Beach Music (57 page)

“Quit thinking about my funeral,” Lucy said, her eyes still shut. “I’m not dead yet. Just bone-tired.”

“I was thinking how odd it was to live in a state where you can’t even get decent Chinese food.”

“You’re lying,” she said. “You had me dead and buried.”

“Why don’t I murder Dad?” I said. “We can all have a dry run to see what a parent’s death feels like. But because it’s just Dad, none of us have to be emotionally involved.”

“Don’t talk about your father like that,” my mother ordered.

“He’s not my father,” I said. “Don’t forget the annulment and the shame that is ours now that we’re bastards.”

“What do you know about shame, son?” Lucy asked, sitting up and smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress. Opening her purse, she took out an atomizer and sprayed White Shoulders cologne on her wrist and the car carried the full story of my childhood into the airstreams of the highway.

“A lot. I know a lot about shame.”

She shook her head and rubbed the perfume into her throat and face.

“It hurts Jude that you left the Church,” she said.

“It’s none of his business,” I said.

“He baptized all my boys. Gave you First Communion,” she said.

“We used to think you two were lovers,” I said. “I told him that when he gave you the last rites.”

She laughed and said, “What did he say?”

“Not much. Personality’s not his long suit.”

“Jude told me it was time,” my mother said, closing her eyes.

“Time for what?”

“To put the cards on the table,” she said.

“Back to shame again, huh?” I said.

“Yeh. It always leads back there,” Lucy said. “Father Jude’s my brother, Jack. Your uncle.”

“Odd,” I said, after driving another mile of Carolina highway in silence. “Even for you, odd.”

“I got caught up in my own lie. Never could figure out how to backtrack and start again. I could face anything but Ginny Penn’s contempt. Know what I mean?”

“No,” I said honestly. “I’ve no idea. It’s traditional in most Southern families to introduce worthy young nephews to their blood uncles long before their thirty-seventh birthdays.”

Lucy laughed, then said, “You’re so old-fashioned.”

“Even for us, Mama, this is too screwed up. Frankly, I wish Father Jude had just been your lover. It’d be so much easier to swallow.”

“It made perfect sense to me,” she said, “once upon a time.”

“I can’t wait to hear the details,” I said, driving, then I shouted out the window, “the ghastly, fucking unbelievable details.”

“Compose yourself,” Lucy said, and she began to tell the story.

I listened.

T
he truth is that Lucy McCall was born a Dillard on dirty sheets in a three-room shotgun house within earshot of the Horsepasture River in the county of Pelzer, in the mountains of North Carolina. There was not a dentist or a doctor within a hundred miles of where she was born and few people over forty in the valley who still had their own teeth. Her father, A.J. Dillard, said he was a farmer, but he was neither an industrious nor a successful one. He drank when he should have been sowing and he drank all the way through harvesttime and through the first snow. His daughter never learned what the initials A.J. stood for and no one ever mentioned her mother’s maiden name. Her mother’s first name was Margaret.

Her brother, Jude, was born two years after she was on the same dirty sheets. Again, the father was passed out drunk and Margaret delivered the child by herself in silence, without making a single sound that might rouse her husband from his drunken slumber. She was always proud that she never asked for help nor asked to be beaten, the latter was something he always thought up for himself. Wife beating was both an itch and a pastime with A.J. Dillard, one that he had learned at the knee of his own father. No one in the family on either side could read or write. One had to travel to Asheville to find a copy of any book except the Bible. It was common for children to die in infancy in those parts, and broken-down
women such as Margaret prayed for those merciful deaths. Later Margaret used to dream that her children were taken to see Jesus right after their deaths and fitted out with the prettiest angel’s wings made out of lace and snow. Margaret was twelve years old when Lucy was born, fourteen when Jude arrived. In her portion of Appalachia, Pelzer County, she was not looked upon as a particularly young mother. But neighbors did pity her as an unlucky one. No one ever wasted breath by saying a good word about A.J. Dillard. A Dillard was the lowest form a white man could take in that part of the world, an all-white county with an unwritten sunshine law forbidding black people inside the county line after the sun went down. When the Depression finally struck America, no one in Pelzer County noticed anything different in their economy at all.

Lucy was born hungry and Margaret’s milk flow was thin and weak and Lucy would stay hungry through most of her childhood.

Lucy never could pin down the exact moment when she understood that her father was dangerous. She grew up seeing blood and bruises on her mother’s face, and thought that it was natural for a husband and wife to beat each other with fists. The beatings altered the way her mother looked, and as the years passed, Margaret’s eyes would grow more troubled and the shape of her jaw and cheekbones would set into different angles as the bones were broken and rebroken. But Lucy always remembered her mother’s sweetness.

When she was five and Jude three, her father went down from the mountains and hired himself out as a laborer on a tobacco farm outside of Raleigh. Sometimes, he would come back for the winter and sometimes he would send back money by mail, but he became less and less a part of their lives in the next five years. Margaret blossomed in his absence and discovered that she could coax more crops from the rock-strewn field than her husband ever could. She raised chickens and quail and bees in the yard around her unpainted house. Lucy and Jude learned how to fish with cane poles and worms along the bank of the Horsepasture River and caught trout for dinner much of the year. Margaret could use a shotgun as well as any man in the valley and she traded deer and bear she had shot for supplies she needed for the farm. By the time she was ten, Lucy could use a shotgun as well as her mother and took pride in the sore
place on her shoulder when she went to bed after a successful hunt. She had cut her teeth on her father’s .22 rifle and no squirrel or rabbit or possum was safe when she entered the forest. That .22 became a part of her and she would handle it as smoothly as she did a rolling pin when she was flattening out a batch of biscuit batter.

Once she killed a wild turkey after stalking it all day. It was a full-grown gobbler, a beast of such grandeur and wildness that she found herself admiring its cunning as it fled through thickets of blackberry and wild rose, moving swiftly as a racehorse as she followed its prints, large as a boy’s hand when it crossed through giveaway patches of earth.

The churches of Appalachia during Lucy’s years worshiped a severe and unforgiving God. Though illiterate, both Margaret’s and A.J.’s families were God-besotted and extreme in their beliefs. Their faith was hard-core, uncompromising, and single-minded in its intensity. At the height of their ecstasy, communion with the Lord, the Church of the Primitive God and His Saints passed poisonous snakes back and forth among the pale-throated righteous congregation who believed that the serpents would not harm them if their faith in God was sincere. Lucy could remember the Sabbath when two men failed the test and lay writhing on the floor, felled by an Eastern diamondback that was making his debut appearance. One of the men, struck in the eyeball, died within minutes. When they buried Oakie Shivers, the preacher exhorted his flock to try to live better lives and promised all of them that he had received a divine vision of Oakie writhing in hellfire for all eternity, the fangs of that serpent still attached to his eyeball. The preacher was named Boy Tommie Green and the Lord had appeared to him in a burning chariot near a field below Chimney Rock and called him in a voice like thunder to the ministry of snakes. He screamed out his sermons, which he never wrote down, nor did he ever purr out the name of Jesus. The word Jesus scissored through the air when Boy Tommie spoke and he wielded that name like a sound to frighten the mountain-broken sinners who came to his church for relief and succor. Eternal life seemed especially sweet to folk who had eaten songbirds and stray dogs for dinner and who tried to coax measly crops from fields more granite than loam.

Like most mountain men in that region, A.J. made his own liquor high above the Horsepasture River whenever the tobacco season ended and he had worn out all his welcomes everywhere else. As the years passed his homecomings became dreaded events and Lucy could never remember her father gentle or sober. Everything about him was as hard as an outcropping of stone. The beating of his wife and children was sport to him, one he could indulge upon waking, half-drunk and hungover, when he could run his family down, slap them for sins of which they were completely innocent, then grow morose and sorrowful as the cycle began anew when he took his first sip of clear whiskey. In midwinter, Lucy and Jude would pray for tobacco to begin blooming in central North Carolina fields. They had learned that husbands were masters of their own houses and that men held dominion over women and children and all the beasts of the field, but it was Boy Tommie who was destined to deliver all of them from the wrath and natural meanness of their father.

Boy Tommie could speak in the unknown tongues and quote the Gospel of Luke from the beginning to the end without once glancing down at the Bible. He was a wonder when it came to the things of the Lord, but could not be considered a saintly man because his eye for women was as advanced as his biblical knowledge.

Boy Tommie made his visits to the Dillard farm always during the height of tobacco season when he was sure A.J. was gone. Before he would enter the house for a Bible reading with Margaret, he would drop a copperhead onto the bare dirt ground and give long sticks to Lucy and little Jude and teach them how to race a snake around the yard, making sure you didn’t lose the snake to either the river or the woods. The snake bore the coloring of an October path, and as the children teased the snake, Boy Tommie gave spiritual encouragement to Margaret inside the three-room house.

A.J. returned in early September one year, unannounced, his arm broken and set badly, splinted by a self-taught doctor who patched up migrant workers who cut each other up in fights or were injured in the tobacco fields. A.J. possessed an illiterate’s intuition and he took the scene in quickly, as he saw his children lifting a snake high into the sunlight with a stick, unattended to in the unearthly
quiet of a late afternoon. When he found Boy Tommie on top of his wife, both naked as the day they were born, he killed Boy Tommie with a single blow from an ax. The ax cleaved the preacher’s brain in half and his blood splattered against two walls and over Margaret’s face. A.J. rubbed her lover’s blood over Margaret’s face and neck, smearing pieces of his brain all over her breasts and stomach. He beat her face until her blood and Boy Tommie’s blood commingled into something love-born and sacramental. He beat her with his good hand until he knew he had broken that hand and the bones in her face. Then he dragged her and kicked her naked out into the yard before the eyes of the yard fowl and mule and two stricken, terrified children. A.J. took her to the Horsepasture River, cursing God’s name and his wife’s name and the both of them covered with a dead man’s blood, and he plunged Margaret’s face into a deep chute of water, which ran scarlet from her wounds. He held her there for a moment, then brought her up to air and light to tell her to prepare to die in water as the Lord had commanded them to be reborn in the same waters of life. The screams of his wife were nothing compared to his fury and the righteousness of his vengeance, but a mistake was made, a terrible unrecallable error that he lived long enough and in enough agony to regret. A.J. had not heeded the silence of his bitter, pretty daughter, the one who was moving toward the river with a copperhead turned around the end of a long pole, a snake she had learned to love and trust.

A.J. took Margaret by the throat and struck her head against a rock that had a sharp place to it, opening up the back of her head, and a new flag of blood unfurled in the waters. But underwater, she heard the faraway, subdued cry of her husband who did not see the girl place the serpent around his neck, making it a loose-fitting collar, mountain-hued and vibrant. The fangs hit his wing bone first, then sent a second dosage of venom near the coccyx. It was there that A.J. caught the snake and hurled it into the water where it was swept downstream toward a deep trout pool where the copperhead reached the far bank and slithered off into the forest after its long captivity among the saved.

When he let Margaret go, she too was taken by the river, tumbling down a short rapids. She would have drowned but she caught
hold of the exposed roots of a sycamore tree and hung on until she regained both her breath and a sense of where she was. She watched Lucy and little Jude sprinting up a path that led straight up the side of a mountain with A.J. in pursuit, but his pace slowed with each step taken. His hand kept searching for marks on his back he could not seem to find, his good fingers groping to find whatever it was that was paining him. Once or twice, he howled, then turned back looking for his wife. The poisons burned inside his veins, but he could still function in his rage well enough to drag the corpse of Boy Tommie to the river and spit as he let the swift current take the body to the first falls where it stuck between two rocks. Margaret watched in horror as the corpse sat up in the current and Boy Tommie’s mouth and dead eyes opened and white water poured over his shoulders. She held on to the roots, the cold water slowing her heartbeat and her blood flow, and she did not dare pull herself from the river until it was near darkness and she believed all the rage and pain of her husband had subsided.