Unto These Hills Read Free

Nana in her flapping flannel gown, long white hair flying loose, leaning over Sheila’s bed in the wee dark hours, looking chillingly witchy.
    “ You done soaked this bed, you lazy heifer! Too durned no-account to get up and walk to the bathroom is what you are.” And I see Sheila’s eyes, sleep-dazed, confused, and humiliated. I now cringe that I said nothing in her defense, even when Nana’s anger strongly peppered her language.
    But I cannot go back and relive one day.
    To her credit, Nana laundered the urine-soaked sheets and kept a rubber cover over the mattress to protect it. The daily toil must have been backbreaking for a woman her age. Now, past the age she was at that time, in retrospect, I recognize the effort she spent keeping two households up and running; Uncle Charlie’s and ours’.
    Nana, despite her horror of Mama’s ways, indulged her green-eyed, utterly outrageous ‘baby’, Ruby, whom God, for whatever His reasons, blessed with a beautiful face and perfect curves that could cause a traffic pile-up.
    I understood. Nana couldn’t help but adore Mama — despite her visceral condemnation of Mama’s whoring. Neither could I resist her. Neither could my handsome daddy, whose driving force had been, as far back as I could remember, to placate Mama’s incessant quest for thrills and anything zany.
    Yet, despite all his efforts, on that lovely May day, during our exuberant family outing, failure smacked him broadside.
    ~~~~~
    We ate an early lunch at Abb’s Corner, the village café hangout located downstairs from the Movie House. Outside steps took us down to the lowest level of the Community Center. Divorce Me COD spilled from the jukebox as we piled into a large booth and Daddy splurged to buy hamburgers, fries and tall frosty milk shakes for the lot of us, including sixteen-year-old Francine, who usually by-passed family things.
    I hated the divorce song. Soon Frank Sinatra soothed the airwaves with Night and Day and I relaxed and counted my blessings that we were together.
    I caught glimpses of conjecture on my sister’s cynical face and I knew. She, too, hoped Mama would for once in her screwed-up life be good, and think of us rather than herself. I frowned at her, discouraging her dark skepticism.
    Afterward, at Mama’s request, Daddy parked the car on the curb near the post office, as close to the Company Store as he could get. Mama hopped out, then stuck her head in the back window, where we huddled, her offspring, beguiling us with Blue Waltz fragrance and her incandescent smile.
    Her white silk, clingy shoulder-padded blouse, tucked into fashionable pearl-gray, loose-legged slacks, cupped what Francine had informed me were lush breasts — much like her own, she smugly added, which had drawn my dismayed gaze downward to my own comparatively small assets, ones that resembled two once-over-lightly fried eggs.
    “Can we go, Mama?” whined Sheila.
    “ Nonono.” Laughter, rich as hot fudge, gurgled from her as she reached over to tweak the little freckled nose. “Doncha know I’m gonna get ya’ll each a surprise ? Even Daddy gets one,” she said in her throaty way, rolling her vibrant greens at Daddy. I was just beginning to realize what everybody meant by ‘Ruby’s bedroom eyes’, when her lids lowered like a silk curtain, exposing only a sliver of sea mist glimmer.
    “Now ya’ll be good for Daddy, y’hear? I’ll be a little while.” Her voice oozed slow and thick as honey. She wrinkled her perfect nose. “Promise?”
    “Promise,” chirruped everybody except Francine, who considered such compliance unbearably soppy.
    Nobody, but nobody could stir my butterflies like Mama. Fact was, with her infectious, teasing laughter and melodious voice, she had the power to sweep us all from calamity to ecstasy in seconds flat. And despite her equally quicksilver explosive fights with Daddy, and her loose ways, in that lovely sun-filled moment I adored her.
    After all, my brain