by Janis Owens
“Said she fell down,” Mama would intone dryly. “Third time this month. I tell you what, the Law’s gone step in, it happens again.”
There would be a chatter of light agreement, then someone else would offer a further tidbit of damnation: “Children skinny as rails. State ought to take them is what I say, and I don’t care who hears me either, their Mama too sorry to light the fire—”
And I’d wrinkle my forehead against the cold screen, perplexed, beginning to see there was something wrong on Magnolia Hill, something I had no name for yet. All I recognized was the name Sims, which belonged to our neighbors to the left, newcomers to Lafayette and virtual strangers to me, for Mama didn’t like the looks of Old Man Sims the moment she laid eyes on him and wouldn’t let me play in their yard. But I only had Mama’s bad impression to go by, for despite the rumor of unease in the porch talk, to my eyes there was nothing so wrong with their narrow, two-bedroom house, nothing to set it apart from any other house on Magnolia Hill, except that it still had an outhouse for a toilet. But that was all.
In fact, my friend Ira lived there. Younger than me by a year, he was three years behind me in school owing to the fact he only made it maybe three out of every five days. But despite his educational deficits, there was something very likable about his carrot-red hair, his thin country voice, his very bouyancy of spirit. In the brief time they’d lived on Lafayette, he’d firmly established himself as the neighborhood clown, the lovable idiot who’d eat insects and be dared into anything—peeing off the porch in broad daylight, smoking grapevine under the porch at night, stealing penny candy from the corner store. These attributes alone would have been sufficient to win our approval, but coupled with his grinning fearlessness, he spoke a peculiar East Louisianan dialect that the rest of us hicks found old-fashioned and charming. He called a furnace a stove, used words like et for ate and kindly for kind of, and most of his sentences began with either it were or it weren’t.
Harmless and country, we thought him, but it was a compilation of these very attributes that led to the first domino fall that would eventually change all our lives on Magnolia Hill, though it really wasn’t Ira’s fault at all; it was my cousin Randell’s.
Now Randell was fifteen, and every July when my sister Candace (I see the Faulknerian irony here, but what can I say? It’s her name, or actually the shortened version of her name, which is—no joke— Canadasier) went to youth camp, he would come down by Greyhound bus and spend two weeks with us. A year younger than Michael, he was a long, tall boy with a big mouth and an eye for the girls, and at some point in the summer—maybe it was the Fourth of July—he had the great fortune of taking Lynnie Hall out in a boat during a Sunday School picnic and, in order to escape a sudden thunderstorm, of spending two hours, unchaperoned and well-excused, in an abandoned boathouse across the lake.
Now before I proceed any further, maybe I need to clarify our sexual development on Lafayette Street. A lot of literature has been written that seems to point up the Southern working class as a culture with an easy access to early sex, but whether this image is incorrect or whether we were an enclave of repression there on Magnolia Hill, I don’t know. All I know is that my nine best friends and I were as ignorant of sex as the potted plants on my mother’s back porch. We knew it had something to do with us down there and gids down there, and we liked to look at women’s breasts (titties, we called them), and maybe a few of us had figured out the ways and means of masturbation, but that was about it. By some genetic fluke, breeding on Lafayette had produced families with a high ratio of younger sons, so there were no girls our age to experiment on or with, no interaction to spin us on to higher revelations. And as far as open, frank discussions where sex was concerned, I can only say that asking my God-fearing mother to explain the strange urges and curious surges I was experiencing hourly was about as easy as asking her to do a dance on the dining room table. I never did, and I know damn well Michael never did, and neither had anyone else by the looks of blank interest on their faces when Randell, fresh from Phenix City, Alabama (where, he said, and I quote, the girls were easy), rowed back into the swimming area, and while he assiduously helped a wet and shaking Lynnie Hall into the arms of her worried mother, turned and gave us this wink.
Well, we didn’t know what to make of it, and Randell’s subsequent winks and hints only perplexed us more, though we were too proud to admit it and only grinned back like the fools we were. All of us, that is, except Ira. He was too young, too stupid, to be ashamed; his only problem was that he was too ignorant to frame the question.
We played together all morning the day after the picnic, setting shingles on the amazing Swiss Family Robinson mansion we were constructing in the low-hanging limbs of one of the live oaks in our backyard, and I could see something was on Ira’s mind. Something very pressing that had his face flushed and absorbed, and I was hoping he’d break down and admit his ignorance so the rest of us could be enlightened over what exactly might have happened between a boy and a girl in an abandoned boathouse that would subsequently give the boy cause to wink, but he didn’t say a word till Mama called us in to dinner.
She always invited Ira in to meals, for she was convinced his mother didn’t feed him, not one crumb, and, indeed, you could see the bones of his ribcage under his T-shirt and the very clear outline of his kneecap in the middle of his toothpick legs. So he was a fixture at our summertime table, and I must say I begrudged it, for we ate out of two pots, one fresh vegetable, one starch, and Ira could by God put a dent in both. I have never seen the likes of it in all my life: from the time his tail hit the chair till the food was gone, he’d be whipping that fork back and forth, back and forth, talking the whole time, unless Daddy happened to be home for dinner. He’d listen awhile, then murmur in a light, heatless voice, “For God’s sake, son, hush a minute. I cain’t hear myself think.”
Ira would only grin wider, not breaking his pace, but keeping his eyes on the food, being very polite about seconds (and thirds and fourths), always saying “please ma’m” and “thank you sir.”
But on the day after the picnic, with Randell still there, still winking and saying things like “Boy that was the bes ride I ever took in my life, I tell you what,” Ira was quiet and preoccupied, even when Mama brought in the food and prayed and told us to begin.
That’s when Randell, the big shot, was sly enough to slip one by, right under Mama’s nose: “Thet picnic, now, I tell you what, I have never enjoyed mysef more.”
He said it with a wink to Michael, and Mama was making some reply, saying something about how glad she was he had enjoyed himself, when out of the blue, little Ira, his neck pencil-thin, his face an agony of inexpression, asked in a high, country twang: “Ran-dell? Didju ponk her?”
Well, he’d finally found a word, ponk, and where the hell he’d come up with such a euphemism I’ll never know, but in the context of the sentence, we could all pretty well figure its rough translation, even Mama. For perhaps ten seconds she looked at us, one at a time, then carefully laid her napkin on the table and requested Randell’s presence in the living room, please.
They left in perfect silence, Randell casting a murderous glance at Ira, who had begun eating again, attacking the squash with his usual frenzy, only turning once, to Michael, and asking again in that flat, astounded voice, “Did he ponk her?”
Michael was as paralyzed as I and could only stare, but Mama heard him through the wall and came out and told Ira he’d have to leave.
“But I ain’t et yet—” he began, so she put his plate in his hands and pushed him out the back door, then sent us to our room.
We laid crossways on the old double bed in perfect silence, haplessly listening while in the next room, Mama was taking Randell apart, piecemeal.
“—a good, fine girl, her Daddy was to hear you’d talked about her that way, he’d have your ears—”
I guess she considered him too old to whip and was getting her pound of flesh by stark terror, but I was sh
aking in my shoes, for I knew intimately that I was by no means too old to whip and could feel one coming on.
Michael was lying beside me with his face to the ceiling, rubbing his eyes, crying, I thought, until I felt the bed vibrate. Nothing more than a tiny, tiny shake in the springs, and when he felt my eyes on him, he turned and looked at me a moment, then cocked his head, and in brilliant imitation of Ira’s wiregrass twang, whispered, “Didju ponk her?”
Well it was the difference between night and day, I can tell you that; suddenly, Randell’s fate at Mama’s hands was funny, funny; it was the most hiliarious thing I’d ever heard in my life. I laughed so hard Michael had to gag me with a pillow, while in the living room, Randell was groveling like a dog, begging Mama not to call his mother.
“—we didn’t do nothin Aint Cissie, I swear to God. You can call her and ast—”
Mama answered levelly, “Well I just might do that. Ask her what she knows about this—ponking—bidness—”
It was too much, even for Michael. We lay there and laughed like wild men, beating the mattress with our fists and holding our sides, even when Mama came in with the belt and tried to get us back on the straight and narrow by lashing at us and telling us we were a disgrace before God, and so on. But it made no difference. She could have come at us with a blowtorch, and we would have still hollered like idiots. Maybe it was nervous tension or hysteria, but we simply laughed all afternoon, calming to bare reasonableness at times, till Michael would wrinkle his nose and cock his head and we’d be gone, Mama yelling that she was calling Daddy, calling Daddy at work, we didn’t hush this minute.
The next morning poor Randell was shuffled back to Phenix City in disgrace, and Daddy did indeed whip us, not over the ponk business, but for what he considered back-talk to Mama. However, rumor of the incident spread to the neighborhood, and all the frustrated virgins on Magnolia Hill finally had a word for it. The word was ponk, and we used it incessantly thereafter, for it opened up a whole new world of conversation, enabling us to connect the bits and pieces of evidence into an achievable act, the act of ponking.
In fact, I think it might have remained our word of choice for copulation, and I might have spent the remainder of my life calling slow drivers motherponkers, and asking colleagues with beautiful but incompetent assistants, what was the matter, were they ponking her? if not for Myra, dear Myra, my love, and because of her, the very word became a curse, and what had been a child’s naive grasp of an adult mystery became a catchword for evil, a keyhole into an abyss.
Chapter
3
Myra was Ira’s sister. His baby sister, and for the first few years they lived on Magnolia Hill, we never saw much of her. For one thing, she was shy; for another, she was not allowed off the front porch or outside the backyard, and thanks to Mama’s edict, we were separated by a four-foot-high, pig iron fence.
So the environs to the rear of the Sims’ house were her private domain, and there she seemed content to remain, a quiet, colorless child, somewhat more healthy-looking than Ira, with dark hair carefully braided down her back, and eye color that was undetermined, as her face was perpetually downtilted to her feet. The closest we ever came to actual social contact was when she’d sometimes fall into step behind us boys on the way home from school, not close, if we could help it, for we were all a bit more worldly by then, still virgins, every one, but beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of a new girl at church named Cassie Lea Scales, who in her first month in town had French-kissed everyone but me. So we were careful that Myra not overhear our blatant ponk-talk lest she run her mouth to Brother Sloan, but when we’d shoo her away, she never fought back, only stopping perfectly still till we were a block away, then walking again, quietly, her face still averted, her feet taking her straight up the front steps into her narrow, sagging, old house, where the door would close behind her till morning.
Now I was a fairly sensitive child, given to tears and pouts rather than cruelty, but snubbing Myra Louise Sims never gave me a twinge of ill-conscience, for everyone on Lafayette knew she was the Sims’ undisputed babygirl, which in West Florida dialect meant princess. Most of the families had one, either as mother or youngest daughter, prototypes of feminine sweetness to be fought over and cherished, catered to and spoiled, with no apologies to anyone. Already, Myra showed signs of the beginnings of a long and pampered life. As I’ve said, she was healthier-looking than Ira and stayed home for meals and lived, so we all could assume she ate there, and furthermore, she was her father’s pet—blatantly, unashamedly so. I had sat there more than once and watched the Old Man (a traditional title, incidently, for he was not old—perhaps as young as thirty) come home from work, calling he had a present and when Ira and Myra came to the porch, smile and hand Myra a small treat, usually ice cream of some sort, then go inside, leaving Ira bare-handed and green, not saying a word, only watching in a pale, breathless silence as Myra sat on the steps and ate it slowly, losing most of it to the heat, his mouth moving like he could taste it.
Mama happened to be planting roses at the fence one evening when this little scenario played itself out in all its miserable inequality, and I thought we in the Catts household would never hear the end of it. For days, at supper, at dinner, on the porch before and after curfew, her voice would rise and fall, for, as she put it, it just beat all she ever seen.
From that moment on, she drew Ira even closer under her warm maternal wing, making him desserts and giving him hand-me-downs, and when the Fourth of July picnic rolled around again, she somehow finagled Mrs. Sims into letting him tag along. It was one in a string of calm, hot summer days, the sky a light robin’s egg blue, the lake tepid as a drawn bath, all of us boys, now somewhere in the neighborhood of thirteen, shamelessly ponk-conscious, watching the girls in their bathing suits with many comments on who was flat and who was not, and when Cassie showed up in a two-piece, we were rendered totally speechless and had to back off to the trees and talk about this thing.
It was agreed she had cleavage. It was agreed her navel was showing, but those were the only conclusions that could be safely drawn before Brother Barns started blowing his whistle, announcing the relay race, and we had to line up under the trees and wait our turn to swim to the float. By luck, I was the last in line on the boy’s team and Cassie was last on the girl’s, and summoning my courage, I asked her if I could kiss her. After all, everyone else had, from Ira down to Benny (the first of us to start in on acne), and I was in no way prepared for her answer, which was an unequivocal no.
“Why not?” I asked, thinking she was shy and noting the trees afforded privacy, and it was not the first nor the last time in my life that I have ever regretted my inability to take no for an answer when she clarified the situation with a wrinkled nose and a simple explanation, “I don’t like fat boys.”
Then she crossed her arms and moved up next to Lynnie and giggled something in her ear, and I had a pretty good idea who the joke was on and wandered back to the parking lot and lay down in the back of Uncle Case’s old Buick in a haze of humiliation.
Growing up in a family of wiry people had always been a source of worry to me, since I was—well, fat is not the word—chunky, I guess you’d say, and Cassie’s words had confirmed my darkest fear. I’d rather read than play baseball; I was fat; I had curly hair; I was the only boy at church who’d never kissed a girl: I was, in short, homosexual; and in 1962, in rural West Florida, it was not what you’d call a divine revelation, and one particularly hard on me because, by God, I loved the girls, and the thing with being queer was you didn’t get many girls. I mean, it was just a sad fact of life even a sheltered church-boy like me knew to be true, and I was lying in the breathless heat of the closed-up car sinking under the weight of the thing, when suddenly, Daddy jerked open the door and shoved the ice chest onto the floorboards, calling to Michael and Candace and Ira that it was time to go home.
Mama was with him, her face pale and stunned, and for one blank moment
, I thought it was because of me, that Cassie had told the world, but Daddy, speaking aside in his low patient murmur, told me Mama was feeling poorly and needed to go home. Around our house, “feeling poorly” was synonymous with menstruation, a curious facet of female-ness we Catts men catered to nervously (and in Mama’s case, anyway) about fifteen days out of the month, but I was grateful to be spared the horror of facing Cassie Lea over dinner and felt my despair lift a tiny bit as Ira ran his mouth all the way back to town, poking it full of fried chicken and deviled eggs, but not stopping for a breath, not once. When we got home, I took to my bed and sulked the day away, oblivious to everyone else, till Michael woke me up late in the night and told me what had really happened down at the lake: how that after the relay race, Mama decided they were getting too much sun and called them in from the water to to rub them down with hand lotion (nobody used anything else back then; I don’t think sunscreen had been invented). First she did Candace, then Michael, then she told Ira to pull up his T-shirt and when he did, she gasped aloud.
For all across the front of Ira’s bony little chest, from shoulder to shoulder, there were a dozen or so little round holes, some fresh, some healed over, all a little bigger than redbug bites, and when she asked him what in the world had he gotten into, Michael swore Ira just grinned that silly grin and fingered one on his shoulder. “Oh, thet’s where my daddy, he put out his cigarette.”
Mama just knelt there rubbing the excess lotion into her hands, looking at him, just a blank uncomprehending stare; then she turned him around and when she saw his back, she stood suddenly and called Daddy and Brother Sloan. Michael said they stood around him a long time, talking in low voices, shooing the other children away when they tried to sneak a peek, Daddy trying to pat Ira reassuringly on the back, but not quite able to find a place to lay his hand, finally settling on a tousle of the hair; that’s when Brother Sloan took out his handkerchief and blew his nose and said maybe it’d be best if we went on home.
