A Place to Call Home Read online

  Not to mention my thirteen Maloney and Delaney aunts and uncles plus their spouses, my three dozen first cousins, Mama’s and Daddy’s numerous cousins of various degrees, and other assorted relatives, in-laws, and friends, who came and went as if our home were a train station at the center of the universe.

  In the long run, Roanie Sullivan never had a chance. From the start, he was only one against many.

  He and his daddy lived in a trailer down in Sullivan’s Hollow among junked cars and appliances and piles of rusty tin cans, beside a gully filled with half-burned garbage. Big Roan only had one leg; the other was a metal contraption—so I’d heard, because I’d never gotten a peek at it. Evan and Hop insisted the metal leg had all sorts of weapons built in it—a bayonet and a poison-dart gun and a razor-tipped claw—and that Big Roan Sullivan could whip it off and throw it like a spear. I never had the gall to ask Mama and Daddy if any of that was true.

  The Sullivans didn’t have People—none that anyone knew of, anyway. Grandpa said Big Roan had rambled into town a year or two before the Korean War. He was an edgy hot-rodder who took a job at Murphy’s Feed Mill and threw beer cans out the window of the room he rented from Old Maid Featherstone.

  Daddy and Mama were already married and expecting Josh, but Daddy enlisted for the war because that’s what Maloneys have always done, and several of our relatives enlisted, too. But all of them, Daddy included, spent the war stateside, keeping the Commies at bay by fixing army jeeps and cleaning latrines.

  Big Roan Sullivan, who was Irish but didn’t have the luck, got drafted and was immediately carted off to the front lines. He came back to Dunderry because he’d had no place else to call home, and because it was as good an address as any for his disability check. He’d lost most of his right leg when he stepped on a mine.

  Daddy said he’d been surly before, but after the war he turned mean—a mean drunk, a condition that took some work, since the county was dry then. Because Big Roan was a war hero Grandpa Joseph Maloney deeded him two acres in the hollow east of our farm. The Masons and the VFW bought him a used house trailer and an old truck.

  Daddy and his brothers drilled a well for him and built a bathroom onto the back of the trailer. The Kiwanis donated the tub and toilet. The Latchakoochee Power Company ran the electricity and gave Big Roan six months’ free service. Dunderry Gas donated and installed a propane tank. Mountain View Telephone ran the phone lines and donated a phone.

  The Ladies’ Association planted a lawn, and Mama set out a few of her rose shrubs. All five members of the Dunderry African Men’s Association (one of whom was a relative of ours, but my family didn’t talk about that in public back then, and not much now) brought out a tractor and dug Big Roan a garden patch. Barker Murphy offered him his old job at the feed mill. He was prayed with, and for, and over, by every minister in the county, including the priest from our tiny Catholic chapel.

  The salvation of Big Roan Sullivan was the biggest civic project since a tornado scattered the county courthouse to kingdom come, but unlike the courthouse, he couldn’t be rebuilt.

  He let the lawn and the garden patch go to weeds. The roses shriveled, the trailer began to look like a garbage can, and Big Roan kept the truck working just well enough to drive to the grocery store and down to Atlanta twice a week for liquor.

  He stumped around the town square on his metal leg most nights, drinking and pissing in the flower tubs and shouting nonsense—“To hell with all you coward sons of bitches! The whole country can kiss my ass!”—until the sheriff’s deputies hauled him off to jail to dry out.

  “That’s why I can’t laugh at Otis on Andy Griffith,” Grandpa Joseph said. “There’s nothing funny about a town drunk.”

  At least one part of Big Roan still worked, and it attracted a certain kind of girl, mostly the kind who would have lived on the wrong side of the tracks, if we’d had tracks. He laid rail until Mother Nature called his bluff and word got around that Jenny Bolton was pregnant. Jenny, by all accounts, was a pretty little brunette, only about seventeen, but beaten-looking already. She’d arrived the year before with her brother and his wife, tenant farmers from south Georgia looking for a new stake.

  The three of them shared a two-room log cabin on a cattle farm owned by Daddy’s first cousin, Charley O’Brien, and when people figured out who’d knocked her up, they organized a righteous group, mostly made up of my relatives, who dragged Big Roan over to the O’Brien farm and made him own up to his part. Today we’d call it an intervention. In those days they called it a shotgun wedding.

  Jenny moved to the Hollow with Big Roan, but when it came time for the baby to be born, he was passed out, drunk, behind their trailer. Mama felt sorry for Jenny and had been checking in on her nearly every day. Mama found her curled up and crying in the trailer’s tiny, dirty bed. Daddy hurried over to the Hollow and carried Jenny out as if she were a kid herself. He and Mama drove her to the hospital in Gainesville as quick as they could, but the doctors had to deliver the baby by cesarean—he was so large and Jenny was so small. When Mama asked her what she wanted to name him, she gasped out, “Roan, Junior, please, ma’am,” then fell asleep for the next twelve hours.

  Everyone called the baby Roanie to distinguish him from Big Roan. Five years later, right about the time I was born, Jenny caught pneumonia and died. She had given all her willpower to Roanie, I think. There was a lot of talk about taking him away from Big Roan, but people were squeamish—a man had an ordained right to his own seed, especially if he’d already sacrificed a leg for his country.

  And so, in the way even good people have of turning their backs when problems are messy, my family let Roanie grow up the way he did.

  I figured his situation this way: I came into the world to take care of him for his mama.

  No one else wanted to.

  When I started the first grade at Maloney Elementary School, Roanie was already in the sixth. I watched him from a distance with horrified curiosity.

  “You stay clear of Roanie Sullivan,” Mama warned me. “He had head lice last spring.”

  Maloney women are known for their red hair. Bunch us up and we look like a fistful of lit matches. I had a glorious head of hair—dark red, long, and curly. The thought of lice setting up shop in it was enough to convince me. Head lice meant you’d have to have all your hair shaved off, and it meant you were the lowest of the low, because decent people didn’t get lice.

  Besides, Roanie always looked dirty, and his jeans were too long one week and too short the next. He was big for his age but wiry-thin, with huge gray eyes looking out of a tight face. His brown-black hair was shaved down to nubs except for a greasy patch at the top of his forehead. His crooked tooth gave him a sinister expression when he opened his mouth. I wanted him to talk right and have his tooth fixed, so he’d be respectable.

  Evan, who was in the same class with him, told us Roanie stories at supper.

  “He smells like that old garbage hole in the Hollow,” Evan would say, “and Miss Clark makes him sit off by himself sometimes. He chews his fingernails right down to the pink parts. Man, his lunch bag is so greasy, Mama could fry chicken on it.”

  Somebody was always messing with Roanie; he was like a scab the other boys couldn’t stop picking. White trash. Pig shit. Smells like a toilet. He’d fight anything, anybody—older, taller, or heavier, all comers—and about half the time he got the living daylights beat out of him. It wasn’t unusual to see Principal Rafferty dragging Roanie down the hall to have the nurse stitch up or ice down some part of his face.

  His fury and isolation and status as a worthless outcast fascinated me because I was his opposite—the pampered darling of a prosperous clan. I had a vast number of kinfolk who really were kin, not just names but a daily part of my life. At school I couldn’t spit gum without hitting someone related to me.

  But Roanie and I had one thing in common: my foibles, too, were no secret. If I got into trouble for talking in class, or traded my lunch money for anoth
er kid’s forbidden pack of Twinkies, or was caught scribbling knock-knock jokes on the wall of the girls’ bathroom, the trespass traveled the family grapevine faster than a monkey on pep pills.

  I couldn’t imagine someone who broadcast his notoriety without benefit of three dozen cousins to transmit for him. That was power. At the same time, I felt sorrier for Roanie Sullivan than I’d ever felt for another human being in my life.

  I knew I could count on Grandpa Joseph to have respect for an underdog.

  Grandpa never bragged about how much money he’d made or how many Japanese soldiers he’d killed during World War II; he wouldn’t talk about the war at all. He wouldn’t even watch John Wayne war movies on TV.

  One time he took me with him to eat Saturday breakfast at the Dunderry Diner, and I sat in the center of a rump-sprung vinyl booth, surrounded by him and his cronies, and somebody brought up the war in Vietnam, and the other old men started talking big—wipe out the Commie gooks, drop the bomb on ’em and fry their little godless, slanty-eyed behinds, that kind of stuff. Josh had just come home from Vietnam, so I guess they expected Grandpa to agree with them.

  “Shut up,” Grandpa said suddenly. “Those Vietcong are damn sure mean, but they fight for what they believe in and they die for it, and I’ve got more respect for ’em than I have for any of you old loud-mouthed bastards.” And he got up furiously and took me by one hand, and we went home.

  “Distance makes killin’ sound too clean and easy,” Grandpa said. I guess he’d never forgotten about killing Japanese soldiers during the war. “You need to look a man in the eye,” he told me, “and see his fear, and watch him bleed, and watch him die. There’s a balance to that. Accepting responsibility. You’ll know what it means to take another person’s life.”

  So I knew you had to respect the people you fought, and be grateful you’d come out on top, and just hope you were as lucky the next time.

  I figured that was how Roanie thought of us.

  He didn’t let people catch him standing beside the road at the Hollow. I guess he knew how he looked, waiting for the school bus by the lopsided mailbox in front of that awful sinkhole with its junk and garbage-filled gully and rusty trailer.

  But there was another reason, too: my older cousins, Arlan and Harold Delaney. They were already in high school, old enough to drive, and if they caught Roanie by the Hollow’s mailbox, they’d take a whack at the mailbox with a baseball bat. When they could catch him, they took a whack at Roanie, too.

  I missed the bus one morning in May. I was in a mood, an ill mood as usual, as Mama called it, because I’d spilled a whole pot of hot grits on my skirt while I was helping her make breakfast. It was thundering and pouring rain outside, weather that made my curly hair explode in fuzz. I knew I looked like cotton candy with a face. Mama braided my hair four different ways and finally slicked it down with hair gel. “Now I look like a greasy Brillo pad,” I sobbed, and hid in my bathroom.

  So I missed the bus.

  Grandpa was the only one who could stand me when I was being a brat, so he drove me, Hop, and Evan to school. I sat glumly beside him in the front bucket seat of his Trans Am. That was Grandpa. He didn’t drive an old-man car, he drove the latest-model black Pontiac Trans Am with mag wheels and an air scoop on the hood.

  So there we went, skimming between the forest on either side of Soap Falls Road, rain drenching everything around us, Grandpa humming along with a Tammy Wynette song on the radio, me wrapped in a pink plastic raincoat and a pink scarf protecting my hair, Hop and Evan wedged together in the Trans Am’s small backseat. We rounded the curve at Sullivan’s Hollow and saw Arlan and Harold’s souped-up truck speed off.

  I shrieked. “They got Roanie again!”

  “Those skinny-assed shitbirds,” Grandpa said under his breath.

  Roanie was hanging on to the mailbox in that downpour. He had no raincoat, no umbrella, no nothing except a plastic garbage bag pulled tight around his shoulders like a cape. His books were scattered in the weeds, and the way he and the mailbox leaned, it wasn’t clear which one was going to fall down first.

  But as soon as he saw another car he turned, staggered, fell, got up, and ran down the Hollow’s mud-slicked driveway. The last I glimpsed of him he was wobbling into the woods on the next hill.

  “Grandpa,” I begged. “Grandpa, please stop.”

  Grandpa pulled off to one side.

  “Aw, come on, Claire,” Hop protested from the backseat. “You can’t catch him.”

  “He’ll smell up the car,” Evan said.

  “Grandpa,” I said again. “Nothing could stink worse than Hop’s sausage breath.”

  Grandpa studied me with his head tilted. “Roanie’s your fish, Claire. If you want to reel him in, you’ll have to get out in the rain and do it yourself.”

  I guess he was testing me to see what I was made of. Vanity or valor. I gave Grandpa a level look. “I’m already fuzzy and greasy. Might as well get wet, too.”

  I pushed my door open. “Hold on, sweet pea,” Grandpa said, but I was already out. I trudged down the muddy road. “Roanie!” I yelled. Rain whipped water into my face. I slipped on the mud and sat down hard. “Roanie, come here! We’ll give you a ride to school! It’s okay! I swear!”

  Grandpa stood beside me, cupping his hands to his mouth. He could have yodeled Moses down from the mountain. “Cooome ooon, Roooanie!”

  Silence. Stillness. We called for ten minutes.

  I knew Roanie was watching us from somewhere in the dripping green forest on a ridge above the Hollow. I could feel his gaze in the goosebumps on the back of my neck. But he wasn’t coming back.

  “All right,” Grandpa said wearily. “We can’t get that cat out of his tree.” He gently pulled me to my feet. All my pent-up misery curled out in small, choking sobs. I was muddy, I was soaked, and I was still better off than Roanie. “He thinks we’re jinxed,” I cried as Grandpa guided me back to the car. “Every time he has anything to do with us something bad happens.”

  Grandpa patted my shoulder. “We’re not jinxed. We just live on the opposite side of the fence. We’re as strange to him as he is to us.”

  I turned toward the woods again. “You come over and see us!” I yelled. “I’m leaving a gate open for you!”

  • • •

  When I was in the second grade, Neely Tipton made my life a constant, daily hell. He was a year ahead of me, the third-grade bully—a walking, talking stereotype of a future football gorilla—and he made a game of slipping up behind me, hissing “Bony Maloney,” yanking my hair so hard, my eyes watered, then running before I could turn around.

  I knew, of course, that Evan or Hop would cheerfully strangle Neely if I asked them nicely, but one of the lessons I’d already learned, being the only girl in a house full of brothers, was to keep quiet and get even. I was both a girly-girl and a tomboy—the first because Mama was so pleased to have a female child that she exaggerated my differences, the latter because—poor Mama—Hop and Evan treated me like a baby brother who just happened to have long hair and an innie.

  The only problem with Neely was that he moved too fast for me to smack him. I began to get twitchy about it, always looking over one shoulder with a fist curled against my stomach.

  But he learned his lesson one day and he never laid a hand on my hair again.

  It started like every other Neely-dreading encounter. At recess I edged warily out a doorway to the playground. He was lurking behind the open door, and the next thing I knew my head jerked and I flew backward like a calf hitting the end of a rodeo rope. I landed on my back on a concrete stoop and lay there, gasping for air, my jumper hiked up to my panties, the crown of my head burning as if I’d been scalped.

  “Bony Maloney, I gotcha,” Neely yelled. Dazed, I propped myself on my skinned elbows just in time to hear Neely’s footsteps crunching quickly on the graveled rain-drip bed beside the building. Then I heard a whump and looked over to see Neely bounce off the brick wall and sit down hard
.

  Roanie towered over him, cool as a cucumber. “You mess with her again,” Roanie told him calmly, “and I’ll jerk your butthole through your mouth.”

  I stared at Roanie with stunned wonder. Neely began snuffling. I got up, wobbled over proudly, and punched him in the side of the head. Personal revenge, better late than never.

  Roanie looked down at me with his eyes half shut and glittering. Maybe he expected me to ignore him or insult him or run like a squirrel. “Thanks, Roanie,” I said very carefully, because I couldn’t quite forget those head lice he’d had the year before.

  “I seen you, and I heard you, that time at the Hollow,” he said. “You ain’t like nobody else in the whole world.” Then he just shrugged and walked away.

  That was the day I began to love Roanie Sullivan.

  The realization that I was in love was something I weighed against Maloney romantic tradition, which, to me, was majestically powerful but might be bad for a person’s teeth.

  Sean and Bridget Maloney. Romantic Irish names. But there was nothing romantic about the two old people, my great-great-great-grandparents, who stared down at me from massive portraits that hung in the main hallway of our home. I was afraid of them—that gray-bearded Irishman and the solemn, thin-faced Irishwoman with her hair in white ringlets who had birthed twelve children and buried six of them with her own hands.

  Daddy assured me people just didn’t smile for pictures back then. Smiling wasn’t proper, and besides, a lot of old people were missing a couple of their front teeth. But I was convinced that my ancestors thought I wasn’t up to the job of being a Maloney. They’d crossed an ocean. They’d carved a thousand-acre farm out of the Estatoe Valley wilderness. They’d named a town and helped build it. They were giants.

  And they were still close by, under timeworn tombstones on a knoll behind the house, surrounded by their lost babies and surviving children, the wives and husbands of their children, their grandchildren, and assorted others—a sprawling, granite town of dead Maloneys. On Halloweens my brothers and cousins and I huddled among them, telling one another ghost stories that seemed all too real. Uncle Bert jumped out of the shadows one Halloween, wearing his preacher’s robe and a Nixon mask.