I figured it was time to set the record straight. I told her what she already knew. I told her the thing she had silently forbidden me to utter aloud a million times. On fifty occasions between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, when it stopped because I threatened to go to the police, my daddy climbed into my bed while Mama was out of the house and screwed me and called me his little Whore of Babylon and Ninevah until he shuddered and left me terrified that I had a monster growing inside me.
“You remember my senior year of high school when we moved to Whitville?”
Her look of betrayal was priceless.
“Didn’t you think it was odd, Daddy up and deciding to move in late summer to a podunk school that offered a salary that amounted to half of what he’d been making?”
“The Lord took us to Whitville. I loved Whitville.”
“The Lord got his ass to Whitville because I had already told three of my friends what he was doing to me and I was about to go to the police.”
“Who?”
“Daddy.”
“Doing what?”
“What do you think?”
She knew I was telling the truth. Of course she said it was just another one of my desperate lies. She clucked and shook her head and tried to act like I was nine again, telling another whopper and she just didn’t know where she got such a bad little girl.
“Look, Mama, I’m out of it. You just tell yourself whatever you have to in order to keep from killing yourself or him.” Then I packed my bag and I left without another word.
I haven’t called or written or spoken to them since. I know every defiant thing I do and say has my daddy in it. I know that when I hauled off and slugged Dashnell Lawler in the mouth, I was hitting back at my daddy. Daddy dresses a little better than Dashnell. Daddy cuts his fingernails. He’s got just enough education to articulate his ignorance a little more clearly than Dashnell. That makes him infinitely more dangerous.
My daddy made me the Whore of Babylon. My mama stamped his atrocities with her silent seal of approval. Some mornings I try to understand the evils that perverted my parents. I try to find the largesse to forgive them. If I could, then I might be able to change, to endure this flesh that’s eternally threatening to split in two.
Then I’ll hear Glen’s power saw scream from the garage and it’s hopeless. I told Michael about it. He likened me to Mary Magdalene. That likens him to Christ. It’s true. I look to the men in my life for my salvation. The men in my life look to me for a certain elevation of stature.
Except Heath.
All other considerations aside, I knew I wasn’t worthy of his innocent affection. Heath isn’t looking for Mary Magdalene or the Whore of Babylon. I wouldn’t know how to be what Heath Lawler deserves. I told him over and over that I didn’t deserve a man like him. It was the truest thing I ever said to a man. He didn’t understand. He didn’t believe me. He’s too good to understand something like that. It was the best thing I had to offer him. He fell in love with the woman I could have been. She deserves him. I never will. The only way I know to be with a man is to serve him. Heath would never accept that. He deserves a woman who’ll walk tall and
straight beside him. Glen is all for being served, but it’s mindless slavery. Michael understands that I’m less than him. Yet serving him is helping him facilitate the good he does in this world. That’s as close to a meaningful existence as I’ll ever come. Unless I start believing in miracles.
T
hey hang like invisible starched sheets about me as the darkness falls. I don’t get them much during full daylight. Only sometimes. Now and again as I straighten up to rest a minute in the garden with the night settling, a dry whisper, a broken laugh or an odd idea hovers. Apt as not it’s a gathered awareness. I’m feeling how it felt if, for example, they were sitting on the porch in the evening and I was just out of sight in the side yard and I’ll think, “Thee great guns, it’s them.”
They left me aches and a hard way to go. I want to think they come back to comfort and guide me, but, no; it’s not like that. There was never much love in their kindnesses to me.
I lived way longer than I had right or expectation or intent to. I become mostly old when I was still a child. This last seventy years is just hanging around after the fact. Some trudge up life’s hill and attain a comfortable view of where they’ve been. That summit is the wherefore and why of every weary step that come before it. Hezekiah is that way. His life added up to a sum greater than all its parts. I never could figure mine. Though now abouts it’s fairly tolerable. There’s no discernible backwards or forwards, very little difference between my best and worst days, I don’t get the extremes. I just trudge and some days I’ll wake up and curse heaven for making
me endure one more day. Some I can’t pull my dress on quick enough so I can run out to my garden.
Hezekiah says life passes through me while others pass through life. I’m a born stranger. Even when they were young and hopeful my mama and daddy never really thought much of me. Their feelings were obligatory. Long before the Trouble I overheard Daddy asking Mama what made me so strange. All I ever loved was Eula because she didn’t mind my strangeness. She took to me and maybe that was only because I was the only other child close by. She loved me endlessly. I put Mama and Daddy behind Eula and my singing heart was full. Eula was my connection to this earth. When she was taken from me, that was taken from me.
They come more often now. I listen, I wait for a summation, directive, pronouncement or sign of some sort.
Nothing.
They don’t rile or scare me. It’s them except he can’t knock the wind out of me with his slaps and she can’t screech fearsome nonsense till my ears hurt. It’s no torment to me when they’re close by. It don’t seem to mean much of nothing. Except right on the last here, Beauty B.’s whispered “Git home,” in a voice that a person would take for rustling leaves unless they stopped to realize there was no wind, nor leaves close about to rustle.
Cheryl had drove all the way down here from Birmingham by herself determined to haul me back up there to live with her and Hezekiah. She’s a fine woman and better in my opinion than he’ll ever deserve. Cheryl won’t ponder a thing into a puddle fretting over whether she feels like doing it. If she thinks it needs doing, she’s already halfway through it.
She pulls big money out of them funeral homes up at Memphis. Hez and them lives high. I’d be up there in more style than I ever knew. It might be nice to have some twilight with my grandchildren. Hezekiah and I probably wouldn’t butt heads too badly. She’s even told me I could have all the garden I required in their backyard.
Pity it’s Alabama.
Alabama is evil ground. I will not go back to Alabama unless I’m
carried there in a box. If it were in my power I would sew salt over every square inch of that wretched, godforsaken place. Hezekiah warned Cheryl I wouldn’t go back with her. She came on to Charleston, though, because it wasn’t no other way to show me her invitation was genuine.
Once she saw I was set on Charleston, she hushed about it. Cheryl has regard for other people. She stayed a day or two, long enough to have my back screens replaced and a new square of linoleum laid in the bathroom. She went by and talked to my doctor and got my medication sorted out. She took me to the beauty parlor and had me an extra pair of eyeglasses made.
Just before she was about to start home she remembered we hadn’t turned my mattress. She saw the holes in my sheets and that led her to investigate the linens. She found a sale on sheets and towels in the newspaper and she drove off. I went out back to the garden to grab up some winter greens before it rained. That’s when I heard that damned ruffled scratch whisper say, “Moena, git home.”
Mother died regretting Alabama. South Carolina turned her foolish and loud. She tried to do what had to be done to keep things up. But her talk was one-way, crazy and cold. You’d tell her something and she’d look right through you. Some of the old people around the turpentine farms got to saying she conversed with spirits. The devil would be more like it. They say she got on some with Hezekiah. I wasn’t around. I was in Charleston sewing drapes and slipcovers for cheap women who wore too much perfume and bathed twice a day. I don’t know what passed between them.
I had a hundred inclinations to leave Charleston and do what I could for my mother and father and Hezekiah down on that farm. I made more than one trip there believing I was going to stay. Mother was talking in tongues by then, suffering visions and spells. Losing Alabama had broken my father. It had left him alone in a strange place where he had no more than he could earn draining sap from a white man’s pine trees. He turned to meanness and whiskey and whatever low, whore trash tramp he could drag home. It was fearful and unbearably sad.
Mother wasn’t completely sure who I was. Father addressed me as “Strange.” He’d say, “Strange, you can chop some damned garden weed and set some dough to rise.” What Hezekiah understood of Mother’s madness and Father’s decline I don’t know.
I didn’t know I could get a baby. I didn’t know I had one coming. God help me, I thought I was dying with a tumor. I wasn’t but fourteen.
I’ve seen hell in Charleston too. I buried a husband and watched my girls grow up into three kinds of fools. They had no example but mine to follow. I meant to love them and do better. I lived my life thinking
next year for durned sure
. Next year I’d be past my troubles, my endless, despised travail, and climb back up onto the world and walk with my head up. It ain’t no next year. It’s just more
now
and more.
I did the best by accepting life. I keep Alabama before the evil. I had a warm quilt on soft grass by the creek and Eula and when that was taken, I turned and remained old for the next seventy-five years. I won’t be angry about it. I’d split in two if I let myself get angry. I try hardest not to mind about anything. If Dereesa moves back in on me for the fiftieth time, I don’t mind. If she’s working a job and has money, I don’t mind. If she brings the kids, I don’t mind. If she’s stretched out on the sofa looking at stories all morning and wanting my money, I don’t mind. If she comes in with a sackful of groceries and we have a big supper, I don’t mind. If we do without, I don’t mind. I stay half-dead to keep from minding. Dying is only the other half. Lord knows I don’t mind dying.
What’s this cursed “Moena, git home”? Why do I turn it over and over, examining it? Is old Beauty B.’s ghost any less crazy than she was?
I could see Cheryl felt bad leaving me. She did me the great kindness of not telling me so or squeaking up into some funny voice and cocking her head to one said and asking me one more time, “Miss Moena, we’d so love to have you; won’t you please just come for a week?” None of that hooey. She pulled new cotton sheets over my bed, laid a stack of towels on the hamper and that Cadillac was crossing Carolina, thank you, ma’am.
I mind about that whispering in my garden, though. What would old Beauty B. want to trip me up like that for? Do the dead forget or is she still too crazy to know how it stands with me and Alabama?
Oh, that other Alabama!
She loved those paper white cherry blossoms, Eula. If I went back it would only be to visit her grave and plant that particular cherry tree. If she stayed and died in Prince George. Otherwise I’d have no idea where she’s buried. I did used to regularly wonder who Eula married. What went with the farm? Did her sisters get all the money? Mama laid claim that Eula and her sisters would part ways over money. But I doubt it. Eula had an uncommon understanding of money, for a child or anyone else. Money stuck to Eula.
No, they won’t never let me back in Prince George even if I lost my mind and went to Alabama and begged them.
Eula, git home?
To Alabama, state of utter disgrace, birthplace of evil, forsaken by ghosts and angels!?
Thee great guns. And, Dear God, please come for your pitiful world!
L
ily told me about Michael. I can’t tell her what to do. But I can see what she’s doing. She’s balled religious love and romantic love up together. She worships him. Michael is not all he tries to be or he wouldn’t take advantage of a confused woman like that. I tried to point that out to her, but she said I never had the courage to go after that kind of love. She’s right. I never went after anything except a job at Pizitz Department Store and Dashnell Lawler.
To Lily that schoolhouse is a temple and Michael is the god on the altar. I don’t mean to pass judgment. I don’t know how much Lily and Michael are to each other. I have no opinion of Glen. I can’t tell her to leave him or go back to him. I can’t tell her with anything like conviction that her children need her at home. It’s next to impossible to know what life is like inside other people’s houses. I have been to enough discussion groups to see that Michael likes to be worshipped. It’s also clear that something in Lily needs to grovel.
We had an unsettling discussion group last night. They all hugged me when I walked in ten minutes late. Lily had apparently told them about my leaving Dashnell. They wanted to show their support. It was very sweet. It made me tired to think that they had all been talking my business. We all sat in our accustomed circle and Michael asked me to say all the things I want from life while the
rest of the group closed their eyes and tried to see it for me in their minds. I said I’d like to get Mama’s place fixed back right and learn a skill, cosmetology or word processing or maybe even a little college work. I had two years of junior college. In the back of my mind, I always wanted to try to build that up into a teaching degree. I think the group was hoping I’d say something more spiritual.
Lily steered the discussion back to the man on the lake. She told them I had left Dashnell over his part in it. I immediately spoke out saying I knew no such thing about Dashnell and neither did Lily. She hushed, but she gave me betrayed looks for the rest of the evening. The rest of them looked at me as if I protested too much.