One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  “Mama?” she heard. It was Emerson Bridge, climbing back through the window.

  She stood, her body perched forward, her mouth rushing out the words “What if I got you a little cow to buddy with? It’s what they call a steer. You could love it and it love you.”

  “That wasn’t kind what I did with the rock. I’m sorry.” His words came just as fast.

  Then silence. It hung in the air like a third person.

  She saw his eyes swollen and his cheeks flat. “That rock don’t matter, hon. Just you.”

  He wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve. Four inches at least of his wrist showed. He’d had the coat for close to two years. She could buy him a new one with the money they’d make with the steer. She’d look for a nice green to set off his eyes.

  “What about that little steer, hon? Would you like you one? There’s this big cow show, and the best one gets a nice blue ribbon and y’all would have your picture on the front page of the newspaper together. Y’all would be famous.” She started to say “And we’d get a lot of money,” but that was her worry. He was just a boy.

  He kept his arm over his eyes and began to nod, the red of his hair vibrant in the midday sun that lit up the room. “I’d be kind to it,” he said.

  Harold had done well with him. “I know you would. You’re a kind little boy.”

  He slid his arm down his face and peered over it. “Why did Papa die, Mama?”

  This was the first question he’d asked since she’d found him in the automobile. “Hard times, hon. He died of hard times.”

  He slid his arm back over his eyes. She wondered if he would ask what that meant. She didn’t want to tell him his papa couldn’t live with what he’d done and drank himself to death. She’d just say had he that bad phlegm.

  His eyes peered over again.

  She swallowed and readied herself.

  But his eyes looked heavier than that question. They looked to be carrying something more, like he wanted her to hold him.

  The curtain behind him whipped his way, but Sarah felt the urging at her back. She stepped towards him. But what if he didn’t want her to, but was just wondering why she didn’t.

  She moved in no further.

  She could not delay getting the steer. He needed a buddy and now.

  Maybe Mr. Dobbins would sell her one and let her pay on it like she was doing for the land and burial. She recalled the $32.50 she would clear each month. She would go to see him the next day and pledge $30 a month. They could live off her dressmaking until the steer won the cow show. That was one year away.

  She sat back down. She’d made wrinkles in his bedspread. She ran her flat hand over it, smoothing it out. She would make it clean, wash it and hang it out to dry.

  MARCH 17, 1951

  LC lay under his bed that early morning in darkness, save for the light from his horse lamp on his night table. He lay with his arms tucked tight beneath him, his legs pressed together. He thought if he could fold up into himself, he might disappear.

  “Get your hard clothes on, boy, not that baby git-up your mama lets you wear.” It was his father, shouting up the stairs.

  On LC’s pajamas, little brown horses ran sprinkled about and free. He pictured the one on his pocket over his heart. He looked like he might run the fastest. LC named him Shortcake.

  “He’s too little, Big LC, don’t,” his mother said.

  Yeah, too little, LC thought, but Shortcake would protect him. The horse would take him some place far away. LC jumped on. They went galloping off across pastures and creeks.

  “But LC’s not Charles, Big LC. And Charles was older and wanted to and asked for it the first time.”

  His father’s boots slapped the wooden steps. Indians with their hard hands slapping against their open mouths, a steady yell calling through. Shortcake was running now. LC, his knees bent, and holding on.

  “Hey, boy!” his father called from the door, his big boots showing through the fringe on the bottom of LC’s bedspread, Shortcake’s mane. Shortcake outrunning the Indians, the wind blowing back the dark hair of his mane. LC blew on the fringe, making it move in the wind.

  “Get out from under there.” His father stuck his long arm through. Tomahawks now raised, Shortcake running harder.

  His father yanked him to his feet. “Today’s the first day of your education. Today you start being a true Dobbins man.”

  The Indians’ faces marked with red stripes. LC thought it could be blood.

  “You a man?” his father asked.

  LC wasn’t, but told him, “Yes sir.”

  “What kind?”

  He recalled his father’s exact words. “A Dobbins man. A true one, Daddy.”

  His father thumped LC’s shoulder. “The truck’ll be leaving in ten minutes.”

  LC bent his knees like he was in a saddle.

  He and Shortcake would go again.

  …..

  LC’s father put the shotgun in LC’s arms. It was heavy. LC had never held one. It felt cold and hard like the devil he’d learned about in Sunday school.

  They were at Parson’s Mountain, an hour south of Anderson. Daybreak was on the cusp with the first hint of light showing itself. They stood in cover at the edge of the woods, a field of green before them. LC had on corduroy pants, a flannel shirt, and a denim jacket.

  “That’s a 16 gauge there, a Browning, the best there is,” his father told him and slapped him on his back, the front of the gun flipping up and hitting LC in the forehead.

  His father got in behind him and helped him get the gun back on balance. “Nature’s got its own rules, boy. Number one is not to have no racket out here. No deer’s gonna come up with racket. You understand me?”

  LC nodded. His arms shook.

  His father pushed LC’s left hand out along the barrel, until it reached a wooden holding place, his arm stretching so far, it hurt. Then he placed LC’s index finger on his right hand against the trigger. It was curved like Shortcake’s tail when he ran real fast. Like now. They were running fast together. “It’s all about lining up. Look down the barrel there, and put it dead on one of them hardwoods across over there.” His father now guiding his arm to the left. LC lining up with a big tree, the kind they had in the yard, the kind he liked to climb and hide in.

  “Now we just wait. They like young grass,” his father said. “Then he’s ours.”

  LC imagined his knees bent, a bad man chasing him and Shortcake. Run faster, Shortcake. Faster. The horse’s hooves digging into the ground, throwing up clumps of grass, the bad guy tripping and falling, LC and Shortcake running free.

  “There he is,” his father whispered. “Shoot it.”

  A small deer bent to the grass about twenty yards away, snapped off several blades with its mouth and then returned its head high, making quick movements left and right, while it chewed. A few blades hung from its mouth.

  “I said, ‘Shoot it.’”

  His father’s arms around him tighter now the way LC’s legs wrapped around Shortcake, him and Shortcake good pals. The bad man was back on his feet, his arms extended towards the horse’s rear end and LC.

  LC closed his eyes.

  He pulled the trigger. The blast scaring Shortcake.

  The deer went down.

  LC’s knees giving way, his father catching him and going down with him.

  The sound of the gun echoing.

  …..

  Ike Thrasher walked out of the dressing room at Sears & Roebuck in a new denim shirt and rider jeans so stiff they could stand by themselves and in pointed-toe black cowboy boots so shiny he could see himself curling his mustache in them. On his head, he set a cowboy hat, also black. It was too big for him, but he hoped no one would notice.

  Just outside the store, on the square in downtown Anderson, under a sky of unfettered blue, sat his new pickup truck, a ’47 Ford, fresh washed and green with black fenders. He’d bought it that very morning at Scarboro Motors on South Main, traded in his Buick for an eve
n swap. He had thought that they would call him back into the store and tell him that it was all a tease, that there was no way that Isaiah Ferdinand Thrasher belonged in a truck like that. But he had gotten away with it. They let him drive it off the lot.

  He laid the sack with his old clothes and wingtips in the floorboard and then scooted his slick-bottomed boots up front to the hood, where he tried to lean as if he’d been leaning there his entire life. His clothes, though, being skin tight and of the western fit, kept him from accommodating much of a slant. He crossed his fingers that someone would notice, like one of the men at the McDuffie Street Boarding House two blocks east.

  But no one did. What thrilled him, though, was that no one pointed at him and laughed. Or called him names that he himself used to laugh at, but not when he was alone.

  The big clock on the courthouse showed almost ten o’clock. It was Saturday, and typically he’d be at the cowboy picture show at the State Theatre, his favorite cowboy being Roy Rogers. But this day he had something more important to do, strike a deal with Mrs. Creamer.

  He’d begun his preparations the afternoon before. After seeing the steer at Richbourgs, he visited the Agriculture Department on Towers Street and found out that the biggest cattleman in all of Anderson County was a fellow named Mr. L. C. Dobbins, Sr. His older son, Charles, had won a string of Grand Championships. Ike then made one other stop, the South Carolina National Bank, where he’d withdrawn a crisp one hundred dollar bill. His balance showed only $89.02, but the steer was worth it.

  That morning, he allowed himself one more thing. He scooted to the back of his truck, which he imagined as Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, and saw himself do what the cowboy king liked to do in the movies, go airborne over the animal’s rear end, only to deliver himself into the saddle. He was ready now to head out to the Creamers. He would liked to have rolled his window down, not because it was on the verge of being warm, but because he’d seen other men ride with their windows that way. But the wind the open window would bring might blow his hat off, and that was reason enough to keep his windows where they were, closed and tight and safe.

  When he approached his father’s land this time, he looked to the right side of the road, at the eighty-two acres Ike had sold to another cotton farmer. The land was fresh-plowed and ready for planting. But the old home place up ahead he could not see for the trees and overgrown shrubs and weeds that stood tall and unsupervised. He inched his truck forward, letting it take him within a few feet of the dirt driveway, where he could see part of the house, the once white boards showing the worst kind of gray and the roof on the front porch sagging deep.

  He parked his truck along the road and stepped towards the driveway, stopping just short of its edge. He aimed the tips of his boots towards an address that once carried love. Didn’t it? Didn’t the address of Mr. Isaiah Ferdinand Thrasher, Sr., Route 2, Anderson, S.C., once carry love?

  And like no time had passed at all, Ike became a boy of four and five and six, each version of himself rising higher among his father’s stalks of cotton. “Take a look, Junior,” his father would say, “one day you’ll be the King of Cotton in all of Anderson County, just like me.” The laughter would come next, first from his father and then Ike following and mimicking. It was ever growing, their laughter, so much that people all around could hear. Couldn’t they hear?

  But in Ike’s seventh year, the laughter stopped one Saturday morning when he was riding in the back of his father’s wagon, Ike and a boy named James, a tenant on his father’s farm. They were on their way to pick cotton in early September, one of those mornings that offered a glimpse of the relief from heat that was to come. The light showcased James’s jaw, the line of hard bone that girded the muscles flexing from the apple he was eating. Ike felt his own jawbone and found it unsubstantial like a match stick in the tin container by his mother’s woodstove. But it was James’s eyes of blue the light favored the most, carrying the powdery quality of Ike’s mother’s talcum and falling somewhere between a soft baby and a deep royal. To Ike, it was the blue of bluebirds, the most beautiful color God had created. Ike kissed the boy on his cheek.

  His father stopped the wagon hard, and both Ike and James fell to the ground. His father grabbed James by his shirt. “You say a word about this, and you and your people will be out of here so fast, you’ll feel like a chicken with your neck ringed.” Then his father threw Ike into the back of the wagon and whipped the horses with his reins until they got to the church up the road, where his father dragged Ike inside to the altar and threw him to the floor. “I know you’re pushing all the boy you got, but the Lord’s going to have to help you push some more.”

  Ike didn’t know what was wrong with kissing a bluebird, but his father did. Ike decided to become a preacher that day. On his father’s deathbed some twenty-five years later, his father told him, “You never fooled me once. You been wearing a preacher’s git-up all this time, but until you become a real man and can look in the good Lord’s eyes and not have him spit on you, you better not step one blame foot on this place, not even the tip of your fancy wancy wingtips. If there was another soul on earth I could leave all this to, I would. But I’m stuck with you.” The next Sunday, Ike quit preaching, and, within six months, he had sold all the land except the house and five acres.

  The smell of dirt found its way to Ike’s nostrils. It surprised him, how familiar the smell was. He’d been thinking he’d taken nothing from his past.

  He called up in his mind that steer and ran his hands down his thighs, his hands at first held flat, but they became fists, which he squeezed, until he felt a toughness rise up in him. “Not yet, Daddy,” he said out loud. “But almost. I’m about to be a real man. A cattleman.” He turned back towards his truck and began to run, holding onto his hat and listening as his soles slapped the hardness beneath him. He wondered if this was how Roy Rogers’s boots sounded and let himself believe it so.

  …..

  Luther Dobbins went to the center of his big lot out from his barn, turned on the spigot at his watering trough for his cattle, and placed his hands under the running water. They were covered in deer blood, dried hard and cracking on his skin. “Rule number two,” he had said to his boy when they both were able to gather back on their feet, “got to give each party its due.” Then Luther picked up the gun and walked with LC to the deer, lying on its side. Inside the animal’s wound, at its neck, Luther sunk his fingers and brought them, warm with blood, to his boy’s face, running them first along his forehead and then down each cheek. Luther dipped his fingers in again, and this time brought them to the gun, to its barrel, and said, “Y’all are marked now.”

  A breeze brought the scent of pine his way, pungent against the smell of blood, musky and dank. A whole strip of pines grew at his back, beginning a few yards behind him on the other side of the hammer-mill shed and stretching past his house to the road. They were planted as seedlings, upwards of fifty of them, close to seven years ago, soon after LC was born. His wife, Mildred, had begged him to plant them, said she wanted something special to mark LC’s birth. But Luther didn’t like pines. Pines were weak. They let the wind blow them however the wind wanted. He only agreed to plant them to shield his big house from Uncle’s tenant house across the field.

  LC was no longer with Luther. He was inside the house. He had run there as soon as they returned home. Mildred was probably in there scrubbing his face and hands raw. Luther had wanted to start on LC’s second lesson of the day, learning how to help Uncle operate Luther’s prized hammer mill, the only one in Anderson County. It ground his corn into fine, edible specks for his cattle. And then he’d planned to take LC down into the pasture, walk among his herd of five dozen Herefords, and show LC the steer that was certain to be the next 1952 Fat Cattle Show & Sale Grand Champion. Luther had picked it out himself. The animal was one of five steers, each a year old, the prime age for feeding out. It was wide between the eyes, which would mean broad in width and frame. All of Charles’s wi
nners had looked that way, and he’d won Grand Champion every year since 1942. Charles was Luther’s older boy, a student at Clemson College and too old to compete. Charles always had selected his own steer, but he didn’t pick out LC’s for the last show. Luther had.

  And Luther had let LC run on.

  Why had he done that?

  He pulled his hands from the water. Ribbons of red, some wide, others in strings, swirled in his wake. The red-and-white-striped top LC used to play with when he could barely walk, Luther with him on the floor, the top beside them, Luther priming the long knob in the middle, making it spin faster. The two of them laughing. The top slowing and stopping and LC pointing to the toy and looking at Luther as if Luther could do all things. Luther priming. The top spinning. His boy laughing. Luther was beating the top and winning.

  He looked back at the pines, tossing in the breeze, free to go here and there without fear of losing. They could be playing. Couldn’t they be playing? A boy should be playing.

  He imagined his boy running to him. To him, Luther Dobbins. Running without being called, prodded, urged, shouted at, demanded. Running because he thought his father could do all things.

  Luther took off running to the pine that was the tallest, the strongest, the one with the most to show. It grew the third from the road. But he stopped at the first one from the shed, the weakness, the littlest, the one that had to try the hardest. There, on the bark, he saw ladybugs, a whole procession of them marching up the trunk like they were going to a burial. He wanted them to play and put his finger beside one, pushing it out of line in a playful shove. But the bug lay tilted on its right side, its left legs in the air and spinning. Luther was too rough with it. LC would not be so rough, not nearly. “LC!” he called out. “LC!” he called again, this time louder and kept his eyes on the back porch screened door, some fifty long, bloody feet away.