My Drowning

by Jim Grimsley

  “But he can’t.”

  “No. Because the Batman protects you.”

  “He can’t protect me. I can protect myself. Because I have my own house and I have a job.”

  “Not in this comic book you don’t.”

  “Well that’s what I have.”

  I told him about school, to the degree that I understood anything about it, having only started. At school we sat in seats side by side, and my partner was Nina Holland. We had a bench near the back. I liked to sit with Nina because sometimes she didn’t bring a lunch either, and it was easier to sit beside somebody who wasn’t eating, during the lunch break.

  We took naps in the afternoon, and I explained that meant that you laid your head sideways on your desk and you rested on your ear like that till it ached, or else you crooked your arm and it fell asleep, and you closed your eyes, and you did like that until the teacher said it was time to learn letters.

  Joe Robbie was curious about everything and asked questions. He wanted to know about the other kids and what they looked like, and the teacher and how she acted. I described some of the kids, including the ones who had expensive clothes and clean hair and faces. Some of their mothers and fathers came with them on the first day, and I told Joe Robbie about it then, after he stopped being upset and started asking questions. The parents were all kinds, but some of the women even wore hats.

  We talked most often in the kitchen when I did chores, like stacking firewood or drying dishes or cleaning the slop pot. Joe Robbie sat on his stool with the pillow for a seat cushion, always near the stove. He liked to sit there because he was usually cold, and there was a fire in the stove even in the hottest of summer. He had a murmuring, whispering, soft kind of voice, and he slurred a bit so you had to listen very close.

  I told him the teacher, Miss Sterndale, could ask you all kinds of questions, like, one morning, she asked us all what we had for breakfast. It turned out that me and Nina Holland had the same thing, biscuit and sweet coffee, which we both called coffee soup, and she dipped her biscuit like I did. She asked what our fathers did for a living, and I said mine worked in the woods logging, but he only worked when he felt like it. Everybody laughed and I blushed and knew I had said something stupid, so after that when she said anything to me I kept it short. “I hate to talk in the class,” I told Joe Robbie.

  When I was at home, Corrine became my baby, but sometimes Joe Robbie could help with her. He was strong enough to hold her while she was small and could warn me when she messed herself. Most of the time Nora was with us, but some of the time she was working in dry tobacco with Mama, at Mr. Allison’s farm. Even then Nora had the harder chores for herself, making supper being the worst of them, and doing the heavy dishes, and carting most of the water. She had time for her own homework—she stayed in school—after supper when the dishes were done.

  Once Joe Robbie asked her could she teach him how to read, and she looked at him like he was a stump.

  When Daddy and Carl Jr. came home, Joe Robbie sat quietly in the kitchen, shy of them but wanting to listen to their talk. He liked their dirty jokes that made them stomp the floor laughing, and he liked the rough gossip about the other loggers. “I can’t understand a goddamn word Tyrone says, can you?”

  “No, I tell you what, Daddy, when he opens his mouth I just stand there.”

  “He was trying to tell me something today, and he was talking like he had some goddamn shit in his mouth, and I told him not to fuck with me any more if he can’t talk English. I be goddamn if I have to listen.”

  “Shit-ass don’t do a lick of work because he’s always acting like he don’t understand what he’s supposed to do. I hope a log falls on his ass.”

  Daddy pulled his coffee toward him, “I need me a drink of liquor, but they ain’t nothing but this shit-ass coffee.”

  “I need me a drink too, it’ll take this taste out my mouth.”

  “We ought to walk up the road and see what old Roe Yates got.”

  “That son of a bitch will steal from you.” Carl Jr. tilted the hat down over his eyes. “Last time I bought a jar from him he didn’t give me the right money back. You ready to go?”

  “You got any money? I don’t.”

  Carl Jr. shook his head. “Yeah, I got some. Come on.”

  They walked together out the door. Joe Robbie watched them like a light had faded inside him.

  Usually they stayed away for a while on a trip like that, drinking with the Yates boys or with whomever was down at the Little Store, but that time they brought home some of the stuff Roe Yates made. Carl Jr. and Daddy laid out under the tree drinking while the rest of us did laundry in the yard. Otis puffed with the ax, splitting logs for the washpot fire. Nora and me stirred the clothes boiling in the pot. The babies were crawling in the grass near Mama, who worked the clothes in the rinse water.

  Joe Robbie sat with Daddy and Carl Jr. under the elm tree, Joe Robbie in the wagon beyond reach of the dog chains. We heard Daddy laughing, and I saw Carl Jr. taking the jar down from Joe Robbie’s lips. He wiped Joe Robbie’s mouth and slapped him on the back.

  “What are you giving that youngun?” Mama wrung the water out of one of Daddy’s shirts.

  “I thought he ought to try something new.”

  “You letting him drink that liquor?”

  “Louise, the youngun never has any fun.”

  “That ain’t the kind of fun he ought to have.”

  “You got plenty to do around that fire, you don’t need to be worrying about me and Joe Robbie.”

  “You’ll be sorry if we have to take him to the doctor because you mess up his brain.”

  “It ain’t going to hurt him, Mama,” Carl Jr. swore, “he ain’t had but a taste.”

  “I want some,” Otis said.

  “Shut up, Otis.”

  “If Joe Robbie can have some, why can’t I?”

  Joe Robbie was smiling. One hand fluttered up, soft and white, to brush his throat. “It’s hot, all down in here.” The usually slurred voice was even softer. “It’s all right Mama, I like it.”

  Daddy and Carl Jr. laughed, and even Mama smiled a little. Carl Jr. held the bottle to his mouth again. He swallowed, eyes fixed inside the jar. The stuff ran down his chin, and Carl Jr. wiped his mouth again. He reached his hands to the jar vaguely, as if he would take it, and Carl Jr. laughed in a gentle way. “That’s enough, sport. You don’t want to go getting the big head and thinking you can handle it like I can.”

  “You ain’t neither one of you worth a shit,” Mama said. “Neither one of the three of you. You mark my word, Joe Robbie, you better not turn into no drunk.”

  “I ain’t no drunk.” He leaned his head to the side, as if it had become heavy. Pillows propped up his back or else he would have slid out of the wagon. “This is funny, Mama.”

  “Your mama got drunk one time,” Daddy said.

  “Lord, Willie, don’t tell that.”

  “She did. She got drunk. We was drinking out of a jar about the size of this one, ain’t that right, Louise?”

  “Lord,” Mama dipped her hands into the rinse water, a blush rising along her neck.

  “That’s right. It was a right good-size jar. And me and her, we sat right at the table and we drank it. Carl Jr. won’t nothing but a rat running round between our legs, the rest of you hadn’t even been thought about. And then we got hot and we sat on the porch, and your mama hiked her dress up, and she won’t wearing any drawers. I swear. You Uncle Cope got him a good look.”

  “I wished you wouldn’t tell these younguns that story.”

  “I done told it.”

  “I wished you wouldn’t.”

  “If your ass weren’t so big and you could get drawers around it, and you might not embarrass yourself.”

  “There you go.”

  “Go what?” He had passed the bottle back to Carl Jr. “I ain’t doing nothing but talking.”

  “I forgot about I hiked my dress up that high,” Mama held up a pair of
Daddy’s drawers, yellow at the front, “I was hot.”

  “Carl Jr. got him a look too. I bet you don’t remember it.”

  “No, I don’t remember it.”

  “I wished you would shut up,” Mama repeated, but then pressed her lips together. Her eyes, full of vague hurt one moment, mildened the next. “Anyway, I never drank another drop of that mess.”

  “What shit you speak.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “You tell a lie and you know it. And I could prove it, but I ain’t going to give away everything I know.”

  “I appreciate that,” Mama said.

  MAMA KEPT A soft spot for Joe Robbie even after Madson was born, and while she was nursing Corrine she found time to feel sorry for Joe Robbie and to pamper him. She made him syrup biscuits and fed them to him with her fingers. When the others were at school, she would walk to buy him a cold drink at the Jarman store, a concession she made for nobody else. She used money she saved to buy extra batteries for the radio, so he could listen even when Carl Jr. was logging. So Joe Robbie told me about bombing in London and submarines near Raleigh, and about Mr. Roosevelt, the president. He also learned to sing Grandpa Jones and Mother Maebelle Carter by heart, in a voice you could barely hear, with his eyes rolled back in his head.

  His trips to the doctor ate up a lot of the money we made working in the fields. He was the reason I got only the one new dress the year I started school, to add to the one faded hand-me-down dress I owned, provided by Aunt Tula. He worsened and improved, as he always had. On some days, though, he became too weak to leave his bed. With me in school, Mama tended him herself, or else kept Nora home to help with him.

  “He’s got worse since your daddy give him that liquor,” Mama swore.

  “He was already getting bad like this, Mama, that stuff ain’t hurt him, I don’t think.”

  “Well, I know.” Mama sighed, and tucked her chin down in a way that made her skin fan out like a collar. “That liquor changed this youngun.”

  “The doctor ain’t said so.”

  “I ain’t told him your daddy got him drunk.”

  “Well, you ought to tell him then.”

  “I ain’t. They might put your daddy in jail.”

  “Oh, Mama, this is some more mess you’re making up.”

  “They put you in jail when you manslaughter somebody the same way they do when you murder. I know. They put my brother in prison when he manslaughtered somebody with a tractor.”

  “Daddy hasn’t manslaughtered nobody.”

  Mama sighed. The argument had become too complicated. Whenever that happened, she started from the beginning again. “That liquor messed up this youngun’s brain. Your daddy done that. When he dies, it won’t be on my conscience.”

  Soon after that, Joe Robbie told me, “Mama says my brain has swollen up, and that’s why I lay in the bed all the time.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “Maybe you’re tired,” I said.

  He shrugged, a hardly perceptible movement. “I don’t do anything but look at comic books all the time. Ain’t nobody to ride me around in the wagon.”

  “If you would get out of bed, I could ride you around.”

  “You’re in school.”

  “I know. But I could do it now.”

  Instead, he told me another story from the new comic book they gave him at the doctor’s office, where, Mama swore, the nurses loved him to death. This comic book was thicker than most, and I sighed. “But this time I get to say what the girls did.”

  “Okay. But if I don’t like it, I can change it.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “It’s my book.”

  I crossed my arms and set my mouth. He opened the cover and started.

  Superman had flown off into space again and headed back from this faraway mission past Jupiter away off, and all of a sudden he saw this explosion like the wreck of a spaceship, and sure enough, it was. Superman flew to it and found nothing but flaming balls of wreckage and dead parents and their little boy, who was a orphan, and because the parents were dead, Superman took the boy with him to the nearest planet, and he doctored him, because the boy was injured and couldn’t even walk. It took the boy a long time to wake up and Superman was very worried and wouldn’t move him and kept bringing oxygen and stuff. But finally the kid got better and Superman asked him who he was and told him his parents were dead, and then he took him back to Earth. And by then Superman wanted to be the boy’s new daddy. And he taught the boy to read like all the other kids. But the boy stayed really sick from the injuries he had gotten in the space wreck, and no matter what Superman did, he couldn’t cure him. He worked and worked but he couldn’t. They went to doctors together, until it made Superman too sad. Then the boy got so sick he stayed in bed all the time and he laid there and he couldn’t even move his head, and then his brain swelled up in his skull and he died. Even Superman couldn’t do anything about it. Then he described the child’s funeral, and all the relatives who came and cried, and the long-lost brothers and sisters, and the aunts and the uncles, and everybody was sad because the child had died.

  HOLBERTA WINTER

  THAT SEASON PASSED as the hardest of our winters. We lived barely better than animals in a barn, trying to burn enough wood in that iron stove to heat a house with cracks in the walls and floors and nothing but grease paper in many of the windows. Daddy swore he never intended for us to live in that shack through the hard weather. He had wanted to move by Thanksgiving. But come December, with a hard frost on the ground, we were still walking the mile and a half from Holberta to the main road to catch the school bus. Daddy had stopped talking about moving us to a new house at all.

  I have no clear recollection as to why those times became so particularly difficult, but I suppose it must have been money, because that winter after Corrine was born, we had less than usual in every way. My winter coat rode halfway to my elbows and barely covered the bottom of my butt. Nora had no coat at all, and wore something Daddy used to wear in the fields when he farmed. We stretched biscuit and fatback as far as biscuit and fatback would go. We took no lunch to school and we ate little afterward. For breakfast we had coffee soup.

  On weekends, to save on firewood and to keep us from working up appetite, Mama made the smallest children stay in bed all day. Otis, Nora, and I spent our day gathering firewood from the surrounding woods, not an easy task since all the folks in Holberta scoured for wood in the same place, and knew the country better. Mama shivered in the house, wearing both her dresses and wrapping herself in a worn quilt. Uncle Cope, whose bed occupied one corner of the main room of the house, sat watching her, the covers wrapped around his bloated stomach.

  When not gathering wood to burn, we lay in our beds in the bedroom listening to the whistling man in the trees outside the house. Wind made the noise, but we spoke of the man the sound resembled, someone high in the tops of the pines, walking and whistling from limb to branch. Probably in a hurry because of the cold, according to Joe Robbie, probably hurrying home to get to his own fireplace.

  I was glad, in those days, to go to school, because at school we had a coal-burning furnace that heated every room. Though I found it hard, every day in the middle of the day, to watch the other children pull out their wrapped sandwiches and parcels of cold fried chicken.

  Christmas break interrupted even the warmth I enjoyed while learning the alphabet under the supervision of Miss Sterndale. We stayed at home for the two furious, frozen weeks near Christmas.

  Mama said the winter might be so cold because of the war. The Japs and the Germans might have drawn off all the heat, they had blown up so many bombs. The weather was different now than when she was a girl, and Uncle Cope agreed with that. Wasn’t so cold in the old days, he said. Sure wasn’t, Mama chimed.

  For Christmas we had a basket of oranges, and Daddy and Carl Jr. split a quart jar of Roe Yates’s best blend. Daddy fought with Mama and at
one point shoved her against the stove. She burned her arm and knocked down the flue, and the house quickly filled with smoke while Carl Jr. and Otis hurried to fix the flue and Nora held Mama’s burned arm under the spigot and pumped water nearly cold enough to freeze over the angry patch of skin, Mama and Nora shivering outside in the frigid Christmas wind. When they came inside, Mama smeared lard on the burn and Carl Jr. finished fastening the flue back into place, retwisting the strips of tin that had provided its support in the first place. The smoke cleared out of the house.

  Daddy, passed out facedown on the bed, slept till sundown.

  By then I was old enough to know what Christmas provided for other people, like the children at school, who talked of nothing else for weeks. In those days even a wealthy family rarely gave as much as children are given now, but we were given nothing, like always. Going to school, I knew the difference.

  Mama made black-eyed peas for New Year’s Day and told us that for every pea you ate you would get a dollar for the new year. We ate ourselves sick.

  It was my job to carry the slop pot through the cold, up the slight grade along the path that led to our johnny house. Winter-dead honeysuckle overflowed the roof. The planks of the walls and the floor were none too sturdy, and each step was accompanied by a sickening spring. I dumped the pot without looking, from as far away as possible, and tried not to hear the horrible sick wet sound. I ran to the pump and rinsed out the pot, no matter how cold it was. Inside, I stowed the pot in the corner and closed the lid tight.

  To do our business during the cold, we carried the pot into Mama and Daddy’s bedroom, closing the door for privacy. When Daddy was in the room, I took the pot in the other bedroom, and so did Nora. It was cold and nobody lingered. Something always struck me as odd about stripping down my step-ins, squatting and cleaning myself afterward in Mama and Daddy’s empty bedroom, a place where I had never spent much time at all. Their bed seemed much higher off the floor than our beds, and bigger, in some way. The emptiness echoed.