Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

“I don’t want to leave you here with Daddy,” I said, “let alone myself. He’s still got a pretty good left hook.”

“Don’t stay on my account,” Mama said. “I let him in last night, though I don’t remember it all in a solid kind of way. It was the cure-all. It keeps me confused. And I get so lonely.”

“That stuff doesn’t cure a thing,” I said. “It just makes you drunk and dreamy, and gives you excuses. You ought not drink it anymore.”

“You don’t know how things are,” she said. “It makes me feel good when I feel bad, and without it, I feel bad pretty much all the time. You should go. Forget digging up anybody, that’s a bad idea, but you should go.”

“I told you, I don’t want to leave you with Daddy.”

“I can deal with him.”

“I don’t want you to have to,” I said.

Mama considered on something for a long time. I could almost see whatever it was behind her eyes, moving around back there like a person in the shadows. Time she took before she spoke to me, had I been so inclined-which I wasn’t-I could have smoked a cigar, and maybe grown the tobacco to roll another.

“Let me tell you something, honey,” she said. “Something I should have told you maybe some years ago, but I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know what kind of woman I was.”

“You’re all right.”

“No,” Mama said. “No, I’m not all right. I said that before, and I mean it. I’m not all right. I’m not a good Christian.”

It wasn’t Tuesday, so I wasn’t all that high on religion.

“All I know is, if something works out, God gets praised,” I said. “If it don’t, it’s his will. Seems to me he’s always perched to swoop in and take credit for all manner of things he didn’t do anything about, one way or the other.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’ve been baptized.”

“I been wet,” I said. “All I remember was the preacher held my head under the river water, and when he lifted me up he said something while I blew a stream out of my nose.”

“You shouldn’t have such talk,” she said. “Hell is a hot and bad place.”

“I figure I could go there from here and feel relieved,” I said.

“Let’s not discuss it any further,” she said. “I won’t have the Lord spoken ill of.”

She smoldered for a time. I decided to let her. I sat there and checked out the tips of my fingers, looked at my feet, and watched dust floating in the air. Then she said something that was as surprising as if she had opened her mouth and a covey of quail flew out.

“The man you call Daddy,” she said, “well, he isn’t your daddy.”

I couldn’t say anything. I just sat there, numb as an amputated leg.

“Your real daddy is Brian Collins. He was a lawyer and may still be. Over in Gladewater. He and I, well, we had our moment, and then…I got pregnant with you.”

“Then Don ain’t my daddy?”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t.’”

“Forget the ain’t shit. He ain’t my daddy?”

“No. And don’t cuss…what a foul word. Never use that word…I been meaning to tell you he isn’t your daddy. I was waiting for the right time.”

“Anytime after birth would have been good.”

“I know it’s a shock,” Mama said. “I didn’t tell you because Brian isn’t the one who raised you.”

“It’s not like Don did all that much raising, either,” I said. “My real daddy…what was he like?”

“He treated me very well. He is older than me by five years or so. We loved one another, and I got pregnant.”

“And he didn’t want anything to do with you?”

“He wanted to marry me. We loved one another.”

“You loved him so much, you come over here and married Don and let me think he was my daddy? You left my daddy, a lawyer and a good man, and you married a jackass? What was you thinking?”

“See? I told you I was a bad mother.”

“Okay. You win. You’re a bad mother.”

“Listen here, Sue Ellen. I was ashamed. A Christian woman having a child out of wedlock. It wasn’t right. It made Brian look bad.”

“He said he’d marry you, didn’t he?”

“I was starting to show,” she said. “I didn’t want to get married to him like that, even if it was just in front of a justice of the peace. He had a good job and was respected, and I didn’t want that to be lost to him because I couldn’t keep my legs crossed.”

“He had something to do with the blessed event.”

She smiled a little. “Yes, he did.”

“So to stay respectful, you left him and came here and ended up marrying Don while you were showing, and now here we are, me toting a stick of stove wood and you a cure-all drunk.”

“I was seventeen,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“I’m seventeen.”

“You’re sixteen.”

“Close enough.”

“You aren’t the way I was when I was your age. You’re strong. Like your real daddy. You have a determination like he has. You’re hardheaded in the same way. He wanted to marry me no matter what. I ran off in the dead of night and caught a ride and ended up with a job in a cafe. I met Don there. He wasn’t so ragged and mean then. He wasn’t an intellectual or financial catch, and no one thought so highly of him that if he married a pregnant woman it would matter. I decided I could deal with that with him, but not with Brian. He deserved better.”

“You didn’t think you was good enough?”

“Were good enough,” she said. “It’s ‘were.’ That’s the proper word.”

“You been sleeping up here and wandering around in a vapor of cure-all, but now you have time to fix my English?”

“Brian was a good man and it would have changed things for him.”

“What about me?” I said.

“I was young. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“That’s your hole in the bag? You were young?”

“I wanted you to have a home. Don said he didn’t care whose child it was. He just wanted me. I thought he meant it, and things would be okay, and Brian could go on with his life. Next day after our wedding, Don got drunk and blacked my eye and I knew who he was. But I was stuck. He got what he wanted, and then the hell began. It’s gone on now for over sixteen years. He has times when he’s like the man I met, but then he has more times where he’s the man I know now.”

“And here you are, wearing hell’s overcoat and happy to have it.”

“I think Don has done the best he could,” she said. “I think, in his own way, he loves me.”

“I know this, Mama-Jinx don’t have to go to bed at night with a stick of stove wood.”

“I stayed for you.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said, leaning forward in the chair. “It was for me, we’d been long gone a long ways back. You stayed because you’re too weak in the head to do anything else. Weak before you took that damn cure-all. Weak and happy to be weak. You’re just glad he don’t hit you as much as he used to, and when he does, not as hard. He’s got you in a bottle now, and he can pour you out and use you when he wants to. That ain’t right, Mama. You left me to deal with him while you was floating on some cloud somewhere. I don’t blame the cure-all for it, Mama. I blame you.”

I could see my words had stung like a bee, and that made me happy.

“You’re right,” she said. “I am a quitter. I quit the man I loved. I quit life, and I married a quitter, and I’ve pretty much quit you, but I didn’t mean to.”

“Now that makes it all better.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.

“Somebody meant it,” I said. “You wasn’t swigging cure-all back when you got pregnant and run off. Tell you what. I’ll leave you a good stick of stove wood by the bed. When you ain’t drunk on your medicine, which is about fifteen minutes a day, you can use it on him. I think a good shot to the side of the head is best. Rest of the time, you can float in the clouds and he can do what he wants, and you can pretend you don’t know or understand. But you ain’t fooling me, and let me say ‘ain’t’ again. Ain’t.”