Bad Moon

Chapter One

   During those long hot summer months, Ma's clothes would appear to shrink. She'd cut and alter them until they were more my size than hers. She loved the sun on her body and had the best figure of any female around. She knew it too and used it like a weapon.

   Most of the men in town paid Ma more attention than they should and Pa got real mad at the way they looked her up and down. But Ma gloried in it all. Life in Richmond County, Virginia, was a whole lot better than her previous existence up in the hills when she was a child.

   Her long hair was thick and dark, Pa said it was black as the devil. Ma would laugh and shake her head, making her hair dance wild and free like a horse's tail, even when there were no flies to swat. Like he was annoyed at something; annoyed at being tied. Maybe Ma did the same thing when a thought didn't sit right.

   I wanted to be just like her one day and spent hours brushing my hair, it wasn't quite as dark as Ma's but I wanted it to shine the same. I'd look at myself and wish I had curves like hers too, but I was all flat and straight, but when I looked at my face in the mirror, Ma's face looked back at me. My eyes were every bit as black as hers, one day I would learn to use them the way she did.

   She'd catch me looking at myself sometimes and say, 'Don't worry honey, one day soon your body will change. You won't always look like a stick insect.'

   Pa and my brother Nathan worked away from home a lot of the time. There wasn't much work in town so they went wherever they found it. Ma liked having the house to herself, to entertain the men from town while Pa was away.

   Pa caught one of them one time and dragged the young man out to the barn where he used to work on his wood carvings. It was the extra money he got from his carvings that kept the food on our table. Ma told me the young man only got a good thumping and I wasn't to listen to any of the gossip I heard in town. Some of the kids at school were saying that my Pa fed the body to the hogs.

   I knew it was a lie. Pa was a big man, but he was gentle and only ever got angry when there was good reason. Ma gave him that most of the time but she could always calm him down real quick. She'd take him to their room and I'd wait a few minutes before going to my room to listen.

   Pa built the house when Nathan was a baby. The inside walls were too thin, you couldn't help hearing things. I'd lie on my bed and wait for the soft moaning that always followed, and then Pa would say, 'Ruby, why do you do it, why do you need other men?'

   'Now Papa Bear, don't fuss so, you know I got a big appetite. One man aint never been enough to fill the need in me.'

   One time I heard Pa slap her real hard and he told her there must have been a bad moon rising the night she was born. Ma laughed the way she always did, a low sound like singing. I had the feeling Pa would snap one day and do some of the things the folk in town accused him of.

   There were times when Ma didn't care if the door to her room was wide open for all to see. I knew most of the men she entertained. Some would tell her to shut the door but most were like Ma and didn't care if I was watching. I didn't like the way they looked at me, like they wanted to do to me what they were doing to Ma.

   I lost count of the times Ma only just got her clothes on before Pa and Nathan came in the house, and I heard the man she'd been entertaining climb out of the window. Pa must have heard it too but he did nothing, even seeing some man from town running across our field wouldn't make him angry, only if he caught them face to face would he lose his temper.

   Nathan didn't feel the same way about Ma as I did, he hardly spoke to her at all and when he did it was always nasty. But I'd seen him looking at her like the men from town. Nathan was nineteen and Ma teased him all the time about girls. I didn't think she ought to, as he'd get real mad. Sometimes she'd go too far and run her hands over her body, letting her hands linger on certain parts. She'd say, 'Want some of what Ma's got? I've seen you looking boy ...'