pregnant woman it would matter. I decided I could deal with that with him, but not with Brian. He deserved better.”
“You didn’t think you was good enough?”
“Were good enough,” she said. “It’s ‘were.’ That’s the proper word.”
“You been sleeping up here and wandering around in a vapor of cure-all, but now you have time to fix my English?”
“Brian was a good man and it would have changed things for him.”
“What about me?” I said.
“I was young. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“That’s your hole in the bag? You were young?”
“I wanted you to have a home. Don said he didn’t care whose child it was. He just wanted me. I thought he meant it, and things would be okay, and Brian could go on with his life. Next day after our wedding, Don got drunk and blacked my eye and I knew who he was. But I was stuck. He got what he wanted, and then the hell began. It’s gone on now for over sixteen years. He has times when he’s like the man I met, but then he has more times where he’s the man I know now.”
“And here you are, wearing hell’s overcoat and happy to have it.”
“I think Don has done the best he could,” she said. “I think, in his own way, he loves me.”
“I know this, Mama-Jinx don’t have to go to bed at night with a stick of stove wood.”
“I stayed for you.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said, leaning forward in the chair. “It was for me, we’d been long gone a long ways back. You stayed because you’re too weak in the head to do anything else. Weak before you took that damn cure-all. Weak and happy to be weak. You’re just glad he don’t hit you as much as he used to, and when he does, not as hard. He’s got you in a bottle now, and he can pour you out and use you when he wants to. That ain’t right, Mama. You left me to deal with him while you was floating on some cloud somewhere. I don’t blame the cure-all for it, Mama. I blame you.”
I could see my words had stung like a bee, and that made me happy.
“You’re right,” she said. “I am a quitter. I quit the man I loved. I quit life, and I married a quitter, and I’ve pretty much quit you, but I didn’t mean to.”
“Now that makes it all better.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.
“Somebody meant it,” I said. “You wasn’t swigging cure-all back when you got pregnant and run off. Tell you what. I’ll leave you a good stick of stove wood by the bed. When you ain’t drunk on your medicine, which is about fifteen minutes a day, you can use it on him. I think a good shot to the side of the head is best. Rest of the time, you can float in the clouds and he can do what he wants, and you can pretend you don’t know or understand. But you ain’t fooling me, and let me say ‘ain’t’ again. Ain’t.”
I got up, picked up my stove wood, hesitated, and laid it on the chair by the bed.
“Here’s the wood,” I said. “I can put it beside you if you like.”
“Honey, don’t be mad.”
I had moved to the foot of the bed and was starting for the door. “I was any madder the house would catch on fire.”
I went out and slammed the door and went to my room and slammed that door and locked up and cried for a while. Then I got tired of crying, as I could see it wasn’t helping a thing. I decided I was so mad I wanted to wear shoes. I got some socks that only had one hole in each foot, put them and my shoes on, and went downstairs and outside, started walking briskly along the river’s edge.
7
By now the sun was pretty high and the air was hot and windless and sticky as molasses. I didn’t know where I was going right then, but I seemed to be getting there fast, and was pretty sweated up over doing it.
I walked for hours, and eventually came to the spot where we had found May Lynn. I don’t know if I went there on purpose, or if I just ended up there, but I came to it.
I walked close to the bank and looked down at the Singer sewing machine that had been left there. I bent down and had a closer gander at it. Where the wire had been tied was bits of gray flesh with flies on it. The killer had bent the two ends in such a way as to tie a knot and then a little stiff bow. It was like what he had used was ribbon, not wires.
I wondered if the murderer thought that was funny. I kept thinking how the man I thought was my daddy, and Constable Sy Higgins, had jerked her feet loose from the wire and hadn’t bothered trying to untwist it off of her. I could still hear the bones in May Lynn’s feet snapping. I remembered how the wet skin stripped off her feet like sticky bread dough and stayed on the wire.
I shooed the flies away, and as I did something moved inside of me that made me feel funny; something that felt like a wild animal trying to find a place to settle down. I started walking again.
I walked until the trees and brush thinned and there was a wet clay path that went up a grass-covered hill like a knife cut in a bright orange sweet potato. When I got to the top of the hill, there was another clay road that wound off of it, and it led to the top of another hill, and on top of that hill was a small white house that looked as fresh as a newborn calf. There was a small green garden out to the side of it with a fence around it to keep out the deer and such, and way out back was a little red outhouse. It looked so bright and perky I had the urge to go up there and use it, even if I didn’t have to go.
The red clay, being wet from the night before, stuck to my shoes and made my feet heavy. I got off the path and took off my shoes and wiped their bottoms across the grass until they were clean. I put them back on and stayed on the grass as I climbed the hill. On the top of the hill it was flat and there wasn’t any grass. The ground had been raked, and there were bits of gravel in the dirt that Jinx’s daddy had hauled in. In front of the house there was a horseshoe drive and no car in it. The car would be up north with Jinx’s daddy.
The house was very small, maybe two rooms, but unlike our huge house, it was in fine shape and the roof looked to have been shingled not too long ago. The shingles were made of good wood, split perfect, laid out and nailed, tarred over to keep out the rot. I knew Jinx’s daddy had done it before he went back north. It was always his way to keep things fresh and tight.
There were a few chickens in the yard, but there wasn’t any livestock. Jinx’s daddy mailed money home to them, and unlike most anyone else around the bottomland, they bought all the meat they ate, except for chicken now and again, and some fish. They mostly had the chickens for eggs, and since they didn’t have any kind of set place for them to nest, they had to be alert as to where the eggs had been laid, or otherwise, you wanted an egg for your breakfast, you might have a bit of a treasure hunt before you could crack one in the pan. I knew that for a fact, as I had to do exactly the same thing at home.
I was almost to the door when I saw Jinx come out of the house carrying a basket with laundry piled high in it. She had her hair out of her usual braids and knotted up behind her head in a thistle-like pile and tied off with a piece of white cord. She was wearing a man’s blue work shirt, overalls, and shoes that looked as if they had room for another pair of feet in them.
She called out to me and I followed her to the backyard and the wash line, which was strung between two tall posts. There were clothespins in the basket, and I helped her hang the wash. We hung it carefully and neatly, and while we moved down the line, we talked.
“I’m wanting to go on that trip we talked about,” I said.
“I wanted to,” Jinx said. “Then I get to thinking about Mama here with just my little brother. Now that I’m home and not out there on the river, this seems all right to me.”
“Not me. What I got is a big house that’s about to fall down around my ears, a drunk mother, and a jackass I have to fight off with a piece of stove wood that I thought was my daddy, but he ain’t. So I reckon I’m coming from a place now that I wasn’t coming from yesterday.”
“What’s that you say?” Jinx said, pausing with a clothespin she was about to clamp to a pair of underpants. “That part about he ain’t your daddy.”
