“Come on,” Lawanda said, and stalked ahead, hands jammed in her pockets.
The buses were parked nose-to-tail, with hardly three feet between them.
“That’s First Bus,” she said, pointing to the older vehicle, the school bus. It was held up by concrete blocks all around, whereas the city bus had two wheels. Lawanda didn’t go any closer. I crossed in front of her and stepped up the metal steps.
My mouth went as dry as it had been full before; my heart raced. “I don’t believe it,” I heard myself say. The only mess was at the back, where the burglars had built their fire. “Did you fix it like this for him?”
“What?”
“Did you make it all neat like this?” The books lined up on the seats, the maps vaulting the walls, the care given to it all I could not comprehend.
“Of course not!” Lawanda was pulling at my arm, dragging my focus toward her. “You think Garland would let me touch his things? You think I was playing house?”
The wind was lashing her hair around and her cheeks were patched red.
“I don’t know, Lawanda. I don’t know what you were doing. That’s what we were going to talk about.” I went past her down the steps and over to Second Bus. Dry grass whisked and rattled.
“Ah!” I heard the satisfaction in my voice as I peered in at the familiar ruin. The setting was new, but the spectacle it held was what my father always created: chaos, dreariness, filth.
“Shut tight,” I commented, holding the cold, heavy pad-lock in my hand. “There’s nothing for us to do here. Let’s go find a warm place to talk.” I was shaking, shaken. Lawanda’s face was shut tight too.
“Okay,” she said, and took off down the hill.
I looked back a minute before starting after her at the buses backlit by a reddening sky.
LAWANDA: Hiking downhill, I thought about this talk we were headed for. Sex was what Nancy Catherine wanted to know about. It was so stupid. I hardly knew any more about sex than I did when I first got the news.
Mom wouldn’t tell me a thing about it. I don’t mean when I started growing up; I mean from the get-go, the first time I noticed Noonie had this little thing that went out and hung down where I had this little place folded in. “Why?” I wanted to know.
“Hush, Lawanda,” was what Mom said, and that was her last word. I got all my information from Abby Trosper. I asked her my same question, only by this time we were eight years old and I put it different.
“How come boys pee standing up?”
“ ’Cause boys are so ornery, they’re proud of anything, even peeing.”
“I mean, how come they’re made different?”
“Oh, Lawanda, you know that.”
“I do not.”
“You do too. Everybody does.”
“Okay, you tell me.”
“It’s ’cause they have to go to work and pee in strange places where they’d be afraid to sit down.”
We both hugged ourselves with giggles out behind the Quonset hut that was Peggy Parsee’s third grade.
But I knew Abby knew more than that.
“How come boys go out and we go in?”
“Lawanda, you are filthy-minded. My mama would wash your mouth out with soap.”
“I don’t care. Tell me.”
“I’m not the one to know about such things.”
“You do, though. Janie said so. She said to ask you ’cause your mother used to be a nurse.”
“Janie thinks she’s so smart,” Abby said, swirling the brown puddle water with a ribbon that slid off her pigtail.
“She is,” I said.
“Smart is as smart does.”
“You mean pretty. Pretty is as pretty does.”
“It’s the same with smart,” Abby insisted, her yellow ribbon amber now, her freckles flecks of light. “Janie thinks she’s so smart, she’s stupid.”
“C’mon, Abby. Tell.” I knew she was stalling, waiting for Miss Parsee to ring the bell.
“Don’t you know where babies come from?” Abby asked, disgusted.
“God?” I asked her. That’s what Mamaw said.
Abby laughed and hooted and held her belly and said “God” over and over, choking and sputtering like it was the biggest joke of the world until I grabbed her red-plaid shoulders and shook her hard.
“It’s not funny! You tell me right now!”
And she did.
Her flushed face got gray and her blue eyes got cold and she spat out, “He has to put it in you—his thing. Up inside you where the hole is. And that gets babies.”
I stared at her. The bell was ringing. She had to be wrong or I would die.
Abby looked sick, her little nose and mouth all gummed up on her face.
“You stink, Lawanda Ingle!” she cried. “I hate you!”
…
“Turn the other way at Slusher’s Market,” I told Nancy Catherine. “There’s a Druther’s just across the bridge.”
For someone so big—maybe because she’s so big—Nancy Catherine can look kind of shrunk sometimes. She ran her hand through her cap of hair, trying to fluff herself up, but she didn’t speak.
She got coffee, I got a Coke. We sat in a booth by the rest room.
“My digestion is off,” said Nancy Catherine.
Shut down? I wondered, like when they turned off our water? I stirred my Coke. I love it when the ice comes right to the top.
I waited. I thought I would just keep waiting, but the weight of those shoulders across the table pulled me to say, “What happened?”
“I’ve been sunk in the swamp of my childhood.”
“Pardon?”
“You can’t bring a person back to the present, Lawanda. When you came to get me, when I agreed to come, I was headed right for the past. And it’s not pretty.”
“Oh.”
She stirred sugar in her coffee, took a drink, made a face at it. Then she leaned her forehead on the back of one hand and began pushing spilled sugar around with the other. In a different voice she said, “I want to know why he was so good to you and so rotten to me.”
“He was lonely?” I offered.
“He always hated to be alone.”
“But that’s what he chose.”
“Did he ever hit you?”
I felt as if she’d hit me. “Of course not! Do you think I would have gone back?”
“We did.”
I felt cold even though the restaurant was steamy. My daddy would never hit us. The few spankings I’d had came from Mom.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Did he ever kiss you or push you or touch you?”
I’d been expecting this. I’d thought it through and I didn’t want to give my kiss away. It would turn into something else if I said it out loud, if Nancy Catherine heard it. But I was quiet too long.
“Come on, Lawanda. What happened?”
“Once he kissed me, that’s all, and it wasn’t what you think. We were playing a game.”
“Sure.”
The slur in her voice made me mad.
“Stop that! You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I told her about playing school. I even told her about crying on his book.
“And he ran you off?”
“Yes.”
“I’m amazed. Listen, Lawanda: you’ve been up there lighting matches by a powder keg. It’s a thousand wonders you’re sitting here in one piece.”
“You are, too,” I said.
“Yeah, but I’m a pretty poor patch-up job.”
“Mamaw says it was prayer.”
“What?”
“That kept the whole thing from blowing up.”
“Her prayer?”
“No, Garland’s.”
“Daddy? Praying?” She gave a fake laugh.
“Not any way you could see. Mamaw says prayer is whatever you do in the direction of God.”
“I don’t even think Amos was bom in the direction of God.”
“That’s a hateful thing to s
ay,” I snapped, but her face was so full of hurt that I took it back. “Did you know your grandparents?”
“Not the Garlands. His dad was killed in the mine and his mother took to her bed with a bad heart. Died in about six months. I knew my Grandma Sturgill, though. She lived with Uncle Wick: a big woman, had eight kids. Pretty primal.”
“And Mr. Sturgill?”
“I think he ran off. I was never sure. You know how it is around here. He could have died out in the field.”
“Everybody dies,” I told her. “Not just here.”
Nancy Catherine studied her coffee. Shivers kept rolling over me like waves.
“It’s the things that die and don’t get funerals that worry me.”
“What?”
A crowd of people had come in all of a sudden. There were fryers going, fans. I could hardly hear.
“When a person dies all over,” Nancy Catherine began, “we recognize it and hold a funeral. Likewise, when one person kills another completely. We call that murder. But just die by degrees and nobody notices. Just kill a person in installments and nobody gives a damn.”
“How old were you when you left your father?”
“Eight,” she said. “And fifty.”
“And you’ve changed since then?”
“I hope so.”
“Don’t you think he’s changed, too?” My eyes were starting to burn. I bit my lip. “I don’t know this person you’re calling some kind of murderer. The Garland I know is hurt and sometimes angry, but he pulls away too fast to do any harm.”
“Hard to believe,” she said. “My father never pulled away till he saw you bleed.”
“He’s an old man,” I reminded her, tears like a fist in my throat. “He’s not like that now. Maybe he’s seen enough.”
Nancy Catherine drained her cup. Mine was still full.
“What do you want to happen?” she asked.
“I want him to get out,” I said. Tears made me feel stupid. “I want you to love him. I want him to go home.”
MAMAW: There’s no talking to Howard Ingle. He’s got sex in his head and he can’t hear a word I say. Some men are like that: it don’t matter if it’s sex they want or sex they call the Devil’s—the world gets shrunk to the fork of somebody’s legs.
I went by the We-Suit-U to try to talk to Howard. Didn’t want to go to his house on account of June. She’s as upset because her man is upset as she is about Lawanda. That worries me. Anyway, Mr. Ballard sent me back to the boiler room, said Howard Ingle couldn’t leave what he was doing.
“Who sent you here?” was all the howdy I got.
“It’s time to ease up, Howard Ingle,” I told him. “You got to come back to your human self.”
“Mamaw,” he gritted out, like he was holding his temper with his teeth, “this is something you don’t know nothing about.”
“You think I got my children by holding hands?”
“Good God Almighty!” He wiped his face. He was sweat-slick where he wasn’t dusted with soot. “Just take your feathers and your filthy mind and go home.”
“It’s not filthy! That’s what I’m here to tell you. Man and woman: it’s as clean as the ground.”
He hauled off and spat a big gob at my feet. “You think Lawanda and that old man—”
“No, I don’t, son, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. He never laid a hand on her. I was up there—”
“Once!” He looked at me quick. He was watching dials.
“And I know what I saw, what it was like.”
“Then why are you talking about sex?”
“Because that’s what you’re thinking! And you believe the whole thing’s filthy—”
“Goddamn it!” He was getting up more pressure than the boiler.
“You do. You’ll call it something pretty for you and June, but anything not locked up in a house, you call filthy. That’s why you can’t stand to think—”
“Mamaw!” He jammed a shovel in the coal pile. “Get out of here!”
“I’m a-going, but just—”
“Now!” He raised the shovel and shook it at me. I let myself out the back way.
…
So what could I do but go try Garland? Muddier waters but at least he’s a deeper pond. Galt shook his head at me.
“He won’t take to no preaching.”
“It ain’t Sunday,” I said.
“With women preachers, I hear that don’t make much difference. ”
I looked at his face, a dough ball that needed punching down. “Lead the way,” I told him.
Garland looked up at me from his cot. He was scary white, limp.
“Look what the cat drug in,” he greeted me. “Ada— Lawanda’s mamaw—Smith.”
“At least I ain’t a dead rat,” I answered.
“Me neither. Yet.”
“Then let’s try to reckon some stuff while we’re alive.”
“Whoa, there, Feathers. Don’t judgment come when you’re cold?”
“I didn’t say judgment.”
He pointed to the chair. I pulled it closer to his cot and sat down.
“If you can come here, I guess I can listen. Watch your tongue, though. They’s lawyers bugging the walls.”
“Let them listen. Nobody’s heard the truth yet.”
“About what?”
“About you and my grandbaby. Has anybody asked you?”
He leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes, and sighed.
“Not a soul,” he said.
“Ain’t that crazy?”
He opened his eyes just a squint. “I don’t know, Mamaw. Stay in here a while and you can’t tell beans from farts.”
“You know who Howard Ingle is?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s hopping around like a flea because of this thing Galt said you wrote.”
“It’s a notebook. Diarylike thing.”
“Whatever it says about Lawanda, Howard Ingle thinks you done.”
“I’d like to get a really sharp pen and slit Galt’s throat.”
“He don’t bleed ink,” I reminded him.
Amos sat straight up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I figure you’re a person who don’t like blood.” This was a thing I just knew.
He stood up and clenched his fists, then walked over to the bars. “Go on.”
“What happened, Amos?”
“I was as good to Lawanda, respectful, as I would be of my own daughter.” He laughed. The sound hurt. “No, by God! I was better. Ask Nancy Catherine. I never hurt Lawanda. Ran her off a couple of times. That’s all.”
“And that writing—”
“That’s my own goddamn business! It’s me, inside, not something out in the world. How would you like it, Mamaw”—he leaned over and took hold of my dress front— “if somebody tore the prayers out of your mouth and printed them up in the paper?” He pulled me closer, his forehead almost on mine. “And then accused you of wanting the wrong thing, or too much, of being a sick old woman?”
I put a hand up to touch his shoulder and he let go. The front of my dress was twisted sideways. I reached in for what I’d brought.
“You’re a sight,” he said.
I gave him the speckled feather.
“If they yank out my prayers today, they’ll find your name.”
NANCY CATHERINE: “Okay, Lawanda,” I said, “I hear you. And for all the hurt the old man inflicted on his own kids, it never was sexual. I’m not sure that proves anything for you, but…”
She nodded, blew her nose in her napkin. I changed the subject.
“We’d better head for that dinner. What do you suppose your mom will fix?”
“Meat loaf,” said Lawanda as we went out the door. “Turnip greens,” as she went around the car. “Mashed potatoes,” as she climbed in. “Combination salad,” as she settled herself. “Pineapple upside-down cake,” as she leaned forward, lifting her hair and fanning it out over the back of the seat.
“Sounds like you read it off a menu,” I told her.
“I did. It’s on the front of the refrigerator.”
“Every day?” This was amazing.
“A week at a time. Mom says if it’s not up there, she worries all day about what she’s going to feed us.”
“And it doesn’t change when you have company?” I was curious.
“We added the cake,” she said.
“Oh.”
We were quiet then till we got to Lawanda’s house. Her dad met us at the door.
“You better be getting in here, girl,” he said to his daughter, clapping her on the shoulder. Then he looked at me. “Come in, now. Make yourself at home.”
“Please call me Nancy Catherine,” I said.
“All right. I’m Howard and June’s—”
“Come on in,” June called from the kitchen. “It’s on the table.”
The room was at once crowded and pinched with neatness. Lawanda got to work settling Jeff while her mother sliced the meat loaf. She stopped long enough to say hello and direct me to my chair with the knife.
The meat loaf looked good enough, if you like dead cows.
“I’m afraid I don’t eat meat,” I said.
“Oh, dear—” June started.
“No, I’ll be fine, really. I just don’t want you to think I don’t like what you fixed.”
“Do you?” Dessie asked. She had straight crow black hair and a smart-alecky look on her face.
“Dessie!” Howard Ingle sounded disappointed. “Watch your manners!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s been so long since I ate meat loaf.”
At this point, the conversation was interrupted by the back door opening. A big lanky boy loped in.
“Wash up, Ray. You’re late,” June told him.
“Practice,” he said.
“Early basketball,” Lawanda told me.
In a minute, he was back and we all sat at the table while Howard said a graceless grace. Then came plate passing and polite conversation. June was working hard to hold my interest, Howard to hold his temper. This didn’t seem to faze Lawanda. Me, it about did in. Finally, I took the plunge.
“I don’t know how to get us out of this mess my daddy’s got us in,” I told them.
With a Hammer for My Heart Page 12
