by Karr, Mary
The men meet here every year to swap and start consuming gift bottles of Jack Daniel’s. This year’s is white with a molded pheasant flying out of the brush. Four of these open bottles sit on the card-table corners. In the middle, there’s a little battery-operated monkey Ben bought for his granddaughter. It holds two cymbals. When you turn it on, it bangs them together until you smack the top of its head. Then it bares its teeth and hisses at you. Daddy thinks this is funnier than fart jokes.
When he figures the men have gotten shifty enough to change the subject out from under him, he starts back talking. “I knowed they was something wrong with him the day I got back from the war. He was standing in the ditch in front of the house. Cutting grass with a sickle. I seen him a long ways off. Coming down the hill from the train, I was. Walking. And he seen me. But he just keeps swinging that sickle. That grass was about titty-high on him. In them days, the mosquitos would get up and breed in ditch grass like that. Just about eat you alive. Hell, I seen them kill a bull. Crawl up his nose and down his lungs and draw all his breath out.”
“They didn’t have no mosquito trucks back then,” Shug says. “The sleeping sickness’d get started, and they wasn’t hardly no ways to stop it.”
“Not out in that country,” Daddy says. “Maybe up in town.”
Cooter clears his throat, and Ben scratches on the monkey’s neck like he’s a live kitty or something. Me, I just lay low and feel tickled to be in on how the story’s a lie. I wait for Daddy to reel the other fellows in.
“I got up level with him on the road and said hey. He didn’t say nothing. Just kept swinging that sickle. One side to the other, like a clock a-working. So I said hey again. ‘Howdy-doo,’ he said.” Daddy squints into the middle distance like he’s sizing the old man up, getting sized up in return. “He just looked at me. Serious as a heart attack. After a minute he says, ‘I know we kinfolk. But I don’t know how.’”
“He’d done got simple,” Cooter says.
“That’s exactly right,” Daddy says. Cooter nods at the other men, and they nod back. “He didn’t have no more idea who I was than he would her.” He points a thumb at me, and I straighten up. I’m sitting on an upended bait bucket, lining up saltines with curlicues of Cheez Whiz into an army on a plate I’ve got balanced on my lap. I’m killing time till Ben turns that monkey on again. It’s Christmas, and I want that monkey so bad I can taste it. It stares at me like a long-lost cousin.
“Did he ever figure it out?” Ben asks.
“He’d have times he come to,” Daddy says. “His mind was broke down most days. Poor old thing. Couldn’t see no further than here to that minnow tank.” Over in the tank the minnows shiver in their black bodies like a whole school of commas facing us through the glass. Daddy laughs like he’s remembering something. “That didn’t keep him from driving that Jeep, though. ‘Tom,’ Beaver Bishop’d say to him. Beaver was near as old as Poppa. Been sheriff of Jasper County since I could remember.” Daddy squirrels his mouth around into its Beaver Bishop shape, kind of pudgy-cheeked, like he had a jaw full of chew. “‘Tom, I don’t want to catch you climbing up in that Jeep. You too old to be out on them roads.’ Poppa would just shake his head. ‘Beaver, them’s my roads out there,’ he’d say. Hell, that’s what he thought. Him and those other men had cut them roads with the Indians and colored guys and every other kind of fellow. Chinamen, even. Back when the trees was so thick a cat couldn’t sneak through. Beaver would go along with him a little bit. ‘Tom, you know that, and I know that, but the state of Texas has a different idea.’”
“They can scare you out on them roads,” Cooter says. “I got behind me an old fellow the other day going to Central Mall—“Ben fires him a look that would melt rubber, so Cooter puts a lid on it.
“Mr. Bishop took Poppa’s license. You think that bothered Poppa?” He gazes from man to man, as if they question him. “Hell, that little square of paper didn’t mean him nothing. Not if he took it in his mind to get somewheres. Beaver finally had to come out one Sunday and have his boy take the tires off the Jeep. ‘Miz Karr,’ he said. ‘You need to go to the store or something, we’ll come up here and get you. But I can’t cut that old man loose on them roads.’”
“How long he stay that ways?” Shug asks. He tips the bottle of whiskey into his paper cup. Everybody else does the same. Usually, Daddy likes questions, unless they’re meant to hurry him, the way Shug’s is now. Daddy takes a cracker from my army of saltines and I get to work on a new one to fill in the spot. He uses the chewing time for them to stop their bottles shifting around. If the Liars’ Club men start a silence contest, Daddy will always hold the last silence in the deck.
“I guess it wagged on a year or so,” he finally says. “Sometimes he knowed me. Sometimes not.
“That whole time he got so he’d climb up on things. Get up on the barn or shed. Whatever he could lean a ladder to. Said he wanted to get closer to the Lord. And he was a fool to sleepwalk. I’d hear him bumping around in the middle of the night. ‘Pete!’ Momma’d call me. ‘Pete, there he goes again. You go catch him.’” The high voice he uses for his Momma voice doesn’t sound like he’s mocking her, like some fellows do when they talk like women. It sounds real. It has that determined, old-lady tremble to it. “He’d run just as straight up Highway 60 in his drawers, fast as he could go. And me flapping behind him in mine. First thing he’d do when he got up was to put his hat on. It was a tan-colored Stetson with a short brim. Many’s the night I followed that hat bobbing up the road in front of me.” Daddy can see he’s losing them, so he puts the story into high gear. “Had it on the day he died.”
“Now that’s something,” Cooter says, “to hang yourself wearing a hat.” Cooter thinks he’s found some kind of secret in the story.
“That’s not the point, Cooter,” Shug says. They sull up at each other a second—Cooter and Shug—like there might be words between them. Ben sees the mean looks they swap. He slaps the table hard with the flat of his palm so whiskey sloshes and the monkey tips over. “Goddammit. It’s Christmas,” Ben says. He sets the monkey back up straight, but doesn’t turn it on. Everybody settles back into listening.
“I was sleeping out on the porch when I heard something up on the roof. A coon or something, I figured at first. So I drift back off. Pretty soon I heard the old lady get up. ‘Pete, he’s climbing again.’ Sure enough, we go outside, and there he was on the peak of that roof. Looking up the branches of a old long-needled pine like he’s got something treed in it. He looks down over the gutters at me with that old hat on his head and says, ‘You tell him to git down first.’” Daddy jerks his thumb up at the top of that invisible pine tree.
“Who’d he think was up there?” Cooter says.
“Ain’t no way to tell. Just somebody he thought up, I reckon. The old lady had gone in the house to get some honeycomb. She could coax him down with that pretty good. Most times. I got the ladder and started up. I just got high enough to make out the buttons on the back of his drawers and the sweat-stains around the band of that hat—they was a moon out—when Poppa started talking again.” Daddy stares up at the light fixture where the moths flicker around. His face twists into a mask of his daddy’s face. It’s Cherokee Irish and mean as a snake: “‘Haul your goddamn feathered ass off my land. Boy, go git my gun.’ And them’s the last words he spoke. He stomped on a rotted beam and fell straight through the roof. So skinny he didn’t even make a hole big enough for his head. Else he twisted going down. It caught him up under the jaws. And there he hung. Time I got up to him, he was gone. Just staring up the tree branches with his tongue all poked out. That silly-assed hat setting on his head.” Daddy taps a Camel on the tabletop for punctuation. Tap tap tap. Those taps are his way of saying The End.
“That’s sure a awful way to go,” Ben says.
“Ain’t no good way,” Shug says. “Sorry you had to be there, Pete. With you momma and all.” Shug knows better than to look at Daddy when he’s saying something this nice
. There are shrugs all around, like saying something nice is water you have to rise out of and let slip off your shoulders.
What’s rolling around in my head at this time is all the dying and near dying I’ve run into lately. I can picture Grandma the way I found her all slack-jawed in the bed, then Lecia glassy-eyed on the sand. For a minute, I even think about Mother propped up in her bed night and day next to a tower of books that only seems to get taller and more wobbly. Then it’s her face slack-jawed I see in place of Grandma’s, her arm hanging down that the ants are running on. I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I’m more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth. I am eye-level to the card table, sitting on an upended bait bucket, safe in my daddy’s shadow, and yet in my head I’m finding my mother stretched out dead.
Before I know it, out of my mouth comes a question I know is wrong even before I hear my own voice saying it. I ask Daddy what he thinks happens when you die.
This makes Shug shoot me a look. Ben gets sensitive about being Baptist. Daddy tends to tease about it. He even made up a little song that he sings in a whiny voice like he’s playing the violin all squeaky: Jesus, lover of my soul. / Pass me down the sugar bowl.…When Daddy sings this, it pisses Ben off, but then Ben feels it isn’t Baptist to get pissed off at somebody so clearly heathen. Instead, he’ll suddenly remember he’s got a haircut appointment, or needs to quick pick up a carton of milk. That remembering marks the end of the Liars’ Club for the day. So we don’t want to get Daddy going on heaven. That’s why Shug is looking at me all long-faced.
Maybe that’s why Ben finally flips the switch on the monkey’s back, to change the subject. That monkey starts banging the cymbals, twitching his head side to side like he’s saying No, No, No, No. Or like he wants to be sure we’re all watching.
Which we are, except for Daddy. Daddy’s flipped the top off his Zippo lighter, and he’s lipping his Camel and studying that blue flame. “I know what happens when you die,” he finally says when the cigarette’s lit. “Done seen what happens. You lay down in a box, and they throw some dirt on you.” That said, he reaches a muscled arm across the table and slaps that monkey on the head, so the animal bares its metal teeth and hisses at him. And Daddy bares his dentures and hisses back, blowing a long highway of smoke in the process. That’s where the memory freezes, that instant with Daddy and that monkey gazing down either side of that smoky road at each other like it’s somewhere they both have to get to.
Daddy never fessed up to the lie that I know. It stayed built between him and the other men like a fence he’d put up to keep them from knowing him better.
That winter Mother wouldn’t have let a word about Grandma’s dying ever pass her lips. She wouldn’t get out of bed, seemingly hypnotized with whatever book she propped on her middle reading.
Sometime after New Year’s, two bad things jump-started my parents into an evil stretch—drinking and fighting. Mother blames Daddy for this, and I suspect if Daddy had ever talked about such things, he could have argued that it all started with Mother. It’s one of those chicken-and-egg problems. Daddy might have said Mother’s drinking and mulligrubbing drove him out of the house. Mother said that Daddy just bailed out during Grandma’s cancer and after the funeral, which absence set her to drinking. I don’t know who or what to blame.
Nor can I figure what exactly led to Mother’s near-fatal attack of Nervous. Maybe drinking caused Mother to go crazy, or maybe the craziness was just sort of standing in line to happen and the drinking actually staved it off a while. All I know is that first Mother was drinking, then she and Daddy were fighting worse than ever, and finally they were hauling her away in leather four-point restraints.
Drinking was not a totally new hobby in our house. Daddy always drank, and with few ill effects that I can see. By always, I mean he drank every day. He kept a six-pack in the fridge. Plus there was a fifth of whiskey ratholed under the seat of his truck. You knew he was heading for a drink when he made the mysterious pronouncement that he was going out to check on his truck, the idea being—or so I thought for years—that it might be scared out in the garage by itself or lonely for him. That was just maintenance drinking, as I see it now, as opposed to drinking so’s you’d notice. He could also sip at shots of Jack Daniel’s pretty steady when he was shooting pool or throwing dice or playing cards, which activities he pursued whenever we needed school shoes or such. But drinking didn’t change him much back then. Every now and then he’d come home lurching around like a train conductor, and I remember a few times dancing around the kitchen in my nightgown with my bare feet on his steel-toed boots, both of us sliding around in the yummy cloud of whiskey he was breathing. That was it, really. He never missed a day of work in forty-two years at the plant; never cried—on the morning after—that he felt some ax wedged in his forehead; never drew his belt from his pant loops to strap on us or got weepy over cowboy songs the way some guys down at the Legion did.
Mother was another story. She had set down the drink when Grandma came home to die, out of necessity, I guess. Then she picked it up the night she got back from the funeral while we were all rubbing on her. She’d said could I fetch her some Gallo wine and 7-UP from under the china cabinet (a combination she likened to sparkling burgundy), and I said sure. Then I walked as slowly and miserably as any mule through any cotton row in order to assemble that drink.
The wineglass had a dusty yellow scum on it. That’s how long it had stood empty. I made a big show of scrubbing it off with a Brillo pad, then polishing the glass dry with a dish towel. If I thought anything at all, it was probably This won’t hold much wine, not sparkled with 7-UP. Mother had always been a binge drunk, not touching a thimbleful for weeks or months when she’d gotten her gullet full. But once she took that first drink, she was off.
That night she got home, she kept it down to that eensy glass of wine, after which she tumbled naked into her oversized bed and slept for twelve hours.
But at some point after New Year’s that wine made her hanker for alcohol of the high-test variety. Then, she dialed up the liquor store to order her vodka by the case, and she reached down the biggest jelly glass she could find in the cupboard. There was no need for ice or a measuring shot glass or even vermouth or those weird baby onions people who play at Gibsons make such a fuss about. The vodka was sloshed out in five-fingered units. Oddly enough, she hated the taste so much that she literally had to hold her nose to swallow the first one, like a kid taking medicine. But after that one, she downed them the way people in hell must down ice water.
The big game for me once she’d started drinking was to gauge which way her mood was running that I might steer her away from the related type of trouble. Hiding her car keys would keep her off the roads and, ergo, out of a wreck, for instance. Or I’d tie up the phone by having a running chat with the busy signal (seven-year-olds don’t yet have any phone life to speak of), so she couldn’t dial up any teachers or neighbors she was liable to bad-mouth. If I could thwart her first urges to call So-and-So or head down the highway to Yonder-a-place, eventually she’d get onto something else or just give up and pass out.
Lecia didn’t have the stomach for watching her that close, I think. She put herself in charge of counting Mother’s drinks. She kept a long-running tally of both the number of drinks poured and the approximate number of ounces consumed, which was no small feat if Daddy happened to be drinking too. And she did all the ciphering in her head, minus pen and paper, itself impressive. Having exact numbers always reassured Lecia no end. (When she got older and studied calculus, she even worked out a formula that factored into account the percentage of alcohol in various liquors—wine’s only about fourteen percent alcohol, for example—as well as how much time had elapsed from the first drink, whether Mother had eaten, and how much she weighed. She’d then compare the outcome to that from another drinking bout in a way that sound
ed like this: “At Thanksgiving she was doing at least four ounces of eighty-six-proof alcohol per hour for four hours, and she weighed ten pounds less but was nowhere near this wild. Of course she’d eaten a lot.…”) The numbers seemed beside the point to me. You just never knew what would happen once Mother uncorked that bottle. The difference between two drinks and ten might not even show. So while my technical-minded sister counted, I myself zeroed in on the lines of Mother’s face and the timbre of her voice in hopes of divining the degree of Nervous she might get to.
One big tip-off to her mood came from what record she plopped on the turntable. If she was feeling high-minded, for example, she’d play opera.
Opera was a good sign, because she never really cruised for a plate-smashing fight with Daddy while listening to Aïda or Carmen. It made her remember New York, though, which had been the holy land of her youth and from which she felt exiled. (When I read about Napoleon defeated and shipped off to that squatty volcanic island, how he lay pouting for days in his bath about his lost empire, it put me in mind of Mother in Leechfield conjuring New York.) No sooner did the needle scratch down on an overture than she was back there. Going back usually brought her some relief. Her eyes would fog over, and her voice would go smoky. Then she took on that Yankee accent.
For some reason, I remember a particular night with La Traviata playing. The turntable was balanced in the window over the sink. Mother had on an old black turtleneck with little flecks of cadmium-yellow oil paint on the sleeves. She sat at the plywood bar in the kitchen, where Lecia and I were just finishing up crockery bowls of vanilla mellorine—a low-rent form of ice cream. Mother had tried to doctor the rubbery taste off the stuff with a chocolate topping she made from Baker’s chocolate and butter and real vanilla.