Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [16]
Mattie’s tanned features paled, but she kept her mouth closed and her eyes level with her mother’s. They stared each other down, while Tucker wiped his forehead and licked dry cracked lips.
“It’s got to be suppertime,” Tucker pleaded finally.
Shirley nodded slowly.
“Let the whore cook it.”
“Whores and thieves and bastards,” she cursed them when she went into labor that last time. She cursed steadily for hours till Tucker sent all the children off to one of his sisters’. “I never wanted no man to touch me. I sure never wanted you to touch me. You put death and dirt in me every time. Death, you hear me? All I’ve got out of you is death and mud and worms.”
“It’s just the pain,” the midwife told Tucker, but neither of them really believed that. Tucker believed this was the time when Shirley told him the whole truth. The midwife did squeeze Tucker’s arm once and say, “Do you notice how she don’t really scream?”
The baby finally came in two pieces covered in a stinking bloody scum. Tucker borrowed a car and wrapped Shirley in three blankets to take her to the county hospital. The midwife wrapped up the baby in flour sacks to carry in with her, but Shirley became hysterical when they tried to put it in the car. They had to put it in the trunk before she would calm down.
“Don’t you think I knew it was dead?” Shirley curled her fists around Tucker’s wrists so tight he thought the little bones would crack. “I told you. You put death in me.”
“No telling what causes this kind of thing,” the doctor told Tucker. “But she’s had her last child, that’s for sure.”
“You’ve had your last poke at me,” Shirley whispered to Tucker when she could talk again. “I never wanted it, and if you come to me for it again, I’ll cut your thing off and feed it to these damn brats you pulled out of me.”
Tucker said nothing. The doctor had told him he’d have to be very gentle with Shirley for a while, that she was gonna be weak for a good long time.
“You don’t know Shirley,” Tucker told him. “She might be sick, but she an’t never gonna be weak.”
It was October when the baby was born dead. Shirley Boatwright would not go back to work till May. The pennies saved up over the summer were gone by then, as were the canned goods Tucker’s sisters had sent over in the fall. By February, half the Boatwright children were wearing strips of sacking tied around their broken shoes. Every morning they’d stand still while Shirley directed Mattie in tying the sacking correctly. It was Bo’s birthday, the eleventh of that month, when she caught hold of Mattie’s sleeve as she headed for the door with the other children.
“No,” Shirley said. “You’re thirteen now, no need to waste your time in school. You either, Bo.”
All the children stood still for a moment, and then Mattie and Bo stepped back and let the others go. It took Shirley half an hour to get herself dressed, shaking off Mattie’s hand when she came to help. It took them all another hour to walk the eight blocks together to the mill. Neither Bo nor Mattie spoke. Both of them just kept looking up to their mother with swollen frightened eyes.
Mattie had small quick hands and a terror of the speeding shuttles. She kept her lower lip clenched in her teeth while she worked to untangle the bunched and knotted threads. Bo was clumsy and spent most of his time crawling underneath frames to grease the wheels that turned the bobbin belts. Sometimes he would crawl right up under Mattie’s hands and hiss up at her to get her attention. Both of them avoided their father. When their mother came to work in May, they avoided her too, but that was easier. Shirley had been transferred from the carding room to finishing. Safely separated from the rest of the mill by a wire-and-glass wall, Shirley and twelve other women ran up towels, aprons, and simple skirts from the end runs of same-fabric bolts.
“You see what I mean?” Shirley’s mouth had grown so tight she seemed to have no lips at all. “Quality