Bastard out of Carolina (7 page)

“Smile, now, everyone,” called Alma as the shutter clicked.

T
he spring Mama married Glen Waddell, there were thunderstorms every afternoon and rolling clouds that hung around the foothills north and west to the Smokies. The moon came up with a ghostly halo almost every night, and there was a blue shimmer on the horizon at sunset.

“An’t no time to be marrying,” Granny announced. “Or planting or building nothing.”

“You sure, now, Anney?” Earle must have asked Mama twice before he drove her down to the courthouse in his pickup truck to meet Glen and get the license. It seemed he just couldn’t take her ready smile for an answer, even though he agreed to be best man after Glen’s brother had refused the honor. He asked her one more time before he let her out of the truck. “You’re worse than Granny,” Anney told him. “Don’t you want to see me settled down and happy?” He gave it up and kissed her out the door.

Granny wasn’t surprised when she heard that Great-Grandma Shirley had turned down her invitation to the wedding dinner Aunt Alma organized. The Eustis aunts, Marvella and Maybelle, the ones who insisted they could tell the future from their beans, also skipped the dinner, though Marvella was polite about it. “I know he loves Anney,” Marvella told Alma when she came by to collect flowers from their garden. “And sometimes love can change everything.”

Maybelle was not so generous. “Yeah, Glen loves Anney. He loves her like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up. I don’t trust that boy, don’t want our Anney marrying him.”

“But Anney loves Glen,” Alma told Maybelle impatiently. “That’s the thing you ought to be thinking about. She needs him, needs him like a starving woman needs meat between her teeth, and I an’t gonna let nobody take this away from her. Come on, Maybelle, you know there an’t no way to say what’s gonna happen between a man and a woman. That an’t our business anyway, that’s theirs.”

Alma took Maybelle’s hands between her own. “We just got to stand behind our girl, do everything we can to make sure she don’t get hurt again.”

“Oh, Lord.” Maybelle shook her head. “I don’t want to fight you, Alma. And maybe you’re right. I know how lonely Anney’s been. I know.” She pulled her hands free, tucked some loose gray hairs up in the bun at the back of her neck, and turned to her sister. “We got to think about this, Marvella. We got to think hard about our girl.”

They did what they could. The sisters sent Mama a wedding present, a love knot Marvella had made using some of her own hair, after Maybelle had cut little notches in their rabbits’ ears under a new moon, adding the blood to the knot. She set the rabbits loose, and then the two of them tore up half a dozen rows of their beans and buried honeycomb in a piece of lace tablecloth where the beans had flourished. The note with the love knot told Mama that she should keep it under the mattress of the new bed Glen had bought, but Mama sniffed the blood and dried hair, and shook her head over the thing. She couldn’t quite bring herself to throw it away, but she put it in one of her flower pots out in the utility room where Glen wouldn’t find it stinking up their house.

 

Reese and I hated the honeymoon. We both thought we would get to go. For weeks before the wedding Mama kept telling us that this was a marriage of all of us, that we were taking Glen as our daddy at the same time she was taking him as a husband. She and Alma had even sewed us up little lace veils to wear as we walked ahead of her at the wedding, Reese carrying flowers while I carried the rings. But Mama and Glen left halfway through Aunt Alma’s dinner, with only one quick kiss goodbye.

“Why don’t we get to go?” Reese kept demanding while everybody laughed at her. I got so mad I hid in Alma’s sewing room and cried myself to sleep in her rocker. When I woke up I was on her daybed with a quilt across me and the house quiet. I got Alma’s picture album out and climbed into the rocker. The new pictures from the picnic were at the back. There were half a dozen snapshots of Reese and me, alone, together, and with Granny or Earle. There was only one good one of Glen and Mama, only one in which you could see her smile and his eyes. In most of them, Mama’s head was bent so that only her chin showed, or Glen’s face was turned away so that you saw only the pale line of his neck and ear under his new haircut. Because of that, perhaps, the good picture was even more startling.

Everything in that picture was clear, sharp, in focus, the contrast so strong you could trace the lines where sunlight sheared off and shade began. There was a blush on Mama’s cheek like the shadow of a bird, polka dots on her seersucker blouse, a raised nap on her dark calf-length skirt, and a fine part in her brushed-back blond hair. Mama was beautiful in it, no question, though there was a puffiness under her eyes and a tightness in the muscles of her neck that made her chin stick out. But her smile was full, her eyes clear, and you could see right into her, see how gentle she was in the way her neck angled as she looked past Glen to Reese and me, the way her hands lay open on her lap, the fingers slightly bent as if they were ready to catch the sunlight.

Beside Mama, Glen was half in shadow with his head turned to the side, but the light shone on his smile, his cheek, his strong hands and slender frame. The smile was determined, tight, forceful, the eyes brilliant in the camera lens, gleaming in the sun’s glare, the shoulders tense and hunched forward a little, one arm extended to hold Mama close, reaching around her from where he sat to her left. You could not tell a thing about Glen from that picture, except that he was a good-looking man, strong and happy to be holding his woman. Mama’s eyes were soft with old hurt and new hope; Glen’s eyes told nothing. The man’s image was as flat and empty as a sheet of tin in the sun, throwing back heat and light, but no details—not one clear line of who he really was behind those eyes.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to live with him once the honeymoon was past. I looked at the picture again and remembered the day of the picnic, the way he kept pulling Mama back against him, his hands cupped over her belly possessively. I had heard Alma tease Mama the day before the wedding that she better hurry up and get married before she started showing. Mama had gotten all upset, demanding to know how Alma had found out she was pregnant. I wondered if she had told Glen yet.

“Come on, girls.” Glen’s voice when he called Reese and me for the picture had had a loud impatient note I had never heard before. I’d come back around Earle’s truck at a walk and looked into his face carefully. Yes, he knew. He was so pleased with himself, he looked swollen with satisfaction under that terrible haircut. Mama had said he wanted her to have his son, and it looked to me like he was sure he had it on the way.

I sat in that rocker with those pictures until morning woke the house and Aunt Alma came to check on me. I ran my fingers over Reese’s baby smile on one, traced Earle’s dark hair on another, examined just how far Granny’s chin pushed out under her lower lip, and looked back to my own face in each to see how the camera had seen me—my eyes like Mama’s eyes, darker but open as hers, my smile fiercer and wider than Reese‘s, and my body in motion across Alma’s yard like an animal leaping into the air.

 

Glen was like a boy about the baby, grinning and boasting and putting his palms flat on Mama’s stomach every chance he could to feel his son kick. His son—he never even entertained the notion Mama might deliver a girl. No, this would be his boy, Glen was sure. He bought a crib and a new layette set on time payments, put them in their bedroom, and filled the crib with toys a boy baby would love. “My boy’s gonna look like the best of me and Anney,” he told everyone insistently, as if by saying it often enough he could make it so. He even went out to Aunt Maybelle and Aunt Marvella’s house with a gift of sweet corn for the rabbits, just so he could look into their eyes when he said “a boy” and hear them say it back to him when they took the corn.

“They said it was a boy,” he told Earle later over pinto beans and cornbread at Aunt Ruth’s house—the first evidence he’d ever given that he believed in the Eustis aunts’ claim to women’s magic. He was bursting with pride.

“Well, goddam, Glen. Congratulations.” Earle kept his face carefully neutral.

“Never come between a man and his ambitions,” he told Uncle Beau after Glen had gone. “Glen ever gets the notion that anybody messed up his chance of getting a boy child out of Anney, and he’s gonna go plumb crazy.”

“A man should never put his ambition in a woman’s belly.” Beau didn’t like Glen much at all, couldn’t, he admitted, since he never trusted a man who didn’t drink, and Glen was as close to a teetotaler as the family had ever seen. Beau spit out the side of his mouth. “Serve him right if she gave him another girl.”

Uncle Nevil harrumphed, pouring them each a short glass of his home stock. Nevil never wasted words when he could grunt, or a grunt when he could move his hands. He was supposed to be the quietest man in Greenville County, and his wife, Fay, was said to be the fattest woman. “The two of them are more like furniture than anything,” Granny had once said. “Just taking up space and shedding dust like a chifforobe or a couch.” Nevil and Fay had heard her and in their quiet way refused to be in the same room with her ever again. It complicated family gatherings, but not too much. As Aunt Alma told everybody, Nevil wasn’t any great loss to conversation anyway.

It was a surprise, then, when Nevil sipped his whiskey, lifted his head, and spoke so clearly he could be heard out on the porch. “Me, I’m hoping Anney does give him a son, half a dozen sons while she’s at it. That Glen’s got something about him. I almost like him, but the boy could turn like whiskey in a bad barrel, and I’m hoping he don’t. Anney’s had enough trouble in her life.” He sipped again and shut his mouth back to its usual flat line.

Earle and Beau stared at him, unsure whether to laugh or curse, but finally they dropped their glances into their cups. It was true enough, they both agreed. Anney deserved an end to trouble in her life.

 

The night Mama went into labor, Glen packed the Pontiac with blankets and Cokes for Reese and me, and parked out in the hospital lot to wait. He’d been warned it was going to take a while for the baby to come, and when he couldn’t stand pacing the halls anymore, he came down to smoke cigarettes and listen to music on the car radio while Reese and I napped in the backseat. At some point well before dawn, when it was still dark and cold, he reached across the seat to tug my shoulder and pull me up front with him. He gave me some Coke and half a Baby Ruth and told me he’d been in to check a little earlier and Mama was doing fine.

“Fine.” I blinked at him and nodded, unsure what I was supposed to do or say. He smoked fiercely, exhaling out the top of the window where he’d opened it just a few inches, and talking to me like I was a grown-up. “I know she’s worried,” he said. “She thinks if it’s a girl, I won’t love it. But it will be our baby, and if it’s a girl, we can make another soon enough. I’ll have my son. Anney and I will have our boy. I know it. I know.”

He talked on, whispering quietly, sometimes so softly I could not understand him. I pulled my blanket around me and watched the sprinkling of stars visible just over the tall fir trees at the edge of the lot. The song playing low on the radio was a Kitty Wells tune that Mama liked. I rocked my head to the music and watched the night. I was thinking about the baby Mama was having, wondering what it might be like, if maybe it wouldn’t be a girl. What were they going to name it? Glen Junior, if it was a boy? They had never said. Mama thought it was unlucky to choose a name for a baby till it was born.

Glen put his hand on my neck, and the stars seemed to wink at me. I wasn’t used to him touching me, so I hugged my blanket and held still. He slid out from behind the steering wheel a little and pulled me up on his lap. He started humming to the music, shifting me a little on his thighs. I turned my face up to look into his eyes. There were only a few lights on in the parking lot, but the red and yellow dials on the radio shone on his face. He smiled, and for the first time I saw the smile in his eyes as plain as the one on his mouth. He pushed my skirt to the side and slid his left hand down between my legs, up against my cotton panties. He began to rock me then, between his stomach and his wrist, his fingers fumbling at his britches.

It made me afraid, his big hand between my legs and his eyes glittering in the dim light. He started talking again, telling me Mama was going to be all right, that he loved me, that we were all going to be so happy. Happy. His hand was hard, the ridge of his wristbone pushing in and hurting me. I looked straight ahead through the windshield, too afraid to cry, or shake, or wiggle, too afraid to move at all.

He kept saying, “It’s gonna be all right.” He kept rocking me, breathing through his mouth and staring straight ahead. I could see his reflection in the windshield. Dawn began to filter through the trees, making everything bright and cold. His hand dug in further. He was holding himself in his fingers. I knew what it was under his hand. I’d seen my cousins naked, laughing, shaking their things and joking, but this was a mystery, scary and hard. His sweat running down his arms to my skin smelled strong and nasty. He grunted, squeezed my thighs between his arm and his legs. His chin pressed down on my head and his hips pushed up at the same time. He was hurting me, hurting me!

I sobbed once, and he dropped back down and let go of me. I bit my lips and held still. He brought his hand up to wipe it on the blanket, and I could smell something strange and bitter on his fingers. I pulled away, and that made him laugh. He kept laughing as he scrubbed his fingers against the blanket. Then he lifted me slightly, turning me so he could look into my face. The light was gray and pearly, the air wet and marble-cold, Glen’s face the only thing pink and warm in sight. He smiled at me again, but this time the smile was not in his eyes. His eyes had gone dark and empty again, and my insides started to shake with fear.