There was only three of us in the house, and Daddy and Mama mostly avoided one another. They had little to say except simple stuff about chickens and hogs, and as of late, there was less of that. Daddy spent a lot of his time somewhere else, and Mama didn’t care. She took to bed often, lay propped against cotton-stuffed pillows drinking cheap cure-all she bought from a man that traveled the country in a dusty black car. He always wore a big black hat and had black clothes and boots, and his shirt was the color of flour paste. He had been around for years and looked the same. Some said for twenty years, but others said a son had taken over the father’s position. There were even those who said he was the devil. I had seen him, a tall, whip-lean man in a black hat and a smooth black suit. His face looked like it had been cut out of wood, and his chin was long and pointed.
“Devil don’t need no car that runs on gas,” Jinx had said. “So he ain’t no devil. And there ain’t no devils or angels anyhow.”
Jinx was certain on the matter. Me, it depended on if it was Tuesday or not. I had a tendency to believe all manner of things on a Tuesday. I know this: what the salesman sold to Mama was certainly devilish. It was a mixture of alcohol and most likely laudanum. It went for a quarter, and may have cost him a dime. It was money we couldn’t afford, but she bought the stuff by the box and sucked it like a baby will suck a bottle.
Daddy had his whiskey. Mama had her cure-all. It made her deep dream, she said, and the dreams were fine and bright and there was no river near the door. In those deep-down dreams, she said, me and her lived in a good way in a clean white house on high, dry land. Daddy was shaved and dirt-free and upright, wasn’t missing so many teeth, and lived the way he should. When she woke, she said, it was like she was in a nightmare, and everything that mattered was stepped on and messed with or mistreated, but a few long swigs of the cure-all took her back to where she liked to live. It hurt to think I was losing Mama to twenty-five cents a bottle and a lying dream.
The light in the house was a lantern burning on a nightstand near the window. Mama had lit it and left it for me. I was glad for the light, but thought it was damn dangerous to let it burn like that, being near the curtains. Then again, Mama’s judgment was missing a step these days. I blew out the lantern and looked out the window. The rain had gone away as swift as it had come, and the clouds had parted, and the apple-slice moon was giving out shiny light that looked greasy through the glass; it made the yard shimmer like a wet nickel.
I started upstairs with my stove wood, feeling my way along the rail by experience. Daddy didn’t leap out on me. I watched the bad boards, and made it to the top of the stairs without one of the steps breaking and dropping me through like a gallows. Upstairs, it was musty where the old carpet had rotted. Rain came through a hole at the end of the hall, and sometimes so did pigeons. Daddy was always planning to fix it, but when it came time to buy boards, he bought whiskey instead.
The thing I did like was having a room of my own with a lock on the door. Most river people didn’t have such a thing, and even Terry, who had come from better circumstances, slept on a pallet in their living room, along with four other kids, who had come as a package with his mama’s new husband.
I started to go in my room, but stopped and went down the hall, where Mama stayed. The door was cracked. When I looked in, I could see her shape on the bed, and I was surprised to see another. Even in the dark, I could tell it was Daddy. The moonlight, though thin, lay on his face and made it look as if he was wearing a mask. He was halfway under the covers and had his head turned toward me.
Mama had had far too much laudanum, and that was a fact. Otherwise she would never have let him in to sleep with her, even if it was only to lie at the foot of the bed as a foot warmer.
As I stood there looking, Daddy opened his eyes and saw me. He didn’t move. He just kept looking at me. After a while, he smiled, and the few teeth he had held the moonlight.
I frowned, smacked the stove wood against my open hand until his smile went away, and then I closed the door and walked off.
I dug in my overalls for my key, unlocked my door, pushed it shut, and locked it. I took off my clothes, pulled on my nightgown, shoved back the covers, and crawled in bed with the stove wood beside me. I lay there with the moonlight poking through the thin curtains over my window. I patted the stove wood like it was a bark-covered cat. I thought about Mama and Daddy together, something that ought to have been right, but wasn’t. They had been as distant from one another in recent months as the moon is from the earth, and now this.
I came to the conclusion that on this night, in Mama’s laudanum dreams, he may have been a white knight on a white charger, and she had, so to speak, opened the castle doors and let him in. Bless her heart, the laudanum lied. Yet who was I to judge? Even a root hog has its needs, and I suspect even a root hog has its dreams.
The bed was soft and I was tired. I lay there half awake, half in dream. I dreamed of me and Jinx and Terry, sailing down the Sabine River until we came to Hollywood, sailing right out of darkness and into light, gliding down a wide, wet street of water. On either side of us, standing on golden bricks, were handsome men and beautiful women, all movie stars, people we had seen in films. They waved at us as we drifted by and we waved back, sailing along on our stolen raft with a big white bag of stolen money with a black dollar sign on it. Next to the bag was May Lynn’s ashes in a golden urn.
Along the street, on either side, all the people-knowing who May Lynn was and what she might have been, knowing all the movies she didn’t make, the life she didn’t live-stopped waving and started to cry. We sailed quietly down the street, out of their sight, into shadows black as crows.
6
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.