Rather than use their forenames the McClures called each other brother and sister in the quaint, formal way of mountain people. They had moved to Norwalk from the hills of North Carolina after my friend Teddy’s father, who everyone called Pappy, died. Their eccentricities were sometimes embarrassing and their backwoods mentality and argumentative spirits often overshadowed their common sense but they were warmhearted and earthy. They drove junk cars and liked liquor and guns. They were proud and fiercely loyal to one another and they took me in and treated me like a member of the family when I needed a place to live in order to finish high school.
They were descendants of the Scotch Irish immigrants that wandered from the northern states to the unsettled regions of the Southern Appalachians in the early 1800’s. There was also a branch of Cherokee Indian somewhere in the family tree. The women were red heads, good looking in a faintly masculine way and they gave me the feeling that they could be dangerous if you crossed them. The men were sandy haired or blond with sharp chiseled features and high cheek bones except for Henry who was dark and had the dead-eyed aura of an alcoholic about him, and who Teddie’s mother June said got all the Cherokee blood.
They were hard-scrabble, no nonsense people, but open and friendly if they liked you, tough and taciturn if they didn’t. They were immigrants in their own country, a diaspora that held on to their traditions and dialect just as my Italian relatives had held on to theirs, except that they had crossed the Smokey Mountains into the strange world of the coastal North East and my family had crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
We lived together in a basement apartment. It was really just a cellar with a toilet and sink and draperies for room dividers, in Broad River, downstairs from Teddie’s older brothers John and James and their families. The apartment was shared by Teddie, me, June, and on and off, Jackie and Marion, Teddie’s two older sisters, Jackie between husbands and Marion between boyfriends, and to my teenage delight, would make me completely uninterested in girls my own age. When they teased me about taking French, Jackie licked her lips and said "Honey I can teach you French." Henry or “Hennie” June’s younger brother moved in after his last stint in a Carolina jail. It was crowded but nobody minded.
Hank Williams’s scratchy nasal laments seemed to always be playing on the phonograph. Every move we made in those three badly ventilated rooms seemed to be to the beat of “Your Cheating Heart” or “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” There were the smells of people living in close quarters, sweat, shampoo, perfume, cigarettes, lard and the smells of southern cooking, feminine smells, masculine smells. I paid ten dollars a week for a mattress under the stairs or a place on the sofa. June was happy to have me and ten dollars, even if it wasn’t much, helped her economically. For a couple of dollars more she did my laundry. Teddie and I pooled our money and shared a shelf in the refrigerator for our own food and Jackie and Marion took care of anything else I might need.
Hennie’s sinewy arms stuck out of a grimy undershirt that had undoubtedly started out white but had become that dingy grey that you see in advertisements for the miracle washing detergent that “makes your whites whiter.” His shirt was the before.
He had a skull and crossbones decorating his upper arm and across the knuckles of his right hand was tattooed L-O-V-E and on the left H-A-T-E, amateur ink work that prisoners scratched into each other as a signal to the world that they had done hard time. He had a dollop of thinning, greasy, hair, at forty was already missing half of his teeth, and had grungy fingernails at the end of nicotine stained fingers.
I thought Hennie got up at dawn until I realized that he never went to bed. He sometimes urinated in the shrubs early in the morning, probably because like a lot of people from the hills he wasn’t used to indoor plumbing. I was on my way to school, saw him there holding his dick in both hands and asked him why he didn’t use the toilet. "Son “pissin’, inside the house is for city folks. Now shittin’ is another thing cause ya gotta’ squat down so you’re not free anyhow." “Hennie, what does using a toilet have to do with losing your freedom?" “ Son, don´t you know nothin´. What they teachin´ you in that school?" June said that Hennie was a little touched, “terched” as she called it, since he fell off the bridge when he was doing construction down home. I wouldn’t argue. His brain wasn’t only damaged it was twisted.
I was startled awake by a cold weight pressing on the bridge of my nose and then jabbing me in the forehead. I woke up looking down the barrel of Hennie's Winchester. He told me to get the hell up. “Boy what you doin’ in my baid?” as if he knew that I was tumbling around in it every chance I got with both of his nieces. But that wasn’t what he meant that night. He hadn't come home and I saw a chance to move off of the sofa. He´d had been out poaching deer on the Weston, Redding line, waiting to shoot them from his car while he blinded them with its headlights. He kept a pint of Old Crow next to him on the seat for company. I wasn’t about to argue with his rifle. It was late and he was a mean drunk with a hair trigger temper.
In the morning he and June sat at the Formica topped table drinking coffee and smoking the day's first Chesterfields. She chided him and wondered why he didn’t just open a can of beer directly and kill the day properly. I asked him if he shot any blind deer and he cackled, “naw I didn’t shoot no deer but I was thinkin’, about gettin, me a smartass dago Yankee that was sleepin’ in my baid. Would’ve been just as much fun.” June came to my defense. “Now Hennie you leave that boy alone.”
There was a fly circling, buzzing erratically between them, alternately trying to land on June and then Hennie. They were waving it away, fanning the air aimlessly, annoyed. I reached out, snatched it from its orbit, closed my fist around it and shook it, making it dizzy and disorientated, one of those meaningless skills that I had perfected to impress my friends. I opened my palm and let it out to stagger around on Hennie’s saucer. “Here you are Hennie. It’s a present for not shooting me last night. Keep it as a pet.” When he looked up at me his eyes weren’t any more than slits in his leathery, jaundiced skin. He blew smoke through his nostrils and wheezed “I sure scared the shit outta’ ya last night now didn’t I boy?”