“Miss Patterson…” I say aloud. She was present at my birth, apparently delivering me. Maybe she would know.
“Imogen?” Grandpa says, too defensively. “Ya gone plum crazy, honey. I’m not coverin’ fer Imogen.” He laughs, not his usual jolly belly laugh but off pitch and from his shoulders.
I wasn’t going to insinuate that he was.
That woman’s too nice. Ain’t no one that nice for no reason, Enisi said the day she drove Miss Patterson away from the house with her 12-gauge.
Yer a angel, Imogen. The sentiment vibrates between my ears. I’ve heard it countless times, Miss Patterson repeatedly rescuing my mother.
Imogen. She is the only unrelated woman that Grandpa calls by first name. That’s intimate—allegiance. All other women are Miss or Ms. or Mrs., depending on marital status and age. It is a generational thing he has never outgrown.
“Rebecca, my grandmother…” I say, deploying my own truth-diverting tactics “…tell me about her.”
It works. Caught off guard, it takes Grandpa only a moment to put it together. Mom told me about her too. Tears flood his lashes like a dam breaking, remembrance and relief. He quakes with sobs and laughter, recounting their life together. The old but new story is my favorite part of the visit.
I only wish I could sit in it more, take in every detail, without the fairy godmother “whys” and “hows” whirling about in my mind.
“You’re the only father I ever wanted. I chose you over her, Pop.” My eyes sting with the fact. The conflicted little boy remains. “And you can’t even support my choosing music over the mine.”
“Seems to me, you got all the support you need between your mom and Johnny Guitar.” Growing short of breath, he aims the oxygen tubing at his face rather than putting the damn thing back on. “You never gave me the chance to support you, son. You hid it from me. Like you didn’t want me to be a part of it.”
“Oh, don’t put it on me. The outcome would’ve been the same and you know it.” Everyone around him gets the cold shoulder when things aren’t going his way. “I never ‘wished’ Johnny Allman was my father, but at least he supports me.”
“Sure he does. He ain’t the son of a son of a son of a miner.”
“And there it is,” I say as impassively as his canned response. The outcome would’ve been the same.
“Johnny broke your mom’s heart. He’ll break yours too. That’s what he does. Maybe that’s why I broke the guitar, breaking the only part of him I can. The only thing that means anything to him. You must be one hell of a musician if he has any use for you.” Pop catches his breath, taking a few puffs from the oxygen tubing.
I can’t tell if he is actually paying me a compliment or deploying praise to drive home his criticism.
“If he’s supporting you, it’s only because it can benefit him. What’s he grooming you to be the new face of his band?”
Yeah, that’s it. I don’t bother saying it aloud, my dull stare doing the talking.
“He is getting up there in years for a ‘frontman,’” Pop sneers. Money and fame may separate them, but age cares not if one is a miner or a guitar god. “He sure as hell didn’t support Maisy in keeping that pregnancy. If you ask me, she never got over that. Took to the pills for comfort. Tucked tail and running, he broke any chance Mason had, period.”
“So Mason knew? That Shelby was Johnny’s?”
“He would’ve been a fool not to think it. Everybody else did. But how could you prove it, without a paternity test, Maisy running around with both of ’em at the same time.”
“There was a test?”
He shrugs. “Maisy must’ve said something, set Mason off. He was happy with his head in the sand. The last time I met him to get some mullein—boy, was he ever a wreck. It was at the river, you know,” his voice lowers.
“Where he was murdered. Pop, you were there?” My voice is as low as his.
“The same damn day.” His eyes bulge, dumbfounded that that would be the last time he saw Mason alive. “It had to be only hours, maybe minutes, before he was gone. I thought for sure Poke County’s finest would be knocking on my door. But they never did. I even thought about knocking on theirs, telling them the frame of mind he was in. I thought maybe he took his own life. But word had it, they ruled out suicide.”
“You should’ve said something, Pop.”
“And what…have them barking up my tree. Assuming I did it, the way you just assumed.”
Point taken, I hang my head, unable to tolerate the offense in his eyes. “Who was he meeting with after you? Did he say?”
“Hell, no. And I didn’t ask. As out of sorts as he was, I took my damn mullein and left.” Pop shakes his head. “I couldn’t get away from him fast enough. He talked at me more than he ever talked to me. ‘The Patterson woman was up to something.’ He wanted the info for the P.I. I used.” Pop shakes his head at himself this time. “He was gonna ‘catch her in the act.’ It was gonna ‘change their lives,’ free Maisy of addiction, then she’d go with him.”
“The fairy godmother?” What was she up to, other than rescuing people.
“She was at your birth ya know, delivered you and that girl.”
“That girl has a name, Pop, and you know it.” Use it, damn it!
“If you ask me, Maisy…and Shelby inadvertently…are responsible for his death. If he had done like Johnny—hadn’t been waiting around here on them—he would’ve been as successful as Johnny, at least in Lexington, and still alive. Instead, Maisy swallowed him up like Johnny swallowed her up, and he lost his fucking mind before he lost his fucking life. Trying to pin Maisy’s pill habit on the Patterson woman.”
“Mason thought Miss Patterson was giving Maisy drugs?” Was she?
“That woman’s done so much for his family, for a lot of families up and down the holler. What, she doles out pills so she can get another wee-hours’ call to haul someone off to the hospital? I don’t think so. He was out of his mind, son.” Out of breath, Pop sucks up more oxygen before continuing. “Hell, you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that woman. You don’t believe me, ask your mom.”
I’ve gotta go see a woman about a birth, Mom said.
What’s she getting herself into.
At dusk, I pull into Miss Patterson’s drive. It’s a humble house off the beaten path. What house isn’t in the hollow.
Like any small-town caregiver, everyone knows where she lives—on the backside of the river. On the backside of the river where my father was murdered.
It dawns on me that in all the time I’ve spent with Miss Patterson, all the times she has been to my house, I’ve never been to hers. Instinct—or the rare feeling of my father’s presence—tells me I shouldn’t be here now.
I should wait until tomorrow, the day after New Year’s. Hot Brown will be back to business as usual. I should meet with her in the light of day, when people—witnesses—are around.
Breathe! Stay calm. Don’t come off as desperate, I coach, stepping out of the Shelby. This isn’t about your father’s death. Forget about Grandpa’s reaction. This is about your biological father.
I rehearsed the conversation I had with my mother over and over on the way here, hoping that by repetition it will be the nearest thing on my mind.
For the love of God, it’s Miss Patterson—the fairy godmother! I mediate between instinct and reason, as I ring her doorbell. She gave you your first job. She’s treated you with nothing but kindness. She’s helped your mother time and again. She didn’t murder your father.
“Shelby, dear?” she says, opening the door in a quilted nightgown and cap. Surely one she handmade. Between all of her volunteering, managing, feeding, and taxiing, where does she find the time. “Is everything okay?” Intuitively, she reaches for her coat, conveniently hanging by the door.
“Oh, yeah, I’m not here for anything pressing.” It’s kind of pressing. “I mean, no one needs your help.” I kind of do. “It’s not a life or death situation.” Or is it? Oh, Go
d. Shut up!
She giggles—the lilting tone reminiscent of the chorus bibbidi-bobbidi-boo—hanging her coat back on the hook. “Pardon my jumping to conclusions. It’s rare that folks come calling just to call. Come in, dear.”
“It can wait until tomorrow.” Maybe it should. “I don’t want to keep you from your rest.” I bet she never gets enough of it.
“Nonsense, dear. I was just getting up! Come in out of the cold.”
I do. The door shuts behind me, like a gong, a crash—eerie isolation.
Leading me to the kitchen, “Don’t mind the mess,” she says. “New Year’s Eve was as busy as ever. They kept me running all night.” The ball on her stocking cap brushes her shoulder, her head shaking beneath it.
They must keep her running all year, every year, from the looks of this place. Things, pawnshop-looking items, are strung and propped up here and there along the walls. I read an article in the library at school about hoarders. Is Miss Patterson a hoarder?
“I’ve got it all lined up for a New Year’s pawnshop run. People must think I’m the Goodwill too.” She giggles again, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.
Quit staring! You’re making her uncomfortable.
“Cuppa tea?” she offers.
“Sure. I mean, yes, ma’am.” An empty cup sits on the table, a lipstick imprint around the rim. It is as red as the blood I donated—black rose. Wren! She was here? Is she still here? Tied up in the basement!
It takes the tea kettle next to nothing to whistle—already warm. Someone was here. Wren was here. Where is she! Quit staring. Run. OMG. OMG. OMG! My legs do not listen. They just stand there, locked at the knees. I burst into tears.
“Now, now, Shelby, dear…” Miss Patterson comes toward me.
Don’t touch me! I fall back into the chair.
“…whatever is the matter?” She sits down beside me, replacing Wren’s cup with a fresh one for me. “Sip, sip,” she says, gesturing toward the tea, “it calms the nerves.”
Don’t drink that. Did she poison Wren! My shaky hands are actually of use. They couldn’t deliver the tea to my mouth without spilling it everywhere. “Do you…have records…of my birth?” I manage to ask between sobs. That’s why I came here, isn’t it.
“Records of your birth?”
“You were there…weren’t you?” Running has never given my diaphragm such a workout as this terrified cry.
Through my tears, I can see her blurry head nodding. “You were born right into these.” She waves her hands around the way the fairy godmother does her wand. It looks like one big blob of quilted nightgown to me.
“Was there a…paternity test…blood tests…anything?”
“Oh, dear girl, if ever a child belonged to Mason, you did.”
I sob harder. She just said the same thing Grandpa said. Like they rehearsed it. Run!
“Don’t pay no mind to holler gossip. It serves no purpose other than to drag a person down.”
It’s not gossip. My mother told me! Damn her truths and amends.
“Come, come. Here, let me show you.” She takes my hand and coaxes me up from the chair, pulling me—like a draft horse pulling a log—toward a back room.
No. If she ties me up, how will I ever know if Wren’s tied up. It can’t be possible to sob harder, but I do.
She stops abruptly.
I run into her.
My vision tear-drenched—cloudy the way Grandpa describes his cataracts—I can barely make out her arm over her head. She’s wielding something at me? A chain! I duck.
The light comes on in the room.
A pull-chain light—you bumbling fraidy-cat! My sobs turn to laughter, a strange, unbalanced titter. If I weren’t so relieved, it too would scare me.
“Get a hold of yourself, dear.” She pats each of my cheeks with the pads of her fingers. “You’re scaring me.”
I’m scaring her? I hold in the sobs or the laughter, whimpering instead like a dreaming puppy.
“Now where is that journal.” Her hands rummage through green filing folders, earmarked by years, in a cumbersome cabinet as tall as she is. There are tons of journals, and even more things piled up in this room. “Someday, when I retire again…” bibbidi-bobbidi-boo “…I’m going to organize this mess. Aha!” She pulls a platinum-colored journal from the filing cabinet, the year of my birth etched on its cover.
The record of my birth of course would be bound in gray—the color of reality. My whimpers cease because I hold my breath, wondering what reality is in that journal.
“Platinum,” she says, as if I didn’t notice. “Must’ve been my twentieth year in nursing.” She is married to it. Guess it makes sense that she commemorates it as an anniversary. “In what month were you born, dear?”
“April.”
She goes straight to the fourth tab, then licks her thumb, leafing through the first few entries of the fourth month of the year. “Ah, yes, see here: A baby girl born to Maisy and Mason Lynn. A baby boy born to Wren and Boone Cooper.” There are times and weights and a bunch of other statistics I know not how to comprehend.
I could’ve told her that. It’s on my birth certificate. But that doesn’t make it biologically correct.
“It’s all coming back to me now,” she says, reviewing the log. “Was that ever a topsy-turvy transport. My first…and only…double birth, and premature to boot! We were crammed in that ambulance. Both of you pretty much came out at the same time, blue as you could be, in need of resuscitation. The medic and I on the delivering ends, in over our heads as to how to keep you alive until we got to the hospital, it was pure chaos. I just kept saying, ‘don’t get them mixed up.’ I never had any use for one myself, but thank God for that tattoo! See, I even made a special note here to clarify.”
My eyes, finally cried out, clearly read the abbreviated note: wren tat ank boy.
“I said that over and over, too, ‘wren tattoo ankle boy.’ Even jotted it down on the back of my latex glove until I could get it on paper,” she says, proudly.
Too proudly. “So…the boy…Ace…was born to the woman with the wren tattoo on her ankle.” That gong sounds again, struck in the center and ringing and vibrating out. It rattles me to the biological bones, goose bumps erupting all over the skin that covers them.
“The woman the boy was born to was Wren,” Miss Patterson reiterates firmly, pointing once more to the journal, as if everything documented within it must be true. “Why…it would be pure coincidence that Maisy had a wren tattoo…on her…ankle?” Suddenly I see the staggering revelation in her round, wide fairy godmother eyes. It’s all coming back to her.
A different transport—merely a few months ago—where she swaddled my mother’s naked, drug-riddled body in one of her patchwork quilts, and she noticed the feathery Bewick’s wren inked on the interior of my mother’s exposed ankle. Oooh, what a pretty bird. You don’t see many of those around here anymore. Where have I seen that before? She must have let the thought go as quickly as it tried to jog her memory, carefully tucking the tattoo beneath the quilt, more pressing tasks await.
And I blew it off with the frivolous thought that she must have seen the tattoo during any of the previous times she transported my mother.
“Oh, Shelby, dear…I never meant…” She comes toward me, her arms open.
Don’t touch me! Is this why she murdered my father? Because he figured it out. What a blunder she had made. Run!
I back away from her, stumbling into and over boxes stacked high up the walls and along the floor of the room. One of the boxes tumbles to the floor with me. Out rolls a stash of empty syringe containers. Like the one I found full of pills in Grandpa’s sock drawer. Like the one Destiny dropped in that stall on the bathroom floor of Hot Brown.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” She shouts, scurrying to pick up the syringe containers. “It’s all too much. Too much for one woman. Won’t anyone help me!”
I want to help her. I should help her. She’s helped me! Hasn’t she? But I crab walk backwards to the do
or of the room, never taking my eyes off her.
“It’s okay, dear,” she says, but I don’t believe her. As unhinged as I was coming in here, she is on the verge of sobs and laughter. “Don’t be scared.” Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. “We can fix this!” Sob.
My legs finally receptive to the fight or flight message, the crab becomes the hunted deer. I flip over into sprinters’ start formation. Crouched and exploding off my toes, I lunge and dodge around and over all the things from the back room to the front door.
“Shelby! Get back here! We can fix this!” Her screams chase me into the numbing night air.
Boom! Boom! Boom! OMG, she has a gun? Then why did she use Grandpa’s!
I hunch over, opening the door of the Shelby. Slamming it behind me, the sky bursts with bright colors in the rearview mirror. Fireworks, you jackass! It is New Year’s. Loud and echoing from the river behind us. The river behind her house. The river where my father was murdered.
I can still hear her cries over the rumble of the Shelby starting up. She needs someone, something. She needs help!
And here she comes, quilted nightgown and all. Go! Drive! But what about Wren? My biological mother? Is she inside, tied up! Or her body already disposed at the river…
I peel out just as Miss Patterson bangs her fist on my driver’s side window.
“After all I’ve done for you!” she shrieks.
I can’t even look back. What if her Caddy drives like the devil after me.
“Ace!” I hear my name called at the top of what I think are female lungs, even over the brawling and rabble-rousing of the fights.
No stranger to having my name called—cheered on or heckled—in this setting, I don’t believe the person calling it now is cheering or heckling.
Shelby? Nah. She hates the fights. She wouldn’t come here. Would she?
From my position out back of the barn—shaking off my first bout—I consider disappearing. One bout is good enough. After a few months of not fighting, I have the shiner to prove it. I barely came away without bruising my knuckles. I need my hands now more than ever to play gigs. To prove to myself, to everyone, and especially to Pop that I am more cut out for music than the mine.
Just Shelby Page 24
