The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  For technically speaking, I’ve hardly ever seen Uncle Ira except when I was little, when he used to come and visit sometimes. Even then, he wasn’t a real people person, nothing like my favorite uncle or anything (that would be Grannie’s brother, my great-uncle Case), but kind of distant and big, really big, which is what I remember most about him. He also smoked (Camels, I think), and filled the house with the smell of tobacco, which I found very pleasant, though it used to aggravate Daddy, who really did have this, like, pathological horror of being connected to trash in any form. And though Uncle Ira was borderline respectable back then, he still had the makings of a pretty trashy life, with a different woman every time he came (and a wife, too, somewhere out there, who Mama would always ask about). He also had a lot of tattoos, of dragons and eagles and things, some of which dated back to when he was stationed in Saigon, that I thought pretty cool, a sentiment Daddy didn’t share in the least. He only put up with him out of respect for Mama, at least till he (Uncle Ira, that is) was arrested in Orange Park for a crime (a murder, I knew that much) so bad that Mama wouldn’t talk about, though Sim knew all about it, but wouldn’t discuss it either. (“Spare yourself the details” is what he used to tell Missy and me.)

  But anyway, that was Uncle Ira, who was a drill instructor in the Marines and now in prison, two qualities I (secretly) found kind of attractive and certainly brag-worthy, much more than the Mystery Genius, who never favored us with so much as a phone call, much less a Christmas card or a visit. In my mind’s eye I pictured him as balding and nearsighted, kind of like the old guy on My Favorite Martian, though if I’d have thought about it, I’d have realized that he was too young for that, younger than Daddy, even.

  Like I say, I never really gave it much thought, at least not till that landmark weekend I turned nine, a day that started innocently enough, out by the pool, where everything in this family begins. The reason I was out there that day was because I had been begging Mama to let me and Kenneth swim early, when the water was still cold, and somehow in the wheeling and dealing had agreed to clean the pool, which was my first mistake of the day.

  For I believe I’ve mentioned that my mother has a great affection for trees; the only problem is that she has an equal aversion to aluminum and refuses to even consider defiling her marble pool with anything as tacky as a screened enclosure. This means that practically speaking, someone ends up with the thankless job of skimming leaves about five times a week, especially in March when the live oaks are shedding at a rate of about a pound a minute. It really is enough to try a saint’s patience, and I had finally burst into tears that afternoon as I had worked and worked to remove the floaters, when a burst of March wind sent down a shower of leaves, ruining an hour’s hard work.

  Missy, who was busy packing for a weeklong French Club field trip to Paris and in a rare obliging mood, came out to see what the fuss was all about and with her usual take-charge sureness, informed me that I was going about it the wrong way.

  “Do the bottom first,” she told me, “then the floaters.”

  I didn’t argue as she took the skimmer in hand and proceeded to demonstrate, giving me a little breathing space to sit there with my feet in the shallow end and curse Mama and her trees, too, when there was the sound of a car in the drive, pulling in so fast it skidded a little in the gravel.

  Something in the force of it was portentous, making Missy pause in her skimming long enough to lift her face, though before she could speak, our cousin Lori came tearing around the corner of the garage in bare feet and a pair of old cheerleading sweats, her blond hair limp, her face white-lipped and haggard.

  “Aint Myra?” she asked Missy in a trembling little voice. “Is she home?”

  Now, Lori is Aunt Candace’s one and only princess of a daughter, a Farrah Fawcett look-alike (though not as tall and skinny) who won’t leave the house until she’s spent some quality time with her hot-rollers and makeup mirror. Seeing her in public with flat hair and white lips was really kind of a shock, and I stood there and frankly stared as Missy tipped her head toward the house to indicate that Mama was inside.

  Lori didn’t even nod, just went straight in, calling for Mama, who met her just inside the French door, Lori handing her a slip of paper that she glanced at curiously, then looked up with a face of stone-cold surprise.

  “What is it?” Missy hissed, as if I had X-ray vision or something.

  I just shrugged, though it was clear something very heavy was coming down, Mama leading Lori to the kitchen with a protective arm around her shoulder, both of them looking at whatever Lori had handed her, a bad piece of news by the look of it.

  Missy and me just stood there gawking, polite enough to give them a thirty-second buffer before we tired of the suspense. “Be back in a sec,” she said, handing me the skimmer and gingerly opening the French door to go inside. She was only gone for a matter of seconds before she came back outside with a face of disgust.

  “What is it?” I whispered, though Missy just took the skimmer and started on the leaves again.

  “Nothing. I don’t know. Mama said for us to stay outside. Said we’re going over to Grannie’s.” She rolled her eyes when she said it because we were always being shuffled off to Grannie’s when something interesting was afoot. “But something mighty fishy’s going on. Mama called Daddy at work.”

  This was surely a premonition of evil if there ever was one, for Daddy was an unashamed workaholic who only left work early for reasons of national emergency. After that, Missy and I were a little rebuffed, watched in silence as Aunt Candace came screeching up in her little Subaru, then Daddy, who drove us to Grannie’s little house on the far side of town, in a West End neighborhood the old-timers call Magnolia Hill. Originally built around the same factory Daddy started working in when he was fifteen (and by dint of hard work and good luck, eventually bought from the original owners, lock, stock, and barrel), Magnolia Hill is just a tiny remnant of what was once the thriving working-class section of town.

  Now reduced to only three or four streets wide, it’s mostly made up of ancient little row houses intermixed with cheap prefabs and one or two mobile homes, the trailers flat-roofed double-wides with garden tubs and central air (that attract a lot of envy), the older houses with not much to offer in the way of modern comfort, though they have a lot of native charm, each with its own little yard and porch and potted begonia. But the Hill’s best feature, far and away, is that it’s within easy walking distance of all the landmarks of modern civilization: the Piggly Wiggly and the church and a McDonald’s, and comparatively close to the high school, so that it acts as our official home-away-from-home when we’re in town. I spend most of my Sunday afternoons there (watching wrestling with Grannie), while Missy and Sim practically live there during softball and basketball seasons, sometimes only coming home three or four nights a week.

  As a matter of fact, Sim was already there that day when Daddy dropped us off, just home from some practice or another—probably basketball, that time of year. For like Missy, Sim’s an all-around athlete, though unlike Missy, he’s not a born prodigy, just a solid, plodding player, the kind of four-year letterman who plays three different sports a year, but is never offered anything at graduation but small, low-dollar scholarships to no-name community colleges. He never complains, for in that and in most ways, he is truly the Perfect Southern Son, heir to the best of the Catts-Sims clans, as polite as Mama, as ambitious as Daddy, the kind of multicultural phenomenon who would be equally comfortable at Augusta National or the Winston Cup in Atlanta.

  When we got to Grannie’s that day, he came out as soon as he heard the car door and met us on the porch. “What’s up?” he asked Missy, who didn’t answer right away, just gave him a little glance over my head.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “Nobody’s talking. But something is up. Something has hit the fan.”

  That’s all she would offer with me standing there, for she and Sim have always had this annoying habit of keeping secrets
to themselves and not letting me in on them. That meant that around the Catts house, the Official Family Grapevine went from Mama to Daddy, to Sim to Missy, and there it ended, with me completely out of the loop. I never really knew why at the time, maybe because I was the baby of the family, or because I’d been known to blow their cover occasionally, or pass on information they’d just as soon I’d kept to myself.

  I was sure they knew something I didn’t, though when I went to Grannie for details, she didn’t pay me any mind, just concentrated on cooking supper (which is what Grannie does when she’s nervous: Mama gardens, Grannie cooks), filling her tiny little kitchen with the delectable smell of fried pork.

  “It’ll be all right,” she kept murmuring in this distracted little voice as she shifted pots around on her old gas stove, “it’ll work out.”

  I could get nothing more out of her, finally wandered back to the living room and spent the afternoon building a Lego city on the coffee table till just before dark, when there was a commotion in the drive, then the sound of many feet coming up the porch steps. Soon a whole chattering crowd spilled into the living room, Mama and Daddy and Uncle Ed and Aunt Candace, and finally Curtis and Lori, who were all smiles now, holding hands and announcing they had some big news: they were getting married.

  “I knew thet already,” I said, for they’d been engaged since Christmas, though Mama clarified things.

  “They’re getting married next weekend, baby,” she told me. “In the front yard, in the rose garden.”

  There was an immediate flurry of excitement and hugging, Grannie moved to tears at the wondrous news, till something suddenly occurred to me. “Wait a minute,” I cried. “You cain’t get married next week! We’re going fishing, me and Daddy. It’s all planned.”

  Because it was. That was my birthday present, a bass expedition to Lake Eufaula, just me and Daddy. We were going all out, borrowing Mr. Sam’s bass boat and spending two nights at the Holiday Inn on the river. We’d had reservations since Christmas, and wedding or not, I wasn’t letting go so easily, making my way to Lori and telling her flat out: “You’ll just have to wait till June. Thet’s what the invitations say, anyway. Why d’you wanta mess it up? Nobody gets married in March.”

  “Oh, hush,” was Lori’s truly blond reply, all my protests drowned out as Grannie’s living room is kind of small and gets filled pretty quickly.

  Within minutes, it was packed with Curtis’s sisters and parents, a regular hillbilly love fest, with me running around like a little white rabbit, tugging at people’s sleeves, saying: “But they cain’t. It’s my birthday. Me and Daddy are going fishing. It’s all planned.”

  “Oh, Clay, give it up,” Missy told me, as it was easy for her, she was going to Paris France on Monday, she could afford to be generous. I was the one getting the short end of the stick, and finally collapsed at the dining-room table in a torrent of tears, right there at the end where Grannie was sure to see me.

  Sure enough, she took one look at me and waded back into the living room, returned with Daddy in tow, though everyone was making such a racket that he could hardly be heard.

  “Settle down, Claybird!” he raised his voice to shout. “What’s all this fuss about?”

  “They cain’t get married next weekend!” I told him. “We’re going fishing! You PROMISED!”

  I had to positively holler this last, as it was the clincher and I wanted to make sure he heard me. Apparently he did, for he rubbed his face a moment, then made a grunt of impatience at the noise, gestured for me to follow him to Grannie’s spare bedroom, where he closed the door behind us, slightly muffling the roar.

  “Good God, what a bigmouthed bunch they are,” he said of his future nephew-in-law’s relations, for to be honest, I don’t think Daddy was ever real impressed with Curtis’s larger family, though he thought Curtis was nice enough. I mean, they weren’t like Uncle Ira, absolute abominations, but they weren’t much to write home about either, just pure-dee country, as they used to say; 100 percent pure Saltine.

  But that was all he said of them as he sat me down on the edge of the bed and tried to reason with me in this kind, patient voice: “Son, I know what I promised, but—”

  That was about as far as he got before I gave into complete despair, bursting into a fresh wave of tears, as it was clear that by some jinx of fate, Lori’s idiotic whim was taking precedence over MY BIRTHDAY! Me, Clayton Michael Catts! Who never even got to go to Atlanta, much less Paris, France! Who was the baby of the family and by God, dyslexic! Who couldn’t even read, though I tried and tried!

  The horror of the thing was just about more than I could bear, and for some time, Daddy sat there and tried to reason with me, promised me all kinds of things: that he’d take me to Waycross with him the next Friday, or buy me a new bike; that we’d plan another fishing trip, this one bigger and better than before.

  “To Eufaula?” I managed in a sniffly little voice.

  For a moment, he just sat there, then said: “Well, baby, I was thinking that maybe we’d do something a little closer to home. You know, wait till the river’s down in July, then call and see if Gabe could take off a few days, and we could all go out to Uncle Case’s like we used to when we were boys, set some trout lines, gig the stumps.”

  Now, of all the strange, misplaced, straight-out-of-left-field notions my father ever entertained, this had to be the strangest. I just looked at him in the purest amazement, breathed, “What?”

  He repeated himself levelly and you could tell he’d given it some thought, though I just sat there, thinking: Who cares? I mean, what was that by way of barter? Give up my golden trip to Eufaula with the custom-built bass boat and the Holiday Inn in favor of a weekend at Uncle Case’s dinky little trailer with seven hundred flea-bitten hounds and My Favorite Martian for company?

  I’d just as soon have a tooth pulled and my face must have shown it, for Daddy backed off after a moment, and went on to other options, other promises, though I just wouldn’t be consoled, kept bringing him back to my original argument: “But they weren’t supposed to get married till June! The invitations!”

  Daddy finally gave up then and stood, and for one desperate moment I thought I’d talked him around to my side and he was going to the living room to inform the larger household. But he just stood there a moment, arms crossed resolutely on his chest, then sighed and told me the real reason that Lori and Curtis had changed their wedding date: Lori was pregnant.

  “But she cain’t be,” I argued. “She ain’t married.”

  Daddy just scratched his ear on that, commented in a wry little voice: “Well, son, you don’t have to be married to get pregnant, you know.”

  By the blank look on my face, he must have realized that I by gosh didn’t know, for he sighed another big sigh, then sat back down on the edge of the bed and began talking to me in this patient, fatherly voice about how we were all human and made mistakes and how that sometimes, your emotions could get away with you, and all kinds of nutty, irrelevant stuff.

  I just sat there and stared at him, was wondering what the heck he was talking about, when he suddenly dispensed with the morality of the situation and dived in the deep end, explained how you could indeed get pregnant, married or not, as long as you performed a few necessary functions. Then, without even pausing for a breath, he went into a little blunt, country detail about those functions, about which I’d heard a lot of snickering and rumors before, but never stated so baldly right there on my sainted Grannie’s chenille bedspread in a house full of chattering relations.

  I don’t believe I’ve ever been so truly disgusted in my life, and my face must have shown it, for Daddy stood again abruptly and began pacing around the little room like he did when he was nervous. He finally paused and asked if I had any questions, which I certainly did not, though I did lower my pillow to ask in a trembling voice: “Daddy, you ain’t ever done anything like that, have you?”

  This brought him to a complete halt there at the foot of the be
d, his arms crossed on his chest, his face amazed and a little exasperated, though he tried to be kind.

  “Well, Claybird?” he asked. “Son? Where d’you think I got you childrun?”

  And I tell you what: the horror of that remark just about made me swoon, it really did, till an even more hideous thought occurred to me, making me lift three trembling fingers, whisper: “You did it three times?”

  For a moment, Daddy just stood there staring at me, arms crossed on his chest, his face much like Mama’s had been when Lori handed her that mysterious slip of paper, kind of stunned and blank, then he just dropped forward to the bed, as if he’d been shot. I didn’t know if he’d fainted or what, and really didn’t care, just buried my face in my pillow, while he lay there beside me, laughing so hard he couldn’t speak.

  “Claybird, Claybird, Claybird,” he finally wheezed. “What are we gonna do with you, son?”

  But I was too numb to join in the hilarity, just lay there thinking: My gosh, Curtis and Lori did that? No wonder they were always traipsing off to the drive-in—at least that was dark. How could they come waltzing into Grannie’s living room in front of God and everybody when everyone knew what they’d been up to? Had they no taste? Had they no shame?

  I don’t know how long we lay there, till Uncle Case gingerly opened the door and checked us out, clearly curious about Daddy’s laughter, though he only asked, “Claybird? You wanta run uptown with me? Yo Grannie’s out of rock salt, wanting to make some ice cream. You kin ride in the back.”