Minny was asleep.
The boys had found a king snake in the garage. The oldest boy hit it over the head with the hammer. Then he wrapped it around the hammer handle. The youngest boy brought it into the house.
Daryl hitched a ride with his partner at the realty and drank a hot beer in the car to calm his nerves, but when he opened the door he sensed that everything was not all right. He knew that he was two bourbons away from peace, and in his desperation he opened the wrong door, not the cabinet under the sink but the basement door, and tumbled down the rotten stairs.
The youngest boy heard the air-conditioner running in his parents’ bedroom. He opened the door and saw Minny asleep beside the baby girl. He knew it was a sin for his mother to be asleep in the daytime, the baby-sitter gone.
He looked at her awhile. Then he hit her in the mouth with the hammer.
It woke her up. It also woke up the snake, who had been only stunned by the blow in the garage. The snake unwound itself from the hammer handle and fell on the bed. It rose and twisted since half its nerves were gone. It almost stood up. The boy was horrified and fled the room.
When this woman saw it, she thought she was still in a dream and she felt very guilty for her sleep.
Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt
Mother Rooney of Titpea Street, that little fifty yards of dead-end crimped macadam east off North State, crept home from the Jitney Jungle in the falling afternoon of October 1965. She had on her high-laced leather sneakers and her dress of blue teacup roses; she had a brooch the size of an Easter egg pinned on at her booby crease; she clutched a wrapped-up lemon fish filet, fresh from Biloxi, under her armpit.
Mother Rooney had been served at the Jitney by Mimsie Grogan, an ancient girl who had converted back in the thirties to Baptist. Mimsie would hiss at her about this silly disgusting ritual of Fridays as she wrapped the fish. Mother Rooney was Catholic. She was old, she had been being Mother Rooney so long. In the little first-story bathroom of her great weird house no spray she bought could defeat the odor of reptile corpses stewed in mud. Her boarder boys, all gone now for a month, would sometimes come in late and use her bathroom to vomit in, not being able to climb the stairs and use their own. And sometimes they were not able to use even hers well. There would be whiskey and beer gravy waiting for her on the linoleum. Just unspeakable. Yet the natural smell of her toilet would be overcoming the other vileness, she could not deny it. A couple of the young men smarties would openly confess, in the way of complaining about the unbearably reeking conditions among which they were forced to puke last night, that they were the ones. One of them even arranged his own horrid bountiful vomit into a face with a smile, such as a child might draw, and this she had to confront one morning at six o’clock as she came to the chilly tiles to relieve herself. Nobody confessed to that. But she caught on when she heard all the giggling up in the wings, at this hour in the morning. She wasn’t deaf, and she wasn’t so slow. The boys were sick and tired of her flushing the toilet and waking them all up every morning. Her toilet sounded like a volcano. Yes, Mr. Monroe had voiced that complaint before. He said it sounded as if this old house’s back was breaking at last, it couldn’t stand the tilt anymore. It woke them all up, it made them all goggle-eyed, everybody stayed stiff for two hours in their beds. Nobody wanted to be the one to make the move that finally broke it in two and sent them all collapsing down the hill into the Mississippi State Fairgrounds. What a way to wake up, Mr. Monroe complained. The situation here is uninhabitable. I don’t know a man upstairs who isn’t planning to move out of here as soon as he sees an equal rent in the paper.
She promptly brought down the rent to fifteen a month, and the boys all showed up downstairs Saturday night to celebrate, spilling wine and whiskey, which were illegal in this state, everywhere, and grabbing her ruggedly around her weary little rib cage and huffing smoke and rotten berries into her face, calling her the perfect landlady; but profanity began to be used in the dining room, and she was eager to remind them that hard liquor such as three or four of them were drinking was against the law in the state of Mississippi. The party got quiet. They all took their hands off her. They left like mice, not a backward look. She was so sorry to have ruined this party. It was too loud, it was drunken, but one thing had been agreeable to her. Their hugging on her had been good. The hugging. So many big boys had put their arms around her ribs and had not hurt her. She didn’t feel a thing there, nary a lingering of pain, but a warm circle of her body Mother Rooney rubbed against. Oh oh, it was like old flannel cloth that had fingers. Give me that, honeys, she thought. Keep me. Watch me. Watch me, witness me make my old way till one day I’ve got my eyes closed and you’ll. . I’ll keep you here at twenty-five cents a month, but you’ll have to discover me dead, feel me with those large hands, you will circle me, wrap me, you boys made of flannel cloth. Some mornings Mother Rooney would pretend and lie toes-up in her bed past six-thirty, having to tee-tee agonizingly, but not going to the toilet and flushing it on time, and getting all she could out of her own old flannel gown. By seven the pain in her bladder would take her almost to true death.
Mother Rooney of Titpea Street came on.
Her boys had all left her now. Like mice. Not a whisper since. Some of them had said they’d write her every day. But not a line. Not a hint even as to whose facilities they were throwing up in nowadays. Her boys were lost in unknown low-rent holes of Jackson, the big midstate town of Mississippi. They had broken up their tribe. They. .
She was deafened by thought; she’d kept it inside so long, there was a rumble. First thing she knew, she was at the doorknob leaning too hard; she broke the glass doorknob and the door gave. Still, she was a deaf-mute. If sound would come back to her, she could maybe hold on with her sneakers at the top of the hall. That retrograde dance at the top of her perilously drooping lobby, it couldn’t come. She saw ahead of her the boards that were smooth as glass; she saw the slick boards beckoning her like a well down past the gloom of the stairs. The fish bundle jumped out of her arms and broke out of its paper and lit on the boards, scooting downward like a pound of grease. No sound would come to her. She flopped in her skirts; her face turned around for a second. She got a look at the wasted orange trees and a look at the sky. It was so chilly and smoky, but quiet. Then her sound came back to her. She was falling.