Blackberries were blooming everywhere along the road. I remember this. I knew there must be thousands of snakes there. Snakes love blackberry patches. I took my hands off the sides and just let myself be bounced up and down. And then we were at the pasture.
“Ho, Bill! Sadie!” Zeke Pardue called. But nothing happened. “Ho, Bill!”
We waited for a few minutes by the gate while he kept hollering.
“Let’s go on in,” he said. “We’ll find them.”
Mama started to get back in the truck, but Zeke Pardue stopped her. “We’ll just walk. The truck’s probably scared them off. They can’t be far.”
Mama looked around at us three kids, looked at each one of us like she was measuring us. I remember that. Then she asked if it was safe.
“Sure,” said the Devil.
And that is how I almost got killed by a buffalo. We were partway across the pasture and Zeke Pardue was calling, “Ho, Bill! Ho, Sadie!” when they came charging out of a pine thicket. They were huge and coming straight toward me. I dropped Papa’s hand and started running. I knew they were behind me, though. I could hear them catching up. I could feel their breath.
And then I was in the air and the Devil was holding me there and was laughing. And Mama and Papa and Artie and Donnie were laughing. The buffaloes were standing by them and Artie was patting one of them on its head.
I looked down at Zeke Pardue, way down into those yellow eyes, so deep I could see flames flickering.
“I know who you are,” I said.
“So you do.” And he threw me into the air and caught me, laughing. “Now go back to your mama.”
And I did. I even have a picture made of me sitting on Bill. I am not smiling in this picture. I am looking toward something out of the camera’s range. It is the palm of Zeke Pardue’s hand pressed against my mother’s thigh.
THIRTY
What Naomi Cates Will Never Tell Dolly
YOUR AUNT ARTIE KNEW HER MAMA. YES, SHE DID. BOTH MY girls thought Sarah Sullivan was handed down. They’d go to her house to help with those parties she was always giving and come home saying “Mrs. Sullivan says this” or “Mrs. Sullivan does that.” The china was just so and the silver, and Mrs. Sullivan wore such and such a dress. And I wouldn’t say a thing, just think that’s how much you know about Sarah Sullivan, little girls. Quite a lady, she is, over at the hotel. I’m the one changes the sheets. I know.
I knew Thomas Sullivan couldn’t afford all that entertaining she did. He was a teacher with mouths to feed and bills to pay. I said as much one day, and Mariel jumped right in. “It’s her money, Mama. Left her by her daddy. She can do what she wants with it.” And I thought if it was her money she was using, I knew where it was coming from and it wasn’t her daddy. Unless her daddy was named Zeke Pardue.
Thomas and the children had to know it. I’d see Thomas at mass not just on Sundays but sometimes at early mass during the week. I guess he still thought God was going to straighten everything out for him. I’d watch him lighting his candles and kneeling and I’d think, Don’t hold your breath, Thomas. But I felt for him. The early morning sun showed how thin his hair was getting, how dark the circles were under his eyes. And I wanted to reach out, put my arms around that good, sweet man. Feel his arms around me. But he belonged to Sarah like a fish caught in a net, like she’d cast a spell over him.
And then he would drive to Mobile to work, and I’d clean the sanctuary. That’s what I was doing there. Father Carroll kept thinking the smell of incense and those candles flickering would reach out and grab me. I knew that was why he hired me. But if I’d looked up and seen the Blessed Mother herself crying real tears I would’ve just handed her a rag to blow her nose on. I might have said, “I know how you feel. God treated you bad, too.” But I wouldn’t have hollered, “Miracle! The statue is crying!” Give the woman her privacy. Besides, Father Carroll would have given God credit for it.
“Listen, God,” I said the night Toy was dying. “Let her live and I’ll do anything you want. I’ll walk on my knees to New Orleans. I’ll praise and serve you every day.” I couldn’t think of anything else, but all he would’ve had to do was ask. Instead he took Toy away from me.
The doctor came and stood in the doorway. Didn’t say a thing. I knew. Father Carroll got up and went to talk to him and then came touching me on the shoulder. “Naomi.”
I looked around the room. It was empty except for us. God had gone.
“Let us pray for Toy’s soul,” Father Carroll said, kneeling by me. But I got up and left him there on his knees. I walked outside where traffic was going back and forth even in the middle of the night.
“Naomi,” Father Carroll said, following me. “We can’t begin to know the reason these things happen.”
“God,” I said.
“There is a purpose—” he began. But I walked away into the park across the street.
“Naomi!” But I kept on walking. Somewhere I lost the priest. When I got to the river, I was by myself. The stars were falling into the water. Ping. Ping. Ping. I sat and watched them and didn’t feel sad, just empty. I watched the stars and thought that was the way of it. God was too busy for Naomi Cates. No use fooling with him.
I wrapped Toy’s blanket around me. It smelled like her. I sat there with the blanket over my head until it began to get daylight. Then I threw it into the river and walked to the bus station to go back to Harlow.
There’s one thing needs to be straight. I never threw Will Cates out like most people thought. He took himself out a little at a time. Finally he wasn’t there at all, and, sure enough, here comes the priest saying, “Naomi, Will’s killing himself with grief.”
“He’s killing himself with whiskey,” I said. “Has been for a long time. You going to tell me it wasn’t his fault he passed out and left Toy in the sun? You going to tell me ants weren’t already after that burned baby’s skin when I found her? Ants, Father.”
“He needs some help,” Father Carroll said.
“Then get him some.” I was busy. It was my day off and I was boiling clothes in the wash pot. “You’re the priest. Pray for him.”
Father Carroll slammed the door to his car and started off. Then he backed up and yelled, “He’s your husband, damn it!” And before I even had the wash hung, here he was, coming back down the road with Will.
A pitiful sight Will was, too. I took him inside and pulled all his clothes off and put him in the washtub. Scrubbed him like I scrubbed the clothes. Spread a quilt on the floor and rolled him up in it. He was red-splotched and droopy-eyed, lying there like a cocoon. But I knew he could hear me.
“Old man,” I said. “I got no quarrel with you.” He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me with those eyes about half-open but seeing me. “You and me have the same enemy.”
He still didn’t say a thing. I took his clothes out to wash and when I came back in he was asleep.
“Will,” I said. “Will.” And I fixed him some milk toast and woke him up to eat it. He was so weak, I had to feed it to him.
When the children came in, I had him in bed. “Your father’s here,” I said. But not a one went in to see him. Not a one. And he was gone again next day, soon as his clothes got dry.
THIRTY-ONE
A Letter to Dolly, Never Mailed
MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT, DOLLY, WE CATESES WERE PINEY woods trash, still are to the folks in Harlow regardless of what we do or who we marry.
You could have sliced that town right down the middle. The nice people lived on the bluff and the ladies played bridge and ate at the Grand Hotel at least once a week. Their husbands worked in Mobile, and on weekends they played golf or went out on their boats.
The white trash’s houses, sometimes just shacks, were scattered around in the woods, some near the bay but never on it. Our fathers worked in garages or on fishing boats or on the grounds at the Grand Hotel. Or not at all. My father, your grandfather, Will Cates, worked at the boat dock and drank. Your grandmother Nomie
was a maid at the hotel.
Of course my sister Elizabeth and I were impressed with Sarah Sullivan when we were teenagers. And I know, God knows my analysts have told me enough, that the things we admired so like the china and silver and Mrs. Sullivan’s clothes were superficial. But there was more to it than that. When we studied that poem in school about a woman walking in beauty, I thought that poem could have been written about Sarah Sullivan.
I know what they say about her, about her mental illness and her affairs. I know how she hurt her husband and children. But she walked in beauty. Dolly, your grandmother Sarah walked in beauty.
Mama would say, “Beauty is as beauty does.” And I realize now how hard it must have been for her, having us come in bragging so much on Sarah Sullivan and her parties and Mama struggling to keep food on the table for us. So many of us needing things, pulling at her from all directions, and the child she loved best, Toy, dead and buried long ago.
Toy came about three weeks early and caught Mama by surprise. There were a couple of doctors staying at the hotel who were called, so Mama probably got better care than she had for any of the rest of us. Anyway, they put her on a cot in a storage room behind the gift shop, and Toy was born before the second doctor could get off the golf course. Mama named her Dorothy, but everybody called her Toy right from the beginning because the gift shop lady said she looked like a toy. A little doll.
Toy. My sister you are named for, Dolly. My first real memory.
“Sit on the floor, Mariel,” and Mama putting her into my arms. The warmth, the sweet, milky breath. She opened her eyes and looked at me.
I didn’t want Elizabeth to have a turn holding her. Toy was my baby. I’d lean over Mama’s lap while she nursed her, rub my hand over her head, feel the soft spot where her pulse beat, the spot Mama said we must be very careful of. Her hair felt like silk. It was black, not like the rest of us, but Mama said it would fall out and come back blond like ours had done. Every day I’d look to see if she was bald yet.
How old was I? Four years old? Look at Mariel playing in the dirt yard the day Toy dies. The day Papa caused her to die. Gather on the porch and grieve for Naomi and even Will who has to live with his guilt. But Mariel, Elizabeth, Harry, Jacob, Steve, Ben. They’re children. They play in the yard, their world going on. What do they know about death? Come have some cake, children.
And we did. And I told myself that Toy was inside, sleeping in the dresser drawer. Once I even heard her cry. How is it I remember this? I said to Jacob, “Toy’s crying.”
“No, Mariel. Papa left her in the sun too long until she got blisters all over and died.”
But I knew the sun couldn’t make you die. I pulled off my shirt and sat in the yard and waited. And what I thought was right. I didn’t die.
“Better come in now, Mariel.” Father Carroll’s hand was cool against my hot shoulder. He picked me up and carried me inside and washed my face and hands.
“Is Toy really dead?” I asked him.
“Yes. Gone to heaven to live with Jesus.”
“Does Jesus know not to touch her soft spot?”
“Yes.”
“She won’t come back?”
“No. She’ll wait for us, though.” He carried me to the bed where Elizabeth was already sleeping. “Try and get a nap now.”
But I couldn’t sleep. Mama was on the other side of the wall. I got up and opened the door to her room. She was leaning over the washbowl. I could see the steam rising from the cloth she held against her breasts.
“Mama?” She turned. “Mama?” I said again, this time not sure. This woman’s face was swollen and gray.
“Come here,” she said. The cloth dropped from her breasts. She picked me up and sat in the rocking chair.
“Toy,” she said. And I did what I had wanted to do while I watched Toy nursing. I took Mama’s breast into my mouth. And while she held me close, I drank.
The pieces came together, how Papa had put Toy on a quilt on the porch and, drunk, had gone to sleep and left her there all afternoon. How was it that he was left alone with her? Where were Mrs. Potts and the rest of us? Were we swimming in the bay or playing at Mrs. Potts’s sister’s house while Toy was burning up?
Mama, coming home from work, found her, already blistered, already unconscious. She ran with her to the hotel, and Mr. Graham, the manager, took them to Mobile to the hospital.
But she was gone before the sun came up. “Gone to Jesus,” Father Carroll assured us. “Gone to Jesus,” he told Mama who sat with her beads in her hands turning them over and over. “Gone to Jesus,” he told Papa who sat out by the live oak tree not saying anything.
“Take your papa some food,” Grandmama said. And we did. But what we had taken him earlier was still there covered in ants.
Jacob told us years later that Father Carroll had told Mama and Grandmama that he was afraid Papa might commit suicide, and they should watch him.
“He’s doing it anyway,” Grandmama said. “Might as well get it over with before he takes somebody else with him.”
But Mama didn’t say anything. The day after the funeral she went back to work. Mrs. Potts came as usual and Grandmama went home. Papa left the live oak. We could hear him chopping wood all morning. I kept hearing Toy cry and I’d run in the house calling for her. Once she was there, lying in her dresser drawer bed, her arms reaching up for me. But I wasn’t allowed to pick her up. “You’re okay,” I said. “You’re okay.” How is it that I remember this?
Papa fixed himself a pallet in the woodshed and slept there in the summer. I’m not sure what he did in the winter. Jacob said he thought he had a room in Mobile. Sometimes he was home; sometimes not. For a while we missed him.
I have this memory, though, that comes skittering up sometimes when I’m not thinking about Papa at all. It likes to catch me by surprise. We are going to the bay swimming, all six of us kids. We walk down the shell road and cut through the Sullivans’ yard.
As we start over the dune, Jacob says, “Whoa!” We stop and he scrambles down to what looks like a partially clothed body that had been washed up against the dune right on the path.
“It’s okay,” he says. “He’s just asleep.” And we walk down the path, stepping over our father who is lying face-down in the sand. The sun has already turned his bare back red; a whiskey bottle is clutched in his hand.
By the time we finish our swim, a long one, and start home, he is gone.
THIRTY-TWO
Sunrise, Sunset
MARIEL HAS CALLED HER MOTHER TO TELL HER THE ROSARY IS still on. Now she and Donnie are driving along the beach road to pick her up. The sun, above the horizon as they started toward Naomi Cates’s house, dips, a giant orange, into the bay. One can almost hear the sizzle as it touches the water. In five minutes, it is gone. Mariel is convinced it falls faster as it nears the horizon. She doesn’t mention this to Donnie who is thinking the same thing.
“Someone has been dumping trash on Mama’s road again,” she says. “Do you think we can get Reese to come clean it up?”
“The county ought to do it.”
“But it takes forever. Last time I called them it took six weeks.”
“We can ask him. I’m sure he will. He thinks your mother is handed down.”
“I know. They’ll probably just sit on the porch and watch soap operas.”
“He’ll get it done eventually.”
Mariel takes off her sunglasses and rubs her eyes which feel heavy, swollen. “I wonder what he’s going to do now.”
“Stay on at the house as usual. Regardless. What I wonder is what Dolly will do.”
“She’ll go back to Atlanta, I expect. There’s not much for her here.”
“Maybe.” Donnie turns on his left turn signal. Habit. No one else is on the road. “I hope she makes the right decisions.”
“So do I. Bobby called this afternoon. He may come to the funeral tomorrow, she said.”
“She still won’t talk about the divorce, will she?
”
“Not really. I think she talked to Artie some.” Mariel grabs Donnie’s arm. “There’s the garbage. See?” Someone has added a stained mattress to the pile since she was there earlier in the day. Well, her mother couldn’t be blamed for that. “It just makes me furious.”
“We’ll get it cleaned up,” Donnie says. “Hektor and I can come down here tomorrow with his truck.”
“Why do people do that, though? Dump garbage on people’s property?”
“I don’t know, honey. But don’t worry about it. I’ll get it up.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Mariel says. “I’ll get it up myself. I’ll go get that lazy pinheaded Junior Morgan out here and make him do his job. That’s what he gets paid for.”
“Mariel,” Donnie says, “are we talking about garbage?”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you the rosary and funeral are okay. I meant it.”
“No, you didn’t. Besides, just telling me they’re okay is patronizing.” She looks over at Donnie. He looks more rested since his nap and food. “I don’t like you, Donnie,” she says.
“Yes, you do.” He reaches over to pat her hand.
“I do not. You patronize me. Just like Artie did.”
He takes her hand into his. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I really don’t intend to.”
Mariel sighs.
Naomi Cates is standing in her yard waiting for them. She has on the black dress she has worn to funerals for thirty years and yellow flip-flops.
“I couldn’t find my good black shoes,” she explains. “I’ll just tell everyone these are my rosary thongs. Artie would have loved it.”
“Mama, you can’t do that,” Mariel says. “Where all did you look?”
“Everywhere.” She gives Donnie a hug. “How you doing, baby?”
“I’m okay.”
“Mariel told me about your trip to Birmingham. I’m glad you decided to go on and have the funeral, though.”
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