But she was on her own track. “Church was his trouble,” she said. “It started him off on the wrong foot.” This was a new one on me, especially coming from an old person. I’d heard of course about the snake-handling, but she said it was worse than that. Men wanting to get back to the Old Testament, reaping virgin girls and using daughters for their slaves. “There’s some I knew would have taken more wives than Jacob if they thought they’d get away with it.”
“Did Jacob have more than one?” I asked. I was holding the empty plate that had a picture on it of Abraham Lincoln. I wondered how he got in here. It took some doing to keep myself from licking the sandwich crumbs off his face.
“Two wives and two concubines. You don’t know the scriptures?”
It seemed like a trick question. I told her the truth, that Mom had gone sour on all that. And that as far as I knew, her son was probably not churchy either by the time he got to Lee County. Mom just wouldn’t have tolerated anything like that in a boyfriend.
“You didn’t know him,” she said. “He died in July, and you weren’t born till the fall.”
I was a little freaked out by her knowing that.
“He was crazy over cars, too. He had the sickness. A car can kill a man faster than a snake. I’ve not driven one of those killing machines since 1961 nor had one in my possession.”
This was a lot to take in. First, that my dad was into vehicles, the same fever I had in my blood. I was always that kid on the playground with my eyes turned out to the road, watching the metal roar by while the older boys yelled, Oh man, a Continental with suicide doors!
Second of all: since 1961? How did a modern person not have a car?
She said she got her groceries delivered, and if she needed anything else in town, she walked. Or had one of her girls drive her, or run the errand for her. She’d raised and educated eleven girls total, some from wayward teens, a few from babies. So she was like a foster mom. She said she did it on her own steam, though, without paychecks or anything. She took a dim view on how they could mess things up at social services. I told her amen to that.
So, Mom’s crazy story was true. Betsy Woodall must have come to see her. The hell and brimstone she’d supposedly laid on was surely not true, just Mom’s nightmares talking. But the plan of taking me was real. Did Mom agree to that? If I’d been born without the plumbing, would I have grown up here in this house as a whole different me, sitting around eating sandwiches in chairs with animal feet? My brain was pretty close to blowing a gasket.
I asked to use the bathroom, and she showed me what she called her washroom but luckily it did have a toilet. Even though a weird one that took a minute to figure out, due to a pull chain. She didn’t stay to watch if I stood up.
It was a pretty terrifying afternoon on the whole. She asked if there were people I’d run away from that needed to be called. I said not really. But she pressed the point, not wanting the police on her, so I told her who needed to know I was alive and with a relative. After she made the call, she asked what on earth had possessed me to come find her.
I told her my sorry tale. I didn’t want this lady being all “told you so” where Mom was concerned, it’s not like she’d dropped the ball totally, so I said my life was great and everything until Mom took up with a guy that believed in educating with his fists, that bullied and brainwashed her till the day she died. Then came foster care with an old guy running a slave-boy farm. And all the while this lady’s looking at me like, Told you so. I tried to work a different angle other than Men Are Satan, because honestly Mrs. McCobb was no great shakes, nor Old Baggy either. Not to mention Miss Barks that dumped me for better pay. And the truck-stop whore, definitely a bad character, but that was tricky to get into. I just wrapped it up saying I was a hardworking person and had started out with the money to prove it, but it got stolen.
All she said at the end of my story was, “That poor girl.”
Wait, what? Not poor me? She didn’t mean the money stealer, which I’d not mentioned being a hooker. She meant Mom. I was still pissed at Mom for dying on me, so I wasn’t ready to take her side. But this lady seemed pissed off at her son for dying on her, which she said was a lowdown thing to do to Mom, leaving her in charge of a baby. I wondered if Mom had felt the same, and nixed his name off my birth certificate to get even. Definitely Mom stayed pretty torqued over whatever accident took him out, to the extent of refusing to talk about it. Maybe this lady had answers, but all the sudden she looked slumped and sad, all out of steam. We sat listening to the clocks tick. She also had a man’s big round gold watch that she took out of her pocket, looked at, wound up, rubbed against her sleeve and put away again. A gray cat slunk out from under a big cabinet thing and gave me the evil eye before it oozed along the wall and ran out the door.