by Mary Karr
Lecia tried to make peace by saying that she wouldn’t mind so much getting whipped with a horse quirt. It was no worse than Daddy’s belt or the limber chinaberry switches Mae Brown had been known to cut from the backyard. I said that I wasn’t some old barnyard mule and didn’t want to get whipped like one. Grandma pointed out to Mother how I thought I was in charge of my punishments. This seemed to her undeniable evidence that I needed my butt blistered. I aggravated her worse by saying that all the baths and whippings I’d got since Grandma came were “warping my character.” That’s a direct quote, according to Mother, who started to laugh and shake her head. Then she asked would I get her some orange baby aspirin because she felt like she had an ax in her forehead. (She became a terrible baby-aspirin junkie at this time, ate them like peanuts from an economy-sized jar with a depressing label on which two pink-cheeked Swedish-looking children trudged off to a red schoolhouse hand in hand.) She hung the quirt on the doorknob of her new bedroom and continued to conduct our whippings with either the flyswatter or a rolled-up New Yorker.
Daddy was never around after Grandma came home. It was some unspoken deal everybody had. Since she thought that he was low-rent and since she was herself dying, she sort of trumped him into staying away from his own house. He worked days and pulled a lot of double shifts. On days off, he fished till it turned squirrel season. Then he hunted.
One Saturday, he brought home dozens of squirrel tails for me to play with. The tails had bloody stub ends where they’d been lopped off, and I remember pinning them all together with clothespins and looping them around my neck, which grossed Lecia out. I think I fancied myself, in this squirrel-tail stole, some cross between Greta Garbo and Daniel Boone.
Lecia put herself in charge of cooking squirrel gumbo. She had a recipe for a black and garlicky roux that a Cajun neighbor lady had taught her. One whiff of that gumbo will make some gland draw up in the back of your throat and ache. Yankee gumbos are full of tomatoes and okra and all manner of pussyfied spices, but that game gumbo Lecia fixed—made with squirrel or duck or deer sausage—came together out of nothing quite so pretty. Instead it was mixed up from things you cannot live without—lard and flour and onion. It was a thin, black, elemental soup that opened your sinuses from the three kinds of pepper and left you tasting garlic and sassafras root for days after. Grandma said just the smell of the roux browning made her want to hork. She took Mother out for shrimp rémoulade at Al’s Seafood. (Shrimp rémoulade, I might explain here, was my grandma’s moral antidote to all those little split-up squirrel carcasses dismantled and frying in fat.) The shrimp are blanched pink, peeled and deveined, then hooked over the side of a sundae dish like the legs of so many young girls hanging over the edge of a swimming pool. The sundae dish may get piled up with shredded lettuce in the middle just for show. The rémoulade sauce is an extra-lemony kind of mayonnaise that has the muted luster of good pearls.
When the car backed out to take them to the restaurant, the headlights streaked across the kitchen wall behind Daddy. He sat in his string T-shirt at the table he’d built from sheet plywood and clear varnish. He held his spoon the way I later learned guys in jail are supposed to. He looped his arm around his plate so it was sort of guarding the bowl from somebody snatching at it. Positioned like this, he scooped the gumbo into his mouth in a steady motion that didn’t stop till the bowl was clean. I still had the squirrel tails looped around my neck and said didn’t it hurt his feelings that they wouldn’t eat what he’d brought home. The idea made him laugh. “Shit, that’s okay too, Pokey,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Just more squirrel for me and you.”
One Sunday, when Daddy was working days, I woke up late and found the old lady sitting in her wheelchair by herself in the kitchen. Breakfast dishes were scattered around, and she had a beer stuck between her thighs. I’d never been alone with her before and didn’t fancy it. She lifted her head like she’d been dozed off; then she jumped a little when she saw me. “Don’t shout!” I remember her saying. She gave me a walleyed stare. I told her I hadn’t made a peep. She said that Lecia had asked Mother to drive her to church, which idea made me want to dip snuff. Lecia’s religious ardors were at least as vague as mine. But her going to church had the desired effect on Grandma: she got a rapturous look telling me about it, as if that one piddling trip to the house of the Lord might hold Lecia a place in heaven. Then Grandma said she had something to show me in her room.
I was grateful, at least, that she had her leg on that morning. She’d even covered it up with these thick support hose, Supp-Hose, they were called. They were orange and heavier than sausage casings. Anyway, she wore those and had wedged the black shoe back on the plastic foot. (There’s something overdressed about a shoe on a plastic foot, like it’s beside the point.) Once we were in her room, she closed the door and posted herself, wheelchair and all, right in front of it.
Let me take a minute to tell you about the smell in that room. It stank of snake, specifically water moccasin.
If you are walking in waders through a marsh, say, on a warm winter morning, scanning the sky for mallards riding their jagged V overhead, you can smell a moccasin slithering alongside you long before you see it. It has an odor like something dead just before the rot sets in and the worms in its belly skin get it to jiggling around unnaturally. Often the smell of some rotting carcass—armadillo or nutria rat or bird—has stopped me in my tracks and gotten me to turn my eyes expecting to find on the ground the triangular, near-black head of a cottonmouth, which is related to both cobra and pit viper and the most vicious snake on this continent. I could never smell one swimming in a bayou, but on land it gives off a musk easily as strong as skunk. (I knew a drug dealer once who collected them in glass tanks all over his trailer. He had a harelip that somehow protected him from the stink, but the rest of us became, when dickering over pharmaceuticals with him, the noisiest and most adenoidal mouth breathers. We all sounded like Elmer Fudd, so a coke deal took on a cartoonlike quality: “You weally tink dis is uncut?” It was particularly hard to talk this way when you were tripping your brains out on LSD and had gone there only as a last resort to buy something to help you come down.) It’s not just the smell of death, but the smell of something thriving on death, a smell you link up to maggots, or those bacteria that eat up corpses one cell at a time.
Anyway, we were wrapped in this smell when Grandma announced that she had been waiting for some “alone time”—that’s what she called it—to show me this surprise. I could see she had something ratholed in the pocket of her blue cotton dress. Finally, she drew out what looked like a small brass book. It fit in the palm of her hand. There were two halves folded shut, like two tablets closed on each other. And she held her hands around it for a minute like she was praying. In my head there flashed the image of Moses as he appeared in the full-color picture in her Bible, hoisting two stone tablets joined with a leather thong.
After a while, she opened the small tablets on her lap, and they turned out to be dime-store brass frames around school pictures of two children, a boy and a girl. The pictures had a celery-green tint to them, like they’d been too long in the sun. “That’s your sister and brother,” she said. “That’s Tex and Belinda.”
Oddly enough, my first feeling at this news was relief. Here finally was this Belinda person that Grandma had been harping on. She was a real little girl, and blond like Lecia. She had a tight little Afro, and this was long before Angela Davis made that hairdo mean something. In fact, it was the age of the Toni Home Permanent, a kind of chemical skull-burn enacted on girl children all through the late fifties and early sixties. In our area, the perm solution was so strong that they rigged matchboxes over your ears with rubber bands and cotton wool to keep the drippings from blistering your ears slap off. I empathized with this Belinda person on that point. Tex was more abstract to me somehow for being male. He was bucktoothed, his dark hair slicked back. He wore a black string tie of the sort that cowboys favor.
She said t
hey were a lot older than Lecia and me. They were going to high school now in another state. Here, in my memory, her voice trails off into a sort of fog, and my brain moves away from what she’s saying into a state of pure puzzlement. What did these two kids have to do with me, anyway?
I’d never seen them before, and here Grandma was announcing them as kin, not just cousins, but brother and sister. Even when she said that they were my half brother and half sister, I couldn’t figure it out. Hell, other than Mother divorcing Paolo, which was a kind of family secret, I’d never known anybody who’d divorced, never even heard about anybody divorcing other than Elizabeth Taylor. The idea of having half a sister fascinated me. Which half was mine? I must have asked Grandma about this, because at some point she explained that they were Mother’s Other Kids from her Other Husband. I asked was that Paolo, whom Daddy had whomped so good so long ago, and she said no. She always got weary thinking of how Mother had thrown Paolo over, so she took a second to look weary before saying that their daddy was another husband, Mother’s first husband, Tex, who was news to me. The whole idea of a new husband and two kids added up to my not knowing squat about Mother’s life before she came to Leechfield. Her history was almost a cipher as it stood. Oh, I knew she’d gone to art school in New York City during the war. But none of that story involved any other babies. She always made a big deal about how Lecia and I were her first babies, how she was thirty and that was old. I kept staring at the pictures in Grandma’s lap till she snapped them closed and slid them back in her dress pocket.
While the fact of these two kids was trying to take shape in my head, Grandma did something that to this day my sister claims was so out of character for her it could not have happened. She grabbed my shoulder and breathed that death smell all over my face and said that should I fail to mind my mother—here Grandma brought her mouth right up to my face—if I continued to sass back and crud everything up—her eyes were almost pure white by now behind her smeary horn-rims—I would be Sent Away, just like they had been. They had never seen their mother again, not since they were babies.
It was then that I found out that the snake smell wasn’t just from her bedpan or some old food getting nasty somewhere in the room. It came from her. In fact, it came from her open mouth, from deep inside her where the cancer was doubtless eating out whatever was human. If you had told me at that minute that writhing in her belly were dozens of newly hatched baby moccasins just busted loose from their eggs, I doubt I would have expressed surprise. She had also put Vicks VapoRub around her nostrils, maybe to shield her very self from her mouth’s own death stink. That eucalyptus in the Vicks rode right on top of her cottonmouth breath in a way that made it worse.
(The closest I had ever come to that smell before Grandma’s room was the closest I’d come to a snakebite. One evening when Daddy had rowed our rented boat into a patch of morning glories, he all of a sudden lifted the dripping oar from the bayou and took a swipe about three inches above my head, so the water from the oar fanned down over my face and bare arms. There was a quick plop in the water next to the boat. The cottonmouth had been draped off a branch right over me, he said. We watched it drag its S-shaped body through the brown water. I started shaking, not from cold.)
That day in Grandma’s room, with no one in the house to rescue me, I started to tremble at that smell. I shoved past her chair and ran for the kitchen.
When Mother came home, Grandma made her spank me. She said she’d caught me going through her drawers trying to steal her ear bobs, which lie I didn’t even bother arguing with. I just followed Lecia’s advice for once and stood still, and sure enough, the whipping was over in a Yankee minute. But I could see a rigid set to Mother’s jaw and feel something mechanical about the whapping of her hand on my rear end.
Sometime during that whipping, I began to get rid of Tex and Belinda’s existence—an erasure that held for nineteen years. Some chasm in my skull opened up that morning and swallowed those children so totally that I never even mentioned them to Lecia, who served at that time as a live-in checkpoint for theories relating to Mother. (I later learned that she’d been shown the same pictures by Grandma. She had also promptly forgotten them. In this way, we entered amnesia together.) I knew, of course, that three husbands was a lot. Three husbands crossed the line between a small mistake and a nasty habit. (An often-divorced friend of mine once declared that when you’re saying “I do” for the third or fourth time, you have to admit to yourself that they can’t be entirely at fault.) So two extra kids who’d appeared from a pocket in Grandma’s apron were unfathomable.
This doesn’t completely explain my blanking out Tex and Belinda, though, because usually you could convince me of anything. That very year, Lecia had persuaded me—with zero evidence—that I was a robot assembled to serve her and to help with chores. She said I was in constant danger of being turned off if I didn’t work out. I was not, therefore, exactly broke out in brains, particularly when it came to being convinced that I was inadequate, inhuman, or otherwise Not Right. I now know that I couldn’t twig to the fact of those two spare kids because they were lost kids. And if they could be lost—two whole children, born of Mother’s body just like us—so might we be. To believe that she’d lost those kids was to believe that on any day our mother could vanish from our lives, back into the void she came from, that we could become another secret she kept.
In short, when Grandma told me that I could be Sent Away for badness, that threat had the hard, dull sound of truth to it.
After Grandma’s threat, I started to watch Mother even more closely for signs of Nervous. But until Hurricane Carla hit, I saw nothing, which is—I’ve since come to know—perhaps the surest sign of Nervous there is.
I watched her. She in turn watched the hurricane tracking reports every evening on the weather. We had a little portable TV that she had broken the antennae off of in some temper fit. It was rigged up with coat hangers for rabbit ears and produced a pale-blue and ash-white picture. The weatherman wore the shimmery full-body halo of indifferent reception. This was before satellite pictures where stop-action clouds swirled across the honest-to-God coastline. The weatherman, who also hosted an afternoon kids’ show called Cattleman Bill, stood before a white greaseboard map of the Gulf drawing in Magic Marker. Little spirals were tropical storms. He drew fleets of arcing black arrows to indicate the general direction of the storm (which invariably blew at the east Texas coast either northwest from the Caribbean or northwest across the Florida Keys). When a spiral got big enough—once it took up a hundred miles of coastline and had winds of about a hundred and fifty miles per hour—it was a hurricane.
Then the game became guessing where the storm would hit, or, in local parlance, “go in,” as if it were some stray relative in search of lodging. Pull into any gas station and the grease monkey would invariably start the pump, then lean into your window to ask where you thought it was going in. Guessing the hurricane’s point of entry was a town-wide sport every fall, easily as popular as high school football. Anybody who worked on the Gulf—a shrimper or a fellow tending some offshore oil rig—became an oracle overnight. When one of these guys hit the door of the American Legion, the bartender would crank down the TV or jukebox and draw a free cold beer while the patrons got all quiet and spun around on their stools or lifted their pool cues from the table. Most of the fishermen played it to the hilt. Their pronouncements took on the imagery of some voodoo chieftain: “Hit was a yellow rang around the moon last night,” one Cajun shrimper said. “Dat storm’s coming in right here at Sabine Pass.” The offshore guys were tamer in their premonitions: old So-and-so out on the rig off of Morgan City, Louisiana, had a football knee start paining him like never before. No sooner did this sort of thing get said than fellows at the bar would leave their stools and head for the pay phone booth out in the parking lot. They’d line up to call their bookies so as to up or hedge their bets.
Leechfield had evacuated a few years before for Hurricane Audrey. That w
as the first storm I remember in the alphabetical lineup of girls’ names. During Audrey, Mother made a big stink about the female gender taking the heat for all that destruction. “Hell, it’s men who fight wars,” I remember her saying. After Audrey came Betsy. She skirted us, but spilled over the levees and sandbags piled up around New Orleans so the whole town filled up like a saucer with seawater.
Hurricane Carla first arrived in my skull on a particular evening when Grandma was sitting in her wheelchair tatting with movements so tiny they looked like worry itself. Mother was stretched the length of the couch with a mug of coffee miraculously balanced on her breastbone. Lecia and I were squatting down at her feet inflicting our version of a pedicure on her. This involved coloring in her toenails with various shades of Crayola. (I favored purples and lavenders and royal blues. Lecia stuck with the more fashionable pinks.) They ran film clips of Audrey, with Cattleman Bill bragging that he had personally rowed a pirogue—a kind of Cajun kayak—up Main Street with a camera crew in the motorboat beside him. Mother said, Oh horseshit. She claimed that he’d left his wife and kids eating handout food in the high school gym while he “evacuated” up to Oklahoma City with his secretary. Cattleman Bill was, in Mother’s estimation, nearly as big a sissy as Grandma, who was apparently so terrified of any kind of storm that she was always the first one down in the storm cellar out in West Texas when the wind started blowing. Grandma didn’t even seem to hear about Carla. She just kept worrying that lace into being with that mean little shuttle.
When the storm did wheel in toward us, Grandma rallied some crazed kind of courage, so we weren’t the first ones out of town. I don’t suppose we were the last to leave, either. But the guys from the National Guard who were driving up and down the streets with bullhorns telling folks to evacuate had to stop at our house twice.
