Our food came. Varlene brought it out. She set my waffle down lightly, and pretty much slung my father’s plate down. It rattled and wobbled like a dropped dime on a cookie sheet. My father placed a five-dollar bill on the table. I said, “I got you a Father’s Day present.”
My father said, “You ain’t got to give me nothing, Presto. Just coming out to meet women who could’ve been your mother is enough gift for me.”
I’d decided on Allen wrenches—they’d been used, sure, but I’d gotten some three-in-one oil and sanded off the rust—because my father’d broken a couple of little ones while unsuccessfully trying to unstick gravel from the treads of his tires. My father called them “hex keys,” and he needed them for the Fortuna automatic skivers and United Shoe Machinery splitters he worked on at the behest of independent textile supply companies and cotton mills that demanded his presence when their machines ran afoul. My grandfather started the business, and when he died my father dropped out of college—where he met my mom—and took over.
I said, “What I got you is better than this, I bet.”
My father shook his head. He said, “We got a couple more places to go.”
WE LEFT MAMA’S nook and took Highway 54 toward the town of Glenn Springs, where—according to my father—a special curative mineral water got bottled and shipped to high-ranking members of the Confederacy, and the entire operation dwindled once General Lee or someone accused an interloper of bottling a tainted tonic that induced dysentery in the troops before the First Battle of Kernstown or the Battle of Appomattox Station. Maybe it was Stonewall Jackson who blamed Glenn Springs water, or the white supremacist Lieutenant General Jubal Early. One of them. Glen Springs still featured a number of wooden two-story antebellum houses owned by the descendants of bottlers and shallow-water-spa attendants, but each house fell more and more into disrepair.
I didn’t speak during this twenty-minute trip. Maybe I got all obsessed with how either Arlene or Varlene might’ve sprinkled rat poison in my waffle batter. I thought about how it wouldn’t be all that hard to stir some kind of liquid poison in a syrup container. My father took a left turn and said, “It’s around here somewhere.” He hit his brakes, accelerated, hit his brakes, accelerated, and I rolled down the window of his truck in case I needed to get sick.
About ten o’clock we turned down a pea-gravel and pine-straw entrance to what ended up being one of those Sears Craftsman bungalows. My father pulled up to the house and opened his door. I slid out his side, for he parked way too close to a rock wall on the right. “I’m back here. Hey! I’m back here,” a woman called out as my father approached the front door.
My father took me by the right shoulder and directed me around the house. He walked with a sudden and pronounced limp, it seemed, and leaned on me as we curved around.
“It’s Buck and Preston,” my father said when we reached an open chain-link fence. He and I both looked around eye level, swooping our heads this way and that like half-lighthouses, like indecisive street-crossers, like adamant naysayers. My father said to me, in a louder-than-normal conversational voice, “We’re here to see Rayelle Purvis.”
“I’m up here,” Ms. Purvis said, and we looked up into the limbs of the kind of oak tree usually seen in movies that involve hangings. She stood on an eight-by-eight-foot platform of two-by-twelves, at least twenty feet in the air. No ladder stood nearby, and no low limbs protruded from the trunk. She said, “Buck Hewitt? What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were smart enough to know better.”
My father said, “What’re you doing up there?” He didn’t introduce me. I craned my neck. I tried to figure out if this woman scrambled up the tree like some kind of squirrel, or trick pit bull.
Rayelle Purvis looked up at the sky, then back down to us. She said, whispering, “I hope you didn’t go to the front door and wake up Floyd.”
My father shook his head no. He whispered back, “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“Floyd would kill you if you came to the door. If you woke him up or not. You know that.” To me she said, “Hey, little fellow.”
I waved but said nothing. My father said, “We’re just out on a tour today seeing who’s alive and who’s not. Maybe I’m feeling middle-aged, you know.”
A live brown field rat fell off Rayelle Purvis’s platform, landed closer to me than my father, then skittered off slowly. I won’t say that I didn’t jump. I won’t say that I didn’t maybe let out a little squeal. She said, “Damn it to hell.” Rayelle squatted down out of sight, then stood back up holding a silver industrial stapler. I guess she’d had her toe on the rat’s tail up until this point.
“Do you want me to try and catch that thing?” my father said. He said, “I wanted Preston to hear about how you and Ginny used to be roommates. I wanted for you to tell him how his momma’s smart and normal, I guess.”
“Smart and normal” seemed an odd thing to push a stranger into admitting, I thought, even then. I looked off to where the rat ran—under a pile of what ended up being the past winter’s butterfly bush clippings—then back up to Rayelle Purvis. She stared at me and said, “Your momma and I used to be roommates in college. We were KD sorority sisters. I introduced her to your daddy, and my lot in life got decided because of Ginny’s drive.”
My father said, “Well. That’s not exactly how I remember things, but okay. Come on down from there, Rayelle.”
For some reason I felt empowered enough, maybe because this woman said my mother’s name in a way that almost sounded like a curse, to say, “Are you more comfortable with rats than with people?” I’d read some kind of National Enquirer thing my mother left behind about people who cared more for vermin than humans. There were human beings out there who held Cheerios in their mouths and let rats climb up their shirts.
Rayelle said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t go to the front door and wake up Floyd. He was up all night trying to catch an owl. I’m trying to catch a hawk. We got us a dream to travel around showing the schoolchildren injured birds of prey.”
My father said, “So you’ll catch a normal bird, then injure it?”
“Hey, you shouldn’t be so unaccustomed to such a thing, Buck,” Rayelle Purvis said. “Am I right or am I right?” She pointed off in the distance and said, “We got another platform over there with roadkill possums and coons stacked up for turkey vultures. I got to keep an eye out for them, too.”
I said, “Mom was in a sorority?”
My father said to Rayelle Purvis, “I wish you nothing but the best of luck. You should be proud. You and Floyd both should be proud.”
I said, “Was she a cheerleader or something?”
My father waved upward, and took my right shoulder again, and led me to the truck. We got in. He said, “That woman’s insane, you understand. I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t know she would be that crazy.”
He started the truck and turned his head to back out of the long driveway. He put his arm around the back of the bench seat, and I could smell Ivory on his skin. I said, “Is her husband mean or something?”
My father said, “Yes, he’s mean and out of control. He’s a loose cannon. I went to high school with him. Floyd got kicked off the football team for beating up a trumpet player in the pep band he thought blew off-tune. He could headbutt a Coke machine into spitting out bottles.”
“What if he’d answered the door?” I asked. My father swung the steering wheel hard. He put the truck in first gear and peeled out on the asphalt.
“I was going to say we had the wrong house. That’s what you do. I was going to say, ‘I’m sorry. We’re looking for the Snopeses.’ Listen, Preston, in these kinds of situations, always say you’re looking for the Snopeses. It’s kind of a joke. It’s a long-winded joke I’ll tell you about sometime. I learned it in college. Floyd wouldn’t remember me, for one, and he never read about the Snopeses, for two.”
I said, “Let’s go home. I want you to open up what I got you.”
&n
bsp; He didn’t say, “Two more,” didn’t say, “Having you spend the day with me is Father’s Day enough.” I think I heard him mumble, “Still better than checking in voluntarily.” He drove back toward town a couple miles, then took a left. He said, “Old Canaan Road. Old Grist Mill. Old Stone Station,” to himself, like a mantra.
Between us he had a folded map of the entire county, which he didn’t need, for he’d memorized his routes.
WE GOT HOME right before noon. My father pulled into the driveway. We lived in a normal middle-class subdivision, one of those places that emerged in the early 1960s filled with brick ranch-style houses, all sixteen hundred square feet, some with half-basements that always flooded. I wanted to hurry inside and see the look on my father’s face when he unwrapped the hex keys. I foresaw his pulling those things out one by one and twirling them between his thumb and forefinger, maybe saying, “This little L-shaped wrench will work perfectly on a skiving machine.” Maybe he’d say something like, “It’s three inches long,” and I could say, “That’s 76.2 millimeters!” seeing as we’d been going over the metric system in math class right before summer started.
My father closed his door and said, “Let’s take a little walk.”
He held out his hand for me to grab. I did. I said, “Come on. Come inside so you can open up your Father’s Day present.” Maybe I stomped my foot like a big baby.
“Two more,” my father said. He looked at his wristwatch. He said, “Your mother would want it.”
When I say “normal middle-class subdivision,” I should mention that it was only half a subdivision. It was a sub-subdivision, a circle divided by two streets. We lived on Great Smoky Circle. The two streets that intersected Great Smoky were Yosemite and Yellowstone. Everyone who lived on Yosemite pronounced it “Yoze-mite,” two syllables. We walked down Great Smoky for a while, then continued on a path surrounded by kudzu on both sides. My father took me through a place where—years later—two children would be found dead. We walked down a path that, when the subdivision developers continued their project, would turn out a slave cemetery on either side.
We walked what must’ve been a half mile, until we reached what I learned later was an old unpainted heart-pine sharecropper house between two creeks, set in a four-acre expanse of bottomland. My father hunched low and whispered, “I should’ve brought the binoculars for this one. Be quiet.”
A woman came out in denim overalls. She didn’t wear a shirt beneath them. She had her head wrapped in a red bandanna. This might all have taken place about fifty yards away, not far. Two mixed-breed dogs trotted behind her, wagging their tails, their heads lifted in search of any scent, I imagined. Twenty chickens stood high on the gutters of the house. The woman held a silver two-gallon metal bucket that she swung by her side. A hawk went, “scree-scree-scree,” overhead. I don’t know if she hummed a tune, or if music merely followed in her path. If we’d gone to this woman’s house first I might’ve said to my father, “Witch!”
Except I’d never seen a more beautiful woman in my life. My mother was pretty, but this woman held an exotic appeal that could’ve been recognized by Ray Charles and Helen Keller alike. I said, “This woman could’ve been my mother?” I felt ashamed for saying it. Betraying my depressed mother wasn’t something I planned to do on Father’s Day.
“Shhh,” my father said. “No. No, never.”
The woman stopped and turned our way. She looked perplexed for a second, then started laughing and said, “Is that you, Buck?”
My father eased up to his full height. I didn’t. If anything, I crouched down farther. My father lifted his right hand and said, “Hey, Bess. I’ll be damned. Is that you? Me and my boy here are looking for his dog. His dog ran off. And we’re looking for it.” My father ambled slowly toward this Bess woman. “You haven’t seen a dog out this way, have you?” To me he said, “Come on, boy, don’t be shy.”
Understand that I’d never been shy in my life, but this woman’s beauty apparently stunned my synapses to the point where no muscle knew how to function. My father walked back toward me, grabbed my collar, and stood me up. Bess said, “I ain’t seen no strange dog out here since these showed up to live here. What kind?”
When we entered what might be considered her yard, my father said, “I don’t know. What kind of dog would you say you got?”
If it weren’t Father’s Day I could’ve called him on all of this. But I said, “Oh, it’s a mixed breed. Maybe part collie and part something else.” I couldn’t think of one breed besides collie. I’d seen Lassie, but never Rin Tin Tin or Old Yeller. To my father I said, “Maybe if he shows up here it would be good for her to know its name.”
My father said, “Richard. The dog’s name is Richard.”
Richard? I thought. My father must’ve been thinking of the president or something.
Bess lifted her arm to wipe sweat from her brow. A rooster ran off under the house. I noticed about two inches of blond hair emerging from Bess’s armpit. Off to the right a mule brayed, then kicked at nothing with both back legs. He stood in a corral of sorts, surrounded by a large garden of tomatoes, corn, and sweet peas. I said, “My name’s Preston. The dog’s name’s Richard.” Again, I cannot explain this woman’s outright sublime nature. Two inches of armpit hair, I thought, equals 50.8 millimeters.
My father said, “Yeah, looking for the dog. You still growing your ‘organic’ vegetables?”
She nodded. She said, “You need to change your ways, Buck. The government’s into killing off people with chemicals they spraying on. Oh, the government’s telling people they depend on to not eat store vegetables, but everyone else don’t know. They got secret ways of letting their rich backers know to buy from me, but they ain’t telling no one else. You know why? Because of integration. Ever since the integration, the government’s been happy to kill off every black and white-trash linthead who can’t afford private schooling so’s to start up a new race of people, just like Hitler wanted. You know who buys from me? I’ll tell you. Both our senators, for one. Funny thing is, they send they slaves down here to pile up the backs of they Cadillacs full of peas, corn, tomatoes, beans, and sweet potatoes. I might look like I live in poverty, but I got a bank account you wouldn’t believe.” She said all this fast, like she had it memorized and wanted to get it out of her throat.
There on the outskirts of Bess’s garden I said, “Dad.”
He said, “Well, okay, Bess. I guess we better go look for Richard elsewhere.”
She walked up and squatted down to me. She said, I think, “Go to a private school, if you can talk your daddy into it. You need to be around people only like you, always. They’s going to be a race war in time. You and your dog need to know about it.”
I thought, How can my father have ever been interested in a racist woman? What would have happened to me had this Bess ended up my mother? Would I have been driving around in a convertible, wearing a hood like all the Ku Klux Klan members I’d seen driving through our sub-subdivision? Would I forever make fun of people not like me?
We got back home, and my father turned on the TV. I kind of forgot about the hex keys, which still sat atop the kitchen table, next to an empty bowl.
Finally my father got out of his chair with a grunt and walked into the kitchen. I heard him tearing apart the wrapping paper. Then, I couldn’t tell if he laughed or cried. He made noises. I never asked.
The next time we visited my mother, he brought the hex keys along to show her. He said, “They make me remember how adjustments need to take place daily.” When my father knew his death loomed, three decades later, he gave those tools back to me. Over the years I’ve kept them in my pocket, and roll them between my thumb and index finger often, instead of saying to my own son, “She could’ve been, she could’ve been.”
UNEMPLOYMENT
MY SECOND-GRADE TEACHER DIDN’T THINK AHEAD when she agreed to let us sing that “Name Game” song the last hour of Valentine’s Day class. Because—as Miss Dupre even admit
ted—her homemade heart-shaped cookies turned out warped into looking more like bananas, it seemed almost necessary to sing. My friend Compton Lane had suggested everything, seeing as we no longer took music classes weekly; the chorus teacher had quit during Christmas break, saying she couldn’t distinguish an on-key student in all of Forty-Five Elementary.
I didn’t quite understand the implications of Compton’s request, didn’t realize what lyrics would occur in a class that, oddly, included two Chucks, a boy named Lucky, another named Tucker, and an unfortunate girl—unless later on in life she had gathered work in a Nevada brothel—whose parents tabbed her Bucky.
“Okay,” Miss Dupre said. “We’ll sing the song starting with Compton. Then, Comp, you point to whoever’s next.” She went on to say how we would hand out our cheap Valentine’s cards to each other afterwards and eat her misbaked cookies that, once she realized hadn’t come out heart-shaped, were iced yellow with HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY painted in red.
As years went on, I remembered those cookies as reading only HAPPY V.D., but maybe my memory turns that way because twenty-three-year-old Miss Dupre had gotten fired soon after handing them out.
The class stood in a circle, surrounded by four corkboards that stressed personal hygiene, poisonous plants, things to do on rainy days, and how to crouch during both natural and unnatural disasters. Compton pointed at me when his name was done, only because we were best friends who both had crazy runaway mothers. We went, “Mendal, Mendal bo bendal banana fanna fo fendal,” et cetera, and the whole while Comp jerked his head for me to call on Tucker. I pointed toward Tucker next, not knowing—this was second grade in a town where people gossiped when someone said dam or heckfire after falling from a roof—that our song would have a term I’d heard only once, when my father stepped on a nail.
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