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LEIGH ALLISON WILSON 625 FROM THE BOTTOM Up (1983) from The Raising Of the eight matrons perched like pigeons around two identical card tables, Mrs. Bertram Eastman was the lone childless woman. Her husband, in whom-she was sure-the fault lay, only confounded this burden she'd borne for thirty years, fixing a funny look on his face every time the subject came up and saying, in a voice soft as solemnity itself, "Spare the child and spare the rod, Mrs. Eastman." But he was like that, a nitwit, and half the time she never knew what he was talking about. Still, being a woman of industry, Mrs. Eastman took up the slack of impotence by becoming an expert on children and motherhood. She was renowned in the gin rummy set, in the Daughters of the Confederacy set, and perhaps in the whole area of East Tennessee, renowned and widely quoted for her running commentary on child-rearing. ''A child is like a new boot," she'd say and pause with the dramatic flair of a born talker. "You take that boot and wear it and at first it blisters your foot, pains you all over, but the time comes it fits like a glove and you got a dutiful child on your hands." What she had missed in experience, Mrs. Eastman overcame with pithy insight; what she lacked as human collateral in a world of procreation, Mrs. Eastman guaranteed with sheer volume. She was a specialist in armchair mothering. A steady hum ofa general nature had settled over the women playing at both tables, punctuated by an occasional snap ofa card, but like a foghorn in the midst ofa desert the voice ofMrs. Eastman rose and fell in every ear. She was explaining, for the third time since seven 0'dock, the circumstances that led to Little Darryl, the melungeon orphan boy, who would come to live at her house the very next morning. A child! In her own home! She couldn't get over it. Her brain worked at the idea with a violence akin to despair turning upside-down and her hair, from some internal cue, dropped onto her forehead a large, stiff curl that flopped from side to side as if to let off steam. Mrs. Eastman, although not fat, was a formidable personage, stout and bigboned and not unlike the bouncer in a hard-bitten country bar. Mr. Eastman was the tiniest man in Hawklen County. Just yesterday he had come home and told her, out of the blue, that he was bringing Little Darryl out from Eastern State and into their home-one two three and like a bolt ofelectricity she was a mother. She couldn't get over it. Little Darryl was thirteen years old and of "origin unknown," a poor abandoned charity case dumped from orphanage to orphanage since the day 626 LISTEN HERE his faceless mother-unfit and unwed, Mrs. Eastman knew for a certaintydropped him offin the middle ofthe canned-goods section ofthe Surgoinsville A&P. He was discovered beside the creamed corn, eating an unhealthy peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The "origin unknown" part delighted Mrs. Eastman: Little Darryl would be her child, sprung as mysteriously and as certainly into her care as a baby of her own making. 0, she would make a lawyer out ofhim, distill the taint ofhis blood like meltwater. She would recreate the boy in her own image and watch him tower among men in her old age. "Smart as a whip, the social worker told Mr. Eastman," Mrs. Eastman said in a loud, confidential voice. At her table were old Mrs. Cowan, the Methodist preacher's wife; Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the Jenkins Hardware Jenkinses; and Mrs. Talley, wife of Hubert Talley, the local butcher. Mrs. Eastman had given each one advice, off and on, for thirty years, from Mrs. Talley's red-headed boy who was thirty years old and no good, right down to Mrs. Jenkins' six-year-old who still sucked her thumb and was a "mistake." "You said that ten minutes ago, Eloise," Mrs. Jenkins told Mrs. Eastman, "and you said he was a genius before that." Mrs. Jenkins was playing North to Mrs. Eastman's South. "You said he was a genius that wasn't understood and you ain't even met him yet." "Made him a lawyer already, too," said Mrs. Talley, looking calmly over Mrs. Jenkins' shoulder, her lips screwed up in concentration. "Ida Mae Talley!" cried...

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