Дороти Эллисон - Bastard Out of Carolina

“You know how these things can happen.”

“Oh, I do,” he said, enjoying it al immensely.

The form he brought out was no different from the others. The look he gave my mama and my aunt was pure righteous justification. “What’d you expect?” he seemed to be saying. His face was set and almost gentle, but his eyes laughed at them. My aunt came close to swinging her purse at his head, but Mama caught her arm. That time she took the certificate copy with her.

“Might as wel have something for my two dol ars,” she said. At seventeen, she was a lot older than she had been at sixteen. The next year she went alone, and the year after. That same year she met Lyle Parsons and started thinking more about marrying him than dragging down to the courthouse again. Uncle Earle teased her that if she lived with Lyle for seven years, she could get the same result without paying a courthouse lawyer. “The law never done us no good. Might as wel get on without it.”

Mama quit working as a waitress soon after marrying Lyle Parsons, though she wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. “We’re gonna need things,”

she told him, but he wouldn’t listen. Lyle was one of the sweetest boys the Parsonses ever produced, a soft-eyed, soft-spoken, too-pretty boy tired of being his mama’s baby. Total y serious about providing wel for his family and proving himself a man, he got Mama pregnant almost immediately and didn’t want her to go out to work at al . But pumping gas and changing tires in his cousin’s Texaco station, he made barely enough to pay the rent. Mama tried working part-time in a grocery store but gave it up when she got so pregnant she couldn’t lift boxes. It was easier to sit a stool on the line at the Stevens factory until Reese was born, but Lyle didn’t like that at al .

“How’s that baby gonna grow my long legs if you always sitting bent over?” he complained. He wanted to borrow money or take a second job, anything to keep his pretty new wife out of the mil . “Honey girl,” he cal ed her, “sweet thing.”

“Dumpling,” she cal ed him back, “sugar tit,” and when no one could hear, “manchild.” She loved him like a baby, whispered to her sisters about the soft blond hairs on his bel y, the way he slept with one leg thrown over her hip, the stories he told her about al the places he wanted to take her.

“He loves Bone, he real y does,” she told Aunt Ruth. “Wants to adopt her when we get some money put by.” She loved to take pictures of him, The best of them is one made at the gas station in the bright summer sun with Lyle swinging from the Texaco sign and wearing a jacket that proclaimed

“Greenvil e County Racetrack.” He’d taken a job out at the track where they held the stock-car races, working in the pit changing tires at high speed and picking up a little cash in the demolition derby on Sunday afternoon. Mama didn’t go out there with him much. She didn’t like the noise or the stink, or the way the other men would tease Lyle into drinking warm beer to see if his work slowed down any. As much as she liked taking pictures, she only took one of him out at the track, with a tire hugged against his left hip, grease al over one side of his face, and a grin so wide you could smel the beer.

It was a Sunday when Lyle died, not at the track but on the way home, so easily, so gently, that the peanut pickers who had seen the accident kept insisting that the boy could not be dead. There’d been one of those eerie summer showers where the sun never stopped shining and the rain came down in soft sheets that everybody ignored. Lyle’s truck had come around the curve from the train crossing at a clip. He waved at one of the pickers, giving his widest grin. Then the truck was spinning off the highway in a rain-slicked patch of oil, and Lyle was bumped out the side door and onto the pavement.

“That’s a handsome boy,” one of the pickers kept tel ing the highway patrolman. “He wasn’t doing nothing wrong, just coming along the road in the rain—that devil’s rain, you know. The sun was so bright, and that boy just grinned so.” The old man wouldn’t stop looking back over to where Lyle lay stil on the edge of the road.

Lyle lay uncovered for a good twenty minutes. Everybody kept expecting him to get up. There was not a mark on him, and his face was shining with that lazy smile. But the back of his head flattened into the gravel, and his palms lay open and damp in the spray of the traffic the patrolmen diverted around the wreck.

Mama was holding Reese when the sheriffs car pul ed up at Aunt Alma’s, and she must have known immediately what he had come to tel her, because she put her head back and howled like an old dog in labor, howled and rocked and squeezed her baby girl so tight Aunt Alma had to pinch her to get Reese free.

Mama was nineteen, with two babies and three copies of my birth certificate in her dresser drawer. When she stopped howling, she stopped making any sound at al and would only nod at people when they tried to get her to cry or talk. She took both her girls to the funeral with al her sisters lined up alongside of her. The Parsonses barely spoke to her. Lyle’s mother told Aunt Alma that if her boy hadn’t taken that damn job for Mama’s sake, he wouldn’t have died in the road. Mama paid no attention. Her blond hair looked dark and limp, her skin gray, and within those few days fine lines had appeared at the corners of her eyes. Aunt Ruth steered her away from the gravesite while Aunt Raylene tucked some of the flowers into her family Bible and stopped to tel Mrs. Parsons what a damn fool she was.

Aunt Ruth was heavily pregnant with her eighth child, and it was hard for her not to take Mama into her arms like another baby. At Uncle Earle’s car, she stopped and leaned back against the front door, hanging on to Mama. She brushed Mama’s hair back off her face, looking closely into her eyes. “Nothing else wil ever hit you this hard,” she promised. She ran her thumbs under Mama’s eyes, her fingers resting lightly on either temple.

“Now you look like a Boatwright,” she said. “Now you got the look. You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl. This is the way you’l look til you die.”

Mama just nodded; it didn’t matter to her anymore what she looked like.

A year in the mil was al Mama could take after they buried Lyle; the dust in the air got to her too fast. After that there was no choice but to find work in a diner. The tips made al the difference, though she knew she could make more money at the honky-tonks or managing a slot as a cocktail waitress. There was always more money serving people beer and wine, more stil in hard liquor, but she’d have had to go outside Greenvil e County to do that, and she couldn’t imagine moving away from her family. She needed her sisters’ help with her two girls.

The White Horse Cafe was a good choice anyway, one of the few decent diners downtown. The work left her tired but not sick to death like the mil , and she liked the people she met there, the tips and the conversation.

“You got a way with a smile,” the manager told her.

“Oh, my smile gets me a long way,” she laughed, and no one would have known she didn’t mean it. Truckers or judges, they al liked Mama. Aunt Ruth was right, her face had settled into itself. Her color had come back after a while, and the lines at the corners of her eyes just made her look ready to smile. When the men at the counter weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sel .

Reese was two years old the next time Mama stopped in at the courthouse. The clerk looked pleased to see her again. She didn’t talk to him this time, just picked up the paperwork and took it over to the new business offices near the Sears, Roebuck Auto Outlet. Uncle Earle had given her a share of his settlement from another car accident, and she wanted to use a piece of it to hire his lawyer for a few hours. The man took her money and then smiled at her much like the clerk when she told him what she wanted. Her face went hard, and he swal owed quick to keep from laughing.