Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [122]
I opened the car door on my side quietly and stepped out. There was a fork under my foot, the tines buried in the ground. Flatware was scattered everywhere, and an egg turner stuck up out of a broken flowerpot. I stepped over a smashed plate and saw dozens of spools of thread under the porch and a pair of pliers under the Pontiac’s right front tire. Dust was on everything, making it hard to see what was what until I looked closely. Just past the fender, a little breeze lifted a tangle of red-brown curly hair from the hairbrush that lay near a shattered hand mirror. I bent over and saw a stack of faded pictures half buried under the crushed petals of black-eyed susans and a smear of baby’s breath. The fan-shaped wedge beside them looked like the venetian blinds that Aunt Alma had always hung in her bathroom.
“Honey. Sweet girl. It’s all right,” Mama was saying. I looked over at them. Aunt Alma’s feet were resting on a little pile of chopped black slats—45 rpm record fragments—and her pale stockings had slid down over her broken-at-the-heel brown shoes. There was mud on her calves and knees, plainly visible where her yellow flower-print dress was pulled up. A strip of the hem on her white cotton slip hung down behind her knees. The sleeves of her faded blue sweater were rolled back, and it was all covered with dried mud like the dress. Her hands were as dirty as the rest of her, stained dark, her nails broken and the cuticles torn.
Blood, I realized. That was blood among the mud stains all over Aunt Alma’s hands, dress, sweater, calves, and face. Her hair was matted with it. A chill went through me, and the skin on top of my head went tingly and hot. Aunt Alma’s fingers were knotted together in her lap. Her face pointed straight ahead, but her eyes were completely unfocused, looking inside not out. She opened her hands slowly and brought them up to her face, the torn, raw fingers sliding past her cheekbones to push her hair back, spreading fresh blood on her temples. There were cuts on her forearms, one on her left cheek, and another on her neck, below her chin. My mouth hung open. I turned my head. There was glass everywhere, shattered, scattered, gleaming in the sun. I was standing barefoot in a yard of broken glass.
“He’ll be back soon,” Aunt Alma was saying. “Back any minute now, I know. I’m ready for him.” She turned and looked Mama full in the face. “I’m ready for him,” she said again, her voice as calm and familiar as Mama’s. “I’m ready for him.”
“Yes,” Mama said. “I see, honey. You are. We both are. We’ll just sit here a while and wait for him.” She kept her face pressed close, not looking away from Aunt Alma’s eyes, as if only her presence was keeping Alma attached to the earth. One of the girls started whimpering over by the garden. I looked back, unable to resist the notion that everyone had gone crazy. Women all over Greenville County were going to smash stuff and then sit down to wait for Armageddon or sunrise or something. It sounded like a good idea to me.
“Bone, get away from there.” It was Uncle Earle’s whisper. He was standing well back over near the stand of pines where the drive turned, his black hair gleaming in the sunlight and an expression on his face of almost comical nervousness. “Come on, girl. Get back in the car and let your mama handle this.” His hands were flat on his thighs, and his jaw was set. He looked scared, deathly scared.
“I’m gonna cut his throat,” Aunt Alma said in the most reasonable voice imaginable. “I got the knife for it.”
“Where is that?” Mama asked her.
“In my pocket.” Aunt Alma’s hands came down, patted the skirt of her dress. Her right hand slipped into a pocket I hadn’t noticed before and came out with a razor, the straight edge closed into the handle. She flicked her wrist and it swung