Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [87]
“You want these peaches to boil over?” she asked me. “You got to watch this stuff close. You can’t be running off in the yard with a fire under these pots.” She planted me on a stool by the stove. “You sit here and keep your eyes open, little girl.”
Aunt Raylene came in laughing, and pinched my shoulder. “Ah, Anney, Bone’s the best you got, works like a dog, she does, just like you and me.” I dropped my shoulders and stared into the simmering pot of peaches.
For three days running then, I sat at that stove while Aunt Raylene and Mama gossiped and cooked.
“How’s Glen doing?” Raylene’s voice was polite, as if she didn’t care much whether Mama answered or not.
“Oh, he’s fine. His dairy routes don’t seem to have worked out the way he hoped, and I think he and his daddy were fighting for a while there. But lately he’s been working more in the processing plant itself. He don’t talk about it. Don’t think he wants me to hear him complaining about his daddy, but at least it’s full-time again. Just wish he made more money.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You do, don’t you? When you first worked at the mill, you didn’t make enough money to spit at.”
“Oh, they never wanted to have me do what I knew how to do best. Wanted me to work on the line rather than fix their machines. Never could accept that I was a better mechanic than a mill worker. After a while I just gave up fighting them about it. Couldn’t stand being that poor anymore, specially since my creditors couldn’t hardly stand what I wasn’t paying them.” Raylene’s grin was wicked. She poured herself some hot coffee and leaned over closer to Mama.
“Remember that time Alma wouldn’t let the sheriff take her furniture?” she asked. “That time she started screaming for the neighbors how they were trying to rob her?”
“God, yes,” Mama laughed. “And that sheriff like to peed in his pants when he saw her throwing clothes out the window and yelling, ‘Take it all, why don’t you? Take the kids too, take it all.’ Oh, my sweet Jesus, yes.”
“Wade always said she threw her housedress at him, and then just stood there in her underwear, and he wasn’t gonna go near her after that.”
“Oh no, girl. That’s just what people tell. She didn’t really do that. She just threatened to do that.”
“It’s a better story if she had done it, which is probably why they say she stripped down to her panties, huh?”
“Just like her, too. Alma an’t scared of hell or high water.”
“Not like her girls.”
“No.”
Mama looked over at me. “Give that rack a jiggle,” she told me. “You don’t want them jars to settle too much.” She stretched her neck to look over without getting up. “I don’t think those jars are setting deep enough in that pot.”
Aunt Raylene poured mama some more ice tea. “Oh Anney. Bone’s doing a good job. When she grows up, she’s gonna know all she’ll need about canning and cooking and gossiping in the kitchen.”
Mama spooned a little more sugar into her tea. “Raylene, you’re spoiling her. You should have had some of your own, and then you’d watch them all a little more sharply.”
“Well, for not birthing any, it sure feels like I’ve raised a crowd. Seems like I’ve had somebody’s kids under my feet for years now. An’t nobody in this family ever been selfish with their children. Why, I’ve got up many a morning to find a porch full of young’uns somebody’s dropped off in the night.”
“Most often Alma’s.”
“Oh, don’t go on about Alma. She’s got a good heart, for all that temper of hers, and maybe because of it. And damn, but she