by Ninie Hammon
And an image formed, dim at first, then brighter as the light came up in the room of my memory.
I have the covers pulled up under my chin, my head buried in the pillow, trying not to hear. But it’s impossible to escape the angry voices from downstairs. Mama and Jericho’s room is directly below me, where the study is now. Piped up through the register, their loud voices are so clear, their words so distinct, the two of them might as well be standing at the foot of my bed yelling at each other.
“You think I’m that stupid?” Mama’s voice. It sounds odd, the words are muddy. “You think I don’t know where you’ve been.”
“I told you where I was.” Jericho.
“The Lone Star? You think I believe you were at the Lone Star ‘til three in the morning?”
“I don’t care what you believe—I went there straight from work, me and Marty was shootin’ pool.”
“You were with her! That Indian slut. That’s where you always go, a dog licking up its own vomit.” There’s a thump, then a crash as something shatters, like somebody has knocked over a table and lamp.
“Look at you!” Jericho sneers. “You can’t even stand up! Why would I want to stay home with you? Why would any man get near you? Can you even remember the last time you were sober? A month ago? Christmas, maybe?”
“You brought Windy over here this afternoon and left her so you could be alone with Little Dove. You think I’m going to baby-sit that little Indian rat so you and your mistress can—”
I feel something warm beside me, something small under the covers with me. Windy!
“It’s too dark up there, I’m scared!” Her voice sounds like little bells ringing on a cold morning. Crisp and clear. “I don’t want to be in that big bed all by myself.”
Windy’s room is on the third floor. Mama makes her sleep alone in the huge four-poster bed in the back bedroom. Everyone else is downstairs.
I scoot over to make room and she cuddles close. Her hair smells like cigarette smoke. “You can stay here with me,” I tell her. “In the morning you can—”
“I’m going upstairs right now and get that little rat and take her back home where she belongs!” My mother’s voice, and Windy is instantly tense.
“I don’t want to go home!” she whispers, and the terror in her voice makes me afraid, too, though I don’t know what I’m afraid of. “Not now, not at night. They mostly come at night.”
She tunes up and starts to cry and curls into a ball beside me with her arms hugging her knees. I fold myself around her, spoon fashion, and try to block out the voices.
“You’re not taking Windy anywhere! My daughter’s got just as much right to be in this house as that perfect little princess of yours. You’re not kicking her out in the middle of the night!”
“And who’s going to stop me?”
There’s the sound of scuffling, something else clunks to the floor. Mama suddenly cries out. Did Jericho hurt her?
“You think you can tell me what to do, where I can go, when to come home?” This time, I hear him hit her, hear the slap! She screams and something thumps, a chair falling over, maybe. “You think you own me? Well, let me tell you something, Sweetheart— don’t nobody own me!”
Mama’s crying now, sobbing. “Look what you did. My nose is bleeding! I’ll have you arrested! I’ll … I’ll—”
“Put that down, Susan!” he growls. “I paid $200 for that music box and you’re gonna drop—don’t you dare—!”
Something crashes through a window.
“You don’t scare me!” Mama is totally hysterical—taunting him, raging and crying. “I’ll call the cops and they’ll haul you off to jail—hitting a woman! I’m not afraid of—”
“Well, you better start getting afraid!”
“Touch me and I’ll claw your eyes out!” Something heavy hits the floor and Mama lets out a yelp of pain. Maybe Jericho knocked her down or maybe she just fell. She shrieks, “Stay away from me or I’ll rip your face—”
“Stop it!” Bobo’s husky voice. “Both of you stop that fighting right this minute, you listening to me? The whole neighborhood can hear you.”
“Nosey busybodies,” Jericho snarls. “It ain’t none of their business what we do in our own house. It ain’t none of your business neither. Get out of here and leave us—”
“They’re gonna call the law, Jericho! They hear screamin’ and breakin’ glass in the middle of the night, what do you expect them to do? They’re going to call the police (pronounced PO-lease). The police come, they’ll arrest you both.”
There is silence, broken only by the sound of Mama sniffling.
“Aw now, don’t get all upset,” my mother mumbles. “We were just having a little disagree—”
“Don’t step over here!” Bobo warns. “There’s broken glass on the floor and you ain’t got no shoes on. I’ll get a broom and sweep it up ‘fore somebody cuts their foot open. Go on, get out of here, both of you. Go on and let me get this mess cleaned up.”
Windy has stopped shaking, the tension in her shoulders and back begins to ease.
“Will the neighbors really call the police and have my daddy arrested?”
“I don’t know. They might, I guess.”
“I don’t want my daddy to go to jail. If he goes to jail, I can’t come here anymore.” I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Windy is three years younger, but she seems much older in some ways. She always looks further out than I do. I can’t think of any response so I don’t say anything else, just wrap myself close around her and try not to think about Jericho hitting Mama, or Windy vanishing out of my life forever.
I feel like crying, but I can’t. It would upset Windy. So I lie in the dark, my throat tight from unshed tears, listening to the fight downstairs wind down, the voices lower. I drift off to sleep with the cigarette-smoke smell of Windy’s hair in my face.
And it was over. Like the end of a movie when the house lights come up and the credits start scrolling on the screen, and it takes a minute for your eyes to adjust to the brightness and your mind to adjust to the sudden shift in realities.
The real world felt thin, like ice.
Well, it had finally happened. The memory closet door had opened more than a crack this time. I’d remembered—not just a glimpse, a little peek. I’d gone back in time to the world inside this house and lived in it for awhile—long enough to get a really good look.
Long enough to see the ugliness.
A gale more powerful than the tornado that twisted a bunch of trailer houses into wads of tin howled through my head. Claps of thunder detonated in my ears; blinding lightening flashed behind my eyes. The world was no longer shifting under my feet. It had given way completely and dropped me in a free-fall into nothingness.
Whoa, wait a minute! Why am I so shocked, so surprised? What did I expect to find out when I finally remembered?
Reality check: something happened in my life so terrible my mind erased all trace of it and everything anywhere near it is a circle of destruction a decade wide. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Boom! Was I really so naïve that I didn’t think I’d ever remember anything bad? It was inevitable: if I dug around in my past long enough, eventually I’d lift up a rock and find maggots.
But I didn’t think one of the maggots would be my mother!
Nothing could have prepared me for the revelation that Mama wasn’t who I thought she was! I never dreamed I’d see such sordid tawdriness in the demure woman who never raised her voice, never said an unkind word, the gentle woman who conducted her affairs with quiet dignity, and who would have laid down her life for Joel and me. How could I reconcile that woman with a … a sloppy, pathetic … white-trash drunk?
Suddenly, I was crying, great, heaving sobs that wracked my body like seizures. I cried until my sides and chest ached and I could barely catch my breath. I cried harder than I cried when my mother died. This pain was jagged, serrated; it sliced open my soul.
For the first time, I felt a kinship, a bond with the lit
tle girl with blonde braids. I reached out to her somehow and we connected. And then I did what she wanted so badly to do with Windy in her arms and angry voices drifting up to her from the room below: I curled up in a ball in my bed and cried myself to sleep.
The next morning, I went downstairs in my nightgown and found Bobo at the kitchen table, just sitting, waiting for me before she started on her bowl of Rice Krispies.
“You look rode hard and put up wet. You up all night trying to put that furniture together? I seen them bookshelves you—”
“Bobo, I want to know about Mama’s drinking.”
She looked like I’d slapped her. The color drained out of her face. She said nothing, just let out her breath in a long sigh. She suddenly seemed smaller, older, more bent.
“What do you mean your Mama’s drinking?” She launched it out there but it was a bluff and we both knew it.
“I remembered it last night.” I sank down into the chair across the table from her. “I remembered her fighting with Jericho. He hit her!” Bobo flinched. My voice started to break but I pushed on. “They were yelling and throwing things, breaking things.” I buried my face in my hands and choked out the rest through tears. “Windy was in bed with me and we both heard it. We were both scared.”
I lifted my head and looked at Bobo. “Tell me about Mama. The truth, all of it. I want to know. I have a right to know.”
“Sugar, you hadn’t ought to a’come here.” Her own eyes filled with tears but she didn’t cry. “Won’t do you no good a’tall to know about all this. You was better off—”
“Better off a freak? Better off taking a razor blade and slicing up my arm just so I could feel something instead of the emptiness inside me?” I yanked up my sleeve and showed her the thin white marks marching like railroad ties up the inside of my left arm.
“You cut your own—?”
“Better off sleep-walking and terrorized by nightmares, so timid I jump at my own shadow?” I was crying so hard I could barely get the words out. “You can’t forget your whole childhood and be normal, Bobo!”
She got up slowly and hobbled to the counter where a paper towel holder was mounted under the cabinet. She ripped off one, started to turn, then ripped off a second towel and came back to the table. She handed one to me and clasped the other in her knobby, disfigured fingers.
“Susan was a alcoholic.” She sat down in the chair and whispered the rest. “Just like Joel.”
“Joel?”
“Not your brother, Joel. My Joel, my boy. He hit a tree going 70 miles an hour ‘cause he was too drunk to keep the car on the road.”
She wadded the paper towel into a tight ball in her hand.
“If your mama ever put a drop of liquor in her mouth before she met Jericho Johnson, I never seen it!” Then she shook her head. “But I s’pose there could have been a lot I didn’t see. Shoot, I didn’t even know she was going out with your daddy ‘til she come home one day and said she was knocked up.”
I never saw Bobo’s incoming rounds quick enough to duck. This time, my head may actually have snapped back from the psychic blow because she looked at me questioningly.
“You did know your mama and daddy had to get married, didn’t you?”
“I like to think they chose to get married.” I sniffled. I wasn’t crying anymore, but there was a hitch in my breathing, like a little kid after a tantrum. I tried to breathe deep to make it stop but it hung on like the hiccups. “As soon as I was old enough to do the math on the wedding date and my birthday, I figured it out.”
“Susan wasn’t what you’d call wild, just headstrong. She was only 18, but she up and decided she was going to get married and move to Kentucky and you couldn’t have changed her mind for love nor money. Wasn’t nobody in the world any better with horses than Simon and he’d got his self a job taking care of thoroughbreds.”
She made a humph sound in her throat.
“Cecil liked to a’swallowed a goat when she told him.”
I knew that, too. Mama hadn’t put it quite as colorfully as Bobo, but she told me once her father had been less than thrilled.
“That’s when Cecil changed the trust, said he wasn’t goin’ to give Susan her inheritance when she turned 21 like he done the boys. She needed to grow up some. If she didn’t have no more sense than that, she could just wait ‘til she was 30.”
Bobo unconsciously wadded up the paper towel, then unwadded it as she spoke.
“I s’pose she might a’been drinking all along. But she went to school when you was a little bitty thing and become a secretary, and she took care of herself and you just fine after your daddy left. And I never seen no sign of her drinkin’ when she first moved back to Goshen after Joel was kilt.”
Bobo’s voice changed.
“Then she met Jericho and her whole life went to hell in a hand basket.”
A dozen questions buzzed around in my head, angry hornets shaken up in a Mason jar. But I kept silent. I didn’t squeeze the soap.
“She hadn’t ought to a’married Jericho. I tried to tell her but she wouldn’t listen to a meddlin’ old woman.” She reached into her mouth and removed the lower plate of her dentures but left the top plate in place. Only her lower lip caved into her face, but I was used to it by then and I hardly noticed.
“He wasn’t no good.” She took my hand in her gnarled fingers and squeezed, and her husky voice had a sharp steel edge. “Jericho was a bad man, Annie. Not just selfish bad or crude or plain ornery. He was evil.”
She released my hand and massaged her gums absentmindedly.
“Susan couldn’t see it, though. She was lonely and Jericho was good looking and he paid her lots of attention, made her feel pretty and wanted again.” She sighed. “Soon as she married him, it was like she become a drunk overnight. Him being a bartender, he could hold his liquor, and he knowed how to make them sweet drinks, daiquiris and such, that tasted like sody pop. Ever now and again I’d see him set out a drink for her on the bedside table before he went to work at night—so she could have it soon as she opened up her eyes the next morning!”
“I remembered hearing them through the pipes, yelling at each other. Jericho was hateful and mean … “ I stopped and struggled to get the words out. “But Bobo, Mama sounded just as bad! She was so drunk she couldn’t even stand up. I heard her falling into things, she pitched a music box through the window and screamed at Jericho like a—”
“Don’t you sit there and judge your mama!” Bobo’s tone slapped me hard in the face. “You wasn’t there. You don’t know. You ain’t never been married. You ain’t never loved a man and give him your whole self like she done Jericho, and then he throws it all back in your face. Annie, a man can drag a woman down, turn her into something she never was. That, and booze, it can … change you.”
“But Bobo, why—?”
“I’m done. I ain’t talking ‘bout this no more.” She didn’t bark at me though, just said it quiet, sad. “I loved my Susie.” Her voice cracked. “She was all I had left.”
She wasn’t crying, but tears streamed down her wrinkled face and she made no effort to wipe them away with the paper towel crumpled in a ball in her hand.
“The rest was gone, all of them gone. And that man was destroyin’ her.”
She stood up, put her hands on the table and leaned toward me.
“But what could I do?” Her eyes were pleading. “Who was I gonna tell about it, about what was going on in this house? Who could I go to for help, an old woman nobody’d believe?”
She straightened up, buried her face in her hands and her shoulders began to shake. I went to her, put my arms around her and pulled her close. She felt so fragile, her bones like the thin sticks in a baby bird’s wings. The tears on my wet face dripped down off my chin into her wispy white hair.
“I’m sorry, Bobo. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to watch your only daughter ruin her life.”
“Not just her life. Joel’s, too.”
“Jo
el’s?”
She pulled out of my arms and stepped back so she could look up at me.
“That’s what wrong with him.” She saw the shock on my face and her gaze softened in sympathy. “I guess you didn’t know that, did you, Missy?”
She reached out and patted my arm, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Some big structure inside me collapsed like a skyscraper imploding, and the roar rumbled with the tinnitus in my ears so loud Bobo’s words barely made it through.
“We didn’t know at the time, of course, but later. We found out later. Her drinkin’ when she was pregnant with him done something. Messed up something. That’s why he’s slow like he is.”
Joel! My precious Joel. He’s a Fetal Alcohol Syndrome child.
“After Susie got sober at AA, she spent the rest of her life trying to make up for the mistakes she made when she was married to Jericho.” She shook her head, eased back down into the chair and added softly, “All the mistakes she made.”
But I barely heard her. I wasn’t listening to Bobo. I was listening to my mother.
“I swear before God I didn’t intend to … but I’m going to burn in hell for it just the same.”
Is that what Mama meant? Was she talking about Joel?
The doorbell sang its ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong-ding chorus. Julia called out her presence from the parlor and waddled into the kitchen where Bobo was seated at the table and I was standing beside her. She could see we both were upset and turned to leave us alone.
“I weel get the dirty clothes now, sí?”
Bobo suddenly pushed her chair back and stood up. When she looked at Julia, her face was an empty room, blank and vacant.
“What’d you put this in my pocket for?” She reached into the folds of her apron, the one she kept hanging on a hook by the back door under her prairie settler bonnet, and pulled a can of WD-40 from the pocket. “I ain’t got no use for this stuff.”
She held it out and Julia took it without comment, just shot me a glance Bobo didn’t see.
