Slow Way Home Read online

  At the bus station, I slid to the end of a wooden bench advertising a furniture store and watched them from a distance. Mama kept pulling at the pants that matched the color of her hair while Darrell kept counting the wad of cash he had made from selling the car.

  As black fumes floated around the bus, passengers lined up to board. Mama made one final attempt. “Now, Brandon, you know if Mama could, she would.” She handed me a Greyhound bus schedule. “Right up here is Poppy and Nana’s phone number. You’re better off with them right now. Trust me on this one. Me and Darrell gotta get settled first and then we’ll come back for you. I promise it’s just for a little while. Hey, look at it as our new destiny. I’m going up there to get things ready for you.”

  I fought from blinking so I could tear right through her daisy-shaped sunglasses with my eyes. I won’t cry. I won’t cry. The words rang in my head to remind me I was tougher than anything she could dish out. My jaw clinched, and all of a sudden I found myself wanting to rip every fake blonde curl right off the top of her head.

  “Brandon, don’t give me that look. Just don’t, okay. This is hard enough on me as it is.”

  Darrell yelled from the door of the bus, and with one final brush against my arm she drifted away. At the top of the bus step she kissed her index finger and pointed it right at me. Her feet looked as tiny as doll feet standing on the wide step. With a final climb nothing was left of her at all.

  Before I called the number on the schedule, I watched the bus move slowly forward and then with a roar lurch towards the intersection. Unable to stop it, my eyes burned with emptiness, so I turned to study the red-and-white swirls on the nearest Coke machine. Staring into the bright colors, I felt myself becoming smaller and smaller until at last nobody could make out the pity that weighed on my shoulders.

  People of various colors and classes moved about the station as if it was just an ordinary day. Only a few looked down with a smile that they might offer a new puppy in a pet-store window. The garbled call for Columbus, Georgia, blared from the loudspeaker. Families with sons dressed like G.I. Joe clumped around the bus. Mothers with crisp white handkerchiefs dabbed their eyes. All the while, I watched and massaged the callused place on the inside of my arm, a nervous habit I had acquired right after the run-in with Darrell and his cigarette. A free tattoo, he called it. A branding meant to make a man out of me.

  After nine more buses had pulled away, my grandparents’ white Ford appeared at the curb. Nana’s forehead was wrinkled with worry. The way she held on to the string of her plastic bonnet and searched the crowd, I figured she was wondering if she would recognize me. When she turned in my direction, her brow softened and a smile formed as if she was simply picking me up after an afternoon spent at the library. As she made her way through the crowd of servicemen, the hem of her houseshift flapped around her knees.

  Her touch was soft to my shoulder, and she pointed towards Poppy. He was sitting in the car with a cap pulled down close to his pointed nose like a getaway driver about to flee a robbery.

  “You’ll feel better when we get something in your stomach. Now on the way home I want you to study about what you’d like for supper. A hamburger maybe or how about I fry up a breast of chicken?”

  Her words hazed my mind the same way the bus exhaust blanketed the air. As we walked towards the car, her arm drew me closer to the folds of her stomach. Poppy cocked his hand forward as if we were about to set off on a vacation. No words were spoken as they took me away to their farm outside of Raleigh. The hum of the engine and cries from a steel guitar on the radio filled the car. An urge tempted me to turn around and look back at the bus station one last time. But I kept my fingernails dug into the vinyl backseat and managed to win that one.

  By the time we had reached their farm, mist from the air conditioner covered the car window. Nestled between a thicket of pines and a field blanketed with tobacco, the white farmhouse teased me like an oasis. Ancient ferns swung from chains on the front porch as easy as jewelry on a rich woman.

  When I was in the big claw tub that evening, their words drifted from the kitchen and rose above the sound of hot grease popping in a skillet.

  “The worst kind of trash wouldn’t do something so sorry,” Nana said.

  “I’d skin her alive if she was standing here right now,” Poppy added.

  I leaned against the cold surface of the tub and tried to picture Poppy skinning Mama with the switchblade he used to clean catfish. But I gave up trying to picture it, deciding there was not enough flesh on Mama’s bony frame to allow such punishment.

  For the first few months at Nana and Poppy’s farmhouse, whenever I went to the bathroom or got ready for bed, I would glance at the black phone propped on top of a Sears and Roebuck catalog on the hallway table. It was a carefree glance, like one someone might give a penny on a busy sidewalk. I didn’t want to stare too long and make Nana and Poppy think I wanted to hear from her. But the concern was short-lived. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I realized there would be no good-night calls offered from the land that seemed as far away as the North Pole. By Christmas, I had even stopped praying that God would make Mama come back at all. It was then that I let the house’s perfume of pine needles, mothballs, and cooking grease seep into my system. I pictured the scent running up my nose and through my blood, ironing out all the nervous places as perfectly as Nana pressed the collar of my church shirt.

  “A fresh start” were the words the school guidance counselor used when talking about life on my grandparents’ farm. Even then I knew the experience deserved more than a dime-store cliché. It was more than a new start. Life on the farm would be nothing less than a resurrection in which the past and the future are called up and transformed into perfection.

  Two

  “Hurry up, slow poke,” I heard my cousin call out. She skipped barefoot through weeds and over small branches. Her paint-chipped toenails brushed across the top of the soil barely touching the earth before her legs would fly up again. If I didn’t know her better, I would’ve thought she was timid, but by now I knew she hated more than anything else to get her feet dirty. “Nice Nasty,” her brother, Mac, called her.

  A branch from a pine sapling slapped the side of my head. I snatched it away and pulled at the leaves of a maple tree, fighting to break free. Dusk had chased away a layer of muggy air. An eerie blue outlined the trees and wild vines that separated my grandparents’ farm from the double-wide trailer Mac and Mary Madonna lived in. Their land was a wedding gift from my grandparents to their daddy, Uncle Cecil.

  Breaking free from the limbs, I spotted Mac by the pile of dirt Uncle Cecil delivered on weekends for extra money. Money that Nana said paid for all the big bills Aunt Loraine ran up at the stores. Mac was holding a Mason jar high above his head as if offering a torch to light our way.

  I tried to gauge the moment their greenish lights would blink, and soon Mary Madonna reached out for the lightning bug I had laid claim to. “That’s mine,” I shouted more because I thought she would expect me to than for any other reason.

  “Tough titty said the kitty and the milk’s not free.” She kicked up her tan leg and pulled up the edge of her dress before running off. Even her run had sassiness to it. Named for Aunt Loraine’s Catholic side of the family, Mary Madonna was a princess in two people’s minds: hers and her mama’s. My cross to bear, Nana would tell me whenever I complained about my oldest cousin.

  “No lightning bug’s gonna just fly in your jar. You gotta go for it. Go on, catch it,” Mary Madonna said, dancing circles around us.

  Watching her hold the hem of her red-and-white dress and run in circles with flashes of blue-green from the lightning bugs all around, I felt steady and strong. There was an ordinariness to it all that satisfied me as much as the food from Sunday dinner.

  After the stars filled the sky and the last lightning bug had been captured, Mac stretched out on the floor pallet Nana had made for us out of hand-sewn quilts in the living room. Like always
, Poppy warned of the dangers of color TV. “You boys gonna go blind sitting too close to that thing.” The jars filled with our catch were right next to us, and during commercial breaks we’d recount to verify how many bugs were still flashing.

  Mary Madonna reclined against Nana’s chair and instructed Nana how to properly comb the knots out of her long blonde hair. It was a package deal. I could be sure that whenever I asked Mac to spend the night, Aunt Loraine would see to it that Mary Madonna would have her pink Barbie suitcase in hand, leading the way across the trail of flattened weeds that separated our grandparents’ home from theirs.

  “This girl has the prettiest head of hair. You sure must get that from your mama’s side of the family. Lord knows you don’t get it from me. I always had the wiriest hair.”

  Casting a watchful eye on Mac, I casually rubbed the top of my hair, satisfied that there were a few waves.

  “This mess of mine never would do a thing but nap up just like a colored woman’s hair,” Nana said as she pulled the comb out of Mary Madonna’s mane.

  “Ouch, Nana.”

  “Sorry, sugar.” Nana smoothed the injured spot with her broad, weathered hand.

  Mary Madonna tilted her chin and stared at the TV screen. I wanted to reach over and yank it but good.

  “You got pretty hair, Nana,” I said.

  She looked up at me as if I had cussed. “Well now.”

  “See there, Pearl.” Poppy nudged Nana from his easy chair. “You’re a regular silver fox.” We all laughed at Poppy, even Mary Madonna. The laughter made me feel light-headed. I thought of the colored pills Mama used to take whenever her nerves would run high and wondered if they made her feel the same way.

  “Oh, me,” Nana said. Her coarse gray hair was twisted in a braid and pinned into place on the back of the head. The first time I had one of the bad dreams, Nana came into my room with it all loose and hanging wild down her back. The stark whiteness of her hair, bathed in the blue moonlight that seeped in through the blinds, reminded me of a ghost. Before I came to my senses, I told her I didn’t like long hair. She laughed and wrapped her arms around me. The roll of skin on the side of her back was cushiony. “Sugar, it’s just part of my religion, nothing to be scared of. It’s my covering. The Bible says so.” Her callused hand squeezed mine, and she lay with me until the past rolled away and sleep returned.

  After the television was turned off, Poppy moved towards the porch-light switch, and Nana assigned beds. Mac would sleep with me, and Mary Madonna would take the sofa.

  While Nana searched for sheets in the hall closet, Mary Madonna twirled her damp hair and sighed. “I’d sleep on that old hard floor if I was you.” Cupping a hand to her mouth, she closed her eyes and smiled. “He pees all over hisself. Just like a little bitty baby.”

  “He does not, you farthead,” Mac said, and then quickly looked at me for confirmation.

  I shook my head and glanced at the blank TV screen, trying to lie without coming right out and doing it.

  Curling the edge of her lip, she let loose. “Don’t tell me. Mama said he wakes up like a crazy person. Screaming and spraying pee all over the place. Poor little thing.”

  That baby-sounding voice. Mama’s voice. Before I could help it, I snatched the brush from the coffee table and whacked it against her golden arm. She screamed, and Nana pulled us away from each other.

  “What in the world is going on in here?”

  Mary Madonna tried to fake-cry. “Ain’t you gonna spank him?” she moaned.

  “I tell you who I’m going to switch, the whole mess of you if you don’t get yourselves to bed. Now scat.” Nana waved her hand for effect, and Mac and Mary Madonna scattered. But I stood still as could be. Fury was one emotion I had mastered, and a play act was something I could detect by the slightest change in voice pitch.

  Hours later I rolled over to find the pillow missing and a wrinkled sheet beside me. Tiptoeing into the living room, I found Mac stretched on the old quilt, his hair spiked and legs twisted like a slinky. And at the edge of the hall I paused to look real hard at the black rotary phone. In a moment of weakness I glared and waited, staring until the white panel and black numbers blurred my vision like an early morning mist.

  The first time the school secretary called my name over the fat brown speaker box in Miss Douglas’s class, my heart began racing. Dewayne Pickings had reported that the principal used an electric paddle on him with no fewer than forty-five spikes in place for added torture. And seeing the brown cardboard that now replaced the lunchroom window, the same window Dewayne broke with a rock just because he wanted to see it shatter, I figured he was an expert on discipline. The hissing sounds from those around me didn’t help slow my heart rate, and I gave them a sneer as I stuffed the denim bookbag Nana had made me.

  But at the front office there was no electric paddle, not even the principal for that matter, only the school secretary, who sold pencils and pads of paper each morning, and Poppy. After he explained that I had an important appointment, I watched Poppy write unsteady letters that spelled his name across a white pad. My chest swelled when I read the name in Poppy’s scratchy penmanship. After I was born, Mama didn’t give me the last name of my real daddy. She gave me the same name as hers, Willard. It was the best decision Mama made concerning men. The name Willard became an asset the day Poppy and Nana picked me up from the bus station. Fewer questions from nosy people like the school secretary. I was one of them, and the same name proved it. For all people knew, I was their own son. I heard Nana talking about some lady at her church who’d had a child during the change. People probably thought I was like that. A child that changed their lives.

  We exited Stalwart Elementary that day to find a green boat attached to Poppy’s truck. “Bought it this morning when they auctioned off old man Randell’s belongings.” Poppy ran his hand down the boat’s side. “Figured you’d help me try her out.”

  A tradition was soon born, and during Friday homeroom I’d try to guess if this would be the afternoon Poppy would show up to whisk me away. Nana only gave in to our ritual after I begged a little more than usual. “You just make sure you don’t get behind with your lessons,” she said, inspecting the string of fish we proudly displayed.

  Some days we’d sit in that aluminum boat on Ricer’s Pond, and Poppy would talk about a new hog he had bought or the olden days when he ran the filling station and fixed fancy cars that passed through town. Mostly we’d just be quiet and listen to the locusts buzzing deep in the tall grass and watch the water crack and shatter with the landing of our lines. Only one time do I recall Mama floating into the conversation.

  Poppy pulled the green cap with the John Deere logo low on his head. “How’re you managing?”

  “Fine.” I didn’t look up as I reached inside the faded cottage cheese container and found a worm wiggling to the bottom.

  Poppy’s voice cleared, and I heard the steady drum of his boot tapping against the boat floor. “You know, it’s a real shame your mama’s turned away from us. Used to be a good girl and then…But, now, none of that has a thing in the world to do with you.”

  Residue from the earthworm made my hand stick to the pole, and I gripped it even tighter. I cast the line extra hard hoping the pop would drown him out. The sound echoed, and a white bird flew away from a patch of lily pads.

  Poppy reeled in his line and stared straight ahead. “Never figured out why she started using dope.”

  I jerked the line and gasped all at the same time. For added effect, I jerked the line and pretended to strain.

  “The way I see it, she just let a bad habit run away with her.”

  “I got something,” I moaned.

  The boat rocked as Poppy slid to offer assistance. Grabbing the light rod, he cut his eyes towards me.

  Staring into the murky water, I shrugged. “Must’ve broke free.”

  There was no need to talk about Mama. I was getting my fill of that from the guidance counselor, Mrs. Hanson. Every Monday w
hile the others lined up for the lunchroom, I was pulled aside, and together Mrs. Hanson and me would have lunch in the conference room by the principal’s office. If the door was open when we walked past, I’d search the wall high and low for the electric paddle. The only thing that came close to being something that could cause bodily harm was a golf club tucked in the corner next to the flag.

  Mrs. Hanson was wrinkled but had hair as pink as cotton candy. I liked how two curls on each side of her head twisted and hung free like clumps of grapes. But I did not like how Mrs. Hanson would ask me how I felt about Mama and then turn her head and make an attempt to smile. Her smile always ended up lopsided and looked like any minute she would bust out crying.

  “How’s Nana and Poppy doing?” she asked between sips from her chocolate-milk carton.

  “Fine.” I studied the pictures that lined her wall. A girl, little babies, and one old man who most likely was her husband. “Who’s that?” I asked pointing to the girl centered at the top.

  “Umm. That’s Rachel, my oldest granddaughter.” The way she clasped her hand with the napkin still caught between her fingers told me that Rachel was the detour.

  “How old is she?”

  “Fourteen. Lives in Chattanooga. And can dance like you never did see. Wins all sorts of talent shows. Told me the other night that she’s going to be a majorette.” She wrinkled up her nose and giggled.

  “She sure is pretty.” And while I learned how Rachel was a walking miracle on account of her being born too early, the big hand on the clock that hung over the file cabinet continued to move forward.

  On Saturday afternoons the squeals and yells from Mac and Mary Madonna were the only invitation I needed. I’d run down the path Uncle Cecil had mowed between my grandparents’ home and their trailer, pulling my T-shirt over my head in mid-flight.