Grief

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.

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• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Bastard Out of Carolina 17 R eese had never been to a funeral before, and I was unsure how we were supposed to behave. Reese was just worried about what we were going to wear. “Don’t we have to go buy black dresses?” she kept asking. “Mama, when we gonna go get our black dresses?” She sounded as if she was already thinking about going to school the day after the funeral in her new black dress. Not so long ago that was what I would have been thinking. Now all I could think about was Aunt Ruth and the way she had talked to me all last summer. When Mama shushed Reese and told her she could just wear her dark blue skirt and a white blouse, I went off to sit on the porch steps, hugging my knees to my chest. There was a tight painful place inside me that squeezed me, not my heart, but just above my heart. I remembered the way Aunt Ruth had looked when she smiled at me, how thin she had been with her bird fingers and feverish eyes. But most of all I remembered the way she had laughed with Earle and then stared off into the distance all those long hours in the hot afternoons. “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.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  A little Hank Williams, the Monroe Brothers, Hazel Cole, and—who was that?—yeah, Blind Alfred Reed, right? Bet she even got out ‘Wabash Cannonball,’ and ‘Where the Soul of Man Never Dies.’” “’Pistol Packin’ Mama.’” I reached under Butch’s seat for the Pabst bottle, took it up, and drained it. He stared at me, unbelieving. “She really loved that one. We sang it together all one afternoon.” I set the empty bottle back under his chair. His face crumpled slowly. “Goddam,” he whispered. “I forgot that one. Shit.” He dropped his head and covered his face with his hands. I watched his shoulders tighten, feeling far off and a little numb, the liquor like cotton batting all along my nervous system. “Christ damn,” Butch cursed, and stood up. “I hate this.” He kicked his chair over, kicked it again and knocked it a couple of feet away, went after it, and gave it another kick. “I didn’t think I’d feel like this. When I talked to Deedee, we both swore we weren’t gonna act like this, and there she is up in Mama’s bedroom now, crying like her heart’s broke, like she lost her best friend in the world. And hell,” he almost shouted, turning back to me, “she and Mama couldn’t barely stand each other.” I nodded. “It don’t make sense, does it? I always thought Deedee hated Aunt Ruth, she talked so bad about her. But this morning…” I paused to wipe my face. “It all looked different.” “Goddam, you’re drunk.” Butch walked over to me, tilted my face back, and put his down close to mine. His lips pressed my lips, his tongue slipped in and pushed at my tongue, I pulled my head away in surprise. “How old are you now, Bone?” he asked. “I’ll be thirteen in May,” I told him. “Thirteen.” Butch nodded. “I always liked you,” he whispered. “Still do. You an’t always a damn fool like everybody else.” He straightened back up. “So don’t go making more out of this than there is.” I got to my feet carefully. The back of my skirt was stuck to my legs. I pulled it free with one hand and felt one of the scabs tear loose. I winced, but Butch had bent down to retrieve the beer bottle and didn’t see. I went back inside, walking slowly, placing one foot deliberately in front of the other. It was kind of interesting being drunk. I liked the numb part. In the overheated house, there seemed to be no good air left. The kitchen was full of women standing around talking and watching over the stove. Mama and Alma were sitting at the table, Alma leaning on Mama’s shoulder. Carr was over at the counter, slicing ham and laying it out on a platter. Temple and Mollie were with her, helping to put more food out.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Whoa, Bone! Girl, you been growing up while I been gone? Drinking beer and stealing whiskey?” I drained his cup and handed it back. “They still should have had music. Aunt Ruth loved music.” “Yeah.” Butch knocked the cup against his knuckles, making a low hollow sound. “Yeah. She did. Used to love to play those scratchy old records. Kept them even after D.W. broke her record player. Always planned to buy her another one, but I never seemed to have any extra money. Couple of times I borrowed Earle’s record player for her just so she could listen to it.” “Earle loaned it to her last summer while I was there. We played a bunch of her stuff.” Butch smiled. “Don’t tell me. ‘Gospel Train,’ right? A little Hank Williams, the Monroe Brothers, Hazel Cole, and—who was that?—yeah, Blind Alfred Reed, right? Bet she even got out ‘Wabash Cannonball,’ and ‘Where the Soul of Man Never Dies.’” “’Pistol Packin’ Mama.’” I reached under Butch’s seat for the Pabst bottle, took it up, and drained it. He stared at me, unbelieving. “She really loved that one. We sang it together all one afternoon.” I set the empty bottle back under his chair. His face crumpled slowly. “Goddam,” he whispered. “I forgot that one. Shit.” He dropped his head and covered his face with his hands. I watched his shoulders tighten, feeling far off and a little numb, the liquor like cotton batting all along my nervous system. “Christ damn,” Butch cursed, and stood up. “I hate this.” He kicked his chair over, kicked it again and knocked it a couple of feet away, went after it, and gave it another kick. “I didn’t think I’d feel like this. When I talked to Deedee, we both swore we weren’t gonna act like this, and there she is up in Mama’s bedroom now, crying like her heart’s broke, like she lost her best friend in the world. And hell,” he almost shouted, turning back to me, “she and Mama couldn’t barely stand each other.” I nodded. “It don’t make sense, does it? I always thought Deedee hated Aunt Ruth, she talked so bad about her. But this morning…” I paused to wipe my face. “It all looked different.” “Goddam, you’re drunk.” Butch walked over to me, tilted my face back, and put his down close to mine. His lips pressed my lips, his tongue slipped in and pushed at my tongue, I pulled my head away in surprise. “How old are you now, Bone?” he asked. “I’ll be thirteen in May,” I told him. “Thirteen.” Butch nodded. “I always liked you,” he whispered. “Still do. You an’t always a damn fool like everybody else.” He straightened back up. “So don’t go making more out of this than there is.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  If He’d take bastards into heaven, how come He couldn’t put me in front of those hot lights and all that dispensation? Gospel singers always had money in their pockets, another bottle under their seats. Gospel singers had love and safety and the whole wide world to fall back on—women and church and red clay solid under their feet. All I wanted, I whispered, all I wanted, was a piece, a piece, a little piece of it. Shannon overheard and looked at me sympathetically. She knows, I thought, she knows what it is to want what you are never going to have. I’d underestimated her. That July we went over to the other side of Lake Greenwood, a part of the county I knew from visiting one of the cousins who worked at the air base. Off the highway we stopped at a service station to give Mrs. Pearl a little relief from the heat. “You ever think God maybe didn’t intend us to travel on Sunday afternoon? I swear He makes it hotter than Saturday or Friday.” Mrs. Pearl sat in the shade while Mr. Pearl went off to lecture the man who rented out the Rhythm Ranch. Shannon and I cut off across a field to check out the headstones near a stand of cottonwood. We loved to read the mottoes and take back the good ones for Mrs. Pearl to stitch up on samplers and sell in the store. My favorites were the weird ones, like “Now He Knows” or “Too Pure.” Shannon loved the ones they put up for babies, little curly-headed dolls with angel wings and heartbreaking lines like “Gone to Mama” or “Gone Home.” “Silly stuff.” I kicked at the pieces of clay pot that were lying everywhere. Shannon turned to me, and I saw tears on her cheeks. “No, no, it just tears me up. Think about it, losing your own little baby girl, your own little angel. Oh, I can’t stand it. I just can’t stand it.” She gave big satisfied sobs and wiped her hands on her blue gingham pockets. “I wish I could take me one of these home. Wouldn’t you like to have one you could keep up? You could tell stories to the babies.” “You crazy.” Shannon sniffed. “You just don’t understand. Mama says I’ve got a very tender heart.” “Uh huh.” I walked away. It was too hot to fight. It was certainly too hot to cry. I kicked over some plastic flowers and a tattered green cardboard cross. This was one of the most boring trips I’d ever taken with the Pearls. I tried to remember why I’d even wanted to come. At home Mama would be making fresh ice tea, boiling up sugar water to mix in it.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  He also had a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon under his chair, Nevil’s beer of choice, which he kept pouring into a metal coffee cup and drinking openly. I don’t know how much he’d had, but he looked relaxed and comfortable despite the cold, wearing one of Uncle Travis’s old army greatcoats and a plaid wool scarf wrapped around his neck. I had borrowed Uncle Nevil’s fleece-lined jacket and leather gloves, and wasn’t too chilled myself, but it wasn’t surprising that no one else had joined us. “What?” Butch muttered in my direction. “A little Carter Family caterwauling? Maybe that one about building your house for the Lord?” He snorted and began to sing a brief offkey chorus of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” His breath came out in pale little clouds. “You can’t sing,” I told him. “Hell, none of us can.” He passed me the whiskey. “You want a sip? Might warm you up.” I said nothing, just drank deeply. I liked the taste. It was strong, a little bitter, but warming. Butch laughed gently, tipped the bottle back, and refilled his cup with Pabst. “Don’t you tell your mama, now. She’d take my head off.” “Give me some.” I took the cup before he could object and poured as much as I could of the beer down my throat. It tasted mild after the whiskey, but it hurt to swallow, whether because it was so cold or that I drank such a big gulp, I couldn’t have said. For all I knew, beer was supposed to hurt going down. Butch peered closely at me. “You trying to get drunk?” he asked. “You think I can?” “Oh, pretty surely. But I might have to go get another couple of bottles if you want to do it up right.” “Earle’s in there too. Bet we could get some more whiskey from him or Beau.” “Whoa, Bone! Girl, you been growing up while I been gone? Drinking beer and stealing whiskey?” I drained his cup and handed it back. “They still should have had music. Aunt Ruth loved music.” “Yeah.” Butch knocked the cup against his knuckles, making a low hollow sound. “Yeah. She did. Used to love to play those scratchy old records. Kept them even after D.W. broke her record player. Always planned to buy her another one, but I never seemed to have any extra money. Couple of times I borrowed Earle’s record player for her just so she could listen to it.” “Earle loaned it to her last summer while I was there. We played a bunch of her stuff.” Butch smiled. “Don’t tell me. ‘Gospel Train,’ right?

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  The teacher arranged for me to meet with some of the young women from her school. I went to see them, trying to sort out for myself what was right and wrong in all the issues raised at that town meeting. The problem was that I had a young child, and I understood completely the impulse of a parent to protect the child. There were books I would not want my son to read, and if it came down to it, I could imagine going to his teachers and objecting—particularly to hateful, violent books—to books that might damage his sense of justice, books that might invalidate his belief in what made sense in the world, and what did not. What right did I have to say that the book I had written was not that terrible for some people? How could I justify the grief and hopelessness I saw in that young teacher’s face as she talked of how much she loved teaching, the young people with whom she worked, and how awful the year had been as all the work she did was questioned and her students pulled away from her and showed their own fear and disappointment? “I thought we could work all this out,” she said. “I did not think it would become so complicated and awful. I did not think the board would act the way it did.” Bringing those young people and me together was her way of trying to win back some sense of making a difference. She wanted them to be able to talk to me, to ask questions, and to have an opportunity to say what they thought. I understood the impulse both as a teacher myself and as a survivor of childhood violence. Most of the girls I met had experienced some sort of violence; a few could have matched Bone in horror and grief. They were shy and tended to drop their voices when they spoke. They let their hair fall across their faces. They bit their fingernails and twisted in their seats. They were excited and ashamed and they mostly knew each other from school or church. It wasn’t the first time they had gotten together. They’d met before and became somewhat comfortable with saying things they hesitated to say outside that little group. They talked about rape and beatings, about being cursed to their faces and called names they didn’t want to repeat. Some of them had told counselors or teachers little fractions of what they endured. Some had not. None of them wanted to say anything in public, and they were awed that I could go up and talk at the town hall meeting, to the people from the school board, and to the principal. “You’re so brave,” one young woman said to me. “No,” I said, “I’m just a lot older than you, and I have a world of experience you don’t have.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know. Story is told in a voice. The voice of Bastard Out of Carolina is that of a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice. You don’t know who she is until the story ends, and I always intended for the ending to make the reader angry. In the writing I had thought that if I get this right, I can change so much—how people think about rape and child abuse, and working-class families and the nature of resilience, and even perhaps something about how love can both save us and not save us. But also in the writing, I had thought that there was no way to get anything that right. All I could really do was tell a story the best way I could and hope to nudge some people’s notions a little more toward understanding what still does not make sense. Why would anyone beat a child? Why would anyone rape a child? Older and full of the world’s experiences as I am, I still do not know the answer to those questions. Oh, I understand the psychology of hurt and desperate characters. I understand how people can make terrible choices in situations in which they feel powerless and full of rage. I understand all too much about self-hatred and violence and how the cycles of violence are handed down in families rich and poor, urban and rural, and in every region. No one has a monopoly on horror. Many of us can tell terrible stories that barely hide the origins of our understanding—the kinds of stories that are unbelievable without a newspaper clipping or a video on YouTube. What banning books does is continue the denial, extend that damage, and block any way for us to come together and address the reality of violence within our families and communities. We know this even as we go on wanting a world in which we do not need to tell these stories at all. Last year another school board—this one just down the highway from my home in northern California—voted to ban the use of Bastard Out of Carolina in the schools of Fremont. I was in Colorado teaching a workshop when a reporter called me to get my response on the case. I stood there feeling again that weak helplessness I had felt in Maine. I knew I could not say what I was feeling, say “this breaks my heart” and hang up the phone. I had to take a deep breath and try to be reasonable and respectful and pretend I was not feeling what I was feeling. Grief.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I wrapped my arms around Reese and held on, while in the front seat, Glen just sobbed and cried. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] After Mama got home from the hospital, her sisters came around to see us every day. Aunt Ruth had been in the hospital with what Granny called female trouble only a few weeks before, and still wasn’t well enough to do much but sit with Mama for an hour or two and hold her hand, but she called every morning. Aunt Alma practically moved in and-took over, making Mama stay in bed, doing all the cooking, and fixing beef and bean stew. “To put some iron back in your blood, honey,” she said. Aunt Raylene showed up in her overalls and low boots to clean the house from one end to the other, going so far as to make Reese and me help her move furniture out in the yard for the sun to warm it. When she went in to change the sheets on Mama’s bed, she lifted Mama easily and carried her out to sit on the couch in the fresh air. Everyone stepped around Glen like he was another chair or table, occasionally giving him a quick hug or squeeze on the shoulder. He didn’t respond, just shifted from the table to the porch when Raylene started sweeping. When Nevil and Earle came over, he stood out in the yard with them and drank until his shoulders started to go up and down in fierce suppressed sobs and they looked away to spare him being embarrassed. I watched him closely, staying out in the yard as much as I could, squatting down in the bushes where I hoped no one could see me. I put my chin on my knees and hugged myself into a tight curled ball. Mama’s face had been so pale when they brought her home, her eyes enormous and unblinking. She had barely looked at me when I tried to climb up in her lap, just bit her lips and let Aunt Alma pull me away. I cried until Aunt Raylene took me out in her truck and rocked me to sleep with a damp washcloth on my eyes. “Your mama’s gonna need a little time,” she told me. “Then she’s gonna need you more than she ever has. When a woman loses a baby, she needs to know that her other babies are well and happy. You be happy for her, Bone. You let your mama know you are happy so she can heal her heart.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  The sun was so bright, and that boy just grinned so.” The old man wouldn’t stop looking back over to where Lyle lay still on the edge of the road. Lyle lay uncovered for a good twenty minutes. Everybody kept expecting him to get up. There was not a mark on him, and his face was shining with that lazy smile. But the back of his head flattened into the gravel, and his palms lay open and damp in the spray of the traffic the patrolmen diverted around the wreck. Mama was holding Reese when the sheriff’s car pulled up at Aunt Alma’s, and she must have known immediately what he had come to tell her, because she put her head back and howled like an old dog in labor, howled and rocked and squeezed her baby girl so tight Aunt Alma had to pinch her to get Reese free. Mama was nineteen, with two babies and three copies of my birth certificate in her dresser drawer. When she stopped howling, she stopped making any sound at all and would only nod at people when they tried to get her to cry or talk. She took both her girls to the funeral with all her sisters lined up alongside of her. The Parsonses barely spoke to her. Lyle’s mother told Aunt Alma that if her boy hadn’t taken that damn job for Mama’s sake, he wouldn’t have died in the road. Mama paid no attention. Her blond hair looked dark and limp, her skin gray, and within those few days fine lines had appeared at the corners of her eyes. Aunt Ruth steered her away from the gravesite while Aunt Raylene tucked some of the flowers into her family Bible and stopped to tell Mrs. Parsons what a damn fool she was. Aunt Ruth was heavily pregnant with her eighth child, and it was hard for her not to take Mama into her arms like another baby. At Uncle Earle’s car, she stopped and leaned back against the front door, hanging on to Mama. She brushed Mama’s hair back off her face, looking closely into her eyes. “Nothing else will ever hit you this hard,” she promised. She ran her thumbs under Mama’s eyes, her fingers resting lightly on either temple. “Now you look like a Boatwright,” she said. “Now you got the look. You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl. This is the way you’ll look till you die.” Mama just nodded; it didn’t matter to her anymore what she looked like. A year in the mill was all Mama could take after they buried Lyle; the dust in the air got to her too fast.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I ran into the bathroom and grabbed the Noxzema jar. Reese was there, her hair all tousled and her eyes gummy with too much sleep. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” she complained. “Where is everybody?” “Everybody’s gone, but Mama’s here. Get cleaned up and come out to the kitchen.” I hurried away. Mama would have to tell her. I couldn’t. When I got back, Mama was still in the same position with the napkin under her eyes, but now she was truly crying. Big tears were spilling out and streaking down her face. I ran to her and threw my arms around her. For a moment we clung together, and then, awkwardly, she pulled her arms free and pushed me a little away. “You loved her too, didn’t you, Bone?” She looked hard into my face as if she could see inside me. “You know how much she loved you?” I nodded. I couldn’t talk. Mama hugged me to her, rocked me against her breasts. Her hands squeezed my shoulders and shook me a little. “Oh, my little girl,” Mama whispered. “I wish I could be sure Ruth knew how beautiful she was.” 17 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] Reese had never been to a funeral before, and I was unsure how we were supposed to behave. Reese was just worried about what we were going to wear. “Don’t we have to go buy black dresses?” she kept asking. “Mama, when we gonna go get our black dresses?” She sounded as if she was already thinking about going to school the day after the funeral in her new black dress. Not so long ago that was what I would have been thinking. Now all I could think about was Aunt Ruth and the way she had talked to me all last summer. When Mama shushed Reese and told her she could just wear her dark blue skirt and a white blouse, I went off to sit on the porch steps, hugging my knees to my chest. There was a tight painful place inside me that squeezed me, not my heart, but just above my heart. I remembered the way Aunt Ruth had looked when she smiled at me, how thin she had been with her bird fingers and feverish eyes. But most of all I remembered the way she had laughed with Earle and then stared off into the distance all those long hours in the hot afternoons.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I stared up into the pattern of rusty dried paint and spider-fine traceries on the porch ceiling. I opened my mouth to cry, but no cry came. Tears kept running down my face into my collar, but I didn’t make a sound. Children cried. I was not a child. Maybe, I told myself, I should go stay with Aunt Carr up in Baltimore or go out to Eustis and visit Aunt Maybelle and Aunt Marvella. I closed my eyes and licked my lips. The screen door swung closed with a thud. I turned my head. Mama stood motionless in one of her old short-sleeved dresses, her arms crossed under her breasts and her head up. She was looking at me from slitted eyes. My heart raced at the sight of her. Aunt Ruth had told her after Lyle Parsons’s funeral that she would look the same till she died. “Now you look like a Boatwright. Now you got the look,” she’d said. In all the years since, that prophecy had held true. Age and exhaustion had worn lines under Mama’s mouth and eyes, narrowed her chin, and deepened the indentations beside her nose, but you could still see the beautiful girl she had been. Now that face was made new. Bones seemed to have moved, flesh fallen away, and lines deepened into gullies, while shadows darkened to streaks of midnight. I breathed hard, feeling like I was underwater looking at her. She came across the porch, her face stern, her mouth set in a rigid line. The muscles in her neck stood out in high relief. I pushed myself up. She came straight to the rocker. My face felt plaster-stiff. The music was still playing. It wasn’t God who made us like this, I thought. We’d gotten ourselves messed up on our own. “Baby.” Mama’s voice was a raspy whisper. I did not move, did not speak. “Bone.” She touched my shoulder. “Oh, girl.” I could not pull away, but still I did not speak. I wondered if she could see herself in my pupils. She drew back a little and dropped down to half-kneel beside me. “I know,” she said. “I know you must feel like I don’t love you, like I didn’t love you enough.” She took hold of her own shoulders, hugging herself and shivering as if she were cold. “Bone, I never wanted you to be hurt. I wanted you to be safe. I wanted us all to be happy. I never thought it would go the way it did. I never thought Glen would hurt you like that.” Mama shut her eyes and turned her head as if she could no longer stand to look into my face. Her mouth opened and closed several times. I saw tears at the corners of her eyes.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  The guitar plunked and became clearly Patsy Cline’s voice singing “Walking After Midnight.” The driving notes and the dark undertone of the drum paced her voice. I listened closely, heard the pause as the song ended, and then Patsy’s voice started again, taking up from the beginning, the scratches and popping of the worn record overwhelming that heartbreaking voice, making me wish I could still cry the way I had with Aunt Ruth. The silence extended, the soft rustle of the river barely audible. A breeze swelled and died down. The music came back, the chords different. Not Patsy Cline. Kitty Wells. “Talk Back Trembling Lips.” Her twangy voice shook and scolded, louder still than Patsy’s drawl. Mama always said Kitty had a smoky voice, not as pure as Patsy’s, but familiar. That raw accent, like Beau’s or Alma’s, flattened vowels and stretched-out syllables to fit the chorus. I rocked back and listened to the record play through. The next one was another of Mama’s favorites, Patsy Cline telling the world that it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels. Grief filled me. I stared up into the pattern of rusty dried paint and spider-fine traceries on the porch ceiling. I opened my mouth to cry, but no cry came. Tears kept running down my face into my collar, but I didn’t make a sound. Children cried. I was not a child. Maybe, I told myself, I should go stay with Aunt Carr up in Baltimore or go out to Eustis and visit Aunt Maybelle and Aunt Marvella. I closed my eyes and licked my lips. The screen door swung closed with a thud. I turned my head. Mama stood motionless in one of her old short-sleeved dresses, her arms crossed under her breasts and her head up. She was looking at me from slitted eyes. My heart raced at the sight of her. Aunt Ruth had told her after Lyle Parsons’s funeral that she would look the same till she died. “Now you look like a Boatwright. Now you got the look,” she’d said. In all the years since, that prophecy had held true. Age and exhaustion had worn lines under Mama’s mouth and eyes, narrowed her chin, and deepened the indentations beside her nose, but you could still see the beautiful girl she had been. Now that face was made new. Bones seemed to have moved, flesh fallen away, and lines deepened into gullies, while shadows darkened to streaks of midnight. I breathed hard, feeling like I was underwater looking at her. She came across the porch, her face stern, her mouth set in a rigid line. The muscles in her neck stood out in high relief. I pushed myself up. She came straight to the rocker. My face felt plaster-stiff. The music was still playing. It wasn’t God who made us like this, I thought.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “You know what he said to me? You know what he said to me?” Alma asked, hanging on to Mama with one desperate hand. She didn’t wait for an answer. She took hold of the blanket in her fist, shook it and hissed the answer between her teeth. “Said, ‘What you want an’t what I want.’ He said, ‘You old and ugly and fat as a cow, crazy as a cow eaten too much weed, and you smell like a cow been lying in spoiled milk.’ Said, ‘I wouldn’t touch you even if you took a bath in whiskey tonic and put a bag over your head.’ He laughed at me. Then he walked right out of here.” She lay back limply. There were tears on her face, and her lips had flattened back against her teeth. She shook her head slowly back and forth. “All this time, taking care of him, loving him, giving him children and meals and clean clothes and loving him. Loving him, and him to talk to me that way.” She cried deep, broken sobs. “And Annie!” she wailed. Mama gathered Aunt Alma up like a little girl, rocked her back and forth while she cried. It didn’t last long. In the silence that followed, the two of them murmured a little, something I couldn’t hear clearly. It sounded like Mama said something about Uncle Wade being a loving man, that Aunt Alma loved him. Then Aunt Alma’s voice came out loud and strong again. “Oh, but that’s why I got to cut his throat,” she said plainly. “If I didn’t love the son of a bitch, I’d let him live forever.” [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] “Woman takes it in her head to go crazy, you just might as well stand back.” Uncle Earle was joking to Grey and Garvey out on the porch in the dark, the three of them standing close together smoking and sharing a beer. They’d wanted to get in the house so bad Mama had finally let them move some of the broken furniture, insisting they do it quietly so that Alma could sleep. “Oh, women,” Garvey grunted. “They’re not that hard to handle.” “You think!” Uncle Earle laughed. “I’m telling you, boy, you never can predict what a woman might not do. You remember that little girl from Nashville I brought around two summers ago, sweet little thing not any bigger than Bone and all pasty-faced, blond, and giggly?” “Tiny, yeah,” Grey almost laughed. He sounded like he remembered her well. “She was so shy nobody got to know her.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I grabbed the front of Mama’s dress with my good arm, ignoring the pain in my shoulder as I pushed forward into her embrace. She caught me, pressing my face against her throat and whispering into my ear. “It’s all right, baby. You just cry. You just go on and cry.” Her hands touched me gently, lifted, and came back down as if she were afraid she might hurt me but couldn’t keep from reaching for me again. “You’re my own baby girl. I’m not gonna let you go.” Over Mama’s shoulder, I saw Raylene in the doorway, her face as red as a new apple. Mama’s hands stroked my hair back off my face, cupped my head, held me safe. I pressed my face into her neck, and let it all go. The grief. The anger. The guilt and the shame. It would come back later. It would come back forever. We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn’t know how to get it back. The music stopped, and the sound of the river water filled the night. My crying eased and then stopped. Mama rocked back on her heels. A jaybird dropped off the porch lintel and streaked up into the darkening sky. The dog loped out to nose its track in the dusty grass. Raylene called Mama’s name softly, then mine, her voice as scratchy and penetrating as the chords of a steel guitar, as familiar as Kitty Wells or a gospel chorus. Mama looked back at her and shook her head. She straightened and gave my hand on the rocker’s arm a little pat. Her smell, that familiar salt-and-butter smell, almost made me cry again, but I felt empty. I just watched her. Raylene had been right. I didn’t understand anything. But I didn’t want to understand. Seeing Mama hurt me almost as bad as not seeing her had. There was an envelope on my lap. Mama had put it there. She leaned forward and kissed my cheek just below where Nevil had kissed me. The memory of his burning eyes startled me. He would not forgive. He was out there hunting. I almost cried out. Mama’s finger touched my lips. Her eyes burned into me. “I love you, Bone,” she said. “Never forget that. You’re my baby girl, and I love you.” Her ravaged cheeks shone in the light from the house, her eyes glittered. She bent, kissed my fingers, and stood up. Aunt Raylene came through the door, but Mama backed away quickly, shaking her head again. We watched her cross the yard, heard her start the Pontiac in the darkness past the curve of the road. “Damn,” Raylene cursed. Her fist drummed on the doorjamb. “Damn,” she said again, and dropped her hand as if she could think of nothing else to say, to do.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  His restless black eyes dared Aunt Ruth to contradict him. “That wife of his, that Maggie, is the trouble in Beau’s life. Little white-faced thing, white eyes, white-headed, bruises soon as the wind blows hard. Woman makes babies the way you make biscuits. All the time pregnant with some little whey-faced empty-eyed child of God. Hellfire, Beau couldn’t get ahead of himself if he gave up everything but black coffee and hard work. Seven children! Bad enough Alma’s got so many, but at least she knows how to keep hers fed and clean. That little Maggie can’t even change a diaper without coming on a dizzy spell. Woman has eaten Beau alive. Like some vampire sucking the juice out of him. You cut that girl open and you’d find Beau’s blood pumping her heart.” “Magdaline’s not the reason Beau’s gonna bleed himself to death,” Aunt Ruth snorted. “She don’t make him drink that poison.” “Don’t she?” Earle slammed the wringer down on the rags he’d spread out to spare the porch boards. “Tell the truth, Ruth. Don’t you think she’s got even a little to do with Beau keeping himself blind drunk all the time?” Aunt Ruth pulled herself around to look Earle right in the face. “You making out like you think that’s what’s wrong with your life, Earle Boatwright? Your woman eat the heart out of you? The mother of your daughters drive you to drink and day jobs and cursing on my porch in the broad daylight?” I hugged my knees up close and watched Earle’s face. He was always arguing with Aunt Ruth, but it rarely got so mean. I bit my lips and saw him hang his head. When Earle looked up, his face was red and his eyes all shiny. “Yes, Ruth,” he whispered. “The bitch of it is, I do.” Aunt Ruth harrumphed out her nose and then pulled herself out of her rocking chair to stalk over and grab him around the neck. “I’m sorry, baby.” She looked a little wet-eyed herself. “That was a low thing for me to say. I know. I know how you miss your girls. Know how you ache for what is gone. Don’t think I don’t hurt for you, baby. Don’t think I don’t know how you hurt.” “Oh, Ruth!” Earle tried to jerk away, but Aunt Ruth was holding him too tight. I bit down harder, tasting metallic blood in my mouth, feeling my eyes swell up with hot tears, but almost choking on a crazy need to laugh. Aunt Ruth looked so funny, all spindly and frail hanging on to her big tall red-faced brother so hard she was nearly choking him. But he had always been her baby, like Beau and Alma and Raylene and Mama. Ruth had half-raised them and still acted more like their mother than Granny ever did.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I looked over to Mr. Pearl and saw his head dip again. If it had been me in that ball of flame, would they have come to my funeral? Mrs. Pearl lifted her face from the flowers. Her watery eyes flickered back and forth across the pews. She doesn’t understand anything, I thought. Mrs. Pearl’s eyes moved over me sightlessly, her hands crushing the flowers pressed against her neck. She started to moan suddenly, like a bird caught in a blackberry bush, softly, tonelessly, while the preacher carefully pushed her down into the front pew. The choir director’s wife ran over and put her arm around Mrs. Pearl as the preacher desperately signaled the choir to start a hymn. Their voices rose smoothly, but Mrs. Pearl’s moan went on and on, rising into the close sweaty air, a song with no meter, no rhythm—but gospel, the purest gospel, a song of absolute hopeless grief. I turned and pushed my face into Mama’s dress. All my hardheaded anger was gone. As if she understood completely, Mama’s hand stroked my neck and down my back while she crooned under her breath her own song—muted, toneless, the same hum I’d been hearing all my life. Bastard Out of Carolina 14 S hannon’s death haunted me. Suddenly I didn’t feel so grown-up anymore. I tried to make up with Reese, but she had decided that Patsy Ruth was the only person she trusted in the world, and had her sleeping over all the time. The two of them whispered together, giggling and pointing at me and then running off. Even Mama was mad at me. Exhausted with the effort of trying to come up with something new to wear five days out of every week, I’d worn jeans to school one day and been sent home with a stern note. “Your clothes are clean. You got nothing to be ashamed of,” Mama had snapped. Any other time she might have been sympathetic about the girls at school laughing at me for wearing the same few A-line skirts and shirtwaist dresses over and over, but there was no money for new clothes, and no one to loan us any. Uncle Earle was still at the county farm, Aunt Alma had been laid off from her part-time job at the laundry, and Aunt Ruth was so sick Travis was paying a nurse to help Deedee care for her. Everyone was worried and irritable. The back of my throat was tight all the time.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Aunt Raylene’s voice was soft but perfectly clear. “I just an’t gonna have this. Tonight or tomorrow, I’ll talk to you about your mama. Then you can whine and bitch to your heart’s content, curse and scream and do any damn thing you want. But right now, you’re going to her funeral the way she would want. If you don’t, ten years from now you’re gonna hate yourself for missing it, and I damn sure am not gonna let that go by. So get your butt up out of that chair and wash your face before I slap you silly.” Deedee hesitated, her mouth hanging open, and Raylene drew her hand back. Immediately, Deedee was up and into the house. We heard the water running briefly and then her feet on the stairs. Aunt Raylene sighed and pushed a few stray hairs back behind her ears. She looked over at me carefully. “Go get in the car,” she said. “We an’t got time for no more nonsense.” They had let Earle out of the county farm early so he could go to Aunt Ruth’s funeral. He showed up at the funeral home drunk, wearing a brand-new dark suit with his old work boots, and hanging on to the arm of a ridiculously young and skinny girl no one had seen before. I was out front standing with Raylene and Alma when we saw him coming up the steps. He gave me one quick nod but kept his attention on his sisters. When Raylene snorted at him, he told the girl to go wait in his truck. “Don’t get snotty, Raylene,” he said as the girl walked away. “That child is the only thing keeping me alive.” “And what are you doing for her?” “Everything I can, sister, everything she wants.” “You marry her, then?” Aunt Alma looked tired and impatient. “I’m going to. Hell yes. I am, I surely am.” “Goddam, Earle, you fool. One of your women gonna have you put in jail one of these days.” “An’t no woman ever gonna put me in jail.” Earle swayed a little on his old boots. “An’t no woman would dare.” “Aww, Earle.” Raylene shook her head at him and shrugged. She folded her big arms around his shoulders and pulled him to her breast. “I’m just glad you’re here.” When she let him go, she smiled for the first time since Ruth had died. “That child buy you that suit?” “Why? Don’t you like it?” Earle ran his hands down the sides of his suit coat. He was so thin that when he bent his arms the dark material flapped like a crow’s wing. His hair was still bristly short and close to his head, but dark again, as if he’d dyed it.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  His hum went on in time to the soft radio music, and the smell of Pall Malls began to soothe me. I didn’t know I was falling asleep until I woke up in the bright gray light of full morning. Glen was gone, the car still and cold. There was an ache between my legs, but I wasn’t afraid in the daylight. I sat up and looked out on gray clouds and dew-drenched fir branches. The asphalt looked wet and dark. There were a few nurses going in and out the emergency-room doors, talking in low mumbly tones. I breathed through my mouth and watched as more and more people drove into the lot, wondering if I had dreamed that whole early-morning scene. I kept squeezing my thighs together, feeling the soreness, and trying to imagine how I could have bruised myself if it had been a dream. When Glen came out of the emergency room, the doors swung back like a shot in the morning air. His face was rigid, his legs stiff, his hands clamped together in front of him, twisting and twisting. I looked into that face and knew it had not been a dream. I pulled Reese up against me, ignoring her soft protesting cry. Glen climbed in the car and slammed the door so hard Reese woke up with a jerk. She twisted her head like a baby bird, looking from me to Glen’s neck and back again. We sat still, waiting. He said, “Your mama’s gonna be all right.” He paused. “But she an’t gonna have no more babies.” He put his hands on the steering wheel, leaned forward, pushed his mouth against his fingers. He said, “My baby’s dead. My boy. My boy.” I wrapped my arms around Reese and held on, while in the front seat, Glen just sobbed and cried. After Mama got home from the hospital, her sisters came around to see us every day. Aunt Ruth had been in the hospital with what Granny called female trouble only a few weeks before, and still wasn’t well enough to do much but sit with Mama for an hour or two and hold her hand, but she called every morning. Aunt Alma practically moved in and-took over, making Mama stay in bed, doing all the cooking, and fixing beef and bean stew. “To put some iron back in your blood, honey,” she said. Aunt Raylene showed up in her overalls and low boots to clean the house from one end to the other, going so far as to make Reese and me help her move furniture out in the yard for the sun to warm it. When she went in to change the sheets on Mama’s bed, she lifted Mama easily and carried her out to sit on the couch in the fresh air.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  We’d gotten ourselves messed up on our own. “Baby.” Mama’s voice was a raspy whisper. I did not move, did not speak. “Bone.” She touched my shoulder. “Oh, girl.” I could not pull away, but still I did not speak. I wondered if she could see herself in my pupils. She drew back a little and dropped down to half-kneel beside me. “I know,” she said. “I know you must feel like I don’t love you, like I didn’t love you enough.” She took hold of her own shoulders, hugging herself and shivering as if she were cold. “Bone, I never wanted you to be hurt. I wanted you to be safe. I wanted us all to be happy. I never thought it would go the way it did. I never thought Glen would hurt you like that.” Mama shut her eyes and turned her head as if she could no longer stand to look into my face. Her mouth opened and closed several times. I saw tears at the corners of her eyes. “And I just loved him. You know that. I just loved him so I couldn’t see him that way. I couldn’t believe. I couldn’t imagine…” She swallowed several times, then opened her eyes and looked at me directly. I looked back, saw her face pale and drawn, her eyes red-rimmed, her lips trembling. I wanted to tell her lies, tell her that I had never doubted her, that nothing could make any difference to my love for her, but I couldn’t. I had lost my mama. She was a stranger, and I was so old my insides had turned to dust and stone. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see again the blood on Glen’s hairline, his face pressed to her belly, feel that black despair whose only relief would be death. I had prayed for death. Maybe it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of anybody’s fault. Maybe it was like Raylene said, the way the world goes, the way hearts get broken all the time. “You don’t know how much I love you,” she said, her face as stark as a cracked white plate. “How much I have always loved you.” My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn’t know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately. “Mama,” I said, not wanting to speak but not able to stop the rush of that cry. I shuddered, and the word came out like a bird’s call, high and piercing. The sobs that followed were hoarse and ugly.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  The man who told me I told his story had not stood up to speak when the meeting was taking place. He had waited two hours to speak those words and leave. The teenagers I met with privately had been plainly frightened that people would learn their secrets, the bruises and terrible curses they endured. They wanted me to write more stories, to make sense of what did not make sense. But they were not writers, they were people trying to live their lives without having to go naked for others the way it seemed I had chosen to do. It is twenty years since the publication of the book I wrote, almost eighteen after the court case in Maine that upheld the school board’s right to block the use of some books in the high schools. We lost the case. We lost the ACLU appeal. After the last ruling, Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha King, bought copies of Bastard Out of Carolina for many of the libraries in the state—a gesture I appreciated more than I could ever express. It seemed to me that countering censorship with the free and open distribution of the novel was the best response possible to all that had happened. But it did not address my grief, or the loss of a dedicated teacher, or the reinforcement of the silence and anger I saw in that man’s face when he came up to me after the town hall meeting in Framingham. * * * Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know. Story is told in a voice. The voice of Bastard Out of Carolina is that of a young girl who has just lost her mother and her sense of any real hope or justice. You don’t know who she is until the story ends, and I always intended for the ending to make the reader angry. In the writing I had thought that if I get this right, I can change so much—how people think about rape and child abuse, and working-class families and the nature of resilience, and even perhaps something about how love can both save us and not save us. But also in the writing, I had thought that there was no way to get anything that right. All I could really do was tell a story the best way I could and hope to nudge some people’s notions a little more toward understanding what still does not make sense. Why would anyone beat a child? Why would anyone rape a child? Older and full of the world’s experiences as I am, I still do not know the answer to those questions.