‘Your daddy’s too busy hunting gold up in the North and your momma’s too busy shining his boots to think of you, girl. Nana laughed, high-pitched and trilling like a shrike bird.
‘Daddy gonna show you the back a’ his hand for beating me.’ ‘They coming back to get me,’ I said, whining voice full a’ tears. She clenched up all her teeth so hard I wondered brief if they was going to crack and fly out her head. ‘Your momma,’ Nana said, ‘my fool of a daughter, running off with that man.’ She looked at me like I was Momma for a minute, kindness in her eye, then must a’ seen that Daddy half a’ me and got mad again. All them years, Nana must a’ been hundreds, all them wrinkles creasing up her face, that sigh is what them years sound like, wheezing, long, and dog-tired. Seen other old folk in Ridgeway sigh like that, like they weren’t just sick a’ the person giving them ire but sick a’ the world what was full a’ them. That’d show her, I figured, show her good. ‘My mouth ain’t nothin’, you ain’t my momma, you can’t tell me nothin’.’ I was wailing and trying my damnedest to push over the eating table, to send all them plates and three types a’ fork scattering all over.
Had me welts the shape a’ that stick fresh on my back. ‘That mouth of yours is black as the goddamn devil’s,’ she shouted in that tone what meant I was in for a beating. I told her to go spit seeds and started howling.
Don’t remember Nana ever calling me Elka. I think I had a different name back then. ‘My house, girl,’ she said, ‘you just a guest here till your parents come back. I told her pretty is for fools and I didn’t want no pine smelling up my house. Said it made ’em burn with a pretty smell. She wanted me to go collect pine resin for the lamps. Seven years old I was and screaming up something fierce at my nana. When the thunderhead came to Ridgeway, my clapboard town, I had nowhere to hide. When the thunderhead comes, drumming through the sky, you take cover, you lock your doors and you find a place to pray because if it finds you, there ain’t no going back. Click ‘read more’ or scroll down to continue to the second chapter. This extract carries on from chapter 1, which you can read on Facebook. Get a sneak peak of The Wolf Road, the debut novel from Beth Lewis, out June 30th in hardback and eBook.
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