Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [69]
I put my hand on Earle’s forearm and felt with a dizzy sensation how tight and hot the skin was, as if every muscle in his body was fighting off God. If I had not been so certain of his prospects of hellfire and damnation, it would have tickled my pride to see what a challenge to God’s patience Earle managed to be. As it was, all I could think was how marvelous it would be when he finally heard God speaking through me and felt Jesus come into his life.
I tried to do all I could to save my poor uncles from their heathen ways, but when I tried to get them to go to Sunday services, Earle just laughed at me, Nevil grunted, and Uncle Beau worked himself into a coughing fit. “Goddam women and their goddam churchgoing ways,” Uncle Beau yelled at Granny, as if she had put me up to it. “A man don’t have to have God on his ass to know what he should do. A man don’t need a woman preaching at him all the time.”
“Stop cursing like that,” Granny told him mildly enough. “You the biggest fool in Greenville County, and it an’t the women made you who you are. You been after somebody to blame your life on since you was born.” She spit snuff and told me to get out of the house and into the sunshine.
I didn’t argue with her. If I got balky, she was sure to make me squeeze up a piece of her leg when she had to take her insulin shot. She always made me do it when she was angry at me, which was plenty of reason to keep her from getting mad.
“If God lived in a whiskey bottle,” I heard Granny tell Uncle Beau as I headed out the door, “He’d of filled up your heart a long time ago. But He don’t, and you an’t never gonna be saved, so keep your nastiness to yourself.”
Uncle Earle got work building a carport and took some of the money to get Mama a little electric record player and four records. “That’s all I’m giving for free,” he told her, scooping up gravy with one of her biscuits. “I even bought you some of those old June Carter songs you like. What’s that funny one? ‘Nickelodeon,’ right?”
He scooped and sopped, and drank sweet tea down like it was whiskey. Mama said he’d eaten so many of her biscuits by now he was like a child of her own.
“A man belongs to the woman that feeds him.”
“Bullshit,” Aunt Alma insisted. “It’s the other way around and you know it. It’s the woman belongs to the ones she feeds.”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
Out of those four records, there was only one Mama liked, and she damn near wore it out. “The Sign on the Highway,” it was called, and after a while I could sing it from memory. “The sign on the highway, the scene of the crash ... the people pulled over to let the hearse pass ... their bodies were found ’neath the signboard that read—Beer, Wine and Whiskey for sale just ahead.”
What surprised me was that Mama, who wouldn’t go to church and never even said Jesus’ name, had the same response to that music I did. She cried every time she heard it, and she wanted to hear it all the time. It was a gospel song, of course, a kind of a gospel song. Mama would play it over and over, and I’d come in to sit with her while she listened, her with a glass of tea in one hand and the other over her eyes, and me as close to her as she’d let me, both of us crying quietly and then smiling at each other and playing it again. Uncle Earle would come in and laugh at us.
“Look at you two. You just as crazy as you can be. Look at you. Crying over some people didn’t never really die. That’s only a slide guitar and some stupid folks can’t make a living