Ширли Мерфи - Poor Jenny, Bright As A Penny

Bingo had just come home from school. He slammed into the kitchen, tossed his sweater on a chair, got the bread and jelly from the cupboard. He was reaching into the icebox when he heard calked boots on the porch and thought, Papa’s home early.

But it was not Papa. It was another logger. He opened the screen door without knocking and stood there staring at Bingo. “Your mother home?” He pulled off his cap and wiped his arm across his sweaty forehead. “Where is she?” His manner alarmed Bingo.

“Maybe in the tavern. What’s the matter?”

The logger didn’t say. He swung out through the door and Bingo followed him, running along the boardwalk. He entered the tavern and Bingo slid in behind. Mama was sitting at the bar, telling a funny story to the men who sat with her. The logger put his hand on her shoulder and spun her around on the stool so she was facing him. Bingo saw Mama’s expression change from laughter to one he could not name.

In the dimness of that tavern with its stale smell of beer, Bingo learned what had happened to his father.

He did not run to Mama. He ran blindly down the trail behind the tavern and along the stream to the boulder where Papa took him fishing. He didn’t cry. He stood beside the boulder for a long time. He beat at the boulder with his fists, with his face, until he was bloodied. With his bloody hands, Papa would come and heal him.

Yet he knew he would not come.

Jenny found him there. He turned on her with the rest of his fury. When his rage was spent he clung to her.

When Crystal was told, she went to Mama, sharing Mama’s sopping handkerchief. Jenny, white and stricken, could not cry. After she had found Bingo and at last had gotten him to sleep, she went into the woods and was sick. When she got back she found Crystal curled up on the bed with Bingo, and Mama had gone out.

After Papa died, Mama needed people around her more than ever, and Crystal seemed to also. She did not like to be alone, and Jenny and Bingo didn’t fill her need as Mama’s friends did; perhaps the firm smile of a logger made her emptiness for Papa easier to bear.

Once, after Papa died, Jenny said to Bingo, “Papa’s not gone far.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe in God anymore.”

“Rubbish. You know that’s rubbish.”

“Why is it rubbish? What kind of God would take Papa?”

She stared at him perplexed. She didn’t exactly believe in God either. Not a bearded old man watching over them. Nor had Papa. But Papa had believed in something. Papa had said once, “It’s something we can’t know for certain. We were never meant to know. There are miracles we can’t see, wonders we can’t imagine.” Still, he had used the word “God” with Bingo. Whatever intellect it was that had created all this could as well be called God. But now, what could she tell Bingo, six years old and desolate with loss? Besides, Papa would have said that that intelligence had nothing to do with a person’s dying. She put her arm around Bingo.

“What makes you think God plans everything, including when we die? If it were all planned out, there wouldn’t be any sense in it. God makes the rules, but He leaves room for things to just happen. Otherwise we’d only be puppets. Papa said that, Bingo. Don’t you believe Papa?”

The cabin with the stone fireplace was the first and last real home the children had, and when Jenny thought of it she saw Papa there, wrestling with them, stirring fudge over the old black range, making pancakes in the shape of rabbits, or telling them stories. Always, Papa’s face was smiling and strong.

After Papa died, things changed. They began living on welfare checks, and there were men visiting Mama; she had less and less time for the children. Jenny looked after Bingo, but Crystal was older and would not have Jenny’s interference. “Crystal can take care of herself,” Mama would say, smiling at Crystal indulgently. Mama had never made Crystal mind Papa’s rules the way Jenny and Bingo had to, and now that Papa was dead the rules were gone anyway.

Then Lud came. Then they started to move around.

It wasn’t possible to pretend those dark little apartments they lived in were home. It wasn’t possible to feel comfortable in rooms where nothing was theirs, where countless other people had left dirt and smells, had left behind, it seemed to Jenny, something like ghosts of themselves in the battered rooms. And where the lives of their neighbors were forced on them through the thin apartment walls: swearing, fighting, drunken love-making, and sometimes other children crying in terror. They could hear beatings; they could hear it all. Once Jenny walked into an apartment and brought back a little baby all black-and-blue and kept it until the police came for it. It was a little girl. The apartment had food on the floor, and mouse dirt, and the kitchen sink was black with crawling ants. There were empty capsules on the counter, and hypodermic needles with ants crawling over them.

But, in spite of the ugliness they still lived in apartments. Mama said they couldn’t afford a house. Jenny said that was rubbish. If they would stay in one place and Mama and Lud would go to work they could. But Mama gravitated to what she liked best and seemed easiest, and Mama liked living close to lots of people. She would visit with people in the halls, listen to their problems and tell them hers, lean against the stained plaster, dropping cigarette ashes onto the threadbare carpets, and laugh with people who were strangers. Mama and Lud had an instant social life wherever they went.

Chapter 3

There were no towns along the highway, only blackness, as if they were hurtling through space. When lightning flashed, the rain was a curtain of silver needles. Bingo was half asleep, his face pressed against the rough upholstery that smelled of ancient dust.

Crystal pushed her feet against the boxes that crowded the floor and there was the sound of shattering. She turned away from Jenny’s accusing stare and lit a cigarette.

Lud stopped for a six-pack, running into the store through the rain and out again clumsily. It was a wonder he hadn’t sent Mama. He drank with one hand and guided the car absently with the other. When Mama had finished her third beer she started on the welfare worker again. “The nerve, anyway, barging in like that! And then to top it off, saying I should go to work! They want a little nine-year-old boy running the streets with no supervision?”

Bingo opened his mouth to say something, but Jenny poked him in the ribs.

Lud said, “Well, maybe they—”

“Maybe they what? They’ve got their gall. Real gall. They can take their job training and shove it. I know my rights.”

“What are they going to do when they find out you’ve left the county?”

“What can they do?”

“And you had to tell them I was your cousin from California on my way to Washington to pick apples. Apples this time of year?”

“Late apples.”

This struck them as very funny. Three or four beers were just about Mama’s limit on an empty stomach.

The blackness of the highway receded; a greasy orange light shone around the drenched yard of a forlorn motel.

U-Auto Rest Nice Cabins Cheap Cut-Rate Gas Groceries

From one cabin rock music beat heavily, and the light from its open door made a yellow square where a boy sat on the steps, his bare feet stuck out in the rain. The other cabins looked empty.

Beyond the cabins stood a larger shack; it had a store window and two ancient gas pumps in front. To Jenny the lighted store was like a stage, the theater around it darkened and the play about to begin. On the stage were shelves stacked with jumbled cans and boxes, a high old-fashioned counter, and a man sitting in a rocker reading the paper. When Lud entered, the play began. It did not need words. Lud signed a card, money was exchanged, the key taken from a rack. Then Lud moved off stage and the bulbous-nosed man settled, with an obvious sigh, to his newspaper.