My Drowning (24 page)

I return to my house when I am sure she's gone. I lie in bed till dawn, even though I can hardly close my eyes.

I am beginning to understand. In that river I am moving, too.

NORA LIVED TO
be a good age, sixty-eight, old for my family. She collected a little Social Security at the end, as I have.

I believe we were friends when she died, a relief, since she behaved as if she hated me when we were young. She hated everyone then, but especially me. I sat through her funeral while a high wind threatened to rip off my hat, a nice beaded black affair with a veil, something my second husband gave me. I clamped my hand there and tried to ignore the wind. I was thinking we might have to close the lid on Nora after all, the way the wind was whipping that lacy thing at her throat. She reclined there quietly, composedly, with a piece of a smile across her lips. Even dead, Nora could stir up a storm.

When we chopped cotton and when we picked it, I worked near her, and she kept her eye on me. She criticized the way I chopped, she claimed I skipped over patches and left the dirt in big clods. I took it to heart and chopped furiously, finer and finer, till my back and shoulders and arms burned. At times Nora whimpered and pressed her hand against her lower back, and I mimicked the pose. The pressure
of my hand provided a bit of relief for sore, tired muscles. But neither of us said much about it, and we rarely com plained to Mama, who had her own aches and pains.

We both grew thin as sticks, all those years, till suddenly one day Nora began to blossom into a kind of plumpness that Daddy kept his eye on.

He kept her close by him. She washed his hands at night, and pulled off his boots and socks, and rubbed his feet. She stirred the sugar into his coffee. At times he showed a softness toward her that made Mama arch her back and spit. But Nora never lost her fear of Daddy, and I understood why.

Daddy caught Lyle Yates propped against the corner of our house talking sweet to Nora, and Daddy blacked both his eyes and then raised welts on Nora's backside with a leather cord. When Mama got upset about it, he gave her a couple of licks to think about, too.

One day, when we returned home from school, Mama glared at Nora from across the kitchen. Her expression became so menacing that Nora stopped midway through the room; she trembled and became very afraid, knowing Mama's temper. “Your ass is going to get stomped when your daddy comes home,” she hissed.

“What did I do?”

“You daddy is going to break every bone in your nasty body.”

“Mama please,” a flutter in her voice, “what are you talking about?”

Mama drew a letter out of her bosom. “You got this here letter. Carl Jr. told me this has your name on it.”

A desperate longing, like nothing I had ever seen before, consumed Nora. “Give it to me! Oh please!”

Mama shoved the letter back into her bosom. Nora stood whimpering and my heart had begun to pound. “If this letter is from a boy, your daddy will wear you out.”

“Mama, please give it to me. Please don't tell Daddy.”

Instead, Mama gave her a smack across the face and wheeled and left the room.

I did the same, leaving my schoolbooks on the table and carrying the water bucket outside. A patch of red spread across Nora's cheek.

Daddy came home stomping mud off his boots and flapping his work gloves against the porch post. His hands were scratched and dirty and oozing blood in places. He had gone back to logging after a spell of tending fires in tobacco curing barns; the wood fires had to be watched all night. The money was better logging but the work was hard and he always hated it, especially that he scratched his hands up, and tore his fingernails, and blistered his palms. He mustered with the crews at Mr. Jarman's store, and Roe Yates gave him a ride home every evening.

“Get over here and wash my hands.” He stopped by the water bucket and glared at Nora. When she failed to move instantly, he said again, “Did you hear me? I said get over here.”

Nora moved toward him, arms folded like a shield against her chest. She stood in his shadow and poured hot water into the basin, cooling it with water I had drawn from the well. She took his hands and soaked them in the hot water. “Goddamn, that stings,” Daddy said, and Madson, at the kitchen table, giggled.

“What the hell are you hooting at?” Daddy asked, and Madson shut up right quick.

Nora took a soft washcloth and ran it tenderly over the gnarled backs of Daddy's hands, one scar from a knife fight in Holberta, another from an accident opening oysters. She scrubbed so gently Daddy was surprised and blinked uncertainly, gazing at the top of her head. All four of their hands were submerged in the soapy water.

From the back of the house we could hear Mama barreling down on us. “Is that Willie?” she shrilled. “Is that your daddy? One of you younguns better goddammit answer me.”

“It's me,” he said flatly.

She loomed in the door and studied Nora.

“Did she tell you?” Mama asked.

“Did who tell me what?”

Mama jerked her head toward Nora. She looked like she wanted to spit. “This one. Did she tell you what she done?”

Daddy narrowed his eyes at Nora and pulled his hands out of the washbasin. He reached for a towel to dry his hands.

Mama pulled the letter out of her bosom, the envelope slightly moist and wilted. “This here letter,” she hissed, “is from a boy.”

“How do you know, Louise, you can't read.”

“Carl Jr. read the name to me.”

“That little son of a bitch was by this house?”

Carl Jr. and Daddy fist-fought over money Daddy owed Carl Jr.; Daddy threw Carl Jr. out of the house. He was living with Uncle Snookie, Mama's brother, at Willard's Fork.

“He come by to get some clean overalls,” Mama said.

“That rat-ass son of a bitch ever steps foot in this house while I'm here, I'll fuck him up bad.”

“I had to give him some clothes,” Mama explained, slightly withered by Daddy's response.

But his curiosity about the letter defeated his anger against Carl Jr. Daddy snatched the letter away from her and peered at it. Daddy could read, and in fact got to be pretty good at it later in life when he was no longer working; he would sit in his house on the one chair he and Mama had left, and all day he would read pornographic books, girls prancing naked on the paperback covers, dancing with the tips of their nipples two inches long or more, stiff as bolts. Facing Nora, Daddy read the name on the envelope, then opened the letter and mouthed the name at the end.

“This is from that son of a bitch Lyle Bates,” Daddy spat.

“I knew that's who it was from.” Mama shook her head and all her chins. “She's been pining after that one.”

“Hush, Mama,” Nora whispered.

“Make me a cup of coffee while I read this letter.” Daddy fixed Nora with a stare and spoke to her in a low, flat tone.

“That's why she's rushing down to that store two and three times on a Saturday,” Mama kept nodding and eyeing Nora, a gleam of satisfaction in her eye. “She's been mooning over that boy.”

Nora served Daddy, who sat peering at the letter. Lips moving the slightest bit. He read something and smacked his lips. “Oh, horse shit,” he hooted. “When did you let him touch your titties?”

“I never done no such of a thing.”

“It says right here, ‘I love to run my hand up under your blouse where your titties are.'”

“It don't say anything like that.”

Daddy glared at her. His smirk had slowly changed to something else, before my very eyes. “Did you let him stick his fingers in your pussy, too?”

Tears sprang down Nora's cheeks so suddenly it was as if a wound had opened. Daddy rose over her like a shadow, and she huddled without moving. Daddy's tone was low and cold. “Answer me, girl. You let him rub your pussy?”

“No, sir.”

“You sure you hadn't?”

Speechless, she nodded her head. “I never done it,” she croaked.

“So if I check it, I'll find out it's just like I left it.”

Nora blushed to the roots of her hair. Mama stood behind them both with her legs planted wide. Nora's chin trembled and she spoke with a broken voice. “Daddy, I didn't do anything with Lyle Yates, I didn't do what he said, Daddy, I swear it. He's been after me, and I kept telling him to leave me alone.”

“She's a liar,” Mama swore. “She's been after that Yates boy since I don't know when, parading all up and down the road.”

“Hush, Mama,” Nora said, trembling, and Daddy struck out, once, fiercely, across her face. The crack was like gunfire, and Nora's head turned, her hair whipped around; I see it even now in such detail, as if it is happening in front of me, slow motion. She gave a small cry and her nose started to bleed. She held her hand up under her nose but stood still.

“Get out of my sight,” Daddy said.

She stumbled through the door that led to the back of the house. A few minutes later I found her holding a wet cloth over her nose. She glared at me like a bird of prey. “What do you want?”

“Are you all right?”

She laughed. “No, I'm not all right. Daddy just knocked the hell out of me.”

I twisted my toes all together and stood there. She lay on the bed and looked at nothing in particular. A question floated in the air between us, because I had heard what Daddy said, but I feared to ask it out loud, and Nora stared right through me. Then turned her face to the wall.

I helped with supper. Mama fried fatback black at the edges, boiled cabbage flavored with fat. I cooked a pot of soupy rice with black pepper. For once Nora was nowhere near to boss me, but Mama kept glaring at me which was almost as bad.

“You'll be getting boys to send you that love mess in a letter,” Mama accused.

“No, I won't.”

“Yes, you will, I know. You'll be dragging all around here like your sister, laying in there in the bed pouting because her daddy told her what's what.”

“I don't have to do everything she does.”

“Don't sass me, missy.” Mama cuffed me across the face, hard.

Nora stayed in the bed through dinner, but the rest of us ate. Carl Jr.'s place sat empty, and we all felt it more so with Nora gone too. I had to feed the kids and Otis started to eat off my plate again, but I laid my fork against the tender part
of his wrist till Daddy laughed and Mama made me stop. When Otis whined and Daddy smacked him, I was glad in my heart.

Later I slipped into the bedroom with a fatback and biscuit for Nora, and she ate it huddled against the headboard. She hunched over the biscuit like a field mouse. She licked every crumb from her fingertips and chewed the fatback rind last of all.

Next morning, Mama woke Nora and me and said to come to the kitchen, even earlier than usual, before dawn. Daddy sat in the chair with a cut on his cheek and another one on his arm. Carl Jr. sat next to him with one ear all bloody and his clothes tore up pretty bad. Him and Daddy had become the best of friends now. He looked at Nora and said, “We damn near killed Lyle Yates. Swore he wasn't doing a thing with Nora, lying bastard.”

Nora blinked at him and never said a word. Mama had lit a fire in the stove. Nora sent me to the well for water, and I stepped fearfully onto the porch and down the steps.

We cleaned both of them up and bandaged the cuts. Mama dabbed alcohol onto Carl Jr., blowing on the wound to fend off the sting. Carl Jr. cooed and pumped his legs. Nora took care of Daddy and pronounced, “It's going to take stitches for you.”

“It won't,” Daddy spat.

“Daddy, your cheek is cut open.”

“It don't reach that deep.”

“It's nearabout all the way through.”

“Oh, shut up.” He pressed the cut back together, dabbing
it with alcohol himself, tears streaming down his face. “Pull off my shoes and wash my feet.”

He looked her in the eye. For a moment, the tiniest flicker of rebellion flickered across her face.

Without a word she unlaced his boots, took them off. She filled a pan with hot water and peeled the socks down his white, veiny legs. He soaked his feet and she rubbed them. She knelt over the pan with her cheeks pink and flushed, dress wet and clinging to her back, her hands glistening, Daddy's toes curled back with happiness. She toweled the feet dry and pulled clean socks over the smattering of hair on the top of each foot. Daddy had a tuft of black hair on each big toe.

Daddy looked at Nora in satisfaction. “I like how you take care of me, little girl.”

“I ain't so little anymore.”

Whether she meant to be coy or not, Daddy took it as flirtation, and laughed.

That evening I found her in the bedroom with a paper sack; Corrine snored beside her, sleeping like a log. When Nora saw me coming she shoved the sack under the edge of the bed. I knew right then she was leaving. She looked at me and blinked. I pretended I had not seen anything.

We went to bed. She rested there in her dress with the covers pulled up to her chin, and I pretended not to notice that either. Near midnight, with Otis snoring and Carl Jr. sprawled across him, she slid out of bed. She sat there in the dark for a long time. A tap sounded on the window, and she opened it and handed out the bag. She stood over me for a
moment, then kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cool and moist. She whispered, “That letter never was from any Lyle Yates, either. I fooled Daddy this time.”

She grinned. I grinned back. She slipped out the window and was gone. The print of her kiss remained on my cheek; if I close my eyes I can feel it still.

When Daddy found out she was gone, he spit a mouthful of coffee halfway across the kitchen, then fastened his gaze on me. “Were you in the bed with her?”

“Corrine and me was,” I answered, and Corrine hid behind my skirt.

“And you didn't wake up when she got out of bed?”

“No, sir.”