The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  The strangeness of it all brought me sharply awake, thinking how funny it was that as you got older, time began to play tricks on you. I mean, when I was little, I never gave a thought to anniversaries or dates or starred days on the calendar. Then suddenly one morning, I woke up a prisoner of time, transfixed by the passing days, marking them, counting them: two years since the day Daddy was first diagnosed; two years since he went in the hospital for his first surgery—and as of December seventeenth, two years to the day I last saw him alive.

  And just like that, it all fell into place, and after seven months of stubborn, voiceless silence, I knew exactly where I wanted to begin my own personal history: on the icy December night in 1987 when I came home from Tampa in the wee hours of the morning, ran up the steep stairs of our spooky old house so I could talk to my father one last time.

  With no more thought or preparation than that, I rolled out of bed and rummaged through all my boxes and bags till I found the portable recorder I’d bought back in October, and the miniature tapes and triple-A batteries. It took a moment to assemble them, then without even testing the tape, I climbed back in bed, sat there in the darkness of the storm, and racked my brain for every single detail I could remember about that night, that seemed so far away—decades past, hardly within memory.

  At first, I could only bring up a few stumbling details, till I happened to catch a glimpse of the Busch Gardens picture of me and Kenneth and Uncle Lou that I keep on my nightstand, the tape marks still visible on the back where Daddy kept it taped to his bed rails when he went to the hospital that last very last time. The bright, vivid colors of the little photo unexpectedly inspired me, brought back the day in Technicolor detail: the long drive along the coast, the mermaids and the manatees, then Daddy waiting upstairs in his magnificent bed, his gaunt face breaking into a smile when he saw me at the door (“Hey Big Man”).

  It was an image I had somehow lost in the bustle and grief of the past two years, and I can’t tell you how wonderful it was, unearthing it; bringing it back to life the same way Gabe used to, with his hilarious old Michael-stories—I wonder if he tells them, still. Grannie never says, nor does Aunt Candace or Sim or certainly not Missy, who drives me back and forth to school every day, but is otherwise too consumed with her own busy life to worry much with me and my hardheaded ways.

  She hardly mentions Mama or Gabe anymore, though there at first, she was furious at me for moving out, came after me like a pit bull that very first day of high school, back when everything was so new and intimidating. Aunt Candace hadn’t even gone over and got my new school clothes yet, so I’d had to wear a pair of Curtis’s old Wranglers that were about six sizes too small and made me look like a chunky Dwight Yoakam.

  After all her labors to urban me up that summer, I’m not sure if Missy was more angry at me or at my hayseed clothes. I was just standing there at a table in the library thumbing through an encyclopedia, pondering this gruesome paper my honors-lit. teacher had assigned, a paper on our favorite contemporary American author (of which I knew none), when I saw her approaching across the expanse of the room, neat and preppy in shorts and sandals, though her fair, freckled face was dark as a thundercloud.

  Without so much as a hey or a hi-ya-doing, she marched right up to the table, snapped: “Clayton Catts? What d’you think you’re doing, moving in with Uncle Ed, who’ll have you out there mowing and mulching every Saturday till you die?”

  That’s exactly how she put it, all in one fast, accusing breath, so fast that I was momentarily caught off guard, just blinked at her a moment, then asked in this weenie little voice: “Who’s your favorite contemporary American author?”

  “What?” she asked in that snippy little voice. Then: “Flannery O’Connor. Why?”

  I gestured at the encyclopedia: “’Cause I got a write a paper on somebody, it’s due Friday. Who is Flannery O’Connor? What did he write? Is Stephen King a contemporary American author?”

  She just stared at me with the wildest contempt, as if she’d caught me peeing in the stacks, though she seemed to be trying to rein herself in, took a deliberate breath and offered in a voice that fought for mildness: “Listen, Clay, we’ll go through Gabe’s books tonight. He has a thousand of them, has a signed copy of Wise Blood—good gosh! Why d’you have to be so stinking stubborn?” Because at the mention of his name, I started shaking my head: no, no, no.

  After that, things turned a little nasty, Missy informing me in her bossy, know-it-all voice: “Well, if you move in with Aunt Candace, you can kiss those honor courses good-bye. Gabe’s the only one who’ll get you through ’em and you know it.”

  I just slammed the encyclopedia shut, told her in a sure, shaking voice: “I’ll drop out of high school—I’ll work a saw at Sanger before I’d live in the same house with that man—”

  “Oh, you will not,” she countered, overriding me with sheer volume, “you’ll just mope around, whining and showing your butt while Mama paces the floor at night and Gabe goes just about insane—your own father, Clay! Your own father!”

  And just like that, the quiet little fuse Grannie had accidentally lit two days before finally exploded: “He’s NOT MY FATHER!” I shouted in brilliant disregard for the lifted faces around us, the librarian at the desk who leapt to her feet and started toward us.

  “Oh, hush, you know he is—”

  “I hate him!” I screamed, I couldn’t help it, it was true all the way down to my toes. “I hate his stinking guts!”

  “Well, I hate you!” she shouted back, or tried to, because the librarian was on us by then, jerking Missy back by her elbow, threatening to send us to the dean if we didn’t leave this instant.

  Missy was enough of a know-it-all to stand there and try to explain, but I just grabbed my backpack and slammed out the door, not at all hurt or offended, but suddenly vibrant, full of life. It was like every cell in my body was activated, from the tips of my hair to my toenails, making me want to stand there on the sidewalk like a camp-meeting preacher and give all the students milling around the cafeteria a sermon about how much I hated Gabriel Catts. Hated him. Hated his guts. I’d tell them everything: how he came back when we were in a low state, how he slicked us all, won our hearts. How I thought he was God’s reimbursement for taking Daddy and used to lie in bed at night and dream I’d marry Rachel Cole and we’d name our first son Gabriel Michael Catts. And how I felt a little guilty at giving Daddy the second billing, but figured Gabe deserved it; after all, he didn’t have a son of his own to do the honors—

  By the time I’d stomped the three blocks to Aunt Candace’s and let myself in the back door, the phone was already ringing, but I just let it ring, knowing it was Aunt Candace, or maybe Grannie, calling to get me in line. To tell me about forgiveness and understanding and mercy, and I didn’t want to hear it. No way. Not me. When it finally quit ringing, I lay down on the couch and rubbed my face, but the exhilaration was gone.

  Suddenly I didn’t feel like making any more speeches, just lay there, kind of overwhelmed by my anger, my deep, dark rage. It occurred to me that maybe I was a bad seed myself, like Uncle Ira or Granddaddy Sims. Maybe I was destined for the cells myself, because even I couldn’t fathom the depth of my outrage; it hardly made sense to even me. If they’d just leave me alone, I’d be all right, I thought. I could figure this thing out, decode it the way I had to decode everything: slowly, one syllable at a time, with a lot of errors and fill-ins, though in the end, the gist of the text would finally appear, and I could make peace with it, get the message at last.

  I was still lying there a half an hour or so later when I heard a key in the door and sat up, wondering who was home that early. It was Aunt Candace, still dressed in her work scrubs. She didn’t speak, didn’t put down her purse, just came straight to the couch and handed me the phone, said: “Call.”

  I looked at her. “Call who?”

  “Call Missy,” she said. “She’s at Mama’s. Call her there.”

  “Why?” I
asked, and she crossed her arms.

  “Because Mama called me at work, is about to pull the plug on this thing, gave me specific orders that I tell you to call. So here I am and here’s the phone. Call.”

  She wasn’t smiling when she said it, and with a little roll of the eyes to show how silly it was, I sat up and dialed Grannie’s number. She answered on the first ring, didn’t say anything but hello, then handed the phone to Missy, who said: “Clayton.” Sigh. “I’m sorry I said that I hated you. You know that I don’t. And I hope you can appreciate the fact that I love and respect Uncle Gabe even if you don’t, and have a natural concern for him when I feel that he is being treated badly.”

  She stopped then, and I had the definite feeling I was being read to off one of those three-by-five index cards she scribbles notes on for debate. It was something about her voice. A certain stiffness, as if Grannie was standing next to her, making her do it. And the way she said treated badly. Not treated bad, the way she’d have said it if she were speaking off the cuff, but treated badly.

  Good grammar. Good theatrics, and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at Aunt Candace when I answered in a very kind, understanding voice: “Oh. I see. Well, good for you, Missy. And hey, I know you love him and I can respect that.” I paused and let a little conciliatory silence build, then added: “And listen, with any luck here, Mama’ll go nuts again and kill herself and then you can marry him. Then he’ll be my uncle and my stepfather and my brother-in-law, too. Just one big happy family—”

  “D’you hear that?” Missy said aside to someone—Grannie, I guess—though I didn’t pause.

  “—but he will never, ever, ever be my father. D’you HEAR ME?”

  This last was an actual wail, so loud that even I was embarrassed after I slammed down the phone and opened my eyes and found myself facing Aunt Candace, who was standing there in her scrubs, watching me with a face of great exasperation.

  “Claybird?” she said after a moment. “You got two choices here: either you pick up that phone and call Missy and cry and beg and somehow make it right—or you pack your stuff and move back home tonight. I mean, I can withstand Gabe or I can withstand Mama, but I cain’t do both.”

  Well, it was logic even I couldn’t argue with, and though it took a lot of crawling and apologies, I finally wormed my way back into Missy’s good graces, though she is still loyal as a bulldog to Gabe and has never humored me like Grannie and Sim and Uncle Case (who have refused to take sides, pretty much ignore the whole issue). She won’t let me make any snide remarks about him while she takes me back and forth to school every day, and still simply insists that he is my father.

  “You look just like him,” she says, and I never point out that she looks just like Uncle Ira, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s his.

  I don’t point it out because she’d probably slap me, and I mean, she’s buff as Michael Jordan these days, with shoulders like a tailback: Uncle Ira all over again and she hates it. I didn’t blame her, for despite my new surfer wardrobe and my even newer spiked hair (not big spike, but surfer-spike), I still look a lot like Gabe, mostly because of that stinking dimple that has set me apart as the family bastard as far as the whole of West Florida is concerned. No one cares to notice that I also have Daddy’s hair (not the color but the texture) and his eyes and his brains for money. I also have his religion, which is something I sure couldn’t have gotten from Gabe. But see, these things were not obvious. They don’t hit you in the eye like that stupid dimple that I have grown to hate so much that I have given up on smiling all together. And of course, Daddy isn’t here to claim me and Gabe is, and he’s got the kind of personality that makes people kind of bend toward him and see things his way.

  Yeah, he has them all fooled: Missy and Grannie and all of my former buds from LPM—Darius and Bobo and Travis—who really did come to love their old teacher and have never quite forgiven me for turning on him, won’t speak to me when we pass in the hall, or in gym, as if my rejection of Gabe is somehow a rejection of them. Even loyal old Kenneth and I aren’t as close as we used to be—not because of Gabe, but girls, mostly, for since we started school in town, he’s become positively addicted to them. I mean, what religion is to Aunt Candace, boobs are to Kenneth: absolute obsession.

  Maybe it has something to do with his Italian blood, but it’s been a strange and swift transformation, one that’s gotten between us a little, because I still have a deep and strong love for Rachel Cole and Kenneth is like one of Uncle Case’s old hog dogs: he loves females alike, one and all, makes little distinction between tall and short, big or small, black or white, can’t understand why I can’t do the same.

  He’s always trying to fix me up with some chick who is best friends with his current chick (and we’re talking revolving door here: a different girl a week). When I don’t show proper enthusiasm for the job, he gets sulky and insulted, moves his book bag across the room to sit with his old buds from Gifted, who all think I got into the AP track on the back of a bribe and are constantly confounded by my inability to read. (“Are you stupid or something?” one or another of them asks me almost every week.)

  Fortunately, these classes are so hard that almost everyone (Kenneth included) is failing at least one of them, so no one can point too much of a finger at me. In fact, I’m actually faring better than most, eking by in everything but Latin, mostly because I still have scribes to read me my test, and the Blind and Dyslexic Society, who supply all my books on tape, otherwise I’d be flunking out on a spectacular scale. But aside from these nagging little complaints, and a few close calls as far as running into Gabe are concerned (once at a gas station with Curtis, once at Winn-Dixie the day after Christmas), I’ve done all right here at Aunt Candace’s.

  I mean, at first it was hard, with the homesickness, the missing Mama, but Aunt Candace doesn’t run a household that leaves a lot of room for rumination, with every moment of the day filled to the brim with one activity after another. The day after I moved in, she posted a smart little list of daily chores that includes cleaning my room and doing my own laundry and taking out the garbage on Wednesdays, the recycling on Fridays, all of which doesn’t sound like a lot of work, but is.

  For Aunt Candace is a nurse, and Uncle Ed a building inspector, a career combo that makes for just the pickiest people on earth, with every household task boasting its own little protocol. Take the recycling. Instead of just junking all the newspapers and aluminum cans and paper bags in the little blue recycling bin (and feeling pretty smug and sanctimonious about taking the time to do that), Aunt Candace makes me rinse out all the cans and neatly fold the bags and pack it as tightly as a suitcase for an overnight trip. She also makes me clean my bathroom every stinking night, and we’re talking clean, here: not a hint of a shadow of mildew or gunk, and all the shampoos in place and the cap on the toothpaste, and God forbid that a sock should land outside the hamper and spend a lonely night on the tile! Chaos! Disorder! Anarchy in suburbia!

  At first, I was mighty suspicious of it all, figured Uncle Ed had a secret agenda afoot; that he was too pious to tell me plainly that I wasn’t welcome in his house and had concocted a secret plan to run me off by working me like a packhorse. But after months of close scrutiny, I’ve come to realize that cleanliness isn’t a game to these people, but truly a Way of Life, and Aunt Candace is secretly very pleased that she has been given this God-given opportunity to set me on the straight and narrow, right all the mistakes Mama and Daddy made over the years in raising me. I really think that at the bottom of her fervent little evangelical heart, she figures she’ll take me on a few years, shape and refine me, fill me with the Holy Spirit and get me in the habit of ironing my pants, then ship me off to college New and Improved and Right in the Sight of the Lord.

  At least that’s the only thing she insists on: that I go to church with her every Sunday at Living Water Assembly, a charismatic congregation of the name-it-and-claim-it stripe, the kind that subscribe to Charisma magazi
ne and watch the 700 Club and think Kenneth Copeland hung the moon. I don’t mind too much, because they’re a lot more entertaining than the old folk at Welcome, basically a strange, kooky bunch who dance like Zulus during the song service and come up with these incredible crazy theories that they’re always sharing with these innocent, trusting smiles like it’s all perfectly normal. Today’s sermon dealt with demonic possession, which is one of their recurrent themes. Seed faith and demonic possession—every action on earth can be traced to one or the other.

  At first it was so weird that I thought the whole bunch needed deprogramming, but now I just sit back and listen and sometimes it makes a little sense. Anyway, I’d rather sit there next to Aunt Candace and hear about prince spirits than next to Gabe at Welcome and play war on the back of the bulletin like we used to. Those days are over, though Grannie can’t help but drop an occasional remark about how that speaking in tongues is of the devil and so forth, which is what Baptists generally think of the charismatics (until the exact moment they become one themselves).

  But that’s about as much static as she ever gives me when Aunt Candace drops me off at her house every Sunday, one of the few things in my life that has never changed: I still go over to Grannie’s every week after church. At first, I was afraid I’d run into Mama or Gabe over there, but apparently Grannie made some kind of arrangement with them, and Sunday is still our day, and though they attend church just four houses away, they never step foot on Magnolia Hill as long as I’m there. And thank God for that, because Grannie is afraid I’m becoming anorexic from living with Aunt Candace and gets up early before church and fixes some of the best food on God’s green earth. I’m talking roast in gravy and ham and potato salad, and pork chops and pole beans, not to mention corn bread and biscuits and sometimes even homemade rolls and banana pudding. After seven months’ exile in the land of the TV dinner, it really is enough to bring tears to my eyes when I first walk into her rickety little kitchen every week and lift the lids on all the steaming pots, makes me wish my old Grannie had been born Catholic, for if anyone on earth were ever a candidate for sainthood, it is she.