Homeland and Other Stories (2 page)

“As if I hadn't put up with enough, John. It's not enough that Murrays have populated God's earth without the benefit of marriage,” Mother said. This was her usual starting point. She was legally married to my father in a Baptist Church, a fact she could work into any conversation.

“Well, I don't see why,” she said, “if we never had the money to take the kids anyplace before.”

Papa's voice was quieter, and I couldn't hear his answers.

“Was this her idea, John, or yours?”

When Nathan and Jack were asleep I went to the window and slipped over the sill. My feet landed where they always did, in the cool mud of Mother's gladiolus patch alongside the house. Great Mam did not believe in flower patches. Why take a hoe and kill all the growing things in a piece of ground, and then plant others that have been uprooted from somewhere else? This was what she asked me. She thought Mother spent a fearful amount of time moving things needlessly from one place to another.

“I see you, Waterbug,” said Great Mam in the darkness, though what she probably meant was that she heard me. All I could see was the glow of her pipe bowl moving above the porch swing.

“Tell me the waterbug story tonight,” I said, settling onto the swing. The fireflies were blinking on and off in the black air above the front yard.

“No, I won't,” she said. The orange glow moved to her lap, and faded from bright to dim. “I'll tell you another time.”

The swing squeaked its sad song, and I thought about Tennessee. It had never occurred to me that the place where Great Mam had been a child was still on this earth. “Why'd you go away from home?” I asked her.

“You have to marry outside your clan,” she said. “That's law. And all the people we knew were Bird Clan. All the others were gone. So when Stewart Murray came and made baby eyes at me, I had to go with him.” She laughed. “I liked his horse.”

I imagined the two of them on a frisking, strong horse, crossing the mountains to Kentucky. Great Mam with black hair. “Weren't you afraid to go?” I asked.

“Oh, yes I was. The canebrakes were high as a house. I was afraid we'd get lost.”

 

We were to leave on Saturday after Papa got off work. He worked days then, after many graveyard-shift years during which we rarely saw him except asleep, snoring and waking throughout the afternoon, with Mother forever forced to shush us; it was too easy to forget someone was trying to sleep in daylight. My father was a soft-spoken man who sometimes drank but was never mean. He had thick black hair, no beard stubble at all nor hair on his chest, and a nose he called his Cherokee nose. Mother said she thanked the Lord that at least He had seen fit not to put
that nose on her children. She also claimed he wore his hair long to flout her, although it wasn't truly long, in our opinion. His nickname in the mine was “Indian John.”

There wasn't much to get ready for the trip. All we had to do in the morning was wait for afternoon. Mother was in the house scrubbing so it would be clean when we came back. The primary business of Mother's life was scrubbing things, and she herself looked scrubbed. Her skin was the color of a clean boiled potato. We didn't get in her way.

My brothers were playing a ferocious game of cowboys and Indians in the backyard, but I soon defected to my own amusements along the yard's weedy borders, picking morning glories, pretending to be a June bride. I grew tired of trying to weave the flowers into my coarse hair and decided to give them to Great Mam. I went around to the front and came up the three porch steps in one jump, just exactly the way Mother said a lady wouldn't do.

“Surprise,” I announced. “These are for you.” The flowers were already wilting in my hand.

“You shouldn't have picked those,” she said.

“They were a present.” I sat down, feeling stung.

“Those are not mine to have and not yours to pick,” she said, looking at me, not with anger but with intensity. Her brown pupils were as dark as two pits in the earth. “A flower is alive, just as much as you are. A flower is your cousin. Didn't you know that?”

I said, No ma'am, that I didn't.

“Well, I'm telling you now, so you will know. Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it. If you're hungry, then they're happy to give their flesh up to you because they're your relatives. But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower.”

I said nothing.

“They ought to be left where they stand, Waterbug. You need to leave them for the small people to see. When they die they'll fall where they are, and make a seed for next year.”

“Nobody cared about these,” I contended. “They weren't but just weeds.”

“It doesn't matter what they were or were not. It's a bad thing to take for yourself something beautiful that belongs to everybody. Do you understand? To take it is a sin.”

I didn't, and I did. I could sense something of wasted life in the sticky leaves, translucent with death, and the purple flowers turning wrinkled and limp. I'd once brought home a balloon from a Ritchie child's birthday party, and it had shriveled and shrunk with just such a slow blue agony.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“It's all right.” She patted my hands. “Just throw them over the porch rail there, give them back to the ground. The small people will come and take them back.”

I threw the flowers over the railing in a clump, and came back, trying to rub the purple and green juices off my hands onto my dress. In my mother's eyes, this would have been the first sin of my afternoon. I understood the difference between Great Mam's rules and the Sunday-school variety, and that you could read Mother's Bible forward and backward and never find where it said it's a sin to pick flowers because they are our cousins.

“I'll try to remember,” I said.

“I want you to,” said Great Mam. “I want you to tell your children.”

“I'm not going to have any children,” I said. “No boy's going to marry me. I'm too tall. I've got knob knees.”

“Don't ever say you hate what you are.” She tucked a loose sheaf of black hair behind my ear. “It's an unkindness to those that made you. That's like a red flower saying it's too red, do you see what I mean?”

“I guess,” I said.

“You will have children. And you'll remember about the flowers,” she said, and I felt the weight of these promises fall like a deerskin pack between my shoulder blades.

 

By four o'clock we were waiting so hard we heard the truck crackle up the gravel road. Papa's truck was a rust-colored Ford with complicated cracks hanging like spiderwebs in the corners of the windshield. He jumped out with his long, blue-jean strides and patted the round front fender.

“Old Paint's had her oats,” he said. “She's raring to go.” This was a game he played with Great Mam. Sometimes she would say, “John Murray, you couldn't ride a mule with a saddle on it,” and she'd laugh, and we would for a moment see the woman who raised Papa. Her bewilderment and pleasure, to have ended up with this broad-shouldered boy.

Today she said nothing, and Papa went in for Mother. There was only room for three in the cab, so Jack and Nathan and I climbed into the back with the old quilt Mother gave us and a tarpaulin in case of rain.

“What's she waiting for, her own funeral?” Jack asked me.

I looked at Great Mam, sitting still on the porch like a funny old doll. The whole house was crooked, the stoop sagged almost to the ground, and there sat Great Mam as straight as a schoolteacher's ruler. Seeing her there, I fiercely wished to defend my feeling that I knew her better than others did.

“She doesn't want to go,” I said. I knew as soon as I'd spoken that it was the absolute truth.

“That's stupid. She's the whole reason we're going. Why wouldn't she want to go see her people?”

“I don't know, Jack,” I said.

Papa and Mother eventually came out of the house, Papa in
a clean shirt already darkening under the arms, and Mother with her Sunday purse, the scuff marks freshly covered with white shoe polish. She came down the front steps in the bent-over way she walked when she wore high heels. Papa put his hand under Great Mam's elbow and she silently climbed into the cab.

When he came around to the other side I asked him, “Are you sure Great Mam wants to go?”

“Sure she does,” he said. “She wants to see the place where she grew up. Like what Morning Glory is to you.”

“When I grow up I'm not never coming back to Morning Glory,” Jack said.

“Me neither.” Nathan spat over the side of the truck, the way he'd seen men do.

“Don't spit, Nathan,” Papa said.

“Shut up,” Nathan said, after Papa had gotten in the truck and shut the door.

The houses we passed had peeled paint and slumped porches like our own, and they all wore coats of morning-glory vines, deliciously textured and fat as fur coats. We pointed out to each other the company men's houses, which had bright white paint and were known to have indoor bathrooms. The deep ditches along the road, filled with blackberry brambles and early goldenrod, ran past us like rivers. On our walks to school we put these ditches to daily use practicing Duck and Cover, which was what our teachers felt we ought to do when the Communists dropped the H-bomb.

“We'll see Indians in Tennessee,” Jack said. I knew we would. Great Mam had told me how it was.

“Great Mam don't look like an Indian,” Nathan said.

“Shut up, Nathan,” Jack said. “How do you know what an Indian looks like? You ever seen one?”

“She does so look like an Indian,” I informed my brothers. “She is one.”

According to Papa we all looked like little Indians, I especially. Mother hounded me continually to stay out of the sun, but by each summer's end I was so dark-skinned my schoolmates teased me, saying I ought to be sent over to the Negro school.

“Are we going to be Indians when we grow up?” Nathan asked.

“No, stupid,” said Jack. “We'll just be the same as we are now.”

 

We soon ran out of anything productive to do. We played White Horse Zit many times over, until Nathan won, and we tried to play Alphabet but there weren't enough signs. The only public evidence of literacy in that part of the country was the Beech Nut Tobacco signs on barn roofs, and every so often, nailed to a tree trunk, a clapboard on which someone had painted “
PREPARE TO MEET GOD
.”

Papa's old truck didn't go as fast as other cars. Jack and Nathan slapped the fenders like jockeys as we were passed on the uphill slopes, but their coaxing amounted to nought. By the time we went over Jellico Mountain, it was dark.

An enormous amount of sky glittered down at us on the mountain pass, and even though it was June we were cold. Nathan had taken the quilt for himself and gone to sleep. Jack said he ought to punch him one to teach him to be nice, but truthfully, nothing in this world could have taught Nathan to share. Jack and I huddled together under the tarp, which stank of coal oil, and sat against the back of the cab where the engine rendered up through the truck's metal body a faint warmth.

“Jack?” I said.

“What.”

“Do you reckon Great Mam's asleep?”

He turned around and cupped his hands to see into the cab. “Nope,” he said. “She's sitting up there in between 'em, stiff as a broom handle.”

“I'm worried about her,” I said.

“Why? If we were home she'd be sitting up just the same, only out front on the porch.”

“I know.”

“Glorie, you know what?” he asked me.

“What?”

A trailer truck loomed up behind us, decked with rows of red and amber lights like a Christmas tree. We could see the driver inside the cab. A faint blue light on his face made him seem ghostly and entirely alone. He passed us by, staring ahead, as though only he were real on this cold night and we were among all the many things that were not. I shivered, and felt an identical chill run across Jack's shoulders.

“What?” I asked again.

“What, what?”

“You were going to tell me something.”

“Oh. I forgot what it was.”

“Great Mam says the way to remember something you forgot is to turn your back on it. Say, ‘The small people came dancing. They ran through the woods today.' Talk about what they did, and then whatever it was you forgot, they'll bring it back to you.”

“That's dumb,” Jack said. “That's Great Mam's hobbledy-gobbledy.”

For a while we played See Who Can Go to Sleep First, which we knew to be a game that can't consciously be won. He never remembered what he'd meant to say.

 

When Papa woke us the next morning we were at a truck stop in Knoxville. He took a nap in the truck with his boots stick
ing out the door while the rest of us went in for breakfast. Inside the restaurant was a long glass counter containing packs of Kools and Mars Bars lined up on cotton batting, objects of great value to be protected from dust and children. The waitress who brought us our eggs had a red wig perched like a bird on her head, and red eyebrows painted on over the real ones.

When it was time to get back in the truck we dragged and pulled on Mother's tired, bread-dough arms, like little babies, asking her how much farther.

“Oh, it's not far. I expect we'll be in Cherokee by lunchtime,” she said, but her mouth was set and we knew she was as tired of this trip as any of us.

It was high noon before we saw a sign that indicated we were approaching Cherokee. Jack pummeled the cab window with his fists to make sure they all saw it, but Papa and Mother were absorbed in some kind of argument. There were more signs after that, with pictures of cartoon Indian boys urging us to buy souvenirs or stay in so-and-so's motor lodge. The signs were shaped like log cabins and teepees. Then we saw a real teepee. It was made of aluminum and taller than a house. Inside, it was a souvenir store.