Her husband died working in the fields. She tried to raise the family on her own, but had to sell off almost all the land to be able to just keep the house. Her children all moved away as soon as they were old enough to leave. What must it have been like to lose her family, her farm, to watch it all get taken over by trailer trash and the like?
I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to see the look in her eyes when she realizes who I am, because that’ll just bring the past back all that much stronger. The last thing I need to feel right now is that I never changed, that I’m always going to be the kid whose brother abused her, who lived in a house full of losers, who was only ever really loved by one person, her little sister, but she went and abandoned her.
But I don’t see that I have any other choice. If we go to the other houses, either no one’s going to talk to us, or they’re going to have them some fun like those boys back in the woods tried to have.
“I’m going to ask Mrs. Sweeney if she knows where they all went,” I tell Geordie. “She lives just across the street.”
“You don’t sound too happy about talking to her.”
Right now, I don’t even know what happy means. It feels like the last time I was happy was the last time I shot up, but I know that isn’t true. Junk doesn’t bring happiness. All it brings is temporary oblivion. It just seems like happiness because the sick feeling that sits inside your gut has been eased.
“She never much liked any of us,” I say.
“I’ve had neighbors like that.”
“Except they were probably just pills. Mrs. Sweeney’s a wonderful woman. We were the ones that brought down the neighborhood.”
“She’s got an Irish name,” Geordie says. “Maybe we can sweeten her mood with a couple of tunes on the fiddle.”
I think about Mrs. Sweeney, trying to remember if I ever noticed anything that gave her any pleasure.
“I’ll give you the nod if it seems like a good idea,” I tell him.
As we cross the dirt road separating the two houses, I can feel a weight lifting from my shoulders and I start to breathe normally again. I’m still nervous about meeting Mrs. Sweeney after all these years, but even that isn’t enough to take away the relief I feel at leaving the old house behind. I start to lose my nerve again once we’re up on her porch, but Geordie’s a half step ahead of me and just presses the bell. I find myself holding my breath again as we hear movement inside. And then Mrs. Sweeney’s there, looking older than I remember—but of course she is older. It’s been over ten years since I ran away from my last foster home, longer since I’ve been here.
She’s got a hill woman’s strong features—character they used to call it. The skin’s pulled tight against her bones, gray hair up in a loose bun, dark eyes not hiding their suspicion as she looks us over. She comes from stock that farmed these rocky slopes for generations, a woman who withstood heartbreak and sorrow and still carries on.
I never realized it until this moment, but I think maybe she was an inspiration to me, however subconsciously, when I finally came crawling out of my own dark years. No matter what the darkness threw at her, she never gave in.
She comes out onto the porch and looks us over, silent and formidable, and any words I might have had dry right up inside me. Geordie glances at me, then back at her, gives her a bright smile.
“Sorry to trouble you, ma’am,” he says. “We were just wondering if you could tell us what happened to the family that used to live across the road.”
“Why?” she asks. “Are you kin?”
Geordie pauses for a moment and I finally manage to speak up.
“I am,” I tell her.
That earns me a sharper look. She studies me for a long moment, before finally nodding. Her eyes soften a little.
“You’ve got the Carter blood all right,” she says. “You’ll be the older girl—Jillian May.”
I nod.
“I remember you at least tried to keep the place up before you got the good common sense to run away.”
That surprises me. Her voice almost seems to hold some respect for me.
“So what brings you back to this sorry place?” she adds.
“I’m looking for my little sister.”
“Took your time, didn’t you?”
I almost lose it, right there and then, but I swallow, and nod again.
“I know,” I tell her. “But my own life was a mess and … I’ve just been thinking about her a lot lately.”
She considers that for a moment, then glances at Geordie.
“This your boyfriend?” she asks.
He could have been, I think, except after last night we moved to a different kind of closeness and I don’t know if the one excludes the other. It’s too early to tell how it will all work out.
“He’s my friend,” I say and I introduce him to her. “About my sister …?”
“You look a little worn-down,” she says. “The pair of you. Come in and have some iced tea and we’ll talk.”
Opening the screen door, she ushers us inside.
For an old woman who distanced herself from her trashy neighbors the way Mrs. Sweeney always did, she turns out to know an awful lot about our private lives. Sitting in her kitchen, drinking iced tea and eating the cheese sandwiches she makes for us, we hear the whole sorry story of my family—or at least up until the last of them moved away.
It’s funny how, when you leave home, you expect everything to stand still while you’re gone. Not when you think about it, of course, but subconsciously that idea’s still sitting there in the back of your head. Or at least it was in mine. But life goes on for those you left behind, the same as it does for you, and it’s only when you return that the shock of it hits you. Everything’s changed.
I already knew from the empty house we found sitting cross the road from Mrs. Sweeney’s place that things had changed, but it isn’t until she starts to tell me what happened to my family that the truth of it hits home. I listen to what she has to say with a growing numbness.
There’s the litany of my brothers’ arrests—it turns out Del wasn’t the only bad apple in the family. His was only the most bitter fruit in our sorry little orchard.
Raylene left home, but instead of following in my footsteps, she waited until school was done. No one knew where she’d gone, just that she was with Pinky Miller. “I heard they moved into a boardinghouse in Stokesville,” Mrs. Sweeney says when I ask for more, “but that didn’t last. Those girls always wanted more. Then the word was they moved into Tyson proper, but I’ve no idea how they were making a living. Could be they followed your lead and upped and gone themselves.
“It wouldn’t surprise me none if they ended up on one or the other of the coasts—New York City or Hollywood. They had those stars in their eyes, leastwise Pinky Miller always did. Hard to tell what your sister ever wanted, or what she was thinking.”
“So you don’t know where she is?”
Mrs. Sweeney shook her head. “The last time I saw her was ’bout a month ago, standing there in the middle of the road with her friend Pinky, just looking at that old house for a time. Like she was saying good-bye, maybe.”
Our father was dead. Of a stroke. He died in March, just three months ago.
Jimmy was dead, too, gunned down in a fight only a week or so after our father had died.
No one knew what had happened to Robbie.
Del ended up in prison—no surprise there—and our mother moved near the penitentiary to be close to him.
“Is he still in jail?” I ask.
Mrs. Sweeney gives me a nod.
“But he won’t be troubling you for a whiles,” she says.
I look at her, wondering how much she knows about what went on in that house across the road from hers. And if she did know, why didn’t she do something? Would an anonymous call to the police have been that hard to make? But I realize I’m being unfair. There’s no such thing as anonymity, not in a community this small and when you’re on a party
line as we all were. She had her own family’s safety to keep in mind. Considering what she knew about my brother, she would have been afraid that he’d burn her house down, with her in it.
“What put him in prison?” I ask.
“Drunk driving. He killed a little girl out walking along the highway one evening, then just took off without a never-you-mind. Left her to die in the ditch like some old ’possum or fox. Only reason they caught him is Butch Stiles—you remember him?”
I nod. Butch Stiles was a war vet who lived back in the woods with a Korean woman he’d brought back with him when the war was done.
“Well, he was out with his dogs that night and saw the whole thing. Told me he pretty near put a bullet through the head of that brother of yours, but he went to see to the girl instead. He was too late to help that poor child, but not too late to make sure some kind of justice was done.”
“He’s no brother of mine,” I say.
Mrs. Sweeney studies me for a long moment. I glance at Geordie to see what he thinks of all of this, but he just gives me a sympathetic look. Then I remember his own brother—Paddy, the oldest one, not Christy—ended up in prison, too. Unhappiness can run through a family like a fever that won’t quit.
“You know,” Mrs. Sweeney finally says, “I’ve kin back in Virginia and Tennessee.”
I nod to show I’m listening. Right then I don’t quite know where she’s going with this.
“Lot of Carters out that way,” she says.
“I don’t understand.”
“I just want you to know that every family’s got its bad apples. Most Carters I’ve met, they’re good, decent folk.”
“I’m not a Carter anymore.”
She shakes her head. “Changing your name doesn’t change where you come from, Jillian May Carter. You’ve got to know that your branch of the family tree took it a wrong turn is all. Wasn’t your fault. But now I figure maybe it’s your job to set it right again.”
I don’t know if something like that can ever be set right, but I don’t say anything. It’s not an argument I want to get into. What Del did to me isn’t something that gets mended with words or good intentions. And I sure don’t have a warm spot in my heart for the rest of my family, standing by on the sidelines the way they did when all I knew was hurt. There was only Raylene, and she didn’t know what was going on. Sweet little Raylene.
“I’m not trying to tell you what to do,” Mrs. Sweeney says. “I just want you to think on it some, is all.”
“I will,” I tell her, thinking it’s a lie.
Though I suppose it’s not. She’s given me lots to think about. I just won’t be thinking about it the way she’d like me to.
We finish our tea, then we thank Mrs. Sweeney and say good-bye to her. Outside, the skies have cleared a little. It’s not raining, or even drizzling anymore, but there are still more clouds than sun, Geordie turns to me.
“Hard things to hear,” he says.
I nod. “Like the bit about forgiveness and clearing the family name.”
“That’s asking a lot,” he says, but I can’t tell from the way he says it if he’s agreeing with me or Mrs. Sweeney, or just being sympathetic in general.
“I don’t know if it’s even possible,” I tell him.
“It’s not something you have to think about today,” Geordie says. “Or even ever, if you don’t want to.”
I give him a small smile. I see he’s on my side and I don’t feel quite so alone. I guess that’s the moment when I get my first real taste of the Riddell loyalty. That loyalty is pretty much black and white, but when it’s on your side, all you feel is comfort.
“How far do you think it is to the nearest bus stop?” he asks.
“Depends on how much things have changed,” I say, “but we’ll probably have to hike into Stokesville before we can find a bus line. They never ran out this far when I was a kid.”
He switches his fiddlecase from one hand to the other.
“Then we’d better start walking,” he says.
As we reach Stokesville, I start to get depressed again. Everything’s unfamiliar, but nothing seems to have changed either. Shacks and little clapboard houses with tin roofs and walls covered with tarpaper or black joe give way to nicer places with tended lawns and little gardens. The dirt road turns to asphalt and finally acquires a sidewalk on either side, and then it goes downhill again. Now it’s two- and three-story tenements and small businesses and then finally we’re in the Ramble, Tyson’s wrong side of the tracks with all of its bars and diners, pawnshops and poolrooms, dance halls and strip clubs.
For a long time, we’re the only white faces—pretty much until we get to Division Street where the Ramble starts—but no one bothers us unless you count the dogs that took to following us for a while when we first reached Stokesville. They made Geordie nervous—after what we went through yesterday, I think pretty much anything around here would make him nervous—but I wasn’t. I’ve never met the dog, doesn’t matter how mean its reputation, that I can’t make friends with. These ones wouldn’t come for a pat, but after I called out to them a few times, they stopped growling and finally faded away down alleyways and side streets.
I’d never been to this part of town—at least not by myself, on foot like this. We drove through it lots of times on the way into Tyson, but it’s not the sort of place you bring a kid. I could never understand why, but now that I’m grown up, now that I’ve lived through my own years as a junkie and hooker, I don’t have any trouble seeing plenty of reasons. These last few blocks, all we keep walking by are these poor messed-up druggies, scrawny prostitutes, and tough-looking men who wear tattoos with the casual indifference that uptown men wear a cologne. I find myself offering up a prayer of thanks to whoever or whatever was responsible for Lou finding me and taking me in the way he did.
Everybody looks so rough, Indians, blacks, and whites, all mixed now. In this part of town, the only differences that are noted are who’s got the money and who doesn’t. We’re strangers, and it’s pretty obvious we don’t have anything anybody’d want, but I still find myself wishing we’d waited for the bus back a-ways, instead of deciding to walk to the station like we are. Nobody’s threatening us, but the potential for violence lies thick in the air, as does the hopelessness and despair.
I will us to be invisible, or at least not worth anybody’s attention, and that works for a while. But then this guy pushes away from the wall of a poolroom where he’s been leaning with some friends and comes walking over to us and my heart sinks. First impression: he’s as wide as he is tall. His chest strains his T-shirt, biceps bulging, arms covered in tattoos. His eyes are dark, unreadable, hair slicked back. His jeans grease-stained.
“Ray Baby,” he says. “I thought you blew town.” But then his gaze drops to my chest, comes back up to my face. “You ain’t Raylene.”
“I … I’m her sister,” I say, guessing Raylene’s much better endowed than I am.
“No shit. I didn’t know she had her a sister.”
“Jillian May,” I tell him. But I don’t offer him my hand.
He glances at Geordie, then back at me. Pops a pack of cigarettes out from where it was wedged in the sleeve of his T-shirt and shakes one out. Geordie and I both decline when he offers it to us.
“You said she left town?” I say.
He nods, lights his cigarette. I note the prison tattoos on the back of his hands—they’re primitive, self-made, not like the ones on his arms, which were obviously done by a professional. There’s a Harley logo on his right forearm, a naked woman on the left. There are others, higher on the arm, but they disappear under his shirt sleeves and I can’t make them out.
“I wasn’t talkin’ to her, my ownself,” he says, “but that’s the word. Her an’ Pinky are headin’ off to make it big somewheres.”
“But you don’t know where?”
His eyes narrow slightly.
“We’re family,” I remind him. “I haven’t seen her in years
and thought I’d come look her up.”
“Where ya been?” he asks.
I hesitate for a moment, then fall into a role.
“Hallsworth,” I tell him. Hallsworth Prison is the women’s penitentiary just outside of Newford. “I just got out a couple of weeks ago. Fucked the wrong cop.”
I don’t even look at Geordie as I’m saying this. I just hope he knows enough to play along.
“There ain’t no right cop,” our new friend says.
“Well, I guess I know that now.”
He laughs. “I guess you do. You heard about Del?”
“Del’s my brother,” I say, “but he’s not exactly on my list of favorite people.”
“Yeah, he’s a mean fuck, no question. Him an’ me’ve had words a time or two. Ain’t right what he did to that girl, leavin’ her to die like that.”
“Being Del, it doesn’t surprise me.”
“Nothing he’d do could surprise anybody.”
I nod. “So you don’t know where Raylene went?”
He takes a drag and shakes his head. “Just off to make her fortune.”
“But she was happy?” I ask. “She was looking good?”
He laughs. “Oh, that sister of yours, she was always lookin’ good. Not much for the sharin’ of them good looks, mind. Not like Pinky. Man, she’s the original party gal …”
His voice trails off and he actually looks a little embarrassed with where he was going. I can’t even place who Pinky would be. I remember some Millers who lived a little farther down the Old Grange Road, but I thought they were all boys.
“You don’t worry none about your little sister,” he tells me. “She can take care of herself.”
“Well, if you see her …”
“I’ll tell her you dropped by to say how-do.”
I nod. “Thanks.”
“You need anythin’?” he asks. “I know what it’s like, gettin’ outta the joint an’ there’s nobody much interested in even givin’ you the time of day.”
“I’m good,” I tell him. I start to turn away, then stop and ask, “What’s your name?”