by Lamar Herrin
It all slowed down, we bowed our heads for a final prayer, then when we raised them Ellie came rushing up to me. I’d barely had a chance to greet her two daughters, whom, it was true, I really didn’t know, when Ellie grasped me in a hug as though she had something vital she wanted to whisper in my ear. She gave off not the smell of liquor but an anxious sort of heat, a sort of caustic sweetness as her perfume broke down, and I sensed she was holding on to gather strength before she attempted another run back to their car and the husband who had his stopwatch on her.
She said, You didn’t come to my mother’s funeral, and you didn’t come to my wedding, either, Jim, but here I am! And as she concluded her little canned remark, which she half sang, she seemed to gather the strength that would allow her to pull back and look me in the eye. And allow me to look at her. Her green and gold eyes were larger than I remembered, which is to say, more stark in their hollows. She’d added a sparkling bronze burnish to the lids. She now had the pronounced cheekbones and chin you might associate with some predator, or with someone preyed upon. She couldn’t hold her smile. It was as if some seismic wrenching had taken the face of the little girl I’d first seen half hidden behind her mother and left her with this outcropping of bone and this alien mineral luster around her eyes. Surely I was overreacting. But I remembered the last time I’d seen Little Howie as he suffered the deformities of his disease, I remembered his protuberant brows and lopsided head, and I thought, What is it about this family, what have we all bought into?
I said, Mother died very peacefully, Ellie. I’m glad you could come, if only here at the end. And, after glancing once more back to their car and that seemingly inconsequential figure standing there, I added, It would be nice to get away for a few minutes and talk. We have things to catch up on, don’t we?
Oh, Jim, she said with a staged sigh, you don’t know what day it is …
I was about to restate the obvious, as though my little cousin were more oblivious than I could have believed, it was the day we laid to rest the firstborn of the Pritchard girls, when my sister came up to Ellie, followed by Harriet, and children of theirs, all pleased their cousin had made it just under the wire, and I turned my attention back to Leland Oldham, who in the glaring sunlight had begun to pace back and forth the length of his car, no longer looking our way but at his feet, as though he was counting each step and would hold the tally against his wife. I took it as long as I could and was about to walk over there and engage my cousin’s husband in conversation when Ellie slipped away from various kinfolk just long enough to say, Wait, don’t do that, Jim. Wait on me.
And Walter, sitting half slumped before the fire, a full slump being hard to manage in these small chairs, said, “Wait on me”—those were her exact words?
That’s what I remember, I said.
Don’t do what, Jim? I wonder what she thought you had in mind.
Ellie spent a few more moments with my sister and her family, but it was as if she had a hand on my arm the whole time. In fact, she might have. And when she actually started walking back to Leland and their car, I know she had her hand there, up on my left biceps, and its purpose was to slow me down. She wanted to tell me why she and her girls had had to come running in and why they now had to go running off. Besides being the day of my mother’s—and her dear aunt’s—funeral, she wanted to tell me what day it really was. Which would also explain why she was so late in arriving and perhaps a hundred other things. It was, she declared, dedication day for that statue at the entrance to their summer camp for needy boys and girls, the statue of the man with a fishing rod in one hand and his other on the shoulder of a little girl. And what a coincidence that that dedication would fall on the same day as Aunt Esther’s funeral. That was why Ellie had to be in two places at once. It’s was Leland’s baby, that statue—she didn’t say that, but that explained why he was pacing off the minutes until he could get up there for the unveiling, when he intended to present the statue as a big fat sop to his wife.
Your word, Jim.
My word, Walter. But all the rest was what she said. It did not correspond to her grip on my arm. That was an anxious, urgent grip, and it did not let up. We weren’t fifty feet from their car when I slowed our pace and when Leland Oldham—
The toad, Walter said.
All right, the toad, my cousin’s husband, stopped pacing up and down and, motioning his stepdaughters on, managed to get them into the backseat of their car. I said, Ellie, what is it? And under a fluttering pant in her breath, she said, I may need you, Jim. Not today, but sometime.
What do you think she meant? Walter said.
I don’t know. She sounded a little scared, but she also had an adventuresome tone to her voice, as if she contemplated some big step, as if she might need to consult me for one more foolish investment of theirs.
He wasn’t beating her, was he? That wasn’t what she meant?
No sign of it, Walter. Rather, beating her with the booze. That was leaving its marks.
So what did you tell her?
I stopped and looked down at her. She was taller than her husband but not as tall as me. She’d put her sunglasses on, and it took me a moment to find her eyes. Leland was maybe twenty feet away from us now. He was impatient, angry. That statue was his pet project. Anything I said to his wife I would have to say in a whisper, a stage whisper, which I was going to take a certain pleasure in doing. When the time is right, I finally responded, you let me know.
You’ll remember I was the oldest in that generation of the family, Walter. It was a bit of a drama, something of a Godfather moment, with the toad standing there, ready to roar off and leave my mother’s funeral under a cloud of his exhaust. Of course, he was worried he wouldn’t arrive back in the mountains on time. Of course, people would be waiting. Out of deference to his wife, he’d created this gap in his schedule. And, of course, there was the remote possibility that I’d been wrong about him all along, that he was in reality a bashful man, felt out of place, and was reluctant to intrude. That that was why he hadn’t accompanied his wife up to view her aunt’s casket and to offer condolences where they were due. That as an outsider he knew he belonged back with the car, like a chauffeur, or, for that matter, somewhere outside the big house, behind a screen door. But I’d be damned! I spoke slowly, and loud enough for Leland to hear too. I said, Then we’ll see.
Then we’ll see?
Then we’d see what measures I would take. I don’t mind telling you, Walter, I felt like a bit of a fool. But it was my mother’s funeral, Leland’s big day was up in the mountains, a good two hours away.
Then we’ll see, Walter repeated, each word loaded and deliberately delivered, right between the eyes. I almost like it. Noncommittal, but keep your head down. How did Ellie take it? How did the toad?
She didn’t release her grip on my arm, not at once. But it quit digging in. For a quick moment her mind seemed to go elsewhere. Maybe she felt embarrassed, as if she regretted having to beg. I felt something of that in her hand as she loosened her grip. I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, but I was upset, too. She owed my mother more than she’d given, showing up the way she had at the very end of things, running her little girls up there like interference—
Of course, she could say you’d owed her mother, too.
She could.
Isn’t that what you told me, Jim? You were the only notable absence at Rosalyn’s funeral, after all she’d piled into your arms.
I took a deep breath, not suddenly but finally very tired. Walter, please understand. I hadn’t seen Ellie since I’d met her for lunch and urged her, as Rosalyn had asked me to, not to do what she then did. I’d done my aunt’s bidding. Now if her daughter found herself in a fix, it was of her own making. If I felt foolish, it was because of the tone of what I’d said—and the staging. But she’d brought the staging down on herself, hadn’t she? Leland hanging back there like that, Ellie rushing up like some movie star with a fifteen-minute opening in her schedule before s
he went rushing off to her next photo shoot up in the mountains. Running her two little girls out there like movie extras being paid by the hour. I really don’t want to think about it anymore. I don’t know why I brought it up. We were playing cards and I was skunking you—
Unfazed, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said, Walter quoted me, “When the time is right, you let me know. Then we’ll see.” I like it, Jim. Cards close to your vest, but they’re the right cards. I like it. I’ll drink to it. Walter held up his glass, but it was empty, and I did have possession of the bottle now.
I think we’d better eat, I said.
We will, we will.
We were going to steal a march, get in the enemy’s rear. Is that where we are?
Tell me where the toad is and I’ll tell you.
You know where he is.
Did he shake your hand? Did you shake his?
I didn’t have the chance. He opened the passenger door and got his wife inside, and then before I could even approach him, he got around to the driver’s side of the car, and that’s where he was when he mostly mumbled, I’m sorry for your loss.
He did? He said that? And then you were going to shake his hand?
I don’t know. For Ellie’s sake, I might have.
Even though you told her she was being played for a fool.
I don’t think I ever used that word. I’d said that she was making a big mistake, that she owed it to the memory of her father whose fortune, if she didn’t get a prenup, she was going to waste—
But who would be immortalized in a statue soon to be unveiled, and she would be immortalized at his side as his pre-alcoholic little girl—
OK, Walter. It’s all true. Let’s give it a break, find something to eat. It’s been a long day.
I’m glad you didn’t shake his hand. There was absolutely no call for that.
Not even to get in the enemy’s rear?
The goddamn toad got away, to live and fight another day. Walter chuckled at his own remark, but also at the prospect of having the toad around to play with another day himself. Except that the following day we were due to return home. I didn’t remind Walter of that. The fire popped three or four times in quick succession, and that roused him, brought a relishing look into his eye. How’d he drive off, Jim?
You mean did he gun out of that cemetery, leaving a streak of rubber behind?
No, toads don’t do that. But our toad might have. What was his parting shot?
No parting shot.
No? No parting shot? He let you have the last word?
I didn’t say that. It was a small-town cemetery, up on a little knoll. It was full and pretty much forgotten. People were no longer buried there. Unless you’d been thinking well ahead, or your father or your grandfather had, and had bought an ample family plot years before. My grandfather, James Pritchard, the celebrity preacher with the gleaming black eyes, had thought far enough ahead to buy up four burial sites, in addition to those where he and his wife were going to lie, two on each side of theirs. Four for the four Pritchard girls, I suppose. But my mother as her father’s enforcer had somehow gotten them all. I don’t know how. Probably none of her sisters cared. But my mother and father were buried on one side of my grandparents, and on the other side were the sites reserved for my sister and me. Jean, who didn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on death, just laughed it off and said something like, Fat chance! But we played along with my mother, who in her last days kept musing very uncharacteristically about the blissful eternity we had coming when we’d all lie side by side again. She claimed to remember times when my sister and I as children had gotten in bed with both of them and the four of us had floated away in some earthly rehearsal for the eternal rest we had coming, which, given my sister’s and my age difference and my mother’s and father’s clashing characters, and for a dozen other reasons, could never have happened. But we let her believe it, and she probably floated away that night she died dreaming she had her family at her side. And you want to know, Walter, what this has to do with the toad and his parting shot? Nothing. There was no parting shot. In that long-past-its-prime cemetery the narrow roads among the family plots weren’t asphalted, they were all overgrown gravel, and Leland Oldham and his Ellie drove away so slowly and so quietly I could hear every pebble crunching under his wheels. I didn’t miss a one, Walter. Which began to seem like a little eternity of its own.
V
WHAT IS ’UMS? AND “is ’ums” became “isums,” which was the word Mama Grace used—because I did, she insisted—to refer to pancakes when I stood beside her at the stove and waited to be served the first stack. I do remember using that word. But even as baby talk, its derivation seems hard to believe to me, and maybe the word had something to do with that racist cast of characters associated with pancakes in the South, with Aunt Jemima and Little Black Sambo, to name two, and maybe I inherited it from them. What is ’ums? We’re having isums today, Jimmy, and you get the first ones. How many can you eat?
My grandmother stood at the stove. A cast iron stove with a built-in griddle on top. A wood- or coal-burning stove—I’m not sure. At times I think it’s my first memory, and other contenders—one of me playing somewhere up north in the snow, another where I’m mounted on a pony dressed like Cowboy Joe, but not one that has me trailing along behind a little bug-eyed dog named Bing—come from family snapshots, where I’m cherubically round in the face and cheeks, still looking fresh-born. I see my grandmother, it must be summer because she has the flimsiest of slips on as she stands before the stove, the flesh in her upper arms is bare, she’s a tall woman and her hair is piled up, making her taller still, and the perspiration is fresh on the nape of her neck, fresh and clear beneath the caught-up hairs, and I am waiting like a dog down below for her to tell me what isums are and to be served the first stack. Since my grandfather died when I was one, she could have been into the second or third year of her widowhood by that time, which means that my cousin Harriet would have been born, and probably Little Howie, too, but surely neither of them had stood behind her at the stove—behind her and way down there—as she flipped isums and built a stack worthy of her first grandchild.
The isums carried over and became a sort of code word between my grandmother and me, and by the time the war had ended and the soldiers and sailors and Lily, my WAC aunt, had come home, and the Whalens, their business booming, had built their cabin up in the mountains on the lake and we’d had our first family reunion there, Mama Grace was still standing at the stove making pancakes, only on an electric stove now, and I was still entitled to the first stack. It wouldn’t be long before Little Howie would demand that honor for himself, but as the firstborn, first memories belong to me. My grandmother towered above me at the stove, rosy-fleshed in those beginning years of her bereavement, some all but transparent fabric falling over her shoulders and her ample hips, the batter-scent and the flesh-scent getting mixed up into the same stack. As a young woman she’d made an effort to attract attention; now it took no effort at all. Click.
But it quickly became Little Howie’s world up there in the mountains, and he learned quickly, to swim, to fish, to boat, to pop birds out of the trees with his BB guns, to seine for minnows, to catch crawdads, to distinguish between poisonous and nonpoisonous snakes and to scare everybody with the nonpoisonous ones, to back boats out of the boat-house and to nudge them in, to gig for frogs, and with that same frog gig to spear a good-sized boathouse bass three feet under the water, as I once saw him do. Every year he seemed to be more adept at more things—he couldn’t have been over twelve when I sat and watched him repair a balky motor that had stalled on us out in the lake—and then more willing to teach others without making a boastful display of himself while doing it.
I was always surprised, not to say amazed, at what his parents consented to. It was Little Howie who was allowed to take out the speedboat and show not just me, his elder by two years, but much younger children in that ever-enlarging family, how to water-ski. Howie
himself, who all but lived on the lake during the summer, while the rest of us spent on average two weeks there, had had enough water-skiing thrills, but we his cousins needed to learn, and one by one as we got up and got our legs under us and began to speed along the surface of the water, almost, it seemed, to fly, we looked up ahead and there sat Little Howie at the wheel of the speedboat looking back over his shoulder at us, with never a broad smile but a proud and almost private one as if we now belonged to his club.
Or he’d load us all onto the houseboat, and some of the adults too, and take us for a tour of the lake, passing various boat docks, some of which were like little town centers where you could pull in to get gassed up, stretch your legs, go shopping and have a bite to eat, pointing out certain sites, big houses built up on bluffs, railroad trestles, parks with boat ramps, unremarkable streams entering inconspicuous coves but yielding good fish, picnicking areas where we could stop and sometimes did to eat our lunch, fingers of the lake leading off to various towns with attractions of their own in case we were interested, really back-of-his-hand stuff for Little Howie, who was a child prodigy when you added it all up. And, before we’d head back, he’d pull us up below the dam, which rose in a towering concrete crescent above us and where we could feel the current quicken as Howie pitted himself against that massive structure and those built-up depths and gave us all a little thrill before opening the throttle and pulling us back out. He didn’t talk a lot, not even there at the end when we’d reached the climax of the afternoon, for the lake spoke for itself and all we really needed was just something to joggle our memories here and there for the next time we ventured out. The dam explained the how and why of the lake but not the what, not what the lake meant, not for the family that gathered there each summer for two weeks. I was the first of the generation that my namesake James Pritchard had grandfathered when he’d picked his wife out of that mostly pleasure-seeking Saturday evening congregation, but when we convened each summer, that generation had added to itself, so that every family reunion became a celebration of a past, a present, and an ongoing future, and the lake, which Little Howie Whalen had taken the measure of, was like our grand baptismal font.