Next morning I awoke to the sound of a mockingbird outside my window, perched on a cottonwood limb. It was imitating a songbird, and it sounded as happy as if the song belonged to it; the mockingbird is a kind of thief, same as I planned to be. The big difference was he seemed happy about it and I didn’t, and I hadn’t stolen anything yet, outside of cane and watermelons.
I lay there for a while and listened to it sing, then got up and dressed, unlocked my door, and went out carrying my stove wood. I wanted to see Mama, but I feared Daddy might still be there. I went downstairs and looked out the window and saw his truck was gone. I rummaged around in the warmer over the stove and found a biscuit hard as a banker’s heart, and ate that, careful not to break any teeth.
Back upstairs, I knocked on Mama’s door and she called to me to come in. It was dark in the room-since last night someone had pulled the curtain-and I went to the window and pushed it open slightly. Sunlight draped across the bed, and I could see Mama with the covers pulled to her chin, her head propped up on the pillows. Her blond hair was undone and flowed out from her like spilled honey. Her face was white as milk and her bones poked against her skin more than usual, but even so, she was quite beautiful. She looked like a doll made of china.
Dust was spinning in the sunlight, and the bottom of the comforter was fuzzed with it. Cobwebs lay in the corners of the room, thick as ready-to-pick cotton. A bit of the outside breeze came in through the cracks in the wall and moved the floating dust around. It wasn’t anything some elbow grease and about twenty-five pounds’ worth of lumber and a hammer couldn’t fix, but none of us were having at it. We lived there like rats hanging on to a ship we knew was going down.
Mama smiled at me as I sat down in a stuffed chair by the bed. The chair smelled damp and old, like a wet grandma.
“I’d like to get up and fix you something to eat, baby,” she said, “but I don’t feel up to it.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I had what I think was a biscuit.”
“It’s the medicine,” she said. “It makes me woozy. I just don’t feel up to anything, with it or without it.”
“I know.”
She looked at me for the longest time, as if she was trying to see something beneath my skin, and then she came out with a confession. “Your daddy was in here last night.”
I wasn’t sure why she told me, but I said, “Oh,” like I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was knowledge I would have preferred to have tucked away someplace where I couldn’t touch it, like down at the bottom of an alligator pit.
“I’m so ashamed,” she said, and turned her head away from me. “I shouldn’t even be telling you, you’re just a young girl.”
“I know some things you might not think I know.”
Actually, I had an idea she had seen me, or Daddy had told her, and she felt obliged to explain herself.
Slowly she shifted her head on the pillow and looked back at me. “I don’t really remember all that well, but this morning I knew. He had been here. In the night.”
“That’s all right, Mama.”
“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t. He isn’t any good.”
We sat that way for a while, her looking at me and me looking at the floor.
After a time, I said, “What if I wanted to go away?”
“Why wouldn’t you want to go away?” she said. “There isn’t anything for you here.”
This wasn’t exactly what I expected, and I had to let that roll around in my head for a moment before I was certain I had heard what I thought I had.
“No, ma’am, there ain’t nothing here for me.”
“Isn’t,” she said. “Don’t use ‘ain’t.’”
“Sorry,” I said. “I forget.”
“Actually, you haven’t had enough schooling to know better, and I haven’t exactly furthered your education by lying in bed, but I’m not up to much, you know. There was a time when I thought I might be a teacher, or a nurse.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Mama, if you had a friend got drowned, and you found her body, and she always wanted to go to Hollywood to be a movie star, would it be wrong to dig her up after she was buried, burn her to ashes, take them downriver to Gladewater in a jar, catch a bus, and take her out to Hollywood?”
“What?”
I repeated myself.
“What are you talking about? Who is this girl you would dig up?”
“May Lynn.”
“The beautiful May Lynn?” she asked, like there were dozens of them.
“That’s the one.”
“My God, is she dead?”
“Daddy didn’t tell you?”
She shook her head.
“You been kind of out of touch,” I said. “She was found with a sewing machine tied to her feet yesterday and was buried today. I would have told you last night, but you was out of it.”
“Don knew about this?”
“Yes, ma’am. He and Uncle Gene and me and Terry found her in the river.”
“Oh my God,” Mama said. “She was so young. And it hasn’t been that long ago she lost her brother, and before that her mother.”
“She was my age,” I said. “She never did go nowhere. She wanted to, but she never did.”
“Your daddy was there when she was found?” Mama asked, as if I hadn’t already explained it.
“He was.”
“He never said anything to me.”
“No surprise. He wanted to push her and the Singer back in the water.”
“He doesn’t like problems,” she said, as if that explained all his actions.
“I guess not,” I said.
“And now you want to go away?”
“I don’t know what I want. Me and Terry and Jinx-”
“You still seeing that colored girl?”
“I am.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Mama said. “I’m not speaking against her. I’m just surprised you aren’t like everyone else.”
“Everyone else?”
“Way it usually goes is children, colored and white, play together until they get grown, and then they don’t associate. It’s how it is.”
“Thanks for thinking highly of me,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Sue Ellen. I just meant it’s not the standard way things work out in these parts, or most parts, for that matter, and there’s the whole problem of how she’s affecting your speech. You talk like a field hand.”
She paused, seeming suddenly to have taken hold of what I had said about May Lynn.
“You said you want to dig up your friend and burn her up and take her ashes to Hollywood?”
“I said that, yeah, but am I going to do it? I don’t know.”
“That’s pretty crazy,” she said.
“You should know,” I said, and hated it as soon as I said it.
Mama turned her face away from me.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Slowly she looked back in my direction. “No. It’s all right. I wasn’t very thoughtful before I spoke. And I suppose I’m not one to judge anyone in any manner, am I?”
“You’re all right.”
“No. No, I’m not. Listen. I don’t know that you should dig up and burn anybody. I’m pretty sure that’s a crime. I think there’s a list of weird crimes and that’s on the list, along with eating out of the toilet and the like. It’s just not done. So forget that. But I think it would be good for you to leave. I haven’t got the gumption for much of anything anymore, not even being a mother, but you ought not to stay here. Something happens to me, there’s just you and your daddy…and you wouldn’t want that.”
“I don’t want to leave you here with Daddy,” I said, “let alone myself. He’s still got a pretty good left hook.”
“Don’t stay on my account,” Mama said. “I let him in last night, though I don’t remember it all in a solid kind of way. It was the cure-all. It keeps me confused. And I get so lonely.”
“That stuff doesn’t cure a thing,” I said. “It just makes you drunk and dreamy, and gives you excuses. You ought not drink it anymore.”
“You don’t know how things are,” she said. “It makes me feel good when I feel bad, and without it, I feel bad pretty much all the time. You should go. Forget digging up anybody, that’s a bad idea, but you should go.”
“I told you, I don’t want to leave you with Daddy.”
“I can deal with him.”
“I don’t want you to have to,” I said.
Mama considered on something for a long time. I could almost see whatever it was behind her eyes, moving around back there like a person in the shadows. Time she took before she spoke to me, had I been so inclined-which I wasn’t-I could have smoked a cigar, and maybe grown the tobacco to roll another.
“Let me tell you something, honey,” she said. “Something I should have told you maybe some years ago, but I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know what kind of woman I was.”
“You’re all right.”
“No,” Mama said. “No, I’m not all right. I said that before, and I mean it. I’m not all right. I’m not a good Christian.”
It wasn’t Tuesday, so I wasn’t all that high on religion.
“All I know is, if something works out, God gets praised,” I said. “If it don’t, it’s his will. Seems to me he’s always perched to swoop in and take credit for all manner of things he didn’t do anything about, one way or the other.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’ve been baptized.”
“I been wet,” I said. “All I remember was the preacher held my head under the river water, and when he lifted me up he said something while I blew a stream out of my nose.”
“You shouldn’t have such talk,” she said. “Hell is a hot and bad place.”
“I figure I could go there from here and feel relieved,” I said.
“Let’s not discuss it any further,” she said. “I won’t have the Lord spoken ill of.”
She smoldered for a time. I decided to let her. I sat there and checked out the tips of my fingers, looked at my feet, and watched dust floating in the air. Then she said something that was as surprising as if she had opened her mouth and a covey of quail flew out.
“The man you call Daddy,” she said, “well, he isn’t your daddy.”
I couldn’t say anything. I just sat there, numb as an amputated leg.
“Your real daddy is Brian Collins. He was a lawyer and may still be. Over in Gladewater. He and I, well, we had our moment, and then…I got pregnant with you.”
“Then Don ain’t my daddy?”
“Don’t say ‘ain’t.’”
“Forget the ain’t shit. He ain’t my daddy?”
“No. And don’t cuss…what a foul word. Never use that word…I been meaning to tell you he isn’t your daddy. I was waiting for the right time.”
“Anytime after birth would have been good.”
“I know it’s a shock,” Mama said. “I didn’t tell you because Brian isn’t the one who raised you.”
“It’s not like Don did all that much raising, either,” I said. “My real daddy…what was he like?”
“He treated me very well. He is older than me by five years or so. We loved one another, and I got pregnant.”
“And he didn’t want anything to do with you?”
“He wanted to marry me. We loved one another.”
“You loved him so much, you come over here and married Don and let me think he was my daddy? You left my daddy, a lawyer and a good man, and you married a jackass? What was you thinking?”
“See? I told you I was a bad mother.”
“Okay. You win. You’re a bad mother.”
“Listen here, Sue Ellen. I was ashamed. A Christian woman having a child out of wedlock. It wasn’t right. It made Brian look bad.”
“He said he’d marry you, didn’t he?”
“I was starting to show,” she said. “I didn’t want to get married to him like that, even if it was just in front of a justice of the peace. He had a good job and was respected, and I didn’t want that to be lost to him because I couldn’t keep my legs crossed.”
“He had something to do with the blessed event.”
She smiled a little. “Yes, he did.”
“So to stay respectful, you left him and came here and ended up marrying Don while you were showing, and now here we are, me toting a stick of stove wood and you a cure-all drunk.”
“I was seventeen,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“Close enough.”
“You aren’t the way I was when I was your age. You’re strong. Like your real daddy. You have a determination like he has. You’re hardheaded in the same way. He wanted to marry me no matter what. I ran off in the dead of night and caught a ride and ended up with a job in a cafe. I met Don there. He wasn’t so ragged and mean then. He wasn’t an intellectual or financial catch, and no one thought so highly of him that if he married a pregnant woman it would matter. I decided I could deal with that with him, but not with Brian. He deserved better.”
“You didn’t think you was good enough?”
“Were good enough,” she said. “It’s ‘were.’ That’s the proper word.”
“You been sleeping up here and wandering around in a vapor of cure-all, but now you have time to fix my English?”
“Brian was a good man and it would have changed things for him.”
“What about me?” I said.
“I was young. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“That’s your hole in the bag? You were young?”
“I wanted you to have a home. Don said he didn’t care whose child it was. He just wanted me. I thought he meant it, and things would be okay, and Brian could go on with his life. Next day after our wedding, Don got drunk and blacked my eye and I knew who he was. But I was stuck. He got what he wanted, and then the hell began. It’s gone on now for over sixteen years. He has times when he’s like the man I met, but then he has more times where he’s the man I know now.”
“And here you are, wearing hell’s overcoat and happy to have it.”
“I think Don has done the best he could,” she said. “I think, in his own way, he loves me.”
“I know this, Mama-Jinx don’t have to go to bed at night with a stick of stove wood.”
“I stayed for you.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said, leaning forward in the chair. “It was for me, we’d been long gone a long ways back. You stayed because you’re too weak in the head to do anything else. Weak before you took that damn cure-all. Weak and happy to be weak. You’re just glad he don’t hit you as much as he used to, and when he does, not as hard. He’s got you in a bottle now, and he can pour you out and use you when he wants to. That ain’t right, Mama. You left me to deal with him while you was floating on some cloud somewhere. I don’t blame the cure-all for it, Mama. I blame you.”
I could see my words had stung like a bee, and that made me happy.
“You’re right,” she said. “I am a quitter. I quit the man I loved. I quit life, and I married a quitter, and I’ve pretty much quit you, but I didn’t mean to.”
“Now that makes it all better.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.
“Somebody meant it,” I said. “You wasn’t swigging cure-all back when you got pregnant and run off. Tell you what. I’ll leave you a good stick of stove wood by the bed. When you ain’t drunk on your medicine, which is about fifteen minutes a day, you can use it on him. I think a good shot to the side of the head is best. Rest of the time, you can float in the clouds and he can do what he wants, and you can pretend you don’t know or understand. But you ain’t fooling me, and let me say ‘ain’t’ again. Ain’t.”
I got up, picked up my stove wood, hesitated, and laid it on the chair by the bed.
“Here’s the wood,” I said. “I can put it beside you if you like.”
“Honey, don’t be mad.”
I had moved to the foot of the bed and was starting for the door. “I was any madder the house would catch on fire.”
I went out and slammed the door and went to my room and slammed that door and locked up and cried for a while. Then I got tired of crying, as I could see it wasn’t helping a thing. I decided I was so mad I wanted to wear shoes. I got some socks that only had one hole in each foot, put them and my shoes on, and went downstairs and outside, started walking briskly along the river’s edge.