The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  But aside from that, I shook off most of my redneck ways, even grew my hair out a little, enough that it began to curl forward on my forehead, made me look amazingly like the graduation picture of Gabe that still sat on top of Grannie’s television, though I didn’t mind that, either. In fact, I kind of enjoyed the comparisons, to him and Daddy both; was balanced there between them for a pleasant three months, till it all fell apart in my hands, right there at the end of the summer, on Labor Day weekend, a holiday I’ve never been really big on, anyway.

  To me, it’s one of those funky little Monday holidays, so short that you can’t properly celebrate or get anything done, just sit around and chew your nails in nervous anticipation of the new school year, which (in this county, anyway) always begins bright and early the next morning. On this year in particular, I was anxious to get this show on the road; get my fine thirteen-year-old self to town and show off my new hairdo and my new look, try it out on the girls, Rachel Cole in particular, who was as independent as she was beautiful, had never given me the time of day.

  I was hoping that my new urban look might bring her around, got up early that morning and laid out my school clothes a day in advance. For Curtis had called the night before, asked if I wanted to go out on one more run to the river before school started, not fishing, but frog-gigging on the Apalachicola, way down on the edge of the swamp. We probably wouldn’t be back till late, so I went ahead and laid out one of my new Ron Jon shirt and socks and Nikes, then went down to Sanger with Gabe to help move a couch.

  Sim met us at the office, not in his old work clothes, but pressed khakis and a golf shirt, for after months of lowly menial labor in the wood shop, he had finally been moved to the front office to get in a little hands-on experience in management before he left for FSU next August. The position was purely temporary, didn’t even have a title, though the guys on the floor were already calling him the Heir Apparent with a hint of contempt for his rich-boy status, making it clear that he would have to earn their respect, and it wouldn’t come easy.

  Mama and Mr. Sam were worried about it, knew the guys at the plant could be a tough bunch to deal with, though easygoing old Sim had gladly risen to the challenge, his first official act as semimanagement to give his poor old Grannie a brand-new sleeper sofa. Even I knew the gesture was symbolic, meant to send a message, a not-so-subtle reminder that the Cattses’ fabled fortune hadn’t just fallen out of the sky into our laps, but that we’d all started out right where they had, in a two-bedroom row house on Magnolia Hill.

  He wouldn’t even let them deliver it, but went down and picked it up himself, and with me and Gabe’s help, took it over to Grannie, who pretended to be thrilled to death, though I think she really preferred her old couch, and only took the new one out of politeness to validate Sim’s appointment to the front office. In any case, the dang thing weighed a ton, and maneuvering it into Grannie’s little living room proved to be a good and full morning’s work. When we finally got it situated, we moved the old couch to the back porch, where Gabe wanted to leave it.

  “You can sit out here in the afternoon and watch the sunset,” he told Grannie, slumped on the middle cushion, sweat dripping down his nose.

  But Grannie was the kind of self-respecting Southern woman who wouldn’t dream of leaving a washing machine or clothesline or old couch on her porch, and told him in exasperation: “Gabriel Catts, you git thet couch down to the Goodwill. It’s a good fine couch, a Duncan Phyfe. There’s plenty of folk’ll be proud to git it.”

  On that, Gabe opened an eye. “Good God, Mama, this thing is a hundred years old,” he said. “I remember peeing on it when I was a baby. I remember it distinctly.”

  “You remember no such thang,” she said with a little slap to the back of his head. Then, in a more wheedling tone: “You boys run it on downtown. I’m fixing a big nice pork roast for dinner, and potato salad, and making ice cream. It’ll all be ready by the time you git back and Myra and Missy’ll be here and we can all sit down and eat.”

  For Grannie doesn’t share my prejudice toward Monday holidays, but celebrates them like she does every other holiday on the calendar, with food, food, and more food. On this particular occasion, she had smoked a whole pork loin that she served alongside half a dozen other summertime classics, including her famous peach ice cream that she had just lately begun to make in an electric churn Lori had given her for Mother’s Day that she was still mighty suspicious of, complained that it groaned “like a dying cow giving buttermilk.”

  Indeed, all during dinner, you could hear it laboring out on the back porch, Grannie getting up time and again to check on it, afraid the motor would burn up and set the house on fire. The rest of us weren’t too concerned, just sat around the table feasting on pork and discussing the coming year, the room filled with a happy anticipation, though Missy was still worried about me bringing shame on her good name at school, even started ragging me about my table manners.

  “If you ever see me in the cafeteria,” she warned, “don’t bother to speak.”

  After a whole summer of her warnings and appeals, I had gotten used to her nagging and really didn’t pay her much mind, even after Grannie jumped on the bandwagon, began imparting a few tips of her own—how it wasn’t polite to talk with your mouth full; how that when one hand is on the table, the other one ain’t.

  Now, I knew the rule about not talking with your mouth full, but the other one was kind of hard to follow, not just to me, but apparently to Sim, too. He just thought about it a moment, then asked her mildly: “Well, if it ain’t on the table, where is it?”

  I think Sim was actually serious, though before Grannie could answer, I cracked, “It’s on your crotch, Sim. That’s the polite place to put your hand while you’re eating.”

  Missy let out a roar at that, pointed her fork at me and told me to do her a favor and never speak to her again, though Grannie just came wearily to her feet and went out to check on the laboring churn.

  “He’s a’gitting more like his deddy every day,” she announced as she went around the table, giving Gabe a little slap to the back of the head as she passed, telling him: “Now you’ll see what I went through raising you, Gabriel Catts.”

  I don’t think Grannie even realized what she said; neither did I, at first. I mean, if there was anything I was used to that summer, it was people commenting on our likeness, making their little assumptions. It happened so often that it hardly registered anymore, and wouldn’t have then, except for two things: Mama, who closed her eyes when she said it, as if she had taken a quiet blow to the face, and Missy, who met my eye across the table, her disgust with my bad manners replaced in an instant by a sharp, poignant expression that I couldn’t quite place at first, then realized with a strange little jolt that it was pity.

  It only lasted a moment, a quick blink of the eye before she turned to Simon and they resumed their bickering, their voices forced and fake, though I hardly heard them, disjointed pieces of evidence beginning to return to me like random pieces of puzzle, falling into place at last. I remembered Bobo’s face the first time he laid eyes on Gabe in class: the immediate light of recognition, his high, curious voice: “He yo deddy?” And even earlier than that, Missy sitting up in bed the night we had the stepfather discussion, watching me closely, asking: “Did Daddy ever talk to you about Uncle Gabe? Tell you anything kind of—weird?” And most damning of all, Gabe himself, standing at the wall of the old apartment his first Saturday home, discussing the faded, curling old maps that looked ancient to me and Kenneth, though he said they weren’t that old; that he’d put them up the summer he lived here, the summer before I was born.

  “Why didn’t you take ’em with you?”

  “Well, I left in kind of a hurry.”

  Before Grannie even returned with the ice cream, I was already counting forward in my mind: July-August-September, October-November-December, January-February-March—nine months to the day I was born. And just like that, I knew. I understood it compl
etely, all the little hints and confusing winks falling into place, making me close my eyes, take a small, painful little breath.

  I wanted to get up then and get the hell out of there, but I didn’t, of course. I was like the skeleton who wouldn’t cross the road: I didn’t have the guts, just sat there, my face on my plate, the voices around me coming from a great distance, till suddenly there was a knock at the back door, and Curtis’s voice, flat and familiar, calling a greeting through the screen.

  I jumped up as soon as I heard him and headed for the door, though Gabe was fast on my heels, caught me just as I made the truck, his napkin still clutched in his good hand. “Clay. Listen,” he said, his face pale, his voice trying for normalcy: “I need to talk to you when you get home tonight. ’Kay?”

  I didn’t answer, didn’t meet his eye, just scrambled into the truck and slammed the door between us, though Curtis was polite enough to call through the window: “Sure thang, Gabe. We’re just going gigging on the river. Be home by nine.”

  Gabe backed off immediately, told us good luck or be careful or something, I really don’t remember, thrown into shock, I think, my head and neck still hot, so hot I could hardly breathe, had to roll down the window a few inches to get a little breath. I didn’t utter a word all the way to the river, just sat there staring out at the peanut fields that were full of weeds that time of the summer, long past harvest.

  Every once in a while Curtis would make a stab at conversation, finally offered in a placating little voice: “Well, I got a spare this time, if that’s what’s worryin’ you.”

  I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about, just turned and stared at him blankly till I remembered our last fishing trip, way back in December, when we’d run over a nail, had to go back to town before we so much as touched the water. But I hadn’t minded a bit, had been happy as a dog when I heard the pffuf of the puncture, saw the sag on the end of the trailer. For that was the golden morning Gabe had come strolling back into our lives (“Clay? D’you remember your uncle Gabe, from the funeral?”), his face ravaged with a red-eyed, red-nosed grief that maybe wasn’t grief at all. Maybe it was another one of those sagging old emotions that made trips to the graveyard such an ordeal; maybe it was guilt.

  The very thought brought that heavy lava feeling back to my chest, suffocating and breathless. I rolled the window down even lower, held my face to the rush of warm afternoon air, tried to get a grip on myself as we got to the boat slip, Curtis having me back in the truck, then go and park while he secured the boat.

  The little flurry of activity distracted me, though when we were finally settled on the black water, floating placidly along the edge of the cypress, the dark suspicions returned, too close, too insistent to ignore. I finally couldn’t take it any longer and broke the stillness of the high black water to ask in a quick, abrupt voice: “Curtis. Listen. Who do people say my father is?” He was standing when I asked, gig in hand, searching the river’s edge for frogs, his eyes widening with a little jolt of surprise that he managed to hide pretty well, pretending something was wrong with the gig and sitting down immediately, fooling with the tip.

  “Whatchu mean by thet?” he asked, face down, his voice oily and nonchalant, though I had no time for his games.

  “Who do people say my father is?” I insisted, leaning forward a little, trying to see his face. “Do they really think it’s Daddy?”

  And at first he tried to laugh it off. “Oh, hell, Clay, whatchu dreaming up now? I ain’t ever heard of such a thang—”

  But he had, too.

  You could smell it on him, and sitting back on my seat, I worked a little deceit of my own, glanced across the high water and told him in a mild little voice: “Well, somebody told me he wasn’t, is all.”

  “Who?” he countered quickly, and the lie came easily to my lips.

  “Miss Cassie,” I told him, my eyes on the woods that were close and hot, though the sun was past its peak, already behind the trees. “You know—Cassie Campbell—who cuts our hair—”

  He let out another bark of laughter, this time genuine. “Well, hell, Clay, you believe everything you hear down at the beauty parlor, then you’ll be in a sad shape—”

  “—and Grannie,” I added, turning and meeting his eye. “She said so, too.”

  At that, his face lost its laughter in an instant, replaced by a look that was akin to the one Missy had shot me over the table at dinner: a look of deep and thoughtful pity, the same kind of look the nurses used to give me and Missy and Sim when we’d visit Daddy in ICU, take him candy and flowers and test papers with good grades that we thought would cheer him up.

  He didn’t answer right away, just sat there turning the gig over in his hands, the cypress and the water quiet except for the constant piping of the waterbirds and the chorus of the frogs; the late-summer sounds of the river. You could tell he was weighing his options, balancing the merits of a small white lie against the pain of the truth, though his old Cracker honesty finally got the best of him, made him look up and meet my eye evenly, tell me in a flat, honest voice: “Well, I’ve heard, Clay, that he might not be.”

  I was the one who couldn’t speak then, my mouth so dry I had to swallow a couple of times before I could get out my next question, whispered in a weenie little voice: “Then who?”

  Softhearted old Curtis, who had been known to cry when one of his hunting dogs got gored in a hunt, looked perfectly tortured at being put on the spot in such a way, though he was man enough to meet my eye and tell me plainly: “Well, everybody says Gabe is.”

  I must have actually flinched at that, because he was quick to try and soften it. “But, you know, Clay, I just heard that from my gossiping damn wife. Might be something she heard down to the beauty parlor, and wide of the truth.”

  But you could tell he believed it, that look of pained compassion returning to his face when I managed one final question, delivered in a voice of great and utter astonishment: “How?”

  Curtis just rubbed his neck on that, long and hard, finally reached down and felt around under his seat for the bottle of Jim Beam he keeps hidden there from Lori. He unscrewed the top and took a long swig, even offered it to me, though I just shook my head, waited breathlessly for his answer, that was a shrug and a small, mirthless laugh.

  “Oh, hell, Clay, it happens all the time. Gitting a woman pregnant’s easy as sliding down a greased pole, you can take my word on thet.” I must have looked properly horrified, for he shrugged again, took another swig, then added: “You’ll understand, you git a little older.”

  But he was wrong on that one.

  Hell, I didn’t need to be one second older to understand the name of the game here, the same game that had wrecked Miss Susan’s second marriage to a nice-enough air force mechanic from Ft. Walton who was a good-enough deal as far as stepfathers went, a baseball fan who taught Kenneth how to throw a spitball, though he had one fatal flaw: he couldn’t keep it zipped. Unlike Kenneth’s own father, he wasn’t a slapper or a shover, either, but was always stepping out, sleeping around, had given Miss Susan herpes before it was through (and Kenneth said that if I ever told anyone, he’d kill me with his bare hands).

  And I hadn’t. Hell, I was a Catts. I knew secrets. Knew all about them.

  As of last October, I even knew why Uncle Ira was locked up in a little ten-by-ten cell in Raiford, why he’d never again see the light of day. Mama had finally broken down and told Missy, who’d been pretty weirded out by it all, had come to my room one night and told me the gruesome details: how he’d killed a woman, had beaten her to death with his bare hands in a cheap rented room in St. Augustine. Some woman he didn’t even know; that he’d picked up in a bar, who’d probably looked like poor old Emmett Till when they finally found her a week later when the landlord came calling when her rent was due. Missy said there were other crimes, too, stuff that even Sim didn’t know about, though the woman they’d found in bed was the one he’d fry for, because he’d left enough of his skin and
blood and sperm around that the DA in Jacksonville had made a 100 percent match, and that, as they say, was that.

  So, yeah, for a rich white kid who’d never kissed a girl, whose mother drove a Mercedes and whose Grannie taught Sunday school, I knew a few secrets. I just didn’t know this one, and fell into another numbed silence that Curtis filled easily enough, the whiskey loosening his tongue, making him ramble on and on about Mama and Gabe, telling me every little detail that he knew of their Remarkable Romance.

  “—they say he always loved yo mama, since he was a kid, never did get over her marryin’ his brother. But he backed off when Sim was born, went up north to school and all, but then he come back that summer, moved in thet little apartment over the garage.”

  He shrugged then, took another draw of whiskey, concluded in a mild little voice: “And I guess sooner or later, nature just took its course.”

  It was about as much as I cared to hear about that summer, then or ever, but even after Curtis had exhausted every little bit of gossip and innuendo and myth he’d ever dreamed about Mama and Gabe, he kept rattling on, offering little nuggets of advice and wisdom between swigs of whiskey, like: “Way I see it, Clay, is you got two daddies, and that’s a good thang. Most people these days, they ain’t even got one.” Or: “You cain’t be too hard on people. People,” he told me sagely, “are weak.”

  At one point, one very low point, he even commiserated with Gabe over his little slip, confided in a mild, swaggering voice: “Yo mama, she’s still a good-looking woman, but you should have seen her when she was young.” He rolled his eyes, whistled. “Son, she was fine.”