As they often reminded us, the McCullens were not our actual cousins; they were my mother’s. But they were relatives nonetheless, and served as hosts for us and our tent until my mother could find a better place.
Aunt Jane was a Jehovah’s Witness who had married one McCullen brother, had five girls, then married another and had two more. Polly and Molly were the oldest. Large-bottomed twins with a trail of suds perpetually falling from their ripe hands, the pair was most often found in the kitchen, preparing and eating meals, washing an endless pile of dishes. Linda was heart-faced, golden-haired, and serving time in the local prison for being with a man who’d robbed a store and killed someone in the process. Judith was small and bitter, a prickly weed squatting in the middle of the yard. Tess was a dark and moody tyrant whose magic made even the old barn out back shine with glamour and intrigue. She doled out parts and led us in daily reenactments of The Wizard of Oz. Dori was my age and so agreeable she faded from every scene. Tammy, the youngest, was the dark-haired favorite: her pink ruffled bedspread and access to a flush toilet made her a princess, to us.
As a bunch, the McCullens were wildly creative—energy unleashed. Sitting at her electric sewing machine, Aunt Jane would whip off a stream of halter tops to outfit a yard full of sweaty girls. And the stories they told! They laughed and cried as they discussed long dead relatives with children listening from every corner of the room. But the McCullens were also quick to anger, and comfortably aware that their position was much more solid than our own.
Aunt Jane pressured my mother into beating us the time we tried to make cement by peeing in the sand. I felt worse for my mother than for my own behind. She tended to laugh off things like pee-cement, but was in charge of nothing at Aunt Jane’s place. I hated my mother’s being stuck, the way she finally smacked our bottoms without heart, how even our punishment seemed inadequate compared to the soulful whippings Aunt Jane meted out to her own clan.