Дороти Эллисон - Bastard Out of Carolina

“My three boys worship me,” she’d tel everybody, “but my girls, Lord! I’ve got five girls and they never seem to appreciate me. It’s how girls are, though, selfish and ful of themselves. I shouldn’t expect any better.”

“Your granny means wel ,” Mama told me before dropping us off to stay the day over at Aunt Alma’s, “but don’t pay too much attention to the things she says. She’s always loved her boy children more. It’s just the way some women are.” I nodded. I believed anything that Mama said was so.

Almost the first thing I remember is Aunt Alma’s house and yard, back behind the tiny roadside store she and Uncle Wade were trying to manage. It was the summer after Reese was born, which means I must have been about five years old, only slightly bigger than Little Earle, Alma’s youngest.

But Little Earle was a fat toddler stil chafing in rubber pants and grabbing at everything with his unfailingly sticky hands, while I was a solemn watchful child with long thin bones and a cloud of wild black hair. I looked down on Little Earle as a lesser creature and stayed wel out of reach of his grubby fingers and pushed-out baby lips. That was the summer it was so hot the katydids failed to sing and everyone spent their evenings out on the porch with large glasses of ice tea and damp hand towels to cool the back of the neck. Alma wouldn’t even start cooking until after the sun had gone down. Twilight came on early, though, a long-drawn-out dimming of the heat and glare that made everything soft and magical, brought out the first fireflies, and added a cool enchantment to the metal ic echoes of the slide guitar playing on Alma’s kitchen radio. Granny would plant herself in the porch rocker, leaving Alma’s girls to pick through snap beans, hope for a rainstorm, and tease her into tel ing stories.

I always positioned myself behind Granny, up against the wal next to the screen door, where I could listen to Kitty Wel s and George Jones, the whine of that guitar and what talk there was in the kitchen, as wel as the sound of Aunt Alma’s twin boys thumping their feet against the porch steps and the girls’ giggles as their fingers slipped through the cool, dusty beans. There I was pretty much safe from Little Earle as he ran back and forth from Granny’s apron pockets to the steps, where his brothers pitched pennies and practiced betting against each other. Little Earle would lope like a crippled crawfish, angling to the side, swaying unsteadily, and giggling his own wet croupy babble. The boys would laugh at him, Granny would just smile. Oblivious and happy, Little Earle would pound his fists on Grey’s shoulders and then twirl himself around to run al out toward Granny, Temple, and Patsy Ruth. Naked, dimpled al over, fat and brown and wide, his stubborn little body bulged with determination, and his little-boy prick bounced like a rubber toy between his bowlegged thighs as he whooped and ran, bumping his head on Granny’s hip. He was like a wind up toy spinning itself out, and his delight only increased when everyone started laughing at him as he jumped up again after fal ing plop on his behind next to the tub of snap beans.

Granny covered her mouth with one hand to hide her teeth. “You ugly little boy,” she teased Little Earle, almost laughing between her words. “You ugly, ugly, ugly little thing.”

Earle paused, crowed like a hoot owl, and rocked back and forth as if his momentum were too strong for him to come to a ful stop without fal ing over. Temple and Patsy Ruth shook their wet fingers at his fat little bel y while Grey and Garvey smacked their lips and joined in with Granny.

“Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly! You so ugly you almost pretty!”

Earle squealed and jumped and laughed ful out. “Ug-ly,” he parroted them. “Uggg-l y!” His face was bright and smiling, and his hands flew up and down like bumblebees, fast and wild up near his ears.

“Ugly. Ugly. Ugly.”

“You are just the ugliest thing!” Granny rocked forward and caught her hands under Little Earle’s arms, swinging him up off his feet and directly before her face. “You dimple-bel y,” she cal ed him, “you little dimple-butt.” She pressed her mouth against his midriff and blew fiercely so that her lips vibrated against Little Earle’s navel—a bubble-bubble roar that made him shriek and bounce and giggle a high-pitched wail of hysterical laughter. He drew his knees up and cupped his little hands around his sex, which only made Temple and Patsy Ruth laugh louder. Granny swung him back and forth a few times and then dropped him down on his feet. He took off immediately for the shelter of his older brother’s armpit.

“Dimple-butt,” Grey snorted, but pul ed his little brother in tight to his side. “An’t so ugly maybe.” He rubbed his knuckles across Little Earle’s nearly bald head and sang out, “You just tal , that’s al .” Grey laughed at that while Granny wiped her eyes and the girls poured cool water across the beans.

I edged forward until I could put my hand on Granny’s chair, fingers sliding over the smooth, worn trel is of woven slats to feel the heat of her body through her cotton dress. The laughter echoed around me, the music, truck brakes ground up on the highway, and somebody started shouting far off as the dark descended and the fireflies began to flicker past the boys’ heads. Granny put her arm down and squeezed my wrist. She leaned over and spat a stream of brown snuff off the side of the porch. I heard the dul plopping sound it made as it landed in the dusty yard. I slipped under her shoulder, leaned across the side of the rocker, and put my face close to her breast. I could smel wet snap beans, tobacco, lemon juice on her neck, a little sharp piss scent, and a little salt.

“Ugly,” I repeated, and buried my face in her dress, my smile so wide the warm cotton rubbed my teeth.

“Pretty ugly,” Granny whispered above me, her fingers sliding across the back of my head, untangling my hair and lifting it up off my neck. “Almost pretty. Oh, you’re a Boatwright al right, a Boatwright for sure.”

I laughed up into her neck. Granny was ugly herself, she said so often enough, though she didn’t seem to care. Her wide face was seamed and spotted with freckles and long deep lines. Her hair was thin and gray and tied back with one of the little black strings that came off a snuff pouch.

She smel ed strong— bitter and salt, sour and sweet, al at the same time. My sweat disappeared into her skirt, my arms wrapped around her waist, and I breathed her in like the steam off soup. I rocked myself against her, as happy and safe as Little Earle had felt with her teeth on his bel y.

“You know, Bone, your mama’s gonna be late,” Temple told me. “These hot nights, they take forever to clean up down at the diner, and old Glen’s gonna be there hanging over the counter and slowing her down. He’s pure crazy where your mama’s concerned.”

I nodded solemnly, hanging on to Granny. The radio sounded louder, the boys started to fight. Everybody was busy, everybody was talking, but I was perfectly happy at Granny’s side, waiting for Mama to come home late from the diner, take Reese and me back to the tiny duplex she had rented downtown. If the heat continued into the night Mama would put us out on the screened porch on a makeshift mattress of couch cushions and sheets.

She would sit up by us out there, humming and smoking in the quiet dark, while the radio played so soft we couldn’t make it out.

The world that came in over the radio was wide and far away and didn’t touch us at al . We lived on one porch or another al summer long, laughing at Little Earle, teasing the boys and picking over beans, listening to stories, or to the crickets beating out their own soft songs. When I think of that summer—sleeping over at one of my aunts’ houses as easily as at home, the smel of Mama’s neck as she bent over to hug us in the dark, the sound of Little Earle’s giggle or Granny’s spit thudding onto the dry ground, and that country music playing low everywhere, as much a part of the evening as crickets and moonlight—I always feel safe again. No place has ever seemed so sweet and quiet, no place ever felt so much like home.