“Are you saying she’s real? Like, a human person?”
They looked at each other, then me. Leery. A whole lot of pigeons were lined up on the wire overhead, all facing my way, and it felt like they were staring too. The guy up in the truck bed answered. “She’s real, yessir. Reckon the jury’s still out on the human part.”
They all laughed. Other than the birds.
“Where would I find her?” I asked.
It was so still. I could smell hay and sweet feed. Everybody waiting.
“Bottom of Watauga Lake, if you’re lucky,” one of them finally said, laughing. But the others didn’t. He was a younger guy, string bean. Acne that looked painful.
“You needn’t to be disrespecting an old lady,” I said. “What if I’m her kin?”
The jaws chewing tobacco all stopped at the same time. Damn. All these men with their hands tucked into their overall bibs, looking at me like some unheard-of type of fish on their line. Finally an older guy said, “If that’s so, I’d say you come honest by that red head of yourn.”
But she didn’t have red hair. According to Mom. “How do you mean?”
Now they all looked at him instead of me. Two guys headed to their trucks, wanting no part of this. One said, “Go on, Slim, give ’at boy what he’s after.” And Slim, which was a fat guy, said, “Look here, don’t nobody say I done what I oughtn’t to have,” and the other ones said their opinions on feeding me to a man-eater, until my head was fixing to blow up.
“You all can go to hell!” I yelled.
That did it, they told me. All at the same time: take a left after the place that used to be the furniture store, or else used to be the schoolhouse, on a road that was called Janet Lane or the old donkey road. They didn’t agree on a thing except that I would come to a yellow two-story. I left them fighting it out. Blisters be damned. I covered that last mile at a gallop.
There was no sign on the road, but a yellow house there was, lone and tall on a hill like it didn’t want company. The place was kept up very decent, big windows, the yard crammed with flowers, a fence around it with a wire gate that I didn’t dare open. I was filthy enough to scare the birds out of that yard. Looking at all the color and buzzing bees got me sort of dazed. That plus having not much to eat lately. For whatever reason I didn’t right away see the lady pulling weeds, till she straightened up and put a hand to her back. Dang. Possibly the tallest old lady I ever saw, tanned dark, like a tobacco hand. Hard-looking in her features. No sign of the guys at the feed store being wrong. She had on a man’s hat and shoes, a stout skirt. Lumpy legs in her stockings, like bagged walnuts. If she hadn’t moved, I might have taken her for a scarecrow.
She saw me. Raised up her hand trowel like she was fixing to throw it. “Go away!”
I was frozen.
“I said get. No boys here!” She started chopping the air with her weapon.
If I opened the gate and took a step towards her, which I did, there was nothing brave about it. Just no choice. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m your grandson.”
She lowered the trowel. She had those wraparound sunglasses that old people wear, and she took them off. Underneath was another pair of thick glasses that made her eyes look like swimming fish. Green like mine, milky, surprised. She stood there looking me over from my busted shoe to the top of my wiry red head. Especially that.
“Oh, lord,” she said. And sat down on the ground.
26
My grandmother had no use for anything in the line of boys or men. “Any of them that stands up to make his water,” was how she put it. Bad news for me.
Her parlor smelled of stale cigarette smoke and old people and you never saw so much furniture in one room, from the olden times. The chairs had wooden legs with animal feet, and lace things on the arms so you wouldn’t wreck them. She spread out a tablecloth on her sofa for me to sit on, same reason. Then pulled up a chair and looked me over, fanning herself with one of those funeral home fans with the stick handle. It was hot as hell in there, and crowded with knicknacks and whatnots all over the place. Big old clocks on the mantel, and I’m saying more than one. If you wasted this lady’s time, she was going to know it.
“What are we going to do with you?” she kept asking. Like I knew.
She sounded like a man, with that deep type voice smokers get as their prize for the hundred millionth pack. But it was also what she said and how she said it. Like somebody that doesn’t give a damn if you agree or not. In a while she got up and left me sweating like a pig, not daring to move. Came back with a plate of sandwiches and watched me stuff it all in. Not pretty.
She had questions. Starting with, had anybody ever told me I was the spitting image of my father. I told her yes, that people called me by his nickname, Copperhead. She shook her head over that like, No sir, not going there. Bad memories maybe, in the snake department. She said I’d about given her a heart attack out in the yard. “My own boy come back from the dead, is what I thought, come to me as a boy instead of a man to get back on my good side. But it won’t work. Boys aren’t a thing but just little men still learning what to aim at.”
I wondered if this pertained to how we pissed, which seemed like a major sticking point. I told her I was sorry for all that, and asked what my father did that had put her out so bad.
“Lord, child, I don’t have days enough left to tell you.”
I said I hoped she wouldn’t hold it against me. And that my mom had thought he was awesome, so maybe he’d cleaned up his act some in his later days. I wanted to ask if it was a true story about her coming to visit Mom, and seeing me getting born a boy.
But she was on her own track. “Church was his trouble,” she said. “It started him off on the wrong foot.” This was a new one on me, especially coming from an old person. I’d heard of course about the snake-handling, but she said it was worse than that. Men wanting to get back to the Old Testament, reaping virgin girls and using daughters for their slaves. “There’s some I knew would have taken more wives than Jacob if they thought they’d get away with it.”
“Did Jacob have more than one?” I asked. I was holding the empty plate that had a picture on it of Abraham Lincoln. I wondered how he got in here. It took some doing to keep myself from licking the sandwich crumbs off his face.
“Two wives and two concubines. You don’t know the scriptures?”
It seemed like a trick question. I told her the truth, that Mom had gone sour on all that. And that as far as I knew, her son was probably not churchy either by the time he got to Lee County. Mom just wouldn’t have tolerated anything like that in a boyfriend.
“You didn’t know him,” she said. “He died in July, and you weren’t born till the fall.”
I was a little freaked out by her knowing that.
“He was crazy over cars, too. He had the sickness. A car can kill a man faster than a snake. I’ve not driven one of those killing machines since 1961 nor had one in my possession.”
This was a lot to take in. First, that my dad was into vehicles, the same fever I had in my blood. I was always that kid on the playground with my eyes turned out to the road, watching the metal roar by while the older boys yelled, Oh man, a Continental with suicide doors!
Second of all: since 1961? How did a modern person not have a car?
She said she got her groceries delivered, and if she needed anything else in town, she walked. Or had one of her girls drive her, or run the errand for her. She’d raised and educated eleven girls total, some from wayward teens, a few from babies. So she was like a foster mom. She said she did it on her own steam, though, without paychecks or anything. She took a dim view on how they could mess things up at social services. I told her amen to that.
So, Mom’s crazy story was true. Betsy Woodall must have come to see her. The hell and brimstone she’d supposedly laid on was surely not true, just Mom’s nightmares talking. But the plan of taking me was real. Did Mom agree to that? If I’d been born without the plumbing, would I have grown up here in this house as a whole different me, sitting around eating sandwiches in chairs with animal feet? My brain was pretty close to blowing a gasket.
I asked to use the bathroom, and she showed me what she called her washroom but luckily it did have a toilet. Even though a weird one that took a minute to figure out, due to a pull chain. She didn’t stay to watch if I stood up.
