A Place to Call Home

  Hundreds of yellow jackets flitted around him. They crept over the apple peelings, they swarmed lazily around the corer, they perched on his shirt and his hands, they clung to the wiry tufts of brindled hair on his thick forearms.

  But they didn’t sting him. They never did, according to local legend. He’d made some kind of magical, dignified peace with the small, hurtful creatures and they knew it. And they respected him.

  “Granddaddy,” Tula said softly. “Will you fix us some candied apples?”

  Mr. Tobbler nodded solemnly. “But I’m not gonna let y’all stand back like babies anymore.” He slid a fresh apple into the coring vise. The yellow jackets hovered over his hands like the tiniest fairies. “Y’all are half grown now. You know there’s nothing to be afraid of. Fear is what stings. Come on. Come close.”

  Rebecca and Violet refused to budge, but I edged forward and Tula did, too, because I guess she knew we had a double dose of magic between us. I moved in slow motion, my heart in my throat. Yellow jackets feathered our wrists, our hands; one lit on the nail of my forefinger and sat there calmly, rubbing its head with one tiny front leg, like a cat cleaning itself.

  I expected to feel needle-hot stingers at any second.

  “Now there, they know you got good hearts,” Mr. Tobbler whispered as he handed us two filled plates. “They know you’ll share with ’em.” Victory! I sighed with relief as we backed away. My personal yellow jackets left my skin delicately.

  “Wow,” Rebecca murmured.

  Violet had her hands clamped to her mouth. She just stared at us. We said our thank-yous and dropped two dollars in the can because Mr. Tobbler donated the money to the school’s booster club.

  And then the four of us retreated hurriedly. Even Tula looked happier once we were out of yellow-jacket range. “No problem,” I lied proudly. “I wasn’t scared a bit.” I popped a caramel-soaked slice of apple into my mouth, chewed it, swallowed, and looked around to see who might be admiring me.

  There was Roanie, standing just inside the shadows on the side of the grassy hill above the concession stand.

  I halted. Whether his gaze was admiring or not, I couldn’t tell. I could never quite tell what he was thinking behind those gray wolf eyes, his scrutiny as sharp as a ten-penny nail. He stood with his hands in his pockets, one long leg angled out to the side. I like the shadows, I want to be right here, don’t mess with me, everything about him warned.

  At fourteen he was as tall as a grown man and about as wide as a board. He was stuck with cast-off jeans and work shirts from the Dunderry Civitans Thrift Shop, and his enormous, patched, red-flannel shirt was instantly familiar. Grandma Dottie had donated a bag of Grandpa’s work shirts to the Civitans. It looked like a tent on Roanie, but I considered it a good sign.

  “Come on, come on, Claire,” Violet urged nervously, tugging at my arm.

  “Why’s he looking at you?” Rebecca whispered. “He oughta know better than to look at a Maloney.”

  “He knows I’m not gonna sting him.”

  Tula grabbed my sleeve. “He sure might sting you.”

  But I knew that wasn’t true. Hypnotized, I climbed the hill toward him, every step catching the breath out of my lungs. Roanie straightened, his head came up, and he frowned.

  Rebecca called, “We better go tell Aunt Marybeth! Claire? We gotta tell your mama!” From the corner of one eye I glimpsed her and Violet and Tula take off toward the stadium.

  “Get on back,” Roanie called out, glancing around uncomfortably. His voice was deeper than I remembered from Christmas. I wanted to shout, I grew two inches over the summer, but my mouth wouldn’t work. “Git,” he ordered firmly. “Little peep, I don’t want no trouble.”

  My heart broke. I stopped. When his expression grew darker, I spouted, “I’m not scared of yellow jackets. How come you’re scared of me?”

  “It ain’t right, you chasin’ after me,” he said gruffly. “You’re just a half-pint. You ain’t got no idea how it looks. Go on.”

  “You’re not so old!”

  “Hey!” a voice called behind me. I turned. My cousin Carlton, who was a senior that year, so big and fleshy even the football coaches had given up trying to sweat a game out of him, was glaring up the hill at us. A half-dozen of his cronies were with him. They weren’t football-burly types either, but they were big enough, and mean enough, in a crowd.

  “Get down here, Claire,” Carlton yelled. “Leave that white trash alone.”

  Nothing, no one, could have changed my mind then. I plowed uphill and planted myself beside Roanie. I realized later, when I replayed the whole mess in my mind, that the instant I stepped out of the light and into the shadows with him, he went on guard in some new way, braced against the world beyond us both, his hands clenching by his sides.

  “I said …” Carlton tilted his head back and raised his voice, “leave that white nigger alone!”

  Carlton uttered the word that separated one small part of the Maloneys from the rest. A word so petty and disreputable that it wasn’t allowed in our house, not ever, for any reason. It was a fighting word to whomever got hit with it, black or white, and Grandpa always told my brothers and me that if we ever used it toward any soul, we could never look the Tobblers straight in the eye again.

  I dropped my plate. “You gonna take that? You go knock the chickenshit out of him! I’ll tell everybody why you had to do it.”

  “Get out of here, Claire.” Roanie’s voice was low, dangerous. The look he focused on Carlton could raise bruises. “I pick my own fights.”

  “But … but you can’t let him call you names like that! You never let anybody do that! What’s the matter with you? Go on! Smack him! I know you’re not scared of Carlton. You’re not scared of anybody!”

  What a little idiot I was, weighing my pride against his, not understanding what I added to his misery. I don’t know what he would have done—probably just turned and walked away—if Carlton hadn’t suddenly strode up the hill. “I swear,” Carlton hissed at me, “at the rate you’re going you’ll end up down on Steckem Road with the McClendon whores.”

  He grabbed my arm. I lurched back and kicked him in the shins. He gasped a shocked sound. Whaaaf. Then he shook me by the arm, hard, just once.

  Because then Roanie was on him.

  There are boxing fights and there are dog fights. One is careful and cushioned and mostly sane, the other is a wild, tearing, close-in jumble of fingers that claw into soft spots and bare-knuckled fists that land with cracking thuds.

  That’s what Roanie gave him, driving him down the hill, Carlton falling, trying to punch back, yelling. If it had ended there and ended quickly, it would have been as brutally neat as a big dog snapping at a fly. But Carlton’s slack-jawed friends joined in. One on one they’d never have had the guts to tangle with Roanie, but they had enough courage among them to gang up on him.

  So there he was, struggling inside a circle of swinging fists and knees, his head jerking back as a fist slammed into his jaw, his body bowing forward as someone punched him in the stomach. Grown men ran toward us, yelling at the boys to stop it. Mr. Tobbler bolted from behind his table, thick arms pumping, yellow jackets parting like a cloud around him.

  But I couldn’t wait for reinforcements, Roanie was getting clobbered. I launched myself down the hill, scrambled atop Carlton’s bucking back, and sank my teeth into the nape of his neck. He squealed like a hog and shook me off.

  I fell under the moving pistons of arms and legs, a hard shoe stepped on my hand, and then, as I tried to get up, Carlton drew back his fist and my eyes crossed as my whole horizon filled with fist, just before it crashed into my mouth.

  I woke up with my head in Mama’s lap, Mama yelling for Daddy to get a cup of ice, and blood streaming down my chin. I was dimly aware of a large crowd around us and of the band playing the fight song again, somewhere where people were still watching the football game.

  I lay there on the shadowy hillside, addled, shivering, and moaning
, my mouth on fire. Mama dabbed my lips with the hem of her skirt. Roanie, I thought woozily. What happened to Roanie? I looked up into Grandma’s calm blue eyes. “Marybeth,” she said, “she’s lost a couple of teeth.”

  “Oh, my lord!” Mama cried.

  Teeth? Something like hard pellets tickled the back of my throat. I retched onto Mama’s lap like a cat coughing up a hairball. Two bloody specks fell out. I touched my tongue to the aching top gap in my once-precious smile, went “Aaaaah,” with embarrassment, and collapsed on my back.

  Grandma plucked my teeth up and wrapped them in a handkerchief. “They’ll go back in,” she promised Mama.

  “Oh, her smile, her smile,” Mama cried. “When I get my hands on Roanie Sullivan—”

  “Woanie!” That was the best pronunciation I could manage, as I struggled upright.

  I saw him not far away, hunched on his knees with his arms braced on the ground in front of him. Grandpa and Mr. Tobbler squatted beside him, holding his shirttail—the tail of Grandpa Maloney’s own cast-off flannel shirt—to his mouth. Blood soaked it, trickling slowly down his chin and falling in terrible, bright red splatters on the legs of his jeans.

  Grandpa and Mr. Tobbler were talking to each other in low, grim voices, nodding like horses pulling a heavy load in tandem. Roanie lifted his head and looked at me. Above the shirt’s crimson material, inside the grimace of his lips, I saw the dark gap where his snaggletooth had been.

  So we’d both had the smile knocked out of us.

  “Your toof,” I said sadly. Half fainting and hurting from the nose down, I opened my mouth and showed him my more humiliating gap, but the horror in his eyes shut my mouth and brought tears down my face. “Woanie dida dah anythang wong,” I announced loudly. “Carltoh dah it.”

  Mama dragged me against her and wrapped her arms around me. “Hush, honey, hush.”

  Daddy ran up the hill, dropped to his heels, and thrust a paper cup filled with ice into Mama’s hands. His face was as red as his hair; his eyes flashed furiously. “Dathy,” I begged, “Carltoh started it. He gwaffed me. Woanie hif him. Carltoh knoffed me in tha mouf.”

  “Hush,” he soothed. “You’re not making any sense, baby.”

  Daddy pivoted toward Roanie and snatched him by one shoulder. “I don’t care how bad hurt you are. You tell me why you got my daughter into a brawl, or I’ll break what’s left of you.”

  “Dathy!”

  Roanie’s eyes flared. He shook his head. Flecks of blood flew everywhere. He wheezed, banding one long arm around his ribs. “I ain’t never gonna let nobody hurt her—”

  “Not let anybody hurt her?” Daddy shouted. “What do you think you just did to her?”

  “Son, back off,” Grandpa ordered. “It wasn’t Roanie’s fault. It was Carlton’s, goddammit. Boss T saw the whole thing.”

  Daddy sat back, his mouth flat with concentration. “That right, Mr. Tobbler?”

  Mr. Tobbler barked out the truth. He told him about Carlton’s insults, and when he said the words “white nigger,” laying them off his tongue with the military dignity of an old warrior, Daddy’s shoulders drew back. “That Carlton, he punched your little girl in the mouth,” Mr. Tobbler added grimly. “He did it deliberately, too. Holt Maloney, you want to break heads, go break your nephew’s.”

  I felt Mama catch her breath. She and Daddy looked at Roanie. Daddy lifted a hand toward him. “I … I … listen, boy, I—”

  But Roanie shrugged away, tried to get up but sat down hard, wiping his mouth with one hand, the other clamping harder across his ribs. He swayed. “None of you got to worry about Claire when I’m around. I ain’t gonna hurt her somehow. I know what you been thinkin’ and I ain’t that way. I wouldn’t a-laid a hand on nobody ’cept Carlton was hurtin’ her. I … I won’t let nothin’ bad happen to her. Not ever. No matter how it looks to y’all.”

  “Woanie,” I mewled.

  He tried to get up again. He couldn’t without help.

  Daddy took him by one arm, Grandpa by the other. Help was what he got, whether he wanted it or not.

  Hurt, distrustful, and trapped, he had no choice. Neither did I.

  So that was the night, that warm, yellow-jacket-charmed night in September, when Roanie began to be part of my family.

  We were taken to my Uncle Mallory Delaney’s office. The doctor. Nothing wrong with me except busted teeth and some bruised fingers, nothing wrong with Roanie except a busted tooth and a cracked rib.

  Then, at Uncle Cully Maloney’s office—the dentist—my two teeth were painfully cemented back in place, and Roanie’s gap was measured for a permanent bridge.

  Finally, we took Roanie under our own roof, at the farm. Mama put him in a spare bedroom. Daddy tried to phone Big Roan but couldn’t find him, either at the Hollow or at Steckem Road. He was off drinking somewhere. Big Roan wouldn’t have cared, anyway.

  There was a haunted, awestruck glimmer in Roanie’s eyes that night. It wasn’t easy for him to trust good luck or Maloneys. In the morning, the bedroom window was open and Roanie was gone.

  I took a strong leap of faith myself and told Mama and Daddy about Ten Jumps. Daddy and Sheriff Vince caught him there.

  Carlton was in the hospital in Gainesville with a broken jaw, a few stitches here and there, an ice pack on his testicles, and a bandage on the back of his neck.

  Aunt Arnetta was determined to punish Roanie. She filed charges.

  “I’m sorry,” I heard Sheriff Vince tell Mama and Daddy that night. “I caught him, and I’ve got a job to do as sheriff. He just can’t run around loose anymore. Big Roan doesn’t want to take responsibility for him, and there’s nowhere for the boy to go.”

  “Bring him here,” Daddy said. “We’ll take him in.”

  Faith. It had worked. I was awestruck.

  “Holt, I won’t have that boy around Claire!” I heard Mama from my crouched vantage point outside the living room’s double oak doors, despite their being closed. Hop and Evan squatted beside me like big, redheaded chimps. We traded spooked glances. I shivered and leaned closer to the crack between the doors. “We still don’t know much about him,” Mama went on. “Claire has some kind of foolish crush on him. Oh, God, Holt, what if he’s a pervert?”

  “Then he’ll be a dead pervert,” Daddy answered firmly. There was a long silence punctuated by Mama’s sniffling sounds. I peered through the crack and saw Daddy hugging her. Then he said, “If I thought there was anything sinister about the boy, I wouldn’t let him set a foot on the place.”

  “How do you know there isn’t?”

  “Because he’s never laid a hand on any of the girls at school. Never spoken badly to any of ’em. That’s what Evan and Hop say.”

  Evan whispered behind me, “Yeah, but they won’t go near him. He stinks.”

  “You shut up,” I whispered back.

  “There are other females besides the ones at school,” Mama said. “There’re those McClendons.”

  “Roanie doesn’t hang around his daddy’s women. Believe me, I’d have heard about it. Sex talk travels, Marybeth.”

  “Uh-huh. I guess you and your brothers discuss something besides the weather during those Saturday gabfests at the feed store.”

  “Hoo! I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you and your sisters get together. My ears’d burn and fall off.”

  More silence. My face felt red-hot. Sex talk. Burning ears. Perverts. My feelings for Roanie. It wasn’t fair to connect all that together. I knew Roanie was no pervert, because I had a clear definition of what one was. Long before I was born, Great-Uncle Victor Delaney moved away to Ohio and married some woman the family never got to meet. Great-Uncle Victor died young and left her all his money, and decades later, when she got old and sick, a doctor undressed her and found out she was a man.

  Great-Uncle Victor was a pervert, everyone said. Or else really dumb.

  “What’re we going to say to the family?” Mama’s voice again. Calm or resigned. “Irene still cries when anybo
dy mentions the Christmas parade.”

  “Don’t visit the sins of the father on the son. That’s what we’ll say. Roanie can’t help what he comes from. I feel bad for the boy. I think you do, too, hmmm?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “We should have stepped in when he was born, Marybeth. Or when his mother died.” Daddy’s voice was low and serious. “All that noble talk about Big Roan having a right to raise his own son—hell, Big Roan hasn’t raised him, it’s a miracle the boy’s not a thief or a dope addict. I say the boy’s got something good inside him, something strong enough to give him a chance. We can’t turn our backs on him again.”

  “But, Holt, no child grows up around that kind of meanness without learning meanness himself. He’s got no solid foundation. Push him and he might fall the wrong way. I just don’t want Claire in his path if he does.”

  “Claire’s a little girl. He’s fourteen years old. He’s got bigger fish to fry. Good lord, hon, when a boy’s that age he’s looking up the female ladder, not down it. I can’t see any sign that Claire’s anything but a pesky little kitten to him. Same way she is to Evan and Hop.”

  Pesky little kitten. I was crushed.

  “Besides,” Daddy continued, “I’ll read him the riot act. ‘You act like a gentleman around the ladies on this farm, or I’ll break your neck.’ ”

  “All right,” Mama answered, sounding tired. “But I’m going to figure out some way to clean him up. Start with the outside and work my way in.”

  I gasped. This was unbelievable. This was wonderful. This would split the responsibility for Roanie among me and Mama and Daddy, because what they’d offered would upset every Maloney and Delaney in the county.

  “Claire, Claire, what do you look so worried about?” Mama asked that night as she sat beside me on my pink-ruffled bed in my pink-ruffled bedroom.

  “Mama, Roanie isn’t a pervert.”