from The Raising
Of the eight matrons perched like pigeons around two identical card tables, Mrs. Bertram Eastman was the lone childless woman. Her husband, in whom—she was sure—the fault lay, only confounded this burden she'd borne for thirty years, fixing a funny look on his face every time the subject came up and saying, in a voice soft as solemnity itself, “Spare the child and spare the rod, Mrs. Eastman.” But he was like that, a nitwit, and half the time she never knew what he was talking about. Still, being a woman of industry, Mrs. Eastman took up the slack of impotence by becoming an expert on children and motherhood. She was renowned in the gin rummy set, in the Daughters of the Confederacy set, and perhaps in the whole area of East Tennessee, renowned and widely quoted for her running commentary on child-rearing.
“A child is like a new boot,” she'd say and pause with the dramatic flair of a born talker. “You take that boot and wear it and at first it blisters your foot, pains you all over, but the time comes it fits like a glove and you got a dutiful child on your hands.” What she had missed in experience, Mrs. Eastman overcame with pithy insight; what she lacked as human collateral in a world of procreation, Mrs. Eastman guaranteed with sheer volume. She was a specialist in armchair mothering.
A steady hum of a general nature had settled over the women playing at both tables, punctuated by an occasional snap of a card, but like a foghorn in the midst of a desert the voice of Mrs. Eastman rose and fell in every ear. She was explaining, for the third time since seven o'clock, the circumstances that led to Little Darryl, the melungeon orphan boy, who would come to live at her house the very next morning. A child! In her own home! She couldn't get over it. Her brain worked at the idea with a violence akin to despair turning upside-down and her hair, from some internal cue, dropped onto her forehead a large, stiff curl that flopped from side to side as if to let off steam. Mrs. Eastman, although not fat, was a formidable personage, stout and big-boned and not unlike the bouncer in a hard-bitten country bar. Mr. Eastman was the tiniest man in Hawklen County. Just yesterday he had come home and told her, out of the blue, that he was bringing Little Darryl out from Eastern State and into their home—one two three and like a bolt of electricity she was a mother. She couldn't get over it.
Little Darryl was thirteen years old and of “origin unknown,” a poor abandoned charity case dumped from orphanage to orphanage since the day his faceless mother—unfit and unwed, Mrs. Eastman knew for a certainty—dropped him off in the middle of the canned-goods section of the Surgoinsville A&P. He was discovered beside the creamed corn, eating an unhealthy peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The “origin unknown” part delighted Mrs. Eastman: Little Darryl would be her child, sprung as mysteriously and as certainly into her care as a baby of her own making. O, she would make a lawyer out of him, distill the taint of his blood like meltwater. She would recreate the boy in her own image and watch him tower among men in her old age.
“Smart as a whip, the social worker told Mr. Eastman,” Mrs. Eastman said in a loud, confidential voice. At her table were old Mrs. Cowan, the Methodist preacher's wife; Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the Jenkins Hardware Jenkinses; and Mrs. Talley, wife of Hubert Talley, the local butcher. Mrs. Eastman had given each one advice, off and on, for thirty years, from Mrs. Talley's red-headed boy who was thirty years old and no good, right down to Mrs. Jenkins’ six-year-old who still sucked her thumb and was a “mistake.”
“You said that ten minutes ago, Eloise,” Mrs. Jenkins told Mrs. Eastman, “and you said he was a genius before that.” Mrs. Jenkins was playing North to Mrs. Eastman's South. “You said he was a genius that wasn't understood and you ain't even met him yet.”
“Made him a lawyer already, too,” said Mrs. Talley, looking calmly over Mrs. Jenkins’ shoulder, her lips screwed up in concentration.
“Ida Mae Talley!” cried Mrs. Jenkins. “Put you in the East and straightway you cheat left and right.”
“For your general information,” Mrs. Eastman said and tossed her curl, like a hook, back up into her beehive hairdo, “for your edification, Little Darryl scored in the ‘excessively bright’ range on three different tests.”
“I am most certainly not cheating,” said Mrs. Talley. “I seen those kings three minutes ago.”
“God loves all the little children, smart and stupid, black and white,” old Mrs. Cowan said with a smile so bright that her lips appeared to retreat back into her gums. She was the simple-minded member of the women's club although, somehow, her children had grown up to be wildly successful bankers and businessmen in the county, as if to intimate that children, even life, were too muddled a factor to control entirely. For this reason old Mrs. Cowan said nothing that was really heard, did nothing that was really seen, and existed in the main as a hand in gin rummy, or as a how-de-do on the Methodist Church steps every Sunday morning. She was incapable of taking sound advice, given in good faith, by even the best of friends. Deep in her bowels Mrs. Eastman believed her to be the most wicked woman of her acquaintance, the most deceitful as well as the most dangerous, and to hold, somewhere behind her idiocy, a hidden ace in the hole.
“God may be well and good on Sundays,” Mrs. Eastman said, leveling her eyes like shotgun bores toward old Mrs. Cowan's western position. “But God Hisself don't have to raise no boy geniuses at a moment's notice. Pass me one of those green mints, Vivian.” She stretched her free hand toward Mrs. Jenkins. “The white ones give me the morning sickness.”
“They come in the same box, Eloise. Green and white. In the same damn box.” Mrs. Jenkins, whose mints and home provided this evening's entertainment for the club, shut her cards with a click, laid them carefully face down on the table, then folded her arms like hemp cord and stared at Mrs. Eastman. She looked ready to pounce in panther fashion across the table, to defend her territory with a beast's wit. Mrs. Eastman had on her patient expression, the one she recommended for children with colic.
“I only meant to point out that I read somewheres that they put more dye in the white mints than they do in the green, that's all. They start out gray and add twice't the dye to turn them white. Scientific fact. Twenty schoolchildren alone have died in Detroit, Michigan, from a pound of white mints. Now think about that.”
“All I know,” said Mrs. Jenkins, rising clumsily from her chair, “is we've had these same mints for fifteen years and I never heard a word till now. I'm going to put whip cream on my jello if you'll excuse me.”
“I didn't read it till last week,” Mrs. Eastman called over her shoulder, then she lowered her voice until only the whole room could hear: “Don't either of you tell a dead man, but she's on particular edge tonight strictly because her boy was found pig drunk, with a hair ribbon in his mouth, underneath the 11-E overpass. No clothes on him anywhere.”
“O,” said old Mrs. Cowan. “He was the finest acolyte our church ever had.”
“No more he ain't,” Mrs. Eastman said happily. “Comes of no discipline.”
“Now, now,” Mrs. Talley said, watching herself thumb through Mrs. Jenkins’ cards, “You ain't exactly the one, Eloise”—here she paused to exchange one of her cards with one in the other pile—”you ain't exactly the one to pass judgement on a drunk, now are you?”
“Well, Mrs. Ida Mae Talley.” Mrs. Eastman sneered on the “Mae.” “Are you sinuating that my husband is a drunk?”
“That's for you to know, Eloise,” she said, “and me to hear over coffee.”