John Toole - The Neon Bible

Work in the drugstore went on like always. Mr. Williams had the old front torn off and put all glass in the place where the old bricks were. That made business pick up some, just like he said it would. I don't guess he ever thought of what it would be like in the store when the sun was going down and it was shining right in through all that glass. That was the time the store got all orange inside, and it hurt your eyes to look at almost anything. Then he had to spend a lot more money buying shades, and that messed up the way it was supposed to look.

Around this time Aunt Mae began to change. She had always been nice to me, but she was even better now. I never told her about what happened with Jo Lynne, so she didn't have to feel sorry for me, but it seemed to me that she did, and I wondered why.

Thinking people feel sorry for you is something I guess you should appreciate, but I didn't and never have. It made me mad to see someone acting like I was pitiful, always asking how I was, fixing special things for me, talking to me in a sort of baby way, making her eyes all sorry-looking when she looked at me. I wanted to tell Aunt Mae she got me mad, and I wanted to ask her why she treated me in such a different way, but somehow or another, I never did. I just stayed curious and waited to see what was making her act like I was a crippled little mountain rabbit that hadn't had anything to eat for a week.

Sometimes when I went home at night I just went up to the old room where my train was. I could open the window up there and prop it up with a broom pole and look out at the stars and the pine tips. I could feel the breeze blowing into the room, stirring the dust off everything and pushing the old, stale air around. Aunt Mae wasn't around to pat me on the head and feed me the special things she made and look at me with that look that made me mad. I could think up there too.

I could think about plenty things. Everybody who left grade school with me was at the state university now, at least all who went to high school, and most did. People who came into the drugstore always talked about them, what a good time they were having, how some were in fraternities and sororities if they had money, how this one was studying to be a doctor or something else you had to go to college to be. I thought of what I was ever going to be. I couldn't stay at the drugstore all my life, and there wasn't much else I could do in the valley. You had to go to college to be anything. But I didn't even get near high school, and almost everybody got that far.

I thought about Jo Lynne too. I didn't like to think about it, but I did. The night I went out with her was the best time I had since I was in school or during the war at the propeller factory party. When I thought of the day in the drugstore, my face got hot and my eyes began to pound again. I could feel my heart beat all over my body. That was a day I wanted never to remember, but every time I got up in the room and let my mind go over things, it came back to me as clear as if I was right there getting hit.

Maybe I could have told Aunt Mae about Jo Lynne. It was the way she was acting to me that made me not tell her. If Aunt Mae had been like she was before, I would have told her, but I didn't want her to know about it, not anything about it. I was tired enough of what she was doing now, and I didn't want her to get worse when I told her how I missed Jo Lynne and wished I could write her and try to make some excuses and say I was sorry about what I had said and done and ask her to write me a letter back, even if she was still mad, just as long as I got something from her that I could see her writing on. I wanted to go by her grandfather's and get the place where she lived, but I never could do it. Maybe if I would have talked to Aunt Mae she would have told me the right thing to do, but I didn't want to talk to her about anything like that right now.

So I just sat up there in the old room and looked out at the pine tips sticking up near the stars, or at my old train that didn't run anymore but just stood there all tan from rust and rusted to the track from the leaky roof. I sat there and thought that someday I would get to work on it and get it loose and oil it, and maybe it would run again.

When I sat up there nights, I could hear the radio playing under me and Mother asking questions and Aunt Mae answering her. Aunt Mae was home nights now. Clyde went to Nashville to see some man who might give him a job on the radio there, on a music program. Every day I saw a letter around the house he wrote Aunt Mae. I could tell they were Clyde's letters because they were printed. Clyde didn't know how to write, at least I didn't think so, because I never saw him do anything but print. Aunt Mae never said when he was coming back, and I didn't care. I was glad to have her home nights to sit with Mother, even though we needed the money.

But Mother was changing, I thought. She didn't look like she did once. She got skinnier and skinnier, and her cheeks began to sink in. The skin was stretched over her nose until it looked like just an onion peel covered the bone. That's why I was glad Aunt Mae was home, so I could get upstairs. I didn't like to sit in the half-dark with her and listen to the radio. It got me scared to look at her and see her look at me with that black under her eyes. When I was around, she just looked at me, and that made me feel uncomfortable. Even when we were eating. She wouldn't eat if I was at the table with her. She just sat there with the food in front of her and stared at me. After she did this a while, Aunt Mae had to give us our food at a different time so both of us could eat, because I couldn't eat either with her staring at me.

I got mad at myself for feeling that way about my own mother, but then I thought about it, and I told myself she wasn't a real mother anymore. She was just a strange woman who frightened me and didn't seem to know me at all. She didn't even look like my mother. I knew what my mother looked like. I remembered the woman who put me to bed and danced with me at the factory party and stood with me when my poppa went off to war. I remembered the woman who looked at the train until long after it was gone with Poppa on it. But this wasn't the same one. This was a woman that I was scared to be in the same house with. She never talked to me now. She just sat and looked and made me scared.

And I knew what was happening down in town. It was a long time since I graduated from grade school and we got Flora to sit with Mother. After that everybody in town knew about her. They were pretty nice about it, and after they saw I wasn't going to talk about it too, they never said anything else to me. But I knew the way the people in town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought.

I knew what everybody thought about Mother. She didn't have any more friends down in town to say any different, so Flora's story got bigger and bigger. I knew Flora was back with the preacher and was even the head of the big people's Sunday school. It was too bad if the preacher got to be the leader in anything. Except for Bobbie Lee Taylor, everything he planned always came off right the way he wanted. When he wanted to send people out of town, they went, especially if they didn't belong to the church.