Bastard Out of Carolina

  “My granddaddy, your great-great-granddaddy, he was a Cherokee, and he didn’t much like us, all his towheaded grandchildren. Some said he had another family down to Eustis anyway, a proper Indian wife who gave him black-haired babies with blue eyes. Ha! Blue eyes an’t that rare among the Cherokee around here. Me, I always thought it a shame we never turned up with them like his other babies. Of course, he was a black-eyed bastard himself, and maybe he never really made those other babies like they say. What was certain was my grandma never stepped out on him. Woman was just obsessed with that man, obsessed to the point of madness. Used to cry like a dog in the night when he was gone. He didn’t stay round that much either, but every time he come home she’d make another baby, another red-blond child with muddy brown eyes that he’d treat like a puppydog or a kitten. Man never spanked a child in his life, never hit Grandma. You’d think he would have, he didn’t seem to care all that much. Quiet man, too. Wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t barely talk. Not a Boatwright, that’s for sure.

  “But we loved him, you know, almost as much as Grandma. Would have killed to win his attention even one more minute than we got, and near died to be any way more like him, though we were as different from him as children can be. None of us quiet, all of us fighters. None of us got those blue eyes, and no one but you got that blue-black hair. Lord, you were a strange thing! You were like a fat red-faced doll with all that black black hair—a baby doll with a full head of hair. Just as quiet and sweet-natured as he used to be. You didn’t even cry till you took croup at four months. I’ve always thought he’d have liked you, Granddaddy would. You even got a little of the shine of him. Those dark eyes and that hair when you was born, black as midnight. I was there to see.”

  “Oh, hell,” Earle laughed when I repeated some of Granny’s stories. “Every third family in Greenville County swears it’s part of Cherokee Nation. Whether our great-granddaddy was or wasn’t, it don’t really make a titty’s worth of difference. You’re a Boatwright, Bone, even if you are the strangest girlchild we got.”

  I looked at him carefully, keeping my Cherokee eyes level and my face blank. I could not have said a word if Great-Great-Granddaddy had been standing there looking back at me with my own black eyes.

  Mama wore her hair cut short, curled, and bleached. Every other month she and Aunt Alma would get together and do each other’s hair, rinsing Aunt Alma’s in beer or lemon juice to lighten it just a little, trimming Mama’s back and bleaching it that dark blond she liked. Then they’d set pin curls for each other, and while those dried they would coax Reese into sitting still long enough that her baby-fine red locks could be tied up in rags. I would tear up the rags, rinse pins, strain the juice through a cloth happily enough, but I refused the perm Mama was always insisting she wanted to give me.

  “Stinks and hurts,” I complained. “Do it to Reese.”

  “Oh, Reese don’t need it. Look at this.” And Aunt Alma tugged a few of Reese’s springy long curls free from the rags. Like soft corkscrews, the curls bounced and swung as if they were magical. “This child has the best hair in the world, just like yours, Anney, when you were a baby. Yours had a little red to it too, seems to me.”

  “No.” Mama shook her head while she pulled more rags out of Reese’s curls. “You know my hair was just blond. You had the red touch, you and Ruth. Remember how you used to fight over whose was darker?”

  “Oh, but you had the prettiest hair!” Aunt Alma turned to me. “Your mama had the prettiest hair you ever saw. Soft? Why, it would make Reese’s feel like steel wire. It was the softest hair in Greenville County, and gold as sunlight on sheets. It didn’t go dark till she had you girls, a little bit with you and all dark with Reese. Hair will do that, you know, darken in pregnancy. An’t nothing that will stop it once it starts.”

  Mama laughed. “Remember when Carr first got pregnant and swore she’d shave her head if it looked like it was gonna go dark?”

  Aunt Alma nodded, her dark brown pin curls bobbing. “Rinsed it in piss, she did, every Sunday evening, Tommy Lee’s baby piss that she begged off Ruth. All ‘cause Granny swore baby-piss rinses would keep her blond.”

  “Didn’t she stink?” I bit at the rubber tip of a hairpin, peeling the coating off the metal so I could taste the sweet iron tang underneath.

  “Baby piss don’t stink,” Aunt Alma told me, “unless the baby’s sick, and Tommy Lee wasn’t never sick a day in his life. Carr didn’t smell no different than she ever did, but her hair went dark anyway. It’s the price of babies.”

  “Oh, it an’t that.” Mama pulled me up onto her lap and started the arduous process of brushing out my hair. “All us Boatwrights go dark as we get older. It’s just the way it goes. Blond goes red or brown, and darker and darker. An’t none of us stays a blond once we’re grown.”

  “’Cept you, honey,” Aunt Alma grinned.

  “Yeah, but I got Clairol, don’t I?” Mama laughed and hugged me. “What you think, Alma? Should I cut this mop or not? She can’t keep it neat to save her life, hates me pulling on it when I try to brush it out.”

  “Hell yes, cut it. I’ll get the bowl. We’ll trim it right down to her neck.”

  “Noooo!” I howled, and wrapped my hands around my head. “I want my hair. I want my hair.”

  “But you won’t let us do nothing with it, honey.”

  “No! No! No! It’s my hair and I want it. I want it long and tangled and just the way it is.”

  Aunt Alma reached over and took the hairpin out of my mouth. “Lord, look at her,” she said. “Stubborn as the day is long.”

  “Uh-huh.” Mama put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed. She didn’t sound angry. I raised my head to look at her. Her brown eyes were enormous close up, with little flecks of light in the pupils. I could almost see myself between the flashes of gold.

  “Well, what you expect, huh?”

  I looked back at Aunt Alma. Her eyes were the same warm brown, deep and shining with the same gold lights, and I realized suddenly that she had the same cheekbones as Mama, the same mouth.

  “She’s just like you.”

  My mouth wasn’t like that, or my face either. Worse, my black eyes had no gold. I didn’t look like anybody at all.

  “You, you mean,” said Mama.

  She and Aunt Alma nodded together above me, grinning at each other in complete agreement. I loosened my hands from around my skull slowly, letting Mama start brushing out my hair. Reese put her pudgy little fingers in her mouth and stared at me solemnly. “B-Bone,” she stammered.

  “Yes,” Aunt Alma agreed, hefting Reese up in her arms. “Our stubborn Bone is just like her mama, Reesecup. Just like her aunts, just like a Boatwright, and just like you.”

  “But I don’t look like nobody,” I wailed.

  Aunt Alma laughed. “Why, you look like our Bone, girl.”

  “I don’t look like Mama. I don’t look like you. I don’t look like nobody.”

  “You look like me,” Mama said. “You look like my own baby girl.” She put her fingers delicately on my cheeks, pressing under my eyes. “You got the look, all right. I can see it, see what it’s gonna be like when you grow bigger, these bones here.” Her fingers slipped smoothly down over my mouth and chin. “And here. You gonna look like our granddaddy, for sure. Those Cherokee cheekbones, huh, Alma?”

  “Oh yes, for sure. She’s gonna be another one, another beauty to worry about.”

  I smiled wide, not really believing them but wanting to. I held still then, trying not to flinch as Mama began to brush relentlessly at my knotted hair. If I got a permanent, I would lose those hours on Mama’s lap sitting in the curve of her arm while she brushed and brushed and smoothed my hair and talked soft above me. She always seemed to smell of buttery flour, salt, and fingernail polish—a delicate insinuating aroma of the familiar and the astringent. I would breathe deep and bite my lips to keep from moaning while my scalp ached and burned. I would have cut off my head before I let them cut my hair and lost the un
speakable pleasure of being drawn up onto Mama’s lap every evening.

  “Do I look like my daddy?” I asked.

  There was silence. Mama brushed steadily while Aunt Alma finished pulling the rags from Reese’s hair.

  “Do I? Like my daddy, Mama?”

  Mama gathered all my hair up in one hand and picked at the ends with the side of the brush. “Alma, get me some of that sweet oil, honey, just a little for my palm. That’s enough.”

  The brush started again in long sweeping strokes. Aunt Alma started to hum. I dropped my head. It wasn’t even that I was so insistent on knowing anything about my missing father. I wouldn’t have minded a lie. I just wanted the story Mama would have told. What was the thing she wouldn’t tell me, the first thing, the place where she had made herself different from all her brothers and sisters and shut her mouth on her life?

  Mama brushed so hard she pulled my head all the way back. “You just don’t know how to sit still, Bone.”

  “No, Mama. ”

  I closed my eyes and let her move my head, let her pull and jerk my hair until she relaxed a little. Aunt Alma was humming softly. The smell of sweet oil on Mama’s fingers hung in the air. Reese’s singsong joined Aunt Alma’s hum. I opened my eyes and looked into Mama’s. You could see Reese’s baby smile in those eyes. In the pupils gold flecks gleamed and glittered, like pieces of something bright reflecting light.

  3

  Love, at least love for a man not already part of the family, was something I was a little unsure about. Aunt Alma said love had more to do with how pretty a body was than anyone would ever admit, and Glen was pretty enough, she swore, with his wide shoulders and long arms, his hair combed back and his collar buttoned up tight over his skinny neck.

  Sometimes after Glen had been over to visit and gone, Mama would sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette, looking off into the distance. Sometimes I’d go slide quietly under her armpit and sit with her, saying nothing. I would wonder what she was thinking, but I didn’t ask. If I had, she’d have said something about the road or the trees or the stars. She’d have talked about work or something one of my cousins had done, or one of the uncles, or she’d have swatted my butt and sent me off to bed, then gone back to sitting there with her face so serious, smoking her Pall Mall cigarette right down to the filter.

  “You and Reese like Glen, don’t you?” Mama would say now and then in a worried voice. I would nod every time. Of course we liked him, I’d tell her, and watch her face relax so her smile came back.

  “I do too. He’s a good man.” She’d run her hands over her thighs slow, hug her knees up close to her breasts, and nod to herself more than me. “He’s a good man.”

  The nights Mama worked at the diner, she’d leave us with Aunt Ruth or Aunt Alma. But sometimes, if she wasn’t working too late, she would make up a bed of blankets and pillows in the backseat of her Pontiac and take us with her. She’d feed us dinner in a booth near the kitchen and let us listen to the jukebox for a while before she put us to bed in the car, telling me sternly not to unlock the door for anyone but her. While we sat in that booth, I’d watch her at work. She was mesmerizing, young and sweet-faced and too pretty for anyone to be mean to her. The truckers teased her and played her favorite songs on the jukebox. The younger ones would try to get her to go out with them, but she’d joke them out of it. The older ones who knew her well would compliment her on us, her pretty girls. I watched it all, admiring the men with their muscular forearms and broad shoulders as they sipped the coffee my mama served them, absorbing the music as it played continuously, keeping Reese from spilling her milk or sliding down under the table, and smiling at Mama when she looked over to me.

  “You’re Anney’s girl, an’t you?” one of them said to me. “Your little sister looks just like her, don’t she? You must look like your daddy.” I nodded carefully.

  When Glen Waddell came, Mama would get him a beer and sit with him when she could. Sometimes, if she was busy, he would carry us out to her car when Reese got sleepy, holding us in his big strong arms with the same studied gentleness as when he touched Mama. I always wanted to wait till Mama could tuck us into our bed of blankets, but she seemed to like for Glen to carry us out with all the truckers watching. I’d see her look over as he went out with us, see her face soften and shine. Maybe that was love, that look. I couldn’t tell.

  My mama dated Glen Waddell for two years. People said it took her time to trust men again after Lyle Parsons died. Mama would occasionally take Reese and me with her to pick Glen up from his new job at the RC Cola plant. Sometimes he would still be working, lifting flats of soda bottles to stock his truck for the next morning’s route. All those full cases had to be loaded and the empties pulled off and transferred to the conveyor belt for cleaning and shipment to the bottling plant. He would shift each case of twenty-four bottles above his head and onto the truck with a grunt, swinging from his hips with his whole weight, arms extended and mouth sucked in against his tongue with concentration. His collar was open, his pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt was limp, and it stuck to his back in a dark stripe down his spine. Mama would still be in her waitress dress, smelling of salt and fried food, and just as sweaty and tired as he was, but Glen would smile at her like he knew she sweat sugar and cream. Mama would lean out the window of the car and call his name softly, and he would blush dark red and start moving a little faster, either to show off his strength or to get out of there sooner, we weren’t sure.

  Glen was a small man but so muscular and strong that it was hard to see the delicacy in him, though he was strangely graceful in his rough work clothes and heavy boots. There were bottle fragments on the pavement, crushed shards ground into the tarmac, and all the men wore heavy work boots with thick rubber soles. Glen Waddell’s feet were so fine that his boots had to be bought in the boys’ department of the Sears, Roebuck, while his gloves could only be found in the tall men’s specialty stores. He would pivot on those boy-size feet, turning his narrow hips and grunting with his load, everything straining and forceful, while his hands cradled cases and flats as delicately as if they were soft-shelled eggs. His palms spread so wide he could easily span half a case’s width, keeping every bottle level no matter how high he had to throw the flat.

  People talked about Glen’s temper and his hands. He didn’t drink, didn’t mess around, didn’t even talk dirty, but the air around him seemed to hum with vibration and his hands were enormous. They hung like baseball mitts at the end of his short, tight-muscled arms. On his slender, small-boned frame, they were startling, incongruous, constantly in motion, and the only evidence of just how strong he was. When he reached for Reese and me, he would cup his palms around the back of our heads and drop down to look into our faces, his warm, damp fingers tangling gently in our hair. He was infinitely careful with us, gentle and slow with those hands, but he was always reaching for Mama with sudden, wide sweeps of his arms. When he hugged her, he would lay his hands on her back so that he covered it from neck to waist, pulling her as tight to him as he could.

  Mama was always taking Glen’s hands between hers, her fingers making his seem even bigger, harder, and longer. “He’s a gentle man,” she told her sisters. “You should see how tender he gets, the way he picks Reese up when she falls asleep in the back of the car, like she was so delicate, so fine—like that glass that chimes when you click it against your teeth.” My aunts would nod, but not with much conviction.

  But I could tell that Mama had begun to love Glen. I saw how she blushed when he looked at her or touched her, even in passing. A flush would appear on her neck, and her cheeks would brighten until her whole face glowed pink and hot. Glen Waddell turned Mama from a harried, worried mother into a giggling, hopeful girl.

  One afternoon Glen dropped the last case onto the truck and turned to look at Mama, Reese, and me waiting in Mama’s old Pontiac. The sun caught his sweat, shiny beads and rivulets, so that he seemed to glitter in the light. He wiped his face, but the sweat kept
coming down in tracks, and he looked as if he were weeping. He walked toward us slowly, dropped by the door in a crouch, and reached through the window to take Mama into a tight embrace.

  “Oh Anney,” he whispered. “Anney, Anney.” His voice was a husky tremolo. “You know. You know, I love you so. I can’t wait no more, Anney. I can’t. I love you with all my heart, girl. ”

  His arms stretched over the seat and pulled Reese and me forward, pressing us into Mama’s neck and back. “And your girls, Anney. Oh, God! I love them. Our girls, Anney. Our girls.” He sobbed then, pulling us in tighter so that Reese’s bird bones crunched into my shoulder and the haze of his sweat drifted all around us. His face slid past Mama’s hair, pressed into mine, his mouth and teeth touched my cheek. “Call me Daddy,” he whispered. “Call me Daddy ‘cause I love your mama, ’cause I love you. I’m gonna treat you right. You’ll see. You’re mine, all of you, mine.”

  His shoulders shook, his body reaching through the window seemed to rock the whole car. “Oh, Anney.” He shuddered. “Don’t say no. Please, Anney, don’t do that to me!”

  “Glen,” Mama breathed. “Oh, Glen. I don’t know.” She trembled and slowly stretched her own arms up and around his shoulders. “Oh, God. All right, I’ll think about it. All right, honey. All right.”

  Glen jumped back. He slammed his hands down on the car top, once, twice, three times. The echoes were like shots. Mama was crying quietly, her shoulders heaving back against Reese and me.

  “Goddam,” he screamed. “Goddam, Anney!” He spun in a circle, whooping. “I knew you’d say yes. Oh, what I’m gonna do, Anney! I promise you. You an’t never even imagined!” He spread his arms wide and whooped again. His face looked like someone was shining a hot pink light on it. He pulled the door open and reached for Mama, his hands still shaking as they wrapped around her back. He drew her in so close that she came off her feet, and then he swung her around in the air, laughing and shouting. Reese put her hands on my shoulders and held on. I could feel the vibration as she shook gently to the echo of Glen’s shouts. We both smiled and held on to each other while Glen danced Mama around the parking lot in the shelter of his arms.