storyshell

The sun came up, again, and Jeanine rose alone with it. Bobby wasn’t in the bed, and his spot wasn’t even depressed and the pillow wasn’t even dented, so, apparently, he never even made it to bed.

She swung from her own pillow and slipped her feet into her house shoes. The floor was always cold on mornings like this and it was hard that the first thing you felt before you walked was a floor as cold as a tombstone. She reached under the bed and pulled out the chamberpot. It was a porcelain bowl, with a purple rim that her mother had painted on. This chamberpot had come through two generations. As Jeanine often joked, that chamberpot has taken shit for almost a hundred years now. She took the cover from it and set it underneath her. She pulled up her sleeping gown and squatted over the bowl. She leaned against her bed. She looked out of the window as she went, hearing her water splash and mix with the water from last night. The morning sun had caught the back of the outhouse and threw a shadow of it across the lawn. She usually hated going to the outhouse in the mornings, the dew on the grass always getting reaching up to her, getting her wet. The rain boots she wore out there never did a thing to keep her gown dry.

Beyond the shadow of the outhouse, there was the line of trees that guarded the woods, and which, she often thought, guarded her escape. They were her cell walls.

She finished and stood up, wiped herself with the tissues from her nightstand, yawned, and replaced the pot and went right to the twin’s’ room. The twins’ names were Jesse Girl and Jesse Boy. It was her idea to name the twins the same name and Bobby agreed. He would have agreed then to calling them just Boy and Girl, considering his drunken condition on the day they were born, born just right in the room where she was standing now.  She and Bobby had hardly considered that giving them the same name would make for a childhood of teasing, a litany of cruelty that she should have been able to predict. It became obvious when Jesse Girl and Jesse Boy turned seven that the names had to be changed. Kids would purposely interchange their sexes, calling Jesse Girl “Jesse Boy” and vice versa. Then, their genders got replaced by animals. Jesse Cow. Jesse Dog. Jesse Worm. It just depended on the day. Then, it became “Jesse Pretty” and “Jesse Ugly”, again, interchangeable, depending on which hurt the worst. The cruelty came like the daylight and it made Jeanine cry. It made her kids not want to go outside.

So she changed the names. Not legally, but just in how they were written down. Jesse Girl took on Jeanine’s middle name,  Anne. Jesse Boy made initials out of his first name and Robert, his dad’s full name, and he became J.R. Problem solved, in a sense. The neighbor kids still teased, saying that they now had fake names, and that they were shameful, and that, in the end, they are still Jesse Fish and Jesse Fowl. It took nearly two years before the teasing curled away. The shotgun double killings in July of 2003 and the fire at the Jefferson Elementary later that same year that killed five kids all took away the sting of  being two Jesse’s, and redirected it times ten toward the fact that the whole town of Long, Alabama lost some perfectly normally-named kids.

Still, even after their names changed in public, in the Smith household, they were, and always will remain, Jesse Boy and Jesse Girl. They seemed almost relieved to hear their real names. They at first complained, but, they got used to it. They got used to the comfort that their mother actually loved their names. That love was something they never felt outside the house.

Jeanine peeked her head into their room. They were in their beds, still curled and breathing deeply. It was Saturday, so there was no need to wake them. They always slept so well. Jeanine figured it was because they would rather sleep.

She went back to her room and got the chamber pot. She put on her rubber rain boots and went outside, to the outhouse. It was getting warm, the sun just getting  a good start at burning away the lacy cool of night. The bluegrass sparkled in the sun. It was pocked with dandelions and clover, but mostly a good, smooth shade of green. She heard the chickens in the back yard clucking contentedly. One scampered past her as she walked. She was startled, but she kept both hands on the chamber pot. She walked slowly, thinking of the kids, how she’d explain again about why daddy didn’t put them to bed last night.

She got the front of the outhouse and sighed. She set the chamber pot on the little stool on her left, next to the front door of the outhouse. Bobby had painted a half moon on the door, as a joke, which she didn’t think was funny. She sighed and opened the door.

There was Bobby, slumped sideways on the seat, leaning against the side wall, his pants down to his knees. He was snoring. She reached back and grabbed the chamber pot and she pushed him aside slightly,  took the cover off the chamberpot and dumped it into the half moon space between his naked ass and the shit hole. Some of the urine inside splashed on Bobby’s thighs.

She stared at him for a while. She stared at the brillo pad stubble on his fat cheeks, the dour gray of his face. Somewhere under that face, there was the boy who drove his Chevy pickup too fast on muddied roads and who had charmed her with the way he sang George Jones songs and made even the iron-faced redneck boys who were his friends laugh at his antics. There was that boy who could pull out his silver Zippo, carved with a flying eagle, and light her cigarette with one effortless sweep of his strong fingers. Somewhere under that liquor-filled belly was a flat stomach that bullets could bounce off. Somewhere under that sun beaten skin, a man got lost.

And, in the next second, she saw Jesse Girl and Jesse Boy in his sunken face. She saw their closed sleeping eyes in his closed unconscious eyes. She saw she loved him. She saw she needed him. She saw the kids needed him. Their life stank like the air in the outhouse. But life was like the outhouse. They still needed to wake up and dump in it every day.

And, that made her hurt a little.

She sighed and kicked his knee, hard, with her wet rain boots. He jumped awake, his crusted eyes wide, his face scrambled.

“What? What? What? What?” he said, falling back against the wall.

She took a breath, full of words, words that could pierce him, rip lines into his scalp, make him bite his lips in half.

But, when she let the breath go, there were no words at all. Just rushing air.

She just turned and walked out.

As she walked, the dew spritzed the hem of her gown, and tears dotted the gentle curve of her cheeks.