They held the funeral at Bushy Creek Baptist. Mrs. Pearl insisted on laying an intricately embroidered baby blanket over the coffin. I gave it one glance and then kept my head down. Mrs. Pearl had put a cherub with pink cheeks and yellow hair on the spot that was probably covering Shannon’s blackened features. I kept my hand in Mama’s and my mouth shut tight. Reese had wanted to come, but Mama had refused to let her and sent her off to Raylene’s for the day. Mama wasn’t too happy that I wanted to go to the funeral either, but she agreed to bring me after I started crying. Daddy Glen had gotten angry at Mama for giving in to my “nonsense,” as he’d called it, and gone off fishing with Beau and Nevil. Over the last few months, he’d started drinking, matching them beer for beer at family gatherings and coming home to fall asleep on the couch.
“Boy can’t drink,” Beau joked, taking great amusement in Glen’s red-faced confusion after a few shots. “Just don’t have the constitution for it.”
“The belly,” Uncle Nevil corrected.
“Right, the belly.” They all laughed at that. Glen suddenly taking up drinking seemed to please them in some odd way.
“Damn fools,” Raylene had complained.
“It don’t matter,” Mama had told her. “Glen an’t gonna be a drinker no matter how hard he tries.” It was true. Where Beau and Nevil could drink for hours and only get noisy and mean, Daddy Glen would invariably fall asleep while they were still sipping away. He’d wake up with an aching head and a sour stomach when Beau and Nevil were starting to sip coffee to get ready for a day of work, both of them still half drunk from the night before but going on anyway. It all made me nervous, but like Mama I couldn’t see anything that could be done about it.
“Did you ever see her?” Mrs. Pearl said to the preacher they’d brought in from their family church in Mississippi. “She was just an angel of the Lord.”
The preacher nodded and laid his hands over Mrs. Pearl’s as she hugged close a great bunch of yellow mums. Beyond them, the choir director had one hand on Mr. Pearl’s elbow. Mr. Pearl was as gray as a dead man. I watched from under lowered lashes while the choir director pressed a paper cup into Mr. Pearl’s hand and whispered in his ear. Mr. Pearl nodded and sipped steadily. He kept looking over at his wife and the flowers she was gripping so tightly.
“She loved babies, you know. She was always a friend to the less fortunate. All her little friends are here today. And she could sing. Oh! You should have heard her sing.”
I remembered Shannon’s hoarse wavering voice humming in the backseat of her daddy’s car after she had told me a particularly horrible story. Was it possible Mrs. Pearl had never heard her daughter sing? I looked over to Mr. Pearl and saw his head dip again. If it had been me in that ball of flame, would they have come to my funeral?
Mrs. Pearl lifted her face from the flowers. Her watery eyes flickered back and forth across the pews. She doesn’t understand anything, I thought. Mrs. Pearl’s eyes moved over me sightlessly, her hands crushing the flowers pressed against her neck. She started to moan suddenly, like a bird caught in a blackberry bush, softly, tonelessly, while the preacher carefully pushed her down into the front pew. The choir director’s wife ran over and put her arm around Mrs. Pearl as the preacher desperately signaled the choir to start a hymn. Their voices rose smoothly, but Mrs. Pearl’s moan went on and on, rising into the close sweaty air, a song with no meter, no rhythm—but gospel, the purest gospel, a song of absolute hopeless grief.
I turned and pushed my face into Mama’s dress. All my hardheaded anger was gone. As if she understood completely, Mama’s hand stroked my neck and down my back while she crooned under her breath her own song—muted, toneless, the same hum I’d been hearing all my life.
14
Shannon’s death haunted me. Suddenly I didn’t feel so grown-up anymore. I tried to make up with Reese, but she had decided that Patsy Ruth was the only person she trusted in the world, and had her sleeping over all the time. The two of them whispered together, giggling and pointing at me and then running off. Even Mama was mad at me. Exhausted with the effort of trying to come up with something new to wear five days out of every week, I’d worn jeans to school one day and been sent home with a stern note.
“Your clothes are clean. You got nothing to be ashamed of,” Mama had snapped. Any other time she might have been sympathetic about the girls at school laughing at me for wearing the same few A-line skirts and shirtwaist dresses over and over, but there was no money for new clothes, and no one to loan us any. Uncle Earle was still at the county farm, Aunt Alma had been laid off from her part-time job at the laundry, and Aunt Ruth was so sick Travis was paying a nurse to help Deedee care for her. Everyone was worried and irritable.
The back of my throat was tight all the time. Out in the utility room that hook no longer sang to me. The thought of its sharp pointy edges made me want to touch it again, but I could not bring myself to climb up and take it down. Even the river out at Raylene’s made me scared and sad, the rolling dirty water reminding me of the rainy mud at Shannon’s funeral. I kept thinking of how she had been standing there with her head down, all her life still open and unknown, what might have happened, who she might have become. I did not think of the fire but of the dull thudding sound of her life shutting off, everything stopping.
Everything in my life was just as uncertain. I too could be standing somewhere and find myself running into the wall of my own death. I began to tremble whenever Daddy Glen turned his dark blue eyes to me, a deep hidden shaking I prayed he couldn’t see. No, I whispered in the night. No, I will not die. No. I clamped my teeth. No.
I took to watching myself in mirrors to see what other people saw, to puzzle out just what showed them who I really was. What did Daddy Glen see? Aunt Raylene? Uncle Earle? My hair had started to lighten, taking on red highlights instead of blue, but my eyes had stayed black as night. I looked at my cheekbones in the bathroom mirror. Not like Reese’s smooth, soft face, my cheeks were high and strong. Maybe ugly. Probably ugly. I turned my head. My teeth were white and hard, sharp and gleaming. I was strong all over. Turned sunshine into muscle, Mama swore. She was proud of how sturdy I was, what I could lift and how fast I could run, but I was suddenly self-conscious and awkward. I had shot up in the last year, so much so that my bones seemed to ache all the time.
“Growing pains,” Aunt Raylene told me. “Keep this up and you gonna be tall, girl.”
I didn’t want to be tall. I wanted to be beautiful. When I was alone, I would look down at my obstinate body, long legs, no hips, and only the slightest swell where Deedee and Temple had big round breasts. I had nothing to be proud of, and I hated Aunt Raylene’s jokes that we were all peasant stock, descendants of women who used to deliver babies in the fields and stagger up to work just after. Gawky, strong, ugly—why couldn’t I be pretty? I wanted to be more like the girls in storybooks, princesses with pale skin and tender hearts. I hated my short fingers, wide face, bony knees, hated being nothing like the pretty girls with their delicate features and slender, trembling frames. I was stubborn-faced, unremarkable, straight up and down, and as dark as walnut bark. This body, like my aunts’ bodies, was born to be worked to death, used up, and thrown away. I had read these things in books and passed right over it. The ones who died like that, worked to death or carried off by senseless accidents, they were almost never the heroines. Aunt Alma had given me a big paperback edition of
Gone with the Wind,
with tinted pictures from the movie, and told me I’d love it. I had at first, but one evening I looked up from Vivien Leigh’s pink cheeks to see Mama coming in from work with her hair darkened from sweat and her uniform stained. A sharp flash went through me. Emma Slattery, I thought. That’s who I’d be, that’s who we were. Not Scarlett with her baking-powder cheeks. I was part of the trash down in the mud-stained cabins, fighting with the darkies and stealing ungratefully from our betters, stupid, coarse, born to shame and death. I shook with fear and indignation.
“What the hell is that girl doing in the bathroom so long?” Daddy Glen was irritable as only a man who’d been drinking the night before can be. I turned the lock against him and tried not to listen when he yelled through the door.
“Bone, you get out of there and come help me with these potatoes.” I washed my face and went out to Mama, still in her waitress uniform and flat white shoes. She smiled and passed me a pot. “Cut the eyes out but leave the skins on. We’ll make mashed potatoes like your daddy likes them.”
From the living room came Daddy Glen’s grunt and then the sound of the side door opening and closing. Mama put her hands on my shoulders and hugged me close. “I want you to go over to Alma’s after school for a few days. I’ll pick you and Reese up when I get off. I want you to keep those kids for Alma so she can get some time to spend with Ruth.” Mama paused, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter.
“Daddy Glen’s worried about Christmas and money. He’d like to do something special. Last night he was talking about how we’ve never had his brothers to dinner in all these years.”
I looked down into the pot of potatoes, remembering the last time we had gone out to the Waddells’, the way Daddy Glen had stuttered when his father spoke to him. That old man was horrible, and working for him must be hell, even I knew that. Mama leaned in so that her mouth was close to my cheek.
“I don’t know. I just don’t understand why his daddy treats Glen so bad. Glen’s always trying to please him, and that old man takes every chance he gets to make Glen look like a fool. It just eats Glen up, eats him up.” She sighed.
“Let’s be careful for a while, Bone. Be real careful, baby.” She hesitated as if there were something more she would say, but instead gave my shoulders another squeeze and went to change out of her uniform. I watched her walk away, her head bent forward. How long had it been since I had seen Mama not tired, not sad, not scared? Forever. It seemed like forever.
I kept looking for something special in me, something magical. I was growing up, wasn’t I? But the only thing different about me was my anger, that raw boiling rage in my stomach. Cherokee maybe, wild Indian anger maybe, like Shannon’s anger, bottomless and horrible. I pulled my lips back so my teeth showed. Every third family in Greenville might have a little Cherokee, but I had been born with a full head of black hair. I’ve got my great-granddaddy’s blood in me, I told myself. I am night’s own daughter, my great-grandfather’s warrior child. I pushed my hair up high on my head and searched my pupils for the red highlights that sparked in the depths, dark shiny red like rubies or fresh bright blood. Dangerous, I told myself. I could be dangerous, oh yes, I could be dangerous. Let Daddy Glen yell at Mama again, let him hurt her, let him hurt me, just let him. He’d better be careful. He’s got no idea what I might not do. If I had a razor, I would surely cut his throat in the dead of night, then run away to live naked and alone in the western hills like someone in a Zane Grey novel. All I had to do was grow a little, grow into myself.
Daddy Glen yelled at me at dinner. “That bathroom’s a sty. Way your mama has to work, least you could do is clean up now and then, help out some around here.” Mama sighed and pushed her plate away. Reese ate with her head down, and I said nothing. Mama had said to be careful. Carefully, I kept my head turned, watching lights from the highway reflect off the kitchen curtains, not looking at Daddy Glen.
After dinner, I scrubbed the tub and took a long, hot bath. I looked for black hairs in my navel and felt for fuzz between my legs. I was smooth and clean. I took up Mama’s hand mirror and propped it at an angle between my legs. My chin was pink and dimpled, my neck pale underneath, so that I could see the blue lines of veins threading up to my ears. I put my palms flat on my cheeks, pushed back and slanted my eyes. My face remained unreadable, my eyes blank and silvery. My face told nothing. It was scary, stern and empty. I bent my head back, looking down to my reddish-brown nipples, my puckered belly button, long thighs, and bruised knees. My neck ached, my teeth, my lower spine and ass. All of me was ugly, pasty, and numb—nothing like Uncle James’s girls in their white nylon crinolines and blue satin hair ribbons. They were the kind of little girls people really wanted. No part of me was that worshipful, dreamy-eyed storybook girlchild, no part of me was beautiful. I could see why Daddy Glen was hateful to me. At dinner when Mama had gone back to the bedroom to get her sweater, he had made a point of telling me that I didn’t have anything to be so proud of.
“You think you’re so special,” he’d jeered. “Act like you piss rose water and honey. Think you’re too good to be straightened out. Your mama has spoiled you. She don’t know what a lazy, stubborn girl you are, but I do. I know you. I know you, and I an’t gonna have you turning out like your useless cousins, not growing up under my roof.”
“Hateful man,” I whispered. “I don’t care if his daddy does treat him bad. I don’t care why he’s so mean. He’s hateful.”
I rolled over and pushed my face underwater. I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen’s eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid. But at the bottom, at the darkest point, my anger would come and I would know that he had no idea who I was, that he never saw me as the girl who worked hard for Aunt Raylene, who got good grades no matter how often I changed schools, who ran errands for Mama and took good care of Reese. I was not dirty, not stupid, and if I was poor, whose fault was that?
I would get so angry at Daddy Glen I would grind my teeth. I would dream of cutting his heart out, his evil raging pit-black heart. In the dream it felt good to hate him. But the horrible thing was how I felt when I was awake and wasn’t burning with anger. The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in
Robinson Crusoe.
It must have been like what he felt when he stood around his daddy’s house, his head hanging down.