The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  But he didn’t answer; I’m not sure now that he heard me. Downstairs, you could hear Mama letting in the paramedics and bringing them up the stairs, not an easy prospect as the staircase was as old as the rest of the house, steep-cut and creaky, with a sharp angle at the landing that made for a lot of commotion and instruction (“Higher, Jim—no, lean in. There we go—”).

  Daddy didn’t pay them any mind, just sat there staring at my picture with that tired resignation till they finally made it upstairs, and began rolling the gurney down the hallway toward us with a mighty rattle of rubber on wood. That’s when he finally looked up and spoke to me, everything about him—his color, his hair, even the whites of his eyes—so weirdly and quickly changed, though his voice was his own: “You keep having fun, Claybird,” he said with all his old bossy sureness. “You don’t let this bother you, me getting sick. Don’t let it get you down. You and that fool Kenneth just keep living. Keep having fun. ’Kay?”

  Which, as it turned out, was the only thing my father ever planned or asked of me. I mean, with Sim and Missy, he spent months agonizing over their futures, what they’d do when they grew up, where they’d go to college. But with me, he never said go to school or stay home or anything. He just told me to live, to have fun. To keep having fun, as much fun as we were having when they snapped that picture of us at Busch Gardens that day.

  At the time, I saw no reason to deny him and just yawned—“Sure, Daddy”—and that was about the end of it.

  Almost immediately, the paramedics were at the door, two men and a woman, who shooed me into the hallway while they prodded around on him awhile, took his blood pressure and checked his pulse, then transferred him to the gurney in one quick lift. With a minimum of fuss and bother, they strapped him in and rolled him out the door and down the hallway to the narrow staircase, lifting him like a king on a royal litter a foot or so above the rails, everything smooth till they made the sharp corner, where they by God would have lost him if he hadn’t been secured at the chest and legs.

  But he just tilted a little to the side, and once they got him to ground level, they made good time, rolling him quickly down the hall to the front door, that I ran ahead to open. They slid by with professional briskness, nobody paying me any mind till Mama went past, her purse in hand, as if she was going to town, when I had to break in and ask: “Aren’t you getting dressed?”

  Because she was still in her old winter robe, her hair wild and upended, and no makeup at all, which in Mama’s case makes for a ghostly pale. She was also barefoot, which was odd as it was stinking cold there on the porch, the puddles from an afternoon rain crinkled with a thin ice, though she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Candace’ll bring me something,” she answered distractedly, her eyes on the ambulance. “Sim and Missy are at your grandmother’s—I’ll call from the hospital, see if she can pick you up for church—”

  “I’m okay,” I assured her, and right about then, when I might have taken the opportunity to run across that icy porch and duck my head in the ambulance and kiss my father good-bye for the very last time, I just begged, “Can I sleep in yawl’s bed?”

  Now, I have to take a moment to defend this idiotic lapse by pointing out that I was terribly sleepy and had been up a long time—and anyway, this isn’t any ordinary bed we’re talking about, but a king-size wrought-iron canopy, draped with tulle and tassels and even a few peacock feathers, with a squashy feather mattress on top (Mama’s contribution) and an insanely expensive Posturepedic beneath (for Daddy’s bad back). To lie there was to be happy, to sleep there, a living dream, and indeed I did, as often as I could, at least until Daddy got sick. Since then, their bedroom had become the hub of life in the house and I’d been exiled to my room next door, and my own little bunk beds that even then weren’t as wide and accommodating as they used to be.

  So I was quick to take this opportunity to get back in clover and Mama didn’t argue. “Sure, baby,” she said as she backed across the porch, “but turn on the alarm and leave Sim a note or it’ll go off when he gets home.”

  I nodded quickly, didn’t even wait around to watch them leave, just shut the door and hightailed it to the laundry room and set the alarm, then painstakingly wrote Sim a note telling him to disengage it or be prepared for a blast from on high. Then I scampered upstairs and took my time ordering my little nest, meticulously straightening the top sheet and big fluffy comforter, even arranging the pillows into an inviting half circle before I stripped off and dove in with a happy little sigh, just as the first tendrils of daylight were lightening the eastern sky.

  I didn’t even lie there and savor the moment, just went right to sleep, right where Daddy had been lying a few minutes before, the feather mattress still warm, so comfortable that I didn’t wake till much later than I’d expected, almost four in the afternoon, when Sim finally came home. As it turned out, he and Missy had been stranded at Grannie’s for the better part of two days, not having such a hot time of it, what with all our Catts and Tierney relations circling like buzzards, so morbid and weepy that Sim finally had enough of it and came home to get dressed to go to the movies.

  He even let me go for once and we had a big time, saw Witness with Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, who you got to see topless before it was over, always a treat. And, you know, that’s really about all I remember from those last few days when Daddy was wasting away in the hospital, out of sight and out of mind. I remember the day at Busch Gardens and almost puking on the Scorpion, and later, watching Kelly McGillis standing there topless, taking a sponge bath, and thinking Harrison Ford was an idiot for not going in. I remember that so clearly, in every detail, but not much else till Tuesday morning, when Aunt Candace woke me up early, just after dawn, and hurried me downstairs to the living room, where Brother Sloan told us that Daddy had died that morning in the hospital, “peaceful in the end,” which was what Grannie kept telling everyone at the funeral.

  But I never got to see him again, and it wasn’t till much later—maybe March—that one of the nurses on the ICU found the picture of me and Kenneth tucked away in a spare drawer in the nurses’ station and sent it home by Aunt Candace. Apparently, Daddy had taken it with him to the hospital that night in the ambulance, had kept it taped to his bed rails those last two days in intensive care, showed it to all the nurses; talked about how tall Kenneth and me were getting; how we both needed to be in baseball.

  Indeed, if you looked closely, you could see the tape marks on the back of it—you still can, to this day. Like I say, I keep it here on my bedside table at Aunt Candace’s and I look at it a lot, for it is one of the few pieces of actual physical evidence I have here in Exile that can take me back to the old house and the old life and the day that, contrary to what it might have seemed at the time, has truly and everlastingly turned out to be the worst day of my life: December 19, 1987. The day my father Michael died.

  He was forty-three. I was eleven.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Now, when I say that my mother is a vampire, I’m not being intentionally cruel or resentful or casting any aspersions on her character. She and I have gone our separate ways these days, but I still love her a lot, I always will. I mean, I know it’s a wimpy thing to say and maybe I’m as fairy as I once thought Gabe was, but there it is. Though I live with Aunt Candace now, I still catch an occasional glimpse of her tooling around town in her big old Mercedes, all sunglasses and stiff hair, and from this angle, from the outside, I can see why people tend to look at her with such distant respect: the rich woman in the big house; unapproachable, not among us.

  It used to puzzle me when I lived at home, for there was nothing particularly remote or distant about her back then. She was just Mama: the center of our lives, or eye of the hurricane, if you will. Around her blew Daddy’s chaotic business life, the day-to-day operations of two thriving furniture factories (Sanger Manufacturing here in town, and the South Georgia Furniture Company in Waycross) and Simon and Missy’s sports and science projects
and two dozen best friends. Nothing about her ever struck me as unusual or scary back then; if I’d had to liken her to any supernatural creature, it’d have been Casper, the Friendly Ghost.

  Come to think of it, I wasn’t the one who came up with the Vampire Theory to begin with, but that doofus Kenneth. He was the one who began to detect echoes of the supernatural around our house sometime in the spring of what? First grade? Second? One of the lower grades, when you still sit at tables, when this know-it-all black kid named Reggie Hines informed the rest of the class that I lived in a haunted house, which, in fact, I do (or did, before I moved into town with Aunt Candace, who is so stinking hygienic that no self-respecting ghost would come within a mile of the place or he’d be put to work scrubbing tile).

  But at the time I did, one that was old enough to have a name: The Clarence Thurmon House. That’s how it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places, not because it’s haunted, of course, but because it’s old, built in 1903 by a rich old banker who once owned half the county. Who, when it came time to build his new country house, bypassed twenty thousand acres of pristine Florida woodland to situate it smack-dab on top of an old slave graveyard, an insult the local black folk have never forgiven him.

  Their offspring faithfully warned us Catts children of the dangers of living on top of such hallowed ground, said there used to be a church there, too, that he not only tore down, but incorporated into the structure of the house. According to them, the windows in our front parlor (the bow ones) were once the front windows of the church, an insult the Lord duly avenged when the Old Man was struck down by a heart attack just seven months after he moved in. As legend had it, he fell out right in the front yard, dead as a hammer, though his ghost wasn’t the one that supposedly haunted the place, but the dozen or so slaves buried in the old graveyard beneath the foundation. They were the ones who had sent Old Man Thurmon to his untimely death, and after that, no one would live there for a long time.

  “Not till yo people moved in,” Reggie noted with a sniff, as if such a foolhardy move was just the kind of thing he’d expect from the likes of me.

  I didn’t argue the matter, for like I say, I was just in second grade at the time and still brokenhearted over leaving the sanctuary of my sagging old house, haunted or not. Furthermore, I was kind of shy of the black folk and had no intention of disputing anything with any of them, as Lincoln Park is about 60 percent black, and not middle-class Cosby Show black, either, but homegrown, don’t-need-to-listen-to-noner-yocrap black.

  So I just shrugged, as I’d actually heard the story before, grown up with it, familiarity wearing away the Stephen King aspects of living on top of a graveyard, though Kenneth, it fascinated him. Obsessed him. Until then, we had just been playground buddies, the lukewarm kind who’d wave to each other in the grocery store, but after that, he pursued me, spending the rest of the school year nagging me to sit with him in the lunchroom, or on the bus, where he’d always work the conversation around to our house.

  “You ever noticed any, like, sunken places in the yard?” he pressed. “Or corners of coffins? You know, poking up out of the dirt?”

  “I don’t thank there are any,” I told him flatly. “Mama would have dug ’em up with her roses. Reggie’s just talking.”

  But that didn’t satisfy Kenneth, who is the kind of person naturally drawn to the supernatural, always watching The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, reading horror comics. I really don’t know why, for there’s nothing particularly haunted about his family. God knows Miss Susan isn’t a vampire, she’s too doggone busy. Maybe it’s because he’s Catholic—or was when he was born, way up north in New York, though he only lived there a few years before his parents divorced and his mother moved him and his brothers Kemp and Keith (who are identical twins) to Ft. Walton, looking for a better life. Unfortunately, all she found there was yet another husband (and a sorry one at that) and another divorce that left her crapped out at thirty with three children and no education and not many prospects. It was a burden a lot of women would have wilted under, but not Miss Susan, who, despite her sorry taste in men, is probably the best mother I know, or at least the most energetic (even more than Aunt Candace). Instead of lying down and admitting defeat, she just packed up her sons and moved inland, where she took on any job that paid, working at convenience stores, gas stations, what-have-you, till she finally found her niche cleaning houses for the rich folk at Indian Springs. By then she’d nosed out the cheapest rent in America in the form of a ratty old single-wide trailer a mile or so east of Sinclair, the tiny black crossroads just down the road that supplies most of the population of Lincoln Park Elementary/Middle.

  That’s how Kenneth came to be the Yankee minority student amongst us, though Miss Susan is full-blooded Italian (actually, Sicilian), making him curly-haired and kind of dark. When we were little he was sometimes mistaken for an oreo (that is, mulatto), which used to annoy him, though since we’ve started high school in town, I’ve noticed he’s better about it, even subtly fosters this image of a cool, light-skinned black dude, wearing starter jackets and gold chains and stuff.

  But anyway, that was him in second grade: small and dark and quiet around adults, though he’s a great schemer and chatterer on the sly, and soon had me begging Mama to let him spend Memorial Day with us. This didn’t take much persuading because I’ve never had the truckload of friends Sim and Missy have and Mama was always afraid I’d grow up a loner like her, was just pleased as punch I had me a friend. When we got home that day, she had the house all clean and sparkling, had even made M&M cookies, as if she was afraid Kenneth would get mad if there wasn’t anything fit to eat and storm home, leaving me friendless.

  To tell you the truth, I think she might have overdone it a little, for even aside from its haunted reputation, our house can be kind of overwhelming on first impression, with the marble pool and the draped palms and the high-ceilinged rooms, all full of shining floors and antiques and (in Kenneth’s honor) even fresh flowers on the mantel. Poor Kenneth seemed kind of shell-shocked by it all, just sat there at the kitchen table, gnawing cookies and glancing around with these scared, furtive little looks, hardly able to answer Mama’s solicitous questions about where he was from and what his daddy did for a living.

  It was just her good Louisiana manners asserting themselves, but Kenneth is kind of sensitive about where he’s from, because he catches a lot of grief at school about being a Yankee, and his father has always been a sore spot that he doesn’t like to talk about much. And to be honest, Mama can be intimidating in her own right when she’s trying to make a good impression, for she is doggone close to six foot tall, and red-haired and attractive in an old-timey way, kind of a hick Maureen O’Hara. She’s also part Cajun (though she doesn’t like to talk about it) and just this inspired cook, her M&M cookies not the recipe on the bag, but this pleasing combination of butter and brown sugar, chocolate and pecans, all colorful and crunchy, better than anything you can find at the bakery or the mall.

  Between her and the house and the cookies, poor Kenneth didn’t have much to say, though once I got him shook loose of Mama’s good manners, he regained a little spunk and color as we spent the afternoon poking fishing poles in the dirt, searching for coffins. We didn’t have any luck but still had fun, and after another day spent nosing around the house, under the staircase and down in the cellar, he announced positively that for once in his young life, Reggie Hines was right: I most certainly did live in a haunted house.

  “We ain’t found nothing,” I argued, though he was insistent.

  “Gosh, Clay, who cares what we found? Ghosts aren’t like dogs. They just don’t come out when you whistle. But they’re here, all right. I can feel ’em.”

  Now, I believe I’ve mentioned that Kenneth can be a great persuader when he wants to be, and in the light of his absolute certainty I began to study our house with a different eye and had to admit that from certain angles and in certain lights, it certainly looked haunted.
Partially because of its age and partially because of my mother’s love of trees and the fact she never cuts any of them down, even if they are half-dead and hollow to the core. She just lets them stand, especially the live oaks, and won’t even clear out the scrub beneath them, so that our narrow gravel driveway curves through thirty acres of moss-draped wilderness till our old house suddenly appears, standing silent in the half-light of the canopy. It really does look gloomy on cold days, big and old-timey and spooky, with gables and a deep porch and three different chimneys, all with different angles and caps.

  So I had to admit that maybe Kenneth was on to something, and when school ended in June, ghost-busting quickly became our hobby. In the morning, Miss Susan sent him to day care in town, but as soon as he got home every afternoon, he’d pedal his bike over and we’d resume our investigation, poking the soft ground under the live oaks for graves or thumping the parlor walls, searching for secret passages. He’d sometimes bring along horror comics to fuel the fire, once brought along a Ouija board so we could have a séance and clear the air once and for all, but when we went to Mama to borrow candles, she strictly forbid it.

  “Leave them to their sorrows,” she said of our household ghosts with this half-joking, half-serious resignation that just infuriated me.

  “One of these days you’ll come upon one, at night, when Daddy’s at work,” I predicted, hoping to scare her. “Then what’ll you do?”

  But Mama, particularly resistant to this kind of challenge, just crossed her arms and smiled. “Well, baby, I’ll probably sit him down, fix him a cup of hot tea, ask why they planted the century oak so close to the house. Your daddy says it’s upending the foundation.”