“I guess not,” I said.
“And now you want to go away?”
“I don’t know what I want. Me and Terry and Jinx-”
“You still seeing that colored girl?”
“I am.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Mama said. “I’m not speaking against her. I’m just surprised you aren’t like everyone else.”
“Everyone else?”
“Way it usually goes is children, colored and white, play together until they get grown, and then they don’t associate. It’s how it is.”
“Thanks for thinking highly of me,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Sue Ellen. I just meant it’s not the standard way things work out in these parts, or most parts, for that matter, and there’s the whole problem of how she’s affecting your speech. You talk like a field hand.”
She paused, seeming suddenly to have taken hold of what I had said about May Lynn.
“You said you want to dig up your friend and burn her up and take her ashes to Hollywood?”
“I said that, yeah, but am I going to do it? I don’t know.”
“That’s pretty crazy,” she said.
“You should know,” I said, and hated it as soon as I said it.
Mama turned her face away from me.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Slowly she looked back in my direction. “No. It’s all right. I wasn’t very thoughtful before I spoke. And I suppose I’m not one to judge anyone in any manner, am I?”
“You’re all right.”
“No. No, I’m not. Listen. I don’t know that you should dig up and burn anybody. I’m pretty sure that’s a crime. I think there’s a list of weird crimes and that’s on the list, along with eating out of the toilet and the like. It’s just not done. So forget that. But I think it would be good for you to leave. I haven’t got the gumption for much of anything anymore, not even being a mother, but you ought not to stay here. Something happens to me, there’s just you and your daddy…and you wouldn’t want that.”
“I don’t want to leave you here with Daddy,” I said, “let alone myself. He’s still got a pretty good left hook.”
“Don’t stay on my account,” Mama said. “I let him in last night, though I don’t remember it all in a solid kind of way. It was the cure-all. It keeps me confused. And I get so lonely.”
“That stuff doesn’t cure a thing,” I said. “It just makes you drunk and dreamy, and gives you excuses. You ought not drink it anymore.”
“You don’t know how things are,” she said. “It makes me feel good when I feel bad, and without it, I feel bad pretty much all the time. You should go. Forget digging up anybody, that’s a bad idea, but you should go.”
“I told you, I don’t want to leave you with Daddy.”
“I can deal with him.”
“I don’t want you to have to,” I said.
Mama considered on something for a long time. I could almost see whatever it was behind her eyes, moving around back there like a person in the shadows. Time she took before she spoke to me, had I been so inclined- which I wasn’t-I could have smoked a cigar, and maybe grown the tobacco to roll another.
“Let me tell you something, honey,” she said. “Something I should have told you maybe some years ago, but I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know what kind of woman I was.”
“You’re all right.”
“No,” Mama said. “No, I’m not all right. I said that before, and I mean it. I’m not all right. I’m not a good Christian.”
It wasn’t Tuesday, so I wasn’t all that high on religion.
“All I know is, if something works out, God gets praised,” I said. “If it don’t, it’s his will. Seems to me he’s always perched to swoop in and take credit for all manner of things he didn’t do anything about, one way or the other.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’ve been baptized.”
“I been wet,” I said. “All I remember was the preacher held my head under the river water, and when he lifted me up he said something while I blew a stream out of my nose.”
“You shouldn’t have such talk,” she said. “Hell is a hot and bad place.”
“I figure I could go there from here and feel relieved,” I said.
“Let’s not discuss it any further,” she said. “I won’t have the Lord spoken ill of.”
She smoldered for a time. I decided to let her. I sat there and checked out the tips of my fingers, looked at my feet, and watched dust floating in the air. Then she said something that was as surprising as if she had opened her mouth and a covey of quail flew out.
“The man you call Daddy,” she said, “well, he isn’t your daddy.”
I couldn’t say anything. I just sat there, numb as an amputated leg.
“Your real daddy is Brian Collins. He was a lawyer and may still be. Over in Gladewater. He and I, well, we had our moment, and then…I got pregnant with you.”
“Then Don ain’t my daddy?”
“Don’t say ‘ain’t.’”
“Forget the ain’t shit. He ain’t my daddy?”
“No. And don’t cuss…what a foul word. Never use that word…I been meaning to tell you he isn’t your daddy. I was waiting for the right time.”
“Anytime after birth would have been good.”
“I know it’s a shock,” Mama said. “I didn’t tell you because Brian isn’t the one who raised you.”
“It’s not like Don did all that much raising, either,” I said. “My real daddy…what was he like?”
“He treated me very well. He is older than me by five years or so. We loved one another, and I got pregnant.”
“And he didn’t want anything to do with you?”
“He wanted to marry me. We loved one another.”
“You loved him so much, you come over here and married Don and let me think he was my daddy? You left my daddy, a lawyer and a good man, and you married a jackass? What was you thinking?”
“See? I told you I was a bad mother.”
“Okay. You win. You’re a bad mother.”
“Listen here, Sue Ellen. I was ashamed. A Christian woman having a child out of wedlock. It wasn’t right. It made Brian look bad.”
“He said he’d marry you, didn’t he?”
“I was starting to show,” she said. “I didn’t want to get married to him like that, even if it was just in front of a justice of the peace. He had a good job and was respected, and I didn’t want that to be lost to him because I couldn’t keep my legs crossed.”
“He had something to do with the blessed event.”
She smiled a little. “Yes, he did.”
“So to stay respectful, you left him and came here and ended up marrying Don while you were showing, and now here we are, me toting a stick of stove wood and you a cure-all drunk.”
“I was seventeen,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“Close enough.”
“You aren’t the way I was when I was your age. You’re strong. Like your real daddy. You have a determination like he has. You’re hardheaded in the same way. He wanted to marry me no matter what. I ran off in the dead of night and caught a ride and ended up with a job in a cafe. I met Don there. He wasn’t so ragged and mean then. He wasn’t an intellectual or financial catch, and no one thought so highly of him that if he married a
