Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [124]
Mama had stayed right beside Alma, keeping her hands on her, steadying and quieting her, and keeping between me and that razor that never left Aunt Alma’s hand. She talked as if nothing had happened, and in fact most of it was about me, about how slow I answered, how daydreamy I was, how much I looked like my great-aunt Malvena. I’d been surprised to hear all that, more surprised when she said I would stay here with Alma, give her a hand now that spring was warming up. “You need some help around this place, Alma,” Mama told her. “You’ll like having Bone around. Maybe you can even get her to sing for you now and then.”
My mouth had fallen open, and I’d stood transfixed, as close to the bed as I dared. Did she mean that? Did Mama think I was reliable? Did I look like my great-aunt Malvena? Did she really think I could sing?
Aunt Alma barely acknowledged what Mama said, just went on with her complaints about Uncle Wade. “I said, ‘Give me a baby, Wade. Just give me a baby.’ ” She tried to sit up, and Mama leaned over to soothe her, climbing in bed with her.
“You know what he said to me? You know what he said to me?” Alma asked, hanging on to Mama with one desperate hand. She didn’t wait for an answer. She took hold of the blanket in her fist, shook it and hissed the answer between her teeth. “Said, ‘What you want an’t what I want.’ He said, ‘You old and ugly and fat as a cow, crazy as a cow eaten too much weed, and you smell like a cow been lying in spoiled milk.’ Said, ‘I wouldn’t touch you even if you took a bath in whiskey tonic and put a bag over your head.’ He laughed at me. Then he walked right out of here.”
She lay back limply. There were tears on her face, and her lips had flattened back against her teeth. She shook her head slowly back and forth. “All this time, taking care of him, loving him, giving him children and meals and clean clothes and loving him. Loving him, and him to talk to me that way.” She cried deep, broken sobs.
“And Annie!” she wailed. Mama gathered Aunt Alma up like a little girl, rocked her back and forth while she cried. It didn’t last long. In the silence that followed, the two of them murmured a little, something I couldn’t hear clearly. It sounded like Mama said something about Uncle Wade being a loving man, that Aunt Alma loved him. Then Aunt Alma’s voice came out loud and strong again.
“Oh, but that’s why I got to cut his throat,” she said plainly. “If I didn’t love the son of a bitch, I’d let him live forever. ”
“Woman takes it in her head to go crazy, you just might as well stand back.” Uncle Earle was joking to Grey and Garvey out on the porch in the dark, the three of them standing close together smoking and sharing a beer. They’d wanted to get in the house so bad Mama had finally let them move some of the broken furniture, insisting they do it quietly so that Alma could sleep.
“Oh, women,” Garvey grunted. “They’re not that hard to handle. ”
“You think!” Uncle Earle laughed. “I’m telling you, boy, you never can predict what a woman might not do. You remember that little girl from Nashville I brought around two summers ago, sweet little thing not any bigger than Bone and all pasty-faced, blond, and giggly?”
“Tiny, yeah,” Grey almost laughed. He sounded like he remembered her well. “She was so shy nobody got to know her.”
“Well, that little thing,” Uncle Earle drawled, “that little thing just about cut my balls off with a pair of scissors one night. Got me by the short hairs and tried as hard as she could. If I hadn’t been twice her weight and six times as scared, she’d have left me a eunuch.” He laughed like the idea still made him nervous. “I’m telling you, women are dangerous. You need to keep it in mind.