Swan Place (2 page)

I knew how hard all that was on Roy-Ellis, because he really didn’t like fooling around with us kids very much, not even Little Ellis, who was his very own child, and so I figured either Mama was lots better, and he was happy about that, or else he was trying to do something nice for us because Mama was so sick. So I just went along with what Roy-Ellis wanted to do, because maybe I really didn’t want to know why he was trying so hard.

Roy-Ellis let me and Little Ellis help him color some pretty eggs that evening, but Molly, who was only a year and a half older than Little Ellis, wouldn’t color herself a single egg. She just got up from the table and stood back against the sink and watched us with eyes that looked like they were on fire, sucking her thumb the way she always did, with the thumb deep inside her mouth, her index finger curled around her nose, and her soft, baby-mouth in a pout.

“Come on, sugar,” Roy-Ellis coaxed her. “Come on over here and color you some pretty eggs.” But she just stood there and watched us the whole time, with those storm-cloud eyes of hers. Oh, I’d seen that look plenty of times before, especially when Mama would finally get out of the bed Sunday afternoon and walk barefooted into the kitchen, still wearing her spangle dress and with mascara shadows under her eyes.

Back then—before Mama got sick—she and Roy-Ellis almost always had their Saturday night fun at a big roadhouse called Across the Line, because it was just across the Beamer County line. The county we lived in was what they called a dry county, on account of nobody being able to buy beer in it, so they went to Across the Line almost every single Saturday night. After Mama got all dressed up in one of her spangle dresses—just like the dress she had been wearing in my dream—she and Roy-Ellis would go honkytonking; that’s what they called it. And she always looked just like a movie star, with her hair silverblond and in allover curls and dangle earrings that sparkled when she moved her head and with her makeup done so nice—even down to a little dot of eyebrow pencil right beside her bright-red lips. A beauty mark—that’s what she said it was.

Roy-Ellis could look right nice himself on Saturday nights, especially after he’d had a good bath and combed his wet hair and then settled his cowboy hat on his head just right. Mama always had a pair of freshly ironed jeans for him to wear and a clean shirt. But it was the cowboy hat and the boots that sure made him look so special.

I didn’t mind being left alone to take care of Molly and Little Ellis one little bit, because if honky-tonking made Mama and Roy-Ellis that happy, then I wanted them to have it. Even when they came home real late, they would still be happy as could be and having the best time. Mama always laughed when Roy-Ellis tripped on that broken front step and almost fell down and said bad words and then shouted, “Gotta fix that bugger, one of these days!” And Mama would shush him and laugh some more and then go back to singing a jukebox song real softlike under her breath.

“Come on, baby,” she’d say. “Mama’s gonna help you.”

But on Sundays—usually in the early afternoon, when us children had gotten back from going to church with Aunt Bett—when Mama would finally get out of bed and come into the kitchen, Molly would stare at her like maybe she’d caught Mama doing something really bad.

“Don’t you go giving me that Sunday Schoolteacher look, missy,” Mama would say while she lit a cigarette with shaky hands. “I got a right to have me a little fun once in a while. And Roy-Ellis, too.”

I thought so too—what with her working all day long every day in that little airconditioned room Roy-Ellis fixed up for her on part of our back porch, cutting ladies’ hair and giving them permanents and sometimes putting lots of little shiny strips of aluminum foil in their hair. But I didn’t know what that was for. And Roy-Ellis needed some fun too—after a long week of driving that truck loaded with crates of live chickens back and forth, back and forth to the poultry processing plant and him coming home haggardlooking and smelling of chicken feathers and fear and saying to Mama, “Don’t you never put a piece of chicken on this table when I’m sitting down to it. You hear me?”

And Mama saying, “Yeah, I hear you, honey.”

The only person besides Molly who thought Mama and Roy-Ellis’s honky-tonking was bad was Aunt Bett. She and Mama fussed about that lots of times, with Mama telling Aunt Bett she had a right to live her own life any way she wanted to, and with Aunt Bett crying and saying Mama and Roy-Ellis were gonna burn in everlasting hellfire if they didn’t mend their ways.

Because it wasn’t just the beer-drinking that bothered Aunt Bett. What she really hated was that neither one of them would
 . . .
or could
 . . .
wake up on Sunday mornings early enough to take us to church. I asked Aunt Bett about that one time. Asked her why Roy-Ellis and Mama didn’t like to go to church. She clamped her teeth together and mumbled something about Mama and Roy-Ellis simply not being churchgoing folks. But it was hard for her to say something that easy-sounding, so she added, “I’ll just keep praying for them.”

But she did lots more than just praying for Mama and Roy-Ellis—she took it on herself to
raise us right
. She said that maybe she couldn’t do a solitary thing to stop all that honky-tonking Mama and Roy-Ellis did, but she could certainly take us to church with her every single Sunday, so we would grow up knowing the difference between right and wrong. So every Sunday morning, she drove up in front of our house and honked her horn, and we children would go running out and crowd ourselves into the backseat, in and among all our damp, clean, soapy-smelling cousins for the ride to church.

But Easter Sunday was always the best of all, with everything feeling all squeaky-clean, or something like that, and us children being so proud in the pretty clothes Aunt Bett always brought over for us the day before, and the church with all that sunlight streaming in through the windows and the voices singing, “Up from the grave He arose!” And then, “Hallelujah! Christ arose!”

Made me think that any minute, Christ Jesus Himself,
raised up from the dead,
was going to come bursting in through the swinging doors at the back of the church, making them go
bang!
And He’d have strong, brown arms and beautiful eyes and white teeth, and He would grin and wave at us all with those big carpenter’s hands and stride mightily right down the aisle to the altar, and we all would jump up and down in the pews, whooping and hollering and clapping and cheering for Him. Why, it gave me goose bumps, just to think of it!

So on that early Easter Sunday morning when Mama was sick in the hospital, I thought that maybe things would be okay, after all. Because even though I couldn’t see much in the dark room, I knew that our Easter clothes were hanging on the back of the door. Carefully mended, washed and ironed dresses for me and Molly—dresses that were of sizes in-between Aunt Bett’s own girls—and short pants and a white shirt for Little Ellis, from in-between the sizes of Aunt Bett’s boys.

I’d been careful to say thank you to Aunt Bett when she brought over this Easter’s clothes for us—mostly to show her that Mama
had
raised me right, even if she didn’t take us to church. But Aunt Bett just waved the back side of her hand at me like she always did, and then she got in her car and drove away, still shaking her head. That’s the way Aunt Bett always did, every single time she stopped by our house, especially after Mama had to go to the hospital. She’d come by with a big bowl of potato salad or some extra cornbread she’d made for us—or else with in-between clothes and shoes she thought we could use, and she always ended up looking around the kitchen and the living room, rolling her eyes and clucking her tongue at the way me and Roy-Ellis were doing things. Then she’d heave a big old sigh and roll up her sleeves and wash up the sink full of dirty dishes and pick up the empty SpaghettiOs can and look at me like I’d done something wrong because I’d heated that up and fed it to Molly and Little Ellis for their lunch, and in general do a lot of things to help us out—but she always ended up shaking her head and clucking her tongue and rolling her eyes again, before she said, “Well, I got family of my own to tend to, so I better be getting on back home.” That’s what she always said. But her heart was in the right place. I know that for sure. And whenever Roy-Ellis was home when Aunt Bett came, they would go into the kitchen and shut the door and talk real low for a long time. Sometimes, if Molly and Little Ellis were watching cartoons in the living room or already in bed, I stood real quiet outside the kitchen door, trying to hear whatever they were saying. But I never could make out any of it. Except that they sounded worried. That much I could tell.

So maybe that’s why I wasn’t really much surprised when, on that Easter Sunday morning, the loud ringing of the telephone broke the silence of the dark living room just beyond my door. Because a phone ringing so early always means that something is wrong, somewhere. And for our house, it could only mean that something had happened to Mama.

My heart started thudding in my chest like a squirrel trying to get out of a cage.

Then the phone rang again, and it sounded even louder.

No!
I was thinking.
No!

I heard Roy-Ellis groan and roll out of bed.

No! Don’t answer it!

But I could hear him stumbling across his and Mama’s room and bumping his shoulder hard on the door frame as he came out. It rang again, and I felt as if all the breath had gone out of my body.
No! Please don’t answer it! If you don’t answer it, Mama will be fine, like in my dream!

But then the light in the living room went on, and I could see a little sliver of the light coming under my door.

“Hello,” Roy-Ellis said in a roughsounding voice. Maybe because of his shoulder hurting him. I held my breath.

“Yeah, this is him.”

Then silence. A very long silence.

I could hear Roy-Ellis breathing, because my cot was right up against the wall between the bedroom and the living room. Finally, he said, “She did?” And he sounded almost like Little Ellis, the way his voice tilted up in such a sad way. I felt my heart split in two, right inside my chest!

“When?”

Mama!

Another long silence.

Then, “Yes. I’ll take care of it.”

The sound of the receiver clicking back into its place and after that, no sound at all. So I could hear what the silence said
:
Mama was gone!
I heard Roy-Ellis pick the receiver up again and dial. Then his voice was husky when he said, “Bett? I’m afraid it’s bad news.” A long pause, then, “Yeah.” I shut my eyes tight and stayed just as still as could be, believing with all my heart that if I moved so much as my little finger, my cot would tilt, the whole world would tilt, and I’d fall out of bed and down into some deep, dark faraway place—wherever my mama was, all cold and dead.

Mama!

Then it almost seemed that my cot dropped away from under me, and I was floating up in the air, high above our little gray house and the other ones just like it, all lined up along the silent street, like little shaggy gray ponies waiting for a race to start and falling asleep while they were waiting. And I could look down on the big chinaberry tree in our yard, where the mockingbird curled his toes around a twig and sang his babysong into the darkness. Slowly I floated back down onto my cot, inside the bluepapered walls of the room in the little gray house, where nothing was ever going to be the same again.

I heard Roy-Ellis hang up the phone and go along the hallway, into the kitchen, where the table was still covered with old, rainbow-colored newspapers and the thick white cups holding all those Easter egg colors—purple and blue, yellow and red, green and orange. And in the refrigerator were the three egg cartons holding all those pretty eggs we were supposed to hunt for in the tall grass in the backyard that afternoon. Only now, Mama was
gone.
And right then and there—in a way I’ll never understand—I knew that my path had just split in two
again
, that it had split with that very first ring of the telephone. Just like it split for the first time when my daddy—my real daddy, that is—ran off and left me and Mama when some blond-headed lady in the office of the construction company where he worked asked him if he would drive her to California, and he did. And he never came back.