Drowning in Gruel

by George Singleton

  I couldn't argue with Mayann, for I had left teaching college English in midsemester when I realized that my older colleagues were spineless, the younger ones idiots. Luckily, I'd inherited all of my father's woodworking tools, his crude hand-drawn blueprints, and enough handheld turkey calls left over to use as templates. I went back into the family business, though, in retrospect, I never really left it. I still constructed about a dozen turkey calls a year in my spare time, and kept them boxed up in the carport for whenever one of my father's favorite longtime customers called up with some sad story about how he sat on his call, or stepped on it, or got it stolen by an avid and jealous fellow turkey hunter. Each time I tested a handheld paddle box turkey call, made from the finest maple and poplar, the yelps, squawks, clucks, and purrs that emanated within my work shed sounded exactly like any responses my English 101 classes made as I called the roll.

  Mayann placed her flip-flops, two pairs of pumps, and special shoes worn only for aerobics workouts on the refrigerator shelves below the Danskos. She said that her mother did the same thing whenever they went to Myrtle Beach on vacation. "My mother read somewhere that one of the ancient tribes always hid their shoes before leaving on a hunt or pilgrimage, because the afterlife didn't accept people without footwear. So, according to my mom's story, if you got in a bad wreck, you might get mangled and maimed, but you wouldn't die, because your soul couldn't go to heaven without shoes."

  I said, "Did /all go to Myrtle Beach barefoot? That doesn't make sense. Wouldn't you wear shoes in your car?"

  Mayann slammed the side door of my van—she thought we should enter Gruel without showing off. She thought it best we not take her VW Rabbit. "Huh," she said. "I never thought about that. I guess maybe Mom thought we'd be barefoot a lot because we were at the beach. Maybe she feared us getting killed by sharks."

  Going back to Gruel, ultimately, could only be blamed on me. Mayann had the dream, then got out a Rand McNally to look up odd-named towns that could only be in states of disrepair. She started in Tennessee—Gassaway, Hanging Limb, Hohenwald—and ended up in the south Georgia town of Needmore. Mayann took notes. I said, "Tell me what, again, you have in mind?"

  Mayann set down her highlighter. "I was thinking that it might be neat if I applied for some grants, hired out local help, and got to work renovating old homes. I could either start up a series of retirement homes for, say, indigent textile employees. Or I could bring the arts to such a downtrodden community, you know. Like start up an artist colony. Don't worry about any of that. It'll come to me sooner or later. An artist colony. Sooner or later. That's it."

  I didn't say, "Maybe you should take a nap and see if Jimmy Carter has some better answers." I said, "In the early 1970s there was exactly nothing in the town of Gruel, South Carolina. My mother and I lived there for a couple years. There was a pool hall and diner. An army-navy store. I think maybe there was a pharmacy. All of this was on a square with some kind of Civil War hero standing in the middle."

  My wife opened her atlas to South Carolina. Then she looked in the back matter for all towns listed with a population over six hundred. "It's not in here," she said. "What do you mean, your mother and you lived there for two years? Where was your father? You're making this up. How come you've never told me about this Gruel place?"

  I shrugged. I opened up her atlas and pointed out where Gruel would be if it were big enough to mention on a map. I didn't say anything about the prison farm located farther south, toward the Savannah River nuclear facility, or how Mom and I went down there on Saturdays to visit my father.

  Mayann said, "Gruel. Gruel. Grewwww-ullll. Grewwww-ullll. I like the sound of that. Listen. I'm not going to quit my job, or let anyone there know about my plans. But I've got a few weeks' vacation time saved up. Let's you and me drive on down there and check things out."

  For the next two days my wife kept a list of things we'd need to take along. She packed my van meticulously, including tax statements, paycheck stubs, and the like, should she need to meet with a local banker in regards to a mortgage loan. She emptied her closet, for she wanted an ensemble appropriate for any possible occasion, from pool party to soiree.

  I packed our dome tent and sleeping bags. My wife didn't understand that there would be no Hyatt, Omni, Hilton, Marriott Renaissance, or Gruel Inn located on the square or down an alley where locals probably still hitched their palominos.

  I also shimmied six sample turkey calls into the van, knowing it would be a surefire way for me to make instant friends and stay out of fistfights. My wife would come off as a carpetbagger, certainly, but I planned to blend right in—something I didn't pull off in the fifth and sixth grades as my father served a two-year sentence for operating without a business license, tax evasion, and failing to respect Tennessee fire codes, which is what I told friends.

  Mayann drove. Near the North Carolina border on 1–40 she asked me if I might be interested in starting up some kind of Montessori school wherein I could impart knowledge that involved composition and manual labor. I held the map and stared forward.

  Listen, parents and students had two educational choices if they lived on the square in Gruel or one of its four offshooting side streets: either get bused an hour's ride to Forty-Five to attend their elementary, junior, and high schools, or enroll in Gruel Normal, a private school run by an intelligent, multiple-divorced couple who hailed from the old Black Mountain College community. Gruel Normal wasn't a K through 12 white flight school. Parents paid a few hundred dollars a year to send their children there. More than a handful of bake sales, car washes, and raffles took place in order to pay the school's unaccredited teachers—mostly other disenfranchised adult runaways with penchants for history and literature, plus near nuns who knew Latin and a little biology—enough to live in their run-down mansions.

  When I was in the fifth and sixth grades there weren't more than two dozen students altogether. I don't know how many Gruel schoolchildren took the bus to Forty-Five—there couldn't have been another twenty-four—because their parents distrusted the moral or intellectual abilities of the disenfranchised. I'm sure that some of my mother's neighbors believed that their children were better off listening to some southern belle say "I before E, except after C," like a mantra, over and over.

  Gruel Normal's teachers weren't like that. Our classrooms were housed in two cement block buildings donated by a defunct sand and gravel company, which provided a great playground, and each day began with our teachers saying something optimistic like, "What do you think would happen if we no longer had food?" Then they listened for an hour, and told us to read the book of Job, The Grapes of Wrath, maybe some poems by T. S. Eliot.

  "Why are people mean to each other?" "Why's it impossible for there to be another planet Earth somewhere in the universe?" "Do you think that the floral and candy industries invent holidays?" These were our daily questions. And every day we were told to read something, something else, and the book of Job. In between we learned multiplication tables, long division, and a skewed version of geography wherein the rest of America was the United States, and Gruel was Gruel.

  Here's health class:

  Right before my father got paroled and moved us back to Jonesboro, Tennessee, where he had originally started up the Wiggins Palm Clucker Turkey Call Company, all of us in sixth grade—which would mean both of us, Dwight Tollison and me—sat in the old sand and gravel company's break room. The principal, Mr. Lupo, brought in four men to talk to us, but not about sexual education or condoms or venereal disease. The special guests didn't mention exercise or hygiene.

  The first man was blind. He said, "I wasn't borned like this. Back when I was about y'all'ses age we had a full solar eclipse, and I looked straight at it for only about three seconds. The next thing you know, I was completely blind." He left the room tapping his white cane. He also had the aid of a German shepherd that both Dwight and I knew guarded the army-navy store at night seeing as it was Victor Dees's pet.

  I thought the se
cond man was blind, too, but he took off his glasses and had the worst cross-eyes ever. Then he went off to tell a story about how his mother warned him not to cross his eyes or they might stick like that. Sure enough, they did. Mr. Lupo said, "I see you boys crossing your eyes all the time when I turn my back. Let this be a lesson to you. Job was cross-eyed, by the way."

  Dwight and I nodded. I'm not sure if I even breathed during this supposed health class. The third man said, "I'm glad you boys are able to sit down on those nice chairs. I wish I could do the same. But I can't. No sir. If I did, I might pop and bleed to death. Let me tell you about sitting down on cold cement and the history of lowly polyps."

  I thought he said something about lollipops.

  I was about to ask if he had any extras, but Dwight nudged my ribs and started giggling. He wasn't making fun of this poor soul, though. Already he'd caught a glimpse of the hair growing off the final guy's palms.

  Mr. Lupo dismissed us. He said nothing about how a frog set on his nose at one time, thus causing the wart, or how his own knuckles were the size of jawbreakers due to popping them in his early years. He said to me, "I understand your daddy's about to be released on good behavior, Charlie. Is this true?"

  Dwight ran off to one of the sand dunes to shoo one of the stray, wild cats that always lurked on the edge of Gruel Normal's boundaries. I said, "My momma says he was never guilty in the first place. She says he got caught up in a trap between people who were plain jealous that a man could invent a better turkey call and people who were plain jealous that a turkey call maker could have a pretty wife. That's what she says."

  Mr. Lupo said, "The same could be said of Job, son. Don't you worry any about all that. Don't feel embarrassed about your father's shortcomings. You are you."

  "He's getting out, and I think we're moving back to Tennessee. My father says if he'd not been so stubborn, he could've gotten out of the fire code charge. The only thing he had to do was burn up his wood scraps instead of letting them pile up in the backyard." That was my story in Gruel. I never mentioned how my father was really sent upriver on an indirect murder charge.

  My principal and I walked back toward the other building where one of the other teachers would ask, "If it's true that American livestock lay down before a storm, what happens to cattle south of the equator?"

  When Mayann and I hit such a small state road that its number went something like 108801, a mile from Gruel's square, I said, "I'll never teach again, honey. I might expand to duck calls or silent dog whistles, but I have no ambition to bring kids in to view a man's fake hairy palms."

  My wife veered from an animal I never saw lurch out onto the macadam.

  The amateur real estate agent, in charge of many of Gruel's falling and bleak-storied mansions for sale, happened to be state representative Howard Purgason's wife. Paula Purgason grew up in nearby Forty-Five, but her father owned and operated Gruel's once-thriving pet store. I didn't remember a pet shop on the square, but with my father in prison I doubt my mom would've walked me past a place that advertised other mouths to feed. "My father was the first man in South Carolina to import chinchillas," Ms. Purgason said to Mayann and me as we sat down on fur-covered wingback chairs in the den. "My uncle had a pet store over in Ware Shoals. He was the first to import Siamese fighting fish and spread the rumor that all chinchillas had rabies."

  Mayann said, "We saw some of the houses for sale. Boy, they sure do need work, don't they?" which I thought was pretty smart. She didn't want to seem eager.

  I thought about my shoes in the refrigerator back home. I wanted to be wearing tennis shoes at this particular moment, should I decide to take off running. At the moment, a horrendous scream emanated from upstairs. "That's just Howard," Ms. Purgason said. She shoved a USA Today in my direction and directed me to page D4—that's where I learned about what I concluded had to be the three stupidest members of the South Carolina state legislature. I read the item and said, "I'll be damned," then handed the paper to my wife.

  "Howard's got a theory, but I don't know if it's right. He keeps thinking he's got a bleeding ulcer or internal bleeding of some type. I keep telling him it's plain old hemorrhoids. I told him to wipe hisself with rubbing alcohol, and that'd tell him which was which."

  I said, "I guess if he had a bleeding ulcer, it wouldn't burn, right?"

  "Not lest he drank it," Ms. Purgason said. She wore a hairdo that could've doubled as a termite mound on the Brazilian pampas. Tom Waits and Lucinda Williams could've collaborated and written an opera about the woman's large, loud dress—which was punctuated with a bow the size of a barn owl in midflight. "Y'all want some iced tea or anything before I take y'all over to look at what they got me selling? I want to make sure Howard comes down okay, you know."

  Mayann had originally called Ms. Purgason when she finished a few good hours of investigation. I'd told my wife that there was no remaining Chamber of Commerce, that anyone calling information would get no Realtors' listings, and so on. I'd said, "Why don't you get on the computer and punch 'Gruel, South Carolina' in. See what happens. I'd be willing to bet no one there has a computer yet, so there won't be any Web pages or whatever."

  I never did understand how Mayann got ahold of anyone, amateur Realtor or not.

  We declined the iced tea. Mayann said, "Charlie here says there's no motel nearby. Is that true?"

  "Not a one. Used to be the Gruel Inn way off on Old Old Augusta Road, but that's a sad story. It became some kind of weight-loss clinic, and then a writers colony. Some crazy fellow named Novel lived there for about a year, but then he took off and no one heard from him again. Now we got a bunch of guru types living in there, doing yoga all the time."

  I said, "What?"

  "But the other people who've come down looking I've let stay in the houses they was interested in. All the houses still have all they furniture. I've been good about washing and changing linens."

  "Did these people just die off with no next of kin?" Mayann asked. She shifted in her seat and a plume of chinchilla hair floated upward.

  "Oh they got kin. Kin just don't care. Some of them so old they can't get back down here to sell what they inherited rightly."

  Howard Purgason eased down the stairs directly, leaning heavily on its banister. He wore suspenders and a straw hat with the brim flattened straight up. "Well I guess my screaming and moaning came out loud and clear. I forgot Paula said y'all was coming. Good news for me; bad news for me, too."

  He stuck out his hand to shake. I'd like to say that I didn't want to shake hands with a racist, first off, but to be honest I didn't want to shake hands with a man so stupid he'd wipe his ass with toilet paper soaked in isopropyl alcohol. I stood up, but said, "I have a bad case of poison ivy."

  "Well. Okay, then. That's mighty considerate of you." He nodded at Mayann, but didn't take off his hat. Who sits on a toilet wearing a hat? I thought. "Listen. I just come up with one more way to solve the South's problems. Listen, you know how buckets and pails and barrels of water fill up with mosquito larvae in the summer? Well, what we should do is keep those buckets of rainwater filled with minnows. Then they'd eat the larvae. In times of drought, you'd just have to keep filling up said buckets, pails, and barrels with tap water so's to keep the minnows from frying."

  I thought about being in elementary school and singing the alphabet song without an N, A, C, or P. My wife said, "Back home, we go out after big summer rainstorms and simply dump the water out so mosquitoes don't lay their eggs."

  Howard Purgason looked at my wife as though she spoke in tongues. He squinted, raised his eyebrows, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Paula Purgason said, "They don't drink iced tea, either."

  "Why your parents name you after the most northern state?" Howard Purgason asked my wife.

  Evidently my wife didn't possess mind-reading skills. She didn't turn her head their way and blurt out, "Help, help, Charlie's going to kill me as soon as we're alone in the car. That's what he's thinking, that's w
hat he's thinking."

  My wife and I camped out inside 101 Old Old Greenville Road. This particular house held some thirty-six hundred square feet, and might've been painted white back in the 1920s or thereabouts. The original owners, according to Ms. Purgason, lived through the Civil War and ran a gristmill. Their final kin left Gruel in the early 1960s for job opportunities on the coast, after having inherited grocery stores, train depot cafés, textile supply companies, and car dealerships.

  We spread out sleeping bags atop metal springed iron beds in one of the two downstairs bedrooms. There were two others upstairs. The house also included an old-fashioned parlor, a den, living room, dining room, added-on kitchen and mudroom and bathroom downstairs. Upstairs, outside of the two bedrooms, was another bathroom in what probably used to be a closet.

  The wraparound porch slanted downward in a way that might've made wheelchair victims feel as though they were unwanted.

  Outside stood a summer kitchen, springhouse, and outbuilding of indeterminate use. Scuppernong vines encased an ancient wooden pergola of sorts that must've run twenty yards in length, five feet above the ground. Muscadines hung from another such structure, perpendicular. Fig trees clumped sporadically beneath hundred-year-old magnolias. A stand of twelve pecan trees ran up the pea gravel drive.

  Any sane human being in the middle of the day would've said the place exuded flat-out aristocratic Old South charm.

  I was inside the place for about ten minutes before I saw specters flying around, fifteen minutes before I had a tent pitched in the front yard and my flashing lights blinking on the van next to it. Mayann came out and said, "What's your problem?"