“That’s none of our business,” I said piously.
“The devil it’s not. Why are we out here half-drowning if it’s none of our business? The poor little child just got born dead, baptized in a sink and deep-frozen with a hundred pounds of shrimp and Spanish mackerel, and I want you to tell me what that poor creature could have done to deserve hellfire, Tom Wingo.”
“It’s God’s business. It’s none of ours at all.”
“My sister! My business! Especially when I’ve got to pray for her in the middle of a storm,” Savannah said, her hair darkened and tangled with rainwater.
I began shivering and the storm worsened. Wiping the water from my eyes, I turned toward the house, wondering if it was possible that my mother simply did not know it was raining. I could barely see the house through the rain, so I turned again to the small, forlorn grave.
“Why is Mom always pregnant?” I asked for no particular reason and expected no particular response.
With her hands folded in a mimicry of prayer, Savannah sighed and said in an exaggerated tone, “Because she and Dad are always having sexual intercourse.”
“Quit talking nasty,” Luke warned as he prayed. He was the only one who could keep his mind on the repose of my sister’s soul.
“They do?” I said. This was the first time I had encountered that fancy and peculiar phrase.
“Yes, they do,” Savannah said definitively. “And it makes me sick to my stomach. Luke knows all about it,” Savannah said. “He’s just shy and doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“I ain’t shy. I’m praying like Mom told both of you to do.”
“You and Tom got to quit saying ain’t, Luke. You and Tom sound like rednecks.”
“We are rednecks and so are you,” Luke answered.
“Speak for yourself,” Savannah said. “Mom told me secretly that we descend from the very highest southern aristocracy.”
“Oh sure,” Luke said.
“I’m certainly not a redneck,” said Savannah, shifting her knees on the wet, displaced soil. “Mom says I’ve got a certain amount of refinement.”
“Yeah,” I said, giggling. “You sure had a lot of refinement last night when you were sleeping next to Rose Aster.”
“What?” Luke said.
Savannah looked at me through the rain with a baffled, noncommittal glare, as though she had missed the punch line of a joke. “What are you talking about, Tom?”
“I’m talking about finding you all wrapped up with a dead baby you got out of the freezer sometime last night.”
“I didn’t do that, Tom,” she said seriously, shrugging her shoulders at an appalled Luke. “Why would anybody do such a strange thing? Nothing gives me the creeps more than a dead baby.”
“I saw you, Savannah,” I said. “I took her back to the freezer.”
“You must have been dreaming, boy,” said Luke.
“How can you dream something like that?” I asked. “Tell him, Savannah. Tell Luke it wasn’t a dream.”
“It sounds like a nightmare to me, Tom,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I was about to answer when we heard my father’s truck coming down the dirt road toward the house. All of us bowed our heads and began to pray deeply and reverently again for the newly anointed Wingo angel. He pulled the truck up behind us and we could hear the windshield wipers slapping the rain from side to side. For a minute or two he watched us in mute and uncomprehending astonishment before he said, “Have you lost your goddamn minds, idiots?”
“Mama told us to pray for Rose Aster,” Luke explained. “So that’s what we’re doing, Daddy. We buried her today.”
“We’ll be plantin’ the three of you under that same tree if you don’t get out of this rain. It isn’t enough that they’re all born dead; she tries to kill the ones that live, too. Get your butts into the house.”
“Mom’ll get mad if we go in too soon,” I said.
“How long you been kneeling out here in the storm?”
“ ’Bout an hour, I reckon,” Luke said.
“Jesus Aloysius Christ. When it comes to religion, don’t listen to your mother. She used to pick up rattlers when she was a kid to prove that she loved God. I baptized Rose Aster. She’s in a hell of a lot better shape than any of us right now. Now move your butts into that house and I’ll handle your mother. She’s going through what they call
post-departum depression. It happens to women after they lose a kid. You all be especially sweet to your mama for the next few weeks. Bring her flowers. Make her feel special.”
“Did you bring her any flowers, Dad?” asked Savannah.
“I almost did. At least I thought about it,” he answered, driving the truck to the barn.
As we rose from our knees, drenched and shivering, Savannah said, “What a sweet guy. His baby dies and he doesn’t bring his own wife flowers.”
“At least he thought about it,” Luke said.
“Yeah,” I added. “He almost did.”
We walked into the house suppressing a forbidden and dissident laughter, the ill-made humor of children who were developing the dark wit of the luckless, the black laughter of subjugation. It was that laughter which ended our hour of prayer over the small body of my sister, that preserving laughter which sustained us as we walked toward the house and our parents and away from that small garden of sleeping Wingos. My mother would plant roses above each grave and those roses would grow luxuriously, splendidly, stealing all the color and beauty from the rich hearts of infants. She called them “the garden angels” and they spoke their narratives in roses each spring.
That night, my mother had not left her bedroom and we had all made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. The three children had prepared what we considered an elegant meal of fried shrimp and corn on the cob, and brought it on a tray to our mother’s bedside with a bouquet of wildflowers. But she could not stop crying and only ate one of the shrimp and did not touch the corn. My father sat in the front room and read back issues of Southern Fisherman —thumbing through them angrily, looking back occasionally toward the room where his wife lay crying, his eyes glistening in the electric light as though they had been softened with Vaseline. He was one of those men incapable of making the smallest gestures of tenderness. His emotions were like some perilous mountain range obscured beneath clouds. When I thought of his soul, tried to visualize what was real and essential to my father, I saw only an endless acreage of ice.
“Tom,” he said, catching me staring at him. “Go in and tell your mother to quit boo-hooing. It’s not the end of the world.”
“She’s feeling bad on account of the baby,” I said.
“I know why she’s feeling bad. But she’s just crying over spilt milk now. Get on in there. It’s you kids’ job to make your mother feel better.”
I tiptoed into my mother’s bedroom. She was lying on her back, tears rolling down her cheeks, crying easily and softly. Afraid to approach her, I stood by the door, unsure of what to do next. She was staring at me with the most bereaved, inconsolable face I had ever seen. There was such defeat and hopelessness in her eyes.
“Daddy wants to know if you need anything, Mama,” I whispered.
“I heard what he said,” she said, sobbing. “Come here, Tom. Lie down beside me.”
I climbed into bed beside her and she laid her head against my shoulder and cried hard, digging her nails into my arm. Her tears wet my face and I lay there paralyzed by such sudden and passionate intimacy. Her body pressed against me and I felt her breasts, still heavy with the milk she could not use, press hard against me. She kissed my neck and mouth, pulled down my shirt, and covered my chest with her kisses. I did not move but was keenly alert for noises in the main room.
“I’ve only got you, Tom,” she whispered fiercely in my ear. “I don’t have anyone else. It’s going to be all up to you.”
“You’ve got all of us, Mama,” I said quietly.
“No. You don’
t understand. I’ve got nothing. When you marry nothing, you have nothing. Do you know how the people of this town look at us?”
“They like us fine, Mama. People like you a lot. Dad’s a good shrimper.”
“They think we’re shit, Tom. You know that word, don’t you? Your father uses it all the time. They think we’re river shit. Low class. We’ve got to show them, Tom. You’ve got to be the one. Luke can’t do it because Luke’s stupid. Savannah can’t do it because she’s only a girl.”
“Luke’s not stupid, Mama.”
“He might as well be retarded as far as school’s concerned, Tom. The doctor thinks it was the forceps they had to use when he was born. It’s up to you and me to show this town the stuff we’re made out of.”
“What stuff, Mama?”
“That we’re better than anyone in this town.”
“That’s right, Mama. We are.”
“But we’ve got to show them. I wanted to fill this house with children. I wanted eight or nine kids that I’d raise smart and proud and given enough time we’d take this town over. I’m going to marry off Savannah to the richest boy in town. I don’t know what I’ll do with Luke. Maybe a sheriff’s deputy. But you, you, Tom, are my hope for the future.”
“I’ll do good, Mama. I promise you.”
“Promise me you won’t be anything like your father.”
“I promise, Mama.”
“Say it. Say it to me.”
“I promise not to be anything like my father.”
“Promise me you’ll be the best in everything.”
“I’ll be the best in everything, Mama.”
“The very best.”
“I’ll be the very best.” “I’m not going to die in a house like this, Tom. I promise you that. No one knows this yet, except me. But I’m an amazing woman. You’re the first one I’ve told. Do you believe that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I’m going to prove it to everybody, even to your father.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You won’t ever let anybody harm me, will you, Tom? No matter what I do, I can depend on you, can’t I?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said again, and her eyes transfixed me with both their gauntness and their burning intensity.
“You’re the only one I can trust,” she whispered. “I’m so isolated out here on the island. So alone. But there is something wrong with your father. He’s going to hurt us.”
“But why?”
“He’s a sick man, Tom. He’s very sick.”
“Then we should tell someone.”
“No. We must be loyal. Family loyalty is the most important thing. We have to wait for the right time. We must pray for him. We must pray that his good qualities defeat his bad qualities.”
“I’ll pray. I promise I’ll pray. Can I go back to the living room now?”
“Yes, Tom. Thanks for coming in here. I needed to tell you this. Something else, darling. Something important. Very important. I love you more than any of them. More than all of them put together. And I know you feel the same about me.”
“But Luke and Savannah love you just . . . ”
“No,” she said harshly, pulling me close to her again. “Savannah’s a hateful child. She’s been that way since she was born. Not good. Disobedient. Luke’s dumb as a goat. You’re the only one I care for. That’ll be our secret, Tom. You and Mama can share a secret, can’t we?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, moving toward the door. “If you want anything, Mama, please call me and I’ll get it for you.”
“I know you will, darling. I’ve always known that since the night you were born.”
I stumbled out of that room carrying a terrible, inadmissible weight and could hardly bear the puzzled gazes of my brother and sister as I came out of my mother’s bedroom. I was shaken by both the monstrousness and the nakedness of my mother’s confession to me and wondered what relationship it had to the loss of her child. She had imprisoned me with the bitterness and honesty of her testimony; by taking me into her confidence, she made me an unwilling co-conspirator in her undeclared war against Luke and Savannah. She bound me in an unsolvable dilemma: By agreeing to become her most trusted confederate I was also giving my consent to the betrayal of the two people I loved best on earth. Yet her rawness, the urgency of her approach, the imprint of her lips on my throat and chest—all of it was forbidden in the way I understood the order and proper alignment of the world, yet it was seductive to be chosen by our mother on the day she was half crazed over the loss of a child. I took this selection to be emblematic, honorable, and proof that I was something special and extraordinary. By the scandal of her revelations she ensured the inviolability of my oath of secrecy. My father would not have believed a word of what I said if I had confessed every syllable of what my mother had told me in that room. Nor could I ever bear to hurt my brother and sister by revealing the context of my mother’s passionate dismissal of them as allies. She was looking for lieutenants, not relatives, and though her method was unclear to me, I understood that my mother, who until that time I had thought of only as a mother, had some plan of attack of indefinite shape and structure, which she planned to initiate at some future time. Before, I had thought of her as only beautiful and unapproachable, but now I became aware of something dissatisfied, even cunning, behind the prettiest blue eyes I would ever see. I left her room less of a child. I walked toward the rest of my family with my heart troubled with adult terror. My mother had tired of her solitude and martyrdom in that house on the river. From that night on, I began a long study of this woman I had underestimated for so long. I revised my assessment of her almost daily. I learned to fear the things she left unsaid. She was born in my consciousness that night, and for the first time in my young life I felt alive and fully cognizant.
Many years later, I told Luke and Savannah what my mother had revealed to me in her bedroom that night. I expected outrage from them when confronted by the knowledge of my mother’s secret pact, when she enlisted me as an agent in her unformulated agenda against both her family and Colleton. But, no, there was no anger at her whispered perfidy, only profound amusement. Both Luke and Savannah roared with laughter when I imparted this information that had caused me such great shame and guilt. My mother might have been new to conspiracy but she mastered its tricks and stratagems with a felicity that indicated she carried a natural affinity for it. In that same week that Rose Aster was buried, my mother took both Savannah and Luke aside, isolated them as she had done me, and took them into the strictest confidence. She told them the exact same thing she told me, that she could trust only them, that the others were unreliable, and that she required of them an intimate oath of allegiance, a solemn affirmation that they would stand beside her through any test or skirmish or storm. She told them (as we compared notes) that I was frightened, unsteady, and could not be trusted in a crisis. She enlisted Savannah because Savannah was a woman and understood intuitively the difficulty and unfairness of a woman’s situation. Luke was strong, unshakable, the perfect soldier—she needed him as intercessor and champion. All of us were seduced by the naked avowal of her need for us. There was no room for refusal, no possibility of disclosure. Her faith in us left us awestruck. By dividing us, she left herself in control, impregnable, the softest enigma in our lives.
But by the time I traded notes with Luke and Savannah my mother had already proven herself the most formidable woman who had ever walked the streets of Colleton.
It was still raining when we went to bed that night. My father put out the lights in the house and smoked a pipe on the screened-in porch before he retired. He seemed uncomfortable with us when my mother was not orchestrating the tenor of household life. Several times during the evening, he had yelled at us when something minor and insignificant had irritated him. My father was an easy read. When there was real danger you knew instinctively to avoid him; he had a genuine gift for tyranny but no coherent strategies. He was both brutal and ineffectual as
a man who would always be a stranger in his own house. As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant worker who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible. He would have been lovable for his fecklessness and his blustering eccentricities if he had not been born a violent and unpredictable man. I think my father loved us, but there has never been a more awkward or deviant love. He considered a slap to the face a valentine delivered. As a child he had felt neglected and abandoned and neither of his parents had ever laid a hand on him. He never noticed us except to scold us; he never touched us unless in anger. At night, surrounded by his family, my father looked trapped, and he taught me a great deal about the self-made loneliness of mankind. I began my life by being taken prisoner in my father’s house; I would begin my manhood by walking over him on my way out the door.
When Savannah asked me into her room for a talk that same night, the rain was making sweet music on the copper roof as it fell. I sat on the floor by her bed and we watched the sheet lightning flashing over the islands to the north.
“Tom,” she whispered, “if I ask you something seriously, will you answer me?”
“Sure.”
“You can’t laugh or tease me. This is too important.”
“Okay.”
“Did you really find me in bed with Rose Aster this morning?”
“Of course I did,” I said, irritated. “And then you lied about it to Luke.”
“I didn’t lie about it, Tom,” she said, and her face was worried in the dark. “I don’t remember it at all.”
“She was in your arms when I found you. Dad would have killed you if he had found her.”
“I thought you were crazy when you told us that out in the yard,” she said.
“Ha! Who’s the crazy one?”
“I didn’t believe you until I got into bed tonight.”
“What changed your mind?” I asked.
“There’s a wet spot in the bed.”
“She was in the freezer. She was kind of melted when I got here.”