The Dry Grass of August(12)

“C’mon on in, Willie, the water’s great!”

He put down his gun, stripped to his underwear, and dove in. Mrs. Straley, who’d walked out on the dock, said, “Yore daddy’s gone crazy.”

“He’s done that before,” Stell said.

“Gone crazy or gone swimming?”

Stell didn’t answer.





The jelly we made turned out just fine. Daddy’s favorite was the spicy brown apple butter Mama put up in the fall, which he ate with hot biscuits and fried frog legs, after Mr. Straley taught him how to gig. Daddy let me stand in the marsh grass at night and watch as Mr. Straley beamed a flashlight steady on a frog to blind it while Daddy impaled it on his gig, an old broomstick with tenpenny nails in the end. They tossed the frogs into a sack that hung from a tree limb. The bag kept on wiggling, which made me feel bad. Mama cooked frog legs at least once a week, but I never would eat them. I made do with everything else, snap beans and limas, corn on the cob, tomatoes and green peas, collards boiled with fatback, new potatoes, and leathery dried apples.

Our bathroom was an outhouse across a creek, and Mama wouldn’t let us use it at night. So Stell and I, who slept together in a single bed, peed in an enamel pot that was cold to my bottom, summer or winter. When I had to get up in the night to squat over the johnny, I’d crawl back in next to Stell and try to stay awake to listen to Mama and Daddy. Sometimes they laughed so loud it shook the wall between our rooms.

In the winter, when the front room smelled of kerosene and wood smoke, Stell and I played Parcheesi and Chinese checkers to the shuffling and snapping of Bicycle cards as Mama and Daddy played gin rummy. There was an old piano with pump pedals and perforated rolls of music. Mama and Daddy harmonized to “The Darktown Strutter’s Ball” or “A Bicycle Built for Two” or Daddy’s favorite, “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie.”

Stell asked Daddy why he liked that song so much.

“Your mama knows.”

Stell looked at Mama. “Is it because you fell in love?”

Mama shook her head. “Not right away.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Daddy. “The first time I saw you, I fell for that mess of curls and those gorgeous hazel eyes.”

“Then you got married and had two little girls,” I said.

Mama smiled. “Something like that.”

That night, Daddy stood at the kitchen sink pumping water, singing, “Wait till the sun shines, Pauly.”

Even before they married, there were problems with Daddy’s mother, Cordelia Watts, who thought that a college girl like Mama would never appreciate a country carpenter like Daddy. In Mama’s opinion, Meemaw wouldn’t have approved of anyone her baby boy took for a wife. And right off, they disagreed about religion. Meemaw asked Mama what church she went to, and Mama said, “Methodist, of course,” which was well known of girls who attended West Virginia Wesleyan.

Meemaw said, “The Watts’re full-immersion Baptists. Always have been.”

Mama told us she went to one baptism and never saw anything so primitive. She stayed what Meemaw called a “city Methodist,” and eventually Daddy became one, too.

When I think of Shumont, I remember a June morning after Puddin came along. We’d gone back to the mountains for a vacation. Mama was nursing Puddin in one of the wooden porch rockers, a scarf around her shoulders against the chill. Daddy was splitting kindling, and Stell and I were helping Mrs. Straley churn butter. Daddy had his shirt off, and in spite of how cool it was, he was puffing and sweating.

Mama hummed while she rocked. Mrs. Straley let us churn until we got tired, then she finished, moving the plunger up and down as if there were nothing to it. She poured off a glass of buttermilk for herself and spread fresh butter on a slab of homemade bread for me and Stell. That morning is what I remember when I think of the log cabin on Shumont, and it’s hard to understand how bad things got between Mama and Daddy after that.





CHAPTER 5

Stell stood by a building between Uncle Taylor’s house and the dunes. She shouted over the roar of the surf. “We’re staying in here—with Sarah.”

The cabana reminded me of the breezeway at home, filled with light, catching the wind, with bamboo blinds to lower if it rained. Straw mats covered the floor, and strings of Japanese lanterns crisscrossed the ceiling. Three bunks with plaid spreads, summer blankets folded across the end of each. Our suitcases on luggage racks. Stell pointed to a door. “Our own bathroom.”

“Cool! And where’s—” Then I saw her, plain and quiet, sitting on the third bunk. “Hey, Sarah.”

“Hey.” She was all bony angles. Her brunette hair, tied back with a green ribbon, was thick and glossy. Like her mother’s. Her eyes looked fuzzy and sad behind the thick lenses of the horn-rimmed glasses she nudged with her finger. Nothing fit my memory of my pleasant cousin.

“How you doing?” I asked her.

“Okay.”

The screen door banged open and Puddin came in.

“Y’all come to the beach! It’s great—oh, hey, Sarah.”

Sarah looked at Puddin.

Puddin said, “I saw your daddy. Where’s your mama?”

“Gone.”

“When’s she—”

Stell said, “Puddin, hush.”