Sourland

encountered other vehicles, moving slowly, headlights shimmering in rain. Ditches were overflowing with mud- water and at every narrow bridge Momma had to slow our car to a crawl, whispering to herself. Where it was light enough we could see the terrifying sight of water rushing just a few inches below the bridge yet each time we were spared, the bridge wasn’t washed away and all of us drowned. To drown out the noise of the wind, Momma played Johnny Cash tapes, loud. Johnny Cash was Momma’s favorite singer, like her own daddy, she claimed, lost to her since she was twelve years old. In the backseat in a bed of wet, rumpled clothes Lyle fell asleep whimpering but I kept Momma company every mile of the way. Every hour of that night. I was Aimee then, not Mickey. I wasn’t sorry to leave the shingleboard house on Half Moon Creek that was run-down and smelled of kerosene because Lyle’s daddy was not my daddy and in Bob Gleason’s eyes I could see no warmth for me, only for Lyle. Where my own daddy was, I had no idea. If my own daddy was alive, I had no idea. I had learned not to ask Momma who would say in disdain, “Him? Gone.” From Momma I knew that a man could not be trusted except for a certain period of time and when that time was ending you had to act quickly before it was too late.

Through the night, the rain continued. In the morning there was no sunrise only a gradual lightening so you could begin to see the shapes of things along the road: mostly trees. Then I saw a shivery ray of light above the sawtooth mountains we were headed for, the sun flattened out sideways like a broken egg yolk, a smear of red- orange. “Momma, look!” And a while later Momma drove across the suspension bridge above the Chautauqua River at Ransomville and when at midpoint on the bridge we passed the sign CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY she began crying suddenly.

“No one can hurt us now.”

These words that came to be confused in my memory with Johnny Cash’s manly voice. No one can hurt us now the words to a song of surpassing beauty and hope that was interrupted by applause and whistles from a vast anonymous audience. No one can hurt us now soothing as a lullaby, you drift into sleep believing it must be true.

My aunt Georgia Brandt lived in a ramshackle farmhouse at the edge of Ransomville. Of the original one hundred acres, only two or three remained in the family. Georgia was not a farm woman but a cafeteria worker at the local hospital. She was a soft-fleshed fattish woman in her late thirties, six years older than my mother, a widow who’d lost her trucker husband in a disastrous accident on the New York Thruway when her oldest child was in high school and her youngest, Sonny, was five months old. Aunt Georgia had a way of hugging so vehemently it took the breath out of you. Her kisses were like swipes with a coarse damp sponge. She smelled of baking powder biscuits and cigarette smoke. To keep from crying when she was in an emotional state Aunt Georgia blurted out clumsy remarks meant to amuse, that had the sting of insults. First thing she said to Momma when we came into her house after our all-night drive was: “Jesus, Dev’a! Don’t you and those kids look like something the cat dragged out of the rain!”

If Sonny happened to overhear one of his mother’s awkward attempts at humor he was apt to call out, “Don’t listen to Ma’s bullshit, she’s drunk.”

Aunt Georgia was a hive of fretful energy, humming and singing to herself like a radio left on in an empty room. She watched late-night TV, smoking while she knitted, did needlepoint, sewed quilts — “crazy quilts” were her specialty. Some of these she sold through a women’s crafts co-op at a local mall, others she gave away. After her husband’s fiery death she’d converted to evangelical Christianity and sang in a nasal, wavering voice in the choir of the Ransomville Church of the Apostles. She was brimming with prayer like a cup filled to the top, threatening to spill. Even Sonny, at mealtimes, bowed his lips over his plate, clasped his restless hands and mumbled Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive through Christ-our-Lord AMEN. My aunt Georgia was the second-oldest of the McClaren girls who’d grown up in Ransomville and had always been the heaviest. Devra was the youngest, prettiest, and thinnest — “Look at you,” Georgia protested, “one of those ‘an-rex-icks’ you see on TV.” In an upscale suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, lived the oldest McClaren sister, my aunt Agnes who was famous among the relatives for being “rich” and “stingy” — “snooty” — “cold-hearted.” Agnes was the sole McClaren in any generation to have gone to college, acquiring a master’s degree from the State University at Buffalo in something called developmental psychology; she’d married a well-to-do businessman whom few in the family had ever met. Agnes disapproved of her sisters’ lives for being “messy” — “out of control” — and never returned to the Chautauqua Valley to visit. Nor did she encourage visits to Cleveland though she’d taken an interest, Momma reported, in me: “Aggie thinks you might take after her, you like books better than people.”

I did not like books better than people. I was nothing like my aunt Agnes.

I hated Momma’s brash way of talking, that my cousin Sonny Brandt might overhear.

First glimpse I had of Sonny that morning, he came outside in the rain to help us unload the car, insisted on carrying most of the things himself — “Y’all get inside, I can handle it.” Sonny was just fifteen but looked and behaved years older. Next, Sonny gave up his room for Lyle and me: “It’s nice’n cozy, see. Right over the furnace.” The Brandts’ house was so large, uninsulated, most of the second floor had to be shut up from November to April; the furnace was coal-burning, in a dank, earthen-floored cellar, and gave off wan gusts of heat through vents clogged with dust. Sonny was always doing some kindness like that, helping you with something you hadn’t realized you needed help with. He was a tall, lanky-lean boy with pale ghost-blue eyes, said to resemble his dead father’s. His eyebrows ran together over the bridge of his nose. Already at fifteen he’d begun to wear out his forehead with frowning: one of those old-young people, could be male or female, Momma said, who take on too much worry early in life because others who are older don’t take on enough.

Like his mother, Sonny was always busy. You could hear him humming and singing to himself, anywhere in the house. He slept now in a drafty room under the eaves, at the top of the stairs, and his footsteps on the stairs were thunderous. He had a way of flying down the stairs taking steps three or four at a time, slapping the wall with his left hand to keep his balance. He could run upstairs, too, in almost the same way. It was a sight to behold like an acrobat on TV but Aunt Georgia wasn’t amused calling to him he was going to break his damn neck or worse yet the damn stairs. Sonny laughed, “Hey Ma: chill out.”

Sonny was in tenth grade at Ransomville High but frequently out of school working part-time or pickup jobs (grocery bagger, snow removal, farmhand) or helping around the house where things were forever breaking down. The previous summer, Sonny had painted the front of the house and most of what you could see of the sides from the road but the color Georgia selected was an impractical cream-ivory that looked thin as whitewash on the rough boards and would have required a second coat. Sonny gave up, overwhelmed. If he’d had any brains, he said, he would’ve worked those weeks for a painting contractor, at least he’d have been paid.

Momma teased Sonny for being a “natural-born Good Samaritan” and Sonny said, scowling: “Natural-born asshole, you mean.”

Lyle and I were crazy for our cousin like puppies yearning for attention, any kind of attention: teasing, swift hard tickles beneath the arms, attacks from behind. Sonny never hurt us, or rarely. He was sometimes clumsy, but never cruel. He was just under six feet, built like a whippet with shoulders and arms hard-muscled from outdoor work. His hair was the color of damp wheat and sprang straight from his head. By fifteen he had to shave every other day. His skin was often blemished and he wore grungy old jeans, Tshirts, sweatshirts yet girls called him on the phone after school, giggling and shameless. If Georgia happened to answer she spoke sharply, “No. My son is not available.” Sonny basked in the attention but couldn’t be troubled to call any girls back. Still Georgia complained, “All that boy has got to do is get some silly girl pregnant. Wind up married, a daddy at sixteen.”

A flush rose in Sonny’s face if he happened to overhear. He hated to be teased about girls, or sex. Anything to do with sex.

“Chill out, Mom. Or I’m out of here.”

One day, Sonny changed my name: he’d had enough of “Aimee,” he said. Especially the way my mother wanted it pronounced: “Aim-ee.”

“‘Mickey’ kicks ass, see? ‘Aimee’ gets her ass kicked.”

It was so! Clear as a column of numbers added up.

Sonny called Lyle “Big Boy.” (Which was a sweet kind of teasing, since Lyle was small for his age at six.) Sometimes, Sonny called my brother “Lyle-y” if the mood between them was more serious.

Sonny had a formal way of addressing adults, you couldn’t judge was respectful or mocking. He could