Me and my brothers didn’t look much like brothers but we got along as brothers do, beating the tar out of each other one minute but not letting no one else put a hand on any of us the next. Local folks called us the Mutt Gang, and we didn’t look for trouble much, just mischief, but few boys or even grown men dared cross us after wronging us once.
Little Virgil was the only one of us who ever had a real dad in Shady because for some reason, a short feller with a small round curly head named Arthur Hoskins decided to face up to his responsibility about it.
I was so young then that my memory of Arthur Hoskins was fuzzy but I remember Ma wanting to get married quick to Arthur before he tried to get away. Arthur couldn’t go to the outhouse or take a walk by himself for a week before the nuptials without a man hired by the elders keeping an eye on him if Ma wasn’t around.
She told us that she’d finally found a decent man who could tolerate children and her occupation, so her and Arthur up and got hitched one hot Saturday afternoon under a walnut tree beside the Big Walker River. They even hauled in a real preacher from Abington on the back of a hay truck to do the ceremony. Ma insisted on a legal wedding.
Everybody in Shady Hollow went to it dressed up in the finest they owned as we all stood on the grassy riverbank.
Once it was over and dark set in, there was general high living and raucous behavior of all sorts. The elders paid for all of it.
But that short loud feller Ma had got hitched to got himself shot outside of McCauley’s Pavilion just before little Virgil was even crawling. Got shot square in the face. By a woman. Ma found out later that her dead husband was married to about a dozen other women besides her. One of them tracked him to Shady Hollow and killed him over it because he’d taken a good bit of her fortunes before he left.
The elders questioned Ma afterward over and over why a true professional con man like Arthur Hoskins, whose trade turned out to be robbing wealthy women, would want to marry a whore in Shady Hollow who didn’t have nothing but a bunch of hungry young’uns. Arthur’s other wives were all rich or within spitting distance of it. Ma kept telling the elders that she didn’t know, maybe Arthur just felt love for her and little Virgil.
They never bought into her explanation, I don’t think. Even grieving over her dead husband, Ma was summoned to a lot of elder meetings that year. Looking back, I believe that’s why they started getting suspicious of her.
Anyway, growing up, me and my brothers never called any man Dad or Papa or anything like that, but Ma told us to call some of the men who spent time around our second-floor apartment our “uncles,” so we did.
We had lots of uncles in Shady Hollow, and they came and went like leaves ride the river current.
They’d be there for a spell, giving Ma as much money as she could talk out of them and they’d eat her good Southern cooking and bounce a baby on a knee. They shared her bed, too, when she wasn’t working or when one of us wasn’t in it sick, and then one day we’d wake up and all sight and smell of them would be gone.
We’d stand quiet in our three-room apartment, looking out an open window, feeling the chill, watching theway the curtain would blow in and out. Ma had a cowbell nailed above the squeaky door to our apartment to keep better track of us. I guess that’s why they always left out a window—to keep from ringing that bell, same as we did when we’d sneak out.
Ma would shut the window tight all of a sudden and tell us that Uncle Pete or Uncle Shelby or Uncle Carl or Uncle whoever wasn’t bringing back breakfast because he wasn’t coming back. And that’s the last time any of us could speak their name as Ma would go to making grits on top of the coal stove.
She always made grits when we lost an uncle, not sure why because Ma hated grits and I was never fond of them, either. But we’d salt and pepper them and put butter or cheese in them and sit and eat quiet. Times were gonna be hard for a while. Grits signaled such times and we ate a lot of them between uncles.
Uncle Ray was my favorite uncle out of all of them.
Ma had told me the first day he moved in with us that he wasn’t my real uncle when I asked her, which meant he wasn’t my real father. But he could have been one to one of my brothers I guess—even though he didn’t look like none of us that I could see, except Teddy, because Teddy sort of looked like everybody.
Uncle Ray was getting a head start on being an old man in those times. But when he was younger, he’d went to a big college in Connecticut learning to be a doctor, Ma said. He got in some bad trouble not being able to pay off gambling and schooling debts to a bunch of serious fellers in New York City. Uncle Ray took off and I don’t know if he was ever a real doctor. But he could cut and stitch like no one else and he doctored in Shady whenever needed, even if he had to leave a card game to do it. And even if he was winning big or losing big, which he was admired for by some and not for by some others. I figured, too, sometimes that was the reason why Uncle Ray tended to be such a poor gambler.
He’d taught Ma and a couple of other gals to be his nurses for whenever he needed help, and he always told me that Ma was the best of all of them and it was a shame she never got an education. I remember both of them going off together in a rush at all times of the day or night once summoned for help from somebody, most usually for a woman in trouble. I guess I can best say that as far as making a living, Ma tended to the wants of men and the needs of women, all who came to Shady for such different reasons.
But before they worked together as doctor and nurse, it was clear from the first day Uncle Ray stepped foot in Shady that he liked Ma, because he was her best-paying customer. He doted on her more than most men ever did, buying her fancy garments or a hat or even flowers, stuff he didn’t need to buy because he always paid his turn with her in advance. I guess he just wanted to spend more money on her.
I didn’t think back then that Ma deep-down loved Uncle Ray like some folks you see do in movies. He didn’t love her in that way, either, but she seemed to care for him in a more than tolerable way. He stuck around long enough even when he wasn’t forced to, to show me how to do things like use that razor and how to load and shoot a gun—by not paying mind to what’s going on around you or the stirrings in you at that moment, but to just keep eyeballing the front sight and make sure it stayed in the middle of what you wanted to hit, and then keep squeezing that trigger nice and slow no matter if your hands were shaking because they were gonna be shaking if someone was shooting back at you.
“Nice and slow,” he said over and over.
I must have squeezed the trigger on his empty wheel gun a hundred or more times in Ma’s apartment as he’d lay a dime on the barrel. He told me I could keep the dime when I aimed in and squeezed the trigger and the dime was still balancing.
I eventually got to keep that ten cents, and got to pocket about a dollar’s worth more change over the weeks as we’d keep practicing. One day when we walked to the edge of Shady, he finally gave me a real bullet to put in his gun.
I hit an old chicken-pecked pie tin from thirty paces away that he’d hung from a locust tree branch.
Dead center.
He took his revolver from me and said, “You don’t need any more shooting lessons.”
The gun bucked up and backward and I brought it down to squeeze the trigger again, but when I did Mr. Charles was flat on his back in the middle of Main Street. His hat had fallen off, and looking at his thin white hair laying in the muddy street, I now knew for certain that it was him. Ma was crying hysterical and she ran over and kicked the pistol out of his hand even though he wasn’t moving.
I looked down at Uncle Ray and he wasn’t moving, either. Not even his quick eyes, which were wide-open, staring at the sky.
Then Amanda Lynn screamed to the top of her lungs.
I’d just fallen down, almost like my legs were yanked out from under me.