Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [83]
She’d come home to live her life alone, quit the mill after twenty years, still kept her gray hair cut short, and wore trousers as often as skirts. She had only a few friends, all equally quiet private people. Her only social activity seemed to be a weekly card game with the widowed choir director and two of the local schoolteachers. Deedee had called her a lonely old woman once, but Ruth had shushed her, saying a woman was only lonely who wasn’t happy with herself, and Raylene was probably the only person any of us would ever meet who was completely satisfied with her own company. Not that anyone left her alone. The uncles were always dropping by around dinnertime, and Grey and Garvey seemed to be out there as often as they were home.
Raylene was said to be the best cook in the family and earned steady money by selling her home-canned vegetables and fruit. “Woman makes the best chow-chow in the state,” Uncle Beau boasted. “And the second-best home brew.” I had never tasted her whiskey, but Mama took as much of her chow-chow as Raylene would let her have. It had a smoky peppery taste like nothing else, sweet and spicy at the same time. When I started going out to her place I figured I would make Mama happy by talking Raylene out of a few extra jars. I never imagined that out on the river I would suddenly find myself as fascinated with my reclusive old aunt as I had ever been with gospel music.
“Trash rises,” Aunt Raylene joked the first afternoon I spent with her. “Out here where no one can mess with it, trash rises all the time.” She laughed loud, with great enthusiasm, and spit to the side in a way I had never seen a grown woman do before.
On summer nights Raylene kept old truck tires from the county dump smoldering in the yard to drive the mosquitoes away. The smoke rose in a thick stinking brown fog, drifting toward the river, where the men came to fish in the cool of the evening, and where Aunt Raylene kept the weeds cut back to discourage bugs and give her a clear view of the banks.
“I like to watch things pass,” she told me in her lazy whiskery drawl. “Time and men and trash out on the river. I just like to watch it all go around the bend.” She spoke softly, smelling a little of alcohol and pepper, chow-chow and home brew, and the woodsmoke tang that clung to her skin all the time. I watched her shift her hips in her overalls. She was as big around as Aunt Alma but moved as easily and gracefully as a young boy, squatting on her heels to pull weeds and swinging her arms as she walked around her yard. Uncle Earle had said she’d loved to dance when she was young, and she looked as if she still could.
Aunt Raylene’s house was scrubbed clean, but her walls were lined with shelves full of oddities, old tools and bird nests, rare dishes and peculiarly shaped rocks. An amazing collection of things accumulated on the river bank below her house. People from Greenville tossed their garbage off the highway a few miles up the river. There it would sink out of sight in the mud and eventually work its way down to Aunt Raylene’s, where the river turned, then rise to get caught in the roots of the big trees along the bank. Aunt Raylene said the garbage drew the fish in, and it was true that the fishing at her place was the best in the county. The uncles went to Aunt Raylene’s to catch carp and catfish and big brown unnamed fish with rotting eyes and gilded fins that people were afraid to eat. Uncle Earle and Uncle Beau would put out their poles with little bells on the lines and stand in the tire smoke to drink whiskey