Caleb was on his feet in an instant, rising so suddenly he knocked his chair over—and very nearly the table, too. “Mama!” he called, and I stared in amazement. In that moment he didn’t look like a bear at all, but just like any other boy. In the next instant, his features changed and he was once again dark, suspicious, looking for all the world like a great bear. I turned to see what could bring about such a transformation. A man stood just behind Cleda Rae, holding another six-pack of beer.
Bobby Lee was on his feet, too. In an instant he was at the door and had wrapped his mother in a tight embrace. The man stood quietly behind them, grinning uncertainly. Cleda Rae disengaged herself from her older son, set down her six-pack, smiled brightly, and exclaimed loudly, “I hope ya’ll don’t mind, I brought along a friend with me.” She turned to the man standing behind her and took him by the arm, drawing him forward.
“Bobby Lee, Belle, everyone, this here is Mr. Ephraim Turner from up to Huntington. His folks are all away down south today, so I asked him to join us for the holiday. I hope that’s all right with you, Belle,” she added, turning to Aunt Belle, who was standing just behind Bobby Lee by this time.
“Course it is, Cleda Rae,” Belle boomed. “We got plenty of room for friends today. Mr. Turner, why don’t you just bring that beer on into the kitchen?” she continued, taking the man by the elbow and steering him into the other room.
“Cleda, let me take your coat.” Jolene was there now, tugging the awful purple fur thing from Cleda Rae’s shoulders.
“Ain’t it just the smartest thing you ever seen?” Cleda simpered. “Ephraim bought it for me last week. He said that old coat I had before wouldn’t keep a raccoon warm in summer. Jolene, honey, let me look at you. Puttin’ on a little weight, sugar? Now, don’t fret about it. It looks right good on you.”
Turning from Jolene’s grimace, Cleda Rae continued brightly, “Now, where’s my Caleb?”
Caleb still stood where he had risen, never taking his eyes from his mother. His bushy brows seemed to meet in the middle of his forehead.
“Sugar boy, come on and give your mama a kiss.” Cleda Rae held her arms out as she crossed the room toward him.
Caleb stood still for a second longer, then turned and bolted from the room, through the kitchen. An instant later, we heard the back door slam shut.
“He forgot his coat!” Reana cried, running to the front closet to retrieve it.
“Reana Mae! You sit yourself down this very instant!” Jolene’s voice rang out, harsh and tinny.
“But, Mama …”
“He gets cold, he’ll come for his coat,” Jolene said flatly.
“Gracious glory,” Cleda Rae exclaimed, frowning, “I don’t understand that boy. Never have, never will. He’s just like his daddy, that one, never does what he’s supposed to.”
“Mama, why don’t you sit yourself down and get a plate of something to eat,” Bobby Lee said, holding out a chair for his mother.
“Good Lord, no, honey. Ephraim and I, we done ate on the way down here—we got ourselves a hamburger at the Big Boy. I will have me a piece of that pie, though. Is that your sugar cream pie, Helen? I’d know it anywhere. Ephraim, honey, you come sit yourself down beside me and try a piece of Cousin Helen’s sugar cream pie. If it ain’t the best thing you ever ate, I’ll tap-dance Dixie.”
She cut a big slab of pie and put it down before the empty seat at the table, the one Caleb had just vacated. Mr. Ephraim Turner walked over uncertainly, righted the chair, and sat down. He ate the pie silently, never stopped smiling, and never said a word. Cleda Rae, on the other hand, never stopped talking.
“We’d have been here earlier, but poor Ephraim had to work today—on Thanksgiving Day, do you believe it? I thought it was a national holiday, but evidently some people still have to go to work. He works up to the hospital, you know. He’s in charge of the whole, entire food service for the veterans hospital up in Hunting-ton.” She smiled then, looking for all the world like a cat with a live mouse caught by the tail. “Imagine, the whole dang hospital!”
Cleda Rae was not over forty-five then, and still a pretty woman, though her years of hard living were beginning to show in the web of tiny lines around her eyes and mouth. She had dark brown, curly hair—though the curls were probably permed, even then. She was very thin and sharp-looking—all knees and elbows, it seemed. Her dark eyes never rested on any one place for long, and she chainsmoked unfiltered Camels from the day I met her until the day she died. She never stopped moving and she never stopped talking, and she never once seemed to care about anyone but Cleda Rae.
Mr. Ephraim Turner seemed a likely enough fellow—small, thin, smiling nervously. He wore a gray fedora, which he never removed throughout the day, and he didn’t speak more than half a dozen words that day or any other time I saw him. Still, he was there and Cleda’s no-good husband, Noah, was not, and that mattered enormously to Cleda Rae.
I didn’t see Caleb again during that trip. He never came back to Aunt Belle’s that day. Cleda Rae stayed until early evening, then bundled up in her purple fake fur and headed back to Huntington with her smiling, silent gentleman friend. Reana Mae and I watched them go with relief—I figure everyone there was relieved. Cleda’s nonstop chatter made my head ache, and I knew Reana Mae and Bobby Lee were fretting over Caleb’s conspicuous absence.
Once his mother and Mr. Turner had gone, Bobby Lee took Caleb’s coat and went out to find him. Reana told me the next day they hadn’t come back until late at night, and that Caleb had come home with a hacking cough and a fever.
“Can’t you just reckon on how miserable he is, with his mama showin’ up like that with a sugar daddy?” she said, shaking her head.
“A what?”
Reana smiled at me then the way a grown-up smiles at a child.
“A sugar daddy,” she explained, “is a man who buys things for a woman and pays her rent and stuff, so she’ll be nice to him. Like Mr. Turner buying Cleda Rae that coat and hat. He must have a whole pile of money. Why else would she be hanging on him like she was? My mama says it’s just like Cleda Rae to find a sugar daddy to take care of her while we take care of Caleb.”
I stared at her silently. Suddenly, she seemed older than me—not just my little cousin Reana Mae, but an initiate in the mysterious ways of adults. I shook my head and frowned. “Maybe she just likes him.”
“Naw.” Reana seemed sure. “He’s her sugar daddy, all right. She probably lets him kiss her and touch her titties and everything, just to get that coat.”
I was silent again. This was a Reana I didn’t know and I wasn’t sure I liked, either. Then, abruptly, she was herself again—just nine-year-old Reana Mae, sitting on a red-checkered bedspread, brushing Essie’s hair with a round blue brush.
“I just worry about Caleb, that’s all. Can’t you imagine how sorry he must be for his mama’s shame? He knows she don’t want him with her, and that’s bad enough. Then she comes down here with that man. She ain’t even divorced from Noah yet. It’s just purely hard on him, that’s all.”
I nodded sagely. It must, indeed, be hard. Caleb was just a boy, after all—I had seen that in his face when his mother first arrived. For that one instant, he looked like any other boy eager to see his mama. And then the way she’d behaved … even though he was big and gruff, I still felt sorry for him.
My conversations with Reana Mae that week were peppered with stories about Caleb. He had swum all the way across the river in September. Buttons wouldn’t come near him because he’d kicked her clean across the room one day—by accident, he said, but Reana didn’t believe it. He used Bobby Lee’s shotgun to hunt with Uncle Ray, and he caught more fish than anyone else in the valley. He got in a fistfight with another boy at the high school, and then quit going to school. He could eat eleven pancakes at one sitting, and drink a whole pitcher of Tang. By the time we packed the car to head back for Indiana, I knew more about Caleb Colvin than I’d ever wanted to know.
Bobby Lee had
already left on another long haul, so Jolene and Reana Mae came alone to wave good-bye. Mother hugged Jolene tight and I heard her whisper, “You just call us if you need anything, you hear?”
I was sitting in the back of the station wagon, watching through the window in amazement as Jolene hugged Mother back. Mother often hugged Jolene, but I’d never seen Jolene cling to Mother before. She had that tight, strained look again. It scared me.
I watched them out the back window of the car as we bumped down the snowy ruts in the road. Jolene had her arm around Reana’s shoulders, and both of them were waving. Standing there like that, they looked more like mother and daughter than they ever had before. I realized with a start that Mother was right. Reana Mae was going to be beautiful someday.
7
The Innocent
In early January, I received my first letter from Reana Mae.
Dear Bethany,
Hi. How are you? I am doing very fine. I got this pretty paper and envelops for Christmas from Aunt Bell. She says I got a gift for writing because she read my school papers that Ida Lues gave to her. She said I got to practice my writing all the time, so I can grow up to be a famus writer some day. What do you think of that!!!!
I got a very nice present from my mama and daddy. It is a radio for my own room, so I can listen to music when I am in bed. I can get the radio station from Charleston, and last night they played Strawberry Feilds by the Beetles. Do you know that song? It is so pretty it almost makes me cry ever time I here it.
Caleb gave me some color pencils he got at the store in Sant Albans. There are lots of colors, so I can make you a picture at the bottom of this letter. What did you get from Christmas? Write back to me, and I will write back to you tow.
Love your cousin
Reana Mae Colvin
When I showed the letter to Mother, she took me right down to Murphy’s and let me choose a box of stationery, so I could write back to Reana. I chose pale pink paper with dark pink lines and a cluster of strawberries in the bottom corner of each sheet. The envelopes had strawberries, too. Of course, when Tracy saw the box, she pitched such a fit that Mother drove back to Murphy’s and let her pick out some stationery, too. I don’t know who Tracy ever wrote to, but Reana Mae and I wrote letters back and forth that winter and for years afterward.
In February, I was the first one to hear about Jolene’s preg-nancy—and I announced it to the rest of the family over dinner.
“Jolene is having a baby.”
Everyone turned to stare. Even Daddy put down the paper and looked. Mother stopped passing rolls in mid-motion, her arm outstretched like a statue.
“What did you say, Bethany?”
“Jolene is going to have a new baby.” I smiled.
“How do you know?” Tracy jeered.
“Reana Mae wrote me a letter about it.” At this, I whipped the letter out of my pocket and waved it in the air with a small flourish.
“Let me see that, honey.” Mother took the letter from my hand, scanned the first few lines, then read out loud:
“I got some really great news for you. Mama is going to have a baby this fall, so I will be a big sister! She is feeling awful sick now, but I know she is happy because she sings a lot and she pats her tummy sometimes. Her tummy is getting big! And she says daddy will build the new loft for sure now, so we will have room for the baby.”
Mother stopped reading and smiled. “Well, that is big news!”
“She’s lying!” Tracy’s face was white.
“Tracy! Why would you say something like that?” Mother handed the letter to my father to read.
“Because I know Bobby Lee isn’t having any more babies with Jolene.” Tracy smiled smugly.
“And just how would you know something like that?” Daddy’s voice was calm, amused even.
“Everyone knows it, Daddy,” Tracy continued contentedly. “Everyone knows Bobby Lee has a girlfriend in St. Albans.”
“Tracy Janelle Wylie!” Mother’s face was furious. “Where did you hear such a thing?”
Nancy and Melinda gazed steadily down at their plates, never raising their eyes.
“It’s true!” Tracy insisted, her voice rising. “It’s true! Ask Nancy, she knows! Everyone knows!” Her voice was shrill now. “Bobby Lee’s got a girlfriend, and she’s prettier than Jolene, and he’s probably going to leave Jolene any day. It’s true! Ask Nancy!”
Nancy only shook her head.
Mother simply stared at Tracy, her face ashen, her lips moving silently. Daddy slammed his fist down on the table so hard the silverware rattled. “That will be enough of that, young lady. You are excused from the table!”
But Tracy had already left the table. She pounded up the stairs to the attic room we shared, and we heard the door slam shut. Then the screaming started—long, terrible shrieks punctuated by the slamming of drawers and the thudding of books being thrown across the room.
Nancy and Melinda and I sat as quietly as we could. Whatever the truth was about Bobby Lee didn’t matter now. Tracy had lost control again.
Mother sat frozen for a moment, then rose abruptly and walked into the kitchen. “I think I forgot to turn off the oven,” she murmured. I knew she was lying—we all did.
Daddy looked at the three of us and smiled wanly. “Well, girls, eat your supper now.”
He spooned mashed potatoes onto his plate and ladled pan gravy on top. We ate in silence until Mother returned. She was composed, but her eyes sparkled suspiciously and her nose was red. She gave Daddy an impenetrable stare, then sat back down at the table and took up Reana Mae’s letter again.
“Let’s see what else Reana Mae has to say,” she said brightly. She read the letter out loud, so everyone heard how Ruthann had finally let her beau kiss her cheek and how Caleb had argued with Ray over a hunting knife that was missing. Normally, I wouldn’t have let anyone else read Reana Mae’s letter—especially the part about Ruthann, who would be mortified if she knew her first kiss had been talked about all the way to Indiana. But tonight I didn’t make a peep.
Tracy’s fits were the subject of many whispered discussions in our house in those days. She’d always been moody, explosive even, but since starting junior high school, she’d become a living time bomb, as if reaching adolescence had set off something dangerous inside her. She seemed happy enough at school. She was on the student council, she made the honor roll every semester, and she was a cheerleader. She hung out with the right crowd, flirted in the school yard at lunch, and had a steady stream of friends calling on the phone.
At home, however, she was completely unpredictable. It seemed like she held it together through the school day and then just had to let loose when she hit the front steps of our house. We never knew what would set her off—an interrupted phone call, a perceived slight, a giggle at the wrong time. She said we were out to get her, and her beautiful hazel eyes radiated suspicion and hostility most of the time—except, of course, when she was being charming. And the change from charming to rage could come as suddenly as lightning.
It was a terrible rage when it came. When Tracy was raging, the only thing to do was get out of her way, fast. She poured red fingernail polish on Melinda’s white bedspread because Melinda laughed at her platform shoes. She wadded Nancy’s clothes into a pillowcase and lit them in the trash-burning pit because Nancy wouldn’t let her borrow a blouse. Even Mother wasn’t above abuse. One time when Tracy had to miss a party because of a church dinner, she took the kitchen scissors and cut Mother’s best party dress into shreds.
Tracy and I shared the attic of our small house. The room ran the entire length of the house, and Daddy had let us choose the décor—an explosion of bright, primary colors. Crazy quilts covered the beds; posters of Mac Davis, Glen Campbell, and Bobby Sherman plastered the walls; stuffed animals and trolls with neon hair filled every available surface of the shelves, the beds, and the dressers.
I had been thrilled two years before when Daddy and some men from the church had fina
lly finished the attic into a bedroom for us. But now I spent as little time there as possible. I lived in fear of setting off one of Tracy’s fits. At nights I lay awake, waiting for her to fall asleep, afraid that if I slept first, she might kill me in my sleep—I’d never forgotten what she said about Mother’s kitchen knife. Sometimes it got so bad I crept downstairs and crawled into bed with Melinda.
None of us understood why Tracy was the way she was. She could be kind one minute and vengeful the next, looking like an angel and then the devil’s own stepchild, all in the space of a heartbeat. But we all had our theories.
Daddy opined loudly and often that it was hormones—typical adolescent shenanigans. “We were lucky with the first two,” he’d laugh. “Now we’re paying for it big-time!”
Mother didn’t try to explain away Tracy’s behavior. In fact, she didn’t talk about it at all. But we all knew it scared her. She watched Tracy with a kind of panic on her face, her eyes wide, her mouth set in a tight line. As Tracy’s fits grew fiercer and more frequent, Mother’s hair turned an ashy gray and she began the bimonthly ritual of having it colored black again. Crow’s feet edged her eyes, and the furrow in her brow sometimes looked so deep you wondered if you couldn’t plant potatoes in it. She was always patient with Tracy, crooning in a singsong voice that everything was okay, would be okay. But I don’t think she believed it. I know I didn’t.
Nancy and Melinda said Tracy was crazy, like Kelly Morgan’s crazy grandma who had to go live in a hospital—but they never said it to Mother and Daddy. They whispered it to each other and sometimes to me, and I believed them.
But none of us ever mentioned Tracy’s fits outside our family. Mother had a saying: “You don’t hang underwear on the outside line.” Our family’s underwear hung neatly and properly on a clothesline in the basement to dry. And our secrets stayed neatly cloistered within the family, where they belonged. That was our way for a long time, until we couldn’t hide them anymore.
January 25, 1970
Dear Bethany
Prayers and Lies Page 6
