Дороти Эллисон - Bastard Out of Carolina

Mama looked over at the boy standing by the cash register, with his dark blue eyes and bushy brown hair. Time was she would have blushed at the way he was watching her, but for that moment she just looked back into his eyes. He’d make a good daddy, she imagined, a steady man. He smiled and his smile was crooked. His eyes bored into her and got darker stil . She flushed then, and smel ed her own sweat, nervously unable to tel if it came from fear or lust.

I need a husband, she thought, turned her back, and wiped her face. Yeah, and a car and a home and a hundred thousand dol ars. She shook her head and waved Earle out the door, not looking again at the boy with him.

“Sister Anney, why don’t you come over here and stand by my coffee cup,” one of her regulars teased. “It’l take heat just being next to your heart.”

Mama gave her careful laugh and pul ed up the coffeepot. “An’t got time to charm coffee when I can pour you a warm-up with one hand,” she teased him back. Never mind no sil y friends of Earle’s, she told herself, and fil ed coffee cups one at a time until she could get off the line and go take herself a break.

“Where you keep that paper, Ruth Anne’s birth certificate, huh?” they’d tease Mama down at the diner.

“Under the sink with al the other trash,” she’d shoot back, giving them a glance so sharp they’d think twice before trying to tease her again.

“Put it away,” Granny kept tel ing her. “If you stopped thinking about it, people would too. As long as it’s something that’l get a rise out of you, people’re gonna keep on using it.”

The preacher agreed. “Your shame is between you and God, Sister Anne. No need to let it mark the child.”

My mama went as pale as the underside of an unpeeled cotton bol . “I got no shame,” she told him, “and I don’t need no man to tel me jackshit about my child.”

“Jackshit,” my aunt Ruth boasted. “She said ‘jackshit’ to the preacher. An’t nobody says nothing to my little sister, an’t nobody can touch that girl or what’s hers. You just better watch yourself around her.”

You better. You better. You just better watch yourself around her.

Watch her in the diner, laughing, pouring coffee, palming tips, and frying eggs. Watch her push her hair back, tug her apron higher, refuse dates, pinches, suggestions. Watch her eyes and how they sink into her face, the lines that grow out from that tight stubborn mouth, the easy banter that rises from the deepest place inside her.

“An’t it about time you tried the courthouse again, Sister Anney?”

“An’t it time you zipped your britches, Brother Calvin?”

An’t it time the Lord did something, rained fire and retribution on Greenvil e County? An’t there sin enough, grief enough, inch by inch of pain enough? An’t the measure made yet? Anney never said what she was thinking, but her mind was working al the time.

Glen Waddel stayed on at the furnace works with Earle for one whole year, and drove al the way downtown for lunch at the diner almost every workday and even some Saturdays. “I’d like to see your little girls,” he told Anney once every few weeks until she started to believe him. “Got to be pretty little girls with such a beautiful mama.” She stared at him, took his quarter tips, and admitted it. Yes, she had two beautiful little girls. Yes, he might as wel come over, meet her girls, sit on her porch and talk a little. She wiped sweaty palms on her apron before she let him take her hand.

His shoulders were tanned dark, and he looked bigger al over from the work he had been doing with Earle. The muscles bulging through his worn white T-shirt reminded her of Lyle, though he had none of Lyle’s sweet demeanor. His grip when he reached to take her arm was as firm as Earle’s, but his smile was his own, like no one else’s she had ever known. She took a careful deep breath and let herself real y smile back at him. Maybe, she kept tel ing herself, maybe he’d make a good daddy.

Mama was working gril at the White Horse Cafe the day the radio announced that the fire downtown had gone out of control, burning the courthouse and the hal of records to the ground. It was midway through the noon rush. Mama was holding a pot of coffee in one hand and two cups in the other. She put the cups down and passed the pot to her friend Mab.

“I’m going home.”

“You what?”

“I’ve got to go home.”

“Where’s she going?”

“Trouble at home.”

The cardboard box of wrinkled and stained papers was tucked under the sheets in the bottom of Aunt Alma’s chifforobe. Mama pul ed out the ones she wanted, took them into the kitchen, and dropped them in the sink without bothering to unfold them. She’d just lit a kitchen match when the phone rang.

“You heard, I suppose.” It was Aunt Ruth. “Mab said you took off like someone set a fire under you.”

“Not me,” Mama replied. “The only fire I got going here is the one burning up al these useless papers.”

Aunt Ruth’s laughter spil ed out of the phone and al over the kitchen.

“Girl, there an’t a woman in town going to believe you didn’t set that fire yourself. Half the county’s gonna tel the other how you burned down that courthouse.”

“Let them talk,” Mama said, and blew at the sparks flying up. “Talk won’t send me to jail. The sheriff and half his deputies know I was at work al morning, ‘cause I served them their coffee. I can’t get into any trouble just ‘cause I’m glad the goddam courthouse burned down.”

She blew at the sparks again, whistling into the phone, and then laughed out loud. Halfway across town, Aunt Ruth balanced the phone against her neck, squeezed Granny’s shoulder, and laughed with her. Over at the mil , Aunt Alma looked out a window at the smoke bil owing up downtown and had to cover her mouth to keep from giggling like a girl. In the outer yard back of the furnace works, Uncle Earle and Glen Waddel were moving iron and listening to the radio. Both of them grinned and looked up at each other at the same moment, then burst out laughing. It was almost as if everyone could hear each other, al over Greenvil e, laughing as the courthouse burned to the ground.

2

Geenvil e, South Carolina, in 1955 was the most beautiful place in the world. Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth’s matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars. Weeping wil ows marched across the yard, fol owing every wandering stream and ditch, their long whiplike fronds making tents that sheltered sweet-smel ing beds of clover. Over at the house Aunt Raylene rented near the river, al the trees had been cut back and the scupper-nong vines torn out. The clover grew in long sweeps of tiny white and yel ow flowers that hid slender red-and-black-striped caterpil ars and fat gray-black slugs—the ones Uncle Earle swore would draw fish to a hook even in a thunderstorm. But at Aunt Alma’s, over near the Eustis Highway, the landlord had locked down the spigots so that the kids wouldn’t cost him a fortune in water bil s. Without the relief of a sprinkler or a hose the heat had burned up the grass, and the combined efforts of dogs and boys had reduced the narrow yard to a smoldering expanse of baked dirt and scattered rocks.

“Yard’s like a hot griddle,” Aunt Alma complained. “Catches al the heat of that tin roof and concentrates it. You could just about cook on that ground.”

“Oh, it’s hot everywhere.” Granny never agreed with Aunt Alma, and particularly not that summer when she was being paid a lot less than she wanted to watch Alma’s kids. And the little Mama threw in to pay her for keeping Reese and me didn’t sweeten her attitude. Granny loved al her grandchildren, but she was always announcing that she didn’t have much use for her daughters.