Thatsa

by James Waine Carpenter

There is a point on the roulette wheel of emotions where extreme anguish and despair are only a click, a breath away from hilarity and joy. These emotions can share the same tear. It is that strange crux of contrary sensations, of positive juxtaposing negative, of good residing so near evil, that makes one question the integrity of life down here on earth, to doubt one's morality, to inspire a person to drink or pray or leave . . .

I had read this in Malcolm Reynold's book, Extremes. Malcolm was a widowed author who settled on the eastern shore of Virginia. His books were hardly minor successes, but he had an ardent fan in Shirl (until they met and dated). According to Shirl, Malcolm, although a "bona fide expert" on the interactions of human beings, was himself, rude, self-centered and lacking in personal hygiene. (He was also a notoriously hapless gambler.)

Shirl believed in burdens and blessings. In her eyes, luck had nothing to do with it. She often claimed we came into this world either blessed or "dragging a suitcase of burdens." Sometimes, those burdens were blessings in disguise; more often, the blessings were nothing to brag about.

I suppose my own burden in life was to outlive all the people I loved except my children and quite possibly, I like to imagine, Thatsa. Poor Ruster, living all those years, making all that money, and finally getting off the booze only to be brought down by that awful disease. And my only love, Lydia, taken just a few years ago with the cancer. Johnny, my oldest, asked me to write this all down. He's the child that wants to know everything, as if it might help him figure it out for himself. He owns a landscaping business and has a boy of his own now. My younger son, Rusty, smokes too much and goes through young women as quickly as his namesake went through young men. I worry about him .

I'll always remember the day Thatsa came to Bydell on account of it being July 17th, my birthday. That would be forty-four years ago now. I turned 10 years old that morning and rode my new bicycle all the way to the main road.

"Not until you're in the double digits," Shirl said many times. Still, when I climbed on that new red Schwinn with the colored rubber tassels streaming from the hand grips and announced that I would be home in time for lunch, Shirl got that look on her face, that "ain't cut out for mothering" look. Shirl worried a lot about my brother and me. And though she never said so, I imagine she thought we were burdened.

Shirl wasn't our momma, but she may as well have been. She'd taken care of Ruster and me since I was five and he was just three, since she dragged our suitcases out of the house on Langston Road and drove us to her house in Bydell Landing. Ruster doesn't have any recollection of Momma. Despite what Shirl said, I remembered my mother rocking me on the porch while the skipjacks paraded out of the creek during the Blessing, a rainbow of flags waving from their rigging, the crisp autumn air. And I swear I remember Momma's lips brushing my forehead when she tucked me into bed at night. Shirl says it was just dreams, that I was too little to remember. But I do. Even Ma Meddle, before she died of the same disease that took her daughter, said Momma used to press her lips to my forehead and close her eyes like she was saying a silent prayer or wishing on me. And when the old woman told me this, she would close her eyes too, maybe missing Momma as much as I did, wishing for her!

I remember some things, but found out most of what went on in my family and around Bydell from Shirl (or from listening in on the party line myself). I can still see her leaning against the kitchen wall with a dish towel over the mouthpiece of the telephone. Shirl said didn't approve of gossiping, but she apparently had no problem with listening. I learned that my Uncle Hurley was around our house nearly all the time after my daddy left. Folks said he was runnin' my momma, but Shirl said Momma wouldn't have any of him (though he tried his best). After the Marines came to our door with the flag, Hurley took Momma and us to the Smoky Mountains for a holiday. I don't remember that, but I've seen the pictures of the clouds and the rain and the bears. Shirl said that was the summer before Momma started to get thin and weak. Hurley stopped coming around then, stopped helping out with the rent and food and the repairs.

"How come you don't eat and still get fat?"

I had to kick Ruster under the table that morning. Sometimes it was like he had no valve in his head to stop the foolish things he thought from flowing right out of his big mouth. Shirl thought it was funny; I wanted to die. But it was true. She snacked a bit -- pop and peanuts mostly -- but very seldom sat down to a full meal. Yet she was the largest woman in Bydell Landing (and there were some big women in that little town).

"I've just got too much love all holed up inside me," she said and laughed again. "Let's get rid of a few pounds!" With that, the game began. She plucked poor Ruster out of his chair and smothered him with hugs and kisses until he cried out for my help. Now I was laughing. She carried him to the parlor, threw him down on the "lovin' seat" and tickled him till he repeated that she was the prettiest woman on the Delmarva peninsula.

I remember feeling at that very moment that it was true.

That morning out on the main road, it was like I was seeing the trees, the fields and the honey vines along Bydell Road for the first time, as though I was suddenly, finally, part of the world. That bicycle was a dream. The stone-tar sounded like a melody under those fat rubber tires, and I would ring the bell with my thumb every time I passed one of Mr. Bain's nosy cows with its head through the fence.

Two-point five miles. That's how far it was from our driveway -- the last house on Bydell at the mouth of the creek -- to the main road. I knew this from watching the odometer on Shirl's Buick. When I saw a tractor-trailer loaded with chickens flash by on the highway, I pedaled slower, wanting that first ride to last forever.

I put down the kickstand and stood leaning against the Bydell post for nearly an hour -- pulling my arm for the truckers to blast their horns -- wanting the whole county to see that shiny bicycle and the man I imagined I was by its side. And when I grew tired and thirsty from standing amidst the dust and feathers raised by the chicken trucks and their doomed cargo, I sat in the shade and opened the bag lunch that Shirl had packed for me. There was a banana, a package of Nekot Nabs, and a birch beer. The bottle was wrapped in foil, but it was already warm from the morning sun on my basket. Shirl had written Happy Birthday XO on the outside of the bag with one of Ruster's crayons. She was thoughtful in that way.

Shirl never had her own children. She never married, though she sometimes spoke fondly of a man named Fontaine. That was when she lived in Oysterton, on the east side. He was a piano man, she told us. "Long thin fingers and hands pretty as a woman's . . . sure could tickle those ivories." That made Ruster laugh. She was looking after her sister's young-uns then, 'cause Saffire had the Lupus and couldn't get out of bed. After that, she moved on to take care of her own momma till she died. Then it was a blind boy named Theodore; twin girls from Girdlemaker whose daddy hanged himself and whose momma had to work two shifts at the chicken plant; an invalid preacher who asked her to marry him; and my momma.

Ruster and I just sort of fell in her lap after Momma took sick. Shirl took us over after she drove by our house one morning and saw Ruster crawling, naked but for a diaper, toward the drain ditch. "He was always getting away when he was a baby," Shirl would say, "Like a snake in the grass." Fontaine was long gone by then. Last she heard he was still unmarried, still traveling and playing piano wherever they'd let him. "Ain't no life," she would say, as if it made it all right, as if her heart had mended with the passing of years.

"What you doin' out here by yourself?"

My Uncle Hurley was leaning across the passenger seat, sounding like he was yelling at me if you didn't know better.

"It's my birthday," I said.

"G'on home, boy."

I watched his blue Pontiac Chieftain turn out of Bydell and head up the highway towards Boxiron. Hurley was the barber there -- "Twenty-nine years," he would brag, "that's a lotta listenin'!"

"Think he might have learned somethin'," Shirl would say under her breath. She didn't like my uncle much, and the feelings were mutual. He still talked bad about my daddy, his younger brother, for running off and leaving us, for being a "drunk," for getting himself killed in Korea. "Somebody else's battle," Hurley would say. Seemed like everything that happened in the world was somebody else's battle according to my uncle. After he accused Shirl of stealing the government money intended for Ruster and me, and she showed him her record book of every cent, Hurley just waved her off like he was swatting a bee, climbed in his Chieftain, and sped away. Somebody else's battle.

I watched Uncle Hurley's car for the longest time, until it became submerged in the illusion of water a mile or so down the hot blacktop. Then I said grace over the crackers and pop -- adding a little prayer for my momma and daddy and Ma Meddle -- and felt a deep loneliness swell within me. I looked back down Bydell Road where Ruster and Shirl would be waiting for me to come home and felt something like my heart beginning to break. I was overcome with fear, wondering if all the people I loved were just gonna keep dying around me; that perhaps love was my burden, and the more I cared about someone, the greater danger they were in. It would be decades after that realization before I could express my feelings for another person.

Suddenly, she was there. To this day, I can't say for sure where she came from. Not from the north or south on the main road (I would surely have seen her), not from the Bowl-A-Rama across the way. I figured she must have come right out of the woods -- maybe sleeping in the dark cool beneath the pines, woke by the air horns; perhaps dropped off in the night by a big rig when she saw the flashing neon of the Bowl-A-Rama's giant bowling pin toppling over. Thatsa always liked that bowling pin.

Anyway, she walked right for me like she'd been looking for me all her life -- swinging her arms and bobbing her head like some awkward bird attempting flight. If she were a boy I would have likely left my bike and took off running for home, thinking he was about to whoop my behind, better to lose that bicycle than my teeth.

I sat there like I was frozen to the ground. She stood over me like something wild, her hands folded as if in prayer, her tongue out, and her hair hanging down in her face. Then she jutted her chin, looked me hard in the eye and hollered, "THAT-sa boy!"

Well, I just about soiled my drawers. I jumped to my feet, and she backed me against the road sign, all the time wondering what she wanted, who she was, what she was. Then she tilted her head to one side like a dog and barked again. "THAT-sa boy!"

That was enough for me. I left my pop and crackers and took off pedaling down Bydell Road as if I had seen the devil herself. And when I gathered the courage to look back over my shoulder, she was coming -- walking in that fast, determined way -- peeling my banana and yelling at one of Melvin Bain's Guernseys, "THAT-sa-cow!"

Thatsa always hollered the first word and nearly whispered the rest under her breath as if she had used up all her air and energy on the first part. Her prominent chin would jut forcefully with the emission of the always present "THAT" and then recoil, giving her the pecking mannerism of a chicken.

She was big-boned and broad shouldered with blonde, knotty corn rows shooting off in every which way like Medusa. But it was her eyes that were most intimidating. Thatsa stared, looking deeply into your eyes as if searching for something or recognizing someone in you.

Poor Ruster. He was hiding under the front porch when Thatsa finally reached the end of the road. It remained his secret place, despite the fact that everyone knew about it. We just let him be when he was under there with his comic books, his compass and his candy cigarettes. The boy had a two-pack a day habit, and it showed in the black craters between his baby teeth.

Shirl and I were peeking through the blinds, waiting. Ruster had heard my story and wanted nothing to do with it. A few moments later we could hear him under there, probably looking out through the lattice with a sweet Pall Mall held loosely in the corner of his mouth like Robert Mitchum.

How Thatsa knew he was under that porch, I'll never know. But she walked right over, dropped to her knees in the grass and hollered, "THAT-sa-boy!" -- the word "boy" falling soft, nearly affectionate, from her lips, simultaneous with the dull thud of Ruster's head bouncing off the floor joist.

Looking back, Shirl never hesitated. She took to that strange girl -- took her in, as a matter of fact -- just as she had taken to Ruster and me. She was selfless and strong, yet, there were times when she seemed as much a child as we were. Ruster and I determined that she was an angel left on earth to look after lost and abandoned people, though lost herself.

There were lots of things that my brother and I would have never known about Shirl taking in Thatsa -- contacting the Oyster County authorities, searching for Thatsa's kin, even taking the girl to a doctor in Pocowaddox -- if she hadn't filled us in a few months before she died. The doctor told Shirl that Thatsa had been "traumatized." He determined she had been beaten repeatedly as an infant and raped as a young girl. And she was mentally retarded, which we suspected 'cause she bore a hint of the small eyes and slack mouth common to Down's Syndrome.

Thatsa was white, nearly albino, but her features were black. She was strangely pretty, muscular and well-proportioned despite poor posture and that awkward, masculine gait. Her eyes sparkled with fire, and she had a vague, infectious smile that could charm a cigarette off Ruster.

Over the years I shot up nearly four inches and began to look down at Thatsa as we stood side by side on the end of the pier and watched the sun fall into the Chesapeake. It was her favorite ritual, and I didn't mind at all.

"THAT-sa day!" She would turn toward me, take a big step back and spread her arms. It was the way she hugged. See, Thatsa didn't like to be touched -- except by Shirl. Shirl had that way of making everybody comfortable and sane.

Ruster learned the touching rule the hard way. He went in Thatsa's room (which used to be his room till he started bunking with me) looking for a pack of "cigs" and found her sleeping. Thatsa had amazing, large breasts that had become the center of attention for me and my curious, prepubescent sibling. And on that morning, one of those alluring protrusions had slipped exposed from her nightgown and summoned Ruster.

"THAT-sa mean boy! THAT-sa MEEAN!"

Shirl and I heard Thatsa howling and Ruster being wrestled to the hardwood above our heads. Shirl dropped her butter knife and bounded up the stairs like a three-hundred pound gymnast. When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw Shirl with her arms spread toward Thatsa -- a gesture to calm her down and get her off the boy.

Poor Ruster. Thatsa had him pinned face up beneath her prominent buttocks, her shins on his forearms, and her hands holding his knees to the floor. There were muffled moans of suffocation coming from my brother, and it was clear that Thatsa disliked the sound of a young boy screaming as much as she disliked having her breast fondled. She ground her crotch into his face in a most peculiar way of silencing him.

Later -- as late as dinnertime -- Shirl still had a ready-to burst, pained grin on her lips. I suppose she should have let it all out with that roar of a laugh she had, shaking all over till her eyes became red like lava and her nose a snot-erupting volcano. Ruster and I had witnessed this on a couple of occasions -- once at the Boxiron Theater when Laurel and Hardy's jalopy fell apart around them. We slid down in our seats embarrassed to death while she snorted and choked.

Ruster wasn't the same for a long time after that incident with Thatsa. He was quiet and morose and sometimes -- lost in thought -- would put another cigarette in his mouth before the last one had dissolved. Thatsa, in her own way of making amends, would step in front of him, spread her arms wide, and announce, "THAT-sa forgive!"

He eventually softened and smiled, causing Thatsa to elicit a chirping giggle and go skipping off down the road to watch the trucks and nap in the shade beside the highway. Ruster spent a lot more time under the porch that summer and one day announced that he was going to be a preacher. Shirl nearly erupted at that. However, the fact that he had quit cigarettes cold turkey attested to his pending reverence.

It was Ruster who named Thatsa when she first came to us. Shirl had tried relentlessly to get the girl to state her name or say anything at all about who she was or where she had come from. But it was no use. So Ruster started calling her Thatsa, which eventually stuck and seemed comically appropriate. Even Thatsa approved, as if everyone that spoke her name was speaking her language.

Life was simple observations to Thatsa: "THAT-sa car, THAT-sa cloud, THAT-sa sad, THAT-sa hungry." Ruster and I contributed slang to her vocabulary with little lessons at our sunset ritual. And at one Blessing Parade, Thatsa elicited, "THAT-sa Barney Phife!" as Danny-Boy Snead, the cocky new deputy, directed traffic. He had recently grabbed Thatsa and me by the arms and ushered us out of Church after she hollered, "THAT-sa lie!" at the minister's call for Amen. I took the credit for that one myself; Ruster was appalled.

When Shirl found out that Ruster preferred the company of other boys, sometime during his senior year of high school, she called me on the phone, either laughing or crying (it was that way with Shirl, you never quite knew).

"Do you think it was that day what done it?" she whispered over the phone. I could hear her wiping her nose, nearly gagging on restrained emotion.

"What day?" I asked. I was wet from the shower, standing in the barracks lobby in Cape May where I was stationed in boot camp.

"When Thatsa sat on his face?"

Shirl was serious. I had to hold the phone away to keep from laughing and felt something inside me nudge closer to that perilous point that Malcolm Reynolds had tried to define. I myself had known about Ruster for a while, even before the weekend I got my first pass and met him in Sea City. We walked the boardwalk, and I bought us a six-pack of beer that we drank on the jetty. It was the first time Ruster got drunk. (I always blamed myself for his eventual drinking problem; Ruster could never do anything in moderation.) He confessed his sexual preference -- crying, perhaps for first time since emerging from beneath Thatsa's behind.

I was thirty-four years old when Shirl was killed. Ruster called me from Boxiron where he shared a split level with Billy Snead, Sheriff Danny-Boy's little brother. They worked together in insurance. Imagine, Ruster finding "true love" right there in Oyster County. Shirl called it the devil's work -- the insurance business, that is. Ruster considered it to be a lot like preaching, only an easier sell.

Shirl knew she was going to die even before the doctors told her about the tumor. I doubt she knew about the truck, though. Her brakes went to the floor, and her old Buick went out on the main road into the path of a loaded semi. The last thing she probably heard was the blast of an air horn and a chicken choir. But had she not left Thatsa home that morning to shuck the corn, she might have heard, "THAT-sa-truck!" from the passenger seat.

"Damned chickens." Ruster added to my silence on the phone. I had been envisioning the terrible car accident and didn't get my brother's point. My wife, Lydia, had just come in with the groceries. She saw the look on my face and stood clutching my arm.

"I'm sure it wasn't the chicken's fault, Rust. What about Thatsa?"

Lydia's hands tightened on my arm.

"She's gone, Cale."

"She's dead?"

Lydia ran off to the bedroom.

"No! She just walked off."

I wanted to kill Ruster.

"Danny-Boy said she came down Bydell Road right after Shirl, like she knew something was gonna happen. She must have seen the crash. When he got to the scene, she was standing there in the middle of all those chickens and all that blood. He said she was hollerin'."

There was a long pause over the phone line.

"Wh . . .what . . . was she sayin'?" I asked hesitantly.

There was another pause. "She said . . . 'THAT-sa big mess.'"

I pushed the receiver away and bit my lip so hard I drew blood. Thatsa may as well have been standing right there before me in the midst of the chicken massacre with that innocent, foolish look on her face and her hair shooting off around her head like fireworks. There was a muffled silence on the other end of the line, and I could hear my brother fighting to restrain his mixed emotions. Then I heard Billy burst into laughter in the background. That broke the ice. Ruster lost it, and then I let go myself, falling against the wall in a guffawing, crying heap. Lydia returned and stood framed in the doorway -- shaking her head in disbelief, as if I were not the man she married. But I was. I was simply overcome with love, fear, and forgiveness, for dear Shirl, for Thatsa, for my little brother.

Thatsa just walked away. Danny-Boy saw her heading south on the main road. A moment later, she was gone forever.

"Gone just like she came," I said later, over my cup of coffee, as Lydia cried softly. Her emotions had always been more defined than ours. It was probably what attracted me to her.

Something emptied from me that day along with those contrasting tears. It was as if my faith rose to the heavens with Shirl, as if my fear went down that highway with Thatsa. I'd like to say that it changed my life forever or made me a better man. But life is a burden. My suitcase just felt a little lighter after that.

I think about Thatsa all the time these days. And I look for her -- waiting for her to suddenly appear before me -- imagining what she might look like after all these years, what wondrous things she had seen, what other lives she had charmed.

When they were young, I often told my children stories about Thatsa. And it was customary to use her aphorisms in times of need. "THAT-sa deep cut! THAT-sa report card. THAT-sa mess!" Their mother never quite got the humor of it all, never believed much in burdens. However, I'd seen her press her lips against their foreheads when they were babies and close her eyes as if wishing or praying.

Perhaps it's as simple as an observation. What else can we do? Faith is in trusting the relativity of burdens and blessings, of good and evil -- spinning like fortune and disaster, a perilous click apart on the roulette wheel of emotion -- all within a common tear. ;

THAT-sa Life.

Copyright © 2002 James Waine Carpenter
All rights reserved

About the Author

James Waine Carpenter was born on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, and raised in Cape May, New Jersey and Key West and Miami, Florida. He currently resides in the shoreline village of Niantic in Southeastern Connecticut with his wife and son.

As a writer, a songwriter, and a full-time musician, James is currently readying two collections of short stories and a novella for publication, recording a CD in Nashville, and performing throughout the country. He was the winner of Chicago's 2000 Lake County Folk Fest Songwriting Competition, a finalist in the 2001 and 2002 South Florida Songwriting Competition, and he will compete in May as one of three finalists in Boston's Rose Garden Songwriting Competition.

"Thatsa" is taken from a story collection tentatively titled "Delmarva."

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