The Schooling of Claybird Catts

by Janis Owens

  “It’s not like that, Grannie—” he began, then must have realized how cold it sounded, because he shrugged and looked away, added with a lot less conviction: “It’s no big deal.”

  “No big deal,” she murmured, dropping her eyes to the table that was piled high with all the food she’d probably been laboring over since Sim called her that morning from the plant. She ran her eyes down the length of it as if checking to make sure everything was on the table: the salt and pepper, the butter and the pickles, then returned to Sim, asked in a voice that was empty of sarcasm, just level and honest as could be: “Has the money done this to you, baby? Was it that? Or Gabriel coming back? Was it him?”

  It was such an unexpected thrust into the heart of the matter that I felt my face go suddenly hot, though Simon took it without flinching. “No, Grannie,” he answered with great force. “Gabe hasn’t done this to me, or Daddy dying, or Granddaddy Sims—God, Grannie—we all cain’t stay held up here on the Hill or out in the woods, polishing floors and tending flowers. Some of us got to get out there and work—get out there and live—”

  Try as he might, he couldn’t contain a note of gigantic impatience at Grannie and her funny old Grannie-ways that made her draw back, not used to being spoken to in such a way, especially by her good-natured old Sim. For a moment she just sat there, blinking, then quietly laid down her napkin, and for the first time in the history of the world, my tough old Grannie, who in her prime had withstood the Monster of Magnolia Hill, actually retreated in the face of his grandson, just got up and left. She didn’t do it with a lot of fanfare, just went through the kitchen and out the back door and (I guess) down the Hill to see Brother Sloan, to corner him at his desk while he labored over his Easter sermon and warn him that if he ever intended to get a third generation of tithes out of the Catts family, he’d best be praying hard.

  Sim stood, too, though he didn’t run after her, try to apologize or repent. He just stood there with his napkin still clutched in his hand, watching her leave with this white awful face of grief, of perplexity, and I don’t know what all else, till his glance happened to settle on me.

  And let me tell you: it was a whole different ball game altogether.

  “You son of a bitch,” he breathed, slinging aside his chair and rounding the table, yanking me up by the front of my shirt and pinning me to the wall like a bug in a science project, shouting “Yer nothing but a shit-stirring little pain in the ass,” right in my face, spit flying and eyes bulging, though that was about as far as he went.

  I mean, poor Sim, he was really too nice a guy to beat someone up or even cuss them out properly. He didn’t even hit me or use the f-word or the Lord’s name in vain, just kept banging the back of my head against the old bead-board wall as if he was really and truly trying to knock some sense into me, shouting between knocks: “You thank it’s easy working your ass off sixty hours a week? You thank I like it? You thank it’s a picnic, being Michael Catts’s son? You thank it’s easy?”

  It was far from a life-threatening encounter and would have ended without blood loss if I could have left well enough alone. But I didn’t much like being shook around like a rat, and when he finally had enough of me and let go with a disgusted little jerk, I came off that floor like a rubber ball. I caught him just as he went into the living room and jumped on his back the way they do in wrestling, trying to tackle him, though the effect was more like bull riding than fighting, for what Sim lacks in ferocity, he makes up for in size and agility. He didn’t go down under my weight, just rocked forward a little with a roar of anger, and started trying to punch me over his shoulder.

  For a few sweating, grunting, cursing moments, we whirled around the living room like a two-headed man in a fistfight with himself, knocking over lamps and banging into the wall, till one of us finally drew blood. I didn’t know who at that point, just that it was suddenly all over the place: Sim’s forehead, and running down my chin and shirt, and worst of all, spraying in fat little droplets all over Grannie’s brand-new sofa sleeper. When I saw it, I let out a little cry, making Sim pause a moment and look down, and when he saw the spray of dark blood on the broad, pastel cushions, he let out a howl of truly animal rage.

  “You stoopid son of bitch,” he positively roared, then in one tremendous heave, tossed me to the floor like a rag doll.

  He turned on me, was coming in for the kill, when someone shouted: “Hey!”

  The voice was male and country, so familiar that for one strange, disjointed moment, it sounded just like Daddy, enough to make my heart give this great thump-thump, leap to my throat. Even Sim froze, his face suddenly open and scared and full of wonder—though there was no need. It wasn’t a ghostly visitation, but just Uncle Case, stopping by for supper like he did almost every night.

  I don’t know how long he’d been standing there in the dining-room door; long enough to see the blood on the couch, because he didn’t bother to ask if we were all right, just snapped: “Clayton Catts, git yo ass in thet kitchen and git you a rag and clean up thet mess.”

  I was so pumped with adrenaline and nerves that I jumped off the floor like a jackrabbit, hightailed it to the kitchen and found a damp dishcloth, then went back to the living room that was now empty, the front door standing open on its hinges, Uncle Case and Sim nowhere to be seen. I wiped up the floor and righted the lamps and did what I could with the couch, though the red drops seemed to be multiplying rather than disappearing. That’s when I realized that I was the source of all that blood, that Sim had busted my nose, the blood still flowing at an amazing rate, drip, drip, drip, all over the place.

  I gave up on the couch then and went to the bathroom, washed my face and wiggled the end of my nose, feeling for a break. But aside from a strange swelling at the base of the bridge and that fountain of bright red blood, everything seemed intact. I finally just wadded a towel on the middle of my face and went back to the living room, finished wiping down the walls and did what I could with the cushions. When I finally got everything cleaned up, I rinsed out the towel in the bathroom sink, and with nothing better to do, cleared the dining-room table and washed the dishes, had the kitchen mostly clean when I heard Sim’s car start up in the drive.

  He and Uncle Case must have gone out there to talk in private, for Uncle Case ambled in the back door almost immediately, coming to a halt when he saw me, regarding my swollen face with a look of great distaste. “You clean up that mess in the living room?” he snapped, a heck of a lot more intimidating than Sim would ever be in a million years.

  “Yessir,” I answered smartly. “Cleaned up the kitchen, too.”

  He still didn’t look too happy, just shook his head in great disapproval. “Then go on to bed. Put some ice on thet face and hit the rack. Don’t want to hear another peep out of you tonight—you heah me?”

  I nodded meekly, got some ice, and went to bed, though I was too keyed up to sleep, haunted by the crazy look on Sim’s face while he banged me against the wall, his fast, frantic cry. (“You thank it’s a picnic, being Michael Catts’s son? You thank it’s easy?”) To tell you the truth, I’d never thought of Simon’s life in such a way, and for the first time, I saw a different face on my easygoing brother, the face of a boy who’d had too much put on him too early, who was groping for a footing on a life as stumbling and desperate as mine, and a mad, crazy grief that was driving both of us to the strangest extremes.

  My heart really did go out to him, made me feel mighty weenie for deviling him at supper like I had, and after he’d let me stay with him in Waycross, and he’d even fixed me up on a date and it wasn’t really his fault that it hadn’t worked out, was it? The more I thought of it, the guiltier I got, till finally, after a good ten minutes tossing and turning, I got up and slinked back to the kitchen, where Uncle Case had quite forgotten me, was busy fixing his supper, filling his plate at the stove.

  I stood at the door till he heard me and turned, told him in a small, contrite voice: “I’m sorry, Uncle Case, for picki
ng a fight with Sim. I hope I didn’t hurt him.”

  Uncle Case just nodded briefly, then went back to filling his plate, told me over his shoulder, “Well, I’m ashamed of you boys, ashamed of the both of you,” and I thought he was going to say: for upsetting yer Grannie, for taking after yer sorry, good-for-nothing granddaddy Sims and chasing women and trying to settle things with your fists. But he just added with a little grunt: “Almost grown men, the both of you,” then shook his head sorrowfully, “fight like a couple of girls.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SECOND MONDAY OF MAY; THREE MORE WEEKS OF SCHOOL

  I meant to record yesterday in the comfortable wisteria shadow of Grannie’s back porch, but Sunday has truly become my one and only day of rest. After wolfing down one of Grannie’s magnificent Sunday dinners (fried catfish and hush puppies and cheese grits), I fell dead asleep on her couch, didn’t wake up till Aunt Candace came and picked me up at nine.

  Now that I’m in the middle of baseball purgatory, I don’t know when in the world I’ll ever find time to curl up with my tapes and faithful little recorder and tell my side of the matter. At the moment, I’m taping here in Aunt Candace’s living room and have to go quickly because she’s due home any minute, and if she comes in and finds me whispering into a microphone, she’ll probably think I’ve joined the neo-Nazis and am making plans to firebomb the statehouse.

  Ever since she found out about the fight, she’s been mighty suspicious of me, taking on this air of great and regretful reproach, as if disappointed that despite her best efforts to church me and teach me to iron my pants, my old Sims genes have raised their ugly head and are threatening to undo her good work. It all started when Grannie came home that night and found her couch and living-room walls damp and slightly discolored (not by the blood, but the stuff I’d used to clean it off).

  Uncle Case and Sim had left by then, and me and my busted nose were sleeping peacefully in the spare bedroom, so Grannie couldn’t quite figure out what had happened. She just went about her nightly routine: watched the Dothan news, then went to take a bath, when she discovered a trail of fresh blood drips in the dining room that she followed through the house to the laundry room. And let me tell you, when she came upon that bloody towel hanging from the edge of the washer, it was like a nuclear explosion went off on Magnolia Hill. Without even bothering to wake me up, she went straight to the phone and called Aunt Candace at work, must have told her that the chickens had come home to roost! The ghost of Leldon Sims returned to get his revenge at last!

  For Aunt Candace abandoned all of her patients on ICU just like that, came tearing across town and yanked me from my bed, made me recount my sordid tale in a sleepy little voice, then insisted on taking me to the ER for an X ray to see if my nose was broken (it wasn’t). Oddly enough, she wasn’t as upset about Sim and his beer and his women as she was with me, for fighting! Right in Grannie’s living room! With my own brother, blood all over the place!

  You’d think from the way she talked that I’d gouged out Sim’s eyes and ripped out his lungs and scattered his body parts all over Magnolia Hill and danced a jig on his bleached bones. Even after Uncle Case called her at home the next morning and assured her that it wasn’t much of a fight, nothing but a tussle, really, Aunt Candace wouldn’t let it go. It was obvious that she saw Grannie’s ruined couch as a dark portent of evil days, the perfect symbol of our family’s undoing, and after a week of worry and hand-wringing, finally came upon the perfect cure for my rebellion: baseball.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t quite grasp the logic of this move, figured she’d run out of household chores to keep me busy and had to fall back on the old standards: sports and practice and round-the-clock exhaustion to rid me of every trace of my latent, Leldon Sims ferocity. If I wouldn’t have been so guilt-stricken about ruining Sim’s life, I would have probably dug in my heels and refused, but I’m so universally hated these days that I really can’t afford to offend Aunt Candace or I might yet end up on the last bus to Times Square, just as my poor old vampire mother still (probably) fears.

  So I went down to Kmart and bought a pair of cheap rubber cleats (the kind Missy wouldn’t be caught dead in) and joined the Sanger baseball team, which was the only team in Florida willing to take me as a walk-on that late in the season. And after one night of practice, I decided that Aunt Candace might not be so nuts, after all; that maybe baseball in Florida in May really is a soul-purifying exercise, because let me tell you, it’s as good a description of hell as I can imagine.

  For one thing, the other players are all older than me, mostly guys from the plant who stay in pretty good shape from working on the floor and are natural athletes to begin with. They all played up the ranks in Little League and Babe Ruth, high school, and maybe even a semester or two at college level till injuries or bad luck landed them working on the line at the local furniture factory. I guess baseball is one of their last living links to their youthful aspirations, for they follow the game with a seriousness I remember from Daddy, that I myself really can’t quite fathom. That first night at practice, I really thought it was a joke, a sketch from Saturday Night Live. I was sure that Coach Bates (this huge old redneck, a dead ringer for the fat guy on Hee Haw) was poking a little good-natured fun when he gathered us in the dugout and marched back and forth like a sweating old camp-meeting preacher, told us in this awful old hayseed twang that we only had one more week before our first game, boiys, that we’d best work HARD out ther, boiys, and play HARD, iffen we wanted to WIN!

  I kept glancing around at the faces of my fellow players the whole time he paced, waiting for the punch line, for everyone to throw their heads back and laugh their butts off at this hilarious takeoff, but no, this is serious business. This is salvation without a cross, Living Waters Assembly without the Holy Ghost. I find it all very strange, and they find me likewise, everyone really welcoming and nice at first, for after eight months of yard work and starvation with Aunt Candace, I’ve become deceptively lean-and-mean looking, with the kind of height and long arms that could (theoretically) hit a ball a country mile. They were all tickled pink to have me on board, though after watching me bat a time or two, a few of them politely pulled me aside and asked if I was recovering from an injury: a pulled tendon, a dislocated disk?

  I would have liked to have lied (in fact, I think I did), though no injury on earth could forever excuse my batting stance (or lack thereof) or the fact that so far this season, I’ve yet to make so much as a hit, not even a foul, tip, or nick; nothing; swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, three strikes and you’re out. I also can’t catch very well (that is: not at all) and drop every fly that comes my way, not missed in close, fumbled errors, but as Missy puts it, by a country mile.

  That was her only comment after she watched me struggle through my first game, along with a shake of her head and a bemused: “Gosh, if Aunt Candace just wanted to humiliate you to death, why didn’t she make you walk to school naked or something?”

  The reason it was her only comment was that she heard about my fight with Sim by then and was giving me a taste of the old Silent Treatment, taking Sim’s side like she always does. She hardly spoke to me for the better part of a week, till Friday, when Aunt Candace had another one of her divine inspirations and somehow talked Missy into giving me a few one-on-one practice sessions to teach me how to bat and catch, if nothing else. I think money might have changed hands in the transaction, for Missy didn’t complain too much, just dropped by the house this afternoon while I was doing laundry and told me to get my cleats. Without bothering to explain where we were going, she drove me to the old field behind the church (the same field where Daddy taught himself to pitch) and laid down an official home plate, borrowed from her softball coach.

  She was very meticulous about it, carefully flattened it out and brushed it off, then positioned me beside it like a mannequin in a department store and began lobbing me these slow, arching moon balls, yammering advice the whole time. (“Dang it, Clay, box it in�
�no, parallel the base. Drop your elbows—no, not—there. Eyes on the ball, eyes on the ball—swing!”)

  After maybe a dozen misses, I finally began grounding them, and she straightened her pitches, began zeroing them across the plate in whizzing underhand fastball that passed two feet in front of my chest in a scary little blur. It took the better part of the afternoon for me to finally, finally connect with one, enough to send it flying as far as the side of the church, bouncing off the bricks and narrowly missing a Sunday-school window.

  Missy straightened up and watched it arch away, then, like the basically decent human being she is, grinned her audacious old Daddy-grin, called, “Well done, young man!” the same way Daddy used to yell at players during games, bringing fast, sharp tears to my eyes and this sudden stab of pride.

  Once the glacier silence between us was broken, her loyalty to Simon must have been overcome by simple curiosity about what had really gone on in Waycross, for when we finished practice, she casually mentioned that she was hungry, offered to buy me a burger if I’d drop by McDonald’s with her on the way home. She insisted we go inside, bought a strawberry shake for herself, a Quarter Pounder and fries for me, and as soon as we settled in our booth, she fixed me with a curious eye and asked: “So what really went on up in Waycross? Is Sim really living with some bimbo up there? Did he really break your nose when you told Grannie?”

  You might think that after enduring a week’s worth of my sister’s evil silence I would have given her back a taste of her own medicine, that I’d just sit there and munch my burger and refuse to give an inch, but I didn’t, of course. I mean, I really do sometimes think that I’d make a very good Catholic, for if there is one thing on earth I love to do, it is confess. With no more prodding than that, I sat there and spilt my guts down to the very smallest organ, told her everything, from that first dinner at O’Grady’s to my dates with Keri, even mentioned that idiot movie, Fatal Attraction, and how much I hated it.