to watch things pass,” she told me in her lazy whiskery drawl. “Time and men and trash out on the river. I just like to watch it all go around the bend.” She spoke softly, smelling a little of alcohol and pepper, chow-chow and home brew, and the woodsmoke tang that clung to her skin all the time. I watched her shift her hips in her overalls. She was as big around as Aunt Alma but moved as easily and gracefully as a young boy, squatting on her heels to pull weeds and swinging her arms as she walked around her yard. Uncle Earle had said she’d loved to dance when she was young, and she looked as if she still could.

Aunt Raylene’s house was scrubbed clean, but her walls were lined with shelves full of oddities, old tools and bird nests, rare dishes and peculiarly shaped rocks. An amazing collection of things accumulated on the river bank below her house. People from Greenville tossed their garbage off the highway a few miles up the river. There it would sink out of sight in the mud and eventually work its way down to Aunt Raylene’s, where the river turned, then rise to get caught in the roots of the big trees along the bank. Aunt Raylene said the garbage drew the fish in, and it was true that the fishing at her place was the best in the county. The uncles went to Aunt Raylene’s to catch carp and catfish and big brown unnamed fish with rotting eyes and gilded fins that people were afraid to eat. Uncle Earle and Uncle Beau would put out their poles with little bells on the lines and stand in the tire smoke to drink whiskey and tell dirty stories. The bells would tinkle now and then, but they didn’t always stop to go get their catch. Sometimes the whiskey and the stories were too good.

Raylene offered me a glass of lemon tea when I showed up, and then quickly put me to work. She had me pick the fresh vegetables out of her side garden so she wouldn’t have to do all that bending over. “I just about ruined my back at that damn mill,” she said with a grin and a sigh. “Always leaning forward and reaching. Now I’d rather run than bend. You be careful of your back, Bone, or it’ll be damn stiff when you get old.” She told me to go down to the river to pull in whatever trash had accumulated in the tree roots. I came home with fresh tomatoes, okra, two jars of chow-chow, and the head off a Betsy Wetsy doll, the one with the silly rubber curl on her forehead. Raylene told Mama I was the kind of girl she liked, quiet and hardworking, and said she’d pay in kind for my help a couple of days a week. So I started spending all my time with Raylene while Reese went off to afternoon Bible classes at the Jesus Love Academy.

Every day I dragged stuff up from the river—baby—carriage covers, tricycle wheels, shoes, plastic dishes, jump-rope handles, ragged clothes, and once the headlight off a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

“This is good stuff,” Aunt Raylene usually said. “You got an eye for things, girl. I can clean and patch those clothes up. We’ll just soak the dishes in bleach and give the rest of it a scrubbing. Saturday morning we’ll put out blankets and sell it off the side of the road. You get your mama to send you over on the weekend and I’ll give you a tenth of everything we earn.”

I loved her praise more than the money, loved being good at something, loved hearing Aunt Raylene tell Uncle Beau what a worker I was. Sometimes she’d come down to the river and watch me climb around the tree roots. “You’re pretty sure on your feet,” she told me. “Looks like you an’t scared of falling in.”

“Why should I be?” I watched her light a cigarette the same way Uncle Earle did, striking the match against her thumbnail. “A little river water an’t gonna hurt me.”

“No, it won’t. It won’t. But you’d be surprised how silly some people get about the notion of falling in, or getting their pants wet, or bumping themselves on an old river rock. I had Alma’s girl Temple out here once after she quit school, and it turned out she was scared of snapping turtles. Girl was convinced they were waiting for her just under the surface of the water, waiting to snap her little toes off and eat them up! Can you imagine?” She took a drag on her cigarette, cupping it in her hand away from the river breeze.

“Oh, Lord.” She arched her back and then sank down in a squat on the bank, her black serge skirt bunching up under her. “I am so tired of people whining about what might happen to them, never taking no chances or doing anything new. I’m glad you an’t gonna be like that, Bone. I’m counting on you to get out there and do things, girl. Make people nervous and make your old aunt glad.”

She wrapped her arms around her knees and looked off down the river. I saw her do that a lot, sit out there and stare into the distance. She always seemed completely comfortable with herself, elbows locked around her knees and one hand drawn up to smoke. Sometimes she’d hum softly, no music I’d ever heard. Aunt Raylene hated most everything that played on the radio, saved her greatest contempt for the kind of country ballads that bemoaned the faithless lover and always included a little spoken part during the chorus. “Terrible maudlin shit,” she’d declare. “You don’t like that, do you, Bone?”

I’d promised her that no, I didn‘t, ’course I didn’t, not mentioning that I had liked it before. I would have hated for her to think I didn’t have good sense. For my own protection, I never talked to her about gospel music. I couldn’t bear it if Raylene laughed at the music I dreamed of singing.

 

Aunt Alma’s girl Patsy Ruth came out to Aunt Raylene’s to get out of caring for Tadpole. The baby had finally been diagnosed with a heart condition, though she didn’t look sick, just very small and slightly blue. At four she still fit in Alma’s laundry basket and had to be watched all the time. “Tadpole falls asleep and it looks like she an’t breathing. Mama gets all crazy, thinks she’s died or something, and goes shaking her till she cries. Gets on my nerves,” Patsy Ruth complained. “I’d rather pull weeds for Aunt Raylene any day.”

Patsy Ruth wanted to help me pull stuff out of the river but hated getting mud on herself. She stayed up on the exposed roots of the trees and rarely retrieved anything worth the trouble. Still, she was the one who saw the hooks—two of them, linked together with a rusted chain, big four-pronged things still dragging little shreds of rope.

“Lookit the shine!” she yelled, almost sliding down in the mud. “Lookit there. It’s something, I bet you. Something.”

I climbed out on one of the roots until I could reach down to the curved metal edge that was showing through the brown water. It was hard to untangle the hooks from the muddy trash. By the time I worked them free, I’d slid down and had one leg thigh-deep in the mud.

“You get your ass down here and help me,” I yelled at Patsy Ruth, but she had no intention of risking the river. Instead she ran back to find Grey and Garvey.

“My sweet Jesus, look at the size of them.” Grey pulled the hooks out of my hands even before I got them up the bank. “That sucker’s longer than my arm.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a hook, a set of hooks.”

“Any fool can see that. What’s it for?” Garvey had come up too, and was just as eager to get his hands on the hooks as Grey was. He was always fighting with his brother, always challenging anything Grey said.

“Mountain climbing, it’s for mountain climbing,” Grey told us.

I didn’t believe that any more than Garvey, but Grey was so insistent we kept quiet while we ran our fingers along the rusty points of the hooks.

“Look at the edge on them points. They’d sink into rock with no trouble at all.”

“You don’t need nothing like that to climb the mountains around here.” Garvey pulled at the chain dangling down. “You don’t need nothing.”

“Oh hell, probably some Yankee brought them down, didn’t know what our mountains were like.” Grey was adamant. Nothing would serve but that we agree that the hooks were for climbing, no matter how silly it was to imagine Yankees coming down to climb our mountains with those hooks. But Garvey wasn’t going to give in so easily.

“You an’t got the sense you was born with,” he spat. “Even Yankees an’t that dumb.”

“You calling me stupid?”

“Aw, for Jesus’ sake.”

I grabbed the hooks then, before somebody got himself stabbed with one. They were heavy, but not so heavy that I couldn’t swing one around and throw it if I had to. Grey was right about one thing. Those barbs were sharp under the rust, and not only at the points but all along the edges that curled back on themselves. Gray-green algae hid most of the metal shine, but it came off easy with a little scraping. The rust was harder, but it too came off when I ran my pocket knife up and down the prongs. In the center of each hook where the four points came together, there was a packed mass of gluey river mud, weeds, and fish pieces. I set to scraping it all clean and got the boys interested enough to stop fighting for a while. They used a tire iron to pop the chain and separate the two hooks, each taking one as if they intended to keep them.

“Once we get them cleaned up, I’ll show you how mountain climbers use them.” Grey was still determined to convince us that he knew what the hooks were all about.

Garvey laughed at him. “You try throwing that son of a bitch up in a tree and you gonna put somebody’s eye out when the chain catches on a branch.”

“I an’t gonna throw it up no tree.” Grey looked disgusted. “I’m gonna use it to pull myself right up the side of the house. I’m gonna wave at you from the roof, and then you can tell me I’m crazy.”

He did it too, tied a good long rope to the chain dangling off his hook and swung it around and around until he got it high enough, and launched it at the house. The barbs dug right into the wood below the roofline and gouged deep enough to support Grey’s weight, though once he climbed up there, he couldn’t swing around to get a leg over the roofs edge after all. Garvey tried it next, forgetting that they had been arguing, but he had the same problem. He did manage to hang on to the ridgepole while he worked the hook loose and tossed it down. Then he slid down after it, by some miracle not breaking any bones. Neither of them saw me grab Garvey’s abandoned hook and start edging toward the side of the house.

“We’ll aim it at the roof this time,” Garvey told us. “Get it on the roof itself. Then we’ll be able to climb over the top by pulling up on the rope.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” Aunt Raylene had come up behind me while we were all looking at Garvey. She grabbed one hook out of my hands and the other from Grey. “You trying to kill one of these children?” She looked up then and saw the holes the hook had gouged in her wall.

“Oh my Jesus!”
Her left hand snaked out and slapped first Grey, then Garvey. “You digging holes in my house! You planning to just walk off and leave it like that, I suppose. No matter that it’s gonna let the rain in and rot my wall.” The chain dangling from one fist knocked against the skirt of the print dress she’d worn to go into town. “I’m surprised you an’t killed each other already. No.” She shook her head and spat snuff juice to the side. “No. What’s surprising is that I an’t killed you already.”