Scissors, Paper, Rock

  But that was the way of memory: the third agony. Well, he knew how to take care of that.

  He rose and dropped his underwear to the floor, pulled off his undershirt. He strode naked to the closet, where from behind a pile of shoes and dirty underwear (his underwear—since the accident Catherine had been washing hers) he retrieved the hat. He tried it on—it was, of course, too small. He jammed it into place—that would ruin its form for good, tight little well-made cloche that it was, but he had no intention of returning it. He’d have it buried in the garbage before dawn.

  He poured himself a stiff shot, the solitary drink that he’d known he would have from the moment of his first promise not to have it, when Michael lay in a coma in the hospital and no one had known how this would turn out.

  Except that he’d always known how it would turn out. Michael dead, Michael crippled for life: God, the gods, fate could never have been so cruel to someone—himself—who meant so well, whose intentions had always been of the best. Leaning against the sink, the stainless steel cold against his buttocks, the tight-fitting cloche crowding his thoughts, Joe Ray wanted to be sure of this; though he knew only one way to achieve certain sureness. He raised the glass to his lips and drank.

  Scissors, Paper, Rock

  [1988]

  For the first time in Rose Ella’s memory, Raphael came home from San Francisco without a friend. Surely that should have told her something, but over the years she’d been careful not to ask questions of Raphael or his California friends and everyone, including Raphael, seemed to like it that way.

  And on top of this there’d been the party. Since the time of Tom Hardin’s great-grandfather, people had come from all over the south end of Jessup County for the Hardin parties. They brought themselves, and their families, and a bottle, and instruments—banjos, fiddles, guitars—that hadn’t seen paying work since the ragtag bands that in the 1920s played the Kentucky dance hall circuit. Rose Ella and Tom Hardin had quarreled more than once over the expense of these parties, Rose Ella pointing out that it was she, after all, who would be left with seven children and a rented house, if an accident at the distillery should lay Tom Hardin up, or out.

  Party, party. Tom Hardin spent their money anyway, and no accident ever happened. Instead he lived to suffer the indignity of layoff—first the country stopped drinking whiskey, then the company shut down the distillery no more than a few months before he was to retire. Then to add injury to insult the diseases of old age—cancer in the gut, from which he’d recently been salvaged by the surgeon’s knife.

  But no sooner was he home from the hospital than he sent out the word—party, party; if people were to stop drinking whiskey it wouldn’t be on his account. Of course it was left to Rose Ella to pull it off. And so even with Raphael back from San Francisco alone, even with that blackness hovering over his head, she asked no questions, she just kept putting the party together, making it happen, talking talk.

  “You start with all the sons and daughters, and their wives and husbands and children and Andrew, can’t forget Bette C.’s Andrew.” Rose Ella licked her finger and numbered guests in the air. “Then there’s old Tice Flaherty, his great-nephew Dwight’s driving him over, hard to say whether Tice is more interested in playing his banjo or flirting with Miss Camilla but he has arthritis so bad I’ll be surprised to see him play a note, old Mr. Flaherty, that is, not Dwight. Dwight got arrested for growing pot last summer, the government looked at every electric bill in the county and that’s how they caught him, can you imagine, he had a whole basement full and the lights running twenty-four hours a day and his father head of the Knights of Columbus. They said it was practically a jungle, except for one tiny corner he kept clear for his mother’s ironing board. She told the bridge club she thought they were tomatoes. Tomatoes! And there’s the Handleys, I never thought I’d see the day when Tom Hardin would eat at the same table as a Handley but I feel sorry for them out there on that poor little farm and Frances just drying up like a leaf, and her just as cute as she can be and with a darling personality. And Nick in practically the same boat, you’d think it runs in the family except that their mother was such a popular girl, and artistic, too, Nick, that is, not Frances. And of course you’ve got to count your monks twice over, each of ’em eating twice as much as a normal human, not to mention the drinks. And then Miss Camilla will wander over from next door, if only to criticize our grammar—it’s a good thing we all don’t talk like she does, else she’d have to stay home. I’ll set a table for the hospital staff—Tom Hardin had to invite all the doctors, and he’s got to pinch the nurses’ behinds once more for luck. The Ellises have all moved to Florida, she had a sister down there, you remember her, long-necked girl with the teeth that stuck out, she was in your class. Or was that Bette C.’s? The Pattersons are off in their RV to Michigan—heat, they say, drove ’em north, like they’d never lived every summer of their lives watching it get hot around here. I say they spent so much money on the damned thing they got to get on the road to show it off. And how did they come across twenty-five thousand in cash? It don’t pay to ask questions, is what I say, but what do you talk about when the answers are growing in the creekbed you’ve set traps in for forty years? The weather I guess. The McCrearys are all in the graveyard, and the Muhlenbergs, you remember Ittybit Muhlenberg, she was the Altar Society treasurer that year you broke the stained glass? They’ve all moved to Louisville except for the ones that are down there keeping company with the McCrearys. That leaves Tom Hardin and me, but somebody’s got to sing the funerals. Su’vivors,” she said gaily, “we’re just su’vivors.”

  “You could say that about us all,” Raphael said.

  The silence that followed grew into something she could touch, the size and shape of themselves. Raphael said nothing more, and as for the questions that crowded Rose Ella’s tongue, each looked like a door closed on things she knew but didn’t want to know and in any case couldn’t bring herself to speak the words she’d have to say to learn more. All this with Tom Hardin not long back from the hospital and none too well himself, and a mob of people about to show up on her doorstep hungry and thirsty and expecting a good time. In the end Rose Ella said nothing but took up her kitchen hatchet and led Raphael outside to the carriage rock.

  Already the Hardins were scattered about the yard, clustered under the trees like barnyard animals in a heat wave. For the first time in years Rose Ella had strong-armed all of her surviving children into the same place at the same time, along with in-laws, out-laws, grandchildren. The younger men were inside watching baseball; the older men were gathered at the bar set up under the old dogwood, from whose outstretched limb hung the flag from Clark’s coffin—Rose Ella brought it out on special occasions. The younger women watched the next generation and compared brood notes on the patio; the older women were inside fixing supper. Old Tice Flaherty was climbing from Dwight’s van, customized metallic blue with golden flames roaring down the sides—Dwight had pulled right onto the grass, so as to unload his stereo. At the last minute Dennis appeared—Elizabeth’s high school boyfriend. He’d been down from Louisville, he explained, visiting family, had seen the cars in the Hardin driveway, and thought he’d stop in. Rose Ella had her doubts, but sacred manners won out—she had Joe Ray fix him a drink. In the outer reaches of the long, sloping yard the older grandchildren flew about like chickadees, alighting first on the horseshoe pit, then fluttering to the swing set; flying over the grass, so dry it crackled underfoot; in and out of the apple orchard, until settling finally to red rover, where for referee they installed Michael, Joe Ray’s eighteen-year-old, in an Adirondack chair on the sidelines.

  While his great-aunt Galina was still alive and holding forth in this very house, Tom Hardin had hauled and cursed the old carriage rock to the edge of the barbecue pit. Rose Ella slapped the fish down on it now: a fifteen-pound, steel-blue channel cat, iridescent against the bone-white limestone. “Global warming,” she muttered. She turned to Raphael. “Was a time w
hen your father and me’d set a dozen trot lines, we’d catch two dozen fish. Yesterday I caught exactly one, but at least he’s a prize. Speaking of su’vivors. Look at the meanness in him.” The fish glared up at her. There was a resemblance, though Rose Ella would never have admitted it; the same broad chinless grin, the same boxy figure tapering to next to nothing—ankles, in her case, which she took care to show off; she always bought her slacks a little short. Since the change of life she could even sport whiskers, but fortunately for her there was Nair.

  She stood aside and waited for Raphael to do what men do—take this hunk of fishy meat by its tail and slam its life against the rock. Raphael studied the hot blue sky. “Doesn’t look like much chance for rain today, either.”

  The fish lay quiet, gills gasping. “City boy,” Rose Ella said. She whetted the hatchet against the rock’s edge, clutched it in clenched fists, raised it above her head, plunged it into the fish’s flat skull. Then she handed the hatchet, the fish flopping and twisting on its blade, to her son, along with an apron. “Better for the fish to slam it against the rock—at least that’s what your father says. But I could just never bring myself to do that.” She went inside to fetch a bucket of brine, leaving Raphael holding the hatchet.

  Raphael spread some newspapers, laid the catfish across the headlines. He’d hesitated not from squeamishness. As a child he’d killed his share of animals, hunting and fishing with Tom Hardin—those days when his father taught him to wield a weapon or gut a deer were among the few times they’d spoken without anger.

  Now Raphael was in a place where life and death seemed more fragile. Had the living fish been left to him, he would have flung it back into the shrunken river, a demonstration that it was humanly possible to thwart fate. But he was here, and the run-through fish was here, and there was only one possible end to this particular chain of events. Raphael worked the blade free from the fish’s skull, then took up a knife and slit its gut.

  From Tom Hardin he’d learned to kill and gut fish and deer; from Rose Ella he’d learned to clean and cook them. She taught him that, then she got him off to California. “You take that money and vamoose,” she’d said to Raphael when he won a scholarship to college, and when he announced he was going to California she raised ringed fingers and danced a little jig. “On the condition I get to come to visit,” she’d said. “He’ll come back a damned hippie,” was what Tom Hardin had said, but Rose Ella silenced him with a look. “It’s no place for this one around here,” she’d said, and even Tom Hardin gave ground before her determination.

  Each passing year Raphael grew more distant from these parties, as he grew away from this place. He wore his pants pleated and pegged now, he had his hair styled, flat up the sides and long on top, except where it was thinning at the crown; he wore spectacles (when he wasn’t wearing contacts) with round, imitation tortoise shell frames with high-tech lenses. In this vanity he was closer to his nephews, with their perms and gold chains, than to his older brothers. “City boy,” Rose Ella had called him. Among these country men he was the city boy, in city clothes and city ways, as out of place as the catfish on the carriage rock; as out of place as he himself had once been on city streets.

  But if not this place then what place? Here in the South places laid claim to people, not the other way around, but California laid claim to no one—it was too vast and grand, too young and full of itself for that. People came and squatted on its living, trembling earth, which in a given year might or might not tolerate their presence. How did a man go about establishing himself in the heart of a place? Raphael wondered. By loving it over a long time, he guessed. And how much time, how many generations would that take, in that cheerfully rootless place? More time than was likely to be left to an HIV-positive man, of that much he could be sure.

  This was his place in the world: a shell of thought and emotion wrapped around a core of anger and grief so bitter that he saw these as his choices: Dwell in anger, or forgive and forget.

  He admired those men and women who, driven by righteous anger, shouted accusations from balconies, chained themselves to bureaucrats’ doors, seized the Golden Gate Bridge and transformed it into a media event. Insofar as things were better for him than for his friends who had gone before, it was due to these people’s courage and boldness, their love for each other and for him, a man whom they’d never met. He understood all this but he remained on the sidelines. He gave money, volunteered, marched—he was always marching; but when the bullhorns and handcuffs came out he was always to be found safe on the margins. The deaths he’d witnessed drove him less to action than to inaction—a resignation just shy of despair.

  Accept. Only accept. Raphael found himself ambushed by this mantra as he stood on busy street corners, or in the middle of crowded parties, or (worst of all) alone in his bed, awakened by its insistence at some odd hour in the middle of the night. It welled up from some place deep within: Only accept this fate, but he could not accept, and with each refusal to accept he grew more bitter, his heart hardened to a callus.

  He was washing blood from chunks of catfish meat when the monks pulled up in the monastery truck, whooping and chattering like schoolboys set free. Years before, hunting on monastery land, Tom Hardin struck up friendships with the brothers he found laboring or praying in the fields. Tom Hardin preferred the company of men; he’d have been a monk himself, he said this often, except that he was allergic to religion.

  In the years since, the Hardins had seen abbots lax and strict come and go, but always some of the monks managed to slip out of the enclosure for an occasional evening with the Hardins. Eusebius, Hippolytus, Anselm, Cyril, Samuel—for Raphael their names opened back into time, bringing to life here in K mart Kentucky the memory of medieval scholars and martyrs, the continuity of all that, how very close it was in the scope of things to their own time: twelve aged men and women, linking hands, might join his own hand to that of Saint Anselm; twelve more pairs of hands would join him to Jesus.

  They were Yankees, these monks, veterans of one or another war or children given gratefully to the Church by families from the Catholic immigrant ghettos of big Northern cities (one less mouth to feed; spiritual collateral in the event of a God). As a child Raphael had heard a foreign country in their flat nasal vowels—a place with elevators, baseball, blizzards. They’d brought a glimpse of a world almost as fantastic as California, with Samuel, born and raised in the heart of Harlem, the most exotic of them all.

  On this hottest of summer evenings they wore their formal dress—“party clothes,” Samuel called them; white woolen albs over brown woolen surplices, belted at the waist with plain leather bands. They gathered around Tom Hardin, standing at the bar.

  Eusebius clapped Tom Hardin’s shoulder, then drew his hand back. “Maybe I shouldn’t be so rough. How’s it going? How are you doing?”

  “Just fine,” Rose Ella said. “The doctor is almost certain he cleared out every bit of trouble, and what’s left he’ll catch with chemo.”

  “I’m not going to let him do chemo,” Tom Hardin growled.

  “Now isn’t he just a pill?” Rose Ella took Eusebius by the elbow. “Go on, you have Tom Hardin fix you all a drink while I get some lard for the skillet.” At her cue the monks lined up. Tom Hardin poured stiff whiskeys, then excused himself to the kitchen. A few minutes later he emerged with a glass of water, and Raphael understood that there would be no more drinking for Tom Hardin, not in this life.

  Rose Ella returned with a tub of lard. She greased the skillet, then called Raphael to the grill. She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Rafe, you keep a eye on Joe Ray. You don’t need to tell him I said so but you know how he gets after a few highballs. I don’t want you pulling him out of the fire again.”

  In his younger days Raphael would have insisted on facts—how could he have pulled Joe Ray out of the fire? He was living in San Francisco by then. But Rose Ella lost no sleep over facts. “If you weren’t there you ought to have been,” was what she�
��d say. As for Joe Ray, he still carried scars scattered like coals up his neck.

  Brother Eusebius: tall, thin, serious; he had been an orphan. He retrieved his drink from the bar and stood at Raphael’s side, watching as he dredged the fish in flour, then gently lowered each slab into hot lard. “And which is this? And which is that? And how do you know?” he asked.

  Raphael pointed with a fork. “Crappie. Bluegill, from the freezer, with the little spots on their gills. Catfish. Fresh from the river.”

  There was a screech, then a deafening howl, then a guitar riff echoed through the yard—Dwight Flaherty had the stereo up and running. “Turn that thing down!” Elizabeth called. She was their other Californian—she and Andrew, her boyfriend, had flown in from Los Angeles the day before. She wore a bright flowered blouse that Rose Ella would have called tacky on anybody else’s child.

  “I thought you Californians would be used to that kind of noise,” Joe Ray said. “They have to play it loud, you know that. What they lose in quality, they make up for in volume.”

  One of the grandsons groaned. “Another lecture from the middle-aged set.” He made quavery, trembling motions with his hands. “You stick with selling computers, Uncle Joe. Let the musicians handle the music.”

  “There’s not one of ’em could play next to the greats,” Joe Ray said. “Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Roy Orbison. Even Elvis, for God’s sake. These guys you listen to now—they’re three generations removed from the real thing. It’s nothing they can help, but there it is.”