Bodark Creek - 4. Chapter 4

Aunt Evie came to live with us when I was six. She was Mama’s sister, and I always thought she was older. But she was thirty-seven, and Mama was already forty-two. “Is she going to work at the mill?” I asked. Everyone I knew worked at the mill. Of course, all the houses in our part of town were owned by the cotton company.

“Evie’s going to help me out,” Mama said, though I didn’t see why she needed that. Rosalind and I already helped, and if Charley was still too small, that didn’t seem to matter. There wasn’t a lot that Mama couldn’t do by herself.

There were other things I didn’t understand, like why Aunt Evie would leave her own children. She had a girl and two boys. The youngest was almost my age, and the oldest was fourteen. That was my cousin Liese. While Aunt Evie was with us, Liese was helping Uncle Georg with her brothers.

“Doesn’t Liese go to school?” I asked. I’d just started first grade, after going to kindergarten for two years at the mill. Charley was too young for that, so he still stayed with Mrs. Seiler every day.

“Liese goes to school,” Mama said. “And she takes care of her family, just like I took care of my cousins.”

“Is Uncle Georg as old as Daddy?” I wanted to know. Daddy was older than almost everybody’s father. Mama said he was fifty-three when I was born.

“Uncle Georg is the same age as my sister,” Mama told me. She seemed tired of answering my questions, but I tried for one more.

“Won’t Aunt Evie miss her children?” I asked. That made Mama smile.

“Don’t you think I’d miss you?”

“Yes,” I said. And that ended that.

After she came, Aunt Evie took care of Charley during the day. And she helped make our dinners, and with the washing and cleaning, and in the garden. But she didn’t work as hard as Mama, and there were some things she couldn’t do, like carry the coal.

“She isn’t strong enough,” Rosalind said. Since I wasn’t, either, that made sense.

When Aunt Evie moved in, Rosalind and I had to sleep in the front room, on the daybed Daddy brought for there. “Why can’t we have two beds in our room?” I asked Mama. “The way you and Daddy have a little bed for Charley?”

“Evie needs to be alone,” Mama said. “Now you be nice.”

I wasn’t being selfish. I just thought it would be fun having Aunt Evie with us at night, to tell stories. Instead, Rosalind went on telling them to me.

“Why do you think Aunt Evie is here?” I asked.

“It’s a secret,” Rosalind said.

“Do you think it’s about Uncle Georg?”

“It might have something to do with him.”

“Do you think he’s mean?”

“No,” Rosalind said. “Then Aunt Evie wouldn’t leave cousin Liese with him.”

“But she has her brothers.”

“But they’re not big, like ours. So they can’t protect her.”

Rosalind and I went on thinking about Aunt Evie and making up stories about Uncle Georg. He was never mean in her stories, because she wouldn’t let him be. But I sometimes made him that way. Because I loved Aunt Evie and couldn’t understand why Uncle Georg wouldn’t let her live with her family.

In the summer after Aunt Evie came, Uncle Georg came to visit, and he was nothing like Rosalind or I thought. He was younger than Daddy, just like Mama said, and he was bigger and stronger. He could lift things that even Daddy couldn’t, and in the three weeks he stayed, he helped Daddy put a porch on the back of the house, and fix the one in the front, and make new cabinets for Mama in the kitchen.

Uncle Georg didn’t bring any of our cousins with him, which Rosalind and I thought was too bad. “They’re staying with my sister,” he told us. “My brother-in-law has a farm, and there’s plenty of room. They always like their visiting there.”

As a surprise, Uncle Georg brought photographs of Liese and her brothers for Aunt Evie. She cried when she saw them, and that was something else Rosalind and I couldn’t figure out. Uncle Georg was nice, and Aunt Evie seemed really glad to see him. So why was she living with us?

“Maybe he isn’t always like this,” I told Rosalind. “Maybe he’s being ‘specially nice so she’ll go home with him.”

“I don’t think so,” Rosalind said.

“Then what?”

But she didn’t know.

Uncle Georg did almost the same kind of work as Daddy. They both fixed things in the mill. But Uncle Georg said he’d always worked in one mill, where Daddy had worked in a lot of different places. And Daddy had done a lot of different jobs before Hattiesburg.

“Where?” I asked.

“I worked in Prichard, for one.”

“Is that near Hattiesburg?”

“No, it’s in Alabama.”

Rosalind told me that was another state, but I already knew that. I saw it on a map in school.

“Why did you leave Alabama?” I asked Daddy.

“Same reason I left Virginia.”

“Well, why did you leave...”

“Addy!”

“All right,” I said. But when I was with Rosalind later, I asked, “How long do you think we’re going to stay here?”

“I never thought about that. Why?”

“Because everyone in our family lives somewhere else. And everyone’s always moving somewhere else. I bet we don’t live here very long.”

Rosalind didn’t agree with me. She said, “We’ve already been here for almost five years, and I can’t remember anybody leaving. In fact, people keep coming here. The mill keeps building more houses.”

She was telling the truth, because even our church kept getting bigger. But if that was really true, then why didn’t Uncle Georg and our cousins move from Hattiesburg? And what about our brothers and our sister Frances?

“If Uncle Georg can visit from Hattiesburg,” I asked Rosalind, “how come our brothers can’t come? Is it very hard to go on a train?” Rosalind couldn’t answer that, and it seemed like the first time she’d been asked.

When Uncle Georg left, he seemed as sad as Aunt Evie. He didn’t cry the way she did, but she didn’t go home with him, either. When I asked Mama why, she wouldn’t say.

“Don’t you want to go home?” I asked Aunt Evie.

“Yes,” she said. This was after she stopped crying.

“Then why don’t you?” I asked.

“Because I can’t, Addy.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t, that’s all. As much as I’d like to, it’s just not possible.”

The truth was that Aunt Evie came to us to die. But that was something else Mama didn’t tell us.