Long, Last, Happy

by Barry Hannah

  He taught me to fish, to hunt, to handle dogs, and horses, to feed poultry. Then, one day, to stand watch at the post factory over a grown black man while he left in a truck for two hours. But this I highly resented.

  “I want to see if this nigger can count. You tell me,” he said, right in front of the man, who was stacking posts from the vat with no expression at all. He had heard but he didn’t look at me yet, and I was afraid of when he would.

  Such were the times that Peter Howard was hardly unusual in his treatment of black help around the farm. He healed their rifts, brought the men cartons of cigarettes. He got them medical treatment and extended credit even to children who had run away to Chicago. Sometimes he would sock a man in the jaw. I don’t believe the etiquette then allowed the man to hit back. In his kitchen his favorite jest, habitual, was to say to a guest in front of their maid Elizabeth: “Lord knows, I do hate a nigger!” This brought huge guffaws from Elizabeth, and Peter was known widely as a hilarious crusty man, good to his toes. But I never thought this was funny, and I wanted my uncle to stop including me in this bullying niggerism, maybe go call a big white man a nigger.

  While he was gone those two hours in the truck I figured on how mean an act this was to both me and the man stacking the fence poles. I never even looked his way. I was boiling mad and embarrassed and could not decide what the man, my uncle, wanted from this episode. Was he training me to be a leader of men? Was he squeezing this man, some special enemy, the last excruciating turn possible, by use of a mere skinny white boy, but superior kin, wearing his same name? I couldn’t find an answer with a thing decent in it. I began hating Uncle Peter. When he came back I did not answer him when he wanted to tally my figure with the black man’s. I said nothing at all. He looked at me in a slightly blurred way, his eyes like glowing knots in a pig’s face, I thought. He had on his nice fedora but his face was spreading and reddening, almost as in a fiend movie. Too, I smelled something in the car as from an emergency room I’d been in when I was hit by that car, waking up to this smell.

  “Wharoof? Did you ever answer? Didja gimme the number?”

  “Have you been in an accident somewhere, Uncle Peter?”

  “No. Let me tell you. I have no problem. I know you might’ve heard things. This”—he lifted out a pint bottle of vodka, Smirnoff—“is just another one of God’s gifts, you understand? We can use it, or we can abuse it. It is a gift to man in his lonesomeness.” To illustrate he lifted it, uncapped it, turned it up, and up came enormous bubbles from the lip as in an old water cooler seriously engaged. He took down more than half of the liquor. The man could drink in cowboy style, quite awesomely. I’d never heard a word about this talent before.

  “I’m fessin’ up. I’m a bad man. I was using you out here as an alibi for having a drink down the road there, so’s your aunt wouldn’t know. She has the wrong idea about it. But she knew I wouldn’t drink with you along.”

  “You could drink right here in front of me. I wouldn’t tell, anyway.”

  “Well. I’m glad to know it. It got to my conscience and I came back to make my peace with you about it. Everything between you and me’s on the up and up, pardner.”

  “You mean you didn’t need me counting those poles at all?”

  “Oh yes I did. It was a real job. It wasn’t any Roosevelt make-work.”

  “Don’t you consider that man over there has any feelings, what you said right in front of him?”

  “What’s wrong with shame, boy? Didn’t you ever learn by it? You’re tender and timid like your pop, you can’t help it. But you’re all right too.”

  “Anybody ever shame you real bad, Uncle Peter?”

  He looked over, his jowls even redder and gone all dark and lax, gathered up by his furious eyes. “Maybe,” he said. An honest answer would have been, had he come out with it all: “Once. And I killed him.” I wonder how much of that event was in his mind as he looked at me sourly and said, “Maybe.”

  He feared my aunt, I knew it, and let me off at the house, driving off by himself while I gathered my stuff and waited for my folks to pick me up. I heard later that he did not return home for three weeks. For months, even a year, he would not drink, not touch a drop, then he would have a nip and disappear. Uncle Peter was a binge drinker. Still, I blamed my aunt, a fastidious and abrasive country woman with a previous marriage. It was a tragedy she could give him no children and I had to stand in as his line in the family. She blundered here and there, saying wrong and hurtful things, a hag of unnecessary truth at family gatherings—a comment about somebody’s weight, somebody’s hair, somebody’s lack of backbone. She was always correcting and scolding when I visited and seemed to think this was the only conversation possible between the old and young, and would have been baffled, I think, had you mentioned it as an unbearable lifetime habit. I blamed her for his drinking and his insensitivity to blacks. He was doing it to show off to her, that’s what. He was drinking because he could not stand being cruel.

  The next time I saw him he had made me two fishing lures, painting them by hand in his shop. These he presented me along with a whole new Shakespeare casting reel and rod. I’d never caught a fish on an artificial lure, and here with the spring nearly on we had us a mission. His lakes were full of big healthy bass. Records were broken every summer, some of them by the grinning wives and children of his customers, so obliged to Mister Peter, Squire of Lawrence County. On his lands were ponds and creeks snapping with fish almost foreign they were so remote from the roads and highways. You would ramble and bump down through a far pasture with black Angus in it, spy a stretch of water through leaves, and as you came down to it you heard the fish in a wild feeding so loud it could have been schoolchildren out for a swim. I was trembling to go out with him to one of these far ponds. It seemed forever before we could set out. Uncle Peter had real business, always, and stayed in motion constantly like a shark who is either moving or dead. Especially when he came out of a bender, paler and thinner, ashen in the face almost like a deacon. He hurled himself into penitential work. His clothes were plainer, like a sharecropper’s more than the baron’s, and it would be a few weeks before you’d see the watch chain, the fedora, or the nice boots—the cultured European scion among his vineyards, almost.

  I did not know there were women involved in these benders, but there were. Some hussy in a motel in a bad town. I’d imagine truly deplorable harlots of both races, something so bad it took more than a bottle a day to maintain the illusion you were in the room with your own species. He went the whole hog and seemed unable to reroute the high lonesomes that came on him in other fashion. But had I known I’d have only cheered for his happiness against my aunt, whom I blamed for every misery in him.

  At home my father meant very well, but he didn’t know how to do things. He had no grace with utensils, tools, or equipment. We went fishing a great many times, never catching a thing after getting up at four and going long distances. I think of us now fishing with the wrong bait, at the wrong depth, at the wrong time. He could make money and drive (too slowly), but the processes of life eluded him. As a golfer he scored decently, but with an ugly chopping swing. He was near childlike with wonder when we traveled, and as to sports, girls, hobbies, and adventures my father remained somewhat of a wondering pupil throughout his life and I was left entirely to my own devices.

  He had no envy of his wealthy brother’s skills at all, on the other hand, only admiration. “Old Peter knows the way of things, doesn’t he, son?” he’d cheer. It seemed perfectly all right that he himself was a dull and slow slob. I see my father and the men of his generation in their pinstripe suits and slicked-back hair, standing beside their new automobiles or another symbol of prosperity that was the occasion for the photograph, and these men I admire for accepting their own selves and their limits better, and without therapy. There’s more peace in their looks, a more possessed handsomeness, even with the world war around them. You got what you saw more, I’d guess, and there was plaine
r language then, there had to be. My father loved his brother and truly pitied him for having no son of his own. So he lent me to him, often.

  In the dullish but worthy ledger mark my father down as no problem with temper, moodiness, or whiskey, a good man of no unpleasant surprises that way. He was sixty-five years old before he caught a bass on a spinning reel with artificial bait. He died before he had the first idea how to work the remote control for the television.

  At last Uncle Peter had the time to take me and himself out to a far pond, with a boat in the bed of the truck and his radio dialed to his beloved Cardinals. We drove so far the flora changed and the woods were darker, full of odd lonesome long-legged fowl like sea birds. The temperature dropped several degrees. It was much shadier back here where nobody went. Uncle Peter told me he’d seen a snapping turtle the width of a washtub out in this pond. It was a strange, ripe place, fed by springs, the water nearly as clear as in Florida lakes.

  He paddled while I threw a number of times and, in my fury to have one on, messed up again and again with a backlash, a miscast, and a wrap, my lure around a limb six feet over the water next to a water moccasin who raised its head and looked at me with low interest. I jerked the line, it snapped, and the hand-painted lure of all Uncle Peter’s effort was marooned in the wood. I was a wretched fool, shaking with a rush of bile.

  “Take your time, little Pete. Easy does it, get a rhythm for yourself.”

  I tied the other lure on. It was a bowed lure that wobbled crazily on top of the water. I didn’t think it had a prayer and was still angry about losing the good one, which looked exactly like a minnow. We were near the middle of the pond, but the middle was covered with dead tree stumps and the water was clear a good ways down.

  A big bass hit the plug right after it touched the water on my second cast. It never gave the plug a chance to be inept. It was the first fish I’d ever hooked on artificial bait, and it was huge. It moved the boat. My arms were yanked forward, then my shoulders, as the thing wanted to tear the rod out of my palms on the way to the pond bottom. I held up and felt suddenly a dead awful weight and no movement. The bass had got off and left me hooked on a log down there, I knew. What a grand fish. I felt just dreadful until I looked down into the water when the thrashing had cleared.

  The fish was still on the plug in ten feet of water. It was smart to try to wrap the line around the submerged log, but it was still hooked itself and was just sitting there breathing from the gills like some big thing in an aquarium. My uncle was kneeling over the gunwale looking at the fish on the end of the line. His fedora fell in the water. He plucked it out and looked up at me in sympathy. I recall the situation drew a tender look from him such as I’d never quite seen.

  “Too bad, little Pete. There she is, and there she’ll stay. It’s almost torture to be able to look at your big fish like that, ain’t it? Doesn’t seem fair.”

  Uncle Peter didn’t seem to enjoy looking in the water. Something was wrong, besides this odd predicament.

  “No. I’m going down for it. I’m going to get the fish.”

  “Why, boy, you can’t do that.”

  “Just you watch. That fish is mine.”

  I took off all my clothes and was in such a hurry I felt embarrassed only at the last. I was small and thin and ashamed in front of Uncle Peter, but he had something like fear or awe on his face I didn’t understand.

  “That fish big as you are,” he said in a foreign way. “That water deep and snakey.”

  But I did swim down, plucked up the fish by its jaws, and came back to throw it in the boat. The plug stayed down there, visible, very yellow, as a monument to my great boyhood enterprise, and I wonder what it looks like now, forty years later.

  My uncle had the fish mounted for me. It stayed in our home until I began feeling sorry for it after Peter’s death, and I gave it to a barber for his shop. The fish weighed about nine pounds, the biggest I’ll ever catch.

  I was not the same person to my uncle after that afternoon. I did not quite understand his regard of me until my father explained something very strange. Uncle Peter was much the country squire and master of many trades, but he could not swim and he had a deathly fear of deep water. He had wanted to join the navy, mainly for its white officers’ suits, but they had got him near a deep harbor somewhere in Texas and he’d gone near psychotic. He seemed to expect great creatures to get out of the sea and come for him too and it was past reason, just one of those odd strands in the blood about which there can be no comment or change. Since then I’ve talked to several country people with the same fear, one of them an All-American linebacker. They don’t know where it came from and don’t much want to discuss it.

  When television appeared I was much enamored of Howdy Doody. Some boys around the neighborhood and I began molding puppet heads from casts you could buy at the five-and-dime. You could have the heads of all the characters from the Howdy show in plaster of paris. Then you’d put a skirt with arms on it and commence the shows onstage. We wrote whole plays, very violent and full of weapons and traps, all in the spirit of nuclear disaster and Revelations, with Howdy, Flub-a-Dub, and Clarabell. I couldn’t get over my uncle’s interest in the puppets when I brought them over and set up the show in his workshop.

  The puppets seemed to worry him like a bouncing string would worry a cat. He looked at me as if I were magic, operating these little people and speaking for them. He had the stare of an intense confused infant. When I’d raise my eyes to him, he’d look a bit ashamed, as if he’d been seduced into thinking these toys were living creatures. He watched my mouth when I spoke in a falsetto for them.

  I still don’t know what the hell went on with him and the puppets, the way he watched them, then me. You’d have thought he was staring into a world he never even considered possible, somewhere on another planet; something he’d missed out on and was very anxious about. I noticed too that he would dress up a little for the puppet shows. Once he wore his fedora and a red necktie as well.

  A number of years went by when I did not see my uncle much at all. These were my teen years when I was altogether a different person. He remained the same, and his ways killed him. I don’t know if the dead man in his past urged him toward the final DTs and heart attack, nor will I ever know how much this crime dictated his life, but he seemed to be attempting to destroy himself in episode after episode when, as he would only say afterwards, the high lonesomes struck him.

  The last curious scene when I recall him whole was the summer right after I turned thirteen. We were all around the beach of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where we’d gathered for a six-family reunion of my father’s people. The gulf here was brown, fed by the Wolf and Jordan rivers. It provided groaning tables of oysters, shrimp, flounder, crabs, and mullet. Even the poor ate very well down here, where there were Catholics, easy liquor and gambling, bingo, Cajuns, Sicilians, and Slavs. By far it was the prettiest and most exotic of the towns where any of the families lived, and my Uncle Max and Aunt Ginny were very proud showing us around their great comfortable home, with a screened porch running around three sides where all the children slept for the cool breeze from the bay. All over the house were long troughs of ice holding giant watermelons and cantaloupes and great strawberries. Something was cooking all the time. This was close to heaven, and everybody knew it. You drifted off to sleep with the tales of the aunts and uncles in your ears. What a bliss.

  Most of us were on the beach or in the water when Uncle Peter went most bizarre, although for this I do have an interpretation that might be right. He had been watching me too intently, to the exclusion of others. He was too around, I could feel his eyes close while I was in the water swimming. He was enduring a sea change here at the sea, which he was supposed to be deathly afraid of. I believe he was turning more urban, or more cosmopolitan. He’d been to a Big Dutchman convention in Chicago. Somebody had convinced him to quit cigarettes, take up thin cigars, get a massage, and wear an Italian hat, a Borsalino hat, which he now
wore with sunglasses and an actual designed beach towel, he and his wife sitting there in blue canvas director’s chairs. He had been dry for over a year, had lost weight, and now looked somewhat like Versace, the Italian designer. If this was our state’s most European town, then by God Uncle Peter would show the way, leading the charge with his Italian hat high and his beach towel waving.

  He was telling all of them how he was getting rid of the bags under his eyes. He was going to take up tennis. He had bought a Jaguar sedan, hunter green. Now on the beach as he sat with the other uncles and my father, watching us kids swim, he seemed all prepared for a breakout into a new world, even if he couldn’t swim, even in his pale country skin. Here he was in wild denial of his fear of the water. His wife, my aunt, seemed happier sitting there beside him. She’d been kinder lately, and I forgave her much. Maybe they had settled something at home.

  I’ll remember him there before the next moment, loved and honored and looking ahead to a breakout, on that little beach. He could be taken for a real man of the world, interested even in puppets, even in fine fabrics. You could see him—couldn’t you?—reaching out to pet the world. Too long had he denied his force to the cosmos at large. Have me, have me, kindred, he might be calling. May my story be of use. I am meeting the ocean on its own terms. I am ready.

  The New Orleans children were a foulmouthed group in general out there in the brown water of the bay. Their parents brought them over to vacation and many of the homes on the beach were owned by New Orleans natives. The kids were precocious and street-mouthed, sounding like Brooklynites really, right out of a juvenile delinquent movie. They had utter contempt for the local crackers. The girls used rubes like me and my cousins to sharpen up their tongues. And they could astound and wither you if you let them get to you. They had that mist of Catholic voodoo around them too.