Bastard out of Carolina (19 page)

“Oh, Anney.”

I pushed the door open with my foot and stepped through. Their heads turned to me, Mama leaning forward on her chair close to Ruth’s bent neck, Ruth looking paler and more worn than when I had gone into the kitchen.

“Took you long enough.” Aunt Ruth’s glance was too intent.

“I sliced the lemon the way Mama likes. You can see right through those slices.” My face felt frozen. I gave Mama her glass and went back to the overturned bucket and the broken mass of roots. I tore one half free and dumped it back in the bucket and then just as roughly started breaking out four equal sections of roots and top growth. As I worked I kept my face down, my eyes on the plant.

“I was telling your aunt Ruth that Daddy Glen’s started a new job over at the Sunshine Dairy. He’s real pleased about going to work for his daddy, and it looks like this job is going to work out pretty good.”

“That’s good.” I shook dried dirt free from one clump of roots and then set the mass down in the damp mix in the earthenware pot. “You want me to use that braided cord to hang these up, Aunt Ruth?”

“Yeah, the brown cord Travis brought home from the dime store. It should hold up pretty good.”

I nodded without looking at her.

“You get that done, Bone, and we can talk about when you’re gonna come home. Reese’s been missing you pretty bad.”

“I thought I was gonna stay till school started again.” I kept my voice neutral, my head still down. “Aunt Ruth can’t possibly get along without me. She needs me.”

There was a long silence, and then Aunt Ruth cleared her throat. “Bone’s right, Anney. I don’t know how I’d drag my sorry butt out of bed without Bone to wake me up. She gets up in the morning singing along to the radio. Sounds just like Kitty Wells sometimes.” She might have been starting to laugh, but coughed instead.

I looked up then, carefully, trying to keep my face in the shade. Mama was leaning forward into the sun, her fingers laced together on her knees, her eyes squinted against the light but intent on me. Aunt Ruth was leaning back in her rocker, her hand up, almost covering her mouth. Mama pulled her fingers free and dropped her hands down so that her palms cupped her knees.

“Well, I can see how you might not be able to stand the loss of that. But maybe I’ll just bring Reese out on Saturday. Wouldn’t want her to forget what her big sister looks like.”

I spooned loose dirt into the little pot, sprinkled water on the dusty leaves. The cutting drooped already, getting ready to lose half its growth. But the stem was moist and flexible under my fingers. Strong. It would come back strong.

 

In August the revival tent went up about half a mile from Aunt Ruth’s house on the other side of White Horse Road. Some evenings while Travis and Ruth sat and talked quietly, I would walk up there on my own to sit outside and listen. The preacher was a shouter. He’d rave and threaten, and it didn’t seem he was ever going to get to the invocation. I sat in the dark, trying not to think about anything, especially not about Daddy Glen or Mama or how much of an exile I was beginning to feel. I kept thinking I saw my uncle Earle in the men who stood near the highway sharing a bottle in a paper sack, black-headed men with blasted, rough-hewn faces. Was it hatred or sorrow that made them look like that, their necks so stiff and their eyes so cold?

Did I look like that?

Would I look like that when I grew up?

I remembered Aunt Alma putting her big hands over my ears and turning my face to catch the light, saying, “Just as well you smart; you an’t never gonna be a beauty.”

At least I wasn’t as ugly as Cousin Mary-May, I had told Reese, and been immediately ashamed. Mary-May was the most famous ugly woman in Greenville County, with a wide, flat face, a bent nose, tiny eyes, almost no hair, and just three teeth left in her mouth. Still, she was good-natured and always volunteered to be the witch in the Salvation Army’s Halloween Horror House. Her face hadn’t made her soul ugly. If I kept worrying about not being a beauty, I’d probably ruin myself. Mama was always saying people could see your soul in your face, could see your hatefulness and lack of charity. With all the hatefulness I was trying to hide, it was a wonder I wasn’t uglier than a toad in mud season.

The singing started. I leaned forward on the balls of my feet and hugged my knees, humming. Revivals are funny. People get pretty enthusiastic, but they sometimes forget just which hymn it is they’re singing. I grinned at the sound of mumbled unintelligible song, watching the men near the road punch each other lightly and curse in a friendly fashion.

The preacher said something I didn’t understand. There was a moment of silence, and then a pure tenor voice rose up into the night sky. The spit soured in my mouth. They had a real singer in there, a real gospel choir.

The night seemed to wrap all around me like a blanket. My insides felt as if they had melted, and I could taste the wind in my mouth. The sweet gospel music poured through me in a piercing young boy’s voice, and made all my nastiness, all my jealousy and hatred, swell in my heart. I remembered Aunt Ruth’s fingers fluttering birdlike in front of her face, Uncle Earle’s flushed cheeks and lank black hair as they’d cried together on the porch, Mama’s pinched, worried face and Daddy Glen’s cold, angry eyes. The world was too big for me, the music too strong. I knew, I knew I was the most disgusting person on earth. I didn’t deserve to live another day. I started hiccuping and crying.

“I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

How could I live with myself? How could God stand me? Was this why Jesus wouldn’t speak to my heart? The music washed over me....
Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling.
The music was a river trying to wash me clean. I sobbed and dug my heels into the dirt, drunk on grief and that pure, pure voice soaring above the choir. Aunt Alma swore all gospel singers were drunks, but right then it didn’t matter to me. If it was whiskey backstage or tongue-kissing in the dressing room, whatever it took to make that juice was necessary, was fine. I wiped my eyes and swore out loud. Get that boy another bottle, I wanted to yell. Find that girl a hardheaded husband. But goddam, keep them singing that music. Lord, make me drunk on that music.

I rocked back and forth, grinding my heels into the red dirt, my fists into my stomach, crooning into the dark night and the reflected glow from the tent. I cried until I was dry, and then I laughed. I put my head back and laughed until my voice was hoarse and the damp fog came in to cover the lights from the revival. If Aunt Ruth had come out to me then, I would have apologized for everything, for living and not loving her enough to save her from the cancer that was eating her alive. I didn’t know. For something, surely, I would have had something to apologize for, for being young and healthy and sitting there full of music. That was what gospel was meant to do—make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified. It worked on me. It absolutely worked on me.

T
he gospel revival tent had been a revelation, but the “Sunrise Gospel Hour” became an obsession. Every morning, before Aunt Ruth and Uncle Travis were up, I’d go sit close to the radio in their parlor to listen to the “Sunrise Gospel Hour.” In the stillness of the early dawn, I would lean into the speaker and practice my secret ambition, cupping my fingers next to my chin and tilting my head back to whisper-sing so no one could hear me. I sang quietly along with everything, not just the gospel shows but the country hits that followed—Marty Robbins, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, Ruth Brown, Stonewall Jackson, June Carter, Johnny Horton. I sang so quietly I could barely hear my own voice, but in my imagination my song soared out strong and beautiful.

Aunt Ruth would always smile when she saw me with my head pressed close to the radio. “Turn it up,” she’d say. “You an’t the only one likes a little music.” Sometimes she’d even start humming along. One weekend she got Earle to bring his record player over and we spent two days listening to her favorite songs. It turned out Aunt Ruth had a bunch of her own records in a box under her bed, an original Carter Family set, Patsy Montana singing “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” the Clinch Mountain Clan doing Hank Williams’s “Are You Walking and a-Talking for the Lord,” Roy Acuff’s “Wabash Cannonball,” and Roy Acuff singing “The Wreck on the Highway.” Her prize was a copy of Al Dexter and the Troopers singing “Pistol Packing Mama.” Every time the chorus came on, she’d pound her hand on the couch and sing along, waving at me to join in with her. We’d yell it out, “Pistol packing mama, lay that pistol down,” until we drove Uncle Travis out to sit on the bumper of his car with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

He came in once to get a hunk of cheese for a meal and stopped in to complain. “You’re scaring off the dogs. Give it a break.”

“Leave us alone, old man.” Aunt Ruth’s face was pink and happy. “We’re full of the spirit.”

“But you sound terrible,” he told us sadly. “You just can’t sing. ”

“Oh, hell, Travis, we know.” Aunt Ruth looked too pleased with herself to take offense, but I was shocked. I thought we’d been sounding pretty good. “We know and we don’t care. It’s just so much fun. Why don’t you join us? Come on. Bone, put on that one Earle loaned us. You like Stonewall Jackson, don’t you, Travis?”

“Oh, no. You an’t gonna get me started. I an’t no singing fool.” He backed out the door like he was afraid something was gonna jump on him. I shrugged and put on the Jackson song. If I squeezed my neck down tight I could almost mimic Stonewall’s deep sad sound. My voice came out rusty and dark as his, like a man singing up from the bottom of a coal mine.

Aunt Ruth beamed at my attempt, laughing until she almost strangled. “Oh, God, Bone! Good God, you are something. You are just about more than I can stand.” She fell back weakly, her fingers still keeping time to the music. “Lord God, you are. You are. Lord God, play it again.”

 

The weekend before school was supposed to start, Mama said I had to move back home and leave Aunt Ruth to the care of her daughter Deedee. Deedee had agreed to come home only after Travis promised to make the payments on her prized Chevy sedan, and she delayed her arrival until the night before I was to leave and showed up irritable and complaining of having to come back at all. She acted like her mama’s illness was her personal cross to bear. I was appalled.

“She could die any time,” I told Deedee the next morning. “Don’t you ever think about that?”

We were out on Aunt Ruth’s porch waiting for Mama to come for me, Deedee sitting in the rocker while I leaned against the rail. Deedee just smirked, lit another of the Chesterfield cigarettes that Aunt Ruth hated, and tossed the dead match back at me. “She an’t gonna die, not yet anyway, not till I’m out of my mind with boredom and ready to kill her myself. You don’t know, Bonehead. You don’t know how long Mama’s been dragging around. I been picking up after her and my lazy-assed brothers all my life. People always whining at me what a tragedy it is, Mama so sick and likely to die. Uh-huh, right, I say. First it was female trouble and she couldn’t lift nothing, then it was bad lungs and nobody supposed to smoke in the house. Never could play the radio or make no noise after sunset so she could get her rest. Never no boyfriends could come by and honk to take me out. No new dresses ’cause her medicine cost so much. Nothing but wheezing and whining and telling me what to do.”

Deedee’s face was hateful, her eyes flinty and piercing. She reached up and grabbed my forearm, pulling me down close to her. “You don’t know what it’s like, Bone. Getting out on your own and then being dragged back home. Wait a few years, get yourself a sweetheart, a job that pays you your own money, stuff you like to do that your mama thinks is silly or sinful.” She let go of my arm and kicked the rocker into motion. “Hell, just about everything I like in this world is silly or sinful. Silly sinful Deedee, that’s what they call me. Well, damn them, I don’t care. I got my car and my own plans, and when that car’s paid for, you can bet your ass I’ll be gone again. Next time I get out of here, the devil himself an’t gonna be able to drag me back.”

The hair on the nape of my neck stood up. I didn’t know what to say, what to think. Earle had finished painting the porch last weekend, and now the white boards shone in the sun, throwing the noon light up into Deedee’s dark eyes. I remembered Earle leaning against the porch rail shaking his head, his voice hoarse and sad as he complained that he just didn’t understand how things could get so messed up. The simplest things, I thought. I went down the stairs and squatted on the bottom step with my fingers templed on my knees as if I were praying. Deedee sounded like she hated her mama, wanted her to die. I couldn’t understand that, couldn’t stand to think about it. I watched for Mama’s car and sang over and over in my head, “Sun’s gonna shine, sun’s gonna shine, in my back door, someday.” Song was prayer, prayer was song. What could I sing that would touch Deedee’s heart or my own, comfort either one of us?

 

Every afternoon after school I was supposed to go stay with Reese at Aunt Alma‘s, but instead I started going over to the West Greenville Cafe on the Eustis Highway. The jukebox had as many old songs as new—Loretta Lynn, Teresa Brewer, Patsy Cline, and Mama’s favorite, Kitty Wells. The truckers loved that music as much as I did. I’d sit out under the cafe windows and hum along with those twangy girl voices, imagining myself crooning those raw and desperate notes. Everybody knew that Opry stars started as gospel singers. All those women singing about their unfaithful men sang first about the certain love of God. Half asleep in the sun, reassured by the familiar smell of frying fat, I’d make promises to God. If only He’d let me be a singer! I knew I’d probably turn to whiskey and rock ’n’ roll like they all did, but not for years, I promised. Not for years, Lord. Not till I had glorified His name and bought Mama a yellow Cadillac and a house on Old Henderson Road.