The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  When Daddy was alive, he kept her meddling in line, but now that he was gone, poor Mama had a hard time resisting her, caving in like pressed aluminum on the matter of the graveyard visits, coming to my bedroom when she left and apologizing in a contrite little voice: “Baby, I didn’t mean to—you know—scare you, with the pauper thing. I don’t want to be an unnecessary burden to you children.”

  I assured her she hadn’t been and got kind of cross with Grannie myself, for always keeping such a line on Mama, always trying to run her life. I wouldn’t go over to her house to watch wrestling the next Sunday, which might not sound like much of a boycott, but was, Grannie getting my message loud and clear, staring at me in church that night with this sad, forsaken little look and passing me a whole pack of gum (usually she only passes it by the stick). I didn’t even unwrap it or chew any, just handed it to Mama to put in her purse, and poor Grannie, it was like a knife in her heart.

  After that, she let up on Mama and never criticized her openly, even when spring gave way to a hot, humid summer and the men started calling, all kinds of men, all suddenly very concerned about our welfare, wanting to see how we were holding up under the strain of our grievous loss. Mama told them we were holding up very well, and didn’t return their calls, so I didn’t think much of it—at least not till late June, when Kenneth casually mentioned that Uncle Lou was flying in for Fourth of July, wondered if me and Mama wanted to go to the beach with them for the fireworks.

  I was thinking about it, picturing all of us on a blanket on the sand, when he dropped his bombshell with his customary calm: “I mean, face it, Clay: if you’re gonna have a stepfather, you might as well have one you like.”

  I just stared at this, thinking poor Kenneth had finally gone ’round the bend. “What d’you mean, stepfather?” I asked. “I don’t have a stepfather.”

  “Not yet,” he offered with a knowing little look, “but brace yourself.”

  I had found over the years that the best way to deal with Kenneth was bald interrogation, and asked him plainly: “What the heck are you talking about?”

  “Stepfathers,” he repeated. “You know: the man who takes your real father’s place—your mother’s new husband. The guy she starts dating, then talking about all the time, telling you what a great guy he is and how you need to be friends—then, if all goes according to plan, marries.”

  Finally, he’d hit upon a word that connected. “You think Mama’ll get married?” I asked with exactly the same disbelief I’d once asked if he thought she was a vampire.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not? She’s a good-looking woman—for a mother,” he added quickly, lest I start suspecting him of untoward motives, “and a good wife, too, and cooks and goes to church, which nobody does anymore. Mom says she’d be perfect for Uncle Lou, because he cooks, too, and has had cancer and all, and can relate to her grief.”

  I didn’t have an answer to this, just sat there and tried to imagine Mama and Uncle Lou, but it was a hard match. Aside from the fact they were both inspired cooks and had good manners, there wasn’t much to go by, as Uncle Lou was gray-haired and about fifty and wore a gold chain, and that chain alone knocked him out of Mama’s orbit. That chain said: I ain’t from around here, and furthermore, her old redneck uncles would eat him for breakfast the first time she took him home to Louisiana, run him over with a tractor or something.

  I think Kenneth could see that I wasn’t taking too much to the notion as he tried to go to bat for Uncle Lou in a sly way, going on to tell me about stepfathers and how awful they could be. How they were all nice at first, when they were after your mother, then, once the honeymoon was over, they slowly got exasperated, then, finally, tired and ready to be rid of you.

  “It’s your mother they’re in love with,” he explained with a shrug, not particularly bitter, just matter-of-fact. “You’re just a kid to them. Another mouth to feed.”

  Gabe would later identify this air of tired resignation as Premature Cynicism, but at the time, I took Kenneth’s unemotional speculation as the honest truth, and a chilling one at that. I was so shook up about it that Kenneth took pity on me and backed off, though he continued to drop hints about Uncle Lou all summer long, and how much he liked children, how Italians were big on family; how much money he made with Anheuser-Busch. How he had a retirement. I had a feeling that Miss Susan was somewhere in the background feeding this thing, and in less kind moments wondered if they had their eye on planting Uncle Lou upstairs in Daddy’s magnificent bed and the rest of them in a trailer out back, with all our family furniture and fortune to be shared.

  I must say I wasn’t too keen on the idea, not that it did much good, for by then, by Labor Day, everyone at Welcome was full of speculation over who would marry the Widow Catts and become part owner of her Mercedes and big old mansion. With the official Year of Mourning almost over, all kinds of men had begun to call, not just Uncle Lou, but Brother Kennard and James Lee’s granddaddy (who was old as the hills and kind of funny about it), even Carlym, who was a lot younger than Mama but probably willing to overlook a few crow’s-feet for the chance to move out of the cramped little parsonage and into Mama’s magnificent bed (so said Missy).

  Mama herself seemed to find the whole subject kind of tasteless and didn’t like talking about it, and I finally ended up going to Missy to discuss it, as she is my second-choice confider, less sympathetic than Grannie, but slightly more confidential. I tracked her to her bedroom one night in late September, a year and a month to the day that Daddy had his first surgery, found her sitting up in bed working her way through her usual mountain of homework, the bedspread and surrounding floor strewn with notebook paper and calculators and Norton anthologies.

  “We need to talk,” I told her, shutting the door behind me.

  She was used to me coming to her with my little problems and didn’t even ask why, just laid her book facedown on her chest and listened grimly to the news that Kenneth had passed on that afternoon: that Uncle Lou was coming down for Thanksgiving, was wanting to know Mama’s favorite flower so he could send her a Thanksgiving arrangement. Missy didn’t need any more explanation than that, just chewed her lip a moment, asked: “Does Grannie know?”

  I assured her she didn’t (or if she did, she hadn’t heard it from me) and Missy was thoughtful. “Maybe we ought to tell her,” she offered.

  I nodded, was about to say something else when she added, from right out of the blue: “Uncle Gabe needs to get his butt home where it belongs.”

  For a moment, I didn’t think I’d heard her correctly, breathed: “What?”

  “Uncle Gabe,” she repeated casually, as if we discussed him every night of our life. “He needs to come home.”

  “Why?” I pressed, as Missy had gotten kind of quiet on the subject of Uncle Gabe the last few months, with none of her earlier enthusiasm, carefully sidestepping the subject if I brought him up. Over the course of the summer I’d tried to feel her out a few times, find out why she was suddenly so distant about him, but she was resistant to all my hints and comments, simply wouldn’t be drawn out, as elusive and mysterious as Sim had been back when Daddy first mentioned him the weekend I turned nine.

  I was naturally curious at her sudden thawing, though Missy just shrugged, answered simply: “’Cause he’s the obvious choice.”

  “Choice of what?” I begged, for being the token idiot in a family of child geniuses has always been a burden to me. With Missy especially, I’m always running along a few yards behind, peppering questions at her back that she’s too impatient to answer.

  “For second husband,” she replied, a little line of annoyance creeping into her forehead, as if I’d missed an obvious truth here. I was sure enough speechless at that and just sat there dumbfounded while she went on to bemoan the fact that Aunt Candace had somehow lost his number in a moving mishap. “—And nobody can find him anymore. It’s like he’s fallen off the face of the earth.”

  “But why Uncle Gabe?” I had to break in a
nd ask, making Missy repeat herself with great exasperation.

  “Because he’s the obvious choice, Clay. You want Carlym moving in here, walking around in his underwear, making us go to church every time the doors open? Or Uncle Lou, or some stranger from the grocery store?”

  “Well, why does Mama have to marry anyone?” I countered, my sincerity making Missy back off a little and actually look at me, as if, for once, I’d made a point worthy of consideration.

  “Well, you’re right, of course,” she allowed. “I mean, chances are, she’ll just stay holed up in this mausoleum of a old house, sipping tea and reading Sherlock Holmes till she dies. Ever read ‘A Rose for Emily’?”

  I shook my head wordlessly, though Missy didn’t belabor it, just sighed again, hugely, then fixed me with a level eye. “I tell you Clay: Uncle Gabe must return. He’s the missing link, the only one who can bring Mama back. He would, too, if he thought Grannie was cool with it. That’s why he hasn’t come back. He’s afraid she’s still mad about—you know—”

  She paused then, as if waiting for a reply, though I just sat there, taken aback by the fanatical ring in her voice that kind of reminded me of the way Brother Sloan talked about the Rapture in church. I half expected her to say: The trump would sound and the dead in Christ would rise first, though she wouldn’t go any further without me, just insisted: “What about you?”

  “What about what?” I caged, making Missy roll her eyes.

  “What about Uncle Gabe? Marrying Mama? I mean, you’re cool with it, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged, for I wasn’t cool with it as much as perplexed. “Well, I don’t know,” I offered hesitantly. “I’m not sure it’ll, you know, work.”

  I said this very carefully, for we were embarking on sensitive waters here, even I knew that, and a misstep or a wrong comment could bring on the wrath of Missy and Sim and Grannie, too. For in the intervening year since I’d last discussed Uncle Gabe with Missy, I’d had a conversation of my own with an informed source who’d given me a very private, very enlightening bit of insight about our Absent Uncle, whose mystery had turned out to be a very tricky mystery, indeed.

  Missy, who has a radar like Grannie, immediately picked up on my hesitancy and pinned me with a level eye. “Did Daddy ever—you know—talk to you about him? About Uncle Gabe?”

  We were drifting into even trickier waters here, my reply very careful. “Well, he said, you know, that he’d be back. That I should, give him a chance.”

  When I didn’t offer anything else, she pressed me further: “Is that all? He didn’t tell you anything else? Anything kind of”—she paused a moment, then offered—“weird?”

  I immediately knew what she was talking about and told her plainly: “Not him, but I know. I heard.”

  “Ah,” she said with a wry smile. “Who told? Surely not Grannie.”

  “Miss Cassie,” I said, meaning Cassie Campbell, our family beautician.

  “Might have guessed,” Missy muttered with another roll of her eyes, then: “Well, are you okay with it? I mean, it must have been weirder than heck, finding out at the beauty parlor—good gosh, don’t tell Grannie. She’ll have Miss Cassie’s head.”

  This was aside, as if speaking to herself, then, more directly: “I didn’t even know myself till after the funeral, when I kept wanting to call him. Mama sat me down and had this little gruesome little mother-daughter talk. I think Daddy meant to tell you himself, when he was sick, but everything happened so fast, there at the end, and I don’t think he wanted you to—you know—think badly of him. Of Uncle Gabe, I mean.”

  “I don’t,” I assured her, though I did have to ask: “What about Carlym? And Brother Sloan?” For that was my first concern, that Brother Sloan or Carlym would find out and be all up in arms about it, have Grannie cut from her Sunday-school class, I shouldn’t think.

  But Missy didn’t seem particularly worried, just gave a little shrug. “Well, what about ’em?” she asked. “They probably don’t even know. Or Carlym doesn’t. Brother Sloan, maybe.”

  “What about Mama?” I had to ask, meaning: What was her take on all this? I mean, as far as I could see, she’d be the one making the great sacrifice by marrying Uncle Gabe, though Missy just rolled her eyes in exasperation like she always did when speaking of Mama and her nutty vampire ways.

  “Well, who knows? You know Mama: the Sphinx Woman. She won’t talk about it, even to Aunt Candace. But she’ll be cool with it if he comes back. She loves him, you know.”

  “Uncle Gabe?” I exclaimed for maybe the fifth time that night, though Missy was very nonchalant and matter-of-fact.

  “Sure. You know, they grew up together on the Hill, were like childhood sweethearts, or something. Her father’s the one who messed up his hand.”

  “Granddaddy Sims?” I breathed, though Missy just gave another shrug.

  “Apparently so. That’s why Grannie hates him so much—because of what he did to Uncle Gabe. Messed him up, like, emotionally. Aunt Candace says that everything that happened was because of him.”

  I just blinked at that, wondered how Granddaddy Sims could be thought responsible for something as weird as Uncle Gabe’s proclivities, though Missy didn’t give me much time to ponder it, but brought me back to earth with an impatient: “So? Are we in agreement here? About Uncle Gabe? No throwing your weight behind any outside contenders?”

  She was speaking of Uncle Lou, of course, and for a moment, I hesitated, weighing the possibilities, then offered without much conviction: “I guess.”

  She smiled then, a quick, unthinking smile of genuine affection that was always a shock in my redheaded sister, who only favored Daddy in two ways: her grand slams and the sudden, infectious grin that occasionally lit her fair, freckled face, transforming it eerily into his image.

  “Then we’re cool here,” she announced with a fond little slap to my leg. “And I must say, Clay, that you’ve just surprised the crud out of me, taking this so well. I mean, everybody—Aunt Candace and Grannie—they all thought you’d flip out or something, and here you are, cool as a cucumber, acting like you practically have good sense.”

  I just grunted at her good-natured insult, flattered despite myself, though as was usual with Missy, I had the feeling that maybe 60 percent of the conversation had passed a foot over my head. But at the moment was just glad to be on the winning side and stood and went on to bed; I didn’t have anything better to do. Sim was at the movies with his girlfriend Sondra, Mama asleep (also as usual), the night hot for October and very still, the summer crickets gone by then, though the owls were out and about, mating in the trees with a racket that wasn’t to be believed.

  I remember lying in bed that night and listening to them, their frantic cluck-cluck-cluck-CLUCK-CLUCK rising to this shriek of passion, just unbelievably loud, like flocks of horny chickens had taken over the earth. Between them and my stepfather worries, I stayed up half the night, though I did finally come to some sort of peace about it, figured that Missy was right: if Uncle Gabe could be talked into doing the right thing and coming home to raise his brother’s children, then I’d be cool with it, even it meant getting kicked out of Welcome, or becoming the laughingstock of Lincoln Park Middle.

  Because that was the real snag, even then. I mean, it was bad enough that I was the token rich white kid in a poor black school, the only kid in class who lived in a haunted house, who could barely read. Now, chances are, I’d be the only kid in North America with a vampire for a mother and a fag for a stepfather. And boy, I knew even then that if word got out, I’d never hear the end of it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Now, the notion that Gabe was gay never would have come into my head unassisted, though once the possibility lodged itself there, it became as real and sure to me as the idea that Mama was a converted Baptist vampire. It just answered a lot of questions, solved the Mystery of the Missing Uncle in a most satisfactory manner, sometime right after the funeral when Gabe and his abrupt departure was still the talk of the
town, everyone—Lori and Curtis, Brother Sloan, even Uncle Case—pulling me aside, asking if he’d said anything to me while he stood there in front of Daddy’s coffin and stared me down.

  They usually backed off at my quick shake of the head, my obvious reluctance to discuss it, though not Miss Cassie, who is just the prototype of the nosy beautician, the kind caught in a fashion time warp, still wearing stretch pants and frosted pink lipstick and eternally blond hair. Once she had you caped and imprisoned in her chair, you were at the mercy of her battery of questions that were personal and unending, mostly about Daddy and Sanger Furniture, though that day she was more keyed to family gossip, not beating around the bush with preliminaries, but going straight to the heart of the matter.

  “So what’s old Gabe Catts up to these days?” she asked as soon as I sat down, in this tone of great familiarity, for she had grown up at Welcome, had known Daddy before he came into any great bucks, a fact she was always bringing up, maybe to prove that their friendship wasn’t mere sucking up to the rich, but old and historic.

  I shrugged in reply, indicating that I didn’t know Gabe or anything about him, though Miss Cassie wasn’t to be drawn off the scent, Velcroing the cape at the back of my neck and regarding my head with a professional eye.

  “Well, he was home for the funeral,” she said, tilting my chin this way and that. “I saw him in the parking lot—didn’t get a chance to speak.” Then, “How short d’you want this?”

  “Real short,” I told her, for I was still in my Redneck Stage back then, back before the Gabe Revolution, wearing Wranglers and Ropers, keeping my hair high and tight, crew-cut if Mama would let me.

  “Doing that Redneck Thang,” Miss Cassie murmured as she rifled around her console for her electric shears, then returned to the matter at hand. “Well, he looked kind of disoriented to me. Was he drunk?”