CW: CSA
My first memory is of following Annie Mae out in the yard to collect firewood with the hard ground hurting the bare soles of my pale feet. Up in front of me, Annie Mae’s feet were dark against patchy frost. My job was to pick up dry twigs and branches to use for kindling while she gathered small logs from the wood pile for our stove. She lived out behind our house in a little cabin of her own. None of us had electricity or indoor plumbing. My parents, Annie Mae, and I used the same outhouse. It was the time of the Great Depression, and we all lived in a pecan orchard in central Alabama near the railroad tracks and a village called Burnsville.
My grandfather, my father’s own father, lived in the village with a woman he called his nurse because he had the sugar diabetes. He had indoor plumbing and let me take baths in his house, though he never seemed to like me all that much and called me a little stick girl. “Shame you can’t you be pretty like your cousin Mary,” he’d said to me more than once. Still, he took me with him and his nurse on a car trip to Miami down the Tamiami Trail, which was mostly gravel, sand and dust. We stopped at a Seminole camp and had our picture taken. It was the first time I’d traveled more than ten miles from our pecan orchard. Folks called him Mr. Henry with respect. Many feared him because he’d gone to the state penitentiary for murder. While sitting up on his horse, he’d shot a man, the man already beat down. My mother’s people made whiskey in the deep piney woods and my father raised cows, grew cotton, and kept mostly to his own counsel.
Years after that first memory of picking up kindling, I remember my uncle came around when nobody was home but me and Annie Mae. He was my mother’s baby brother, and he looked like her with dark hair and wide shoulders. He’d long made me uneasy, the way he’d wink at me and laugh. But nobody ever let him be alone with me, and so I hadn’t developed a fear of him—just a caution. That day, my mother and father were off at the cotton gin. I was young enough that I hadn’t bled yet but was old enough to have some idea that I should not be left in the house with just my uncle.
He came through the front door without knocking and caught me in the parlor, reading. The first thing he did was yank me out of my chair and put his big paw of a hand on my chest and rub, snickering as I struggled to pull out of his hold. I could smell the whiskey turned rancid in his mouth and the mud scent of the river in his clothes. This might have been the first time I felt fear. Even though I fought, he smashed me against him and put his tongue in my mouth. It tasted filthy and I had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting. I did my best to scream but only got out garbled grunts and whines.
Annie Mae must have been sweeping because she ran into the room clutching a broom. As soon as she saw the way of things, she hit my uncle over and over with that broom until he let go of me and spun around to her. He called her names I’d never repeat and lunged toward her. As she tried her best to fight him off with the broom, I saw she would lose, so I ran into the kitchen. My mother kept a machete behind the kitchen door to fight off snakes or to use if any of the hobos down by the rail tracks came up to the house and seemed a danger. I snatched up that machete and ran back to the room where Annie Mae was down on the floor with my uncle big over her and hitting her, hitting her hard. I screamed at him to let her be and he whirled around and glared at me. Then he laughed. He laughed and called me a little redheaded cunt, a word I had never heard before and never heard again for decades.
Still laughing, he lurched toward me. Behind him, Annie Mae jumped up and I saw she gripped a small knife in her hand. To this day I don’t know if she took it off him in their struggles or if she already had it tucked away in a pocket, but she jumped at him and stuck that knife in his arm. When he howled, I swung the machete toward him like I’d cut him bad.
He pulled the little knife out and flung it toward Annie Mae and ran out the door, pausing just long enough to call us both that dirty word again and promise he’d be back to finish off what he’d started.
Before I could drop that machete, Annie Mae was holding me, looking me over and asking if I was hurt. Once I told her I was all right, she said I must never speak a word of this to anyone, especially not to my mother or father, or my father would have to kill my uncle. “He ain’t knowing no better and being mad like he’d rightly be, he’d prob’ly kill that man right in front of God and ever’body, and the high sheriff, he’d have to put your daddy in the jail, sure.” She bound me to my word that I would never speak of this. Then she said, softly like a promise, “You let me take care of this here mess, you hear.”
Later that afternoon, my grandfather came to our house from his lumber yard, still smelling of saw dust and pine resin. He took a long look at me before he pulled Annie Mae aside. She must have sent for him in some way I didn’t know. They talked, but I couldn’t hear what they said at first, though I saw her lean close to him. He put his arms around her and then she rested her head on his chest. When finally she lifted her head up and looked him directly in the eyes, he nodded and patted her back. Only words I understood were her saying “I knewed you would, sure.” Out on the road, I could hear the horse and buggy and knew my mother and father were on the way to the house but were not yet home.
My grandfather came quickly to me then, lifted up my chin with his long fingers, and stared long into my eyes. He asked if I was all right. I said I was, not telling him that I’d thrown up at the edge of the okra patch. Then he told me that I must not mention this to anyone, especially to my father. “I will see to this,” he said, his voice hard as he dropped his fingers from my face. “You and Annie Mae need not fear that man again.” Then he put his hat on his head, straightened back his shoulders, and he went out the door.
Five days later a man out fishing on the Black Warrior River spotted a body in the reeds near the bank. It turned out to be my uncle. The high sheriff counted him drunk and drowned. If anyone grieved him, I can’t say. My mother never shed a tear that I saw over her dead brother. My father dusted his hands off after the funeral with a clean white handkerchief and never spoke of the man again.
I never did like my grandfather all that much. Truth told, I was embarrassed by him, what with his prison term in the state pen for killing a man. But what he saved Annie Mae and me from, I don’t know if I can rightly tell. By the time he died, he’d sent my pretty cousin Mary up to New York City to try and be a model like she wanted, and the men cousins off to the university. To me, he left a 500-acre pecan orchard. I went off to college, married a preacher’s son, and had two children, both redheads like me, and I never before spoke of this. But my parents, Annie Mae, and my grandfather are all dead now, and I am dying, and I want to tell the story of my life.
The first thing I ever remember is Annie Mae’s bare feet in front of me on a cold morning as we were gathering up kindling and firewood.
Claire Hamner Matturro has been a journalist, blueberry farmer, attorney, and taught at Florida State University College of Law and University of Oregon School of Law. Her first of eight novels, Skinny-dipping (William Morrow 2004), is a tale of convoluted revenge with comic interludes. A later novel, The Smuggler’s Daughter (Red Adept Publishing 2020), is a tale of long delayed revenge. Her poetry appears in SLANT, Glassworks, One Art, and others. She is an associate editor at Southern Literary Review and lives with her husband in Florida along with their bossy black cat. Her favorite historical revenge story involves Taylor Swift’s brilliant move to regain control when the masters of her first six albums were sold apparently against her will. In response, she re-recorded those older albums and re-released them as “Taylor’s Versions,” greatly devaluing the masters sold without her approval.
