Bastard Out of Carolina

  “Ruth Anne.” He leaned forward, his face close to mine, his whispery voice too big in my ear. “I want to help you. I want you to tell me what happened, girl. I’ll take care of everything. I promise you. You’ll be all right.”

  No. He thought he knew everything. Son of a bitch in his smug uniform could talk like Santa Claus, promise anything, but I was alone.

  “I want to go home,” I said. “I want my mama.”

  Sheriff Cole put his hand on mine and sighed. “All right. All right, girl.”

  I looked at him, remembering what Raylene had said that night on the landing when I told her how much I hated people who looked at us like trash. What must it be like to be Sheriff Cole? What made him who he was? I’d think about that sometime, but not now. I didn’t want to think at all right now.

  The double door swung open. I turned eagerly, but the struggling angry figure there wasn’t Mama. Raylene was wrestling with a nurse, pushing the woman away and almost losing her black pea coat in the process. “Let me go,” she said in a voice bigger than the room. “You let me go.” She shoved the woman away and came forward like a tree falling, massive, inevitable, and reassuringly familiar.

  “Bone. Baby.” Her words echoed hollowly against the stark white walls.

  “Oh, my girl, what’d they do to you?” Raylene leaned over me, and the smell of her wrapped me around. I opened my mouth like a baby bird, cried out, and reached up to her with my good arm. I said her name twice and lay against her breasts. Her arms were so strong, so safe. Don’t let me go, I thought. Just please, don’t let me go.

  “What are you doing to this child?” I felt her turn slightly, her voice loud and insistent above me. “You tell me what right you got to be in here with her alone, and keeping me outside?”

  Sheriff Cole’s voice was patient. “We need to know what happened,” he said.

  “You can see what happened,” Raylene snapped. “Look at her. She’s hurt and scared and don’t need nobody hurting her any more. Were you gonna keep me away from her till you had her ready to jump out the window or say anything you wanted her to?”

  “Miss Boatwright, I’m sorry, but there’s been an assault. There has to be an investigation.”

  “She’s just twelve years old, you fool. Right now she needs to feel safe and loved, not alone and terrified. You’re right, there has to be justice. There has to be a judgment day too, when God will judge us all. What you gonna tell him you did to this child when that day comes?”

  “There’s no need—” he began, but she interrupted him.

  “There’s need,” she said. “God knows there’s need.” Her voice was awesome, biblical. “God knows.”

  The notebook snapped closed. I looked sideways out of Raylene’s embrace and saw Sheriff Cole glare at her and stuff his notebook back in his pocket. “You call me,” he said. “You call me when she’s ready to tell us what happened.”

  Aunt Raylene grunted contemptuously, and held me close as he stomped away. “My girl,” she whispered in that strong voice, and stroked my hair back off my face. “Oh, my poor little girl, you just lay still. We’ll get you home. Don’t you worry. Don’t you worry about nothing. I’ll get you home and safe.”

  22

  There was no stopping Aunt Raylene. When the doctor insisted I stay overnight, she planted herself in a chair by my bed and refused to move. She held my hand all night while I lay unsleeping and restless. My arm throbbed, and my mouth was so bruised I could only whimper.

  “I can’t give her anything,” the nurse told Raylene each time she checked on us.

  “I know,” Raylene nodded. “Just give me a straw, why don’t you?” She fed me sips of Coke and hummed quietly while I stared up at the ceiling.

  In the morning, the doctor felt all over the back of my head while Raylene glared at him from her chair. I was numb with exhaustion and pain, couldn’t even smile when he grumbled and signed the release forms. The nurse took me to the entry in a wheelchair. I could see the photographer waiting outside, but Raylene just harrumphed and picked me up like a baby doll, not looking left or right as she carried me out to her truck.

  Raylene settled me close to her right hip before she started the engine, but I slid away, over to where I could hang on to the door and look out through the window. I could not look at her, could not listen to the words she kept trying to speak softly in my direction. Murmurs of comfort, meaningless phrases that did not register. The one thing I wanted her to say went unspoken. Where was Mama? What had happened to her?

  When we pulled up in Raylene’s yard, the sun was beating down on the muddy spring grass. The river ran flat and fast, and there was no breeze at all. I wiped sweat off my neck and watched a big unfamiliar yellow dog creep out from under the porch and stand by the steps with his head canted to one side. Raylene sighed and cut the engine.

  “I need to say something to you.” Raylene sounded uncertain. “The thing you need to understand, that’s the one thing I’m afraid you’re too young to hear.” She didn’t look at me. Her words came out in a rush. “But it’s simple enough, and one day maybe you will understand it.” She turned to look at me then.

  “One time you talked to me about how I live, with no husband or children or even a good friend. Well, I had me a friend when I was with the carnival, somebody I loved better than myself, a lover I would have spent my life with and should have. But I was crazy with love, too crazy to judge what I was doing. I did a terrible thing, Bone.” Her skin looked tighter over her cheekbones, as if her whole frame were swelling with shame. She shook her head but didn’t look away from my eyes.

  “Bone, no woman can stand to choose between her baby and her lover, between her child and her husband. I made the woman I loved choose. She stayed with her baby, and I came back here alone. It should never have come to that. It never should. It just about killed her. It just about killed me.”

  Aunt Raylene covered her eyes for a moment, then pushed her hair back with both hands. “God!” She dropped her hands and turned back to me. “We do terrible things to the ones we love sometimes,” she said. “We can’t explain it. We can’t excuse it. It eats us up, but we do them just the same. You want to know about your mama, I know. But I can’t tell you anything. None of us can. No one knows where she’s gone. I can’t explain that to you, Bone. I just can’t, but I know your mama loves you. Don’t doubt that. She loves you more than her life, and she an’t never gonna forgive herself for what she’s done to you, what she allowed to happen.”

  Aunt Raylene gripped the steering wheel fiercely and stared at me. “I shouldn’t talk so much. I’ve said enough.” She wiped her mouth. “We need some time. You need some time. You know what you look like, girl?”

  I turned away. I knew what I looked like. At the hospital when they had left me alone in the bathroom for a minute, I had looked at myself in the mirror and known I was a different person. Older, meaner, rawboned, crazy, and hateful. I was full of hate. I had spit on the glass, spit on my life, not caring anymore who I was or would be. I had wanted to laugh at everyone, Raylene and the nurses, all of them watching me like some fragile piece of glass ready to shatter around boiling water. I was boiling inside. I was cooking away. I was who I was going to be, and she was a terrible person.

  “Ruth Anne,” Aunt Raylene whispered. “Girl, look at me. Stop thinking about what happened. Don’t think about it. Don’t try to think about nothing. You can’t understand it yet. You don’t have to. It don’t make sense, and I can’t explain it to you. You can’t explain it to yourself. Your mama ...” She stopped, and I looked back at her. “Your mama loves you. Just hang on, girl. Just hang on. It’ll be better in time, I promise you.”

  I promise you, she said. My mouth twisted. I stared at her hatefully.

  Raylene looked at me as if my rage hurt her, but she said nothing, just climbed heavily out of the truck. She moved slowly, hugging her old purse to her bosom and stopping only to give the panting dog a quick pat on the head before she w
ent up and laid the purse on the steps. She came back and took me up again as easily as if I weighed no more than that purse. She carried me inside the house, the dog following, and put me in her bed. The dog settled himself on the rug, comfortably. I lay still, ignoring Aunt Raylene’s movements but thinking even so about the woman she had loved, the woman who had loved her child more. It was too much for me. I’d have to think about it some other time.

  The dog turned to me with hopeful brown eyes, his tongue hanging down as if he wanted me to invite him up on the bed. Big dumb sad eyes waited on me. I wanted to beat my fists until bones splintered, kick my heels into raw meat, scream until my tongue pulled loose and split at the root, but everything was slow, words and feelings just moved across my brain. I was slow, numb, and stupid. The pain in my arm was comforting, the throbbing at my temple was a music I needed in order to keep breathing.

  Everything hurt me: my arm in its cotton sling; the memory of the nurse’s careful fingers; the light that glinted into my eyes from the flawed glass of Raylene’s window; my hip where it pressed against the mattress. Most of all my heart hurt me, a huge swollen obstruction in my chest. Every time I closed my eyes there was a flash of Glen’s face as he had looked above me. I kept turning my head as if Mama’s prayers still echoed in my ears, and even the slow drag of that dog’s eyes raked over my skin like a pitchfork cutting furrows in dust. I had seen my whole life in Sheriff Cole’s eyes, contemptible, small, meaningless. My mama had abandoned me, and that was the only thing that mattered. When Raylene brought me some soup later, I refused to eat. “I hate her,” I whispered through torn lips. “I hate her.”

  “You’ll forgive her,” Raylene said.

  I pulled the sheet up over my mouth.

  How do you forgive somebody when you cannot even speak her name, when you cannot stand to close your eyes and see her face? I did not understand. If I thought of Mama, I thought of her with her head thrown back and her mouth open, Glen’s bloody face pressed to her belly. I could not stand to remember that, could not watch it again. I turned away, closed my eyes, and prayed for the darkness to come back. I wanted to die. I refused to eat, refused to speak, covered my face, and would not let Aunt Raylene coax me out of bed. She left me alone, and I woke up with my eyes wet and my mouth open, but with no memory of dreaming. The only sound was the yellow dog’s tail thumping the rug. My heart, the pulse that pounded in my head, beat to that rhythm. Everything in me said no, repeated it, drummed it, hummed and sang it. I had no more spirit of meanness than a bug had. I was just a whisper in the dark saying no and hoping to die.

  Raylene came in the morning and fed me grits with a spoon. She let me be quiet that day, but the next, she picked me up and carried me out to the porch to sit on her rocker in the sun. I wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t speak, but she didn’t seem to care. She watered her plants, fed her dogs and chickens, and stood smoking on the steps until the cool air came up from the river. Then she carried me back to bed. The next day, grudgingly, I dragged myself up, ate a little on my own, and went out to the rocker on the porch. But it was not a surrender. I was willing to eat and sit up, but not to speak.

  I stayed on the porch and would not talk to anyone, not to Raylene and not to Earle when he brought me his battered record player and tried to make me laugh. He played some of the same records I had listened to with Aunt Ruth, but I sat unmoving, dry-eyed and distant. Eventually he left me alone. Raylene didn’t try to talk to me. She brought me beans to pick over, which I did with no interest. She also asked me to rip out the hem on some old curtains, but that I refused to do. Not that I argued with her. I just left them lying untouched on the dusty boards by the rocker. I would have slept in the rocker, but Raylene threatened to drag me out of it kicking and screaming.

  “I an’t gonna have you sleeping on the porch,” she fumed. So I pulled myself up painfully and crept off to bed like an old lady, bent over and cramped. I did what I had to do so they would leave me alone. I heard Raylene talking to Earle about Mama. They were worried. No one knew where she had gone. No one knew where Glen was either, though the uncles were talking about paying a bounty to anyone who found him. Earle was adamant, Beau had bought a new shotgun, but it was Nevil who scared Raylene.

  Nevil came out to Raylene’s one evening and stood silently in front of me. He touched my bruised chin with one outstretched finger, traced my hairline, and leaned forward to kiss my left cheekbone with dry chapped lips. I wanted to speak to him but instead held my breath, looking into his dark hooded eyes.

  “I promise,” he said, and I saw Raylene cover her mouth with one hand. I knew what he meant, and I smiled. He turned and went down the steps abruptly, stomping with his bootheels. Raylene called his name, but he didn’t pause. Fay told Raylene that Nevil had stopped sleeping at home. He was living in his truck, driving the county roads at night, searching.

  “He’ll get himself killed,” Raylene told me, but I refused to say anything.

  I didn’t care anymore who got killed.

  The night Mama came, Raylene was at the record player, listening to every record Earle had brought over. That music seemed to echo off the porch ceiling, the silvery river surface, and the night sky. The guitar plunked and became clearly Patsy Cline’s voice singing “Walking After Midnight.” The driving notes and the dark undertone of the drum paced her voice. I listened closely, heard the pause as the song ended, and then Patsy’s voice started again, taking up from the beginning, the scratches and popping of the worn record overwhelming that heartbreaking voice, making me wish I could still cry the way I had with Aunt Ruth.

  The silence extended, the soft rustle of the river barely audible. A breeze swelled and died down. The music came back, the chords different. Not Patsy Cline. Kitty Wells. “Talk Back Trembling Lips.” Her twangy voice shook and scolded, louder still than Patsy’s drawl. Mama always said Kitty had a smoky voice, not as pure as Patsy‘s, but familiar. That raw accent, like Beau’s or Alma’s, flattened vowels and stretched-out syllables to fit the chorus. I rocked back and listened to the record play through. The next one was another of Mama’s favorites, Patsy Cline telling the world that it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels. Grief filled me.

  I stared up into the pattern of rusty dried paint and spider-fine traceries on the porch ceiling. I opened my mouth to cry, but no cry came. Tears kept running down my face into my collar, but I didn’t make a sound. Children cried. I was not a child. Maybe, I told myself, I should go stay with Aunt Carr up in Baltimore or go out to Eustis and visit Aunt Maybelle and Aunt Marvella. I closed my eyes and licked my lips.

  The screen door swung closed with a thud. I turned my head.

  Mama stood motionless in one of her old short-sleeved dresses, her arms crossed under her breasts and her head up. She was looking at me from slitted eyes. My heart raced at the sight of her.

  Aunt Ruth had told her after Lyle Parsons’s funeral that she would look the same till she died. “Now you look like a Boatwright. Now you got the look,” she’d said. In all the years since, that prophecy had held true. Age and exhaustion had worn lines under Mama’s mouth and eyes, narrowed her chin, and deepened the indentations beside her nose, but you could still see the beautiful girl she had been. Now that face was made new. Bones seemed to have moved, flesh fallen away, and lines deepened into gullies, while shadows darkened to streaks of midnight.

  I breathed hard, feeling like I was underwater looking at her. She came across the porch, her face stern, her mouth set in a rigid line. The muscles in her neck stood out in high relief. I pushed myself up. She came straight to the rocker. My face felt plaster-stiff. The music was still playing. It wasn’t God who made us like this, I thought. We’d gotten ourselves messed up on our own.

  “Baby.” Mama’s voice was a raspy whisper.

  I did not move, did not speak.

  “Bone.” She touched my shoulder. “Oh, girl.”

  I could not pull away, but still I did not speak. I wondered if she could see her
self in my pupils.

  She drew back a little and dropped down to half-kneel beside me. “I know,” she said. “I know you must feel like I don’t love you, like I didn’t love you enough. ”

  She took hold of her own shoulders, hugging herself and shivering as if she were cold. “Bone, I never wanted you to be hurt. I wanted you to be safe. I wanted us all to be happy. I never thought it would go the way it did. I never thought Glen would hurt you like that.”

  Mama shut her eyes and turned her head as if she could no longer stand to look into my face. Her mouth opened and closed several times. I saw tears at the corners of her eyes.

  “And I just loved him. You know that. I just loved him so I couldn’t see him that way. I couldn’t believe. I couldn’t imagine ...” She swallowed several times, then opened her eyes and looked at me directly.

  I looked back, saw her face pale and drawn, her eyes red-rimmed, her lips trembling. I wanted to tell her lies, tell her that I had never doubted her, that nothing could make any difference to my love for her, but I couldn’t. I had lost my mama. She was a stranger, and I was so old my insides had turned to dust and stone. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see again the blood on Glen’s hairline, his face pressed to her belly, feel that black despair whose only relief would be death. I had prayed for death. Maybe it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of anybody’s fault. Maybe it was like Raylene said, the way the world goes, the way hearts get broken all the time.

  “You don’t know how much I love you,” she said, her face as stark as a cracked white plate. “How much I have always loved you.”

  My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn’t know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.