A Place to Call Home (17 page)

But Roanie was part of us. He belonged to us. He belonged to me. He shouldn’t talk as if he wanted to cut us down to the ground.

I pretended to watch the football game but snuck bewildered glances at his hard profile. He’s a lot older than me, I thought with sudden awareness and sorrow. And sometimes he’s so far away, I can’t bring him back.

We were at the flea market down by Murphy’s Feed Mill. Mr. Murphy had outfitted one of his warehouses with a hundred wooden stalls and on weekends people came from miles around to deal with vendors who sold everything from junk to, well,
good
junk. Mama liked to hunt for books and pottery; I liked to hunt for Beep.

Beep Murphy was Mr. Murphy’s oldest son. He was a
grown man, really, but he was retarded, with round, small, Mongoloid features that made him baby-faced forever. He walked around in overalls and a thick sweater, smiling endlessly as he swept floors and cleaned the portable toilets outside the building and picked up trash, which he deposited in his white plastic bucket with flower decals on it.

He loved kids because he was one at heart, and he knew which ones of us he could count on. When he spotted me, he ducked out a side door. “Come on,” I said to Roanie.

“What for?”

“We gotta catch Beep. You’ve never chased Beep?”

“Nooo.”

“Come on!” I ran outside. It was a bright, clear, cold December day. I dodged among the cars and trucks parked on the graveled apron around the warehouse. “Beep, Beep, Beep,” I called as I searched each lane. I rounded the end of a car.

“
BEEP
!” Beep bellowed back at me. He was crouched beside the fender. He pounded his trash can with one hand. We both burst out laughing.

“How you doin’, Mr. Beep?”

“Beep.”

Roanie walked up beside me. Beep grinned up at him. “Beep.”

“Say it back,” I whispered.

“I don’t think so,” Roanie said with some dignity.

“
BEEP
,” Beep said insistently.

“Say it back, Roanie. Or he’ll follow you around till you do. That’s part of the game.”

Roanie was silent, frowning. “Beep.” It was the flattest beep I’d ever heard.

But Beep nodded and laughed, satisfied. He sprang to his feet. “Beep!” he tossed over one shoulder as he lumbered back into the warehouse.

“Now you’re a member of the Beep Society,” I told Roanie seriously. “You’ve been
Beeptized
.”

“And I thought I’d missed out on a lot,” he answered drolly.

“You don’t like Beep?”

“Feel sorry for him. He acts like a fool. People make fun of him.”

“I wasn’t making fun of him.”

“I don’t mean you. I just mean in general. He doesn’t know how to fight back, so he plays along.”

“No! He’s happy.”

“He’s not in on the joke.”

“Sure he is. He likes it.”

His face tight with anger, Roanie leaned against the car and shoved his hands in his jeans pockets. “I saw him in town once. Waiting outside the grocery store while his old man was shopping. Four or five boys decided to have a little
fun
with him. Got in a circle around him, called him names. Called him an idiot, said he was stupid. He started cryin’.”

I felt bad, but I didn’t know what to say. Roanie knew how Beep must have felt because he’d been singled out for mean treatment himself. I wanted to squeeze one of his hands in sympathy or hug him, but I knew, too, that he wouldn’t like that in public. And not much in private, of course. It was as if touching and being touched were dangerous in some way, and I don’t mean because of boy-girl regulations. “I didn’t do anything about it,” he added dully. “There was so many of ’em. I just watched. I hated it.”

“That’s how I felt when you were getting beat up on at school,” I said. “And at Easter that time, and the Christmas parade last year, and when Aunt Bess sent you away.” My voice cracked. He was looking down at me now, not angry anymore, but somber and gentle. “I couldn’t do anything,” I rushed on, swallowing hard and fighting a tremor in my lower lip. “When I told on you last fall and they caught you over at Ten Jumps so you couldn’t hide anymore, I felt awful. I did it to help, but I was scared it was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“You did all right. Did plenty. More’n anybody.”

“No, I didn’t. What?”

“Gave me a reason to keep trying.”

“Trying to do what?”

“Not give up.”

I brightened. “Really?”

“Don’t get a big head over it.”

I punched him on the arm. “Now you’re teasing me!”

“Beep,” he said darkly.

“Shitbird!”

We started inside the flea market, but an old sedan pulled past us into a parking space. Peeling paint. Missing hubcaps. Duct-taped windows. Yep. A McClendon car. Sally climbed out. She was dressed in a fuzzy white jacket and tight jeans and fuzzy white boots. Her hair was piled up in a curly yellow topknot. She spotted us and looked Roanie up and down with her black-mascaraed eyes. Maybe she’d never seen him in nice clothes before.

Roanie pushed me ahead of him, on into the warehouse. I dug the heels of my loafers into the ground and twisted away. “What are you doing? I want to talk to her.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I don’t like the way she eyeballs you. I’m gonna tell her to mind her own business.”

“She’s all bark and not much bite,” he told me grimly. “If you want to feel sorry for somebody, feel sorry for her.”

That shut me up.

“You’re a good baby-sitter, Roanie,” Sally called, grinning at him as she sauntered over. “We miss havin’ you around.”

Baby-sitter
. I wanted to pull out her fuzz one clump at a time. Roanie clamped a hand on my shoulder. “I got tired of draggin’ my old man home when you and Daisy kicked him out. Y’all oughta kick him out for good.”

Sally stopped in front of him. Her grin faded. “You
ain’t ever coming back to see us, are you?” she asked in a small voice.

“I can’t change what goes on down there, but I don’t have to be part of it.”

“You’re not like your daddy.” She tossed that off with a thin smile. “He cain’t stay away. Cain’t keep his pants zipped neither.”

Roanie turned me around and nudged me toward the door. His face was red. “Claire, go inside. I’ll be along in a minute.”

I pivoted and glared up at him. “Oh, no. I’m not budging.”

“
Claire.
”

“No.”

Sally seemed to have urgent words burning inside her. She edged closer to Roanie. “He’s a dog, but lots of the fine men around here ain’t any better. It’s gonna catch up one day. Be hell to pay. One of these days I might just move on. I saved that money you gimme.”

Money? Roanie had given her money?

“I ain’t like you, Roanie,” she went on sadly. “I ain’t foolin’ myself.” She reached out and smoothed the collar of his jacket.

Roanie shook his head. “There’s people who’ll give you a chance to do better. But you gotta meet them halfway.”

“What?” She pointed at me. “Her and her kin? They’re lyin’ to you. They don’t give a damn about you. Her people ain’t nothin’ special. Her Uncle Pete’ll fuck anything that stands still long enough. And he ain’t the only one.”

I screeched wordlessly and lunged at her with one hand drawn back in a fist. Roanie grabbed me. Picked me up without a word, circling my waist with one arm and lifting me, dangling, off my feet. I swung my arms and kicked. Sally laughed. “Don’t be jealous, queenie. Roanie got away before I had a chance. You take care of him, you hear?”

“Put me down!” I shrieked as Roanie carried me away.
He took me inside and ducked into a corner hidden behind the stalls. He set me down. “
Cool off
.”

“What’s she talkin’ about?” I demanded. “
Did you give her money?
”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because she needs the help, Claire.”

“
Why?
”

“Like I said about Beep, I can’t stand by and just watch somebody get kicked in the teeth.”

I took several deep breaths. “I’m trying to feel sorry for her,” I told him. “I really am. But I need to go pull some of her fur out first.”

He leaned toward me. His harsh eyes burned into my defiant ones. “She gets hurt in ways I never had to put up with. You get it? By the time she wasn’t much older than you, she was scared of men.
Scared
. That’s why she acts like she does.”

I looked at him with slowly dawning horror. “She shoulda asked for help.”

“Like me? I wouldn’t a-taken help if it hadn’t been for you. She don’t … she
doesn’t
have anybody special like you.”

“Beep?” Beep said, poking his head around a corner and shaking his trash bucket at us.

I ran to Beep. I threw my arms around his stout waist and hugged him hard. He looked stunned. “Beep,” he purred, and awkwardly patted my back.

I turned and met Roanie’s shrewd, troubled eyes. “I care,” I said slowly. “And don’t you forget it.”

I told Mama that Sally had hinted about leaving town someday. I thought Mama might be relieved to know. I was wrong.

“That baby of hers isn’t some stranger,” I heard Mama crying to Daddy late that night as I hid on the back stairs with Roanie. “Poor little Matthew. None of us even talk
about him as if he has a
name
. I don’t even know whether Sally named him after Matthew the apostle or Matt Dillon on
Gunsmoke
. What kind of life will he have if Sally decides to run off with him?”

“I’ll tell you what’ll happen if you try to take him away from her,” Daddy said quietly. “We’ll have to go to court, and no judge is likely to see it our way. She’s the baby’s mother. She’s got rights.”

“Oh, Holt! From all I’ve heard she’s no better than a cat! When some new tom yowls at her, she’ll forget she ever had a baby.”

“Hon, even if we could adopt Matthew, we’d never get your brother to admit to anything. What would you do? Force Pete to take a blood test?”

“We could. Ralph told me he could get a court order—”

“Set my brother against your brother? Good God, hon, you want to do that to the family? What about your mother? She’s old, and Pete’s a misery to her as it is. You keep pushing the idea that Matthew’s his little boy, you’ll break her heart.”

I listened to Mama crying as Daddy murmured soothing sounds to her. I looked at Roanie, who stared into space, frowning. I could never get him to talk about his mood that night.

I realized much later that there’s nothing worse than realizing the limit of good intentions.

T
he trouble with Roanie was that he didn’t know his place yet; he had been pulled up by the roots too many times. There was a lot of talk about
place
in my family. It was no small matter to know your place in the world, and I don’t mean in the way spiteful people talk about
keeping someone in their place
, I mean the sense of belonging. A place at the table. A place in a family. A place on the land. A place in the heart.

That might be a very Southern concern—places. Aunt Jane was founder and president of the Eudora Welty Literary Society, which met at the library every Tuesday night, and it was a telling fact that she named her book lovers’ club after a Southern writer who’d said we had a profound sense of place, that our feelings were all tied up in place.

Roanie had a place in our family, as far as I was concerned, and a deep, secure place in my heart, but he needed something else and I couldn’t decide what it was, until the day Grandpa took us up to Dunshinnog Mountain to gather mistletoe.

Dunshinnog towered over the eastern edge of our valley like the king of all mountains. Maloneys had owned it since the very first pioneer land-grant years, which was amazing when you considered the frugal choices old Sean
and Bridget Maloney had to make to survive and prosper in the parceled-out wilderness.

After all, Dunshinnog wasn’t valuable farmland, like the valley. You could only look at it, and love it. I thought that bit of appreciation said a lot about the hearts of those old ancestors of mine, that they must have been romantic, even without their teeth.

The mountaintop was wide and almost level, with a natural meadow at one end. We skirted patches of pine trees that stairstepped down the easiest side, the west, where some long-dead Maloneys had once built terraced pastures for cattle. I could find the foundation of a house and barns on a low ridge, but only because I knew where to look.

Otherwise the mountain was covered in old hardwood forest, and each spring we gazed up at its white clouds of dogwood blooms and then the pinkish clusters of laurel. In autumn it blazed with red and gold. In the early winter, when Roanie and Grandpa and I went there, Dunshinnog was a spartan world of somber gray. Small herds of deer roamed it, and raccoons, and wild turkey. Hawks hung over it on a clear day, and we saw an eagle once. There was even a bear or two left when I was a girl, though we never saw one.

But
foxes
were the mountain’s barter in local legend, foxes and the whimsy of Irish tall tales. Like Mr. Tobbler and his yellow jackets, we chicken-farming Maloneys had long ago made peace with our enemies in trade.