Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction by Lex Williford, Michael Martone Page B
Authors: Lex Williford, Michael Martone
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her sisters did on weekends. Hazel never used lipstick or permed her hair; she wore it cut almost like a man’s. Seen at the occasional rodeo or bull sale in her decently pressed pearl-button shirt and new Levi’s, she stuck close to her dad. Like me, Hazel apparently was not permitted to hang around the men.
What Hazel did not seem interested in was any kind of fun, and a great resolve arose in me that, whatever I was, I was going to have…whatever it was. I would get married, even if I wasn’t supposed to.
But my mother had another, darker reason to be angry with me, and I knew it. The reason had broken over me suddenly the summer I was seven and had been playing, on warm afternoons, in a rain barrel full of water. Splashing around, elbows and knees knocking against the side of the barrel, I enjoyed the rare sensation of being wet all over. My little sister, four, came and stood on tiptoe to watch. It occurred to me to boost her into the barrel with me.
My mother burst out of the kitchen door and snatched her back.
“What are you trying to do, kill her?” she shouted.
I stared back at her, wet, dumbfounded.
Her eyes blazed over me, her brows knotted at their worst. “And after you’d drowned her, I suppose you’d have slunk off to hide somewhere until it was all over!”
It had never crossed my mind to kill my sister, or that my mother might think I wanted to. (Although I had, once, drowned a setting of baby chicks in a rain barrel.) But that afternoon, dripping in my underpants, goose-bumped and ashamed, I watched her carry my sister into the house and then I did go off to hide until it was, somehow, all over, for she never mentioned it at dinner.
The chicks had been balls of yellow fuzz, and I had been three. I wanted them to swim. I can just remember catching a chick and holding it in the water until it stopped squirming and then laying it down to catch a fresh one. I didn’t stop until I had drowned the whole dozen and laid them out in a sodden yellow row.
What the mind refuses to allow to surface is characterized by a suspicious absence. Of detail, of associations. Memories skirt the edge of nothing. There is for me about this incident that suspicious absence. What is being with held?
Had I, for instance, given my mother cause to believe I might harm my sister? Children have done such harm, and worse. What can be submerged deeper, denied more vehemently, than the murderous impulse? At four, my sister was a tender, trusting little girl with my mother’s wide gray eyes and brows. A younger sister of an older sister. A good girl. Mommy’s girl.
What do I really know about my mother’s feelings toward her own dead sister? Kathryn’s dolls had been put away; my mother was never allowed to touch them.
“I’ll never, never love one of my kids more than another!” she screamed at my father in one of her afternoons of white rage. The context is missing.
During the good years, when cattle prices were high enough to pay the year’s bills and a little extra, my mother bought wallpaper out of a catalog and stuck it to her lumpy walls. She enameled her kitchen white, and she sewed narrow strips of cloth she called “drapes” to hang at the sides of her windows. She bought a stiff, tight cylinder of linoleum at Sears, Roebuck in town and hauled it home in the back of a pickup and unrolled it in a shiny flowered oblong in the middle of her splintery front room floor.
Occasionally I would find her sitting in her front room on her “davenport,” which she had saved for and bought used, her lap full of sewing and her forehead relaxed out of its knot. For a moment there was her room around her as she wanted it to look: the clutter subdued, the new linoleum mopped and quivering under the chair legs that held down its corners, the tension of the opposing floral patterns of wallpaper, drapes, and slipcovers held in brief, illusory harmony by the force of her vision.
How hard she
What Hazel did not seem interested in was any kind of fun, and a great resolve arose in me that, whatever I was, I was going to have…whatever it was. I would get married, even if I wasn’t supposed to.
But my mother had another, darker reason to be angry with me, and I knew it. The reason had broken over me suddenly the summer I was seven and had been playing, on warm afternoons, in a rain barrel full of water. Splashing around, elbows and knees knocking against the side of the barrel, I enjoyed the rare sensation of being wet all over. My little sister, four, came and stood on tiptoe to watch. It occurred to me to boost her into the barrel with me.
My mother burst out of the kitchen door and snatched her back.
“What are you trying to do, kill her?” she shouted.
I stared back at her, wet, dumbfounded.
Her eyes blazed over me, her brows knotted at their worst. “And after you’d drowned her, I suppose you’d have slunk off to hide somewhere until it was all over!”
It had never crossed my mind to kill my sister, or that my mother might think I wanted to. (Although I had, once, drowned a setting of baby chicks in a rain barrel.) But that afternoon, dripping in my underpants, goose-bumped and ashamed, I watched her carry my sister into the house and then I did go off to hide until it was, somehow, all over, for she never mentioned it at dinner.
The chicks had been balls of yellow fuzz, and I had been three. I wanted them to swim. I can just remember catching a chick and holding it in the water until it stopped squirming and then laying it down to catch a fresh one. I didn’t stop until I had drowned the whole dozen and laid them out in a sodden yellow row.
What the mind refuses to allow to surface is characterized by a suspicious absence. Of detail, of associations. Memories skirt the edge of nothing. There is for me about this incident that suspicious absence. What is being with held?
Had I, for instance, given my mother cause to believe I might harm my sister? Children have done such harm, and worse. What can be submerged deeper, denied more vehemently, than the murderous impulse? At four, my sister was a tender, trusting little girl with my mother’s wide gray eyes and brows. A younger sister of an older sister. A good girl. Mommy’s girl.
What do I really know about my mother’s feelings toward her own dead sister? Kathryn’s dolls had been put away; my mother was never allowed to touch them.
“I’ll never, never love one of my kids more than another!” she screamed at my father in one of her afternoons of white rage. The context is missing.
During the good years, when cattle prices were high enough to pay the year’s bills and a little extra, my mother bought wallpaper out of a catalog and stuck it to her lumpy walls. She enameled her kitchen white, and she sewed narrow strips of cloth she called “drapes” to hang at the sides of her windows. She bought a stiff, tight cylinder of linoleum at Sears, Roebuck in town and hauled it home in the back of a pickup and unrolled it in a shiny flowered oblong in the middle of her splintery front room floor.
Occasionally I would find her sitting in her front room on her “davenport,” which she had saved for and bought used, her lap full of sewing and her forehead relaxed out of its knot. For a moment there was her room around her as she wanted it to look: the clutter subdued, the new linoleum mopped and quivering under the chair legs that held down its corners, the tension of the opposing floral patterns of wallpaper, drapes, and slipcovers held in brief, illusory harmony by the force of her vision.
How hard she
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