Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [48]
Trash steals, I thought, echoing Aunt Madeline’s cold accent, her husband’s bitter words. “Trash for sure,” I muttered, but I only took the roses. No hunger would make me take anything else of theirs. I could feel a kind of heat behind my eyes that lit up everything I glanced at. It was dangerous, that heat. It wanted to pour out and burn everything up, everything they had that we couldn’t have, everything that made them think they were better than us. I stood in the garden and spun myself around and around, pouring out heat and rage and the sweet stink of broken flowers.
8
I was ten, a long-boned restless ten, when we moved to West Greenville so Daddy Glen could be closer to the new uniform plant where he’d gotten a job as an account salesman. Boxing up dishes and pots in the utility shed, Mama found the remains of the love knot Aunt Maybelle and Aunt Marvella had given her. It had been reduced to scraps held together by dust and seemed to have survived only because it had fallen between the bottom of one flower pot and the bowl of another. Mice had picked the ribbon apart from the hair, and bugs had carried off most of the herbs and blood. Even so, the knotted core of the old lace scrap had somehow held all that time. Mama recognized the thing from the color of the ribbon.
“That was a wedding present from your Eustis aunts,” Mama told me, but I already knew what it was from Granny’s stories. As Mama carefully tried to gather it up, the whole thing fell to dust. My stomach cramped, and I wrapped my arms tight around my middle. Impatiently, Mama swept out the shed and packed up her laundry baskets. “Root magic,” she muttered to me.
That week Marvella woke up in the night after dreaming her hair had turned to barbed wire, and Maybelle woke up in the morning sure the rabbits had eaten all their beans. They found instead that a dog had dug up the honeycomb and torn right through the lace. Neither of them told the other what they thought it meant.
The new house in West Greenville was so far from any of the aunts’ houses that there was rarely time to stop by and see them. Granny was still keeping Reese for Mama when she could, but it was out of the way to take her to Alma’s and pick her up, and Mama decided maybe it was time to start trusting me to keep us both alive while she was at work. After that we only saw Granny on the Sundays when Mama would let Daddy Glen sleep and take us over to visit with Aunt Ruth or Aunt Alma. “Hate you being so far away,” her sisters would complain, but Mama would just smile and tell them how nice our new house was, how hard Daddy Glen was working. And it was a nice house, with a big wide yard, but it also cost more, which meant Mama had to take on a few extra hours to bring in a little more money. It didn’t seem as if Daddy Glen’s route was working out as well as they had hoped.
“Your daddy’s having to work awfully hard these days,” Mama told us. “You girls be quiet when he gets home. Stay out of his way and let him get his rest.”
“He loves you,” Mama was always saying, and she meant it, but it seemed like Daddy Glen’s hands were always reaching for me, trembling on the surface of my skin, as if something pulled him to me and pushed him away at the same time. I would look up at him, carefully, watchfully, and see his eyes staring at me like I was something unimaginable and strange. “You don’t look like your mama,” he said once, “except when you’re asleep.” Sometimes when I ran by him, his hands would suddenly catch me, half-lift me, and pull me back to him. He would look into my face, shake me once, and let me go.
“Don’t run like that,” he’d say. “You’re a girl, not a racehorse.”
Reese and I joked about that and played racehorses when we got home from