White Lightening

Miriam never, ever liked the color red. Not even on flowers, and especially lipstick.

Red lipstick meant you were an unsavory woman - up to no good.

“Only whores and robbers are out after midnight,” she always said. This was the advice she gave me when she set my curfew at 11:59pm.

At five foot eight, she was taller than I would be all of my life. She came up from nothing, leading a hardscrabble life with her husband who turned alcoholic after dodging bullets in World War II and in a cruel twist of fate, getting struck by lightning after coming home. The bolt shot straight through him and came out his feet. He had to go to the Veteran’s hospital to recover, leaving Miriam by herself with six kids to look after. When he returned nearly a year later, he seemed a completely different person. The lightning had poisoned his psyche, and Miriam never saw the man she married, the one she loved, again.

They owned a car, but every day he took it early in the morning when he woke up so sober he shook. It was good to get the kids up and fed and dressed and ready for school in peace. Some days she got a ride to the sewing plant where she worked, but that still required a mile walk up the dirt road to the intersection. Her friend Ethel owned a two-story farm house whose living room store served the small community with a smattering of the essentials available for purchase. Miriam often walked the mile home carrying grocery sacks of flour and eggs and bologna and potted meat for sandwiches. Right up the street from Ethel lived Miriam’s go-to source for milk fresh from the cow. All she had to do was bring the empty jug back, and Verbe would trade her for a full one. These two friends understood Miriam’s plight, respected her fortitude, and gave her things on credit. She was always good for it.

The little girls got handmade dresses; Miriam herself had worn flour sack dresses as a child. Just as her mother had been, Miriam was a good seamstress, so when she wasn’t working, cooking, cleaning, or raking the sparsely grassed yards, she enjoyed making her children’s clothes. The boys were easier than the girls; a pack of white tee shirts went a long way with them.

Sometimes the children heard when their father hit their mother. She took as many of his licks as she could, knowing that eventually he’d run out of steam and pass out drunk. Sometimes too, he’d piss right on the floor and demand she clean it up. And back before the Earth got so hot, Georgia used to get regular dustings of snow. In a fit of rage, he once sent her out in the snow without so much as a blanket. Miriam hid in the woods until she knew he was asleep and then pecked softly on the children’s bedroom window. The boys raised it as quietly as mice, and she crept back in, shivering for another hour. Another time, while she was preparing dinner, he walked into the kitchen and tossed the onion peels all over the floor.  Just to prove his false bravado, he’d made her crawl around on her hands and knees and pick up each paper-thin peel with her teeth.

It was like the Devil traded places with God and sent that lightning bolt at him. Or maybe God was trying to kill him and it just didn’t work because he had too much of the Devil in him already.

The onion peel situation sent Miriam over the edge. Years later, as she recounted the story for me, she explained it all.

“We didn’t have no shelters for women and children back then Honey. You understand? And it was legal too. Now men can get arrested when they beat their wives.”

There was only the sound of the ticking of the clock and the wood creaks as she slowly rocked back and forth in her chair. She sat warm-as-toast by the fire in a plush house coat given to her by her girls several years before. To her right in a small closet by the front door, were at least 4 more plush gowns of varying colors and patterns, save red of course. No red anywhere. She only wore the one, and intended to save the others either to be buried in or for someone who might need them more than she did. She pointed her toes into the wooden floor and thought while she rocked. I didn’t say a word. I knew that this was big stuff she was telling me, big in the way that I needed to hear so I would know how to live my life in a better way than she’d had to.

“It was one or two weeks later and Dorsey came in staggerin’ but he wasn’t like he usually was, like maybe he’d gotten a weak batch of the white lightening and so I knew I could say what I wanted to and he’d be too drunk to fight back and sober enough to hear it.”

“What did you say?”

“Well, I told him I wasn’t gonna take it no more. I had me a pot of water in a rolling boil on the stove. When he laid down on the bed in yonder, I let him get settled in and warm, and I took me a dipperful of the water back there, splashing some as I went, and I held it over his face.”

“Oh no. Granny?”

“Then I said to him, Dorsey, the very next time you lay a hand on me I’m gonna put me a pot of water on the stove like I got right now, and I’m gonna let it get to a scalding rolling boil and when you open your mouth and start that snorin,’ I’m gonna pour it right down your throat.”

“What did he say!?”

“He just laid there and looked at me and I knew that he knew I was serious. And then I turned around with my dipper of hot water and went back into the kitchen.”

“He would've died if you’d done that Granny.”

“Well, God saw fit to take him another way.”

And God had. When my father was only 17, Dorsey took a handful of tranquilizers given to him by the Veteran’s hospital doctor. That combined with his usual pint of white lightening had taken him straight from this world into what I could only imagine then was a fiery burning hell. Frankly, I was glad I never met him. I might’ve killed him too.

In the 21 years that had passed between his death and our talk, Granny hadn’t even entertained the thought of letting another man into her life.

“Best thing you can do Honey is this: just stay away from boys. Don’t even let them know you’re interested in them.”

The last 35 years of Miriam’s life did go much better than the first 52. When she died, we buried her in a steel blue casket, a brighter steel than her eyes had been, and instead of choosing one of those old unworn gowns to bury her in, we found a brand new rosy pink gown and housecoat. The undertaker even put some pink lipstick on.

We gave him strict instructions – no red lipstick, no red flowers, nothing red at all.