"Merry Christmas," he says, giving me half the coconut. "Now go bake us a cake." He joins up with the others and they all ride out, talking loud about where to get hold of some moonshine.
I set out trying to recall how Momma once made a coconut cake, starting with the flour, then the eggs, thinking all the while that it takes almost a week to get to New Orleans and back.
I am frosting a good-looking cake when who comes in through the door but Mr. Frank, the day's sunlight lit up behind his head. His right eye is black but he is smiling to see me, and I rush to him and hug him tight.
"How you doin', Addy?" he whispers.
"Tolerable well," I whisper back.
We break away so we can have a look at each other.
"Miss Irene told me where to find you."
"What happened to your eye?" I ask.
"Never mind about that," he says.
"That happen in New Orleans?"
"New Orleans is grand, Addy. You would love it." He tells me about the plank sidewalks there and the women's fancy hairstyles, their hair threaded with gold ropes and embroidered ribbons such as he's never seen. His left eye is still bright with the city. I imagine that even the soles of his shoes still smell of the trampled fruit from a New Orleans marketplace.
"I wanted to give you these." Mr. Frank, he holds up a pair of store-bought shoes. Not girl shoes that dig into my ankles, like he made me. These here are boy shoes. Work shoes already made soft. Walking shoes. Running shoes. I put them on my feet and my feet are yelling out their thank-yous. I join up with them. These here store-bought boy shoes are my first comfortable shoes.
I say, "Oh, oh, oh." And when I look at him, his one eye is watering.
"And Miss Irene, she wanted me to give you these." He hands over a jar of peaches from his ma's pantry and a coat, a good, blue wool coat that fits me just right. Not too small, but still big enough for me to grow into.
"Merry Christmas, Addy."
I look into Mr. Frank's one watering eye and think how far he and me have both come. He used to hate O'Donnells. I can't forget that. He said we were "self-willed" and "haughty." He said we were "undisciplined" and "filthy." He said words I know the meanings of now. I don't know when that changed and I don't care to know. All I know is that he looks at me differently now. It takes a little bit of bravery to change your way of thinking about people, and I can't help but ponder: Would other people change like Mr. Frank? Could Pappy? Could I?
"I sure wish I had some little something to give you, Mr. Frank," I say, looking around the room.
"Being right here's enough."
Maybe someday I can do something for Mr. Frank. Maybe someday he'll even ask.
I think about their Christmas and mine.
I think how nice it would have been to wake up in Mr. Frank's fine house that morning, light a fire, milk the cow, open a present, and be with them both.
"What did you bring back Miss Irene?"
He lowers his head and says, "Just a few things. Some calico and coconuts."
I always have been slow. This I know. But right now, I want to hurl that beautiful coconut cake outside the door.
"What happened, Mr. Frank?" I am just barely whispering.
"It's none of your concern, Addy. It was just another robbery. Happens a lot nowadays."
"How many of 'em?"
He looks at me square. "Four."
The two of us, we sit there, knowing what we know.
"Mr. Frank? Did you want to grow up and be like your pa?"
Mr. Frank, he sits and thinks on that. "I wanted to be like everyone else but me. I wanted to be like my brother, my pa, and my grandpa." He smiles kindly at me. "But you see, I was wrong to want that. You become who you were meant to become, and you can spend a lifetime trying to figure out who you were meant to become."
I nod, pretending I understand what all he's talking about. "I love my pappy," I say, thinking, pondering, itching my head. "It makes me terrible sick that I don't like him."
"I reckon I gotta shoot your eyes out when I see you." It is Pappy's dark shape standing there at the door, and from the sound of his voice, I know he has found moonshine. He staggers in and slaps Mr. Frank on the back. "By ginger, have a drink with me, Shanks."
"I don't drink."
"That's not what I hear."
"I best be going."
"Leaving No-Bob? So soon?" Pappy eyeballs him up and down.
"You don't need to come here starting fights, Mr. O'Donnell."
"I don't start fights, mister. I finish them."
"He came to visit with me, Pappy. He is our guest."
"I came here to see Addy. I didn't come here to fetch anything that is mine." Mr. Frank is looking at all the bounty.
I am glad when Pappy yawns. That means he is all out of ideas and mischief. I give Mr. Frank a little push on the arm. I whisper, "Leave now."
Mr. Frank leaves on his horse and Pappy swipes his finger across the top of the cake, licking the icing, while I watch Mr. Frank ride away.
I hear something break and I turn around to see my jar of pine branches broken on the floor. Pappy screams and curses, saying I should know by now how much he hates anything from the outside inside. He never wants to see pine branches or flowers inside his house again, and he sure doesn't want them or anything like them on his grave. I don't say it, but I think it: Pappy will never have to worry about somebody putting flowers on his grave.
That night all the O'Donnells come round for a big frolic and all the men come in sweaty, bragging loud and jostling each other. They greet each other with some special, silly handshake, making up words starting with kl, like klavern, kleagle, kluupa, and klonvocation. And they say all this with their low, serious voices and I can hardly stop myself from laughing out loud.
The women are quiet and set to work. They know to do just that, stay low and quiet. All the O'Donnell women are bony and quiet, their hair pulled back in tight buns and their thin lips set to stay shut. You don't see them smile much. They do not speak because they know not to. More than a few of them have black eyes from the night before, when they might have spoken out of turn.
Hams, turkey, chicken, all sorts of jam and jellies, come out from people's smokehouses and cellars; berry pie, buttermilk, and hot corn pone, and I keep thinking, Where was all this fine food when me and Momma were so hungry? The men eat first and the boys and girls fill in, then the women eat last while the children get dusty wrestling and playing leapfrog.
Smasher wishes me a happy Saturday. He says "Satidy." He hands me over a bunch of wildflowers in a jar, which I put away in the smokehouse, not in Pappy's house.
"Addy?" Smasher says to me. His breath smells of moonshine and he still hasn't bathed. But there's a sweetness to him, a sweetness I imagine Momma saw in Pappy. "Why you go and put my flowers in the smokehouse, Addy? Why you bein' so mean to me?"
"Never you mind, Smasher. Go on. I'm busy."
He puts both his hands on my shoulders and smashes his dried-out lips into mine. He smashes so hard I can feel his two front teeth. He steps away, smiling. Now I know how he got his name.
"If you ain't the blessedest," he says, smiling, showing his dirty, brown teeth.
And this is my first kiss. From Smasher. And all I feel like doing now is washing my mouth out with soap.
"I told you to wait," Pappy says. "I suppose now I gotta knock all your teeth out."
Smasher thinks Pappy is kidding, but I can see by his face that he is not. I can smell Pappy's anger and it smells like a fish coming out of a fire.
"Ah, Smasher," I say. "What you need teeth for, anyway?" I say.
He waits and thinks on this. "To chew," he says.
"No," I say. "To keep your gums from sticking together."
It takes both Pappy and Smasher a minute, but when they laugh, they clap their hands together and then slap each other's backs. Oh but they like that one. I back away, relieved they aren't fighting.
Pappy brings out his fiddle, an
d Eustace, who usually never says a word, calls out, "Hoedown!" and fixes to call out the dances loud and clear. Soon enough the menfolk, married and single, are slinging the single women around, dancing and having themselves a big time. Most of the married women clean up or stand against the walls and watch. Some clap their hands and stomp along. They are careful not to dance with anyone but their husbands, for to do otherwise will start a fight.
Everybody loves my coconut cake, but I can't eat a bite. Everywhere I look is O'Donnell, O'Donnell, O'Donnell.
***
That night around the fire, I listen to Pappy and the other men talk. It all comes out in stories meant to be funny, meant to make people laugh. There is the story about the black man who didn't tip his hat as he passed and the white man who killed him, put him in a hollow log, and sunk his body in the swamp. There is the story about the black man they dragged out of bed only to beat out his eyes with corncobs. There is story after story, each one more embroidered, stories of torture and killing, stories of white men pestering black men, white men pestering Indians, and at the end of each telling, there is some punch line or twist that makes the white man win, and everybody laughs, relieved.
When I was in the kitchen with the women, or outside stirring a pot, I used to love listening to women talk. Momma would tell somebody how to make a tea or a salve. Somebody else would tell how someone was cured or saved. I used to love their hear-tell. But our men's stories are different. They talk about how people get hurt.
"Gimme that," a girl says to her little sister. She takes a ball from out of her hand and the little girl starts crying. Their mother slaps the crying girl on the head. The sister with the ball laughs and sticks her tongue out.
I look around at all the other women and children at the fire, listening to the stories their men tell. And I can't help but think that the children in No-Bob turn out just as mean as their mommas and pappies because this is where they learn all about mean.
Maybe Mr. Frank was right the first time about all of us O'Donnells. Mean just makes more mean.
Finally, Pappy tells his story of thieving Mr. Frank and it is told all night again and again, each time the laughter rising louder and louder when Pappy says low and serious, "You know, they used to call him 'Shanks.'" And that gets everybody laughing even louder and I can't do a thing about any of it.
After all the fun and carrying on, and after all the women and children leave, the men stay behind and Pappy's talk turns serious. He talks about what a terrible, sorrowful job Ulysses Grant is doing in Washington and how ex-Confederates have to work hard to get their vote back, seeing how they are now banned from voting. He says it's not right to fight and fight for your country, then come home and not be able to vote. He says he wishes he'd never seen the violence and slaughter he saw at the Battle of Franklin, but to hear him tell it, I'm not so sure. For five hours his commander charged his soldiers to move forward. Seventeen hundred and fifty of them killed, 3,800 wounded, 702 missing. "My flesh trembles when I think of it. Would to God that I never witnessed such a scene."
We hear a screech owl.
In the Bloody Angle area at Spotsylvania, Pappy says he and his repelled thousands of charging Yankees at Fort Gregg, throwing rocks when ammunition gave out. Some of them even went with Robert E. Lee when he surrendered at Appomattox. They called themselves the Smith County Defenders because they weren't fighting for anything—they were defending.
"So tell me," Pappy says. "We come home, broken, and we're supposed to stand aside and watch those colored boys vote while we can't?"
I stay down low under my quilt, and as I listen I think, How much of this meanness I see now started with warring? How much of all these everyday violent ways began with battlefield battles? Mr. Smith, Pappy, and so many other men were paid and taught to kill for a cause, then they lost and they were supposed to go home peaceful, legally bound now to a new united country. Wasn't that asking too much? Who thought of these rules?
"I'm glad Grant said for Mississippi to work it out. I don't want no government handouts," Pappy says.
"The Klan don't have no use for the carpetbaggers and scallywags making the rules," somebody says. "Don't have no use for them no way."
"You hear that fellow from Maine is planning to run for governor of Mississippi? What's his name, Ames?" Pappy says.
I hear, "Jesus God Almighty."
"They look down on us; all of them do up north," Pappy says. "But I tell you what. I'd rather be somebody's enemy than someone's loser. Course, I'd rather be neither. I'd rather just be Mark O'Donnell, only better off, but how am I supposed to do that?" He stares at the fire, thinking on the circle he just talked himself into. His face is filled with furrows and canals where dirt has caked in. He still parts his hair down the middle, but that's only when he parts his hair. Tonight it's slicked back, then thrown off to both sides helter-skelter. His ears poke out uneven and his chin has a cleft that Momma always liked. The worry lines across Pappy's forehead look like all the rivers running in these parts, rivers that don't ever meet up and don't ever seem to end.
When I wake up before the sun, I put on my new store-bought boy shoes and carefully, quietly step over all the sleeping men. The room smells like man feet and man breath. I don't see Pappy, but I do see Smasher, who is asleep and snoring on his back with his mouth open, a line of spittle running into a puddle on the ground.
I stop when I see one man sleeping in a hood-and-mask costume. I walk around this still figure, lying sprawled out and asleep on the ground. I recognize the hood and then the hood's mask. It is the fancy hood with the extra slits above the eyes, mouth, and nose, like worry lines, that belonged to the man who lit the match that lit the cross that fell on the colored schoolhouse and burned it down and killed Jess Still.
I stand still for a very long time, looking down, staring at this person covered in a sheet with the mask. I do not have to pull off the mask to know who this is, but I do. I have to. I do it carefully. I bend down. I take the ends in my fingers, and quietly, gently, I lift the hood from the sleeping head it covers. Without thinking, I ball up the hood in my fists and stuff it in my pocket.
When I see him, when I recognize for sure that this here is my own pappy, I cannot say that I am surprised, but for a minute I cannot breathe. He does not wake up. He sleeps on like a baby. What could he be dreaming?
I think, Now it is worse because the killers are not only just men, one of them is my pappy. If they were monsters, we would just get rid of them and not think twice. But they are men. They are our men. They are one of us. They are who we are. And him? He is my pappy. He is who I am.
Pappy, who people say is such a jokester in No-Bob. My pappy, who lives to make people laugh. It was Pappy who burned a cross over thirty feet high in front of the colored people's church. It was Pappy who killed my sweet little friend named Jess Still.
Last night they said they were curing what they called the horrors of anarchy and reckless Negro rule. But Pappy and these O'Donnell men? These men are stirring up a fight when there is no fight. These men, this whole nation of men, were forced to quit the war in 1865, when they lost. Then they got mad and started to fight each other. They are trying to make it so that it is like it was before all the fighting and they kill anybody and everybody who disagrees.
I put together what I've known all along but couldn't admit to myself. I think of the talk last night, what Pappy said, the secret handshakes. All around me are my people. All around me are violent men, killers, members of the Klan. I could run and tell Mr. Frank now so he could get the sheriff who has the warrant for Pappy's arrest, but I think, No, I cannot, should not. Already I have brought too much trouble to the Russell home.
I look down at my sleeping pappy. If I could, I would shake him awake this instant and stand before him and tell it to his face. I would say to him, Pappy? You are a killer and a thief. You have stolen so much from so many. You have taken lives. You will not steal from me. You will not steal away my life. But I c
ould never say this to his face.
I look around at all the passed-out, sleeping men in this grungy one-room house, and it's like seeing the map in Mr. Frank's schoolhouse for the first time. I see exactly where I am now, and I know what to do. I do just what Pappy would do if he were his own little girl. I bundle up some leftover cornbread and sweet potatoes in my quilt. I put on my new blue coat and tie the quilt around me so the food won't fall out. I take the asafetida bag from my pocket and hang it around my neck.
Then I step over everybody laying there on the ground and I keep stepping and stepping and stepping until I am running. And I keep running. I only have one plan and that plan is to get out.
You have to cross No-Bob to cross out of No-Bob and I do. I run across No-Bob and away into the piny woods where the trees sway like dancers and the hills are snakes curling their backs.
Chapter 9
Once in the woods, I walk the paths that few know, past misty fields sprayed with leftover, worn-out corn and rows of longleaf pines standing soldier straight. I say hey to the frogs and the rabbits and the birds and Mr. Snake who slithers into some sunshine to sun himself.
When I need to do my business, I squat in the field like a partridge.
I keep moving to stay warm. I walk further away from the roads, to where the pines grow closer together, to where horses can't pass through. I am grateful for the shoes and the good, warm coat Mr. Frank gave me. Did he know? Did he know how I would need and use them both? I only wish I'd taken the jar of peaches. No peaches better than the ones from those two trees in front of Little Bit's house. Little Bit and Jack are two lucky people, to have all the fried chicken and peaches they can eat. Do they know their own good fortune?
When I Crossed No-Bob Page 8
