My grandmother had no use for anything in the line of boys or men. “Any of them that stands up to make his water,” was how she put it. Bad news for me.
Her parlor smelled of stale cigarette smoke and old people and you never saw so much furniture in one room, from the olden times. The chairs had wooden legs with animal feet, and lace things on the arms so you wouldn’t wreck them. She spread out a tablecloth on her sofa for me to sit on, same reason. Then pulled up a chair and looked me over, fanning herself with one of those funeral home fans with the stick handle. It was hot as hell in there, and crowded with knicknacks and whatnots all over the place. Big old
clocks on the mantel, and I’m saying more than one. If you wasted this lady’s time, she was going to know it.
“What are we going to do with you?” she kept asking. Like I knew.
She sounded like a man, with that deep type voice smokers get as their
prize for the hundred millionth pack. But it was also what she said and how she said it. Like somebody that doesn’t give a damn if you agree or not. In a while she got up and left me sweating like a pig, not daring to move. Came back with a plate of sandwiches and watched me stuff it all in. Not pretty.
She had questions. Starting with, had anybody ever told me I was the spitting image of my father. I told her yes, that people called me by his nickname, Copperhead. She shook her head over that like, No sir, not going there. Bad memories maybe, in the snake department. She said I’d about given her a heart attack out in the yard. “My own boy come back from the dead, is what I thought, come to me as a boy instead of a man to get back
on my good side. But it won’t work. Boys aren’t a thing but just little men still learning what to aim at.”
I wondered if this pertained to how we pissed, which seemed like a major sticking point. I told her I was sorry for all that, and asked what my father did that had put her out so bad.
“Lord, child, I don’t have days enough left to tell you.”
I said I hoped she wouldn’t hold it against me. And that my mom had thought he was awesome, so maybe he’d cleaned up his act some in his later days. I wanted to ask if it was a true story about her coming to visit Mom, and seeing me getting born a boy.
But she was on her own track. “Church was his trouble,” she said. “It started him off on the wrong foot.” This was a new one on me, especially coming from an old person. I’d heard of course about the snake-handling, but she said it was worse than that. Men wanting to get back to the Old Testament, reaping virgin girls and using daughters for their slaves. “There’s some I knew would have taken more wives than Jacob if they thought they’d get away with it.”
“Did Jacob have more than one?” I asked. I was holding the empty plate that had a picture on it of Abraham Lincoln. I wondered how he got in here. It took some doing to keep myself from licking the sandwich crumbs off his face.
“Two wives and two concubines. You don’t know the scriptures?”
It seemed like a trick question. I told her the truth, that Mom had gone sour on all that. And that as far as I knew, her son was probably not churchy either by the time he got to Lee County. Mom just wouldn’t have tolerated anything like that in a boyfriend.
“You didn’t know him,” she said. “He died in July, and you weren’t born till the fall.”
I was a little freaked out by her knowing that.
“He was crazy over cars, too. He had the sickness. A car can kill a man faster than a snake. I’ve not driven one of those killing machines since 1961 nor had one in my possession.”
This was a lot to take in. First, that my dad was into vehicles, the same fever I had in my blood. I was always that kid on the playground with my
eyes turned out to the road, watching the metal roar by while the older boys yelled, Oh man, a Continental with suicide doors!
Second of all: since 1961? How did a modern person not have a car?
She said she got her groceries delivered, and if she needed anything else in town, she walked. Or had one of her girls drive her, or run the errand for her. She’d raised and educated eleven girls total, some from wayward teens, a few from babies. So she was like a foster mom. She said she did it on her own steam, though, without paychecks or anything. She took a dim view on how they could mess things up at social services. I told her amen to that.
So, Mom’s crazy story was true. Betsy Woodall must have come to see her. The hell and brimstone she’d supposedly laid on was surely not true, just Mom’s nightmares talking. But the plan of taking me was real. Did Mom agree to that? If I’d been born without the plumbing, would I have grown up here in this house as a whole different me, sitting around eating sandwiches in chairs with animal feet? My brain was pretty close to blowing a gasket.
I asked to use the bathroom, and she showed me what she called her washroom but luckily it did have a toilet. Even though a weird one that took a minute to figure out, due to a pull chain. She didn’t stay to watch if I stood up.
It was a pretty terrifying afternoon on the whole. She asked if there were people I’d run away from that needed to be called. I said not really. But she pressed the point, not wanting the police on her, so I told her who needed to know I was alive and with a relative. After she made the call, she asked what on earth had possessed me to come find her.
I told her my sorry tale. I didn’t want this lady being all “told you so”
where Mom was concerned, it’s not like she’d dropped the ball totally, so I said my life was great and everything until Mom took up with a guy that believed in educating with his fists, that bullied and brainwashed her till the day she died. Then came foster care with an old guy running a slave-boy farm. And all the while this lady’s looking at me like, Told you so. I tried to work a different angle other than Men Are Satan, because honestly Mrs.
McCobb was no great shakes, nor Old Baggy either. Not to mention Miss
Barks that dumped me for better pay. And the truck-stop whore, definitely a bad character, but that was tricky to get into. I just wrapped it up saying I
was a hardworking person and had started out with the money to prove it, but it got stolen.
All she said at the end of my story was, “That poor girl.”
Wait, what? Not poor me? She didn’t mean the money stealer, which I’d not mentioned being a hooker. She meant Mom. I was still pissed at Mom
for dying on me, so I wasn’t ready to take her side. But this lady seemed pissed off at her son for dying on her, which she said was a lowdown thing to do to Mom, leaving her in charge of a baby. I wondered if Mom had felt the same, and nixed his name off my birth certificate to get even. Definitely Mom stayed pretty torqued over whatever accident took him out, to the extent of refusing to talk about it. Maybe this lady had answers, but all the sudden she looked slumped and sad, all out of steam. We sat listening to the clocks tick. She also had a man’s big round gold watch that she took out of her pocket, looked at, wound up, rubbed against her sleeve and put away again. A gray cat slunk out from under a big cabinet thing and gave me the evil eye before it oozed along the wall and ran out the door.
Then out of nowhere she stood up and said it was time to bring out little brother dick.
Christ. Mine? To prove I was unfit for being adopted?
She didn’t say another thing, just went out and left me with Abraham Lincoln on my lap. In a few minutes she came back pushing a wheelchair with a little man in it.
Oh kay. Little brother Dick.
He was the size of a kid, but old and gray like her. With the same Melungeon look as her, the light eyes and dark, dark skin. These had to be my people. But in all the ways that she was tall and sturdy, he was little and crooked and pigeon-boned. It almost hurt to look at him, his little feet both turned to one side, not even reaching the footrests of his wheelchair.
Shoulders hunched one way, head cocked the other. They had the exact
same eyes though, the color of pond algae, hers with the thick glasses and
his bare-naked, staring at me like a little child would. I sat still, letting those four green eyes go all over me.
“This is your great-nephew,” she told him. “Damon’s child.”
His eyes got wider, and mine probably did too. I’d never known my
name was from my father. The little man’s mouth opened. It seemed like he was laughing, but nothing came out.
“A boy,” she said. “Not much to be done about that, is there?”
Brother Dick’s head shook sideways on its crooked track, agreeing with her, but he was looking at me with a kind of twinkle. Almost like, We’re in this boat together, my man.
“What should we do with him?” she asked.
He did the silent laugh again, nodding his head. His eyes crinkled up and he worked his mouth until sounds finally came out. It sounded like “Wortheemup.”
She nodded. “All right. That’s a good idea, I’ll run him a bath. And then what?”
Brother Dick looked me right in the eyes, reading me like a book. I wanted to look away but he didn’t let me. Then he looked the rest of me over like he could read that too. Every place I’d been, every damn thing I’d lost, the full shame and the pity of me. He seemed interested especially in my shoe that was wrapped in a bread bag. The nodding and working his mouth started again, like pumping a well handle until sounds came out:
“Henees noothoos.”
“Oh, for the love of Pete. He does. I’ll ask Jane Ellen if she can hunt up some shoes to fit him. You have a sharp eye, little brother.”
She marched me upstairs to a bathroom with a tub. Yes. Goddamn son of a bitch. No shower, and not just your average tub, this sucker was big enough for boiling a hog. She showed me how to turn the taps and said I’d better take a good long soak while this Jane Ellen person rounded up some things for me to wear. Supposedly she had brothers in all the sizes. I sat on
the toilet thinking about the Devil’s Bathtub that took out my dad, a hushed- up tale that had run rogue on my brain for all my days. I didn’t know what that place looked like and never would, but probably nothing like this long white china bowl. I stared the thing down, thinking: Okay devil, it’s you or me.
In the end I figured I’d probably live and be the better for a good soak, given the days of shit I needed to get off my skin. I ran the water, I held my breath, I stepped in. Eased my butt down into the deepest water I’d ever got into. Sat there, naked and not dead, letting a boatload of new info soak into my brain. My whole lifetime of having nobody, claiming a pretend
mammaw, getting kicked to the back of every line while people with kin looked after their own: that was all a lie. I had my own. It’s a lot to turn over all at once. I had no idea what came next. Maybe nothing more for my
trouble than some hand-me-down shoes, but still. I had my father’s name. These people looked like me. And had money, you had to think. I mean, that house. Parlors and washrooms, downstairs, upstairs, every room full of furniture. Chairs with goddamn feet. The bathtub I was sitting in had feet,
that looked like scary bird claws. This is not a lie. If the devil had a bathtub, that would be the one.
Somebody had laid out so many clothes on the bed, it looked like an outlet store in there. I put on the most normal ones that fit and went downstairs to a big dinner cooked by my grandmother and this Jane Ellen individual, a heavyset girl with long, twisty black hair and a gap between her front teeth that she stuck her tongue in whenever she smiled, which was every time you looked at her. There was so much food. I was set to founder and die happy.
Jane Ellen was number eleven of the girls my grandmother had raised up and educated. She was in high school, worked part-time in the doctor’s office, and had lived at this house since she was eight. No discussion of
where she came from before that, a mystery given the brothers around
someplace not far away, with clothes evidently to spare. Not a pure orphan like me. She acted like living with my grandmother was the happiest life imaginable. They both treated Brother Dick like their pet, asking his
opinions on things, leaning over to wipe off his chin. Our dinner was chicken, sweet potatoes, and green beans. His was this green milkshake thing they brought him in a big glass with a straw because one of his
problems was with swallowing.
Before we ate, my grandmother asked me, “Do you return the blessing?” No idea how to pass that test. I froze. Fork stuck in a piece of chicken,
heart in my gullet.
“We don’t!” she said in her gruff voice. Jane Ellen and Brother Dick laughed, and we all dug in. She asked more questions, such as why Mom took up with such a bad apple after my father died. I could think of a few answers, starting with Mom having shit for brains, but due to politeness I just said lonesome I guess.
“Lonesome! Nothing lonesomer than getting shackled to a bully-man in his house of spite.” My grandmother looked at Jane Ellen, and for once
there was no smile there. I got the idea they’d both done time in the spite house. My grandmother with her snake-handling husband, and as far as
Jane Ellen went, who knew. I wanted to tell them it’s not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are. But I
kept my mouth shut. It’s safer knowing more about people than they know about you.
After dinner my grandmother and Brother Dick smoked cigarettes. His legs and the rest of him weren’t much count, but his hands were amazing.
Tiny and clean, the fingernails rounded off, holding the cigarette like a little white bird perched in his hand, singing its song of pretty blue smoke. I tried not to stare. The brother was more like a sister, and vice versa.
They put me up that night in the room with all the clothes, now folded and put away so I could sleep in the bed, which was the size of a ship, with tall wooden posts in all four corners, for what reason I have no idea. Like you might need to run up a flag in the night. The room smelled the same as the rest of the house, like dust and old people, and their doors had the old- fashioned keyholes like in the Peggot house. Maggot and I used to play around with those long iron keys because nobody at all cared if we buried them in the yard for treasure, tried melting them in a fire, or what. Not so here. My grandmother came and looked in on me after I was in bed. Then
the door closed, and I heard the key turn and click. I was her prisoner.
But if I could run, where would I even go? Being locked in a room, or living my life in general, no difference. The only roads I knew were full of people that would sooner run me over than help me out. I could end up as dead as my mom and baby brother on any given day. I settled on being glad this was not the day. I had a full belly and wasn’t getting rained on.
Tomorrow, another story. Probably the story of getting kicked out due to being a boy.
But this Dick person she doted on, asking for his advice and even taking it. That one I turned over and over. Then remembered what she’d said about people making their water. How he did that exactly, I couldn’t picture. But for sure, not standing up.
