by Nick White
Rick finally spoke when he blessed the food. His voice was much deeper than Larry’s, and like my father’s in that you had to listen closely to hear him.
After the prayer, they went inside the Chapel Cabin to prepare for our first activity down by the lake. From the front yard came the whisk of car doors shutting, engines fluttering to life, and very soon afterward, tires were crunching down the gravel road. I hadn’t paid very much attention to the other parents, but in their leaving, I briefly wondered about their lives, about the conversations they would have on their drives back home. My father had no one to keep his counsel, and maybe that was for the best. When I heard his truck’s growling over the rest of the vehicles, my heart dropped into my stomach. I was split. Part of me longed to be in the Chevy with him headed back to the Delta. Another part of me believed it was for my own good that I wasn’t. And I understood which impulse had to be destroyed.
The hot dog and potato chips in front of me looked about as appetizing as the mildewed wood of the picnic table. I picked at the food, pushing it around the plate, my hunger overshadowed by other feelings, mostly sadness.
For the first time at camp, the five of us were alone. We kept silent for most of the meal until, at last, Sparse spoke, keeping his voice low so only we at the table heard him. “In prison,” he said, “they say you can always pick which one of the newbies won’t make it the first night.” Our eyes followed his over to Dale. He was sitting all by his lonesome, his food, like mine, untouched. Homeschooling had shielded me from boys like Dale: a stout teenager with an impervious jawline and a head the size of a ripe cantaloupe. Still, I knew he was the type to make trouble for boys like me. I knew this about him the way a rabbit knows the danger of the owl perched in the tree limb overhead. Perhaps the other boys were picturing all the Dales they’d encountered before: übermasculine and proud, cavorting to their lockers without fear of anything in this world. Boys like Dale were talented, I suspected, at sniffing out the sissies among their classmates and zeroing in unmercifully. We stared at Dale, four pairs of unblinking eyes, until he broke under the scrutiny. He jerked his mulish head in our direction and scowled. Actually scowled. Then he brought down his fist onto the table as if he were squashing a bug. We jumped and looked away.
After a pause, Sparse changed the subject. “What bothers me is the woman,” he said. “Too smiley all the time.”
“Oh, she reminds me of somebody,” Christopher said. He was overweight and sported an unfortunate bowl cut. He reminded me of how I might have looked had I still been heavy. He licked the chip crumbs from his fingers and then washed them down with the final swallows of his soda. “Somebody,” he said again. “On the tip of my tongue.”
“It’s the wig,” Sparse continued. He was as skinny as Christopher was fat, a stick man come to life. “All that makeup, too. Tammy Faye?”
Christopher shut his eyes to consider the person Mother Maude had conjured up in his mind. “Dottie West,” he said finally.
Sparse and I shared the same bench, and he leaned over to me to whisper, “Who?”
“The country singer,” I told him. “Died in a plane crash.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding. “White-people shit.”
Christopher shook his head. He said Dottie West wasn’t a plane crash. “You’re thinking of Patsy Cline, ain’t you? Dottie West was a car wreck.”
“That’s right!” Sparse held up his arms—he was, as my father would say, “acting.” “Miss West was a drunkard. Left this world in a heap of carburetor and asphalt.” His arms remained extended a beat longer. “Bless her!”
“Thought you didn’t know who she was?” I said.
“Lucky guess—don’t all those old lady crooners die tragically?”
“Them and us,” Rumil said, and all four of us laughed. It was almost pleasant, considering the circumstances.
“Fags.”
The word was like a fist thrown in our faces. After he’d spat it out, Dale’s head dipped forward as if that neck of his had collapsed from the weight of his skull. Then his head sank down even more to rest on the table. Beside his face, flies swarmed the plate and around the lip of his Dixie cup. When two of them ventured over to his exposed cheek, dotting his flesh like animated punctuation marks, he swatted them away, but they kept returning. Finally, he gave up and burrowed his head under his arms.
As if on cue, the back door of the Chapel Cabin swung open and out sailed Mother Maude. A robust woman of early middle age, she wore knee-length khaki shorts and hiking boots and an oversize yellow T-shirt matching Rick and Larry’s, except hers had MOTHER written across the back in bold typeface. She circled our table first and cooed as if she were warming up her voice for a song. Her acrylic nails raked across the tops of our heads as she hummed our names, making a little rhyme of it. “I see Christopher and Rumil. I see Robert and I see Will.” Sparse started when she called him by his real name, but I was thankful she had used mine.
Mother Maude sidled over to Dale’s table, his head still hidden behind his arms. “My lamb?” she said, and there didn’t come any answer. She placed a hand on his shoulder. “Why you all by yourself, hmm?” After a pause, he gave a muffled “Dunno.”
“You don’t know?”
“No,” he said, this time much louder.
“I see.” She sat down across from him. “I think I may know,” she said. “I think you think you are better than them over there.”
From the woods, a bobwhite called, trilling its own name several times before it was satisfied and went silent.
“Oh, son.” Mother Maude gestured in our general direction. “Those boys are no different from you. No less children of God. Why, my own brother was like you. My sweet John.”
“Amen,” Larry said. He and Rick had appeared soundlessly from the Chapel Cabin, newly fitted in their coveralls and gloves, already glistening with sweat.
Dale lifted his head.
“Fuck you,” he hollered. He leaped to his feet and tottered back from the picnic table, taking a step to the side to steady himself. His eyes were wide and searching, the eyes of an animal cornered, hunting for the direction he might try to make his escape.
Rick and Larry kept their distance, perhaps not wanting to spook him any more than was necessary. Mother Maude crossed her legs and gazed up at him, the blandest of smiles curving across her face.
The sky was melting into one feverish shade of violet. Slowly, Dale’s hectic breathing returned to normal. The simple fact of our situation must have finally settled over him: There was nowhere to go, at least not on foot. The gravel road in front of the cabins went for two miles before it ran into a highway, and even then it was another five miles before you hit a town. A minute passed. Then another. Finally, he slunk back to his table, to the side where Mother Maude sat, and shoved in beside her. She put an arm around him and whispered something in his ear. I strained to hear what it was. The only word I picked out was “sister.” When she finished mumbling to him, Dale began to sob.
Larry came forward then to give his bit about our behavior. “We are your stewards,” he said. “We will hold you accountable and love you through your darkest moments.”
This time Mother Maude said, “Amen,” and then she mentioned Rick and Larry’s summer project. They were studying us, she said. “And they are going to write about us, too—write about us and shock the world holy.”
On our long walk to the lake, Dale’s crying continued. “He’s acting like such a little bitch,” Sparse said. “Like we’re going off to war or something.” No matter how much Larry encouraged him to hurry, Dale kept at his own wandering pace. His stubbornness irked me more than the tears did. By the time we reached Lake John, we were all seething because of him. Which was, I think, exactly what Mother Maude had been counting on.
—
The day I first met them in Hawshaw, Mother Maude and Father Drake took me
home in their RV. Father Drake drove us down a residential street near First Baptist, heading in the wrong direction. When I told them as much, he pretended not to hear. I was sitting in the back on a little fold-out seat, the metal clasp of the seat belt broken and dangling around my ankles. The inside of the RV stunk of fast food, the greasy scent that clung to paper wrappers and then to your fingers long after the meal. In the far, far back of the RV, an unmade bed blocked access to the toilet. The tattered carpet matched the beige color of the walls. These details told me the story of their lives: They lived on the edge of things. Like gypsies.
Mother Maude was riding shotgun. After a couple of blocks, she squeezed her husband’s arm, and said, “We ought to turn around, shouldn’t we?” Father Drake grunted, apparently his signal for consent, and took a left at the first stop sign we came to, then another at the next one, putting us on Lee Street, headed eastward toward home more or less.
The sky had a terrible overcast, a gray murk writhing above us, spitting out rain and sleet in sudden spurts. Father Drake refrained from using the windshield wipers, causing the buildings and homes we passed to warp and slide and swim. Once we crossed the railroad tracks, I knew we were close and suggested they take a right at the county co-op onto the main drag in town. To my surprise, Father Drake listened. “There we are,” I said, and pointed. A neon sign blinked MISSY’S, incongruous with the rest of the house it was attached to. The restaurant was an old home with a screened-in front porch wrapping around the property. Our apartment was on the second floor. Brother Mims had helped my father find the place after we could no longer live in Agnes Musclewhite’s old house rent-free. On the porch, under the thwacking of ceiling fans, customers came from all around Mississippi to eat the greasy barbecue. Living above the establishment had several challenges, not the least of which was the smell of smoked meat wafting up through our floor that coated our clothes and our furniture and even our bodies in the sour reek of pork. “My Lord,” Mother Maude said, when she saw the place. We had stopped at a red light, and she leaned forward to get a better look at where we lived. I told them how we used to live in a parsonage, and truth was, it wasn’t very nice, I said, but it was bigger, so maybe that made it only seem nicer. She wasn’t paying much attention to me, however. As soon as Father Drake parked at the curb, Mother Maude was rushing us inside, hurrying me up the backyard stairs and through the door that led into the apartment’s tiny living room. As she alluded to in the graveyard, my father had been talking to her for some months, discussing with them the merits of their summer plans. I hadn’t been expecting him home for another two days and didn’t notice his Chevy out back on the way up, so it was a surprise to find him sitting on the couch when we entered.
“Oh,” I said. “These are—”
“I know who they are,” he said.
For dinner, he had picked up pulled-pork sandwiches from downstairs for everyone, and as we ate, nobody was willing to carry on much conversation. It was a meal punctuated by skittish glances. Mother Maude would look at me, and I would look at my father, and my father would look out the street-facing window over my shoulder at the dimming sky. Father Drake stared at his food. He chewed, he swallowed, he frowned. His face was shaved clean, and his white hair clipped close to the scalp. He was handsome, I admitted, his stalwart masculinity exuding from his general state of being: from the way he sat (straight backed, both feet firmly set on the floor) to the way he chomped down his food (mechanically, methodically) with an expression of begrudging delight, as if he found delicious tastes such as this a frivolity that must be endured. In our silence, muffled conversations from the restaurant below filtered up to the apartment.
Mother Maude finally broke the silence by repeating a remark she had made to me at the cemetery. “I was telling Drake,” she said, “how much your boy looks like my Johnny did.” My father smiled and told her Debra Rose had often made the same observation. “The curly blond hair,” Mother Maude said, “and the eyes—it’s a remarkable resemblance. Don’t you think so, Drake?” Father Drake shrugged, and she returned her gaze to me. “Did your mama ever tell you about Johnny?” I went to say she had but burped instead. Father Drake chuckled mirthlessly, and Mother Maude’s eyes widened. (I couldn’t tell if she was more surprised by my poor manners or by her husband’s laughter.) “Pardon me,” I said, and told her how my mother had told me a little about her brother but mostly about the Neck. “All those stories about the women and the moonshiners,” I said, remembering the Sunday I had embarrassed my father in the choir and my mother confiding in me, later that night, about how I reminded her of her brother.
Mother Maude was laughing now. “Oh, yes—she and Mama liked to spin yarns, mixing the truth in with lies, all willy-nilly.” She laughed again, remembering something. “I said to her once, ‘DR—that’s what we called her, you know—you should just sit down and write all that out and sell a book.’” I admitted suddenly, my mouth outrunning my brain, to having written many of those stories down in a notebook.
My father leaned forward, and said, “I didn’t know that.” I told him I would show him the notebook, and he blushed and sat back. A knowing look was shared between him and Mother Maude. Our talking about my mother’s stories had opened up this warm feeling inside me—not a fire, exactly, but more like the kind of heat you get from filling up your belly with warm vegetable soup on a cold day. I told Mother Maude my favorite one was about the lost mother.
She squinted. “The who?” she said.
I told her the story as best I remembered it: the mother who liked to wander off, the father who moved the children away so she could never find them. The story was fantastical and stupid. As I spoke, Mother Maude got very still, and her smile faded. When I finished, everybody at the table had gone silent. Downstairs was alive with loud talk and clinking silverware. She stared at the remains of her coleslaw, and said, “That’s a pretty story, and I bet your mama meant well in telling it. She had a habit of pretending things weren’t how they really were.” My father said he would clear the table, and Father Drake said he would help. They took our dirty paper plates into the kitchen.
“I don’t care that she didn’t dwell on me, but I do wish your mama would’ve told you more about Johnny,” Mother Maude said. “Back when I was trying to make it as a singer, you see, he helped me book churches and found the right people to let me cut a record.” Her voice was a kind of music in itself, a mix of hum and accent. “He was meek, my Johnny. Gentle and loving. We supported each other—our parents had died and your mother, bless her heart, made it clear she didn’t want anything to do with us. So it was just us, me and him, and he’s the one who said I deserved to be on the radio, he’s the one I prayed with before every performance. But he was also weak in matters of the flesh. A sodomite—you know what that means?” I told her I thought so. “Well, your daddy seems to think you know what that word means, too. If what he’s told me about you is true, then you’re halfway to hell already, my lamb.” When the two men didn’t return right away, I understood the reason. They wanted to give Mother Maude some time alone with me. She continued. “Let me tell you, Johnny would always be sorrowful afterward. Confessing his sins and promising to repent and doing good for about six months, maybe a whole year. Then he’d make a fool of himself with somebody or another. A miserable life in general, but especially miserable for a man like him who loved the Lord. And he did love the Lord. Do you love the Lord? Well, I think you do.” She told me when she married Father Drake and cut back on her singing, her brother Johnny got mad and ran off. “I should have stopped him,” she said. “Should have chained him to my leg, but there was no hitting pause on him, not my Johnny. When he made his mind up to do something, he did it.” First, Johnny went to Charleston, only to eventually wind up in New York City. “That’s where he was when the sickness was killing his kind off left and right.” She didn’t see him for two years, and then he called, finally, to tell her he was ill. “Imagine it:
My beautiful and blond brother, the picture of health, like you are now, wasted down to nothing.” He died before Mother Maude and Father Drake could move him back home, but they buried his body out at the Neck near the lake. “Because that was our place—where we would go when things got bad at home and we needed a place to get away. I’ll show you when you come this summer. And I can tell you this, honey: He died a saved man, I made sure of it.” After they buried him, she and Father Drake went back to the city with a new mission. “The city was filled with sinners about to meet their Maker without the Spirit in their heart. So we spent”—here, she yelled at Father Drake, who was still piddling in the kitchen with my father, “Oh, how many years was it, Drake, two, three?—going round the hospices and hospitals and shelters spreading the good news. It was the best of times and the worst of times. Saving so many people, only to have them wink out like a candle not long after.” She said it was a race against the clock. “The hand of God is mighty and swift when his vengeance is being carried out. I said to Drake—after about the thirtieth funeral—I said, Drake, there must be a better way. A way to reach these boys before they get to this point of destruction.”
Father Drake spoke up from the kitchen, saying, “I told Maudie we needed to get them early—get them before they have a chance to do so much damage to themselves.”