PATRICIA AND I CAME HOME FROM SCHOOL ONE DAY AND, to our shock, found our trailer wrapped in police tape. We weren’t allowed to go inside.
Mama had stabbed Ronnie Brown in the chest and was in jail. Mama had met Ronnie in Reed’s Trailer Park, where we were now living. Ronnie was a good man and a nice man—maybe too nice for Mama’s crowd. When another tough guy showed up and started coming around our house, Mama soon grew sweet on him. Her new flame started picking on Ronnie. A fight ensued, and somehow in the middle of it, Mama stabbed Ronnie, apparently trying to kill him with a large steak fork. Somebody called the police, and the authorities hauled Mama off to jail again. Although Ronnie lived, Mama’s arrest was a violation of her probation. Eventually she was convicted and sent to a state prison in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Department of Social Services (DSS) didn’t take us back to the county-run receiving home. Instead, they escorted Patricia and me to the far end of the trailer park to trailer number 34—Grandpa’s place. Grandpa had moved to Reed’s Trailer Park, so the DSS asked Grandpa if we could stay with him for a while.
Most kids have fond memories of spending time with their grandparents. I don’t. When I recall visits to Grandpa’s place, it makes me retch. Grandpa was a mean, grouchy, nasty man, so we rarely stayed with him for long. But this time we were moving in.
MOVING IN WITH GRANDPA WAS MUCH WORSE THAN LIVING in any foster home. Grandpa constantly reminded Patricia and me that he didn’t ask the DSS to bring us there. He wanted us there about as much as he had wanted a litter of kittens he had put inside a potato sack along with a brick. Then he tossed the sack into a deep creek.
Truth is, Grandpa didn’t care about much of anything except smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and watching Rawhide on his small television. He especially couldn’t have cared less when Mama had someone dump Patricia and me at his place from time to time, whenever she had to go back to the mental hospital or when the law came and took her off to jail. Sometimes Mama simply took us to Grandpa’s and told us to get out of the car before she romped away on another escapade. But this time was different. We had no idea when Mama might return. Attempted murder was a serious charge.
Grandpa got up every morning before the sun rose. Weekends were no exception. Grandpa always said you could get more accomplished before the sun came up than any good-for-nothing-late-riser could accomplish all day. Of course, Grandpa hadn’t really tested that theory; Grandpa never had a job or a hobby.
Grandpa didn’t teach me how to fish. We never worked on a bike together or talked about school or anything else that grandfathers and grandsons ordinarily do. The only time he voluntarily spoke to me was to yell something like, “Ya darn punk, go outside!” or “Git outta the way, boy!”
We had one real conversation in my entire life. I asked Grandpa about the scars on his neck and how they got there.
He replied, “I was sitting in my car at a drive-in theater. Someone walked up beside the car, reached in through the window, and cut me with a knife.” That was it. The entire explanation.
I didn’t believe him, but then again, Grandpa was an old-school entrepreneur from the mountains of North Carolina, where they hauled the sunshine in and the moonshine out. He sold moonshine and carried a gun in his right front pants pocket. There was no telling how those scars got there. A part of me wished it had been Grandma who had put them there.
My mom said Grandpa treated Grandma really badly. I never met her, but I heard my grandmother was “a good, God-fearing lady,” as some might put it. Grandma passed away when Mama was seventeen years old, before I was born. People who knew her back then said that Mama was never quite the same after her mom died.
I DO CREDIT GRANDPA FOR ONE THING—HE TAUGHT ME how to earn money at a young age. His teaching method was simple. When he lived near the golf course, he’d say, “I’m not givin’ ya nothin’. Git yourself out there on the golf course and hunt golf balls outta the weeds and bushes and sell ’em to the golfers.”
I spent every summer day searching for golf balls in the creeks and brush that surrounded the golf course. The bushes scratched my arms and legs, and there was always the danger of deadly copperhead snakes, but I plunged right into the weeds and ponds, searching for those balls. One by one, as I found them, I’d wipe them off and toss them into a tube sock. I filled an entire tube sock with golf balls and tied the sock to my belt loop. Then I’d do the same with another sock. I’d wait quietly at the greens with tube socks filled with golf balls attached to both sides of my shorts. I must have been a funny sight, but I didn’t care. I was in business.
Once the last golfer putted, I yelled, “Wanna buy some golf balls? Quarter apiece!”
Almost always, the golfers replied, “Let’s see what you have.”
I untied the socks and shook all the golf balls out on the ground alongside the green. The golfers searched through them, picking out a few they liked.
Sometimes a golfer might ask, “Will you take one dollar for five balls?”
“Sure thing, mister.”
On a good day, a golfer might make a special offer. “I’ll give you ten dollars for all the golf balls you have there.”
Sold.
Sure, he was ripping me off, but ten dollars was a lot of money to a nine-year-old boy.
MANY TIMES MAMA SIMPLY LEFT PATRICIA AND ME ALONE with Grandpa for several days or weeks at a time. She gave us no warning or advance instructions. If she wasn’t in the mental hospital or jail, we had no idea where she was, and sometimes it could be quite frightening.
For instance, I woke up on my tenth birthday, and Mama was gone. I wasn’t sure where Grandpa was either, and that concerned me because from the back of the trailer, I smelled smoke. By now I had lived around trailer parks enough to know that most of the mobile homes were tinderboxes, tragedies waiting to happen. If the trailer was on fire, I didn’t have much time to get Patricia and me out of there.
I slid the bedroom door open, ran through Grandpa’s bedroom area, and slid the door open between his bedroom and the kitchen, looking for Patricia. Then I saw her; she was standing in the kitchen, bawling.
She had gotten up early and had tried to bake a birthday cake for me, but she had burned it, smoking up the whole trailer. I felt so sorry for her that I told her I liked burned cake.
“No, you don’t!” she said, tears streaming down her face.
“Sure I do. Watch, Patricia,” I said. “Look; it’s good. I’ll eat it.” I laid some canned pineapple slices on top of the charcoaled cake and cut a piece.
“See, I love burned cake,” I told her, as I stuffed the piece of blackened cake into my mouth. It nearly gagged me, but I ate the whole thing. And Patricia stopped crying.
It really is the thought that counts.
AFTER MAMA WENT TO PRISON FOR STABBING RONNIE, Patricia and I stayed with Grandpa for a few months before we moved in with Sarah Moses, a childhood friend of Mama’s. Growing up, Mama and Sarah often got together and baked homemade biscuits, fried fat-back, and fried chicken, along with all sorts of other soul foods. Sarah’s old house always smelled like cooked grease, but it was better than Grandpa’s. Plus, we were accustomed to staying at Sarah’s.
Even when Mama wasn’t in jail, she sometimes left us at Sarah’s for a few days, weeks, or even months at a time. Truth is, we spent much of our childhood at Sarah’s. Her house was a second home to us, and during my preteen years, Sarah was as real a mom to us as Mama—often, more so. Sarah was good to us, especially considering that she had three children of her own: Lawrence, the youngest; little Sara, who was disabled; and John Wayne, who was meaner than the devil himself. Making matters worse, Sarah’s husband, Bill, was an alcoholic and unwilling to work.
When we realized that Mama wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon, I stayed at Sarah’s a few months before Sarah and Grandpa made me move back to Grandpa’s. Patricia remained at Sarah and Bill’s. Sarah needed Patricia’s help around the house since Sarah had to go to work to support the family. Patricia washed all the clothes, cut the grass, and cleaned the kitchen while Sarah walked to and from work in the textile mill. Meanwhile, most days, Bill laid passed out drunk on the bed.
I worried a lot about Patricia that summer.