Thrown-away Child

to be always clowning about his mother-in-law. My Willis, he’d say, Every time a mother-in-law dies it’s ’cause hell needs a fresh devil.”
    “Oh, Mama!” Ruby said.
    “Now, y’all go upstairs for your lie-down like I told you.” Mama’s orders. “When I come back, I’m going to be storming around my kitchen.”
    Ruby crossed through the parlor to the stairs. She turned to me. “Coming?”
    “Go ahead, I’ll be up in a minute.” I had the feeling Mama wanted to say something private to me. Ruby continued up the stairs. After I heard a door open and close again, I asked Mama, “Do you have an idea where Perry might be?”
    “Now you heard what I told them other po-lice.”
    “And you know I’m not like either one of them.”
    Mama looked me up and down. She was not eyeing a son-in-law, she was taking measure of a cop. “Suppose I tell you where Perry might be at. What you going to do?”
    “Better I should find him before Mueller and Eckles do Perry’s got the right to be afraid. But somebody has to tell him you make mistakes when you’re afraid.”
    “I know you right.”
    “Where’s he hiding?”
    “Only’d be a guess, but I’ll tell.”
    After she did, Mama crossed the room, opened the door, and walked down the steps to the street. I watched her through the window, and saw a switch in her hips as she walked along, like she was a young woman again, with a lion in her life...
    This woman bearing the lonesome sorrow of widowhood, and now the sorrow of her nephew. How do such women sleep? Sister Bertice, who was not all bad, knew the answer. One year she made me memorize a Yeats poem about the muttering Moll Magee, tortured by her little girl’s death. But always, as I’m movin’ round, Without doors or within, Pilin’ the wood or pilin’ the turf. Or goin’ to the well, I’m thinkin’ of my baby and keenin’ to my sel.’ And sometimes I am sure she knows: When, openin’ wide His door, God lights the stars, His candles, and looks upon the poor.

    Upstairs, where I had carted our suitcases, I found Ruby lying flat out on her back in a high bed that dominated a small room with pink walls and the smell , of sachets buried in bureau drawers. The bed looked like a Macy’s display of pillows and lace. Ruby had stripped off her clothes and dusted herself with talcum in attempts to drop off into a cool nap. But she was still awake.
    I set the suitcases underneath the double window over the back alley. I glanced out the windows, and pictured Ruby as a girl again—playing down there in the alley in another day in shorts and sneakers, going off to Sunday school in braids and a polka-dot dress and Mary Janes and white anklets. Then I looked back at Ruby lying naked in the big bed, and thought of her soft grown-up breasts pressed against my chest and her breath in my ear and her brown legs entangled in my own...
    Then came the grim visage of every nun I have ever known in my life, a whole coven of them chanting at me in Irish, Peaca súil —sins of the eyes. This quickly changed the earthy ideas coursing through my mind and emboldening my middle extremity.
    “Do you think Mama likes me all right?” I asked, thinking this a wholesome line of conversation.
    “Like? I think she wants to adopt.”
    “Damn, I’m sweet!”
    Ruby yawned. “We’re going to need some rest before the onslaught of Janny dearest, and the rest.“
    “You and your sister have problems? I’ve never even heard you mention her.”
    “No, you haven’t.” That was all Ruby had to say for now on the subject of Janice.
    There was a photograph hanging in a wooden frame over the bed, and a crucifix tucked back behind it. In the photo were two people in church robes—Violet Flagg and a heavyset, dark-skinned man with a big smile.
    “That’s Mama with a voodoo con artist,” Ruby said of the picture. “You know, the Most Reverend Zebediah Tilton.”
    “The one who scammed your mother and father out of the cottage?”
    “Same one who telephoned and made Mama feel low by saying he’d be calling out Daddy from the dead this Sunday. Damn him!”
    I sat on the edge of the bed. Ruby ran her hands over the lace coverlet. “This is the bed I was born in," she said. “Also the bed my daddy died in.”
    I looked to another photograph. It was the centerpiece of the bureau, a hand-painted wedding portrait. Violet Duclat in a silver bridal gown with yellow flowers in her hair. And the groom, Willis Flagg, a handsome