Now, as Sam stared at a picture of a child with a Depression-style bowl haircut, Damson was saying, “Old Will Stone always referred to himself as ‘me.’ ‘Me did this. Me wants that.’”
Hort said, “The Stones were always trying to get you to do something for them. Get around one of them and they’d think of something they wanted you to do.” The Stones were their mother’s people.
“I never would let ’em tell me what to do,” Damson said with a laugh. “I’d say, ‘I can’t! I’ve got the nervous trembles.’”
Damson was little then, and her aunt Rue always complained of nervous trembles. Once, Damson had tried to get out of picking English peas by claiming she had nervous trembles, too. Sam remembered that. He laughed—a hoot so sudden they thought he hadn’t been listening and was laughing about something private.
Hort fixed a plate of fried chicken, potatoes, field peas, and stewed apples for Sam to take home. He set it on the back seat of Damson’s car, along with fourteen eggs and a sack of biscuits. Damson spurted out of the driveway backwards, scaring the hound dog back to his hole under a lilac bush.
“Hort and Cecil’s having a time keeping up this place,” Sam said, noticing the weed-clogged pen where they used to keep hogs.
Damson said, “Hort’s house always smelled so good, but today it smelled bad. It smelled like fried fish.”
“I never noticed it,” said Sam, yawning.
“Ain’t you sleeping good, Sam?”
“Yeah, but when my stomach sours I get to yawning.”
“You ain’t getting old on us, are you?”
“No, I ain’t old. Old is in your head.”
Damson invited herself into Sam’s house, saying she wanted to help him put the food away. His sisters wouldn’t leave him alone. They checked on his housekeeping, searched for ruined food, made sure his commode was flushed. They had fits when he took in a stray dog one day, and they would have taken her to the pound if she hadn’t got hit on the road first.
Damson stored the food in the kitchen and snooped in his refrigerator. Sam was itching to get into his bluejeans and watch something on Ted Turner’s channel that he had meant to watch. He couldn’t remember now what it was, but he knew it came on at four o’clock. Damson came into the living room and began to peer at all his pictures, exclaiming over each great-grandchild. All Sam’s kids and grandkids were scattered around. His son worked in the tire industry in Akron, Ohio, and his oldest granddaughter operated a frozen-yogurt store in Florida. He didn’t know why anybody would eat yogurt in any form. His grandson Bobby had arrived from Arizona last year with an Italian woman who spoke in a sharp accent. Sam had to hold himself stiff to keep from laughing. He wouldn’t let her see him laugh, but her accent tickled him. Now Bobby had written that she’d gone back to Italy.
Damson paused over an old family portrait—Pap and Mammy and all six children, along with Uncle Clay and Uncle Thomas and their wives, Rosie and Zootie, and Aunt Rue. Sam’s three brothers were dead now. Damson, a young girl in the picture, wore a lace collar, and Hort was in blond curls and a pinafore. Pap sat in the center on a chair with his legs set far apart, as if to anchor himself to hold the burden of this wild family. He looked mean and willful, as though he were about to whip somebody.
Suddenly Damson blurted out, “Pap ruined my life.”
Sam was surprised. Damson hadn’t said exactly that before, but he knew what she was talking about. There had always been a sadness about her, as though she had had the hope knocked out of her years ago.
She said, “He ruined my life—keeping me away from Lyle.”
“That was near sixty years ago, Damson. That don’t still bother you now, does it?”
She held the picture close to her breast and said, “You know how you hear on the television nowadays about little children getting beat up or treated nasty and it makes such a mark on them? Nowadays they know about that, but they didn’t back then. They never knowed how something when you’re young can hurt you so long.”
“None of that happened to you.”
“Not that, but it was just as bad.”
“Lyle wouldn’t have been good to you,” said Sam.
“But I loved him, and Pap wouldn’t let me see him.”
“Lyle was a drunk and Pap didn’t trust him no further than he could throw him.”
“And then I married Porter, for pure spite,” she went on. “You know good and well I never cared a thing about him.”
“How come you’ve stayed married to him all these years then? Why don’t you do like the kids do nowadays—like Bobby out in Arizona? Him and that Italian. They’ve done quit!”
“But she’s a foreigner. I ain’t surprised,” said Damson, blowing her nose with a handkerchief from her pocketbook. She sat down on Sam’s divan. He had towels spread on the upholstery to protect it, a habit of Nova’s he couldn’t get rid of. That woman was so practical she had even orchestrated her deathbed. She had picked out her burial clothes, arranged for his breakfast. He remembered holding up hangers of dresses from her closet for her to choose from.
“Damson,” he said, “if you could do it over, you’d do it different, but it might not be no better. You’re making Lyle out to be more than he would have been.”
“He wouldn’t have shot hisself,” she said calmly.
“It was an accident.”
She shook her head. “No, I think different.”
Damson had always claimed he killed himself over her. That night, Lyle had come over to the homeplace near dark. Sam and his brothers had helped Pap put in a long day suckering tobacco. Sam was already courting Nova, and Damson was just out of high school. The neighborhood boys came over on Sundays after church like a pack of dogs after a bitch. Damson had an eye for Lyle because he was so daresome, more reckless than the rest. That Saturday night when Lyle came by for her, he had been into some moonshine, and he was frisky, like a young bull. Pap wouldn’t let her go with him. Sam heard Damson in the attic, crying, and Lyle was outside, singing at the top of his lungs, calling her. “Damson! My fruit pie!” Pap stepped out onto the porch then, and Lyle slipped off into the darkness.
Damson set the family picture back on the shelf and said, “He was different from all the other boys. He knew a lot, and he’d been to Texas once with his daddy—for his daddy’s asthma. He had a way about him.”
“I remember when Lyle come back late that night,” Sam said. “I heard him on the porch. I knowed it must be him. He was loud and acted like he was going to bust in the house after you.”
“I heard him,” she said. “From my pallet up there at the top. It was so hot I had a bucket of water and a washrag and I’d wet my face and stand in that little window and reach for a breeze. I heard him come, and I heard him thrashing around down there on the porch. There was a loose board you always had to watch out for.”
“I remember that!” Sam said. He hadn’t thought of that warped plank in years.
“He fell over it,” Damson said. “But then he got up and backed down the steps. I could hear him out in the yard. Then—” She clasped her arms around herself and bowed her head. “Then he yelled out, ‘Damson!’ I can still hear that.”
A while later, they had heard the gunshot. Sam always remembered hearing a hollow thump and a sudden sound like cussing, then the explosion. He and his brother Bob rushed out in the dark, and then Pap brought a coal-oil lantern. They found Lyle sprawled behind the barn, with the shotgun kicked several feet away. There was a milk can turned over, and they figured that Lyle had stumbled over it when he went behind the barn. Sam had never forgotten Damson on the living-room floor, bawling. She lay there all the next day, screaming and beating her heavy work shoes against the floor, and people had to step around her. The women fussed over her, but none of the men could say anything.
Sam wanted to say something now. He glared at that big family in the picture. The day the photographer came, Sam’s mother made everyone dress up, and they had to stand there as still
as stumps for about an hour in that August heat. He remembered the kink in Damson’s hair, the way she had fixed it so pretty for Lyle. A blurred chicken was cutting across the corner of the picture, and an old bird dog named Obadiah was stretched out in front, holding a pose better than the fidgety people. In the front row, next to her mother, Damson’s bright, upturned face sparkled with a smile. Everyone had admired the way she could hold a smile for the camera.
Pointing to her face in the picture, he said, “Here you are, Damson—a young girl in love.”
Frowning, she said, “I just wish life had been different.”
He grabbed Damson’s shoulders and stared into her eyes. To this day, she didn’t even wear glasses and was still pretty, still herself in there, in that puffed-out old face. He said, “You wish! Well, wish in one hand and shit in the other one and see which one fills up the quickest!”
He got her. She laughed so hard she had to catch her tears with her handkerchief. “Sam, you old hound. Saying such as that—and on a Sunday.”
She rose to go. He thought he’d said the right thing, because she seemed lighter on her feet now. “You’ve got enough eggs and bacon to last you all week,” she said. “And I’m going to bring you some of that popcorn cake my neighbor makes. You’d never guess it had popcorn in it.”
She had her keys in her hand, her pocketbook on her arm. She was wearing a pretty color of pink, the shade of baby pigs. She said, “I know why you’ve lived so long, Sam. You just see what you want to see. You’re like Pap, just as hard and plain.”
“That ain’t the whole truth,” he said, feeling a mist of tears come.
That night he couldn’t get to sleep. He went to bed at eight-thirty, after a nature special on the television—grizzly bears. He lay in bed and replayed his life with Nova. The times he wanted to leave home. The time he went to a lawyer to inquire about a divorce. (It turned out to cost too much, and anyway he knew his folks would never forgive him.) The time she hauled him out of bed for the move to this house. He had loved their old place, a wood-frame house with a porch and a swing, looking out over tobacco fields and a strip of woods. He always had a dog then, a special dog, sitting on the porch with him. Here he had no porch, just some concrete steps, where he would sit sometimes and watch the traffic. At night, drunk drivers zoomed along, occasionally plowing into somebody’s mailbox.
She had died at three-thirty in the morning, and toward the end she didn’t want anything—no food, no talk, no news, nothing soft. No kittens to hold, no memories. He stayed up with her in case she needed him, but she went without needing him at all. And now he didn’t need her. In the dim light of the street lamp, he surveyed the small room where he had chosen to sleep—the single bed, the bare walls, his jeans hanging up on a nail, his shoes on a shelf, the old washstand that had belonged to his grandmother, the little rag rug beside the bed. He was happy. His birthday was two months from today. He would be eighty-four. He thought of that bird dog, Obadiah, who had been with him on his way through the woods the night he set out to meet someone—the night he first made love to a girl. Her name was Nettie, and at first she had been reluctant to lie down with him, but he had brought a quilt, and he spread it out in the open pasture. The hay had been cut that week, and the grass was damp and sweet-smelling. He could still feel the clean, soft, cool cotton of that quilt, the stubble poking through and the patterns of the quilting pressing into his back. Nettie lay there beside him, her breath blowing on his shoulder as they studied the stars far above the field—little pinpoint holes punched through the night sky like the needle holes around the tiny stitches in the quilting. Nettie. Nettie Slade. Her dress had self-covered buttons, hard like seed corn.
VIII
Whimsy
As a college student I wrote a humor column for the campus newspaper. And the impulse toward parody and wry commentary never left me. Eventually I had a chance to write some Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker, and several Shouts and Murmurs columns in that magazine.
—BAM
La Bamba Hot Line
Featured in the New Yorker, September 7, 1987
“Hello. La Bamba Hot Line.”
“Is it true that ‘La Bamba’ is derived from the Icelandic Younger Edda, set to music by Spanish sailors and transported via the Caribbean to America in 1665?”
“No, not even close. La Bamba Hot Line. Go ahead, please.”
“When is the next Louie Louie Parade scheduled?”
“You want the Louie Louie Hot Line. This is the La Bamba Hot Line.”
“Oh.”
“La Bamba Hot Line.”
“This is Senator Sethspeaks in Washington, on the Committee for the Investigation of Obscene Rock Lyrics.”
“State your business, please.”
“Uh—I was wondering, just what are the words to ‘La Bamba’?”
“Do you have the record?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, listen to it.”
“But I can’t tell if the words are obscene or not.”
“That’s your problem. La Bamba Hot Line.”
“My teen-age daughter has been acting funny lately. She refuses to eat, and she has frown lines on her face. She’s become aggressive with her parrot and when you talk to her she just says everything is geeky. The doctor can’t find anything wrong with her. What should I do?”
“I’m glad you asked. The La Bamba Hot Line has a special pamphlet dealing with problems of teen-agers. Just send a self-addressed stamped envelope to La Bamba Hot Line, P.O. Box 4700. But first, I’d have a heart-to-heart with that parrot.”
“Much obliged.”
“Likewise, I’m sure. La Bamba Hot Line.”
“This is Phil Donahue. Is it true that the La Bamba Hot Line is having a lip-sync contest?”
“Absolutely. October the ninth.”
“What do I have to do to win?”
“What do you think? Perform ‘La Bamba’ till your eyes bug out, do it like a rockin’ fool, blow the house down.”
“Do you think I’ve got a chance?”
“Everybody has a chance in life, Mr. Donahue.”
You wouldn’t believe the stuff I get on the La Bamba Hot Line. I work twelve to four. It’s an intensive job and can burn you out quick. Two short breaks, while all the calls stack up. They get a message, “All the La Bamba Hot Lines are temporarily busy. Please try again.” It’s unfair that people have to keep calling and calling, dialing till their nails split in order to get the La Bamba Hot Line. We need help! We need somebody to handle the genuine emergencies, weed out the crazies. The things people want to know: they want to know are they going to get cancer, will the plane they have a ticket on for tomorrow crash, which stores are giving double coupons this week? We try to answer what we can, but I mean we’re not God. I tell them play “La Bamba” thirty-two times in a dark room, then improvise thirty-two versions, then listen to it standing on their head. I tell them to walk down the street muttering “Yo no soy marinero/Soy capitán.” Count the number of people who recognize the lines and multiply by four, and whatever number that is, that’s Ollie North’s secret Swiss bank account. I mean, some things are so simple you wonder why anybody would bother calling up. We deal with a lot of that. Little kids call just to be funny, try to catch us off guard. Is your refrigerator running, that kind of thing. I’m on to them. I start screaming a wild, cacophonous sort of schizo “La Bamba.” Blows them right out of the water.
But mostly it’s scholars. Academic stuff. People wanting to know about roots, symbolism, the double-entendre of the marinero/capitán lines, etc. Idea stuff. I spend my mornings at the library just to stay even with these people. Man, they’re sharp. One guy had a beaut—a positive beaut. The way he traced the Paul-is-dead hoax back to the lost Shakespearean sonnets, twisting it around and back through “Poor Ritchie’s Almanac” straight up to the chord progressions of “La Bamba”—it was breathtaking. The switchboard was lit up like the stars in the open desert sky on a cl
ear night while I listened and kept all those calls on hold. I was humbled right to my knees. Unfortunately, his spiel didn’t get recorded and I didn’t get the guy’s name. But he’ll call again. I’m sure he will.
Some of the ideas that come in are just junk, of course. Did Idi Amin record “La Bamba”? Of course not. But former President Jimmy Carter did. Some stuff you hear is so unbelievable. No, the Voyager is not carrying “La Bamba” out to the end of the universe. Don’t I wish. That’s sort of my job really, to carry “La Bamba” to the end of the universe.
My boyfriend is giving me a hard time. He says I take my work too seriously. We’ll be watching “Washington Week in Review” and I’ll say, “Look at those guys. Talk about serious. Don’t they ever get down?” He says, “All day it’s your La Bamba duties, your La Bamba research, your La Bamba outfits. You go off in the morning with your La Bamba briefcase. When are we ever going to talk about us?”
He says, “This La Bamba thing is going to blow over any minute. It may be blown over by Friday. Things are that fast these days.”
“Don’t say that!” I cry. “Buddy Holly. ‘American Pie.’ The Big Bopper. Elvis. Things last longer than you think.”
We’re going through crisis time, I guess. But we’ll work it out. I have faith in that. Right now, my work is at a critical juncture. I’m talking demographics. Market potentializing. La Bamba aerobics, theme weddings, instructional software. We were represented at the harmonic convergence. We met on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, an overflow crowd of La Bamba regulars. We played the song over and over and concentrated on fibre optics, sending our vibes out all over the universe.
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