by Janis Owens
I paused, couldn’t finish the sentence, and Grannie looked at me mildly. “Is he what?” she asked, but I really couldn’t get it out.
I just kept staring at her, finally stammered, “Is he—okay?”
Grannie went back to her stove on that, told me over her shoulder: “Yessir, he’s fine. The doctor took an X ray, found a hole in his stomach—” But that’s about as far as she got, when, to both our consternation, I burst into tears like a big old hundred-and-eighty-pound baby.
I think it might have been the single most embarrassing moment in my life, though Grannie was the soul of comfort, just wiped her hands on her apron and came over and gripped me in one of her tight Granniehugs, murmured: “Oh, shug, don’t you worry yoursef. Gabriel Catts is like Old Tommy.” Tommy was her cat. “Underneath all that fluff and fur, he’s a tough old thing. He’ll be fine.” Though she looked very smug and satisfied when she said it, pleased that at least one of her grandsons hadn’t gone the way of all flesh and could still be unashamedly neurotic and emotional and sissy.
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” I told her as we parted, wiping my eyes and adding (as if it were the reason for the tears): “I think I failed Latin. It was too hard. And Mr. Neeley hates me.”
Grannie smiled at me indulgently, didn’t argue or tell me what a goof I was, just went back to the stove and finished telling me about Gabe, who’d just come out of surgery, was doing fine, the doctor said, would only be in the hospital a couple of days at the most.
“Sim come all the way from Waycross to sit with him,” she added with a significant lift of her chin, as if this were indisputable evidence that my brother hadn’t gone completely to the bad. “Did it for his mama,” she told me, “who wasn’t in no fit state to hang around thet hospital all day. I brung her home with me, made her take a nap.” Then, in the single reproach she ever voiced over my treatment of my mother: “She ain’t had the easiest life, your mama ain’t. I knowed her when she was a chile, living right across thet fence, and let me tell you, son, it wadn’t no picnic, growing up over there with that sorry excuse for a daddy she had.”
She must have known that Aunt Candace had filled me in on the gruesome details, for she didn’t add anything else, just met my eye in that voiceless, chin-out challenge till I assured her: “I know, Grannie. I know.”
“Well,” she said with a smart little shake her of apron, “you’ll speak nicely to her when she gets up.”
Her old Grannie bossiness struck me as funny for some reason, made me laugh for the first time that day. “Well, what d’you want me to do in the yard?” I asked, and her face lost its challenge just like that. Grannie’s too old to push a wheelbarrow anymore and too poor to hire a yard service, and though she’s too proud to let her children pay for it, she really does worry that her neighbors sit around their supper tables every night and wonder aloud at what has become of Sister Catts’s nice yard.
So she was quickly all business, took me outside and showed me the kudzu that had taken over the five-acre field behind her house and was making steady inroads on her back and side fence. She put on a pair of leather gloves and showed me how to rip it out and follow it to its roots, big old potato-looking things that she had me dig up and burn (Grannie not being the kind of person who toys with her enemies, but opts for a straight scorched-earth policy).
The kudzu alone took the better part of the afternoon, and once I had the roots and vines smoking in her burn barrel, she showed me the different plants that needed to be transplanted: four azaleas and two camellias, which doesn’t sound like a lot of work, but by gosh, was. For we’re not talking about fragile little specimen plants here, but big old ancient monsters, the camellias absolutely enormous, six feet high, at least, with taproots, and went on and on, I’m talking to China.
By sundown, I had dug myself halfway under her house searching for the end of the roots, finally gave up and started chopping, hoping to God that we weren’t entering one of those cursed summer droughts, or Grannie might lose one of them and God help us if she did (the old Debutantes were her favorite). Fortunately, she’d gone inside to finish cooking supper, so I got away with my chopping, was moving the last of the camellias, lumbering under the weight of the hideous old thing, when I realized that Mama was standing there on the porch steps watching me.
She must have woken up from her nap and come out without a sound, just appeared there in all her ghostly tranquillity, her hair chopped off so short that she really did look kind of pathetic, like a chemo patient trying to get a little sun before the summer came fully on. I didn’t quite know what to say, just manhandled the old camellia over to the fence and dropped it sideways with a little crash, then wiped my face on my arm and sent her a terse little nod, the way rednecks nod when they pass each other on the highway, a brief, neighborly acknowledgment of recognition.
She didn’t nod back, just stood there at the top of the steps, one hand on the porch rail, in a timid little stance that was familiar to me for some reason, I couldn’t figure why. Then I remembered Aunt Candace’s story about how Mama had fallen in love with her majorette uniform when she was a child, but was too shy to come to the fence, would stand on their porch and peer at her across the twilight.
She stood there with that same mixture of eagerness and timidity, till finally, after what—twenty-eight years?—she gathered the courage to leave the safety of the porch and come slowly down the steps.
“Claybird?” she called across the twilight. “Can we talk?”
There was an immediate pound of nervousness in my chest, though I tried to be cool and casual, told her: “Let me finish with this camellia.” Then, so she wouldn’t think I was putting her off: “Grannie’s paying me.”
She nodded at that, then went over to the old pig-iron fence next to the sweet gum and sat down in the flickering shade, waiting patiently while I took care of that cursed last camellia, ripping roots and breaking branches in my hurry to get it in the ground, till the gardener in Mama must have gotten the best of her. For she came to her feet, called across the yard: “Claybird. Wait. Here, baby—not so deep.”
Then, with no concern for her clothes or nails, she came over and helped me plant it, knelt down on the ground and wrapped the dragging roots in a nice little ball that she fitted into the hole. Once the dirt was nicely patted in, she had me go down to the ditch and dig up some black muck to top it off, then finally came to her feet with the satisfied look of a job well done, her nice khaki pants no longer so nice, her hands and nails a sorry sight.
“Gosh, Mama, you got all dirty,” I told her, though she couldn’t have cared less.
“That’s all right,” she said, absently slapping the loose sand off her knees. “Run get the hose and I’ll water it in.”
But I’d been working in the yard for the better part of six hours by then, was about ready to take a load off my feet. “It’ll be all right,” I told her. Then, “Did you want to talk?” Because I was tired of waiting, was wanting to get this thing out in the open right now, while I had the courage to face it and was really too tired and whipped to care. But Mama, Earth Mother that she is, couldn’t leave that cursed old camellia alone.
“Claybird, the root’ll dry out if we leave it like this,” she said. “Run get the hose—it won’t take a minute.”
With a little roll of the eyes to show how much of an inconvenience it was, I went and got the hose and she stood there and shot water on her specially dug hole till it was nicely filled, a mud pond with a camellia bush poking out of it. When she was finished, she washed her hands, though in true Mama-fashion didn’t bother to go and ask Grannie for a towel, just wiped them on the butt of her pants, then left the tip of the hose to drip the same way she did with her new roses.
By then, the sun was far down the sky, mostly behind the roofline of the sagging old houses at the end of Lafayette, its last, straining rays catching the top of the old sweet gum, turning its crown a fiery cherry red. That’s where Mama settled again, in
the sand next to its thick black trunk, her back to the ratty old shack, where rumor had it, she’d once died. She didn’t look too disturbed by the close proximity of the scene of her early death, just lifted her face to the sun-dappled old tree when I sat down, said aside in a light, casual voice: “Gabriel and I used to play here, when we were children.”
It was actually a strange sensation, having my mother bring up one of her past lives with such casual ease. I didn’t quite know what to make of it, just closed my eyes, glad to be off my feet, said, “Really?”—hoping she’d tell me more, but she didn’t, of course.
I must not have sounded enthusiastic enough, for she immediately took cover in the mundane routine of current events, asking me about baseball, of all things, then other family matters: how Lori was doing in school, and how Ryan liked preschool; whether Missy would really go to college in France.
I just sat there and listened as the sun sank low in the sky, the old sweet gum losing its burnished glow, disappearing into the twilight, soon nothing more than a dry rustle of leaves above our heads. It wasn’t until then, till her old friend, the twilight, had settled upon us, that Mama finally worked up the courage to bring the conversation around to more sensitive waters, told me about Gabe and his surgery, and how she’d talked to the surgeon, and everything went fine.
I just nodded, told her: “Yeah. That’s what Grannie said.”
She paused then and actually took a breath for courage before she hesitantly offered: “He’s sorry, Clay, about what happened.”
I just nodded, wondered exactly what he was sorry about (making a fool of my father? making a fool of me?). But I didn’t ask, just looked across the fence at the nasty old shack that really did have white trash written all over it, the yard weedy and overgrown, the limestone chimney beginning to detach itself from the sagging walls, the porch completely taken by the kudzu, a smooth, sculpted green. I was absently wondering what it’d be like to actually live there, to live and sleep and pee in the ratty old outhouse that still stood in crooked, sagging isolation out in the yard, when she pushed ahead nervously, still talking about Gabe.
“I just wish you could accept it—” she began, though when I looked up in challenge, she backed down quickly, stammered: “Not accept—forgive. Forgive it.”
Well, that was hardly any better and I just shrugged to show my disinterest, though Mama wouldn’t let it go. You could tell it was killing her to have to directly deal with such an unpleasant subject, her words halting and unsure as she made her point, tried to explain: “I don’t mean you have to deny it, or say it was all right—because, Claybird, believe me, nobody knows better than me that forgiveness isn’t saying it was all right, it was fine, what happened. Forgiveness is just saying: that was the way it was, and letting it go. That’s all it is, baby.”
In another time and place, I might have appreciated the simplicity of her levelheaded advice, but at the moment, I was bone-tired from all my labors: Latin conjugations and yard work and trying to learn baseball and trying to make sense of my doofus little life. I was too tired to be cooperative and just sat there in the lowering darkness, not really feeling up to any more shouts and arguments, the sad, honest truth finally working its way up through my wounded pride to make a brief, unexpected appearance.
“But I don’t know how it was,” I said in a calm little voice that even surprised me, because by God, it was true. So true that poor Mama looked terribly pained, terribly wounded, sitting there by the fence in her cropped hair and her ghostly paleness, looking shorn and miserable till I added a little clarification of my own: “You don’t ever talk about him.”
“What?” she asked, and I gave a little shrug.
“Daddy,” I said. “Grannie and Aint Candace, and Lori and Curtis—they all talk about him. You never do.”
For a moment, she just looked at me in wonder, even tried to argue, stammered, “Gosh, Clay—what d’you mean, I don’t talk about him? Sure, I talk about him. I think about him all the time—”
But I had no time for her denial, told her plainly: “You do not. It’s like he never even lived, you forgot him so quick. You don’t even go to his grave anymore.”
She looked briefly and sincerely pained at this, just sat there a moment as if trying to find the right words to defend herself, then began in this halting little voice: “Baby, if I don’t talk about him, it’s just because it’s—so hard. I mean, when people die, it’s like who they really are gets a little lost in the telling. You know how it was at the funeral, when everybody kept going on and on about what a great guy Michael was—how petty it all sounded, like we were throwing him a bone because he left us in his will. That’s why I don’t talk about him, baby—because it hurts.” She seemed to finally be hitting close to the truth, pausing on the force of the word, then adding in a smaller voice: “And I’m not so good at it, anyway.”
She halted on that, leaving us at what you might call an impasse, because I knew she could talk about him if she wanted to. I mean, I was the one who’d interviewed her for the oral-history project, and her story, by gosh, it had been the best one on the tape, everyone had said so, even the judges. So I wasn’t going to let her off easy, just sat there under the sweet gum, the yard much cooler now that the sun had gone down, a few timid little stars beginning to glimmer at the edge of the tree line that Mama watched with great interest, her face suddenly and mysteriously lighting.
“A star fell the night we got engaged,” she told me, her pale face momentarily lit as she glanced down and met my eye. “We were driving home through the flat woods from Milton, and I don’t know if I’d have married him if it hadn’t, because Mama was dead set against it, pitching a fit up in Birmingham, and I hardly knew him—didn’t even know his middle name. But then a star fell like a comet, all the way across the sky, and he stopped in the middle of the road, told me to make a wish.”
I smiled then, because Daddy was a great wisher on stars, had done the same thing with me a few times when we were coming home from Waycross, tracking across the flat woods on a cold winter’s night, the sky dark and close and mysteriously alive. He’d never actually stopped in the highway, but he would always slow down and point it out to me through the windshield, tell me to make a wish, and I always would, too. Sometimes I’d wish for easy things: comic books or Transformers or the latest Lego invention, but usually it was the same wish, the same prayer that I prayed every night before I went to sleep: that I’d learn to read; that I’d quit being the family dumbo, would grow up to be like Missy and Sim: tall and smart and athletic.
Sitting there in the cool sand under the sweet gum, it occurred to me that by gosh, I’d gotten that wish, and wasn’t it funny? It was the one prayer I never had any faith for, that I never thought would come true.
But Mama didn’t pause for my ruminations, the floodgates open to her own memories, her own explanations, her voice fast and oddly passionate, as she leaned toward me a little, told me in this earnest, pleading voice: “And Clay, that’s what your father was to me: he was that star. He came out of nowhere, he streaked across the darkness. He lit the sky with this terrible beauty, this great love, then, just like that”—she quietly snapped her fingers—“he was gone. And everything faded, back to black.”
I came back to myself with a jolt, realized she was actually telling me something here: she was setting the record straight, my mother was, about who I was in this family, who my father was and what he was to both of us, the effort so intense that quiet little tears began streaking down her cheeks that she ignored, might not have realized were even there.
I just watched her a moment, full of this sudden, terrible pity, asked: “What’d you wish for, that night?”
Mama seemed to find the question funny, and laughed a little, even through her tears. “Oh, baby, I don’t remember. Happiness, I guess. Or that Mama’d let up on me. It didn’t really matter at that point, ’cause I didn’t need to be wasting my time wishing anymore. I was heading back to Magnolia Hill,
to live with Cissie and Mr. Simon—and that’s all me or Ira ever wanted, anyway.”
It came to me then that by God that was all I ever wanted either: a place of sanctuary, a little peace and acceptance. Maybe it was all anybody ever wanted, and after a moment, I moved over next to her, put my arm around her, tried to think of some way to tell her that I understood her tears, and why she loved Grannie so much, and Granddaddy Sims, too—but it was a hard thing to do.
I finally just dipped my head at the nasty old shack behind us that was hardly visible in the full darkness of the early May night. “Aint Candace told me about—you know—when you lived there. Your father and all.”
It wasn’t the most articulate statement I’d ever made in my life, but Mama seemed to understand, sniffed: “Yeah. It was tough.”
“You don’t ever talk about it,” I pointed out, and she wiped her face and glanced aside at me.
“Well, what d’you want to know?” she asked. I must have looked surprised, for she added: “I mean, I’ve just come to that point, Clay, that I told you about, where you say: that was the way it was, and you let it go. But if you need me to dig it back up, I will. I mean, I do it for Ira, every time they send me a subpoena. I’ll do it for you, too, if you want.”
But I was really not into horror stories, I never had been, and just shook my head. “That’s all right,” I told her, and she looked at me with a face of great compassion “Because, one day, Claybird, that’s what you’ll have to do about Gabriel and me. It’ll be the hardest thing you ever do in your life.”
I was the one who was stuck silent then, kind of embarrassed at her bringing her and Gabe out in the open like that, though I did manage to answer, not with accusation or heat, just the bare truth: “I don’t think I can. Not about you,” I hastened to add. “I understand about you. But not him. He loved him.”
Like Missy the night before, Mama didn’t bother to ask who I was talking about, just wiped her nose and assured me: “He did. That’s what you need to remember, Clay. They did love each other, so much.”