Tarnished Gold

She straightened as if her spine had turned to steel. When she looked for Daddy, she found he was already well on his way to a good drunk, all his buddies around him, laughing and guzzling beer and whiskey as fast as they could. She and I stood behind him. He stopped laughing and looked around fearfully for a moment.

'We're going home, Jack,' she said. 'Now!'

'Now? But . . . I'm jus . . . havin' some fun.'

'Now,' she said again.

He grew angry. 'I ain't running home,' he replied, 'to hear you roll out complaints.'

'Suit yourself,' Mama said. She took my hand and we marched to the front door. 'We'll walk home,' she told me. 'It won't be the first time I left him behind and I know it won't be the last.'

10

  Failing

Mama wouldn't speak to Daddy for days after the fais dodo. He didn't come home that night anyway, and when he appeared the next afternoon, looking as if he had slept in a ditch, she refused to give him anything to eat. She even avoided looking at him. He moaned and complained and acted as if he were the one who had been violated and betrayed. He fell asleep on the floor in the living room and snored so loud the shack rumbled. He woke with a jerk, his long body shuddering as if electricity had been sent through him. His eyes snapped open to see Mama hovering over him like a turkey buzzard, her small fists pressed against her ribs.

'How could you go and do that, Jack? How could you run down your own daughter for an Atkins, huh?'

He sat up and combed his fingers through his hair, gazing around as if he didn't know where he was and couldn't hear Mama screaming at him.

'We put Gabrielle through all that horror living in that dreadful woman's house secretly just so no one would know what a terrible thing had happened to her, and you go and spill your guts out to the likes of Jed Atkins? Why? Tell me that, huh?'

Daddy licked his dry lips, closed his eyes, and swayed. He lay back against the settee for a moment, making no attempt to respond or defend himself.

'And then you go and promise your daughter to a no-account slob, no better than the vermin living in the rotted shrimp boats. Where's your conscience, Jack Landry?'

'Aaaa,' he finally cried, putting his hands over his ears. Mama paused, put she continued to stand over him, her little frame intimidating as she glared down at him. He took his hands from his ears slowly.

'I just done what I thought would be good for everyone, woman. I ain't no traiteur with spiritual powers like you. I don't read the future like you, no.'

'Oh? You don't read the future like me? Well, it ain't hard to read your future, Jack Landry. Just go follow a snake. How it lives and how it ends up is about the same as you will,' she said.

Daddy waved his hand in the air between them the way he would swat at flies. 'Never mind all this. Where's that stuff you made for headaches and bad stomach trouble?'

'I'm all out of it. You get drunk so much and so often, I can't keep tip with the demand anyway,' she scolded. 'Besides, there's no traiteur alive who can concoct a remedy for what ails you, Jack Landry.'

Whatever blood was left drained from Daddy's face. His bloodshot eyes shifted my way and then back to glance at Mama.

'I ain't staying here and be abused,' he threatened.

'That's 'cause you're the one who's been doing the abusing, not us.'

'That did it,' he said, struggling to stand. 'I'm going to go move in with Jed until you apologize.'

'When it snows in July,' Mama retorted, her eyes turned crystal-hard.

Daddy kicked a chair and then marched out of the house, slamming the screen door behind him. He wobbled down the steps and tripped on his own feet before making it to the pickup. Mama watched him struggle to get into his truck, gun the engine, grind the gears, and then spit up dirt as he spun the vehicle around and shot off.

'Every time I get to feeling too good for my shoes, I'm reminded how stupid I've been,' she muttered. Despair washed the color from her face as she sighed deeply.

'Oh, Mama, this is all my fault,' I moaned.

'Your fault? How can any of this be your fault, honey? You didn't go and pick who'd be your daddy, did you?'

'If I cared more about being married, Daddy wouldn't do these things,' I wailed. I flopped into a chair, my stomach feeling like a hollowed-out cave.

'Believe me, child. He would do these things anyway, your being married or no. Ain't no rock around that Jack Landry can't crawl out from under,' she said. 'Pay him no mind. He'll come to his senses and come crawling back, just like he always does.' She gazed after him one more time and then went back to work.

But days passed and Daddy didn't return. Mama and I worked and sold our linens, our towels and baskets. In the evenings after dinner, we sat on the galerie and Mama talked about her youth and her mama and papa, whom I had never seen. Sad times always made her nostalgic. We listened to the owls' mournful cries and spotted an occasional night heron. Sometimes there was an automobile going by, and that would make us both anticipate Daddy's return, but it was always someone else, the car's engine drifting into the night, leaving the melancholy thick as corn syrup around us.