Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [13]
“An Act of God,” my uncle said.
My aunt and Cora crawled out downriver, and two of the girls turned up in the weeds, screaming loud enough to be found in the dark. But one of the girls never came up out of that dark water, and Nancy, who had been holding Cy, was found still wrapped around the baby, in the water, under the car.
“An Act of God,” my aunt said. “God’s got one damn sick sense of humor.”
My sister had her baby in a bad year. Before he was born we had talked about it. “Are you afraid?” I asked.
“He’ll be fine,” she’d replied, not understanding, speaking instead to the other fear. “Don’t we have a tradition of bastards?”
He was fine, a classically ugly healthy little boy with that shock of white hair that marked so many of us. But afterward, it was that bad year with my sister down with pleurisy, then cystitis, and no work, no money, having to move back home with my cold-eyed stepfather. I would come home to see her, from the woman I could not admit I’d been with, and take my infinitely fragile nephew and hold him, rocking him, rocking myself.
One night I came home to screaming—the baby, my sister, no one else there. She was standing by the crib, bent over, screaming red-faced. “Shut up! Shut up!” With each word her fist slammed the mattress fanning the baby’s ear.
“Don’t!” I grabbed her, pulling her back, doing it as gently as I could so I wouldn’t break the stitches from her operation. She had her other arm clamped across her abdomen and couldn’t fight me at all. She just kept shrieking.
“That little bastard just screams and screams. That little bastard. I’ll kill him.”
Then the words seeped in and she looked at me while her son kept crying and kicking his feet. By his head the mattress still showed the impact of her fist.
“Oh no,” she moaned, “I wasn’t going to be like that. I always promised myself.” She started to cry, holding her belly and sobbing. “We an’t no different. We an’t no different.”
Jesse wraps her arm around my stomach, presses her belly into my back. I relax against her. “You sure you can’t have children?” she asks. “I sure would like to see what your kids would turn out to be like.”
I stiffen, say, “I can’t have children. I’ve never wanted children.”
“Still,” she says, “you’re so good with children, so gentle.”
I think of all the times my hands have curled into fists, when I have just barely held on. I open my mouth, close it, can’t speak. What could I say now? All the times I have not spoken before, all the things I just could not tell her, the shame, the self-hatred, the fear; all of that hangs between us now—a wall I cannot tear down.
I would like to turn around and talk to her, tell her . . . “I’ve got a dust river in my head, a river of names endlessly repeating. That dirty water rises in me, all those children screaming out their lives in my memory, and I become someone else, someone I have tried so hard not to be.” But I don’t say anything, and I know, as surely as I know I will never have a child, that by not speaking I am condemning us, that I cannot go on loving you and hating you for your fairy-tale life, for not asking about what you have no reason to imagine, for that soft-chinned innocence I love.
Jesse puts her hands behind my neck, smiles and says, “You tell the funniest stories.”
I put my hands behind her back, feeling the ridges of my knuckles pulsing.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “But I lie.”
Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee
My Grandmother Mattie always said my Great-grandmother Shirley lived too long.
Shirley Wilmer, of the Knoxville County Wilmers, married Tucker Boatwright when she was past nineteen, and he was just barely sixteen. Her family had a peanut farm off to the north of Knoxville, a piece of property they split between the five sons. Shirley was the only daughter. Her inheritance was a cedar chest full of embroidered linen and baby