Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [135]
I closed my eyes. Mama hadn’t talked to him. I felt suddenly so tired I could barely draw breath.
“They call you Bone, don’t they?”
I said nothing.
“Bone, I want you to know that no one is gonna hurt you. No one is gonna be allowed to hurt you. We can see that you’ve been through enough. Just tell me who beat you, girl. Tell me.” His voice was calm, careful, friendly. He was Daddy Glen in a uniform. The world was full of Daddy Glens, and I didn’t want to be in the world anymore.
“Honey,” the sheriff said again. I hated him for calling me that. He didn’t know me. “We’re gonna have to know everything that happened.”
No. My tongue swelled in my mouth. I didn’t want anyone to know anything. Mama, I almost whispered, but clamped my teeth together. I couldn’t tell this man anything. He didn’t care about me. No one cared about me. I didn’t even care about myself anymore.
“Ruth Anne.” He leaned forward, his face close to mine, his whispery voice too big in my ear. “I want to help you. I want you to tell me what happened, girl. I’ll take care of everything. I promise you. You’ll be all right.”
No. He thought he knew everything. Son of a bitch in his smug uniform could talk like Santa Claus, promise anything, but I was alone.
“I want to go home,” I said. “I want my mama.”
Sheriff Cole put his hand on mine and sighed. “All right. All right, girl.”
I looked at him, remembering what Raylene had said that night on the landing when I told her how much I hated people who looked at us like trash. What must it be like to be Sheriff Cole? What made him who he was? I’d think about that sometime, but not now. I didn’t want to think at all right now.
The double door swung open. I turned eagerly, but the struggling angry figure there wasn’t Mama. Raylene was wrestling with a nurse, pushing the woman away and almost losing her black pea coat in the process. “Let me go,” she said in a voice bigger than the room. “You let me go.” She shoved the woman away and came forward like a tree falling, massive, inevitable, and reassuringly familiar.
“Bone. Baby.” Her words echoed hollowly against the stark white walls.
“Oh, my girl, what’d they do to you?” Raylene leaned over me, and the smell of her wrapped me around. I opened my mouth like a baby bird, cried out, and reached up to her with my good arm. I said her name twice and lay against her breasts. Her arms were so strong, so safe. Don’t let me go, I thought. Just please, don’t let me go.
“What are you doing to this child?” I felt her turn slightly, her voice loud and insistent above me. “You tell me what right you got to be in here with her alone, and keeping me outside?”
Sheriff Cole’s voice was patient. “We need to know what happened,” he said.
“You can see what happened,” Raylene snapped. “Look at her. She’s hurt and scared and don’t need nobody hurting her any more. Were you gonna keep me away from her till you had her ready to jump out the window or say anything you wanted her to?”
“Miss Boatwright, I’m sorry, but there’s been an assault. There has to be an investigation.”
“She’s just twelve years old, you fool. Right now she needs to feel safe and loved, not alone and terrified. You’re right, there has to be justice. There has to be a judgment day too, when God will judge us all. What you gonna tell him you did to this child when that day comes?”
“There’s no need—” he began, but she interrupted him.
“There’s need,” she said. “God knows there’s need.” Her voice was awesome, biblical. “God knows.”
The notebook snapped closed. I looked sideways out of Raylene’s embrace and saw Sheriff Cole glare at her and stuff his notebook back in his pocket. “You call me,” he said. “You call me when she’s ready to tell us what happened.”
Aunt Raylene grunted contemptuously, and held me close as he stomped away. “My girl,” she whispered in that strong voice, and stroked my hair back off my face. “Oh, my poor little