A Place Called Wiregrass (14 page)

“You and Gerald go out for your usual steak supper last Saturday?” Miss Claudia asked while I dusted the mahogany stair rail.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She stood a minute longer and opened her mouth to speak, but then walked away. The tap of her cane faded, and she closed her bedroom door.

I was in no mood for such foolish thoughts of romance; I had a crisis in my midst. Miss Claudia was sitting in her bed, reading the newspaper, when I entered with an armload of folded underwear to place in her chest of drawers.

“Cher was just here washing my window, tapping the glass, and making all sorts of monkey faces.” Miss Claudia pouted her lips and scrunched her nose. She giggled, and I only offered a smile.

“I declare,” she said, and her laughter died. “Erma Lee, you said this all started over the kids teasing her about her name?”

With my back to her, Miss Claudia could not see me roll my eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Has this happened before?”

“No, not really. Where do you want your scarves to go?” I slightly turned to see her hazel eyes burning a hole through the inside of me.

“Top drawer is fine, thank you. Listen, turn around where I can look at you.”

Just what I did not want to do
. I sighed a little too loudly.

“Now what in the world is going on? It’s me now. I’m your friend.”

“She just got in trouble at school is all. Some girl picked a fight with her.” I hand-dusted the top of the drawer. Anything to prevent looking at her.

“All this over her name. Why, Cher is a lovely name. I don’t see anything a’tall wrong with…”

“It’s her last name. Her last name,” I said out of utter frustration to make her comprehend my problems. “She changed it. Told all the teachers she was going by LaRue’s last name…her da…her biological father.”

Miss Claudia picked up the magazines off her bed and tossed them on her nightstand. “The poor girl’s just confused.”

I sighed, not expecting Miss Claudia to understand. Whatever we had in common concerning taking licks from a man, she didn’t have all the problems I faced. She had an imperfect child, but he lived next door, not in a prison. She didn’t face the loss of love and hope from the one person you believed would change a mess of destruction. “It’s more than all that. You just don’t understand.”

“Well, try me.”

“No, just forget it. I just never should have…”

“Erma Lee, you’re just all to pieces. Now I’m concerned about you. You don’t want me to worry about you now, do you?”

I stepped towards the chair by her bed and ran my fingers over the brocaded fabric on the armrest.

“What’s the matter with the child pretending? She’s having an identity crisis. She needs to know who her people are.”

“I’m her people,” I said, pointing into my chest. “She needs nobody else but me. He won’t have her, I keep trying to tell her.” My voice echoed down the hall and greeted me
once again. I reeled my emotions back and got onto myself for getting out of control. She sat there and looked at me. She was expecting more, signaling me with her eyes that she was tough and could take it.

“Is this man dangerous for her?”

All I could do was look down and nod my head in shame. Shame that my own daughter had brought evil into our lives. Shame that I couldn’t stop it. Finally, after what seemed two hours of silence, I sat down in the chair by her bedside.

“He’s real dangerous. That’s why this is not just some schoolyard fight. I should’ve seen it with Suzette too. My daughter was raised with fighting and screaming all the time. You can just imagine how bad. And I don’t blame her for running off and marrying the first thing who looked over his shoulder at her. Not much different than me, I reckon. I tried to tell her what a mistake I made marrying so young, but Suzette knew more than me.

“Bozo or me, neither one liked LaRue. Can you blame us? She met him when the carnival came to town. He called himself a ride engineer. I saw through that bull. The carnival was always littering the airport field after they left town, and in my book LaRue was just one more piece of trash they left in Cross City. LaRue got a job working construction, and after his third paycheck Suzette got pregnant. Lord knows, I begged her not to marry him. I told her I would raise the baby while she finished school. She cussed me for everything under the sun and told me I wanted to keep her chained. That was LaRue talking, I know that now. They snuck away the next morning. I didn’t hear from her until a week later when she told me they found a rental house in Shreveport.”

“Well, I declare,” Miss Claudia said with her chin propped on her knuckles.

“Yeah, LaRue always had a big scheme. He was going to paint houses, or he was going to own a gas station, always
something. Except any money he made went straight up his nose. But I will say at first Suzette tried. She was even a good little mama for a few months. I don’t know how long it took her to get doped up, but soon we knew something wasn’t right. Cher was just a year old when they were flying high. New vehicles, lots of jewelry. Then next thing you know, we weren’t hearing from them. I’d send a letter. No response. Call on the phone and get no answer. I called for a solid week before one morning I called and got a message saying the phone had been disconnected. I called in sick at the factory and drove straight over to Shreveport. Calling it sixth sense or whatever, I knew something wasn’t right.

“I went up the small steps of the blue rental house expecting nobody home. The yard was scattered with plastic bags and beer cans. I pried the front door open with a rusty jackknife I found by the side of the house. As soon as the door popped open, the smell of old beer and urine nearly knocked me back out. Clothes and shoes were piled all in the middle of the floor, and the sofa Bozo and me gave them as a wedding gift had been torched. I first thought some type of Charles Manson gang had come in and killed them all. I pulled my shirt over my nose and stepped over beer cans and bottles of Wild Turkey. Half-eaten McDonald’s hamburgers with white mold on the buns still sat in yellow containers on the kitchen counter.

“The kitchen table and chairs had been tossed in all directions. You’d a thought a hurricane hit the place. One empty can of cat food sat on the floor next to the refrigerator. I opened the refrigerator door, and the stench of rotten food made me gag and my eyes water. I turned to run out the front door and tripped over a bottle. When I got up, I looked up and saw her. Just sitting there in the corner of the room. Behind a turned-over keg, wild-eyed and shaking, with her mouth wide open. It was Cher. They just left her there like some empty
bottle they were through with.” Tears fell freely on to my arms. I sat just as still at the courthouse the day the jury convicted Suzette and LaRue of child abandonment and neglect.

I put both my hands over my eyes. “Cher stayed in the hospital for two weeks, dehydrated and in shock. If it hadn’t been for that one can of cat…” I bent my head down and tried not to bawl like I had when I grabbed her up in her soiled clothing and ran out the front door of that blue shack. It was the last time I really cried in front of Cher. The doctor at the hospital told me this was no time for sissies. Cher needed rocks, not mud.

I never heard Miss Claudia leave the room, but I felt the soft touch of her bony hand on my back. My face was hot, and when I leaned up, I saw her standing before me with a glass and a lace handkerchief.

“Take a sip of Coca-Cola,” she said, handing me the handkerchief at the same time. She sat in the wingback chair next to me. We were silent for quite some time. I figured she wanted to make sure I had gotten it all out of my system. Or maybe she was waiting for an ending. If only I had one to offer.

I blew my nose and cleared my throat. “They found LaRue and Suzette two days later. High on crack, in some fleabag in Las Vegas.” I inhaled and blew the air out hard like I imagined a marathon runner would do headed towards the finish line. “Suzette had even been selling herself,” the words trailing with the last puff of air. “She’s in prison, not in a state home. I lied, okay?”

I looked at Miss Claudia, waiting for her to scream and kick me out of her house, to do something, anything. But she just sat there with her head tilted towards her shoulder.

“I’m sorry for lying to you. Look, I know how this must seem to you with me and my history…”

“Now, you’ve done nothing but try to take the girl and give her a decent raising. Does she know about all this?”

I jingled the cubes of ice in the blue-swirled glass and
shook my head. “I know I ought to tell her. But she’s a good girl. And with all the drugs and mess kids get into.” I suddenly looked up at her as if I had another bright idea, “Do you want me to leave?”

Miss Claudia pulled herself up by the arm of the chair and gripped her cane. I learned long ago nothing made her madder than to have someone rush over and help her get out of a chair. Leaning on the cane, she turned her head and smiled. “Erma Lee, what do I have to do to convince you that you’re family now? And that’s what families do, they bear burdens. I love you and Cher.”

I looked down at the Oriental rug and shook my head. The words
I love you
sounded different coming from her than they did when I tried to drill them into Cher.

She caressed the strands of hair pulled neatly back on my head.

“Can I offer advice? These are burdens we can’t bear. Cannot control. Whenever I face times like these, I just put them at the Lord’s feet.”

I did not respond, but simply sat still and studied the swirls of navy and burgundy that jumped at me from the Oriental rug. I wanted to shrink into the swirls and become part of the carpet. Instead, I clasped her hand and closed my eyes tightly.
Would God hear my prayer?
I wasn’t worthy like Miss Claudia. I was silent and let her lead.

We prayed for protection of Cher and for peace of mind. She even prayed for LaRue and Suzette, people I was sure the good Lord had long given up on. When it was over, she hugged me tightly. “We have our crosses to bear, you and me.”

I never fully explained to Gerald why I couldn’t go to the steak house with him on Friday night. I told him Cher was on restriction and couldn’t go to the skating rink. It embarrassed
me that he brought dinner to us that evening. As he placed plastic bags on the counter, I knew the Lord was answering part of the prayer already. Gerald’s presence seemed to lighten the tension that ran between Cher and me.

As typical of our fights, after two days me and Cher were speaking again. In that way she was like me. We were too no-nonsense for pouty bickering. She entered the kitchen Monday morning downright chipper. Even kissed me on the cheek before she went to the bus stop. All day, I felt guilty for trying to force her into accepting something Mother Nature had not intended, to hate a parent.

After determining how much it would cost to host a skating party for ten, I sat at the kitchen table to figure up how far my bank account could stretch for a skating party. Sixty dollars was the bare minimum for a party, and with the light bill due next week the numbers in my register just wouldn’t cooperate. Reluctantly, I approached Miss Claudia with the idea of a loan. But I made her sign a piece of notebook paper stating I would pay her back by June 15. “You didn’t take us to raise,” I continued to remind her.

The truth shall set you free.
It’s one of the few lessons I still remember from my days attending Sunday school and church with Aunt Stella. But telling the truth about Cher and Suzette to Miss Claudia gave me insomnia. As I laid there in my bed hearing the clumps of pine straw drift down on my tin roof, I was all tight inside. All I could think of in the first few nights after my confession was that spring day twelve years ago in Shreveport. I had dismissed it out of my mind when Suzette entered prison, and now LaRue had drug it all back up.
All this is his fault
. I kicked the sheets until they clumped together at the end of the bed. I sat up and sighed at the stillness of the room. Turning on the lamp, I picked up a pencil and notebook.

With a pillow as a bumpy desktop, I put little dots beside each point I wanted to tell Suzette someday. All the questions
and details that led up to my discovery that spring day in Shreveport. All the holes I had not allowed myself to fill during the trial, vowing to never speak to her again.

I sat with the pencil dangling between my fingers like a cigarette. Thinking of issues to discuss in this imaginary world, I swung the wild strands of hair out of my face. The movement brought Gerald’s perfect daughter to mind. Even I had to admit, with all her high and mighty ways, Marcie was a success. I saw it in the way Gerald grinned at her sassy one-liners, or at how he shook his head and chuckled at the cookout when she told him he was serving the salad all wrong. His daughter had become what he and Leslie expected and hoped for. Beside the pencil dot on the blue-lined paper, I wrote the last point I would address with Suzette: Why?

“This little thing ain’t half bad. Sounds pretty good,” Gerald said, examining the pink radio I had transferred from Cher’s room to the counter of the kitchen. After asking Gerald over for dinner, I asked Cher if I could borrow her radio.

“The old me would’ve just pulled it right out without asking,” I reminded her at the skating rink.

“You’re trying,” she said and got out of the car.

After a second pork chop, I decided I had to do it before my heart tore out of my chest. Gerald was still holding the biscuit on the edge of his plate when I ventured on shaky ground. “This is some of the best corn,” he said, using the biscuit to guide the kernels onto his fork.

“Hey, I need to talk a minute,” I said, clinching the paper napkin into a ball. I was glad the radio was softly playing to provide distraction.
The truth shall set you free,
I heard Aunt Stella’s pastor scream from old files in my mind.

Gerald looked up, holding the serving bowl of fried corn. His green eyes looked bigger than usual. He probably thought
that he really didn’t know me. Maybe he thought I was going to announce I had put poison in his pork chop. “What’s on your mind?” He calmly put the corn back on the table without taking a second helping.