Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [8]
Mama was working grill at the White Horse Cafe the day the radio announced that the fire downtown had gone out of control, burning the courthouse and the hall of records to the ground. It was midway through the noon rush. Mama was holding a pot of coffee in one hand and two cups in the other. She put the cups down and passed the pot to her friend Mab.
“I’m going home.”
“You what?”
“I’ve got to go home.”
“Where’s she going?”
“Trouble at home.”
The cardboard box of wrinkled and stained papers was tucked under the sheets in the bottom of Aunt Alma’s chifforobe. Mama pulled out the ones she wanted, took them into the kitchen, and dropped them in the sink without bothering to unfold them. She’d just lit a kitchen match when the phone rang.
“You heard, I suppose.” It was Aunt Ruth. “Mab said you took off like someone set a fire under you. ”
“Not me,” Mama replied. “The only fire I got going here is the one burning up all these useless papers.”
Aunt Ruth’s laughter spilled out of the phone and all over the kitchen.
“Girl, there an’t a woman in town going to believe you didn’t set that fire yourself. Half the county’s gonna tell the other how you burned down that courthouse.”
“Let them talk,” Mama said, and blew at the sparks flying up. “Talk won’t send me to jail. The sheriff and half his deputies know I was at work all morning, ‘cause I served them their coffee. I can’t get into any trouble just ’cause I’m glad the goddam courthouse burned down. ”
She blew at the sparks again, whistling into the phone, and then laughed out loud. Halfway across town, Aunt Ruth balanced the phone against her neck, squeezed Granny’s shoulder, and laughed with her. Over at the mill, Aunt Alma looked out a window at the smoke billowing up downtown and had to cover her mouth to keep from giggling like a girl. In the outer yard back of the furnace works, Uncle Earle and Glen Waddell were moving iron and listening to the radio. Both of them grinned and looked up at each other at the same moment, then burst out laughing. It was almost as if everyone could hear each other, all over Greenville, laughing as the courthouse burned to the ground.
2
Greenville, South Carolina, in 1955 was the most beautiful place in the world. Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth’s matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars. Weeping willows marched across the yard, following every wandering stream and ditch, their long whiplike fronds making tents that sheltered sweet-smelling beds of clover. Over at the house Aunt Raylene rented near the river, all the trees had been cut back and the scuppernong vines torn out. The clover grew in long sweeps of tiny white and yellow flowers that hid slender red-and-black-striped caterpillars and fat gray-black slugs-the ones Uncle Earle swore would draw fish to a hook even in a thunderstorm. But at Aunt Alma’s, over near the Eustis Highway, the landlord had locked down the spigots so that the kids wouldn’t cost him a fortune in water bills. Without the relief of a sprinkler or a hose the heat had burned up the grass, and the combined efforts of dogs and boys