To celebrate my Return to Hardscrabble Road book launch on October 16—and to honor readers for their patience as I dithered and dillydallied for a decade about writing this sequel—here is the first chapter in its entirety:
Chapter 1
I found Mama waiting for me in the kitchen. Her blonde, shoulder-length hair, always a little wild, seemed neglected instead of carefree, with more silver woven through it than I remembered. Her slim face looked gaunt, dark eyes flinty. The blue-checked gingham apron she always wore while doing chores showed reddish-brown splotches of food, but so did the sleeves of her housedress, which had been stitched from daisy-patterned flour sacks, as if she’d stopped giving a damn about her clothes.
On closer inspection, the stains looked a lot like blood spatter, such as someone might get firing .38 caliber bullets from a Colt revolver into Papa at close range. Six times. And the apron pocket in front sagged as if it might contain that murder weapon, which he used to keep snug in his waistband during my childhood.
“Hey,” I said. I draped my greatcoat on the kitchen table and set the Army Air Forces cap atop it. They matched the olive drabs I’d hitchhiked in from the Colquitt, Georgia, bus station. Dropping onto the bench on one side of the splintery table, I realized I’d automatically chosen the spot Papa had assigned me when I was a kid.
Mama sat across from me. “Only two letters since you left?” Her voice hadn’t softened a lick.
“You didn’t write back after either of them.”
“I been busy.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the kitchen, which looked and smelled the same, yet different, from almost a year ago.
Everything seemed smaller, but thick cobwebs still coated the rafters, where the latest generation of spiders said grace and devoured whatever flew their way. A bare electric bulb dangled above us now instead of the kerosene lantern that had seemed to create more shadows than light. The same old stove put out welcomed heat on this New Year’s Day of 1947, but all I smelled was burning wood without the usual accompanying aroma of cornbread baking in Mama’s cast-iron skillet.
My finger traced familiar patterns in the scarred and pitted table with gaps between the slats. As a boy, I once knocked over a glass and sent well water streaming between those spaces and onto Papa’s creased slacks. My jaw tightened as I recalled the crack of his backhand that had knocked me to the plank floor. After I had staggered back to the bench, he’d done it again, even harder. Now Papa was dead, shot to pieces, and everybody knew Mama had ended him.
Though desperate to ask her about that—I’d thought of little else during my journey home—her haggard appearance made me hesitate. I didn’t want to kick her while she was down.
In one respect, I felt grateful for his murder, because if anyone deserved killing, he did. But I was also horrified by the brutal violence that apparently ran in both sides of the family. I blurted, “How’d it feel, pulling that trigger over and over again?”
“What’re you going on about, Bud?”
“I prefer my real namenow. Shooting Papa—how’d it make you feel?”
“Well, Roger, who said I shot that sonofabitch?”
I snorted. “Everybody.”
“You been in San Antone the better part of a year at that Lack of Land place—”
“It’s called Lackland.”
“That don’t make no never mind to me. How can you know what anybody round these parts is saying, let alone everybody?”
I indicated the port-wine stain that colored the upper quarter of my face like a clock shaded crimson from nine to noon. “With this birthmark, folks recognize me straight off, and they seem to like talking about the MacLeod…history.”
“Meaning what?”
“Papa shooting you at the Cottontail Café. Him marrying the Ramsey widow and overseeing her sawmill operations.”
She grunted. “Not that he’d bothered to tell me he got a judge to divorce us.”
And not that Mama had bothered to let their marriage get in the way of her own countless affairs. Just like him. I’d had it out with her a few years before over her promiscuity—which, among other results, had produced me—and I couldn’t stomach another go-round. Instead I said, “They also like talking about his murder in that same sawmill. And your name comes up a lot.”
“Aye God, they don’t know pea turkey.”
Her hands closed into fists on the worn tabletop. Like her face, they also looked thinner. I asked about the other thing heavy on my mind. “Mama, how are you making ends meet?”
“I got my ways. Don’t you worry about me none.”
The laughter of my two brothers echoed down the hall from the front porch. We had telegrammed each other after my oldest brother, Jay, received news of Papa’s death. It provided the perfect excuse for emergency leave so we could reunite here, with the military paying for our travel to the Colquitt bus station and back to our duty stations. I swallowed my reply, swung my legs over the bench, and hurried to greet them.
Twenty-year-old Jay pushed the door open and held out his hand to usher in Chet, eighteen—a year older than me. I hadn’t seen either in a long time. Both wore their Army uniforms, military regulations be damned. They must’ve deduced, as I had, that people were happy to pick up hitchhiking soldiers. With World War II still fresh in everybody’s mind, it helped folks show their patriotism.
Jay had made sergeant, while Chet remained a private first class, same as I was in the Army Air Forces. I’d lied about my age to enlist in 1946, and now, for once, he didn’t outrank me. We had all traveled light; their green duffels joined my knapsack on the wood plank floor of the front room. It was the same spot where the three of us had been forced to share the one lumpy feather mattress growing up, with them along the edges and me lying in the middle in the opposite direction, keeping their feet company.
They’d put on some much-needed weight in the service. No more having to divide a few wormy tomatoes, a round of fly-specked cornbread, and a handful of butter beans among six people, with Papa getting the lion’s share.
Jay had grown tall and become a man after two years in the military, during and after the war. Like many soldiers, he smelled of cigarette smoke; it made him seem even older and more worldly. Chet was a gnat’s eyebrow shorter and as handsome as ever, boasting even thicker muscles, as if the Army had decided to make a weapon of him.
Compared with either of them, I still looked like a kid.
Chet gave my uniform a once-over. “I thought you were too good for us Army dogfaces and decided to be a flyboy instead.”
“We’ve got the same outfit as you for just a while longer. Rumor is, they’ll create a whole new branch this year called the Air Force and give us nicer duds.”
Ever the peacemaker, Jay said, “I wouldn’t care if you became a swabbie or a jarhead neither. We’re all battling on the same side—”
“Us against the world,” Chet and I finished for him.
Jay put his long arms around our shoulders. “Fellas, I wish we’d been born sooner. With all three of us in the fight, we could’ve ended the war before it really got going. If that ain’t the God’s honest truth, then grits ain’t groceries.”
Chet reached behind him and pounded a granite fist between my shoulder blades. “Speaking of the war, we went by the Kraut POW camp, Roger. Looks like you didn’t manage to free the entire Afrika Korps.”
“Just Hermann. He and Cecilia sent me a sweet Christmas card. She’s expecting.”
Jay released us and looked at his high-gloss shoes, which he’d somehow managed to keep clean despite the dusty roads. “Um, any word about her big sister?”
“Nothing but sad news. Geneva lost her husband and kids to polio over a year ago. Her parents have been trying to set her up with someone new, but nobody appeals to her.”
He nodded. “Maybe she’ll give me a shot. What’s the latest with you and Rienzi?”
From my breast pocket, I removed the monochrome photo of us arm in arm, posing in front of the Alamo.
Chet glanced at the snapshot before passing it to Jay. “Don’t you and Tokyo Rose know we lost that battle?”
“But we won the war. And she’s only half-Japanese, on her mother’s side.”
Jay returned the photo to me. He winked and asked, “Which side is the better smoocher?”
Blushing, I slid the picture back in my pocket while savoring the memory of her goodbye kiss.
Chet said, “I reckon she can still throw you across a room if you get too fresh.”
He was right, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Mindful of how quickly I’d lapsed into their slow drawl, the speech patterns of home, I said with my best schoolhouse diction, “Sir, I was raised to be a perfect gentleman.”
“Don’t you hey me, boy,” she said from the kitchen. “You and Roger couldn’t be bothered to give me a proper goodbye and don’t have the manners for a decent hello.”
Jay and I followed him, my oldest brother saying, “That’s right, Mama. If the Army catches wind, they might be put in the stockade as a lesson to the other ingrates.” He kissed her cheek and hugged her.
She rose onto her shoe tips and glared at me and Chet over his shoulder. “Now this is the way a son’s supposed to reunite with his poor old mother.”
I couldn’t meet the challenge in her eyes. As ever, I envied Jay’s ability to always be kind to someone who’d made our lives even worse. If Papa was the tornado that tore through every day of our childhood, Mama had chosen, as often as not, to push us into the path of that twister instead of pulling us to safety. Maybe just to see what would happen.
Still, a boy coming home after so many months away should’ve greeted his mother properly rather than cross swords with her, as I’d done.
Chet pursed his lips like he wanted to spit. “Now that Papa’s out of the way,” he said to her, “who’s next on your hit list? More important, when’s supper?”
She let go of Jay and sidestepped him to face Chet. “I was hoping we’d go to town, seeing as how all y’all is on Uncle Sam’s payroll.”
“Just like the old days,” Chet snapped, giving voice to my thoughts. “Wanting to wring every last cent outta us.”
“Aye God, why’d you bother coming back here?”
Outside, somebody stumbled up the back porch steps. The door opened. Our twenty-two-year-old sister, Darlene, back from Atlanta and remarried yet again, shuffled in. The left side of her face was swollen and purplish, the eye there blackened, her blonde hair matted with dirt. Her arms crossed and hovered above her sides as if shielding her ribs while being afraid to touch them.
Jay approached her. She flinched and said through split lips, “No hugs. Please.”
She had a gap on the left side of her mouth where two teeth should’ve been.
To read the rest, please order it online here.