Georgia Bottoms (12 page)

“I can fix that. You wait right here.”

On her way down the hill Georgia muttered curses against whoever invented the mid-heel pump. At the car she changed into an old pair of sneakers that had lived in the hatchback since she took that aerobics class.

It’s a good thing she sprang for the pricey paper plates. Lesser plates would have wilted under the load she piled on. In the center of the food she wedged a pair of Lobster Scallion Shooters, still chilled from their ice bath.

She stuffed plastic flatware and napkins in her purse, and headed up the slope with a plate awkwardly balanced in each hand. It didn’t exactly make her Mother Teresa, but she was glad some of her food would be eaten and appreciated by someone she loved.

“Dear God,” Krystal said when she saw the heaped-up plate, “I thought you was bringing a pack of crackers. What is this,
Gourmet
magazine?”

Georgia described how she had driven all over Six Points trying to give the food away. She left out the part about hateful Rhonda, but otherwise gave as objective an account as she could, considering it had happened to her. She told about Sharon Overby at the nursing home and Madeline Roudy at Hull’s Market.

Krystal laid the shotgun on the cement slab, and dug into the Fresh Mountain Apple Jell-O Compote. They ate standing up with the chair between them as a picnic table. “Now that is good eatin’,” Krystal said. “Maybe Madeline didn’t understand what you were trying to do. Maybe she thought you were trying to give her charity or something.”

“I distinctly told her it wasn’t. I explained the whole thing.”

“But you didn’t invite her to the lunch, so maybe that’s how it felt—to her, I mean. Can’t you see where it might?”

“Oh now, you’re not going to take her side?” Georgia cried. “Please don’t. I can’t stand it if you do.”

“Hey, you asked my honest opinion,” said Krystal. “If you want bullshit, you better talk to somebody else.”

True enough. “So what should I have said?”

“George, you’re upset. Tomorrow, you call her and tell her you didn’t mean anything.”

“
Me
apologize to her?” Georgia shook her head. “I’m not the one who was incredibly rude!”

“Maybe she was upset too. We’re all upset today, Georgia. It’s a bad day.”

“Oh shut up!” Georgia cried. “I don’t care about that. I’m already sick to death of it! It didn’t happen to anybody we know. It doesn’t have anything to
do
with us! But now everything’s ruined, and I swear I could just—God
damn
it!” A wave of frustration crashed over her. She hurled the plate with all her strength, spattering food on the bushes. The votive candleholders caromed across the gravel, spitting lobster and red sauce.

Krystal put her plate out of Georgia’s reach, and turned with open arms. “Come give us a hug.”

Georgia said, “I don’t want a hug.”

“Sure you do. Everybody wants a hug.”

“Not me,” said Georgia. She didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to feel just this bad.

“Fine.” Krystal turned up her hands. “No hug for you then. Go pick up your goddamn plate. That’s littering.”

“Oh would you shut up!” Georgia burst into tears.

Krystal kept eating, watching Georgia out of the corner of her eye. At last she said, “I only tried to hug you. Jeez.”

“I know,” Georgia said. “I appreciate it, I really do.”

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know,” Georgia said. “Just let me be. I’m almost done.”

“Okay,” said Krystal. “I swear to God. You are such a mess.”

A
fter a long afternoon standing guard with Krystal, Georgia arrived home to find the house peaceful, quiet, and clean, the last load of dishes sloshing and clanking in the dishwasher, all the platters washed, dried, and stacked on the counters to be put away. Someone had swooped in to perform this magic while Georgia was gone, like Snow White cleaning up for the dwarfs. She understood why the dwarfs were not all that happy about it: it’s alarming to come home and find your house has been cleaned by invisible hands.

She found Little Mama tucked in bed, working the same old crossword puzzle.

“Mama, what did you do? I was going to clean up but you’ve done it all.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Little Mama. “That was your brother.”

After all these years of being waited on hand and foot, Brother apparently had been inspired by the news on TV to try to make all his amends in one afternoon. Mama said his conversion was something to see. Georgia wished she’d been there to see it. He had washed dishes, mopped floors, moved furniture, rolled out the rugs, vacuumed, and dusted until the whole downstairs was shiny clean.

Every once in a while Brother experienced one of these bursts of contrition, usually after a worse-than-usual hangover, his bad acts crashing down around him in a wave. Brother meant well, in short stretches. He didn’t seem capable of meaning well for more than two days in a row.

The AA people told him not to bother coming to meetings if he was only going to go out afterward and get drunk.

His parole officer sent him back to jail for a month to put the fear of God into him, but all it did was make him mad and a little crazier. The first thing he did when they let him out was cut off his hair—he shaved his head with a dog clipper he borrowed from his girlfriend Trish (whose name, Georgia thought, was off by one letter). Without hair, Brother announced that he was a punk rocker, then a cancer patient, then Lex Luthor in
Superman
. A neo-Nazi. A Jew in a concentration camp. He “tattooed” a number on his arm with a Sharpie. He drew zigzag hair on his naked skull. When his real hair grew in, he dyed stripes in it and announced that he was an artist.

For a while he spent his afternoons on the washing-machine porch making crazy oil paintings with too much color dripping off the sides. Georgia actually encouraged that phase. Oil paint was messy and expensive, but much less flammable than whiskey. For a few weeks, painting seemed to keep Brother out of trouble.

Just when he seemed to be getting better, he fell into an obsession with Roy Moore, a judge in Montgomery who was engaged in a noisy battle over his God-given constitutional right to display the Ten Commandments in the headquarters building of the Alabama Supreme Court. Moore had his eye on the governor’s mansion; he thought he could become the next George
Wallace by riding the Ten Commandments to the statehouse, as Wallace had ridden segregation.

Like all true fanatics, Roy Moore had the courage of his convictions. He raised funds for a block of marble the size of a Hammond organ, engraved the Ten Commandments on its face, had it installed in the lobby of the supreme court under cover of darkness, and dared anyone to remove it. Then he went on a speechmaking tour, trying to stir up the old Wallace magic among the God-fearing citizens of rural Alabama.

Brother taped newspaper clippings about the case all over the walls of his room. He stayed up all night recording long anti-Moore manifestos into a cassette recorder. The next day he would listen back to the tape on his earphones, furiously taking notes, as if he was learning important things from himself.

It got worse after Sims Bailey drove him to Evergreen to see Roy Moore give a speech. Brother came back convinced that Roy Moore was the literal Antichrist. “He’s doing the work of Satan by claiming to represent God’s will in court,” Brother said. “He has built a graven idol and placed it in the public square to be worshipped. Don’t you see, it’s straight out of the Old Testament! Do you know what ‘graven’ means?—engraved! He’s got people all over the country worshipping a piece of marble. Somebody’s got to stop him.”

“You don’t seriously think that means you,” Georgia said, but yes, he did think that. Brother, who had never had a religious bone in his body.

Georgia didn’t know what to do. If she ignored what was happening, it would get worse—and she would still have to clean it up later.

She sat Brother down for a talk. They both cried. Little Mama
came in and cried too. Brother declared he would move out and get his own place, a job, a new start, really try to make a go of it this time. He talked like that for a couple of days, then let it drop.

Georgia spent the next weeks organizing a change of opinion among the leaders of Six Points. She treated Sheriff Allred to an extra-special Friday night as a thank-you for telling Jimmy Lee Newton he now favored Krystal’s annexation plan. His department already spent so much of its resources in East Over, the sheriff said, might as well annex them and let the city help pay for it.

Jimmy Lee Newton reported this change of heart on the front page of the
Light-Pilot.
He didn’t realize that’s why he got a long, luxurious head-to-toe rubdown the following Thursday.

The fact that Jimmy Lee had come out for annexation did not go unnoticed by Lon Chapman at the bank, once Georgia put the paper in his hand and pointed it out.

A few weeks after that, Lon told her he would be glad to try to talk Jackson Barnett out of his opposition. Georgia could barely contain her smile of triumph. Judge Barnett didn’t realize he was outnumbered until annexation passed the town council by a vote of six to two. The subsequent ballot issue carried by a wide margin, thanks to heavy black turnout. Krystal was the hero of the day. Six Points and East Over were peacefully integrated—thirty years after the rest of Alabama, okay, but justice doesn’t run to the farthest corners first. Georgia was proud that she had helped make it happen after all this time.

She never told Krystal who had pulled the strings. Better to let her think it was all her own mayoral doing. Krystal knew just
enough of Georgia’s private life to deflect her suspicion. As far as she was aware, Georgia was carrying on an affair with the married Eugene while seeing another mysterious man whose identity she refused to divulge. The fact that this shadowy man was actually five other men was the kind of detail Krystal did not need to know. They were best friends but even that had limits, if you were living Georgia’s life.

She’d been hoping to occupy her empty Saturday night with Eugene Hendrix’s replacement in the First Baptist pulpit, if only for the sake of history and symmetry. For months there had been a succession of guest pastors and lay ministers, then finally a new preacher, a harmless old coot named Josiah Barker, with a plain old wife to whom he was plainly devoted.

Barker’s unadorned style was better suited to the First Baptist congregation than poor Eugene’s tortured, searching explorations. Barker specialized in homilies about huntin’ dogs and Mama’s biscuits.

It wasn’t absolutely necessary for Georgia to have the First Baptist preacher on her client list. Yet it had always brought a certain balance to affairs of church and state.

The first man who ever offered her a gift was the Rev. Onus L. Satterfield, father of Billy, Krystal’s onetime high-school boyfriend (and a side interest of Georgia’s, although Krystal never knew that). Onus was in his midforties at the time, very good-looking for such an old guy—and jealous of his son Billy getting to slip around with the lovely Georgia, who was seventeen. One night after a Campus Life meeting, the randy preacher waylaid her and led her down the path to Satan’s door. He was a horny bastard. He breathed insinuations into her ear, flattered her, promised her things.

Georgia could hardly pretend to be pure, especially when he told her in exact detail everything she’d done with Billy.

Even as a girl, Georgia had a practical bent. She made sure Onus kept his promises before he ever laid a hand on her. Nobody knew but the two of them. Over time, Onus gave her quite a lot of cash. When he had his stroke and was forced to retire, it seemed natural that Georgia would dedicate her Saturday nights to his young, handsome replacement.

But now that was history too. Eugene was gone for good. Georgia felt pure and chaste as a Puritan wife, at least on Saturday night.

Sunday mornings in the tranquilizing presence of Preacher Barker made her wonder why she even bothered going to church anymore. To maintain appearances, of course, and how bad was it to sit there for an hour inspecting her manicure?

Still, she began drinking a second cup of coffee before church, just to stay awake.

She was amazed how easily Little Mama had given up religion after she broke the hip. Every Sunday for months, Georgia offered to take her to church. No, she would say, it ain’t worth it.

“What ain’t worth it?” Georgia said after hearing this a few dozen times.

“Dragging myself all the way over there,” she said, “just to get up and drag myself home.”

“Well, if that’s all it means to you,” Georgia said. “Don’t you enjoy seeing the folks? Visiting with your friends?”

“Not especially,” Mama said. “If they want to see me, they know where I am.”

That was that. After a lifetime of faithful attendance, Little Mama gave up on God because her hip hurt. Personally, Georgia didn’t think anyone as old as Little Mama should run the risk of
getting shut out of heaven at the last minute. It was left to Georgia, the nonbeliever, to carry the flag for the whole Bottoms clan. Otherwise they couldn’t hold up their heads in town.

In April she drove across Alabama to the little village at Catfish Bend, for her annual carload of quilts.

No matter how high Alma Pickett raised the price at Treasures n’ Stuff, Georgia couldn’t keep up with the demand. “I’ve only got two hands,” she told Alma, without actually saying she used those hands to make the quilts.

This year she called ahead to reserve every quilt in the old ladies’ inventory. Those gals were mighty impressed when she whipped out a bankroll and counted off twenty-two hundred-dollar bills. Nobody asked Georgia what she needed with twenty-two quilts. If they’d asked, she would gladly have told them she was marking up their $100 quilts to $500 at Treasures n’ Stuff, and splitting the profit with Alma Pickett.

“Can’t y’all make ’em any faster?” she said. “I can use all you can make.”

The head woman said they’d been thinking of bringing in some nieces to increase production. Meanwhile, one Civic hatchback full of quilts per year was enough to maintain Georgia’s cover.