The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  Drunk or not, this was probably not the wisest move on his part, because there was still a loaded pistol on the seat between us (to shoot moccasins) and I thought about putting a bullet in his head before it was over. Fortunately, the bourbon soon got the best of him, made him blinking and sleepy, mostly silent on the ride home, dropping me off in our front drive as promised.

  He was too far gone by then to offer any more advice, just yawned and waved, backed the truck around and went on his way, leaving me standing on the edge of Mama’s rose garden in the close, muggy darkness, the front of the house dark, the back dimly lit.

  So they were home, I thought, my happy little family, probably huddled around the kitchen table discussing me, Missy the voice of reason, insisting: “Gosh, somebody needs to tell him—everybody on earth knows but him, it’s embarrassing—”

  Though she’d be called down by someone (Sim? Uncle Case?) who’d add their two cents with a little shrug: “Why bother? He’ll never figure it out. Hell, he thought Gabe was gay—”

  And worried or not, they’d burst into laughter at that, everyone but Mama—or maybe Gabe himself, who wouldn’t think it very funny, would tell them to hush—that I was fine. There was nothing wrong with me at all. I was just an unusual personality. Diffrent, as Daddy would say.

  Like father, like son.

  I took off then, back down the drive to the highway that was pitch-black that time of night, the grass verge full of all kinds of nasty stuff you don’t notice when you’re tooling along in your mother’s big Mercedes: dead possum and rabbits and even a smashed kitten or two, dank and corrupt in the September heat, all buzzing flies and matted fur and glassy, staring eyes. I wouldn’t see them till I was almost on top of them, would have to step over them in my old fishing shoes, hot and sweating and dizzy, tears streaming down my face the whole time I stomped; strange, independent tears that were quite detached from anything I actually felt, flowing down my cheeks and chin and neck, on and on and on.

  I didn’t even know where I was going—to Grannie’s, I guess, to spill it all out, let her fix this the way she fixed everything. To go to bed in tears like Little Gene, wake the next morning to a happy, miraculous turnabout, Gabe restored to his place of honor as my good-natured, hilarious old storytelling uncle who God in His wisdom had sent down as Daddy’s replacement, in answer to a hundred prayers.

  But this wasn’t one of Grannie’s hokey little bedtime stories: this was me, Clayton Michael Catts, the runt of the litter, who had never walked more than a block in his life if he could help it. By the time I made it past the courthouse—sixteen miles, at least—I was dragging butt, hardly able to stumble along. I was about to lie down on the sidewalk and die when I saw the yellow lines that marked the school crossing for the high school, and turned there in desperation, made my stumbling way to Aunt Candace’s house. I dragged myself down her street and up the narrow steps to her dark porch, stumbling in the half-light, knocking over a wreath and a fern till I finally found her doorbell and rang it, just as the sun was rising on what would have been my first day of high school in town; the first day of my glorious new life.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Aunt Candace herself answered the door, not in a nightgown, but a pair of the baggy teal scrubs she wears to work, apparently just coming home from the hospital or just on her way, I didn’t know which. I just pushed inside without a word, was barely able to make it as far as her couch before I collapsed, light-headed and nauseated, though I couldn’t puke, I was too tired to heave. I just lay there, eyes closed, head swimming, dimly aware that she had gone into her nurse’s mode above me, checking my pulse and feeling my forehead and apparently not liking what she found.

  For she started yanking off my shoes and socks and wiggling me out of my T-shirt, her voice rising and falling in a light, excited murmur: “What in the—Clay, does your mother know—good Lord, son, look at your feet! Did you walk all the way from the house?”

  I didn’t so much as open an eye, was content to lie there in bare-chested, barefoot bliss, at least till I heard the click of a phone that brought me back to life with a vengeance, rising up like Lazarus to point at her and shout: “No! No! Don’t you call them—NO!”

  I think I must have been a little hysterical, for she obeyed without a word, just quietly replaced the phone on the cradle, her eyes very level, though they weren’t curious anymore, but tired and resigned and quietly pained, just like Mama’s had been at supper; as if a blow had fallen, one long expected.

  But unlike Mama, Aunt Candace didn’t seem too demoralized by it all, her face quickly regaining its bossy old practicality as she held out her hands, said: “Come and take a bath, Big Man. I think you have a touch of heat exhaustion. A nice cool bath’ll set you straight.”

  I hardly remember anything after that, just followed her to the bathroom in my crippled little walk, yelling aloud when my blistered feet touched the bathwater, though once I got used to it, it did indeed make me feel better, good enough that I think I might have fallen asleep in there.

  For when I woke, I was curled up on a strange, frilly bed in one of Uncle Ed’s T-shirts and some of his underwear, big old Hanes boxers that almost came to my knees. I rolled to my back and looked around the room with tired eyes, not at all curious about where I was, or why. It was dark, or near dark, and after a moment, I realized I was in Lori’s old bedroom that Aunt Candace had left just the way it was the day Lori moved out, almost four years before. The walls were still painted a girlish mauve, the dresser and shelves crowded with a small forest of teddy bears and keepsakes and framed photographs of Lori in these all-American teenage poses: with her JV cheerleading squad, and standing next to Mickey at Disney, and half a dozen of her and a much younger Curtis in high-school formal wear at different dances and proms.

  Everything about the place—the hairdos, the tuxes, even the bedspread—was straight out of 1985, a dip back in time that struck me uneasy, for some reason, as if I had woken up inside the opening scene of The Twilight Zone. I half expected to hear a voice-over from Rod Serling welcoming everyone aboard, lay there yawning till my empty stomach finally forced me out of bed. Kicking off the covers, I tiptoed down the hall on my sore feet like a little ballerina to the living room, where Aunt Candace was sitting in a recliner watching a rerun of Designing Women.

  She smiled when she saw me, clicked off the remote, and said: “Well, good evening, sleepyhead. You nearly slept the day away.”

  And I’ll tell you what: shock is a funny thing. I mean, even after she said that, I still didn’t really know why I was there, though I figured it would come to me in a moment. I just sat down on the couch in my T-shirt and big underwear, was about to ask if there was anything to eat when Aunt Candace gave me a look of mild reproach, told me: “I called your mother, Clay. That was a ratty thing to do, running off without a word.”

  Just like that, the weight and horror of the day descended, making me close my eyes and slump there on the couch, wanting to go back to sleep, or die, or something. But it was no use. Aunt Candace had been waiting around all day for me to wake up, had the bright-eyed look of a cat about to pounce.

  “So? Are you ready to talk?” she asked.

  I just yawned in reply, asked where Uncle Ed was.

  “He’s at a board meeting at the church,” she said. “Won’t be home till late. That’ll give us plenty of time to work this out. Your mother’s very upset, Clay. So is Gabe.”

  I ignored that, yawned. “D’you have anything to eat?”

  Now, I believe I’ve mentioned that Aunt Candace doesn’t cook, nor does she eat, or at least not so that you would notice, her pantry full of the sights and sounds of appetite—gourmet coffees and color-coded Tupperware and expensive cookware—but no actual food itself. It took a little scavenging around, even a trip out to the garage, to find a bag of Doritos, the gigantic kind you buy at Sam’s for family reunions or church suppers.

  I wasn’t complaining, just sat on the couch and ate th
em by the handful while Aunt Candace fixed herself a cup of hot tea, then came and sat down next to me, started talking about Mama for some reason, telling me what a good woman she was, and what a tough time she’d had. She finally paused and asked if I knew about her. If I knew what she was.

  Well, I was all out to sea at that point, had not a clue in the world to what she was talking about, just answered in a tired, flippant voice: “Oh, Curtis told me what she was.”

  But Aunt Candace didn’t catch my sarcasm, asked: “Well, d’you know what that means?”

  I dived for another handful of Doritos, assured her: “Oh, I know what a whore is, Aunt Candace. Even I know that.”

  I don’t even know why I said it; where in the world it came from. I think Curtis must have sent it into my head by mental telepathy, though once I heard myself say it, I was sticking with it, my face defiant, while Aunt Candace’s was just mild and matter-of-fact as she quietly reached a hand over and grabbed the front of my T-shirt, pulled me about an inch from her face.

  “Claybaby?” she murmured in this polite, motherly voice. “If I ever hear you talk about your mother like that again, I’m gone go outside and pick a switch and whip yo spoiled little ass. You hear me?”

  Now, I would have liked to have done something manly in reply, like spit in her face, but the forced march the night before had left me weak and defenseless as a baby. Just like that, I could feel my face begin to crumple up and the tears begin to flow, God, I don’t know where they came from. I mean, I’d already cried, like, ten hours, the night before. You’d think I’d be dried out by then, but I wasn’t, just sat there clutching my bag of Doritos and sobbing with such intensity that Aunt Candace backed off and dropped my shirt, even made a stab at repenting for using the dreaded a-word, before she, by gosh, burst into tears herself.

  I don’t think she knew why, either. I think we were crying out of general disappointment with the sheer wrongness of life: fathers who died too young and daughters who left home too early, and people you loved so much—you trusted with your life—who betrayed you, ripped your heart out by the roots, then wanted so desperately to Make It Right, when there was no more Right. When Right was as dead as a doornail—dead as poor Emmett Till, or the woman Uncle Ira killed, or Daddy himself, lying there in his big old coffin, his hair gray, his eyes closed, nothing but a small man in an expensive suit, gone.

  Aunt Candace got the better of herself before I did, went and got us a big box of Kleenex that she tossed on the couch between us, then sat back down, offered aside in this casual, sniffling little voice: “You know, Claybird, ever since you started going around with your little recorder last spring, looking for family stories—well, there’s been this story I’ve been wanting to tell you. Not about Gabe,” she assured me at the quick, panicked lift of my face. “But of me, and your mother, and the first time we met, when she was twelve. Has she ever told you that story?”

  I shook my head wordlessly, for despite the flood of family history that had come on the tails of the Gabe Revolution, Mama’s childhood was still her own, as veiled and voiceless as the paupers’ section at the Riverside, the markers turned to pulp by the weather, unreadable and forsaken. Just like that, something inside of me seemed to stir to life at Aunt Candace’s sniffling, hesitant offer, something curious and brave that wanted our family ghosts to show up, to reveal themselves, so I could finally sit them down the way Mama once said she’d like to do, fix them a cup of tea and get a few answers. Not about the century oak, and why they’d planted it so close to the house, but other things—nameless questions I could not even frame, that according to Aunt Candace, all had their roots in the summer of 1959, sixteen years before I was born, when a family of Louisiana Crackers moved in next door to Grannie on the Hill: a mother and father, a redheaded son, and a shy little girl they all called Myra Louise.

  “—and God knows we hated them, every one,” she concluded with a wry little shake of her head.

  “Why?” I sniffed, surprised at her vehemence, if nothing else.

  For all her fevered religious ways, Aunt Candace is not squeamish about owning up to a fault, and told me plainly: “Because we were hardworking, hard-shell Baptist, and the Simses were everything we despised: redheaded, holy-rolling, snuff-dipping white trash. Or maybe not snuff dipping,” she allowed, “but you know what I mean.”

  I did indeed, for there were still a few enclaves of poor white families around Sinclair trifling enough to qualify as trash, with junk cars and rotten teeth and droves of loudmouth, goof all children who were the scourge of the special-ed classroom. It was hard to imagine Mama springing from such a source, though Aunt Candace didn’t leave any room for rumination, just forged ahead: “And anyway, it was clear pretty early on that the father over there, well, he was a monster—”

  “A what?” I interrupted again, thinking I hadn’t heard her correctly.

  But Aunt Candace just retrieved her teacup from the end table and repeated herself in a voice of great authority. “A monster. Six-foot-three, maybe two hundred and sixty pounds, with a gut and temper, used to beat the living crap out of everybody over there, all the time. I mean, all summer long, you could lay in your bed at night and follow the action across the fence like ringside seats at a Golden Gloves match. First, there was the shouting, then the blows and splats and shrieks—then, when it was all over, these quiet, shaking little sobs that went on and on, half the night.”

  She paused on that, her face dim with the memory, her voice lacking her usual hardheaded conviction, though she made up for it in sheer candor, taking a sip of tea and admitting with her dry old honesty: “But I never actually went so far as to feel sorry for any of them over there. I was too busy with my own life, in my last year of high school, working for Dr. Winston part-time, already accepted at FSU. I left the pity to Daddy, the worry to Mama, who took Ira under her wing pretty early on, would invite him to supper all the time, give him Michael’s hand-me-downs, worried over him day and night, because we knew he was getting flayed over there every week, that some of those quiet little sobs were his.

  “She saw some whelp marks on his back at a church picnic and actually called the law on the Old Man, took the bus downtown and signed a complaint, which was just an unheard-of thing back then, turning in a neighbor for domestic violence. It was like a declaration of war, though it didn’t do any good. The Old Man never saw a day of jail time, just kept strutting back and forth to work every day, and poor Mama, it about unhinged her mind. I actually remember her sitting at the table that summer, discussing ways to discreetly do away with the Old Man—you know, bake him a birthday cake and lace it with rat poison—I really do,” she added when I broke out in a grin, I couldn’t help it.

  I mean, I could just see Grannie sitting there at the dinner table in one of her nice Sunday dresses, sipping iced tea and discussing ways to kill her neighbor and get away with it.

  Aunt Candace didn’t pause to enjoy the moment, just took a sip of tea and rolled right along: “Then, to make matters worse, Gabe, who was this goofy, extroverted little nut—he developed this huge crush on the little girl over there, Ira’s sister—”

  “Mama?” I interjected, because Aunt Candace said it in such an offhanded way.

  I guess she’d gotten so caught up in her story that she’d forgotten who she was talking to, for she blinked back to the present, agreed in a mild, wondering little voice. “Yeah. Your mother. Myra Louise, they called her, and even that irritated me, it was just so hick and country. I grew to hate the sound of it, and God knows I heard it enough, with that idiot Gabe yammering on about her, day and night. And the strange thing was, though me and Michael heard about her all the time, we never actually saw her.”

  Unbidden, a slip of memory bubbled up, of me and Kenneth sitting at the attic window late one summer evening, watching Mama deadhead roses below. “Your mother doesn’t go out much, does she?” he’d asked, and I’d had to agree: no, she didn’t go out much at all.

  Agai
n, Aunt Candace didn’t allow any room for reflection, just pushed ahead. “I doubt I would have known the Simses even had a daughter, if I hadn’t have been a majorette, because she took a liking to my uniform. Every Friday night when I started getting dressed for a game, Gabe would just beg me to go out there and talk to her, and there was no denying him. He was just persistent as heck, would just nag and nag, follow me room to room, just about drive me nuts, because we didn’t own a car of our own, and I was always begging rides and running late.

  “But Gabe would by gosh get his way, and on the way out, I’d run outside and look for her, though she’d never come any closer than their back porch, would just peer at me from behind a post, her face pale in the twilight, with Gabe dancing between us like a pixie, trying to get us to move in closer. But she never would, and I never really got a good look at her till the night the Old Man turned on Daddy, tried to kill him.” She finally paused then, commented in that mild, honest voice: “It was an evil day.”

  She came to a complete halt on that, just sat there, holding her teacup to her chest, staring ahead with a look of absent thoughtfulness.

  I’d gotten too caught up in her story to be left hanging, and sat up straighter. “Killed who?” I asked. “Who got killed?”

  But Aunt Candace wouldn’t be hurried, just took another leisurely sip of tea. “Not killed,” she corrected, “not quite, though he came doggone close—ruptured his spleen, sent him to the hospital for the better part of a month—and we should have seen it coming, because earlier that year, around Christmas, the Old Man had caught Gabe playing in his yard, had broken his wrist, none of us really knew why. I mean, Gabe wouldn’t talk about it, neither would Ira, but he’d done more than just break it, he’d actually crushed it, Dr. Winston said. Literally ground it to pulp. So things were not so great between us there on the Hill, this wall of tension running back and forth between us till sometime that spring—oh, maybe February—I came home from work one night on the bus, was hurrying up the Hill at dusk, when I saw two men fighting in the Simses’ front yard.”