The Noah Confessions by Barbara Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

all accounts. The money probably came from bootlegging, and he took advantage of his family’s debts during a period of drought. So he got the money but was disowned by the family. All shrouded in a mystery we don’t need to solve right now. That brings us up to the turn of the century. Grandpa Brodie was in possession of a small farm and was looking to have his own family. He was inventive, wealthy, and a bit of a rapscallion.
    Now the rumors really run wild. Some say he married a distant relative, the beautiful olive-skinned Nancy Jukes, heir to a distant North Carolina fortune. Other stories say that he met Nancy in a bar in North Carolina, where she was earning a living as a lounge singer. Nobody really knows anything except that my grandmother, Granny Nancy, was exotically lovely, darker than any self-respecting white girl should be. A no-nonsense girl who was happy to marry “up,” which is Southern for improving her circumstances. She took easily to being a wealthy farmer’s wife.
    They quickly had three children—my mother, Fern, first. She was black-haired and black-eyed, gorgeous and petulant and wild. My aunt Rose second—blond and fair-skinned and fair-natured, no trouble at all. And then my uncle Joseph, dark like my mother and nothing else to recommend him except that he was a boy.
    Grandpa Will didn’t care for the girls. He only wanted a boy, and as soon as he got one he forgot all about the sisters. Mama Nancy did her best with the wild girl and the shy one, but as soon as they were free to marry she let them. Fern got married first, before she even left high school, to the handsomest boy in town, named Gerard Wyatt.
    Fern became my mother. So that’s what we’ll call her from this point on.
    Mama always said she married right away to get out of her house. I don’t know what that means; I don’t ask her. She was happy in her marriage at first. Gerard made a lot of money as a tobacco salesman, and it wasn’t long before they had a son, my much older brother, Gregory. Their style of high living calmed right down after that. Whereas they used to run around the Southeast, taking vacations and going to parties, Mama was forced to stay at home with Gregory. Her husband kept running around.
    Not long after one of his “business” trips, Mama received a pair of shoes in the mail. A note accompanying the shoes said, “Mrs. Wyatt, you left these in the hotel room during your last stay.”
    â€œThey weren’t even my size,” Mama told me when she related the story. My sister and I used to laugh very hard at the tale and Mama laughed too, just to keep us company. But I could see she didn’t find it funny.
    Mama moved out of her married home and back in with her parents. Only, they didn’t want her. My grandfather had spent his whole life trying to get the girls out of the house—damned if he was going to take the difficult one back in. My grandmother always sided with him. She said, “No way, Miss Sister, you made your bed, you’ve got to lie in it.”
    It was 1952. Mama was all alone in the world with a little boy, barely four years old. She didn’t know how to cope. Grandma suggested that she move to Danville to find a job. They would look after Gregory until she situated herself. When she found herself a job and a husband, she could have her son back. My mother agreed. There was nothing else she could do.
    â€œLooking back, I should have seen how it was going to go,” Mama used to say to me. “But I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have anybody to teach me.”
    She got all dreamy when she said things like that, as if she had somehow missed her own life.
    She doesn’t talk about it much anymore. This was when I was little. These days she just sits and smokes and drinks iced tea and writes letters to Sandra in college. When she sees me it’s like she’s a little confused as to why