Love and Fury Read Online Free Page A

he was drunk, a loudmouth. He was a regular and had a kind of gang there. Him and Etta were up there all the time. And that night he was on his feet and telling everybody to pipe down, pipe down, his daughter was going to sing. Your mother didn’t want to. She asked him to stop. ‘My daughter Dolly’s going to sing a song!’ he kept saying, and I believe if she hadn’t got up to sing it would have got ugly. So she did. She was a little shy but she had a great voice. You know your mother could always sing. And I don’t remember if I asked her out that night or called her later.” I asked him if he remembered what she sang that night and he said he didn’t.
    Her songs, her singing, hung on for a while, though not for long. I remember my mother singing and ironing:
    (clump) Come onna my house, my-eye house,
I’m gonna give you ca-an-dy. (clump)
    Come onna my house, my (clump) house,
I’ll make you feel (clump) da-an-dy.
    Come onna my house: My mother is stirring soup made from boiling half a dozen franks in salt water, two or three potatoes and half an onion cut up in it, with parsley and a dash of pepper. Supper after supper of this. Supper is our word. We eat supper. “They” have dinner. Out in the “west end” of town, where “the Rockefellers” live, they have dinner.
    Or “hamburger soup”: meat boiled till it is gray, floating in the water it’s been cooked in, not skimmed, lenses of slick fat floating and rainbowing the florescent kitchen light, two or three potatoes and half an onion cut up in it, with parsley and a dash of pepper. Supper.
    On Mondays (also the day my mother did laundry and hung it, billowing, on clotheslines the length of the yard) we had a supper called “cream-dry beef.” And every Monday my father would explain, again, that this creamed and dried beef was also called “shit on a shingle,” the shingle being the slice of toast over which the salty thick goop was ladled. I loved it because it was army food. I loved it like my father’s paratrooper regalia, and his bayonet in its sheath. I used to look at the stains on that blade, wondering if they were blood, if my father had killed Nazis with it. I only ever saw my father use the bayonet to open old paint cans that had crusted shut; eventually the tip snapped off of it, and it became even more useful for that task. I had the chance, recently, to order it—Creamed Dried Beef—in a southern diner, and although they plopped it on a biscuit and garnished it with a sprig of parsley, it still tasted good to me. Whether I acquired a taste for it via my father’s emphatic belly-patting pronouncements each week, “Man, that’s good!” or would have found it tasty anyway, I can’t say. So much of my life is history, I don’t know if anything, any soul or essence or self preceded it. I’ll leave that to the geneticists, since by the time I became aware of myself as someone distinct from the person my parents believed they were speaking to, by the time, that is, that I had enough inside to try to manipulate the outside, I was already brimful with history.
    Home from the store, my mother divides up the S&H Green Stamps between Bobby and me so we can paste them in their squares in the redemption booklet. For five thousand points you can get a nice set of tea towels. For ten thousand a set of cups and saucers. Fifty thousand will get us a floor lamp that would “go nice” in the living room.
    Que sera, sera
, my mother sings,
Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera.
    â€œYour mother and I got through that okay. She took me back. She forgave me.”
    What else could she do? What choice did she have? I wonder sometimes what choices she ever had. My mother grew up in rural poverty during the Depression, illegitimate, with a drunken stepfather and three younger sisters, and school ended after