Oral History (9781101565612) (35 page)

“Little lady,” Mr. Bristol said—he always called me that—“You ought to make something of yourself.” His words seemed to hang in the air like his breath, all the way into town, the same way I was hanging myself between what I might do and what I was doing, between Hoot Owl Holler and leaving these hills, and I was wrapped up in it all like the fog of his breath, like the fog that hung on the side of Black Rock Mountain which I used to look at of an evening, sitting on our porch.

Pappy was making music again by then. Billy never sang—he was moving away by degrees then, the same way I was—but Maggie and Pearl did, and the neighbors would come over and still it was not the same. It was not so I could leave it, but still it was not the same.

This is the way it went until Ora Mae got pregnant and Maggie got polio.

Ora Mae got fatter and fatter, and when I finally mentioned it to her she patted her stomach stretched out big and tight beneath her old black skirt and said “Hunh!” like she was real surprised to find a baby in there. Pappy acted silly, he was tickled pink, you could tell it, and he always did have a silly streak. He told Mr. Bristol he bet Mr. Bristol didn't know he could still cut the mustard, did he. Stuff like that.

Ora Mae was real big when Maggie got polio. “Polio!” Roy said when I told him. He shifted his leg on the kitchen chair. You remember polio—nobody gets it anymore, and didn't then either as I recall except way off someplace in the newspaper and you'd read about it—but Maggie got sick her senior year in high school and the day she went back to school after being sick, she leaned over to get a drink of water out of the water fountain and couldn't stand back up.

For a long time we all thought she'd die. I will never forget the time when she was back home from the hospital in Richlands—she was in and out a lot—and she was in Pappy and Ora Mae's bed in the front room and Pearl had been reading out loud to her.

“That's enough now,” Maggie said. “Thank you, Pearl.” Maggie was so thin her face looked almost
blue
somehow against the white pillow, and the quilt barely rose at all over her body beneath it on the bed. That was the bear paw quilt—the old, old one—her favorite. Maggie loved all the old songs, and all old things.

I was real glad when Maggie said that because Pearl had been reading poems, which I hate. Pearl was the salutatorian. “Do you all want some ice tea?” I asked everybody, and Pearl and Ora Mae said they did and I went to get it.

“Actually,” I heard Maggie say when I was halfway into the kitchen, “I wouldn't mind if you read to me out of the Bible, Pearl,” and something about the way she said it stopped me dead in my tracks.

I knew then she was going to die.

I knew then it was what I was waiting around for.

I got the ice tea like a robot while all the rest of them scrambled around like crazy looking for a Bible, which of course we did not have.

“That's all right,” Maggie was saying when I got back in with the tea. “That's all right,” she said, and she held one thin hand up like a blessing, and then she let it drop.

I held the tea for her so she could drink.

“I guess I'd better get ready,” Pearl said. She was going to the Key Club Awards Banquet, it was the end of school.

“Wait,” Maggie said, so faint you could barely hear her. “Just a minute, Pearl.”

Maggie reached up and took out her earrings, Mama's old gold hoops, and handed them over to Pearl. “I want you to have them,” she said. “You can wear them tonight.”

“Oh, I couldn't,” Pearl said, but her hand was already out and her eyes were glittering.

“For me,” Maggie said. “I want you to keep them.”

Pearl took the earrings and ran straight out of the room.

“Luther!” Ora Mae said suddenly, grabbing the arms of her chair.

“Luther, I think it's time,” she said, and Pappy got up and got her bag and I helped him get her down the mountain to the car, which was not easy, the pains coming close together and Ora Mae such a stout woman anyway, and no spring chicken either. I'll swear they looked just about comical—Ora Mae so tall and fat, and Pappy like a little bug or something, hopping all around her. “Just take it easy, honey,” he said.

“You take it easy,” said Ora Mae.

I stayed with Maggie while they were gone.

 

The baby as you know was a big healthy baby, not Mongoloid at all like the woman at the County Health had said he might be, and since we all thought Maggie was dying, they let her name him.

Maggie named the baby Almarine.

“Not hardly!” Ora Mae snorted when she heard, but for one time Pappy stood up to her and said if that's what Maggie wanted to name him, then by God that was that. He said Maggie could name him whatever she wanted. Ora Mae said if that was the case, why then she'd call him Al.

Ora Mae went out on the porch where I was and smoked three Lucky Strikes and then she came back in and nursed Al.

Pearl came out on the porch with me.

At the Honors Banquet, she had been named Most Artistic. I was stringing beans.

“I don't think I can stand it,” she said. She wore Mama's earrings all the time.

“Stand what?” I went on stringing beans and looking out at the mountains.

“Ora Mae and that baby,” Pearl said. “Her in there nursing him like that.”

“Well, Pearl” I said. “He's got to eat.”

“Oh, but it's just so
gross
,” she said. She was holding tight to the porch rail, I could see her veins through her hands.

“It's just natural,” I said, which was true, but I never liked Ora Mae much myself as you recall. I couldn't bring myself to stand up for her.

“Well you
would
say that,” Pearl snapped out at me. “I know what you do.”

I went on stringing beans. I knew what I did too. But whatever I do, or ever have done, it is right out in the open, for one and all to see.

What could I say?

“Listen, Sally, I've got to leave here. I'm going ahead and start in summer school, start now instead of fall”—Pearl had this full scholarship at East Tennessee State—“and I know it leaves you with a lot on you”—she meant Maggie dying—“but it's all I can do. I want . . . I want . . .” Pearl burst into tears then, big old horrible gut-wrenching sobs, and came over and threw herself down on the porch floor and buried her head in my lap, beans and newspaper and all.

“What do you want, Pearl?” I asked.

“I don't want anything to be like this. I want things to be
pretty
,” Pearl said. “I want to be
in love
.”

I kept on stroking her hair, and two weeks later she left.

 

I'm going to speed this story up now.

Oh, I could go on and on—draw it out, you can draw anything out—but when I was telling it to Roy, it was the middle of the afternoon by then and I knew if I wanted to finish by dinner, I'd have to move right along.

We hadn't even gotten to the part Roy really wanted to hear about anyway—the only part he knew, about Pearl and the high school boy.

Here's what happened.

All of us grew up and left.

Maggie did not die at all. She got well and married a visiting evangelist, John Diamond, who has been perfect for her. They had four kids right off the bat and she has never been sick a day in her life since, that I know of. She lives in Marietta, Ga., right now in a brick house next door to her husband's Baptist Church, but they move about every four years.

Pearl went to East Tennessee State where she made the Dean's List every time, majoring in art, and then she got a job teaching high school in Abingdon. Lewis Ray went into the Army and then to two years of college at V.P.I. He runs an insurance agency in Pikeville, Ky., and does real well. Married—I never see him. I bet he's still stingy and mean as a snake.

Billy went to technical school at Radford and then he went in the Army—that's where Lewis Ray got the idea, I guess, since Billy went first—and then he started an electrical supply business and married a stuck-up bitch from Richlands. Her daddy was a surgeon and she had a pool in her backyard. That's where their wedding was, around the pool, and my Davy who was three then was the ringbearer. I had to buy him a little white three-piece suit to be in the wedding, cost me an arm and a leg, and then he cried at the last minute and refused to do it at all! The surgeon never thought Billy was good enough for his daughter, and neither did she. I don't know why she married him. She had been married once before, and I guess she was tired of being single in a little town like Richlands where everybody is just naturally married, and drinking gin and tonic with couples at the country club gets old real fast. Billy was already bald then, and picked at his fingernails. But he wanted to move up in the world. Trouble ahead, you could see it. I said as much.

“Trouble ahead,” I told my husband right at the wedding, and he agreed. I looked down into the pink champagne fountain they had put up there by the diving board, at the bubbles coming up and how they popped when they got to the surface. Those bubbles kept coming, and somehow I was reminded of Billy the time he fell down in the well.

That pink champagne gave me the creeps.

Of course it was trouble ahead for me too.

I forgot to say I ran off to Florida with a disc jockey from Gate City, Tennessee, who came in the Rexall one time. I did this soon after Maggie got well. I won't say too much about it—this part is Pearl's story, not mine, from here on out, and I'll get to her in a minute—but I had a hard time down there. Things were not like I thought, and I still have this scar on my leg to prove it. I won't even tell the disc jockey's name because he didn't last long, and neither did any of the others. I stayed down there a long time, until the day I was leaning over the side of some old scummy falling-down bridge in North Florida, didn't even have grocery money that day, and I was pregnant, looking out over this flat white water with the trees standing up in it. Some planes went by overhead and I was wondering a little bit where they were going, Miami or where, and then I started back to the trailer.

It was so hot, it was always so hot down there. The heat would beat in on your head. When I was almost to the trailer, two big black birds rose up out of noplace, right out of the swamp grass in front of my feet it seemed like, straight up out of the swamp, flapping their wings and screaming like cats. They almost scared me to death. I stood there shaking and watched them fly away over the water, thinking about my baby.

I went back home. Not to Pappy and Ora Mae's house in Hoot Owl Holler—or not for long—I got me and Rosy a two-room apartment in Black Rock over the Western Auto store, where I got a job, and then I took over the books and then I got a job at the bank as a teller, and by and by I married old Ding-a-ling and we had Davy.

I shouldn't call him that. But he married me to
save
me, or so he said, and I married him because I wanted to be saved and make something of myself—“improve my condition” as Mr. Bristol had told me, all those years ago. Have a respectable life.

We had it, too. I wish to hell it had all worked out. I mean, we were married for years and years. But all we did was work and come home from work and as I said we never talked. We didn't have much to say, and you'll think that's funny coming from me, the way I run on, but it's true. I didn't have anything to say and neither did he. What scares me now is that we might have gone our whole lives like that. Plenty of people do. Not knowing anything better but knowing a lot about worse, you know they really do.

What happened was I met Roy.

“You weren't worth saving,” my husband said the day he left. All those years I had gone to church with him and been in the Home Extension Club which I hated, and done the best I could.

“I guess not,” I told him, which was true. I was glad to hear it. I was happy I didn't have to be saved anymore, tired of putting up a front. You can put up a front for years until it becomes a part of you, you don't even know you're doing it. I was glad it was over with.

Pearl did that too, I guess. It's her story from here on out—hers and Pappy's and Ora Mae's, some of it Al's too.

 

I should say now that Al turned out to be the joy of Pappy's life. I guess it's a good thing he
got
some joy, finally. Al was a rough-and-tumble baby from the word Go, a cut-up, a clown, a go-getter. Pappy taught him to play the guitar when he was not but six. Pappy and Al had little Western shirts and string ties and cowboy hats exactly alike, they used to go and play at hoedowns and UMW meetings and political rallies. “Bunch of foolishness,” Ora Mae called it. She never went with them. But I bet she kind of liked it, all the same. She liked anything Al did. I was not around then but I've seen the pictures—Pappy and Al, cowboy hats cocked at exactly the same angle, grinning. Pappy and Al performing was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened in the world, according to Pearl. She said she could not stand even the thought of it, and didn't go to see them when they played at the Miss Claytor Lake Contest right outside Bristol, not two miles from where she was in school. They said it hurt Pappy's feelings real bad.

Pearl grew more and more high-falutin.

She wouldn't associate with the rest of us, except Billy a little bit, and during all that time I lived over the Western Auto store she never once gave me the time of day.

Which is why I was surprised that day when I was still married to old Ding-a-ling, who saved me, and Pearl showed up at my front door. No phone call, no warning, no nothing. We lived out of Black Rock on Potter Street then, by the nylon hose company.