John Toole - The Neon Bible

It seemed like we just started, but before I knew it I heard the cinders under my feet, and I realized we were in the front yard. Aunt Mae stopped at the gate to rest. I waited with her for a while, then I walked on up the porch to see how Mother was. It was late, and maybe Flora had put her in bed. When I got to the door, it was wide open. I wondered what Flora had done that for. I could hear Mother talking in the kitchen, but I didn't hear anybody else. I stood on the porch and waited for Aunt Mae, and when I saw she was going to rest by the gate for quite a while, I called to her to hurry up and come in. She came across the cinders slowly, fanning herself with her big hat. When she got up to where I was on the porch and saw the door open, she looked at me and I told her how I had found it. She said Flora must have been crazy to let the door open like that with all the things in the hills that might run in. Mother was talking louder in the kitchen. We both heard her.

Aunt Mae went in and threw her hat on a chair in the front room while I closed the door. She turned around and said to me that Flora should have got Mother in bed long ago. The only voice I heard in the kitchen was still Mother's. She was answering somebody, it sounded like, only I didn't hear the other person. Aunt Mae was already in the kitchen when I got there, and I heard her asking Mother where Flora was. Mother was sitting at the table looking at the picture of the white crosses. Aunt Mae asked her again. She looked up like she was surprised to see Aunt Mae.

"Flora? Oh, yes. She told me I was crazy, Mae. Right to my face. Can you imagine that? Right to my face. She wasn't here thirty minutes. I've been sitting here waiting for you two to come in. Yes, Flora wasn't here thirty minutes."

Aunt Mae looked at Mother for a while, and I saw just how tired her eyes really were. Then she looked at me. And we just stood there under the one electric bulb and looked at each other and didn't say anything.

I knew I wasn't going to high school, so I got a job down in town. It was at the drugstore, and it paid almost twenty dollars a week. I delivered and worked behind the counter selling things. I was lucky I got it, because it was a pretty good job. Aunt Mae was glad for me. She stayed with Mother in the daytime, but that wasn't much trouble. At night Clyde got her to go with the band. Most of the people in the valley had heard them, though, and they didn't get so much business anymore. When they did get jobs, it was usually someplace further away than the capital where people didn't know them. Then Aunt Mae would come in at almost four o'clock in the morning, and I'd wonder if it really took that long to drive back or if Clyde stopped along the way. Aunt Mae was really looking tired, I thought. If we didn't need the money, I never would have let her go out with him on the jobs. As it was, we didn't get much money from it anyway.

Flora went all over town and told everybody about Mother. Aunt Mae said she made a mistake in the first place asking her to come up to the house that night to take care of her. I knew if Flora didn't like Chinee people she wasn't going to like the way Mother was. Nobody in town would have known about it if it wasn't for Flora. Mother never went into town anyway, and nobody ever came up to our house, except Clyde sometimes, and he was always paying attention to Aunt Mae and ignoring everybody else. Plenty people in town got to wondering what went on up on the hill with Mother. Nobody in the valley acted strange aside from Mr. Farney, and that was different. People began to come right around the house to hunt until we put up a No Trespassing sign. That made them more curious, but it kept them away.

When I came in from the drugstore in the evening, I'd go into the cleared land behind the house to see Mother. The seedling pines were big now, and you never would think the land was ever cleared. Sometimes rabbits ran under them, and squirrels went up and down their trunks. Mother would be sitting down on the ground under the pines looking up at their branches. I'd sit and talk to her for a while, but I couldn't get her to say much anymore. She just looked at me with a faraway look and smiled. She smiled at everything I said, so after a while I stopped talking, and we would just sit in the pines and watch the sun go down and everything go dark. Then Aunt Mae would come out and sit a while. After that we went in for dinner. Aunt Mae would go upstairs and get ready the nights she had a job, and I'd sit with Mother in the kitchen and listen to the radio. Mother listened to the radio better than she listened to Aunt Mae or me. She followed all the stories and would say things while they were on, like "Just listen to the way that man goes on" or "Who do you think is the murderer, David?" Whoever I said, she would say, "No, I think you have the wrong one." And when the one I picked was the right one, she would say, "Oh, they were wrong about him."

One evening when I went back into the clearing, she got up off the ground and held me by the arm and pointed to the pines that were growing there and said, "You see how they're growing? They're your poppa's." Then she took me down to the front yard, and we stood on the cinders, and she pointed out over all the hills. "You see how they're growing?" I looked at the thousands of pines all over the valley. "From a little seed your poppa planted they're growing all over, but I saw them come up in his clearing first. I saw them first."

I liked the drugstore job. Mr. Williams, the man who owned it, gave me the job mainly because he had heard of Mother. Anyway, that's what I thought. He was nice that way, always trying to help people who needed it. He used to charge the people who lived on the street north of town a lot, but he let some of the poor people owe him for almost a year. I know because I delivered everything he sold. The ones on the street north of town never said anything about the high prices, and the poor ones were happy to get credit, so I guess it was alright.

You don't know how many people you can meet delivering for a drugstore -- or, I guess, delivering for anything. They had all kinds. The women who lost their husbands in the war ordered things like Kleenex and hand lotion and Camay soap. I don't know why, but I almost always delivered things like that to them. They were still quiet, but none of them cried anymore. They always said, "Thank you, son," and didn't even seem to know I was there.

I delivered to Mr. Farney's house too. He ordered the expensive men's powders and aftershave things that nobody in town used. Mr. Williams got it from the company just for Mr. Farney and the other man he lived with who taught music. They came in the drugstore a lot because they liked to look around at everything, even the women's things. When one of them saw something he'd say, "Oh, come here and see this. Isn't this just precious." Mr. Farney always asked about Mother and said it was "tragic," which made me feel bad. But I knew Mr. Farney didn't know it made me feel that way. He wouldn't have said it if he knew I felt that way. Mr. Farney seemed to know when he said something to make you angry or make you feel bad. Then he'd say, "Oh, look at me. Look what I've done. Will you ever forgive me?" Then he would bite his nails or pick at his face.

One woman I delivered to was named Miss A. Scover. Anyway, that's the name she had on her doorbell. I had seen her before because she worked at the post office selling stamps. Her house was one of the new ones they were building up in the hills. She lived all alone for all I knew, except for a lot of cats that sat on the porch and went in the front door when she opened it. Sometimes she came to the door holding one in her arms. She would kiss it behind the ears and blow in its fur and say, "We're going outside, baby. Outside, outside."