Love would make me beautiful; a father’s love would purify my heart, turn my bitter soul sweet, and lighten my Cherokee eyes. If he loved me, if he only loved me. Why didn’t he love me? I drummed my fists on the porcelain walls of the tub, shook my head and howled underwater, came up to breathe and went under to whine again. If anyone had come in, they wouldn’t have known I was crying, and I was sure even God couldn’t hear me curse.
Over Christmas holidays at Alma’s house, I spent my time organizing the cousins to act out complicated stories, half of them drawn from television programs. As long as everybody did what I told them, I was the best baby-sitter Aunt Alma had ever seen.
“You can be Francis Marion,” I told Little Earle. “Reese and I will be Cherokee warriors, Patsy Ruth can be the British commander, Garvey will be the cowardly colonist, and Grey can be a colonist on our side.”
“Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, where have you been?” Little Earle began singing, but Patsy Ruth cut him off. “Why do I have to be the British commander? Why can’t you be the bad guy and let me be a Cherokee?”
“’Cause you don’t climb trees worth a pig’s ass. Everybody knows Indians can climb trees.”
“Then I get to ride the horse, and I want to ride Grey’s bike, not Little Earle’s old one.”
“If she gets to ride my bike, then I want to wear your cap.”
“We don’t use my cap in this one. We only use my cap when we play Johnny Yuma.” I was losing patience, and I certainly didn’t want to give up my rebel cap, the one Uncle Earle had brought back from the Fort Sumter general store. It was beautiful—gray, soft, with a slouched brim, and the Stars and Bars stitched in yellow thread.
“Johnny Yoo-ma,” Little Earle started singing again, trying hard to imitate Johnny Cash’s deep voice, “he roamed through the west ...
Johnny Yoo-ma the rebel
... he wandered alone ...”
“You always wear it.” Grey swatted Little Earle’s rear end and turned back to me with a look of sweet reason. “Don’t matter if we’re playing Frankenstein’s monster, and you know didn’t nobody wear no cap like that in the Frankenstein movie.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” I let Grey wear my cap, but I lost interest in the Swamp Fox. Who’d ever heard of him before he showed up on Walt Disney?
Grey and Garvey would only play with us about half the time. They had taken up smoking and were busy practicing pitching pennies. When school started again, they planned to wipe out the lunch money of half the sixth grade. Meanwhile, they kept their distance unless I proposed a plot they really liked.
“Let’s play Dalton Boys again,” Grey kept suggesting. He’d perfected the trick of diving off his bicycle after pretending to be shot, and he loved to show it off.
“It’s the Dalton
Girls
,” I insisted. Reese and I had seen the movie and had told everybody the plot in such detail that the cousins would argue over just what did and did not happen even though they’d never seen it. All of us girls loved the idea of the gang of sisters who had robbed banks and avenged their dead brothers, but the boys preferred to play at Jesse James or the Younger Gang.
“In that movie maybe, but everybody remembers the real Dalton
Boys
.” Garvey had seen the movie too, and hadn’t gotten over how the Dalton brothers were killed off in the first scene so the women could learn to shoot guns and rob banks. “I don’t think that movie was real anyway. I bet you their sisters never robbed no banks.”
“What you want to bet?” Reese challenged. She’d loved that movie. “You think a girl can’t beat your ass? You think I can’t beat your ass?” She snatched my cap off Grey’s head.
“You couldn’t scare a chicken off a nest of water moccasins!” Grey tried to get the cap back, but Reese kept running and twisting out of his reach, yelling at him over her shoulder.
“You’re the one scared of water moccasins. Aunt Alma said you pissed your pants when she took you blackberrying, all ’count of you stepped near a little green snake thinking it was some old water moccasin.”
“You shut your chicken-piss mouth.” Grey jerked the cap back.
“You shut yours!” Reese kicked at his ankles.
“Girls!”
“Boys!”
“You give me my cap.” I pulled it out of Grey’s hands as he tried to hop out of the way of Reese’s hard little feet. I was hoping she would really hurt him when Aunt Alma broke the fight up. She sent the boys to play in the backyard and told us girls we’d have to stay in front.
“If you can’t play together, I’ll keep you apart.”
“I don’t want to be around no stupid boys anyway.” Reese spit in Grey’s direction. Sometimes I agreed with every word out of my little sister’s mouth.
“But what we gonna play now?” Patsy Ruth whined. “We can’t ride the bikes in the front yard. We can’t do much of nothing in the front yard.”
I spun my rebel cap on my fist and had a sudden inspiration.
“We’re gonna play mean sisters.”
“What?” Patsy Ruth kept wiping snot off her lip. Mama swore Patsy Ruth had had a runny nose since she was born. “She’ll be wiping snot the day she’s married, wiping snot the day she dies.” I gave Patsy Ruth the handkerchief I’d sneaked out of Daddy Glen’s drawer for a bandanna.
“We’re gonna play mean sisters,” I told them all again, and I could see in my mind’s eye Shannon Pearl’s twisted mean face. “First we’re gonna play Johnny Yuma’s mean sisters, then Francis Marion’s mean sisters, then Bat Masterson’s. Then we’ll think of somebody else.”
Reese looked confused. “What do mean sisters do?”
“They do everything their brothers do. Only they do it first and fastest and meanest.”
Reese still looked confused, but Patsy Ruth whooped.
“Yeah! I want to be the Rifleman’s mean sister.”
Patsy Ruth ran off to get Grey’s old broken plastic rifle.
All afternoon she pretended it was a sawed-off shotgun like the one on “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Reese finally got into it and started playing at being shot off the porch. I took Aunt Alma’s butcher knife and announced that I was Jim Bowie’s mean sister and no one was to mess with me.
I practiced sticking Aunt Alma’s knife into the porch and listened to the boys cursing in the backyard. I was mean. I decided. I was mean and vicious, and all I really wanted to be doing was sticking that knife in Daddy Glen.
That evening, Patsy Ruth entertained Alma and Wade by running up and down yelling “Ten-four, ten-four” until she knocked over Aunt Alma’s glass.
“What in God’s name are you playing at, child?”
“I was being Broderick Crawford’s mean sister,” Patsy Ruth wailed, wiping her nose.
“His what?” Uncle Wade started laughing into his glass. “His what?” He rocked back on his cane-bottom chair and ground his cigarette out on the porch. Aunt Alma shook her head and looked at Patsy Ruth like she had gone crazy.
“Broderick Crawford’s mean sister! My Lord, what they don’t think up.”
Patsy Ruth was humiliated and angry. She pointed at me. “She told me about it. She told me I could.”
Wade reached out and slapped my fanny. “Girl, you got a mind that scares me.” He swatted me again, but lightly, and he kept grinning. “Broderick Crawford’s mean sister.”
I didn’t care. I played mean sisters for all I was worth.
15
M
ama let Aunt Raylene take Reese and me along when she went to visit Uncle Earle at the county farm. Aunt Raylene said he would be there another three months and he was lonely to see his nieces and nephews.
“Why don’t you take Grey and Garvey?” Mama asked her. “Show them what’s gonna happen to them if they keep breaking into telephones.”
“The hell with that.” Aunt Raylene was sensitive about Grey and Garvey, who had been picked up by the highway patrol for drag-racing in Uncle Beau’s truck when they were supposed to be staying the night at her place. Alma got mad at Raylene for not keeping a more watchful eye on them, and Raylene came close to slapping Garvey when he boasted that they were the youngest in the family ever to be arrested. Now Aunt Raylene folded some of Uncle Earle’s clean underwear and put it in a paper sack while her face flushed red with anger.
“They get into any more trouble, the law won’t have to send them away. I’ll send them so far they’ll never find their way home.”
“Shit you will.” Granny slammed a basket of food down on Aunt Raylene’s kitchen table. “You’ll visit them every month and take them sweet cornbread, just like you do Earle.”
“You’ll see what I’ll do.”
“I’ve seen it already.”
I waited for them to really start fighting, Instead Granny leaned over and kissed Aunt Raylene right on the mouth, her lips pressing Raylene’s with an audible smack. Aunt Raylene gaped in surprise, and Granny laughed until the tears came.
“Oh! Oh! Look at you. Raylene, I finally got you. Oh Lord! I enjoyed that.” She dropped down on a kitchen chair and wiped her eyes. “Well, never mind, you just tell Earle that I love him. And then tell him if I’d beat his ass more when he was a boy, he wouldn’t be where he is today.”
“Nothing you could have done would have stopped Earle from his fighting.” Raylene was trying to recover from the shock of Granny’s kiss. “Earle had a spirit of meanness in him when he was born.” I watched Aunt Raylene push her gray hair back up into her hairpins. Did I have a spirit of meanness in me? I wondered. It felt like it. It had felt like it for weeks. Maybe I hadn’t been born with it, but I’d come to it, as Granny would say. I’d come to it soon enough.
Earle was a little skinnier and a little grayer around the eyes. His hair had grown back some, into a short black brush that stuck straight up all over his head. He kept running his hands over the top of his head as if he couldn’t believe his thick wavy hair was gone. Still, when we settled down on the grass for our picnic, he had gifts for everybody—key tags and belts for all the boys and coin purses and hair barrettes for the girls, all of them hand-tooled and elaborately decorated. Aunt Raylene got a handbag as big as her lunch basket. For Mama he had a leather wallet stenciled with rose vines.
“You give her that, and tell her I think of her all the time.” He laughed his black laugh. “I think of her biscuits. These cooks here can’t make a biscuit a man can eat.”
I played with the wallet and watched the other families on the grass. All the women had leather handbags with stenciled roses. Little tooled leather vines wrapped around the shoulder straps, the edges of the wallets. I ran my fingers over Mama’s wallet and wondered how it was done.
How did they tool the leather?
I opened Mama’s wallet and stroked the unfinished leather. Around us, women were feeding children and keeping close to their husbands. The glaring hot yard smelled of spoiling food, sweat, and sour baby diapers. I looked up at Uncle Earle and saw he was watching the women, sweat running down into his eyes.
“How do you do it?” I asked him, lifting the wallet to catch his glance. “Don’t you have to cut all this stuff?”
He took the wallet from me and ran his fingers over the leather roses, the engraved vines. “We use punches. You hit them with a wooden mallet, pound out the design over and over again for hours. Just the thing for men in jail. Keeps ’em busy and off each other’s necks.” He grinned.
I stared up at him, not quite able to ask.
He laughed at me then, understanding perfectly.
“They count ‘em—the punches, the blades. If the count don’t match at the end of the afternoon, we don’t get out for dinner. Of course, sometimes they count wrong, and sometimes the razors break.” He wiped sweat on his jeans and brought his hand up, palm open. A slender metal blade glinted in the sunlight. He laughed again, that low growling laugh, while I stood with my mouth open.
“They think they so smart.” He spit in the direction of the fence. He looked different without his long black hair, harder and older. Only his eyes were the same, dark and full of pain. Now those eyes burned in the direction of the guards walking the other side of the fence.
“They think they so damn smart.”
My heart seemed to swell in my breast. His hand wiped again at his jeans, and I knew the blade was gone. He was my uncle. I was his favorite sister’s favorite child. I knew absolutely that I was his and he was mine, and I was suddenly fiercely proud of him, and of myself.
“I love you,” I whispered.
“Sure you do, sunshine.” He laughed. “Sure you do.”
Uncle Earle picked me up and hugged me tight to his shoulder. I looked toward the fence and narrowed my eyes. We’re smart, I thought. We’re smarter than you think we are. I felt mean and powerful and proud of all of us, all the Boatwrights who had ever gone to jail, fought back when they hadn’t a chance, and still held on to their pride. When Aunt Raylene called my name, I took my time walking back to the car.
“Why does he have to be so stubborn?” Raylene was leaning forward with her hands on the wheel of the Pontiac. “Why does that man have to go looking for trouble all the time?”
“He don’t look for trouble.” I was still full of the magic of the hidden knife. “He just knows how to handle it when it finds him.”
“He does, huh?” Aunt Raylene turned to look at me. “Well, if he knows how to handle it, how did he get his ass in jail? How come he couldn’t handle himself well enough to stay out of jail? How come he couldn’t handle his own temper enough not to break the jaw of the best friend he’s got in this county?”
She shook her head and shoved her new pocketbook under the seat. “All you kids think your uncles are so smart. If they’re so smart, why they all so goddam poor, huh? You tell me that.”
I went looking for Grey when we got back from the county farm and told him it was time to use that hook. He gave me a slow grin of satisfaction and promised to meet me “anytime, anywhere.” The look in his eyes was a match for the one I’d seen in Earle’s, the one I imagined in my own. A small drum of excitement began to beat inside me, and the beat only sped up when I got the hook down. I gave it to Grey when he came over that night, even though it hurt me to let it go. It would be easier for him to get it down to Woolworth’s without calling attention to himself. A boy with a sack could look perfectly innocent, while I would be asked what it was I was carrying. I ground my teeth in irritation but held on to the idea that I’d get it back soon enough. We would meet at Woolworth’s Friday night, when Mama would be visiting Aunt Ruth and I was supposed to sleep over at Alma’s.