A Place to Call Home

  I watched his tense gaze travel slowly around the large room, taking everything in as if he might be seeing it all for the last time. It was home to me; I tried to picture it through his stunted view—the handsome, plush furniture, the crammed bookcases, the wide stone fireplace, the fine lamps, and the console TV and stereo case stuffed with record albums. Astonishing luxury.

  Mama had draped a soft blue bath towel over Roanie’s knees, and he wiped his big hands on it. They were smeared with some of my regurgitated tobacco. I thought of that intimacy as a sort of bonding ritual, my bile-soaked embarrassment drawing the misery out of him.

  But his eyes were bleak.

  Mama entered the room. He stiffened, staring straight ahead. She laid a folded heap of brown material on the piano bench. “Those are the coveralls I wanted you to try on,” she said.

  He looked at her incredulously. “But—”

  “Mama, he didn’t do anything wrong.” I was begging.

  “Oh, I’ve already figured out who’s to blame.” Mama squinted at me.

  I held my breath. Mama studied Roanie with a kind of sad, thoughtful frown between her slender brows. “You go take a bath,” she told him. “Change into those coveralls. All right?”

  “You mean I ain’t in trouble, ma’am?”

  “Good lord, no. Claire’d probably be a lot worse off if you hadn’t been there to help her. Thank you.” She gave me a look that said, If you weren’t already sick …, then strode from the room, flicking her fingers across the front of the slim denim skirt she wore, as if shooing her own doubts away.

  I said cheerfully, “See? Mama doesn’t think you’re gonna eat me alive.”

  “I hope not. You’d stick in my craw if I tried.”

  “Then I’d just whack you on the back until you spit me out.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that, I could tell. I smiled with smug confidence.

  We were giving each other breathing lessons.

  After that, against the advice of everyone else in the family, Mama and Daddy trusted him in my presence unwatched. So I rambled around with him every day, talking his ears off. I gained a certain mystique in the fourth grade at school. To my female cousins and girlfriends Roanie exuded danger like a musk; I basked unafraid in the shadow of his reputation, so I was widely admired and gossiped about for taming him, as if I’d adopted a wolf.

  Aunt Lucille eventually relented and let Violet wander outside with me, and so I coaxed her down to the equipment shed one Sunday, where Roanie was rebuilding a tractor engine. He was great with mechanical things; he’d had to learn in order to keep Big Roan’s truck running.

  Violet was stiff with apprehension. Red hair stuck out from under her sock cap, as if she’d been electrified. I led her into the huge, oil perfumed building. Roanie’s face and hands were streaked with grease. He looked positively wicked, with a camouflage army coat pulled back from his chest and his gray eyes glinting in the raw glare of two work lights clamped to the tractor’s steering wheel. Sitting among engine parts on a tarp, with General Patton curled up beside him, he surveyed me and Violet somberly. I pointed at him as if I’d trained him. “Say something,” I commanded.

  “Boo,” he deadpanned.

  Violet ran all the way back to the house.

  “You scared her,” I said furiously. “I wanted you to make a good impression!”

  “You wanted to show off,” he corrected smoothly, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “But if you go get her and bring her back, I’ll tell her I was just kiddin’.”

  “Why don’t you come with me and say so in front of everybody? Then you could get something to eat. You could sit at the kitchen table.”

  “No, I couldn’t. That’s for family. Besides, I don’t want a bunch of people starin’ at me and whisperin’ about me.”

  “They won’t do that. I won’t let ’em.”

  “I wish you was in charge of the whole world, Claire. I really do.”

  “Please come to the house,” I repeated wistfully.

  “Boo.”

  “Oh, boo yourself. You don’t scare me at all.”

  “You scare me,” he said darkly. “How about that?”

  “I do not. How?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. He wiped greasy wrenches and rearranged engine parts; his gloomy and unfathomable silences were as deep as a well. Then, “ ’Cause you’ll grow up one day and be like everybody else.”

  “I will not.” I had no idea what he meant, but I was certain of my uniqueness. “I’ll never be scared of you, and when I grow up, I’ll have my own house and you can sit at my table anytime you want.”

  He looked at me seriously. “I’ll have a house, the best house in the world, and you can sit at my table.”

  “All right. Whatever. Shake on it.” I stuck my hand down. He encased it carefully in his tough, greasy fingers, and we closed the deal.

  I never understood my feelings about Sally McClendon. She gave me the creeps, and I was jealous of her because she had breasts and I didn’t yet, but I also felt sorry for her. The collision of emotions left me nearly tied in knots.

  I saw her again, up close and personal, one autumn afternoon. I was sitting on the counter at Uncle Eldon Delaney’s hardware store, waiting for Daddy to come out of a back room, where he and Uncle Eldon had started debating saber saws and ended up debating politics. It had been a subject of fine controversy all fall, since our own Governor Carter was known to have aspirations for the White House.

  I could hear their exasperated voices from the back of the store.

  “I’m still a Talmadge Democrat,” Uncle Eldon thundered. “Carter’s so far off center he’s not much better than a socialist.”

  “Oh, hell,” Daddy shot back, “you wouldn’t know what a socialist was if one walked in here and hit you with a hammer.”

  “I know the damn Democrats don’t say anything worth listening to anymore.”

  “Are you telling me you’d vote Republican?”

  “You bet I am!”

  “Good lord!”

  I shivered. Vote Republican? We’d have to do a lot of cleanup work at the family cemetery plots—all those Maloneys and Delaneys knocking up clumps of grass as they whirled in their graves.

  So I sat there, frowning, idly drumming my heels against the counter’s thick, sturdy side. I liked being different, but I didn’t like startling changes. This store and this counter were over a hundred years old. The counter was built of burnished slabs of extinct chestnut, each one two feet wide, from a tree that must have been majestic to behold. The cash register that sat at the opposite end of the counter had belonged to Great-Grandfather Thurman Delaney. It was the Victorian cathedral of cash registers, decorated in brass curlicues, with tall price tabs that popped up smartly, like wooden targets at a carnival shooting gallery, when Uncle Eldon pressed the enameled keys.

  But I sat on the counter among stacks of magazines with slinky Cher on the cover and a wooden bowl filled with smiley-faced Have A Nice Day pins, and a tray of mood rings. I slid one on my finger, scrutinized the murky oval plastic jewel against my skin, and waited to see what my mood was.

  I was just murky.

  One of the broad wooden doors swung open so hard the windowpanes rattled. Sally marched in, her thighs bulging in tight jeans, her bosom bulging in a tight sweater, her red platform shoes thudding unevenly on the wood planks. Her hair had grown blonder and bigger every year, her mascara heavier, until at eighteen she looked like a big-haired yellow raccoon.

  She teetered right up to me and stared into my eyes. “What’s a little pink sugar baby like you gonna do for a boy like Roanie?”

  “Well, I got him a good home and a straight front tooth, for one thing. And he doesn’t belong to you anyhow.”

  “He will when he’s a little older. You’ll see.”

  “You’ve got enough boys. Big and little. What do you need with another one?”

  “There ain’t any others like him. Y’all are just gonna m
ess him up, give him big ideas and then knock him flat.”

  I had a horrible thought and immediately gave voice to it. “Mind your own business! He doesn’t want to make babies with you or anybody else!”

  “Babies. Babies? Little queen, I don’t want no more babies. One lap rat from your kin is enough.”

  “That baby doesn’t even look like my Uncle Pete! You better watch it. If my mama knew for sure, she’d come get him.”

  “If your mama knew the whole story, there’d be hell to pay that you ain’t got no idea about.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She leered and leaned closer. “Your folks are blind as bats when its suits ’em. Roanie’ll be sorry he trusted ’em, someday. He’s just playin’ along to get money. That’s how people like him and me get what we want.”

  I picked up a Have A Nice Day pin, bent the pin out, and thrust it under her chin. I whispered to Sally, “You want a prick? I’ll give you a prick.”

  Her eyes widened. She backed off. I think she wasn’t so much scared as amazed.

  The shop’s door opened again suddenly and Big Roan glared inside. I heard footsteps coming from the back room. Daddy and Uncle Eldon.

  “Get your ass out here,” Big Roan said to Sally in a low voice. “Truck with my money and I’ll take it out of your hide.”

  “Roanie’s money,” she retorted, but she slunk away, throwing dark looks at me over her shoulder and bitter ones at Big Roan. I stared as he slammed the door behind her. As they walked off, I ran over and watched through a window, him limping, her wiggling. He dug one hand under her fanny and squeezed so hard she nearly fell off her shoes.

  “Who was just in here?” Daddy asked, marching up to me with a red-faced Uncle Eldon still muttering about politics behind him.

  “Sally McClendon.”

  Daddy scowled. “What did she want?”

  “Uh … uh, I guess she’ll come back later. I think she was looking for a screw.”

  That just popped out. I froze my face in neutral innocence. Daddy squinted hard at me, but Uncle Eldon started pounding the counter and talking about Governor Carter again, so Daddy was distracted.

  I dragged the mood ring off my finger and stuck it back on the tray.

  The plastic stone had gotten darker, a lot darker.

  • • •

  I tracked Roanie down as soon as we got home. He was in a storage shed, stacking sacks of fertilizer. I tiptoed up behind him, latched a thumb and forefinger in the seat of his jeans, and pinched hard muscle with all my strength.

  He dropped a sack and whirled around, one fist rising like a sledgehammer. When he saw who’d attacked him, he dropped his arm by his side, but his dark brows drew together in a formidable V. “What do you think you’re doin’? You keep your hands to yourself!”

  “You keep your hands to yourself!” I yelled. “Don’t you mess with ol’ big-tittied Sally McClendon, or the next time I’ll sneak up on you with a pair of pliers!”

  “Who says I done anything like that?”

  “She says you belong to her!”

  “Well, she’s lyin’!”

  “Did you … did you … have you ever …”

  “No, I ain’t, not ever! And I ain’t talking about this kind of stuff with you! Now haul your little monkey fingers out of this shed!”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” I said sweetly. “Because I do believe you.”

  “Well, thank ya so much. You got a nasty mind for a little girl.”

  Oh, this was war. “Sally’s busy, anyhow!” I taunted. “She was with your daddy and I saw him squeeze her on the butt!” The look on his face. Oh, the awful shame that colored his rawboned cheeks. I willed my mean-spirited news back into my mouth the instant it left, but it was too late. He sat down on a stack of fertilizer bags and stared at the dusty floor.

  “I … I … maybe I made a mistake,” I lied quickly. “Yeah, I, uh, I didn’t see—”

  “Yeah, you saw.” His voice was so low.

  “Well, he was just being friendly, I guess. I mean, ’cause Sally’s not his girlfriend or anything. I mean, he’s like, uh, a daddy, and she’s kinda young, uh, and besides, Daisy’s his girlfriend.” I halted and studied him miserably. “Isn’t she?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you … you’re not, uh, upset ’cause you like Sally? Like she’s your girlfriend—”

  “Claire, for God’s sake, she ain’t my girlfriend.”

  “Oh, yeah. Okay.” I swallowed sickly. Then, in a small voice, “Is she Big Roan’s girlfriend, like, uh, Daisy is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, oh, my, oh, shit.” I sat down on the floor by his feet. “It’s all right,” I said finally, and I patted the toe of his workboot. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “Everybody knows.” He just sat there, staring into space.

  I kept patting the toe of his shoe. Small caresses, careful ones, through the hard leather.

  No wonder he didn’t want anything to do with girls who were old enough to do it with. Big Roan might have gotten there first.

  Every year I made the mistake of naming the newborn calves and making pets of them, and I always picked a favorite, and the next year, without fail, we ate him. My bad luck was uncanny.

  That fall the future contents of our meat freezer was a steer I called Herbert. Herbert the Hereford.

  I knew, of course, that the cute red-and-white Hereford bull calves had one purpose—to grow up, grow fat, be castrated, and be killed before their meat turned tough. Either we ate them or someone else would. When they were stocky yearlings, Daddy sold them to a slaughterhouse broker, and they were loaded into huge stock trucks and disappeared forever.

  Herbert was like all of our de-balled bovines—placid and unsuspecting, with dark, gentle eyes and the sweet scent of ruminated grass on his breath. He’d been spindly when he was young. I’d helped feed him special formula from a big, rubber-teated bottle. I’d scratched him between the eyes when the summer flies were after him. I’d laugh and tell him, “Herbert, you’re gonna taste good.” Because I admitted that after Herbert was dead I’d stop thinking of him as Herbert. He’d become a steak.

  So I understood the facts of a steer’s life completely and could joke about it with the same bawdy humor as my brothers, except for the countdown hours on the day of the butchering and then I was grief-stricken.

  On Herbert’s execution day I hid in the loft of the main barn and cried my eyes out.

  Roanie found me up there, lying flat on my stomach between pyramids of baled hay, my head buried in my arms. He carried General Patton up with him and set him down next to me. General Patton snuffled my hair and whined. I sat up quickly, wiped my eyes, and looked at Roanie sadly. “Daddy’s fixin’ to shoot Herbert. I can’t watch.”

  “That’s what I figured. Grandpa Maloney told me that’s why you went running out here. I told him I better keep you company.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I gotta go down in a minute. Supposed to help with the skinnin’.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “You, too?”

  My mouth trembled, but I shrugged. “I’m not a sissy.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Yeah. I know.”

  “I’ve seen all sorts of dead things. I’ve seen Grandpa chop off chickens’ heads. Boy, do chickens flop around. Then you dunk ’em in hot water and pick all the feathers off, and you clean ’em out and cut ’em up, and pretty soon they look just like chickens in the grocery store.”

  “Yeah. Then you don’t have to think about how they got that way.”

  “Josh shot a bunch of squirrels once. We ate ’em. He gave me their tails. I made a necklace out of ’em.”

  “Squirrels are tough to eat.”

  “Aunt Arnetta hunts. She sits up in a deer stand and shoots at anything that moves. Daddy says Uncle Eugene won’t even go outside in the fall. ’Fraid she’ll plug him.” I studied Roanie carefully. “You go hunting?”

&n
bsp; “Yeah.”

  “Grandpa doesn’t hunt anymore. Josh quit after he came home from Vietnam. And Daddy stopped because Mama said he couldn’t put any more stuffed deer heads on the living-room walls. She said it was getting to where she couldn’t read in there. It felt like she had an audience.”

  “I don’t much like to hunt myself.”

  “Then why do you?”

  He rubbed General Patton’s head and didn’t answer right away. Then, “Got used to it. It was better than eatin’ cereal and bologna sandwiches all the time.”

  I started to say, Well, we don’t feed you any bologna, but the distant pop of Daddy’s pistol threw me down on the floor again. I pressed my hands to my ears. “Herbert,” I moaned.

  Roanie put a hand on my hair and stroked it very gently. “It’s done with so quick,” he offered in a low voice. “Herbert didn’t feel no pain.” He paused. “So I’d say he had it pretty good.”

  Roanie had a low standard for happiness. All he asked was that things not hurt.

  Daddy loaned him a deer rifle and he went hunting with Evan and Hop, and he shot a sixteen-point buck at dawn in the woods of Old Shanty Pass.

  That buck made him a celebrity. To deer hunters, bagging a sixteen-point rack of antlers—which means there are eight prongs on either side—is like bringing home the crown jewels. It had been so long since anyone had seen anders that big that even Grandpa Maloney had trouble remembering one.

  A parade of men and boys stopped by our farm to gaze longingly at the giant spread on the buck’s glassy-eyed head, which sat in a place of honor on a workbench outside the barn. “Gut shot or through the heart?” they asked Roanie with the solemn interest of doctors consulting on a patient.

  “Through the heart,” he answered.

  I got my Instamatic and took a picture of Roanie sitting beside the buck’s head. I had connections with Mr. Cicero, the publisher of the Dunderry Weekly Shamrock; I was secretary of the 4-H Club at school, and Mr. Cicero ran my two-paragraph articles about the club meetings and gave me a byline. So I had established myself as a bona fide member of the press.