Winter Birds (3 page)

Another time she heard a dry crawling sound under the sink and spent the rest of the morning taking everything out of drawers and off shelves until at noon she found a chicken snake curled behind the drainpipes. She crushed its head with a tub of lard and burned its body on the trash pile along with the rest of the day's refuse.

Another time Mr. Luther, who owned the seed farm Papa worked on and the house you lived in, shot a six-foot rattlesnake in the dirt road near your mailbox. Mama, Amy Kay, and you watched from behind the ditch. Mama held you by the shoulder to keep you from running into the road. You watched the dying snake whip dust with its thick, musical tail. The sight of the long thing lashing frightened you so much Mama had to sit with you that night before you could fall asleep.

Later that same summer, as Mama folded clothes she had gathered sun-drenched from the line, Amy Kay called out to her, “Mama, there's a snake with Danny on the bed!” Mama ran to the door.

You simply sat there, Danny, staring at what might have been a coil of dull brown rope. Mama whispered to you not to move. Later when she told the story she said
she was terrified at the way you sat so perfectly motionless, staring with complete fascination at the snake. She brought a quilt from the other room. She stepped calmly behind the snake and threw the quilt over the dry, scaled body. Without pausing to take a breath she pulled you off the bed—you stiff and wide-eyed, not making a sound —and then she balled up the bedspread around the quilt and the furious snake and dragged the whole bundle outside. The snake coiled round and round itself in the fabric. She let it find its own way out and cut off its head with the hoe, cut its body a dozen other places, watching the pieces of snake turn over and over helplessly in the grass. A moccasin. Inside, she stripped you raw and checked every inch of you for bites. You held her arm and gazed at her without a word. Amy Kay watched from the doorway, knuckles in her mouth.

That night Mama told Papa in a high, strained voice, “You better get Mr. Luther to stop up the holes in this house. I don't care if it takes iron bars to do it, if that's what it takes to keep the snakes away from my babies.” When Papa held her she trembled. He asked, more gently than was his habit, what had happened this time.

Whether he ever spoke to Mr. Luther about the snakes is another matter. Papa had work to do and no time to worry about snakes. He was the foreman on Mr. Luther's farm and the work kept him busy from morning till night. It was here on Mr. Luther's seed farm that Papa lost most of one arm.

You never heard the whole story, Danny, and neither
did your brothers or your sister. Papa never talked about that day, and only rarely mentioned the green cinder-block house or Mr. Luther's farm. Mama told you the story. She said she was hanging out clothes on the line when she saw Mr. Luther's blue Cadillac full of people roaring away from the fields in a fog of gray dust. She figured something was wrong by the speed of the car and thought maybe Mr. Luther was having another heart attack. It made her sad to think so because Mr. Luther had always been nice to her. But she went on hanging out the clothes, expecting she would hear whatever news there was when Papa came home for lunch.

A few minutes later Mrs. Luther drove up in the white Cadillac. Mrs. Luther got out of the car slowly, as if she weren't quite sure where she was. Her face was ashen. There was an accident, she said, or something like that, not meeting Mama's eyes. God only knew how it happened, Bobjay knew to turn off the harvester before he tried to clean it. Mama dropped her load of clothes to the ground and grabbed Mrs. Luther by the arm. Mrs. Luther reared back like a snake about to strike. “Mr. Luther has taken him to the hospital himself,” she said. “There wasn't time for an ambulance. Bobjay was working alone in the backfields and got his arm caught in the corn harvester—it ground up half his arm.”

Mama released the woman and turned slowly. Mrs. Luther watched her without any particular sympathy. “They brought him to my house. Right into my kitchen when any fool could have seen there wasn't a thing I could
do for him. There's blood everywhere. The boys said he walked half a mile through the fields with only his shirt for a tourniquet. Mr. Luther said I should drive you to the hospital as soon as the boys get back from the fields.”

“The boys?” Mama asked. Mrs. Luther took a long deep breath. “My husband sent three of them back there to get the … to clean the … out of the machine.”

A MONTH
or so later you moved to a red-shingled house that smelled of fish. Mama found this house for you to move into after Mr. Luther told her Papa couldn't work on the farm anymore with only the one arm that he could use. Mama sold her wedding rings to pay the first month's rent. Mr. Luther's hands loaded your furniture on a truck while Papa sat in the car smoking cigarettes and staring ahead at the empty driveway. Mama watched him nervously and hollered at the men loading the truck to be careful with her furniture.

The new house was hardly a house at all, having only one large room with a window in each wall and a sink in the corner. The outhouse stood in lush weeds a short walk out the back door, down a path fringed with chickweed and sheep's burr. You children had never used an outdoor toilet before and at first you were afraid you would fall through one of the dark, stinking holes. But Mama told you this was the only kind of bathroom there was when she was little, and she stayed with you the first time, holding you steady with one hand while covering her eyes with the other.

You named this place the Fish House, because before you lived in it the owner Mrs. Edna Crenshaw had run a fish store in the building, and the smell of the fish had soaked every board. Mrs. Crenshaw, a large, powder-fleshed woman, had been in the fish market business many years, buying fresh seafood off trucks that drove straight up the highway from the coast. Her customers were the local farmers and merchants, who got tired of their wives' fried chicken and fatback and greasy pork chops. Over the years Mrs. Crenshaw had done well enough to lay aside money to build herself a brand-new brick fish store across the highway from the old one. You could see it from the window of your house, a small, square brick building with a multicolored sign in front, that Mrs. Crenshaw's husband retouched lovingly every week from the same four cans of paint. Amy Kay called him Mr. Fish Face because of the way his eyelids drew back from his eyeballs, exposing the whites all around.

You and Amy shared a bed in one corner of the house, with Allen's crib next to you near the couches and chair that separated you from Mama and Papa's bed in the other corner of the house. The first night you lived there Mama unpacked dishes while Papa glared at her from that bed. His empty sleeve dangled at his side. “This whole place smells like goddamn fish,” he said.

Mama settled the dishes in the fresh-scrubbed cabinets without answering or looking around. From the frown on Papa's face you knew there would be a fight that night. It gave you a feeling in your stomach, a hurting like
you wanted to cry inside. You watched Papa and waited. When he began to shout—about the bitch who couldn't find no better place to live than this shack a fat-ass Holiness woman sold fish out of —you ran for the screen door to escape the sound. You tripped and fell. No one noticed then. You sat outside in the cold, listening to Papa's shouts till long after dark. Mama unpacked boxes and wiped her eyes. Finally Papa drank enough to fall asleep in his chair. You came back into the house then. But even after Mama put Papa to bed and turned out the last light in the house you lay awake in your bed, listening.

In the morning your ankle was swollen where you had fallen. Mama put a cold cloth full of ice against the hurt place, and stroked your forehead. “The doctors say your blood is special,” she said. “It doesn't do what other people's blood does. Isn't it nice to have special blood? Even when it hurts a little?”

Papa, frowning and sullen behind her, looked at your ankle as if it were untouchable. When the wound in his piece of arm healed Papa took a job at a gas company paying thirty-five dollars a week. He delivered bottles of gas for farm wives to cook with, and bulk loads of gas for farm husbands to cure tobacco with, and repaired stoves and furnaces and refrigerators besides. Even with one hand Papa could fix almost anything, if he had time to fiddle with it. He got a little happier when he was working again. But he wasn't making nearly as much money as he had made working for Mr. Luther. Every night you ate potatoes cooked a different way. Papa hardly ever spoke
at all, only stared at his plate. In his presence you children became quiet and fearful, because he was always frowning, and because the place where his whole arm used to be looked vacant and strange now. He would catch you looking at him and turn away. Where before he came home drunk once in two weeks, now he came home drinking two or three times a week. The look in his eyes was like flat gray stone.

Mama watched him carefully from across that one big room, continually gauging the distance.

No neighbors came to visit, except Mrs. Crenshaw at the first of each month, standing in the door wearing her smile and her blood-stained apron, talking jovially about Holiness revivals, holding out her dough-white hand for Mama to count green money onto. Mama watched the money slide into Mrs. Crenshaw's apron pocket and Mrs. Crenshaw turned away, wiping her hands on that apron. Until one month Mama met her with a smile, no money. Papa had to pay on the hospital bill for his arm, Mama said, or else the hospital would arrest him. So could Mrs. Crenshaw wait a little while for the rent? A week or two?

Mrs. Crenshaw, being a woman of firm business principle, shook her head no. Only a little later you moved again, away from the Fish House.

AMY NAMED
the next house the Ice House because there was only one heater in the whole place, in the kitchen. All winter you and the others sat there watching television till it was time to go to bed, with the rest of the rooms closed
off and dark around you, too cold to live in. Allen Raymond had grown big enough now to sit up on Mama's lap and suck his thumb; you couldn't call him a baby any more. But Mama was going to have another baby soon. Her stomach was growing bigger and bigger.

Mama and Papa argued the whole winter about this baby that was coming. Papa didn't see how Mama could expect to feed another mouth on forty dollars a week, which was what he was making now that he had worked for the gas company for a while. Mama asked what Papa expected her to do about it now. It was water under the bridge. The new baby was on the way, they couldn't do anything but love it. Papa said, expensive love, if we all have to go hungry to feed it.

Later you watched him standing in the doorway to their bedroom, staring at the stump of his arm and grinding his jaw. You understood their fights only vaguely, but you knew that the strange dulled look on Papa's face meant he had been drinking from the bottle Mama hated. He drank from that bottle more and more as Mama's stomach grew. Through the cold months their arguments blended one into the other.

Once he came home late in the night with a cut over one eye and a story about a fight in the Downs, the part of Potter's Lake where black people lived. Papa said some coon cut him with the lid of a tomato can. The sheriff's deputy broke up the fight before it went any farther, but since he was a friend of Papa's he didn't arrest anybody. Mama tended the cut and put Papa to bed, glad he had
picked somebody else to fight for an evening. He slept like a lamb till the next afternoon, curled up like a baby under mounds of quilts. A frost-covered Sunday slipped by, Papa laughing and joking with all of you.

The next week Amis John Crell was born. Papa drove Mama to the hospital in his work truck. Mama's youngest sister Delia stayed in the house with you children, sleeping in Amy Kay's rickety bed, in the same room with Allen and you. Mama stayed in the hospital four nights running. Papa visited her at first, but he didn't like hospitals and never stayed for very long. At night when he came home he talked to Delia in a low voice and gave her long looks you didn't understand. But they made you feel afraid. Delia was always careful to keep you children in the room with her and to ask about Mama and the baby. She went to bed when you children went to bed, and locked the bedroom door, but once she stood beside it listening for a long time.

The hospital bill totaled five hundred forty-nine dollars and seventy-three cents.

When it came in the mail Papa read it and left the house without a word. You watched him splash on the headlights and roar out of the yard, his face hard and angry, his whitened knuckles gripping the steering wheel. Amy, Allen, and you fell asleep before he came home. But every hour Mama tiptoed into the room to check on the new baby that slept like a little pink nut inside his shell of blankets. Whenever Mama came in the room you woke up and watched her standing over the crib with that tender look on her face.

Early in the morning Papa came home and the argument began. The shouting woke you up too, and you listened. Pretty soon Amis John began to cry because of the noise, but when Mama tried to comfort him Papa chased her out of the room and wouldn't let her come back inside. You heard her call out once in pain. All night the baby sobbed, with only Amy, Allen, and you to quiet him. In the morning Mama's face was swollen on one side and her eye was dark blue. Papa sat at the kitchen table drinking his coffee as if nothing had happened. When he left Mama took Amis John to her room and they stayed there all day with the door closed.

In the spring after the second winter in the house, Papa found a place he thought was better, and you moved again.

IN THE
Pack House Amis John got his nickname—Duck—by taking his first steps through a mudhole. He had his share of cuts and bruises but they healed quickly, and the doctors soon declared him as normal as Allen before him as far as bleeding was concerned. Mama breathed easier when she found that out. Even with a new baby she watched you every minute, Danny, and you never stepped out of the house without hearing her warning to be careful. You were always careful. You never walked barefoot in the grass. For a while your spells of bleeding didn't come so often. You were happy, listening to Mama sing as she changed Duck's diapers, calling Amy Kay or you to come hold the pins.