I called Braden again on Wednesday. Three days had passed since our fight, and he wasn’t answering the phone at the airstrip. Finally he answered, sounding as if he had just crawled out of the sheets.
“My father died,” was all I could think to say. He didn’t speak for a few seconds and then said, “Gaylen, you asked me to leave, so I left.”
“I didn’t say leave.” It was a fight, so how could he remember? Didn’t he know emotional memory wasn’t dependable? “You’re coming today, aren’t you?” I asked.
“I flew the Weyerhaeuser executives to Phoenix.”
“But you came back, right?”
“No, I got drunk. My heads not on straight. I got a room and stayed until I could think straight. Did you say James passed? Are my parents there? They’re not answering the phone.” I was still holding my breath when he asked, “When’s the funeral?”
“An hour from now,” I told him, not wanting Renni to overhear.
He let out a long sigh as if reeling in the miles between Phoenix and Boiling Waters.
He asked, “What are you going to tell the Sylers? That I up and left you in the middle of your daddy’s funeral? I wouldn’t have, you know.” He then said, “Don’t you tell them this is all my doing. You know better.”
“Didn’t you check your messages?” I’d left three. “Call me! Emergency!” I had said each time. When I tried to form the words about Daddy, the only thing that came out was the breathing you do when hiding behind poise. “Are you saying you didn’t check your phone?”
“Not until this morning. I thought you were calling about the fight. I wanted time to think. Can you postpone the funeral?”
“The aunts leave tomorrow.” I wiped my eyes. Didn’t he know what he was doing to me, leaving me to deal with the Sylers without the shield of an objective outsider beside me?
He asked again. “Did my parents come?”
“They’re in Jamaica, their housekeeper said.” I had talked to Anita before breakfast. She worked for his father and helped his parents out around the house. She hadn’t come in until this morning when she found sixteen unheard messages on the Boatwrights’ answering machine.
Braden’s voice broke. He cried easily. I listened to him saying nothing, as if I knew that he was about to ask me, “Are you holding Up?”
“Delia’s not doing so well. She fell apart when we picked out the casket,” I said.
I paid tribute to my father’s love of hunting—the minister had told me that when you don’t know someone well, you talk about the persons hobbies. The field outside the church was frosted over, the grass resistant to every human step. The relatives and neighbors seated in the little Assemblies of God church my mother attended on occasion sat nodding and agreeing to the polite things I read about Daddy.
According to Renni, Daddy was not high on church until he saw the end was near. “Two days before he died was the first time,” Renni said, “that he mentioned matters of religion. He mumbled until I brought my ear close to his mouth. Then your daddy told me, ‘I got some things off my chest with the Big Guy. Ask the preacher to say grace over me. I’ll make it good on the other side.’” She whispered that all to me as the pallbearers wheeled Daddy down the aisle. The front wheel got stuck, though. My cousins all looked at one another until Tim Grady, Uncle Tommy and Aunt Renni’s boy, came forward, fiddled with the wheel, and got it moving again.
Daddy told me, Delia, and anyone who would listen that when he was buried next to my mother behind their house, to let the men from the Masonic Lodge serve as pallbearers. Then Renni told me how horribly her cousins funeral went when the Lodge Masons took over. So my male cousins filled in as pallbearers, wheeling my father’s remains out of the church and into the ice blue limousine. Delia and I rode behind in the family car. The funeral-home chauffeur led the caravan out to the acre behind the house where Delia and I once buried a dead pet cat.
The Masonic Lodge officers showed up but hung back, whispering and cutting their eyes at my sister and me.
Delia and the aunts and their husbands shivered in the cold shade of pines under William Hawkins’ funeral-home awning. The cousins traversed the clearing north of the deer woods to deliver James Syler in a rose-suffocated pine box. Tim Grady took the head pallbearer’s job. The guys surprised us by dressing in duck-hunting camouflage, branches sticking out from hats, leaves hanging about their ears. Tim made everyone laugh. Even Delia laughed. Sweet relief that Tim had taken charge! Sweet boy to ferry Daddy back to the earth like the exultant hunter he knew.
Twelve cars were parked on the sticky mud-and-grass acre like rows of coffins below the hill where my father was buried.
The cold mud clotted the streets from downtown Boiling Waters to our family farm. Laudus, my father’s first cousin and only bachelor cousin, gossiped about my father Wednesday after the funeral. He collected old coins the same as my father and talked about the gold and silver market as if the world were about to end, also like my father. He and the other veterans gathered on the lawn, talking over the women’s chatter. They swapped stories about Daddy, prompting Laudus to say, “Winter came early for James Syler.”
I remember Daddy telling the old man, “I’m goin to die just as I come into the world—at winter’s onset. Mark my words.”
James Syler came into the world by midwife in the room that eventually became the place where Delia and I slept.
“He got his teeth early and could whittle by five,” said Laudus after the service. He knew those things. “I grew up with James down on Sharon Creek and was still living there until urban renewal bulldozed the place down in the ′60s. But James, he got the luck of the draw. The interstate missed his land entirely by a good twenty miles. James was lucky, lucky like that his whole life.”
The veterans nodded and lit cigarettes off one another.
Laudus found God a year earlier than my mother. Daddy called it queer the way Laudus had taken to reading religious books and the Bible. But he liked the old man in spite of it. After the peeved men from the Masonic Lodge left the cemetery, driving off in matching Cadillacs, Laudus stayed behind, lingering, maybe praying.
The American Legion guys folded up the flag on my father’s coffin and presented it to Delia and me. Afterward, they gathered in a circle on the hill with their hands in their pockets. They laughed, telling a funny story about Daddy.
I memorized Laudus standing over my father’s grave, his hands clasped in front of him, and the serenity of his gaze. He was the last to leave my father’s graveside. I envied what he knew about Daddy.
My father told me things over the phone his last two weeks that I did not notice until after he was gone like, “Make sure the house is fixed for winter, the plumbing wrapped beneath the house. Be sure to watch after the plumbing, the roof, the Ford, the light bill, and Delia. Take better care of yourself. You’re bad with money, so don’t spend any. Take care of the place, check the water pipes,” he said again. He did not ask me about Braden, but he was never one to ask about my husband. “Delia needs looking after,” he said again. “Don’t let her get pregnant or anything.”
Laudus’s tires spun in the mud, and then he disappeared into the curve of Winding Lane.
Red clay coated the relatives’ car tires. “Bad for the alignment,” said Uncle Carl, my great-uncle. He asked the great-nephews to run a hose across the field to wash mud from the cars. “Give ye a dollar a car wash,” he told them as though the boys would gasp. He threw in a movie ticket each to attend the opening of the Royal movie house Friday night in downtown Boiling Waters. He was a retired cabinetmaker but was given free passes when he installed the countertops for the theater’s concession counter. He called it a genuine downtown movie house, not like the one-theater building shut down last summer. The Royal boasted four different theaters. “Don’t let the water run like that!” yelled Uncle Carl. The hill hardened into an icy knob.
By the end of the day, Renni was pale. I was the only one who saw her kneel on the floor near my father’s bed. She cried and kept touching a pack of his cigarettes. It was the only time I would hear her say, “I miss you.”
Wednesday came and went. The funeral behind us now, it was “happy Thursday” and “good morning” and “we ought to not take so long to gather as a family and sorry for the circumstances.” The trio of aunts, Renni, Lilly, and Tootie, were a cloud of gossip and Camel tobacco smoke. The women bobbed and teased their hair into what might have been perfectly opaque helmets were it not for the parlor lamps shining through the thinning fringes. Renni, who was Tim’s mother, smothered Delia and me in big-armed hugs until we slipped away to the front porch. She followed close behind.
“Lousy to crash your husbands plane, and what with you all doing so well, Gaylen.” Renni meant it in the best possible sense. “You staying outside, Gaylen? It’s getting cold out on this porch,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said. I took the rocker with the creaking leg. None of us could bear to sit in Daddy’s chair. I pulled my knees up into an oversized sweater. Delia rocked beside me for only a moment and then trailed Renni back into the house.
The fog kept most of the men out of the deer woods, all but a few cousins promising one last hunt to honor Uncle James.
“When you hear the first round, Gaylen, that one’s for Uncle James,” Tim Grady told me. He held Daddy’s rifle over his head. So good of him. Sappy but good, but Tim never shied from sentiment. Delia and I grew up playing with him and his sister Fanny, down by the stream running east of where Daddy kept bees. Tim was the boy who swathed Delia in a surplus of kind words. When at age twelve she babbled like a six-year-old, Tim told her, “You ought to be a comedienne, Delia.”
Daddy called Tim big for his age and a chump for taking teasings from us Syler girls. After neglecting his earlier studies for the outdoors, he finally got his payoff when he made forest ranger for the state of Colorado.
“You’ll have the whole woods to yourselves,” I said. Out of respect for my father’s death, none of the neighbors had inquired about deer hunting on the Syler land. Word spread throughout Boiling Waters that James Sylers prostate had finally given out.
“Try not to shoot each other,” I told Tim and the guys before they headed into the deciduous woods. Two-hundred-year-old trunks and a milky mist hid the quarry. But Tim and a nephew, Fanny’s son, claimed to have spotted a white buck at dawn, sight enough to whet their appetites.
“I’d forgotten how warm it still is in November in North Carolina,” yelled Tim. “Woo-hoo!” He gathered our other guy cousins, all tall as pines now, most gainfully employed, at least as far as their mothers knew, and led them into the woods. Five red vests turned pink as salmon in a morning fog that swallowed them whole.
“It ain’t warm to me,” said Renni, stumbling through the doorway rubbing both arms.
“Tim’s in Colorado now,” I told her. “North Carolina would be warm to him.”
“I’d not be out on this cold porch, but it’s loud in the kitchen. Didn’t Fanny have a lot of children?” asked Renni.
I turned my chair back toward the mound of fresh burial dirt.
Renni dropped into the chair evacuated by Delia. She moved the rocker closer to mine. “I’ve done good this week not to ask, Gaylen. You ain’t said a word about Braden. Now that we’re alone, you can trust me. I won’t tell.” There was no escaping her.
“We’re working things out. He did have a big client to deliver to Phoenix, though.” Renni wasn’t wrong about the cold, so I zipped my jacket closed. “Braden had to take the only good plane left to Arizona. What else was he supposed to do?” It was his way of punctuating his anger, of making me feel guilty after I crashed the new Embraer—and for sleeping with the professor from the university.
Renni stubbed out her cigarette in the tin ashtray I had won for my father at a county fair.
The more I thought about it, the more the affair seemed like something that had happened to another woman in another place. Like I was someone else watching me like my sister watches the war on TV. Instead, I kept the talk light. “Braden doesn’t want the family mad at him,” I said.
“Braden loved your daddy as much as you. It don’t make no sense,” said Renni. She kept saying, “It don’t make no sense,” and staring down at her red cuticles. She and Aunt Lilly had just sliced beets for soup. “Your daddy told me he wanted Braden to have one of his guns. So’s he coming in later? Is that the grand plan?”
A shotgun discharged in the woods. Fog was a heavy piece of weather turning noise to deadwood.
“Delia never could keep a husband. But you and Braden calling it quits … I’d have not believed it.”
“I didn’t say quits,’” I said. Quits is a final word. It means you’ve taken off the gloves, so to speak. I didn’t believe in quits for the time being. Braden would make me suffer for a while. That was to be expected. He was coming around, though.
Renni was the talker out of all of the aunts. She said, “Aunt Tootie, you know, she was saying this morning how you got the best life out of the Syler women. I told her, told all of your aunts and cousins, ‘That Gaylen, you can count on her to do what’s right.’ That’s why you got Braden and got it so good. You always did right by your mother, your daddy, all of us Sylers.” She whispered, “Not like Delia.” She muttered something inaudible about Delia.
It was time to change the subject. “Tim said he saw a white deer,” I said. “Did Daddy ever talk of seeing a white deer in our woods?”
She could not be sidetracked. “You and Braden will get it worked out, you’ll see. If its about that plane, why its only a scrap of metal after all. I hope you give up your flying license now. Your daddy said all along you wasn’t cut out for such things. ‘Women are too emotional to fly,’ he said. What was Braden thinking? The things he could talk you into.”
Braden had not talked me into getting my pilot’s license. I said that from the beginning. I got the idea in my head that it would be the thing that Braden needed from me that I had not been able to give him. A partner. He used that word often. He had lifted it from his mother and father, Clemson and Daurie Boatwright.
The toes of Renni’s black loafers lifted gently up. The rocker back tapped the wall restored by my grandfather. Down came the toes.
I catalogued my aunt as I saw her in the moment. Black loafers, knit pale green slacks. Hair by no means completely styled, silvery strands glistening like a web by morning. Pretty when she smiled, but not as pretty as my mother. Renni had a slightly crooked front tooth that gave her face a bit of character.
“In all my years here, I never saw a white deer. I think Tim’s wrong,” I said. He and his nephew told Fanny’s other children about the white deer standing out in Sylers Field before the sun had come up.
Delia squeezed out of the door to keep her dog inside. He was a half lab, half something-or-other pup brought along, she said, to play with Fanny’s kids. She called him Porter, after her boyfriend’s favorite steak. By that, she meant porterhouse, I thought. Delia named her animals according to her men. The chicken she kept in a birdcage in her kitchen she called Least One. Her second beau was only five two, thus the name. A set of canaries called Dee and Lee, the pet names she and her first husband had given to one another, slept most of the day. They were thin-necked little birds, their mouths gaping open when a human moved too close to the cage. Delia had loved Leland, but he was the swine who taught her a hard lesson: don’t name a pet after a man who might disappear when the money is cut off. Once Daddy realized why he hung on to Delia even after she had shown up with her wrist in a suspicious cast, he stopped giving her money. Leland disappeared.
So she named the pets according t
o things that reminded her of whoever happened to be the man of the hour.
“I told you to leave that dog at your trailer, Delia,” said Renni.
“Fanny’s telling a funny. I think she’s got it wrong,” said Delia. “Gaylen, you see if I don’t have it straight. We was all riding a raft down the creek one summer when the water was up. Remember, the water was spilling over the banks?”
I remembered the creek being up that summer. Delia never had to wait for agreement, though.
“We all nearly drowned.” She laughed.
“Not us,” I said and then, catching my words too late, added, “was it?”
I coaxed Delia that day onto the pallet that washed ashore. I called the pallet—a set of planks nailed to three thick two-by-fours—a raft. A lumber mill seven miles from the farm habitually kept timber stacked near Sharon Creek. Rain washed the pallet into the stream during the storm, and fate deposited it beneath our tall pine wonderland. Fanny and I helped Tim hang three swinging ropes from the treetops. I took Tarzan’s role, and because Tim said Jane was a patsy, he had to play Cheeta. He mostly sulked, sitting up a tree, refusing to pick his fleas and eat them. He grew bored. The pallet created a new trove of possibilities.
“You came home looking like a drowned rat,” said Renni. “I about whipped Tim for letting you get in the creek and what with it so high from the rain. But what does Fanny know about it?”
“She was there, like Tim,” said Delia.
“I thought your mother would die,” said Renni.
Mother nearly beat Delia to death. Delia looked perplexed.
“Renni is telling it right, Delia,” I said.
My sister was stunned. “That’s not how it goes.”
“It was a long time ago. Who could possibly remember?” I laughed, so as not to send Delia into a rage.
The pallet carried her five miles downstream; the water sucked her under a fantastic pipe and then spit her out where she finally swam to shore.
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