Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 49 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “We’ll come.” Mama’s voice was emphatic, but I saw her eyes flick once up the road as she spoke. Mrs. Parsons nodded brusquely and climbed in the truck. Her brother never said a word, just started the engine and put it in gear. Reese was waving fiercely even before Matthew gunned the engine. I saw Mrs. Parsons wipe her eyes as the truck pulled away, and then I saw the Pontiac come around the corner of the intersection up the road. Mama’s hands curled into fists and pulled up in front of her belly. I leaned in close to her and watched the Pontiac as it edged slowly past the truck. When it reached us, Daddy Glen leaned out the window. He looked back up the road and then over at Mama. “You didn’t sign nothing?” he demanded. “No, Glen.” I felt Mama’s hips shift awkwardly as she spoke. I looked up to watch her face as her mouth shifted into an equally awkward stubborn smile. “You know I wouldn’t sign anything that you hadn’t looked at first.” Daddy Glen smiled as if that satisfied him. I let my air out carefully. Reese went on waving though the truck was long gone. I hooked my thumbs in the belt loops of my jeans and stood by her until Mama and Daddy Glen went back into the house. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] “He’s quiet, but you make Glen mad and he’ll knock you down,” Uncle Earle said good-naturedly. “Boy uses those hands of his like pickaxes.” If they thought we weren’t near enough to hear, Earle and Beau would go on about Daddy Glen’s other parts. “He gets crazy when he’s angry,” they laughed. “Use his dick if he can’t reach you with his arms, and that’ll cripple you fast enough.” I was too young to understand what they meant, why they laughed so mean and joked that no woman would ever leave Daddy Glen, or roared and spat comparing the size of his nose to his toes to his fingers. “Man’s got a horse dick,” Butch boasted to other boys, and that I understood. But it wasn’t Daddy Glen’s sex that made me nervous. It was those hands, the restless way the fingers would flex and curl while he watched me lean close to Mama. He was always watching me, it seemed, calling me to him whenever Mama and I would start talking, sending me to get him a glass of ice tea or a fresh pack of cigarettes out of the freezer, where he kept his cartons so they wouldn’t go stale in the summer heat. Mama told me I should show him that I loved him, but no matter how hard I tried, I never moved fast enough for him. “That child an’t never gonna love me,” he complained tearfully to Mama one afternoon.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Reese went on sobbing while I stood gripping the edge of the table with no idea what I had been about to do. I looked down at my hands, my fingertips flattened and white, my nails bitten off in ragged edges. My hands were still, but my arms were shaking. What had I been going to do? What had I been going to do? Daddy Glen looked at me standing there. “I know how much your mama loves you,” he said, putting his hand on my arm, squeezing tight. When he let me go, there was a bruise, and Mama saw it right away. “Glen, you don’t know your own strength!” “No.” He was calmer now. “Guess I don’t. But Bone knows I’d never mean to hurt her. Bone knows I love her. Goddammit. You know how I love you all, Anney.” I stared up at him, Mama’s hands on my shoulders, knowing my mouth was hanging open and my face was blank. What did I know? What did I believe? I looked at his hands. No, he never meant to hurt me, not really, I told myself, but more and more those hands seemed to move before he could think. His hands were big, impersonal, and fast. I could not avoid them. Reese and I made jokes about them when he wasn’t around—gorilla hands, monkey paws, paddlefish, beaver tails. Sometimes I worried if he knew the things we said. My dreams were full of long fingers, hands that reached around doorframes and crept over the edge of the mattress, fear in me like a river, like the ice-dark blue of his eyes. 6 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food—not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother’s milk singing to your bloodstream. When I got hungry my hands would not stay still. I would pick at the edges of scabs, scratch at chigger bites and old scars, and tug at loose strands of my black hair. I’d rock a penny in my palm, trying to learn to roll it one-handed up and around each finger without dropping it, the way my cousin Grey could. I’d chew my fingernails or suck on toothpicks and read everything I hadn’t read more than twice already. But when Reese got hungry and there was nothing to eat, she would just sob, shiny fat tears running down her pink cheeks. Nothing would distract her.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  It scared me that it was so easy—my records, after all, had not caught up with me—that people thought I could be a Roseanne Carter from Atlanta, a city I had never visited. Everyone believed me, and I enjoyed a brief popularity as someone from a big city who could tell big-city stories. It was astonishing, but no one in my family found out I had told such a lie. Still, it was a relief when we moved that time and I went off to a new school under my real name. For months after, though, I dreamed that someone came up to me and called me Roseanne, that the school records finally exposed me or one of those teachers turned up at my new school. “Why’d you tell such a lie?” they asked me in the dream, and I could not answer them. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] One month, Earle announced that he had finally sold that old wallhanger Beau had foisted off on him to some fool from Greenwood who couldn’t tell the difference between a decent shotgun and a piece of corroded junk. He insisted on loaning Mama a little money, telling her that she was better than a bank for him. “You know how I am, Anney,” he said. “If I keep cash, I’ll just throw it away on nothing at all. If I give it to you, then come the time when I really need it, I know you’ll give it to me if you got it, and if you don’t, well then, at least you’ll feed me. Won’t you, little sister?” Daddy Glen got mad at Mama for taking the money, as if she had done it just to prove he couldn’t support us. He screamed at her that she had shamed him. “I’m a grown man,” he yelled. “I don’t need your damn brother to pay my way.” He spent a week not speaking to any of us, and when Earle dropped by to visit, Daddy Glen grumbled that he didn’t have time to shoot the shit, and drove off like he had work to do. “Too much pride in that boy,” Earle told Mama mildly. “If he don’t lighten up a little he’s gonna rupture something. Hell, we all know we got to help each other in this life.” He winked at me, hugged Reese, and teased Mama till she giggled like a girl and made him a fried-tomato sandwich. When he got ready to leave, he gave Reese a quarter and me a half-dollar.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “If I started talking to Earle about Sunday-morning church services and witnessing for our faith, he’d think I’d lost my mind.” Alma laughed and pinched my chin. “You go for us, girl. You witness. If the world really is gonna end tomorrow, I’d rather save you than any of those drunken uncles of yours. And don’t you even try to talk Jesus to Earle. The man is impossible to talk to about God and religion.” I took Aunt Alma’s warning as a challenge and started talking to Uncle Earle about faith and good works. I played him Mama’s most tearful gospel country music and repeated all the most dramatic soul-saving stories I’d found in the pamphlets the Christian Ladies’ Aid Society passed out. Earle loved the whole thing, my sincerity, the Bible verses, and the thinly veiled threats of perdition. But most of all he loved the argument. While I tried to prove to him that God was love and Jesus saved, he set out to prove to me that the world was irredeemably corrupt. “Never mind the ninety and nine, let’s talk about the poor lost sheep in this county,” Uncle Earle would start off. One shot glass of whiskey and a tall glass of beer and he was ready to address the issue of Jesus, only occasionally reminding me of his wife, Teresa. He blamed the loss of Teresa on Jesus, naturally—Jesus who made Catholics, Catholics who were so particular on the subject of fornication and made it so hard for a decent Baptist man to get a divorce. He was funny about Catholics, damning them for making his life so difficult and admiring them at the same time. “At least,” he told me, “Catholics are interesting, got all that up-and-down stuff, chanting, velvet carpet on the pews and real watered wine for communion. What the hell Baptists got? Grape-juice communions, silly rules against dancing and movies, self-righteousness by the barrelful, damn-fool preachers in shiny suits, and simpleminded parishioners! Baptists could learn something from the Catholics.” Sometimes in his arguments, Uncle Earle would get Teresa, the Catholic Church, and the county marshals a little confused. Given enough whiskey, he’d start talking about the way they had all united to blight his life. If there was a God, Earle had decided, He was on the side of Teresa, the Catholics, and the marshals. But there was no God, Earle told me, no God and no hope in churches. People were better off learning to rely on themselves and each other, instead of running around praying for what they weren’t going to get.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “God!” I screamed with all the strength I had. Not loud enough, not loud enough for anybody but me to hear, but he let go of my throat and slapped my mouth, crushing my lips into my teeth. He started a steady rhythm, “I’ll teach you, I’ll teach you,” and pounded my head against the floor. “You’ll die, you’ll die,” I screamed inside. “You will rot and stink and cave in on yourself. God will give you to me. Your bones will melt and your blood will catch fire. I’ll rip you open and feed you to the dogs. Like in the Bible, like the way it ought to be, God will give you to me. God will give you to me!” All the time my left hand was flailing, reaching, scrambling for anything, something. Where was that knife? Where was Aunt Alma? He reared up, supporting his weight on my shoulder while his hips drove his sex into me like a sword. “Give me something! Give me something!” I begged. I tried vainly to bite him, my teeth pushing up through my clamped-down lips. “Give me something!” He went rigid, head back and teeth showing between snarling lips. I could feel his thighs shaking against me as my butt slid in the blood under me. “Oh God, help me, let me kill him. Please, God. Please, God. Let me kill him. Let me die, but let me kill him.” He went limp and came down on me, rag-loose and panting. His hand dropped from my mouth, but the urge to scream was gone. Blood and juice, his sweat and mine, my blood, all over my neck and all down my thighs, the sticky stink of him between my burning legs. How had it all happened so fast? I tried to lick my lips, but my tongue was too swollen. I couldn’t feel my tongue move, just my lips opening and closing with no sound coming out. Red and black dots swam up toward the ceiling and back down toward me. Daddy Glen moved a little, mumbling something I could not understand. I saw past him the open door and the late-afternoon sun darkening. I closed my eyes, opened them, felt like I had passed out briefly. He was still on me, but something was different, some feeling in the air. I looked again to the door and saw her. Mama’s enormous white face was moving toward us where we lay, toward me. “Mama,” I tried to say, but never got it out. Glen’s body jerked above me and pulled back. The air hit me like a fist, all my wet and open places. I whimpered. He screamed. “Anney!” She hit him with something I could not see. Then she was grabbing things, canisters off the stove, pans, glasses, plates, anything she could throw at him. I smiled. The corners of my mouth tore, but it didn’t matter. “No, Anney, no!” “You monster!”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Yes,” Mama said. “I see, honey. You are. We both are. We’ll just sit here a while and wait for him.” She kept her face pressed close, not looking away from Aunt Alma’s eyes, as if only her presence was keeping Alma attached to the earth. One of the girls started whimpering over by the garden. I looked back, unable to resist the notion that everyone had gone crazy. Women all over Greenville County were going to smash stuff and then sit down to wait for Armageddon or sunrise or something. It sounded like a good idea to me. “Bone, get away from there.” It was Uncle Earle’s whisper. He was standing well back over near the stand of pines where the drive turned, his black hair gleaming in the sunlight and an expression on his face of almost comical nervousness. “Come on, girl. Get back in the car and let your mama handle this.” His hands were flat on his thighs, and his jaw was set. He looked scared, deathly scared. “I’m gonna cut his throat,” Aunt Alma said in the most reasonable voice imaginable. “I got the knife for it.” “Where is that?” Mama asked her. “In my pocket.” Aunt Alma’s hands came down, patted the skirt of her dress. Her right hand slipped into a pocket I hadn’t noticed before and came out with a razor, the straight edge closed into the handle. She flicked her wrist and it swung open, the blade shining in the sunlight. She brought her left hand up and laid the blade on her palm, looking down at it like it was beautiful. “Oh, that’ll do it,” Mama said, her voice still soft and matter-of-fact. She looked back over at me. “Bone, girl, go inside and get your aunt a glass of tea, why don’t you?” Her eyes tracked past me to Uncle Earle, and she shook her head slightly. He nodded and started backing away toward the pines. “We should get you cleaned up a little, Alma. You look like you got caught in a storm.” She gave a soft little laugh and pulled gently at her sister’s arms. Alma shuddered and hunched over the razor. Mama went still, her face carefully empty.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  She waved the tines up close to Grey’s face. “You think this is a big old fishhook? Well, it an’t. It’s for trawling, for dragging. You go down in the river and they’ll use something like this to pull you up in chunks. Pull you loose from the junk in that deep mud. Pull you up in pieces, you hear me? Nasty slices of you, little boy, for your mama to cry over.” Aunt Raylene’s tale didn’t really scare us. When I tried to imagine my flesh in pieces it was like a cartoon, completely unreal, but in the night stringy terrible pieces of meat loomed in my dreams. The hooks got in my dreams too, dripping blood and river mud. Maybe it hadn’t been fish parts I’d cleaned out of them. It could have been anything. I made up stories about where those hooks had come from, who had lost them, until Patsy Ruth got nightmares. She dreamed that she had drowned in the river and the morticians had to sew pieces of her back together to look like somebody. Only they had to sew different people’s pieces together just to make up one reasonable body to bury to show her mama. When she told Aunt Alma, Alma told me to stop making up such gruesome stories. Aunt Raylene put a lock on her cellar door to keep all of us away from the hooks, and everyone seemed to forget them. But a few weeks later, I started to dream about them again. This time their razor points whistled when the wind blew, and the steel edges reflected light where there was none. I would wake up from those dreams with my teeth aching, my ears throbbing as if there were a wind blowing on me, stinking, cold, and constant. I wanted one of those hooks, wanted it for my own, that cold sharp metal where I could put out my hand and touch it at any time. I started going over to Aunt Raylene’s place every chance I got, hanging out and being helpful. I pulled weeds and picked tomatoes, corn, and peppers. When canning started, I was there to boil the mason jars and melt the wax while Raylene cut and chopped at her kitchen table. I brought the fruit jars up from the cellar. I brought up the wax, the rubber seals, and the metal racks, and when Aunt Raylene went out to put her neck under the old water pump on the far side of the house, I brought up one of the hooks. I hid it under the porch before anyone could see, laughing because it was so easy to do, but when I got back to the kitchen, Mama was standing there over the bubbling vats. “You want these peaches to boil over?” she asked me. “You got to watch this stuff close. You can’t be running off in the yard with a fire under these pots.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I felt Mama’s hips shift awkwardly as she spoke. I looked up to watch her face as her mouth shifted into an equally awkward stubborn smile. “You know I wouldn’t sign anything that you hadn’t looked at first.” Daddy Glen smiled as if that satisfied him. I let my air out carefully. Reese went on waving though the truck was long gone. I hooked my thumbs in the belt loops of my jeans and stood by her until Mama and Daddy Glen went back into the house. “He’s quiet, but you make Glen mad and he’ll knock you down,” Uncle Earle said good-naturedly. “Boy uses those hands of his like pickaxes.” If they thought we weren’t near enough to hear, Earle and Beau would go on about Daddy Glen’s other parts. “He gets crazy when he’s angry,” they laughed. “Use his dick if he can’t reach you with his arms, and that’ll cripple you fast enough.” I was too young to understand what they meant, why they laughed so mean and joked that no woman would ever leave Daddy Glen, or roared and spat comparing the size of his nose to his toes to his fingers. “Man’s got a horse dick,” Butch boasted to other boys, and that I understood. But it wasn’t Daddy Glen’s sex that made me nervous. It was those hands, the restless way the fingers would flex and curl while he watched me lean close to Mama. He was always watching me, it seemed, calling me to him whenever Mama and I would start talking, sending me to get him a glass of ice tea or a fresh pack of cigarettes out of the freezer, where he kept his cartons so they wouldn’t go stale in the summer heat. Mama told me I should show him that I loved him, but no matter how hard I tried, I never moved fast enough for him. “That child an’t never gonna love me,” he complained tearfully to Mama one afternoon. “Oh, Glen, don’t say that.” Mama’s voice was thin and shaky, as if she were afraid he was right. “Bone loves you, honey.” She kissed his cheek, put her hands on either side of his face, and kissed his lips. “She loves you. We all love you.” Daddy Glen pulled her down to him and sighed softly as she kissed his eyelids and then rubbed her cheeks against his. I ran outside. Dinner would be late, or we’d wind up going out for hamburgers. Whenever they started kissing on the couch, they’d go in the bedroom and shut the door for an hour at least. When they came out Daddy Glen would be smiling and easy in his body.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  His voice got harder, hoarser but no louder, and it was the quiet that terrified me. It reminded me of Alma with the razor in her hand and madness in her eyes. Daddy Glen’s eyes were just as crazy, more crazy. There was pain in them, deep pain, yes, but hate was the thing that made them burn. Suddenly his fist shot out like it was on a spring. His knuckles raked the side of my chin, and I fell back on the table. “You can’t destroy me so easy,” he said. “Anney’s gonna come back, she told me. She just needs a little time. I can understand that after everything that’s happened.” He leaned toward me, one hand extended. “But if she wasn’t gonna come back to me, I’d kill you. You know that? I’d break your neck.” His hand touched the side of my face, my ear, my neck, slid down my front, the slight swells of my breasts. His blue eyes trailed down my body. “Ahhh,” Daddy Glen moaned. He pulled me to his chest, holding me tight, breathing hard. There was blood in my mouth and a roar in my head. I went hard, stiff, metal-hard, as hard as the butter knife I found I had grabbed without thinking. He kissed me wetly, his teeth grinding into my mouth. I jerked that knife up and rammed it into his side hard as I could. It slid along his belt, smearing peanut butter on his shirt, not even tearing the material but hurting him anyway. I could tell. “Damn you!” He threw me away from him so that my back hit the counter and I slipped down, falling as he came toward me, kicking at me. His boot hit me solidly in the shoulder. His arm came down, caught my right wrist, and jerked hard, pulling me up sharply, then dropped me. Something gave, crunching audibly, while a wave of sickening heat followed, and my arm flopped uselessly under my body. “You little cunt!” He kicked again, and his boot slipped along the side of my head, cutting my ear so that blood gushed. Then that boot thudded into my belly and I rolled sideways, retching bile down my right arm. “You!” he cursed, and it echoed in my head. “You goddam little bastard!” “You!” I told him. “Mama’s never gonna go back to you. I won’t let her. I hate you.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Aunt Raylene.” I turned my head to look up at her again, ready to try and persuade her that I wasn’t really drunk. Her expression stopped me. She was looking down at my panties where they draped my left shoe, the brown stains in the seat showing clearly in the bright light. She pulled me back a little, and her left hand lifted my skirt. I tried to push it back down with my numb fingers, but she had a good grip. “Sweet suffering Jesus!” A shock went right through me. Suddenly I was terrified, unreasonably, horribly terrified. “No,” I begged. “No, please.” But the door was open. She was pulling me out. I hung back, but she was unstoppable. She pushed me into Deedee’s empty bedroom. “Earle,” Aunt Raylene was yelling. “Earle, come here. You and Beau, you come here.” “No.” I said it again. “Please, please.” “Be quiet, Bone. An’t nobody gonna hurt you. I swear to you, an’t nobody ever gonna hurt you again.” Earle pushed through the door. “Raylene, what you yelling about? The kids are asleep upstairs, and you’re yelling loud enough to scare people in the next county.” Raylene whirled on him. “Shut up and look at this.” She turned me around and flipped my skirt up. I started to stutter. “No, no.” “Damn.” Earle’s voice was soft, and scarier than I could have ever imagined. I wrapped my fingers around the back of my neck, dropped my head, and shook all over. “Leave me alone,” I begged. My panties were still tangled on my left shoe. “Hush, hush.” Aunt Raylene’s arms wrapped around me like a blanket. She sat on the bed and pulled me up on her lap. “Hush.” Earle was gone. The door opened again, and Nevil and Beau were there. “It true?” Beau demanded. “That son of a bitch beat her bloody?” “Like a dog,” Raylene told him. “Child’s striped all the way down to her knees.” She pulled my panties free of my shoe and threw them at him. “I’d kill him.” She said it in a very matter-of-fact tone that made me believe her. “No,” I moaned. “Shit!” Nevil’s voice was barely recognizable. There was a scream from down the hall, a loud crashing noise, and Earle’s voice shouting, “I’ll murder you, you son of a bitch!” Nevil and Beau turned together. “No,” I pleaded. “Aunt Raylene, please!” But she just held me tight. I turned, started punching her, trying to get free. Mama’s arms came around me so suddenly I almost stopped breathing. “Mama! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “No, darling. No! It’s not what you think.” What was it, then, I wondered, and flopped over on my belly. Pain. My shoulder, my knees, my thighs, my face—everything hurt but none of it mattered. It was all far off. Rubbery and numb, my arm was under my face. “You!” Mama screamed. There was more crashing, but I didn’t look up. Would she think I wanted him to do that? Would she think I asked for it? What would he tell her? I had to tell her that I had fought him, that I had never wanted him to touch me, never. But the blood running out of me was stealing all my energy, all my air. I could not talk, could not think. For a moment then I wanted to be dead already, not to have to look into Mama’s face ever again, and not his. Never his, never again. Please, God, let him die, let me die, let someone die. Don’t let him hurt my mama. “You bastard! You monster!” “Anney, please!” “Don’t you touch me. Don’t you touch her!” I tasted tears, snot, blood that had run down from my ear. I spat and tried to push myself up. I had to get up, do something, get Mama out of there. Mama’s hands were on me now, feeling for the damage. My head cleared a little, and I looked up. He was across the room, face white and stricken, and she was down on her knees with me. A roar went up through me, and I gritted my teeth. We had to get out of there, get away from him. I got to my knees. “Come on, honey,” she cooed like I was a baby again. “I’m gonna get you to a doctor.” Her hands smoothed my blouse, knotted the torn pieces together over my belly, dragged my pants up my legs a little at a time, covering me up. “Anney, no, wait,” he was saying, but she wasn’t listening. That’s good, don’t stop. Keep moving, Mama. Get us out of here. “Come on, baby,” she said, and pulled me to my feet. I swayed on rubber-band knees, an empty bowl of pain for a belly. Those dots were floating everywhere. I looked over at Daddy Glen. His face was as empty as my belly. Icy terror rode up my legs to my heart. Get out, we’ve got to get out of here. You don’t know, Mama, you don’t understand. She was whispering, “Baby, baby,” holding me tight to her hip as she started for the door.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Serve you right if you did,” Granny yelled at him. “You could have killed that child. Reese, you get your little dimple ass up here with your mama.” “You come on too, Bone,” Mama called to me. “You and Reese come on up here for Alma to get a picture of the four of us together.” “Yeah, come on, girls.” Glen held on to Mama with both hands around her waist. “Smile, now, everyone,” called Alma as the shutter clicked. 4 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] The spring Mama married Glen Waddell, there were thunderstorms every afternoon and rolling clouds that hung around the foothills north and west to the Smokies. The moon came up with a ghostly halo almost every night, and there was a blue shimmer on the horizon at sunset. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] “An’t no time to be marrying,” Granny announced. “Or planting or building nothing.” [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] “You sure, now, Anney?” Earle must have asked Mama twice before he drove her down to the courthouse in his pickup truck to meet Glen and get the license. It seemed he just couldn’t take her ready smile for an answer, even though he agreed to be best man after Glen’s brother had refused the honor. He asked her one more time before he let her out of the truck. “You’re worse than Granny,” Anney told him. “Don’t you want to see me settled down and happy?” He gave it up and kissed her out the door. Granny wasn’t surprised when she heard that Great-Grandma Shirley had turned down her invitation to the wedding dinner Aunt Alma organized. The Eustis aunts, Marvella and Maybelle, the ones who insisted they could tell the future from their beans, also skipped the dinner, though Marvella was polite about it. “I know he loves Anney,” Marvella told Alma when she came by to collect flowers from their garden. “And sometimes love can change everything.” Maybelle was not so generous. “Yeah, Glen loves Anney. He loves her like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up. I don’t trust that boy, don’t want our Anney marrying him.” “But Anney loves Glen,” Alma told Maybelle impatiently. “That’s the thing you ought to be thinking about. She needs him, needs him like a starving woman needs meat between her teeth, and I an’t gonna let nobody take this away from her. Come on, Maybelle, you know there an’t no way to say what’s gonna happen between a man and a woman. That an’t our business anyway, that’s theirs.” Alma took Maybelle’s hands between her own. “We just got to stand behind our girl, do everything we can to make sure she don’t get hurt again.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Can we talk to each other or not?” she had asked me. I had tried, but in the end I had lied. I hadn’t told her that she was dying, hadn’t told her the truth about my fear of Daddy Glen. I hadn’t told her that I knew what he was thinking when he looked at me, that I could see in his eyes not only confusion and anger but something hotter and meaner still. I hadn’t told her about the way he had touched me. I had been too ashamed. Mama thought that keeping me out of the house and away from Daddy Glen was the answer, that being patient, loving him, and making him feel strong and important would fix everything in time. But nothing changed and nothing was really fixed, everything was only delayed. Every time his daddy spoke harshly to him, every time he couldn’t pay the bills, every time Mama was too tired to flatter or tease him out of his moods, Daddy Glen’s eyes would turn to me, and my blood would turn to ice. I had never said that to Aunt Ruth, never said it to anyone. I didn’t know how. My head ached so bad I didn’t even hear Daddy Glen shout. I was still curled up on the porch when he stepped through the front door. “I was calling you, girl.” He grabbed me by the shoulder. He hadn’t had time to shower yet, and his face was still sweaty, his uniform smelling of spilled milk. I looked up at him with hatred and saw the pupils of his eyes go small and hard. “I didn’t hear you,” I said plainly, coldly. “You damn well did.” He pulled me up to my feet. “I didn’t,” I yelled at him. My blood was pounding in my head. “I didn’t hear you. You an’t got no business calling me a liar.” Through the open door I could see Mama come out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. “Glen,” she called. “Glen.” “You think ‘cause your aunt died you can mouth off to me?” Daddy Glen was almost spitting with rage. “You think you can say just anything you damn well please! You got another think coming.” He dragged me into the house. Reese jumped up off the couch and ran for the bedroom. “Glen,” Mama called again, coming after us, but he didn’t stop. My shoulder hit the door-jamb as he pushed me ahead of him into the bathroom. I stumbled and would have fallen on the floor, but he was still hanging on to my arm. The door slammed behind us. “Glen! Don’t do this, Glen!” Mama’s hands beat on the bathroom door.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  That vent would snap free with one good shove. It was as clear in my head as the face of the man who still managed the store—Tyler Highgarden. I knew his nervous, skinny-faced children from Greenville Elementary School. If they hadn’t been such sorry miserable creatures, I’d have gotten the cousins to beat them up for their father’s sins, but they’d never looked worth the trouble. Still, Tyler Highgarden and the Woolworth’s humiliation had itched at me for years, always in the back of my mind. The revelation that there was something I could do about it was too exciting not to act on. The fan blades weren’t sharp, just greasy and covered with dust. I reached through and measured carefully, and then went back over to the water tower and pulled my hook free. I coiled the rope up and tied it around the prongs. I would push it ahead of me into the darkness. I didn’t think it would get stuck, any more than I thought I would. I didn’t even think of it as a weapon. All I knew climbing over the dirty blades and wiggling around the engine block was that I wanted those razor points with me. I was a little scared and half convinced I might get caught, but those points were sharp and certain and tangibly dangerous, the way I wanted to be. I couldn’t leave them behind. The exhaust pipe widened on the other side of the fan, and there was a filter there made of prickly stuff that bit my fingers. I unfastened it on my side, crawled through, then fastened it again, pushing the hook ahead of me in the dark. There was no warning at all when the hook suddenly banged against a sharp bend in the pipe and swung out of my hand. I fell after it, my shoulder hitting a thick cushion of cotton batting and the edge of the frame that held up the insulation and sealed the vent. The frame thudded and slipped sideways, dropping free on one side and swinging open. The hook fell ahead of me with a crash. I caught the edge of the vent cover, held myself an instant, then followed the hook. I bit my tongue as I fell, and it was a miracle I didn’t scream. I hit the side of the rack that displayed pattern books and slammed into a glass countertop that broke with a dull snap under me. I gasped and registered immediately the points of the hook sticking up from another case just inches from my butt. “Oh, my God,” I whispered. “Sweet suffering Jesus.” My hip ached where I’d hit, but nothing seemed broken.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I jumped in and threw my books in the backseat before she could stop me, but I was still surprised when she didn’t tell me to get out, just gunned the engine so that the wheels spun as we pulled out onto the highway. “It’s your Aunt Alma,” she said. “Little Earle called. Sounded terrible. Couldn’t even get out what had happened, so don’t ask.” Mama looked stern—scared and angry at the same time. I wondered what was wrong, if it was something Uncle Wade had done, or maybe one of the cousins. It could be anything with the way Aunt Alma had been since Annie died. “Don’t we just lead charmed lives?” Aunt Alma had said the last time we saw her. “Bad things seem to be happening all the time.” I concentrated on gripping the door handle while Mama roared out toward the West Greenville Highway. She took the Old Henderson Road turnoff, past the gas station where Uncle Wade had been working before his accident, and turned onto the dirt road that cut through open country where the interstate was supposed to go in next year. Aunt Alma had gotten a deal on one of the condemned farmhouses out there, and had moved in after Ruth died. Little Earle was waiting for us beside the cow grate down near the mailbox, his face white and his shirt streaked with muddy brown stains. There was snot all over his upper lip, and he kept wiping his hands down over his middle where the worst of the mud had smeared. Mama didn’t get out of the car, just stopped for a minute and leaned out the window. “You all right?” she yelled, and he nodded. He sure didn’t look all right to me. “She’s up at the house,” he whispered, as if he were afraid to talk too loud. “I tried. I tried, but she wouldn’t let me do nothing.” He hugged his shoulders tightly. “She’s up there by herself. I got the girls away and called you.” There was a pause as he gulped air between every few words. “And then Uncle Earle. Uncle Earle said not to go back, and anyway, she scared me. Mama scared me.” He stopped and looked back up the dirt drive that wound to the side and disappeared into the pines. “Oh God, Auntie, she’s gone crazy as a milk cow, just like Daddy said she would!” “Wipe your face and keep quiet,” Mama told him fiercely. “I’ll send Bone down for you in a little while, and I don’t want you scaring your sisters. You wash your face and get some of that dirt off yourself.” She sounded almost hateful—a way I had never heard her talk before to any child. I turned from watching Little Earle to look at her and almost rolled across the seat when she started the Pontiac racing up the drive again.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I screamed with all the strength I had. Not loud enough, not loud enough for anybody but me to hear, but he let go of my throat and slapped my mouth, crushing my lips into my teeth. He started a steady rhythm, “I’ll teach you, I’ll teach you,” and pounded my head against the floor. “You’ll die, you’ll die,” I screamed inside. “You will rot and stink and cave in on yourself. God will give you to me. Your bones will melt and your blood will catch fire. I’ll rip you open and feed you to the dogs. Like in the Bible, like the way it ought to be, God will give you to me. God will give you to me!” All the time my left hand was flailing, reaching, scrambling for anything, something. Where was that knife? Where was Aunt Alma? He reared up, supporting his weight on my shoulder while his hips drove his sex into me like a sword. “Give me something! Give me something!” I begged. I tried vainly to bite him, my teeth pushing up through my clamped-down lips. “Give me something!” He went rigid, head back and teeth showing between snarling lips. I could feel his thighs shaking against me as my butt slid in the blood under me. “Oh God, help me, let me kill him. Please, God. Please, God. Let me kill him. Let me die, but let me kill him.” He went limp and came down on me, rag-loose and panting. His hand dropped from my mouth, but the urge to scream was gone. Blood and juice, his sweat and mine, my blood, all over my neck and all down my thighs, the sticky stink of him between my burning legs. How had it all happened so fast? I tried to lick my lips, but my tongue was too swollen. I couldn’t feel my tongue move, just my lips opening and closing with no sound coming out. Red and black dots swam up toward the ceiling and back down toward me. Daddy Glen moved a little, mumbling something I could not understand. I saw past him the open door and the late-afternoon sun darkening. I closed my eyes, opened them, felt like I had passed out briefly. He was still on me, but something was different, some feeling in the air. I looked again to the door and saw her. Mama’s enormous white face was moving toward us where we lay, toward me. “Mama,” I tried to say, but never got it out. Glen’s body jerked above me and pulled back. The air hit me like a fist, all my wet and open places. I whimpered. He screamed. “Anney!” She hit him with something I could not see. Then she was grabbing things, canisters off the stove, pans, glasses, plates, anything she could throw at him. I smiled. The corners of my mouth tore, but it didn’t matter. “No, Anney, no!” “You monster!” “No, darling. No! It’s not what you think.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I looked down at my hands, my fingertips flattened and white, my nails bitten off in ragged edges. My hands were still, but my arms were shaking. What had I been going to do? What had I been going to do? Daddy Glen looked at me standing there. “I know how much your mama loves you,” he said, putting his hand on my arm, squeezing tight. When he let me go, there was a bruise, and Mama saw it right away. “Glen, you don’t know your own strength!” “No.” He was calmer now. “Guess I don’t. But Bone knows I’d never mean to hurt her. Bone knows I love her. Goddammit. You know how I love you all, Anney.” I stared up at him, Mama’s hands on my shoulders, knowing my mouth was hanging open and my face was blank. What did I know? What did I believe? I looked at his hands. No, he never meant to hurt me, not really, I told myself, but more and more those hands seemed to move before he could think. His hands were big, impersonal, and fast. I could not avoid them. Reese and I made jokes about them when he wasn’t around—gorilla hands, monkey paws, paddlefish, beaver tails. Sometimes I worried if he knew the things we said. My dreams were full of long fingers, hands that reached around doorframes and crept over the edge of the mattress, fear in me like a river, like the ice-dark blue of his eyes. Bastard Out of Carolina 6 H unger makes you restless. You dream about food—not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother’s milk singing to your bloodstream. When I got hungry my hands would not stay still. I would pick at the edges of scabs, scratch at chigger bites and old scars, and tug at loose strands of my black hair. I’d rock a penny in my palm, trying to learn to roll it one-handed up and around each finger without dropping it, the way my cousin Grey could. I’d chew my fingernails or suck on toothpicks and read everything I hadn’t read more than twice already. But when Reese got hungry and there was nothing to eat, she would just sob, shiny fat tears running down her pink cheeks. Nothing would distract her. We weren’t hungry too often. There was always something that could be done. Reese and I walked the side of the highway, picking up return deposit bottles to cash in and buy Mama’s cigarettes while she gave home permanents to the old ladies she knew from the lunch counter.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I wouldn’t let nothing happen to my little girl.” Daddy Glen relaxed under Mama’s touch until he was almost smiling. “Bone, get your daddy some ice tea,” she told me. “And put some extra sugar in it like he likes.” I got the tea and then a washcloth so Mama could cool Daddy Glen’s neck while they sat together. Mama didn’t look at me once the whole time, but Daddy Glen did, his eyes sliding over me like I was a new creature, something he hadn’t figured out yet how to tame. It had been a long time since he had caught me alone, and sometimes I could almost convince myself that he had never held me tight to his hips, never put his hands down inside my clothes. I pretended it had all been a bad dream that would never come back, but I was careful to stay away from him. I ran off before Daddy Glen could ask for anything more and took the fan out on the back porch. I sang to myself as softly as I could, humming into the motor, thinking about how gospel singers were always on the road. Even if I didn’t get to be the star, I might wind up singing background in a “family”—all of us dressed alike in electric-blue fringed blouses with silver embroidery, traveling in a big bus, and calling home from different cities. But it would be better to be a soloist and be in demand all the time. All I needed was a chance to turn my soulful black eyes on a tent full of believers, sing out the little break in my mournful voice. I knew I could make them love me. There was a secret to it, but I would find it out. If they could do it to me, I would find a way to do it to the world. “Bullshit and apple butter,” Granny laughed cruelly when I finally told her about watching the morning gospel singers and wanting to be like them. “You got to be joking, Bone! You can’t sing, girl. You can’t sing at all.” “Not now,” I admitted grudgingly. “But I’m working on it. I’m gonna get better. And think about it, Granny. Think about what it would be like.” “Oh, I know.” Granny’s expression became gentle, her voice careful. “I know the power of gospel singers. Some of these Christian women will believe anything for the sake of a gospel singer.” “Anything.” I loved the way she said that. Granny’s “Christian women” came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying. “Anything,” I echoed, and she gave me her toothless, twisted grin. We were sitting close together in Mama’s lawn chairs in the backyard.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I saw his fingers curl up and loosen again. He flung his huge hands out to the side and shook his head, laughing. “That woman loves you more than I can understand. Needs time to work things out with you.” He sneered the words. “Time with you. My sweet Jesus.” He shrugged his shoulders, put his hands on his hips, and put his face close to mine. “You’re gonna have to tell her it’s all right,” he said. “You’re gonna have to tell her you want us all to be together again.” He paused, looking at me intently. My stomach hurt. I looked down. My sweaty fingers were rolled into fists. “No,” I whispered. “I don’t want to live with you no more. Mama can go home to you. I told her she could, but I can’t. I won’t.” “Won’t?” He touched my cheek. I looked up at him. “You won’t live with me?” His eyes were hard blue rocks, his mouth an angry line. “You’re not even thirteen years old, girl. You don’t say what you do. I’m your daddy. I say what you do.” “No.” I said it quietly. My throat was so tight it was hard to say anything. I saw him rock back away from me, close his eyes, push his hands together in front of his body as if he were about to pray. He shook his head. “No,” I said again. “I’m trying to be reasonable with you, girl. I want you to talk to your mama. I want you to stop this nonsense before you make me really mad.” His clasped hands shook. He opened his eyes. “No.” I said it louder. “I’d rather die than go back to living with you.” “You would?” His lips curled into a mean smile. “I bet you would,” he said in a whisper. There was a long quiet moment. I could hear my heartbeat. “Make me that sandwich,” he said, “and we’ll talk.” I stood unmoving, watching his face and hands. “No. I don’t want to talk. I want you to leave.” He shook his head and went on smiling. “I’ll tell Mama,” I said desperately. “I’ll tell her.” His hands came up and grabbed my shoulders, shook me. “You don’t want to make your daddy a sandwich?” His voice grated with rage. “You don’t want to do nothing for me?” Another shake. He lifted me so that my feet came off the floor. My mouth opened. I wanted to scream, but nothing came out. I remembered all the times he had lifted me like that before, lifted me, shaken me, then pulled me to his chest, held me against him and run his hands over me, moaned while his fingers gouged at me. I had always been afraid to scream, afraid to fight. I had always felt like it was my fault, but now it didn’t matter.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  There was just the scrape on my temple and the cut along my ear, but those had bled all down my neck and shoulder. It was hard to believe all that blood had come from so few cuts. The nurse was gentle and slow. I let her touch me as she pleased, turning my head to follow her smile like an infant watching the nipple. I watched, but didn’t speak. I didn’t tell her how much I hurt. I figured she could see the bruises on my throat and my torn lips. She could certainly see the look in my eyes. The one glance I’d got at my face in the mirrorblack pane of the examining-room door scared me. I was a stranger with eyes sunk in shadowy caves above sharp cheekbones and a mouth so tight the lips had disappeared. “That shoulder’s gonna ache for a while.” The doctor didn’t look at me when he spoke, just made notes on a clipboard. “And that wrist is badly sprung. It’ll be a couple of months healing completely.” The nurse was washing dried blood from my cheek with an alcohol swab. I watched her instead of him. “We’re going to have to wait a while before we give you anything.” The doctor’s eyes wandered up from the clipboard and down my body, pausing at the bruises on my thighs and sliding down to the swollen knees, one of which was scraped raw. He put his palm on my hip and squeezed slightly. “You tell me now if anything else hurts you.” It might have been a question. It might not. I looked up at him with no expression. I kept wondering where Mama had gone. What had happened to Daddy Glen? I didn’t remember the ride in from Alma’s place, didn’t remember Mama saying anything to me. Had she told them what had happened? Did anyone know? Where was Mama, and why wasn’t she with me? The deputy leaned against the door until the nurse brought him a folding metal chair he could prop back against the wall. He was a red-faced boy with sandy hair cut so short you could see his pink scalp under the fuzz. He reminded me of the twins when they came back from the county farm, stiff-backed, crewcut, and proud of themselves. This one was proud of himself too; kept smoothing down his uniform shirt and pulling at the material so the sweaty wrinkles under his arms wouldn’t show. His mouth was soft and his chin small, but when he looked at me, he would poke his lips out and try to make his face stern. Watched too much television, probably thought of himself as some public defender type. I tried to feel dangerous, but my eyelids were damp and swollen, my neck itchy, and my mouth too painful for me to frown.