“When’s the last time you listened to a live body play a guitar?” Andrew asked.
“They’re not playing guitars anymore, they’re playing computers,” Joe Ray said.
“Well, thank the Lord they’re buying computers,” Rose Ella said. “It’s good for your business.”
A battered farm truck pulled up—Nick Handley, with his sister Frances. Tom Hardin pointed with his cane. “Are we scraping the barrel for guests or are they just showing up because there’s a free meal to be had?”
“Oh, hush,” Rose Ella said. “I just thought it’d be nice to have somebody Rafe’s age among the Geritol set.”
“Bottom of the barrel,” Tom Hardin said.
Rose Ella made an extravagant show of greeting the new guests. She threw her hands about in wide gestures that took in the family, the guests, the monks—the whole heat-seared yard.
Nick Handley was in his thirties, with a farmer’s wiry muscles and red raw skin, his brown hair shot through with sun-streaks. He and Raphael had graduated together, then had hardly seen each other since Raphael went away to California. Now, watching Nick cross the yard, Raphael was struck by a newer, deeper sense of recognition. Nick carried himself with the distance and gracelessness of a man who could not allow himself to be touched, who from his earliest self-knowledge had placed himself beyond touching. He had been hardened by sun and dirt and work, yes, but more than that by years of turning in on himself. He was high-strung like a banjo drone, taut and fine-tuned to the point of breaking, and singing with desire so urgent it announced itself, singing out of its own accord in his awkward handshake, in the trembling of his fingers as he lit a cigarette, in the nervous flexing of his shoulders as he stood at Raphael’s side, and all the while Nick himself clearly so certain of what he needed to believe: that nobody saw his wanting, not his sister, not his neighbors, not the townspeople whose eyes he avoided on the street. As for them, they were relieved to aid and abet.
Raphael knew this apartness. He tucked in his shirt, straightened his bloodstained pants, passed a hand over his thinning hair, raised his hand to touch Nick’s shoulder. “You’re looking sleek. Working the farm must do you good.”
“Frances told me you were in town. Welcome home,” Nick said, but he drew back from Raphael’s touch. His hands roamed like a raccoon’s—searching out small objects, picking them up, turning them over, testing their edges. He seized a platter from the carriage rock. As Raphael lifted chunks of fish from the sputtering lard, Nick arranged them on serving dishes.
Now they were ten around the fire: Raphael and Nick, Joe Ray and his wife Catherine, Eusebius and Nick’s sister Frances, Elizabeth and her boyfriends past and present—Dennis and Andrew; and nearby Rose Ella, keeping peace among the younger children.
Raphael speared some frying bluegills and handed them to Nick. “So how are things on the farm?”
“Could be worse, but I’d need a lawyer to tell me how.”
“Mother tells me you’re about the only one around here who hasn’t gone into pot.”
“We wouldn’t touch the stuff,” Frances said.
“We find it all the time,” Eusebius said. “Practically inside the enclosure. They figure the police won’t come onto monastery land.”
“They’ll quit growing it when the government builds that dam,” Joe Ray said. “That’s half the reason they’re putting it in—flood out the pot growers.”
“We’ll have lakefront property,” Nick said. “I’ll tear down the tobacco barn and build a marina.”
“You and what bank.” Frances pulled a cigarette from a pack and took a lighter from her purse, but Eusebius had a match already struck. Frances pulled back her hair and bent to the flame. “You see that, Nick? Gentlemen live!”
“You don’t want a lake,” Elizabeth said. “People from Louisville out every weekend. Breaking into your houses, leaving their trash. Paying cash three times what you’d think of borrowing, to buy an overgrown piece of knobs. You won’t be able to afford your own land.”
“I live in Louisville and you can put me down for a lot at whatever price you name,” Joe Ray said. “I’d quit computers in a heartbeat. I’d have a little air-conditioned store to keep open on the weekends and fish in between.”
“No fish in a Corps of Engineers reservoir,” Raphael said.
“You think we can’t stock ’em?” Joe Ray asked. “You have been in California too long.”
“Damn right,” Elizabeth snapped. “We’ve seen the future and it’s Los Angeles.”
“I liked Los Angeles,” Rose Ella said, looking up from the children. “So much to do. I’d love to go back. That’s a hint.”
Catherine took Joe Ray’s hand. “We need a man in the kitchen, to get the heavy dishes down.”
“Here’s Miss Camilla, just in time for her spot of whiskey,” Joe Ray cried, pulling his hand free. He seated her in the folding chair that Tice Elaherty had pulled out. Tice parked himself in a neighboring chair. He threw his hands in the air and slapped her knee. Finally his hand rested itself on her thigh, where it sat like some forlorn object, neither refused nor welcomed.
Next the hospital staff arrived, dressed at Tom Hardin’s request in their hospital whites—Tom Hardin thought the nurses were sexy in their uniforms. They flocked around the bar. One of the nurses struck up a conversation with Dennis, who spent most of his day on his feet selling cars and who had problems with his back. He was swearing by a treatment he’d first seen described in a holistic newsletter—each day he hung upside down, his feet clamped in antigravity boots, while he listened to alpha (or was it beta?) waves broadcast through a Walkman attached to his belt.
Catherine circled the yard calling in the grandchildren. It was time to eat.
The children roared across the patio, lining up to wash their hands at the hose. Catherine was all over the yard and the house, bringing out plates, tearing off paper towels for extra napkins, picking up glasses before they might leave rings on the big Adirondack chairs that Samuel and Tom Hardin had turned out from Tom Hardin’s woodshop. Catherine ushered Raphael into the kitchen, where she put him to work rooting condiments from the refrigerator.
Joe Ray sailed in, to throw his arm around his wife. “My Queen of Clean,” he crooned. Pulling plastic forks and knives from the cupboard, Catherine eyed him coldly. “Just warming up to sing,” he said.
“Try not to get too warm. Just this once.” She lifted the drink from his hand and replaced it with a tray of banana croquettes. “Take those to the outside table. See if you can make it without tripping over the steps.”
He balanced the tray on one hand, snapped the other hand to his forehead. “Yes, sir.”
Raphael watched his brother negotiate the back stoop, past kids reaching after croquettes, over pets and toys. He didn’t spill a thing—he wasn’t that drunk, not yet. With the high-leaping steps of a racking horse he deftly avoided all obstacles and set the tray atop its three-legged stand. He turned and bowed in their direction.
The commotion shifted from the patio to the front door. The grandchildren were fighting over who would ring the dinner bell, a great iron thing that could be heard in the farthest reaches of the fields. Rose Ella struck a compromise. The bell rang out. Family and hospital staff crowded around the patio.
Rose Ella took two of her grandchildren’s hands in her own. “Give us some of that Yankee grace, Samuel.”
Samuel stood and bowed his head. The family joined hands to form a circle for his grace, then Rose Ella raised the clasped hands of Tee Junior and Michael, the youngest and oldest of Joe Ray’s three sons. She nodded at the flag hung from the dogwood limbs, unmoving in the still, late afternoon heat. “And don’t forget Clark, who lives still in our hearts.”
“And Leola Ferber.” This from Brother Samuel.
“And Gaspard,” Rose Ella said. “Though I don’t know that Gaspard died—he just disappeared, about the time they took Leola off to the Little Sisters.”
“Speech, speech!” Joe Ray cal
led—he had hooked up his video camera.
“Food first,” Rose Ella said. This brought a cheer from the grandchildren.
“What about Frances and Eusebius?” Andrew asked.
“They’ve gone for a walk,” Rose Ella said.
“To the cemetery bench,” Joe Ray said with a broad wink.
“Eusebius can do better than that,” Tom Hardin said.
“Just as cute as she can be and with a darling personality,” Rose Ella said.
“Oh, Mother, please.” Elizabeth paused in the middle of filling her plate. “We all know Frances is plain as a plank and tough as nails.”
Joe Ray snapped off the camera. “Here we have an illustration of the subtlety of California conversational technique.”
“That’s not to say I don’t like her,” Elizabeth said. “It’s just the truth, is all.”
“I think the world could use a little less truth and a little more manners,” Rose Ella said. “Bette C., do me a favor and go check on the cornbread.”
At one end of the long table were platters of fish, huge blossoms of rich white flesh. Around the platters’ edges small flat bluegill fanned out, petals around a corolla of catfish fillets encrusted with golden cornmeal. In the center were the delicate-meated fighters—large- and smallmouth bass, crappie. Stalks of leafy celery, feathered radishes, carrot sticks, and small round hush puppies ranged among the piles of fish—Nick had been at work here.
Next to the fish were bowls of dark green kale cooked since morning with a side of fatback, with cider vinegar at hand in Rose Ella’s great-grandmother’s silver-and-crystal cruets. A gilt-edged platter carried a small mountain of thin fried potatoes, encircled by a moat of Rose Ella’s green tomato ketchup. Quartered watermelons showed speckled crescents next to pyramids of homegrown tomatoes, yellow and red. Deviled eggs peered up at the sky, their scrambled yolks bloodshot with paprika. A pile of corn on the cob filled a silver platter. At the center of the table three jam cakes iced with caramel ringed a cut-glass punch bowl filled with layers of fruit cocktail, cubes of electric-green Jell-O, Cool Whip, and miniature marshmallows, topped with a sprinkling of toasted coconut and luminescent maraschino cherries. “Heavenly hash,” Rose Ella said proudly. “It’s my own invention.” She had changed into a fluorescent scarlet blouse. As she served potato salad Joe Ray shielded his eyes. “I’d better be careful around that—you’ll blind the camera.”
“Elizabeth brought it,” Rose Ella said. “I don’t ask questions, I just wear what she tells me. She says they’re all the rage in California.”
“Oh, well. California,” Joe Ray said.
The line snaked along the table to bunch up at one end, where Joe Ray set up the camera to interview every hungry person down to Tee Junior himself.
The Hardin brothers and sisters, Rose Ella, and Tom Hardin sat at a single long table, covered with floral tablecloths and real glassware—Tom Hardin refused to eat from a bare table or a paper plate. Always Rose Ella kept a place set and empty for Clark—she’d remembered hearing somewhere that Jewish people do this, and she liked the thought that in some way he was sitting down with them for hush puppies (his favorite) and fish. In-laws and grandchildren and friends and the hospital staff sat at side tables, clustered in a circle around the family. Of the grandchildren only Michael, Joe Ray’s oldest, sat with the older generation. Years after his accident and he still needed someone to help him with delicate movements—writing, or holding a fork.
Elizabeth waved at Dennis, who was wandering about alone, a loaded plate in his hand. “Take a seat,” she said. “Ex-lovebirds are allowed.”
“Not if I have any say in it,” Andrew grumbled, but Elizabeth hushed him with a kiss.
A few minutes and the evening settled into a mealtime quiet. In the silence that followed loading the plates Joe Ray started a joke. His voice rose to the punchline. Michael laughed, too early and too hard.
Tee Junior carefully rested his plateful on the table next to Samuel. Standing on tiptoe, he reached toward the monk’s head. The monk lifted the boy into his lap. “What you want, little boy?”
“To pat your head,” the boy said. “Grandfather told me I get a wish every time I pat a nigger’s head.”
Silence.
Catherine stood and swooped up her child. “Your grandfather said no such thing.”
“Let’s every one of us here take a last look at that platter of fish,” Rose Ella said. “A man can outcook a woman over an open fire—I don’t deny it—but it takes a woman to make it look pretty.”
“Nick arranged the fish,” Raphael said.
A smaller silence.
“Well, I ought to have known,” Rose Ella said. “You ought to see what he does for the Advent altars. Milkweed pods and devil’s walking stick and crown of thorns, can you imagine, and he turns them into something positively holy. I don’t know what the Altar Society’d do without him. He’s so artistic.”
Joe Ray gave Nick a sympathetic nod. “I have to admit I’ve wondered all these years, and I’m sorry to hear it now. But all of us have to work with what the Lord gives us. I’ve read where some kids can’t even talk to their teachers, they’re just in a world of their own. You don’t look like you’ve got it that bad.”
“Artistic,” Catherine said. She lifted a drink from Joe Ray’s hand. “An entirely different thing.”
“You better believe it,” Raphael said.
“He’s not artistic,” Tom Hardin said. “He’s just a damned tobacco farmer.”
“There’s an art to farming tobacco,” Nick said.
“Why don’t we just skip supper?” Joe Ray said. “Catherine can put Tee Junior straight to bed and we can start singing.” Tee Junior, searching one grownup’s face after another for clues, let loose an anguished howl.
“Just leave the boy alone,” Tom Hardin said. “Samuel don’t mind. Do you, Samuel.”
“Don’t mind a bit,” Samuel said cheerfully. “Tee Junior, you can pat my head anytime you want.”
Behind Samuel’s back, Rose Ella pointed at her open mouth with a wooden spoon. “Cornbread,” Catherine said, “and high time. Samuel, you take your pick.”
There were baskets of cornbread, hot from its cast-iron molds—heart-shaped muffins and the long pones. For years Rose Ella had kept track of the last cream-producing cow in the county and now she brought out a mound of butter crisscrossed with her trademark slashes.
Eusebius and Frances came trotting up then, a little breathless. “You all took so long loading your plates we decided we’d take a little walk,” Frances said. “The black-eyed Susans are so pretty this time of year. Mind if I sit down?” She squeezed herself into the empty place at the foot of the table, between Rose Ella and Raphael, then scooted over to make room for Eusebius.
“That’s Clark’s place,” Raphael said.
“Hmm?”
Tom Hardin stood and went to the bar, leaving his plate untouched. “Don’t move on our account,” Frances called after him. “Oh, don’t pay attention to him,” Rose Ella said. “Since the operation he just has a little trouble sitting for long spells. Isn’t that right, Tom Hardin?” Standing at the bar, Tom Hardin turned his back.
Andrew turned to Dennis. “So where’s Crystal?” he asked—Crystal was Dennis’s wife.
Rose Ella lowered her voice. “They’re working out their differences.”
“They’re considering a divorce,” Elizabeth said in a loud, cheerful voice. “Which Andrew knows perfectly well, since I told him only yesterday. Well, there’s no point dodging it. They haven’t lived together for the last three months.”
“Which is no reason for their situation to become supper table conversation,” Rose Ella said.
“We’re not considering a divorce. We’re just—working out our differences,” Dennis said. “Just because people in California live together for a lifetime without making some kind of commitment doesn’t mean that’s the way it’s got to be every place else.”
“Well
, these things happen,” Elizabeth said. “You can’t expect people to live out their lives in a monastery, hmm, Eusebius?”
Tom Hardin spoke from the bar. “You can expect people to abide by their word. Once was a time you gave your word, you stuck by it. They got married, they gave their word. There’s such a thing as being loyal, even when it don’t suit your ends.”
Dennis took on the stony face of a man forced to talk about things he’d prefer left unsaid. “I couldn’t agree more, sir. This is temporary. It’s just like Mrs. Hardin said. We have too much commitment to our family to consider anything else.”
“Well, you don’t have to be married to be part of a healthy family,” Andrew said. “Elizabeth and I have a healthy family, if it comes to that.”
“Not by my standards,” Dennis said.
“And what might those standards be?” Andrew asked.
Dennis waved at the crowd of relatives. “People that you’re tied to by blood. What’s the point of a family if you can just up and leave it anytime things get rough?”
“What’s the point of family if all it does is make you unhappy?” Andrew asked.
“Yes!” Dennis said. “I mean, no!”
Andrew smirked.
“We wouldn’t even have a family if it weren’t for Reach Out America and Supersaver fares,” Elizabeth said.
“A telephone call is great but it’s no substitute for Catherine’s chicken soup,” Joe Ray said.
Dennis tapped Andrew’s chest with his forefinger. “It’s a man’s place to be responsible. You and Raphael—you might like your friends, but you don’t have kids you’re taking care of.”
“Instead I’m taking care of friends who are dying,” Raphael snapped. “A lot of them a thousand miles from parents or brothers or sisters who could care less.”
Silence.
“There’s a time and a place for this conversation and it’s someplace else and later on,” Rose Ella said. “Right now we’re all in good health and happy to be here.”
Dusk fell. Some of the hospital staffers left for late shifts, others joined the family on the patio. The children adjourned to the television room—Joe Ray had hooked his video camera into the television set and was showing the tapes he’d shot earlier that evening—“an interactive family video installation,” Andrew called it. Tice Flaherty sent Dwight crawling into the van to dig out his ukulele. “I don’t know why you asked me to set up the stereo, if you’re not going to listen to it,” Dwight said.
Scissors, Paper, Rock Page 15