Listen Here (71 page)

“That's how dumb the Possetts are,” my grandmother told us.

“The most money they can think of is me and my poor little in-debt store with nothing but books full of credit.” She said it made her so mad to think that Elroy Possett had got her in all this trouble that she threw the light switch, jut hit the whole bunch of them with the spotlight my father had installed so she wouldn't stumble going out to load her coal scuttle. Light all over Elroy, who shaded his eyes. The fellow up on the steps already had a hat pulled low over his eyes, and the one down by the garage stepped back in the shadows, so she never did get a look at him.

“Now, why'd you do that?” said the one called Ed, and my grandmother took a closer look at him; narrow-shouldered, with clothes that didn't fit, like they belonged to another man. Like they'd been stolen, she thought.

“Tell her what we want, Ed,” said the man in the shadows.

“Well,” said Ed, “we was traveling and we got hungry and this fellow here said you could sell us some lunch meat and bread and pop.”

While he talked, my grandmother kept looking at his hat, a man's regular dress hat of a greasy black color, and it reminded her of something, and all of a sudden she was sure it belonged to the old fellow with the little store about a sixth the size of her own. She thought, Lord Lord, they killed that old man who wanted to keep me company, they killed him and took his money and his hat and now they're going to kill me. It was the hat that set her imagination to working. She wasn't the kind of person to imagine out of nothing, but the hat and the grease spots made her see the old bristle-chinned fellow lying with his throat cut in a pool of blood in that store, where, if his head was at the stove, then his feet must be out the door. She saw her own blood then, too, on the linoleum of her kitchen floor. Saw her apron and her plaid print dress. Saw a terrible stillness of sunrise on herself laid out on the floor with no life in her.

She heard another snuffle from Elroy, and it infuriated her that a filthy oaf like Elroy Possett was going to be the death of her. She got so mad, she snarled, “What are you laughing at, Elroy Possett? It isn't funny these poor boys being hungry and thirsty in the middle of the night like this and wanting a little something, and you know very well I can't open up this store.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Elroy.

The one named Ed with the old man's hat said, “Just some lunch meat, lady.”

“Can't open the store,” she said. You know I'm not one to have wild ideas, she told us; it was something about the Possett that gave her the idea. “I can't open my store, much as I'd like to.”

The man in the dark said, “And why's that, ma'am? We surely would like a little something to eat.”

My grandmother kept looking at the Possett, the only one of that whole family with any meat on him, no doubt stealing from his mother and the little ones, no doubt giving his sister that baby. She said, “Elroy Possett knows why, don't you Elroy? I can't open up because of my boy Elroy.”

There was a little silence, and Elroy Possett said, “Yes, m'am.”

She said, “You know all about my poor Elroy, don't you?”

Ed said, “What are you talking about?”

Elroy Possett said, “Her boy Elroy.”

“How many Elroys
is
there around here?”

“Two of us,” said Elroy Possett, and my grandmother's head began to swim. Some moths and beetles were flapping and flying and banging on the spotlight, and the one named Ed slapped at them.

“Tell us about him,” said the one in the dark.

“He's a bad boy,” said Elroy Possett.

“Now, Elroy,” said my grandmother, feeling a kind of joy; things happening, and she wasn't still yet. “Now, Elroy, don't talk about my poor boy like that. He never hurt me.”

“He hurts other folks, all right.”

The one down in the shadows said, “Where is this fellow? I'd like to see this Elroy.”

“Law,” said my grandmother. “I'd never disturb him.”

“Don't disturb him!” said Elroy. And my grandmother turned out to have underestimated him, because it was Elroy Possett who made up the next part. “That Elory sets in the store next to the money box with a shotgun, and nobody never gets near nothing.”

Ed cursed. “Why the----”

“Blank,” my grandmother said.

“Why the blank did you bring us here then?”

Elroy Possett was having a good time; his imagination was working away. It must have been a real treat for him, said my grandmother, to feel his brain working.

“Yes, sir, that Elroy sets right there with that shotgun and blows folks' heads off. He sleeps in the daytime and shoots burglars at night. He shot lots of burglars.”

My grandmother was getting worried that Elroy was going to ruin it by saying too much. “Now, Elroy, you're exaggerating.”

“Why ain't he in jail?” asked Ed.

“Well, he never killed anybody,” said my grandmother. “He has real bad coordination, my boy Elroy. He never hurt those boys, the time Elroy's talking about. They wasn't supposed to be in the store, after all. The sheriff agreed to that.”

The one down in the dark said, “Tell him to step aside then, ma'am, he'll do what you tell him.”

“Law no,” said my grandmother. “I'm sorry to say that I'm not a trusting woman. I have a suspiciousness in me.”

“Let's go,” said the one in the dark, and the cigarette went hurling off. “She ain't letting nobody in her store.”

Elroy Possett said, “That Elroy is ugly too. And he ain't bright.”

Ed cursed again, then cursed Elroy and stomped down the steps, and Elroy went after him. My grandmother said she went around checking all her window locks, then she got out the butcher knife and sat all night in the kitchen with the knife in her lap.

“Why didn't you call the Robinsons?” asked my mother.

“It was getting late,” my grandmother said. “Besides, I always like to do what I can by myself.”

“We're getting you a gun,” said my father.

“I'd shoot my foot. Beside, it turned out those Hine boys got caught earlier that day all the way over in Danville. Those boys weren't the convicts after all,” she said. “Although I do believe they were mean as convicts.”

I asked, “What about that hat?”

She shrugged. “Two hats. The old man was fine. I got a message from him the next day through the bread boy. He wanted to take me out for a drive on Sunday. In my car.”

“Just the same,” said my father, “we're getting you a gun.”

“All I need,” said my grandmother, “all I need is for people to pay their bills.”

“Did Elroy come back?” I asked her. “Did you ever see him again?”

“Of course,” said my grandmother. “He brought the whole family down again a day later. The whole defective mess of them. They stood around my store for three hours and never bought a thing.”

She looked at us. “Do you know what they were waiting for?”

I knew, but I said, “What?”

She gave a nod with her chin. “They were waiting to see my boy Elroy.”

(October 23, 1957–)

Short story author Leigh Allison Wilson is a native of Rogersville, Tennessee. She earned a B.A., magna cum laude, from Williams College in 1979 and did graduate work at the University of Virginia from 1979 to 1981. In 1983, Wilson received an M.F.A., with honors, from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her first book, a collection of short stories,
From the Bottom Up
, was awarded the first annual Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press in 1983.

Wilson's work, which is frequently set in the mountains of East Tennessee, features characters who are endearingly eccentric. Noted one reviewer, “She records not only absurd behavior but the stubborn craziness baked into rural personalities.”

Wilson says, “I've recently realized how very much I owe my sense of storytelling and humor to the Appalachian women who raised and nurtured me. I had thought I created my sensibilities and wit out of my own cloth, but now I realize I owe much of it to my family, particularly their ready grasp of narrative and humor.”

Responding to critics who insist on labeling Appalachian literature as “regional,” Wilson says, “All American fiction, it seems to me, is circumscribed by place; I have the feeling my work ends up being labeled regional simply because fewer people come from my particular place.”

The following scene from the short story “The Raising” is from Wilson's collection,
From the Bottom Up.

Short stories:
Wind: Stories
(1989),
From the Bottom Up
(1983).

Contemporary Authors
, Vol. 117, 487–88.
Southern Women's Writing
(1995).

from The Raising

Of the eight matrons perched like pigeons around two identical card tables, Mrs. Bertram Eastman was the lone childless woman. Her husband, in whom—she was sure—the fault lay, only confounded this burden she'd borne for thirty years, fixing a funny look on his face every time the subject came up and saying, in a voice soft as solemnity itself, “Spare the child and spare the rod, Mrs. Eastman.” But he was like that, a nitwit, and half the time she never knew what he was talking about. Still, being a woman of industry, Mrs. Eastman took up the slack of impotence by becoming an expert on children and motherhood. She was renowned in the gin rummy set, in the Daughters of the Confederacy set, and perhaps in the whole area of East Tennessee, renowned and widely quoted for her running commentary on child-rearing.

“A child is like a new boot,” she'd say and pause with the dramatic flair of a born talker. “You take that boot and wear it and at first it blisters your foot, pains you all over, but the time comes it fits like a glove and you got a dutiful child on your hands.” What she had missed in experience, Mrs. Eastman overcame with pithy insight; what she lacked as human collateral in a world of procreation, Mrs. Eastman guaranteed with sheer volume. She was a specialist in armchair mothering.

A steady hum of a general nature had settled over the women playing at both tables, punctuated by an occasional snap of a card, but like a foghorn in the midst of a desert the voice of Mrs. Eastman rose and fell in every ear. She was explaining, for the third time since seven o'clock, the circumstances that led to Little Darryl, the melungeon orphan boy, who would come to live at her house the very next morning. A child! In her own home! She couldn't get over it. Her brain worked at the idea with a violence akin to despair turning upside-down and her hair, from some internal cue, dropped onto her forehead a large, stiff curl that flopped from side to side as if to let off steam. Mrs. Eastman, although not fat, was a formidable personage, stout and big-boned and not unlike the bouncer in a hard-bitten country bar. Mr. Eastman was the tiniest man in Hawklen County. Just yesterday he had come home and told her, out of the blue, that he was bringing Little Darryl out from Eastern State and into their home—one two three and like a bolt of electricity she was a mother. She couldn't get over it.

Little Darryl was thirteen years old and of “origin unknown,” a poor abandoned charity case dumped from orphanage to orphanage since the day his faceless mother—unfit and unwed, Mrs. Eastman knew for a certainty—dropped him off in the middle of the canned-goods section of the Surgoinsville A&P. He was discovered beside the creamed corn, eating an unhealthy peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The “origin unknown” part delighted Mrs. Eastman: Little Darryl would be
her
child, sprung as mysteriously and as certainly into her care as a baby of her own making. O, she would make a lawyer out of him, distill the taint of his blood like meltwater. She would recreate the boy in her own image and watch him tower among men in her old age.

“Smart as a
whip
, the social worker told Mr. Eastman,” Mrs. Eastman said in a loud, confidential voice. At her table were old Mrs. Cowan, the Methodist preacher's wife; Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the Jenkins Hardware Jenkinses; and Mrs. Talley, wife of Hubert Talley, the local butcher. Mrs. Eastman had given each one advice, off and on, for thirty years, from Mrs. Talley's red-headed boy who was thirty years old and no good, right down to Mrs. Jenkins' six-year-old who still sucked her thumb and was a “mistake.”

“You said that ten minutes ago, Eloise,” Mrs. Jenkins told Mrs. Eastman, “and you said he was a genius before that.” Mrs. Jenkins was playing North to Mrs. Eastman's South. “You said he was a genius that wasn't understood and you ain't even met him yet.”

“Made him a lawyer already, too,” said Mrs. Talley, looking calmly over Mrs. Jenkins' shoulder, her lips screwed up in concentration.

“Ida Mae Talley!” cried Mrs. Jenkins. “Put you in the East and straightway you cheat left and right.”

“For your general information,” Mrs. Eastman said and tossed her curl, like a hook, back up into her beehive hairdo, “for your edification, Little Darryl scored in the ‘excessively bright' range on three different tests.”

“I am most certainly not cheating,” said Mrs. Talley. “I seen those kings three minutes ago.”

“God loves all the little children, smart and stupid, black and white,” old Mrs. Cowan said with a smile so bright that her lips appeared to retreat back into her gums. She was the simple-minded member of the women's club although, somehow, her children had grown up to be wildly successful bankers and businessmen in the county, as if to intimate that children, even life, were too muddled a factor to control entirely. For this reason old Mrs. Cowan said nothing that was really heard, did nothing that was really seen, and existed in the main as a hand in gin rummy, or as a how-de-do on the Methodist Church steps every Sunday morning. She was incapable of taking sound advice, given in good faith, by even the best of friends. Deep in her bowels Mrs. Eastman believed her to be the most wicked woman of her acquaintance, the most deceitful as well as the most dangerous, and to hold, somewhere behind her idiocy, a hidden ace in the hole.

“God may be well and good on Sundays,” Mrs. Eastman said, leveling her eyes like shotgun bores toward old Mrs. Cowan's western position. “But God Hisself don't have to raise no boy geniuses at a moment's notice. Pass me one of those green mints, Vivian.” She stretched her free hand toward Mrs. Jenkins. “The white ones give me the morning sickness.”

“They come in the same box, Eloise. Green and white. In the same damn box.” Mrs. Jenkins, whose mints and home provided this evening's entertainment for the club, shut her cards with a click, laid them carefully face down on the table, then folded her arms like hemp cord and stared at Mrs. Eastman. She looked ready to pounce in panther fashion across the table, to defend her territory with a beast's wit. Mrs. Eastman had on her patient expression, the one she recommended for children with colic.

“I only meant to point out that I
read
somewheres that they put more dye in the white mints than they do in the green, that's all. They start out gray and add twice't the dye to turn them white. Scientific fact. Twenty schoolchildren alone have died in Detroit, Michigan, from a pound of white mints. Now think about
that.”

“All I know,” said Mrs. Jenkins, rising clumsily from her chair, “is we've had these same mints for fifteen years and I never heard a word till now. I'm going to put whip cream on my jello if you'll excuse me.”

“I didn't read it till last week,” Mrs. Eastman called over her shoulder, then she lowered her voice until only the whole room could hear: “Don't either of you tell a dead man, but she's on particular edge tonight strictly because her boy was found pig drunk, with a hair ribbon in his mouth, underneath the 11-E overpass. No clothes on him anywhere.”

“O,” said old Mrs. Cowan. “He was the finest acolyte our church ever had.”

“No more he ain't,” Mrs. Eastman said happily. “Comes of no discipline.”

“Now, now,” Mrs. Talley said, watching herself thumb through Mrs. Jenkins' cards, “You ain't exactly the one, Eloise”—here she paused to exchange one of her cards with one in the other pile—”you ain't exactly the one to pass judgement on a drunk, now are you?”

“Well, Mrs. Ida
Mae
Talley.” Mrs. Eastman sneered on the “Mae.” “Are you sinuating that my husband is a drunk?”

“That's for you to know, Eloise,” she said, “and me to hear over coffee.”