On Her Birthday

Michael Hamlin

Grandpa Mabe’s Amoco station marked the middle of Starr, a 1950s speck of a

town hell-bent on hosting its own bit of the South’s post-World War II car craze. Red dirt

stock car race tracks, dusty ovals featuring Friday night under-the-lights racing with all of

its thrills and drama were nearby, run by men with hands stained black by oil, grease, and

under-the-hood road grit. Mabe’s Amoco, a red brick bunker of a building and a hang-out

for the good ole dirt track boys, stood markedly larger than the nearby trailer clinic

where I was born. I lived in a house on a small rise behind Mabe’s station until I was 10

years old. The whole place is now at the bottom of a reservoir where the water glistens in

a potash sheen, reflecting an impressionistic image of the coal-fired power plant nearby.

Out front at the station’s gas pumps, Grandpa and my Uncle Tilton ran the station’s

main business: selling gas and cleaning windshields, checking oil and patching tires.

Over near the air hose meter was a white-washed out house toilet marked “Colored”

where my unofficial uncle, Cicero, ran a lazy looking side business, selling “hooch,” clear

backwoods moonshine, illegal to make, have, or even drink in dry little Starr. This was of

trifling worry to Uncle Ci.

“Here’s your pint, sir,” Uncle Ci drawled to the North Carolina State Patrol officers

who visited his store now and again. “Much obliged and come see us again soon, ya

hear?” These uniformed customers, commanding respect in their blue-gray coats and

polished black calf-covering boots, decided which service station to call when a wrecked

car or a truck needed towing. They kept my Grandpa’s tow truck, “Big Blue,” busy.

In the station’s grassy side lot where wrecked cars rusted, my relatives and near-

kin folks seemed to know just when to find their places in the late afternoons at the picnic

tables that semi-circled a dented up 50-gallon steel barrel. Gathering “‘round the big

can,” as my folks called it, they smoked barely-cured tobacco in corn cob pipes or store-

bought cigarettes, all the while trading family gossip and passing the news. Phones were

for something urgent or something long distance in Starr where four-digit phone

numbers had just arrived.

“Y’all hear the Carolina game last night?” a much older cousin called out to anyone

one late afternoon one spring-like February day. “They lost to a team with niggers. One

day, Carolina’s gonna need to get a couple of those boys ourselves.”

Addie was my mother’s name. At eighteen, she was mom to a kid, me, and she had

married my father, Flannery Redd, when she had to, but never lived with him. “Tim, you

got a better last name out of the deal and he can never deny that you are his, but staying

out here in Starr is something I will never do,” she quick whispered to me one day,

exhaling cigarette smoke from her nose and mouth, her thin face nosing toward me. She

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was serious, opening her green and gold eyes wide, brows arched high and furrowed, her

red lips set barely apart, head high and cocked slightly to the right. That face was Addie’s

look, as I heard Uncle Til call it. My mother deployed it like a flamethrower to make

undoubtedly clear that what she had just announced or pronounced was true.

Mabe’s Station was popular with Starr’s young men, students at P. B. Moore

Junior-Senior High School, young men who asked young women to walk down to Mabe’s

to get a grape Nehi drink from the station’s cooler, nonsensically called the “Coke Box.” It

was a first date thing to do. On a second or third date, the couples might carry their soda

pops across Highway 210, only then taking the others’ hand, ambling down Cherokee

Road, passing Jordan River Church, walking all the way down to Redd River. By crossing

the road, these couples were said to have maybe taken the next step.

“Straight up to ya, boy,” my mother told me, “some of those people are doing it

down there.” So, I knew something went on down by the river, but I never asked anyone

what “it” was, not Grandpa when we went down there to fish, and definitely not anyone

on a Sunday when pastor baptized people on the river’s very edge and we all watched

and clapped and sang out our praises. I stayed quiet and watched, added in pieces I

heard, kept things to myself.

“Real life starts younger for boys in places like Starr, truly it does. So, tell me

everything, ask me anything,” my mom commanded a few weeks later, her look fully in

place. “You gotta learn fast.”

“We’ll stick it out together here for a bit and, whatever, it’ll always be us two,

Timmer, but you gotta learn things fast.” A smile replaced her look and she kissed my

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forehead. I called this woman “Addie-Mom” because she smiled at me when I did and

because she was different from other moms I saw. She wrestled against some people and

some things as they were then in Starr. She revolted if told what to do. Mothers did not

do that, any that I saw. We were eighteen years apart in age; mostly, she and I were

fellow travelers, companions on a path to someplace else.

Addie-Mom said to me one afternoon out at the tables ‘round the can, one day

when a good-sized crowd had gathered up, a spring Saturday I think, everyone shootin’

the breeze and she said, “Timothy, if ever you say the word nigger, I will tan your skinny

white butt ‘til it’s redder than a dog’s balls after they’ve been cut off. Walking around

with no balls and saying that word is no way to go through life.”

“Okay.”

In 1950s North Carolina, there was a saying that I heard folks say it when talking

about my mother – “she’s not quite right, you know what I mean?” She was different, I

did know, and I cried about it sometimes. Whatever, I knew that my mother was mine

and I felt unshakable faith that she would never forsake me no matter what. Addie-Mom

was my steadfast friend in this time, my childhood, and in this place, Starr. She was my

mother and my friend and that was the truth. I can see her look in my mind’s eye even

now and so, so . . . it was so.

“My Addie,” Grandpa would crow, “can sell coal oil to the devil himself.” As for

Grandpa, Addie-Mom said that the only words he could write were those in his name.

Running Mabe’s Amoco, Grandpa gave himself the job of jabbering with the customers

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and just barely tinkering with their cars’ oil filters. He had farmed tobacco and then made

good money working in the Norfolk shipyards during the war. When he came home for

good from Norfolk after the war, he wanted a change, a step up from tobacco farming to a

business man’s business, and the respect that would come with it. He sold the farm, took

all of his savings from shipbuilding, and chanced it, buying land on a little road that

became a north-south running highway through Starr, North Carolina. There, he built

Mabe’s Amoco. Uncle Til handled the money end of the business and was the mechanic.

My mother was then a high school junior, working on a business diploma, determined to

be the first high school graduate in the Mabe family. It really was true, Addie-Mom says

still, that times were good.

Oh, but then, one Sunday morning after church hour, Grandma found Uncle Til

bloody faced, still mostly drunk, propping himself up with one hand while head down

peeing on the back wall of the Mabe’s Amoco station’s service bay. Grandma has spotted

Uncle Til from the back porch of the house, built as it was just up on a small knoll behind

the station

“If the front door to the service bay had been open, people coming out of church

could’ve seen Til from the road, Ed,” Grandma was supposed to have gasped. “Why, for

land’s sakes, he was leaking on the very place he works. We can’t let him go up to the

bank no more. It’d shame us all! Let Addie count the money and do the ordering.”

So, beginning when she was 16, working at the station is what Addie-Mom did for

a time as she thought about her future. She got an old car and learned to drive it, went to

White Lake and stayed in a hotel, graduated from high school and appointed herself chair

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of the class reunion committee. She drove her friends to the movies in Rockingham and

went with Grandpa to some kind of business meeting in Siler City. She dressed herself in

clothes she made from cloth bought in Hylton, about 30 miles away, going that far

because, she told me later, she wanted to see the store owner’s son, Flannery. They

married at the court house on the day she graduated from high school. Some months

later, she birthed me in that trailer rural health clinic, taking me home to Grandma and

Grandpa’s nearby house.

For a while, she kept working at the station, tracking the money, phoning in gas

and oil orders, paying station’s the bills, but getting more and more itchy. Her

restlessness was clear in the way she spoke to others. All five of us lived at Grandpa and

Grandma’s house. Uncle Til slept on a sofa on the enclosed back porch of my

grandparents’ house, a space he shared with Grandma’s wringer washer. His sofa was as

far away as it could be from what Grandma called the “front bedroom” of the house where

Mom and I slept. Addie-Mom locked our bedroom door at night, saying that we needed to

keep “the slug, your Uncle Tilton” out.

Uncle Til was one to sneak up behind me and deliver a bruise-raising pinch on my

butt. He had a scar on his side that started just below his left ribs and tailed off in a curve

leading into a deeper pit about an inch to the left of his navel. I could see it through his t-

shirt, especially when he was sweaty. I asked him about it.

“Why do you have that? What is it?” We looked at each other right in our faces as

I pointed to the side of his shirt.

“A scar, a knife scar.”

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“Why is it deeper right there?” I circled with my pointer finger the skin pit next to

his navel. Uncle Til shuddered just a bit.

“’Cause that’s where the man twisted it half way ‘round.”

Who?”

“A Jap.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I’d shot him.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I guess so. Sometimes, yes, it does.”

He never pinched me again. Addie-Mom told me later that Uncle Tilton lived at

Grandpa and Grandma’s because he had hit his wife, Aunt Dottie. One Friday night, I

went with my cousins to see Uncle Til run his truck in the fifth race that night. He came in

third and was happy, buying me a hot fog to eat on the way home.

Before long, Addie-Mom took on a second job at a law office in Hylton, using

correspondence dictation-taking skills she had taught herself in a mail-order course.

Grandma kept me and, before long, I started school. Most evenings after supper, my

mother and I talked as she leafed through magazines, showing me pictures of cities and

the people living in them. “I wish I could speak without an accent,” she once said. “It’s

holding me back.” Would we have an accent in some other place, I wondered. She looked

to be thinking. “It’s expensive in a city. Not sure what it would cost,” Addie-Mom

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observed. Her eyes moved from me to stare at the dial of the radio on the bedside table in

the front bedroom.

Not sure. That’s how life in Starr stood until one summer Saturday morning just

before my eighth birthday when Addie-Mom declared with a look, “As for you, you half-

grown man, you need to learn how to eat politely. Put on your Sunday pants and we’ll go

to Hylton for lunch.”

We sat in the restaurant’s big black chairs and right away, she tells me, “Put your

napkin in your lap and put your hands on top of your napkin and sit up straight.” And

then a big man with dark hair came and sat in the chair next to hers.

“Timothy, this is Mr. Hardiman, a friend of mine.”

Mr. Hardiman stayed in the picture through the fall and into December, he picking

her up often to go out. He even came to the Mabe family’s Christmas Eve party and gift

swap which was at its peak, loud and crowded when I popped the question.

“Mr. Hardiman, are you going to be my new daddy?”

Grandma was seated on her very Victorian couch between Mr. Hardiman and me

and at once, the color of Grandma’s face matched that of the Christmas punch in the clear

cut glass cup she held with both hands. “Why, Timothy, you have a daddy,” she choked

out.

“I have Grandpa, but that’s not the same,” I observed, scooting forward to the edge

of the couch, touching a foot to the floor, and looking across Grandma at Mr. Hardiman.

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I also sneaked a peak across the living room to find Addie-Mom next to the fake fireplace,

green suit fitted at her small waist, black heels shining, smoking a cigarette from a long

purple painted holder. Nobody around there smoked like that with a cigarette holder and

only my mom had a hair cut so short that she could pass for a man were it not for the

stylish woman’s clothes she made for herself. She had overheard my question and now

stood erect, gunning me down with a look. I responded with an attempt at a blank, open

face, lips flat lined, but I was struggling not to snort out a laugh.

Mr. Hardiman slowly raised his lower lip to cover his upper lip, his eyes aimed to

the right and down at me. I thought he was trying not to grin. Looking up, I saw Addoe-

Mom fast approaching us. I bolted down the hall to the bathroom, slammed its door shut,

and climbed out of the window, catching my older cousins, Norma Jean and Nadine,

sneaking a shared cigarette in the bushes.

A few months later, on her birthday, my mom herself popped the same big

question about Mr. Hardiman to me. “Timmer, honey,” she said, “I have something for us

to talk about.” She sat stiff in a scratched up yellow wooden kitchen chair, hands folded,

wearing a crumpling smile, chin up, viewing me from slightly above.

Having no money, I specialized in no-cost birthday gifts. As she began to tell me

her marriage news, I began singing my birthday gift, a song about mothers and their

specialness that I had learned at Sunday School. I finished singing the song and her eyes

moistened. There was no hug, but she asked me to sing it again and then said that she had

been thinking things over and that it was time for us to talk about what she was thinking.

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“I feel itchy, Timmer,” she began quietly. “I don’t know why, but the answer is not

to stay here. I gotta go, just get out of Starr and see what else is going on some place else.

I need more.”

“Are we leaving here?” Addie-Mom’s head was down and I knelt on the floor to

look up at her eyes for her answer to my question. “Gotten all there is to get here. I need

to go, I know that . . . ” was all I got for an answer. There was a pause before she said

what I knew was coming, “Timothy, Mr. Hardiman loves me and wants to marry me. I

told him yes.”

And then, “When he and I know more about where we will be and get settled, you

can come then . . . but, well . . . maybe here with Grandpa and Grandma is . . . well, um . . .

is a better place . . . um . . . right now.” She grounded out every word through red metal

lips, rising from her chair to face the kitchen window, back to me. Not even a look.

March had brought longer days. The sun’s light through the kitchen window’s

wavy glass softened the room, including what my mother had said, her words dangling

out there, up in the air. I rushed to fill in the blanks of what she had said before her

words were final. Thoughts raced in my head before I blurted out my next words.

“Will I see Grandpa and Grandma? After we move from Starr, I will want to see

Grandpa and Grandma.”

Still facing the window, my mother spread her arms out to each side and set them

flat palmed on the counter tops. The belt around her slim waist seemed to loosen as if

she were sucking her guts up high inside her. I felt fear in my stomach like the dread that

came right before the first smack of my mother’s hand when I got spanked. When she

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turned to me, would I see the look? To endure, I watched past Mother through the

window as Grandma pulled winter onions with two-handed tugs.

Addie-Mom turned blank faced. Another long moment and then, “Yes, you will. I

promise that. I know you will miss Grandma and Grandpa, but we are moving on and

we’ll be together.” Mom’s words were soft and crisp, whatever notions there had been

were now put to rest. Grandma bustled into the room with her big basket of white

onions, the slam of the back porch screen door combined with the smell of cut onions

sealing the end of this talk. On her birthday, Addie-Mom had gifted me.

A few days later, Mother and Mr. Hardiman told us at Sunday dinner that they had

set their wedding date. They would be married in Jordan River Church, a short walk

across the highway from Mabe’s Amoco and the house where we lived. I heard my mom

ask Grandpa to clean his black fingernails for the big day.

The big day came and it was fun, especially the big cake that we ate at long

wooden tables out back of the church where white and silver streamers decorated the

trees. Mother and Mr. Hardiman – Daddy Bob? – left for a trip driving a car with cans that

had been tied to the back bumper by Uncle Til and Cicero. It was summer. I was out of

school, working at Grandpa’s station, unpacking boxes, and pumping gas.

The ‘round the can crowd gathered on the grassy side lot most afternoons if there

was no rain. Being almost nine now, I was old enough to sit in on the talk, but not old

enough to have license to say much unless asked. I felt like a grown up sitting there.

Uncle Til would come sit by me, usually tossing a cigarette toward his chin that would

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somehow get caught on his lower lip, lighting it with a flash of a flame from his flip top

silver lighter.

“What do ya hear from your mama, Timmy,” Cousin Myrna called out across the

tables one afternoon.

“They’re up north visiting Mr. Robert’s Yankee folks,” I half turned and said over

my shoulder. I could smell the chicken Grandma was frying for supper.Uncle Til turned

full around and put his hand on my back. “Myrna, do your fishing in the river,” Uncle Til

hissed. “They’ll be back soon.”

I had not been waiting for Addie-Mom and Mr. Hardiman to come back from their

wedding trip. Until now. Now, I for sure was. I waited and I watched and I listened, but I

never asked about anything. Great Aunt Zettie came to visit from Seagrove and stared at

me for most of her week-long stay. Grandpa let me have all of the grape Nehi drink that I

wanted. The days were getting shorter, but seemed to me to stretch longer as the waiting

turned the freedom of my summer into an open pit of empty time. There was no talk of

what was happening to me or with me. It was just waiting that dug so deep into me that

crying felt useless.

I remembered her words to me about learning life fast.

Grandpa was calling for me to come out front of the station. I looked up from the

box of 10W30 motor oil I was unpacking. Uncle Til came to the door of the stock room

where I was working. “They want you out front, son.” I followed him to the service stall

where Uncle Til worked, cutting through it toward the station’s front. In the distance, I

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saw Uncle Cicero sitting in a chair leaning up against his “hooch” hut, which was,

strangely, closed for business. By the gas pumps stood Grandpa, a man, and the pastor.

I slowed my walk just as Uncle Til lay his hand on my back, palms between my

shoulder blades. “Be careful out there, Tim,” he whispered. “Trust your own self with

your own thinking.” And then, “I believe Addie loves you.”

I walked out into the glaring mid-afternoon sun with my hands in my pockets.

“Hey, Grandpa.”

“Tim, pastor has brought someone to meet us this afternoon.” I guessed it was the

man standing between Grandpa and the pastor.

“Tim, this is Flannery Redd, your daddy. Timothy Redd, please meet Flannery

Redd.”

Flannery stuck out his hand to be shaken. I pulled my hand from my pocket and

shook, glancing over my shoulder to Uncle Til watching from the service bay.

“I was thinking that this is a good time for us to get to know each other,” he went

on. “I hear you like the races down in Rockingham. Maybe we could go one night.”

“Sounds fun, Tim,” Grandpa chipped in. I stood, studying their faces. I felt like they

were expecting me to say something.

“You know, the boy looks just like Addie,” Flannery observed, breaking the silence.

“Just like Addie.”

“Yes, I do. Lots of people tell me that. They say that I’ll never be able to deny who

my mother is.” I offered a thin-lipped smile. Flannery’s face hardened and he nodded

slowly with lips set.

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“After a big thunderstorm in August, I went down to Redd River with my friends to

play with the snakes that got caught in pools by the river after the downpours. That’s

where my cousin, Carlton, broke the news in a question.

“Timmy, you want to come live with me?”

“Naaah, I live with my Grandma and Grandpa and soon my mom and new daddy

will take me to our new place.”

“They’re gone, Tim. If they were coming back, you would know by now.”

“I know. I’m grown enough to know.” Grown enough to know. To know what?

Grown enough to know what Addie-Mom had promised. Grown enough to know what

folks meant when they said she wasn’t quite right, you know what I mean?

Carlton and I waded into the river’s pool and I found a rock to stand on, feeling

nothing but the swimming snakes as they bumped against my legs. Nine years old and I

needed to know which of all the voices was true.

___________________

From my apartment. I often walk up to rue de Temple, turn left, and continue on,

crossing Pont Louis Phillippe, approaching the great cathedral from its back. The

sprawling buttresses of La Cathedral de Notre Dame de Paris, projecting strength and

grace, rise to my left. The Cathedral’s front square is where crowds queue up in

meandering lines.

Today, I find my place at the line’s end and begin the process of moving toward the

cathedral’s entry, adorned many centuries ago with gargoyles and snakes and saints. The

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line is a blessing, giving me time to slowly walk and think about the Cathedral ahead,

what is behind, and why I am here today.

Entering past the great wooden doors, I move carefully toward a seat, alone

among the throng, my back aching, feeling my years of standing in front of a classroom of

history students. Watchful of the uneven floor, I sit and rest for a time, then stand and

move to a niche where candles brightly burn. I light one and set it among the others, the

candle glowing for my Addie-Mom on the anniversary of her birth, she having left life long

ago, leaving me standing here in the City of Light, far from Starr.

I sit in this great cathedral remembering her and Starr and thinking, perhaps, I am

not quite right. You know what I mean? Even my own grown-up kids ask me that

nowadays, “Daddy-Tim, you know what I mean?” Hope, that’s what I mean. Always hope.

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