Gods in Alabama

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Oh,” I said, sobering. “That’s a heap.”

  “A heap?” said Burr.

  “It’s kudzu. It’s a plant, like a vine. It’s all over Alabama. It eats anything it touches, just climbs right up it and covers it and kills it.”

  The heap outside my window had coated a row of dizzyingly tall pines. I could still see the basic outline of the trees underneath. The heap undulated in a sinister stretch, slowly reaching back towards itself from tree to tree, lacing itself higher, sending grounders out, looking for something else to climb.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Burr wiped his eyes and then put the Blazer back in drive. There was very little traffic, and he pulled back onto the highway and gunned it.

  The speedometer said he was going about seventy, but it felt to me like we were moving at the speed of light, whipping around curves and over hills. Florence and Bruster were ahead of us, and with them my addled, grinning puppet of a mother. The rest of my lunatic family surrounded us, scattered in a fifty-mile radius. Rose Mae Lolley was aimed at our location, heading at us from Texas on a collision course. And somewhere in the wilds of Alabama, whatever was left of Jim Beverly was waiting for her to find him.

  I had promised God I would stop systematically fucking my way through Fruiton High School. In fact, I had promised to stop fornicating completely. But truthfully, up until I fell in love with Burr, cutting sex out of my life had been more of a relief than a sacrifice. I had promised God that I would go into exile and never return to Alabama. But if God had my relatives, He would happily promise to stay out of Alabama, too.

  I had always known the heart of the deal was my promise to give up lying. It was as if I had broken the smaller, more self-serving vows as practice, using the plan to go to Alabama as a flimsy excuse to be with Burr, and using the fact that I had been with Burr to push myself across the state line. But in the darkest corner of my mind, in the savage place that shuddered if a black cat crossed my path, I believed that as long as I did not lie, the deal was still intact.

  I’d had a chance to lie to Rose Mae in Chicago and had blown it righteously. The pressure of the promise I had made caused me to falter at the most important moment. I could not afford to be caught unprepared again.

  It occurred to me that if I broke the vow now, bloodlessly, told some smaller lie, when I met Rose it would all be that much easier. There would be nothing left to break.

  Perhaps it was fortunate that I was headed into the clutches of Aunt Florence, the dogmatic grand inquisitor. Florence, who never inferred anything, would be waiting to get me alone. She had ten years’ worth of interrogation on every possible fragment of my life ready in the hopper. If she got her teeth in me, she would worry at me until I broke and gave her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But perhaps I could use my practice lie, my vow-breaker, to distract her or even defuse her. And if I could get a lie past Flo, Rose Mae would be a piece of cake.

  “Baby, where’s that bag of popcorn?” Burr asked. I got it out of the backseat and opened it for him.

  “I think I want to tell a lie,” I said, passing him the bag.

  “Just a sec, let this moron pass me,” said Burr. A guy in a red Celica hurtled past us on the right. “That’s new. What lie?”

  “I think we should tell my aunt Florence and everyone that we got married,” I said.

  Burr had the popcorn propped between his thighs, eating it as he drove. His mouth was full, and he coughed a little. Once he got the bite swallowed, he said, “Why would we do that?”

  “Because a boyfriend is tenuous. They could launch a pretty good full-scale racist-alert war against a boyfriend. But on the Southern Baptist Church scale of sins, a divorce is probably worse than a black husband,” I said. “If we’re married, then they have to take us both or leave us. I don’t want to give them the option of me and not you.”

  Burr shook his head, fishing out another bite of popcorn. “Should I prepare for pillowcase hats and flying bullets?”

  “No, it’s not that they’re Ku Kluxy, Burr. They’re just garden-variety backwoods Alabama racists. But Aunt Florence? She’s ruthless. She has no ruth at all. And assuming she doesn’t flat disown me—big assumption—if she sees any seam between us, she is going to pick at it and do her damnedest to get us apart.”

  I racked my brain, trying to sufficiently explain the power of Florence. Finally I said, “Let me tell you a story. Growing up, our closest neighbor was Mrs. Weedy. She was an older lady. A widow with no kids. But she had this pet chicken named Phoebe. And she loved Phoebe insanely. I mean that literally. She was not mentally well on the subject of Phoebe. And whenever my cousins Wayne and Clarice did something great and Aunt Flo would try to brag on them, Mrs. Weedy would interrupt with a long tale of Phoebe’s latest accomplishments.

  “According to Mrs. Weedy, Phoebe understood English, liked country music, had political opinions and a passionate personal relationship with Jesus. But all Phoebe ever did really was drop chicken poop and scratch around.

  “After Wayne died, Mrs. Weedy came over with a ham-and-green-bean casserole and told my aunt Flo, ‘Honey, I know exactly how you feel. I can’t imagine if I lost Phoebe! Phoebe and I will pray for you.’

  “Clarice told me this story. She was only eight when Wayne died, but she remembered Mrs. Weedy coming by with the casserole. She watched Aunt Flo’s fingers get whiter and whiter as she clutched the dish. After Mrs. Weedy left, Clarice watched Florence deliberately open her hands and let the casserole dish fall and smash on the floor.

  “About two weeks later, Mrs. Weedy did lose Phoebe. Clarice told me she was playing out on the porch, and she heard Mrs. Weedy calling until she had no voice left, and Phoebe never came. And the next day my aunt Flo took Mrs. Weedy a chicken chili cheese pie and said how sorry she was.”

  Burr was silent for a long time. “Am I to infer that the chicken part of the chicken chili cheese pie was—”

  “Infer what you like.”

  “And did Mrs. Weedy eat the pie?”

  “Licked the platter clean, according to Clarice.”

  Burr handed me the half-full popcorn bag. “I think I’m through with eating now,” he said. “Your aunt Florence is hard-core.”

  “It’s not that big a lie, is it, Burr?” I said. He was watching the road. “You did ask me to marry you this morning.” I looked down into the depths of the popcorn bag. “Did you mean it?”

  In my peripheral vision, I could see Burr’s hands flexing on the wheel. “Yeah, I meant it,” he said slowly. “Are you saying yes?”

  “I did say yes,” I said to the popcorn bag. “But you were sleeping.”

  There was a pause then, a pleased silence, and Burr said, “So, we’re engaged. How about that?” He took one hand off the wheel and tucked it around my thigh, just above the knee. “I planned to do a better job. I have a ring. I was going to do the restaurant thing. Take you to hear a good blues band, get champagne.”

  “The way you asked was pretty good, I thought,” I offered, still shy. I shook it off and added, “Anyway, if we’re engaged, it’s barely even a lie. It’s more like telling a pre-truth.”

  Burr laughed out loud at that. “What happens at the wedding if they already think we’re married?”

  “Oh God, no, I don’t want a wedding, Burr. I don’t want anyone but us. If I had a wedding, Aunt Flo would mobilize the entire family like the Fifth Infantry. She’d flog them into rented vans and point them at Chicago. And I don’t mean just Uncle Bruster and Mama and Clarice. She’d dredge up my vicious aunt Sukie and her hell spawn. She’d snatch my great-great-aunt Mag out of the nursing home and load the trunk with the ashes of my asshole grampa and Saint Granny. And that’s just the Bents. She’d get Bruster’s whole tribe, Dill Lukey and Uncle Peaches and Luke-John and Fat Agnes and all nine million of my wild boy cousins, and they’d head to Chicago to try and stop the wedding. It would be like the traveling-freak-show version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
. I’d much rather we did it just us, on the quiet. Your mama could give us a reception in the fellowship hall at church one Sunday after services.”

  Burr widened his eyes. “You’ve just described every man’s dream wedding.”

  The story was pushing at me again. There are gods in Alabama. The urge to tell, to spill everything out onto his lap, to set it down and rest, washed over me in a wave. “Can it be soon? Really soon?” I said.

  “Baby, I’m good to go the day we get home,” said Burr. “You’re worried about being pregnant?”

  I boggled at him because, stupidly, that hadn’t occurred to me. I started counting days, working backwards in my head. “It’s not likely,” I said. “But when I was a girl, my aunt Florence always said to me and Clarice, ‘If you are on the battlefield, you can get shot.’”

  Burr smiled at that. “Soon, then,” he said.

  “Really soon,” I said, and he nodded. “And let’s lie.”

  Burr said, “That seems a little—”

  I interrupted him. “You know, nothing like sex can happen at my aunt’s house. Thin walls. I would die. But if we tell them we’re already married, we can sleep in the same room.”

  “Sold,” said Burr. “I’m pro-lie.”

  “All right, then,” I said, and ate a little popcorn. “Is your cell phone charged? I think I’ll do better on the phone. It’s been a long time since I told a lie. And maybe you better pull off the highway. I feel like I might need room to walk if I’m going to do this.”

  Burr took the next exit. There wasn’t anything there but a Shell station with an attached diner, surrounded by rolling Alabama pastureland on one side and woods on the other. Burr was heading for the Shell, but I said, “Don’t pull in. I don’t want the people or the truck noise.” He cruised a few hundred feet before pulling onto the shoulder.

  I said, “You get out, too. I might need the moral support.” We were next to a rail fence surrounding a long, thin pasture. Two fat ponies and a creaky old horse were ambling about in it. When we got out, the ponies glanced up and then went on grazing, but the horse started meandering slowly over to investigate. He was a swaybacked, ancient yellowed thing with a Roman nose. The hair around his mouth had gone entirely gray.

  Burr, a city boy to the core, watched the horse suspiciously while I dialed. He said, “Do you think he’s upset I parked here?”

  “No, I think he just sees the popcorn bag,” I explained. “It’s ringing.”

  “Arlene?” said my aunt Flo. “This better not be you.”

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “I said it better not be,” said Aunt Flo. “What’s the excuse this time? Aliens abducted you back to Chicago? You suddenly had to take a side trip to Guam? Lay it on me, Arlene, I have been waiting for this call all day.”

  The horse reached the fence and put his nose over. Burr took an ultra-casual step back and leaned nonchalantly on the car.

  “I’m not calling to cancel, Aunt Flo. We’re about two hours away. Maybe less.”

  I tilted my head and pushed my shoulder up to secure the phone, then dug out a small handful of popcorn for the horse. I offered it on the flat of my hand, and he started nuzzling it up with his prehensile lips. A few kernels of popcorn fell to the ground. I couldn’t tell if my hands were shaking or if the old horse had knocked them off.

  “Lena,” Burr whispered urgently, “should you be doing that?”

  I flapped the popcorn bag at him because I couldn’t hear Aunt Florence.

  “—not calling to say hey, so you might as well spit it,” Florence was saying.

  The fatter pony’s ears pricked up when he noticed the horse was getting something, and he started over at a trot. The second pony followed him. They were pretty, brown roly-poly things. The fatter one’s sides jiggled as he trotted over.

  “Now look what you did,” whispered Burr.

  “Aunt Florence, I just wanted to call before we got there and explain why we stopped over last night.” I took a deep breath and did it. I lied, flat and plain. “Yesterday we stopped in Tennessee and got married.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. The ponies arrived at the fence and flanked the horse, questing forward with their noses and trying to press him out. I held out popcorn for the fatter one first, as he seemed the most desperate about it. I was happy for the distraction. If I thought about feeding ponies, it was easier to let lies slip out of my mouth, almost as if I wasn’t noticing them.

  “He could take your finger right off,” whispered Burr. “Look at those teeth.”

  I shook my head at him and almost dropped the phone.

  “Married,” said Florence in a dire, deep voice. “You got married.”

  “Yeah, we pretty much did,” I said.

  “Well. Thank you so, so much for calling to tell me this.” Sarcasm flooded the phone and spilled out, soaking me. “I appreciate the news bulletin. Is there anything else you want to tell me while you are passing on this tidbit? Is your new husband that your family has never met an ex-convict, for example? Or are you just knocked up?”

  As she spoke, I wiped my horse-feeding hand on my jeans and grabbed the phone, holding it a little away so Burr could hear. The cell phone’s tiny speaker distorted Aunt Florence’s powerful voice, and from this distance it sounded like nothing more than the quacking of an enraged duck. I put the phone back to my ear.

  “I’m not pregnant, and he’s not a convict. I told you, he’s a lawyer. But while I’ve got you, I guess I should tell you he’s black.”

  I clipped the phone between my chin and shoulder again. There was a long silence. I shared out another handful of popcorn among the horse and the ponies. Burr was watching me, rubbing his hand across his lips.

  Finally she said, “What do you mean, he’s black? You mean he himself is black? A black man?”

  “Yes. By black, I mean he is black.”

  Florence took a deep breath and then spoke, her voice dead cold. “I am hanging up now, Arlene. I will take this up with you and your secret black husband when you arrive.”

  “Yes, you’d better go quick,” I said. “You have less than two hours to get on the horn and tell everyone that Arlene married a black man just to piss you off. I wouldn’t want Aunt Sukie to have live kittens if you don’t get to prep her before Uncle Bruster’s party. We have a large extended family—may I suggest a phone tree?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “A phone tree,” I said. “It’s where you tell everyone you call to call two more people, and they tell their people to call two more—”

  “Don’t sass me. I head the Baptist Women’s League, I think I know what a phone tree is, Arlene. We will discuss this further if you actually show up, with or without your secret and possibly made-up black husband. I am not stupid, Arlene. I guess now I am supposed to say, ‘Oh no, if you have invented a secret black husband, then you can’t come home and ruin your uncle’s special day, so scamper on back to Chicago with my blessing.’ Is that your plan?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I am not making Burr up. You know I never lie.” I stopped speaking abruptly, because saying that I never lied was a lie now.

  “Oh yes, that’s right,” said Aunt Florence. “You don’t lie unless your mouth is open and words are coming out of it.” And then she hung up.

  “I don’t usually lie,” I said to the dial tone. I hit the red button and handed Burr his phone back. The horse stamped a front foot, and the ponies gazed at me in popcorn-induced adoration. “That’s all,” I said. “Go graze, you spoiled things.” But they didn’t speak English, so they stayed at the fence, craning their hopeful noses at me.

  “I’m terrible at this,” I said to Burr. “I don’t lie ever.” My hands were shaking. Fornicating had been much easier.

  “I know, baby,” he said. We got back in the car and buckled in.

  “I shouldn’t have lied. I shouldn’t have even called. This gives her time to line up snipers around the driv
eway.”

  Burr merged back onto the highway. I turned the stereo on and slipped in one of Burr’s Skip James CDs. I was in a blues kind of mood. I jacked it up pretty good, and James’s eerie falsetto filled the car. I didn’t feel like talking. Burr seemed to catch my mood and drove us silently, one hand tapping out odd rhythms on my thigh.

  We listened to the CD twice through, and just as it was starting over, we hit the turnoff onto Route 19. I turned down the volume and told Burr to hang a left.

  “If we kept going, we’d come to Fruiton,” I said. “This way, in about ten minutes we’re going to shoot through scenic downtown Possett. I believe it is obligatory to make the standard small-town joke, so allow me to say ‘Try not to blink.’”

  “Check,” said Burr.

  We wound our way down 19, passing through all three blocks of downtown Possett and then through clutches of ranch houses. After that, there were lengthy stretches with nothing but fields on either side of us. In another four miles, we started to see a few houses again.

  “Coming up ahead on the left,” I said, “that’s Mrs. Weedy’s house we’re passing. She died five or six years ago, and I don’t know the folks who took it. That big fence is around my aunt Florence’s vegetable garden, and that white frame up ahead, that’s us. Turn in the gravel drive, that concrete one will take you back around to the garden and the shed.”

  The house looked just the way I remembered, neat and tidy, with its green shutters and door gleaming. The hydrangea bushes out front were trimmed and orderly. Florence had put some sort of blooming creeper in the front bed, and its big white flowers were bobbling lazily as if they were nodding at us. Florence and Bruster had come out on the front porch and were sitting in their respective rockers, watching for us. Burr slowly crept us up the gravel drive. He stopped short of the carport, and we got out and walked around to the front of the house.

  They rose together as we approached, Florence in one of her nice housedresses, sinewy and tall. Uncle Bruster stood behind her, a great big bear of a man with sloping shoulders and tufts and wisps of gray-blond hair sticking up on his bald head. He looked like he had put on some weight.