Prayers and Lies (3 page)

Daddy was sixteen then—tall, freckled, and handsome. He was so smart, folks knew he wouldn’t stay in the valley and work the mines. Mother was tiny and pretty, with curling dark hair and flashing black eyes. She had a quiet manner and a fiery faith in Jesus Christ. She caught Daddy’s heart right away, and she loved him fiercely.

Three years after they met, my parents got married in a big church up in Charleston—Mother in a demure, white gown and Daddy sweating nervously in his first real suit. They moved away from West Virginia the very next day.

Daddy studied at a college in Oberlin, Ohio, while Mother typed away in a doctor’s office. As soon as my father graduated and got a sales job with Morrison Brothers’ Insurance Company, my mother quit her own job, got herself pregnant with my sister Nancy, and set to work making an orderly, clean, and quiet home for her family. She never once wanted to go back south. Even when her own mother died in 1957, she only drove down for the funeral in Charleston, then came home the very next day.

I was two years old when my father was made a regional director at Morrison Brothers’. As a regional director, Daddy had to travel, and the summer months were the busiest. So he decided, rather than leaving us alone in Indianapolis, he would leave us with his kinfolk for the summers. And Mother knew better than to try to argue him out of it.

My sisters might have copied her disdain, but I loved the Coal River Valley right from the start. I loved the way the steam rose hazy off the water in late August. I loved the way the muddy river bottom suddenly dropped out from under your feet if you stepped in the wrong spot. I loved the nasal twang and sleepy drawl of the voices around me, the fiddling, the innumerable cousins, the smoky kerosene lamps, and the mossy dark woods that crowded in around the row of small, clapboard houses. I even liked the outhouse behind our cabin, gray and white with a tiny window box planted with petunias under a painted-on window.

There was so much life in that valley. Babies were born and old folks died in those houses by the river. Our own cottage had seen weddings and births and even a death or two. The red-checked curtains in the bedroom I shared with Tracy were hand-sewn by my Grandmother Araminta when she was young and newly widowed. The sagging porch out back was where Joe Colvin first kissed my Great-Aunt Arathena. The weathered picnic table in the kitchen had groaned under more Thanksgiving turkeys than I will ever eat. It was my family’s place, even if they didn’t seem to know it.

It was home.

I don’t think Reana Mae ever felt at home in the valley. The dense woods and muggy heat were suffocating to her. As a small child, before she could even read, she spent hours at her Grandpa Ray’s little grocery, paging through the same old
National Geographic
magazine—one with vivid photographs of a gloriously blue sky somewhere over Montana. And it seemed to Reana Mae that a person could probably breathe out there in the West, and maybe she wouldn’t feel so afraid under a great big sky like that.

Reana Mae was born in the little house Bobby Lee bought from Aunt Belle when he and Jolene got married. Jolene’s labor went so fast, they didn’t have time to drive to the hospital at St. Albans, so Bobby Lee sent his kid brother running to Belle’s, to ask if her housekeeper could come quick. Donna Jo Spencer had tended to women birthing in the valley for years, and she delivered the baby without a hitch—though Jolene swore the process nearly killed her. Her Grandma Loreen told folks later she’d never heard a woman carry on so over a few labor pains, especially since Reana Mae was such a tiny thing—barely five pounds, after all. But Jolene had hollered so you could hear her half a mile down the river. Poor Bobby Lee, smoking unfiltered Camels on the porch outside, could hardly stand it.

After the birth, Loreen carried Reana Mae out to meet her daddy, wrapped tight in a blue flannel blanket. Bobby Lee grinned at the baby and asked, “Boy or girl?”

Loreen shook her head. “I’m afraid it’s a girl, Bobby Lee … an itty-bitty little girl. Ain’t she just the scrawniest thing you ever laid eyes on? I’d never even guess she was Jolene’s baby,” she clucked, pulling the blanket from the baby’s head. The cool air on her scalp made the baby squall, and Bobby Lee brushed past Loreen and into the cabin.

“I’m sorry, Bobby Lee,” Jolene said, wiping a hand across her eyes. “I know how bad you wanted a boy.”

“That’s all right, sugar,” he crooned. “We’ll get us a boy next time.”

Jolene dropped her hand from her eyes and stared up at her husband with wide eyes. “You listen here, Bobby, and you listen good. I ain’t never doin’ that again. I done gave you a daughter, and you’ll just have to make do with her.”

All the while, Loreen stood on the porch with the tiny girl already forgotten by her parents and screaming at the world into which she’d been born.

3
Essie Down Under

R
eana Mae and I spent the sticky summer months of 1969 hunting for garter snakes, swimming, digging tunnels in the mud at the river’s edge, carving out a clubhouse in the dense bushes, and mothering her dirty little doll, Essie. Essie had a lumpy cloth body and a rubber head, hands, and feet. Her hair and face were painted on, and she had one yellow-flowered dress to wear. I had a much prettier doll at home, but my mother didn’t let me bring her to the river. There wasn’t room in the car, she said, and she didn’t want me to lose my best doll. “I’ll get you another doll when we get there.” She sighed, kissing my forehead.

“But there aren’t any other dolls like Patsy,” I wailed. “And she’ll be lonely without me.”

But Mother would not be moved. Patsy was left in her pink flannel nightgown, tucked safely beneath the quilt on my bed back home, her beautiful blue glass eyes shut beneath her real eyelashes. I hated Mother that day.

I didn’t tell Reana Mae about Patsy. She loved Essie, and I didn’t want her to know how much nicer my own doll was. So we played that summer with Essie, carrying her out to our clubhouse in the bushes, making her a bed from leaves and soft, dry grass, feeding her with an old baby bottle Cousin Lottie had outgrown in the spring.

One morning in early July, I was lying on my back in the sun on the small porch behind our cabin, listening to Mother and Jolene talking in the kitchen over coffee.

“I’m going over to St. Albans tomorrow, Jolene. Do you need anything?”

“Thanks, Helen, we’re fine. Don’t you worry ’bout us.”

“Well … I was thinking I might pick up a doll for Bethany while I’m there, since she forgot hers at home.”

Forgot? Was my mother telling a lie? I leaned against the wall and listened intently.

“And I was thinking I could get one for Reana Mae, too.” Mother paused briefly, then continued in a rush. “That way the girls would have matching babies to play with.”

“No, thanks, Helen.” Jolene’s voice was flat. “Reana Mae’s already got herself a baby doll. She wouldn’t know what to do with a brand-new one.”

“I just thought …” my mother began, but Jolene cut her off.

“That girl is the most careless child you ever saw. What she don’t ruin, she loses. She don’t need a new doll, Helen. When she does, her daddy and me’ll get it for her.”

Mother gave up, and I never got a new doll that summer either. But I understood why she wouldn’t let me bring Patsy to the valley. It was the same reason I didn’t tell Reana Mae about her. Neither of us wanted Reana to know how little she had. She loved Essie, and that would have to be enough.

What I didn’t understand in those days was why Mother took such an interest in Jolene and Reana Mae. They were the very picture of all the things Mother despised about her West Virginia childhood. Jolene was nearly illiterate, slatternly, and mouthy—often profanely so. Moreover, she was overtly, even brazenly sexual—reveling in her marriage bed and flaunting herself shamelessly to young men and old alike. And poor Reana Mae was purely odd—everyone said so and even I saw it. She hardly talked at all; when she did, it was in a nasally half-whisper. Her face and hair and clothes alike were mostly dirty and disheveled. Worse, she sang to herself almost constantly that summer, a tuneless, wordless humming she seemed unaware of. From near silence to constant hum, no one seemed to know why she was the way she was. She was just odd.

But Mother doted on Reana Mae in ways she never did on her own daughters. We all saw it, and we all resented it—even Nancy, who didn’t seem to worry about what Mother thought most of the time. But for Tracy, it went way past resentment. She hated the attention Mother paid Reana Mae, and whenever she could, she made Reana pay dearly for the smiles and quick hugs she received from our mother. For Reana Mae to receive so freely what Tracy fought so hard for must have been a fine torture to her stunted soul.

That day on the back porch, I understood why Mother would lie to Jolene about me forgetting my doll at home. She wanted to get Reana Mae a new one.

But the two women soon began talking about other things—like hemlines. In 1969, ladies’ hemlines were a topic of great controversy. Just now, my mother was opining that they couldn’t get any shorter without God himself sending down another flood, and Jo-lene was laughing that she planned to take all her dresses up another two inches that very week.

I gave up listening and rolled off the porch onto the damp ground below, and then on down the hill to the river’s edge. I didn’t care about hemlines or God’s wrath, either.

Reana Mae was out with Bobby Lee that morning, on a rare father-daughter outing. He had been home almost a week—a nearly unheard-of break during the summer months—and Loreen had pestered him into taking Reana to St. Albans to get an ice cream. I watched them roar off on the motorcycle just after breakfast, Reana Mae clinging to her daddy’s back and grinning from ear to ear. Usually when Bobby Lee took them anywhere, Jolene rode behind him on the bike—her short skirts hiked up over her thighs, her arms wrapped around his waist, her hands resting in his lap—and Reana rode in the small green sidecar. But this morning Jolene had stayed home.

“I got cramps,” she told Bobby Lee. “You go ahead and take Miss Mouse.”

So Reana got to ride behind her daddy that day. Which was all fine and good for Reana Mae, but it left me with nothing in the world to do.

I lay on my stomach, throwing sticks into the water and watching them swirl downstream, wondering what to do next. Then I heard the low rumble of a car and saw Aunt Belle’s long white Lincoln Continental pull up in front of the cabin. If I went up to the house now, Mother would make me come inside and sit quietly, to “pay my respects” to my elders.

Now, most times I adored being with Aunt Belle. When it was just her and us kids, she’d laugh loud and tell silly stories and bad jokes and give us Oreo cookies and cashews and spicy-strong ginger ale.

But around my mother, Aunt Belle seemed to lose some of her steam. Mother was insistent that her girls behave like ladies, and she disapproved of Belle’s great horselaugh and off-color jokes.

Even Arabella Lee Martin didn’t stand up so well in the face of my mother’s disapproval.

Sighing, I threw another stick into the water. Now I was stuck. I couldn’t get up to the road without Mother seeing me, and I couldn’t go anywhere down on the bank. The riverbank was overgrown with weeds and brambles. Gnarled ancient trees stretched out over the water, and thin reeds crowded the shore. A few folks had cleared their portions of the lower bank. One or two even had swings or old furniture set down by the water. And my Uncle Hobie had built a small dock on his property and kept a rowboat tied there. But mostly the area along the riverbank was wild. Our own portion had been cleared, so we could sit with our feet in the water and cast fishing lines out into the river. A tiny path ran from our cabin’s back porch to the bank below, but mostly we just rolled or slid down the hill on our backsides.

Bobby Lee had built a stone stairway behind his house down to the bank, which Jolene boasted of up and down the river. “Thirty-two steps he put in, all by hisself,” she crowed. But the stones were steep and unsteady, and Reana and I usually just slid down their hill, too.

I sat with my chin on my knees, staring at Uncle Hobie’s boat. If only I had a boat like that, I could row it down to the beach. But Uncle Hobie and Mother would have my hide if I used that boat. I glared up at the house and sighed again. Was there ever a day as boring as this?

Finally, I decided to practice my spying skills. Reana Mae and I had been playing spy all summer, crawling on our bellies, sneaking up under windows, listening to people’s dinner-table talk. Not that we heard much to interest us. Ida Louise yammering at Brother Harley about new choir robes. Aunt Loreen clucking over Bobby Lee’s younger brother, Caleb, who had just been kicked out of high school again—this time for pulling a knife on a teacher. And once, Bobby Lee and Jolene in their bedroom, in the middle of the afternoon, sighing and cooing and then moaning.

Reana Mae had run down the hill with her hands over her ears. After that, we’d given up the spying business.

But I was bored and feeling a might desperate.

Silently—or as silently as a child of ten could be—I climbed the hill, cursing as the thistles scratched my bare legs. I crawled back onto the sagging porch and set to listening under the open window again.

“I just don’t know what Cleda Rae’s gonna do with Caleb,” Aunt Belle was saying, her voice grim. “What with Noah gone off like he did, it’s all left on her shoulders.”

“That boy was always trouble,” Jolene said shortly. “The day I married Bobby Lee, when I was getting dressed for the wedding, I caught him peeking in at the bedroom window, watching me.”

“Well.” Aunt Belle sighed heavily. “Caleb’s a spirited boy, that’s a fact. But Bobby Lee could always keep him in line. And Caleb, why, he just worships Bobby Lee.

“Probably,” she added, “that’s why he was peeking in at you.”

“Is that so? I thought it was so he could see my tits,” Jolene said.

Even from outside I could feel my mother’s dismay, see her lips forming a tight, thin line.