“My God, is she dead?”
“Daddy didn’t tell you?”
She shook her head.
“You been kind of out of touch,” I said. “She was found with a sewing machine tied to her feet yesterday and was buried today. I would have told you last night, but you was out of it.”
“Don knew about this?”
“Yes, ma’am. He and Uncle Gene and me and Terry found her in the river.”
“Oh my God,” Mama said. “She was so young. And it hasn’t been that long ago she lost her brother, and before that her mother.”
“She was my age,” I said. “She never did go nowhere. She wanted to, but she never did.”
“Your daddy was there when she was found?” Mama asked, as if I hadn’t already explained it.
“He was.”
“He never said anything to me.”
“No surprise. He wanted to push her and the Singer back in the water.”
“He doesn’t like problems,” she said, as if that explained all his actions.
“I guess not,” I said.
“And now you want to go away?”
“I don’t know what I want. Me and Terry and Jinx—”
“You still seeing that colored girl?”
“I am.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Mama said. “I’m not speaking against her. I’m just surprised you aren’t like everyone else.”
“Everyone else?”
“Way it usually goes is children, colored and white, play together until they get grown, and then they don’t associate. It’s how it is.”
“Thanks for thinking highly of me,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Sue Ellen. I just meant it’s not the standard way things work out in these parts, or most parts, for that matter, and there’s the whole problem of how she’s affecting your speech. You talk like a field hand.”
She paused, seeming suddenly to have taken hold of what I had said about May Lynn.
“You said you want to dig up your friend and burn her up and take her ashes to Hollywood?”
“I said that, yeah, but am I going to do it? I don’t know.”
“That’s pretty crazy,” she said.
“You should know,” I said, and hated it as soon as I said it.
Mama turned her face away from me.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Slowly she looked back in my direction. “No. It’s all right. I wasn’t very thoughtful before I spoke. And I suppose I’m not one to judge anyone in any manner, am I?”
“You’re all right.”
“No. No, I’m not. Listen. I don’t know that you should dig up and burn anybody. I’m pretty sure that’s a crime. I think there’s a list of weird crimes and that’s on the list, along with eating out of the toilet and the like. It’s just not done. So forget that. But I think it would be good for you to leave. I haven’t got the gumption for much of anything anymore, not even being a mother, but you ought not to stay here. Something happens to me, there’s just you and your daddy…and you wouldn’t want that.”
“I don’t want to leave you here with Daddy,” I said, “let alone myself. He’s still got a pretty good left hook.”
“Don’t stay on my account,” Mama said. “I let him in last night, though I don’t remember it all in a solid kind of way. It was the cure-all. It keeps me confused. And I get so lonely.”
“That stuff doesn’t cure a thing,” I said. “It just makes you drunk and dreamy, and gives you excuses. You ought not drink it anymore.”
“You don’t know how things are,” she said. “It makes me feel good when I feel bad, and without it, I feel bad pretty much all the time. You should go. Forget digging up anybody, that’s a bad idea, but you should go.”
“I told you, I don’t want to leave you with Daddy.”
“I can deal with him.”
“I don’t want you to have to,” I said.
Mama considered on something for a long time. I could almost see whatever it was behind her eyes, moving around back there like a person in the shadows. Time she took before she spoke to me, had I been so inclined—which I wasn’t—I could have smoked a cigar, and maybe grown the tobacco to roll another.
“Let me tell you something, honey,” she said. “Something I should have told you maybe some years ago, but I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know what kind of woman I was.”
“You’re all right.”
“No,” Mama said. “No, I’m not all right. I said that before, and I mean it. I’m not all right. I’m not a good Christian.”
It wasn’t Tuesday, so I wasn’t all that high on religion.
“All I know is, if something works out, God gets praised,” I said. “If it don’t, it’s his will. Seems to me he’s always perched to swoop in and take credit for all manner of things he didn’t do anything about, one way or the other.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’ve been baptized.”
“I been wet,” I said. “All I remember was the preacher held my head under the river water, and when he lifted me up he said something while I blew a stream out of my nose.”
“You shouldn’t have such talk,” she said. “Hell is a hot and bad place.”
“I figure I could go there from here and feel relieved,” I said.
“Let’s not discuss it any further,” she said. “I won’t have the Lord spoken ill of.”
She smoldered for a time. I decided to let her. I sat there and checked out the tips of my fingers, looked at my feet, and watched dust floating in the air. Then she said something that was as surprising as if she had opened her mouth and a covey of quail flew out.
“The man you call Daddy,” she said, “well, he isn’t your daddy.”
I couldn’t say anything. I just sat there, numb as an amputated leg.
“Your real daddy is Brian Collins. He was a lawyer and may still be. Over in Gladewater. He and I, well, we had our moment, and then…I got pregnant with you.”
“Then Don ain’t my daddy?”
“Don’t say ‘ain’t.’”
“Forget the ain’t shit. He ain’t my daddy?”
“No. And don’t cuss…what a foul word. Never use that word…I been meaning to tell you he isn’t your daddy. I was waiting for the right time.”
“Anytime after birth would have been good.”
“I know it’s a shock,” Mama said. “I didn’t tell you because Brian isn’t the one who raised you.”
“It’s not like Don did all that much raising, either,” I said. “My real daddy…what was he like?”
“He treated me very well. He is older than me by five years or so. We loved one another, and I got pregnant.”
“And he didn’t want anything to do with you?”
“He wanted to marry me. We loved one another.”
“You loved him so much, you come over here and married Don and let me think he was my daddy? You left my daddy, a lawyer and a good man, and you married a jackass? What was you thinking?”
“See? I told you I was a bad mother.”
“Okay. You win. You’re a bad mother.”
“Listen here, Sue Ellen. I was ashamed. A Christian woman having a child out of wedlock. It wasn’t right. It made Brian look bad.”
“He said he’d marry you, didn’t he?”
“I was starting to show,” she said. “I didn’t want to get married to him like that, even if it was just in front of a justice of the peace. He had a good job and was respected, and I didn’t want that to be lost to him because I couldn’t keep my legs crossed.”
“He had something to do with the blessed event.”
She smiled a little. “Yes, he did.”
“So to stay respectful, you left him and came here and ended up marrying Don while you were showing, and now here we are, me toting a stick of stove wood and you a cure-all drunk.”
“I was seventeen,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
/> “I’m seventeen.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“Close enough.”
“You aren’t the way I was when I was your age. You’re strong. Like your real daddy. You have a determination like he has. You’re hardheaded in the same way. He wanted to marry me no matter what. I ran off in the dead of night and caught a ride and ended up with a job in a café. I met Don there. He wasn’t so ragged and mean then. He wasn’t an intellectual or financial catch, and no one thought so highly of him that if he married a pregnant woman it would matter. I decided I could deal with that with him, but not with Brian. He deserved better.”
“You didn’t think you was good enough?”
“Were good enough,” she said. “It’s ‘were.’ That’s the proper word.”
“You been sleeping up here and wandering around in a vapor of cure-all, but now you have time to fix my English?”
“Brian was a good man and it would have changed things for him.”
“What about me?” I said.
“I was young. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“That’s your hole in the bag? You were young?”
“I wanted you to have a home. Don said he didn’t care whose child it was. He just wanted me. I thought he meant it, and things would be okay, and Brian could go on with his life. Next day after our wedding, Don got drunk and blacked my eye and I knew who he was. But I was stuck. He got what he wanted, and then the hell began. It’s gone on now for over sixteen years. He has times when he’s like the man I met, but then he has more times where he’s the man I know now.”
“And here you are, wearing hell’s overcoat and happy to have it.”
“I think Don has done the best he could,” she said. “I think, in his own way, he loves me.”
“I know this, Mama—Jinx don’t have to go to bed at night with a stick of stove wood.”
“I stayed for you.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said, leaning forward in the chair. “It was for me, we’d been long gone a long ways back. You stayed because you’re too weak in the head to do anything else. Weak before you took that damn cure-all. Weak and happy to be weak. You’re just glad he don’t hit you as much as he used to, and when he does, not as hard. He’s got you in a bottle now, and he can pour you out and use you when he wants to. That ain’t right, Mama. You left me to deal with him while you was floating on some cloud somewhere. I don’t blame the cure-all for it, Mama. I blame you.”
I could see my words had stung like a bee, and that made me happy.
“You’re right,” she said. “I am a quitter. I quit the man I loved. I quit life, and I married a quitter, and I’ve pretty much quit you, but I didn’t mean to.”
“Now that makes it all better.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.
“Somebody meant it,” I said. “You wasn’t swigging cure-all back when you got pregnant and run off. Tell you what. I’ll leave you a good stick of stove wood by the bed. When you ain’t drunk on your medicine, which is about fifteen minutes a day, you can use it on him. I think a good shot to the side of the head is best. Rest of the time, you can float in the clouds and he can do what he wants, and you can pretend you don’t know or understand. But you ain’t fooling me, and let me say ‘ain’t’ again. Ain’t.”
I got up, picked up my stove wood, hesitated, and laid it on the chair by the bed.
“Here’s the wood,” I said. “I can put it beside you if you like.”
“Honey, don’t be mad.”
I had moved to the foot of the bed and was starting for the door. “I was any madder the house would catch on fire.”
I went out and slammed the door and went to my room and slammed that door and locked up and cried for a while. Then I got tired of crying, as I could see it wasn’t helping a thing. I decided I was so mad I wanted to wear shoes. I got some socks that only had one hole in each foot, put them and my shoes on, and went downstairs and outside, started walking briskly along the river’s edge.
7
By now the sun was pretty high and the air was hot and windless and sticky as molasses. I didn’t know where I was going right then, but I seemed to be getting there fast, and was pretty sweated up over doing it.
I walked for hours, and eventually came to the spot where we had found May Lynn. I don’t know if I went there on purpose, or if I just ended up there, but I came to it.
I walked close to the bank and looked down at the Singer sewing machine that had been left there. I bent down and had a closer gander at it. Where the wire had been tied was bits of gray flesh with flies on it. The killer had bent the two ends in such a way as to tie a knot and then a little stiff bow. It was like what he had used was ribbon, not wires.
I wondered if the murderer thought that was funny. I kept thinking how the man I thought was my daddy, and Constable Sy Higgins, had jerked her feet loose from the wire and hadn’t bothered trying to untwist it off of her. I could still hear the bones in May Lynn’s feet snapping. I remembered how the wet skin stripped off her feet like sticky bread dough and stayed on the wire.
I shooed the flies away, and as I did something moved inside of me that made me feel funny; something that felt like a wild animal trying to find a place to settle down. I started walking again.
I walked until the trees and brush thinned and there was a wet clay path that went up a grass-covered hill like a knife cut in a bright orange sweet potato. When I got to the top of the hill, there was another clay road that wound off of it, and it led to the top of another hill, and on top of that hill was a small white house that looked as fresh as a newborn calf. There was a small green garden out to the side of it with a fence around it to keep out the deer and such, and way out back was a little red outhouse. It looked so bright and perky I had the urge to go up there and use it, even if I didn’t have to go.
The red clay, being wet from the night before, stuck to my shoes and made my feet heavy. I got off the path and took off my shoes and wiped their bottoms across the grass until they were clean. I put them back on and stayed on the grass as I climbed the hill. On the top of the hill it was flat and there wasn’t any grass. The ground had been raked, and there were bits of gravel in the dirt that Jinx’s daddy had hauled in. In front of the house there was a horseshoe drive and no car in it. The car would be up north with Jinx’s daddy.
The house was very small, maybe two rooms, but unlike our huge house, it was in fine shape and the roof looked to have been shingled not too long ago. The shingles were made of good wood, split perfect, laid out and nailed, tarred over to keep out the rot. I knew Jinx’s daddy had done it before he went back north. It was always his way to keep things fresh and tight.
There were a few chickens in the yard, but there wasn’t any livestock. Jinx’s daddy mailed money home to them, and unlike most anyone else around the bottomland, they bought all the meat they ate, except for chicken now and again, and some fish. They mostly had the chickens for eggs, and since they didn’t have any kind of set place for them to nest, they had to be alert as to where the eggs had been laid, or otherwise, you wanted an egg for your breakfast, you might have a bit of a treasure hunt before you could crack one in the pan. I knew that for a fact, as I had to do exactly the same thing at home.
I was almost to the door when I saw Jinx come out of the house carrying a basket with laundry piled high in it. She had her hair out of her usual braids and knotted up behind her head in a thistle-like pile and tied off with a piece of white cord. She was wearing a man’s blue work shirt, overalls, and shoes that looked as if they had room for another pair of feet in them.
She called out to me and I followed her to the backyard and the wash line, which was strung between two tall posts. There were clothespins in the basket, and I helped her hang the wash. We hung it carefully and neatly, and while we moved down the line, we talked.
“I’m wanting to go on that trip we talked about,” I said.
“I wanted to,” Jinx said. “Then
I get to thinking about Mama here with just my little brother. Now that I’m home and not out there on the river, this seems all right to me.”
“Not me. What I got is a big house that’s about to fall down around my ears, a drunk mother, and a jackass I have to fight off with a piece of stove wood that I thought was my daddy, but he ain’t. So I reckon I’m coming from a place now that I wasn’t coming from yesterday.”
“What’s that you say?” Jinx said, pausing with a clothespin she was about to clamp to a pair of underpants. “That part about he ain’t your daddy.”
“That’s it. He ain’t my daddy. There’s a fellow named Brian Collins in Gladewater, and he’s my daddy. He’s a lawyer.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“It’s true.”
“Ain’t that something,” Jinx said.
“It’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time, finding out that old son of a bitch ain’t my kin.”
“He did raise and feed you, though,” Jinx said.
“No, Mama did what there was of that, then she took to bed and hasn’t done much since I been big enough to tote my own water. I guess what I’m saying, Jinx, is I’m going away, even if I have to go by myself.”
Jinx let that comment hang in the air like the wash on the line. We moved along, hanging clothes, and when we got to the end of the hanging, she said, “When you leaving?”
“Soon as possible. What I want is to look at that map another time, see I can figure out where that money is, nab it, burn May Lynn to a cinder, stick her ashes in a jar, and head out. I get through here, I’m going to find Terry and talk to him, get the map, and see what I can do from there. For me, it’s die dog or eat the hatchet. I’m heading out quick. I want away from here and soon as I can go. Mama has pretty much given up. She told me as much. Gave me her blessing to light out. Besides, right now I’m feeling a little less than friendly toward her, her waiting till now to let me know Don ain’t kin. It’s like she told me, ‘Oh, by the way, those legs, they don’t belong to you. I stole those from someone when you were born, and now they’re asking for them back.’”
“Maybe she thought you’d handle it some better when you was older,” Jinx said.