THE POTATO ROOM
Patsy Covington

The porch is screened. On one end of it is a room where you store potatoes in the winter. The sickly sweet smell of overripe potatoes, hundreds and hundreds of them piled on one side of the little room, with no windows to let the smell out, makes you try to hold your breath while you're in there in the dark, waiting. You remember the time when your mother came looking and found you in the far corner of the potato room, a rattlesnake between you and the door. She killed it with a hoe. Every time she hit the snake with the hoe its rattles shook and its body writhed. She hit it and hit it and hit it while silent screams roared through your ears. Once again your head is filled with silent screams. Your mother is inside the house now. A man put a gun to her head and made her unzip his pants. The man threw his head backwards and his mouth full of rotten teeth grinned at the ceiling like the scary monster you saw once on a big poster. All black teeth and gums with white sores. She'd been ironing. When he pushed her down to her knees and shoved her face against his pants you saw her hand reach back toward the ironing board. While you hid, whimpering with your teeth biting deeply into your knuckles, and watched from behind the recliner, you saw her hand touch the bottom of the hot iron and recoil away from it. You wanted to tell her to pull it down by the cord. She tried again and got her fingers around the iron's handle. His private parts were in her mouth. His hands in her hair shoved her face against him hard. She swung the hot iron upward toward his face. It hit him under the chin. He yelled and jumped away and the gun was thrown from his hand. It landed near you, but not near enough to reach it without him seeing you. She hit him with the iron on the part that had been in her mouth. He screamed and fell to the floor. Then he got the iron and he beat your mother with it and beat her and beat her until she stopped screaming and reaching toward you and the gun with pleading eyes. Until she lay down on the floor and everything stopped. And you ran out the back door and you knew he probably saw you and you went inside the potato room and it didn't have a lock inside. You went to a corner away from the potatoes, away from where the rattlesnake had been. You waited and you heard the back door slam. You heard him moaning. You heard the screen door slam. You stayed there in the dark. Even when they came to get you, you crawled deeper into the corner of the room where the darkness wouldn't let you see things.

© Patsy Covington 2005

Patsy Covington was born just west of Natchez, Mississippi, which makes her a bona fide redneck. She spent most of her first thirty years in and around New Orleans. Her later years have been spent in the shadow of wheat silos in Kansas. If you don't like her midwestern twang she will try to recapture her southern drawl just for you.

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