Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [67]
“I an’t no fool.” I rocked back and forth in my chair, pushing off hard with my bare feet. Granny’s face twitched, and I saw the light come back into her eyes.
“You know how your mama feels about that word.” It was true. Mama had given me one of her rare scoldings for calling Reese a fool. She hated it almost as much as “bastard.”
“An’t no fool and an’t no bastard.” I rocked steadily, watching Granny’s face.
Granny laughed and looked back over her shoulder nervously. “Oh, you gonna be the death of your mama, and won’t I be sorry then.”
She didn’t look sorry. She looked better. I said it again.
“An’t no fool and an’t no bastard.”
Granny started laughing so hard she choked on her snuff.
“You’re both, and you just silly ‘bout that music just like your granddaddy.” She sounded like she might strangle from laughing. “And goddam, he was both too.”
My gospel thing did get on Mama’s nerves after a while, but Aunt Alma reassured her. “It’s obnoxious but normal, Anney, and you know it. Every girl in the family gets religion sooner or later.” Mama nodded absently. She wasn’t so sure it was that simple. Mama almost never went to church, but she took God and most issues of faith absolutely seriously.
“Oh, Anney’s a Christian woman,” Uncle Earle told Aunt Alma the morning after the night Mama threw him out for puking liquor on her kitchen table. “But she wears me down being so stubborn all the time. You’d think she never took a drink of whiskey or chased no good-looking man in her life.”
“She’s just as stiff-necked as she can be,” Cousin Deedee agreed. She was supposed to be with Aunt Ruth but seemed to be over at Alma’s or Raylene’s more than she was home. “You know, Bone, your mama’s the kind gets us all in trouble to begin with. Like something out of one of them stories they tell in Sunday school, supposed to be a lesson to the rest of us.” She smirked at me. “Ask for nothing, trust in God. Do the right thing. Right! And he’ll send you bastards and rabies before he’s through.
“I hate,” Deedee swore, “the very notion of a Christian woman with her hard-scrubbed, starved-thin, stiff and scrawny neck!”
“She hates herself,” Mama told us when Reese repeated what Deedee had said. “And I don’t know that God has much of anything to do with it.” She gave me one of those sharp, almost frightening looks she seemed to have developed over the summer. “People don’t do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn’t make sense if you don’t.”
I no longer accepted everything Mama told me as gospel, but I knew what she meant. Doing the right thing shouldn’t have anything to do with like or love or goodness or Jesus, though most people swore Jesus had something to do with everything. I knew Mama believed in Jesus well enough, even though she wouldn’t talk about it, and I decided that deep in her heart she understood exactly what I was doing. I gave myself over to the mystery of Jesus’ blood, reading the Bible at the kitchen table after dinner and going to the Wednesday-night services for young people. Mama said nothing, Reese teased me, and Daddy Glen sneered.
Aunt Alma thought the whole thing was funny. “Well, at least she an’t copying Bible passages out and hiding them in your drawers like my Temple did. You just got to let her ride it out. When Temple got it, I teased her a little and the girl nearly took my head off. Almost had the preacher out to talk to me—as if I wasn’t a good Baptist—just because I don’t see no reason to go to church every Sunday of my life.”
“But you should go to church,” I told Aunt Alma imperviously. She made me mad talking like I wasn’t serious about my faith. “You should witness your faith and get Uncle Earle to go with you. He thinks the world of you, and he’d listen to you if you talked to him right.”
“If I started talking to Earle about Sunday-morning church services and witnessing for our faith, he’d think I’d lost my mind.” Alma laughed and pinched my chin. “You go for us, girl. You witness. If the world