The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  She narrowed her eyes as if she was picturing it in her mind, trying to get it exactly right. “Well, I thought the Old Man had Ira out there, was finally getting around to killing him, went screaming to the house for Mama, but when I got to the fence, I realized it wasn’t Ira getting killed over there; it was Daddy. He was already unconscious, lying facedown in the grass, the Old Man beside him, just leisurely kicking him to death, right in front of us all.”

  She threw up her hands in an odd little gesture of passivity, her eyes still dim, as if she were drawn back in time to that gray February twilight in 1962. “And Gabe was on the porch, his arm still in a cast, screaming his head off, not at Daddy as much as Michael, who came sailing out of the house just as I made the porch, took that fence like a sprinter in one giant bound. He was a nothing but a stripling back then, tried to get between Daddy and the Old Man, but he was too big, too strong.

  “He just turned and took him down with one hammer of a backhand, so hard it knocked his feet right out from under him—killed him, we thought. But there was nothing we could do but stand there on the porch and scream—when suddenly, the McQuaigs’ screen door popped open and old Brother George come strolling down the porch steps in his undershirt and suspenders, an ancient old shotgun in his hands that he had beaded on the Old Man, promised to blow his head off if he made one more move, just one.”

  She stopped again, right at the peak of the story, forcing me to sit up again, and repeat like a little parrot: “Did he kill him?”

  Aunt Candace blinked at the question, as if surprised I’d ask such a thing. “No,” she said with an absent little shake of her head, “no, I doubt it was even loaded—probably his old squirrel rifle, or something he’d brought back from the war. But it worked, as far as it went. The Old Man backed off, and Mama called an ambulance, and I went out and helped Michael back to the house, because he was concussed, staggering around, his jaw already swelled the size of a softball.

  “I got him as far as the porch swing, went and fixed him an ice pack, was holding it to his face when Gabe came bursting out the door, white-eyed and frantic, looking for Mama. Well, I went in one direction and he went the other; we found her in her bedroom getting dressed to go to the hospital, dragged her to the kitchen, where low and behold, there stood Mrs. Sims, and the Mystery Child of Magnolia Hill.”

  “Mama?” I had to exclaim, and she gave a slow, even nod of assent.

  “Yessir—twelve years old, standing there half-hidden in her mother’s skirts in this ratty old nightgown that hung off of her in folds, her arms bone-thin, these dark gray rings under her eyes, clearly terribly ill. I mean, I’d seen children like her before in the ER, with cystic fibrosis or end-stage leukemia, with the same dark rings under their eyes, the same terrible suffering. It was just incredible, unbelievable, to me, that this devastation—this dying child was—intentional—”

  That was about as far as she could go for a few moments, just sitting there beside me with her eyes closed, her hand pressed to her mouth, till she finally got a grip on herself and yanked out a fresh Kleenex, explained aside in a small, sniffling voice: “Mrs. Sims was wanting Mama to hide her—said the Old Man was leaving that night, going to Texas, wanted to take her with him, and Mama, she didn’t need any more explanation than that. She just pushed Mrs. Sims out the door, sent her to hide on the tracks, sent me to town to find Uncle Case.

  “Well, I took off in a gallop, looked every where, finally found him at the café, having supper with Ilene Cato. By the time we got back to the Hill, it was full dark, the Old Man long gone, that old shack standing empty across the fence, the front door hanging open on its hinges. Mama had hidden Gabe and Myra in a closet, wouldn’t let them out till Uncle Case went over with his shotgun and nosed around, found Ira crunched down under the porch, hiding from the Old Man, I guess—and it’s funny—but he was the sanest one of that bunch, Ira was, really the neatest little kid. I mean, he was skinny as a rail back then, weighed about eighty pounds, used to try to get between Myra and the Old Man—used to try to covey him out to the yard when he was drunk. I’ve seen him do it a dozen times, didn’t know why, of course, none of us did. I mean, we knew the Old Man was a bully and a drunk, but never figured anything else, till—you know—”

  She paused the way Missy sometimes did, assuming that I could fill in the blanks, but I couldn’t. That was my problem: I couldn’t fill in those blanks, and asked her baldly, “Know what?”

  For a moment, she just looked at me, then told me levelly enough: “That he’d gotten after her, Clay—raped her. That’s why she was so sick—why they had to admit her to the hospital that night, for antibiotics and a D and C. That’s why the Old Man wanted to take her with him to Texas, because he knew that once a doctor examined her, well, it’d all be over but the shouting, then.”

  She paused to give me room to ask a few questions, or cry or maybe roar with outrage, though to be perfectly honest, the rape part really didn’t register much with me, hardly touched me at all. I mean, I hardly knew what sex was back then, much less forced sex—just sat there blinking as Aunt Candace began tying up the loose ends of her story, her voice no longer so intent, but speculative now, mild and kind of tired.

  “In any case, he was gone for good, the Old Man was, and when Myra got out of the hospital, the rest of them left Florida, moved up to an aunt’s house in Birmingham, and that was the last we thought we’d ever hear from them. Gabe, he was pretty devastated, as you’d expect, but we all thought it would pass. We thought it was for the best, that he’d soon return to his goofy old Gabe-self, but he didn’t. I mean, months passed and his arm came out of the cast and Daddy got better, and I left for college—but still, Gabe wouldn’t talk about it, just grew into himself, got quieter and quieter. When I came home the next summer for my wedding, he was this silent, distant stranger. He didn’t run with anybody, didn’t hang out, just laid around the house all day, his hand held against his chest like it still hurt him, though it had been out of a cast for oh, years, by then.

  “But we never heard another word from Ira or any of the rest of Simses, till the autumn Gabe left for school, in October of, oh, maybe ’67—when Myra dropped by the house one night on her way to visit that cousin of hers in Milton. It wasn’t anything planned, just a casual little drop-in to check out the old neighborhood, but Mama took a liking to her, and when it got dark, she just insisted she spend the night—and you know the story—how there was a mix-up with a note, and her and Michael ended up briefly in the same bed.” She rolled her eyes on that, at Grannie and her goofy old Grannie-ways, though she didn’t belabor it, her words beginning to compress, a lot of years packed into a little space: “And it wasn’t very long after, I was standing at my kitchen sink one morning in Wiesbaden doing dishes, looking out on the first snow of the season, when the phone rang, and it was Mama, all excited, told me Michael was engaged.

  “Well, I figured he’d talked Michelle Dunne—this girl he dated in high school—into marrying him, was mouthing my congratulations when Mama broke in, said no, he wasn’t marrying Michelle, but Myra. Myra Odom. Her mother had remarried in Alabama and that was her legal name then, one I didn’t even recognize, and you know how goofy Mama is, she didn’t bother to enlighten me. It wasn’t till months later, when Michael sent me a wedding picture in my Christmas card, that I realized he’d by gosh married the little redheaded white trash kid from across the fence.”

  Even twenty years later, the wonder of this event had the power to make her shake her head slowly, in bewilderment, then add with a wry smile at her own curiosity, “So I was naturally dying to meet her, to see how she’d turned out, and the first thing I did when I got back to Florida in ’74 was to get my nosy little butt out to your house—and let me tell you, son, it was a spooky old house back then, nothing like it is today. There weren’t any roses or garden back then, just a long dirt drive through this wild, ragged little forest, this huge, sagging old house plopped down right in the middle, just weir
d and isolated as it could be.

  “I remember knocking on the back door that morning and standing there, wondering what in the world Michael was thinking, taking on such a project—and when your mama opened the door, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Because the whole time I was in Germany, everybody had been telling me about how good-looking she was, talking about Michael’s good-looking wife—and the woman that opened the door—well, there wasn’t nothing good-looking about her. I mean, she was so skinny, she was a bone, and silent and vacant-eyed, rattling around that big empty house, so drugged and spacey she could hardly remember her own name. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen in my life, because it had been what—twelve years?—since I’d laid eyes on that woman, and she was the same pathetic, skinny kid Mama had rescued that night on the Hill.”

  Aunt Candace paused for a breath on that, then let out a big sigh and began tying it up in earnest. “Well, I knew something was wrong,” she said, “but it wasn’t till we moved back in August that Michael finally broke down and told me the whole story: how that Myra’d had this gruesome breakdown after Missy was born, was seeing this crack brain psychiatrist who had her on so many pills she rattled when she walked—”

  “Dr. Williams?” I had to ask.

  At the very mention of his name, Aunt Candace laid back her ear like a old tomcat. “Yessir, the Wonderful Dr. Williams,” she intoned with great sarcasm, and with no more encouragement than that, launched into a thorough, mostly incomprehensible argument against the good doctor, concluding with a great passion: “—but he can hand out the pills and call it what he will: manic depression or post-traumatic stress—but I personally don’t think Myra suffers from some kind of chemical imbalance, some organic brain disease. It’s just part of the baggage she carries from that hideous childhood, from that evil time on the Hill. I mean, Clay, it’s almost like she didn’t make it that night, that she really did die that winter. That’s why she’s so strong now, why she was so strong when Michael died. That’s the kind of strength you get when you spend half your life working on a resurrection.”

  I had never told anyone—not Missy or Simon or even Grannie—about me and Kenneth and our Vampire Theory, and I didn’t then, though it made her forceful words very easy to understand, very believable. In that way, it explained a great deal about my mother and her strange, otherworldly ways, though in a larger sense, it didn’t resolve the matter of her and Gabe, that Aunt Candace began to warily approach with many little side glances to see how I was taking it.

  “That’s why, baby, I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on her, about what happened that summer, between her and Gabe. She was so spaced out back then, she was hardly responsible—”

  “Was Gabe?” I interrupted to ask sharply.

  For a moment, Aunt Candace’s expression was much as Curtis’s had been the day before, as if briefly weighing the merits of a small white lie, though the truth won out in the end.

  “Sure, baby,” she admitted in a mild little voice. “He knew what he was doing. He wasn’t a kid anymore, he was twenty-six years old. But he loved your mother so much, he always did, and when he came back and saw her rattling around that ramshackle old house, half out of her mind, well, he probably thought he was saving her. I really don’t know, baby. He was gone by the time I got here, and Myra was already—you know—a few months pregnant.”

  “With me?” I had to ask, some small part of me still hoping against hope that she’d roll her eyes in exasperation at my dim-witted ways, say: “No, Clay, with Missy. Gosh, did you think I meant you?”

  But she just watched me a moment with that face of terrible pity, then nodded with a finality that was like a stake through my heart. I was almost numb by then, though I did manage one final question: “What about Daddy?” I whispered, meaning: What was his take on all of this?

  If possible, Aunt Candace looked even more pained at the question, though she answered honestly enough. “Well, he didn’t like it,” she allowed. “But he loved your mother so much, baby, and you, too, from the minute he laid eyes on you—and the fact of the matter is, Michael was a very forgiving man.”

  She paused then, clearly having a hard time explaining such a thing, till in true Southern form, a story came to her rescue, her face visibly lighting as she switched tracks abruptly, told me: “I mean, the day Myra called and told me Lori had showed up on her doorstep pregnant, well, I went ballistic. I jumped in my car and tore over there to confront her, was chewing her out when Michael got home. He came in the back door, didn’t say a word, just took one look at me and pulled me to the kitchen, leaned against the counter and let me rant and rave awhile, till he finally had enough and straightened up, told me: ‘Candace? Honey, I know you’re mad, but you best be careful what you say to that youngun in there who is your only chile in the world. You remember what Daddy used to say: You take a hard line, you live a hard life.”

  She smiled at the memory, explained, “It’s what Daddy used to tell Mama about twice a week when we were growing up, when she’d go off on some tangent about somebody at the church or get in a fight with Uncle Case over his drinking and carousing: ‘You take a hard line, you live a hard life.’ And you know, Clay, if it would have come from anyone else, I would have spit in their face, told them to go to hell. But coming from Michael, I could take it. And I did. I swallowed my pride and went out there and apologized, and now we have little Ry-man running around, and you know how much we love him.”

  But I was far beyond that. I was bleeding from an open wound and told her flatly: “Well, I cain’t.”

  Once again, she didn’t argue, just began gathering the used tissues that were scattered between us. “Well, baby, that’s your choice,” she told me. “You’ll have to work that one out on your own. But you’re welcome to stay here while you do. I promised my brother I’d be there for his children and I intend to keep my promise, though I may have to hog-tie your mother and shoot Gabe to do it.”

  I’d been too wound up in the past to have worried much with the future, just nodded my head quickly and sincerely, Aunt Candace quickly reducing it to practical terms like she always did. “Well, I’ll go out to the house tomorrow,” she said, “talk to your mother, see what I can do. She and Gabe are just heartbroken and fragile as glass about all this, and the less shouting it comes to, Clay, the better. You understand?”

  I nodded again, and she was as good as her word, arising early the next morning and going out to the house to see Mama, somehow talking her into letting me move into town, God knows how she swung it. Knowing Mama, she was probably afraid that if she didn’t agree, I’d flip out and run away from home completely; take a bus to New York and end up a child prostitute turning tricks on Times Square. For that’s the way my poor old mother’s mind works: straight through the mundane possibilities and right to the bottom of the sea.

  So she just bowed to the inevitable, packed my new school clothes and my Nintendo and skateboard and let me go without a fight, with (now that I think of it) the same tired resignation she let Daddy go back to the hospital that final time, as if she knew from experience that some battles were lost the moment they were begun. That sometimes, the better part of valor was a quiet retreat to regroup and reconsider, hope for a better day. Or maybe it was a bluff, or maybe she was ashamed to face me, or secretly glad to be rid of me: Who knows?

  I believe I’ve mentioned that my mother isn’t the easiest woman in the world to figure, not that I particularly wanted to, back then. I was just relieved to be shed of all of it: the matchmaking and the housecleaning and the peacemaking and the job-hunting, and everything else I’d done for her since Daddy left that night in the ambulance, almost two years before. I was ready for some peace and quiet, and spent my first evening at Aunt Candace’s unpacking my stuff in Lori’s closet, then went to bed early, still tired from the forced march the night before, my last waking thought that Simon and Missy must be gratified, lying there in their snug little beds out in the country, if they happe
ned to think of me.

  For after thirteen years of begging and pleading, I had finally done the thing they’d been after me to do for so long: I wasn’t a child anymore. I was all grown up.

  PART THREE

  The Choices of Clayton Catts

  But the rain

  Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

  Upon the glass and listen for reply.

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PALM SUNDAY; EIGHT O’CLOCK AT NIGHT

  I’ve lived with Aunt Candace for seven months now, and the whole time I’ve been here, I’ve wanted to record my side of the matter, and all the little bits of history and action that led up to my Great Exile, but couldn’t. The words just wouldn’t come, no matter how much time I had on my hands, no matter how hard I tried. I even bought a tape player. Thought I’d make it into another oral-history project, but no dice. Then one night last week a freak storm blew in from the Gulf, fierce and fast, rattling the windows and waking me from a sound sleep.

  I sat up in my tangle of sheets, worried that it might be a storm of consequence: a hurricane or spin-off tornado; something with the power to rip off a roof, upend an oak tree. But as I watched the play of lightning on the dresser top full of trophies and picture frames—mementos of my cousin’s perfect life that I’ve never bothered to put away—I remembered it was April, too late for hurricanes, too early for tornadoes, nothing but an early summer storm, quickly upon us and just as quickly past.

  I burrowed back into my covers, was drifting back to sleep when a stark, single memory came to me of waking up the exact same way the spring before to the ferocious whip of the old oaks, the fast, furious rattle of the rain, of being overtaken by that terrible sink of grief. It was the spring of the oral-history project, a spring of great optimism, of endless, baseless hope, and lying there last week, listening to the fury of the storm, I could hardly believe that a whole year had passed: a whole year.