The Glass Castle (18 page)

Behind Grandpa was a ruddy-faced man with a wild swirl of red hair pushing out from under his baseball cap, which had a Maytag logo. He wore a red-and-black-plaid coat but had no shirt on underneath it. He kept announcing over and over again that he was our uncle Stanley, and he wouldn't stop hugging and kissing me, as though I was someone he truly loved and hadn't seen in ages. You could smell the whiskey on his breath, and when he talked, you could see the pink ridges of his toothless gums.

I stared at Erma and Stanley and Grandpa, searching for some feature that reminded me of Dad, but I saw none. Maybe this was one of Dad's pranks, I thought. Dad must have arranged for the weirdest people in town to pretend they were his family. In a few minutes he'd start laughing and tell us where his real parents lived, and we'd go there and a smiling woman with perfumed hair would welcome us and feed us steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat. I looked at Dad. He wasn't smiling, and he kept pulling at the skin of his neck as if he were itchy.

* * *

We followed Erma and Stanley and Grandpa inside. It was cold in the house, and the air smelled of mold and cigarettes and unwashed laundry. We huddled around a potbellied cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the living room and held out our hands to warm them. Erma pulled a bottle of whiskey from the pocket of her housedress, and Dad looked happy for the first time since we'd left Phoenix.

Erma ushered us into the kitchen, where she was fixing dinner. A bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting harsh light on the yellowed walls, which were coated with a thin film of grease. Erma stuck a curved steel handle into an iron disk on top of an old coal cooking stove, lifted it, and with her other hand grabbed a poker from the wall and jabbed at the hot orange coals inside. She stirred a potful of green beans stewing in fatback and poured in a big handful of salt. Then she set a tray of Pillsbury biscuits on the kitchen table and ladled out a plate of the beans for each of us kids.

The beans were so overcooked that they fell apart when I stuck my fork in them and so salty that I could barely force myself to swallow. I pinched my nose closed, which was the way Mom had taught us to get down things that had gone a little bit rotten. Erma saw me and slapped my hand away. "Beggars can't be choosers," she said.

There were three bedrooms upstairs, Erma said, but no one had been to the second floor in nigh on ten years, because the floorboards were rotted through. Uncle Stanley volunteered to give us his room in the basement and sleep on a cot in the foyer while we were there. "We'll only be staying a few days," Dad said. "until we find a place of our own."

After dinner, Mom and us kids went down into the basement. It was a big dank room, with cinder-block walls and a green linoleum floor. There was another coal stove, a bed, a pullout couch where Mom and Dad could sleep, and a chest of drawers painted fire-engine red. It held hundreds of dog-eared comic booksLittle Lulu, Richie Rich, Beetle Bailey, Archie and Jugheadthat Uncle Stanley had collected over the years. Under the chest of drawers were jugs of genuine moonshine.

We kids climbed into Stanley's bed. To make it less crowded, Lori and I lay down with our heads at one end, and Brian and Maureen lay down with theirs at the other. Brian's feet were in my face, so I grabbed him by the ankles and started chewing on his toes. He laughed and kicked and started chewing on my toes in retaliation, and that made me laugh. We heard a loud
thunk thunk thunk
from above.

"What's that?" Lori asked.

"Maybe the roaches here are bigger than in Phoenix," Brian said. We all laughed and heard the
thunk thunk thunk
again. Mom went upstairs to investigate, then came down and explained that Erma was hitting the floor with a broom handle to signal that we were making too much noise. "She asked that you kids don't laugh while you're in her house," Mom said. "It gets on her nerves."

"I don't think Erma likes us very much," I said.

"She's just an old woman who's had a tough life," Mom said.

"They're all sort of weird," Lori said.

"We'll adapt," Mom said.

Or move on, I thought.

THE NEXT DAY WAS
Sunday. When we got up, Uncle Stanley was leaning against the refrigerator and staring intently at the radio. It made strange noises, not static but a combination of shrieking and wailing. "That there's tongues," he said. "Only the Lord can understand it."

The preacher started talking in actual English, more or less. He spoke with a hillbilly accent so thick it was almost as hard to understand as the tongues. He asked all them good folk out there who'd been helped by this here channeling of the Lord's spirit to send contributions. Dad came into the kitchen and listened. "It's the sort of soul-curdling voodoo," he said, "that turned me into an atheist."

Later that day, we got into the Oldsmobile, and Mom and Dad took us for a tour of the town. Welch was surrounded on all sides by such steep mountains that you felt like you were looking up from the bottom of a bowl. Dad said the hills around Welch were too steep for cultivating much of anything. Couldn't raise a decent herd of sheep or cattle, couldn't even till crops except maybe to feed your family. So this part of the world was left pretty much alone until around the turn of the century, when robber barons from the North laid a track into the area and brought in cheap labor to dig out the huge fields of coal.

We stopped under a railroad bridge and got out of the car to admire the river that ran through the town. It moved sluggishly, with barely a ripple. The river's name, Dad said, was the Tug. "Maybe in the summer we can go fishing and swimming," I said. Dad shook his head. The county had no sewer system, he explained, so when people flushed their johns, the discharge went straight into the Tug. Sometimes the river flooded and the water rose as high as the treetops. Dad pointed to the toilet paper up in the branches along the river's banks. The Tug, Dad said, had the highest level of fecal bacteria of any river in North America.

"What's fecal?" I asked.

Dad watched the river. "Shit," he said.

Dad led us along the main road through town. It was narrow, with old brick buildings crowding in close on both sides. The stores, the signs, the sidewalks, the cars were all covered with a film of black coal dust, giving the town an almost monochromatic look, like an old hand-tinted photograph. Welch was shabby and worn out, but you could tell it had once been a place on its way up. On a hill stood a grand limestone courthouse with a big clock tower. Across from it was a handsome bank with arched windows and a wrought-iron door.

You could also tell that the people of Welch were still trying to maintain some pride of place. A sign near the town's only stoplight announced that Welch was the county seat of McDowell County and that for years, more coal had been mined in McDowell County than any comparable spot in the world. Next to it, another sign boasted that Welch had the largest outdoor municipal parking lot in North America.

But the cheerful advertisements painted on the sides of buildings like the Tic Toc diner and the Pocahontas movie theater were faded and nearly illegible. Dad said bad times had come in the fifties. They hit hard and stayed. President John F. Kennedy had come to Welch not long after he was elected and personally handed out the nation's first food stamps here on McDowell Street, to prove his point thatthough ordinary Americans might find it hard to believestarvation-level poverty existed right in their own country.

The road through Welch, Dad told us, led only farther up into the wet, forbidding mountains and on to other dying coal towns. Few strangers passed through Welch these days, and almost all who did came to inflict one form of misery or anotherto lay off workers, to shut down a mine, to foreclose on someone's house, to compete for the rare job opening. The townspeople didn't care much for outsiders.

The streets were mostly silent and deserted that morning, but every now and then we'd pass a woman wearing curlers or a group of men in T-shirts with motor-oil decals, loitering in a doorway. I tried to catch their eyes, to give them a nod and a smile to let them know we had only good intentions, but they never nodded or spoke a word or even glanced our way. As soon as we passed, however, I could feel eyes following us up the street.

Dad had brought Mom to Welch for a brief visit fifteen years earlier, right after they were married. "Gosh, things have gone downhill a little bit since we were here last," she said.

Dad gave a short snort of a laugh. He looked at her like he was about to say
What the hell did I tell you?
Instead he just shook his head.

Suddenly, Mom grinned broadly. "I'll bet there aren't any other artists living in Welch," she said. "I won't have any competition. My career could really take off here."

THE NEXT DAY MOM
took Brian and me to Welch Elementary, near the outskirts of town. She marched confidently into the principal's office with us in tow and informed him that he would have the pleasure of enrolling two of the brightest, most creative children in America in his school.

The principal looked at Mom over his black-rimmed glasses but remained seated behind his desk. Mom explained that we'd left Phoenix in a teensy bit of a hurry, you know how that goes, and unfortunately, in all the commotion, she forgot to pack stuff like school records and birth certificates.

"But you can take my word for it that Jeannette and Brian are exceptionally bright, even gifted." She smiled at him.

The principal looked at Brian and me, with our unwashed hair and our thin desert clothes. His face took on a sour, skeptical expression. He focused on me, pushed his glasses up his nose, and said something that sounded like. "Wuts et tahm sebm?"

"Excuse me?" I said.

"Et tahm sebm!"
he said louder.

I was completely bewildered. I looked at Mom.

"She doesn't understand your accent," Mom told the principal. He frowned. Mom turned to me. "He's asking you what's eight times seven."

"Oh!" I shouted. "Fifty-six! Eight times seven is fifty-six!" I started spouting out all sorts of mathematical equations.

The principal looked at me blankly.

"He can't make out what you're saying," Mom told me. "Try to talk slowly."

The principal asked me a few more questions I couldn't understand. With Mom translating, I gave answers that he couldn't understand. Then he asked Brian some questions, and they couldn't understand each other, either.

The principal decided that Brian and I were both a bit slow and had speech impediments that made it difficult for others to understand us. He placed us both in special classes for students with learning disabilities.

* * *

"You'll have to impress them with your intelligence," Mom said as Brian and I headed off to school the next day. "Don't be afraid to be smarter than they are."

It had rained the night before our first day of school. When Brian and I stepped off the bus at Welch Elementary, our shoes got soaked in the water that filled the muddy tire ruts left by the school buses. I looked around for the playground equipment, figuring I could win some new friends with the fierce tetherball skills I'd picked up at Emerson, but I didn't see a single seesaw or jungle gym, not to mention any tetherball poles.

It had been cold ever since we arrived in Welch. The day before, Mom had unpacked the thrift-shop coats she'd bought us in Phoenix. When I'd pointed out that all the buttons had been torn from mine, she said that minor flaw was more than offset by the fact that the coat was imported from France and made of 100-percent lamb's wool. As we waited for the opening bell, I stood with Brian at the edge of the playground, my arms crossed to keep my coat closed. The other kids stared at us, whispering among themselves, but they also kept their distance, as if they hadn't decided whether we were predators or prey. I had thought West Virginia was all white hillbillies, so I was surprised by how many black kids there were. I saw one tall black girl with a strong jaw and almond eyes smiling at me. I nodded and smiled back, then I realized there was something malicious in her smile. I locked my arms tighter across my chest.

I was in the fifth grade, so my day was divided into periods, with different teachers and classrooms for each. For the first period, I had West Virginia history. History was one of my favorite subjects. I was coiled and ready to raise my hand as soon as the teacher asked a question I could answer, but he stood at the front of the room next to a map of West Virginia, with all fifty-five counties outlined, and spent the entire class pointing to counties and asking students to identify them. In my second period, we passed the hour watching a film of the football game that Welch High had played several days earlier. Neither of those teachers introduced me to the class; they seemed as uncertain as the kids about how to act around a stranger.

My next class was English for students with learning disabilities. Miss Caparossi started out by informing the class that it might surprise them to learn some people in this world thought they were better than other people. "They're convinced they're so special that they don't need to follow the rules other people have to follow," she said. "like presenting their school records when they enroll in a new school." She looked at me and raised her eyebrows meaningfully. "Who thinks that's not fair?" she asked the class.

All the kids except me raised their hands.

"I see our new student doesn't agree," she said. "Perhaps you'd like to explain yourself?"

I was sitting in the second-to-last row. The students in front of me swiveled their heads around to stare. I decided to dazzle them with the answer from the Ergo Game.

"Insufficient information to draw a conclusion," I said.

"Oh, really?" Miss Caparossi asked. "Is that what they say in a big city like Phoenix?" She pronounced it. "Feeeeenix." Then she turned to the class and said in a high, mocking voice. "Insufficient information to draw a conclusion."

The class laughed violently.

I felt something sharp and painful between my shoulder blades and turned around. The tall black girl with the almond eyes was sitting at the desk behind me. Holding up the sharp pencil she had jabbed into my back, she smiled the same malicious smile I'd seen in the playground.