by Mary Karr
No sooner do I choke down that scream than a miracle happens. A very large pool of quiet in my head starts to spread. Lecia’s face shrinks back like somebody in the wrong end of your telescope. Then even Mother’s figure starts to alter and fade. In fact, the thin, spidery female form in black stretch pants and turtleneck wielding a knife in one upraised arm is only a stick figure of my mother, like the picture I drew in Magic Marker on the Mother’s Day card I gave her last Sunday. I wrote underneath it in pink block letters that I decorated with crayon drawings of lace, “You are a nice Mom. I love you. It has been nice with you. Love from Mary Marlene.” That Sunday morning when she’d opened that card up and read it, she cried racking sobs and hugged me hard so her tears streamed down into my ears till Lecia showed up at Mother’s bedside with a vodka martini she’d mixed saying, Here, sip at this. Then there was another martini and another. Della Reese was singing “Mack the Knife” on the record player. She kept saying My poor, poor babies and This isn’t your fault. By the time I got my nerve up to sneak in the kitchen and upend the vodka bottle down the sink, there was only an inch left anyway.
That was Mother’s Day a week ago. On my card, I had drawn a stick-figure mom wearing a string of Ping-Pong-sized pearls around its stick neck. Now in my mind, that stick figure is what Mother becomes. She’s just a head like a ball and curly scribbles for hair. But there the likeness to the figure on my card ends. This stick figure holds a triangle knife with a star glinting off its end. My stick-figure sister is breathing deep in the chest of her white PJs, and I match my breath to hers. We lie there in that cartoon of a room for what seems like forever, and then out of nowhere Mother roars No! like a lioness, her mouth shapes itself into a giant black O with real definite pointy teeth for what seems like a long time. The black NO sails out of that mouth in a long balloon with the tail of a comet streaking past us and out the wax-papered windows into the flaming night.
That’s how God answered my prayers: I learned to make us all into cartoons. That stick woman in the center of the big black page with her eyebrows squinched down in a mad V over pin-dot eyes is no more my mother than some monster on the Saturday cartoons. She just isn’t. I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice. I can feel Lecia cock her head at me, like she wants to know what the hell I have to grin about.
Now the stick-figure mom sets down the knife on the floor to dial the phone. I count the seven turns of the dial, feel it unwind under her stick finger. She’s crying, the stick mommy, with sucking sobs. A whole fountain of blue tears pours from both pin-dot eyes. I guess it’s Dr. Boudreaux who answers on the other end, because she says, “Forest, it’s Charlie Marie. Get over here. I just killed them both. Both of them. I’ve stabbed them both to death.”
CHAPTER 8
After they took Mother Away, I sank into a fierce lonesomeness for her that I couldn’t paddle out of into other things. Nor did anyone come into it looking for me. By this I mean that Daddy never mentioned the night of the fire. Nor did he say when Mother might come home, other than pretty soon. Maybe our own silence on the subject—Lecia’s and mine, for we didn’t bring it up either—was meant to protect him somehow, so as not to worry him overmuch. If we failed him by not telling him all about it, he sure as shit failed us by not knowing how to ask.
At school, I cleaned up my act. There wasn’t cussing or fighting, and I won not a single exile to Frank Doleman’s office for chess. My final report card for second grade shows my getting “Satisfactory +” in both Conduct and Citizenship. Which was for me a first. No doubt, I was operating under the notion that being completely good in the eyes of all authorities might urge Mother back.
At home, I also picked up my side of our bedroom, and grudgingly helped Lecia make our bed with military tucks on the sheet corners. There my housekeeping stopped, though she pulled off a whirlwind scrubbing of the whole house every Saturday, down to the insides of the toilets. She wrought particular hell on Daddy’s ashtrays. He couldn’t thump the ash off a Camel without her swooping down to wash and dry the ashtray before he got his hand drawn back good.
Without real data on Mother’s psychic health (or lack thereof) Lecia and I cooked up some fairly worrisome scenarios about her. On TV one night, we watched a movie called The Snake Pit. It starred Olivia de Havilland as this fairly nice if somewhat highstrung lady who wore over-baroque brooches and belted dresses when vacuuming her house, but who, nevertheless, had a twitchy mouth early in the movie that foreshadowed her hellacious, capital-B Breakdown later. The film’s title captures how the mental ward got portrayed. There was an icy bathtub in which one maniac got dunked under wet canvas, and a description of shock treatment that went something like this: “Then the electrodes are fixed to the temples and ZZZZZZT—thousands of volts course through the brain!” Finally, poor Ms. de Havilland got locked in a padded room and belted into one of those long-armed straitjackets that forced you to hug yourself all day and besides which looked really hot. All the while she was hallucinating snakes crawling all over. That was the picture of mental-ward life for the full-blown Nervous that Lecia and I promptly settled on. It was all we had.
The neighbor kids gave little comfort. Like us, they ran short on real data about psych wards, but they were very long on mean-assed idiom. To this day, it’s a peculiar trait of Leechfield citizenry that your greatest weakness will get picked at in the crudest local parlance. In fact, the worse an event is for you, the more brutally clear will be the talk about it. In this way, guys down there born with shriveled legs get nicknamed Gimpy, girls with acne Pizzaface.
My daddy even worked with a guy whose teenaged son had gone berserk with a twelve-gauge shotgun and marched one summer day into the junior high, where he shot and killed a guidance counselor while the principal (the alleged target, we later heard) hid in the school safe. The men on Daddy’s job right away nicknamed this kid the Ambusher. The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers. I shit you not. Daddy claimed that the card they gave the poor fellow read: “Here’s hoping the Ambusher can finally hang up his guns!”
This kind of bold-faced ugliness was common to us. The theory behind it held that not mentioning a painful episode in the meanest terms was a way of pretending that the misery of it didn’t exist. Ignoring such misery, then, was equal to lying about it. Such a lie was viewed as more cruel, even, than the sad truth, because it somehow shunned or excluded the person in pain (i.e., in the above case, the Ambusher’s daddy) from everybody else. Plus ignoring such a grotesque event as the lobotomy of one’s only son would suggest that the guy was somehow made weak by it or “couldn’t take it.”
So neighbor kids talked to me in language meant to toughen me to the cold facts of my life. I heard how Mother was crazy as a mudbug and nutty as a fruitcake. She didn’t have both oars in the water. She had been slam-dunked in the loony bin, the funny farm, the Mental Marriott, the Ha-Ha Hotel.
I got my ass whipped three or four times by jumping like a buzz saw into kids popping off this way about her. Finally, Daddy urged me to start biting down hard on any kid getting the better of me. He knew that to back up would bring a steady stream of ass-whippings, and my size precluded any bona fide victories. “Lay the ivory to ’em, Pokey” was how he put it. Even if I got whipped after, a bite left a mark that’d stay with a person. That summer, I bit to draw blood seven or eight times. But the time I took a good chunk out of Rickey Carter’s shoulder ultimately led to events that cinched my reputation as the worst kid on the block.
The red-faced Rickey, who was twelve and couldn’t bear having busted into tears in front of the littler kids after I’d chomped on him, scanned around for a way to get even, and then jumped on Lecia. Jumping Lecia always proved a mistake. Rickey was older and way bigger, but she was
tough as a boot. She couldn’t walk into the drugstore for an ice cream without some roughneck pointing at her and saying, “That there’s Pete Karr’s daughter,” which praise always caused some guy’s eyebrow to cock itself north a notch. Anyway, Lecia had pinned Rickey pretty quick when his baby brother Philip came up behind her with a ball bat and brought it down with all his might between her shoulder blades, knocking her out. At the crack of wood against spinal column, the whole gang broke running back to their separate yards. Lecia toppled, and a few minutes passed before her cheeks flushed and her eyes fluttered open.
The next day right after dawn, I pulled down my BB gun from the top bookshelf and went on a rampage that prefigured what Charles Whitman—the guy who shot and killed thirteen people from the tower at the University of Texas—would do a few years later. I stuck a can of hot tamales with a can opener in a paper bag and fixed myself a jelly jar of tea. While all the other kids were still sitting around in their pajamas eating their doughnuts with powdered sugar and watching cartoons, I was sneaking across the blackberry field behind our house. There was a lone chinaberry tree at the field’s center, and I shinnied up it, then pulled my BB gun after me to wait for the Carter kids. They’d planned to berrypick that morning so their mama could make a cobbler. I’d overheard talk about it.
I didn’t wait long. The sun had gone from pink to hot white when the whole Carter clan clamored across the grassy ditch circling the field’s edge. Their daddy was leading them; they straggled behind, each with a saucepan or bait bucket. I lifted the BB gun and sighted through its little V as close as I could to the white glare of Rickey’s glasses. I fully intended to pop him between the eyes. I repeated Daddy’s injunction to pull any trigger slow: “Don’t jerk it, Pokey,” he always said. I didn’t, and after the satisfying little zing, a miracle happened. I saw Rickey Carter slap his neck, like he thought a wasp had stung him.
My next few shots missed. But Mr. Carter heard them skitter through the long grass and tracked the noise till he finally caught sight of my shape in the tree behind leaf cover. Even I could see the little bloody hole in Rickey’s neck where I’d pegged him. Mr. Carter yelled my name, then yelled was that me. But like Brer Rabbit, I just laid low. Then he yelled did I have some kind of weapon up in that tree, and Babby Carter dropped her pot and ran crying back to the road with Philip right behind her. Shirley took out running too. Her flip-flops slapped against her bare feet till she jumped the ditch and hit asphalt on the other side. Rickey put his hands on his hips like he was pissed off, but he stepped sideways so that his daddy stood between him and my chinaberry tree. You pussy, I thought, as if Rickey’s not wanting to get shot were a defining mark against his manhood. Mr. Carter screamed to get down from there, that I could put somebody’s eye out with a pellet gun. And I came back with a reply that the aging mothers in that town still click their tongues about. It was easily the worst thing anybody in Leechfield ever heard a kid say. “Eat me raw, mister,” I said. I had no idea what this meant. The phrase had stuck in my head as some mild variant on “Kiss my ass,” which had been diluted from overuse.
I stayed clueless a long time, even after Daddy had been phoned and ratted to, even after he’d spanked me with Grandma Moore’s old homemade leather horse quirt, itself an insult. I may have actually cried.
The next day, I planned to picket the Carters’ driveway, believing kids from union families wouldn’t cross such a line to play with them. With Mother’s oil paints, I wrote placards for Lecia and me to carry. Mine read, prosaically enough, “Down with the Carters”; Lecia’s, “The Carters Fight Unfair.” But Lecia talked me out of it. My morning as sniper won me a grudging respect. Kids stopped mouthing off about Mother. The anti-Carter campaign had brought me activity, and a parcel of relief. Without them to plot against, I sank back into my lonesomeness for Mother.
Daddy had only one Liars’ Club story that told me about his own momma’s meanness, and that dealt with the blistering quality of her whippings, which were such that he bragged about having stood them. “The old lady would stripe my ass too. Don’t think she wouldn’t. Just as quick as Poppa would.”
We’re cleaning ducks—Daddy and I, and the other fellows. By nine this morning, we’d bagged our limit. I’m scooping the guts out of a little teal duck, and Daddy is pulling feathers from the huge slackened body of our only Canadian goose. With one swipe of his hand he clears a wide path in the feathers. “Momma was tough as a wood-hauler’s ass,” he says, and that’s high praise. Back in the logging camp, wood haulers drove mule-drawn wagons of raw lumber. Since their butts rubbed up against unstripped pine all day, they became badges of toughness.
“How many eggs ya’ll want?” Ben wants to know. Everybody says three. He slides a big slab of Crisco into the black skillet. We stopped here at Cooter’s one-room cabin to clean ducks and eat breakfast. It’s on Chupique Bayou, just across the river in Louisiana.
“Not as big as a minute, my mother,” Daddy says. “But mean as a snake if you ever lied to her.”
Shug then says with a straight face that he can’t imagine Daddy ever lying. He’s quartering the ducks and wrapping the pieces in white freezer paper for us to divvy up when we’re back in town.
Daddy tilts his head at Shug. “Last time she ever whupped on me was over lying. I had got big enough to figure I was too big to whup. Hell, my arms was that big around.” He stares into the washtub full of duck carcass and feathers at his feet like it’s some oracle his momma’s ghost is about to rise out of.
When he’s sure everybody’s listening, he backs up to set the scene. “Had come a hurricane that August. Dumped umpteen-zillion gallons of water in the Neches River. High?” He glares at each one of us so we get the point. “Lord God, that river was high.” The room sits quiet, the only noises the pop of eggs sliding in grease and Shug folding up the butcher paper. For a split second, the word “hurricane” sends roaring out of my own head at me a memory of the Orange Bridge during Hurricane Carla—how the railing had come rushing sideways at the car through the rain. I shake my head loose from that and get back to my teal ducks. It’s sticky work.
“I remember that storm,” Cooter says. He’s got a little wire of excitement in his voice at the idea of actually being in on the story.
“Cooter, you was still shitting yellow back then,” Ben says, “if you was drawing breath at all.” He breaks the yolks with his spatula so the eggs fry up hard. To get eggs like this in a truck stop, you say to the lady, Turn ’em over and step on ’em.
“Well, I remember one like it,” Cooter says.
“Hell, we all remember one like it,” Shug says. He’s about fed up with Cooter, who’s been bossing him all weekend because he’s colored. Shug, get the outboard. Shug, you’re shooting too soon. Goddammit, Shug, I was saving them biscuits for later. Cooter is also just walking the edge of telling colored jokes. He uses Polack and Aggie, but everybody—Shug included—knows that if there wasn’t a black man holding down a chair in this room they’d be nigger this and nigger that. Daddy says Cooter’s just ignorant, never knew anybody colored before, so it’s not his fault. But it seems mean how nobody ever says anything back directly. I mean, the guys do try to corral him a little and keep him from being overmuch an asshole. But nobody says flat out You’re just picking on Shug because he’s colored. It sometimes seems to me like we’re not supposed to notice that Shug’s colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug’s being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody’s difference gets pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man’s skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling.
Daddy’s voice stops me wondering. “Anyways, Momma told me and my brother A.D. flat out not to go into that river. ‘Stay out of that river, boys. They’s boys drowned in that river.’ And we said okay. But A.D. cut me a little look. And I know we thinking the same thing.
“Me and old A.D. go squat outside the window and talk r
eal loud so she’ll hear us. Say we oughta go down the sawmill. See if Poppa needs any help. We take off down that woods road, but soon as we hit the fork where she can’t see”—he forks his fingers like a road he’s arriving at—“we peel off and go yonder a ways. The rest of them boys was gonna be down at the water. So that’s where we want to be too. We got there and stripped on down and dove just as straight in that river as a pair of butter knives.”
Daddy’s done plucking the goose and hands me the prickly pink body to gut. He picks up a mallard. Its head is an iridescent green. When Ben was toting all the mallards up from the duck blind earlier this morning, all their green shiny heads came together in his big red hand like a bouquet of flowers. But for their black eyes staring out, you could almost forget they’re dead.
“And this was your oldest brother you was with?” Cooter asks.
“It don’t matter who it was, Cooter,” Shug says. “Goddamn, you’re the asking-est sonofabitch I ever met.”
Cooter twists around on the chair and stares at Shug. Cooter maintains a birdlike way of twitching his head around that makes me think sometimes that he’s about to go clucking off across the room pecking at the floorboards. “It matters if I feel like knowing,” Cooter says.
Daddy draws back the mallard in his hand like it’s a ball bat he’s fixing to swing. “I swear to God, I’m gonna flail both your asses with this duck if you don’t shut up,” he says.
“He started it,” Cooter says, then sinks back down in his shirt collar.
Ben says to let it go. He’s over at the stove, pouring off the extra grease from the skillet into the lard pot.
