Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [51]
“I don’t want to hear it,” she’d say when I tried to tell her something Granny or Aunt Alma had passed on to me. “Nothing to be proud of in shooting people for looking at you wrong.”
I was ashamed of the way Daddy Glen talked, but Mama didn’t seem ashamed. She just got quiet, more and more quiet all the time. I begged her to tell me stories like Granny did, but she said I was too young to hear such things. Maybe when I was grown and had my own family she would tell me what few things she thought I needed to know, but until then she expected me to ask no questions she didn’t want to answer. Glen was right, Mama told me, she didn’t want me to grow up as wild and mean as Earle or Beau or even Raylene.
When Daddy Glen beat me there was always a reason, and Mama would stand right outside the bathroom door. Afterward she would cry and wash my face and tell me not to be so stubborn, not to make him mad. I’d promise, but I had a talent for sassing back and making Daddy Glen mad, though it was hard to know how not to make him mad. Sometimes when I looked up into his red features and blazing eyes, I knew that it was nothing I had done that made him beat me. It was just me, the fact of my life, who I was in his eyes and mine. I was evil. Of course I was. I admitted it to myself, locked my fingers into fists, and shut my eyes to everything I did not understand.
“Bone.” Cousin Deedee was the first to call me Bone, but everyone did by the time we were living in West Greenville. Dog bone, penny bone, suckle bone, milk tooth, goat head, horse head, tiger bone, collarbone, hipbone, neckbone, knees and toes.
“You are hard as bone, the stubbornest child on the planet!” Daddy Glen told me. “Cold as death, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty.”
Daddy Glen was careful not to hit me when one of the aunts was visiting, and never much when Mama would see, except for those times he could justify as discipline, dragging me into the bathroom while she waited on the other side of the locked door. It was when Reese and I were alone with him that he was dangerous. If I ran from him, he would come after me. He shook me so hard my head wobbled loosely, and he’d joke that chickens and goats had more starch to them than a Boatwright, even a half-Boatwright like I was.
It was the bones in my head I thought about, the hard, porous edge of my skull cradling my brain, reassuring me that no matter what happened I could heal up from it eventually. It was the heat in my heart, my hard, gritty center. I linked my fingers behind my head, clenched my teeth, and rocked back and forth. The sturdy stock we were boasted to be came down in me to stubbornness and bone.
I was always getting hurt, it seemed, in ways Mama could not understand and I could not explain. Mama worried about how careless I was, how prone to accident I had become. “Maybe you’re thin-boned,” she guessed, and started buying me vitamins. I didn’t know what to say to her. To say anything would mean trying to tell her everything, to describe those times when he held me tight to his belly and called me sweet names I did not want to hear. I remained silent, stubborn, resentful, and collected my bruises as if they were unavoidable. There were lumps at the back of my head, not swellings of flesh and tissue but a rumpled ridge of bone. My big toes went flat and wide, broken within a few months of each other when I smashed into doorjambs, running while looking back over my shoulder.
“How could you do that?” Mama asked me. It was my fault, I wasn’t supposed to run in the house.
“She’s always getting into something,” Daddy Glen complained. “Lucky she’s such a hardheaded brat.”
I watched