Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [59]
“They’re drunks,” I said, and Aunt Ruth just nodded.
“Kind of. No different from Travis, I suppose. But you know, they don’t think about it. It’s like going to jail. They think that a working man just naturally turns up in jail now and then, just like they believe they got a right to stay drunk from sunset on Friday to dawn on Monday morning. Beau himself swears that he was fine until he started drinking on weekdays.” She shook her head, pushing her thin hair back with one trembling hand.
“You can’t tell them nothing.”
“Beau got his taste for beer as a boy,” Aunt Ruth told us one Saturday morning. She was sitting out on her porch while I scraped at the railing and Earle cleaned the gunk out of the works of the old wringer washer she’d decided to sell.
“He used to go off with Raylene to that roadhouse over at the Greer city limits after she quit school and he’d just turned thirteen. They earned a little money by sweeping up and cleaning and stocking the coolers full of beer and Coca-Cola. They’d always take themselves a few bottles as a bonus. Never hurt Raylene none, but she didn’t have the taste. Liked cola better, matter of fact, and only took beer to sell back to Beau. Boy liked bottle beer better than mother’s milk, and that’s most of what he’s always drunk, no matter what that wife of his swears. Beer can rot you out too, destroy your liver and turn your brains to bleached oatmeal. It’s a fact. He didn’t need that white liquor they sell over at the franchise.”
“Oh, hell!” Earle slapped his palm against the oily metal of the wringer. He never liked to hear anything bad said about his brother Beau. He didn’t even like to hear people repeat things he said himself. “Beau’s got worse stuff than beer in his life. Beer’s nothing. Keeps you regular, beer and pinto beans. If Beau was to stop drinking his beer, he’d probably swell up and explode.” His restless black eyes dared Aunt Ruth to contradict him.
“That wife of his, that Maggie, is the trouble in Beau’s life. Little white-faced thing, white eyes, white-headed, bruises soon as the wind blows hard. Woman makes babies the way you make biscuits. All the time pregnant with some little whey-faced empty-eyed child of God. Hellfire, Beau couldn’t get ahead of himself if he gave up everything but black coffee and hard work. Seven children! Bad enough Alma’s got so many, but at least she knows how to keep hers fed and clean. That little Maggie can’t even change a diaper without coming on a dizzy spell. Woman has eaten Beau alive. Like some vampire sucking the juice out of him. You cut that girl open and you’d find Beau’s blood pumping her heart.”
“Magdaline’s not the reason Beau’s gonna bleed himself to death,” Aunt Ruth snorted. “She don’t make him drink that poison.”
“Don’t she?” Earle slammed the wringer down on the rags he’d spread out to spare the porch boards. “Tell the truth, Ruth. Don’t you think she’s got even a little to do with Beau keeping himself blind drunk all the time?”
Aunt Ruth pulled herself around to look Earle right in the face. “You making out like you think that’s what’s wrong with your life, Earle Boatwright? Your woman eat the heart out of you? The mother of your daughters drive you to drink and day jobs and cursing on my porch in the broad daylight?”
I hugged my knees up close and watched Earle’s face. He was always arguing with Aunt Ruth, but it rarely got so mean. I bit my lips and saw him hang his head. When Earle looked up, his face was red and his eyes all shiny.
“Yes, Ruth,” he whispered. “The bitch of it is, I do.”
Aunt Ruth harrumphed out her nose and then pulled herself out of her rocking chair to stalk over and grab him around the neck. “I’m sorry, baby.” She looked a little wet-eyed