Chapter 5, Entangled Thorns
Chapter 5
Geraldine Porter Pritchett
*language warning*
I hear them whispering, and I know what they’re saying. Crazy, they say. Lost her mind.
Folks always did accuse me of being weak. I know well enough what they said behind my back all them years, while they was smiling at my face. I know what they say now. This little town ain’t big enough to hide things. But I ain’t weak and there ain’t nothing wrong with my mind, and goddamn them all to hell and back for saying there is.
Tell me this: When a person is done living, what’s crazy about dying? I lost my Junior a year ago last month, and I lost my children too many years ago to count. I have outlived and outlasted anyone or anything I ever cared about, and I am finished; there ain’t nothing weak about that. There ain’t nothing crazy about it, either, but I’ll be damned if just when I decided I was done with it all, Kay Langley didn’t go and call my girls home. And what right had she to do that?
She told me what she’d done when she stopped by to bring me some supper from the diner. I was glad to see Kay; there was a time we was close, and the beef stew she brought tempted my appetite for the first time in weeks. I even managed to swallow a little of it down, to please her, if nothing else. Kay comes from a long line of good cooks and good people, but it wasn’t good of her to meddle between me and my girls.
If I’d known she was doing it, I’d have told her not to. The last time I heard anything at all about my girls was through Kay, just over a year ago when their daddy died. She called them home then, too, but they didn’t come, and I don’t imagine they will now. I reckon it’s clear they didn’t care for their daddy; I reckon it’s also clear they don’t care for me. Maybe he didn’t deserve their caring. Maybe I don’t, either. Maybe I don’t, after all.
My girls left me without a word just after Luke’s funeral. I remember hearing later how we broke the heat record that day, but I didn’t notice it at the time. I didn’t feel the heat, and I didn’t care about no record breaking. I stood there in that terrible sun in the cemetery behind Cedar Hollow Baptist Church, and watched them put my boy in the ground, and I felt anger, boiling hotter than any heat wave, rising up in my chest like the steam from one of them goddamned stills.
I was mad at God and at Junior and at every Pritchett that ever walked the earth, but most of all I was mad at myself. I was so full of boiling over anger I couldn’t hardly speak, much less shake the hands and hug the shoulders of those who came to pay their respects.
Repects, I remember thinking at the time. Not a goddamned one of you respects us, so there ain’t no use in pretending now. But I swallowed my pride and took their offered hands, because that wasn’t the day to make my stand.
I didn’t leave Luke’s grave until every last crumb of dirt was put over him and all the hypocrites was gone. Then I climbed up into that rattletrap truck of Junior’s and let him take me home.
When we got there I walked right past all them people, all the good ladies of the church with their covered dishes and the men in their Sunday shirts with sweat stains spreading under their armpits and around their collars. Lord knew, they hadn’t ever attempted to set foot in my house before my boy’s funeral, and I didn’t see the need for them to be there then.
I didn’t say a word to nobody, and truthfully, if I’d given in to the angry impulses in my mind, I’d have shot them all dead where they stood. But I didn’t. Instead, I shut my door and stripped out of my clothes and climbed into bed, even though it wasn’t but two o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was shining into that bedroom hot enough to peel the paper on the walls. I laid there and stared at the water-stained ceiling above the bed until the room grew too dark to see.
Every now and then I heard car engines start, and the voices grew less and less until finally the only ones I heard were those of Junior and his brothers, and after a while even those went away, far enough from my window that I could pretend they was gone for good. When Junior opened the door to come to bed I moved for the first time all evening.
“Get the hell out of here,” I said, turning my head away from him. “And close the door back behind you.”
Junior Pritchett hadn’t listened to a word I’d said in the twenty years of our marriage, but he listened to me that night. He pulled his head back and shut the door and left me be. I stayed right there just like that until the next afternoon when I remembered I had a husband and two other children who needed me; remembering that forced me from my bed, though in truth I didn’t want to go. But I couldn’t be done with it all just yet, no matter how angry I was.
That was when I learned the girls wasn’t nowhere to be found. Junior didn’t know where they was, and not a single member of his whole goddamned worthless family had even noticed them going. “Now calm down, Geraldine,” he told me when I raised my voice, accusing every last one of them of being the white trash they was known to be. He reached out for me, but I swatted his hand away.
“I don’t want to calm down,” I told him, “I want my girls.” I had just lost one baby; I wanted to keep the other ones close to me where I could see them. Maybe I knew what they’d done, even then, because my chest was already cinched up with fear.
Junior gave up on trying to calm me down and went to the diner to ask if anyone had seen my girls. Valerie Poindexter said she’d seen them headed toward the station when she opened up the library that morning. Kay Langley called over to the stationmaster who told her the girls had bought tickets to Memphis.
The stationmaster said they told him they was going to visit relatives to let them know in person about Luke’s death. He said he figured we’d sent them so he didn’t think nothing of it. But they’d lied; we hadn’t sent them girls nowhere and didn’t neither one of us have kin in Memphis.
A body can go through a lot of bad feelings in twenty-seven years and I reckon I’ve been through just about all of them. When something goes wrong in a family people look to the parents first, especially the momma, and it is true that a parent can kill the soul of a child. What people don’t realize is that a child can also kill the soul of a parent. Yes, she can. I reckon I ought to know.
Kay had no business meddling between me and my girls.
Geraldine Porter Pritchett
*language warning*
I hear them whispering, and I know what they’re saying. Crazy, they say. Lost her mind.
Folks always did accuse me of being weak. I know well enough what they said behind my back all them years, while they was smiling at my face. I know what they say now. This little town ain’t big enough to hide things. But I ain’t weak and there ain’t nothing wrong with my mind, and goddamn them all to hell and back for saying there is.
Tell me this: When a person is done living, what’s crazy about dying? I lost my Junior a year ago last month, and I lost my children too many years ago to count. I have outlived and outlasted anyone or anything I ever cared about, and I am finished; there ain’t nothing weak about that. There ain’t nothing crazy about it, either, but I’ll be damned if just when I decided I was done with it all, Kay Langley didn’t go and call my girls home. And what right had she to do that?
She told me what she’d done when she stopped by to bring me some supper from the diner. I was glad to see Kay; there was a time we was close, and the beef stew she brought tempted my appetite for the first time in weeks. I even managed to swallow a little of it down, to please her, if nothing else. Kay comes from a long line of good cooks and good people, but it wasn’t good of her to meddle between me and my girls.
If I’d known she was doing it, I’d have told her not to. The last time I heard anything at all about my girls was through Kay, just over a year ago when their daddy died. She called them home then, too, but they didn’t come, and I don’t imagine they will now. I reckon it’s clear they didn’t care for their daddy; I reckon it’s also clear they don’t care for me. Maybe he didn’t deserve their caring. Maybe I don’t, either. Maybe I don’t, after all.
My girls left me without a word just after Luke’s funeral. I remember hearing later how we broke the heat record that day, but I didn’t notice it at the time. I didn’t feel the heat, and I didn’t care about no record breaking. I stood there in that terrible sun in the cemetery behind Cedar Hollow Baptist Church, and watched them put my boy in the ground, and I felt anger, boiling hotter than any heat wave, rising up in my chest like the steam from one of them goddamned stills.
I was mad at God and at Junior and at every Pritchett that ever walked the earth, but most of all I was mad at myself. I was so full of boiling over anger I couldn’t hardly speak, much less shake the hands and hug the shoulders of those who came to pay their respects.
Repects, I remember thinking at the time. Not a goddamned one of you respects us, so there ain’t no use in pretending now. But I swallowed my pride and took their offered hands, because that wasn’t the day to make my stand.
I didn’t leave Luke’s grave until every last crumb of dirt was put over him and all the hypocrites was gone. Then I climbed up into that rattletrap truck of Junior’s and let him take me home.
When we got there I walked right past all them people, all the good ladies of the church with their covered dishes and the men in their Sunday shirts with sweat stains spreading under their armpits and around their collars. Lord knew, they hadn’t ever attempted to set foot in my house before my boy’s funeral, and I didn’t see the need for them to be there then.
I didn’t say a word to nobody, and truthfully, if I’d given in to the angry impulses in my mind, I’d have shot them all dead where they stood. But I didn’t. Instead, I shut my door and stripped out of my clothes and climbed into bed, even though it wasn’t but two o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was shining into that bedroom hot enough to peel the paper on the walls. I laid there and stared at the water-stained ceiling above the bed until the room grew too dark to see.
Every now and then I heard car engines start, and the voices grew less and less until finally the only ones I heard were those of Junior and his brothers, and after a while even those went away, far enough from my window that I could pretend they was gone for good. When Junior opened the door to come to bed I moved for the first time all evening.
“Get the hell out of here,” I said, turning my head away from him. “And close the door back behind you.”
Junior Pritchett hadn’t listened to a word I’d said in the twenty years of our marriage, but he listened to me that night. He pulled his head back and shut the door and left me be. I stayed right there just like that until the next afternoon when I remembered I had a husband and two other children who needed me; remembering that forced me from my bed, though in truth I didn’t want to go. But I couldn’t be done with it all just yet, no matter how angry I was.
That was when I learned the girls wasn’t nowhere to be found. Junior didn’t know where they was, and not a single member of his whole goddamned worthless family had even noticed them going. “Now calm down, Geraldine,” he told me when I raised my voice, accusing every last one of them of being the white trash they was known to be. He reached out for me, but I swatted his hand away.
“I don’t want to calm down,” I told him, “I want my girls.” I had just lost one baby; I wanted to keep the other ones close to me where I could see them. Maybe I knew what they’d done, even then, because my chest was already cinched up with fear.
Junior gave up on trying to calm me down and went to the diner to ask if anyone had seen my girls. Valerie Poindexter said she’d seen them headed toward the station when she opened up the library that morning. Kay Langley called over to the stationmaster who told her the girls had bought tickets to Memphis.
The stationmaster said they told him they was going to visit relatives to let them know in person about Luke’s death. He said he figured we’d sent them so he didn’t think nothing of it. But they’d lied; we hadn’t sent them girls nowhere and didn’t neither one of us have kin in Memphis.
A body can go through a lot of bad feelings in twenty-seven years and I reckon I’ve been through just about all of them. When something goes wrong in a family people look to the parents first, especially the momma, and it is true that a parent can kill the soul of a child. What people don’t realize is that a child can also kill the soul of a parent. Yes, she can. I reckon I ought to know.
Kay had no business meddling between me and my girls.
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