The Liars' Club: A Memoir (25 page)

I stayed clueless a long time, even after Daddy had been phoned and ratted to, even after he’d spanked me with Grandma Moore’s old homemade leather horse quirt, itself an insult. I may have actually cried.

The next day, I planned to picket the Carters’ driveway, believing kids from union families wouldn’t cross such a line to play with them. With Mother’s oil paints, I wrote placards for Lecia and me to carry. Mine read, prosaically enough, “Down with the Carters”; Lecia’s, “The Carters Fight Unfair.” But Lecia talked me out of it. My morning as sniper won me a grudging respect. Kids stopped mouthing off about Mother. The anti-Carter campaign had brought me activity, and a parcel of relief. Without them to plot against, I sank back into my lonesomeness for Mother.

Daddy had only one Liars’ Club story that told me about his own momma’s meanness, and that dealt with the blistering quality of her whippings, which were such that he bragged about having stood them. “The old lady would stripe my ass too. Don’t think she wouldn’t. Just as quick as Poppa would.”

We’re cleaning ducks—Daddy and I, and the other fellows. By nine this morning, we’d bagged our limit. I’m scooping the guts out of a little teal duck, and Daddy is pulling feathers from the huge slackened body of our only Canadian goose. With one swipe of his hand he clears a wide path in the feathers. “Momma was tough as a wood-hauler’s ass,” he says, and that’s high praise. Back in the logging camp, wood haulers drove mule-drawn wagons of raw lumber. Since their butts rubbed up against unstripped pine all day, they became badges of toughness.

“How many eggs ya’ll want?” Ben wants to know. Everybody says three. He slides a big slab of Crisco into the black skillet. We stopped here at Cooter’s one-room cabin to clean ducks and eat breakfast. It’s on Chupique Bayou, just across the river in Louisiana.

“Not as big as a minute, my mother,” Daddy says. “But mean as a snake if you ever lied to her.”

Shug then says with a straight face that he can’t imagine Daddy
ever
lying. He’s quartering the ducks and wrapping the pieces in white freezer paper for us to divvy up when we’re back in town.

Daddy tilts his head at Shug. “Last time she ever whupped on me was over lying. I had got big enough to figure I was too big to whup. Hell, my arms was that big around.” He stares into the washtub full of duck carcass and feathers at his feet like it’s some oracle his momma’s ghost is about to rise out of.

When he’s sure everybody’s listening, he backs up to set the scene. “Had come a hurricane that August. Dumped umpteen-zillion gallons of water in the Neches River. High?” He glares at each one of us so we get the point. “Lord God, that river was high.” The room sits quiet, the only noises the pop of eggs sliding in grease and Shug folding up the butcher paper. For a split second, the word “hurricane” sends roaring out of my own head at me a memory of the Orange Bridge during Hurricane Carla—how the railing had come rushing sideways at the car through the rain. I shake my head loose from that and get back to my teal ducks. It’s sticky work.

“I remember that storm,” Cooter says. He’s got a little wire of excitement in his voice at the idea of actually being in on the story.

“Cooter, you was still shitting yellow back then,” Ben says, “if you was drawing breath at all.” He breaks the yolks with his spatula so the eggs fry up hard. To get eggs like this in a truck stop, you say to the lady,
Turn ’em over and step on ’em.

“Well, I remember one like it,” Cooter says.

“Hell, we all remember one like it,” Shug says. He’s about fed up with Cooter, who’s been bossing him all weekend because he’s colored.
Shug, get the outboard. Shug, you’re shooting too soon. Goddammit, Shug, I was saving them biscuits for later.
Cooter is also just walking the edge of telling colored jokes. He uses
Polack
and
Aggie
, but everybody—Shug included—knows that if there wasn’t a black man holding down a chair in this room they’d be nigger this and nigger that. Daddy says Cooter’s just ignorant, never knew anybody colored before, so it’s not his fault. But it seems mean how nobody ever says anything back directly. I mean, the guys do try to corral him a little and keep him from being overmuch an asshole. But nobody says flat out
You’re just picking on Shug because he’s colored.
It sometimes seems to me like we’re not supposed to notice that Shug’s colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug’s being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody’s difference gets pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man’s skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling.

Daddy’s voice stops me wondering. “Anyways, Momma told me and my brother A.D. flat out not to go into that river. ‘Stay out of that river, boys. They’s boys drowned in that river.’ And we said okay. But A.D. cut me a little look. And I know we thinking the same thing.

“Me and old A.D. go squat outside the window and talk real loud so she’ll hear us. Say we oughta go down the sawmill. See if Poppa needs any help. We take off down that woods road, but soon as we hit the fork where she can’t see”—he forks his fingers
like a road he’s arriving at—“we peel off and go yonder a ways. The rest of them boys was gonna be down at the water. So that’s where we want to be too. We got there and stripped on down and dove just as straight in that river as a pair of butter knives.”

Daddy’s done plucking the goose and hands me the prickly pink body to gut. He picks up a mallard. Its head is an iridescent green. When Ben was toting all the mallards up from the duck blind earlier this morning, all their green shiny heads came together in his big red hand like a bouquet of flowers. But for their black eyes staring out, you could almost forget they’re dead.

“And this was your oldest brother you was with?” Cooter asks.

“It don’t matter who it was, Cooter,” Shug says. “Goddamn, you’re the asking-est sonofabitch I ever met.”

Cooter twists around on the chair and stares at Shug. Cooter maintains a birdlike way of twitching his head around that makes me think sometimes that he’s about to go clucking off across the room pecking at the floorboards. “It matters if I feel like knowing,” Cooter says.

Daddy draws back the mallard in his hand like it’s a ball bat he’s fixing to swing. “I swear to God, I’m gonna flail both your asses with this duck if you don’t shut up,” he says.

“He started it,” Cooter says, then sinks back down in his shirt collar.

Ben says to let it go. He’s over at the stove, pouring off the extra grease from the skillet into the lard pot.

Daddy takes a few swipes at the mallard to get everybody’s eyes back on him before he starts up again. “That evening we head down through them woods back home, and here comes Momma. She’d got her apron pulled around and tucked in her skirt so the brush don’t catch it. And she always wore a old blue-flowered bonnet.” Daddy fans his hands behind his head to show the bonnet. “The sun was going down to the west, which was her right side. So that bonnet th’owed a shadow across’t her face. Kept us from seeing her. But I could tell by how she was stomping through those weeds that she was mad. Plus she’d already cut herself a piss elum pole about as long as she was tall. Like she’d
got it in her head already to whup us. I whisper over my shoulder to A.D. not to tell her we went in. Just to say we watched the other boys. And he says okay.

“Not a minute later she stops square on that path in front of me. ‘J.P.,’ she says, ‘you go in that river?’

“‘No’m,’ I says, ‘we just watched them other boys.’ And she says fine. Then she reaches that pole around behind me and taps A.D. on the shoulder. Just light enough to get his attention. ‘A.D., did you go in that river?’ And damned if he don’t say, ‘Yes’m. I went in, and he come in with me,’ And I thinks to myself, you sorry sonofabitch.”

I watch Ben draw a cake pan of biscuits out of the oven. He uses a pointy bottle opener to pop a triangular hole in a brand-new yellow can of sugarcane syrup. I like to poke a hole in a biscuit with my thumb, then fill it with that syrup so it gushes out the sides when you bite down. I figure on doing that, which fills the back of my mouth up with longing for the sweetness of it. I’m still holding that sweetness like a thirst when Daddy starts up.

“Lemme tell you fellas, my momma at that time wasn’t no bigger than Mary Marlene here.” He jerks his thumb at me so I can prove his mother’s tininess. I ignore this by faking big-time interest in slitting open the fat belly of this goose. “Probably didn’t weigh ninety pounds with boots on, my momma. Anyways, she took us out on the screened-in back porch—we slept out there in the summer. Started in on him with that pole and like to have killed him. Brought it down on his back in one narrow swatch, like she was trying to cut a groove through his flesh. I’d laugh like hell every time his eyes caught mine. I figured she was getting wore out on him. So’s my turn wouldn’t be as bad.”

Shug says, “My daddy beat me and my brother thataways. Taking turns, so one watched the other.”

“Now you’re interrupting!” Cooter says, slapping the table. “Why don’t nobody stop him interrupting?” The veins are standing out on Cooter’s neck. Ben tells him to get the plates down and stop feeling sorry for hisself.

Daddy drops the mallard in the tub like he’s all of a sudden exhausted by thinking again about that whipping. The whole burden of it seems to fall on him full force. His shoulders slump. The deep lines of his face get deeper. Then he gets an unfocused look at the middle distance like the beating’s happening right in the room, and all he has to do is watch it and report back to the other guys. “That pole of hers cut the shirt right off my back in about four swipes.” His head drops lower, as if under the weight of that pole, which is getting easier by the minute for me to imagine. “I’ve had grown men beat on me with tire irons and socks full of nickels and every conceivable kind of stick. But that old woman shrunk up like a pullet hen took that piss elum pole and flat set me on fire from my shoulders clear down past my ass. And every time she said a word, she brought that pole down. ‘Don’t—you—lie—to—me—Don’t—you—run—from—me!’ Hell, I broke loose from her a couple of times. And I run to the screen door. But the pine boards on that old sleeping porch was swole up from that rain. The door was swole. So I couldn’t pull it flush all the way, couldn’t get the latch unhooked. I’d just about get it wiggled tight in the frame, and then that pole would find my back again. You could hear it come whistling through the air just a heartbeat before you felt it. And Momma behind it just hacking at me like I was a pine she was trying to knock over. I was scared to fall. Scared I wouldn’t live to get vertical again. I promise you that. You think she was wore out on A.D.?” He squints at us, then picks up the mallard again and picks at a few of the quills like he’s winding down. “Hell, she just warmed up on A.D.”

“They hate that when you run,” Ben says. He’s sliding the last egg onto the platter. “My grandma was the same exact way. Running just dragged it out.” Of course, I am famous for running in the middle of a spanking. It makes me proud that Daddy used to run too. I always figured only a dumbass would just stand still and take it. I have maneuvered my way over by the stove and am eye level now with the plate of biscuits, which have plumped up
nice and brown on top. The slightest blink from Ben saying okay, and I will snatch the first one.

“I finally broke straight through the middle of that screen,” Daddy says. “Left a outline of myself cut clean around the edges as a paper doll.” Shug winks at me over the unlikeliness of this. He always keeps me posted as to the believability quotient of what Daddy’s saying, even though I’m a kid, and a notorious pain in the ass as kids go.

Daddy sets down the duck again, and a smile stretches across his face, his eyes crinkle up, and his shoulders go square like the best part of the story just bubbled back up in him. “And old A.D. had hell to pay. Don’t think he didn’t.”

“Wasn’t Uncle A.D. a lot bigger than you, Daddy?” I am always trying to figure a way around my own skinniness. Uncle A.D. is a big oak tree of a man, white-headed and strong. In all the pictures of the Karr boys lined up, he stands close to Daddy and stares down his nose, like he’s lording something over him.

“Don’t make no difference, bigger,” Daddy says. “Bigger’s just one thing. They’s a whole lot of other things than bigger, Pokey. Don’t you forget it. Bigger’s ass, was what I thought.

“I head out behind the shed,” Daddy says, “and there’s old A.D. hunkered down on the ground. ‘Say, brother,’ I says to him.” Daddy’s voice as he makes out talking to Uncle A.D. is smooth and sweet as melty butter. “‘I believe you made out pretty bad back there.’ I tell him I got some burn salve may take that sting out. And A.D. he bends over. Starts picking at that shirt on his back where that fabric’s stuck down in them sores. He’s a-hissing between his teeth. Gets that old cotton blouse pulled up over his shoulder blades, then asks me does that look bad. And I say, ‘Poor old you.’ Course she cut the shirt slap off my back. ‘Pull your shirt off your neck a little higher,’ I says to him. ‘I don’t want to get this here salve on it. Piss Momma off any worse.’ So he bends way over further. Gets bent double-like. His arms all hung up in them shirtsleeves till he’s stuck like a snake in a sock. That’s when I grab hold to him. Pour that old turpentine horse liniment down in them sores. Was a deep, purple-black liniment Momma made
from tar. I held him still and smeared it in with the flat of my hand. And him wrassling me to break loose.”

Shug stops wrapping bird carcasses a second. He tilts his head at Daddy, then says that his momma cooked up some horse liniment back then out of a tar base. See, Shug’s from up in the piney woods too. “Hers was tar and pine sap, I remember right. Maybe she put some lemon grass in it, one of them stingy herbs.” Shug’s momma knew Daddy’s momma. They were both pretty good country doctors, and every now and then Shug and Daddy ride back toward their mothers into that place to get to something like this liniment, or some other doctoring recipe. The looks on their faces grow so vaguely soft that I feel tears start in back of my eyes. I am verging on lonesome myself for these women I never knew.