Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [46]
“Oh, yeah,” Earle nodded solemnly. “That’s a big difference, that is. Man don’t run cows, he just leases the rights to their titties.”
Glen looked like he was going to spit or cry but controlled himself. “Just don’t say nothing about my daddy.” He almost growled. “Just don’t.”
Earle and Beau let it go at that. Glen couldn’t help what a shit his daddy was, and it was never smart to talk bad about a man’s people to his face. With the passage of time, Glen had gotten more and more peculiar about his family, one moment complaining of how badly they treated him and the next explaining it away. Worst of all, he insisted that we all had to go over to his brothers’ or daddy’s places whenever there was any kind of family occasion, though it was clear to me that they were never happy to see us. We wound up going over to Daddy Waddell’s place at least once every other month. In the Pontiac with the top down and paper scraps blowing around on the floor, Reese and I would lean over the front seat to watch Mama try to keep her hair neat in the whistling wind and listen to Daddy Glen lie.
“We won’t stay long,” he would always promise, and Mama would smile like she didn’t care at all. We gritted our teeth. We knew that he would not have the nerve to leave before his father had delivered his lecture on all the things Glen had done wrong in his long life of failure and disappointment.
“Your daddy wants his daddy to be proud of him,” Mama once said. “It about breaks my heart. He should just as soon whistle for the moon.”
It was true. Around his father, Glen became unsure of himself and too careful. He broke out in a sweat, and his eyes kept flickering back to his daddy’s face as if he had to keep watching or miss the thing he needed most to see. He would pull at his pants like a little boy and drop his head if anyone asked him a question. It was hard to put that image of him next to the way he was all the rest of the time—the swaggering bantam rooster man who called himself my daddy.
“Old Glen’s a cock and a half,” my uncle Earle would tease. “An’t nobody better take a bite out of his ass. Boy’ll get you down if it takes bare bone to do it.” Which was true enough. Half a dozen times I came home from school to find Mama and Glen sitting at the kitchen table with that white-eyed scared look that meant he’d jumped somebody who’d said something to him and lost yet another job.
“Man can’t keep his temper,” Granny complained, but grinned in spite of herself. Everybody did. It was the one thing that saved Daddy Glen from the Boatwrights’ absolute contempt. The berserker rage that would come on him was just a shade off the power of the Boatwrights’ famous binges. “You mess with one of those boys and you reap the whirlwind,” people said of my uncles, and after a while of Daddy Glen. Tire irons and pastry racks, pitchforks and mop handles, things got bent or broken around Daddy Glen. His face would pink up and his hands would shake; his neck would start to work, the muscles ridging up and throbbing; then his mouth would swell and he would spit. Words came out that were not meant to be understood: “Goddam motherfucker son of a bitch shitass!” Magic words that made other men back off, put their hands up, palms out, and whisper back, “Now, Glen, now, now, Glen, now, hold on, boy...”
“Your daddy’s a son of a bitch himself, a purely crazy pigfucker,” Grey was always telling me with a little awe in his voice, a hunger to be half again as dangerous. I’d smile and nod and bite the inside of my lips, replaying in my head two separate movie images: Daddy Glen screaming at me, his neck bright red with rage, and the other, impossible vision just by it, Daddy Glen at his daddy’s house with his head hanging down and his mouth so soft spit shone on the lower lip.
“I hate to go over there,” Mama said, “hate standing around waiting for his daddy to notice us.” She was brushing our hair out fine and loose and putting little barrettes up on the peak where she wanted it to stay back. Reese and I stood still