Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  But my uncle told me all the greats were misunderstood in their own time. He said, “Forney Culpepper. Now that is a name that should be on the cover of a book.” And every now and then, I almost believed him. Then my mother would send me a letter from Nashville, telling me about the musicians she was about to go on tour with and how, in just a year or two, she would hit the big time and fly me out to live with her. That brought me down real quickly. My mother’s letters reminded me who I really was: I was Forney, the boy whose father was dead and whose mother had left him to pursue a far-flung singing career; I was Forney, named for a nowhere town in Texas, where two people who barely knew each other conceived me. Truth: Forney Culpepper was not really that special at all. Ultimately, I could never keep up the exaggerations of my uncle for long—sooner or later, I always gave in to the rough way of things.

  * * *

  —

  THE JUKE JOINT, unofficially called Fay’s, was affixed to the bank of the Yalobusha River not twenty yards from where the train tracks crossed over the water on a rickety bridge. Because the county was dry, Fay’s was, for the longest time, one of the few places near town where a man could wet his whistle in peace away from the company and influence of his wife. You had to walk to get there; most of the men parked their trucks on the side of a gravel road and trekked to the shack, using the river or the train rails to guide them. It would be naïve to assume the police didn’t know about Fay’s, but since most of their own fathers had frequented the establishment, they let it alone so long as there wasn’t any trouble.

  Who Fay had been was long forgotten by the time Uncle Lucas took me there, but on our way that night to the bachelor party, he told me the story of her, or rather his story for her. She had once owned a bed-and-breakfast in town called the Redbud Inn and often kept girls there on the payroll for the men’s pleasure. “It was a good business in those days,” Uncle Lucas said. “Fay had a nice setup, and the men adored her.” She had a shock of bright red hair, and when she traipsed up and down the square, the women would cross the street to avoid her. Some would even hiss.

  As my uncle tells it, Fay messed up and got herself pregnant, and when the news of the pregnancy leaked, the fine ladies of that time turned mean. Fay could claim, they feared, just about any of their husbands as the father. In great distress, the ladies met at the café on the square to discuss what to do about her; of course, the meeting was done in secret, under the guise of a monthly gathering of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. After two hours of debating the issue of Fay and her illegitimate child, it was decided that the woman must be run out of town, plain and simple, and since the menfolk were too dazzled by her to think straight, they would have to do it themselves.

  “That very night they went to the Redbud Inn,” Uncle Lucas said. “And the whole herd of them—respectable church ladies in frilly dresses and fancy flowered hats—went to her front door.” Looking out her window from the second floor, Fay observed the mob approaching and told one of her girls to latch the doors. She then opened her window and called down to them, asking if they had followed their husbands to come see what all the fuss was about. She laughed at the women, shooed them home, but the ladies, indignant from her laughter, would not be moved. Fay had underestimated them.

  Back then, it was high fashion to smoke, so many of them had their cigarette lighters in their purses, and a few of the ladies even had, on their person, matches. The thought must have occurred to them in one grand moment of inspiration: Smoke her out. “No one knows who started the fire, but once lit, the house took like kindling.” The flames lapped up the delicately painted siding, engulfing the pretty inn and driving out the girls. The ladies circled the house like a coven of witches and caught them, one by one, as they came running out in their silk nightdresses. “You could hear the screams echoing through town.” But the one the ladies wanted most of all remained inside; she had phoned the fire department and the police, and held firm that they would rescue her in time, but the fire worked faster than she anticipated, forcing her to the roof, where she clung to the chimney until the Redbud Inn caved in on itself.

  The ladies scattered as the bed-and-breakfast came tumbling down. “It is said,” Uncle Lucas told me, “that many of them couldn’t ever wash the smoke out of their hair and that they smelled of soot for the rest of their days.” Amazingly, the way he tells it, Fay had more life in her than the ladies of the town gave her credit for because, miracle of miracles, she survived. Firemen found her smoking body amid the ruins and carried her in secret to an old bachelor doctor out in the country. There she was nursed back to health and ended up, in the end, having that baby, a girl.

  Fearing their wives, the men built Fay a small house deep in the woods. “She lived out the rest of her life in relative peace there,” Uncle Lucas said. When she died, the men returned to the house to pay their respects and found the daughter, now grown, who could have been any of theirs, cooking corn liquor on the back porch as if she had been expecting them. “She offered them a snort of it. And they each took some and toasted Fay.” Thus, it became tradition for many of them to meet once or twice a month at Fay’s, drink the daughter’s moonshine, and as the train rustled past at midnight, hold their drinks in the air and, in a solemn chorus, roar, “To Fay!”

  * * *

  —

  ALTHOUGH THEY WERE TWINS, Uncle Lucas and Aunt Mavis looked nothing alike. Uncle Lucas had the same blunt nose and wide mouth that my father had. Aunt Mavis, on the other hand, possessed the narrow face and delicate features of a French aristocrat.

  In her college days at Ole Miss, she fancied herself something of a poet. She wrote her senior thesis on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, and had plans of attending graduate school, but after graduation, my grandfather suddenly died, so she stayed behind “to see about things” for a while. Twenty years later and she was still seeing about things and remained single.

  Uncle Lucas never married either, and for most of their lives, they lived together in the same house on Claymore Street, and I lived with them during my teenage years while my mother was away. I remember, before she left me with them, that she told me to be kind to my aunt and uncle because I was all they had left in the world and, besides, I wouldn’t have to stay with them long anyway, just until she got herself settled in Nashville. I was ten, and four years later, around the time of the bachelor party, I wouldn’t have left them for anything. We were, for better or worse, a family. We had long dinners together, where Aunt Mavis and I listened to Uncle Lucas go on in his usual manner. We saw plays and ballets in Jackson at Thalia Mara Hall, took weekend vacations to Biloxi and Memphis and New Orleans. All this time, I considered us outsiders—not just in the town, but in life itself, and a certain closeness developed among the three of us, an intimacy the likes of which I’d never known.

  Now I see that this business about being outsiders was perhaps more complicated than I’d first imagined. I think we knew, on some instinctual level, that we could never be like them, the rest of the town, and likewise, they didn’t see any reason for trying life our way. The town, for the most part, was hunkered down in the insular culture of Little League and church and bunko, and though there is, to my mind, nothing especially wrong with that, our interests lay elsewhere. In a place where every household seemed to have a garden, we kept our lawn bare and preferred the comforts of the indoors where, during the hot months—July and August and sometimes September—we’d spend the long sweltering afternoons reading, cushioned from the heat by a loud AC unit my grandfather had bought at Sears many years ago. We were always reading something. Stacks of books—more like walls of them—lined the hallways and covered the dining-room table and propped open doors. Aunt Mavis mainly read volumes of poetry while Uncle Lucas and I devoured novels, the trashier the better. One summer we made our way through the complete works of Miss Jacqueline Susann (Aunt Mavis, of course, had no idea). Some nights my aunt and uncle
would get a wild hair and read passages from Shakespeare or Auden aloud. Both of them had rich, thick voices—a mix of Midwestern flatness and Southern drawl—that had a way of lifting me right off my seat. It was almost as entertaining as my uncle’s exaggerations.

  It didn’t take me long to hear the rumors about my aunt and uncle, that there was something funny about the way they never married and still lived together. I had a violent streak back then and would fight any of the kids at school who so much as hinted in my presence what their parents had whispered about at home, that Uncle Lucas and Aunt Mavis were somehow incestuous. This was an exaggeration that Uncle Lucas couldn’t control, and the truth was much more pedestrian than the town’s imagination. My aunt and uncle were creatures of habit, and the habit of living together had seemed more preferable than being alone. They were, after all, friends, knowing each other better than anyone else, and they accepted the faults of the other as easily as could be expected of twins and siblings who were believers and practitioners of unconditional love.

  Soon after the bachelor party, my uncle left us. He moved to the little room above his store, and Aunt Mavis, I think, was hurt, but understood his reasons even better than I did at the time.

  * * *

  —

  THE MEN IN MY FAMILY had one thing in common: bad hearts. Each of them died from some kind of heart condition, and it was always unexpected. “We just fall dead,” Uncle Lucas was wont to say. Aunt Mavis found my grandfather slouched over his desk one morning, already purple and cold. My father and I were shelling peas when his heart quit working and he went tumbling off the back deck. And Uncle Lucas was in Canada when his time came. I was a junior in high school. He had gone to a convention in Toronto, his first and only time traveling outside the country. On his last night there, he ate an elephant burger at an exotic restaurant, ice-skated at the park near his hotel, and braved a roller coaster that went upside down three times inside a mall the size of our town. Afterward, he wandered back to his hotel, perhaps drunk with the possibility of life, and fell asleep on top of the neatly made bed in his room. Sometime in the night, his forty-seven-year-old heart stalled. The news came to us at breakfast. A long-distance call and our troupe of three dwindled to two. Aunt Mavis had a time getting his body flown back to us.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER PARKING AND WALKING for a while in the dark woods, Uncle Lucas and I finally reached the little clapboard house by the river. Even in moonlight, I could see how the woods had all but taken over Fay’s. Kudzu and sumac pushed up through the floorboards on the little porch, and the roof sagged in the middle as if the house had taken one last great breath and then had given up altogether. We entered through the side door, which, for all I know, was the only door there was. The plastic floor bubbled and popped under our feet as we sallied past a row of card tables and made our way to a makeshift bar at the back of the dim room. There was no electricity. Greasy kerosene lanterns provided the light.

  Uncle Lucas told the girl behind the bar he wanted two gin and tonics. The girl’s eyes passed from his face to mine and then back again. She looked to be not much older than I was. A pale, thin girl, missing most of her bottom teeth. I wondered if this was supposed to be Fay’s daughter, but I couldn’t tell if she had her mother’s flaming red hair or not because she kept it all bunched up underneath a dirty handkerchief wrapped about her head.

  “Drink this,” Uncle Lucas said, sliding a glass of clear liquid over to me. It looked like Sprite, and I took a long, desperate swig. The walk had dried me out. The drink tasted bitter and wrong, and I was able to choke down only a little. “Easy,” he said. “Sip it. Will protect you from the mosquitoes.”

  He took his glass from the bar and went over to the tables, where a few men had already gathered for the evening. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen here. I had a feeling that the men would drink and talk and maybe play cards, but I also wondered if something darker might occur. Perhaps Fay’s still had those girls in silk nightgowns. I glanced back at the one behind the bar and shivered. She appeared to be the only one working tonight. At the time, I knew the basics of sex, what went where, but I couldn’t imagine doing that with someone like her, someone I barely knew.

  As the gathering of men grew, my uncle migrated from table to table, patting backs, laughing. I stayed put and felt out of place, like I was somehow intruding where I had no business. “You look scared,” the girl said between puffs from a cigarette. I glanced back at her and took another sip of my drink, which began to taste better. Her dark eyes didn’t seem to miss a bit of me, examining every part of my person with extreme scrutiny. “Guppy,” she said, coming to some conclusion, and exhaled a large cloud of smoke.

  I turned away. Around me, on the walls, hung the expressionless heads of fallen deer. Most of them were bucks, their knotty antlers twisting out of their skulls and touching the low-hanging ceiling. A thick skein of dust covered their glassy eyes. It wasn’t long before I asked the girl if I could have another drink.

  Two hours later, I was still there at the bar, nursing my fourth gin and tonic and feeling as if the world were fading away into a shapeless mass of color and sound. “Am I drunk?” I asked her, and she grinned, her toothless mouth now a warm invitation. “I could kiss your face off,” I said, and this made her cackle uncontrollably.

  About that time, Buddy Cooper, the groom, appeared at the side door. “Gentlemen,” he announced to the gathering of men. “I’ve come to sow my last wild oat.”

  The men cheered, and catching on, I cheered too, longer and louder than the rest of them. He heard me at the back of the room and came over, a puzzled look on his face.

  “Cowboy,” I said to him. “What do you know?”

  He took the drink from my hand and asked if I knew the whereabouts of my uncle.

  “Over there,” I said, pointing to a larger table where most of the men had congregated. “Talking shit.”

  “So dark in here. Can’t see nothing.” He smelled my drink and then noticed the girl over my shoulder. “Suppose this is real entertaining, huh?”

  “Seems like he’s having a good time,” she said. “Guppy said he was a big boy now.”

  “I am a big boy,” I said.

  Taking my arm, he led me to the table where my uncle sat red-faced and laughing. “You need to cool off,” Buddy Cooper said, and he produced a chair out of what seemed like thin air. “Here,” he told me. “Pop a squat.”

  He had placed my chair slightly away from the table, out of the way. No one took any notice of my presence, and my uncle continued to hold court with the men. Buddy Cooper crossed his arms, half-smiling, and walked closer to the sound of Uncle Lucas’s voice. When he joined the table, it became hard for me, in the shadowy light, to tell Buddy Cooper from the others. I only made out my uncle, rapt in the telling of his story. It was quite a sight. The men seemed to forget that he was Lucas Culpepper and accepted him completely as one of them, which made my heart sink. I felt abandoned. I wanted him to recognize me sitting there, facing him. I wanted him to call me over and introduce me to everyone. But that never happened. Instead, I sat there allowing the gin and loneliness to wash through me. The floor wobbled back and forth, and I had this crazy idea that the shack had detached from the side of the sandbar somehow and was floating us down the river. I gripped the edges of my chair to steady myself. After a while, the floor stopped moving, and I was all right again. I leaned forward in my chair to listen to Uncle Lucas speaking and realized that he was telling the gathering about Dr. Rosamond.

  Dr. Rosamond, many years ago, tried to have his way with this married woman. He wrote her love songs, and on the weeks her husband wasn’t home (he worked offshore), the doctor sang to her at night outside her window, his voice accompanied by his homemade git-fiddle. The way Uncle Lucas told it, the doctor burned for her with an achy, persistent kind of lust. And one day, enough was enough: He’d have
her or die trying. In broad daylight, he kicked in her screen door and forced himself inside. She fought and screamed something good, and—lo!—the husband came home early and found the doctor bent over his wife trying to make time. The husband broke it up, but the doctor, crazy and slobbering all over himself, told the husband that he wasn’t leaving. “You’ll just have to kill me,” Dr. Rosamond said.

  The husband, not being one to fool around with, went to the bedroom and retrieved his double-barrel twelve gauge. He placed the gun square over Dr. Rosamond’s chest and told him to leave the premises; otherwise, he would have the right to protect his family and blow him, medical degree and all, straight to hell’s gates. Dr. Rosamond, who liked to see things through, clicked his heels together, pulled back his shoulders, and began to sing one of his woebegone love songs. He had made it to the chorus when the husband, frustrated and ready for dinner, pulled both triggers, emptying twin barrels of buckshot into the doctor’s chest. “Shot his heart into a million bits,” Uncle Lucas was telling them. “And now his ghost, it is said, haunts the town, looking for pieces of it, his lost heart.”

  “It was a poet’s death,” said one of the men, and the others laughed at him and begged Uncle Lucas for another story. My uncle glowed with benevolence and gestured for them to quiet down. Then a man with a handlebar mustache spoke up over the rest.

  “That’s not how I heard it,” he said. His gaze traveled the length of the table, making a point to look each man in the eye, even me. “That’s not the way I heard it at all.”