Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [14]
Two of Grandma Shirley’s children died of the flu after gathering melons on a frosty fall day. People swore you could cure the flu with a bath of hot oil and comfrey, but Shirley wasn’t the kind to gather herbs and certainly not the kind to spend her silver on someone who would. She’d never wanted children anyway—not really—and hated the way her body continuously swelled and delivered. She called the children devils and worms and trash, and swore that, like worms, their natural substance was dirt and weeds.
Shirley Boatwright believed herself to be one of the quality. “The better people,” she told her daughters. “They know their own. You watch how it goes; you watch how people treat me down at the mill. They can see who I am. It’s in the eyes if nothing else.”
Mattie, the oldest girl, watched the way her mama’s lips thinned and tightened, the way her sisters and brothers held their own mouths pinched together so their lips stuck out. Shirley Boatwright was proud of getting on at the mill and of how much she earned there, as proud of that as she was ashamed that Tucker still worked in the coal mine.
“A tight mouth,” Tucker Boatwright was heard to say. “A tight mouth betrays a tight heart, and a shallow soul.” His wife said nothing, but pulled her lips in tighter still, and the next day Tucker found the doors locked against him when he came home from the mine.
“Woman, what do you think you’re doing?” He beat on the front door with a swollen dirty right fist. “Woman, open this door!” He spit and shouted and kicked the base of the doorjamb. “Kids, do you hear me? Shirley? Woman?”
Inside, Shirley Boatwright sat at her kitchen table sipping hot tea and staring straight ahead of her. Mattie stood at the sink with her hands flat to the nozzle of the pump. She stood still, unsure of how she could get past her mama to let her father in the door, and absolutely sure that if she tried it, she’d find herself locked out with him before either of them could get inside.
“Put on another kettle,” Shirley told her, looking directly in front of herself and using only her right hand to smooth her hair behind her pristine white collar. “Make me up another cup of tea.” Outside, Tucker went on screaming and kicking. Mattie made the tea while the other children sat quietly on the stairs to the second floor. After a while, the shouting let off and Tucker stomped off the porch. Shirley fed the kids sidemeat and grits, and then put them to bed.
When they got up the next morning, Tucker was sitting at the kitchen table drinking cold water and looking like someone had tried to pull out all his hair. He said nothing, but at the end of the week, he quit his job in the mine and took a position at the JCPenney textile mill.
“A machinist is a higher class of man,” Shirley told the children.
Tucker never got the hang of fixing the big bobbin gears. He’d had a fine talent for the winches and pumps at the mine, but the cables and wheels of the spinning machines confused him. After a few weeks, he found himself standing in front of a wheeled cart, pulling off full bobbins and popping on empty ones. His ears rang with the noise and his eyes watered from the dust, but Shirley just shrugged.
“Mill workers are a better class of people than miners. I never planned to live my life as a miner’s wife.”
Tucker Boatwright took to slipping whiskey into his cold tea, while his blue eyes faded to a pale gray.
The Boatwright children had bad dreams. After supper they were all required to wash again while their mama watched. “That neck don’t look clean to me, Bo. You trying to grow mold in those armpits, Mattie? Why are you so dirty and stupid?” The children scrubbed and scrubbed, while Shirley rubbed her neck with one hand and her bulging belly with another.
“I’d kill this thing,