I wonder what she did in her former life, thinks Carl.
“I don’t know if the accident happened before or after he got in prison,” continues Mrs. Cochran. “Well, time passed, and he said he sure missed his nose and he sure would like to have a new one. So what they did was they rolled up a roll of fat on his stomach or somewhere and tied it off so that it wouldn’t die and rot off. A roll of fat about the size of a big nose, and somehow . . . somehow they could move it on up toward his face. Over a period of time. You know, just somehow move it along a fraction of an inch every few days, Martin said. Don’t ask me how. Finally, after a long time he had a nose.”
“Oh, mercy me,” says Aunt Lil. “They just moved it along?”
“I guess.”
“How in the world did they get it up to right above his mouth?”
“You mean, where his mouth used to be.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about that. Maybe they took it on around behind his head, up his neck, over the top of his head, and then down between his eyes.”
“Lord have mercy,” says Aunt Lil. “Wouldn’t it have gotten hair growing out of it while it was coming up over his head?”
“I don’t know. I never heard. But . . . you know, what about this: do you reckon they used his navel as a nostril?”
“Oh, my goodness, Clara.”
Carl laughs. He’s never . . .
L. Ray unsnaps his seat belt and turns around in his seat, laughing, and after a minute he’s telling a story he heard, and the way he tells the story, his excitement, the way he communicates with those two ladies—after being asked to leave Rosehaven—somehow begins to convince Carl that maybe there is something to L. Ray’s preaching, something to his movement. Maybe he’s more sincere than Carl has imagined. But what about this exposing himself story? Where would that—
“And that little boy,” says L. Ray, “had skin grafted onto his hand from the burn, and this is back when they had to attach things to get skin grafted, and they attached this boy’s hand to his lower stomach, and five or six years later his hand starts growing pubic hair.” L. Ray laughs. Aunt Lil and Mrs. Cochran laugh. Carl can’t help himself; he laughs again, wondering what’s so funny. What a strange story. He senses that Aunt Lil and Mrs. Cochran would follow L. Ray anywhere.
They unload at the mall. Carl parks the car.
In the Piccadilly, Aunt Lil gets fried chicken, string beans, and rice. Mrs. Cochran gets fish and vegetables. L. Ray gets two beet salads, black beans and rice. Carl gets fried chicken, mashed potatoes, cole slaw, and a cottage cheese salad. Everybody gets sweet iced tea, and Carl gets Diet Coke.
One of the staff helps with trays, and they all end up sitting in the smoking section, close to the place Lil and Carl usually sit, against the wall.
“You say the blessing,” Lil says to L. Ray. “You’re the preacher.”
“Well, let’s see. I’d like to use a little portion of a new sermon I’ve been working on, if that’s okay.” He closes his eyes. “O God in us all, may we embrace the rooms of refuge food. Real food, cheap food, food served by people with wet rags under their arms. I eat; I cheat. I forge; I gorge. I taste; I waste. Waffle House, Huddle House, Puddle House, Muddle House.”
Carl opens his eyes and watches him.
L. Ray’s head leans back just a little, eyes closed, trancelike. “Oh, the dying and bygone potential union of blacks and rednecks, once a thread of certain words like draw for drawer, as in ‘Get the pie from the draw over there,’ and hongry for hungry, as in ‘I’m hongry,’ once a thread, food thread or not, always frazzled, a thread of religion and family habits and knowledge of geography, now frayed beyond repair and only redeemable in the fading mist of this new century, redeemable through cabbage, collards, turnip salet, fried fatback, the slunken foods now reserved for movies and poverty . . .”
Carl looks around to see if people are looking; no one is.
“. . . and selected sanitation-grade B cafeterias and some small farms and old evaporated dreams of slack-jawed beggars. Help us, O God in us all, help us reinvent, remember, the proper cooking of foods of the home, foods that feed our attitudes and make bonds where none will otherwise be, foods from the childhoods of old people that will bring to their hearts—through their mouths—precious memories. We church people must bring these foods to old people as we transform nursing homes into churches. Make us ministers of memory.”
Carl shifts in his chair, closes his eyes again. When will this end?
“We need real corn bread. We need a homemade tortilla. May we, with powerful spirits, diminish the force of fast food. Give victory to thy forces as we come to fight with the forces that will put man-made genes into the food that has until the last decade been sanctified by the breath of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Universe of Soft Green Fields. Amen, and amen.”
“Amen,” says Aunt Lil.
“That was a long blessing,” says Mrs. Cochran. “I like that part about corn bread. I like anything about corn bread. They’ve completely ruint corn bread. I had nineteen recipes for corn bread that came out of the Farmers’ Almanac. I need some hot sauce. Texas Pete. Oh, there it is.” She turns to L. Ray. “I wish you weren’t leaving us.”
“I do too,” says Aunt Lil. “I’m getting used to having you around.”
Carl starts to cut his chicken with a knife and fork, looks at Aunt Lil to see if she’s going to pick her chicken up.
“The best way to eat chicken,” says L. Ray, “if you’re not going to pick it up, is with two forks.”
“Pick it up,” says Mrs. Cochran. “We’re among friends.”
“Amen,” says Aunt Lil.
The File Box
AUNT LIL STANDS IN HER ROOM, pointing. “Put it on that footstool, and let me look through it for a minute or two. There might be something in here that I . ..”
Carl places the file box on the footstool, open. She sits slowly, begins pulling out the files, peeking in each one, then putting it in her lap. He wonders if she’ll mention the marriage certificate.
“I want you to go through this one”—she hands him a folder—“and throw away anything over three years old.” She sorts. “Now this one, this one should have something in it that . . .” She opens it and collects a few pieces of the marriage certificate, then puts them back and hands the folder to Carl. “I want you to get out those torn-up pieces in there, please, and then I want you to put them back together on a piece of cardboard that’s the same size and flatten them in a book and glue them back together as much as you can. I’ve thought about that and thought about it and thought about it. That’s all. I’ve decided what I want to do about it.”
“I’ll do it.”
Both her hands are suddenly over her face.
“What’s the matter?” He notices how crooked her little fingers are. He’s never noticed that. Or maybe that’s new. Is she laughing, or crying?
“Nothing,” she says.
“Yes, there is too. What’s the matter?”
She’s having a hard time getting her breath. She drops her hands and looks straight into Carl’s face. Her red eyes hold water. “He did a terrible thing.”
“Who?”
“Tad.”
“What? What did he do?”
She looks out the window. “Can we go out and smoke us one?”
“Sure.”
On the porch, they get settled. Nobody else is around. She starts talking, working a tissue in one hand, holding her cigarette in the other. “He had a son.”
“Uncle Tad?”
“Yes. It wasn’t his. It was his wife’s—the wife before me. Her name was Alice. Her husband drowned when she was six months pregnant. She’d already had the baby when she met Tad, but Tad wouldn’t marry her if she kept the baby, of all things—can you imagine?—so she had him adopted down to Florida, and the boy, after he grew up, came to our house looking for Tad. He was eighteen years old. That’s when I heard the whole story. And
the boy had been through a horrible time working in orange groves all his life. What kind of mother would do something like that? And what kind of man would ask her to?” She balls up the tissue in her fist, sticks out her chin.
He’s never seen her angry—or hardly ever. Nor his aunt Sarah. Well, not even his mother, except when he was little. Was that . . . was that why it was easy to take care of them? “Where was she—the mother—all this time?”
“Well, she died of cancer after she and Tad had been married about five years. That’s the only part I knew about beforehand, and the boy hadn’t known about that till he was grown. His real daddy’s sisters told him all about it, once he tracked them down, and then he comes looking for Tad, but Tad wouldn’t even talk to him. See, Tad married me very soon after Alice died, and I never knew a thing about a boy, a baby—any of that.”
“Why didn’t I know about all this? Mother knew about it, didn’t she?”
“Well, yes, but she and Sarah knew I wanted to forget it all.”
“I wouldn’t have thought anything bad about it—about you.”
“I know. I know. See, I had time enough left to have a child or two when we got married, and I’d always dreamed of that. I always wanted children, always thought about it, hoped for it.”
Carl stands. Why hadn’t they let him in on something like this? Why hide it? He half sits on the porch rail.
“And then,” she says, “when I met Tad and he asked me to marry him, I figured I still had a chance to have a baby, but we never talked about it, because nobody ever talked about things in my family or his, I guess, and we got married, and he said he didn’t want any children, and when I got up the nerve to say I’d always wanted a baby, he said, well, I’d have to get divorced and marry somebody else, he reckoned, and then he tried to make a big joke out of it and talk about all the work it would be—more trouble than it was ever worth, he said—and how the whole business was unnecessary and troublesome. And that was the end of that.”
“Why did you stay with him?”
“Why did I stay with him?” She stares at Carl.
“Right. Why did you stay with him?”
“I don’t know.” She looks down into her lap and then out across the lawn. “I couldn’t leave him. I just could-n’t. Nobody did that. In my family. You haven’t been married, yet. And . . . and I couldn’t argue with him. That just is not something I was made up to do. Look, there’s that little squirrel. I was out here the other day and—”
“Aunt Lil, you were talking about not being able to argue with Uncle Tad.”
“Oh, yes. I wasn’t able to stand up for myself somehow. None of us were, in a way, and I don’t want that drifting on down to you.”
“I think I stand up for myself.” How can I stand up to people who are hiding things? he thinks.
“Then after we’d been married a long time, the young man knocked on our door, and by this time we’d had a pretty good marriage. Well . . . no, it wasn’t a pretty good marriage. It was a tolerable marriage. At best. Thirteen years then.
“We liked to take trips early on, early on in our marriage, and we had gone on some trips to Carolina Beach when we were first married and always had a good time. Your mama didn’t always approve.”
“Why?”
“Oh, we’d sit in bars now and then.” She puts the Kleenex to one eye, then the other.
His mama could have told him this. It wasn’t that bad.
“Then we stopped traveling so much and it seemed like in one way or another we were dealing with Tad’s drinking, and I tried to get used to the fact that I was childless and would be, always. So then Margaret had you, and I started concentrating on being a good aunt, which I think I was.”
“You certainly were—are.” Carl pictures a kind of chart. The front nine-tenths of the chart shows Aunt Lil doing for him, and the final one-tenth, him doing for her.
Aunt Lil looks at her cigarette, takes a drag, taps it over the sand. She dabs her eyes again with the Kleenex that by now has almost come apart. “His name was Bobby. When he showed up that day, Tad would have absolutely not one thing to do with him and asked him to leave. But before he did that—before Tad got home and asked him to leave—I got the story that the boy got from his real daddy’s sisters.
“The couple that took him to Florida had gone to the orphanage looking for a baby, but they didn’t have any. But the orphanage knew about Alice because she’d been by there, and they sent the Florida couple to her, and she gave him up, just gave him up, and so he’d had a hard life in Florida, working in orange groves, because this couple adopted kids to work in their groves for no pay, see—that was their plan.
“Now there Bobby was, come to see what his no-good stepfather looked like. And this was where I suddenly realized that if Tad hadn’t sent him off, I’d at least have been able to raise a boy from the time he was five. I could have called him my own. At five years old is when I’d’ve got him. And he seemed to be such a nice young man, gentle.” She was staring far away, shaking her head slowly.
Carl shifts his weight against the porch rail. “Do you know where he is now? Where he went?”
“Oh, no. What reason would he have to be anywhere close to here?” She looks back at Carl. “It’s certainly not his home—this, around here, Hansen County.”
“I guess not.” For some reason, at that moment Carl sees Aunt Lil’s apartment again—empty.
“When it settled on me what Tad had done, what he’d caused that boy to go through, what he’d denied me of, I tore up that marriage certificate and put it in the bottom of my trunk and then later in the file box, and in the last few years I’ve just . . . just wanted to remember the times at Carolina Beach, the good times, to forget all the bad, but I haven’t been able to, so I thought if I got that marriage certificate glued back together somehow, that might help me put things back.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll take care of that.”
“I don’t think it’ll make any difference, really. And it was terrible taking care of him, Tad, when he finally got sick, just a nightmare, all the while me wondering about why I’d never done anything about it all. Just took it. And I always meant to tell him what I thought about what he’d done.” She looks at Carl through her red eyes. “If there had just been some way to get back to the front of it.”
“Front?”
“Back to right after we got married. I think that was my mistake in life: leaving myself out. Sometimes I . . . He was always good to you. I mean okay. Don’t you think?”
“Uncle Tad? Oh, yeah. He was okay. I mean, he was always good to me. He never gave me any problem. But I never knew about all this other.”
“Let’s get back inside. It’s kind of cool out here.”
Part 4.
Come to Get My Aunt Out of Jail
Come to Get My Aunt Out of Jail
LIL CAN HARDLY BELIEVE what they’ve done, or where she is. In South Carolina. In jail. Thank goodness she has Carl’s number written down, because she had forgotten it, and it’s a wonder they didn’t take her date book and everything else.
“Hello.” He sounds sleepy.
“I’m in jail—in South Carolina.”
“I don’t think so, Aunt Lil. I think you’re at Rose-haven.”
“No, I’m not. They’ve got me in jail down here.” He will believe her. If she just tells him two or three times, he will believe her.
“I’m in bed, Aunt Lil. I think you’re at Rosehaven.”
“I’m not either.”
“Well, I’m sure of it. And . . . and let me tell you what I’m going to do. What I’m going to do is hang up the phone and then dial your Rosehaven number. And if it rings, that means you’re at Rosehaven, that they’ve moved you back to Rosehaven.”
“Do what?”
“When I tell you to, you hang up your phone. Then I’m going to call your number at Rosehaven. If your phone rings, that means they’ve brought you back.”
“They haven’t brought me an
ywhere except South Carolina. I’m in jail in South Carolina.”
“Just hang up, and I’ll call you right back, and you’ll see where you are.”
“I’m supposed to hang up the phone?”
“Yes ma’am. And then see if it rings. If it does, that means you’re at Rosehaven, because that’s the number I’m fixing to dial.”
“Oh.”
“Hang it up.”
“Hang it up now?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I just called.” What is he talking about?
“Because we’re going to do what I just said. I’m going to call your Rosehaven number so you can see if that’s where you are.”
“Okay.” She hangs up. Why does he want to call her all the way down here in South Carolina before she explains anything?
CARL LOOKS AT the clock—a quarter past eleven. He presses the button, gets a dial tone, and dials her number.
“Hello?” she says.
“Hello, Aunt Lil? It’s me. Carl.”
“Carl, they’ve got me in a jail in South Carolina and you need to come get me out.”
“No. You’re at Rosehaven. See, I just called the Rose-haven number and you answered, so that means you’re at Rosehaven.”
“I’m in South Carolina—in jail. They’ve got the pictures and furniture just like it is at . . .”
“Rosehaven?”
“Yes. I know where I am, and I want you to come get me out, Carl. As soon as you can. They won’t let me go unless you come.”
“Okay, let me just do a couple of things, and I’ll call you back or . . . come on down there.”
“Okay. Good.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Carl calls the main desk. A Beverly answers. “Beverly, my aunt is Mrs. Olive in 309. She just called me, and she thinks she’s locked up in a jail in South Carolina.”
“I know. I was just down there. She won’t go to bed—wouldn’t come to supper either. I think she’s just sundowning. She’s not in any danger.”
Lunch at the Piccadilly Page 14