The School of Beauty and Charm

by Melanie Sumner

  Being tone-deaf, I had no idea if Henry was hitting the right notes, but I knew it was music. It was Henry’s one song, and he sang it beautifully. Squinting up into the black squares of the grate, I arched my back against the stiff, scratchy love seat, careful not to touch Roderick, who was cranky when his asthma kicked in and liable to strike. As Henry sang, I felt the familiar vibration of his voice, one wave lapping gently over the next, following the deep, strong current of his heart. Eventually, still standing in the window, Drew fell asleep and Henry carried her downstairs to bed. She never accepted an invitation to Red Cavern again.

  “HENRY,” FLORIDA SAID as we passed an Exxon. “What was wrong with that one?”

  “Too high,” he mumbled.

  “How much was it?”

  “Eighty-eight cents,” said Roderick. “I hope everybody is looking forward to a nice long hike up the Appalachian Trail.”

  “For law’s sake,” Florida sighed. “We can afford that. You’re looking for eighty-seven cents, aren’t you? Yes, you are. You do this every time. It just burns me up.”

  Abashed, Henry said, “I saw eighty-five cents a gallon just a while back.”

  “Why didn’t you stop then?”

  “We didn’t need any gas at that time.”

  Florida blew her top. “Git out of my way!” she hollered at Puff as she reached over him to pull her knitting bag from the floor. Puff sat up, digging his painted nails into her legs as he tried to catch her eye with a woebegone stare. The ribbon in his topknot had worked its way to the end of a curl and hung fetchingly over one big brown eye. “Dad blast it!” she yelled, waving a fist of long, sharp knitting needles, and then with her free hand, she lifted the poodle into the air and sailed him into the back seat, where he landed on top of Roderick with a yelp.

  “Mom!” Roderick screamed, “You’re crazy!” Tears filled his eyes as he clutched Puff to his chest. With daring ferocity, he hissed, “Don’t you ever touch my dog again.”

  Wedged into the middle of the front seat, I felt the muscles twitch in Henry’s arm, but he didn’t swing his hand into the back seat. Instead, he looked at Roderick through the rearview mirror. It was a look I knew well. When Henry had that look— it was a long blue stare—I felt the shock of seeing him as someone other than a father. At these times he would have looked perfectly natural holding a machine gun, with bodies littering the ground around him. No other human had ever looked at me that way, but once a German shepherd had given me that same cold, still eye, right before he bit me. Roderick whispered a sweet nothing into Puff’s ear, and then shut up.

  Henry’s arm relaxed as he drew deeply on his cigar. On my other side, in Florida’s lap, two metallic pistachio knitting needles, each as long as my arm, shot in and out of a tangle of red yarn until something resembling a sleeve began to emerge. We had started the long, lonesome climb up Lookout Mountain with the needle veering off of e. Florida pursed her lips and said, “Knit, pearl. Knit, pearl.”

  There was only one gas station on Lookout Mountain, a Mom and Pop grocery that charged an arm and a leg, and Henry, with a defeated half-smile, pulled right up to the tank, but the store was closed, it being Sunday.

  Florida’s needles went click, click. In the back seat, Roderick held his palm to his mouth and swished the small green inhaler, once, twice, and then a third time. His wheeze sounded like a light snore. Gently, almost tenderly, the Galaxie 500 crested the mountain, and at the top, right before a gravel track posted with the sign runaway trucks, Henry shifted into low gear and stepped off the gas. Although Henry did not actually speed, he went easy on the brake pads, gathering speed after each hairpin curve, flying down the straightaways. FALLING ROCK signs and waterfalls flew past our heads. A deer jumped for his life.

  Florida prayed, “Oh Lord help us,” and I began to compose my obituary.

  MY DEATH WAS for my English teacher, Mr. Samuel Rutherford III. I loved him. In my school locker, away from Roderick’s prying fingers, I kept a notebook of love letters addressed to My Darling Mr. Rutherford (I couldn’t bring myself to call him Samuel). How painful it was, each week when I scribbled out the five-hundred-word essay he required, to erase the concluding sentence, “I love you, Mr. Rutherford.”

  He did not look like an English teacher. He drove an orange VW bug that seemed comically too small for him, like Charlie Chaplin’s hat. When he wasn’t teaching, he coached football, and he often came to class in a pair of long tight gym shorts and a jersey, clacking his cleats across the concrete floor. He was short and wide, barrel-chested, with thick hairy arms and legs, and a lion’s mane of yellow hair. A scar ran down one side of his face, inciting rumors. He had a booming coach’s voice, and when he was angry, he threw chalk so hard against the wall that it shattered into a puff of dust. Once, when Celeste Humphreys tried to hide in the broom closet, he locked the door and left her in there for forty-five minutes. I wished it had been me so that we could have looked at each other when he finally opened the door. When he was happy, he whistled.

  He had a fondness for the dingbat and the aardvark. “When the aardvark ate the dingbat’s new shoes,” he’d write on the board, a stub of chalk clenched in his fist, “she threw her Danish on the floor and called the fire department.” Then he diagramed the sentence, making it look like a rocket ship. He taught us compound sentences: nose-to-nose rocket ships, and compound-complex sentences, nose-to-nose rocket ships with shuttles riding on their wings. Nouns, verbs, and prepositional phrases became part of a twinkling galaxy filled with blue moons and shooting stars.

  It was Mr. Rutherford’s job to introduce us to literature. He did this simply. “Shakespeare,” he informed us, “is a great writer. You may have another opinion, but that opinion is wrong. Shakespeare is great.” To my embarrassment, he made us read Romeo and Juliet aloud. No one dared to snicker. Shakespeare was great.

  “Poetry,” he told us one day, “is not for sissies.” Then, sitting on the edge of his desk, clenching a stub of chalk in his fist, scowling, he recited, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” by Randall Jarell.

  Under his eyes, I began to blush. It was a violent, spastic thing, starting in my chest and rushing up to the tips of my ears. My eyes watered. If anyone spoke to me, if he spoke— Rhoda, he called me for some reason, lips curving over his strong white teeth—a strangled laugh-cry sputtered from my aching mouth, and I’d stop breathing for a few seconds. He enjoyed it. Passing me in the hallway, he’d turn suddenly on one foot and sing out “Rhoda!” just to watch me go through the whole gruesome business.

  He was not married, but I knew that the chances he’d ask a seventh-grader for a date were slim. In order to get his attention, without being obnoxious, I sat about thirteen inches from his desk and absorbed every word he uttered. Consequently, I learned English grammar, but being recognized as a good student fell far short of my mark. Then I switched strategies. I wrote papers with my left hand, so that they were illegible, and when called on in class, I gaped, mouth open, eyes wide, as if struck dumb by a sudden brain tumor.

  This worked. One day, after a particularly fine performance of amnesia, I was asked to stay after class. As the other students filed out the door, my heart fluttered and thumped like a bird with a broken wing. Already, the blush was beginning. Would he kiss me?

  “Well, Rhoda,” he said. He kicked his feet up on his desk, leaned back in his chair, and laced his thick fingers behind his head. He looked at me, hard. His eyes were blue. It was just us, in the chalky room, shades drawn, fluorescent lights buzzing. Slowly, the fire in my chest flickered up to my neck, and then my cheeks, spreading out to my ears. Love! How could I tell him? He had to know my scorching agony—it was him! He was in me, burning and burning. The way he stomped to the board with his stub of chalk, how he scratched his neck, the ball turret gunner, and the aardvark . . . “You’re slacking off,” he said. “Any reason?”

  I gazed back at him. This was the moment. I could say, “Mr. Rutherford, I lust for you.” My face wa
s on fire; my palms sweated; my loins ached. I opened my mouth. “Kiss me,” I wanted to say, and then he would stand up from his swivel chair, lift me onto the broad, battered old desk, and deflower me. He waited. My mouth closed, and then opened again.

  At last, my words came out. I said, “I dunno.”

  “I suggest you get off your butt and get back to work,” he said, and that was the end. His face closed. He was done with me. I was a child.

  As Henry swung us around the steep, precarious curves of Lookout Mountain, I envisioned Mr. Rutherford’s face as the news of my tragic death reached him. He’d be strong at school, tougher still at football practice, but when he went home to his little stone teacher’s cottage at the edge of the Bridgewater campus, he’d crumple. “Rhoda, Rhoda,” he’d moan into his wet pillow as his heavy chest shook with sobs. “Oh Rhoda, how I longed for your passionate surrender.” A suicide would be even better.

  At the bottom of the mountain, Henry pulled into a Sunoco. It was open. They were asking ninety-one cents a gallon. Henry pulled up to a tank and let the car idle for several minutes while he debated with himself. We watched him, waiting. He couldn’t do it.

  “Oh Lawdee!” cried Florida as we pulled back out on the highway. The gas needle was pressed against the far left corner of the gauge. “We’re through!”

  “That’s a racket,” Henry explained softly. “See, he knows that ole Bob up on the mountain is closed on Sunday—the two of them are in cahoots. Bob, you close on Sunday, and I’ll close on Monday, and we’ll wrap this thing up tight. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were first cousins.” The engine made a sound like a straw sucking up the last Coca-Cola from a bottle. “There’s another service station right up the road,” Henry said.

  When the Galaxie 500 finally hiccuped to a stop, Florida was the first one out. A string of yarn had gotten wound around her ankle, and it caught in the door, but she whipped the harness off and without looking once behind her, set off down the highway. It was an empty road, the same gray as the sky.

  At the wheel, Henry said, “Headstrong!” He rolled his window down and called out angrily, “Florida!” but she didn’t even turn her head. In her Jacqueline Kennedy sunglasses and stretch pants, with a red scarf knotted under her chin, she looked just like a divorcée.

  “You want me to go get her?” asked Roderick.

  “No!” shouted Henry. “You all stay put. This family is loose as a goose. She’s going to get killed out there.” Again, he called for her out the window, but she was now a silhouette in the distance. He tried to start the engine, but it wouldn’t turn over. His face turned purple. Blue veins stood out on his neck and hands. “Loose as a goose!” he repeated, and then stepped out of the car, locking the door behind him. He looked furiously at the disappearing figure of his wife and then issued a curt command to us through the open window. “If either one of you so much as lifts a finger, I will skin you alive,” he said.

  Two minutes later, an egg truck rattled by. It passed Henry in a cloud of dust but stopped for Florida. Henry picked up his pace, walking in quick, measured strides with a hard frown on his face, but by the time he reached the truck, Florida had already negotiated a gallon of gasoline with the driver. She waved gaily to Henry and signaled to the rest of the family with a sweep of her arm. We were saved.

  ONE MILE FROM the Deleuth farm, Florida leaned across me to apply her lipstick in the rearview mirror. Then she looked around the car to see if anyone’s hair needed combing. She told Roderick to tuck his shirt in. She opened her hand, palm up, to me, and said, “Spit out that gum.”

  We passed cow after cow after cow, chewing cud behind an endless string of barbed wire. The houses were ugly: tight little brick boxes set on empty lawns. Most of the trees had been cleared, and the few that were allowed to remain had been chopped off to the size of large shrubs and painted white. Florida explained that some people thought stubby white trees were pretty.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it’s not natural,” she said. “When you live in the country, you get sick of nature.”

  All around the small brick houses were vast fields. The tobacco plants, already taller than Daddy-Go, bloomed a defiant green. There were fields of hay, and Martian-green corn, and more stolid, staring cows. Occasionally a horse lifted its head, then flicked its tail and galloped away from the fence, but not fast, and not far. Grandmother and Daddy-Go had never gone further than the county fair in Louisville. When we showed them pictures of the ocean, they were unimpressed.

  Henry eased the Galaxie 500 around the last curve. The tires crunched along the rutted gravel lane, and suddenly we were all waving to Grandmother and Daddy-Go, who had been waiting in the yard for an hour, watching the road.

  As the engine died, Daddy-Go raised himself from the swing with his cane and hobbled forward; Grandmother beat him by five yards. She wore what she always wore: a homemade double-knit polyester dress covered with a cotton apron trimmed in rick-rack, coffee-colored nylon knee-highs, and the pair of Adidas running shoes we had given her last Christmas to cure her corns. Her thin gray hair was wound up in a bun. A pair of silver, cat-eyed glasses, studded with rhinestones, hung from a chain around her neck, and tears ran down the soft, wrinkled map of her face. Her first name was Cornelia, but Henry addressed her as Mrs. Deleuth, in the voice TV anchormen used when they said Mr. President.

  “We thought something had happened to y’all,” Grandmother said, holding out her arms as she sobbed and tried to smile. “Reckoned y’all weren’t coming a-tall.”

  “Hush, Mother” said Florida, embracing her as she watched Daddy-Go slowly make his way across the lawn. “We’re here. Look at your grandchildren. They came all this way to see you.”

  Brack, or Daddy-Go, as Roderick and I called him, was a big tall man in overalls and unlaced brogans. His Stetson was half his age and matched the burnt leather of his skin. White stubble roughened his cheeks; tobacco stained the creased corners of his mouth. Several years ago, his brown eyes had disappeared behind the silver clouds of cataracts, and this is how I knew him: a slow man bent under the weight of himself, moving at the imperceptible speed of the earth, and seeing everything with sightless, silver eyes. He was crying, too. They always cried when we came.

  “Hush that crying, Daddy,” said Florida when he grasped her arm with his free hand. “What are you sad about?”

  “Chou chou,” he said. That was his pet name for Florida. Grandmother called her Sister.

  She said, “Sister, look at them chirren. They’re big! Look at that girl.” But she was still crying, as if we’d all died.

  “She’ll be in eighth grade next fall, said Florida. “She loves her English teacher. You should see what she reads. Hard words! It’s over my head. And Roderick—”

  “That boy done run off,” said Brack, turning his head to spit a stream of tobacco onto the grass. Roderick was gone.

  “He’s stretching his legs,” said Florida, glancing around until she spotted his white hair flashing in the sunlight as he ascended the propane gas tank. The tank was a white cylinder, bigger than any animal on the farm; it looked like a UFO.

  “He’ll fall off there and break his neck,” said Grandmother.

  “Your nasturtiums are looking pretty,” said Florida. “I don’t know how you do it. I can’t get anything to come up.” She walked toward the house—it was over a hundred years old—a big, awkward thing with Georgian columns, covered in white siding and bordered with Grandmother’s perfect flower beds. Henry was shaking hands, first with Mrs. Deleuth, then with Mr. Deleuth. He wouldn’t let anyone help him with the luggage. I wandered around the yard, careful to stay away from the tank so Roderick wouldn’t think I was following him. He straddled the tank as if it were a white steed and didn’t look like a teenager at all.

  I knew yards. Our yard at Owl Aerie was a new yard, with tender young grass that flattened beneath my feet like shag carpet, and something called Japanese rock gardens. Ancient cactus plan
ts grew up around the edges of the new grass, and occasionally, a copperhead wound through the hollow eyes of the sculpted dragon in the rock garden; it was as if we were trespassing. Aside from the boring Georgia pines, which didn’t have decent climbing branches and glued your fingers together with sap, we had a frail dogwood that offered a precarious climb to the roof, and an old hickory tree that had been turned into a pretzel by tornado and lightning. The great advantage of the yard at Owl Aerie was the view. From up there, Counterpoint, Georgia, and the rest of the world, was reduced to a string of twinkling lights; it was very pretty. Red Cavern, on the other hand, was in a valley, and from Grandmother’s yard, the world rose up all around.

  Around the corner of the house I heard Florida exclaim, “Look at that garden, Mother! I declare!”

  “It ain’t much this year,” Grandmother Deleuth answered, as she did every year. She grew snap beans, lima beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, squash, red potatoes, and field peas—enough to can for the winter and feed all her relatives and friends. I didn’t care for vegetables, but I liked having them around.

  The best part of the Deleuth yard was the swing. It wasn’t fast, but it had a good, solid creak, and it hung from the branches of a two-hundred-year-old elm tree whose branches had never been cut. The metal slats of the swing were covered in thick, bumpy layers of paint, interesting to touch. Beneath the swing, the ground was worn by Daddy-Go’s brogans, ground into grooves of silken dust that the toes of my sneakers brushed as I swung back and forth.

  There were grand things in this yard—a dinner bell, a crooked little gate that led to the rattling chicken coop, the cool, dark springhouse, the tin woodshed, and beyond that, the barn—but what I liked best was the dirt. Patches of it were covered in stringy, stubborn bluegrass; here and there you could uncover the stone of a walkway, and of course, blocked off by rabbit fencing were the rectangles Grandmother had claimed for herself and which turned fecund beneath her gnarled, crabbed fingers and from her fierce will sprouted seeds that shot up into green stalks bending with the weight of their fruit, but the dirt was the main thing. It was old dirt. It had a smell. I liked to lie on my belly on the stiff bluegrass, which was usually yellow, not blue, and press my nose into the dust as soft as sifted flour, feeling good all over. I thought, This is what God smells like.