Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [84]
Raylene offered me a glass of lemon tea when I showed up, and then quickly put me to work. She had me pick the fresh vegetables out of her side garden so she wouldn’t have to do all that bending over. “I just about ruined my back at that damn mill,” she said with a grin and a sigh. “Always leaning forward and reaching. Now I’d rather run than bend. You be careful of your back, Bone, or it’ll be damn stiff when you get old.” She told me to go down to the river to pull in whatever trash had accumulated in the tree roots. I came home with fresh tomatoes, okra, two jars of chow-chow, and the head off a Betsy Wetsy doll, the one with the silly rubber curl on her forehead. Raylene told Mama I was the kind of girl she liked, quiet and hardworking, and said she’d pay in kind for my help a couple of days a week. So I started spending all my time with Raylene while Reese went off to afternoon Bible classes at the Jesus Love Academy.
Every day I dragged stuff up from the river—baby—carriage covers, tricycle wheels, shoes, plastic dishes, jump-rope handles, ragged clothes, and once the headlight off a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
“This is good stuff,” Aunt Raylene usually said. “You got an eye for things, girl. I can clean and patch those clothes up. We’ll just soak the dishes in bleach and give the rest of it a scrubbing. Saturday morning we’ll put out blankets and sell it off the side of the road. You get your mama to send you over on the weekend and I’ll give you a tenth of everything we earn.”
I loved her praise more than the money, loved being good at something, loved hearing Aunt Raylene tell Uncle Beau what a worker I was. Sometimes she’d come down to the river and watch me climb around the tree roots. “You’re pretty sure on your feet,” she told me. “Looks like you an’t scared of falling in.”
“Why should I be?” I watched her light a cigarette the same way Uncle Earle did, striking the match against her thumbnail. “A little river water an’t gonna hurt me.”
“No, it won’t. It won’t. But you’d be surprised how silly some people get about the notion of falling in, or getting their pants wet, or bumping themselves on an old river rock. I had Alma’s girl Temple out here once after she quit school, and it turned out she was scared of snapping turtles. Girl was convinced they were waiting for her just under the surface of the water, waiting to snap her little toes off and eat them up! Can you imagine?” She took a drag on her cigarette, cupping it in her hand away from the river breeze.
“Oh, Lord.” She arched her back and then sank down in a squat on the bank, her black serge skirt bunching up under her. “I am so tired of people whining about what might happen to them, never taking no chances or doing anything new. I’m glad you an’t gonna be like that, Bone. I’m counting on you to get out there and do things, girl. Make people nervous and make your old aunt glad.”
She wrapped her arms around her knees and looked off down the river. I saw her do that a lot, sit out there and stare into the distance. She always seemed completely comfortable with herself, elbows locked around her knees and one hand drawn up to smoke. Sometimes she’d hum softly, no music I’d ever heard. Aunt Raylene hated most everything that played on the radio, saved her greatest contempt for the kind of country ballads that bemoaned the faithless lover and always included a little spoken part during the chorus. “Terrible maudlin shit,” she’d declare. “You don’t like that, do you, Bone?”
I’d promised her that no, I didn‘t, ’course I didn’t, not mentioning that I had liked it before. I would have hated for her to think I didn’t have good sense. For my own protection, I never talked to her about gospel music. I couldn’t bear it if Raylene laughed at the music I dreamed of singing.
Aunt Alma’s girl Patsy Ruth came out to Aunt Raylene’s to get out of caring for Tadpole. The baby had finally been diagnosed