by Barb Johnson
“Mama’s sleeping,” Dooley tries. “And I gotta watch T-Ya.”
“We can drop T-Ya by my house,” Uncle Philippe says. “Your aunt can bring her back when she comes for lunch.”
“Yessir,” Dooley says, “thank you, but Mama needs us here. She’ll be scared if she wakes up and we’re gone.” Dooley leans in closer to Uncle Philippe. “Because of the baby,” he whispers.
Dooley’s mama lost a baby a month ago, and she’s been sleeping a lot since then. And crying. Something about losing the baby makes all the men in the family keep their distance from her now. Or maybe it’s the crying. Dooley can’t tell. But right when he says the part about his mama needing them there, Dooley realizes it’s the truth, and he waits to see if his uncles know this, too.
Uncle Drouet leans over in his ATV and pulls T-Ya onto his lap. “You want to go hunting, girl?”
T-Ya hides her face in Drouet’s big camouflage jacket. Uncle Drouet puts his lips on the back of her neck and makes a fart noise and then lifts her up over his head. “Here,” he says, handing her to Dooley. “We can’t take this one if she’s gonna fart like that.”
T-Ya giggles and squirms out of Dooley’s arms and then runs circles around the uncles’ ATVs. Dooley wishes he was little like that and didn’t have to talk.
“You coming?” Uncle Drouet asks Dooley.
“Mama said I can use my harvest money to get steaks,” Dooley lies. The uncles love steak. “She’s gonna take me to the Piggly Wiggly in a little bit.”
Uncle Philippe makes a sound like air rushing out of a tire. “Piggly Wiggly?” He laughs until he coughs. The sound ricochets around the trees like a bullet that Dooley needs to dodge. “Why would you spend your money at the Piggly Wiggly when you got woods right there?” Uncle Philippe points into the dark in the direction of the woods that run along the edge of the bayou and out to the river, not far from where Dooley’s oldest brother is sleeping on his houseboat. The sound of the guns going off in the woods will make his brother cry, Dooley knows. Or shoot back. The uncles don’t seem to realize this. It’s hard for them to see how other people are, Dooley guesses. People who aren’t like them.
He asks the Holy Spirit for the courage to say the part about the guns and how he thinks killing is wrong. “I might can go next week,” Dooley repeats, instead.
After the sun is up good, Dooley and T-Ya are on the porch outside the kitchen door when they finally hear his mama walking around inside the raised house. Dooley hopes it wasn’t the sound of gunfire that woke her. “Go on and see Mama,” he says to T-Ya and opens the kitchen door for her. She isn’t too old for his mama to hold and whisper good baby, sweet baby, something his mama likes to do in the morning, when it seems to Dooley that she’s the saddest.
Dooley stays out on the porch and works on the bow he’s making with a yardstick and fishing line. He heard a man play a cello on TV, and the low notes pulled at the soft parts in Dooley’s chest, a vibrating, good feeling. He wants to see what it sounds like if he uses a bow on his guitar. Before he gets the thing strung right, here comes the buzz of ATVs out on the blacktop, maybe half a mile away. A minute later, all five uncles come tearing down the long, oyster-shell driveway.
Uncle Philippe’s big Chevy shoots in front of the ATVs and swings around to aim its tail end at the roasting pit across the driveway from Dooley. The thick smell of something freshly dead follows the truck, but Dooley doesn’t see a deer anywhere. All of the uncles, dressed in crusty camouflage, scatter like dogs after rabbits, barking orders at one another. Uncle Philippe and Uncle Drouet head straight for the roasting pit, carrying a big red ice chest. When Uncle Philippe opens it, there’s nothing but beer in there, and all the uncles grab one. A couple of them take their beers back to the barn, and Dooley’s relieved that he remembered to take the neck brace off of Reet.
Once they’ve got the roasting pit set up for a fire, Uncle Philippe goes to the bed of his truck and pulls out the big green duffel that used to belong to Dooley’s brother. U.S. ARMY is stenciled on the side of it. Like colored scarves from a magician’s pocket, Philippe pulls a string of blue-wing teal from the bag, their shining heads flopping, white stripes like a nun’s wimple around their faces. One of the ducks flaps a wing and then goes still again. Dooley watches all this from behind one of the big square posts on the side porch across the driveway, close enough to feel a part of things, but not so close that he can see the light go out of a bird’s eye.
The uncles move together in a way that makes Dooley think about the inside of the clock on the mantelpiece, the one he took apart just to see what made it go. Everything inside a clock depends on everything else, and all of it has to keep moving. For days after he took it apart, Dooley couldn’t pass the mantelpiece without thinking about the endlessly rocking cogs and how that quiet clock had so much movement inside it. Movement is like noise. Even when his uncles aren’t talking, they seem loud to Dooley.
On the big porch, Dooley moves closer to the kitchen’s screen door and watches Uncle Philippe toss the string of ducks onto the prep table next to the roasting pit. Uncle Philippe nods toward Dooley. The nod says come on and clean the ducks, but Dooley doesn’t want to look at the ducks’ flat eyes or yank the feathers from their wings. When Philippe pulls out the shears and the knife, Dooley turns away from his uncle to look through the screen door into the kitchen. He counts to himself, un patate, deux patate, waiting for his uncle to snip the filets out and scrape the organ meat into the big bucket next to his feet. Dooley will have to bring the bucket in to his mama for rice dressing, and he hopes his uncle remembers to put the lid on it. Trois patate, quatre patate.
Dooley is staring into the kitchen, his mind cleared by the counting, when his mama gets up from watching the TV. On the little portable set, a group of nuns is saying the rosary before Mass comes on. Dooley’s mama crosses the room to the stove. All the burners are going, and cast iron pots send steamy prayers into the air, the lid of the biggest one clanging amen when his mama sets it down. Even with the door open, cool as it is outside, she’s sweating, a moist spot like a dark hand spreading on her back. Dooley checks her face. Still sad.
Before his daddy left for the two weeks of his two-on, two-off shift, he and Dooley’s mama argued. Dooley’s mama doesn’t want his daddy to run the supply boat out to the rigs anymore. He was offshore when she lost the baby. And now for Dooley’s birthday. “You’re missing all the important things,” Dooley’s mama said to his daddy, and she started to cry. Everything makes her cry now. “You gonna be sad,” Dooley’s daddy told her. “That’s natural. But you gotta go on and do what you gotta do anyway. We both do. And you gotta be brave for these kids.” Dooley wants to tell his mama that she doesn’t have to be brave for him, that he knows how to be brave for himself, which is a lie. It seems like being thirteen is going to require a lot of lying.
There on the porch outside the kitchen door, his face mashed into the screen, Dooley watches his mama cook, her lips moving, whispering the rosary along with the TV. Suddenly the moment goes clear and sharp, like someone just adjusted an antenna inside Dooley, and he knows without a doubt that this is how he will always remember his mama. When he imagines not seeing her, having to remember her, he realizes that this moment is already gone, and he’s in the next moment, one step closer to high school and then graduation and then moving away—he’ll be on his own before long, and his parents will be old—and the time moving so fast in his mind makes the porch feel like it’s heaving a nervous sigh under his feet.
He’d like to go in the kitchen and do something helpful for his mama, but he doesn’t know what would help just now, so he stands there on the other side of the screen, near enough if she needs him, but not so close that he’s in the way. He’ll open the door in a minute, maybe walk across the kitchen and back through the house before Mass starts up on the TV.
The smell of blood from the ducks behind him mixes with the smell of frying onions, and Dooley’s head turns all by itself
just in time to see Uncle Philippe slide his knife back in the case on his belt. In the kitchen, T-Ya has fallen asleep under the table, her head resting on a stuffed Big Bird. Dooley wonders what kind of bird Big Bird is supposed to be. Long legs and a beak like a waterbird, but the wrong color. A great big yellow bird like that wouldn’t last a day out on the bayou behind the house.
“Dooley,” Uncle Philippe calls from behind him.
Dooley meant to go inside before his uncle finished with the ducks. He daydreams too much, his teachers say, and that’s why he can’t keep up with what’s going on around him.
“Dooley,” his uncle calls again. When Dooley turns, Uncle Philippe motions for him to come and get the carcasses.
Dooley goes over by Uncle Philippe, grabs a shovel. He wouldn’t mind wearing gloves but knows better than to let his uncles catch him at it. The sun is trying to burn through a group of heavy clouds, and the light seems to go from steamy white to yellow to green right while Dooley’s standing there.
“Caw, it smells like guts back here,” Dooley says and waits for his uncle to put the limp, empty duck carcasses into the wheelbarrow.
His uncle reaches over and pinches Dooley’s nose closed. “Why you breathing through your nose?”
Dooley rubs at the stink from Uncle Philippe’s hand and looks down toward the bayou. There’s a rainbow arched over the barn, the sky throwing a strange light on the snowy egrets poking around the cows’ feet in the pasture, which has turned a blinding green in the changing light. In the opposite direction, where the bayou goes out to the river and the river out to the Gulf, clouds the color of diesel exhaust hang, a clear band of blue sky between them and the water. Dooley watches the dark clouds drift and pile up behind the bare cypress trees. When he looks back at the barn for the rainbow, it disappears while he’s watching, but then it’s there again, so that Dooley isn’t sure what he sees and what he doesn’t.
The wheelbarrow is heavy and hard to maneuver. Dooley has to shift his weight down and bow over his load to keep from losing control. He finds himself looking right into the blank eye of an empty, wingless duck whose insides have been scooped out. Its neck is flopped back, its chest hollowed and flat, the whole bird folded like a thick sweater.
When Dooley gets to the garbage pit, he tosses some brush in and then shovels the carcasses. Un patate, deux patate, he goes out the secret door of the counting, away from duck heads and feet, flopping, empty. Steam rises from the still-warm parts. Dooley quickly looks away. He knows that the ducks are dead, that they can’t feel anything now. Still, he’d rather not have to put them in a hole, would rather not cover their faces with brush and send their bodies out of this world on a flame. The baby his mother lost is in a hole in the cemetery down the road, a tiny little headstone marking the spot where his whole family shoveled dirt on top of her. Sometimes Dooley dreams that she opens her eyes down there in the dark. When he has that dream, there’s no amount of counting that can get the picture out of his head.
Dooley throws some more brush in the pit and douses the whole thing with starter fluid. Fire rushes up toward his hand almost before he drops the match. The burning duck fat smells good. Dooley wishes he didn’t like it so much.
He glances out in the direction of the Gulf where his daddy is working, but not the Gulf where his brother went to war. Dooley’s never going to work on the rigs or go to war, either one. He’s going to go to New Orleans like his older sister, Delia, and her fiancé. In the city, people get their dinner from a store, and you can stand on a street corner and play guitar for money. Sometimes Dooley can just see it all, how everything is there waiting for him, and he wishes he could fast-forward himself into his future.
The dark clouds out over the water make a sad music percolate up in Dooley, and he whistles the notes as he walks back along the path to the house. The minor and seventh chords in his head pull at his heart, like when the soloist at Mass sings “Ave Maria.” Dooley can tell that whoever wrote that song knew about the lonely feeling he gets sometimes.
Over in the grassy area between the roasting pit and the barn, Philippe and the other uncles have left off tending the fire and started a game of touch football. Dooley watches his uncles crouch and run, watches touch turn to tackle, while he hoses out the wheelbarrow. The cows press themselves against the back fence and watch the game with their moist, worried eyes. On the other side of the fence, the egrets comfort their big friends. Here cow, here now, Dooley imagines the birds saying. Everything is fine.
Back up on the porch, Dooley peeks inside through the kitchen door screen. His mama has gotten the bucket of organ meat herself, and now she’s watching Mass on TV while T-Ya plays a toy xylophone at her feet. His mama picks his sister up and shows her how to cross herself.
“Dooley,” his mama calls out to the porch, kneeling as the congregation on TV kneels in their pews, “you helping your uncles?”
Dooley had forgotten his mama could see him there on the other side of the screen. “Yes, ma’am,” he tells her. “I’m helping.”
His mama turns back to the Mass. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the priest says on TV, and Dooley crosses himself and hopes that God understands about the lies he told his uncles this morning. He tries to remember how Father Faison explained the Holy Spirit, but can’t. It’s supposed to be inside you, but that doesn’t seem right. In Dooley’s mind, the Holy Spirit always seems like clouds. Like storm clouds that come for you and toss you into some other life by telling you what you’re meant to do. When God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham tied his own boy up on top of some kindling because the Holy Spirit came to him and told him to be strong, to have faith. The Holy Spirit can whisper whatever It wants, whether it makes any sense or not, and you’ve got to do it. If you don’t, it’s the same as telling God you don’t trust Him. Be brave and kill a deer. Shoot a stranger for wearing the wrong uniform. Set your son on fire. It doesn’t make a lick of sense to Dooley. The Holy Spirit seems like a troublemaker. Anyone would know that Abraham, like Dooley’s brother, must’ve lost his mind once he realized what he’d let the Holy Spirit talk him into. Dooley knows he isn’t ready, will never be ready, to do the kinds of things the Holy Spirit will ask.
“T-boy,” one of Dooley’s uncles calls to him. “Come on, we need one more.”
Dooley turns away from the kitchen door and looks out at his uncles.
“Think fast,” Uncle Drouet yells from out on the grass and shoots the football in a blazing spiral all the way up to the porch. When Dooley catches it, he jams a couple of fingers on his right hand. He does his best to throw the ball back, but it falls short. Dooley’s been practicing his passing with his daddy. And he’s strong from lifting milk cans. He’s a pretty good passer. But for the way his uncles play, passing isn’t enough. Dooley avoids these games when he can.
“Time out!” Uncle Philippe calls. He reaches into the ice chest they’ve dragged out into the grass, fishing for another beer. He pops the top and goes over to poke at the fire.
Dooley gets down off the porch to get a better look. His uncles—his daddy, too—are very particular about their fires, and Dooley watches how Uncle Philippe pokes it just enough so air can get in, but not so much that it won’t burn evenly.
Uncle Philippe is sweating in the cool air, out of breath from the game. He hands Dooley the poker. “Push that big log till it’s almost straight up.”
Dooley does as he’s told while Uncle Philippe watches.
“Looks good,” Philippe says about Dooley’s arrangement of the logs. “You ’bout to put me outta business.” Dooley sniffs and nods, looks for other logs that need poking.
Uncle Philippe goes back into the shed. “T-boy,” he calls out to Dooley, “give that fire a little more air, huh?”
When Uncle Philippe comes back, he’s carrying a flat grilling cage, the small one, the one they use for cochon du lait. Dooley means to ask why, but here comes the football right at him, and he drops the poker
. The ball drills into his skinny chest before he can get his hands up to stop it.
In the distance, dark clouds are piling up over the Gulf, their weight pushing the bright strip of blue sky into the water. If Dooley closes one eye, the rainbow, which has appeared again over the barn, looks like it’s spraying up out of his Uncle Drouet’s head. Like a thought that you can see and then not.
Dooley leaves the roasting pit and trots out to stand next to Drouet, who has kicked off his hunting boots and now is playing in his socks. Don’t move, Dooley wants to say to his uncle. Your head is a pot of gold. Just when Dooley is getting used to the rhythm of the game, his Uncle Philippe butts into him—C’est ça, tête dur!—and knocks him on his ass. Tête dur, hard head. I wish, Dooley thinks, rubbing the spot where his head hit one of Uncle Drouet’s boots when he fell. On the next snap, Dooley fires out of the line and circles behind Uncle Philippe, keeping low to the ground, waiting. Uncle Philippe moves back and back until he finally trips over Dooley. Fump! His uncle goes down like he’s been shot. Knowing where to stop, Dooley has learned, is just as important as knowing where to go.
“Caw,” his uncle says, sitting up in the grass, smiling, “look at the peeshwank.”
By the time the game ends, it hurts when Dooley takes a deep breath, but he doesn’t complain. Uncle Drouet puts him up on his shoulder and runs a victory lap around the fire with him. All the uncles grab a beer, and Dooley gets to have some, to show he’s not a peeshwank.
The uncles drink and poke at the fire, which is going pretty good now. It’s getting on close to noon, and Dooley remembers the steaks. He doesn’t want to get caught in that lie. “Can somebody take me to the store?”
The uncles look at each other and just for a second they all stop moving at once.
Dooley feels something tighten inside him. “It’s almost time to start cooking, huh?”