The salesman’s jaw fell open. He tightened his tie. I was furious. So he thought Roanie might steal something. He wandered toward Great-Gran, his eyes shifting uncertainly from her back to Roanie. I stepped in front of him and said in an angry whisper, “My grannies are crazy, but they don’t steal, sir. And neither does my … my boy. You leave him alone or he’ll beat your butt.”
The clerk wiped his glistening forehead. “I should never have quit bartending school,” he said under his breath, and then he went over to the cologne counter and shuffled invoices. I think he gave up. He was hiding from us all.
Grandma Dottie returned. I filled her in on the situation—Grandmother trying to cause trouble for Great-Gran, the salesman making Roanie feel like a thief. She shut her eyes for a second, rubbed her temples with her tanned, tobacco-stained fingertips, then said, “Keep moving, sweet pea. Let’s get done and go home. I have a headache.”
What happened next happened so fast.
The little blond boy scooted past us. His mama touched peach-colored, manicured nails to her throat and called softly, “Jimmy, honey, slow down,” and then the daddy stepped out of an aisle and snared the little boy by his shirt collar. “I told you to stay out of the way,” the man said loudly. And then he shook the boy hard, and the boy gave a loud, terrified shriek. “Be quiet,” the man ordered, but the kid shrieked louder and the woman threw out her helpless hands toward him, and the man drew back one of his and slapped his son hard in the face.
The blow tumbled the little guy backward and he fell. He curled up, sobbing, on the carpeted floor.
I stared in unabashed shock. I had seen Mama smack Brady across the legs with a forsythia switch once for saying “fuck.” Daddy had given me a few openhanded swats on the fanny over the years, but the occasions were so rare that each one had the power of legend. I had cousins who laughed about the ritualized whippings some of my aunts and uncles dished out for various transgressions. But I’d never seen anything like this, this sudden and untempered violence against a small child.
Grandma Dottie laid a hand on my shoulder. I could feel her trembling, and when I looked up at her, she was staring at the man with the compressed fury of a slow-burning firecracker. Do something, I screamed inside.
The kid’s mama gathered him up and glanced around, blushing, avoiding our eyes. “Take him somewhere,” the man told her. “You’re in charge of him. I can’t shop with him underfoot. Go on.”
“I’m sorry,” his wife murmured. “He’s just tired.”
The man noticed us watching him. “You have nothing better to look at?” he snapped.
“Nothing worse,” Grandma Dottie answered stiffly.
He turned his back and began flipping through a rack of dress shirts. His wife carried the little boy away. His whimpers faded slowly.
“I saw it,” Great-Gran said behind us. “It was an abomination.”
“I saw it first,” Grandmother Elizabeth added. “Any man who treats his child that way should be horsewhipped.”
They stood there alongside Grandma Dottie, muttering and slinging darts at the man’s back with their gazes, but they didn’t do anything, and I was locked in my own steaming, silent world of unanswerable questions. Why couldn’t we do something? Shouldn’t we say something? Tell somebody?
It happened so fast. Violence is easy; justice is hard. Roanie, accustomed to one but not the other, strode across the aisle and shoved the man on the shoulder. I’ve never forgotten that sight: Roanie, a shabby, lean, fourteen-year-old boy, aiming a murderous stare at a grown man. A gangly young wolf confronting a pampered spaniel. Roanie’s face was contorted. He was almost crying, I decided later. “You son of a bitch,” he said.
“Hey,” the man said, stepping back. “Leave me alone.”
“Goddamned bully.”
The man held up both hands. “Listen, I don’t have to take this kind of crap.”
“How’d you like it if somebody slapped you?”
“Don’t threaten me, hillbilly.”
Roanie hit him. Punched him right in the jaw. The man’s arms flailed, and he fell against a rack of pinstriped suits and sank between two of them, as if he’d been swallowed.
I screamed. Then I broke from Grandma’s grip and ran to Roanie. I dodged in front of him and peered into the suits. The man half lay, half sat, moaning. Blood trickled from his lower lip. “Hit him again, Roanie!” I yelled.
The salesman ran over, his mouth gaping. “Cool it, cool it, kid,” he said, keeping his distance from Roanie. “I’ve called the security guards!”
Oh, no. I switched from attack to retreat. Pushing Roanie was like pushing a brick wall. I plowed into his chest like a bulldozer. I threw my head back and looked up at him pleadingly. His eyes were glazed, his mouth drawn back in a snarl. “Roanie, it’s Claire. Hello, hello. Look at me.”
“Don’t you never hit your kid again,” Roanie hurled over my head at the man. “It ain’t right. It ain’t fair.”
“Roanie, I know,” I begged. “Come on.”
“Assault,” the man groaned. “I’ll have you arrested.”
Suddenly Grandma Dottie was beside us, thrusting an arm around us both. “Roanie,” she ordered in a low, fierce voice, “you and Claire go to the parking deck. I’ll bring up the rear with the Old Grannies. Go on now. Go.”
But people had gathered. A pair of security guards ran up. I latched my arms tightly around Roanie’s waist and held on to him. I wanted to cloak him, make him invisible. I know why he’s like this. We all know. Big Roan hit him that way. When he was too little to hit back. And no one did anything to stop it.
“Call the police,” Grandmother Elizabeth piped up. I heard her delicate, righteous voice. Eyes shut, I could feel Roanie’s heart pounding under my ear. “We’ll just see who deserves to be arrested,” she said. “I’ll tell them exactly what happened.”
“So will I,” Great-Gran said loudly. “Let’s get the law in on this. I saw a grown man knock a baby five feet across the floor.”
“Oh, yes, I certainly saw that, too.” Grandmother Elizabeth again. “We’re in perfect agreement.”
I think the world stopped turning.
To make a long story short, the man quit muttering about having Roanie arrested when the Old Grannies launched into the full story of why Roanie had hit him. The salesman, when prodded, confirmed their account. The store’s security guards scowled and shifted their feet, obviously wishing we’d all just go away. Finally they let us.
And we got out of there. It wasn’t dignified, it wasn’t much of a victory, not with me sealed to Roanie’s side and holding on to him like a vise, Grandma Dottie pushing us, him dragging his feet, the Old Grannies bringing up the rear in slow tandem.
I couldn’t change the future for a little blond boy and his cowed mother any more than I could change the past for Roanie. All I had was the satisfaction of his long arm curled around me, our togetherness in trouble, and the righteous support of two very old grannies and one younger one.
Grandmother and Great-Gran discussed the fight with great relish all the way home. They sat in the backseat close together. I sat in the front between Grandma Dottie and Roanie. I had to know something. I whispered to him, “If some, uh, criminal tried to get me—you know, in a bad way—what would you do to him?”
He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t so much as bat an eyelash. “I’d try to kill him.”
I wound my chubby, determined fingers through his and held on. His skin was sweaty and cold. I didn’t realize it then, but he was scared sick that he’d proven himself unredeemable, like Big Roan. That he’d get sent away for what he’d done.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Daddy lectured him on the consequences of settling arguments with his fists, but it was a mild lecture, no worse than one of my brothers would have gotten. And then Mama sat him down at the kitchen table and wrapped the swollen knuckles of his right hand in a dishtowel packed with ice and insisted he stay put while we set the table and put out
the food for dinner.
Hop and Evan came in and Grandpa Maloney—they wanted every detail of the Rich’s fight. Roanie still looked as if he expected to be electrocuted. We presented a peculiar mood—all of us gazing at him speculatively, Great-Gran nodding, Grandmother Elizabeth smiling at him coyly behind her thin, blue-veined hand.
“You’re a hero,” I blurted out. “Heroes have to sit at the table and get admired.”
He drew back instinctively. “But I didn’t change nothin’.”
“You tried,” Grandma Dottie said firmly. “Which is more than most people can ever claim. More than we had the gumption to do. And I want to apologize to you for not doing more sooner. About similar matters. All right?”
“Fix your plate, Roanie,” Mama ordered with brusque diplomacy. “Dinner’s getting cold.”
Great-Gran and Grandmother Elizabeth were syrupy-sweet to him and endlessly discussed his deed. And I promised him that the next time we went to Rich’s we’d get ourselves that bag of éclairs.
“Oh, yes,” Great-Gran said. “I have to go back next week and do my shopping all over again.”
“Well, I have to go, too,” Grandmother Elizabeth said in an edgy tone.
“Not when I go, Elizabeth.”
“Whenever I wish to, Alice.”
Roanie ate, and listened, and endured. Just like the rest of us. I grinned at him.
The world is spanned by small bridges between people. He’d crossed another one.
Thanksgiving. To me it was a good all-around holiday, though it couldn’t compare to Easter and Christmas since I didn’t get any presents out of it. Thanksgiving meant football bowl games, turkey and dressing, and a house crammed to the rafters with relatives visiting from out of town. Thanksgiving was our big homecoming holiday.
“Turkey leg?” I asked Roanie. He sat in the loft of the big barn, near its open door, with General Patton sitting beside him. I plopped down beside the two of them, pulled a turkey leg from a box full of food I’d put together, and thrust it under his chin.
We looked at each other like old married people who can’t bear to be separated but sometimes can’t bear each other’s company either. “Why do you always track me down during family things?” he asked. “I just ain’t gonna be part of it, okay?”
“I just decided I’d eat up here. Oh, so you’re here, too. Well, my goodness. So shut up and let’s eat.”
So we did. Romance is simple when you don’t discuss it.
From the barn loft we had a front-row, upper-level seat for the annual Thanksgiving Day Maloney-Versus-Delaney Touch Football Game. We leaned against the opposite sides of the door frame, our blue-jeaned legs stretched out on the matted hay. The air was cool, the sky was blue, the mountains in the distance blazed with color. “Now this is a good holiday,” I told Roanie.
“Yeah,” he answered quietly. “This is how I pictured it bein’ over here.”
Below us on the mown, brown autumn pasture, the family gathered in lawn chairs and on blankets. Daddy had marked off goal lines with lime. There was a lot of yelling and running and good-natured insults, which was why it was so much fun to watch.
The oldest player was Mama’s Uncle Winston, who had brindled gray hair and a belly like a walrus. The youngest were Hop and Evan, who were stocky enough to make me think of future redheaded walruses.
Josh and Brady were home from college, so they were down there, too. And there was Mama’s cousin, Stuart Kehoe, the mayor, and his wife, Noona, the county tax assessor, and Mama’s cousin Randy Pinkett, the county commissioner, and his wife, Edythe, who sold Avon products and real estate. Plus a lot of relatives Roanie already knew too well, including Uncle William, Aunt Bess, Uncle Pete, Pete’s sons, Arlan and Harold, Uncle Dwayne and Aunt Rhonda, Uncle Eugene and Aunt Arnetta, and Carlton.
I decided to tell him about the out-of-town relatives he had no reason to avoid. “That’s Sonny Delaney,” I said, pointing. “He lives up in Blairsville. He’s a state senator. If we need something from the government we just give Sonny a call. He’s big friends with Governor Carter.”
“He knows the governor?” Roanie asked slowly.
“Oh, sure.” I pointed again. “And that’s Grandpa’s brother Mack. Great-Uncle Mack Maloney. He lives up in Tennessee. In Nashville. He’s a professional guitar player. You can hear him in the background on some old Elvis songs.”
“He knows Elvis?”
“Oh, sure. Well, he used to anyhow. Before Elvis went to Las Vegas. And that’s Uncle Ralph Maloney over there. He’s a lawyer in Atlanta. If you want to know how to kill somebody and get away with it, ask Uncle Ralph. That’s what Daddy says. And over there, sitting on that quilt, that’s Great-Aunt Sue Maloney. She was in the Peace Corps. She lived in Africa for two whole years. She met President Kennedy, too. Well, not while she was in Africa. After she came back.”
“I’m gonna be bigger than any of them,” Roanie said suddenly.
“What?”
“I said, I’m gonna be bigger than anybody around here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? How come you look mad? I wasn’t bragging.”
“People’ll look up to me. People’ll hang all over me to do whatever I want. I swear. You wait. You’ll see.”
I was flabbergasted, and a little upset. My family ran or owned or had influence over almost everything that mattered in the county. Underneath our blooms we were tough vines. Nobody could pull us down, nobody could pull us out by the roots, and nobody could get a foot in edgewise if we didn’t budge. Maybe that was the main reason people like Roanie had it so hard.
But Roanie was part of us. He belonged to us. He belonged to me. He shouldn’t talk as if he wanted to cut us down to the ground.
I pretended to watch the football game but snuck bewildered glances at his hard profile. He’s a lot older than me, I thought with sudden awareness and sorrow. And sometimes he’s so far away, I can’t bring him back.
We were at the flea market down by Murphy’s Feed Mill. Mr. Murphy had outfitted one of his warehouses with a hundred wooden stalls and on weekends people came from miles around to deal with vendors who sold everything from junk to, well, good junk. Mama liked to hunt for books and pottery; I liked to hunt for Beep.
Beep Murphy was Mr. Murphy’s oldest son. He was a grown man, really, but he was retarded, with round, small, Mongoloid features that made him baby-faced forever. He walked around in overalls and a thick sweater, smiling endlessly as he swept floors and cleaned the portable toilets outside the building and picked up trash, which he deposited in his white plastic bucket with flower decals on it.
He loved kids because he was one at heart, and he knew which ones of us he could count on. When he spotted me, he ducked out a side door. “Come on,” I said to Roanie.
“What for?”
“We gotta catch Beep. You’ve never chased Beep?”
“Nooo.”
“Come on!” I ran outside. It was a bright, clear, cold December day. I dodged among the cars and trucks parked on the graveled apron around the warehouse. “Beep, Beep, Beep,” I called as I searched each lane. I rounded the end of a car.
“BEEP!” Beep bellowed back at me. He was crouched beside the fender. He pounded his trash can with one hand. We both burst out laughing.
“How you doin’, Mr. Beep?”
“Beep.”
Roanie walked up beside me. Beep grinned up at him. “Beep.”
“Say it back,” I whispered.
“I don’t think so,” Roanie said with some dignity.
“BEEP,” Beep said insistently.
“Say it back, Roanie. Or he’ll follow you around till you do. That’s part of the game.”
Roanie was silent, frowning. “Beep.” It was the flattest beep I’d ever heard.
But Beep nodded and laughed, satisfied. He sprang to his feet. “Beep!” he tossed over one shoulder as he lumbered back into the warehouse.
“Now you’re a member of the Beep Society,” I told Roani
e seriously. “You’ve been Beeptized.”
“And I thought I’d missed out on a lot,” he answered drolly.
“You don’t like Beep?”
“Feel sorry for him. He acts like a fool. People make fun of him.”
“I wasn’t making fun of him.”
“I don’t mean you. I just mean in general. He doesn’t know how to fight back, so he plays along.”
“No! He’s happy.”
“He’s not in on the joke.”
“Sure he is. He likes it.”
His face tight with anger, Roanie leaned against the car and shoved his hands in his jeans pockets. “I saw him in town once. Waiting outside the grocery store while his old man was shopping. Four or five boys decided to have a little fun with him. Got in a circle around him, called him names. Called him an idiot, said he was stupid. He started cryin’.”
I felt bad, but I didn’t know what to say. Roanie knew how Beep must have felt because he’d been singled out for mean treatment himself. I wanted to squeeze one of his hands in sympathy or hug him, but I knew, too, that he wouldn’t like that in public. And not much in private, of course. It was as if touching and being touched were dangerous in some way, and I don’t mean because of boy-girl regulations. “I didn’t do anything about it,” he added dully. “There was so many of ’em. I just watched. I hated it.”
“That’s how I felt when you were getting beat up on at school,” I said. “And at Easter that time, and the Christmas parade last year, and when Aunt Bess sent you away.” My voice cracked. He was looking down at me now, not angry anymore, but somber and gentle. “I couldn’t do anything,” I rushed on, swallowing hard and fighting a tremor in my lower lip. “When I told on you last fall and they caught you over at Ten Jumps so you couldn’t hide anymore, I felt awful. I did it to help, but I was scared it was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“You did all right. Did plenty. More’n anybody.”