Naked, on the Edge (15 page)

"Want me to read you the funnies?" Nannie asked after Chloe had retrieved the folded
Virginian Dispatch
from the base of the porch step.

Chloe shook her head. She sat the doll on her lap and stroked the yarn hair.

Nannie fumbled the newspaper open with the three fingers of her good hand. "Fine then. Don't forget to fix that sign 'fore you go on your walk," said Nannie. Chloe nodded. "And you'll watch out for boys?"

Chloe said, "Uh huh. But you got to tell me what letters to put on the sign."

Nannie smiled at her granddaughter. It was Nannie's great pleasure to take care of Chloe. Chloe had been twelve and Stony sixteen when their mother died, the result of massive head injuries after being struck by a pickup truck on the road outside their home. Stony inherited the old family car and the gun that belonged to his long-since-run-away father. Almost an adult then, Stony had said he was ready to be on his own. He secured a cheap room with a friend and a job plucking turkeys at Plenko Poultry. Chloe, who received her mother's set of china, an old collection of perfumes and Avon decanters, and a little pocket change, moved in with Nannie. She grew up in her grandmother's house, quiet and obedient. Each year school classified her as mentally deficient, and her absence was subsequently ignored when Nannie took Chloe out of school in the eighth grade.

The old woman and girl sat on their porch chairs, watching the road as no one came by, squinting until the sun was gone behind the clot of maples at the road's shoulder. Nannie sighed, then shifted down as if to fall asleep,

Chloe got the paint cans and the brush from inside the house and walked down the short graveled driveway to the large sandwich board sign. The sign was gritty and as worn as the siding on Nannie's house. The bottom of the wood was frayed like an old hula skirt.

Nannie's old sign had been painted over and over many times in the past weeks. Originally, large once-red letters proclaimed that here was "Blue Ridge Country Crafts." Ever since Chloe had lived with Nannie, Nannie had been a maker of crafts. She designed marvelous cornhusk dolls, embroidered hankies, and warm, thick quilts. The entire front living room had been Nannie's show place. Travelers from the Skyline Drive, looking for another isolated route to wherever they were heading, came down the mountain in all seasons, driving the hairpin turns and cracked pavement to view the forest in its fall-splashed or snow-shrouded beauty. At the bottom of the mountain, the road passed Nannie's house. Nannie would sit on the screenless porch, sunning her arms, waving a gaily painted fan and wearing a homemade bonnet. The travelers, intrigued, would stop by to chat. And to buy.

Money from the vacationers' purchases as well as a little Social Security had kept Nannie and Chloe in food, craft material, and heating oil.

Chloe stooped down and pried the top from the paint can.

She flicked a few chunks of dried paint from the bristles of the brush. She called for Nannie to wake up, it was time for the spelling. Then she began to work on the correction.

Three months earlier, on a cool spring evening, some local boys had come riding by Nannie's house. They were loud and drunk, hooting over the roar of their trucks and throwing empty liquor bottles to smash on the driveway. Nannie had been awake at that late hour, embroidering a tea towel in the living room. Chloe had been awake as well, lying in bed and counting the allowance savings she kept in a paper bag.

The boys had crashed into the house, breaking the simple hook lock Nannie had on the front door. Hearing the screams and the laughter, Chloe stayed behind her bed on the floor. The assault was quick. The boys grunted and howled; Nannie 's demands that they leave were reduced to muffled screams. Two minutes later, it was over. When Chloe heard the boys head outside to their trucks, she got up from the floor and looked out of her bedroom door. When the trucks roared out to the road, throwing rocks in their hasty departure, she crept into the living room.

Nannie was on the floor on her side, her legs drawn up and her arm spasming. She was bleeding from holes in the left side of her body. The craft shelves were overturned, and the crafts lay among the blood and wreckage, a carnival of carnage, a slaughterhouse of Nannie's dreams.

Chloe fell beside her grandmother. "Who done this, Nannie?"

Nannie's head moved slightly. Her eyes seemed almost ready to shake loose in their sockets. One went wall-eyed, and Chloe thought the eye would pop out.

"Want the doctor?"

Nannie shook her head. Blood pooled in her mouth, and she pushed it out with her swollen tongue.

Chloe stared at Nannie, and was silent. She was certain Nannie would die. Nannie's right ear had been torn from her head. Large hanks of hair had been ripped out, and numerous knife scars traveled the length of her left arm and her torso. Her leg was mauled. But the old woman weakly demanded that Chloe leave it be. She said she would mend at home.

And so Chloe put Nannie to bed in the back room. Nannie only lost consciousness once, when she was stitching herself up. Most of the time she slept or stared out of the window. Sometimes she had Chloe bring in the newspaper and hold it up so she could read it a little. Chloe changed bandages and kept the sign on the front door flipped to "Closed".

Chloe went on her walks when Nannie was asleep.

It was five days from the attack that Nannie got back on her feet. She asked for tea, and drank most of it, then pulled herself up on her good leg and said, "Enough of this. I got work to do." She limped into the kitchen and tried to butter some toast. The severed nerves in her hand would not allow it, so Chloe tried to butter it herself. Then Nannie went out into the living room to see what was left of her craft shop.

She stopped in the middle of the room, put her good hand to her mouth. She said, "Oh, Chloe."

The room was nearly empty and the cash box was gone.The boys had broken most of the crafts, and Chloe had swept them up and tossed them out. The shattered shelf boards lay on the floor and against the wall where they had fallen. Only a few button-eyed chickens still sat on the floor beneath the window, and painted brick doorstops lined the back wall. The braided rug had been thrown out with the ruined crafts, having been stained with Nannie's blood.

Nannie sat down then, fell actually, onto the bare floor. She hid her face in her good fist.

Then she said, "Chloe, you cleaned up. What a good girl. But you could have hurt yourself with the bits of glass and all those splinters."

Chloe said nothing.

Nannie sobbed a few silent tears, then said, "What am I going to do?"

"Make a craft, Nannie," Chloe offered. “That’s a happy thing, makin’ crafts.”

Nannie shuddered then her back went rigid. She sat up as straight as her damaged body would allow.

"You're right, honey. Get me some material from my trunk, and find my sewing kit. Bring them to me."

Nannie spent the next hour trying to thread a needle with her dead hand.

Then she tried to shuck a dried cob for a doll's body.

She tried to dab paint onto a brick from the pile out back, to make a flowered stop. The paint fell in large blue droplets to the wood floor. She looked at the drops and took a shuddering breath. She said, "Chloe, this is a good time for you to go on your walk. Take a stick in case you see any boys."

Chloe took a stick on her walk, but she left it in the woods just past the side yard.

When Chloe returned, Nannie had made it into the kitchen. There was water on the floor where she had tried to fix tea, and a burned biscuit in the oven. Nannie was sitting at the table, with a knife in her hand. Chloe stood and waited for Nannie to say something.

"No more crafts," Nannie said, finally looking at her granddaughter. "Boys took it away from me. Stole it from me. Criminals, all of them."

Chloe was silent.

Nannie brushed bread crumbs from the kitchen table with the blade of the knife, and said, "We ain't gonna make no more money with the shop."

Chloe said nothing.

"Your granddaddy was alive he'd go after them boys. But we's just two women." She laughed. "An old crippled woman and a woman with a baby mind. But never you bother. Maybe we can't get them boys for what they done, and maybe that's for God, anyway, but I got an idea.”

Chloe sat down and picked her doll from the chair beside her. She held it close to her bosom. "What idea, Nannie?"

Nannie smiled, only one side of her lip going up the right way. "Fix dinner, honey. I'll tell you how to do the stove if you're real careful."

Stony came over at seven thirty that evening, relieved that Nannie was up again, and not unduly surprised that she would not be making crafts again. He sat with them on the porch, holding his ball cap in his hands and alternating his gaze from Nannie's bandaged wounds to a patch of poison ivy by the porch step.

"There's state aid," Stony said. "And I got a little saved up. You got Chloe here to keep the house, 'though God knows she ain't half as dumb as she puts on. You ought to put her to work somewheres, least ways part time. Then she could take care of the house in the evenings."

Nannie shook her head. Her hair had not been brushed in days. "You don't know nothing 'bout your sister. She's a poor child God gave a body and no brains. She got a home with me long as I live and I'll take care of her. I'm making a plan. Leave us be. Go home."

"Damn it, Nannie, you can't work no more. I brought money, and I want you to take it." Stony shoved one hand deep into his overall pocket, and pulled out a wad of dollar bills. Nannie would not reach for it.

Chloe said nothing.

"Don't 'barrass me now by dying of starvation. You're family. Take the damn money," said Stony.

"You never tried to help before this. Just you and yourself. Then you get married and you never come over to show me your wife or your baby. That's family, Stony? That's how family acts? Go home."

"Nannie, you make me look like a fool. Everybody at work asks how you are. I have to look at 'em and say, 'She can't work no more but she won't take money from me, and now she's gonna eat dog food and roots and shoe leather'? Take the money."

"Go home."

He went home, and Nannie sat on the porch for a long time, while Chloe played with her doll and caught lightning bugs in her fists.

The next morning, Chloe found Nannie down the gravel driveway on her face, a paint brush in one hand and blue paint bleeding into the coarse gray rocks. Chloe pulled Nannie up with much effort, but the old woman's face, though stone-bruised, was smiling.

"What'cha happy about?" Chloe asked.

Nannie pointed at the old sandwich board sign by the road. Large, runny blue letters were painted in bold strokes over the faded "Blue Ridge Country Crafts." The new sign read, "Victim of Violent Crime. No Solicitors, Curious a Quarter."

Chloe shook her head. "What's that say?"

Nannie's smile did not fade. She tapped the bandages on her left arm, and on her hip beneath her cotton dress. "Crime gonna pay this time, honey. It's gonna pay for us."

On the way back into the house for breakfast, Nannie flipped the "Closed" sign on the door back over to "Open."

At first nobody came. Nannie told Chloe the local folks were not ones to peek too soon, but after a few days there was a trickling of women and men and children, slipping up the driveway and coming hesitantly to the door. The first of the curious pretended to be on church work, bringing along homemade pies and fried chicken. They were anxious to see, but didn't want to appear anxious. The hands which held the pies and chickens were sweaty hands, and the pockets on those dresses and trousers were full of quarters.

Nannie sat on a stuffed chair in her living room where once her dolls and toys had sat. She wore a loose skirt and blouse. When the quarter was dropped into a can by the door, Chloe would pull up Nannie's blouse and the curious would ooh and ahh at the ragged, red scars of Nannie's violent crime. After an uneasy start, the flow became steady for more than a week. People came and paid, acting as though they were embarrassed to be there, making Nannie promise not to tell anyone about their visit, hurrying down to their cars as if they were afraid they would be seen and chastised. Everyone wanted to see; no one wanted anyone to know they wanted to see.

Chloe took the money on her walks. She would be gone a while, and would pick up groceries at the little country store on her way home. Half of the time she bought what Nannie had asked her to buy, the other half she got an odd assortments of pretty shapes and brightly colored boxes and cans. She and Nannie ate well.

Then the money slowed and nearly stopped. Nannie's scars weren't so bad anymore. Kids even scowled and rolled their eyes after they saw what their school lunch quarters had bought them.

So Nannie gave the proof of her assault a little boost.

With a keen kitchen knife, she opened several of the healed wounds, making them a bit bigger than they originally were, and the curious came round again. Nannie upped the price to fifty cents, and displayed the red, draining cuts to those who would make crime pay.

Chloe watched the money clank into the can, and she helped Nannie undo her blouse and lift her skirt. In the late afternoons she took her walks. And after supper she sat and played with her doll while Nannie put on the nighttime dressings.