A Tale About Lilly

THE SPLINTERED VINE

1960

Georgia’s moist heat slid into September of 1960 like sparks from a rowdy blaze. The bright sun clung on as if it were a newborn baby latched on for its first sip of breast milk.

The rays were strong and would not let up. The mornings began to get shorter and the warm nights got longer.

 Lucretia lay on her bed with her right hand propped behind her head looking at a reflection from the sun dance across the wall. She listened to a flock of birds squawking over the apartment building where she lived with her mother, father, three sisters and brother.

She liked to wake up before everyone else and listen to the June Bugs reverberate like miniature maracas. It was September, but the 95 degree heat had, obviously, confused the insects too.

She was nervous about her first day at school. Her older sisters and brother seemed okay about their first day of school. They had always left her and her mother at home and returned okay each afternoon. Her first day of school seemed to be coming much too quickly for her liking. She put the thought of school and what it meant and did not mean out of her head for a while.

She concentrated on the squawking birds. To her, their squawking sounded like a sort of wild music.

A team of airplanes raced above the building. The noise from the planes cracked across the sky, breaking the sound barrier. Her father had called it the sonic boom and had explained how it happened for, what he called, the zillionth time.

Beneath all of the noises outside, Lucretia could hear low moaning sounds from a radio downstairs in her parents’ bedroom.

She blocked out the other sounds and listened to the Righteous Brothers singing, “You’ve lost that Loving Feeling.”

She liked the rhythm of it, knew every word of it. She sang softly along with it to herself until it ended.

She slid her left foot away from the covers and stuck it in front of a white fan that turned from side to side in the far corner of her bedroom.

After her toes had gotten as cool as she wanted them to, she started to slide her foot back under the cover, when she heard a loud clunk against her parents’ bedroom wall.

Her heart jumped. She sat up quickly, wrapped her arms around herself, and bent over the edge of her bed to try to ease the panic in her stomach. It felt as if someone might have jabbed a hot knife into it.

Lucretia knew that her parents were at each other again. When she heard her mother scream, “Fuck You, Clyde,” a chilling panic rushed over her. Her chest heaved in and out, quickly, like a baby bird’s chest. The raised bumps on her arms stung, as if someone had taken sand paper and scratched it against her tender skin.

The picnic last week with Salami sandwiches, blueberry pie, made from berries that Lucretia and her friends had picked, watermelon, fried chicken, potato salad and lemonade, where Clyde had laughed at Lucretia’s “notorious backstroke,” he had called it, had to mean that the lump in her throat would not kill her.

How could they be at it again? Clyde had sang a song to Jeannie, and they had laughed, hugged and held hands at Mosley Park.

Tossie Lee, Lucretia’s grandma, had not been at the picnic. She had died too soon to see Jeannie’s joy luck with Clyde. Tossie had not believed in it - Luck. She had not condoned it. She had no faith in it. She had died three months before the joy luck picnic. She had said that Clyde had to stop getting at Jeannie in front of the children. She used to say that children’s hearts get the perished leftovers from their parents’ wars.

Whether Tossie was right or not, for five-year-old Lucretia, fear was a dangerous thing, and without question, her fear, that things could not change, had become the most treacherous kind.