Gone Crazy in Alabama (3 page)

No one was happier than Vonetta and Fern to get off the bus for good. We weren't done traveling but at least we'd be off the Greyhound. Now that we'd been cooped up on the bus for more than a day, and Vonetta and Fern had long ago worn out their “best behavior,” I saw that Papa knew best by putting us on the bus in New Jersey instead of in New York City. We couldn't have made it one mile farther. Even though the bus transfer from Atlanta to Montgomery would have taken only a few hours, that would have meant a few hours more than we could have stood. It was a miracle Vonetta made it from New Jersey to Atlanta without picking on Fern, and a bigger miracle that Fern's watch still hung from her puny wrist. I was just
glad we survived more than a day's worth of riding without a real reason to call home.

Mrs. turned out to be right after all. Pa didn't mind me calling collect when we reached Atlanta. He told me what a good job I had done getting my sisters down south safely and I soaked it in. Neither Pa nor my real mother, Cecile, were long on praise. I had to enjoy the few words they sprinkled when I got them.

Pa said, “You know Mr. Lucas's truck when you see it.”

“Yes, Pa,” I said. “I know Mr. Lucas's truck when I see it,” I repeated back for my sisters.

“I know Mr. Lucas's truck too,” Vonetta said.

“It's blue, Papa!” Fern added. “Blue and rusty.” I waved my hand to shush them. Still, I couldn't believe Fern remembered the old blue truck. Fern was five when we had come down for the funerals. She was smaller than small and sat on my lap back then.

Fern and Vonetta played invisible hopscotch next to the luggage while I waited for Big Ma and Mr. Lucas to drive up in his truck. Mr. Lucas, a widower with no kids, was practically Big Ma's brother. The Charles and Lucas homes had been standing within shouting distance from each other for more than ninety years. Mr. Lucas had always treated Big Ma's mother, Ma Charles, like she was his mother, and took care of things for our great-grandmother, especially when Big Ma had come to stay with us in Brooklyn.

We still had to drive to Big Ma's small yellow house
that stood on about an acre of land, just off the edge of Prattville proper in Autauga County. I looked forward to seeing the big blue truck. Mr. Lucas was sure to bring us bags of unshelled pecans covered in sugar and salt, and maybe a few ripe peaches. Mr. Lucas and Papa always sang “Old Man River” and other songs on the porch in the evening. Mr. Lucas could dip his voice low to sing baritone and make us laugh. We welcomed his treats and attention. He was the closest thing to a grandpa we'd ever have. We didn't know Cecile's people, and Grandpa Gaither died the year Uncle Darnell was born, although Big Ma never talked about that.

I was the first to see the old Ford truck riding up. Then Vonetta and Fern saw it and stopped in the middle of Fern's hopscotch turn. They began to do their praise dancing, glad that we'd soon see Big Ma and Ma Charles. If Big Ma could have seen them jumping and shouting “Hallelujah!” she would have given them a real reason to jump. But she would have gotten to me first for letting them carry on in public.

The old truck bounced in the distance. When it was maybe one hundred feet away, approaching slowly, I realized Mr. Lucas wasn't behind the wheel. The girls must have realized it also because they stopped praise dancing—Fern reacting to Vonetta, whose face stiffened with recognition.

The truck came to an abrupt halt and lurched forward
all at once. Uncle Darnell got out of the truck and came around. He stood with both hands on his hips and waited. He looked down before he looked up but then he came toward us. I knew Vonetta was still angry over what he had done to us but I missed him, maybe even more than when he'd been fighting in Vietnam. I knew he'd made us cry, and made Big Ma cry and worry, and made Pa hate him. But he was my uncle and I had given up hurting from what he had done to us a long time ago. He was my uncle and I couldn't stop running until I was hugging him.

Vonetta's hurt hadn't dried up and she hadn't forgotten a thing. She couldn't let go because she didn't get it. She couldn't see how our family was scattering, piece by piece. She only cared that Uncle Darnell had stolen our concert money last year and ruined our chance to see the Jackson Five at Madison Square Garden. It didn't matter to her that our uncle had gone to the army hospital to get himself cleaned up and off drugs. You'd have thought she was Fern when she set eyes on Uncle Darnell, clenching her fists and banging them at her sides, ready to fight. Vonetta marched up to Uncle Darnell, took one of her fists, and reared back the way the puncher shouldn't if she didn't want to be the “punchee.” Then she gave a war cry before letting him have it in the gut. She had been saving that up for months.

I knew a look of pity and shame when I saw one. He took her punch and said gently, “Vonetta.”

“I hate you. You junkie. You thief.”

Fern gasped aloud. Her natural instinct was to follow Vonetta, but this time she wouldn't. She loved Michael Jackson, but she loved Uncle D more, and she clamped herself around him in a hug.

That left Vonetta outside of our hug and she seemed happy to not be a part of us.

“You hate me?” Uncle D asked her. “Still?” After all, he had sent us the Jackson Five album by special delivery to make up for stealing from us.

Vonetta showed her teeth like an animal. “I hate you.” She breathed short and heavy. “I hate you.”

“So you're not going to ride with me up front?” he asked.

Vonetta crossed her arms. “Not for a sack full of candy.”

Fern looked at her like she was crazy.

“I'll ride in the back,” Vonetta said.

“Ooh! In the truck part, where it's nice and bumpity-bumpy! Me too!” Fern cried.

“There's a huge bag of chicken feed back there to rest against,” Uncle D said.

“So,” Vonetta said. She hadn't uncrossed her arms.

“Wait.” If Uncle Darnell was hurt by Vonetta he didn't show it. He lifted our luggage onto the truck bed, then took a blanket from the front seat, shook it, and spread it down next to the luggage. He lifted Fern up and into the truck. He went to lift Vonetta but she said, “I can climb.
I don't need your help.” But she couldn't climb and Uncle heaved her up into the truck bed next to Fern.

“No standing, no horsing around.” His voice changed. He was serious.

“We can wave at all the people we pass, right, Uncle Darnell?”

“You bet.” I think he waited for Vonetta to add her two cents, the way she normally would if Fern beat her to the first line. Vonetta stayed mum, arms crossed, chin pressed to her chest.

He and I got into the cab and we were off.

Uncle D was different. Older. He wasn't twenty-one yet, but he wasn't the way he used to be. Singing, dancing, telling us stories about princesses in the tower or about the Arabian Knight of Herkimer Street. The war had made him older. And the drugs. I didn't know if people could be fixed. The way they showed it in health films, commercials, and episodes on crime stories, drugs turned you into something or someone else. Like in
Old Yeller
. Old Yeller was a good family dog who got bit by a rabid wolf while protecting the family. Then he became a mad dog foaming at the mouth and the only thing left to do was to shoot him. When Uncle D came home from Vietnam, he became like a ghost rattling his chain and moaning in the night. Then Pa said he had to leave our house.

I glanced at my uncle, who knew I was staring at him. Knew it but kept his eyes straight on the road.

“Uncle D . . .”

“Ask me what you want to ask.”

“You're a grown man, right?”

“Grown enough.” He squinted against the sun and tilted his head my way. “Go ahead, Delphine. Ask.”

“Are you . . . all right?”

He knew what I was asking. Were the drugs gone for good? Did he sleep and moan all the time? Did his sniffling cold go away? And the hollering out in the night. Was that gone too?

“Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

Mostly
wasn't enough for me or what I wanted to hear. He said, “I did a lot of healing in the army hospital, Delphine. Some on the way down here.”

“But you're better, right?”

His eyes went from the road to me and back to the road. Even though I loved him, I had been hurt by him. Underneath it all I was unsure and Fern was probably a little frightened. But only Vonetta was mad enough to stay mad. I asked him again if he was better. I had to tell my sisters to not be afraid and to not be mad. I had to tell them that it was all right. That he was all right.

“Mostly.” His voice was flat and old. Like Pa's. “That's all I can give you.”

We drove for a little less than three hours. I dozed off, but for how long, I didn't know. When I awoke, the Georgia
pine trees had become Alabama pine trees. I knew we were getting closer as every other town name had
creek
in it. We passed this creek town only to enter that creek town. The memories of driving past trees, ponds, lakes, creeks, and rivers flooded back to me from the last time we had driven down three years ago. Ponds and lakes were in Georgia. Rivers and creeks in Alabama. What did it matter? We were far from Brooklyn.

Then Uncle Darnell began to sing Stevie Wonder's “Uptight (Everything's Alright)” but he jumbled the words and sang “Everything is everything.” That was how I knew my old Uncle D was still in there.

Can a bloodhound remember you from years back and smell you coming from half a mile away? Caleb's welcome grew louder as we drove along the sparsely tree-lined road that would bring us to Ma Charles's property. Uncle D winked at me as if to say,
Girl
,
you were surely missed
, and my heart clanged worse than when I got my first kiss from Ellis Carter. I wanted to be with my grandmother and my great-grandmother more than anything. I wanted us to all be together. As many of us under one roof as could fit. I needed to know we weren't all falling apart.

I could see Ma Charles's yellow aluminum siding house as we wound around the road. It seemed to have grown larger, and not only as we neared it: its size appeared
to have doubled. The girls must have seen the house as well. They sang at the top of their lungs, “I'm Going Back to Indiana” even though we were in the heart of Alabama. I sang along with them. Finally, in the seconds that seemed longest, the truck bounced, shimmied, and slowly trailed up the dirt and gravel driveway of our great-grandmother's house. Even the hens, fenced in by the wire chicken run, clucked and fussed in our honor. Their fussing and squawking went on for as long as it took one hen to spot something tasty on the ground and the others to join in the scuffle to get a piece of it.

Caleb, sturdier than when I saw him last, didn't stop singing his dog song, which was neither a true howl nor a bark. Then Big Ma stepped out on the front porch and scolded him for raising a ruckus. Ma Charles, who had been sitting on the porch in the pine rocker her father made, called out to the bloodhound and joined the noisy welcome, shaking the tambourine that she always kept nearby. Knowing my great-grandmother, she probably told the dog, “Go on, boy. Wake the dead.” One of the funniest things about being down home was that when Big Ma said, “Stop,” Ma Charles said, “Keep on.” All the pieces of down home came flooding up to greet me.

Uncle D stopped the truck and he and I got out. He went around to lift Vonetta and Fern out of the truck bed. My sisters and I became six knees in shorts galloping toward our grandmother. Before she had time to scold and fuss,
Vonetta, Fern, and I were on her, circling her, squeezing her and feeling her squeeze us. Yes, we were surely missed. I took it all in: the firm but biscuit-doughy feel of Big Ma's arms; her gardenia talcum powder and Dixie Peach hair grease dabbed under her wig around her temples. It was good to be circled by hands that smelled of pine cleaner and to be blotted by her coffee-breath kisses.

When Big Ma couldn't stand another squeeze, she pushed us off of her and said, “Let's not carry on for all the neighbors,” although the only neighbor within any visible range was Mr. Lucas.

“Come on, rascals!” our great-grandmother cried, her arms stretched outward. We ran over and hugged her, but carefully. Big Ma's mother was wiry and upright but tender-skinned and small-boned. She rapped us all on the tops of our heads, one, two, three, and said, “Look at my young'ns,” as if there were an army of us. “Just look at you! All those heads inching to the sky.”

“All right, all right. Let's look at them inside.” Big Ma was anxious to not be seen. It was too late. Mr. Lucas's house sat less than a half acre beyond the vegetable garden to our right side. He leaned against one of the white posts that ran from his porch to his roof, and he waved to us and called out to Big Ma. Big Ma waved her arms but only to tell her neighbor, “Stop that waving.”

She said to Uncle Darnell, “Go drive that rig back over to him before he comes down here.”

“Can't,” he said. “I need to get to town.” Uncle D and
Mr. Lucas had worked out an arrangement to share the truck even though Mr. Lucas hardly drove it.

Big Ma scolded us. “See what you all started up?”

Mr. Lucas didn't have as much land as my great-grandmother, but he had a few fruit trees and pecan trees on his property. The last time we drove down south, he had planted a pecan tree in Ma Charles's yard for shade. That pecan tree was hardly the same tree he'd planted a few years ago. The tree was full of pecans and its trunk and branches were now good for climbing. I couldn't hide my smile. Between the tree's height, sturdiness, and branches that formed a seat, I knew I'd found my hiding place.

Ma Charles took her time to bend down to scratch Caleb's ear. “That's a good dog. Let 'em know across the creek that I have young'ns. Let them know my roots aren't cursed. Sing, boy. Go sing! That'll show her!” Caleb raised his throat and snout and did just that while Vonetta and Fern petted him.

“Ma! Will you hush about a curse!”

Ma Charles ignored her daughter. “That's right! Sing, boy. Sing so
she
knows we have life on this side of the creek. Sing!”

Uncle D dropped our bags on the porch and said, “I'm going to town for spark plugs. I'm taking Mr. Lucas with me.”

“You take him into town,” Big Ma said. “But make sure you tell him tonight's for family. Just family.”

Ma Charles said, “Son, tell him no such unkindness.”

And Uncle D, who was probably used to being between his mother and grandmother, was already in the truck.

Fern hopped from her left foot to her right, doing her “Gotta, gotta” dance, and Vonetta hopped along with her. They both looked around for a dreaded but familiar sight. I did too.

I asked what we all needed to know. “Ma Charles, where's the moon house?” That's what we called the small blue wooden shack with half-moons painted on its front door and sides.

“The outhouse?” Ma Charles threw her head back and laughed. “The outhouse is gone,” she said.

“Then where do we go?” Vonetta asked.

Ma Charles said, “Go where you want.”

“Don't tell them that, Ma!” Big Ma scolded. “In spite of that no-mothering mother of theirs, they're not savages.” Big Ma swatted Vonetta on the bottom, then Fern, which was as playful as Big Ma got. “Go on in the house. Use the bathroom.”

Vonetta and Fern screamed for joy. They didn't want to see that outhouse any more than I wanted to iron cotton sheets.

“Nothing scarier than going to the outhouse in the spooky nighttime with the crickets chirping,” Vonetta said.

“And a hoot owl going, ‘
Whoo-whooo'
while you're trying to make doo-doo.”

“Last one waits!” Vonetta shouted. Then they raced each other into the house, leaving the bags for me to carry inside.

Last time we were here Fern was five and too scared to go to the outhouse. She used a pot instead, and my job was to dump it all down the hole inside the little moon house. And for a long while Vonetta called Fern “Stinkpot.”

When we went inside the house I asked Ma Charles, “What happened to it?”

“Mr. Lucas came over one day a year ago, took down the outhouse, and put in all the pipes and pumps and such. Next thing you know, we have indoor plumbing through and through. Always had running water, but this was a welcome change.”

“That was nice of him,” I said. It was more than nice. I was relieved to not have to go to the moon house, or walk Vonetta there and stand guard, or carry Fern's pot there for dumping. Besides, I was a Brooklyn girl. But as sure as I couldn't stop calling my father Pa, I knew I had a small bit of the South in me too. It was funny. You don't know something bothers you until you no longer have to do it. Suddenly you're both angry and glad. Angry you did it for all those years and glad you'll never do it again.

When you get older and taller, everything else gets smaller. But not Ma Charles's house. The house was actually bigger, inside and out. It wasn't my imagination.

“What happened to the house? How did it get bigger?”

“What a dumb question,” Vonetta said. “Houses don't grow.”

“Not like daisies.”

My rolling eyeballs spoke for me.

Ma Charles said, “House grew some.” She turned to Big Ma and said, “No thanks to anyone under this roof.”

Eyeball-rolling was catching. My grandmother rolled her eyes at her mother—something I'd never do to Cecile, and out of respect, not to Mrs., either.

“What do I know about adding on rooms, Ma?” our grandmother said innocently. “I'm a woman, not a lumberjack.” Vonetta and Fern thought that was especially funny and cackled. Big Ma said, “If Elijah Lucas wants to put in plumbing and add a room or two onto your house, that's his business.”

Ma Charles was disgusted by her answer. “That's not the point—whether you swing a hammer or not, daughter. The point is one day you'll step out on that back porch and smell Elijah's new wife's pecan pie cooling from her windowsill.”

“She can bake shoofly pies for all I care,” Big Ma said. “If Elijah wants to kill the memory of his wife and marry some woman, that's between him, God, and that some woman.”

Ma Charles waved her hand away like she had no use for Big Ma.

I had once overheard Big Ma telling Pa he need not worry about her remarrying. She didn't want two husbands in heaven. Only one. That's why she didn't remarry after Grandpa Louis died, and that was when Pa was twelve and Uncle Darnell had been just born. Grandpa Louis died four years after he'd come home from liberating Italy along with the all-black army, according to Big Ma. He gave his medal to Pa, and Pa had given it to Uncle D when he went to Vietnam. Although no one spoke of it, Uncle D had put the medal in the pawnshop when he was sick and moaning, rattling around like a ghost. The medal was more than twenty years old and Grandpa Louis had been gone for about twenty years.

Big Ma didn't seem to mind being alone for so long. She had us and a picture of Grandpa Louis. And when she wasn't with us in Brooklyn she had Ma Charles, Uncle Darnell, and the Lord. She didn't need another husband. “No sir,” she said. “One husband's all the Lord and I know about.”