by Lee Smith
“Yeah?” Billy’d say. “Yeah?” He smoked cigarette after cigarette. Then he’d start talking, telling me all about growing up here with his whiny mother and those two wild girls. “They used to climb out the bedroom window,” he said. “Shimmy down a rope. Then I’d hear them go off in a car. Sometimes I’d know who it was, sometimes not. I hated if it was anybody I knew.”
“Was it boys from school?” I asked, thinking of Billy’s friends. I knew all their names, of course.
“Naw,” he said. “Mostly older guys.”
He recounted every game he ever played in high school, every play. “I dropped back to the left,” he’d say, “and Clint threw this high pass, I never thought I’d get it — “ I remember one night in particular he was going on and on about football and eating a ham biscuit at the same time, and all of a sudden he quit talking and looked at me. “You can’t be all that interested in football, Dee Ann,” he said.
“Oh, sure I am.” I knew I was turning red. I lived for these conversations, though I knew they were nothing to him. He was just being pleasant, shooting the breeze, like he did with everybody. He never mentioned his wife, and I never asked. Though I imagined there was something wrong there, or why would a man like Billy Sims spend so much time talking to a woman like me?
This is how me and Billy got to know each other while his mama died. She was going down a lot faster than Mrs. Hawthorne had, in spite of everything I could do. The county nurse, Mrs. Francine Butler, came around every day to give her a shot, and the doctor came by about every three days. Lots of other people came too, neighbors and cousins and people from her church. But how many times do you think Anne Patrick showed up? I can count them on the fingers of one hand. Lots of makeup, so sweety-sweet it was obviously fake, oh I could see right through her! One afternoon when Billy was there she came by in this little shiny pink outfit, straight from aerobics. I saw how Billy’s eyes got all hot and liquid looking at her. He couldn’t keep his eyes off that little pink butt.
I felt like such a fool then, for thinking that my destiny was to take care of Mrs. Sims.
“She’ll not make it to Christmas,” the doctor said in November. By then Mrs. Sims didn’t recognize anybody, not even Billy. Then Francine Butler asked me if I’d consider coming to live with her mother when Billy’s mother died, and I said yes.
Billy came over a lot, sweeping cold air and electricity in the door with him. When he stamped his feet and took off his jacket and his utility belt, the whole house felt suddenly full of life. But Billy looked bad, dark circles under those pretty eyes. I knew something was wrong besides his mother dying, though Lord knows that’s enough for anybody.
One night in early December, he came in real late. I was still up myself, sitting in the kitchen in my old flannel robe sticking cloves in oranges for a church sale the next day. Billy threw himself down on a kitchen chair and lit a cigarette while I got him some coffee. Then he pulled a little bottle of bourbon out of his jacket pocket and drained it. He rattled the cup in the saucer while he drank the coffee.
“How’s Mama?” he asked, and I said she was not doing too good. He knew that. He looked at me through the smoke. His eyes were red. He had just put in a double shift at the power company. “Dee Ann, talk to me,” he said. “Tell me something.” So I did. For the first time ever, I told what happened when me and Sissy were little girls, that got us put in the home.
It was December then too. We were living out in that cabin in the woods that I told you about, real far from town. It was a cabin that Daddy had found, I think. Maybe the one that owned it was dead, or maybe nobody owned it. Daddy had an old rattle-trap truck then, he’d drive us out to the road so we could catch the bus to school if he was home, and if he was sober, but often we’d stay out there for days by ourselves while him and Mama was off drinking. And then one day he disappeared, just like that. Sissy was too little to understand. “Where’s Daddy?” she’d ask. “Where’s Daddy?” she kept asking.
“Gone with the wind,” said Mama. “Ha ha.”
So then I’d have to stay out there with Sissy whenever Mama got a way into town to seek a better association, and sometimes she’d bring a man back with her and sometimes not. Sometimes he’d be nice to us and sometimes not.
But the time I’m talking about was in December, and Sissy was sick. She’d been sick for days, and Mama was gone. I was nine or ten years old. I had to break the ice every morning to get the water from the creek. I could see my breath like a cloud in the air as I went through the snow to get it. We wrapped trash bags around our feet for boots, but Sissy could not get up or go anywhere. And then we ran out of firewood, and I had to gather all the branches I could find fallen down in the woods, and break them up to burn. First we had some potatoes, which I boiled, and some cornmeal, which I mixed up with water and made some little cakes. We had three Coca-Colas which we drank a little bit at a time, to make them last. I had put Sissy right up by the cookstove, by the fire, but she could not quit coughing. And we were hungry, hungry. When you’re that hungry, your stomach even stops hurting and you go away in your head someplace, it’s hard to describe.
I remember waking up sometime near dawn with Sissy coughing, and going out in the night for water, across the moonlit snow. Oh, it was beautiful! The black trees, the bright snow, the pointed moon sailing like a ship among the clouds. I dipped my pan into the freezing creek and brought it up to drink before I dipped it back down for Sissy. But that cold water sent a jolt straight to my brain. We’re going to die here, Sissy and me, I thought. We’re dying now. And then it was like I was flying through the air, up above the cabin, up above the dark trees, into the clear bright beautiful sky and I could look back down and barely see our roof in the little clearing while the woods went on and on forever on every side. A tiny line of smoke came up from the chimney far below. I took another sip of water and then I was running as fast as I could with the trash bags taped over my shoes, back to the cabin where I grabbed Sissy and wrapped her in everything I could find, all the blankets and quilts we had, and pulled her out the door and across the snow to the treeline, and filled up two more garbage bags with all the clothes and things that was ours and Mama’s, and pulled that out to where Sissy lay in a heap on the snow. I left Mama’s hats on the bed. She had two, a blue felt hat with a peacock feather on it, and a big straw hat with a bunch of cherries. Daddy had left a pile of news papers on the porch. I ripped these up and threw them everywhere. I pulled the furniture kind of together, what there was of it — the table and chairs, an old chester drawers, a rocker, a crib — and then I rolled up a piece of newspaper and lit it at the open door of the stove and went around setting all the other newspapers on fire. When it got to going good, I went out and sat with Sissy.
“Looky,” Sissy said. “Looky there.”
In no time the cabin was outlined by flames, all four walls and the roofline, like a crayon drawing on fire. After a while the porch fell down, and then the roof caved in, sending a huge column of flames and smoke straight up in the sky like a Roman candle. Good, I thought.
The fire had died down some but was still smoking plenty when the people came, I heard their trucks on the road below and their shouts as they came up the holler, though I was too weak by then to answer.
“Good God!” Billy Sims said when I told him this story.
He got up and came over to where I sat in my old bathrobe and hugged me, hard, and then he left.
His mother died the next day. Sue and Darlene came home for the funeral, and then they left, and a week later, Anne Patrick Poe left Billy for Coy Eubanks, from high school. He was a lawyer now, recently divorced. He lived in Memphis. He had come back into her life, she said, when he was in town settling up some family business. Now they were engaged. “Engaged!” Billy said. “But you’re already married to me!” “Oh, that was just a boy and girl thing,” Anne Patrick said. She said she thought he knew that all along. She said she was moving to Memphis immediately.
Bi
lly woke me up to tell me all this the night it happened, he appeared at my bedside drunk as a lord. “She said she didn’t want to leave me until my mama died,” Billy said. “Now what kind of shit is that?” Then he staggered and started unbuttoning his shirt, and I realized that his intentions were to get into bed with me. For a moment I was terrified, but then a vision of Mrs. Hawthorne’s open mouth came to me out of the blue, and I knew that if I didn’t let him, I’d regret it for the rest of my life, no matter how scared I was, and I was plenty scared. But I moved over to make room for him anyway. He climbed into bed with me and cried like a baby for two hours, then shucked off his pants and made my dreams come true.
When I woke up, Billy Sims was gone. Well, I thought as the day passed, that’s that. He was drunk, it didn’t mean a thing. Probably he won’t even remember it. But I couldn’t help humming as I walked around packing up and cleaning so the house could be sold. I was moving from there directly out to Mrs. Francine Butler’s mother’s house in the country, to take care of her. I knew I’d treasure every minute I had spent with Billy Sims and play our conversations over and over in my head, like a tape. But I was kind of looking forward to being out in the country with Mrs. Green. They had a big farm pond out there, and cows, and it was real pretty.
I was all packed up and waiting for Francine Butler to pick me up when Billy’s flashy red truck came roaring into the driveway. He opened the door and scoped out the situation. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he asked, and I told him.
“No, you’re not,” he said. “Come over here. We’re getting married.”
For a minute, I didn’t go. I had a flash that my memories of Billy might make me happier than Billy himself. But then I saw Mrs. Hawthorne’s wide black mouth again, and gave a little scream, and ran straight to him. And we got married as soon as we could, to everyone’s total astonishment, I might add, especially those sisters! It was a good marriage too, a happy marriage. I believe that. For Billy and me, we’re two of a kind, and he never should have been married to Anne Patrick Poe in the first place. She was not his type. I’m his type! We like the same things — cooking and eating, why Billy even built his own pig cooker, for barbecues — and talking. Lord, that man can talk. And dancing, which he taught me to do. Line dancing, two-step, you name it. I’m a natural, though you might not think it to look at me.
But Billy had developed some mighty expensive tastes living with Anne Patrick, as I soon learned. Nothing they owned was paid for, and Billy had signed for all of it himself. So we were stuck, while Anne Patrick waltzed off to Memphis scot-free. Billy’s share of his mama’s little house just about got him out of debt, when it finally sold. I didn’t have a thing in the world, of course, but I soon got a nice job with some lawyers downtown, a good thing since Billy didn’t know beans about money, to my surprise. Why he didn’t even write his checks down in the checkbook! He bought such items as a bass boat, a real expensive entertainment center for the family room, some $475 Tony Llama boots, and all this health equipment, weights and such, after he got hurt.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We loved each other, that was the main thing. And I didn’t care about his spending habits. I wanted him to have those boots! Whatever makes Billy happy was my motto, and I never, ever, said no to anything he wanted, or anything he wanted to do. We went all over the place to Nascar races, for instance. This hobby is not cheap! “Life is short, Dee Ann,” Billy used to say. Naturally his attitude alarmed me. But I had never had any fun before in my whole life, and when I got pregnant with Debbi, my happiness was complete.
I will never forget the night I told him, December 8, seven years ago. He was working late, they were wiring the Sugar Fork tipple. I’d already done the test the day before, and it was positive. Then I came home from work and did it again. Positive. So I got in the car and drove out the House Mountain road and on up the mountain, getting there just at dusk. I love a winter sunset, always have. The tipple looked like a giant Tinkertoy outlined against the fiery sky. The clouds were silver. And there was Billy, high up, working. I knew him by the cock of his hip and the way he held his head. He was black against that sky, which faded to orange while I watched. I saw him lean back against the strap and signal to somebody. Then suddenly bright white utility lights went on all over the tipple and everybody cheered. Billy started waving his arms like a kid. I stood on the ground in the dark with his baby in my belly and cried like a baby myself. It was so beautiful.
“AW, SHOOT,” Sam Hicks says. “Now, now,” says Lois Rubin. “Here honey, here’s a Kleenex.”
BILLY WAS RIGHT beside me in the hospital when Debbi was born, and helped me breathe. But then later he started saying that a baby “cramped his style,” for of course we couldn’t just pick up and go out like we always had. “You go on,” I’d tell him. “Go.” And so he did, and I was glad he did. You can’t expect a man like Billy Sims to stay at home. I was still counting my lucky stars to be with him at all and to be blessed with this perfectly lovely little baby girl too. I loved staying at home with her and would have stayed a lot longer except that the bills were mounting up, and Billy kept pushing me to go back to work. I had to put Debbi into day care at two months, which broke my heart.
She was three when he had the accident.
Billy fell two stories down from that new hospital wing they were wiring. Landed on concrete, broke his jaw, his collarbone, his left arm, his wrist, his leg. If he hadn’t of been wearing his hard hat, he’d be dead. I can’t stand to think of it, to this day. Pretty Billy Sims laying crumpled up in the parking lot exactly like a bird that’s flown into a picture window. Of course the hospital was right there, so they rushed him into surgery immediately. I was half out of my mind by the time I made it, I ran all the way across the parking lot dragging Debbi. The doctor met me outside that awful steel door wearing green pajamas, stripping off his gloves.
The good news was that Billy would live. He would have to have pins in his leg, and more surgery followed by physical therapy, but he would be okay.
The bad news was, we didn’t have any insurance.
“Tell me that again,” I said.
When Debbi was born in that very same hospital, our insurance paid for everything. But Billy had let it go, I learned, so they wouldn’t take so much out of his paycheck. Whatever he’d been doing with that extra $280 every month, I didn’t know. He probably didn’t know either. Money just slipped through his hands like water. Ten here, twenty there. Billy was a high liver, as I said. He cried like a baby when I told him I knew. I couldn’t stand this, what with him in pain and all wrapped up in those bandages.
“Just forget it,” I told him. “What’s done is done, water over the dam.”
I put him on the family room couch with everything he needed (TV remote, phone, cooler) close to hand. For once, I was glad he’d bought that fancy entertainment center!
Then I went back to work.
I ran the office for three lawyers: David Martin (tall, thin, sad); Ralph Joiner, a red-headed ball of fire who was in the state house of representatives; and Mr. Longstreet Perkins, old and dignified, a former judge famous for his opinions. I typed all their letters, made up loan packages, deeds, and so on. Typed papers of every sort. I did all the filing, all the accounting. I handled the reconciliation of trust accounts, the payroll, and collected rent for absentee landlords who paid us to perform this service. I made my lawyers’ bank deposits, wrote their checks, and paid their taxes. They depended on me totally. “Dee Ann, I don’t know how we’d manage without you.” David Martin and Ralph Joiner were always telling me that. “Mrs. Sims, you’re a wonder,” said old Mr. Longstreet Perkins. Meanwhile our own house was a mess with Billy living downstairs in the family room, clothes and plates and magazines and what-have-you strewed all over the place. Men are naturally messy anyway, and Billy was the worst, even before the accident. It broke my heart to walk through the family room.
I have to say, it was nice going over to my own li
ttle office, which is eggshell blue, where I had put my desk catty-corner so I could see out the window into the street. I kept African violets blooming on my desk, and Tootsie-Roll pops in a jar for anybody that wanted one. You’d be surprised how many takers I had. I kept some M&M’s in my top drawer, too, for stress.
Which I had plenty of! Because of course I was the one who paid all the bills at home, and now I just couldn’t do it. Even with his disability check, I couldn’t make ends meet. I couldn’t stand to bother Billy with it either — he was in so much pain, and so blue. I started paying just some of the power bill, some of the water bill, some of the phone bill, some of the hospital bill, and so on. I’d stay up late figuring all this out while Billy watched TV.
“Aw, don’t look so worried, honey,” he said to me one night when the cable bill as well as the rent and his truck payment had come due. “It’ll work out. Come over here and give your old man some sugar.” He was drunk.
But instead of giving him that sugar, I surprised myself by saying, “I fail to see why you have to have such an expensive truck anyway, can you explain this to me?” I heard my voice going up and up like Billy hates. “There wasn’t anything wrong with your old truck that I could see.” He had bought himself a new one only three months before.
“Goddamnit, Dee Ann.” Billy swept everything on the coffee table off onto the floor making the awfullest mess, and then he busted out crying, which was more than I could stand. He looked like the little boy in all his old school pictures. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just so goddamn sorry about the whole goddamn thing.”
