Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [19]
“Goddam, I’ve ruined these britches now.” “Serve you right if you did,” Granny yelled at him. “You could have killed that child. Reese, you get your little dimple ass up here with your mama.”
“You come on too, Bone,” Mama called to me. “You and Reese come on up here for Alma to get a picture of the four of us together.”
“Yeah, come on, girls.” Glen held on to Mama with both hands around her waist.
“Smile, now, everyone,” called Alma as the shutter clicked.
4
The spring Mama married Glen Waddell, there were thunderstorms every afternoon and rolling clouds that hung around the foothills north and west to the Smokies. The moon came up with a ghostly halo almost every night, and there was a blue shimmer on the horizon at sunset.
“An’t no time to be marrying,” Granny announced. “Or planting or building nothing.”
“You sure, now, Anney?” Earle must have asked Mama twice before he drove her down to the courthouse in his pickup truck to meet Glen and get the license. It seemed he just couldn’t take her ready smile for an answer, even though he agreed to be best man after Glen’s brother had refused the honor. He asked her one more time before he let her out of the truck. “You’re worse than Granny,” Anney told him. “Don’t you want to see me settled down and happy?” He gave it up and kissed her out the door.
Granny wasn’t surprised when she heard that Great-Grandma Shirley had turned down her invitation to the wedding dinner Aunt Alma organized. The Eustis aunts, Marvella and Maybelle, the ones who insisted they could tell the future from their beans, also skipped the dinner, though Marvella was polite about it. “I know he loves Anney,” Marvella told Alma when she came by to collect flowers from their garden. “And sometimes love can change everything.”
Maybelle was not so generous. “Yeah, Glen loves Anney. He loves her like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up. I don’t trust that boy, don’t want our Anney marrying him.”
“But Anney loves Glen,” Alma told Maybelle impatiently. “That’s the thing you ought to be thinking about. She needs him, needs him like a starving woman needs meat between her teeth, and I an’t gonna let nobody take this away from her. Come on, Maybelle, you know there an’t no way to say what’s gonna happen between a man and a woman. That an’t our business anyway, that’s theirs.”
Alma took Maybelle’s hands between her own. “We just got to stand behind our girl, do everything we can to make sure she don’t get hurt again.”
“Oh, Lord.” Maybelle shook her head. “I don’t want to fight you, Alma. And maybe you’re right. I know how lonely Anney’s been. I know.” She pulled her hands free, tucked some loose gray hairs up in the bun at the back of her neck, and turned to her sister. “We got to think about this, Marvella. We got to think hard about our girl.”
They did what they could. The sisters sent Mama a wedding present, a love knot Marvella had made using some of her own hair, after Maybelle had cut little notches in their rabbits’ ears under a new moon, adding the blood to the knot. She set the rabbits loose, and then the two of them tore up half a dozen rows of their beans and buried honeycomb in a piece of lace tablecloth where the beans had flourished. The note with the love knot told Mama that she should keep it under the mattress of the new bed Glen had bought, but Mama sniffed the blood and dried hair, and shook her head over the thing. She couldn’t quite bring herself to throw it away, but she put it in one of her flower pots out in the utility room where Glen wouldn’t find it stinking up their house.
Reese and I hated the honeymoon. We both thought we would get to go. For weeks before