Fiction: White Diamonds And Chicken Bones

By Jill Williams

My Meemaw, a self-proclaimed woman of God, used her tongue like a scythe. My Daddy wasn’t just uneducated; he was “a white-trash, heathen hillbilly whose brains ain't nothing but overcooked grits and soggy okra.” She whinnied like a horse, her buck teeth chattering, patting herself on the back for her clever retorts. “And your Mama,” she'd say with her eyebrows peaked high, “wasn’t nothing but a man-eating whore who spread her legs like butter for your deformed daddy. If you’re going to act the whore, at least be a high-priced one. Not some five-dollar backseat quickie kind of tramp.”

Meemaw popped creamed corn fragments from her teeth and spit them onto the oak floor. My stomach lurched. The chewed pieces lined up perfectly in neat little rows like the cover of a Farmers' Almanac. I was fixing to tell her I needed to go upstairs and purge the contents of my stomach, but she cut me off at the pass before I had a chance.

“Plum nasty is what she was for getting knocked up by that circus monkey. But darlin’, the good Lord is full of mercy. You, an angel, popped out of the flames of hell, straight into my arms—God rewarding me for a life lived righteous.”

She wrapped her bat wings around my frail frame, smelling of stale grease and some old lady potion called Youth-Dew. It reeked. I swear she was farting roses and violets without any shame whatsoever. She squeezed me tighter until the room was a blurry merry-go-round. Squashed to her chest, I gasped for air, her farted florals crowding my lungs. Lamps, pictures, and silk flowers shrunk into a black tunnel. Whooshes of air swirled in my ears, muffled and distant. With one final monstrous squeeze, the room faded into an obsidian void. I woke up to her garish blue eyes, tears carving a black-stained trail down her cheeks, praying for the good Lord to heal my spirit of infirmity.

Mama and Daddy were wooden soldiers staring into the horizon, teeth clenched, waiting for an ass-chewing from Lieutenant Meemaw. They feared her more than they feared God or the devil. At least they were predictable. God was good. The Devil was bad. But Meemaw? She could be both at the same time. My folks were coiled wires, and Meemaw was the force that made them snap.

We moved into her rambling house when I was six. Daddy lost his job at the shoestring factory. He glued those little plastic thingies on the ends of the laces. If it weren’t for Daddy’s skillful hands, millions of shoestrings would wither like grapes on a vine. Ten years working there, and the factory just plumb closed up one day, a pile of chains wrapping the doors. No note. No nothing. Just five hundred people with no job and no hope.

Daddy’s “affliction,” as Meemaw so spitefully called his clubfoot, was a deep climb from a muddy hole. “Ain’t no one who wants to hire a cripple,” Meemaw said as catfish and peas tumbled from her lips. Daddy hung his head and locked his mouth. Mama poured a glass of water. And I excused myself to go throw up in the toilet. As I hurled the contents of our Sunday supper into the porcelain throne, I realized something. Meemaw wasn’t actually spitting food. No, the food flung itself from her mouth, willingly committing suicide rather than listen to her yap day and night about Jezebel spirits, slothfulness, and fornication. I think the devil himself preferred escorting her straight to purgatory than to hear a laundry list of her complaints about what a dump Hell was. Shoot, he’d probably fling himself into the Lake of Fire just to get away from her nagging.

Mama, Daddy, and I rotted on the vine in that there house for close to six years. The oak floors, palladium windows, and Bibles stuffed inside every nook and cranny were more like a prisoner-of-war camp than a home. Daddy was so desperate to get away that he took a graveyard janitor shift at the poultry processing plant. Scooping up bloody feathers, severed beaks, and bird guts off the cold concrete floor at 2:00 AM felt like a peaceful retreat compared to living inside Meemaw’s pressure cooker of a house. He saved his change, desperate to buy us a plot of land along the bank of the Toccoa River. I could catch fireflies inside pretty jars. Mama could tend to the wildflowers and the vegetables in her garden, bees and hummingbirds drifting in the breeze. Daddy, he’d get us a nice ol’ double-wide, idling the hours standing in the honey hole, casting his rod, ripping the lips off the hogs, frying them up for supper, laughing and smiling again like he did before Meemaw trapped us in her web of spite.

I rarely saw my folks. Mama worked double shifts at Colonial Haven Nursing Home: wiping wrinkled butts, dodging flying piss bottles, spying wrinkled wieners and sagging gazongas, stabbed with accusations of stealing underpants, peanuts, and even husbands. And even though she came home smelling like a diaper full of caca, I’d never seen her happier. Meemaw sawed logs, giving us time to throw some Jiffy Pop onto the stove, pour ourselves a tall, cold glass of Tang, and laugh our heads off over Sanford and Son. These moments were few and far between. Mama cried for her Daddy, a gentle man who read her poetry and stories every night like Little White Lily and The Adventures of Uncle Wiggily. She whispered, “Mama killed him, you know. Pecked him to death like a goddamn rooster. Calling him weak-willed, double-minded, and a blight on the name of Christ.”

At forty years of age, he never woke up. Meemaw zapped his body with a cattle prod until his skin turned raw, adamant he was faking it just to get out of going to The Bill Gaither Trio concert at First Righteous Redeemer. But at the funeral, Mama said, Meemaw rolled on the ground, wailing and gnashing her teeth, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Take me home, Jesus! Just take me home now!” And as soon as everyone left, she turned to Mama, eyes cold as glass marbles, and said real steely-like, “Thank God that’s over. I can go back to living now.”

Mama leaned in close, eyes on a swivel, and spoke softer than a whisper. “She’s acid rain and an angel of death. Everything that she touches corrodes. Five different puppies died in the span of three years. Daddy, a healthy, happy, and vibrant man, turned into a frail old man scraping and bowing to her every demand until his heart couldn’t take it any longer and exploded in his chest. But I wonder, really wonder, if those puppies and people willed themselves to die. Because living with that wretched old hag is a fate worse than death. Death is a mere vacation, but alive with her is a slow-motion horror ripping chunks of your vital organs and flesh until the pain is so great you’ll do anything to make it stop. Absolutely anything. Baby, someday we’ll blow this popsicle stand and wake up every day smiling at the sun, thankful for another day of life.” She kissed me on the forehead, retreating into her room as "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" meandered in the background.

Most evenings felt like an atomic wedgie inside that house. Meemaw squeezed in tight next to me, stuffing me between her and the armrest. She didn’t give a flip if my arm fell asleep or my bladder was about to burst. She liked her victims trapped. Plopped on her brown-and-gold floral print sofa while her Pall Mall cigarette ashes smoldered in the glass tray, a sticky river of sweat dripped down my back. She leaned into me, crushing my ribs and warning me that I’d best eat up if I knew what was good for me. And if I threw up again this time, she wouldn’t be so nice. She’d force-feed me the vomit until I battened down the hatches and kept her dinner locked in my belly where it belonged.

Bile was a snake crawling inside my gut when I looked at the pile of slop Meemaw had prepared. SpaghettiOs, soggy Wonder Bread, and fruit cocktail splayed across our metal TV trays, our eyes glued to the black-and-white RCA. Walter Cronkite's cold eyes seemed to strangle my throat, the air turning to dust in my chest as he recounted the Vietnam War dead. At that moment, I’da rather been trapped in a foxhole, bullets flying over my head, not knowing if I was gonna live or about to meet my Maker, than to sit there smashed under her sweaty arm, praying for a stray mortar shell to take out the living room and save us the trouble.

The mortar shell never came, but Sunday dinner sure did.

Mama walked into the kitchen fresh off a double shift, wearing a pair of faded denim hot pants and no bra under her flimsy shirt. Meemaw took one look at her, turned the color of a turnip, and slammed her fork into her fried chicken.

“You Jezebel tramp!” Meemaw shrieked, corn bits flying like shrapnel. “I’m calling the lawyer first thing tomorrow! I’m changing the will, cutting you out, and leaving every last cent to the church of—”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She was a tree frog trapped under water, eyes bulging, face bluer than Jimmy Ellis’s after a Joe Frazier pummeling. She pointed to her throat and pounded the table, begging for help. She crumpled to the floor, body thrashing like a whale’s tail in the ocean. The three of us didn’t bat an eye. Daddy said, “Please pass the beans,” as if a woman dying on the kitchen floor was completely normal. I buttered my biscuit. Mama, she smiled, savoring the flavor of her sweet tea, as she asked how I liked school this year.

Before I could answer, Meemaw's death rattles filled the room. Mama reached over, calmer than a sunrise, cranked the transistor radio on the counter, and let Karen Carpenter’s smooth alto sing about being on top of the world. Her sweet voice floated right over the table while Meemaw’s skin turned the color of an eggplant.

A week later, we buried her in a plot of land where the sun blazed the hardest, scorching her bones until they was nothing but alum powder.

As for the three of us, after settling Meemaw’s estate, we had enough money to buy us a 500-acre slice of heaven: a triple-wide with shag carpeting and harvest gold appliances. This castle was nestled right along the banks of the beautiful Toccoa River. Daddy slays them hogs all day, reeling them in and frying ‘em up. Mama paints pretty pictures of our land, tourists snapping them up like hotcakes and paying big bucks. Me? Well, I knew I was happy 'cause I quit puking the day they lowered Meemaw into her eternal place of torment.

 

 

 

 

 

Jill Williams is from Georgia. Her work can be found in EXPAT, DON'T SUBMIT, DODO ERASER, BULL, FAREWELL TRANSMISSION, SERIOUS LIT, URBAN PIGS, REVOLUTION JOHN and elsewhere.