Every time Mommy got mad at me she made a case for my being evil. According to her lights, that was the root cause for all my shenanigans. Hardly a day went by without the hairbrush. Of course it was her tool for pulling the rats out of my yellow frazzle prior to braiding it, but before the day was over it would, more often than not, become her instrument of torture. After returning from church and my failure to sit still enough throughout the service, I was in for some punishment. I soon learned, thanks be to God, that there might be an out: If I hid in my room and began reading my bible, there was a chance she would forget about her intent to discipline.
Mary Opal Martin, nee Tyson, had good reason to weave religion into her brand of parenting. The daughter of a hell-fire Baptist preacher, she had learned to walk the talk. Mary Opal, was fifth of eight children born to Mary Frances Walker and George Washington Tyson, she a bearer of children, he a preacher, seller of Watkins Products and occasional farmer of a few played-out acres near Decatur, Texas. George believed in a God of retribution about whom he preached on a Sunday and whose vengeance he administered as the occasion arose. He applied the strop liberally, especially to his daughter’s supple flanks, most vehemently when they were visited with the curse, a promise of harlotry to come. There had to be an escape.
Mary Opal gazed out the kitchen door, past the well house, and watched a lazy chicken hawk circle the air rising in waves of heat over the calf pasture. She was supposed to be drying the dishes. She was always supposed to be doing something. Never was there a time to think, to dream, to wonder. As she wiped a plate she sang in a clear soprano,
“Somewhere the sun is shining,
Somewhere a songbird dwells.
Hush now my sad repining,
God lives and all is well.
Somewhere, somewhere,
Beautiful isle of somewhere…”
“Opa-a-al!” Mary Frances interrupted, her voice drawing the name out and up, her eyes squinting at the newest row of stitches crisscrossing the taut patchwork. She straightened her shoulders, adjusting the angle of the quilting frame, and reached for a new length of cotton. “Go and turn on the water for that new horse Dad brought home. He could die of this heat. Go, Opal! Now! Do it right now! You hear?”
“Yes, Mama,” Mary Opal sighed and started outside, chucking the damp towel at the dish pan. She walked out onto the low covered porch where the morning’s milking cooled under wet cloths. Flies buzzed urgently, excited by the sweet, creamy odor. Out in the side yard she spied little J.W. digging for doodle bugs, stirring the concave cone of sand with a twig until the bug, goaded to exasperation, gave away his position by kicking up a tiny pouf of sand. The boy was five now, his birthday only last week, and it occurred to her that he was old enough to do some work. “Jimmy,” she whispered, squatting down beside him to peek into the doodle-bug hole. “I want you to go water that horse. Just turn on the spigot. Wait ’til the trough is full up, and then turn it back off—all the way off.”
“Naw,” he argued. “I’m too little. ‘Sides, Ma said for you to water ‘im.
“Aw come on, Jimmy, I’ll save you a whole spoonful when I make my cake for supper, an’ you git the bowl too. It’s gonna be lemon, your favorite. Go on now! You know you’re gettin’ to be a big boy!”
She smiled, satisfied at evading a piece of work, watching as the boy hiked up his knickers and headed for the barn lot, kicking anthills along the way. But her smile changed to a rictus of terror as screams woke the sleepy farmstead. As Jimmie leaned through the fence reaching for the water valve, the horse sank his incisors deep into the boy’s chin, screaming and head-rattling back and forth. Blood mixed with foamy spittle flew in all directions.
Mary Frances came running, her raised skirts flying behind, outraged at the horse, at God for allowing bad things to happen to His people, and most of all at Mary Opal, for her disobedience. She scooped up the shrieking child, blood pouring from his mangled chin, white bone visible through the torn flesh. She clutched him to her breast, choking as she spat out her words like a curse. “Opal, you are evil! Do you hear? Evil! The devil will punish you for this. It’s your fault! All of it!”
Mary Opal stopped breathing. Time stopped flat in its tracks. They must have resumed, for later she watched her father shoot the big horse square between the eyes as it stood breathing hard, legs splayed out like a spindly colt, cords of foamy spittle streaming from its mouth. The monster head jerked from the bullet, its’ impact bowing the thick neck. The horse gave one massive shudder and fell, all four legs buckling as one. The beast groaned and lay on its side twitching. Mary Opal blanched as the wave of sound slammed her chest, the noise bruising ear drums.
“Go get my saw,” George snapped at C.J., his eldest, who had come running when he heard the commotion. Working together in a grim cooperation, the two men sawed off the head and wrapped it in burlap for the trip to Decatur, the grisly trophy necessary to determine if the horse was rabid.
Mary Opal prayed that God would take her to Heaven, knowing with dismal certainty that she could not live beyond this day. But God chose not to hear her prayer, no doubt because of her evil ways, and she lived to witness little J.W.’s pain as he was taken again and again to the city for rabies shots, his belly swollen, red, angry with the repeated sticks from the fat needles, the life-saving serum heavy and thick. She listened as her father described her disobedience from the place of his power, high in the pulpit. After the church service, she read the condemnation of family and neighbors in their quickly averted eyes. She imagined her soul rising like strands of morning mist into the loving arms of a forgiving Jesus who might put her evil ways to rest.
How could such an evil woman not produce an evil child? Doing what you’re told is good; doing what you think is a better idea is sure to be trouble. Little Dorothy Jeanette, Texas high priestess of invention, learned that tricky behavior from her father, but also from her mother. A good girl would have turned the water off herself, like she was told; Mary Opal thought she knew a better way. Sitting still in church is good; zoning out on the rhythm of the preacher’s voice is sin; and wiggling about to stay awake and upright in the pew is more than sin; It is evil. Mary Opal knew what to do about that. Time for the hairbrush. Mary Opal well understood the ways of the evil one. With such an upbringing she was uniquely-suited to ferreting out the ol’ devil in others.
One of my earliest memories is of being lifted to the cook stove in Mommy’s kitchen, placed there to be denied access to a floor where I was free to run amok. The problem was chaos. I was a distraction as a toddler moving with equanimity, laughing, squealing, asking no end of questions, wanting to be everywhere at the same time, ubiquity in Buster Browns. Mommy would lift me up and sit me on the stove between the two front burners. There in terror, I communed with silence. The burners, aflame with blue or yellow, and heating pots or skillets, would get hot and hotter, inspiring a surety that all was surely lost. Skirts had to be tucked carefully under legs and butt so that they wouldn’t catch fire. I sat, suddenly silent, not wanting to tempt fate that might make me into a pyre. When I complained that it was getting too hot to bear, Mommy would twist my arm toward the flame, threatening to burn it, and me as well, into a silent good-girl submission.
Was that a memory or a dream? I have no way of knowing. Once I asked her if that did indeed happen, or must it have surely been a child’s overheated imagining. She insisted that she would have never done such a thing. Do I believe her? Not overmuch.
I remember walking with her down miles of city sidewalks. Other mothers held their child’s hand; mine slipped her right grip beneath my plaited braids and cradled the smooth skin she found there, bare and vulnerable to her grasp. That hand rode me like a yoke, directing my every step, governing all I might attempt to learn. With her thumb and index finger she would orient the angle of my skull. If she wanted to veer left, those fingers twisted my cranium in anticipation of her left intent; a wish to go right netted a corresponding right heading. I could only move in the direction of her resolve. If I remember that so well—and I do—is it so unbelievable that such a mother might place a child on a hot stove to silence her?
Believable but not incontrovertible. I can only cringe and wonder what kind of a person must I be, squeezed from the loins of such a monster. It would be easier if she had been a person filled with hate who despised me. The problem is that she loved me. I was her precious daughter. I was everything she had dreamed, yet never achieved, everything she hoped yet to attain through my ascendancy as her glorious child. How can I trust her as an artifact of my past if I can’t accept the curse she gifts to my present? How can I trust myself if I cannot believe in the one who formed my being? Is it a chicken and egg quandary or simply another bit of nightmare fodder?
Mommy of memory made use of an assortment of tools when purging evil. Burning worked. Controlling was a favorite, a useful standby. It was subtle and usually neat. Cutting popped up as efficient antidote to wrath, though not as convenient since it required an implement of severance, but it remained a treasured tool of her armamentarium.
Ten year old Dotty of memory stood in the drab single rented room she shared with Mommy now that Aunt Judy had sent her back. Mary, her eyes tight, drew the comb through the long hair, preparing to plait it into the two symmetrical braids the day required. Dotty winced. “It hurts!” she whimpered. “Not so hard!”
Mary Opal glared, and reached for her shears, always close at hand. She spoke huskily, a whisper. “Be quiet, or I’ll cut it off. Then it won’t hurt.” Dotty held her breath.
It reminded her of a long ago time when a three year old Dotty screamed and struggled, arms and legs resisting with all her strength. “Mommy, No!” she shrieked, “It hurts! Please! Let me go!” She gagged and sobbed.
Mary Opal, exasperated, demanded that Kelsey help with what was turning out to be a nasty job. “Get in here! I need some help.”
He tiptoed in protesting. “For Heaven’s sake, Opal, what do you want me to do?”
“Just hold her legs! I’ll use the spoon”
Dotty shrieked and bucked on the table. “No, no! It hurts!” She gasped and sobbed. “No, Mommy!”
“Oh yuck!” Kelsey looked down at the mess. He grimaced, taking in the smeared feces, his child’s red tear-stained face, Opal’s rage. He quailed in the face of so much emotion, instinctively aware that he was out of his depth. “Do you really have to do that?” he begged, his gorge rising in his throat along with a taste of panic.
“Kelsey, she’s so stopped up that Syrup of Pepsin didn’t work. Dr. Schuller says we have to get her unplugged some way. Hold her legs open!”
Kelsey did his best, trying to balance strong with gentle. He looked more frightened than his daughter did. Mary Opal, encouraged by his acquiescence to her will, resumed her verbal barrage. “Shut up, and be still, or I’ll cut it out of you. If you don’t believe me I’ll show you!” She stomped out into the kitchen, acting out her frenzy. She returned with her biggest black handled butcher knife, the one with metal rivets holding it together. She brandished the silver edge over the child’s face, her own visage a grotesquerie of rage. “Shut up! You hear? Now!” She twisted the blade slowly and smiled. As it turned, it played with the reflection of daylight twinkling along the edge of its length. “Be quiet this minute or I’ll cut it out of you! Do you hear me?”
The child that was me stopped crying, stopped breathing, emitting only a series of dry gasps.
There is a time when memoir becomes awkward. Truth is great until it’s not. Legacy must be something that enhances the future, or perhaps it should die quietly with its past. Perhaps a not-story is the kindest tale of all. It would be very helpful to know what is real and good. I am either sane or insane; I am either crazy smart or dumb deluded. I need to move somehow into gracious ageing or decide it’s better and gentler to step away. I would move toward the one or the other with a defined purpose, if only I could decide which is the kinder choice. A happy memory lurks, asking to be retrieved: No burning nor cutting was ever transmuted into fact. They were only well-intentioned threats, there to encourage good behavior and hopefully turn me into being a good girl, whom even a Wesson could love. Maybe it’s ok to be a Mommy’s girl after all—or not.