Drifting South. Charles Davis

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ as the things were inside me, the years had grown me silent on the outside and I might not be able to say nothing.

      I’d been either worried about or had been mad at Ma for a long time. But the closer I got to her, I just wanted to see her and hoped to find some peace between us somehow because I needed to feel something like that in a terrible way. I wondered about her for a long time on that trip and then somewhere on the road, my thoughts went to my brothers and where the winds may have taken them.

      I thought about each one of them, and was curious to find out if they’d stayed in Shady, and how many of them now had families of their own, and if over time they’d left to find their own places and fortunes somewhere else, which I figured they all did.

      I hoped luck had been good to them because, besides being my brothers, they were a good bunch of boys even if none of them ever came to visit me. I’d missed each of them more than they’d ever know, and I tried to figure like I’d done countless times what they’d aged to look like and such things because the last time I had seen them, most were just half-grown or less.

      We were the closest of close growing up, sharing that one bedroom and generally one mattress, unless one or more were too young and slept in a bureau drawer or a pasteboard box beside Ma’s bed.

      I was the oldest, and then there was Milton, James, Bernard, Franklin, Theodore and little Virgil. We were all kinds of different colors but we all carried the same last name Ma had, which was Purdue. Her first name was Rebecca, even though almost everybody in Shady called her Violet, which was her working name. Her closest friends called her Becca, which is the name I guessed she favored most to be called. Ma didn’t carry a middle name back then that I knew of.

      Me, Frank and little Virgil were white-looking, mostly. Jimmy was shaded just like Ma, Milton was a red-brown color and Bernie was dark with slanted eyes. But Teddy was the one who stuck out the most from the rest of us, like the time when Ma let a photographer pay for her services with a sit-down photo of us. Teddy had green eyes, blond-red wiry hair and skin dark as a midnight with no moon. It was a black-and-white photo, but you could sense the different colors on him if you studied the picture where it hung in our living room.

      Me and my brothers didn’t look much like brothers but we got along as brothers do, beating the tar out of each other one minute but not letting no one else put a hand on any of us the next. Local folks called us the Mutt Gang, and we didn’t look for trouble much, just mischief, but few boys or even grown men dared cross us after wronging us once.

      Little Virgil was the only one of us who ever had a real dad in Shady because for some reason, a short feller with a small round curly head named Arthur Hoskins decided to face up to his responsibility about it.

      I was so young then that my memory of Arthur Hoskins was fuzzy but I remember Ma wanting to get married quick to Arthur before he tried to get away. Arthur couldn’t go to the outhouse or take a walk by himself for a week before the nuptials without a man hired by the elders keeping an eye on him if Ma wasn’t around.

      She told us that she’d finally found a decent man who could tolerate children and her occupation, so her and Arthur up and got hitched one hot Saturday afternoon under a walnut tree beside the Big Walker River. They even hauled in a real preacher from Abington on the back of a hay truck to do the ceremony. Ma insisted on a legal wedding.

      Everybody in Shady Hollow went to it dressed up in the finest they owned as we all stood on the grassy riverbank.

      Once it was over and dark set in, there was general high living and raucous behavior of all sorts. The elders paid for all of it.

      But that short loud feller Ma had got hitched to got himself shot outside of McCauley’s Pavilion just before little Virgil was even crawling. Got shot square in the face. By a woman. Ma found out later that her dead husband was married to about a dozen other women besides her. One of them tracked him to Shady Hollow and killed him over it because he’d taken a good bit of her fortunes before he left.

      The elders questioned Ma afterward over and over why a true professional con man like Arthur Hoskins, whose trade turned out to be robbing wealthy women, would want to marry a whore in Shady Hollow who didn’t have nothing but a bunch of hungry young’uns. Arthur’s other wives were all rich or within spitting distance of it. Ma kept telling the elders that she didn’t know, maybe Arthur just felt love for her and little Virgil.

      They never bought into her explanation, I don’t think. Even grieving over her dead husband, Ma was summoned to a lot of elder meetings that year. Looking back, I believe that’s why they started getting suspicious of her.

      Anyway, growing up, me and my brothers never called any man Dad or Papa or anything like that, but Ma told us to call some of the men who spent time around our second-floor apartment our “uncles,” so we did.

      We had lots of uncles in Shady Hollow, and they came and went like leaves ride the river current.

      They’d be there for a spell, giving Ma as much money as she could talk out of them and they’d eat her good Southern cooking and bounce a baby on a knee. They shared her bed, too, when she wasn’t working or when one of us wasn’t in it sick, and then one day we’d wake up and all sight and smell of them would be gone.

      We’d stand quiet in our three-room apartment, looking out an open window, feeling the chill, watching theway the curtain would blow in and out. Ma had a cowbell nailed above the squeaky door to our apartment to keep better track of us. I guess that’s why they always left out a window—to keep from ringing that bell, same as we did when we’d sneak out.

      Ma would shut the window tight all of a sudden and tell us that Uncle Pete or Uncle Shelby or Uncle Carl or Uncle whoever wasn’t bringing back breakfast because he wasn’t coming back. And that’s the last time any of us could speak their name as Ma would go to making grits on top of the coal stove.

      She always made grits when we lost an uncle, not sure why because Ma hated grits and I was never fond of them, either. But we’d salt and pepper them and put butter or cheese in them and sit and eat quiet. Times were gonna be hard for a while. Grits signaled such times and we ate a lot of them between uncles.

      Uncle Ray was my favorite uncle out of all of them.

      Ma had told me the first day he moved in with us that he wasn’t my real uncle when I asked her, which meant he wasn’t my real father. But he could have been one to one of my brothers I guess—even though he didn’t look like none of us that I could see, except Teddy, because Teddy sort of looked like everybody.

      Uncle Ray was getting a head start on being an old man in those times. But when he was younger, he’d went to a big college in Connecticut learning to be a doctor, Ma said. He got in some bad trouble not being able to pay off gambling and schooling debts to a bunch of serious fellers in New York City. Uncle Ray took off and I don’t know if he was ever a real doctor. But he could cut and stitch like no one else and he doctored in Shady whenever needed, even if he had to leave a card game to do it. And even if he was winning big or losing big, which he was admired for by some and not for by some others. I figured, too, sometimes that was the reason why Uncle Ray tended to be such a poor gambler.

      He’d taught Ma and a couple of other gals to be his nurses for whenever he needed help, and he always told me that Ma was the best of all of them and it was a shame she never got an education. I remember both of them going off together in a rush at all times of the day or night once summoned for help from somebody, most usually for a woman in trouble. I guess I can best say that as far as making a living, Ma tended to the wants of men and the needs of women, all who came to Shady for such different reasons.

      But СКАЧАТЬ