Hazard Page 11

  She was murmuring for a reason. There was another family in the room and we didn’t want to know them. A noisy passel of kids, two in dirty diapers, three others in worn T-shirts and ill-fitting pants, all of them barefoot, orbited around their mother who was parked in one of the chairs. The mother’s back was to me, but I could see she was colossal, fleshy-armed, and moist. Her sleeveless, faded housedress was soiled around the collar, damp between her shoulder blades, and darkened beneath her armpits with great wet half-moons. A thin gray crust discolored her elbows. An angry hot rash huddled in the folds of her neck, yawning and chafing whenever she shifted in her seat.

  In a hard-scrabble mining town like Hazard, most everyone was either poor or poorer. Your station in life was determined by your whiteness, your cleanliness, whether you went to a Baptist church or not, and especially by how you spoke: your grammar, your choice of words. How fiercely you flattened your long i’s and clipped your short e’s from “get” to “git”; whether you said “ain’t”; how loosely you drawled. One way meant you were backwoods, reclusive, tobacco-spitting. It meant you bore too many children, many of them slow, most of them inbred, all of them dirty.

  I avoided glancing sideways, studiously dropping underpants and pajamas into the washer. Suddenly, behind me, one of the toddlers slipped in the puddle and slammed her mouth on the concrete. Gasping, I twisted around and covered my mouth. The little girl lifted her head and howled, her face blotched with muck, her lips and tongue split and beading blood. The mother cranked around in her chair.

  “Git her up,” she said, thrusting her chin.

  I wasn’t sure whom she was ordering about. My body instinctively moved forward but an older child slid out of a chair and padded over to the toddler, lifted her up, swiped her bloody mouth with a soiled shirt hem, and walked back to the chair. The toddler stood sniffling for a moment, fist in her mouth.

  I didn’t understand the ways of the world, how babies were made, how children were born. Like most girls born in the Fifties, I made it up. I had decided every girl had a certain number of seeds in her stomach and, magically, when she married, these seeds sprouted into babies. I still believed this, though I sensed there was something missing, something I was ashamed not to know. My mother had not told me why “napkins” were sold in bathrooms or why they cost a whole dime. Once, I’d blurted this question in a restaurant bathroom and she had giggled and glanced at Barbara Ann, yanking on the towel dispenser. They had shared a conspiratorial smile.

  Blankly, I hoped I didn’t have as many seeds as this woman. She must have sensed I was staring at her because she shifted around and looked in my direction. That was when I saw him: the teenage boy in her lap. He lay cupped like a baby in her arms. He was about my size, but so thin I couldn’t fathom his years. He flailed like a large stork, stick-legged and loose-winged, his head lolling to the side. His parts meandered around as if they didn’t know how to position themselves. His skull was shaved and pocked with scars, his mouth smeared with baby food. As I stared, his eyes rolled back and he shuddered.

  Queasily, I glanced away and then back again. What would I do with such a child—who kept growing but couldn’t feed himself or walk? When would I ever put him down?

  “Margie,” my mother said. “Pay attention here.”

  Startled, I turned and slotted the coins, triggering whooshes of water. Barbara Ann nudged my arm and handed me a pillowcase stuffed with pajamas and petticoats. Her lips held the pout she had worn all morning since arguing with Mama about mascara. From all I could tell, Barbara Ann hadn’t even noticed the flailing boy.

  “Okay, girls, I’m going around the corner to the Piggly Wiggly,” Mama said, her tone both brisk and oddly sad. “We’re short on detergent.”

  I glimpsed her face. She was pale and her eyes were moist and tinged with something fragile. Whenever my mother was doing household chores she looked weary and downcast. But this was something different, something that had nothing to do with laundry. It was a look of nausea and pity stirred together—the look she had worn for so many months when my brother was a baby.

  I sensed, as profoundly as any child could, why my mother was troubled. There, in Hazard, she was surrounded by her deeply Southern hometown, where belief prevailed that the kind of people who bred retarded children were low and uneducated, whose bad behavior and foul natures led to illness and plague, who were careless and unscrupulous, whose children were ignorant and soiled. They looked like this family taking up the chairs, mixing blood with germs, bedraggled, unclean, squalid, wretched.

  Part of me understood why my mother left for the Piggly Wiggly. Why she didn’t come back until the dryer was done and Barbara Ann and I had folded all of the clothes. She was a born-again, devoutly Christian, clean, educated woman and, still, she had birthed a retarded child, just like this behemoth of a woman with her piteous boy.

  Over in the corner, the oldest girl bent over a bucket sink and spigot. She had a washer board, against which she rubbed a colorless dress. I sensed she was my age. Her flimsy hair fell over her face and she didn’t bother to push it back. Strands clung to her cheek and lips. I realized that she, her mother, and her siblings were not here for the washing machines at all. They couldn’t afford the necessary coins. Instead, they had come in here for the plumbing, the running water, so they wouldn’t have to go down to the banks and suds-up the river.

  I closed the machine and felt its agitation shudder up my arms. The wash drum shimmied like a big bottom, getting on with the task: loosening the grip of dirt, scouring soot and squalor out of our twisted threads and Perma Press.

  Casting around for a seat, I saw only one chair was empty, shoved aside by the mother so her boy’s flailing toes wouldn’t wham its hard edges. A Family Circle lay on the seat, wrinkled and manhandled. I left it alone and instead hoisted myself up onto a washing machine beside Barbara Ann, hanging my legs over the side, my sandaled feet far from the dirty floor. There, I waited for the cycles to wring the last load, and for my mother to return.

  It wasn’t until I had switched all the loads to the dryer that the woman finally hauled herself and her boy out of the chair, swaying heavily from his weight and her own. I did not see her tenderness or realize that she’d carried her son a mile or more so he wouldn’t be left alone for the afternoon. The way she held his head aloft and turned her body so he could see where they were going was lost on me. As she lumbered out the door and headed down to the river bank, I thought only that I did not want her life. Nor did I want my mother’s. If there was any way to keep my seeds from sprouting I was going to make it happen. From all I’d seen, it was best not to have children at all.

  Chapter 13

  All God’s Children

  The air stank of fish. It was Friday and I scuffled after my friend Natalie, pressing my lunch box to my chest, veering around the hot lunch line and weaving in and out of chairs to the cafeteria’s far end zone.

  “Why do they have to eat fish on Friday?” I rasped, cupping a hand over my nose. My fingers smelled blissfully of pencils and glue and a faint swirl of Dentyne.

  “Who?” Natalie wore a madras skirt that flung about her knees and her long, roped braids swished on her back like saucy tails. She chose an empty table and sat down, flipping open her lunch box and peering inside.

  “Catholics,” I whispered, my eyes darting around.

  “How should I know?” Natalie dug out a package of Hostess Sno Balls and shredded off the cellophane. “That’s what Catholics do.”

  Biting into the pink mound, she lost track of me for a few seconds. Her eyelids fluttered and her cheeks puffed with cake.

  “How come?” My voice was high and pickled. Even now, at eleven years old and in my last year at Bear Creek Elementary, I couldn’t add up the pieces of life. I wanted answers. Scraping out my chair, I tugged my skirt taut and sank down on the shivery metal.

  “Maybe it’s a punishment,” I said, flinging the thought out in the open.

  Natalie looked
up at me, coconut whiskers around her mouth. She chewed, regarding me curiously, as if I were an odd specimen.

  How had I arrived at this notion? I knew only that fish was a dreaded meal to me, dry and clinging to my throat, tasting of dirt and minerals. Even fish sticks, masked with bread crumbs and slathers of ketchup, were tolerable only with macaroni and cheese maneuvers following every bite.

  Years from then, after I left home and the Southern table of my family for the Eastern seaboard of New England, I’d learn fish could be a delightful meal, with wild swings of flavor and tenderness. The ocean’s bounty, in the end, would become my favorite cuisine. But then, in 1962, the thawed and over-cooked halibut sliding off my mother’s spatula always felt like penance.

  In my child’s mind, my distaste for fish and what I knew of Catholics were woven together like bad threads in a carpet. Few Catholics went to my school, so there was little to unravel my confusion. I knew of only one Catholic boy. Buddy Gaynor was a foul-mouth who startled me. Without warning, he’d lunge at me at recess, agitating rocks and dust and snorting as he spun away. I couldn’t see that he wanted my attention, that he liked me and didn’t know any other way to show it. I felt only disrelish for him and his habits. Once every year, he came to school with a smear of ashes on his forehead, a dirtiness I wanted to wipe away.

  “You’re mixed up,” Natalie muffled, spraying dark crumbs. She held her forefinger in the air, swallowed, and took a drink of chocolate milk. “They eat fish so they won’t be punished. When they sneak bologna or hotdogs or something like that, they get into big trouble.”

  She put down the Sno Ball, tore open her Lay’s bag, and snapped a chip onto her tongue.

  “You mean if they eat meat they’ve committed a sin?” I flipped my palms up, exasperated.

  “Yep. Bologna’s the Devil or something.”

  I’d never heard of anything so foolish, or as worrisome. I ran my eyes around the room, scanning the hot lunch line for Buddy Gaynor. He wasn’t there. Rising out of my chair, I craned my neck to see over to the boys’ table, and sure enough, there he was, in the midst of a huddle, saying something he shouldn’t and triggering a rumble of sniggers. His hands flew up and I saw they were empty. I’d heard he always skipped lunch on Fridays—that he was too embarrassed to eat fish.

  Sinking back to my chair, I considered my own lunch. Unwrapped before me on a crumple of waxed paper was a soft Wonder Bread blanket covering a square of orange cheese, a leaf of lettuce, and a floppy slice of bologna. Peeling off the bread, I stared down at the pink meat. It looked fleshy and sunburned.

  In the next instant, it vanished, right from under my nose. Whipping my eyes up, I saw Natalie looking dumbly at me. With a short, sharp snap of her wrists she sent my bologna straight up, launching it like a flying saucer. Neither of us looked up. We’d done this before, though always with dry wads of paper, rubbery erasers, or carrot sticks that ricocheted and bounced. Never had we risked a slimy slab of food that might stick to the ceiling.

  We waited, studying each other’s gaze, holding our eyes still and our edges straight. A tiny laugh moved my nostrils. Still, no bologna. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed Mrs. Cooper patrolling the outer perimeter of the tables in her thick-heeled shoes. Natalie drooped her lids. Still looking at me, she rustled her hand to my lunch box, pulled out a celery stick, and, flat-eyed, clamped down with a crunch.

  “What’s up, Doc?” she said.

  I squealed. I couldn’t help it. Instantly, other girls seated around us looked up from their sandwiches and demanded, “What’s so funny?” Mrs. Cooper, clomping toward us, wanted to know what all the commotion was about, and just as she arrived at the end of our table, planting her bosoms before us, her fists on her wide hips, my bologna peeled off the ceiling, dropping like a wet rag from the sky and slapping me on the head.

  Natalie threw back her braids and laughed, braying like a donkey.

  For the first time, I found myself trundling back to the kitchen where the lunch ladies stood in puffs of hot steam and having to apologize. Then, back at the tables, I swiped from one end of the room, and Natalie the other, picking up dirty napkins and tossed bits of food. When I finally hurried down the corridor, run-walking over the slippery linoleum and making for the far end of the hall where our classmates were vanishing through the exit door, I forgot all about sorting Catholics. Natalie flipped around, pushing her bottom against the handlebar, and we spun out to the school’s back lot with its wall of barracks.

  Despite being tardy, I halted just outside the door, holding out my arms to the faraway mountains. It was November, Thanksgiving just over a week away, and snappy gusts of air hit my face. I took a deep breath, inhaling the clean scent of snow sliding off the Colorado peaks, finally washing the dead scent of fish from my nose. Natalie’s tiny voice shouting “Come on!” spurred me back to a run. I tugged my coat collar up around my ears, speeding to the first barracks and scampering up the steps to where Mr. Hennesee stood, coatless, in a crisp white shirt and dark blue tie, holding the door.

  I had begun to like school, partly because I was no longer in Mrs. Larson’s class, partly because I’d discovered words and how they blossomed from my pen. But mostly, I’d fallen in love. Mr. Hennesee couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight at the time. I’d glimpsed his pretty red-headed wife once from the classroom doorway when she came to school on a surprise visit during lunch. She and Mr. Hennesee stood on the sidewalk, murmuring and smiling over the fuzzy-haired baby held in her arms. All other times, though, I stashed his real life away where it didn’t matter. When I sat in class, his blue-eyed gaze and clean-cut hair, his measured voice and fairness of heart, were all mine.

  Now, at the top of the steps, I glanced up to catch his eye. Always, he greeted each of us as we came to the door, even when we straggled in late. But today, he scarcely nodded to me, a short curt drop of his chin with his eyes glancing to the door. My heart fluttered, instantly sorry for my bologna and bad behavior, and, especially, my tardiness to his class. Once inside, I paused at the coat hooks, staring back through the window. There he stood, on the porch, his back to me and the door, hands in his pockets, looking out at nothing.

  The room was a shuffle of scraping desks and chattering noise. My seat was in the front row, directly in front of Mr. Hennesee’s desk, and I maneuvered up the aisle around bumping bodies rustling books out from beneath the desks. When I reached my seat and leaned down to fetch my notebook, Mr. Hennesee moved soundlessly by.

  As was true for every Friday, he paused at the front of the room, leaning his weight back against his desk. This was my favorite hour of the week, when Mr. Hennesee lifted the thick copy of The Deerslayer off his desk, unfolded its pages, and began reading the story aloud. Today though, he didn’t reach for the book, but instead placed both hands to either side of his hips and curled his fingers around the beveled edge of the desk, as if making sure it was strong enough to hold him.

  Something strange sat in his eyes. Like metal. The line of his mouth was thin. He looked like a different person, like he’d been taken ill. A shadow slid over his face and he took a breath.

  “I’m sorry to have to say this,” he said.

  My heart dropped. He wasn’t even looking at me. I had a sickening moment of regret, wishing I could turn back and undo all of the times I’d been thoughtless and late to his class. My elbows folded onto the desk top and I laid my chin in my hands.

  “Our president has been shot.”

  A thick silence fell. No one moved. From above the blackboard, the clock tapped out a thin rhythm as if its hands were tiny sticks. Several seconds passed, and then someone, in a quiet voice, asked, “Is he still alive?”

  Mr. Hennesee moved his eyes, casting them high over me and toward the back of the room. I could hear his breath pushing out from somewhere deep in his lungs.

  “I’m afraid the answer is no,” he said. “The president died, just about an hour ago.”

  Silence. Someone shifted.


  “You mean President Kennedy?”

  “Yes.”

  A leaden hand pressed on my chest. My insides yawned, as if every part of me was wondering how to stay in place. I wanted to get up, leave, tear across the street to the junior high, where Barbara Ann would be waiting to tell me none of these words were true. I wanted to get home to everything I’d left behind.

  Mr. Hennesee spoke again but I didn’t hear him. He turned from this black news to ordinary things, helping us move on from this moment to the next, until the bell rang and we rose from our desks. I felt myself move out to the sidewalk, falling into step beside Natalie, wordlessly, and walking to the buses. All around, bodies moved and shuffled, shoes scuffed. No one spoke.

  Living as I did far out in the country, my journey home was a long one. I sat alone, the seats emptying around me, and when I stepped off the bus at the mouth of Crestbrook Drive, I felt the oddness of the ground. In the wake of the exhaust, I couldn’t get my bearings. I no longer felt eleven, or hungry, or wishful. Or that I owned any of the parts I’d woken up with that morning.

  Dampened and chilled, the ground pushed up through my shoes. I left the pavement and took the foot path, breaking through the field, crunching the wintered grass, brown and bent from the cold. My left foot, the one that tended slightly inward, rubbed against my shoe, but I pushed on, hurrying, wanting to get to my mother, to ask what it meant for the president to die. I wasn’t aware at the time that even with my family’s troubles I was a protected child: white, high middle class, raised in a home with both parents, and fairly certain that I would get a chance to live out my life. I had not been touched by war or death in my family. But somehow this felt like my death, like everyone’s death.

  Suddenly, as I crested the hill and my house came into view, I slowed my steps. A thought swam up before me, one I had been pushing down the whole ride home. He was a Catholic. A faint memory surfaced in my mind, of an evening three years before, when I’d woken in my darkened bedroom, the steady murmuring of the television seeping through the wall. A noise of despair had touched my ear, causing me to sit up and listen. It wasn’t Roddy. I’d risen quickly, moving to the doorway, and peered into the living room.