One Good Mama Bone Read online

  One Good Mama Bone

  STORY RIVER BOOKS

  Pat Conroy, Founding Editor at Large

  ONE GOOD MAMA BONE

  a novel

  BREN McCLAIN

  FOREWORD BY MARY ALICE MONROE

  The University of South Carolina Press

  © 2017 Bren McClain

  Published by the University of South Carolina Press

  Columbia, South Carolina 29208

  www.sc.edu/uscpress

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

  ISBN 978-1-61117-746-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-61117-747-3 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events,

  and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or

  used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Front cover photograph courtesy of Becky Badgett

  To my mama, Barbara Ann Kilgore McClain,

  who showed me blessed motherhood.

  And to my daddy, James Edwin McClain,

  who showed me blessed cows.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Mary Alice Monroe

  Mothers

  Meet

  Teach

  Learn

  Acknowledgments

  FOREWORD

  With her bright wit and positive energy, Bren McClain is as much a force of nature as she is a fellow advocate for our natural world. I first met Bren ten years ago at the South Carolina Writers Workshop. I signed a book for her, a fellow writer, and later struck up a conversation. We bonded immediately, sharing a kindred spirit in our love of animals and nature. Our paths have crossed many times over the ensuing years, and each time I became more aware of the novel she was writing. I heard tidbits … Mama Red, 1950s era, hardscrabble farm life … and I waited anxiously to read it. So it was with great relish and, too, a friend’s trepidation that I agreed to write the foreword for One Good Mama Bone—this highly anticipated story that had been Bren’s personal passion for more than a decade.

  I am honored, thrilled, delighted to declare that One Good Mama Bone was well worth the wait! This book is everything that Bren is—smart, confident, unflinchingly honest, witty, wise, and possessing a reassuring wisdom and kindness that carries the reader from the story’s heartbreaking beginnings to a morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion. Bren McClain’s debut novel is a tour de force!

  Bren’s novel begins and ends with heartrending revelations about the bonds between families, specifically between mothers and children, but ultimately between Mother Nature and all her myriad offspring. In Bren’s themes of the power of family to heal and the power of nature to teach, she speaks to the connective threads that I strive to weave through my own novels. What a joy it is then to see a new voice from South Carolina, and one championed by Pat Conroy himself, take up those inspiriting messages in this novel of the Carolina upstate in the 1950s.

  This novel itself is the progeny of other stories—of Bren’s upbringing on her family’s farm in Anderson, South Carolina, of her father’s boyhood cattle-show experiences, and of other tales entrusted to Bren as both a journalist and a storyteller. The novel she has crafted here is one of great and lasting truths, be those the hard truths of loss and sacrifice or loving truths about family and fate. This is a story of one place, one time, and three families. Yet, in the telling of it, the narrative echoes and reverberates across the plains of its rural South Carolina setting and comes to speak for many places, many times, and many families. That ability to extract the universal from the regional, and from the personal, is the magical power of story exemplified by my dear friend Pat Conroy, who selected Bren’s novel for his Story River Books fiction imprint, giving a literary home to all of the characters whom you will meet in these pages and to the author herself.

  With Sarah Creamer, Bren has crafted a compelling portrait of a woman so damaged by the harshness of her upbringing that she is convinced she cannot be a loving mother, that she lacks even “one good mama bone,” as her own mother professed. But when Sarah chooses to become a mother to Emerson Bridge, an orphaned child of an adulterous affair, maternal instincts rise up from her very marrow, instincts to protect and foster the young boy that challenge her mother’s prophesy. In Emerson Bridge, Bren has given readers the gift of a masterful new vision of rural southern childhood in a character cut from the same rough-hewn cloth as Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, Ellen Foster, Molly Peetree, Lily Owens, and Huck Finn. The bond of mother and child that forms, with some reluctance, between Sarah and Emerson Bridge shows us the capacity for familial nurturing that lies dormant within all of us until called forth. Through this relationship, Bren gives us an insightful depiction of motherhood, of love itself, grounded in the courage to act completely in the interest of another, to give without question and without expectation of receiving the same.

  Sarah must learn to be a mother to Emerson Bridge, and, while this at first seems to be an unnatural act for her, it is to nature that she is drawn for instruction. She finds her model of motherhood in Mama Red, the mother cow who has pushed her way through barbed-wire fences and traversed the fields to be reunited with her child, Lucky, the steer the Creamers have bought from the wealthy and glory-mad Luther Dobbins.

  Perhaps my favorite sections are the poignant and brief passages centering on Mama Red’s animal perspective and Sarah’s monologues with Mama Red as Sarah struggles to comprehend the animal’s strong maternal instincts even as her own grow and ripen in her breast. This theme of animal as teacher—of following the instructive parallels between nature and human nature—has defined so much of my own writing, and I applaud Bren for the thoughtful and unique ways in which she approaches that message in her novel.

  In the contrasts between the impoverished Creamers and the well-to-do Dobbins, and in the compelling connections between Sarah and her son Emerson Bridge and Mama Red and her offspring Lucky, Bren shows us the heart of parenthood isn’t rooted in biology or even in species, but in our capacity to love, to change, to give all that we have, to sacrifice oneself for the sake of another. It is a lesson that we need to hear often because it can be difficult to learn and easy to forget, but I believe, as I think Bren must as well, that this spirit of giving and forgiving is the essence of our being. It is the better part of our human nature, and our purpose on this earth of ours is to tap into it within ourselves so that we may share it with others. Bren has done that in her novel, in her art, and, if we can attune ourselves to truly hear the voices we encounter on these pages, human and animal alike, we can glimpse our own potential as well.

  There is a pull of destiny in this novel too, of forces aligning just beyond the horizon and guiding characters toward what has been set in motion for them. That pull has been a part of birthing this novel as well. In July 1995, following a talk by Pat Conroy in Charleston, South Carolina, Bren was one of hundreds of eager fans who stood in one of Pat’s storied three-hour signing lines. (Pat once told me that at least five marriages could trace their beginnings to his signing lines where future spouses met and, in the course of waiting together for hours on end, realized they had more in common than just a great love of literature.) Simply signing a book for a fan was never enough for Pat. His gratitude to his readers was so deep and genuine that he wanted to get to know them, to treat them as well as they had treated him. He could not meet a reader without striking up a conversation, and this was true of Bren’s encounter. She revealed to Pat t
hat she was a writer working on the beginnings of a novel. Pat inscribed her copy of Beach Music with this: “To Bren McClain, I hope to read your novel one day. Pat Conroy.”

  And he did, nearly twenty years later! Pat read the manuscript of One Good Mama Bone and selected it with enthusiasm for addition to his Story River Books imprint. At Pat’s seventieth birthday celebration in Beaufort, South Carolina, in October 2015, Bren was able to remind Pat of their first meeting and to show him her treasured copy of Beach Music. There, at the Pat Conroy at 70 Literary Festival, Pat signed another book for Bren with this: “To Bren, the marvelous writer who is now part of Story River history. Pat Conroy.” That part of Bren’s history, of Story River’s, and of Pat’s is now where destiny has placed it, in your hands as the novel One Good Mama Bone.

  This is a novel that just might break your heart, and it might well heal it too, but with both acts Bren McClain will remind you of why each of us is entrusted with a heart in the first place—to love, to learn, to make the hard choices, and to feel deeply within ourselves the righteousness and generosity of living in the service of one another.

  Mary Alice Monroe

  part 1

  MOTHERS

  JUNE 22, 1944

  One night, deep into it, when sounds are prone to carry, a baby boy lies crying on Sarah Creamer’s kitchen table. He is minutes old, still wet with his mother’s blood, and hungry for his mother’s milk.

  But she does not hear his cries. She is no longer there.

  Only Sarah. Only Sarah remains. Her body bent over his, her hands rummaging the wooden planks for a towel still white enough to wrap him in. Blood is everywhere, puddled up as if there had been a hard rain. The smell of it saturates the eighty-one-degree air, pushes aside the dry tang of bleach, and fills the heat with the moistness of a long-shuttered earth, now free.

  The baby’s cries penetrate Sarah’s bosom and bounce around its emptiness.

  Her hands are shaking.

  A lone light bulb hangs suspended over the table, a pull string running from the base of the bulb. It hangs as still as death. The light casts Sarah larger than she knows herself to be, beginning on the far wall above her husband, Harold, who lies drunk and passed out in front of the open doorway to the porch. Sarah spreads high and wide.

  Harold’s pocket knife lies atop one of the towels, the blade still open and awash in a red slickness. Sarah yanks the towel towards her, flipping the knife onto the table, still warm from Mattie’s body. “Cut him loose of me!” Mattie’s words to Sarah, who delivered the child. “Get you a knife and cut him loose of me now.” The towel in Sarah’s hands, she twists. The red and white spirals of a peppermint stick. “What was in my head? I can’t keep him. Billy Udean will kill me and this baby, too.” Mattie’s voice almost too hoarse for utterance, her legs working to free herself from the table. She drops to the linoleum and heads for the door, crawls over Harold and leaves on him a trail of bright red. “It ain’t the child’s fault he was born,” her last words from the porch, before the darkness drew her.

  It ain’t mine, either, Sarah thinks now, and wraps the baby in the towel, brings him in close and steps over Harold and into the sweltering night in Anderson, South Carolina, where the moon is on its way to bed, and crickets, a whole chorus of them, sprinkle the farmland in waves.

  “Mattie! Sister Mattie!” she calls out, her bare feet scurrying across the dirt yard to the vegetable garden they share, the rows running from Sarah’s house to Mattie’s. She takes the one between the green beans. They would make in another week or two.

  She rushes up the few steps to the front porch and onto the green concrete slab, throws open the screened door, and turns the knob. It’s locked. “Sister, open the door!”

  Mattie never locks her door. No one does.

  Sarah shakes the knob. “I’m bringing him back to you. This is your baby, not mine. Don’t you put this on me!”

  The door does not open.

  Sarah places her ear against the wooden surface and strains to hear Mattie’s footsteps inside, hear the creaks her barely one hundred pounds would make. But the baby’s cries do not allow for that.

  Sarah kicks at the door and beats it with her fist, beats it hard. “I mean it, Mattie. I ain’t no mama. You his mama. Bet he’s got your dimples. Now come get him. Come get him now!”

  Sarah’s words come fast like the bullets Billy Udean said he wanted to go fire on the people he called “slant eyes,” his arms pretending to hold one of the guns he kept stashed in every room of his house and pointing it like he could see them already. He never broke any of Mattie’s bones, but he’d beaten her black and blue. The newspaper the day before splashed a headline that spanned the top of the front page, “War Hero to Return Home,” and carried words that said Billy Udean Parnell would be on the train to Anderson the next day around noon. That’s in a few hours. “Me and Harold won’t let Billy Udean do nothing to you or this baby,” she calls through and hopes to the high heavens that is true.

  A sheen of sweat coats Sarah’s skin, makes it glisten, and keeps fresh the red of Mattie’s blood that lines Sarah’s hands and wrists and arms. Against the wooden surface in front of her, Sarah lays her forehead, wide like the rest of her, except her eyes, which look almost pinched together, as if huddling. Strands of dark hair, almost black and long loose from her bun, lay stuck to her forehead and neck and sides of her face.

  The baby’s cries ring in Sarah’s ears.

  “I mean it, Sister! Come get your baby! I’m going to count to ten, and if you don’t open the door, I’m putting him down, I am.” Her voice has become shrill.

  Sarah begins to count. She counts loud.

  But Mattie does not come.

  “Alright, then,” Sarah says and steps back, the screened door slapping shut. She lays the baby in front of it. “He’s at your door now, your baby is. You the mama, now you come get him. I don’t want him. He ain’t mine, and I wouldn’t make no good mama.” The back of her throat feels like knives cutting it. “I ain’t playing, Mattie. I ain’t!” She stomps her foot. The jowls in her face shake.

  The door stays closed.

  She takes another step back and holds up her hands in surrender. “Bye, Sister, I mean it. I’m leaving. Now come get him!”

  She starts down the steps.

  From inside the house, a gunshot blasts.

  The sound finds Sarah and lifts her arms like wings.

  “Mattie!” she screams and runs back to the door and rams it with her full self. “You playing, right, Sister? Ain’t you playing? Tell me you playing!” She grabs the knob and shakes it, then beats it with her fists. “Tell me!”

  She listens.

  There is nothing.

  Blood rushes to her head. The hotness of it, then the coolness like a thousand peppermints jammed inside.

  “Mattieeeeee!” Sarah calls out, holding onto her best friend’s name as long as she can.

  She is a child’s toy top spinning. She spreads her feet to steady herself and slaps her flat hands against the screen. “Oh God, no, no, no, tell me no, Mattie. Tell me noooooo!”

  The louder Sarah is, the louder the baby at her feet becomes.

  But their sounds are just for each other. No neighbors live close enough to hear. Field after field of young cotton surrounds them. The farmhouse across the way has long been abandoned.

  Sarah slides down the door, her body folding on top of itself as if she was a knife being put away. Her hands clasp the back of her knees, and she begins to rock. She falls over and draws herself up into a tight curl.

  The baby lies just out from her, his cries now wails.

  They shake her down to her twenty-six-year-old bones.

  Drops of sweat roll down her face. They want to get away from her. She doesn’t blame them. “I ain’t enough, baby boy, I ain’t. I don’t know how to be no mama. I wouldn’t make no good one. No good one. No good one. No good one.”

  The towel reveals only his face, the rest wrapped arou
nd him like the picture of Baby Jesus she saw in her mother’s Bible when Sarah was a girl. She can see his little mouth working. He is hungry. He needs to be fed.

  “Why? Mattie, why? Sister, why?” Sarah’s voice is now a whisper. “No good one, no good one, no good one. No, sir. No good one.”

  He is squirming like he wants to free himself. But he has nothing to free himself for.

  Except her. Except Clementine Florence Augusta Sarah Bolt Creamer.

  She looks at the screened door behind him. It is closed. She lets her eyes climb the large metal design in its center, a bird, painted white. Billy Udean would always laugh and say it was a pelican that lived along the coast, where he pronounced he would live one day, buy a house on the beach and wait for such a bird to fly by so he could shoot it.

  It’s a stork, Sarah thinks now, and it’s brought a baby. A baby boy.

  She can feel light at her back. The sun now is waking. On the baby’s face, she sees the light’s timid beginnings. The world behind them is becoming midnight blue, the color of God’s handoff from night to day, that switchover that appears to occur in a single act, in a single second and setting what was, never to be again.

  “No sir,” she tells him. “It ain’t your fault.”

  Then she makes herself go still. Just like that, go still.

  She rises from the floor and gathers him in her arms. His hair has dried some. It carries a tint of red like Harold’s. Around his tiny and heaving back, she folds her hands. They are strong hands. They can cook, and they can clean. Harold called her “handy” once. He was right.

  The baby, theirs now.

  Sarah bows her head. She can’t say who she is praying to. Her mother’s Jesus does not know her. But she has to believe that someone, something hears.

  NOVEMBER 8, 1950