The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, that grand ol’ folktale alleging life under Lee to have been a convocation of gentleman lording over their lessers who were grateful to have been restored to their natural position beneath the boot, functions something like Agnes’s whitewashing of her early years. “We was happy, mostly,” she says. ‘We’ walls tight as a fortress. Those beyond its walls suffer the wolves without and the arrows shot by the fortunate within. As the right dishonorable Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of what was America, declared in Savanna, 1861, Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [of the assumption of the equality of races]; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. You can’t watch a boy be hanged with impunity, be hanged and then be colored the criminal, without learning something about the mortar that hardens up the walls of We.

A child is dead, body hanged like tallow by a wick, and Agnes harbors in her waters this image, fetor, conception of life brazen in its irresponsibilities, but her heart bothers elsewhere today, more than a decade later, poking around the thought of her molested stepbrother. Yet another story she declines to share with me. No matter. I learned it.

Dropping into the sink the soapslick dish she has been washing in circles, circles, to set these trying thoughts to rhythm, she finally resolves to discharge her uneasy feelings by sharing the letter with her husband and letting him decide.

Everett?

He has just come in from thirteen hours on the family farm, which he is determined to quit just as soon as he can wrap his head around what this life is all about. Fervent, fearful prayers for direction are answered by aches from his hours at the plow. He does not know what God intends for him, but he and his bride got a head start on their surely promising future by taking a ranch home six miles from the bed he wet at three and differently at thirteen. He is man, veteran, and they are a family.

The Aldens were a different sort of family. At the time of this memory, Agnes is eighteen and her stepbrother, Paul, perhaps twelve. The Alden children don’t know his age for sure. They never loved him, never asked.

Paul lives with them the first three years of his mother’s tenure in their father’s bed. But Paul is not with them proper, merely among them, an unblooded interloper whose allergy lidded eyes gaze placid on an indigo backed bluebird the day of his arrival in their home. He tells his new brothers that he has never seen such a thing.

You’ve never seen one? Theys just about all over the place! You must be stupid!

Bobby’s mocking incredulity echoes the affront the others feel at Paul’s audacity. It’s bad enough that they had to take in his mountain whore mother, but for him to think he gets to come too?

His free ride ends. Walter has left the photography beat and begins working full time at the town pharmacy minding the register, crushing pills to powder for the feeble throated and mixing electuaries for livestock. The work is steady, the pay steady and poor, and being confined nightly now to his overcrowded shack has acquainted him as if for the first time with just how overcrowded his lovemaking has left it. Between his six children and Mable’s one, it’s decided there’s one too many. A kindly Tennessee service ships Paul to Ohio in the spring of 1946 to begin life anew with a fresh family and surname. Sixteen months and one World War elapse without word from that union state, until Paul, mysteriously informed of Agnes’s nuptials, writes to her husband at the Alden family address. It is touching, as in the touch of death, that Paul addresses his letter to the Alden home: it means he believes that the family, unwilling to keep him, has taken in – bloodless – Everett.

Agnes collects the letter on one of her rare Sunday visits home. It is sent care of Everett, but what’s his is hers in this fledgling marriage. Neither ‘rape’ nor ‘molest’ appears in the letter, yet the pall of each hangs over, clear as an indictment, what diffident words do make the page. Perhaps he didn’t know those words, concepts of bodily autonomy, consent and freedom from pain being alien, dilettantish to such a boy in such a time. Or perhaps he was fearful to set the reality of his shame to record. What he did know was how to vividly describe what his foster father was doing to him nightly.

“It is not kynd or naturel,” he writes. “It will mak me inlovabl in the iiz of al gud wimin and I don want God to hat me.” 

Everett enters the home, moseys up to his wife of two years (excusing the abeyant eight months of terror abroad), places his washed clean calloused hands across the back of her shoulder blades and leans in to touch his dry lips to her beauty queen profile. Agnes raises her hand, the letter viced between her fingers. His lips land on the folded page.

Before Everett’s read the letter through, Agnes demands, How’s he know your name?

Everett, distracted, doesn’t catch her acid or look up from the letter, muttering, Paul? as though the name meant Pity.

Yes, Paul! Who else? Paul!

Everett turns over the letter to check for more gruesomeness on the back. I called him, he says. From Camp Shelby.

And why would you do that? You know! You know how I feel about him!

Thought I should speak. To him. Before shipping out. Everett looks up from the letter. His hand drops to his side. Paul wasn’t at the wedding, he says.

He wasn’t invited!

Agnes.

I cain’t believe you called him! I must have told you! I must have told you not to a hunnerd times!

Agnes, have you read this?

Well of course!

And? he looks at his wife. He faces her, faces her square.

Cautious, eyes flittering between Everett, aghast, and the empty space hanging grey beside him, she cries out, You don’t know what he did to me! That boy! He right tortured me! Tortured! I don’t wish badness on no one. Let the Lord judge. But tortured!

He may have hesitated a fatal moment before retrieving his shotgun. He may have demanded of himself some reckoning. In his whirlwind romance had he ever before this moment paused to consider what manner of woman he invited eternally into his bed and heart? Whatever his thoughts, he collects his Remington, packs off to the Alden family home to appraise Bobby of this abomination and enlist his overnight aid in rescue. Bobby is sixteen and ripping for adventure. His own rifle, rarely out of reach, is already, always, loaded.

Ohio makes for a long haul setting out from central Mississippi. Who knows what violence they threatened or protections they prayed for over the long hours of that adrenalined drive? Bobby died last Sunday. Those two drove all night.

Morning finds them charming a gas station attendant for directions to Paul’s foster family’s home, the address itself printed, underlined and underlined harder again in a postscript to his plea. I’m told the town was a small one. It has since been dissolved and reincorporated under a different name. No records of the abuse exist. No court intervened or was asked to. A brisk knock on a suburban door. The pedophile rapist answers, greets a bloodlustful backwater teen, a decorated veteran of the American campaign against European fascism, and their lifted, loaded rifles.

“We’re the brothers.”

No further threat was required.

This is how stories come to me. Wads of scrap paper pulled from a neglected drawer. I’ll have been talking with Imogene Ray for an hour about the Aldens’ old town grocer or some other trifle I didn’t ask after, before she comes out with, “We used to all go off to town together Saturdays, me and the other girls and the boys, and the stepbrother, some, til o course he got sent away, and then there was that molestin business with his foster daddy.” Bury the lead with the dead! I ask my mother about it, and she says “Oh yes, Uncle—well, Uncleish Paul. That’s a terrible story.” Terribly relevant to my foray! You’re telling me Agnes’s stepbrother was pawned off onto a pedophile through some black market orphan train human trafficking scheme (Walter ‘met a woman’ who ‘helped with unwanted children’), and months into my attempt to ascertain the warp of Agnes’s psyche, not one sister, daughter, friend or confidant saw fit to mention that transaction?

Thumbing through my notebooks (two filled and I’ve started a third), I’m realizing how misleading it would be to shape Agnes’s biography into anything resembling a polished book. Keeping it ramshackle testifies to how patchwork we love our fellow man. Every lacuna speaks for some dire admission, some pivotal moment that doesn’t make the record because the sole surviving witness just up and forgot or forgot to mention. But that’s all right. That’s the way of things. In the end, what’s left of your life but six or seven ill wrought memories? Tell me, when at eleven years old did you feel most beautiful?

Anyway, since we’re talking about it, I’m going to tell you what Imogene Ray has to say about those Saturday forays into town.

Ablutions pre Mable and post Mable differ. Before their stepmother stormed the stage with her leather suitcase full of dirtfree blouses and airy sundresses options for Saturday attire were lean as the times. There was the canary yellow dress “that look like a bag on Imogene Ray or Erma” but was the picture of “perfect loveliness” on Agnes on account of Agnes’s ample bosom, says Agnes.

“I mean I wudn no beauty queen,” Imogene Ray, desiccated as a taxidermized squirrel, graciously admits. “An Erma was a bean pole. But by gah, ever Saturday Agnes was up at the,” she smacks her hands together loud as a bullwhip, “crack a dawn to pick through that dresser. Sometime even hid what she wan to wear the night before. Would sleep with it in her bed even.”

There was the “daytime purple” dress and the “nighttime purple” dress, descriptions that pertain, I believe, to the differing hues of dawn and dusk draped royal across the shoulders of the Mississippi sky (these girls didn’t own cocktail wear, they didn’t go out at night except to watch the fireflies quarrel). Overlapping caprices led to fights. Imogene Ray being so much younger – seven years younger than Agnes, eight under Erma – served chiefly as witness rather than combatant, watching the blows fly from under her bedsheet.

Agnes Alden, I tell the Almighty, I’m gonna rip your hair from ya if you took the blue!

Saturday mornings, the most sporting of the week, often began with a shouted death threat from Erma, waking the boys and Imogene Ray who offered no sexual competition and so had no reason to wake early to outwit her rival. Agnes is up, has been up a tiptopeing hour. No one heard her wake. No one heard her about her business, which she conducts light as a sprite. Her hands have bathed the rest of her in the basin by the barn. Her hair has been combed and combed exactly one hundred times. Already she stands in the dirt row that cuts between the soybean fields. She stands, resplendent, in blue. She knows that Erma will not walk out of the house undressed, that she will not dress only to walk out for the purpose of confronting Agnes to attempt to steal back the blue, so Agnes has won and has only now to wait, alone, poised, in the fields, in blue. Erma will need an hour to bathe and dress. Stamping out to the barn in her nightgown, Erma hurls invectives at the bright blue figure. You’re nothing but an ol scarecrow! You look turrible in blue! Your chest ain all you think! Agnes ignores her, keeps company with her thoughts. A grim posse, no doubt.

Town itself editorializes the failures of Reconstruction. Nothing more than agglomeration of sooty antebellums built in that otherwise unclassifiable American Main Street style. A dream dreamt by a people defeated before they could decipher the symbolism of their sleeping empire. Hundreds such moribund main streets sun across the South. Locals footle about, crossing the road languidly as slogging through the Mississippi to discover what kingdom may flourish across the water, then finding on this thousandth sally nothing but the same ol fellas lounging around the same ol barbershop, cross back to resume their perch on an overturned orange crate outside the grocery, where they wait, like feral dogs senselessly chasing cars they could never operate or possess, for something, anything, to happen.

Agnes Alden happens on the street.

Hoots, howls, hollers – you are a vision, darling, let me buy you a soda! She is a child with breasts, and they are fathers without every useful tooth, but the line between them is drawn slant, so they look and they reach out towards her. She smiles strutting by because this is what it means to be a woman. If she must be one, she might as well be The One.

That’s Dale Greenfeld’s uncle, Erma protests, probably jealous, possibly fearful. He must be twenty nine years old!

I’ll never be that old, Agnes vows with the unregenerate confidence of a gorgeous child.

Why Miss Agnes, a friendly lech named Death catcalls, you look positively scrumptious this morning. Death may be Tom Maynard, a tubercular farmhand whose improbable longevity earned him his nickname, or else Death is Julius Finn of the acrobatic reflexes which have twice now snatched back an arm from the iron maw of a thresher at the absolute eleventh hour. Death could be any adult fictionalized onto this street in early nineteen forty something as every one of them has passed now into that shadowy fraternity of the once was. Point is, full grown men wanted the child Agnes. They wanted to kiss her, grope her, penetrate, love her, hurt her. What the child Agnes wanted was their eyes and a vanilla ice cream.

Once an unthinkable luxury, a far Valhalla of purely theoretical pleasure, the Alden children now, in the months after Mable’s arrival, regularly indulge in the treacles of the soda shop. To sate his bride’s appetite for the finer things, Walter would have to be a richer man in a more cosmopolitan town, and to possess a taste for the finer things, Mable would require a capacity beyond her famished means, which were sufficient to detect whether meat had spoiled but not whether it had been properly seasoned. Nevertheless, Walter’s employ at the pharmacy proves adequate to open charge accounts across the main street strip, a former deer trail broadened into a formal dirt thoroughfare a century before when the bare feet of the whole race of Choctaw stamp it raw setting off on a thousand mile campaign of forced marching. Walter’s debts are minimal but monumental set against his means and very probably pointless: the girls (colored through bile tinted glasses) recall Mable as a woman thin and thinly clad, whose satisfaction could be bought by a brimming bottle and the thrusting affections of her husband. Where Mable neglects to take advantage of Walter’s delirious largess, the children do not. They know this theft will win them a beating from their father when, inevitably, he learns of it, but the guarantee of that pain inoculates them against the fear of it. Live while ye can, ye sinners in the hands of a country father!

Altogether, the children mob the soda shop to charge sundaes to their father’s account, then the girls and boys break separately to window shop for fabric bolts and handheld weapons.

“Saturdays in town!” Agnes rhapsodizes, impounded at her rehab facility seventy five years after the dubiously recalled fact. “They was just lovely!But I was even lovelier!”

“Wadn’t one man out there that didn say somethin sweet to Agnes,” Imogene Ray complains.

But surely, I say to her, some men didn’t speak.

“Were there black people? Walking around town those Saturdays?”

“Now why!” Agnes turns deadly serious in an instant, “would you ask me somethin like at?!”

A curious revision occurs in all these stories, no matter who’s telling them – blacks, forever in the background, slip from attention, slip from the scene, and are rendered invisible against a backdrop of indifference. There were black men on that street every day, and surely they didn’t catcall a tom’s meow to white young Agnes. Like the trumpet creepers sprouted happenstance along the road (those are lovely little flowers), blacks lived too low to catch the Alden children’s notice. Or so these erasures would have us believe. But what do I really believe? Seems to me that targets are there to be shot, to be spit on, and that kids exploit every opportunity for abuse the adult world affords them. Whatever belated recognition of humanity the living Aldens accord black people now (which is just the modicum necessary to navigate modern life) does not color their picturebook memories. In all our conversations, neither Agnes nor Imogene Ray has once mentioned the Jacksons without my first prompting them to, as though their sole neighbors were nothing but a now forgotten rumor, an almost people.

Saturdays in town! The smell of this place, a constituency of crushed plants, dry dirt, vapors, animal doings and other effluvia, but familiar to the children as the peculiar stench of their own bodies. No business, bastardry that happens here foreign to their lives or nature. No glory. No abuse.

“You wanna know about mother? Honey! I could tell! I could tell all day!”

Aunt Brenda.

“Hang on for a second, hon. If you want me to spill the beans, I’m gonna have to lubricate my delivery system!”

She’s fun. Just don’t talk politics. She wants a crocodile running the country.

“All right, then,” retrieving her cell phone with much banging and telltale sloshing of ice. Brenda and Uncle Richard retired to a sandy bungalow on the Alabama coast where they haunt beachside bars made famous by country songs. To Brenda, bashing Agnes is fine sport, something to keep the heart up. I take her stories like she takes her margaritas: with a near lethal dose of salt. But I’m not saying she doesn’t know things.

 “Well, Uncle Lester always wanted to fly. Be a pilot or an Air Force man. You’ve heard how he was always running around with his arms wide trying to catch the wind? Well, so, mother tripped Lester every chance she got, always joking, Now you’re really flyin! They say he was a sweet man. Never got mad at anybody. Course, I never met Lester. But he and Uncle Edwin were the nice ones, that’s what they say. Not mother, of course. She says Edwin was a tompeeping pervert and that Lester was fit for shit not fit for the clouds.”

We talk a bit about nothing particular. After one while and a many couple of drinks, I start trying to wind her up. You wind up Brenda, she gets going.

“Imogene Ray with that lizard face. That lizard skin. She lives in Biloxi! It’s wet down there! Slather on some Jergens, lizard! And then Aunt Erma was always a stick in the mud, a kind of actual real bitch, but I loved her best because she was good despite her sour face. The Lord designed her specially to be terrible at parties! But, you know, she was kind. Didn’t deserve this. Lord Jesus! Don’t let that darkness take me! I’d rather drown drunk in the ocean, turn up shameful and pantless and bloated, than—uugh” she quivers. “I don’t know what Alzheimer’s feels like: I don’t go in for poetry or like empathy. But I couldn’t even stand it getting dark at six PM in winter, if you know what I mean. Coastal living cures all kinds of existentialisms.” 

We keep going. We can go for hours. Punch for punch, drink for drink. Aunt Brenda, mascot for the good times.

“One time,” tinkle of ice as she slurps her bulk rum and RC Cola. Brenda’s a connoisseur of quantity over quality. She did well in life, don’t get me wrong – sold pesticides to asparagus farmers. A bee stung her once, and she never got over it. “One time, mother put dirt and groundup chicken bones into a pancake she made for Erma’s breakfast.”

“She mount a defense?”

“Momma said she thought Erma was taking up too much of their father’s attention.”

“Where’d she get the bones?” As soon as I’ve asked it, this seems the least pressing of all possible questions.

“Ahh,” she sets her drink down with a thud, swishes the phone across her salt frizzed spray of henna red hair. “Murdered a chicken. Uncle Ed told me. He saw her. They had a coup, but just for eggs. The chickens had names. Well so she storms out mad to the coup and grabs a chicken just sitting there, some creature that’s never known meanness all its life, and mother wrings its neck just like that. Like snap! Takes it off someplace, cuts it open, rips out the wet little rib bones, little wing bones. All this in two, three minutes. She’s I don’t remember how old. A child with a knife tearin an animal apart for spite, just picture that when you picture what I’m telling you. Pancakes for the boys were already on, and she just pops out to rip open the body of some living thing to collect its skeleton to use as a weapon. Doesn’t mind the blood, doesn’t mind the—just yuck. Crushes up the bones with her bare hands. Slaps the shards down into the batter. That’s mother. Classic mother.”

“When did you last talk to Edwin?”

“Not in years. Uncle Ed never talked much.”

“Where is he now?”

“Up north someplace. Last time I talked to him he said he tried living in a place with lots of trees then tried living in a place without any trees.”

“Which one did he prefer?”

“Didn’t say, but I thought it was a real odd way to go about choosing where to live.”

“How was Erma, after the pancake?”

“Spitting blood. But standing. A regular good ol bitch, sour faced. Same as always.”

Brenda ponders another drink, pours it, tells another story. Bobby kills snakes for fun. The Alden’s fields are poxed with copperheads and cottonmouths, dun desert looking snakes nearly invisible, ensconced among the milkweed glades. Bobby beats them with sticks until they contuse, rupture from within, explode and die. Agnes asks to join. Bobby tells her girls can’t kill, killing is for men who grow to be soldiers and cooking is for girls who grow to be mommies. Agnes rejects the binary: she’ll kill if she wants to. I’ll kill my baby, she tells Bobby, if it isn’t nice to me ever day! She comes despite his protests. They find a family, bullthick momma corded around wormy hatchlings, no more than hours delivered into this life, brother and sister eggs yet unsplit warming together in the belly of the den. Agnes lifts her foot, fearless of momma’s deathly bite.

Not the babies! Bobby cries out.

She crushes wormlings, eggs, all.

Walking home across the fields, autumned to the same orange of the now decapitated momma copperhead (Bobby caught it quick with his field knife, took her head to save his sister from the bite), he tears into Agnes, how stupid she was, how reckless and not at all like a soldier, to stamp on the babies with the momma alive guarding just a strike away.

You was gonna let em live, Agnes mocks. You thought they was cute babies. You’re the mommy. I’m the killer.

Propelled by fury so barbed into his being it’s senseless to imagine the boy as something separate from it, Bobby swings his body crosswise to hook his sister in the jaw. But she is older and faster and always wary of his violence. She slams her palm to his nose, a hidden snake egg cradled within. The hatchling flitters its head and gummy tongue into Bobby’s dry nostril before falling to the ground where he stamps it to death in holy terror.

“What did she do with the chicken she killed?” I ask.

“Cooked it. Oh, that’s a funny story. Not funny ha ha but funny hmm hmm. She cooked it, dressed it real nice, served it up for dinner. Granddaddy Walter gets into town that night. And he comes home and comes in and, what in the world, he wants to know why they’re having chicken. Why is this chicken dead? Mother doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t try to jump to her own defense, doesn’t intercept him at the door as he’s walking in to butter him up with her version of things, nothing. So Erma tells the story, says what actually happened. Mother stands there listening, just stands there listening, hands wrapped behind her back, I’m sure, like she always used to do when she was about to whip us. And after hearing the story from Erma, all Granddady W asks mother is, Why? She says, You know why.” Brenda delivers this line to maximum affect, tarting up the intrigue.

“That would seem to imply something grossly sinister.”

“It would seem. It would seem.”

“And?”

“Hell if I know. You think mother would admit to something like that? Swear to God, if it were true, what’d shock me most about it’d be that mother invited a man to touch her.”

“Well, you’re here. My mother.”

“That’s two. Two times.”

Slowly she drags the phone from one ear to the other just to leave those darkly incandescent words resonating unchallenged.

Brenda and I talk an hour. Conversation gets away from the topic at hand because we haven’t spoken in six months and because we’re both drinking. I call her again weeks later, and she tells me this story.

“After mother won Miss Mississippi cherry queen, she called all the girls in towns pig nosed prosties and old dowdy bitches. She said she was the only looker in the county and the best looker in the state, and that it was official now, and that all their boyfriends wanted her.”

I laugh. I’m laughing, I guess, at Agnes’s bad book villainousness, at the audacity of eliding ‘pig nosed prosties’ in her version of the sad tale of how ‘they stole my sash.’ No evidence supports Brenda’s version over Agnes’s, and if I ask the other living and still sane children to tender their memories I’ll merely be mixing into this hue more, muddying colors. Too many witnesses makes mud of every blue. Blue rhymes with true rhymes with you in lieu of any to do, so of course I believe Brenda. Why? Because I prefer the sound of her stories. But I take my responsibility as imitation journalist slash embittered genealogist seriously enough to ask the crowning question.

“Why do you think your mother is the way she is?”

“I don’t know from psychology,” Brenda tells me, “but I’ve met some people.”     

---

‘Confederacy’ is an extract from the as-yet-unpublished novel You Want to Call This Life a Parable.

Austin Adams is a writer from Tennessee. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Prelude, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for The Sewanee Review’s Fiction Contest, A Public Space’s Fellowship, and the Kenyon Review Editorial Development Fellowship. Twitter: @__AustinAdams