Hardscrabble Road Read online

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  The old home place rested in a broad hollow. Smoke rose from the stovepipe in the detached kitchen. A tin-roofed barn and smokehouse sat on either side of the kitchen building behind the house. Within the hog-wire that fenced the front yard, our boy cousins raced around and played ball on the sandlot, while the girls jumped rope or talked in huddled groups. Sunlight flashed green off a nearby pond filled with overlapping lily pads and surrounded by a thicket of river oaks and buttonwood bushes.

  I left my toy inside the fence and caught up with Mama. “C-can I help out in the kitchen?”

  “You mean ‘C-c-can I steal as m-much food as I c-c-can?’ Well, OK—carry this.” She thrust the basket against my chest, almost knocking me over. “You drop it, though, and you’ve had it.”

  I followed her and Darlene up the porch stairs, along the dogtrot hallway, and into the backyard. Smells of fried chicken and fresh biscuits drifted from the kitchen. Mama was right about my motives, of course. Since children had to wait for second-table, helping out before dinner meant snatching mouthfuls of food before it all got cold or, worse, disappeared.

  Nailed above the doorway to the kitchen, a horseshoe had slipped around and pointed downward. The luck was running out, but I couldn’t stretch far enough to put it right. There were so many reasons to grow up faster. Reaching things up high. Marrying Miss Wingate or Cecilia or both. Running away from home.

  Mama and four of her sisters, who were all older and far less pretty, bustled within the large, sweltering room where grease spotted the plank floors and walls and smoke had blackened the rafters. Sunlight poured in through open windows and added to the heat. The women talked over one another and puffed cigarettes as they took bubbling pots off the two-burner woodstove, pulled iron pans from the oven, and chopped, diced, and sliced at the countertop. Within minutes, Mama’s dress stuck to her back in damp patches; darkened ringlets of blond hair clung to her neck.

  Aunt Lizzie, a frowsy platinum blonde with a huge bosom and the manners of a woodsman, piled biscuits on a plate. Her lower lip puffed out with snuff while she screamed, “Hellfire and damnation, I’m trying to talk to y’all, you sorry bitches.” Flecks of tobacco sprayed from her mouth and peppered the bread. In the momentary silence, she said, “Like I was saying, I asked that man of mine where’n the hell he was off to, what with his crops growing up in grass, and he says ‘Fishing.’ So I tell him he can start right in with fishing for his damn peanuts ’cause there ain’t no telling where they are in his field.” She pushed the biscuit plate into my arms and spun me toward the door. With a slap on my behind, she said, “I better hear you whistling the whole way up and back here.”

  I walked outside and competed with the birds as I carried the cat-heads toward the house. Aunt Lizzie’s rant about her husband Roscoe followed me: “I swannee, if he wasn’t such a good-looking man, I’d part his hair with a axe. That no-count is so lazy, he wouldn’t take a job in a pie factory. He wouldn’t pick up a stick to hit a damn snake.”

  Before returning to the kitchen, I pocketed a snuff-stained biscuit and a fistful of fried okra so fresh that the grease blistered my hand. On the next trip, I managed to sneak a chicken leg. I pressed my back against the house, out of sight of the kitchen and below the open dining room windows. The breading crunched and the smoky dark meat left my lips smeared with juice as I stripped the leg clean. With a snap, I broke the leg-bone and sucked out the marrow. I tossed the leftovers to Grandma’s old mutt Penny and gobbled up the biscuit and okra.

  With a satisfied burp, I continued my journey around the house to where the other children played and awaited the call to second-table. Penny followed close at my heels, like she usually did when we visited. I nodded and traded a “Hey” with Jake, my favorite uncle, who sat in a rocker on the front porch, swapping stories with two other uncles—Roscoe was still fishing down at the pond—while the Elrod sisters they’d married made final preparations for dinner.

  In the bright sunshine of the sandlot, girls stood in groups chattering while a ragged circle of boys tried to break long black horsehair across their noses. Blood stained almost every face, but no one could be called “sissy.”

  My brothers leaned against the fence with another boy-cousin, rubbing kitchen matches on the inside of their bare arms, tracing simple designs over and over. The sulfur in the match would leave a temporary scar better than any horsehair because pictures could be made with it. I thought I might trace “VW,” imagining a secret beneath my shirtsleeve that I could touch while I watched my teacher, but my uncles’ conversation made me pause. I drew a wavy “VW” in the sand with my toes while I listened to the men gossip.

  Uncle Doyle said in his low growl, “Yeah, some are wearing ’em shorter, but it still ain’t like ten years past.” He licked his rubbery lips. “Sudden breeze came down the street back then and you got a show, let me tell you.”

  Aunt Lizzie opened the front door and stuck out her head. Her white-blond hair lay pasted against her forehead and frizzed into a cloud everywhere else. “Any of y’all seen Reva?”

  Uncle Davy said, “Unh-uh.”

  “Well, damnation, she said she’d fetch my Roscoe in to dinner, but I ain’t seen hide nor hair of either of ’em yet. Sonofabitch—” She slammed the door shut as she cussed, shaking dust from the porch roof.

  Davy said, “Uh-oh.”

  Doyle snorted. “Funny how she cusses him but always says ‘My Roscoe.’ Like she’s putting everybody on notice.”

  “She’s got no call to worry,” Davy said. “Roscoe’d rather fish than eat. Than anything, I reckon.”

  “I dunno. He’s been known to cast his rod—”

  Uncle Jake rocked forward and stamped his foot, hushing his two brothers-in-law. “Gents, Lizzie just summoned us, indirectly like, to the table. I say we tuck in before it gets cold.” After the other men had gone inside, Jake walked over to me, tall and gangly, and asked, “What’s your favorite part of a bird?”

  I jerked my head up, pretending to be awakened from a daydream. It was just dawning on me what my uncles were talking around, what adults had been saying in a sideways fashion for a long time. I felt grown up but sad and scared for all that. “I-I-I usually get backs and f-feet and such.”

  “I’ll give you a surprise—” he looked at my zigzagging VW and said “—lightning boy.” He disappeared through the doorway in a few long strides.

  I went around to the back porch so I could keep tabs on what food would be left. Mama strode across the field between the pond and the house, heading toward me. I liked the way the shadows on her skirt changed shape as her legs scissored—right, left, right, left—through the knee-high grass. The summer heat seemed to have put a rosy color on her face and she smiled to herself, a rare and wonderful thing to see. However, when our gazes met, she shook her head in frustration. The smile melted into a hard line. She said, “You seen your Uncle Roscoe?”

  “No’m.”

  “Maybe he’s gone and drowned hisself.”

  Aunt Ruby came out and stood behind me on the back porch. Stern and rail-thin, she always wore a disapproving look on her face. I glanced up and saw that her scowl had deepened. When Mama asked if she’d seen Roscoe, Ruby answered, “We sure haven’t.”

  Mama wiped a line of sweat from her upper lip. She said, “I looked all around the pond for that man —behind every tree. Got myself overheated for nuthin.” She fanned her face with both hands and blinked at her sister.

  My aunt studied Mama as closely as Ry had peered at me in the woods. Then Ruby glanced past Mama’s shoulder and said, “Reckon you didn’t look everywhere.”

  Uncle Roscoe now sauntered across the meadow toward us, looking as fresh as always in a starched white shirt beneath deep-blue overalls. He wore a carefully knotted maroon tie tucked behind the bib: his traditional Sunday fishing outfit that he never seemed to get dirty. Mama often remarked on how, though he was forty years old, his features had stopped aging ten years before. His handsome fa
ce had a constant smile and remained unlined. He also never sweated, and every hair stayed neatly combed back and shiny with pomade.

  Aunt Ruby pursed her lips and hissed at Mama, “Be sure to wash your hands before coming inside.” She walked through the doorway, her heels making a racket on the floor.

  Mama said to me, “Don’t that beat all. Where was he hiding?” I shrugged in reply, careful not to sniff, but she’d already turned to the washstand at the end of the porch and began to rub her hands with lye soap and filmy water.

  By the time she’d gone indoors, Uncle Roscoe climbed the porch steps. He wore leather work boots into which he’d tucked his overalls, but even they looked clean. “Howdy, Mr. Bud,” he said. He bent over with his hand out and I thought he was going to tousle my hair, but instead he whisked off a few tiny blades of grass from a boot tip.

  “They b-b-biting OK?” I grinned up at him, trying to appear cute and bright: the kind of boy a perfect-looking man might want to raise up.

  His smile broadened. “The best fishing in Georgia’s right here, yessir.” He washed his hands and, instead of using the soggy, graying towel draped over the porch rail, he shook his hands like they were on fire. Taking a square of ironed kerchief from his back pocket, he finished drying his fingers and then cleaned his nails.

  Aunt Lizzie shouted from the dining table, “Roscoe, get in here this minute. Hellfire and damnation, you’ve held up more folks than Jesse James.”

  Grandma said, “Language, child—I’m about to say grace.”

  “Coming, love,” Roscoe sang back and patted his perfect hair before he went inside.

  If I didn’t act too obvious, I could look in on the grownups at the dinner table without getting scolded. Of them all, Uncle Roscoe had the oddest eating habits, even stranger than Aunt Arzula, who chucked balled-up bread under the table. After Roscoe loaded his plate, he pushed all of the food together in a heap and said, “Thank you for the syrup.” Uncle Doyle passed him the pitcher and he poured cane syrup over everything. Maybe the sugar kept him preserved.

  After the uncles smoked their after-dinner cigarettes and everyone finally pushed back from the table, the women took away the used dishes and utensils and the men returned to the porch, except for Roscoe and Jake. Roscoe went back to the pond without one look at Mama; of course, he didn’t look at his wife Lizzie either. Jake made a show of smoking another cigarette on the back porch until everyone had cleared out. Then he sat down beside me on the stoop.

  “Best I could do,” he said, taking a plump chicken thigh from the napkin he’d palmed. It had cooled, but I could taste the spices in the breading and the juicy meat better because it didn’t burn my tongue. He watched as I stripped the bone clean, sucked out the marrow, and gave the remnants to Penny, who ran off with them.

  “Th-th-thank you for that.” I smiled up at him, wishing not for the first time that we lived closer to him.

  “I wanted to get you a breast, but your Aunt Lizzie took the biggest and your mama got the best—” His face flushed and he wiped his mouth. “The chicken, you know.” He blew out a breath, rubbed damp palms against his trouser legs, and started over again. “Look, Bud. You can’t listen to what other folks say.”

  Uncle Jake had never scolded me before; I could feel the fried chicken coming back up my gullet. I stuttered hard, trying to reply. “I wasn’t listening to nobody, sir. I—”

  He raised a finger, silencing me. “You play like you got your head in the clouds, but I know you got your ears open. I ain’t saying it’s bad to hear what folks talk about. I mean that you don’t wanna take it to heart.”

  Lizzie and Maxine came out of the kitchen balancing stacks of plates still dripping with water, and they headed toward us. With a finger-wag under my nose, he murmured, “Don’t pay gossips no mind, lightning boy.” My uncle grunted as he pushed to his feet, a giant standing above me. He walked through the house, taking long strides, and I heard the creak of his rocker out front.

  Aunt Lizzie said, “Wash up, Bud, and give us a hand. Time you did some work around here.”

  As I helped to set the dining table, I surveyed the remnants of food and tried to imagine how far it would stretch among fifteen kids. Grandma only had ten chairs, so the youngest ones—including me—had to sit on the porch steps while we ate. Being the smallest, we’d also get the least portions. To avoid fighting over who took too much, my aunts would prepare fifteen plates of food, with a spoonful of this and a dollop of that, a chicken foot on one plate and a grizzled neck on another. Narrow cornbread wedges would be subdivided. Aunt Lizzie thrust two glass sweet-tea pitchers into my hands and sent me to the well.

  Behind the kitchen, I drew up a bucketful of cold water and skimmed off the wiggle-tails. Loose flakes of tea and undiluted sugar had made a tan sludge in the bottom of the pitchers, so I sloshed a little well-water into both and gave them a shake. I tipped back one pitcher and then the other, savoring the sweet, coppery dregs. Then I filled them with more water for second-table. All the while, I tried to imagine Mama taking up with Uncle Roscoe and having him as my new father. He was never mean to me like Papa, but not really nice either like Uncle Jake. As handsome as he was, he wouldn’t want folks to think that I was his son. He’d welcome my brothers, but I’d be left behind for sure. Would Papa keep me? Could Nat or Lonnie raise—

  “Hey!” Mama shouted. “Everyone’s waiting on you. What’re you doing just standing there?”

  Heat rose in my cheeks as I tried to think of something to say. So she wouldn’t know I was thinking about her and Uncle Roscoe, I asked, “W-w-what’s Papa do when we c-c-come here?”

  “Oh my stars, the sun’ll cook that pea-brain of yours before it can puzzle that one out.”

  “So w-what’s he do?”

  “Same as me.” She took the pitchers from beside the well and stalked away, muttering, “Wondering what’s gonna become of you.”

  While fourteen kids shifted in their chairs or on the back steps and stared at their dinners, Mama filled a hodgepodge of jelly glasses and jars with well-water. Aunt Lizzie gave me the last plate of food—a crispy chicken foot and other portions almost too small to name—and sent me to the porch. When I sat on the sun-heated bottom stair and surveyed the paltry leftovers, Penny emerged from the breezeway and lay at my feet. Indoors, Grandma stood behind Jay’s chair and said grace, her voice so faint that the five of us outside only knew she’d finished when the ten oldest kids started to eat. Almost no one talked during second-table: our focus was on food.

  Dinner ended soon after it began, and Mama shooed us into the yard. I stood with my brothers and cousins, trying to come up with something to do.

  “Y’all wanna play dodge ball?”

  “Too hot for that.”

  Chet slung his arm around my neck. “Wrestle?”

  “Naw,” I said, “I might p-puke up dinner.”

  One boy whispered, “The train.”

  “Yeah!” Chet released me and flicked his finger against my arm. “Or is you as much of a chicken as that foot you ate?”

  I raised my chin and said, “I done the tr-train before.”

  We hiked a mile to the railroad track. I put my already-mashed nickel down on the rail, hoping to stretch it further. In my mind, I pictured a hair-thin silver disk the width of my hand.

  Everyone had some doodad that he placed atop the rusty iron. We all toed the track and looked east, each hoping to be the first to spot the Seaboard engine.

  “There!” several teenage boys cried out.

  Jay said, “No, fellas, just a cow crossing the tracks.” Even cousins older than him deferred to his judgments.

  We bent forward and back to see around each other. One cousin dropped down and put his ear to the track like Indians did in the Western pictures. In the excitement, I nearly stopped thinking about Mama and Uncle Roscoe and what would become of me.

  “Smoke!” someone yelled.

  “Dust devil,” Jay said.

  Finally, the steam en
gine appeared on the horizon with everyone shouting, “Train!” For a few moments, the boy playing Indian was held down by his brother, who pinned him screaming to the track. It would mean death—though a manly one—to stand at the rail when the locomotive roared past, so we all began to ease backward by very small steps.

  “Hey, sissy,” Chet shouted at me, “you’re halfway to Grandma’s.”

  I stopped and pointed at his toes, farther from the track than mine. “Am not. You’re b-b-backpedaling so fast you done burned up the grass.”

  Whenever someone challenged our courage, we’d ease closer to the rail and the onrushing train. Then we’d edge backward again to safety, the line of us as wiggly as a snake. No one wanted to look too eager to escape a sudden, bone-crushing death.

  The train whistle bellowed angrily as the huge locomotive rushed past. The engineer opened a valve and steam shot out the side. It hit us with hellish hot breath.

  Some of us screamed but Chet just laughed, hands on hips, as the jet of white mist washed over him. Jay held me up by my overall strap to keep me from staggering. A few of the other boys fell back with hands covering their faces but quickly rejoined our line as we cheered and waved. All of us wanted to grow up to be train engineers.

  The railroad cars sailed past in an endless clatter. Ladder rungs alongside boxcars, sliding doors left open—so many invitations to jump on and have an adventure, to escape our parents and everything they did and didn’t do. I reached out and imagined gripping an iron handhold and swinging aboard the way Hopalong Cassidy mounted his galloping horse.

  After the caboose went by, we scrambled onto the tracks to see how the crushing wheels had improved our offerings. Chet shouted, “Neat—it crushed my arrowhead into dust.”

  Jay had set down a few pieces saved from a game of jacks. “Stars!” he said. “Squashed and six-pointed.”

  I burned my fingers picking up the flattened nickel, but to wait for it to cool off or toss it from hand to hand was sissified. The silvery oval seemed larger and thinner. The pictures on the coin were now as blurry as dreams.