Finding My Thunder

by Diane Munier

  Finding my

  thunder

  Diane Munier

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2015 Diane Munier

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Diane Munier

  Cover design by Adrijus Guscia http://www.rockingbookcovers.com

  To my husband--my Danny.

  Finding My Thunder 1

  1966

  Christmas vacation of my sophomore year. I had finally reached a two week reprieve from the hallowed halls of Bondville High in Tennessee. I was too cold to drag my feet but as I neared home I could see it laying by the gate to our front yard, an old dog, a sooner. She rose up seeing me, but there was no challenge in her, just a sorrowful look, hoping I could decide her fate quick.

  I set my books on the ground and knelt beside her and introduced myself. “Hey old girl,” I said. “How you doin’? I’m Hilly Grunier. Yeah that’s a good old girl. Sooner be one thing than another.”

  I gave her some love and she lifted her white muzzle and closed her eyes like her ears hadn’t been scratched in a long time.

  She had a grateful soul.

  But here came Sukey Boyd. He barreled past in his purple Fairlane and Sooner cringed.

  I paid that car no mind, and I told her she shouldn’t either, but I wondered for a second if Danny was riding shotgun like usual and if he saw me kneeling there, and I wondered if he’d think about it…about me. And I let his indifference stab me all over again and I knew I’d let this old dog in.

  “Hey, come on,” I said opening the wobbly gate, not that she couldn’t have come in on her own beneath this rickety fence. But she was polite, I knew that.

  So I let her wait on the porch and when I entered the hallway Mama was not downstairs, but I didn’t expect it. So I crossed the hall and went in the kitchen. There wasn’t much. Naomi lived behind in the carriage house and brought supper like as not. But we had a pack of hot dogs been in there too long. They smelled okay. So I put them on a paper plate and took them outside.

  Sooner was grateful. While she ate I got an old blanket from the chest we used as a coffee table. It had some history, that blanket did, but it hadn’t seen the light of day in a while, and it smelled like it had died. I took it outside and shook it and folded it back. I hadn’t crawled under our porch for many a year and I didn’t want to ruin my one decent pair of bell-bottoms, so I kind of duck walked through the broken trellis that served as a doorway on the side of the porch. I smoothed the blanket under there, and Sooner had followed me in and I patted that cover and she settled down still licking the hot dog taste off her teeth.

  I’d of liked to do more for her, but around here you only got so much of folk’s good intentions cause we were pretty used up.

  So I told her goodnight and she did not follow me now, she let me go.

  Back at my front door, I stopped enough to touch the sadness that was our Christmas Wreath. We’d had it a hundred years seemed like, well everything. I pushed past it and once I was in for good then I had to face Mama.

  All day had me a feeling at school, all day Mama on me like a shadow, worse than usual. So I called her as I took the creaky stairs, my hand dragging on the wallpaper that held years and years of my family’s stories.

  “Mama,” I said, like I wasn’t gonna take her nonsense, like I was brave.

  But she did not answer.

  The stained glass window on the landing threw color on the boards that creaked beneath my penny loafers. Up a shorter second flight onto the floor where the bedrooms were. I listened and it was so quiet. Too quiet.

  Then a thump. Like the house had one heartbeat left in it. And I pushed Mama’s door wide. I put my books on the piled dresser. The bed was tousled, pillows dented, covers knotted.

  I went there and dropped to my knees and lifted the bed-skirt. I looked under the bed across all that dust, and there she was on the other side looking at me. My breath, my hope all in one long rush. She was deeper in.

  I dropped that ruffle and got up on the bed and crawled across. She laid on her side, on that crack of carpet between the bed and the wall. Her face hidden by that bed-skirt.

  I said, “Mama, get up, get up,” the way Jesus said to people so many times. That’s how Naomi preached it, the ‘Get-up and Walk,’ sermon.

  But Mama held that skirt over her face so she didn’t have to see me. I pulled on her now until she’d give way and I could get her up and shove her on the bed.

  These were yesterday’s clothes sure enough. And hair from ten years before cause she didn’t cut it, wouldn’t is what, and it got pretty wild, long and black like the roots of an unearthed plant. But this time of madness was the longest and the farthest away cause I almost couldn’t get her back no matter how I shouted.

  Naomi said to come get her if Mama wasn’t better by tonight and the ladies would come and pray, but sometimes Mama fought that and she would go for Naomi Blue and then we had to pull her off and I’d sit on her until she was better but Naomi was too old now, too old for this.

  So I hoped to shake her out of it, but then you never knew how it would go one day or another so I thought I’d try and get her in the bath and maybe I could get the knots out of her hair and we’d see then.

  “You have got to try,” I said to her, petting her like I did with that sooner just minutes before. “Someone is gonna find out and what if they take you?”

  She grabbed me and she had the crazy eyes so bad, “He was so little…and…I had to save him….”

  “Just calm down. Tonight we’ll watch “Columbo,” and we can have TV dinners…lasagna.”

  But she was gripping me hard, “I did it. I did it….”

  She was gasping and looking all around.

  “Just breathe slow, remember? I’ll run you a bath….”

  She gripped me again, “You can’t tell him.”

  “Tell who? Daddy?” She didn’t need to worry about that. We didn’t tell him anything if it could be helped and anyway he was over at Loreena’s as usual and had been for nearly two weeks now.

  “Promise me…swear it,” she yelled at me.

  “Tell him what?” I thought of leaving her, running downstairs, calling an ambulance and getting it over with, the shame, for she would fight, Lord she would fight. And we had no money. And I could fix this like a hundred other times. I could get her back.

  “The baby…I saved him,” she whispered.

  “Then you should be proud of yourself,” I said.

  She slapped me across the face and I saw something white and heard a ringing.

  I pushed her away and she fell back whimpering and I ran out of there holding my cheek.

  Something popped in me, and I knew I couldn’t bear this anymore. I went in the bathroom and rummaged through the medicine cabinet and grabbed Daddy’s old razor and unscrewed it while I made this terrible sound, and I picked that razor blade out of it with my trembling fingers and I held it up and just stared at it.

  I pictured myself showering this whole place with my blood before I died.

  Then I caught myself in the mirror, holding that blade…and I looked like her…the eyes…something crazy…and the hair…that for sure.

  I thought of Naomi. She would find me. And after Eugene…after him….

  I pitched that blade into the toilet and flushed it down and sunk to my knees on that cold white tile and I slammed the
lid and folded my arms there and put my head on them and I cried without tears…no tears…just sounds like I didn’t know I could make. I wanted…I wanted…and I would die pining…like Mama.

  Mama’s the one came in sometime later and I was sleeping there on that cold floor in that dark room. She turned on the bright sickening light and I sat up and pushed my hair off my face, and she was docile now, standing small and bowed. And my face throbbed.

  “’Columbo’s,’ on,” she said, and this was the most she thought about me in many days…maybe my whole life.

  “If you don’t go to the doctor…I’m gonna get Miss Blue and she’s bringing the ladies,” I said pulling myself onto my feet, stiff and hurting.

  “No,” she said and she came for me and grabbed on. “No, no. I’ll go. You don’t tell no one.”

  “Tell them what?” I said.

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  I did not pick through her ramblings. But I had heard. The baby. And whatever it meant…I did not know.

  And I did not care.

  I made that appointment after New Year’s. Naomi Blue drove us to Corning to see the doctor there. Mama made me sit up front with her, and she lay on the back seat.

  We did not talk much but Naomi did sing hymns sometimes. And she did tell me a story or two about folks in the colored neighborhood. But mostly, we were quiet.

  Mama wouldn’t look at a magazine but she sat in the waiting room, her head down. When they called I went too and took her in and helped her sit on the table. She was cleaned up, but she slumped like a rag doll mostly. The nurse said I had to go out, and I wanted to, wanted them to take over…someone…but it didn’t matter so much what I wanted and I would die of sin and guilt were I to fail her.

  But she wouldn’t look at me, she was mad, she blamed me for this. She didn’t want to come. So I left her there and sat in the waiting room my stomach so sick and anxious I could barely sit still.

  Miss Blue had gone next door to the hospital to see folks cause she had worked there in housekeeping for thirty years…so over she went, and I waited with Mama. When it was done she came storming out holding her blouse closed, it not buttoned. I grabbed our coats and tore after her.

  She took the stairs down, me quick behind her and we hadn’t paid but I had to get her to stop now before she ran outside and I’d have to run after her and everyone would see. So I got her at the bottom. She leaned on the wall and she was moaning, head rolling side to side.

  And I said, “What?” But I didn’t want to hear.

  And she grabbed me and said, “He’s in me…it ain’t good.”

  “Stop it,” I hissed at her filling the stair well with her crazy talk. “Now you tell me straight or I’ll go see myself.”

  She sobered up some and looked me in the eye. “We ain’t gonna say anything to Miss Blue…or to your daddy…don’t you ever…don’t you ever…,” and she was little in size like me but the crazy made her strong as Daddy, and she was trying to shake me.

  I shook her back for a second. “What did the doctor say?”

  “He ain’t ever gonna change…your daddy…if God wants to do me this way…don’t you tell your Daddy and don’t you ever…ever tell…Blue.”

  “Tell what?”

  She eased up and let off, and she slumped against the wall. I’d never seen a look so hopeless. “I got…a lump.”

  “Is it something bad?” I said.

  She looked at me then. “Don’t you ever tell. He’s in me now. He’s in me.”

  We held her secret all that school year…the lump...him being in her. I thought of it in the dark shadows of my room…at church while I watched the ladies dance in the aisle and play their tambourines…at school when I stared out the window…when I looked at Danny across the way…across the great expanse, as they clapped for him on fields, in gyms, on stage at assemblies, in the lunch room…as they wanted so much for him…as he feasted on hoorays…as another year ended and summer stretched long and hot and poor…I thought of Mama and her secrets.

  And I thought of myself. I knew how someone could get inside…and grow. Oh, I knew.

  But Mama…she didn’t love anyone like that.

  Finding My Thunder 2

  Mama looked Italian with her dark coloring and Roman nose. Or Irish, or French, or like an Arab. She looked Jewish, for I had heard her called all of those things by the prayer ladies, or door-to-door salesmen, or even neighbors as they worked to explain her.

  It was not her darkness that confounded them, not the outside dark anyway. That’s what I knew.

  She was from her own kind of mixed up place, white-trash mother ran off with first one low man then another. My great-grandmother finally rescued Mama and brought her to our house. And she inherited it…and the one in back that came with Naomi and her family.

  Naomi and Grandma went way back. They’d had an understanding, is how Naomi put it. And here’s the thing rubbed Daddy’s brain into a boil, Grandma had it fixed so Naomi owned her house. Not the land it sat upon, that was still Mama’s. But the house was hers. So she paid rent every month on the land. Well, it was six dollars and that drove Daddy crazy too, but it’s all me and Mama had to live on sometimes.

  All summer they fought and it was the same old songs crashing up against one another. His were like a rusty old barrel rolling down a hill crushing everything in its path, “Bitch, whore, crazy. I should a…I wished I’d never….”

  Hers were like a hysteria rising, falling, never ending, “We’re broke, you’re drunk, worthless. You should a….I wished you’d never….”

  And I went to church on Sundays with Naomi, and she read, “The tongue, who can tame it…it is a restless evil…it can bring the words of life…or be the harbinger of death…it is such a little thing…like the rudder of a ship…determining where the whole thing goes.”

  “Amen,” the sisters said around me. “Mmmm-hmmm,” they said.

  And I picked at my nails and did not argue.

  By the Fourth of July Mama was deep in the crazy. She was quiet for days, and he liked it that way, then he took off and we didn’t see him much of the time cause there was no one to fight with.

  So we were out of money again. We had taken back the soda bottles and rolled the pennies many times over. Naomi had given us nickels and dimes and her prayer ladies have given us quarters.

  I wore my old jeans and one of Daddy’s old shirts rolled up at the sleeves and I wore a bandana on my head and braided my long hair to keep it out of the way and after he left for work I walked to the shop.

  His shop was located along a row of storefronts on Main Street. It sat next to an alley, and he drove down that to park in the back. His front door was propped open all summer long cause it was hot in there. I could hear the talk station he liked cause he always played the radio.

  So I went in and that smell hit me, that iron and oil smell that hung on every piece of his clothing and everything he sat on or touched…that smell tamped into his skin.

  The shop was one big, long, narrow room with a desk in front, and that piled, a filing cabinet beside it. He had a cork board on the wall and a hundred business cards tacked there and measurements on scraps of paper. Calendars were hung around, too, with slutty girls holding various tools they wrapped themselves around. Made me groan to look at them, so I didn’t. Then on back were tables and tools and vices and his welder and a vat of some kind looked like he was working on, it was hard to tell for it meant nothing to me.

  He came out of the back then where the toilet was and I was standing there. He held a folded newspaper and he smacked this against his empty palm and he came forward a bit, and he said, “What you doing here, Hilly?” And it was strange to hear him use my name for he hardly ever did.

  He wasn’t one to wait for an answer I didn’t have anyway, so he went to one of the tables and picked up his tools and got busy like I wasn’t standing. So I grabbed a broom and started to sweep and it had been a while is what.

  He
ignored me and I pretended to ignore him, and it took me most of the morning to get that floor some clean and to kill a dozen roaches long as my finger.

  When I was done, he was banging away on something, about splitting my ears, and I looked at him several times to make sure I’d dropped out of his mind, and I went to the desk and looked back at him again for I was about to touch the sacred altar and I might lose a hand for it.

  I was just reaching out when I felt a tap on my shoulder and I gasped and turned quick cause the guilt and the fear were that big.

  It wasn’t Daddy. It was Danny Boyd. Mary was no less surprised when the Angel Gabriel appeared to announce the pregnancy that changed everything.

  My heart took off under the hand I’d splayed on my chest. I couldn’t have my senses more assaulted. It wasn’t possible. He stood there, a head taller, his black hair long, longer than I’d ever seen it, and long sideburns. His eyes, green in that tanned face. He had a thin moustache that met these carefully sculpted patches around his beautiful mouth. Rock and roll star. But muscular…I felt faint. Faint from his nearness. My shoulder where he’d tapped me, it throbbed. God, he was a man.

  “Hey Hilly,” he said, like all those years of him ignoring me hadn’t transpired. His eyes on me…it wasn’t an easy thing. I tried to push it away so I wouldn’t whimper or do something more embarrassing.

  It was Daddy saved me. First time ever. He walked up wiping his hands on a rag. “Hey there,” Daddy was saying with his fake company voice, all jovial like he knew Danny.

  Danny turned from me and was shaking Daddy’s extended hand. “Reporting for duty,” Danny said and it was the longest handshake in the world.

  “Yeah, Paul said you’d be by. Well, okay…you got to get a haircut…guess he told you that. I don’t need that long hair getting caught in a machine.”

  “Okay…yes sir,” Danny said.