At our family reunion in Stone Mountain my great aunt, Mavis Sternberger, whispered in my ear that Daddy helped bomb the church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that killed four black children.  She said that Daddy hung out with those fellas then she was all hush–hush and wouldn’t murmur a word to me about their names but I got the feeling she knew who they were.  This was all after I mentioned to her how I had found a photograph of her standing next to a man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.

“That old photograph?  Oh heavens, that was nothing – just a bunch of us joking around, cutting up when we were younger, a little wilder.  That was at a Halloween party at someone’s house.  If you look closely, you can see that I have rouge on my cheeks.  I went as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and I was wearing a gingham dress that I made by hand.  The men thought I was something, I’ll tell you.  Back then I was pure fire inside and out.”

Aunt Mavis is eighty–some–odd–years old, grey hair that is permed and slightly tinted with a blue haze of an inexpensive perm, and she wears tortoise–colored reading glasses that mostly hang from a braided macramè string.  Aunt Mavis was married once, but her husband, who was from New Jersey, a Yankee as they always said on her side of the family each time they mentioned his name, died in World War II when she was nineteen and he was twenty-two. Harold, her husband, was killed in the Pacific Ocean.  He was in the navy and on board the U.S.S. Indianapolis when it was struck by a torpedo and nine hundred men landed in the water.  It was never said, but everyone knows exactly what happened to Harold.  He was eaten by sharks.  Right along with six hundred other sailors.  Not many know of the dead who died when the ship exploded or who was eaten later on, but you got to figure most of them were eaten by sharks since only three hundred or so men survived.  I guess being dead from the explosion saved them the torment of waiting their turn to be eaten.  Aunt Mavis never remarried and she never had any children.  She kept her married name, Sternberger, but she always said, “I’ll always be a Gardner deep down in my heart.”

“Me and your daddy, we were lovers,” she quietly said as she turned to looked over at Daddy talking to several men and laughing, while in the background the clang of a horseshoe rang out.

“Oh, I don’t want to hear that,” I told her.

“But it’s true,” she insisted again.  “You cannot deny history.  You cannot deny the truth.”

“I’m not denying it Auntie, I just don’t want to hear about it.”

“I’m not much to look at anymore, but I was much younger back then, and your daddy and me aren’t but thirteen years apart.  I used to visit your family at the farm and after Harold died I sort of went crazy for a while.  All my bottled-up emotions broke the dam wide open.  I was twenty-six and your daddy thirteen.  That was his birthday present.  Right there in the barn.  Just for your daddy.  I didn’t like no one else.  We carried on for years then I snapped back to normal.  Well, it must have been ten or fifteen years or so we carried on.  Maybe longer.”

“Aunt Mavis, I really don’t want to hear this.”

“But it’s the truth, child, but no one will believe it.  Just like the bombing.  Your daddy denies everything about that, too.  He’s got folks thinking I’ve turned funny.  Where do you think he was the day of the bombing?  At my house – that’s right.  Shhh.  Don’t say a word to anyone.  He wasn’t there all day long.  He came and went as he pleased out the back where no one could see him.”

“How could my daddy have been involved in something like that?”

“People change.  After Vietnam, your daddy changed.  I didn’t hardly know him anymore.  I wonder about my husband, Harold, being in the war, and what would he have been like afterwards.  Would he have been the same man?  Maybe God spared me from that.  I don’t know.  He’s always going to be the man I knew and married.  But your daddy changed a lot.  He fell into a bad crowd of men.  You ask him about that some time.  There’s a good bedtime story.”

Today is Friday, September 2, (2005) and a year has come and gone since my husband, Jim, left me for another woman.  She was no stranger to me.  It was Jim’s first wife, Vera.  I was Jim’s third wife and the best one if anybody ever asks.  Nobody loved him as much as I did and he dumped on me something awful like you would do to a dog you hated because he was always barking and digging up your flowers, or worse, a cat who gets in your car and sprays all over the place and stinks it up.  Ever since he left, I have thought of many ways to kill him. 

I thought about the Bobbitt–lady whacking off her husband’s pride and joy – I thought of that a lot – but it would be messy.  My favorite’s waiting until Jim was asleep then tie his feet and legs together with a mile of rope then strap the rope to the back of the car and drag him right out of house and down the street.  I wondered what would go through his mind as soon as he flopped out of the bed and began banging into the walls and door jambs and was reaching out trying to grab onto the leg of an end–table.

All sorts of women have empowered themselves, albeit wrongly, but I know that they no longer cared about the consequences.  I was like that, too.  Just throw me into the fire.  Go to jail, that’s no big deal for me. Least I’ll have company.  Those women weren’t thinking about anything but dishing out equal pain in return.  If your husband or boyfriend has a wandering eye, poke it out.  You’ve got to set him straight.  He gets only one chance to change.  If he has a wondering of desire then break the man in two pieces, otherwise, you will forever live with what has already been lived by score of women before you.  But men don’t change.  Men are dogs.  Dump him.  Find someone new.  If he slaps you, you have to hit him with a baseball bat.  If he hits you with a baseball bat, you hit him with a Mack truck.  But all those women got caught.  Not me.  I wouldn’t.  Knowing I could get caught, I’d be extra careful.  You got a wandering eye, watch how far I can wander right out of your life.  I’d be sneaky as a rat on a wharf tow line, walking ever so carefully, balancing like it was the end of the world if I made the slightest mistake.  Jim better look over his shoulder.  I might just up and change my ways simply because I’m feeling ornery.  The Eleventh Commandment should be Thou Shalt Kill Your Husband if He is Cheating on You or Treating You like a Stray Dog.

I think the second most perfect way to kill Jim (that is if he was still living under my roof and I was still all crazy mad at him) would be to make breakfast for him, be real lovey–dovey and have bacon frying, toast buttered, eggs almost cooked the way he likes them, the smell of coffee floating around the house, then while he is in the bathtub soaking and ready to step out and eat a nice hot breakfast, I would push his new mini–tv into the bathtub.  I’d run next door in my bathrobe crying, “Oh my.  Call somebody.  An ambulance.  The police.  Oh my God!  Call anyone who can help.”  Cry. Cry. Cry.  Say to the ambulance driver, “His breakfast is still hot – would you like it?  No sense it going to waste.”  Go to the funeral.  Cry some more.  Plant his sorry ass in a pine box in the muddy ground, cry, cry again.  Collect the insurance money.  Cry some more when the man hands me the check in his fancy office with a fake palm tree and pictures that say “Soar with Eagles,” “Success,” and “Victory” with people climbing impossible rock cliffs.  I wonder if they think those words when they slip and are falling to the ground?  How long does it takes a body to rot?  Lots of folks are well on their way before death.  Most folks.  Their soul is as rotten as an apple left on the ground from last year.  When people come over to the house to say how sorry they are – cry, cry some more.

I was really angry at Jim.  All I wanted was to be married, work, have some children, and be a mom and a good wife.  For the first two years of being married I was on the pill and tried avoiding getting pregnant but then I went off the pill but we never had any luck.

About a month after Jim left me, I lost my job at the Cute Curl.  A less rewarding job never existed.  Sometimes I call Jim’s pager and leave the telephone number for the battered women’s shelter.  I also toss in the city morgue for good measure just so he knows I’m still around.

I don’t have a home telephone or a cell phone.  That presents a problem at times especially when it’s raining, but I cannot afford a phone and raise my children all at once.  Things cost money.  Besides, who the hell do I need to call, save for an emergency?  Certainly, no one needs to call me.  I realized that I don’t really need a telephone.  From time to time, sure, but then I walk to the town square right near the fountain shop and page Jim from the pay phone.  I don’t go when it rains of course, because my babies will get wet. 

My little girl's full name is Kimberly Elizabeth Amethyst Michelle Austin.  I call her Keam, which is pronounced Key-Am.  Her brother, older by only minutes, is named George Thomas, after Jim’s daddy.  Before deciding on Keam, I thought of Jessica Michelle as well as a few others, and for George Thomas, I originally had James Walter.  But, I like my choices.

Jim’s living in Chicago now with Vera and their three children.  It’s ninety–five cents a pop to page him long distance.  Not money well spent when I added it up, almost seven dollars a week.  I had to stop.  Margaret, my best friend, said that if I took seven dollars a week in ten years I’d have well over six thousand dollars because of interest.

Now, I page Jim only on occasions like a holiday.  Special days like National Break Your Heart In Two Day.

“The man who finds a wife finds a treasure and receives favor from the Lord,” Proverbs 18:22

My husband Jim would do himself good to know this Bible verse.  He has abandoned a treasure in me that is for sure.  I also started mailing him, once a week, a note with nothing but Bible verses to make him think about me.  Hey, here I am, your wife.  Remember me?  My most recent letter had the following.

I confess my sins; I am deeply sorry for what I have done. Psalm 38:18 

Who has never sinned?  Kings 8:46  

Wash me clean from my guilt.  Purify me from my sin.  For I recognize my shameful deeds — they haunt me day and night. Psalm 51:2-3 

Did Jim contact me?  Not at chance.  Week after week, a note goes out to him.  Even if he denies me, he cannot deny my existence.  He cannot deny the Bible or his wicked ways for dumping on me.

Right now I am in the Sue Kellogg Library in Stone Mountain, Georgia USA.  Margaret is allowing me to use her computer since it’s not very busy and closing time is near and her boss is not here.  Her boss is a pretty fussy cat so Margaret said to wait until she has left the building.  Elvis has left the building – start typing.  Margaret is in charge when Elvis is gone.

The entire year has spun by and not a day has slipped past when I did not believe Jim would run up the sidewalk of my apartment screaming my name like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.  I would take him back before my heart could skip a beat.  He wouldn’t have to beg.  As much as I cried and wished evil on him, I would still take him back.  I wouldn’t even think about killing him anymore, either.  There are so many wonderful things about Jim that I miss, including swimming in the pool, playing cards, reading books together while wrapped up in blankets on the sofa, all sorts of memorable things, including the eighteen-minute sex test, where we just lay on the bed, Jim inside me, neither of us able to move one muscle for eighteen minutes (that’s the rule).

God can use sorrow in our lives to help us turn away from sin and seek salvation.  We will never regret that kind of sorrow.  But sorrow without repentance is the kind that results in death.   Corinthians 7:10

Jim could learn a little from this verse, too.  I have been sorrowful about my entire bad self.  I live with repentance.  It’s true, I live with remorse but no longer with God.  I gave up on Him last year, the worst year of my life.  Twenty–two years of Bible study, preaching, reciting verses, being good, and what did it get me?  Flat-ass nothing.  I’ve flown so far from God even the angels can’t find me.  Thank God for that!  That’s stupid to write – thanking God for helping me turn my back on Him.  Hey, He turned his back on me.  I’m not angry about it.  I’m just no longer giving myself away to God, man, or anyone or anything.  I’m on my own.

I suspect that if people read this Document of Life in one hundred years, they may not want to be preached at so I will limit my Bible verses to a smattering – only a smattering.  I may have stopped believing in God but some things live inside you.  Like verses. If I had memorized Shakespeare, I’d spit him on these pages instead.

Just for starters, Christmas this last year was as rotten as rotten can get all by myself with no money for a tree, no gifts, and no one to spend it with–no nothing, squat.  This upcoming Christmas promises to be much better.  The only thing I had were my babies inside of me and although I was sure they would be sent from heaven, being all alone with no one to talk to was hell.  Pure hell.  I had no t.v. so I couldn’t even watch Dick Clark on New Years.  I had a lot of time to write on my yellow tablets (which I have since lost), the first version of my Document of Life.  I read books galore.  They are free to check out at the library, but better not be late.  I puked a lot because I was still so ill feeling carrying my babies.  Seems that any time I ate anything, be it a hamburger or carrots, I felt sick.  There’s no Christmas joy in that.  Being sick lasted most of my pregnancy.  Good times.

By late spring, I was huge – big as a wooly mammoth, and as hairy, too.  I stopped shaving my legs and arms pits.  Too much trouble as I got big.  I looked like some ape-woman.  My babies were born on Saturday, May 7th, 2005 at 6:29 a.m. and 6:37 a.m. at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, downtown Loserville.  If you got to go to Grady for anything, it’s because you have nothing and you’re probably a big loser.  You have nothing because you are nothing.  George Thomas weighed 5.6 oz and 18 inches long and Keam was 5.3 oz and 17 ½ inches long.  Well, WORLD look at me now.  I have something better than money or a new house or fancy-girl clothes.  I have my babies.  They weren’t planned, and nothing seems to work out as planned but I am blessed.  I will spare you the details; however, if you want to know the amount of pain I suffered during child birth, go stand on the highway and step in front of a semi-truck.  That should explain all you need to know.

I was so poor I was embarrassed for being at Grady Hospital and giving the hospital my real name.  I knew I couldn’t pay for squat, and I didn’t want them hunting me down to make good on the cost of birthing my children, but the lady at the check–in desk was real kind and asked if I had insurance and when I told her no, she said not to worry.  The next day I was so hungry I about ate the paint off the wall.  All that food was free so I stocked up and took home a bunch of apples and little containers of fruit cocktail.  But, if I didn’t hand over my real name I’d never be able to take my babies home.  The only thing I had to pay for was my ride to and from the hospital.  I made up a name but never used it.  Edwina Masso.

On Friday night, May 6th about ten o’clock, I felt that it was time to go, so I took the bus to the train station then rode down to the hospital, carrying my over–night case.  The train ride cost $3.50.  For the ride home, I had a taxi pick me up with two car seats.  The hospital won’t let you take your babies home without a car seat.  That cost $57.80.  I got to the hospital about eleven–fifteen on Friday night and left Sunday afternoon around 1:00.  Today, the babies are four months old.  That would make it September 7.  One of each.  George Thomas was named after Jim’s father, who we all called G.T.  He died last April of this year, not long ago.  That made me very sad because I always thought of G.T. as my second Daddy.

I want you to know what will happen to the Christians who have died. Thessalonians 4:13

When the trumpet sounds, the Christians who have died will be raised with transformed bodies.  Thessalonians 15:52

When the time comes, I will see G.T. in Heaven.  Shirley, his wife, still alive and smoking like a bus, will not be there to interrupt our conversations about old-time baseball, souped-up cars, and playing crazy eights or gin.  She is going elsewhere when the time comes.  I may no longer believe in God, but I believe in Hell.

Being in the Sue Kellogg Library typing happened quite by accident.  About three weeks after giving birth (this would have been the first week of June), I was out strolling my babies through town and as I was about to cross over the railroad tracks, it just started raining like a horse peeing on a flat rock.  I ran the stroller up to the library and had to use their bathroom to dry off with paper towels.  The babies were screaming, and Margaret, who I had seen many times before but did not really know except that she works at the library and checks out books, watched George Thomas and Keam while I dried off.  They got slightly wet.  Margaret was so nice to do that but she couldn’t get them to calm down much so I sat in the library and fed them a bottle until they went to sleep.  Margaret actually fed Keam.  I don’t think her boss, Gloria, was too happy that Margaret helped me out.  It wasn’t even busy.  She only hinted around, “Margaret, are those books shelved yet?  Margaret, do we have any pencils?  Margaret, is my ass screwed on tight enough?!”  I call her Elvis.  “Has Elvis left the building?”  If she’s gone, Margaret will reply, “Elvis has left the building” or “Still singing the blues.”

I’ll bet Margaret’s boss, Gloria, was the kind of kid who was so bossy that she had to beg the other kids to play with her.  I’ll say this?bossy gets the job done.

Margaret is black and seven years older than me.  She's from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and she is very pretty and has a wonderful laugh, like a child with worldly knowledge.  Her full name is Margaret Virginia Eliezer.

“Most people I meet, black or white, hate my guts,” I told Margaret.  “I bet they wish I was dead.  Nobody wants to see a white girl with two black babies.  Sometimes I wish I was dead.  If it wasn’t for my babies, I might just jump off Stone Mountain right into the rocks below.  Let them find me there with a note rolled up in my hand, explaining nothing, but making the mystery even more compelling.”

“Babies need their Momma, especially in this rotten world,” I thought but did not say to Margaret.

“Hannah,” Margaret said, “don’t ever wish yourself dead.  I know what it is like to be dead every night.  That’s the only way I survived my daddy.  He raped me almost every day of my life when I was living at home with him.  When he came into the room, I made myself dead.  I was nobody.  There was nothing I wanted more in the world than to be dead and meet my momma for the first time in Heaven, but that was the wrong way to think.  I only wanted to be dead long enough for him to go away.”

One day Margaret asked if Jim was the babies’ father.

“Naw,” I told her, “I wish he was.  Jim is white.  Their daddy is black.”  That part was true.  But then I lied to Margaret and said, “Their daddy was murdered before they were born and I am pretty dead-dog certain they will never catch the person.”  I didn’t want her ever asking another question about their daddy, and I figured if he was dead, what else was there to know?  Margaret would certainly let the conversation go at that point, and she did.

I never thought about writing a Document of Life until I read a story about a box of papers a woman in Wyoming found that her great, great, great grandmother wrote back in the 1800s when she moved out west on a wagon train.  Her journal is over one hundred years old.  That’s where my idea came from.  This must be well over four years ago that I read about her.  Ever since, I’ve been thinking about my own Document of Life.  It was about the same time my Me Maw died.  She was living with Daddy in his new house, which she said she liked, but I know her heart was at the farm.  One morning when she did not wake up, Daddy went in to find her peacefully still in the bed with her Bible in her right hand and opened to Corinthians 5:4 – “We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by everlasting life.”  Me Maw knew it was her time to go, and she was ready.  We buried her next to Poppa Raymond.  That’s when I started thinking about all my relatives that I don’t really know – some I never met – as well as the ones that are dead who I have heard stories about all my life.  I wanted to know who folks were and what they looked like.  Most are forgotten to time.  I want to be remembered like the 1800s woman.

For the past year, I wrote, not a diary, but tablets of information about rotten things Jim did to me over the last four years.  This Document of Life is much better.  I like what the 1800s woman did much better than all the bitching I did on cheap yellow tablets.  I had over three hundred ways to kill him.  About six I figure I could get away with.  That’s all I wrote about back then–me and Jim–all the bad stuff.  I wrote out my heart.  I tried purging myself like a bad case of the trots.  I was going to mail it to him but that was self–defeating and destructive to the person I want to be, who I am becoming as I change and deal with my rotten fate.  Plus, what if he wound up dead and I wasn’t the person who did it.  I’d get in trouble.  There’s no satisfaction in that.  I never felt too good when all I wrote was the bad stuff.  Bad stuff this and bad stuff that.  But that’s for naught.  I lost all of my yellow tablets on the bus one day – just up and left them on the bus by accident.  That was one big dark day in my life, a black thunder cloud of grief.  Maybe someone who really needed my “Accidental Death List” found it and put it to good use.

Not long after my Me Maw died, I read the story about the 1800s woman and I knew I could do exactly what she did.  I want to say it was around 1840 but I cannot remember exactly, so I cannot say as such.  But around there some where.  I know it was before the Civil War.   Margaret also read the story, but Margaret never thought writing about her own Document of Life, not like I have done.  She, too, cannot recall when the diary was written.  The 1800’s woman wrote:

Momma died last spring of the fever and two days later John started talking about leaving Pennsylvania before much longer.  I fught him on that.  It got to be late in the summer and we would be hit by snow.  This year I went to Momma’s grave early as the snow blew ‘way and cried when I told her I wouldn’t see her ‘gain til Heaven.  Next day we were bumping on the trail with forty other families amoung us, scarfs over our face to breathe out the dust.  Let Heaven fill our thoughts.

I hope she wasn’t sad forever.  She had four children and during the trip the youngest one was killed when the wagon wheel rode over him.  They buried him somewhere in Indiana under a chestnut tree near a lake.  He was only two.  I hope she put soap in her husband’s chili to give him the runs real bad because being on the bumping dusty trail and having to crap every third bump would fix him something good for putting her through all of that torture of moving from her home and her losing baby.  That type of retribution isn’t Christian, but I think God will make allowances for certain behavior.  I don’t know what I’d do if one of my babies is ever hurt.  I’d do anything to provide for them.  A person must provide and protect.

Today is Thursday, and Elvis is off.  I’m here in the library early morning and both babies are on a blanket on the floor.  This little symbol above what I am typing is something Margaret helped me find on the computer to show that for some reason I had to stop typing.  Instead of telling you that I am stopping or that Elvis just showed up, I will just stop and start later.  It might be five minutes later or five days, who really knows until I start back up?  So, for the record, I had to stop because the power went out in the library and I lost a good five pages of brilliance.  I have just learned a valuable lesson in saving what I type.  It is about one and a half days later.  The power wasn’t out long but I went home after the black-out, frustrated and ready to cry for having not backed up my typing.  Go girl, type like your fingers are on fire!

Around the time my brother Vernon got into trouble playing pool and lost ten thousand dollars, and I really became tired of cutting hair at The Cute Curl and started thinking about going back to school to learn to do something else, my troubles all pretty much started at that time, too.  That’s when the big changes in my life occurred.  I always wanted big changes in my life and God answered my prayers.  He delivered like Dominos.

That was the first part of July 2004, right around the holidays when Jim was in Chicago visiting his three boys.  I was driving down the narrow dirt road to pick up Vernon at his new trailer and as I cut a path through the back roads, a tan-colored veil of dust rose up behind my Miata and as I gazed in the rear-view mirror I thought it looked like a cloud of smoke making me invisible to the rest of the world.  I had an appointment with the eye doctor in town, Genestown, where I lived, only a few miles from Stone Mountain.  Vernon wanted a ride into town to play pool on his day off from working at O’Donnell’s Worm Farm and Cricket Hatchery.  I told him he could go if he drove me home from the doctor’s because I didn’t want to drive with drops in my eyes.  His car had a flat tire and needed a new oil pump.  Mr. O’Donnell’s brother picks up Vernon at the bottom of the hill each morning for work, but if he has to honk his horn more than three times he drives off.  Vernon’s pretty good at getting up in the morning and being on time.  I’ll give him that.  Vernon hates being late.

“Ninety percent of things in life take care of themselves just by showing up on time,” Vernon always said.  “The other ten percent is just manners.”

As I made my way to his trailer, I drove past an undeveloped subdivision where the streets were long ago cut out and paved but never was a house built on the property.  It’s like a ghost map of a life unrealized.  It used to scare the heck out of me to go near the place but not anymore.  When I was eleven years old I saw the most horrific sight in my entire life.  It happened in the cut-out roads of this subdivision.  I watched two men rape a woman in the back of a pick-up truck.  I was a witness.  I have never told a soul about this but since I am writing in my Document of Life there is no holding back.  I’ve never told Vernon or Jim.  Only God knows what I saw.

Vernon’s trailer isn’t new.  In fact, it is a thirty-two-year-old worn-down dump with windows gauzed over with duct tape and indoor plumbing that barely functions and carpet that’s threadbare.  In several spots, it’s worn down to the particle board and any spot that’s buckling up or splitting, he nailed it down with stolen road signs.  His floor’s checkered with a stop sign, a yield sign, a do not enter and two speed zone signs – 45 mph and 70 mph.  The 70 mph sign is in front of the bedroom door because as he told me, he’s always moving 70 mph to get laid.  No one had lived there in eight years and there was no electricity when he first moved in, but he and several friends tapped into the power line and hooked up.  All he needed was enough power to run the television, the hot water heater, and an occasional light.  He said he wouldn’t use much electric power, and therefore, would most likely go undetected.  There’s no way to dispose of all his used-up water so Vernon stole pvc pipe from a construction site and rigged the pipes to move the water from the toilet, bath, kitchen sink, and washing machine to the cut-out ditches near the dirt road.  “Just like the Romans,” I thought.  He spray-painted the pvc pipes with camouflage colors and threw dirt, sticks, and leaves over the pipes to cover it from the road.  You can’t see it unless you’re standing on top of it. 

The only two things Vernon did not like about the trailer was the lack of heat but he bought a space heater.  Second, the washing machine was outside under a poorly constructed carport and that didn’t sit too right with him.  When he first opened the washing machine he found a dead raccoon inside but after running a few cycles he figured it was clean enough for his laundry.

It was kind of a genius idea to rig up the pvc pipes but when I asked Vernon why he didn’t use his skills for legal work, he said that just like the Blues Brothers he was on a mission from God and he didn’t necessarily have time to be honest about things that he felt should be free.

Well, I don’t really like the idea of Vernon living in the trailer and stealing electricity but I will never tell on him.  When I told Jim he shook his head in disgust and told me that anytime I wanted to stop giving my “loser brother” some extra money on the side it would be fine with him.  That started an argument.  It’s family and with family you have to be somewhat, if not a lot, tolerant.

When your endurance is fully developed, you will be strong in character and ready for anything.  James 1:4

Jim said, “If the cops come knocking on our door it’s not me they’re going to be taking away in handcuffs.  I’ll show them right to his front door.” 

Vernon and I are twins, but Jim never cared.  I see now that he pretty much disliked my entire family from the get go and half the time I believe he couldn’t stand his own family.  He would argue with his father every time they got together.  Argue over the stupidest things like how cold it is outside or what play the quarterback was going to call, will that fly buzz the window or the t.v. first?  Things that didn’t matter except about who could top who.  “I’m right.  You’re wrong.  I’m the winner!  You’re a loser.”  They never stopped arguing.  I seemed to always get along with G.T.  Shirley didn’t like me much.

I never realized how much they argued or the way Jim treated me until I wrote in my yellow tablets.  I brought up all the old memories, the absolute dirt.  He’s not up front in his dislike, but he made fun of my family.  At a family reunion in Anniston, Alabama, Jim bought my whole family coon skin hats.  We thought they were the nicest thing anyone had done for us.  Jim said he could find anyone in my entire family simply by looking up over the crowd of people for their furry heads bobbing up and down.  On the ride back to Atlanta we had an argument about the hats and then he said my family was so stupid they didn’t even know he was making fun of them.  I didn’t talk to him the rest of the drive home.

Although I thought Vernon’s trailer was an eyesore and that he deserved better, I liked the idea of him finally being on his own and no longer living with a bunch of uneducated friends just sitting around drinking beer and piling up pizza boxes and chicken bones from Popeye’s Fried Chicken in the corner of the kitchen.  Now, I like Popeye’s chicken as much as the next person, so does Jim, but not garbage piled up to my rear end.

Any who, I no longer live near the old subdivision where I witnessed the rape.  When Jim and I were married, we lived about five miles away and I’d drive past it at least once a week, oftentimes more so.  I got comfortable with it.  It’s a subdivision of seven streets and cul-de-sacs that were developed in the early 1990s, but after the developer had cleared the land and paved the streets he was arrested for murdering his family in 1968 in Kansas City.  Almost twenty-one years after the fact, the police finally matched some evidence, and like a swarm of vultures, they were all over him. . . maybe all over him like stink on a pig.  He was sent to prison in Kansas for the rest of his sorry life.  At the time he was arrested I was eight years old - that would make it 1990.  Since the subdivision backed up to my parents’ farm I would walk through the woods or ride my bicycle, sometimes with Vernon, sometimes without, and I would sit in a large live oak tree and eat apples and watch the land being bulldozed over, huge pipes being laid down, and the streets being cut out then asphalt laid down.  Then there were times that I simply looked out over the unused street and weeds growing like wild wreckage.

It took about six years for all the legal wrangling to sift out after the developer was locked away in the pokey but by then the airport traffic had increased so much and the air patterns flew directly over head on a path right over where they proposed to build all those houses.  The airplanes created such a terrible noise that all developing was prohibited and no houses were ever built on the land.  There were plans by the airport authority to build a park and a golf course but the property has never been built upon and all the blacktop streets are overgrown with weeds and scrub brush and look ghostly.  It’s called Rapture Hall but I call it Rape Her Hard.  But never out loud to anyone.

For most of my life I lived near Rapture Hall with my momma, daddy, brothers Larry and Vernon and my sister, Lydia.  It wasn’t always Rapture Hall.  It was a farm owned by Mr. Meriwether but after he died, his children, who no longer lived in the area, sold off the house and anything that wasn’t nailed down in a big auction.  Daddy bought some old tools for a dollar.  Then Mr. Meriwether’s property was sold off to the developer.  This was several years before my parents divorced and sold off their property to the airport authority.  The airport people were going to use part of our land as well as Rapture Hall for the golf course, but they never built it.  Nothing.  It’s all fenced off now except for the portions where people have knocked it down.  I always figured I’d learn to play golf and ride around in a golf cart and see my old house and chicken coop and dog lot.

I must stop typing as it’s late and Margaret has allowed me to type beyond closing time.  Tonight, she and I are walking to the pharmacy for a Cherry Coke and strolling my babies in the sweet summer air of late evening. 

Last night when Margaret and I were sitting in the park drinking our sodas, we sang some songs to the babies.  They both liked best, the themes to Gilligan’s Island and the Beverly Hillbillies: “Here’s a story ‘bout a man named Jed, poor mountaineer barely kept his family feed.  Then one day he’s shooting at some food and up through the ground came a bubbling crude.  Oil that is.  Black gold.  Texas tea.”

Margaret has a better singing voice than I do, and when she starts singing, the babies always turn their eyes toward her to see where the angelic sound is coming from.  I sound like a moose that’s fallen through thin ice, just bellowing out in pain and fear.

This next morning, Margaret stayed in bed with the babies and we laid around in bed talking for about an hour then I walked up to the coffee shop and brought back fresh hot steaming gourmet coffee and fresh bagels and by the time I returned she had woken up.  We sat at the kitchen table and talked some.  She did not have to be to work until 11:30.  The evening fell upon us quickly last night so Margaret slept over, but since I have only one bed, we shared.  I made certain not to bump into her with my feet and cut her with my toes nails.

Margaret doesn’t let me drink coffee but once a week as a treat.  It’s all part of a workout schedule and health regime to get in shape and be healthy.  I’m going to get fit.

“When I was fifteen I ran away from home because my father raped me all the time, over and over,” Margaret said.  When someone tells you something like “my father raped me every day of my childhood,” there is nothing you can do but listen.  You can’t say, well, let me tell you how bad my life was, because having your daddy rape you every morning before school is about the worst it can get.

“He started when I was nine years old, most of the time before I went to school or at night before I went to sleep.  Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night and he would be on top of me, and a few times he was calling out my momma’s name.  He raped me so often that finally when I heard the bedroom door open I'd just hike up my nightgown, spread my legs, and pretend to be asleep until he was finished.”

Margaret has these little small scars, circles, from when her father burned her with a cigarette when she wasn't paying attention to what was going on while he was doing it to her.  The scars are the size of a cigarette tip.  He must have been the biggest asshole in the world.  She said has one near her pussy and no hair will grow there.  I acted as though I didn’t believe her, so she pulled down her panties and showed me and right there on the side of her pussy there was a little circle-scar.  I might'a bought a gun at that point and shot the bastard.

“I ran away to live with my aunt until I finished high school.  Then I went to college until I earned a Masters degree.  I had a scholarship to North Carolina State University then I attended Duke University.”

Rescue the poor and helpless; deliver them from the grasp of evil people. Psalm 82:4

I should not, but I hate her daddy something awful bad.  “What did your aunt say?” I asked.

“I told her what he had done to me when she asked about the scars.  She said I never had to worry about my father ever again.  As far as she was concerned, she did not know where I ran off to and never heard from me.  It was our secret.  My daddy called her a bunch of times wanting to know where I was but my aunt said she never heard from me.  One time, he called and she said that I had called her to say I was fine and living in Portland, Oregon.  She never again heard from him, never heard a word about him–not until she read his obituary in the paper.  She’s the one that told me he was dead.”

“Were you sad?”

“No, not really.  Well, yes.  Any time your father dies it hurts.  It was just something else that happened in my life.  I was scared.  I knew he was in Hell and that scared me.  I knew he was down there burning.  I sort of thought that if I forgave him for what he did, then God would too, and maybe he wouldn’t be in Hell.  Not in Heaven, but certainly he wouldn’t be in Hell any longer.  I prayed everyday for him for his redemption.  Everyday I told God that I forgave him for all that he did to me.  I hope that helped.”

“She must have been a fine aunt to have.”

“She was wonderful and probably saved me from whatever else was going to happen.  She wasn’t my real aunt.  She was a friend of the family.  I don’t even remember how, but she never had any children, and so I used to just call her Aunty E.  Her real name was Elizabeth.  I always knew where she lived in Charlotte because I would get a Christmas card from her each year and I would write her letters and send her my poems and my new address each time we moved.  She always lived in the same house.  I felt as though she was like a mother.  She wasn’t even black.  She was white and about seventy or eighty years old.  But she was feisty.  She didn’t let anyone take advantage of her.  She never did get married.”

“I wonder why not?”

“She told me that there had been a boy she liked in school and they courted awhile, but then he went off to college in the East and when he returned they went to the movies a bunch and she had fallen in love with him, but then the war broke out, World War II, and he was killed when his plane was shot down over England.  He wasn’t the pilot.  He was a gunner, I think she said, or a navigator.  She just never married.”  Just like Aunt Mavis, I thought.

Margaret never knew her momma, and her daddy never would tell her anything about her family, all of whom she has never met.  She only met the kinfolk on her daddy’s side.  Trash mostly, I imagine.  What else could produce someone like him?

A few days before Me Maw died, when I was a senior in high school, I visited her at Daddy’s house and brought some flowers and big navel oranges, her favorite.  She and I sat at the dining room table and played canasta, and that is when I noticed that her fingernails were very dark in color, almost black.  I thought she had painted them but then I realized they were bruised.  She said her fingers had been sore for about a week after she planted some petunias in the backyard.  Me Maw was sharp as a tack, winning every hand of cards, then laughing at how lucky she was. “Oh, look it there.  Can you believe it?”

Momma drove up from Savannah for Me Maw’s funeral.  Both Larry and Lydia flew home but stayed with friends.  Momma stayed at the apartment with me.  The church, the funeral home, and then in the fellowship hall for all the food, these were the last places my entire family ever spent time in together.  Momma talked to all of us kids and gave us tons of hugs, and I know she missed us, but whenever Daddy came around her, she bolted up and went off to talk with someone else.  Larry was funny as I had ever seen him, but he was also angry at Momma and Daddy, and not too forgiving.  Lydia lied her pants off all the way down to her underwear.   She told the most wild stories about meeting movie stars and having lunch with Drew Barrymore and Frankie Muniz.  She had a circle of people listening to her stories but I knew they were all lies.  Vernon and I hung around Larry and Lydia and darn near wouldn’t let them out of our sight.  I kept hoping that a funeral miracle would reunite our family back together, an understanding that we are still a family and that Me Maw’s death was supposed to dove-tail us together.  The next day, Momma, Vernon, Lydia, Larry, and me, everyone except Daddy–he wasn’t invited by Momma–came over to the apartment and Momma ordered pizza and we sat around laughing and telling old funny stories.  After a lot of hugs, everyone went home.

Two nights ago, I had a dream that I was walking up a hill toward heaven.  I must have died but I didn’t feel as though I had and never thought so.  But, when I reached the top of the hill, the land flattened out and was easier to walk upon.  When I saw what looked like heaven, I walked toward it, but when I got to within one hundred feet away from the tall gate, the invisible fence shocked me around the neck like a dog trying to run out of his yard.  When I ran up to the gate and grabbed it, I was shocked, too.  Then when I ran back toward the hill, it was a cliff and I fell off the cliff.  That’s when I woke up.