by Barry Hannah
Minny was asleep.
The boys had found a king snake in the garage. The oldest boy hit it over the head with the hammer. Then he wrapped it around the hammer handle. The youngest boy brought it into the house.
Daryl hitched a ride with his partner at the realty and drank a hot beer in the car to calm his nerves, but when he opened the door he sensed that everything was not all right. He knew that he was two bourbons away from peace, and in his desperation he opened the wrong door, not the cabinet under the sink but the basement door, and tumbled down the rotten stairs.
The youngest boy heard the air-conditioner running in his parents’ bedroom. He opened the door and saw Minny asleep beside the baby girl. He knew it was a sin for his mother to be asleep in the daytime, the baby-sitter gone.
He looked at her awhile. Then he hit her in the mouth with the hammer.
It woke her up. It also woke up the snake, who had been only stunned by the blow in the garage. The snake unwound itself from the hammer handle and fell on the bed. It rose and twisted since half its nerves were gone. It almost stood up. The boy was horrified and fled the room.
When this woman saw it, she thought she was still in a dream and she felt very guilty for her sleep.
Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt
Mother Rooney of Titpea Street, that little fifty yards of dead-end crimped macadam east off North State, crept home from the Jitney Jungle in the falling afternoon of October 1965. She had on her high-laced leather sneakers and her dress of blue teacup roses; she had a brooch the size of an Easter egg pinned on at her booby crease; she clutched a wrapped-up lemon fish filet, fresh from Biloxi, under her armpit.
Mother Rooney had been served at the Jitney by Mimsie Grogan, an ancient girl who had converted back in the thirties to Baptist. Mimsie would hiss at her about this silly disgusting ritual of Fridays as she wrapped the fish. Mother Rooney was Catholic. She was old, she had been being Mother Rooney so long. In the little first-story bathroom of her great weird house no spray she bought could defeat the odor of reptile corpses stewed in mud. Her boarder boys, all gone now for a month, would sometimes come in late and use her bathroom to vomit in, not being able to climb the stairs and use their own. And sometimes they were not able to use even hers well. There would be whiskey and beer gravy waiting for her on the linoleum. Just unspeakable. Yet the natural smell of her toilet would be overcoming the other vileness, she could not deny it. A couple of the young men smarties would openly confess, in the way of complaining about the unbearably reeking conditions among which they were forced to puke last night, that they were the ones. One of them even arranged his own horrid bountiful vomit into a face with a smile, such as a child might draw, and this she had to confront one morning at six o’clock as she came to the chilly tiles to relieve herself. Nobody confessed to that. But she caught on when she heard all the giggling up in the wings, at this hour in the morning. She wasn’t deaf, and she wasn’t so slow. The boys were sick and tired of her flushing the toilet and waking them all up every morning. Her toilet sounded like a volcano. Yes, Mr. Monroe had voiced that complaint before. He said it sounded as if this old house’s back was breaking at last, it couldn’t stand the tilt anymore. It woke them all up, it made them all goggle-eyed, everybody stayed stiff for two hours in their beds. Nobody wanted to be the one to make the move that finally broke it in two and sent them all collapsing down the hill into the Mississippi State Fairgrounds. What a way to wake up, Mr. Monroe complained. The situation here is uninhabitable. I don’t know a man upstairs who isn’t planning to move out of here as soon as he sees an equal rent in the paper.
She promptly brought down the rent to fifteen a month, and the boys all showed up downstairs Saturday night to celebrate, spilling wine and whiskey, which were illegal in this state, everywhere, and grabbing her ruggedly around her weary little rib cage and huffing smoke and rotten berries into her face, calling her the perfect landlady; but profanity began to be used in the dining room, and she was eager to remind them that hard liquor such as three or four of them were drinking was against the law in the state of Mississippi. The party got quiet. They all took their hands off her. They left like mice, not a backward look. She was so sorry to have ruined this party. It was too loud, it was drunken, but one thing had been agreeable to her. Their hugging on her had been good. The hugging. So many big boys had put their arms around her ribs and had not hurt her. She didn’t feel a thing there, nary a lingering of pain, but a warm circle of her body Mother Rooney rubbed against. Oh oh, it was like old flannel cloth that had fingers. Give me that, honeys, she thought. Keep me. Watch me. Watch me, witness me make my old way till one day I’ve got my eyes closed and you’ll . . . I’ll keep you here at twenty-five cents a month, but you’ll have to discover me dead, feel me with those large hands, you will circle me, wrap me, you boys made of flannel cloth. Some mornings Mother Rooney would pretend and lie toes-up in her bed past six-thirty, having to tee-tee agonizingly, but not going to the toilet and flushing it on time, and getting all she could out of her own old flannel gown. By seven the pain in her bladder would take her almost to true death.
Mother Rooney of Titpea Street came on.
Her boys had all left her now. Like mice. Not a whisper since. Some of them had said they’d write her every day. But not a line. Not a hint even as to whose facilities they were throwing up in nowadays. Her boys were lost in unknown low-rent holes of Jackson, the big midstate town of Mississippi. They had broken up their tribe. They . . .
She was deafened by thought; she’d kept it inside so long, there was a rumble. First thing she knew, she was at the doorknob leaning too hard; she broke the glass doorknob and the door gave. Still, she was a deaf-mute. If sound would come back to her, she could maybe hold on with her sneakers at the top of the hall. That retrograde dance at the top of her perilously drooping lobby, it couldn’t come. She saw ahead of her the boards that were smooth as glass; she saw the slick boards beckoning her like a well down past the gloom of the stairs. The fish bundle jumped out of her arms and broke out of its paper and lit on the boards, scooting downward like a pound of grease. No sound would come to her. She flopped in her skirts; her face turned around for a second. She got a look at the wasted orange trees and a look at the sky. It was so chilly and smoky, but quiet. Then her sound came back to her. She was falling.
She put her arms out for flight. She kept her knees together. She knew she was gone. She knew she would snap. She forecast for herself a lonely lingering coughing up of spinal fluid—she could hear all her sounds now—when fock, landing on the fish binding, she hit face-down on the boards as if entering water in a shallow dive.
The back of the house was black, such a black of hell’s own pit. Something was trying to stop her from going down there. Her breasts burned. The brooch had caught the wood and stopped her.
How wonderful of the brooch to act like a brake, Mother Rooney thought. She had slid only to the edge of the stairwell.
She might have butted through the kitchen door, clear out the back of the house and down the kudzu hill, where there was death by snakes at most, terror by entwinement and suffocation at least.
The house stood, slanting backward but not seriously dismantled yet, over a kudzu-covered cliff that dwindled into red clods upon the grounds of the Mississippi State Fair and Livestock Exhibition. Mother Rooney lived in only the bottom story of the brown middle box between two three-story tubular wings with yellow shingles. The brown box was frosted gingerbread-style in white wooden agates and scrolls, and had a sharp roof to it. In the yellow towers, upstairs, was nobody. She had her stove, pot, couch, bed and dining room, where the boarders ate.
But they were gone.
Her husband Hoover was dead since 1947.
Meager breezes of human odor fell and rose on the stairs.
Once last week she took herself up the stairs of the left wing and opened a room and buried her face in a curtain saturated still with cigarette smoke. She got in the curtain. Thi
s time she did not weep. She just held on, getting what she could.
Her rugs moved backward against the baseboards. You dropped a ball of yarn and it took off downhill; you spilled some tea and it streaked away from the dining room, over the threshold hump, and vaporized in the kitchen. The boards were really slick. But she would not nail things down or put gripper mats around everywhere. She wouldn’t surrender. The only concession she made to the house was the acceptance of the sneakers from Harry Monroe, the medical student, who told her they were strictly the newest development from the university, already tested and broken in for her. What they were, were wrestling shoes Monroe and his partner, Bobby Dove Fleece, had stolen off a dead woman in the emergency room, a lady wrestler who had been killed down at City Auditorium. Mother Rooney could make it, with these sneakers, even though her feet didn’t breathe well in them.
She lay hurt more than she then knew beside the stairs, and felt only as usual, surrounded by the towering vacant wings of her house. Now this horror that she had not personally cultivated at all, this queer renewal of sights and sounds in the air—ghosts—was with her.
Mr. Silas was whispering to her in the dining room. “You are living in the cocked twat of the house. This house has its legs in the air. Not only is it ugly, it’s an outrage, Mother. It’s a woman’s thing cocked beggingly between big old thighs. My shocked friends ask why I live here. I answer that it’s what I can afford. I was homeless driving my motorbike and saw the ‘Rooms’ sign. I chose at night. All I wanted was a pillow. Once on the porch, I fell in.”
“She snatched our money and gave us lard to eat,” said Bobby Dove Fleece.
This young man thought he was a genius. All of them were naughty, her boys.
The house tilted all of six inches. A black gap of air stood between the bottom of the porch and the top of the ferny foundation. A sweet waft of ruining potatoes hung in the gap. Hoover had buried the pile for winter-keeping in 1945. Was he ruining so sweetly in his grave? Mother Rooney wondered. Or did his soul lie like a dead putrescent snake in the plumbing under her commode? as she often thought.
But Jerry Silas, leaping from his motorcycle toward the cocked porch, smelled sperm, blowing him over from under the house: haphazard nature had approximated the smell with a rotting compost of yams.
Nature will always scandalize, Silas had told her. And since he was bare-chested, as usual in the house, Mr. Silas had flexed all his upper body, a girl-murdering suavity in his eyes, and made the muscles of his chest, stomach and arms stand out most vulgarly in front of her.
Oh, Mother Rooney wished Mr. Silas and all the young men back now, filling the wings and the upstairs with cigar and cigarette smoke, music, whoops, nonsense, coming down and arranging themselves noisily around her table to eat what they called her Texas pie—because it was so ugly, they said. And she, scooping out the brown stringy beef and dumplings and setting it on their plates with insulted vigor, flak! Oh, they kept her at the edge of weeping or of praying; she was hurt in her cook’s heart.
Some juice spattered on Mr. Delph, the young pharmacist, and he announced, wiping it away: “Fellows, Mother Rooney is not being a Christian again.”
They made her uncertain of even her best dishes, her squash casserole, her oyster patties. When they first had begun this business, she lingered in the kitchen while tears ran off her cheeks into her milky desserts.
But for them just to be here she wished, calling her anything they wanted to. Let them mimic Father Putee behind his back as he advises my poor carnal body, the two of us seated on the couch in the dining room.
Mother Rooney regained the picture of that rascal Mr. Worley, the student at Millsaps College. He was loitering up the stairway listening to Father Putee, and she saw him, dressed only in underwear for her benefit. When Father Putee would finish a sentence, Mr. Worley would snap the waist of his underwear and look upward to heaven. Finally, Father Putee, an old person himself, heard the underwear snap, and turned. But by then Worley was gone, and Harry Monroe was in his place, sitting fully dressed, waving his hand. “Hi, padre. I’m just chaperoning you two.”
Let them, let them, she wished.
Let them take me to another movie at the Royal Theater, telling me it is an epic of the Catholic faith, and then we sit down and see all of that Bulgarian woman in her nightgown prissing about until that sordid beast eats her neck, the moon in the window. Let them ride me by St. Thomas’s Church, as Mr. Worley says in the back seat to Mr. Hammack, the young man who tunes organs, and asking it again to Mr. Delph: “Don’t you hate a fish-eater? Hammack, Delph, don’t you?” They go on and on, pretending to be rural hardshells, then stop the car under the shadowy cross in the street. “Let’s kill a fish-eater.” They ask me to find them one, describing how they will torture one like they did in the Middle Ages, only nastier, and especially an old woman fish-eater. Maybe let her live for a few weeks until she has to beat on the door with her own leg bone to be heard from the street.
Then let them all come down to the table in their underwear, all except Mr. Monroe, who is in on the joke so far as to have his shirt off. I’m in the kitchen and see Mr. Silas stand up and say this: “Pre-dinner game tonight! Here it is! If any old, creeping, venerealized, moss-covered turtle of a Catholic scab-eating bimbo discarded from Pope Gregory’s lap and rejected by the leprous wino in back of the Twentieth Century Pool Hall comes in here serving up any scumsucking plate of oysters of a fish-eating Friday night, we all pull off our jockey shorts and wave them over our heads, okay?” “Yahhhhh!” the rest of them agree, and I peep around and see Mr. Silas putting the written-up piece of paper in his elastic underwear. I wait, wait, not sure of anything except I am getting the treatment from them for asking each one if he was a Catholic by any chance when they first boarded with me. Then: “But where is our sweet Mother Rooney?” I hear Mr. Silas chiming, lilting. “With her charming glad old heart, the beam in her eye of a reconciled old age? Her mushrooms and asparagus, blessed by the Lord? Her twinkling calluses, proud to tote the ponderous barge of householdery? Benedictions and proverbs during the neat repast, and an Irish air or two over the piano afterwards, to bed at nine?” says Harry Monroe. “To flush at six,” says Bobby Dove Fleece.
I sneak in, for I did want music in the house, and had bought the secondhand piano for the corner over there. I know well that Mr. Hammack can play. I did hope in my heart that someone could play and young men would sing around it. At least they are not doing what Mr. Silas threatened they would. And I ask, “Are you really going to sing some Irish songs afterwards?”—passing the fried oysters. Blind drooping of the eyes as if they’d never seen me before. Mr. Silas, who works at Wright’s Music Store and is a college graduate, asks, “Do the Irish have a music, Harry?” Mr. Monroe took a lot of courses in music at his college. “They have a uniform national fart,” Mr. Monroe replies.
I’m already crying, steaming red in the face over the hot oysters. I don’t care about Irish; I’m not Irish, for mercy’s sake, nor originally Roman Catholic. I just wanted music, any kind of music. I just wanted music, and I tell them that.
“Sorry,” Mr. Monroe ventures to say. And they all eat quickly in silence, running back to the wings and upstairs without a word. Next day they all come back from work and school and don’t give me a word. Only Mr. Monroe comes down at evening to eat some soup left from lunch.
But then, of course, the call from the police the next night, saying they know, they have been following, the crude public display of nudity I allow in my boardinghouse, and that there have been complaints about vulgarism. Then I know it must be Mr. Silas, whose light is on. I see as I put down the phone and look up at the left wing. Just to check, just to be sure, still scared from perhaps hanging up on the real police, I walk up there, though it takes a lot of breath.
But knocking, there is no answer, and I open the door and right in the way is Mr. Silas naked, stiff and surprised, but he seems to be proud at the same time. But how did he do it?
<
br /> I ease the door to. There’s only one phone in the house, mine. Mr. Silas cries out vulgarly behind the door; he’s lifting his weights, his barbells—and what sounds, what agony or pleasure of his body.
Yes, let my boys come back to me with all that. Even Harriman Monroe, who drove them all from the house, who told my boys to leave. Let slim Harry, who turned just a wee bit prig on us all, come back. Dearheart, though, he was hurt by the loss of a musical career. And Bobby Fleece mentioned to me privately that Harry Monroe was not making it as a medical student, either. Harry does not take care of his health in the meantime. He breaks out with red spots on the face. I tried to feed him, diet him on good vegetables at night. I asked him what he ate in the day, and he answered me. Women, he said. Whereas Mr. Silas used to sneak down to eat everything I have left. It was a secret between us, how much Mr. Silas ate. It went to six pounds a day.
