The Floatplane Notebooks

by Clyde Edgerton

  Then sometime after the Christmas trip to Florida, Mark confessed to Meredith about going skinny-dipping with Rhonda several years ago. Meredith told me.

  It would be very, very unfair—and reckless—if Rhonda has played these boys off against each other in some secretive manner. I don’t think Rhonda has realized that she’s playing with dynamite.

  THE VINE

  Walker’s brother Julius who lived across the road died after a fist fight with Walker before they had occasion to make up. The fight was about a debt and while Walker had Julius down in the road between their houses Julius bit Walker’s finger and it was always crooked afterward.

  Julius and Walker didn’t speak to each other for two days. Then Julius became sick with influenza and was inside for a week. Walker was on the way over there with a chess pie made by Caroline when he met Julius’s wife Rebecca in the road coming over to tell them that Julius had died. A doctor from Raleigh arrived too late.

  Caroline came out at bedtime and sat beside Walker on the steps. It’s time for bed Walker.

  I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight.

  You should get your rest.

  He might as well been a Yankee as far as our feelings.

  T’warn’t nothing. You both would have been over it in no time.

  I’d liked to have asked him what I might do for his place.

  The ceremony at the graveyard was larger than any of the others. Rebecca had so much food she brought the overflow from their house.

  On the next blue moon, Thomas, Bertha, and Julius appeared in their rockers.

  “Do these children cry like that all the time?” asked Julius.

  “Yes,” said Bertha. “Give them a little push in the cradle…. that helps. I’m afraid that last one down there was born dead like my grandson. We never hear it at all. Can you see in there?”

  “Well.” Julius stretched his neck. “Well, I don’t know if it’s dead or not, but it’s got a foot bigger’n mine.”

  MARK

  It’s the last gravecleaning before I leave for El Paso, and Meredith for Parris Island.

  I finish raking pine straw, get the ax from the truck bed, stop by where Aunt Scrap is sitting and talk to her for a few minutes, then call Rex and start over to the wisteria to cut it with an ax from around all the trees I can get to. All of them maybe. The wisteria is going to kill them. It wraps around and chokes them. The stuff has gone completely wild.

  Uncle Hawk says it won’t make any difference, that I can’t kill it with an ax. Meredith calls me to walk down to the rock pile, so I put the ax back in the truck and go with him.

  We walk through the pines. “Why you going down there?” I ask.

  “The rocks around Tyree’s grave. There’s about four little ones where it needs two big ones.”

  I need to say something about us leaving. “You think there’s any chance of you staying in?”

  “Naw. Two years will be plenty. See some action. You’re the one’ll stay in. Get to sleep in a bed, make big money.”

  I don’t know if he’s jealous or what. It’s not my fault he didn’t go to college. “It won’t be bad. I’ll be glad to get the hell out of here.”

  “Don’t forget to go to church.”

  “Yeah.”

  Thirty yards ahead, down the hill, I see the rock pile—a mound under pine straw. When this was a field, big white rocks were piled up so that plowing would be easier. One of Uncle Hawk’s earliest memories is seeing Old Ross counting silver money on a table, money he’d gotten from under the rock pile to take to town and put in a bank.

  “Y’all decided when you’re going to get married?” I say. “If you could get to Vietnam and get that over, then Rhonda could meet you—in Hawaii. Y’all could get married in Hawaii or somewhere.”

  “Listen, Mark.” Meredith stopped walking. I stopped. The rock pile was about ten feet ahead. “Why the hell did you have to tell me that about you and Rhonda?”

  “What?”

  “Skinny-dipping. I mean, why did you have to tell me? You could have kept shut up about it.”

  “I don’t know. I just felt like I ought to tell you.”

  “Well, shit, why should I want to hear that?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think it would make any difference.”

  “It makes one hell of a lot of difference. Wouldn’t it to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She never took me skinny-dipping. What if I’d gone skinny-dipping with some girl you were dating?”

  “Shit, Meredith, she’s going to marry you.”

  “Yeah, but you did that right under my nose.”

  “That was a long time ago, Meredith, and she suggested it, I mean, she, I mean, it wasn’t just all me, you know. It was us. Hell, I was drunk. It was just some fun.”

  “That’s exactly what I know: it was just some fun; she suggested it. How the hell do I know what else she’s done?”

  “I don’t guess you do, but she hasn’t done anything with me, and she wants to marry you, Meredith. Why can’t you just forget it?”

  “You can’t just decide to forget some things.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I hope something as little as that don’t keep you-all from getting married.”

  “You thought it was funny.”

  “I didn’t think it was funny—in any way that matters. Hell, Meredith, you used to think it was funny. You’d talk about getting Rhonda hot when we went frog gigging and stuff.”

  “Shit, Mark you don’t… You need a daddy, or somebody, to teach you about women.”

  He turns and walks to the rock pile and starts pushing back pine straw and mulch. He rolls out a big white rock, then another. I’m trying to think of something to say. “If there’s some way to forget it, that’s what I’d like to do,” I say.

  “Sure.”

  He picks up one of the big, heavy rocks. “Get that other one. Let’s go.”

  I bend down, pick up the rock in both hands.

  BLISS

  Quilts and lawn chairs were spread in their customary fashion around Mr. Copeland’s truck so that we could eat our customary picnic. Rhonda, looking quite ravishingly striking, joined us before Meredith and Mark came back from the rock pile. She walked into the woods a little way to meet them as they trudged up carrying two large rocks to place in a ring of rocks around one of the graves.

  Once we all got started on the sumptuous food, Meredith said, “I’m going to be buried right over there. I want to make it official.”

  “This graveyard is full,” said Aunt Scrap. “That was decided a long time ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. It just feels right. For one thing, it’s way down here in the woods, and one of these days it’s going to be all growed over with that wisteria vine. I got me a plot at the church. You do too, don’t you, Esther?”

  “Oh, yes. A big one, for Mark and his family and all.”

  “They never shipped home Thomas, did they?” asked Dan Braddock.

  “No,” said Miss Esther, looking at Mr. Braddock, “they didn’t.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I said.

  “I know Hawk and Sybil got a plot in Florida,” said Mr. Copeland, “and we got that one out at Oak Hill.”

  “It’s pretty out there,” said Aunt Scrap.

  “Well, I always wanted to be on that rise looking out across that pretty scenery to them far hills. This place just always seemed like a place to clean off. But I don’t care; if you want to be buried here, it’s fine with me,” he said, looking at Meredith.

  “It ought to stay like it is,” said Aunt Scrap.

  Meredith walked over to a clear spot, and marked an X with the heel of his shoe. “X marks the spot.”

  Every time I thought about Meredith being away in the Marines, a piece of biscuit would get hung in my throat, seem very large, and make my throat ache and my eyes water. And I knew Miss Esther had to be beside hers
elf—her only son leaving, her husband having left for World War II, never to return. I wondered if he had come to the gravecleanings.

  “Hand me one of them ham-and-biscuits,” said Thatcher. “Whose are these?”

  “Mine,” said Aunt Scrap.

  “That’s good ham.”

  “I dipped it in red-eye gravy.”

  “There’s your damn red-eye,” said Uncle Hawk.

  “What’s that?” said Aunt Scrap.

  “I said, ‘There’s your damn red-eye!’”

  “Oh yeah—Ross and the striking iron.”

  I realized I was about to be subjected to yet another family story. Sometimes….

  “We all heard that one.” said Aunt Scrap. “What do you young’uns know about Aunt Vera?” she said to Meredith and Rhonda.

  “She used to drink bitters,” said Meredith, “and she got a Civil War pension and—”

  “Confederate pension.”

  “And her chickens roosted on her bed and she had a black dog named Sailor and she lived right down there.” Meredith pointed.

  “You do know something. You know what she used to say to that dog?”

  “I don’t know that. I won’t here then.”

  “She’d tell him to get out the door, and he’d go under her table. So she’d say, ‘Well, git under the table then.’”

  “Tell about how she smelt,” said Mr. Copeland.

  “No need to talk about that,” said Miss Esther.

  “Well, it’s a fact,” said Aunt Scrap. She spat a stream of tobacco juice—sort of over Uncle Hawk’s shoulder.

  “Watch it,” Uncle Hawk said, ducking. “Don’t you spit on me.”

  “You be quiet. You just want to tell about Ross and the red-eye. Oh, I forgot. The bitters—she’d make a concoction and drink it for medicine. Did you just say that?” she asked Meredith.

  “Yes ma’am, I did.”

  “What was in it?” asked Noralee.

  “Seems like, oh, lion’s tongue and cherry bark. I think that’s right. But it’s a fact about her smell. I slept with her more than once, and I guess we didn’t pay it no mind, but I don’t think she ever washed anything but her feet, and that dog Sailor slept on the foot of the bed, and Lord knows, chickens would come in there and roost on her bed, and lay eggs on it. That ain’t no lie. It was a feather bed and the feathers, even when it was mashed down, was as thick as that.” She held her hands apart. “And bless her heart, that there baby, that BORN DED, was hers.”

  THATCHER

  Meredith and Mark will be leaving for military service in a week or two. It’s unfortunate, but there is no denying the fact that the rest of the world is not as civilized as the United States, and democracy has its price. Sometimes a high price. Of course, this Vietnam thing might be over before they get there. I hope so.

  Anyway, Saturday when we left the graveyard, we left the truck—loaded with all the tools—for Meredith and Rhonda so they could load in the lawn mower when they finished. Meredith wanted to stay and mow the lawn. Aunt Scrap won’t let him do it when we’re all down there because it makes too much noise to talk over. The women went somewhere, and Papa, Uncle Hawk, Mr. Braddock, Mark, and me walked to the shop so Uncle Hawk could see what Papa has done on the floatplane since last year.

  I swear. Papa and the floatplane.

  Uncle Hawk was thumbing through the notebooks. He got to the very last entry which had such and such a date and then it said: “Dropped engine.”

  “What’s that, Albert?” says Uncle Hawk. “You just going to use one engine now?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It says here ‘dropped engine.’”

  “Oh no. It dropped—fell—fell on the floor.”

  “Fell on the floor?”

  “Just a little bump.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  What happened was, he had two chain block-and-tackles, which I got wholesale through Strong Pull, hanging from two rafters in the ceiling, each one holding a motor, because Papa pulls the motors up, see, then sets them down and bolts them to different places on the fuselage looking for what he calls better balance. He uses two rafters so there’s not too much weight on one, and then he moves the plane from one place to another while he’s working on it. It’s pretty light. And so one of the engines ended up hanging from a rafter out over a wing. All we could figure out later was that that rafter was weak from where a knot was in the wood—it was weak all along and we didn’t know it.

  I was out there in the shop, sharpening my knives, when I heard a little crack in the rafter. Papa took a step toward the plane, the rafter popped loud, the engine fell, hit on top of the wing, knocked that wing down, the other wing up, catching him right in the chin and knocking him back against the tool cabinet.

  Mama thought maybe that was the end of the floatplane, but Papa started in ordering fresh aluminum tubing.

  So, anyway, we’re waiting for Meredith and Rhonda to bring the truck so we can hook up the trailer and haul the floatplane to the lake. Twice this summer, Papa’s backed it in the water and buzzed it around. None of the flying controls are hooked up but the rudder, so it won’t fly. He’s started calling them “experimental runs,” and he’ll write a three- or four-page notebook entry—about each one—which you can’t even recognize as what happened.

  “Can’t you do this engine mount a little lighter?” says Uncle Hawk, rubbing his hand across it. “Get something aluminum that’s just as strong as this iron piece through here?”

  “I guess I could,” says Papa. “What I need is bigger engines. A little more power. I know where I can get lighter engines with about twenty more horsepower, and when I get them on and hook up the flying controls she’s gonna lift right up. Fly like a eagle.”

  Papa’s still flying with Joe Ray Hoover in his Piper about two Saturdays a month, sometimes one, and keeping Joe Ray in hickory chips.

  Anyway, we didn’t pay much attention to Meredith and Rhonda not coming back from the graveyard until it was after dark. Nobody had seen either one of them so I drove down to the graveyard—and here’s where we had the big event of the year. Meredith and Rhonda had left a note under some hedge clippers on top of Tyree’s gravestone saying they’d gone to Dillon, South Carolina, to get married and would be back in two or three days.

  It was such a big event it made Bliss cry.

  And Papa wrote it down in one of the notebooks, with the part about the hedge clippers and Tyree’s gravestone and all.

  THE VINE

  Walker was laid up in bed for four days with the death rattle in his chest. The grandchildren were brought in one at a time in the late afternoon to see him. The rattle could be heard through the wall. At night Caroline would heat water and wash him. She said that was all that was left to do that all else had failed. The doctor left a salve for Walker’s chest and Vera brought bitters.

  Two cousins John Boggs and Mantha Sutton had joined the others in the graveyard. When Walker died a new row was started with his grave and in a few days the biggest tombstone of them all was erected over it.

  Years later, Caroline and her grandson Tyree died of typhoid fever. Then Ross died of pneumonia, and on a blue moon he talked to John Boggs:

  “… and all my kids were all the time wanting to go down to see Vera because she had these here great big pockets on her apron that she kept candy in. She loved all the children, she did. She moved out of the house—about the time Helen and me started having children—into a little house me and Papa built for her down the hill.

  “See, she’d put candy in them apron pockets and let the children stick their hands way down in there and find it.

  “She got to be a little bit peculiar. From taking laudanum. She’d get her pension check and walk nine miles to Raleigh to get her laudanum, then come back and dance up a storm.

  “Mama used to worry because she didn’t seem to bathe all that much.

  “She was something; didn’t mind telling anybody to ‘kiss her ass’, and she worried a
lot about Zuba after he got strung up with the wisteria.”

  “That’s Zuba sitting down yonder, I think,” said Walker.

  Ross turned and looked down toward the woods. “Well, my God it does look like him, don’t it?”

  “That was a bad time,” said Walker.

  “Yes, it was.” Ross turned back from looking at Zuba.

  “How’s that?” asked Thomas Pittman.

  “They hung Zuba” said Ross, “and we couldn’t stop them. I tried. Zuba was a field hand, a nigger.

  “You know, you know, Vera kept that dog and them chickens and I don’t know what all right there in her house and them chickens would lay on her bed. I saw it.

  “And she’d, she’d take that crazy girl from the McGuires and bring her home and let her sit and rock, and more than once I seen a chicken jump in that girl’s lap and she’d stop rocking, whereas she wouldn’t stop rocking for nothing else, and I went in the McGuires when that girl died—Vera was down there—and it was the oddest thing: they had a sheet over her, pinned down to every corner of the bed. I don’t know whether it was because of her rocking—she’d rock no matter where she was sitting—/mean, whether they was afraid she’d start rocking after she was dead, or if she did start, or if it had something to do with their religion. They was of a unusual sect.

  “You know, that girl’s papa told me about Zubds daughter and him. He told me on a wagon ride into town one time. I picked him up. It was right odd. The story was about when Zuba and his family was all still together. I remember that, when they lived back in there behind the Hughes’ house—before the rest of them headed north and left Zuba. Her name was Zenobia and she had been long gone when this fellow told me about what happened. But I remembered how pretty she was, even though she was a nigger, always dressed in white, and helped her Mama clean our church. His name was Harper, first name—the one telling me. Well, Harper sort of fell in love, as it were, with Zenobia and they would meet down at Buzzard Rock, in that little cavelike space underneath. While he told me he didn’t seem the least bit ashamed. She black as night and him white as cotton. He took a notion to buy her a bottle of perfume from Moses the Peddler—who I also remember; Moses brought things around in a big old wagon pulled by a little mule. It was almost Christmas and Harper was worried about if he was going to get to see her before Christmas. It was Green Woods perfume, he said, in a little bottle, and Moses had told Harper that his papa—Harper’s papa—had just bought a bottle for Harper’s mama for a Christmas present. Christmas came and Harper didn’t get a chance to give the perfume to Zenobia, and Harper noticed his mama got only a frying pan and a mirror for Christmas, no perfume. Then when Harper met Zenobia in the little space under Buzzard Rock right after Christmas he said she smelled to high heaven—like Green Woods perfume, and it come down on him like that rock had fell in, he said, so he started following his papa on his rounds to the rabbit gums and that’s where he seen them together. Then he come to find out she was pregnant, and there he was. Didn’t know who was the father, him or his papa, and then the last time he saw her, she was leaving for up north in a wagon, when the whole family left except Zuba. She stopped in the store when Harper was there and motioned for him to come out to the wagon, and she showed him something: that little baby. It was black as tar, Harper said. Then somebody told Harper’s papa that they’d seen Harper and Zenobia down at Buzzard Rock together, and Harper’s papa beat Harper within a inch of his life, and all the while he was getting beat, Harper was saying, ‘You done it, too. You done it, too.’