Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [42]
“Well, where are you?” Mama called to us from the kitchen. “I an’t gonna make no pies all by myself when you two can help.” I ran inside while Earle followed slowly behind, dropping his lanky form into a kitchen chair turned around so he could rest his chin on the back of it.
“You just don’t want me telling stories where you can’t hear, little sister.”
“Lies, you mean.” Mama passed me the sifter and a bowl of flour, then poured out a mound of pecans between her and Earle. She took her big butcher knife and started rocking it back and forth across the nuts, chopping them fine. “You know, Bone, Earle’s hair was a dull brown when he was a boy and started school. It just got darker and blacker every year.” She looked over at her brother with a crooked smile. “What you think, Earle, was it school or sin that made your hair so black?”
Earle palmed a mouthful of pecans, tugged on the lock that hung down over his forehead, and sighed a long mournful moan. “Oh, school, little sister. That’s why I had to quit, you know. I had to stop the process before it went too far. If I’d gone on, my hair would have turned so black it would have started to absorb all the sunlight in Greenville County. Crops would have failed and children gone hungry just because of my selfish need to learn algebra and geography. I had to quit and take that job building the new runway out at the air base. It was the only thing to do to save us from starvation and the cold cold night.”
“Oh, you!” Mama slapped Earle’s shoulder lightly. “I can’t say nothing without you telling your awful lies.” She pulled in her rolling pin and leaned on it as she crushed a couple of cups of pecans down to mealy bits. “God’s keeping track, Earle Boatwright. One of these days your stories are gonna come back on you. You an’t gonna know what to say then, I swear.”
Uncle Wade and Aunt Alma fought for weeks, with Aunt Carr and Mama stepping in now and then, until Aunt Carr had to go home to Baltimore and Daddy Glen got laid off from his new job at the Pepsi plant and Mama started working too hard to go visiting Aunt Alma much. It didn’t look like they would ever make up, but then again, nobody acted like it was any big deal. Aunt Alma had sworn she wouldn’t have Wade back in her life till he crawled the length of Main Street singing what a dog he was, but when the baby got sick and the boys started running around at night, she gave it up and moved back in with him.
“I knew what he was like when I married him,” Alma told Mama. “I guess he an’t no worse than any other man.” But she was still mad enough not to move back into their bedroom for a few months. She treated Wade as if he were a tenant in his own house, barely speaking to him until he apologized to her. At first Uncle Wade was indignant, swearing that Aunt Alma would go to hell for treating him like a stranger. He did apologize eventually, though he wouldn’t admit he had done anything wrong.
“A man has needs,” he kept telling everybody from Daddy Glen to the gas-station attendants on White Horse Road. “A man has needs, and she was pregnant. Was I gonna take the risk of hurting my own baby in her womb?”
Wade’s woeful complaint was a joke to all the aunts. “A man has needs,” they’d laugh each time they got together. “So what you suppose a woman has?”
“Men!” one of them would always answer in a giggling roar. Then they would all laugh till the tears started running down. I wasn’t at all sure what was so funny, but I laughed anyway. I liked being one of the women with my aunts, liked feeling a part of something nasty and strong and separate from my big rough boy-cousins and the whole world of spitting, growling, overbearing males.
7
“Don’t you ever let me catch you stealing,” Mama commanded in one of her rare lectures, after Cousin Grey got caught running out of the White Horse Winn Dixie with a bargain quart of RC Cola. “You want something, you tell me, and if it’s worth the trouble we’ll find a way. But I an’t gonna have no child of mine caught stealing.”
I took Mama at her word and hung around with