The Story of Sassy Sweetwater
by
Vera Jane Cook
An Imprint of
Musa Publishing
The Story of Sassy Sweetwater
By Vera Jane Cook
Copyright © Vera Jane Cook, 2012
Smashwords edition
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All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.
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This e-Book is a work of fiction. While references may be made to actual places or events, the names, characters, incidents, and locations within are from the author’s imagination and are not a resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, or events. Any similarity is coincidental.
Musa Publishing
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Published by Musa Publishing, January 2012
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ISBN: 978-1-61937-885-8
Published in the United States of America
Editor: Rory Olsen
Cover Design: Kelly Shorten
Interior Book Design: Coreen Montagna
Warning
This e-book contains adult language and scenes. This story is meant only for adults as defined by the laws of the country where you made your purchase. Store your e-books carefully where they cannot be accessed by younger readers.
To the past, the one lived on a South Carolina farm, before my time.
Ancestors, good or bad, I am of them.
Chapter One
Mama said I was born by a stream named Sweetwater. She called me Sassy the moment she realized I was a girl. Mama said girls should be sassy, gives them sex appeal. So I was named Sassy, after an attitude, and Sweetwater, after a stream. The year was 1949, and the place was a dirty, back-road shack in a dusty, little town in South Carolina. Mama never could remember the name of the town, but she told me that it might have been Cottageville or maybe even Ridgeville. Didn’t matter much what it was called, though. I never saw it again, and as far as I knew, Mama didn’t either.
Some people think a gray, tumultuous sky is an omen of discontent, especially if one’s entry into this world is shadowed by blustery clouds and thunder’s emphatic roar. But my mama said that heaven welcomed my birth with great horns blowing and mighty cymbals clashing and omens sent by mighty seers bring the blessings of miracles, not the doom of devils.
“Gave you its gray,” she said. “Passed it right on to you.”
I always knew she meant my eyes, gray as the weather on the day I was born, and sometimes showing up hazel when the sun confronts the gloom and demands I show some color.
“Gave you its temperament, too, and its mystery, girl. Women need a little mystery. That’s what turns a man’s head. Beauty has nothing to do with anything more than that.”
It always sounded like the great god Poseidon was my father the way my mama tells it. Where else could I have come from? No man had ever come forth and claimed me as his own. Not that I didn’t wonder who my father was, but when I asked I always got the same reply.
“You came from the sky, Sassy Sweetwater; clear as the stream I bathed you in, fierce as the wind that blew away the storm, the one that welcomed you here with great aplomb, and tender as the aftermath of nature’s roar.”
In other words, I was born an ambiguous bastard by a stream in South Carolina, and my seventeen-year-old mama was not about to tell me whose handsome smile had won her over. He was obviously too young or too old to pay for his mistake. I would find out one day, of course. When you ask as many questions as I did, the answers come at you, eventually. My birth was a riddle and I wanted my mama to connect me to some kind of heritage I could claim as my own, but she only gave me new conundrums to chase down. It should have been enough; there’s nothing wrong with chasing around after answers you don’t have, it’s how hard you’re hit with them when they fly back and knock you down.
Mama had traveled at least twenty miles east in Elvira’s old Chevy to give birth to me, screaming the whole way, or so I’ve been told. Elvira was Mama’s nineteen-year-old sister and I guess they’d planned the great cover-up, and the great escape, together. Out of a family of five girls, Elvira was the sanest, according to Mama.
Of course, I never knew how they covered up Mama’s pregnancy, but Mama said her family only had eyes for what they wanted to see and ears for nothing more than what they wanted to hear. In those days, abortions weren’t anything you could go to the doctor for and I’m sure, with Mama’s Catholic background, she would never have entertained that option, even if she could have.
I can’t imagine what she went through when she found out there was a baby in her belly before she even finished high school. And I sure don’t know what she would have done without her sister helping her through it. Elvira promised Mama she’d read every book on birthing babies she could get her hands on and she assured Mama that she had nothing to fear. Well, Elvira must have been pretty well versed in birthing ’cause there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with me that my mama’s milk wouldn’t cure. There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with Mama, either, except all the things you couldn’t see on the outside, all the hurt she must have been feeling; and I don’t mean just about having me bursting open her uterus, but the hurts inside her heart that she never spoke about. But if you knew my mama, you’d know the hurts were there. Mama had the saddest eyes, like a wounded dog on the side of the road that you really want so badly to help, but you can’t offer your services without the risk of being bitten.
Elvira went back home a few days after I was born. Mama and me didn’t go home for another thirteen years. Home for Elvira was fifteen miles outside of Charleston, while where me and Mama went was hundreds of miles southwest. I don’t know how we got there. Mama said we hitched all the way to Louisiana. She said wasn’t a person on the road that wouldn’t stop for a woman with a baby in her arms. I never knew why she’d decided to settle in Louisiana until I found out from Elvira, years later, that Mama had gotten an offer to wait tables in Baton Rouge from some man who’d passed through Carter’s Crossing and had taken a fancy to her. I always wondered if he was my father, but my Aunt Elvira said I’d be more likely kin to King Kong.
Can’t ever figure out why Mama left Baton Rouge and wound up settling in a place as remote as Glenmora. We didn’t stay in Baton Rouge ’cause Mama’s boyfriend turned out to be a shithead and it wasn’t long before some other guy caught her eye just long enough to talk her into following him to Glenmora, where he was assistant principal at the local high school. Of course, I don’t remember much about those years, but I can recall an apartment in the back of a small rooming house where we lived. I can just about capture the features of the woman who took care of me while Mama was working. Connie was her name and I guess she owned the place. Her bosom was large, always showing white freckled skin where the crease was. The memory is good when I think back on Connie, like the talcum powder she put in my underwear and the funny little children’s books she read me, taking on a different voice for each character and scaring me half to death when she spoke like the big bad wolf and kind of lurched forward like she was going to swallow me whole.
Connie was old in the ways that make being old a good thing, with a round, kind face and a voice as soft as silk lining. She made me hot cocoa before I went to sleep every night and tossed a little marshmallow right up on top that melted so nice in the back of my mouth. She picked me up after school every day too, ’cause Mama worked long hours at the Lobster Pot. Connie drove me over to the Lobster Pot for my dinner and Mama would try, as best she could, to help me figure out decimals and multiply fractions in between taking orders. I’d sit at the counter eating crawfish, not really giving a damn what one third times one eighth of anything could ever equal, and doubting if I ever would give a rat’s ass about anything I’d ever have to add, subtract, or multiply.
Mama and the assistant principal wound up breaking up shortly after we settled in Glenmora and not long after, Mama starting dating Guy Grissom, her boss at the Lobster Pot. Mama made me call him Uncle Guy for years, but I never liked him. He smelled feminine, like the cologne Mama wore, and he was always breathing heavy, like he was about to pass out. You might think he should have been real heavyset ’cause he was so short of breath all the time, but he wasn’t at all heavyset. He was tall, though, and big, like those football players with the phony shoulders. But Uncle Guy’s shoulders were naturally broad and then he narrowed so much at his waist, he could have worn Mama’s belts. I always thought he looked funny, sort of like a cartoon character, ’cause his face was square, but Mama thought he was so handsome he could have been up there on the big screen kissing blondes.
When Uncle Guy Grissom was around Mama didn’t act the same. She giggled too much and pretty much said yes to anything I asked her. I knew she barely heard what I’d said ’cause he was there, making himself at home in Mama’s bed. I was pretty much ignored, except of course, when Mama remembered that I was her precious little baby girl; then, all of a sudden, I became this fascinating child with the cutest dimples Guy Grissom had seen this side of Lafayette. “Wish I could adopt this child and make her my own,” he’d say. Of course I knew, even back then, that he was bullshitting me as much as he was bullshitting Mama. Said he was going to make Mama part owner of the Lobster Pot and divorce his wife soon as his youngest child was out of diapers, but of course that never happened.
Guy Grissom paid Connie to take care of me ’cause I saw him give her a white envelope every Friday. She’d hide all the bills in her top dresser drawer, all but a dollar that she’d stick inside her brassiere, right down the middle where the crease was. She’d take me to the park in good weather and buy us ice cream with that dollar or sometimes she’d keep me down at her apartment listening to The Jack Benny Show or sometimes we’d watch Dragnet ’cause Connie liked crime a whole lot. I’d come home late evening only to find Uncle Guy in his underwear eating Mama’s fried catfish, which might have smelled inviting were it not for his sweet cologne stinking up our room.
Uncle Guy got sick when I was about ten years old and he died three years later. We didn’t really see much of him after he was diagnosed with something Mama couldn’t pronounce. Mama had to stop working at the Lobster Pot, of course, and it was eventually sold. Mama couldn’t pay her bills anymore, so I guess Uncle Guy had been paying most of them. Guess he didn’t leave her anything in his will, though, ’cause if he did, I doubt we’d ever have seen the dusty back road of Carter’s Crossing or been desperate enough to claim the McLaughlins as blood relatives.
Right after Uncle Guy died, his wife barged into our apartment and called Mama wanton and loose, not one half hour after they put Uncle Guy in the ground. Mama cried and ordered her out, but the next thing I knew we were packing our bags and I was sitting on a bus and then I was sitting on a train and then there I was on another damn bus and Mama and I were getting off somewhere in the middle of nowhere with two suitcases and soon-to-be-sore feet after walking the two miles from the bus stop to Carter’s Crossing where Mama told me we had family.
* * * *
Nothing about a bus is fun. Trains somehow have a romance to them that buses just can’t claim. I always felt like I could be going anywhere on earth sitting on a train, all the way across the world, listening to the whistle and catching speedy glimpses of old towns I’d never step foot in. But buses are too close to home. The towns all have a sameness to them and the roads are all too long, the destination too far. You can’t be anywhere on a bus but where you started from and I don’t care how many miles away you think you’ve gone. I’d grow up hating buses. Maybe ’cause they’d always remind me of our trip back home to South Carolina and that pathetic-looking, barren bus stop in the middle of nowhere. I’ll never forget stepping off that bus wondering how far was far when nothing stares back at you but road signs that signal you’re hundreds of miles from anywhere you’ve ever heard of.
Mama turned heads, sad eyes or not. She was tall and her hair was nearly black, but her eyes were the prettiest shade of blue I’d ever seen. It made me giggle to see how many men thought the same. I used to watch them eyeing her. Then I’d bat my eyes like Mama did, but they didn’t pay me any mind—just a smile or an acknowledgement and sometimes they’d pat my head. But it was Mama they were after and I knew it, even then. I was the convenient excuse to get to her. I saw more buttons disappear into white handkerchiefs and had my cheeks pinched by one too many hairy fingers and all the time they were showing me magic tricks and pretending to be so fond of children, they were ogling my mama. It made her smile, the way I’d copy her every move, bat my eyes and shake my crossed leg while these lovesick men vied for her attention and downright ignored my girlish flirtations. I always knew Mama wanted to laugh out loud, but she stopped herself.
“Time enough to turn men’s heads,” she’d say, holding me to her.
I guess she didn’t realize I wasn’t at all interested in turning men’s heads. I just wanted to be like her and to look like her and act like her. Hell, there wasn’t a little girl in the world that wouldn’t have wanted the same. But I wasn’t tall and blue-eyed and wispy-looking like Mama. I was skinny and Mama called me strawberry head, ’cause my hair was flaming red, like the hot part of the fire, something I never liked hearing ’cause strawberries gave me hives and fire made my eyes tear. I didn’t have Mama’s clear white skin either. I was a constant blush with pimples about as busy on my face as grass growing on the ground under my feet. Mama smeared me with this stuff called PhisoHex at night, but for every pimple down, three more had burst forth the next morning.
So be it. Mama said I was going to grow into my good looks; I held fast to that. Mama said when your eye lashes are light and thick like mine, shading my “overcast” color eyes, as Mama called them, then men were bound to fall at my feet. Mama said all men are fools for women, but for drop-dead gorgeous redheads, men are lame-brained idiots. Mama told me not to count all the wounded and brokenhearted men I was going to leave in my wake, but to just be prepared to have that effect on them.
Uncle Guy’s death changed things for us, that was for sure. For one, Mama insisted we had to go back home and make amends. I never could figure out what we were amending. For another, returning to South Carolina after Uncle Guy died, and walking up that road with my mama’s hand in mine, was the closet we were going to be for a long time. I always blamed the distances that came upon us due to circumstance or choice, didn’t matter, distance was the last thing I wanted from Mama. But we were coming back to too many bad memories, wanting to be enfolded by a family whose arms were too short to reach us. Walking up the road that day and heading toward Carter’s Crossing, I knew that everything was changing. I could feel Mama’s thoughts and the heaviness in her heart. She was passing it all onto me, the way she had given me the sky’s likeness. And I took it in like a great tide cleansing me and filling up my soul with my mama’s heart. I would cause the weariness she wore and I felt its weight. I carried everything that was inside of her inside of me and I always would. Everything that had hurt her, and everything that hadn’t, would always be a part of my every breath. In my mama, I would find my anchor, but as I held fast to the safety, so, too, I feared the drowning.
* * * *
“Come along now, Sassy,” she said.
I had stopped just in front of the huge white farmhouse, staring at the unfamiliarity. Taking in the strangers that were getting up off their seats to stare back at us. Way in the distance, they stood up on a porch that should have looked inviting, but didn’t. The house sat at the top of a hill and everything around it was green and rolled out toward blue skies. I’d never seen so many beautiful trees stretching lazily and affectionately across the sky, like cats stretching out in the sun.
There was a sign on the white gate that read Carter’s Crossing. I realized then that as far as my eyes could see everything all around me seemed to be Carter’s Crossing and everything around me began and ended here at this house; Mama’s house. I wondered why suddenly finding out my mama was rich didn’t seem the least bit comforting.
“C’mon now, honey, give me your hand,” Mama said.
She was reaching out for me, standing in the daylight in her blue dress and her flat shoes with a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head, looking like someone important. That was the thing about Mama, she always looked like she was more important than anyone else, until she opened her mouth, then she sounded not much older than me.
The dress seemed to hug her from all sides, showing off her figure. And her dark hair was long, like soft cashmere wings flowing down her back.
“I don’t want to live in that house,” I said.
“C’mon now, Sassy. They’ve spotted us.”
I did not move, but the others did. The “others” being the strangers Mama said I was kin to. I think I had an early premonition, ’cause my stomach fell to my knees right then and there.
“We’re better off here than we are anywhere else,” I heard Mama say.
But I didn’t entirely believe her. I wanted to run in the opposite direction. But these people were walking down to where we were standing and you might say I was hypnotized by them. They seemed real tentative, like they just might change their minds and run back and drop the shades and slam the door on us. I didn’t know who looked more like stray dogs: them or me and Mama.
One person had remained on the porch and didn’t follow the others to the road; she held her hands up over her eyes squinting through the sun. I knew she was old, even then. The old were problematic. “Old opinions can kill you,” Mama used to say.
All too soon, there was a man wearing suspenders standing in front of me, thinner than any man should be. His hair was dark, like Mama’s, and his eyes so blue they startled me. Mama called him Seth.
“Violet?” he said, fighting with his sight through the sunlight. “Why, I’ll be. That really you, Vi?”
Mama nodded and the man stood still, his hands in his pockets, staring at Mama, but not holding out his arms, even to me as I walked near and looked up.
“Why, who are you?” he said. “You have a child, Vi?”
“Sassy, this is your Uncle Seth.”
I had not stopped staring at him. He was lanky, like some old tree limb hanging by a prayer. His hands were long like his hair. When he smiled, I liked him better.
“You meet up somewhere with Aaron?” he asked. “Look at that hair, just like Aaron’s.”
“Richard Sweetwater is Sassy’s father. We lost him just a few months ago.” Mama sounded like she was reprimanding him for insinuating that my father was someone named Aaron, someone other than this phantom Richard Sweetwater.
I gave Mama an odd look, and she gave me one right back. The only father I’d ever known was the gray sky and the Sweetwater stream, but I sensed I shouldn’t go around mentioning that, so I didn’t. Far as I was concerned, everything Mama said made about as much sense as everything she didn’t say.
“We’re Irish, Seth, must be loads of redheads in our family. Sassy looks like Richard, yes, she truly does.”
“Okay, Vi, whatever you say.” Seth bent down and held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Sassy,” he said.
I stared at his cowboy boots. They were yellow and pointed and I wondered how his toes could sit right in them. His jeans hung low on his hip, and he smelled pleasing, like manure.
“Sassy, don’t be impolite, say hello to Uncle Seth.” Mama put her hands on her hips.
I didn’t get it. She hadn’t warned me about this. She hadn’t said a damn thing to me about these so-called kinfolk. She obviously hadn’t warned Seth either ’cause we were both looking at each other like some unknown species, but I knew when Mama put her hands on her hips it preceded something she was about to say that was either very bad or very good.
“Go on now, Sassy.” Mama pushed me so far forward I nearly knocked Seth off his feet. I had no choice but to acknowledge him.
“Hello,” I said to the ground.
“You look good,” I heard him say to Mama.
Then all of a sudden, someone was running up to us. She was yelling out Mama’s name and holding out her arms. They started hugging and it looked to me like they were dancing ’cause they didn’t stop holding hands and spinning around like tops.
“Elvira, oh I’ve missed you, honey.”
“I thought that was you. Oh my God, Vi, why didn’t you tell us you were coming home?” she asked. “Why, I would have sent Pike or Dudley down with the car to get you.”
Mama didn’t say a word; once she stopped spinning around with Elvira, she stood there glancing back at the house. She was still holding Elvira’s hand, but I knew she was looking at that old woman who wasn’t doing much of anything ’cept rocking back and forth.
“You are just as beautiful as ever,” Elvira said. “Oh, honey, I knew you’d be back, I prayed for it.”
I didn’t know Elvira then, but she knew me. When she finally broke herself away from Mama she pulled me to her breast like I’d just escaped being hit by a freight train.
“Sassy,” she said through her tears.
I glanced over at my mama, who gave me a look that I interpreted as “make me proud and don’t act like a snit,” but I was speechless. Mama had told me so little about where we were going and who I was and just how exactly I was related to these people.
“You are such a little doll,” Elvira said. “I’m your mama’s sister, Elvira, your Aunt El.”
She didn’t look like Mama at all. She looked like a boy, all skinny and flat-chested, and her hair was cut short, but it was long enough to blow back off her forehead in the soft Carolina breeze. If she’d actually been a boy, she would have been real handsome.
“Are you going to say hello to your Aunt Elvira?” Mama insisted.
I continued to stare at Seth and Elvira without saying a word. My eyes must have been round as half-dollars. I wished Mama had clued me in and given me some background on these people.
“Hello,” I managed to say quietly.
And then, another stranger came slowly toward me. He was running at first, but as he got closer he slowed down. Mama called him Kyle. He was young, maybe only fifteen. His eyes were sad, like Mama’s. Freckles popped up all over his face like flowers blooming and his hair was the same color as the sun. Quite spontaneously, I smiled at him. There was something about Kyle that just elicited a smile.
“Why, Kyle,” Mama said. “Last time I saw you, you were in diapers.”
“Really,” he said, shyly taking Mama in.
“Come on over here and give me a hug.”
I was beside myself watching Mama hug this boy. He was nearly as tall as she was. He looked awkward and embarrassed and the minute he could, he stepped out of her embrace, but Mama held his face in her hands and gently moved the hair that had fallen into his eyes.
“You look like you’ve got the devil in you,” she said.
Kyle stared at her like she was a movie queen. “No, ma’am,” he said. “More angel than devil.”
“Why I guess that remains to be seen.” Mama laughed and dropped her hands to her sides. Off in the distance, some dogs started barking.
“Did Gladys have puppies?” Mama asked. “I hear more than one dog yapping up a storm.”
Seth was the one that answered. I was looking around for the puppies, but not before noticing Kyle’s glance.
“Gladys been long gone, Vi,” Seth said, “but we got a whole litter full of her line.”
“Want to see?” Kyle piped up and took my hand. It seemed so unselfconscious, the way he was holding it and walking me off.
“Can I, Mama?” I asked, looking back at her.
After catching her nod, I ran toward the barn with Kyle. The old woman on the porch was watching me and I glanced her way. Something about her made me feel I’d be about as welcome in her house as carpenter ants.
I was suddenly aware of my dirty jeans and some old T- shirt of Uncle Guy’s that Mama had given me. I hadn’t wanted it ’cause maybe he had died in it and it gave me the creeps. I was hoping it didn’t stink.
“Cute, huh?” Kyle said as he led me to the puppies.
But I was looking at him when I said, “Yes.”
He didn’t look like anybody else, but then again, neither did I. They all had real dark hair, nearly black, and light eyes that kind of took a person by surprise ’cause they were unexpected. But if Mama said these people were kin, then I guess they were. Kyle’s yellow hair seemed an oddity and I wondered if he was just visiting. I guess he was thinking the same thing about me.
“Who are you?” he asked as I reached out to pet the puppies. There were five of them and I knew the breed right away ’cause of the mother, whose fur was soft as cotton. They were all Border collies, Mama’s favorite dog. She always said she wanted to get me a Border collie.
“I like this one,” I said. I pointed to a little black-and-white spotted dog, the obvious runt of the litter. The mother eyed me suspiciously as I reached in and scooped up one of her babies.
“You my niece or something?” Kyle asked.
I laughed. He looked too young to have a niece, especially one as old as me.
“I’m Sassy Sweetwater,” I said.
I watched as he lay back on some hay. He was wearing overalls and brown shoes with broken laces.
“Sassy Sweetwater,” he said. “Never heard a name like that. Where you from?”
“Glenmora, Louisiana,” I said. “Where you from?”
“Right here,” he said and sat up.
It was then I noticed his right hand for the first time. Three fingers were missing. I looked away quickly. I didn’t want to stare, but it had shocked me.
He must have noticed my reaction but he pretended not to.
“I’m not a real McLaughlin,” he said.
“McLaughlin? That’s Mama’s name,” I said.
“Yeah, your mama and everyone else’s here. You’re a Sweetwater?”
“Huh-huh. Where are your parents?” I asked him.
“Don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’ve been told I was left on the porch, and Grandma took pity on me. Picked me right up in her arms and raised me like her own.”
Now it was my turn to fall back on the hay. I laughed real hard. I didn’t want to say it, but it didn’t seem to me that that old lady was capable of taking pity on anyone, and I’d only seen her from a distance.
“Lucky baby,” I said. “I guess.”
* * * *
By the time we left the barn, I had been promised the puppy with the black-and-white spots and I had named it June-bug ’cause it looked like it was covered with little black bugs and it was June. Kyle got a real kick out of that and laughed for a full minute.
“I guess that makes sense, Sassy,” he finally said when he got his breath.
“Of course it makes sense,” I said, even knowing that Kyle was going to name me stupid for calling a dog after a bug.
But he laughed again. Nothing seemed to bother him, at least not anything he wanted to let me know about.
“It’s yours,” he said. “Do what you want, but I think a girl dog wouldn’t want to be named after anything buggy.”
I followed him out of the barn renaming the puppy in my head. Maybe he had a point, but then I changed my mind.
“I like June-bug,” I shouted.
I watched Kyle leap up onto the porch. I watched him look back at me, just to make sure I saw that leap. He was tall and slender with firm muscles in his arms. He might have been the best-looking boy I’d ever seen.
My mama was standing up where the old woman was, but the old woman hadn’t moved from her chair. She was sitting straight as a line ruler and when she did move her head, she did it slowly; it made her look very sly to me.
Mama was leaning against the rail with Elvira’s arm over her shoulder. They were talking real softly and I doubt if anyone could have heard what they were saying. The old woman was looking off, like she wasn’t interested anyway. Seth was staring out in to space with a drooping mouth. It seemed to me like he was listening to sad country music. When I walked up onto the porch, the old woman eyed me like I was the sour in the milk pail.
“Aaron ever marry?” I heard Mama ask.
“Never did,” Elvira said and smiled at Mama. “Nope, never did.”
I looked at Mama. “Kyle gave me one of the puppies,” I said. “Can I keep it?”
I saw the old woman twitch and felt something in my heart that made it skip.
“He did, did he?” the old woman said. She reached out her arms and brought me to her so that I was standing there with nowhere to go, not unless I flung my arms up and disassociated myself from her reach forever, but I guess that might have appeared rude and Mama would have been furious.
“Don’t look like your mama,” she said.
I gave her a hateful look and heard her laugh.
“Sassy, honey,” Mama said. “Say hello to your grandmother…and be nice. We’re going to be living here for a while, you hear?”
I looked all around me. Nothing made sense to me but Kyle. He was smiling. Everyone else looked like they’d tasted hot pepper after biting into a piece of chocolate candy, expecting sweetness and getting burned instead.
“Sassy, say hello to your grandmother,” I heard mama repeat.
But I couldn’t speak to that woman. She’d been punished by the good Lord. Mama always told me that the good Lord punishes evil by making sure it can’t hide. And I saw it plain as day in her face. She was staring at me like I was a freak let loose from the carnival and I knew that in that moment, as I stared back with my most disdainful sneer, that I had challenged her to either destroy me or to let me live.
“You want that puppy, you better say hello to me,” the old woman said, threatening like.
I felt my blood run cold, but I knew I had no choice but to acknowledge the old bat.
“Hello,” I said, looking at her straight on for the first time. She wasn’t half bad-looking, but she was old. So many lines ran across her face, like mazes in a dirt field that never met up or led anywhere.
“Grandma Edna,” the old lady said. “You’ll be calling me Grandma Edna like a proper young girl that shows respect for her elders.”
I shot Mama a glance real quick and I saw her nod at me and I noticed that her expression was as fierce as the old lady’s.
“Hello, Grandma Edna,” I said, trying to smile but failing miserably.
“Here tell it like it is, girl.”
I realized she hadn’t let go of my arm. She studied my face.
“Dogs earn more love than people. You treat that dog well, and I’ll treat you the same.”
I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but I’d soon learn you didn’t argue with Grandma Edna.
“You name it yet?” she asked.
“Named it June-bug,” I said. I heard Seth laugh, and even Mama giggled.
“June-bug, huh?” Grandma Edna said, studying me like I was a damn road map. “That’ll do.”
She looked up at Seth. “Get Pike to make that little June-bug puppy a bed and put it in the girl’s room with a nice blanket.”
“Thought you didn’t like dogs in the house, Mama,” Seth said.
“I got used to having dogs in my house.” Grandma Edna smiled.
Mama and Elvira laughed softly, but Seth didn’t respond at all. He just shook his head and looked away.
“You got to care for that puppy like your own, girl. You stop caring for it, it’ll turn on you like a natural child.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
I felt it when she let go of me, and it almost made me stumble ’cause I’d been resisting being held by her so much.
“‘Thank you, Grandma Edna’ is what you should be saying. I just gave you a puppy, child.”
“Want to fed the pups?” I heard Kyle ask. “It’s time,” he added.
“Yeah, sure do,” I said, avoiding having to thank the old woman as I jumped back off the porch, leaping just as high and as well as Kyle had. As I followed him back to the barn, I heard mama tell the old woman that I was usually very polite and I’d come around.
Come around to what, I wondered?
Chapter Two
It was Aunt El that brought me back to the house an hour or so later. I had been sitting in the barn with Kyle after we fed the pups. I was dying to ask him what had happened to his fingers, but I clamped my mouth shut so I wouldn’t embarrass him. We had been talking about taking a walk over to Beaufort and catching a film. Kyle said he liked films a whole lot, especially ones with pretty girls.
“Wasn’t a pretty girl in Carter’s Crossing ’til you got here,” he said.
I blushed so deep I felt faint.
“Of course we got horses in the barn we could feed.” He looked at me and probably knew by the look on my face that I didn’t care much for feeding horses.
“Grandma Edna usually doesn’t let us feed the horses, says we got servants for that, but I could ask her.”
“Servants? Are you kidding?”
“Nope. Didn’t you have them in Louisiana?”
“Hell no.”
Kyle seemed a little confused by that and looked away, as if he thought everyone had servants, or should have ’em.
“We could take a bike ride over to Abner Creek and catch fish.” He smiled back at me and I could tell he liked to fish. Unfortunately, I didn’t.
“I like films a whole lot,” I said.
It was then I caught Aunt El leaning against the barn door. She’d been listening to our conversation, but I didn’t know for how long. Not that we’d said anything important, but I didn’t much like being spied on.
She was staring at me and Kyle and I wondered what she was thinking; she looked to be a hiccup away from puking.
“C’mon, Sassy. We got your mama’s room ready. You’ll be staying with her. It’s a pretty room. It’s got white lace on the windows and it’s all blue. The windows look out over the hills. I think you’re going to like it.”
I looked back at Kyle and he stood there with his hands in his pockets kind of rocking back and forth on his feet. I think I would have preferred being tossed naked into a snake pit than walking into that house, or anywhere near it, and I knew he was reading my mind. I knew by the way he was grinning at me.
Aunt El put her arm around my shoulder and led me out. She walked slowly and I was a bit relieved that she did. When I looked toward the porch I could see that the old lady still hadn’t left her chair, which meant I’d have to walk right by her.
“It’s good for Kyle to have someone near his own age to do things with,” Elvira was saying. “It’s been so lonely for him. You know how kids are. They’re so cruel. Bad enough he can’t read, but he’s got those missing fingers, something else for the kids to tease him about.”
“What do you mean he can’t read?”
That sure took me by surprise; he’d seemed smart to me. I stopped dead in my tracks and stared at Elvira. I heard her sigh.
“He never learned to read. Can’t learn, it seems. He’s in some special class in school, but he just sits there. Teachers tell us he’s retarded.”
“Can he write?” I asked, knowing if he could write, then he could surely learn to read.
Elvira shook her head. “Nope, can’t write, either,” she said.
“He’s got missing fingers, maybe that has something to do with it, why he can’t write?”
“He’s got a whole other hand of fingers. If the right one don’t work, use the left.” Aunt El stopped walking and looked up at the sky, like I was up there instead of where I was standing. She was tall and nearly as skinny as Seth. She didn’t really look much older than me, though she was past Mama’s age.
“He’s retarded. Runs in this family. There was a baby born like that, years ago, retarded like Kyle.”
I couldn’t believe it. Kyle hadn’t seemed at all retarded to me.
“But he’s smart,” I said.
Elvira laughed and drew me close. “Maybe so,” she said. “But he can’t read and he can’t write and most of the time he just looks off, as if there’s nothing in his head at all.”
“What happened to his fingers?” I asked.
She looked up toward the sky again. “He cut them off,” she said. “We don’t know if it was on purpose or not. But you know how boys are. He was out there playing with the chainsaw and next thing I knew he was on the ground trying to reattach his fingers.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It made me sick to think that something so perfect could be made imperfect by some stupid mistake.
“Doctors couldn’t do it, of course. Poor Kyle. He’ll spend the rest of his life like that. Whatever is going to become of that boy?”
I felt Elvira clutch my shoulder. I felt her grip.
“Pretend you don’t notice his abnormality, Sassy. He’s kind of sensitive about it.”
Nothing seemed real. Kyle had made too much sense to me and now in an instant, he made no sense at all. I didn’t know where my mama had led me or why she’d come back to this place. We could have stayed in Louisiana, gone to New Orleans or back to Baton Rouge. Mama could have gotten work in those big cities. We didn’t need this family.
* * * *
Grandma Edna stared at me like I was the grim reaper as Elvira led me up the porch steps. I could even feel her eyes on my back.
“Make sure you bathe yourself before dinner,” I heard her call out.
As if I wouldn’t bathe after being on a bus for two days. I was going to have to bite my tongue for the rest of my life living with that old lady.
The house was big and cold. Even though it was a Southern June day, the house seemed damp, seemed to carry dampness where the wood split in the floor and where the stairs creaked under my step. And out past the window, where the limb of an old oak tree drooped, there seemed to be a contradictory message between the blazing sun beyond the windowpane and the dankness.
* * * *
I found Mama sitting in a large white chair. She was staring out the window like she’d noticed something that had captured her attention and her body was slightly erect, her eyebrows pinched. I sat on one of the beds and watched her. After a moment she turned and looked at me, whatever she’d been thinking momentarily lost. I would have chased her thoughts if I could and I would have burned them up, ’cause I knew they’d unsettled her.
“You’ll like it here after a while,” she said.
I turned and looked out the window, too, where her thoughts had been. Perhaps if I searched diligently enough, I’d uncover them in the wind.
“This house is damp,” I said.
“It’s old,” Mama said.
“How old?” I asked.
“Civil War,” she said. “It’s been in your Grandma Edna’s family for several generations. She’s the Carter. Her family owned everything around here. They still do.”
“Do you like it here?” I asked, and she laughed. I hadn’t expected her to laugh. “We could have gone anywhere,” I said.
“Remember what you told me about the bus, Sassy, how you never go anywhere at all, how you never get any further away from anywhere on a bus?”
I nodded my head and noticed her eyes, how they picked up the blue of her dress, and I thought that if my eyes were like hers, I’d never wear anything else but the color blue.
“I remember,” I said.
“It’s like that, Sassy,” I heard her say. “I can’t get anywhere I need to be on a bus, not really. But I can’t take a train everywhere I need to go. Sometimes, you just have to be on a bus to get from one place to the other. You don’t have a choice.”
“What?” I wondered if she was teasing me.
She held out her hands toward the walls and made a circle with her arms. “This,” she said. “This is my bus, honey.”
* * * *
I woke up when I smelled something like onions and carrots cooking in a stew. It made my stomach growl. At first I barely knew where I was and then I remembered the blue and white room and the hills in the distance that I could see from the windows. I noticed that Mama must have gone downstairs ’cause I was alone in the bedroom. Mama must have taken off my shoes and she had found a quilt to cover me with. The quilt was pretty; every square had a fancy letter of the alphabet sewn into it and I wondered if the letters stood for anything. But sometimes things just don’t stand for nothing.
I heard unfamiliar voices coming from downstairs and when I looked outside I could see the sun setting. It was a beautiful burst of amber and red, like a paint box set of colors spilling across the sky. For a moment, it seemed like God was showing me his sense of humor as the sun seemed to flirt and to play with my fascination, taking its own sweet time nestling down into the earth.
I sat there and watched the sun until it finally disappeared. I wondered if there’d ever be a time that I wouldn’t stop to watch the sun set and I knew if there was, I’d have no business living.
When dusk began to settle, I looked around the room I was sharing with Mama. It was still and foreign. I could hear the wind and a faint hint of music. This is where my mama grew up; these were her walls and the scent of powder was what clothed her skin. No one else could have ever stayed in this room ’cause my mama was everywhere I looked; she was in every scent I could capture. From the half-open closet I could see her sweaters and, neatly on the floor, I could see saddle shoes and flats I knew she’d worn. This was where she cried about me, knowing I was about to be born, sharing secrets with Aunt El that no one else knew. Here I’d lain in Mama’s womb listening to her secrets, being within her secrets.
I needed Mama to tell me who these people really were and, if they were kin, why we hadn’t seen them in all these years. I had heard nothing but bad things about Mama’s childhood and I couldn’t understand why she’d want to revisit it. And even though I loved the room she grew up in, she might have hated it. She always said that thinking about her childhood made her stomach heave and gave her bad headaches. I wondered how much worse it was going to be actually living here again and how soon it would be before Mama got sick and started heaving.
When I looked out the window, I realized that Mama and I could make our get away on the roof, if we needed to. We could just crawl out and slip on down to the ground once everyone was asleep. I didn’t need to be here and Mama didn’t need to be here, either. I’d take the puppy with me, of course, and we could go back to Louisiana and Mama could get a job, like at the Lobster Pot, and when I got old enough I could work as a waitress, too.
As I was planning our escape, I noticed a snazzy white car in the driveway. I’d just spent two days on a bus calling out car models. It was a game Mama and me played, and I always won ’cause I knew more models than she did, so I was able to recognize right away that the car in the drive way was a 1961 Cadillac Eldorado convertible. I hadn’t seen it earlier and I sure would have noticed that car. I wondered if Mama’s family was throwing her a big dinner party and the Caddie belonged to one of the guests.
Maybe that meant I should change my clothes. Mama used to tell me that she was never allowed to wear pants to the dinner table, so I wondered if I’d be offending anyone if I showed up to dinner with my blue jeans and Guy Grissom’s old T-shirt.
But I came to the conclusion that this house needed exploring, instead of me wasting time trying on one of Mama’s dresses just to please some grumpy old lady. It suddenly occurred to me I’d never eat past lunch since I didn’t own any dresses, except the skirts I wore to school, none of which had been packed ’cause Mama said we were traveling light. So we sold most of our things out on the street before we left Glenmora, including most of our clothes. Mama said I could spend the summer in jeans and shorts and not to worry. Hell, if she knew I wouldn’t be allowed to dinner without a dress, she would have packed one for me.
I put my shoes back on and went out to the landing. It looked like there were five or so bedrooms. I’d never seen a house this big. I wanted to hate it, but I found it was getting under my skin a little. We’d never lived in anything this grand. The banister had a shine to the dark wood and the hallway was wall papered in some beige color with diamonds in the middle that I could feel beneath my fingers when I followed the pattern with my hands. It felt like I was touching tiny, little beads. When I looked up I saw the third floor landing and two closed doors. It was where an attic should have been but it looked to me like there were two more bedrooms up there.
I noticed that the room at the other end of the hall had a porch off of it. I could see the porch clear on down the hall. The porch railing was white, and there was an ashtray on the ledge. Someone had left a cigarette burning ’cause I could see the smoke. I could even smell it. I walked toward the room ’cause it looked like it was sending me an invitation. The white curtains were moving under a soft breeze and I could hear music from a radio. Someone was singing a mournful ballad and I identified the singer as Johnny Ray. Mama loved Johnny Ray, so I got kind of good at knowing the words to all of his songs.
As I got closer to the end of the hall, I realized the room wasn’t empty ’cause I could hear someone walking around. I jumped back. I figured it was Elvira’s room, but the woman suddenly walking through the door was not Elvira. She didn’t look like a boy, either.
“Why, who are you?” she asked.
She didn’t scare me as much as some of the others, so I answered her.
“I’m Sassy Sweetwater,” I said.
She smiled nice and broad. “Oh? I think I just met your Mama, Violet?”
“Who are you?” I asked.
She held her hand out to me. “Earline, that’s my name.”
I stood there looking at her. She had real white teeth that stood out friendly-like.
“You kin?” I asked.
She bent down and whispered in my ear and I could smell her perfume and see how nice her breasts looked swelling up out of her summer sundress. I thought she was real pretty.
“I’m your Aunt El’s special friend,” she said.
I guess I was looking kind of confused ’cause after a while she bent down to my ear again.
“Sort of like a wife is a special friend.”
My mouth dropped. I guess I was trying to figure out how one woman could be married to another, if that’s what she meant.
“So yes, that makes us kin,” she said and kissed my cheek.
“What do I call you?” I asked.
“Aunt Earline,” she said and smiled.
“Aunt Earline,” I said and held out my hand. “You ain’t much older than me.”
“So what about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, sweetheart, I’m going down to get a cocktail. I’ll see you in a bit.”
I watched her head down the stairs in high-heel shoes that clacked real loud on the wood floor. She was tiny as a Barbie doll; maybe that’s why she hadn’t frightened me.
I looked around the landing. Most of the doors were slightly ajar. I knew Grandma Edna’s room right away ’cause she kept it dark and it smelled like an old woman’s room when I walked by, sort of like lavender and talc, with a hint of medicine. I put my hand on the doorknob and pushed ’til it was wide-open. The smell did not offend me; it was nice, sort of like a bath I once took when mama emptied a whole box of red and green oil gels into the tub by mistake and I couldn’t even see her standing there screaming ’cause there were so many bubbles floating around.
I stepped inside the room and observed it. I figured I’d tell the old woman I got lost if she caught me snooping through her things. Or maybe I’d even tell her that I was looking for a dress to wear.
Grandma Edna had white, laced napkins on the dresser that she used to put her toiletries on. Behind that, were framed photographs. That’s what I wanted to see, those photographs. Mama had never shown me a photograph of anyone except myself as a baby. I never even knew I had a family ’til after Guy Grissom died and Mama said it was time to make amends.
I surveyed my surroundings. The bed was huge and very high. I didn’t think I’d like sleeping that high off the ground, but I’d noticed that Grandma Edna had legs long enough to deal with it. I had an urge to raise the heavy shades and let the stars shine in. I couldn’t help but wonder if Grandma Edna didn’t like looking at stars.
I switched a lamp on and it brought a strange luminescence to the photographs and made them take on an eerie quality, like I was looking at ghosts. But old photographs usually have that effect on me; they make me sad. I don’t like the way life’s moments are captured in time. It gives me an uneasy feeling. It’s not like painting, something you can alter and change. Mama says people take pictures in order to remember. “It’s sort of like a passion to live deeply, to capture time,” Mama told me. “Description is a love affair with life,” she used to say. “That’s why writers spend so much time describing things and why painters try so hard to recreate what they’re looking at. Why do you think everyone on this earth has a camera? They’re holding on to time, honey.”
I always think about that when I’m painting, but not painting the way things are, but more like the way I see them. I’ve been painting since Mama got me a paint-by-numbers set for my eighth birthday. Of course, I ignored the numbers and wound up painting the drawbridge over by Lilly Pond Lane. Mama tells me that painting is my way of living deeply, and I guess I can’t argue none with that.
Be that as it may, photographs still spooked me, but I continued to look at the ones in my hand. I recognized the old woman the minute I saw her younger, rather attractive face in one of the photos. There I was seeing Grandma Edna on her wedding day. I found it so hard to believe. She didn’t even look much older than me. I had to see it close up, I had to see it for myself, and I reached for the photograph so I could study it. For a moment I thought it was Mama, but the woman’s face was rounder, like mine. She was slender and alluring, no trace of the old and frightening person who was about to bar me from the dining room for wearing pants. I guess the man she was with was my grandfather, though I didn’t know a damn thing about him. But who else could he be?
I knew right away where Kyle got his looks. He must have been kidding me when he told me he was left on the porch. He looked just like the man in the photograph, whose eyes were so pretty you could see the shape and the color in a black-and-white print. His eyes were just like Kyle’s, so I surmised that they must be green. Mama never mentioned having a father. I figured he was dead or he would have been there out on that porch staring me and Mama down like the others, like we were wolves coming down off the mountain to be shot.
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and realized that I had to get out of there before I was caught by Grandma Edna. But then I saw a photograph of seven children. Some were sitting on a couch and the others were standing behind the couch. I was overcome with a compulsion to see that photograph close up, despite the consequences. The photograph was on a table over by the bed. I ran over and grabbed it as quickly as I could. Then I slid under the bed just as Grandma Edna got to the top of the stairs. My mama was in that photograph and I just had to see it. I’d never seen my mama as a child.