Читать книгу Mulberry - Paulette Boudreaux - Страница 11

“HEY KNUCKLEHEADS,” DADDY SAID without looking at any of us when he came home from visiting Momma and Ida Bea at the hospital. He had gone for his weekly visit, taking a small bag of food for Momma, the kinds of things she didn’t have to cook or put in an icebox—tins of sardines, boxes of saltine crackers, cans of pork and beans.

The boys and I had been waiting in the front room for his return, but he headed right past us and on through to the kitchen where he draped his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair. At the sink he washed his face and hands, splashing water onto the narrow counter around the sink.

He was losing weight despite my best efforts to cook meals as Momma had instructed during her visit home a few weeks earlier. His skin, black as wild berries, had tightened against his skull, highlighting hard angular cheekbones and a square clenched jaw. The veins in his arms and on the backs of his hands showed like small cords.

“Where my supper?” he asked, dropping into a chair as if he were in a diner.

He lit a cigarette and puffed on it quietly while I spooned up a plate of the greasy spaghetti I had made. “Thanks, Baby Girl,” he said, keeping his eyes focused on the food I had set on the Formica top in front of him. He chewed with slow concentration and an expression that said his mind was on something unpleasant. While he ruminated, the boys and I practiced patience.

I stepped back into the kitchen doorway and leaned against the door frame, watching him through the smoke curling away from the cigarette on the chunky glass ashtray beside his plate.

Roy Anthony had pulled a kitchen chair up to the sink and had run more dishwater in it. Earlier I had bullied him into washing the dishes. He had cleaned everything except the pot I cooked the spaghetti in and the plate and fork Daddy was using. He didn’t need to run another sink full of water for those things, but it gave him an excuse to play submarine pilot with the dishrag in the soapy dishwater. Cautious engine noises bubbled through his lips. Earl sat at the table across from Daddy, playing with a small pile of cornbread crumbs on the table. June Bug was lying on his back on the cold linoleum in the center of the room. He held one hand against his chest like a flower, his thumb pointed toward the ceiling. If Daddy weren’t there, his thumb would be in his mouth, a habit he had picked up in Momma’s absence. The first time Daddy saw him with his thumb in his mouth, he slapped his hand away. When June Bug puffed up to cry, Daddy had raised his hand to slap him again. “I’ll give you something to cry about,” he had warned. June Bug had swallowed his tears and figured out how not to suck his thumb around Daddy.

Whatever we were doing or not doing, we were all waiting for Daddy to talk to us about Momma. Thanksgiving was two weeks away, and we were hoping Momma would be home for that. Before he’d left for the hospital visit, Daddy had made us think that might be so. When his plate was empty, he sat back in his chair.

“Y’all’s momma’s fine,” he said, fingering the dying cigarette in the ashtray. “The baby, well, she still ain’t doing too good.”

He fished around in his shirt pocket, pulled out his pack of cigarettes, and made a big display of lighting the new cigarette with the one from the ashtray. He took a long deep draw and kept his focus downward as he exhaled smoke slowly through his nose.

“They fixing to send her to a hospital up near Jackson. Y’all’s Momma going too. It takes hours to get from here up there.”

Roy Anthony’s submarine splashed heavily in the dishwater and June Bug whined in a way that sounded like something was pressing against his insides too hard.

“I’m gon’ get Mr. Gamet’s truck Saturday to bring y’all to the hospital with me to visiting hours here. Probably gon’ be the last time we’ll see y’all momma for a while. I’m sorry. I’m gon’ be …” His voice cracked and he put his hands up to cover his face.

What had he intended to say? The boys all looked at me. We all knew better than to question Daddy.

When Daddy finally uncovered his face and looked up again, his gaze met mine. I read sadness and fear in his bloodshot eyes.

Healthy children weren’t allowed inside the hospital building, so we were made to “visit” outside in the chilly November brightness of the parking lot, overlooked by the red brick hospital building and the phantom baby that had stopped being real to any of us except Momma.

When Momma strolled out of the hospital on thin bare legs, she looked like an overgrown child. Her cloth coat was wrinkled and creased in the way that comes from sleeping in your clothes. Her braided hair had a frizzy, careless look. Her knees were ashy. She stopped a few feet away from us and stood, blinking back tears. My brothers were huddled around me in unfamiliar stillness.

“Well bring y’all’s little nappy heads over here and give me a hug,” Momma said, opening her arms in our direction. We went to her and allowed ourselves to be enfolded in a communal hug. It felt good to lean into her thin bosom. I tried to hold on to that feeling when she released us and we clumsily fell away from her.

“I been missing y’all,” she said. “Lord, I wish they had nurses to look after my baby. Then I could come home more.”

I walked beside her toward the back of Mr. Gamet’s truck. She took June Bug onto her lap as soon as she sat down on the tailgate. I climbed up and sat beside her, my legs dangling above the hard earth. Roy Anthony and Earl played golf in the dirt, with hard clumps of dirt as balls and sticks as clubs. Daddy leaned against the back fender of the old beat-up red Ford, looking at Momma from behind narrowed eyes.

“See, these children doing fine,” he said.

“Thank the Lord,” Momma said.

“And me,” Daddy said.

Momma glanced up to one of the second floor windows of the hospital. “Jimmie’s mama is keeping an eye on Ida Bea, till I get back. She gon’ signal me when the visiting hours is over,” she told us.

“Early boy, sing that song you’re learning in school,” Daddy said suddenly. “Sing it for your momma.” He winked at Momma.

Earl stood at attention and dropped his stick. He shifted his glance shyly around the barren parking lot, then began in a choppy, high pitch. “Mine eyes have seen, the gory, in the coming of the Lord, he is stumping on the village, where the great big rafts are stored …”

Momma chewed a corner of her mouth to hold in her laughter as Earl continued, mangling the words of the song, hesitating, searching his memory, lurching forward into verse again. He sang earnestly, his eyes rolled skyward and his hands pressed together in front of his chest. Daddy grinned and winked at me, and I was reminded of how Daddy used to make music for Momma.

I never knew what prompted his playing, but Daddy would retrieve his silver and ebony harmonica from where he kept it wrapped in a white cotton handkerchief in a small plain wooden box in the back of his top dresser drawer. He sat in his arm chair, or took a kitchen chair onto the front porch. He pressed the harmonica against his mouth as if it were a delicious piece of fruit, and the sounds that poured out were warm and happy. Sometimes he put the harmonica away from his mouth and sang in a rich, gravel-laden voice about the “hoochie coochie man” or a “mannish boy” or “mule chickens” or “mojos” and “jellyrolls.”

Momma would dance, hips swaying, fingers snapping. Sometimes she grabbed the hands of whichever of us was nearest and coaxed us into her dance. The rest of us did our own versions of her dance around the room or the front yard.

Sometimes when Daddy got out the harmonica he stood, stumping out moody tap dances as he played. When I was little, he taught me how to do some dances that made Momma smile.

Other times Daddy sat on the edge of his chair in the front room, and that metal and wood instrument cried when he brought it to his lips. It bled long, sad notes that rolled out over us like molasses. At those times, Daddy seemed to forget there was anyone in the room but him. Momma would sit on their bed leaning back against the metal headboard, her legs stretched out in front of her, her eyes closed and her face hard to read.

“My muddy, moody Gene,” Momma would say to Daddy looking across at him when the music stopped and he resurfaced. “Mr. Waters got nothing on you.”

Once after Daddy had made his harmonica cry so deep and so wide I felt like my insides had melted, Momma said, “Babies, y’all’s Daddy got the blues in him. Ain’t it beautiful? It’s what he was doing the first time I set eyes on him—bringing out the blues. Everybody in the place was weeping. My love couldn’t help but run to him.”

Now I couldn’t see how to make moments like that for me and the boys.

As Earl kept on with his song, singing way more verses than I remembered that song having, Roy Anthony circled the truck, leaving finger marks in the dusty side panels. I could see by his bunched-up expression that he was unhappy. Occasionally he stopped his circling, out of Momma and Daddy’s line of vision, and stared at Earl with an older brother’s resentment.

“Good job, my boy, good job,” Daddy said, grabbing Earl by the neck and tickling him when he finished singing.

“My turn,” Roy Anthony shouted, running back to join us. “It’s my time to sing. I know a song too.”

But Daddy kept tickling and wrestling with Earl who was squealing with piggish laughter. Momma was laughing too, joy, genuine joy playing on her tired face for the first time since she came outside.

After circling the truck a few more times, Roy Anthony threw himself at Earl and Daddy, kicking and swinging with his fists. His face had taken on the gnarled, tight-lipped expression of malice. He kicked and pounded on Daddy, on Earl, making noises like a small animal, grunting and straining with each blow. Daddy pushed Earl behind him and stood still. Roy Anthony kept slamming his nine-year-old fists against Daddy’s legs and stomach. Finally Daddy grabbed his arms, but Roy Anthony kept swinging. Daddy pinned him in a bear hug and leaned back, lifting Roy Anthony’s feet off the ground.

“What wrong with you, boy?” Daddy demanded.

“Let me go,” Roy Anthony yelled, still squirming.

“Boy, you better stop. I’ll take my belt off and whip your ass right here!”

Roy Anthony went stiff in Daddy’s arms.

Daddy stood him on the ground. Roy Anthony’s anger was still there, visible in the stiffness of his back and the belligerent angle of his neck as he looked down at his shoes.

Daddy grabbed his thin shoulders and lifted him off the ground again. He shook him. Roy Anthony’s body wriggled in the air like a cloth doll.

“Gene! Gene!” Momma jumped off the tailgate and ran toward them with June Bug in one arm and her free arm outstretched.

Daddy stopped shaking Roy Anthony and let his feet meet the ground again, but he didn’t take his hands or his eyes off of him. “What’s got into you, boy?” There was an easy, callous anger in Daddy voice. “The only reason I’m not whipping your ass right now is because of your momma.”

Roy Anthony winced as Daddy’s fingers dug into his shoulders, but he didn’t speak.

“Don’t you ever raise your hand to me again. You hear me, boy?” Daddy shook him again. Roy Anthony’s head jerked forward, then back.

“You hear me, boy?”

“Yes sir.” Roy Anthony’s voice was small, but still tainted with fury.

“I brought you into this world, and I can take you out. You hear me?”

“Yes sir.”

“Now get out of my sight ’cause right now just looking at you makes me mad enough to want to knock your goddamned teeth down your throat. Raising your hand to me. You got to be crazy.”

Roy Anthony turned and walked away, his limbs stiff, his eyes focused on the horizon.

Daddy’s capacity for violence showed itself in his straight, angry back, the veins pulsing in his neck and on his forehead, his hands gripping the air like claws at his side as he watched Roy Anthony walk toward the front of the truck.

Momma’s mouth was trembling, and the fine horizontal lines between her eyes twitched as she looked at Daddy. She cut her eyes to me and held my gaze for a few seconds when she found me looking at her. There was a warning there. Then she sighed and looked away.

“Don’t be too hard on him, Gene,” she said when Daddy’s forehead had stopped throbbing and he turned to her. “He’s just a boy. He’s got feelings about everything and he don’t know what to do with them. But he’s just a child.”

“Just a boy, my ass,” Daddy answered, looking toward the front of the truck. “He better not ever come at me like that again.”

I heard in Daddy’s voice that he could have shaken Roy Anthony until his bones began to break if Momma hadn’t stopped him. I had never known him to touch one of us with that kind of anger before. I swung my legs vigorously under the tailgate, making unwanted connections between the barely contained violence I had witnessed, and my older brother whose death had somehow involved Daddy.

He turned and walked away from the truck, as if headed to the hospital, or to one of the other dusty cars waiting like blind animals in the parking lot. Momma followed him. When she got close enough, she caught his arm to make him turn to face her again. I could see only her back, but I could tell she was talking to him, low and soft, like she was trying to calm a child. She let go of his arm and he started pacing back and forth in front of her. She kept talking to him as he paced, his face pointed down, his hands in his pockets. Momma looked strong, solid, a match for Daddy and his stubborn emotions.

“Momma don’t love us like she love that other baby,” Roy Anthony said quietly, as we rode home from the hospital, jostling along dry bumpy roads in the back of Mr. Gamet’s truck with the wind whipping up chill-bumps on our faces and pressing the smell of hay and cow manure into our clothes.

“She do too,” I said, hugging June Bug against my chest.

Daddy made a sharp turn around a corner. We all leaned away from the turn, slanting like blades of grass in a breeze. Daddy drove on as if he had forgotten he had children clinging to the back of the pickup.

“Why won’t she come home to be with us then?” Roy Anthony shouted, looking at me with desperation and rage.

“There ain’t nobody else to take care of that other baby.”

“I don’t believe it. She just don’t love us no more.”

I thumped Roy Anthony on the head with a snap of my fingers. “That’s just a taste of what you’ll get if you don’t shut up.”

His eyes showed his fury, but he kept silent.

Momma’s loving us or not loving us didn’t seem to matter much just then. She had left me and the boys alone with Daddy. And it was clear now that he had become, perhaps always had been, someone who could turn mean and violent, just like Esther’s mother had with her.