Read Online A Place to Call Home by Deborah Smith - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Deborah Smith
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Cousin Vince went after Roanie full-bore this time and caught him before he could get to Ten Jumps. Uncle William signed the court order, and Aunt Bess sent him off to a state boys’ home in Atlanta. Aunt Bess told everyone it was a relief to know that Roanie Sullivan would be safe and well fed during Christmas.
Grandpa was right. Some brands of kindness are hard to abide.
A unt Jane, who ran the Dunderry Library, said the finest writing grew out of terrible pain and suffering over the human condition. That must be true. I was desperate to console Roanie during the month he spent away, and the springs beneath my mattress were lined with letters, poems, and stories I’d scrawled since Christmas. I’d spent more time inside my room than out.
“Why, sure, you can send some of your writings to Roanie,” Mama said carefully, when I asked her. “But I’d have to check your letters for, hmmm, spelling and grammar first.”
I hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck yesterday. I knew what Mama really meant. My letters would end up looking like some of the ones Josh had written home when he was in Vietnam. Full of blacked-out lines and pruned thoughts. “I’ll think about it,” I told her.
I got the idea for my disastrous Roanie Sullivan poem by reading books that were bad for me.
Our house was filled with books. The ones that were good for me were downstairs in the living-room bookcases, the shelves crammed with encyclopedias, agricultural textbooks, and leather-bound classics like Shakespeare and Dickens. The coffee table nearly sagged with Mama’s hugepicture books about art. But the real library was in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom.
Pyramids of paperbacks were stacked on the floor under their polished, cherrywood nightstands. Daddy’s side was wild territory inhabited by testy gunslingers and four-armed aliens and tough detectives who liked their gin cold and their babes hot. Mickey Spillane and Louis L’Amour. Robert Heinlein and John D. MacDonald. Man Stuff.
Mama’s collection was more varied but no less woolly—Tolkien and Vonnegut, Lillian Hellman and John Le Carré, and stacks of fat, luscious historical romance novels, bursting with adventure and passion, heavy on medieval England, which Mama, proud of Grandmother Elizabeth’s homeland, considered part of our family heritage.
I snuck their paperbacks into my bedroom and worked my way through the ones that were particularly shocking and not totally bewildering. So my imagination ran to hard-boiled detectives and space monsters and adventurous medieval ladies, all of whom, to my astonishment, were absolutely determined to have sex.
Sex was not spoken about in our house. It was not joked about, even by my brothers, not in front of me anyhow. Body parts and bathroom noises, yes. Merged body parts, no.
After my awful Steckem Road visit I demanded my older girl cousins explain
exactly
why everyone called it
Stick ’Em in Road
. They told me, and their description was so graphic, so gross, and made the whole sex thing sound so embarrassing that I looked at them shrewdly and said, “Anybody with more sense than a rock wouldn’t waste their time doing
that
.”
What I knew of romance I learned from watching old movies on TV and studying Mama and Daddy.
Mama had big blue eyes and a butt that was the envy of every woman in town—shaped like an upside-down Valentine heart. Daddy liked her fanny so much, he patted it whenever he thought nobody was looking. He would giveher a wicked grin when we caught them doing stuff like that.
Daddy was one of those nearly fat-free men with ropy muscles and hands that could bend steel cable. He had long, lean arms and skinny legs, and he carried what little fat he did have in his belly, a hard little mound above his belt buckle. I would thump it. It felt like the rind of a ripe watermelon. Mama called it his spare gas tank, and she liked to rub it. When he was sitting at the table, Mama would walk by and
Cousin Vince went after Roanie full-bore this time and caught him before he could get to Ten Jumps. Uncle William signed the court order, and Aunt Bess sent him off to a state boys’ home in Atlanta. Aunt Bess told everyone it was a relief to know that Roanie Sullivan would be safe and well fed during Christmas.
Grandpa was right. Some brands of kindness are hard to abide.
A unt Jane, who ran the Dunderry Library, said the finest writing grew out of terrible pain and suffering over the human condition. That must be true. I was desperate to console Roanie during the month he spent away, and the springs beneath my mattress were lined with letters, poems, and stories I’d scrawled since Christmas. I’d spent more time inside my room than out.
“Why, sure, you can send some of your writings to Roanie,” Mama said carefully, when I asked her. “But I’d have to check your letters for, hmmm, spelling and grammar first.”
I hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck yesterday. I knew what Mama really meant. My letters would end up looking like some of the ones Josh had written home when he was in Vietnam. Full of blacked-out lines and pruned thoughts. “I’ll think about it,” I told her.
I got the idea for my disastrous Roanie Sullivan poem by reading books that were bad for me.
Our house was filled with books. The ones that were good for me were downstairs in the living-room bookcases, the shelves crammed with encyclopedias, agricultural textbooks, and leather-bound classics like Shakespeare and Dickens. The coffee table nearly sagged with Mama’s hugepicture books about art. But the real library was in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom.
Pyramids of paperbacks were stacked on the floor under their polished, cherrywood nightstands. Daddy’s side was wild territory inhabited by testy gunslingers and four-armed aliens and tough detectives who liked their gin cold and their babes hot. Mickey Spillane and Louis L’Amour. Robert Heinlein and John D. MacDonald. Man Stuff.
Mama’s collection was more varied but no less woolly—Tolkien and Vonnegut, Lillian Hellman and John Le Carré, and stacks of fat, luscious historical romance novels, bursting with adventure and passion, heavy on medieval England, which Mama, proud of Grandmother Elizabeth’s homeland, considered part of our family heritage.
I snuck their paperbacks into my bedroom and worked my way through the ones that were particularly shocking and not totally bewildering. So my imagination ran to hard-boiled detectives and space monsters and adventurous medieval ladies, all of whom, to my astonishment, were absolutely determined to have sex.
Sex was not spoken about in our house. It was not joked about, even by my brothers, not in front of me anyhow. Body parts and bathroom noises, yes. Merged body parts, no.
After my awful Steckem Road visit I demanded my older girl cousins explain
exactly
why everyone called it
Stick ’Em in Road
. They told me, and their description was so graphic, so gross, and made the whole sex thing sound so embarrassing that I looked at them shrewdly and said, “Anybody with more sense than a rock wouldn’t waste their time doing
that
.”
What I knew of romance I learned from watching old movies on TV and studying Mama and Daddy.
Mama had big blue eyes and a butt that was the envy of every woman in town—shaped like an upside-down Valentine heart. Daddy liked her fanny so much, he patted it whenever he thought nobody was looking. He would giveher a wicked grin when we caught them doing stuff like that.
Daddy was one of those nearly fat-free men with ropy muscles and hands that could bend steel cable. He had long, lean arms and skinny legs, and he carried what little fat he did have in his belly, a hard little mound above his belt buckle. I would thump it. It felt like the rind of a ripe watermelon. Mama called it his spare gas tank, and she liked to rub it. When he was sitting at the table, Mama would walk by and
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