Bastard Out of Carolina

  “You just don’t like the Waddells,” Mama told Granny. She was standing on Aunt Alma’s porch, wearing a blue-and-white polka-dot blouse Glen had bought her. It showed off the color of her eyes, he’d said. From the look on her face anyone could see that she was making an effort to be patient with Granny.

  “Glen loves me, loves my girls. Don’t matter if his family is stuck-up and full of themselves. Glen’s not like that.”

  “You don’t know what that boy is like, Anney. You just don’t know.”

  “I know he loves me.” Mama spoke with conviction, certain that Glen Waddell loved her more than his soul and everything else would come from that. “I know enough,” she told Granny.

  “That boy’s got something wrong with him.” Granny turned to Aunt Alma for support. “He’s always looking at me out the sides of his eyes like some old junkyard dog waiting to steal a bone. And you know Anney’s the bone he wants.”

  “You just don’t think anybody’s good enough for Anney,” Alma teased. “You want her to go on paying you to keep her girls every day till she’s dried up and can’t imagine marrying again. ”

  It was a continuation of a fight that had been dragging on all week. Now it was Sunday, and Glen was coming over to take everyone out to the lake for a picnic. Granny was refusing to come along even though Mama had packed chicken hash and Jell-O with her in mind.

  “Let it go, Anney, and help me with this camera.” Aunt Alma had a new Brownie and was determined to document every family occasion she could. “You can’t win a fight with Mama no way. Just leave her alone and let her come to her senses in her own good time.”

  When Glen arrived, it was the camera that coaxed Granny out of the house and onto the porch with the rest of us. But then it was Glen who didn’t want his picture taken. “I an’t no movie star,” he told Alma, and kept putting his hand up in front of his face when she pointed her camera at him.

  “It’s that new haircut,” Earle joked. “Glen don’t want people to know his ears stick out that far. I’m with you, Glen. We’re too ugly for photographs. Let the women and kids line up for ’em and leave us alone. ”

  Uncle Earle liked Glen Waddell well enough, but like Granny he didn’t think much of the Waddell family. He’d even said so to Glen’s face, but the boy had just grinned at him, and that didn’t seem right. Even if he didn’t get on with his people, Earle believed that Glen shouldn’t let anybody bad-mouth them. If they had traded a few punches over it, bled on each other a little and made up after, the whole thing would have felt better to Earle all around. But Glen was a quiet sort who never fought in friendly style. He either gave you that slow grin or went all out and tried to kill you. The latter earned him a little respect, Earle admitted. The cops had had to be called on Glen once at the foundry before he left to take the job at the RC Cola plant. Glen was a grown man, a working man, and he loved Anney Boatwright. Everybody knew that, even Granny.

  “Now, Earle, don’t you be making no trouble. Granny pushed her hair back behind her ears and smoothed down the wrinkles on her green print blouse. ”I want Alma to get pictures of everybody. I want a book of family pictures for my cedar chest.”

  Earle laughed and sneaked around to poke Alma while she was focusing on Granny and Mama, then chased Reese and me out into the yard, catching Reese and throwing her up in the air so high she flapped her arms like she was going to fly. I dodged them and cut through the bushes, ignoring the brambles that caught in the skirt of the new dress Mama had made me wear. From the other side of Earle’s truck, I stood and looked back at them, Granny up on the porch with her hesitant uncertain smile, and Mama down on the steps in her new blouse with Glen in that short brush haircut, while Alma posed on the walkway focusing up at them. Everybody looked nervous but determined, Mama stiff in Glen’s awkward embrace and Glen almost stumbling off the steps as he tried to turn his face away from the camera. It made my neck go tight just to look at them.

  Only Earle and Reese were relaxed, Reese shrieking and giggling, still up in Earle’s arms, her legs outstretched as he spun the two of them around and around on the wet grass in the bright sunlight. “Bone, Bone,” Reese screamed. “Oh, Bone, help me! Help me!”

  “I’m gonna fly you to the stars, little girl,” Uncle Earle teased through clenched teeth, making Reese scream all the louder. The words were barely our of his mouth when he slipped in the grass, coming down hard on his butt. His legs flew straight out in front of him, and Reese landed safely on his lap, her scream turning to a giggle as Earle started to curse.

  “Goddam, I’ve ruined these britches now.” “Serve you right if you did,” Granny yelled at him. “You could have killed that child. Reese, you get your little dimple ass up here with your mama.”

  “You come on too, Bone,” Mama called to me. “You and Reese come on up here for Alma to get a picture of the four of us together.”

  “Yeah, come on, girls.” Glen held on to Mama with both hands around her waist.

  “Smile, now, everyone,” called Alma as the shutter clicked.

  4

  The spring Mama married Glen Waddell, there were thunderstorms every afternoon and rolling clouds that hung around the foothills north and west to the Smokies. The moon came up with a ghostly halo almost every night, and there was a blue shimmer on the horizon at sunset.

  “An’t no time to be marrying,” Granny announced. “Or planting or building nothing.”

  “You sure, now, Anney?” Earle must have asked Mama twice before he drove her down to the courthouse in his pickup truck to meet Glen and get the license. It seemed he just couldn’t take her ready smile for an answer, even though he agreed to be best man after Glen’s brother had refused the honor. He asked her one more time before he let her out of the truck. “You’re worse than Granny,” Anney told him. “Don’t you want to see me settled down and happy?” He gave it up and kissed her out the door.

  Granny wasn’t surprised when she heard that Great-Grandma Shirley had turned down her invitation to the wedding dinner Aunt Alma organized. The Eustis aunts, Marvella and Maybelle, the ones who insisted they could tell the future from their beans, also skipped the dinner, though Marvella was polite about it. “I know he loves Anney,” Marvella told Alma when she came by to collect flowers from their garden. “And sometimes love can change everything.”

  Maybelle was not so generous. “Yeah, Glen loves Anney. He loves her like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up. I don’t trust that boy, don’t want our Anney marrying him.”

  “But Anney loves Glen,” Alma told Maybelle impatiently. “That’s the thing you ought to be thinking about. She needs him, needs him like a starving woman needs meat between her teeth, and I an’t gonna let nobody take this away from her. Come on, Maybelle, you know there an’t no way to say what’s gonna happen between a man and a woman. That an’t our business anyway, that’s theirs.”

  Alma took Maybelle’s hands between her own. “We just got to stand behind our girl, do everything we can to make sure she don’t get hurt again.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Maybelle shook her head. “I don’t want to fight you, Alma. And maybe you’re right. I know how lonely Anney’s been. I know.” She pulled her hands free, tucked some loose gray hairs up in the bun at the back of her neck, and turned to her sister. “We got to think about this, Marvella. We got to think hard about our girl.”

  They did what they could. The sisters sent Mama a wedding present, a love knot Marvella had made using some of her own hair, after Maybelle had cut little notches in their rabbits’ ears under a new moon, adding the blood to the knot. She set the rabbits loose, and then the two of them tore up half a dozen rows of their beans and buried honeycomb in a piece of lace tablecloth where the beans had flourished. The note with the love knot told Mama that she should keep it under the mattress of the new bed Glen had bought, but Mama sniffed the blood and dried hair, and shook her head over the thing. She couldn’t quite bring he
rself to throw it away, but she put it in one of her flower pots out in the utility room where Glen wouldn’t find it stinking up their house.

  Reese and I hated the honeymoon. We both thought we would get to go. For weeks before the wedding Mama kept telling us that this was a marriage of all of us, that we were taking Glen as our daddy at the same time she was taking him as a husband. She and Alma had even sewed us up little lace veils to wear as we walked ahead of her at the wedding, Reese carrying flowers while I carried the rings. But Mama and Glen left halfway through Aunt Alma’s dinner, with only one quick kiss goodbye.

  “Why don’t we get to go?” Reese kept demanding while everybody laughed at her. I got so mad I hid in Alma’s sewing room and cried myself to sleep in her rocker. When I woke up I was on her daybed with a quilt across me and the house quiet. I got Alma’s picture album out and climbed into the rocker. The new pictures from the picnic were at the back. There were half a dozen snapshots of Reese and me, alone, together, and with Granny or Earle. There was only one good one of Glen and Mama, only one in which you could see her smile and his eyes. In most of them, Mama’s head was bent so that only her chin showed, or Glen’s face was turned away so that you saw only the pale line of his neck and ear under his new haircut. Because of that, perhaps, the good picture was even more startling.

  Everything in that picture was clear, sharp, in focus, the contrast so strong you could trace the lines where sunlight sheared off and shade began. There was a blush on Mama’s cheek like the shadow of a bird, polka dots on her seersucker blouse, a raised nap on her dark calf-length skirt, and a fine part in her brushed-back blond hair. Mama was beautiful in it, no question, though there was a puffiness under her eyes and a tightness in the muscles of her neck that made her chin stick out. But her smile was full, her eyes clear, and you could see right into her, see how gentle she was in the way her neck angled as she looked past Glen to Reese and me, the way her hands lay open on her lap, the fingers slightly bent as if they were ready to catch the sunlight.

  Beside Mama, Glen was half in shadow with his head turned to the side, but the light shone on his smile, his cheek, his strong hands and slender frame. The smile was determined, tight, forceful, the eyes brilliant in the camera lens, gleaming in the sun’s glare, the shoulders tense and hunched forward a little, one arm extended to hold Mama close, reaching around her from where he sat to her left. You could not tell a thing about Glen from that picture, except that he was a good-looking man, strong and happy to be holding his woman. Mama’s eyes were soft with old hurt and new hope; Glen’s eyes told nothing. The man’s image was as flat and empty as a sheet of tin in the sun, throwing back heat and light, but no details—not one clear line of who he really was behind those eyes.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to live with him once the honeymoon was past. I looked at the picture again and remembered the day of the picnic, the way he kept pulling Mama back against him, his hands cupped over her belly possessively. I had heard Alma tease Mama the day before the wedding that she better hurry up and get married before she started showing. Mama had gotten all upset, demanding to know how Alma had found out she was pregnant. I wondered if she had told Glen yet.

  “Come on, girls.” Glen’s voice when he called Reese and me for the picture had had a loud impatient note I had never heard before. I’d come back around Earle’s truck at a walk and looked into his face carefully. Yes, he knew. He was so pleased with himself, he looked swollen with satisfaction under that terrible haircut. Mama had said he wanted her to have his son, and it looked to me like he was sure he had it on the way.

  I sat in that rocker with those pictures until morning woke the house and Aunt Alma came to check on me. I ran my fingers over Reese’s baby smile on one, traced Earle’s dark hair on another, examined just how far Granny’s chin pushed out under her lower lip, and looked back to my own face in each to see how the camera had seen me—my eyes like Mama’s eyes, darker but open as hers, my smile fiercer and wider than Reese‘s, and my body in motion across Alma’s yard like an animal leaping into the air.

  Glen was like a boy about the baby, grinning and boasting and putting his palms flat on Mama’s stomach every chance he could to feel his son kick. His son—he never even entertained the notion Mama might deliver a girl. No, this would be his boy, Glen was sure. He bought a crib and a new layette set on time payments, put them in their bedroom, and filled the crib with toys a boy baby would love. “My boy’s gonna look like the best of me and Anney,” he told everyone insistently, as if by saying it often enough he could make it so. He even went out to Aunt Maybelle and Aunt Marvella’s house with a gift of sweet corn for the rabbits, just so he could look into their eyes when he said “a boy” and hear them say it back to him when they took the corn.

  “They said it was a boy,” he told Earle later over pinto beans and cornbread at Aunt Ruth’s house—the first evidence he’d ever given that he believed in the Eustis aunts’ claim to women’s magic. He was bursting with pride.

  “Well, goddam, Glen. Congratulations.” Earle kept his face carefully neutral.

  “Never come between a man and his ambitions,” he told Uncle Beau after Glen had gone. “Glen ever gets the notion that anybody messed up his chance of getting a boy child out of Anney, and he’s gonna go plumb crazy.”

  “A man should never put his ambition in a woman’s belly.” Beau didn’t like Glen much at all, couldn’t, he admitted, since he never trusted a man who didn’t drink, and Glen was as close to a teetotaler as the family had ever seen. Beau spit out the side of his mouth. “Serve him right if she gave him another girl.”

  Uncle Nevil harrumphed, pouring them each a short glass of his home stock. Nevil never wasted words when he could grunt, or a grunt when he could move his hands. He was supposed to be the quietest man in Greenville County, and his wife, Fay, was said to be the fattest woman. “The two of them are more like furniture than anything,” Granny had once said. “Just taking up space and shedding dust like a chifforobe or a couch.” Nevil and Fay had heard her and in their quiet way refused to be in the same room with her ever again. It complicated family gatherings, but not too much. As Aunt Alma told everybody, Nevil wasn’t any great loss to conversation anyway.

  It was a surprise, then, when Nevil sipped his whiskey, lifted his head, and spoke so clearly he could be heard out on the porch. “Me, I’m hoping Anney does give him a son, half a dozen sons while she’s at it. That Glen’s got something about him. I almost like him, but the boy could turn like whiskey in a bad barrel, and I’m hoping he don’t. Anney’s had enough trouble in her life.” He sipped again and shut his mouth back to its usual flat line.

  Earle and Beau stared at him, unsure whether to laugh or curse, but finally they dropped their glances into their cups. It was true enough, they both agreed. Anney deserved an end to trouble in her life.

  The night Mama went into labor, Glen packed the Pontiac with blankets and Cokes for Reese and me, and parked out in the hospital lot to wait. He’d been warned it was going to take a while for the baby to come, and when he couldn’t stand pacing the halls anymore, he came down to smoke cigarettes and listen to music on the car radio while Reese and I napped in the backseat. At some point well before dawn, when it was still dark and cold, he reached across the seat to tug my shoulder and pull me up front with him. He gave me some Coke and half a Baby Ruth and told me he’d been in to check a little earlier and Mama was doing fine.

  “Fine.” I blinked at him and nodded, unsure what I was supposed to do or say. He smoked fiercely, exhaling out the top of the window where he’d opened it just a few inches, and talking to me like I was a grown-up. “I know she’s worried,” he said. “She thinks if it’s a girl, I won’t love it. But it will be our baby, and if it’s a girl, we can make another soon enough. I’ll have my son. Anney and I will have our boy. I know it. I know.”

  He talked on, whispering quietly, sometimes so softly I could not understand him. I pulled my blanket around
me and watched the sprinkling of stars visible just over the tall fir trees at the edge of the lot. The song playing low on the radio was a Kitty Wells tune that Mama liked. I rocked my head to the music and watched the night. I was thinking about the baby Mama was having, wondering what it might be like, if maybe it wouldn’t be a girl. What were they going to name it? Glen Junior, if it was a boy? They had never said. Mama thought it was unlucky to choose a name for a baby till it was born.

  Glen put his hand on my neck, and the stars seemed to wink at me. I wasn’t used to him touching me, so I hugged my blanket and held still. He slid out from behind the steering wheel a little and pulled me up on his lap. He started humming to the music, shifting me a little on his thighs. I turned my face up to look into his eyes. There were only a few lights on in the parking lot, but the red and yellow dials on the radio shone on his face. He smiled, and for the first time I saw the smile in his eyes as plain as the one on his mouth. He pushed my skirt to the side and slid his left hand down between my legs, up against my cotton panties. He began to rock me then, between his stomach and his wrist, his fingers fumbling at his britches.

  It made me afraid, his big hand between my legs and his eyes glittering in the dim light. He started talking again, telling me Mama was going to be all right, that he loved me, that we were all going to be so happy. Happy. His hand was hard, the ridge of his wristbone pushing in and hurting me. I looked straight ahead through the windshield, too afraid to cry, or shake, or wiggle, too afraid to move at all.