Bastard Out of Carolina

  He kept saying, “It’s gonna be all right.” He kept rocking me, breathing through his mouth and staring straight ahead. I could see his reflection in the windshield. Dawn began to filter through the trees, making everything bright and cold. His hand dug in further. He was holding himself in his fingers. I knew what it was under his hand. I’d seen my cousins naked, laughing, shaking their things and joking, but this was a mystery, scary and hard. His sweat running down his arms to my skin smelled strong and nasty. He grunted, squeezed my thighs between his arm and his legs. His chin pressed down on my head and his hips pushed up at the same time. He was hurting me, hurting me!

  I sobbed once, and he dropped back down and let go of me. I bit my lips and held still. He brought his hand up to wipe it on the blanket, and I could smell something strange and bitter on his fingers. I pulled away, and that made him laugh. He kept laughing as he scrubbed his fingers against the blanket. Then he lifted me slightly, turning me so he could look into my face. The light was gray and pearly, the air wet and marble-cold, Glen’s face the only thing pink and warm in sight. He smiled at me again, but this time the smile was not in his eyes. His eyes had gone dark and empty again, and my insides started to shake with fear.

  He wrapped the blanket around me tight and put me back with Reese in the nest of blankets and pillows he’d built up so many hours ago. I hunched my shoulders against the seat and watched Glen’s head in the gray light, his short hairs bristly and stiff. He lit another cigarette and started humming again. He looked back once and I quickly closed my eyes, then was too afraid to open them again. His hum went on in time to the soft radio music, and the smell of Pall Malls began to soothe me. I didn’t know I was falling asleep until I woke up in the bright gray light of full morning.

  Glen was gone, the car still and cold. There was an ache between my legs, but I wasn’t afraid in the daylight. I sat up and looked out on gray clouds and dew-drenched fir branches. The asphalt looked wet and dark. There were a few nurses going in and out the emergency-room doors, talking in low mumbly tones. I breathed through my mouth and watched as more and more people drove into the lot, wondering if I had dreamed that whole early-morning scene. I kept squeezing my thighs together, feeling the soreness, and trying to imagine how I could have bruised myself if it had been a dream.

  When Glen came out of the emergency room, the doors swung back like a shot in the morning air. His face was rigid, his legs stiff, his hands clamped together in front of him, twisting and twisting. I looked into that face and knew it had not been a dream. I pulled Reese up against me, ignoring her soft protesting cry. Glen climbed in the car and slammed the door so hard Reese woke up with a jerk. She twisted her head like a baby bird, looking from me to Glen’s neck and back again. We sat still, waiting.

  He said, “Your mama’s gonna be all right.” He paused.

  “But she an’t gonna have no more babies.” He put his hands on the steering wheel, leaned forward, pushed his mouth against his fingers.

  He said, “My baby’s dead. My boy. My boy.”

  I wrapped my arms around Reese and held on, while in the front seat, Glen just sobbed and cried.

  After Mama got home from the hospital, her sisters came around to see us every day. Aunt Ruth had been in the hospital with what Granny called female trouble only a few weeks before, and still wasn’t well enough to do much but sit with Mama for an hour or two and hold her hand, but she called every morning. Aunt Alma practically moved in and took over, making Mama stay in bed, doing all the cooking, and fixing beef and bean stew. “To put some iron back in your blood, honey,” she said.

  Aunt Raylene showed up in her overalls and low boots to clean the house from one end to the other, going so far as to make Reese and me help her move furniture out in the yard for the sun to warm it. When she went in to change the sheets on Mama’s bed, she lifted Mama easily and carried her out to sit on the couch in the fresh air. Everyone stepped around Glen like he was another chair or table, occasionally giving him a quick hug or squeeze on the shoulder. He didn’t respond, just shifted from the table to the porch when Raylene started sweeping. When Nevil and Earle came over, he stood out in the yard with them and drank until his shoulders started to go up and down in fierce suppressed sobs and they looked away to spare him being embarrassed.

  I watched him closely, staying out in the yard as much as I could, squatting down in the bushes where I hoped no one could see me. I put my chin on my knees and hugged myself into a tight curled ball. Mama’s face had been so pale when they brought her home, her eyes enormous and unblinking. She had barely looked at me when I tried to climb up in her lap, just bit her lips and let Aunt Alma pull me away. I cried until Aunt Raylene took me out in her truck and rocked me to sleep with a damp washcloth on my eyes.

  “Your mama’s gonna need a little time,” she told me. “Then she’s gonna need you more than she ever has. When a woman loses a baby, she needs to know that her other babies are well and happy. You be happy for her, Bone. You let your mama know you are happy so she can heal her heart.”

  They did name him Glen Junior, Reese told me. She had heard Aunt Ruth and Aunt Alma talking. They had buried the baby in the big Boatwright plot Great-grandma Shirley owned, with the four boys Granny had lost and Ruth’s stillborn girls and Alma’s first boy. Glen had wanted a plot of his own but had no money to buy one, and that seemed to be the thing that finally broke his grief and turned it to rage. His face was swollen with crying and gray with no sleep. He found a house over by the JC Penney mill near the railroad tracks and came home to announce we were moving. Aunt Alma was outraged he’d take us so far away, but Mama just nodded and asked Raylene to help her pack.

  “It’ll be all right,” she told Reese and me.

  Glen put his arms around Mama and glared at Aunt Alma. “We don’t need nobody else,” he whispered. “We’ll do just fine on our own.”

  5

  In the rented house, well away from the rest of the family, Daddy Glen promised Mama that when they had enough money put by, he was going to adopt Reese and me. We were a family, and he was our daddy now, he kept saying. Mama held on to his hands and nodded wordlessly. “These are my girls,” he told her. “I’m going to make sure they grow up to be something special. Whatever I have to do.” She smiled and kissed him, her open mouth pressing his lips hungrily.

  Reese put her fat little hands on his arm and said, “Daddy,” and the two of them lifted her up between them.

  “Daddy,” I tried to say, but it sounded funny in my head. I remembered those moments in the hospital parking lot like a bad dream, hazy and shadowed. When Daddy Glen looked at me, I saw no sign that he ever thought about it at all. Maybe it had not happened. Maybe he really did love us. I wanted him to love us. I wanted to be able to love him. I wanted him to pick me up gently and tell Mama again how much he loved us all. I wanted to be locked with Reese in the safe circle of their arms.

  I stood still and felt my eyes fill with tears. Mama pulled away from Daddy Glen and gathered me up. Over her shoulder I saw Daddy Glen’s icy blue eyes watching us, his mouth a set straight line. He shook himself and looked away. I held on to Mama with fingers as hard and cold as iron.

  Daddy Glen didn’t like us listening to all those stories Granny and Aunt Alma were always telling over and over again. “I’ll tell you who you are,” he said. “You’re mine now, an’t just Boatwrights.” He told us about his daddy, Mr. Bodine Waddell, who owned the Sunshine Dairy, and about his brothers. His oldest brother, Daryl, had lost his bid for district attorney, but his law firm was building a reputation as the one to hire if you wanted a city contract. His older brother, James, was about to open up his dental office, and starting next year we’d go to him to get our teeth fixed.

  “Granny says we got good teeth,” I told Daddy Glen. “She says the one thing God gave the Boatwrights is hard, sharp teeth.”

  “And you believe everything she says, don’t you?” His eyes sank into the wrinkles of his squint, shiny
as mica in sunlight, while his mouth twisted so that one side of his grin was drawn up. He looked as if he was about to laugh, but instead he just pursed his lips and spat.

  “Your granny is the worst kind of liar. That old woman wouldn’t tell the truth if she knew it.” He put his hand under my chin, his big, blunt fingers pressing once lightly and then pulling away. “You stay clear of that old woman. I’ll tell you what’s true. You’re mine now. You and Reese just keep your distance from her.”

  I didn’t trust Daddy Glen, didn’t believe him when he said all Granny’s stories were lies, but I never could be sure which of the things she told me were true and which she just wished were true, stories good enough to keep even if they were three-quarters false. All the Boatwrights told stories, it was one of the things we were known for, and what one cousin swore was gospel, another swore just as fiercely was an unqualified lie. Raylene was always telling people that we had a little of the tarbrush on us, but the way she grinned when she said it could have meant she was lying to make somebody mad, or maybe she just talked that way because she was crazy angry to start out.

  “What’s it mean?” I asked Ruth’s youngest boy, Butch.

  “Means we got some colored people somewhere back up the line.” He grinned at me. “Means Raylene’s a pisser. She’ll say anything, and everybody knows it.”

  I thought about that a while, and then asked anyway. “Do we?” I watched his smile widen slowly into a smirk.

  Butch was just one year older than me, and I knew I could ask him anything—not like Garvey or Grey or Aunt Ruth’s other boys. They were always trying to pretend they were more grown-up than they were, and I could never tell what might start them acting weird. Butch was different—a little soft, not put together too tightly, some people said.

  “The boy don’t act like a Boatwright,” was the way Uncle Earle put it. “Don’t seem to have a temper in him at all. And he’s got a right strange sense of humor. Don’t know what’s serious. ”

  But I loved Butch the best of all my cousins. I could talk to Butch, ask him things, and most of the time he’d purse his lips, squint, and drawl me an answer that was sure to be trustworthy—that is, if he wasn’t in one of his teasing funny moods. Sometimes his answers would sound strange if plausible, and it wasn’t till much later that I’d figure the joke in what he’d said

  So when Butch said, “Colored, oh yes, we got colored,” I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not. He pushed his white-blond hair back behind his ears and squinted and grinned right into my face. “Boatwrights got everything—all colors, all types, all persuasions. But the thing is”—he sucked his lower lip up between his teeth and looked around to make sure we were alone—“Boatwright women got caustic pussy. Kills off or messes up everything goes in or out their legs, except purebred Boatwright babies and rock-hard Boatwright men. And even with us, it burns off anything looks the least bit unusual, polishes babies up so they all pretty much look alike, like we been rinsed in bleach as we’re born,

  “’Cept you, of course, all black-headed and strange.” His face became expressionless, serious, intent. “But that’s because you got a man-type part of you. Rock-hard and nasty and immune to harm. But hell, Boatwright women come out that way sometimes.” I stared at him, open-mouthed and fascinated, pretty sure he was shitting me but taken with it all anyway. His tongue slipped out between his lips, and there might have been the beginning of a grin in his eyes.

  “Naaaa,” I hissed at Butch. “Naaaa!”

  People were crazy on the subject of color, I knew, and it was true that one or two of the cousins had kinky hair and took some teasing for it, enough that everyone was a little tender about it. Except for Granny, people didn’t even want to talk about our Cherokee side. Michael Yarboro swore to me that Cherokees were niggers anyway, said Indians didn’t take care who they married like white folks did.

  “Oh, lots of care they take,” Aunt Alma hooted. “The Yarboros been drowning girls and newborns for surely two hundred years.” Butch didn’t have to tell me about that one. The Yarboro boys were talked about worse than my uncles, and everybody knew they were all crazy. When I started school, one of the Yarboro cousins, a skinny rat-faced girl from the Methodist district, had called me a nigger after I pushed her away from the chair I’d taken for mine. She’d sworn I was as dark and wild as any child “born on the wrong side of the porch,” which I took to be another way of calling me a bastard, so I poked her in the eye. It had gotten me in trouble but persuaded her to stay away from me. I didn’t worry too much about what people thought of my temper. A reputation for quick rages wasn’t necessarily a disadvantage. It could do you some good. Daddy Glen’s reputation for a hot temper made people very careful how they talked to him.

  Reese’s daddy’s people lived back up in the hills above Greenville. Her grandmother had a farm off the Ashley Highway, but we rarely went there to visit. Mrs. Parsons didn’t seem to like Mama, though she was always pulling out some present for Reese and never failed to give me a nod of welcome. I was jealous of Reese for having Mrs. Parsons as a grandmother, since Mrs. Parsons looked like one in a way my granny never did. She looked like a granny you’d read about or see in a movie. I loved her thick gray-and-white braids, pinned together at the back of her neck, loved the stinky old cow that lived in a shed behind her four-room shotgun house, and the sweet red tomatoes and pulpy green peas she grew over near her creek. Mrs. Parsons wore blue gingham aprons and faded black dresses with long sleeves she would roll back to her elbows. My granny wore sleeveless print dresses that showed the sides of her loose white breasts and hitched up on her hips. She kept her thin gray hair curled tight in a permanent wave, tying it back with string when it went limp in the heat. She wore dark red lipstick that invariably smeared down onto her knobby chin, and she was always spitting snuff and cursing. Mrs. Parsons would talk sadly about her lost boys and her distant daughter while shelling peas into a galvanized bucket. My granny would get so mad she’d start throwing furniture out the screen door. She was always moving out of Aunt Ruth’s or Aunt Alma’s house to go stay with one of her sisters, and threatening to burn down whichever place she had left behind. I loved Granny, but I imagined Mrs. Parsons might be a better choice for a grandmother, and sometimes when we went to visit I’d pretend she was mine.

  Every time we went to see Mrs. Parsons, Daddy Glen would whine that Mama shouldn’t be running up there to that hateful old woman. “I don’t like that old biddy telling stories on you,” he kept saying, imagining that Grandma Parsons damned him and Mama as soon as Mama was out of the sound of her voice. I didn’t bother to tell him that she never spoke about them at all, that she talked about everyday stuff, how the garden was going or the weather or the cow’s disposition. The only grown-up she ever mentioned was Reese’s daddy, Lyle, and then only to say Reese had his smile—the soft, slow baby grin she told us had made Lyle the best-loved boy in the county. It was Mama who told us Lyle had been the youngest of three boys, and that the two others had died within a year of Grandma Parsons’s favorite. She told us to be kind to Mrs. Parsons, who was left with only one daughter she never saw and a couple of brothers who were waiting to sell off her land when she died.

  “Reese should get a share of that land,” Daddy Glen told Mama one autumn afternoon when we came back from visiting up in the hills. “Not that she’ll ever need anything from those stuck-up mountain people.” He rubbed at the back of his neck and looked out through the kitchen window as if he were looking into the future. “Still, it’s only right she gets what her daddy would have wanted her to have. You let me deal with them. I’ll take care of our girl.”

  When Grandma Parsons’s brother, Matthew, came by with some papers for Mama to sign, Daddy Glen met him at the door and took the papers in hand. “We’ll just look at these,” he said loudly, and then walked him out to the edge of the property, lowering his voice so we couldn’t hear what he said. Mama bit her lips and watched as the stiff-backed Matthew glared at Daddy Glen
and then climbed into his truck. She went out as the truck drove off.

  “Honey, you didn’t say nothing rude to him, did you?”

  Daddy Glen turned to her with a sweet little smile. He put his arm around her and kissed her on the temple. “Don’t you worry,” he said, and gave her a quick pat on the behind. “I know what I’m doing. You got to be clear with these people, real clear.” He looked so pleased with himself that he couldn’t stop grinning. “I know their type. I sure do.”

  Mama frowned, and he gave her a little shake. “Now, don’t you go signing none of those papers when I’m not here. I’m telling you, you don’t know what they might be stealing from you. Let me handle it.” She nodded nervously, shooing us back in the house for dinner.

  Grandma Parsons called that night, but Daddy Glen took the phone and talked to her in a quiet husky voice that reminded me of the way Uncle Nevil would sometimes whisper from behind his cupped hand. “Uh-huh,” he said. “That’s right. ”

  Mama watched for a moment and then stepped outside to smoke in the shelter of the side porch. I followed her out and leaned into her hip. Her hand stroked down the back of my head, smoothing out my hair. Her face was lit by the reflection from the streetlight, her mouth turned down and her eyes sad. I could tell she was worried.

  “It’ll be okay,” I whispered up at her, and she smiled back down at me.

  “Yeah, probably,” she said. “And if it won’t, it just won’t. Sometimes, Bone, you got to do things you wish you didn’t have to, and I don’t want to hurt that old woman. I really don’t. But Glen needs to take care of this, you understand? He needs to do it, and I’ve got to let him.” She ground out the cigarette under her heel but didn’t go back inside until Daddy Glen got off the phone.