On the evening when Sheriff Delany phoned Donita, informing her that Rodney and his bud had been arrested for stealing cars from a competing auto shop and then driving them into Atlanta to sell them, Donita could hear over her head the sound of splintering trusses.
On the phone, the sheriff informed her that her husband was sitting in a jail cell, charged with grand theft auto. As Sheriff Delany spoke, Donita sobbed while gripping the receiver with one hand and balancing herself by holding a kitchen chair with the other—all the walls were swaying, and the mortar was crumbling from the joints of the red bricks.
His folks put up the bail money, and Rodney was released on bond to fight the charges in court. After the sheriff’s call that evening, Donita cowered in the corner of her bedroom, clinging to her Bible. The wood beams above her were buckling, and the window glass was shattering. She frantically scoured the pages of her Bible, searching for any single scripture that could save her from a house collapsing down around her.
CHAPTER 8
After several weeks in Savannah, I knew with absolute certainty that life was going to be different than during my years at Mountain Home. Her manicured gardens and lush city squares were unlike anything I’d ever known. The cobblestone lanes and intricate, scrolling ironwork were like pictures from a storybook.
Mountain Home, Arkansas, was like some penniless relation when compared to Savannah. For years, Grandma had told me stories of my kin in Georgia. I imagined Savannah was like some distant, wealthy relative, who arrived in her fine, tailored clothes and coiffed hair, tied in pretty silk ribbons. Savannah was a cousin brought up in the best schools, with a keen knowledge of proper manners and social graces. She smelled of sweet perfume and blushed pink when told an off-color joke. She curtseyed and said thank you and no thank you. But Arkansas hadn’t the time for such niceties. Arkansas labored long, hard hours and sweat clear through his undershirt. He didn’t tip a hat as you strolled by. Instead, he begrudgingly grunted with a slight nod as you passed. Mountain Home was a second cousin once removed, with rusty elbows, who wore frayed overalls and cursed aloud at the supper table. Arkansas was poor country-grown kin, who arrived uninvited and whose jalopy leaked motor oil on the front drive. Georgia smiled coyly and batted her long lashes. Arkansas farted and blamed the sleeping mutt.
The single familiarity in Savannah to my life back at Mountain Home was the chiming melody of the local ice cream truck as it paraded through the neighborhoods. The same music-box melody played from its speakers as it approached Digby. But the familiarity to Mountain Home stopped there. Savannah’s ice cream truck was painted the bright colors of the rainbow. Back in Arkansas, the rusted jalopy stopped and stalled along the street, but Savannah’s ice cream cruiser arrived with foil streamers whipping in the breeze, shiny hubcaps, and polished chrome bumpers.
At the first ringing of its chimes outside the window, Sookie yelled, “Poppy, go fetch me my change purse. Here comes Daryl Turnball, Savannah’s most flamboyant sodomite!”
Giddy with excitement, Sookie would wrestle herself out of her rocker when she heard the music-box serenade. Grabbing her walking stick, she would shuffle out to the porch, down the stoop, and toward the front gate.
Mr. Turnball was Savannah’s ice cream man. A slight fellow, thin as a rail and no taller than Sook but standing high behind his counter, Mr. Turnball appeared more substantial than his diminished frame would indicate.
After maneuvering the singing truck up to the curb beneath the shade of the magnolias, Daryl would holler out, waving to all the children on Digby Street. Kids came scurrying out from behind screen doors, descending from tree houses, and scampering from back alleys. Excited and with their weekly allowances stuffed deep in their pockets, they perused the sweets from Daryl’s metal racks and iced coolers. Like some pied piper, Mr. Turnball teased each child, knowing by heart each kid’s favorite fancy. From inside the open window, Daryl displayed a vast assortment of hard candies, suckers, chocolate bars, caramel apples, and puffs of cotton candy. The Piggly Wiggly couldn’t compete with Mr. Turnball’s selection of sugary delights.
Daryl Turnball was Savannah’s mayor of everything sweet and good and yummy. Long whips of red licorice hung from the truck’s ceiling, and glossy candy apples sat in perfect rows along his Formica counter. Deep in his aluminum freezers, Daryl stocked icy bullets, rainbow pops, ice cream sandwiches, and fruit-flavored popsicles.
He wore a constant grin at the corners of his mouth, and his blond hair was greased with a razor-clean part. Although he wildly waved to all the ladies of Digby, it seemed to me Sookie was Daryl’s favorite curbside customer.
“Good afternoon, Sookie,” he called from his ice cream truck. “My gawd, you look particularly beastly in that old terry cloth robe this morning. Jesus, Sook, can’t you kill that haggard rag and put it out of its misery?”
The children gathered near his truck, sucked on their Popsicles, and giggled at the twosome’s constant bickering.
“Daryl, if you’ll hold your acid tongue long enough, I’d like to introduce you to my niece. This here is Poppy.”
“Well hello, Miss Poppy.” Mr. Turnball, bending low over the counter, smiled. Shaking my hand, he said, “Aren’t you a precious little thing. Welcome to Savannah!”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Poppy has come to stay with me for a spell.” Sook rolled her eyes.
“Well, isn’t that special.” Daryl patted the top of my head. “You poor child, havin’ to live with this ghastly woman. You’re fortunate your old aunt has one foot in the grave.” He winked and whispered to me over the register, “You won’t have to deal with her belly achin’ for very long. She’s as close to a corpse as you’ll ever see stalking the cobblestone streets of Savannah. Perhaps if you stick around long enough after she finally keels over and croaks, you can inherit her piles of money. She’s as rich as Midas, ya know?”
“Poppy, don’t pay no mind to this Mary’s foolish babblings,” Sook quipped. “He’s as dandy as Disneyland.”
“Sookie!” I scolded. “You’re terrible!”
“I’m just saying, the man is as fruity as Dixie McAllister’s boysenberry jam.”
Mr. Turnball dismissed Sook with a wave of his hand. “What can I get you today, Poppy?”
I surveyed his vast selection of sweets.
“This man’s prices are downright criminal,” Sook warned. “He charges double the Piggly Wiggly’s prices. Turnball should be arrested and hauled off to jail.”
“I’ll take a rainbow snow cone, sir.”
“A rainbow snow cone, it is!” The friendly man went about preparing my colored ice.
“And here you go, Poppy.”
“Sook, do you want your regular?”
My old Aunt answered with a fart in the affirmative.
Mr. Turnball fanned his hand in front of his nose. “Good Lord, Sook! You are foul. What has crawled up inside your innards and died?”
Sook snickered.
Daryl yelled to all the laughing kids gathered around his truck, “Run, children! Run for your lives. Go seek shelter under your school desks!”
All us kids laughed.
While I suspected Sook enjoyed passing gas in public, it was less a pastime and more of a social experiment, a tactic. My old aunt had a keen sense of the affect her wretched social habits had on the fine, upstanding citizens of Savannah. But Sook was of the belief that if an individual was easily offended by her belching, burping, and backend blasts, then those were the precise individuals whom she’d choose to avoid at all cost.
“The denial of nature is plain foolishness,” Sookie stated as a matter-of-fact. “I will not abide those insufferable simpletons.”
Aunt Sook utilized her digestion test to gauge the worthiness of a person’s character. Most folks failed her test. Thereby, she believed, most were not worthy of her friendship.
“A fart,” Sookie declared, “is merely a hiccup in reverse. And I don’t see folks getting all bent out of s
hape when they encounter a blessed hiccup.”
Mr. Daryl Turnball was one of the select few who had passed my aunt Sookie’s test. The ever-smiling man searched deep into his metal cooler and pulled out a bottle-rocket Popsicle. “Here’s your regular, Sook.” He handed her the slender frozen treat on a stick.
Mr. Turnball watched on as Sookie tore the Popsicle’s paper wrapper like some excited school girl. “Sookie, I must say you’re looking especially grotesque today. That hair of yours is a fright.”
The old woman ignored the insult, concentrating on sucking the tip of her pop with ferocious intensity.
“Poppy, you understand, your aunt is considered a crazed lunatic around these parts?”
Sook spoke, “Don’t listen to a single word he says. He’s a grown man who waltzes about town dressed up like Nurse Nightingale.”
“Young lady, I’m not sure how you can live with this nasty jackal,” Daryl remarked. “Remember to bolt your bedroom door at night, and keep a dagger buried beneath your pillow. She turns into a hairy beast at the stroke of midnight and stalks the streets of Savannah.” He grinned broadly and handed me a hard candy. “Now, here’s a peppermint stick. Any child who lives with sour Sookie Wainwright deserves a big helping of sweetness.”
Anyone could certainly see Sook delighted in Mr. Turnball’s quick quips and sassy mouth. Twice a week, she anxiously awaited the chimes of Daryl’s approach. After all the neighbor kids had chosen their sweets and disappeared back into their homes, the pair exchanged the tantalizing gossip of the week. They snickered over Dixie’s most recent ridiculous hat or Stella Atkinson’s most recent lover. Mr. Turnball kept Aunt Sookie abreast on all of Savannah’s latest scandals. Long after her Popsicle had been licked down to its bare stick, Sook and Mr. Turnball would still be devouring the most recent tasty morsels of rumor and lurid speculation.
Mr. Turnball leaned out his window, closer to Sookie’s listening ear. “Twyla Dandridge went and got herself knocked up by the Patterson boy,” Daryl whispered.
Sook gasped, “That child is only sixteen years of age!”
“Yessum. And did you hear, Mr. Rodney Pendergast has been messing around with Debbie Davenport?”
“No!”
“Yes, indeedie.” Sook sidled up closer to the truck. Mr. Turnball continued, “I was told by a most reliable source. Rodney was changing the oil on Debbie’s Caprice, and then one thing led to another, and he ended up lubricating her right there in her backseat.”
“Scandalous! That man has no shame,” Sookie exclaimed. “He’s an absolute scoundrel.”
Mr. Turnball swooned, “But a criminally handsome scoundrel.”
“I’m not one to gossip,” Sook confided, “but have you heard, Sissy Marston was allegedly carrying the Hudson boy’s bastard child?” She glanced in both directions down Digby. “That brazen hussy thought she had finally gone and trapped herself a young man of substantial means.”
“No!” Daryl shuddered.
“Yessum. Poor Beatrice Hudson was so brokenhearted about her boy. She was absolutely beside herself in the Piggly Wiggly on Saturday,” Sook said. “Beatrice told me she just couldn’t bear the thought of that social-climbing Sissy Marston marrying her boy and someday inheriting all Beatrice’s late mother’s fine china. So, do you know what Beatrice did?”
“No!” Daryl listened on intensely, chewing on a piece of red licorice.
“Poor ole Beatrice was so distraught by the mere thought of that wanton, raven-haired hussy sipping from one of her late momma’s tea cups that she took all of that beautiful, delicate china and shattered it right on her kitchen floor. One teacup at a time. Poof! The entire set of china was obliterated, left in tiny pieces on her linoleum!”
“Oh, my! You mean to tell me that lovely serving set with the pink rose buds and gold detailing from Paris has been destroyed?” Daryl grimaced in pain at the mere thought. “Every piece, shattered?”
“Yes, sirree. The entire serving set.” Sook nodded her head up and down. “Two days later, it turned out that Sissy wasn’t never carrying the boy’s child! That silly girl was just bloated up like a summer squash because she’d had too many shakes of salt on her buttered popcorn at the Saturday matinee.”
The ice cream man gasped. “No!”
“Yessum. And to make matters even worse, poor ole Beatrice went and sliced her toe on a sliver of one of them broken tea cups. Now Beatrice is laid out in the hospital with three stitches, a nasty infection, and her piggy toe swollen up the size of a walnut—all because Sissy Marston had an extra-large bucket of popcorn during the matinee showing of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
I suspected Daryl was my aunt Sook’s best and only close friend in Savannah. The two laughed the hours away standing on the curb.
One afternoon, as his ice cream truck exited from Digby, I asked Sookie, “Why don’t you ever invite Mr. Turnball over for a spot of afternoon tea or for a nice hot supper?”
Sook clutched her chest like she was having a heart palpitation. “Goodness no, child! That man is the most flamboyant homosexual in all of Georgia! How could I seat him at my supper table? What would people think?”
But, I knew that was just old Sookie spouting off. It was crystal clear to anyone who observed the two giggling near his truck that Aunt Sook was mighty fond of Mr. Turnball.
Forecasting what any particular day will bring is just plain foolishness. There ain’t no reasoning with fate. Pearl and I were piecing together a jigsaw puzzle on the front porch on a fine afternoon when a coughing yellow taxi pulled up to the curb.
A messy broad in dark sunglasses struggled to exit the back seat. She fought with her purse strap and tripped on the sidewalk. The cab driver, in a dirty T-shirt, hoisted two scuffed pieces of luggage from the trunk. The woman went searching through her leopard-skin pocketbook for loose change. The driver tipped his hat and pulled away from the curb. The lady wrestled with our front gate latch, cursing, “Gawd-damn it!”
I hollered, “You gotta wiggle the thingamajig.”
Finally, freeing the latch, she gave it a good hard kick, and the wooden gate swung wide open and came back around, striking her square in the shins. “Mother fucker, you son of a bitch!”
With her oversized black sunglasses and teased bubble of yellow hair, she resembled a bulging-eyed, buzzing bumblebee. Seemingly unbalanced on her scuffed red pumps, she stumbled a crooked line all the way up the cobblestone path to the house. When her heel caught on the front stoop, she was sent tumbling to the ground. She fought back to her feet and cursed again, “Mother fucker, gawd-damned, son of a bitch!” Adjusting her ridiculous corkscrew hat, she grabbed her dented Samsonites. Looking weary, wrinkled, and disheveled, she attempted to regain her composure by tugging at her short, frayed skirt and adjusting her skimpy halter top, which scarcely contained her massive set of knockers.
I said, “Howdy.”
“Poppy, wherezourAunSookat?” Her words slurred together like she had a mouth full of cotton. “I need to speak to Sookie.” She walked right past Pearl and me, slamming the screen door behind her.
“Holy moly!” Pearl turned to me with wide eyes. “Who is that?
“That’s Loretta Jo Nell Wainwright,” I replied. “That would be my momma.”
“Holy moly! She’s got herself some whooper titties.”
“Yessum.”
“And did you see those high-heeled shoes? How can she walk about in those stilts?”
“Dunno. Miss Loretta says high heels accentuate her long, luxurious legs. Ever since I can recall, she’s worn ’em high.”
Loretta bellowed from inside the house, “Soooookie! You up there?”
Pearl inquired, “Is your momma OK? Is she gonna be all right?”
“Yup. But I reckon she’s already three sheets to the wind.”
Pearl asked, “Already drunk on a Saturday morning? Holy moly.”
“Pay her no never mind. From all my reading, I’ve gathered that Miss Loretta stays inebriated to cope
with her disillusionment.”
“Disillusionment?” Pearl crinkled her pugged nose.
“Yessum, disillusionment. After studying on it, I gather Miss Loretta suffers from disillusionment caused by her abusive pa, my grandfather. He was mean as spit, and my grandma Lainey, her momma, never did nothin’ to put a stop to all of his cruelty.”
Pearl wore a puzzled expression.
“Yessum. I’ve read up on it in her AA pamphlets,” I said. “Loretta medicates her disillusionment with dope and booze. And she always keeps the company of distasteful men because she ain’t got no self-respect.”
Bewildered, Pearl shook her head.
“The AA literature says she could eventually come ’round, but she’s gotta fall hard first. She’s gotta hit bottom. But I figure, as long as there are barstools, Miss Loretta’s always got her some seat cushion to catch her fall. I don’t suspect she’ll ever find her bottom.”
Pearl shook her head and said, “That sounds like a big heap of trouble.”
“Yessum.”
“I’m sure sorry, Poppy, ’bout your momma’s ailing condition.”
“It ain’t nothin’,” I replied. “Back in Mountain Home, there was a lady on the front page of the newspaper who went bat-shit crazy. On a cold winter’s night, she grabbed her two babies and tossed them into a burning fireplace.”
Pearl’s mouth went slightly agape.
“Yessum. The woman pitched her precious bawling babies in the fire like a cord of cedar.”
“Why’d she go off and do that?”
“Dunno. But when the town officials arrived, she was sipping herself a cup of hibiscus tea and stoking the blazing fire. I reckon it was then I decided to stop my griping about Miss Loretta.”
Aunt Sookie & Me Page 6
