My Drowning

by Jim Grimsley

  Otis and I saw him first. We were playing in the bushes near the road when he came swinging along in the dirt, his good leg pumping and his bad leg flopping. We knew there was a storm blowing, me and Otis were watching the clouds, and playing like we were hunting the Moss Pond monster. Otis had a piece of tobacco stick for a gun and I had a nice shaped branch I had found, which was, to my mind, a machine gun like in the war. The monster was mixed up with the Japanese and we were in the army as well as being expert monster trackers. So to have Uncle Cope appear like that was a natural part of the game, and we shot him several times.

  Otis could be fun when he remembered I was half his size. He liked to hit too hard now and then, to remind me I was a girl and weak. He only hit me a couple of times that day. As we got older, he was acting more and more like Daddy and Carl Jr., and pretty soon that side of him would take over. We shot Uncle Cope and ducked down in the underbrush along the road, before he could see which ones we were. He poked that head this way and that, his neck stretching out like a goose. Then he swung down the road toward the house.

  “That shit-ass is back,” Otis whispered. “Mama will bust a gut.”

  “He’s going to take your bed,” I said, because Otis had been sleeping in the kitchen by himself while Uncle Cope was in jail.

  “Naw he ain’t. He can sleep in there with Carl Jr.”

  “That’s his bed in the kitchen. Yes it is.”

  Otis puffed up and slammed his fist pretty hard into my shoulder. It was to warn me to shut up. I decided it was time to stop playing with him and ran to the house. The pain in my shoulder had nothing to do with it. But Otis said, “Where you going? You’re mad at me now, like some sissy pants.”

  “No, I ain’t,” I shouted, but I kept running.

  “Well, I know a secret about you.”

  I shook my head but stopped running for a moment. I could see he meant it, and I was suddenly afraid. “You don’t know anything I want to know.”

  The wind was blowing as I went inside. We had eaten our Sunday dinner of greens and cornmeal dumplings. I had brought water for the dishes and Nora boiled it over the stove, herself drenched in the heat. The sound of a storm coming was welcome all through the house.

  Inside everybody was saying hey to Uncle Cope.

  Nora held Madson in her lap and played with his curls. Mama sat beside her in the rocking chair that was missing a slat at the back. She had a feather pillow under her. The baby she was now carrying lay low, and you could tell she was nearly done with this one. I missed the look on her face when Uncle Cope appeared in the door. But I remember the way she watched him as she rocked in the chair smelling the sudden cool edge to the afternoon. She narrowed her eyes like a sow when it wants to gnaw off your arm or your leg.

  The expression remains so vivid as I remember it that I am seeing things new all the way back to then. How could she have hated him so much, just because he lived with us? What had he done to her in the long ago? I had no such curiosity then, but now that I have the luxury of reflection, of dwelling on her expression and remembering, I can see more. What did Uncle Cope do to Mama?

  Daddy was saying, “Good God, Cope, I bet you’re glad to have your scrawny ass out of that jail.”

  “You know it. You got something to eat, Louise?”

  “It’s some greens,” Mama said, tucking the skirt down between her legs. Mama rarely wore step-ins, but remained as modest as her skirts allowed. “Help yourself, ain’t nobody going to wait on you.”

  “Lord, I’m tired, that’s a long walk from that highway on these crutches.”

  “When did you get out?”

  “Yesterday. But I was with Bob Yates last night, you know him? He’s Roe’s oldest brother.”

  Daddy nodded his head.

  “I was with him last night,” he repeated, blowing and looking down at the grayed floorboards. “I went up there to see Daddy but he put me out. So I come on down here.”

  “Daddy put you out?”

  “He damn sure did. It’s that new girlfriend he’s got. He’s got a new one. And she put him up to it.” Uncle Cope sighed.

  “Well, you know you welcome to stay here.”

  Mama held still so that only her face twitched a little.

  Otis came inside somewhere along in here. He nodded to Uncle Cope. Seeing him, Nora said, “Otis has been sleeping out here in your bed, Uncle Cope. He ain’t going to be too glad to see you.”

  “What has this youngun been doing sleeping in my bed?”

  Uncle Cope’s tone was joking, but Mama took offense anyway. “The youngun ain’t done nothing to your bed. It wasn’t any harm in him sleeping on it.”

  “I ain’t said nobody could use my bed. This is my goddamn bed.”

  “Shut your mouth,” Mama said, though Daddy was laughing softly. This was the kind of a scene that always pleased Daddy.

  Otis ducked his head a little but his face had turned red. “I ain’t done nothing but sleep on it, and I like it, and I don’t see why I can’t keep sleeping on it and let you have my bed with Carl Jr.”

  “You white-ass son of a bitch, listen at you.”

  “Carl Jr. ain’t sleeping with Uncle Cope,” Nora said. “You can count on that.”

  “He kicks me all over the bed, and I’m tired of it,” Otis said.

  “Well your little ass is going to get kicked all over Carl Jr.’s bed again,” Uncle Cope said, pointing at Otis with the crutch. He sat on the edge of his own bed, neatly made in the corner of the kitchen. “This one is mine.”

  “Nobody wants you here anyway.”

  “Hush that,” Daddy warned Otis.

  “I mean it. Mama don’t want him here, and I don’t.”

  “Well he’s staying here, no matter what you or your mama want.”

  “You hear your daddy, don’t you?”

  Otis glared at him. “You ain’t nothing but a goddamn gimp-legged cornhole shit-ass, I don’t see why anybody has to put up with you.”

  Later we would tell the story this way: that Mama laughed so hard she went into labor and had Corrine almost on the spot. The truth was close to that; Mama’s labor did come on her during the laughter. She told us to find the colored midwife in Holberta.

  Uncle Cope went white, then red, then flung a crutch at Otis. He wanted to bellow, but Mama started to giggle with her hand over her mouth, and that stopped him short. When Mama started to laugh, so did Daddy. That gave Otis the courage to repeat, “A goddamn cornhole shit-ass.”

  Now the laughter became general, and even I joined in it, though I was not sure why the words were so funny or why they made Uncle Cope so angry. He was speechless and got crimson as the laughter continued, and tears sprang to his eyes, but he had only one crutch and was trapped on the bed. He rubbed his stomach like it was tender. He sat there like that, waiting for us to stop laughing.

  Mama could hardly get her breath. When she did, the look in her eyes had turned inward and she made a sound like something deep opening up inside her. Like something waking up. There was a kind of convulsion across her, I saw it run through her like a ripple across a river. It was the first time I had ever seen her go through a contraction. The sound and the motion quieted everything else in the kitchen.

  “My water broke,” she said to Daddy. A wet patch was spreading down her skirt. “Carl Jr. is going to have to get the colored midwife, we ain’t paid Miss Rilla yet for the last two times she come.”

  Uncle Cope’s humiliation lay forgotten in the confusion of Corrine’s birth. But I remember him, curled up like a ball of spite in his bed.

  Nora handed Madson to me and I carried him like a sack of shit to his blanket. By then he was old enough to walk but he was lazy and liked to be toted and petted. I hated to hold him or to be near him, but I did what Nora said. Wanting to watch what was happening to Mama, I hurried the job, and Madson bumped his head on the stove and started crying just as the first clap of lightning lit over the woods. Otis rushed to get Carl Jr.’s bicycle from unde
r the house, and Daddy gave him his logger’s rain slicker to wear. Otis lit out for Holberta with the rain starting to spatter. He would be riding in the mud, which was what he liked best, whenever he could get the excuse to steal Carl Jr.’s bicycle.

  Daddy helped Mama to their bedroom. The first pain passed and she could move on her own, but Daddy was feeling generous because of Uncle Cope’s embarrassment. Nora set a pot of water on the stove in case it was needed, and I wiped Joe Robbie’s mouth with his towel. That was when I looked at Uncle Cope. He was still sitting on the edge of his bed, twisted to a knot, with that useless leg dangling free. His whole body was quivering with fury, and nobody saw it but me. I was the one who finally thought to bring him the crutch he had thrown, that had not landed anywhere near Otis. When I handed it to him, he looked me in the eye and snatched it. His eyes were full of hate all the way out to the whites. His mouth was like a pale slash across his face. Now when I close my eyes I can recall it exactly, down to the fat mole on his chin that sprouted a cluster of gray hairs.

  WHEN HE WALKED in on my bathing, it was not the first time he had spied on me. It would be hard to say when I first became aware that he lurked in the doorway or the window on afternoons when I could get the room alone to wash.

  I had a fear of being naked in front of anyone, even my sisters. The fear came on me early. I would never take my dress off and let Nora see my dark nipples, I was ashamed of them. I would never take my drawers off in front of her. The same with Mama, only more so. Sometimes Nora would try to wash me but I would always squirm until she made me finish. This was all right when I was young and did not care to wash so much, but later I learned that people think you are trash if you go around dirty. So I got in the habit, in later years (in other houses) of washing every day, in the afternoon, alone. I would draw a washpan of water and carry it to the corner of the bedroom.

  Carl Jr. was working on the egg farm, as I have said, and we lived in the house rent free. Uncle Cope had his narrow bed in the back room with the boys, and one day he lumbered into the bedroom where we girls slept.

  The house on the egg farm was one of our nicer places, with electric lights and a hand pump in the kitchen. But we still used a johnny house in the back for our business. I could see it from our bedroom, blown with pages from old newspapers that we used to clean ourselves.

  In the corner of that bedroom I could feel relatively safe. I had already moved to that corner, which was windowless, after Uncle Cope peeped at me through one of the windows. I set the washpan on the floor and took down my dress partway. I unhooked the bra I was wearing, one of Nora’s old ones. I washed quickly without looking at myself.

  Sometimes I would dry the top part of me, then dress it, before proceeding to wash the bottom. This was to keep me from getting too close to naked, because I especially did not like to be naked when I was alone. But that day I pulled off the dress.

  I was naked except for my step-ins and socks, washing in the washpan. He shoved open the door and peeped in. He saw me and ducked his head. I laid down the white bar of Octagon soap and pulled the towel over my breasts, afraid. I said, “You get out of here, Uncle Cope,” and I held that towel against me.

  The difference was not that he came to peep, since he had often tried. The difference was that he walked into the room and wanted something else. I already knew what that was.

  I told Mama that he had peeped at me while I was washing, and she slapped me sharp across the face.

  Beyond my anger rose the image of Uncle Cope sprawled on the dirt with his belly cut open, and some man kneeling behind him, and putting inside him that thing that men have that they use that way. I thought I knew what the look on Uncle Cope’s face had been when he first tumbled down into the dirt with the weight of the other man on top of him.

  I had a dream about that look in his eyes.

  Later, I warned my daughter never to be alone with him. I warned her right to his face.

  This was when Mama lived in yet another house, near Wise Fork. By then I was married and no longer lived with Mama, but had brought my children there for a visit. When I said it, Uncle Cope nodded, as if he agreed with me, and turned on his crutches and left the room.

  ONCE, WHEN I was very young, Otis and I were in my Grandaddy Tote’s chicken yard, and we watched Uncle Cope beat a cat to death with one of his crutches. The cat had caught and killed an old hen. Uncle Cope’s expression remained blank as he leaned on one crutch and flailed, methodically, with the other. He broke the cat’s back with the first swipe and the creature howled pitifully until it could no longer make a sound. After a while the patch of reddened fur lay still. The chicken would be our supper, a rare feast. The cat was Grandaddy’s and had to be killed, now that it had tasted chicken blood. The cat would be allowed to rot where it had fallen, unless the dogs found it. Uncle Cope looked down at both dead things as if they were fresh turds.

  The memories mix together, as if they are rooms in a house and I am walking from one to the other, and in one room Uncle Cope is hanging over me on the crutches while I wipe Joe Robbie’s mouth with the towel, and in the other I am wiping my own baby’s behind clean while Uncle Cope lies passed out on the couch, half-snoring. In another room of memory is a picture of Uncle Cope standing without the crutches, beside Villa Ray Crawford, whom he used to date when he had two useful legs. After his accident she dropped him and married Jay Hawkins instead, and this was another reason Mama always had for hating Villa Ray, because if she had married Uncle Cope like she ought to, she would be the one having to take care of him, soaking the piss out of his sheets, and keeping him away from her daughters.

  In one of these rooms, maybe, he is married to Villa Ray, and has two legs, and children.

  We visited him in county prison only the one time. But later, when we were visiting my brother Madson in the state penitentiary, I remembered Uncle Cope in the jail.

  By the time we visited Madson in the penitentiary in Raleigh, soldiers were fighting in Vietnam and I had all my children with me. We came specifically to bring Mama to visit her beloved son. Corrine and Delia came along too; we all squeezed into that ’57 Plymouth with me driving. Walking into the visitor room to see my brother, seeing the guards and the barred windows, I remembered the county prison and Uncle Cope.

  Uncle Cope said, “They treat us real good. They got us making things. You-all don’t worry about me.”

  Madson said everything was real good in here, he was learning how to swim in these big bloomers, he like to drowned, but other than that everything was fine. They set you right down in with the Mexicans and the niggers, he said, and he grinned at me with the dark front tooth; he would have been handsome except for the tooth gone bad. “You got to watch out in here, not let anybody get behind you.”

  I was shy to kiss Madson’s cheek, and I remembered, suddenly, the taste of Uncle Cope, the clammy skin on his cheek, and I thought, but I never kissed him that day, as I leaned toward Madson, as I brushed my dry lips softly along the smooth shaved cheek, and I could almost smell the rot underneath the aftershave, that my brother was rotting as he stood here, no matter how smooth or straight the part of his hair. I was the one who was remembering, I was the one who was tasting his skin, the texture of his shaven beard. I leaned forward and away.

  It was like the kisses I would give Bobjay in the parking lot of the Walter B. Jones Alcohol Rehabilitation Center years later. Like the dry taste of Mama lying in her coffin, the heap of her suddenly shrunken, and the shadows of the sprays of flowers falling across her powdered nose. Like the brush bestowed on my cheek by Bobjay’s daddy when I first walked into their kitchen as Bobjay’s wife, the dry edge of his lips like a flake of something, sending a shiver through me, a warning. Like the last kiss I ever gave my daddy, one Sunday morning when he let me go to church before the breakfast dishes were done, him needing a shave and smelling of last night’s whiskey. Like watching Mama press her lips against the cool of Madson’s forehead as he lay in his own coffin, a few
months before he would have been released from prison for the second time, had not another prisoner killed him in the exercise yard. All these memories knotted together, and I gained a sense of a kind of time where everything lies next to everything else and everything touches everything.

  I hid under the house, behind one of the outer pillars. Daddy kept dogs chained further under, I could see their shadows moving. If Alma Laura had not been with me I might have been afraid, but she came to sit beyond the post, silent as always, a comforting shadow. The dog chains softly murmured.

  I am there over and over again. There is a kind of cool and safety, as if I have reached some final place. As if I have backed into a corner from which I cannot run. The choice is made. I am under the house.

  Why does the memory of Uncle Cope’s arrest bring out so much? Is it simply that I was older by then, or do I retain this many details from every moment, locked in the cells of my brain? Is there still so much left to mine?

  Corrine was born sometime around the Battle of Midway in 1942, a definite event fixed in history. That would be when my Uncle Cope came home too, the same night Otis called him a cornhole shit-ass. While Mama was in labor in the house, Carl Jr. played the radio and we listened to the news in the yard. Our aircraft carriers were sending planes to bomb the Japanese, and the bombs hit practically every aircraft carrier the Japanese had. The ships sailed in the dark, away over there somewhere, beyond the trees, airplanes hurtling along huge curves, and big flat-topped ships tossed on waves of water. Carl Jr. held the radio close to both our ears. I had never seen an airplane, or a ship, or an ocean, but I made up pictures for the words. I was standing on the flight deck of the Lexington, sea spray in my hair, holding Carl Jr.’s hand. We searched the sky for Japanese planes. Somewhere belowdecks, Mama was having Corrine. The fantasy returns to me as real as the memory of any real event.

  CORRINE

  MY REACTION TO Corrine, when I first saw her sleeping in her cradle, was not like the feeling I had for Alma Laura or for Madson. I felt more of a practical affection. Corrine was born with swirls of black hair, and eyes with long curled lashes. She had a round red face and a way of squinting that made her look as old as Mama. She weighed five pounds when she was born, but she had the voice of God. When she cried, the cups rattled on the shelves.