Bastard out of Carolina (36 page)

“It’s your Aunt Alma,” she said. “Little Earle called. Sounded terrible. Couldn’t even get out what had happened, so don’t ask.” Mama looked stern—scared and angry at the same time. I wondered what was wrong, if it was something Uncle Wade had done, or maybe one of the cousins. It could be anything with the way Aunt Alma had been since Annie died.

“Don’t we just lead charmed lives?” Aunt Alma had said the last time we saw her. “Bad things seem to be happening all the time.”

I concentrated on gripping the door handle while Mama roared out toward the West Greenville Highway. She took the Old Henderson Road turnoff, past the gas station where Uncle Wade had been working before his accident, and turned onto the dirt road that cut through open country where the interstate was supposed to go in next year. Aunt Alma had gotten a deal on one of the condemned farmhouses out there, and had moved in after Ruth died.

Little Earle was waiting for us beside the cow grate down near the mailbox, his face white and his shirt streaked with muddy brown stains. There was snot all over his upper lip, and he kept wiping his hands down over his middle where the worst of the mud had smeared. Mama didn’t get out of the car, just stopped for a minute and leaned out the window. “You all right?” she yelled, and he nodded. He sure didn’t look all right to me.

“She’s up at the house,” he whispered, as if he were afraid to talk too loud. “I tried. I tried, but she wouldn’t let me do nothing.” He hugged his shoulders tightly. “She’s up there by herself. I got the girls away and called you.” There was a pause as he gulped air between every few words. “And then Uncle Earle. Uncle Earle said not to go back, and anyway, she scared me. Mama scared me.” He stopped and looked back up the dirt drive that wound to the side and disappeared into the pines. “Oh God, Auntie, she’s gone crazy as a milk cow, just like Daddy said she would!”

“Wipe your face and keep quiet,” Mama told him fiercely. “I’ll send Bone down for you in a little while, and I don’t want you scaring your sisters. You wash your face and get some of that dirt off yourself.” She sounded almost hateful—a way I had never heard her talk before to any child. I turned from watching Little Earle to look at her and almost rolled across the seat when she started the Pontiac racing up the drive again, Behind us I heard another engine, and looked over my shoulder to see Uncle Earle’s flatbed truck trailing a cloud of red dust, a rattle of tools bouncing around. He yelled something, but Mama didn’t stop, just sped into Aunt Alma’s yard and nearly knocked over her garden barrels before killing the engine and jumping out of the car. I pushed over to the driver’s side to follow right behind her, but Mama yelled at me to stay there without even turning around. I froze where I was while she ran toward the porch and Aunt Alma’s hunched still figure.

Chickens were screeching and running away, dust was settling behind the Pontiac, but everything else was dead still. I could see a row of white faces watching from Aunt Alma’s chicken-wire garden fence—Patsy Ruth, Reese, and Fay’s girls, Grace and Mattie. The sun was pouring down, hot and steamy, and there were puddles under the black walnut tree that hadn’t had a chance to dry up. There was no sign of Uncle Wade or his truck, and everything looked strangely peaceful. Then I saw that all Aunt Alma’s flower baskets were lying in the yard, buds and herbs scattered. Near one of the baskets was the porcelain wringer off her old washing machine, and the lumps in the dust and mud seemed to be clothing. The sound of Mama’s voice drifted over to me, a lulling murmur of softly accented phrases that reminded me of the way Aunt Alma had always talked to baby Annie. Aunt Alma was quiet, bent over, and didn’t respond as Mama wrapped her arms around her and whispered reassuring nonsense.

I opened the car door on my side quietly and stepped out. There was a fork under my foot, the tines buried in the ground. Flatware was scattered everywhere, and an egg turner stuck up out of a broken flowerpot. I stepped over a smashed plate and saw dozens of spools of thread under the porch and a pair of pliers under the Pontiac’s right front tire. Dust was on everything, making it hard to see what was what until I looked closely. Just past the fender, a little breeze lifted a tangle of red-brown curly hair from the hairbrush that lay near a shattered hand mirror. I bent over and saw a stack of faded pictures half buried under the crushed petals of black-eyed susans and a smear of baby’s breath. The fan-shaped wedge beside them looked like the venetian blinds that Aunt Alma had always hung in her bathroom.

“Honey. Sweet girl. It’s all right,” Mama was saying. I looked over at them. Aunt Alma’s feet were resting on a little pile of chopped black slats—45 rpm record fragments—and her pale stockings had slid down over her broken-at-the-heel brown shoes. There was mud on her calves and knees, plainly visible where her yellow flower-print dress was pulled up. A strip of the hem on her white cotton slip hung down behind her knees. The sleeves of her faded blue sweater were rolled back, and it was all covered with dried mud like the dress. Her hands were as dirty as the rest of her, stained dark, her nails broken and the cuticles torn.

Blood, I realized. That was blood among the mud stains all over Aunt Alma’s hands, dress, sweater, calves, and face. Her hair was matted with it. A chill went through me, and the skin on top of my head went tingly and hot. Aunt Alma’s fingers were knotted together in her lap. Her face pointed straight ahead, but her eyes were completely unfocused, looking inside not out. She opened her hands slowly and brought them up to her face, the torn, raw fingers sliding past her cheekbones to push her hair back, spreading fresh blood on her temples. There were cuts on her forearms, one on her left cheek, and another on her neck, below her chin. My mouth hung open. I turned my head. There was glass everywhere, shattered, scattered, gleaming in the sun. I was standing barefoot in a yard of broken glass.

“He’ll be back soon,” Aunt Alma was saying. “Back any minute now, I know. I’m ready for him.” She turned and looked Mama full in the face. “I’m ready for him,” she said again, her voice as calm and familiar as Mama’s. “I’m ready for him.”

“Yes,” Mama said. “I see, honey. You are. We both are. We’ll just sit here a while and wait for him.” She kept her face pressed close, not looking away from Aunt Alma’s eyes, as if only her presence was keeping Alma attached to the earth. One of the girls started whimpering over by the garden. I looked back, unable to resist the notion that everyone had gone crazy. Women all over Greenville County were going to smash stuff and then sit down to wait for Armageddon or sunrise or something. It sounded like a good idea to me.

“Bone, get away from there.” It was Uncle Earle’s whisper. He was standing well back over near the stand of pines where the drive turned, his black hair gleaming in the sunlight and an expression on his face of almost comical nervousness. “Come on, girl. Get back in the car and let your mama handle this.” His hands were flat on his thighs, and his jaw was set. He looked scared, deathly scared.

“I’m gonna cut his throat,” Aunt Alma said in the most reasonable voice imaginable. “I got the knife for it.”

“Where is that?” Mama asked her.

“In my pocket.” Aunt Alma’s hands came down, patted the skirt of her dress. Her right hand slipped into a pocket I hadn’t noticed before and came out with a razor, the straight edge closed into the handle. She flicked her wrist and it swung open, the blade shining in the sunlight. She brought her left hand up and laid the blade on her palm, looking down at it like it was beautiful.

“Oh, that’ll do it,” Mama said, her voice still soft and matter-of-fact. She looked back over at me. “Bone, girl, go inside and get your aunt a glass of tea, why don’t you?” Her eyes tracked past me to Uncle Earle, and she shook her head slightly. He nodded and started backing away toward the pines. “We should get you cleaned up a little, Alma. You look like you got caught in a storm.” She gave a soft little laugh and pulled gently at her sister’s arms. Alma shuddered and hunched over the razor. Mama went still, her face carefully empty.

I stared at them. They seemed more alike than ever. Aunt Alma was a good ten years older than Mama and maybe twenty pounds heavier, but she had the same strong features, cheekbones standing out like hammer hooks under eyes sunken and shadowed. Their hair was the same texture, dry and fine, though Mama’s was more blond for the rinse she used on it, and flattened out a little from the hair net she had to wear at work. Aunt Alma’s hair had a reddish sheen peculiar to all the women on her side of the family. It was their necks, though, that were identical, rigid cords of tendons standing out so that the little hollow where the collarbones met looked even deeper and more pronounced. The skin was the same, work-roughened and red-tinged under the tan, though Aunt Alma wore no makeup and Mama’s was streaked with sweat. Family they were, obviously related, clearly sisters. When I swallowed loud, they both turned to me with the same gesture and the same expression.

“An’t you gonna do what I asked?” Mama prodded, just as if Aunt Alma wasn’t sitting there covered in her own blood.

Aunt Alma stirred, lifted her head, and looked over at me. I couldn’t see where to put my feet.

“Girl children,” Aunt Alma sighed. “Dreamers always standing around sucking on their teeth.”

“It’s a fact,” Mama agreed, and shook her head in resignation.

I wanted to laugh, but instead I flushed in embarrassment. How old was I going to have to be before they stopped talking about me like that? I took a breath and stepped over the shattered pieces of flower pots, past the broken records, and up the steps. There was more rubble in the doorway, propping the screen door half open. The kitchen chairs had been smashed and the table overturned, the cabinets emptied and everything all over the floor. I picked my way across to the refrigerator, surprised that it wasn’t standing open, more surprised to find that the contents were intact and there was ice in the freezer. There was a gallon jug of tea ready-made. I turned back toward the porch, seeing Mama and Aunt Alma still sitting together on the steps.

“You want a glass of tea too, Mama?” I asked slowly.

“Yes, honey, that would be nice.” She put her arm all the way across Aunt Alma’s shoulders and hugged her close. “Your aunt and I just want to sit here a while before we start cleaning all this up.”

 

“I want another baby,” Aunt Alma was saying in a slurred tone. We had her in Patsy Ruth’s bed, bundled. in blankets, with bandages on her hands. Alma’s big old bed was broken in half, though we couldn’t figure out how she had managed to smash that oak headboard so completely. She lay there murmuring softly, groggy from the toddy Mama had made for her with whiskey, hot water, honey, and lemon. “I told him that. Told him I wanted another little girl. Told him it wasn’t gonna be all right until I had another baby.” She paused. She still had the razor in her hand, closed now but gripped too tight to get away from her. We’d cleaned up a good bit, got the kids off to Aunt Raylene’s, and made sure Uncle Wade wouldn’t be coming home until someone went to get him. We hadn’t done anything with the yard, just picked most of the broken glass and ripped clothes off the floor, put the kitchen back together more or less, and cleaned and bandaged Aunt Alma. None of the kids had been hurt, just scared to death. The only casualty was one of the puppies, whose neck had been broken when something or someone fell on him. Grey and Garvey had showed up just before sundown to work on the yard a little and help round up the various animals. Mama wouldn’t let them come in the house. I watched them for a while as they wandered around shaking their heads and exclaiming in awe over how much destruction Aunt Alma had managed to do.

Mama had stayed right beside Alma, keeping her hands on her, steadying and quieting her, and keeping between me and that razor that never left Aunt Alma’s hand. She talked as if nothing had happened, and in fact most of it was about me, about how slow I answered, how daydreamy I was, how much I looked like my great-aunt Malvena. I’d been surprised to hear all that, more surprised when she said I would stay here with Alma, give her a hand now that spring was warming up. “You need some help around this place, Alma,” Mama told her. “You’ll like having Bone around. Maybe you can even get her to sing for you now and then.”

My mouth had fallen open, and I’d stood transfixed, as close to the bed as I dared. Did she mean that? Did Mama think I was reliable? Did I look like my great-aunt Malvena? Did she really think I could sing?

Aunt Alma barely acknowledged what Mama said, just went on with her complaints about Uncle Wade. “I said, ‘Give me a baby, Wade. Just give me a baby.’ ” She tried to sit up, and Mama leaned over to soothe her, climbing in bed with her.

“You know what he said to me? You know what he said to me?” Alma asked, hanging on to Mama with one desperate hand. She didn’t wait for an answer. She took hold of the blanket in her fist, shook it and hissed the answer between her teeth. “Said, ‘What you want an’t what I want.’ He said, ‘You old and ugly and fat as a cow, crazy as a cow eaten too much weed, and you smell like a cow been lying in spoiled milk.’ Said, ‘I wouldn’t touch you even if you took a bath in whiskey tonic and put a bag over your head.’ He laughed at me. Then he walked right out of here.”

She lay back limply. There were tears on her face, and her lips had flattened back against her teeth. She shook her head slowly back and forth. “All this time, taking care of him, loving him, giving him children and meals and clean clothes and loving him. Loving him, and him to talk to me that way.” She cried deep, broken sobs.

“And Annie!” she wailed. Mama gathered Aunt Alma up like a little girl, rocked her back and forth while she cried. It didn’t last long. In the silence that followed, the two of them murmured a little, something I couldn’t hear clearly. It sounded like Mama said something about Uncle Wade being a loving man, that Aunt Alma loved him. Then Aunt Alma’s voice came out loud and strong again.