A Place to Call Home (8 page)

He limped up the middle of Main Street, apelike and huge, a necklace of garland hanging down his plaid shirt and baggy overalls. Greasy dark hair stuck out from his jowly face. He sashayed and twisted his butt. His mouth was screwed down in sarcastic contempt. He staggered through the Girl Scout troop. They dropped their troop banner and scattered like green leaves in a windstorm. Big Roan plowed ahead, waving a beer bottle. “Y’all want to see Santy Claus?” he bellowed. “I’ll drop my pants and y’all can kiss him on both cheeks!”

Then he threw the beer bottle. It hit one of the Wise Men’s nervous horses on the rump. The horse bolted and collided with Aunt Rhonda’s mule. Aunt Rhonda fell off. The mule jerked away from Uncle Dwayne and darted ahead. The high school band split down the middle, and my cousin Aster toppled over with her tuba. The mule raced by the fire truck and the firemen accidentally pelted it with a handful of candy, which made the mule accelerate. It careened past Aunt Irene and clipped one of her angel wings, and she spun sideways like an out-of-control airplane.

My feet were frozen to the windowsill. People were screaming. Daddy and some other men ran out in the street
and grabbed Big Roan. He went down swinging and hit Daddy in the face.

I squealed with outrage and fear. Suddenly I realized that I was standing on the sidewalk, that Roanie had pulled me off the sill and set me there, and that I was by myself.

He’d melted into the shadows, or evaporated from shame.

The Atlanta newspapers and TV stations ran stories about the Dunderry Christmas parade. We were funny, small-town, mountain people. We were quaint. We were humiliated.

Daddy had a broken nose. Big Roan was sentenced to three months in jail. My whole family, both the Maloney and Delaney sides, swore no
Sullivan
would ever cross their doorsteps. I was the family goat after word leaked out about my hobnobbing with Roanie during the parade. Mama was widely advised to keep an eye on me, as if I might grow up to join the circus or vote Republican.

Cousin Vince went after Roanie full-bore this time and caught him before he could get to Ten Jumps. Uncle William signed the court order, and Aunt Bess sent him off to a state boys’ home in Atlanta. Aunt Bess told everyone it was a relief to know that Roanie Sullivan would be safe and well fed during Christmas.

Grandpa was right. Some brands of kindness are hard to abide.

A
unt Jane, who ran the Dunderry Library, said the finest writing grew out of terrible pain and suffering over the human condition. That must be true. I was desperate to console Roanie during the month he spent away, and the springs beneath my mattress were lined with letters, poems, and stories I’d scrawled since Christmas. I’d spent more time inside my room than out.

“Why, sure, you can send some of your writings to Roanie,” Mama said carefully, when I asked her. “But I’d have to check your letters for, hmmm, spelling and grammar first.”

I hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck yesterday. I knew what Mama really meant. My letters would end up looking like some of the ones Josh had written home when he was in Vietnam. Full of blacked-out lines and pruned thoughts. “I’ll think about it,” I told her.

I got the idea for my disastrous Roanie Sullivan poem by reading books that were bad for me.

Our house was filled with books. The ones that were good for me were downstairs in the living-room bookcases, the shelves crammed with encyclopedias, agricultural textbooks, and leather-bound classics like Shakespeare and Dickens. The coffee table nearly sagged with Mama’s huge
picture books about art. But the real library was in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom.

Pyramids of paperbacks were stacked on the floor under their polished, cherrywood nightstands. Daddy’s side was wild territory inhabited by testy gunslingers and four-armed aliens and tough detectives who liked their gin cold and their babes hot. Mickey Spillane and Louis L’Amour. Robert Heinlein and John D. MacDonald. Man Stuff.

Mama’s collection was more varied but no less woolly—Tolkien and Vonnegut, Lillian Hellman and John Le Carré, and stacks of fat, luscious historical romance novels, bursting with adventure and passion, heavy on medieval England, which Mama, proud of Grandmother Elizabeth’s homeland, considered part of our family heritage.

I snuck their paperbacks into my bedroom and worked my way through the ones that were particularly shocking and not totally bewildering. So my imagination ran to hard-boiled detectives and space monsters and adventurous medieval ladies, all of whom, to my astonishment, were absolutely determined to have sex.

Sex was not spoken about in our house. It was not joked about, even by my brothers, not in front of me anyhow. Body parts and bathroom noises, yes. Merged body parts, no.

After my awful Steckem Road visit I demanded my older girl cousins explain
exactly
why everyone called it
Stick ’Em in Road
. They told me, and their description was so graphic, so gross, and made the whole sex thing sound so embarrassing that I looked at them shrewdly and said, “Anybody with more sense than a rock wouldn’t waste their time doing
that
.”

What I knew of romance I learned from watching old movies on TV and studying Mama and Daddy.

Mama had big blue eyes and a butt that was the envy of every woman in town—shaped like an upside-down Valentine heart. Daddy liked her fanny so much, he patted it whenever he thought nobody was looking. He would give
her a wicked grin when we caught them doing stuff like that.

Daddy was one of those nearly fat-free men with ropy muscles and hands that could bend steel cable. He had long, lean arms and skinny legs, and he carried what little fat he did have in his belly, a hard little mound above his belt buckle. I would thump it. It felt like the rind of a ripe watermelon. Mama called it his spare gas tank, and she liked to rub it. When he was sitting at the table, Mama would walk by and trail one fingertip through the soft hair at the base of his neck.

The contrast was clear—sex was something sweaty and naked and embarrassing, not to mention highly regulated and often forbidden, but romance was lovely and polite and involved admiring each other with your clothes on.

So that was the kind of romance Roanie and I would have. I resolved to explain my intentions with a series of poems led by a polite ode to his worthiness.

I taped the first poem to our refrigerator in a prominent spot between the
Farmers’ Bulletin
calendar and a snapshot of Mama, Daddy, me, and my brothers in the lobby of the Atlanta Civic Center when we went to see the touring company show of
The Sound of Music
.

Cojones
was a term I’d discovered in one of Daddy’s detective novels. I judged its impressive power by the way it was used in the book. I waited to see who’d notice the poem first.

Aunt Arnetta was as nearsighted as a mole. She wore thick glasses with bright orange rims or prescription sunglasses
with Day-Glo blue reflecting lenses, which made her look like a big, blue bottle fly. She was a hefty woman, a no-nonsense woman with a fashion sense that favored brown with hints of more brown.

Her allegiances were rock-hard: God, church, children, job, bingo. I think thieving, weasel-inclined Carlton was an embarrassment to her, and probably the reason she was so hard on everyone else.

Uncle Eugene, who owned a local car dealership and was umbilically tied to a TV set in his spare time, was way down on her list of priorities. She worked for a state agricultural agency as a home economics expert.

She had come over to drop off a new brochure on no-salt cooking, because Mama was worried about Great-Gran’s blood pressure. Aunt Arnetta tromped into the kitchen, where I was lounging at the table pretending to read a
Reader’s Digest
. It was a freezing day in early January, and a streak of cold air seemed to follow her across the warm room.

“You’ll ruin your eyes holding that magazine up like that,” she said to me. “You’re a bookworm. You better practice good habits, or you’ll end up with bad eyes and stooped shoulders.”

“Oh. Okay. Yes, ma’am.”

She breezed past me, and I was afraid she’d go through to the back hall and miss the refrigerator completely. But she zoomed in on my poem like a radar and halted. I watched her lean forward. She leaned back. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the lapel of her brown blazer, put them back on, and leaned forward. She quivered.

“CLAIRE KARLEEN MALONEY, what is this filth?”

Aunt Arnetta tore my poem off the refrigerator and whirled around and slapped the paper on the table. My mouth went dry. “It’s a poem!”

“You’re writing poetry about … about Roanie Sullivan’s
privates
?”

“What? Huh? No, it’s about his cojones!”

“Privates,” Aunt Arnetta repeated, shaking the paper under my nose. “Male organs. Gonads. Testicles.” Her voice rose on each word, and when I stared at her in blank horror, she finished loudly, “His
balls
.”

I shrieked.
That’s
what the men in Daddy’s books meant when they said somebody had big cojones? “I didn’t know! I thought cojones were
muscles
! Big, strong
muscles
.”

“Oh, I’ll just bet you didn’t know! A smart girl like you! Let me tell you something, Missy Claire, if you lay down with pigs, you’ll get up muddy! You don’t have the good sense to keep your distance from that lowlife Roanie Sullivan! Well, I’ll just put the lid on this pot right now! I’m telling your mama and daddy that that junkyard dirty-fingered hillbilly white-trash troublemaker is inspiring you to write dirty rhymes!”

I leaped up. “No! It isn’t his fault! I read about cojones in a book!”

“There’s not one book in this house that discusses the male privates in those sorts of lewd terms!”

Aunt Arnetta had no idea. “It’s not Roanie’s fault! Don’t say anything to Mama and Daddy! I was just trying to show everybody what I think about him!”

“You’re sweet on him! Lord have mercy, this is worse than I thought! Nine years old and running after white trash! Claire Karleen Maloney, you put that boy out of your mind! There’s no way on God’s green earth this family’ll ever let you take after that Sullivan boy! He’s bred to be thick-blooded and mushy-minded, and he won’t ever amount to a hill of beans! In another few years he’ll be lyin’ around on welfare breeding a shack full of younguns with some whiffle-tailed girl! Your folks’d just as soon lock you in the cellar and throw away the key than see you fall under his filthy-mouthed spell!”

By the time she finished I was over my shock and well on the way to a tantrum. Never talk back to your elders. Never. I knew that, but since I had a ruined reputation now anyway, I might as well go whole hog. “Go worry about
Uncle Eugene’s cojones!” I yelled. “Daddy says he can’t find ’em anymore because you keep ’em in your jewelry box!”

No tomato ever turned redder than Aunt Arnetta’s face at that moment. She stuttered something and her eyes gleamed with magnified tears behind her glasses. She slapped the no-salt brochure down on the table and went to look for Daddy.

Oh, what a mess. I got lectured on all sides and punished—I lost my weekly allowance for the rest of the month and had extra work added to my regular household chores—but worse, everyone decided I had absolutely no sense at all where Roanie was concerned.

To top things off, Aunt Arnetta was mad at Daddy for months. Daddy told me not to ever repeat anything he said about her and Uncle Eugene again. Uncle Eugene’s missing balls—like my devotion to Roanie—was the kind of embarrassment the family swept under the rug.

I took all my writings outside and buried them behind one of the barns. A person can never be too careful with her privates. Especially if she isn’t certain what they are.

Roanie came home finally, along with Big Roan. We heard Big Roan stayed down on Steckem Road with Daisy McClendon most of the time. That’s why Aunt Dockey and Mama didn’t go over there the next Easter. They sent Uncle Bert and Daddy to deliver the Easter baskets.

I don’t know what kind of Easter Roanie had that spring; Hop and Evan saw him at school and said he was even more of a loner than before. I tried to talk Hop into giving him my Easter rabbit and a note I’d written; I wanted him to know I was sorry Aunt Bess had sent him away and that she’d meant well by it. But Hop said the family doghouse only had room for one Maloney at a time and he didn’t want to be stuck in it, too.

Hop did try to talk to Roanie for me eventually, but Roanie just stared at him as if he were an enemy.

I guess, at that point, we were all enemies to Roanie.

That September I finally learned, firsthand, why Sean and Bridget Maloney hadn’t had enough teeth for a smile. Love is hard on a smile. It will knock your teeth right out.