Defiant
It was my mother who found the girl, untied her from the bed and pulled her, filthy and blinking out into the sunlight.
I wanted to take her home and give her a bath. She was like a little doll, all blonde, mop-headed and blue-eyed. Dirty, though. She was very dirty.
My mother threw cans of corn and peas, boxes of pancake mix, maple syrup, oranges into the back of the Volkswagen bus. A crate of apples from last fall, I plucked out of cold storage back of the shed, staggered with it out to the car. Handfuls of rice filched from the pantry, my mother’s canned string beans, peaches, and beets, we crammed it all into the rear of the bus and rattled heavily down the two track dirt road. We were missionaries on a mission of supreme justice, spies to anyone who asked.
My mother was born generous. Maybe it had to do with being born and growing up in the south. I was probably the only northern Michigan farm kid who knew not to round my “o’s.” “Pawtsmuth” I went around saying to everyone I knew. “My mother was born in ‘Pawtsmuth, Vuhjineea,’ and she was educated and had her debutante party in ‘Nawfick,’” and I would put my nose into the air and look down it at the plain northern farm girls, until we all broke into giggles and howled on the floor, and tears ran out of our little northern eyes.
It was the grip of my father that attracted her in the first place, she said. And other times she said, “Maybe you’ve got your temper, and maybe your brother has asthma, but I,” she paused so maybe as to weigh whether she should say it, “have your father.” If it’s true he was a stone around her neck, he was also a rock in the ground and she was the grass which grew around him, shallow-rooted and prolific, for by the time she was done, she’d had eight babies. Billy and I were just the first.
Which is not to say her roots grew deeper; the flowers with which she surrounded herself just grew more numerous. In her mind, I believe she was making little southerners as an act of revenge on the north.
Because in attitude and in bearing and in manners, and in the grace with which she conducted herself, a southerner she stayed. Her generosity in our farming community, through the church and the library, was her privilege and her endowment to those less fortunate, and in her mind all northerners were less fortunate. In her heart, the confederate flag still flew. When people asked about the south, she would raise her arm and wave it in the air and shout, “The South will rise again!”
“I never,” my mother said to me over house chores, “had to make my own bed.”
“Never?”
“Never. The woman came in twice a week, washed the embroidered sheets, ironed them, and put them back on the bed, polished silver, swept every speck of dust out the door. She did every room in the house; she was a good worker, that woman. Nellie was her name.”
“What a lot of work,” I said, thinking how I pulled the covers over my unmade sheets every morning. “How come I have to do it?”
“Because you don’t have a nanny.”
“How come you got a nanny and I don’t?”
“Because your father takes all the money and deposits it in the bank down state.”
“Why?”
“If I knew that,” she said, pushing her finger through a hole in a sheet, “I’d know why God saw fit to help the north instead of the south.”
She leaned against the door until it scraped open with a quick shove, which was just the same as a self-made invitation, my mother said. I didn’t think it was right, but my mother stepped in, set the box of food on the hall table.
Dirty kitty litter boxes greeted us in the front hall and the smell of ammonia bouncing around in my stomach reminded me with nausea of my mother’s speeding road habits over hills, that little bit of time when you feel the car lift and you know that, like it or not, you’re airborne. I didn’t have the best of stomachs. My mother’s stomach was made from the lead pipe that ran under the road and across to the barn where the cows pushed the clapper down and drank from it. Lead-foot Alice, the men called her. My mother didn’t even wrinkle her nose.
The floor held crumbs and the soiled footprints of heavy boots. A little blonde mophead child in yesterday’s shorts, of indeterminate sex, sat meticulously coloring the wallpaper in the living room, drawing faces in the petals on the wall. It glanced at us and let us walk by, didn’t seem wild.
“We’ll look around,” my mother said. “She must have been sick for some time.”
A dark-eyed boy popped up from behind an overturned easy chair, held our eyes with a toy pistol in hand, and sprinted for the door. I nailed it to the wall, handed it o my mother who pulled it silently in the bathroom, its little mouth clamped shut and it so venomous, it could have passed for a wild west snake.
“Ech! There’s dead flies in the sink.” But the water ran and the child screamed, came shooting out and gave me a look, despite its face was clean, and hid behind the chair with the stuffing come out of the arms.
My mother stopped and looked at me, puzzled perhaps – that’s what I’d say her expression was. She looked very angry for a moment, and then seemed to let it go. Who at, I didn’t know.
“Where’s the? . . . I’m not going alone.” She took my hand and we glided quietly into the shadowy hall, where I dropped her hand because a spy for Humphrey Bogart doesn’t hold hands with his mother. Wires hung from a light socket overhead. I expected a choked sound, a scream of “Help me!” wherein my mother and I would leap with our Uzis wide open, shoot down drug dealers, hatchet men, molls. No one would dare bar the path of our justice.
Abruptly a dark door banged open. A boy of five or six in filthy clothes jumped out spread-legged and shot us with an M14 squirt gun. My mother ducked. Water flooded the walls. “I’ll get him!” I dragged him out from under the bed and threw him in the bathroom and closed the door. He pounded away, shouting things he was too young to know the meaning of.
My mother crouched and looked at me from the far end of the dark hall, but then she reached with her hand, pushed, swung the door wide, and gasped. Her arm went to her mouth, and I leaped in behind her.
The dullness in the girl’s eyes was brittle, caught fire, fanned to smoke, and then fled.
There are things that are unspeakable, the red imprint of a hand that stays on the cheek and eye and hardens on the skin, rope burns that rub the wrists raw, the sullenness in a child’s eyes. And me, no more than a child myself, I thought I understood it then; I don’t understand it at all now.
What is the emotion that turns a parent against a child, the other children against the child? I cannot grasp it. I roll it in my mind like cookie dough, but it does not flatten into conceivable circles, carries no weight. I cannot pinch a half-inch thickness from it, cannot force cutters evenly onto its surface. I have to lump it up and start over, pounding the damn surface to nothing.
It is hard to say how long we stood looking in at the wreck of this child’s life, the defecation and urine, the torn clothes, skin so dark from dirt it looked like someone smeared black tractor grease all over her.
As we knelt beside her trying to avoid her teeth and unclipped nails, he came to stand in the doorway. She glanced up, saw him, hung like a whipped dog. My mother quickly untied her, picked her up never minding the stink, for she weighed nothing, and stood in front of James Carl, Sr., her father.
“Move,” my mother spoke. It was an even tone, not shouted, but it held all the authority of the church behind it in which everyone knew my mother was so prominent.
I don’t know what James Carl, Sr. thought or what he was capable of.
I had anger rising up in me until I thought I would choke on it, and instead tears came to my eyes and I started trembling and half hid behind my mother, ashamed. Of what, for whom, I could not say.
“Move,” my mother said, and he did not give ground. The man stood there, belly sticking out from under his dirty shirt, boots with manure on them standing on the bedroom carpet as if he didn’t know it wasn’t the barn floor. His eyes narrowed on the girl in my mother’s arms.
“Katie?” he said. “Come to Papa?”
The girl looked at him for a long, long moment, and I could feel from her arm I was holding she was trembling, but then she seemed to gather herself, rise half-up, her thin body shaking all over. “No,” she whispered. That defiance must have cost her because she leaned her head against my mother’s chest and closed her eyes.
My mother did not move. “I will not ask you again,” she said. “In God’s name, you do what is right now.”
And James Carl, Sr., who could have beaten my tiny mother to a pulp, stepped back, spun on his manured heel and strode out, swinging the bedroom door wide behind him, as if in the end, he knew we were going to go through and take the girl out.
“How could I say,” my mother said to my father when he came in at six from the orchard, “that she knew art, had heard music, understood the flight of swallows to Henderson’s cliff? Why should I say that she was better off tied to that bed post than with a good family, a good home?”
“It’s not our business,” my father said. “It’s got nothing to do with us. Leave it alone.” But his eyes lingered on her, perhaps caught by something he could not name, held, until he did not look away. Something came into his face: an idea, perhaps, a recognition fanned by the July wind that took on strength, blew open a gate in his mind. “Where is she?” he whispered. He abruptly stood to his feet. “Alice? Where is the child?”
And my mother, in the boldest move we had ever seen her make, flung wide the doors to our parlor which had long since been turned into a second nursery, and reached in with both arms and pulled the girl out. Filthy and nasty as a wild barn cat, she fought my mother’s embrace. I dared not breathe.
“I will not have! . . .”
“David Simon Jackson, you will have and you will listen to everything I have to say and when I’m done you will do nothing and say nothing. This is my affair. I made the choice to bring her away from there.”
“Go!” she said to us and we were so used to her not raising her voice to us, that we stood rooted, stunned, then turned and fled, secretly happy that someone had finally spoken to our father that way.
Within three days, my mother and I took the girl before Judge McCrea who pronounced her a ward of the court. He leaned over the bench in his black robe, asked my mother would we take her in as a foster child? My mother sighed, and started to cry. The judge shooed the other people out of the courtroom and rose behind his bench and shrugged out of his black robe and came and put his arms around my mother and comforted her, for more time than I thought I could bear.
The girl and I sat at the table behind them, our heads down. I was embarrassed and I didn’t even know what I was embarrassed about. I scraped the wood table with my thumbnail and drew tic-tac-toes and nudged her arm to play. She sat silently, blank in her eyes, as if she were dead. As if she did not care. As if the world were all the same to her, foster home, parents’ home, what was the difference? One was just like another. I tried to pinch her.
“I’m sorry, Noel,” my mother whispered, “you know he won’t.” Judge Noel McCrea patted my mother’s shoulder and kissed her cheek, and returned to the bench. He called for the court officer who went out and came back in immediately with a thin woman wearing a suit and a pretty smile.
“Social worker,” my mother whispered to us. The pretty woman signed papers at the judge’s desk and spoke gently with the girl at length while my mother and I gathered our things.
Katie was sent back home with the social worker, cleaned up and dressed in one of my dresses. I wonder what kind of shreds it’s hanging in now, wonder more often about my mother and the judge. But I can’t say I knew anything for sure.
I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking James Carl, Sr. would come through my window with the stink of manure on his boots and do to me what he had done to Katie only worse, as if I really knew what he had done.
My mother went light on me, smiled at me more than usual, touched my hair and offered to talk. But when I sat down at the kitchen table and looked at her, nothing came out of my mouth.
I was never a gentle child, never a predictably sweet girl with dolls and manners, but the day we let that girl go back home, I transformed over night, clenched my fists and swore and spit as rough as any of our hired migrant boys swinging and drunk for a fight on Friday night after being paid. I was fourteen years old and turned away from people, fled into hiding places in the woods if anyone dared come near me.
But I couldn’t stop my thoughts, I couldn’t change them, couldn’t shrug them away. They had to come, toppling over each other. Exhausted, I gave up struggling, standing beside my mother on the darkening porch, stunned.
Because of us, the church converged on the Carls like ants on peanut butter. You couldn’t stop them, couldn’t unstick them, couldn’t flick them off. The cars went by our house breakfast, lunch, and dinner, bumping down the Carls’ road, one or two or three at a time.
We walked down to see, stood in the first row of orchard trees, saw as they handed in clothes by the basketful, food by the aluminum pan. They moved into the Carls’, swept floors, washed laundry, gave the children daily baths and prayers, and so undid the natural order of the Carls’ daily life that James Carl brought his insane wife home, stood shotgun at his door on the fourth morning, let his children pelt the church people’s cars with stones.
But is we who opened their door, and the church, in its mission, which followed and pressed down, drowned the Carls’ voices, squashed their ability to put their lives back together, to try and do right by their own.
And I’m not saying the Carls were good and decent people. Everything I know about the Carls goes against it. But to be made into public victims and felt sorry for is to shred a family of any attempt to raise themselves in the public view, to bring back self-respect, to re-create a decent life from the shambles of the old one, to say yes, we made a mistake. Because then there is no family.
And that was our crime.