The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  With that kind of distance between us, I could think about him without that awful sink of despair; could even worry that I was losing him. For aside from my little midnight hauntings, I could hardly remember him anymore: his bossy old voice, his grunts of interest; his wheezing laughter when I said something that amused him. (“Claybird, Claybird, Claybird. What’re we gonna do with you, son?”)

  My failing memory didn’t perplex me as much as it filled me with a nagging little guilt over not being more loyal to his memory, though when I mentioned it to Gabe one morning on the ride to school, he didn’t seem overly shocked or disappointed. “You were only eleven when he died,” he pointed out. “And grief is a strange process, anyway, like the tide on the beach that comes and goes. As you get older, pieces of him will begin to return to you. Then, one day, you’ll find that the bad things—the guilt, the regret—are mostly gone, the laughter and the little things are what remain. And that never goes away.”

  We rode along in silence for a moment, till something seemed to occur to him, making him turn and look at me with sudden interest. “Why don’t you make him your final project?”

  “Daddy?” I asked in amazement, for our final projects were a very big deal, indeed, individual oral histories he wanted us to concentrate on the last four weeks of school with an eye toward entering the best of them in the countywide Social Studies Fair.

  This was always held the last Monday in May at the high school in town, though the poor country kids from Lincoln Park hardly ever placed, much less brought home any of the coveted schoolwide trophies Gabe assured us we could win if we played our cards right. To that end, he spent the last three weeks of school giving us a crash course on oral history, hammering us about accuracy and reliability, demonstrating the different ways to collect data. He even bought half a dozen tape recorders for us to borrow, helped everyone pick out a suitable subject, Kenneth doing his on naval stores (that is: the turpentine industry), Bobo on folk medicine, Gabe’s enthusiasm so high that even us dumbos in special-ed began to entertain hopes of winning locally, going on to regionals, maybe state.

  From the very beginning, I had planned on doing my project on Vietnam, couldn’t believe that Gabe thought Daddy would be a more provoking project. “Won’t everyone think it’s silly?” I asked. “Doing your own father?”

  “Of course not,” he answered with that old Gabe sureness. “Michael lived and died. He moved in time. He has just as valid a claim to historical preservation as Ronald Reagan, for God’s sake.”

  So I just shrugged, said, “Sure,” though I was still kind of apprehensive about it, afraid Daddy wouldn’t be nearly interesting enough to place on the county level, much less go to state, because, face it, he was a good man, but he wasn’t famous or anything.

  But I was so anxious to please Gabe that I didn’t argue, just bought a fresh pack of tapes at Wal-Mart, and notebook paper and a big project board, then went to Mama first, figured she’d be a good practice subject, and not afraid of the microphone. Gabe had lectured us on the importance of a congenial interview site, so I set up my tape recorder on the kitchen table late one Friday night while she was waiting for Missy to come home from a softball game, relaxed in her old terry robe, sipping a cup of hot tea. And though she’s not the storyteller Gabe is, Mama does have an artist’s eye for detail, and told me the funniest little story about the first time she met Daddy when she came back to the Hill when she was seventeen.

  She said that she had come by bus, was just passing through, but Grannie had talked her into spending the night, had tucked her away in Daddy’s bed while he was working the night shift. Grannie had promised to leave him a note telling him to sleep on the couch, but apparently didn’t quite get around to it, for sometime in the night, Mama was awakened by a jiggled bed and a man’s voice, right in her face, breathing: “Dang.”

  “Except he didn’t say dang,” Mama conceded with a fond little smile (meaning that he really said damn).

  “Did you scream?” I asked, though Mama just laughed.

  “Oh, baby, I wasn’t much of a screamer in those days. Anyway, your grannie came strolling in half a second later, her hair in rollers, said, ‘Michael, baby, d’you remember Myra Sims? Lived next door? Ira’s little sister?’ Introduced us like we were standing in the vestibule of the church.”

  Mama is also not the mimic Gabe is, but can do a pretty good imitation of Grannie when she wants to, had me laughing my butt off at Grannie and her nutty old Grannie-ways that were harder than heck to capture on tape. I mean, in real life, Grannie is full of quaint sayings and weird convictions, as colorful an old bird as any oral historian could wish for, but once I set up the recorder, she kind of fell apart on me, started crying about Daddy dying, her voice all sniffly and muffled, hard to pick up on tape. In the end, I had to depend on a lot of secondary sources: Uncle Case and Aunt Candace, Brother Sloan, though the best interview, far and away, was with Daddy’s business partner, Sam McRae.

  As much a workaholic as Daddy, he was too busy to sit down and talk into a microphone, so I had to tag along with him on one of his biweekly trips to Waycross to sign the payroll (he’s just a manager in Florida, a co-owner up there). I didn’t mind, because I loved the old Waycross run, the blooming peach orchards nostalgic and familiar, Mr. Sam’s voice kind of lulling as we drove along, his story just incredible. I mean, at first it was the same old dry stuff—how they met when Daddy went to work at Sanger; how he’d shown Daddy the ropes because the older hands were too busy to be bothered.

  Then, as we creeped along the edge of the swamp, where the gas stations and the interruptions were few, he told me other things: how some of the local guys didn’t like it when Daddy made him manager (because Mr. Sam is black; I don’t know that I ever mentioned that); how the actual Klan had gotten after them, burned crosses, stuff like that.

  I had never heard so much as a whisper of such a thing, but recognized a good story when I heard it, filled tape after tape of notes and details, some of which I had to later cut because they made the report go so long, and I had yet to interview my Star Witness, you might call him: Uncle Gabe. I went to him last of all because he was the Family Expert where Daddy was concerned, though on that particular night, he was kind of quiet; in fact, he let me down.

  I interviewed him out by the pool late on a Friday night, everything quiet except for the distant hooing of our colony of owls, and the close, musical piping of the whippoorwills back and forth through the trees. I went about it in just the right way, made sure he was comfortable, led in with good questions, but Gabe just wouldn’t take the bait and run. He wasn’t weepy and emotional like Grannie, but just sat there slouched down in one of Mama’s bayou chairs toying with a glass of tea, not offering any of his hundred hilarious Michael-stories, but just reminiscing in a wandering little voice about the summer he’d left for college; how he’d tried to talk Daddy into coming to Tallahassee with him, but he wouldn’t. “Stayed home,” he said wistfully. “Stayed home.”

  His stuff barely made the final cut on the tape and didn’t appear at all on the written report that was the hardest part of the whole thing, twice as hard as the interviews or the project board that Mama had helped me design, acted as my Artistic Director, you might say. She helped me go through Grannie’s picture box and pick out the best pictures, showed me how to arrange them on the board, then, once they were set, took the whole thing out on the deck and sprayed the margins with invisible glue, sprinkled silver glitter all over it with a light hand.

  That left me with a whole weekend to finish my written report, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because I really and truly have the crappiest handwriting in the world, my squiggly little sentences starting out okay, though after a few paragraphs, they lose their neat margins and begin to slope below the blue line, end up looking like the work of a two-year-old. I must have rewritten the dang thing ten times, finally gave up late on Sunday night and creeped down to Missy’s bedroom with my latest draft clutched in my
hand.

  As usual, she was sitting up in bed doing homework, already yawning when I came in, asking “What?” in a not very friendly voice, knowing a favor was about to be asked.

  I just stood there by the bed a moment, trying to look as lost and desperate as I felt. “You know my final project, in history?” I asked. She nodded warily, and I shuffled around a moment, finally got to the point: “Could you write it for me?”

  Missy rolled her eyes massively on that. “The whole thing?” she asked. “Gosh, Clay, why don’t me and Mama do it all, while you stay home and watch The Flintstones?”

  She said it with her usual broad sarcasm, though I was too desperate to rise to her bait. “’Cause I don’t need you to do all of it,” I begged. “I have the interviews on tape and the artifacts labeled. I even have the board ready and the paper finished—but I cain’t write worth a crap, Missy, you know I cain’t. Look at it,” I cried, shaking six pages of my crumpled, uneven hand under her nose, full of erased sentences and misspelled words. “I don’t want Gabe to see it like this. He’ll think I’m some kind of retard.”

  Now, Missy can be as hard-hearted as the Wicked Witch of the West, but she still has a few old Grannie-bones rattling around inside her, and softened at my sheer desperation.

  With a big sigh to show how much of an imposition this was, she took the papers from me. “How many pages are we talking about here?”

  “Six,” I said, “maybe seven. The tapes are the main thing, and the board and the physical stuff. The report is extra, for the judges. I have to beat Bobo, and everybody says his stuff is good.”

  “They’d be more impressed if it was typed,” she murmured, though I had no time for that.

  “I cain’t type,” I said, “and anyway, it’s too late,” then dug out one final page that I handed to her with a red face because it was a dedication that read: TO GABE, WITH LOVE.

  “You’re doing a dedication?” she asked, as if the evidence wasn’t right in front of her nose.

  I just shrugged in reply, though her doubt made me suddenly unsure. “Well, you don’t think he’ll think it’s a, you know, declaration of passion, or anything, do you?”

  She just cast me the edge of a curious eye, murmured: “I don’t know what he’ll think it is.” Then, “When’s it due?”

  This was the question I was dreading, and for a moment I just stood there chewing my thumbnail, then admitted in a small voice: “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” she cried, and all but threw it back in my face, though after a little venting and fuming on her and Sim’s favorite subject (how I wasn’t a child anymore! I was thirteen! I needed to grow up!), she sighed the sigh of the martyr and promised to give it her best shot.

  I thanked her as thoroughly as she’d allow, then creeped back to my room, not at all convinced that she’d come through, though when I woke up the next morning, I found eight wonderful pages on my dresser, with a cover page, a dedication, the works, all in her clear, fat hand. By then, the glue on my project board had dried, Mama’s little glitter sprinkles just the right touch, making Daddy’s pictures—the old ones from the Hill when he was a little boy, and later, at his wedding, and one at Sanger with Mr. Sam—look magical, as if he’d led a charmed life.

  Gabe had to go into town early that day to help the other social-studies teachers set up the fair, so Mama took me and Kenneth to school with our projects and dropped us off at the library entrance. We were supposed to set them up on the back counter for Mrs. Lunt to register and take to town, but once I’d filled out my little slip and hoisted my book bag to leave, I had the weirdest feeling in my stomach, like I was abandoning Daddy to strangers. Even after Kenneth left and the tardy bell rang, I kept standing there at the counter looking up at my project board, thinking about all the stories on the tape: about how Daddy had failed at baseball, but won at money; about his first date at sixteen; how he was too poor to go to the prom, and for some reason, it filled me with the awfulest sadness. When Mrs. McDonald sent Bobo and Darius down to see what was keeping me, they found me standing there in front of my magnificent board, staring up at the picture of Daddy on his wedding day, tears streaming down my face because he looked so much like Sim; he looked so happy.

  And though Bobo and Darius are like me, not the brightest bulbs in the pack where schoolwork is concerned, they immediately knew what was up and were really nice about it, patted me on the back and told me how good my project was, how I’d be sure to win a ribbon, stuff like that. I appreciated their support, wiped my face on my T-shirt, and went to class, though I was so nervous all day I could hardly think, me and Bobo both were. As predicted, his project on folk medicine was probably the best of the bunch, his board not so impressive (just a dime-store poster board), though he had six tapes and all kinds of physical evidence, not just the mojo hand, but recipes for roots and salves and even a little bag of chicken bones his great-grannie used to tell fortunes with.

  Since Gabe was already at the school, Mama took me and Kenneth to town that night, bought us hamburgers at the concession stand the Beta Club had set up in the cafeteria as an end-of-the-year fund-raiser. Missy, who was secretary that year (she’d be president the next), was already there, bossing everyone at the grill with her usual take-charge manner.

  Like Daddy, she’s just the soul of competition, and as soon as she laid eyes on me, she ran over and asked: “Did you place?”

  “The award thing isn’t till seven-thirty,” I told her around a bite of my hamburger, though Missy just rolled her eyes.

  “That’s for the school trophies and Living Biography,” she said. “The judges came through hours ago. The eighth-grade projects are down in the gym; go look.”

  Well, she didn’t have to ask twice. Without even finishing our burgers, me and Kenneth tore off out the door and across the courtyard to the echoing old gym that was packed full of clamoring students and parents and teachers and out-of-town judges, all wandering up and down the aisles, inspecting row after row of project boards and models and maps.

  As we made our way through the crowd, searching for the oral-history section, I began to have this sinking feeling in my heart, because some of the projects were doggone good, one gigantic one on the Tet Offensive that really made me jealous. I had stopped to look at it, was staring enviously at its big blue ribbon when Kenneth gave a holler, called me to the next aisle, where his project on the turpentine industry was pinned with a red third-place ribbon.

  It was a disappointing showing for a hotshot like him, though I tried to be upbeat about it, was congratulating him on placing at all when Darius and Travis spotted us in the crowd and came running up, making all these noises of excitement. It was impossible to make out what they were saying; me and Kenneth finally just followed them to the corner of the gym, where Bobo was by gosh leaping into the air in triumph, surrounded by a excited little knot of relatives from Sinclair.

  “What?” I shouted to Kenneth, then saw with a sinking heart that Bobo’s flat little dime store poster was tagged with a big blue ribbon: FIRST PLACE, ORAL HISTORY.

  I didn’t want to go any further after that. I mean, even if I won second place, I wouldn’t go to regionals, must less state. But Bobo had been so nice that morning when he’d found me bawling in the library that I swallowed my disappointment, was pushing through the crowd to congratulate him when Ga’Lisa spotted me from across the room, shouted: “Clayton! Come ’ere! Clay!”

  All of us—me and Kenneth and Darius and even Bobo and a few of his cousins—raced down the aisle to the very end, where my three-sided project board stood in isolated splendor, a big blue ribbon hanging below Daddy’s wedding picture. We didn’t know if it was a mistake or what, two projects winning first place, just let out a roar of triumph, not just for me, but for LPM and Gabe and myth and symbol and empowerment, all his other nutty liberal ideas.

  Darius and Travis tore off immediately to look for him, to tell him about the wins, finally tracked him down to Living Biographies and broug
ht him back to the gym, Gabe all dressed up in his wedding suit, though his tie was loosened, his hair poking up like usual. When he saw my blue ribbon, he grinned and held out his hand for a shake, raised his voice to shout: “Congratulations, Mr. Catts—excellent job, just first rate. I’d have given you an A even if you weren’t kin to me.”

  “But Bobo won first place, too!” I shouted above the roar.

  Gabe just shrugged, “Well, that’s all right; this isn’t an in-school competition. We can have more than one first place. Matter of fact, the more blue ribbons, the better. We just might take that schoolwide trophy yet.” On that, he turned to Kenneth, asked, “Mr. Brown? How’d you do?”

  When Kenneth told him third place, the grin disappeared from Gabe’s face like magic. He didn’t seem to believe us, but had Kenneth lead him back to his project, where he slipped on his bifocals and peered at the red ribbon for a long moment in absolute wonder, then tore off through the crowd, his jaw jacked like he was heading for a fight. We didn’t know what to make of it, just stood there with our hands in our pockets till he finally returned with one of the judges, a nattily dressed guy of about his own age, wearing a checkered vest and gold watch chain, who he might have known from Tallahassee, because they were on first-name basis, Gabe calling him Tom, though his name tag said Dr. Somebody-or-other.

  Me and Kenneth just stood back and watched in wonder as Gabe acted the part of the outraged parent, browbeating him about Kenneth getting a third place, asking if he’d read the report, listened to the tapes. The judge just rubbed his neck with great forbearance, told him: “Listen, Gabe, there were over two hundred entries this year, we didn’t have time to listen to every tape—”