Page 32 of Demon Copperhead
His eyes got wider, and mine probably did too. I’d never known my name was from my father. The little man’s mouth opened. It seemed like he was laughing, but nothing came out.
“A boy,” she said. “Not much to be done about that, is there?”
Brother Dick’s head shook sideways on its crooked track, agreeing with her, but he was looking at me with a kind of twinkle. Almost like, We’re in this boat together, my man.
“What should we do with him?” she asked.
He did the silent laugh again, nodding his head. His eyes crinkled up and he worked his mouth until sounds finally came out. It sounded like “Wortheemup.”
She nodded. “All right. That’s a good idea, I’ll run him a bath. And then what?”
Brother Dick looked me right in the eyes, reading me like a book. I wanted to look away but he didn’t let me. Then he looked the rest of me over like he could read that too. Every place I’d been, every damn thing I’d lost, the full shame and the pity of me. He seemed interested especially in my shoe that was wrapped in a bread bag. The nodding and working his mouth started again, like pumping a well handle until sounds came out: “Henees noothoos.”
“Oh, for the love of Pete. He does. I’ll ask Jane Ellen if she can hunt up some shoes to fit him. You have a sharp eye, little brother.”
She marched me upstairs to a bathroom with a tub. Yes. Goddamn son of a bitch. No shower, and not just your average tub, this sucker was big enough for boiling a hog. She showed me how to turn the taps and said I’d better take a good long soak while this Jane Ellen person rounded up some things for me to wear. Supposedly she had brothers in all the sizes. I sat on the toilet thinking about the Devil’s Bathtub that took out my dad, a hushed-up tale that had run rogue on my brain for all my days. I didn’t know what that place looked like and never would,but probably nothing like this long white china bowl. I stared the thing down, thinking: Okay devil, it’s you or me.
In the end I figured I’d probably live and be the better for a good soak, given the days of shit I needed to get off my skin. I ran the water, I held my breath, I stepped in. Eased my butt down into the deepest water I’d ever got into. Sat there, naked and not dead, letting a boatload of new info soak into my brain. My whole lifetime of having nobody, claiming a pretend mammaw, getting kicked to the back of every line while people with kin looked after their own: that was all a lie. I hadmyown. It’s a lot to turn over all at once. I had no idea what came next. Maybe nothing more for my trouble than some hand-me-down shoes, but still. I had my father’s name. These people looked like me. And had money, you had to think. I mean, that house. Parlors and washrooms, downstairs, upstairs, every room full of furniture. Chairs with goddamn feet. ThebathtubI was sitting in had feet, that looked like scary bird claws. This is not a lie. If the devil had a bathtub, that would be the one.
Somebody had laid out so many clothes on the bed, it looked like an outlet store in there. I put on the most normal ones that fit and went downstairs to a big dinner cooked by my grandmother and this Jane Ellen individual, a heavyset girl with long, twisty black hair and a gap between her front teeth that she stuck her tongue in whenever she smiled, which was every time you looked at her. There was so much food. I was set to founder and die happy.
Jane Ellen was number eleven of the girls my grandmother had raised up and educated. She was in high school, worked part-time in the doctor’s office, and had lived at this house since she was eight. No discussion of where she came from before that, a mystery given the brothers around someplace not far away, with clothes evidently to spare. Not a pure orphan like me. She acted like living with my grandmother was the happiest life imaginable. They both treated Brother Dick like their pet, asking his opinions on things, leaning over to wipe off his chin. Our dinner was chicken, sweet potatoes, and green beans. His was this greenmilkshake thing they brought him in a big glass with a straw because one of his problems was with swallowing.
Before we ate, my grandmother asked me, “Do you return the blessing?”
No idea how to pass that test. I froze. Fork stuck in a piece of chicken, heart in my gullet.
“We don’t!” she said in her gruff voice. Jane Ellen and Brother Dick laughed, and we all dug in. She asked more questions, such as why Mom took up with such a bad apple after my father died. I could think of a few answers, starting with Mom having shit for brains, but due to politeness I just said lonesome I guess.
“Lonesome!Nothing lonesomer than getting shackled to a bully-man in his house of spite.” My grandmother looked at Jane Ellen, and for once there was no smile there. I got the idea they’d both done time in the spite house. My grandmother with her snake-handling husband, and as far as Jane Ellen went, who knew. I wanted to tell them it’s not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are. But I kept my mouth shut. It’s safer knowing more about people than they know about you.
After dinner my grandmother and Brother Dick smoked cigarettes. His legs and the rest of him weren’t much count, but his hands were amazing. Tiny and clean, the fingernails rounded off, holding the cigarette like a little white bird perched in his hand, singing its song of pretty blue smoke. I tried not to stare. The brother was more like a sister, and vice versa.
They put me up that night in the room with all the clothes, now folded and put away so I could sleep in the bed, which was the size of a ship, with tall wooden posts in all four corners, for what reason I have no idea. Like you might need to run up a flag in the night. The room smelled the same as the rest of the house, like dust and old people, and their doors had the old-fashioned keyholes like in the Peggot house. Maggot and I used to play around with those long iron keys because nobody at all cared if we buried them in the yard for treasure, triedmelting them in a fire, or what. Not so here. My grandmother came and looked in on me after I was in bed. Then the door closed, and I heard the key turn and click. I was her prisoner.
But if I could run, where would I even go? Being locked in a room, or living my life in general, no difference. The only roads I knew were full of people that would sooner run me over than help me out. I could end up as dead as my mom and baby brother on any given day. I settled on being glad this was not the day. I had a full belly and wasn’t getting rained on. Tomorrow, another story. Probably the story of getting kicked out due to being a boy.
But this Dick person she doted on, asking for his advice and even taking it. That one I turned over and over. Then remembered what she’d said about people making their water. How he did that exactly, I couldn’t picture. But for sure, not standing up.
Chapter27
It took some time for her to make up her mind about me. She was one of these that is never going to be wrong, period. As regards to me: (1) No flesh and blood of hers was getting turned back over to the do-nothings at DSS. (2) She’d sooner shoot herself in the head than raise a boy, so. Getting her way was going to be a problem.
Her opinion on her brother Dick: most people thought he was brainless, but really he was the smartest person they knew. She wanted me to hang out with him, which I was a little scared to do, honestly, due to not knowing how. I asked what happened to him to get in the wheelchair. She said he was born with a spinal type of thing, but that life hadn’t helped his case any either. Whenever they were little, the boys at school bullied him to the extent almost of death. Stuffing him in a feed bag, hiding him in a culvert, stunts like that, just for being so small he couldn’t fight back. Also for liking to read and knowing the answers in school, which everybody knows is asking for it. She was the big sister and got handy at warding off the boys with whatever weapon fell to hand, but their father had other ideas and put him in a home in Knoxville. He didn’t get a lick of schooling over there, so she took him books if they went to visit. The father wanted him out of sight, with people at church saying a cripple was punishment from God. Poor little Dick was there for years, until the rest of the family passed away and she could go get him out.
Damn. I was still nervous to go talk to him, but less so after she told me all that. One no-toucher kid knows another, you have to think.
His room was downstairs for the wheelchair, and usually the door stood open. The first time I went in, he didn’t notice me because ofreading a book. Not regular reading, I meangone. He and that big book were not in this house, nor maybe this world. His room was basically a living room with a bed in it. Chairs, lamps, desk, plus some medical and bathroom stuff I tried not to look at. The desk had a lot going on there, including a kite. Every wall had shelves of more books than I’d seen anywhere, school library included. Some few had the skinny spines and the colors I knew were kids’ books. I’d not seen a lot of those. Somebody one time gave me the one where the boy is hateful and sent to bed with no supper, and in his head he’s a monster and goes to this island where it’s all wild monsters like him, seriously ticked off, making their wild rumpus. I loved that. But preferred comics, which I didn’t see any of at all in Mr. Dick’s room.
Finally I said, “Hey, Mr. Dick,” and he looked up and smiled, not that surprised. He motioned me to come in. His throat or voice box was messed up, but you could get used to it and mostly tell what he was saying. It took me a minute though to get to that point. That first day I checked out his books, asking what this or that one was about, and pretended I understood the answer. I didn’t find the wild boy one. His kids’ books had the old-timey pictures that kids now would get bored of. He must have kept every book he ever read. I asked if those were the ones his sister brought him in the cripple home, and he said yes. Which kind of wrecked me, how tragic that was. Jesus. But here these two were now, living happier-ever-after than most.
Mr. Dick didn’t take offense at much of anything, so in time I asked some nosy shit, like how did my grandmother get such a nice house (by outliving everybody else in the family), and what did the others die of (being meaner than snakes). Did he remember my dad? Yes! At the time of my grandmother fetching Mr. Dick back from the cripple home, after her husband died, my dad was a teenager. That tripped me out, to think of him walking around in this exact house, alive and a kid. I was used to thinking of my dad as another category of being, like Ant-Man or Jesus. But a real person. That looked like me. I wanted to know a million things, like what was his first car, what sports did he play. Mr. Dick was vague on that, saying just that he fought a lot withthe religious father, and then without any dad in the house to lay down the law, fought with my grandmother. Then turned sixteen and moved out. What he did between leaving this house and taking up with Mom in Lee County, which was a lot of years, Mr. Dick had no idea. Possibly nobody did. I wished I could find the book of my whole dad in that house and read every page.
So, taking crap from a teenager that looked like me: Was this the start of my grandmother taking her dim view of boys? I had to ask. Mr. Dick smiled and shook his head no, motioning over his crooked shoulder like, way, way back. Of course. The big, stinking guys that shoved his little wishbone arms and legs in a feed sack, laughing their nuts off. She’d made up her mind long before she had her redheaded baby boy. He probably never had a chance.
It was after her son ran off that she’d started taking in girls for their so-called educations. I asked Mr. Dick what she taught them that they wouldn’t learn in regular school. I’d already seen how Jane Ellen hit the books every single evening, homework spread out all over the kitchen table. My grandmother would quiz her or give pointers on history or even math, trig and such, which surprised me that an old person would know about. I’d thought it was a newer invention. Mr. Dick said she taught her girls to be the best in their class and not let anybody talk down to them. Same old song in other words: steer clear of the hateful boys. Mr. Dick said yes, that was it. I asked him how the girls graduated from their educations and moved out. He said generally by getting married.
It was a long couple of weeks I waited around. Some days she’d put me outside on garden chores. Jane Ellen also, if she wasn’t at school or work. We spent a morning turning over dirt where she wanted to put in her fall collards. I could get Jane Ellen tickled over the smallest thing, talking worms etc. But that only takes you so far. There wasn’t any TV. It was usually Mr. Dick or nothing. We guys had our laughs. Sometimes we made fun of my grandmother a tiny bit. He loved her of course, but to a certain extent, she was batshit. Our little secret.
