The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Maybe even more fascinated, for at least Missy had been able to vent her curiosity about Gabe aloud, pose a few questions, and once Daddy came home from the hospital, he simply never mentioned his brother again. He was just too sick by then, on oxygen part of the time and all these different medicines, so weak he hardly got out of bed anymore, even to go to the bathroom. But as long as Mama was with him, he was fine, all safe and sound and content, which is just where the rest of us wanted him, Sim and Missy and me farmed out to friends and relations who wined and dined us every night of the week.

  Sim practically moved in the parsonage with Brother and Sister Sloan, while Missy stayed with Joanna Chapin (her best friend) and I was shuttled around between different people—Daddy’s partner, Mr. Sam, and his family, and Curtis and Lori—though I mostly stayed with Kenneth, who lived so close that I could still ride the bus to school. I couldn’t complain, for Uncle Lou had flown in for the holidays, and every night would present us with some new Italian delicacy: antipasto and handmade cannolis, fried squid and fresh spinach swimming in garlic and olive oil. I think he was trying to feed me out of my misery, though to tell you the truth, I had gotten caught up in the whirlwind of activities and the hugs and pity and being the center of attention and really wasn’t as heartbroken as everyone thought.

  I mean, sure, it was tough seeing Daddy so thin and weak, but he and Mama were so low-key and coolheaded about it all. Whenever he wasn’t actually sleeping, they would pass the afternoons sitting up in bed planning his funeral, fussing like they always did, Daddy wanting to go first class, Mama more practical, wondering aloud at the luxury of a polished cherry coffin when the pine ones looked good to her.

  “You’ll be in a vault,” she reasoned, making Daddy (who was just the pickiest person in the world on matters of quality assurance) rise up from his bed of affliction long enough to shout: “Pine? Slash pine? It’s particle-board, Myra! Why don’t you just pitch me in the ground and be done with it?”

  “Oh, hush,” Mama would reply, not very moved by his outburst, but kind of tired and drugged herself, as Dr. Williams had put her back on medication—not lithium, but something else. Something for her nerves, she said, the first she had taken in years.

  Whatever it was, it made her sleep about as much as Daddy, so that if you dropped by the house to see them those first few weeks in December, chances were you’d find them snuggled up under an electric blanket like two little twins in a mother’s womb, the bed strewn with sports pages and get-well cards and florist brochures. I’d just leave them a note and a kiss before I was swooped off on another fun trip, to the beach with Sim or mullet fishing with Uncle Case, or there, the first Saturday of Christmas break, to Busch Gardens with Kenneth and his uncle Lou, who’d fought the good fight with cancer himself, and was very sympathetic to Daddy’s plight.

  It all went so quickly, so painlessly, that even after Daddy went back to the hospital that night, I wasn’t too worried. I just hung out with Sim, went to the movies, really didn’t understand that the end was upon us, because, well, it had never been upon us before. Even when Aunt Candace woke me up early Tuesday morning and told me to get dressed, that Brother Sloan needed to talk to me, I didn’t get too upset. I just pulled on some sweats and followed her to the living room, where in a scene almost identical to the one in September, he sat us down on the couch and told us that Daddy had died that morning in the hospital, just before dawn.

  This time, there was no hysteria or crying, just a lot of closed eyes and deep breaths, and it was only then that I realized what a burden Daddy’s quiet, stoic decline had been on all of us. I mean, when they’d sat us down four months ago and given us the news about the cancer, there’d been tears and disbelief and fake courage. Now there was only a bone-deep relief that it was finally over: the thinness and the shots and the morphine and the Lysol smell, all of it echoed in Brother Sloan’s assurance that Daddy hadn’t suffered, but died in his sleep, peaceful in the end.

  Only Aunt Candace seemed truly rattled, jumping in and giving us this bright-eyed lecture about how we had to stick together and have faith in God, before she finally fell apart and sobbed like a schoolgirl against Brother Sloan’s shoulder. He patted her on the back and told her all his little Baptist things, leaving me and Missy and Sim to sit there in our pajamas in an embarrassed little silence, glancing at one another out of the corners of our eyes and getting kind of weird about it when there was a rattle at the door, and Mama came in for the first time in three days.

  Just that quickly, the weirdness was gone, for she was just her tired old Mama-self, disheveled and exhausted and vampire-pale. But she had a kiss for all of us, even Brother Sloan, before she plopped down in one of the wing chairs and answered Aunt Candace’s sniffling inquiries about where she’d been. That wasn’t she supposed to go to Mama’s? (Aunt Candace’s Mama, which would be Grannie.)

  “I’ve already come and gone,” she said with a yawn.

  Somebody—Brother Sloan—asked how Grannie was holding up, and Mama answered with her eyes closed: “You know Cissie. Solid as a rock. Sent me home to sleep, I don’t know why. That’s all I do anymore.”

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked, bringing on a round of these fast, strange looks, as if everyone thought I hadn’t caught it, that he was dead, though all I meant was: Where was his body?

  Only Mama understood and answered with that same tired, unemotional levity that had taken her through his illness: “Being fitted for that fine cherry coffin, I guess. Twelve thousand dollars and gold-plated fittings. He will be pleased.”

  It was so unexpected, so calm and assured, that suddenly everything was cool again, all of us bursting into laughter, even Aunt Candace, who quickly regrouped and ordered Mama to bed, then spent the rest of the day working out her grief by bossing us around like a drill instructor. I mean, you’d think the day your father died would be one of peace and introspection, but with Aunt Candace in charge, it wasn’t exactly a day of rest, Missy and me having to do laundry and strip our beds and even vacuum the pool.

  By the time Mama woke up that afternoon, the house was restored to a semblance of its old holiday cheer, the Christmas tree twinkling in the living room, the kitchen sparkling, the late-December chill barely cool enough for a fire. You’d never know anything had happened at all except for the constant baying of the phone and the carloads of food that began to arrive around supper: whole hams and smoked turkey, fried chicken and sweet corn, cakes and pies and a gigantic pan of homemade lasagna from Mr. Lou. I think in that way, Sicilians and Southerners are alike: they think gluttony a good cure for grief, and far from spending that little two-day interval between Daddy’s death and funeral in mourning, I mostly spent it in feasting, hanging around the kitchen, Styrofoam plate in hand, chatting with the hundred thousand visitors who dropped in to pay their respects.

  To tell you the truth, I don’t think some of them even knew Daddy, but had just seen his obituary in the paper and dropped by out of sheer curiosity, as rumor of Mama’s magnificent house and garden had circulated around town for years, but if you didn’t attend Welcome Baptist, chances are you never got a peek. At least none of the mourners seemed too overwhelmed by grief, but just wandered around, plate in hand, going on and on about the marble pool and the palms, asking all kinds of questions about the fireplaces and the mantels and the acres of shining wood floor.

  “—white oak downstairs, yellow pine above,” I heard Mama explain a dozen times in answer to a dozen inquiries, and of her roses: “The red are Louie-Philippe, the white, Clotilde Soupert.”

  You’d think she was a guide on a tour of homes instead of a grieving widow, though I much preferred her levelheaded, gray-eyed hospitality to the cloud of just inconsolable despair that had settled at Grannie’s, where Daddy’s people had gathered in this strange Baptist-Irish wake that was just too creepy for words. Mama made us go over that first night to show ourselves to our aunts (great-aunts, that is, Grannie’s sis
ters), who kept grabbing me every time I passed in these rib-crushing hugs, telling me things like: “He picks the loveliest flowers for His bouquet” (meaning, I suppose, that Jesus had picked Daddy for his centerpiece—and a strange notion it was).

  Even the men on the porch were subdued, Uncle Case slumped in a corner, chin to his chest, not joining in the stories the other men told about Daddy, but just staring into space, so pathetic that I offered him different things to cheer him up: cake, tea, even a stick of gum, all of which he refused with a polite: “No, baby. Wouldn’t care for it.”

  Compared to that, I much preferred Mama and her historic tour that lasted till Thursday afternoon when her relatives began to trickle in from Birmingham and Slidell. And though they were pretty Irish themselves, with flaming red hair and majorly hick voices, they were naturally less heartbroken than Daddy’s kin, and seemed to look on his demise as an opportunity to take a cheap trip to Florida, most of them having plans to go on to Disney or the beach once Daddy was properly put away. I didn’t begrudge them their holidays, though their sheer numbers made for a lot of dirty dishes and loud talk and commotion, the house filled with a cloud of cigarette smoke that made me think of Uncle Ira, who couldn’t come, of course, though he did call Grannie and offer his condolences.

  By the afternoon of the viewing, Uncle Gabe was the only official relation still unaccounted for, and a source of some anxiety to Missy, as the general feeling among the Louisiana kin was that he wouldn’t show.

  “Why not?” she was bold enough to ask one of the old men on the porch, a great-uncle from Slidell, who regarded her levelly over his cigarette, drawled: “Well, shug, same reason the skeleton wouldn’t cross the road.”

  He let us reflect on this nonsense a moment, then supplied the punch line with a wink: “Didn’t have the guts.”

  The other old men burst into laughter, prompting Missy to later ask Mama (in the privacy of her bedroom): “Why are your relatives so weird?”

  Mama, who was sitting at her vanity, trying to camouflage her Dracula-paleness with a Estée Lauder compact, just sighed: “Oh, baby, I don’t know. It’s a Louisiana thing.”

  Which was how Mama explained most of the intricacies of life. Daddy’s unbridled ambition was a compulsion thing. Uncle Ira’s tattoos were a rejection thing. Sim’s 3.9 average was a perfection thing. It was as if she grasped the essence of all of them; she just didn’t have the words to break them down into clear-cut explanation.

  By then, Missy was positively desperate for news of Uncle Gabe, and tried to pin her down. “Well, why are they so nasty about Uncle Gabe?” she asked. “What’s he ever done to them?”

  Mama had not so much as mentioned Uncle Gabe since me and Sim had our little run-in last year, but has always gone to great lengths to satisfy Missy’s boundless curiosity. She paused a moment, compact in hand, and tried to offer a halting explanation: “Well, baby—your uncle—he tends to, kind of, get on people’s nerves.”

  “How?” Missy insisted. “He’s like the nicest guy in the world. He’s hilarious.”

  Mama just blinked at that, murmured: “Well, he would be, to you.”

  Missy, who has never had much patience with Mama and her strange Mama-ways, was truly exasperated by then. “How can he be the nicest guy in the world and get on everybody’s nerves, too?” she demanded, and for a moment, Mama faced her in the mirror, then bowed to the inevitable.

  “I don’t know, baby,” she said, returning to her compact. “It’s a Gabe thing.”

  Which didn’t offer much hope that he’d show up that night at the viewing, me and Missy spending most of the evening in the foyer of the funeral home, Missy running to the door every time a car pulled in the parking lot, thinking it was Uncle Gabe.

  “He ain’t coming,” I told her at eight, when the early-comers had begun to leave, making Missy gnaw her lip in a way that made her look amazingly like Daddy.

  “Well, it’s not his fault,” she reasoned. “He probably doesn’t even know. I mean, Aint Candace couldn’t find a home number, just left a message at work—oh, and Clay,” she added, her eyes still on the parking lot, “listen—if he does come, don’t stare at his hand or anything, okay? I mean, it’ll just embarrass the crud out of me if you do.”

  My reputation as an unabashed starer was legendary in the Catts household, nothing I could deny, though the news about his hand was new to me, making me gape at her, ask, “What’s wrong with his hand?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just messed up. He can’t use it, so don’t try to shake it or anything, or put the old X-ray vision on it.” (Which is what Missy called it when I gave something a particularly potent stare.)

  As you can imagine, this just weirded the heck out of me. It was like telling me he had a glass eye or something; I knew as soon as I saw him I’d be staring at his bad hand like a big old goober and he’d be humiliated and never come back. That’s really how I felt, which is kind of strange when you think about it, that even then, when Daddy was hardly cold and Mama in shock and Uncle Gabe still sight unseen, I was already making plans for him, wondering what I’d say to him; wondering where he’d stay.

  Even with all of Mama’s kin piling in, there were still a few empty couches at our house and one bed: the bottom bunk in my bedroom that wasn’t what you might call a luxury accommodation, but cheaper than a motel (which is why Grannie said all Mama’s people were staying with us: too cheap to rent a room). I’d kept it there, saved, in case he wanted to stay with us, but he never showed that night, Missy finally going inside at nine-thirty and sitting beside Uncle Case in a dejected slump on a love seat in the hallway, both of them red-eyed and desolate, the very picture of grief.

  She continued to hold out a faint hope that he’d fly in that night, though when morning dawned the next day, we were too busy to give it much thought, as it wasn’t any small task, getting ready for a funeral in a house that for all the splendor of the wood floors and marble pool, only had one shower. Everyone had to line up and take their turn, a minor crisis erupting when I couldn’t find my dress shoes, though by the time the funeral home limousine pulled up at ten-thirty, I was the only one who was dressed and ready and got the best seat, next to the window.

  Sim had spent the night with Grannie, and at the last minute Mama had insisted on taking her own car to the church, so Missy and me had to ride in alone with all the out-of-towners, Missy weepy and withdrawn while I was overcome by this silly nervousness that made me laugh a lot and just chatter my head off, all the way to town. I mean, it wasn’t that I was happy I was going to my father’s funeral, it was just so new, the limousine and the attention, everyone slipping me Certs and promising me things—to take me to Disney World that summer, or the Superdome in New Orleans.

  It was like I was suddenly the Cinderella of the Ball, the only note of weirdness Missy’s tears that were profuse and unending, and Sim’s stony silence when he met us at the church and I bragged about the limousine and how cool it was. You could tell by his expression that it was exactly the wrong thing to say, though he didn’t tell me I was an idiot or anything, just told me to sit still during the service and BE QUIET.

  Then he turned me over to a funeral-home usher, who led me through the double doors into the sanctuary that was packed to the gills with people all dressed up in suits and hats and gloves, though I didn’t pay them much mind. I only had eyes for the front of the church that was as familiar to me as the back of my hand, though on that day it was hardly recognizable, the altar and pulpit transformed by a strange, glittering forest of flowers that were jammed in around an open coffin in a wild profusion of color. They were nothing that Mama could grow in her yard, but enormous carnations and orchids and hothouse lilies, their size and very perfection almost dwarfing Mama’s sole contribution to the day: a simple oval arrangement of green spidery fern dotted with ten dozen tiny pink roses that covered the foot of the shining cherry coffin.

  They were Cecile Brunner, an antique rose that had just l
ately become her passion, one that Daddy used to bemoan (because they were so expensive), though even he would have admitted that these were a great success, delicate and fragile against the waxy flamboyance of the other flowers, a quiet, intimate message that for the first time that day, brought a heaviness to my heart, a sudden nervous pounding. (“Sweetheart roses,” Mama had told him in bed last week when she ordered them, “because you are my sweetheart.”)

  Just that quickly, my happy little rise of excitement was replaced by a clammy tightness in my chest that made it hard to breathe as the usher pushed past the edge of the flowers and seated me smack in the middle of the family pew, right across from the coffin, next to Mama. She must have realized I was having a hard time of it, for she took my hand immediately, gave it a little squeeze for courage, then held it tight throughout the service that was actually kind of boring. There were just too many speakers, the preachers all saying the same things they’d been telling us in private for the past two days: that in my Father’s house are many mansions, and so on, things I’d been hearing all my life, though I didn’t much understand how they applied (because my father already had a mansion, out in the woods, that he and Mama had spent a fortune fixing up and restoring and what good would it do him now, lying there in that shining cherry box?).

  When they finally finished, Mr. McQuaig got up last of all and didn’t try to preach, but just reminisced about Daddy, about growing up with him on Magnolia Hill and what a hard worker he was and finicky and neat; how much he loved baseball. It was all well and good, just that he went on forever, and kept crying and snorting back snot in a way that nearly drove me crazy. I was about nuts by the time they finally handed the service back to Brother Sloan, who prayed a final prayer, then had us stand and sing Daddy’s favorite hymn (“Amazing Grace”) that for some reason, we sang without an accompaniment. It was the first (and only) time we’d ever done it that way, the familiar old hymn echoing back eerily hollow to my ears and just heart-wrenchingly sad.