“What does your ‘group’ think?”
“It’s a support group. We’re not allowed to make suggestions. That’s a rule.”
“Ah.” Hayes took a long breath and blew on his glasses. “Shall I be honest?”
“As the day is long.” Clay sucked noisily on his class ring, as if it were a pacifier.
“Jimmy, the day is long. In fact, the day is just about done. You have been asking me for a quarter of a century whether you should marry Tildy. Apparently, you have never gotten around to asking her.”
“The thing is—”
“You could have grown children and your own home by now. Instead, what have you got?” Hayes unfolded his fingers one by one, a mannerism of his Aunt Victoria’s that he’d always admired. “You’ve got a dinky little apartment with no bathtub, and your old model train on the dining-room table. You’ve got a dozen different-colored bowling balls. A bunch of X-rated video tapes you try to force people to come over and watch with you. And a tank of stupid fish you’re always having to flush down the goddamn toilet. And that’s it. That’s what you’ve got. Well, you asked me to be honest.”
Jimmy Clay, his eyes wide open, had sucked his entire ring finger into his mouth.
“Meanwhile.” Hayes looped his glasses around his ears, which were fiery hot. “Tildy Harmon is your cousin. Meanwhile, she’s already been divorced, three times, and I say this in all sincerity, Jimmy, everybody in the county but you knows why she got divorced. Meanwhile, Tildy had already slept with at least two guys I could personally name back in high school when you started all this ‘Should I marry her?’ in the first place!”
With a baleful stare, Jimmy Clay put his hands on the back of his hips, then on the sides. He stepped back and then rushed forward and slammed his cousin in the stomach with his head.
“Ooofff…” said Raleigh as he landed in the muddy grass, with one sleeve in the water. He caught his breath, shook his arm, listened to his watch, and yelled after the tall green figure stomping off. “In other words, no! In case I didn’t make it clear, Jimmy, no, I don’t think you should marry Tildy! How’s that! That’s my advice!”
“Who asked you?” yelled Clay. The white Cadillac shot backward out of the crowded driveway.
Alone, Raleigh began prying large rocks out of the mudbank and heaving them into the pond. Their loud splashing thunk was as satisfying as if each rock had been a Hayes. During a boyhood visit, he had idly loosened one of these rocks with his bare toes, to find himself stared at by a large yellow-eyed snake that lay coiled beneath in a circle tight as malice. Nothing had ever before looked at him with so contemptuous an indifference, and from then on he was ready to believe that snakes had once been God’s rivals in heaven. Clearly, they had, in Flonnie Rogers’s phrase, the Power. Clearly, they’d held a grudge. God might have changed their shapes, but not their eyes. God’s eyes probably looked just the same, only worse. After all, God had won. Had won—thought Hayes now—and had sat back and kept those eyes of His on His old enemies while they were having a great time torturing fools like Jimmy Clay.
“Okay,” said Raleigh as he stood to brush mud off the seat of his pants. “One step at a time.” Now to find his aunt Lovie a birthday present so he could ask her a few questions. The gift was necessary. Among Hayeses, present-giving was both incessant and evanescent; mounds of gifts were exchanged on every known ceremonial occasion, and it had long been clear to Raleigh that the contents mattered less than the ritual of (sloppily) wrapping and (rapidly) unwrapping as many little surprise packages as possible. His daughters, genetically infected, were always disappointed when on their birthday he presented each of them with “one really nice thing.” In the continual family potlatch, merchandise rotated, season to season, Hayes to Hayes, without memory, as handy objects lying about junkjammed houses were offered up, with bright paper slapped round them, as “little surprises.” For Valentine’s Day, Reba was likely to give Lovie the same brass figurine of an elf under a toadstool that Little Em had given Reba for passing her realtor’s exam. There was no true Hayes who would not rather open a surprise grabbag of junk than dollar bills wrapped in wax paper. (This was how Big Em’s son— disguised as the pepper shaker on Let’s Make a Deal, had ended up with the three goats behind the curtain instead of the $3,000 he’d had in his hand.)
Raleigh plowed through Vera Sheffield’s old clothes in the backseat of the Pinto. He found a fur stole made up of three foxes, each with its tail in the next one’s mouth. He found a huge black acetate scarf with orange poppies all over it. He rolled the fur stole up inside the scarf and tied the ends together into a bow. Then he went back inside the house and tried to call Aura; no one was home. No one was home at the Sheffields’ either. Aura and Vera were probably in jail by now. Peeking down from the door of the Wreck Room, Raleigh saw his relatives singing “I’m Alabama Bound,” accompanied by the player piano, while Mingo Sheffield spun jiggling to a jitterbug with Tildy Harmon, who should have been wearing a brassiere. Both dancers gasped for air.
“Up here, Raleigh!” His aunt Victoria was at the end of the hall with Reba, conversing with Lovie through the open door of a small bathroom. “Your arm’s wet…Lovie’s in there.”
He said, “Excuse me.”
“Honey, stay.” Lovie coughed. “I’m just smoking. I’ve got to do it in here where it goes up the ventilator fan. Then I spray with Lysol.”
“Ah,” Raleigh murmured, wondering if perhaps Aura did the same.
From her wheelchair, Reba tugged up at his sleeve. “Senior would die if he knew Lovie’d kept on smoking after the doctors told her she better quit because of her heart.”
“Her heart?”
Victoria pursed, then stretched her lips with a click. “Yes, Raleigh. I thought it was cancer too, but turns out it was both.”
“Called it coronary thrombosis. Just like Hackney,” Reba explained.
Lovie nodded. “I had my attack selling chrysanthemums at the State–Wake Forest game for the Elks.”
Raleigh whispered, “A bad one?” and Lovie’s laugh shook her earrings of dangling purple beads. “Well, darling, what’s a good one?” Her hand reached out the door and twisted his shirt-front into a tight ball. Her fingers were crowded with inexpensive rings and her broken nails were painted the color of her earrings. “This one,” she whispered dramatically, “was kind of like an elephant squatting on your chest and wiggling around.”
Victoria pushed her arm past Raleigh, jerked the lipstick-glossy Pall Mall out of her sister’s mouth, and threw it in the toilet. “Mind if I ask you why you don’t quit smoking before you have another attack! And please go locate that Bible so Raleigh can take it to Earley before that idiot drops dead, too.” Giving Raleigh’s convenient arm a sharp twist of exasperation, Victoria spun the wheelchair around, banging it against the walls. “Come on, Reba, I want those chickens on the grill. I don’t intend eating supper at midnight again.”
Reba leaned her head back to smile upside down at her sister. “Don’t you love it when we have a big crowd like this?”
As Victoria marched away, she snorted. “Reba, you don’t know what a big crowd is unless you’ve sailed steerage from Rangoon to Singapore with a rooster on your head and a leper lying across your legs.”
Lovie finally found the Hayes family Bible in a dresser drawer under her old tap shoes, her wedding-night lingerie, and an envelope containing all her sons’ first teeth and first-cut hair. She confessed she had no idea whose were whose.
“Here’s a little surprise,” explained Raleigh when he reached out his hand for the Bible and saw he was still holding the poppywrapped foxes. “From us, and, ah, the Sheffields.”
“Why, that Mingo is the sweetest thing! I’ll put this on the pile. Did you see my new poker table Jimmy gave me? Let’s play some Mexican Sweat tonight, deuces wild. I feel lucky today.”
“Well, actually, Aunt Lovie, I need to press on, I’ve got to—”
“Honey, I know. Vicky Anna said
you’re going to take BuddyGates to patch things up with Earley. That’s just wonderful.”
Raleigh sat down on her bed, shoving aside the feet of an old Shirley Temple doll already reclining there. “Yeah. I’m supposed to find somebody called Jubal Rogers, too.”
Lovie dropped her unlit cigarette. “Does Vicky know?”
“Who is this guy? Do y’all know him? Is he Flonnie Rogers’s kin?”
Nodding, Lovie sat down on the bed beside him. “You know, I bet Earley’s right!” She patted Raleigh’s knee. “Go get him. But I wonder if he’s dead.”
“Daddy?!”
“Jubal. Wonder if Flonnie knows.”
“Maybe she’s dead.”
Lovie laughed. “Good gracious no. She’s too mean to die.” Now his aunt shook her head sadly; like her son Jimmy’s, her face could slide from glee to grief and back in seconds. “No, Flonnie’s gone to one of those nursing homes, spite of all of us begging her to move in. This place is just for black people. It’s about halfway between Goldsboro and Mount Olive and they don’t even have but one TV set in the whole place and it’s not on cable.”
While Lovie located an addressed package of little surprises she’d been meaning to mail to Flonnie, Raleigh turned the stiff mottled pages of his family’s Bible. The corners of the leather covers had crumbled away and the smell of age rose from the paper. A pressed rose, thin and brittle, fell apart as it dropped from a page of the Gospels, a page in which Christ was supposedly waltzing on the waters while His petrified disciples turned green back in their seasick boat. Raleigh flipped to the Old Testament, vaguely looking for the Book of Job. He couldn’t find it. Maybe one of the Hayeses had removed the whole chapter as out-of-keeping with their preposterous sanguinity.
“You will meet, but you will miss me!” Lovie had returned and was singing. “There will be an empty chair. I remember how Papa sang that song the night he died, trying to get everybody to laugh, but nobody would. And then he told Earley to go get that very Bible, and ‘Read me on out, son. Read me the good parts of the Song of Songs.’ ” Lovie’s imitation of Raleigh’s grandfather’s stroke-garbled speech was eerily accurate. “And Earley read on all through the night till Papa was gone.” She began crying, then slapped her ringed fingers against her purple pants, and laughed. “Earley said later on, he’d peed right there in his pants ’cause he didn’t have the heart to take a break.” To Raleigh’s embarrassment, Lovie now reached inside her blouse and pulled out what had appeared to be her right breast, but was in fact a large round wad of Kleenex. She unwound a few tissues, and returned the others. “It evens me out,” she explained, and blotted her tears. Then she announced she’d come to a decision. “I wasn’t going to tell you where Buddy was, ’cause I promised him I wouldn’t tell a soul.” (“Buddy” had been the nickname the Clays had given Gates, when Earley and the small boy had moved in with Lovie for the first year after Roxanne left them.)
“You know where he is?”
“He’s my boy, Raleigh, and I’m going to stay in touch, even if nobody else will, and even if Senior swears he’ll file for divorce if I send that poor child, my own nephew and my own godson, another red cent, but I say if we can’t help out those we love, we might as well all fly to the moon and stack rocks for a living.”
Raleigh did not care to pursue images of isolation, or even to argue with her description of his thirty-year-old brother, a compulsive gambler, unsuccessful con artist, relentless liar, and probable parole violator, as a “poor child.” Instead, he told her, “Gates’s mother may be dying. I’m going to take him to see her.”
Lovie squeezed his hand. “That’s just like you, honey. After what Roxanne did to Buddy, I don’t know if I could get my lips to say a decent word to her face. But you’re just forgiving and forgetting. It’s a lesson to us all.…Raleigh, Buddy’s hiding out in your rental cottage at Kure Beach.”
Indignation carried Hayes to the other side of the room. “Why wasn’t I told? Who told him he could break into ‘Peace and Quiet’?!” Raleigh himself had painted the name “Peace and Quiet” above the porch gable of his first beachfront property, a little wood house on the Cape Fear side of a spur poking into the Atlantic. It sat there in wonderful seclusion, unbothered by neighbors, undisturbed by even a phone. Every August he went there to spend his own vacation repairing ravages inflicted by his renters. The doors were bolted shut now! “I don’t believe this! Why didn’t Sea-Breeze Realty stop him? Who told you this?”
“Raleigh, now don’t take on.” His aunt spun him around as he rushed past her, thumping the Bible like an evangelist in a frenzy. “Aura had a feeling this would rub you the wrong way.”
Raleigh slowly pulled back. “Aura? Aura Godwin Hayes, to whom I am married?”
“Well, honey, she said the realtor didn’t have a thing lined up for that cottage till the first of May, and here was poor little Buddy-Gates with no place to turn and needing to be on the ocean for a few weeks anyhow. Besides, I couldn’t keep hiding him out at the Elks Club because they only turn the heat on on Wednesdays and weekends, so this looked like a god-send, and Aura agreed. So there he is, and you have this wonderful idea about helping Buddy go make up with Roxanne and Earley, and now you don’t even have to look for him! Now, let me see a big smile. Come on, can’t you do any better than that?”
Raleigh, in fact, was not even attempting to smile. He was biting the inside skin of his mouth and swallowing the blood with a terrible pleasure. He sat down too quickly in an armchair piled with laundry and, by the feel of it, a sharp rake (it was, in fact, a set of electric curlers). “Aunt Lovie,” he began softly, “forgive my inquisitiveness if I attempt to clarify certain factors here? Do you mind? One, why does Gates ‘need’ to be at the ocean?”
“He needed to run an errand.”
“Two, why does he ‘need’ to be anywhere except in prison, to which I presume he’s now been sent again, and escaped.”
“He did not. He’s paroled.” Lovie had taken a string of red and white popbeads from her jewelry box; when she opened the lid, a ballerina began twirling to the tune “Fascination.” “It was all a misunderstanding anyhow.”
Hayes snorted. “Taking a great deal of money from foolish women to trace their genealogies so they can get in the Daughters of the Confederacy and then making up the charts? Selling them forged letters from Robert E. Lee? That’s a misunderstanding?”
“Well, I sure don’t think they ought to put you in jail for it! Not after you served your country in the military!”
“Lovie, if he finished his parole, why were you hiding him at the Elks Club?”
Lovie had now found some old Christmas wrapping paper which she was twisting around the popbeads. “I don’t know, but he said it didn’t have a thing to do with the police.”
“I bet.”
“He said he had to deliver something important to a friend at the beach, and a bunch of gangsters were trying to stop him for no good reason.” She lowered her voice dramatically. “Because he knew too much. He was on a train with a gangster who talked in his sleep.”
“Lovie, that is, well, I’m sorry and forgive my language, but that is typical Gates bullshit. You don’t believe that.”
She tied a bow around her little package. “If you won’t believe your own brother, honey, you might as well go live in a cave in the middle of the ocean.”
“Sounds great,” said Hayes, as he stood up. “Could I use your phone again, Aunt Lovie?”
But, of course, Aura was still not home, and besides, why should he ever go see her, whoever she was, again. It occurred to Hayes that maybe he wouldn’t go back home now; maybe he would go straight to the beach and throw his brother out of “Peace and Quiet”; maybe he would go straight to find his father so he could throw Gates in his face; maybe…But he certainly wasn’t going to do any of this accompanied by Mingo Sheffield; not that, after those first terrifying minutes, he really thought Mingo would shoot him, or even (probably) shoot himself; on the other
hand, he did think Mingo capable of serious irrationality, so maybe he would start shooting. Raleigh’s inability to understand unreason made him feel very vulnerable; he was incapable of predicting the path of the erratic, and what he couldn’t predict, he couldn’t cope with. He had to get away from Sheffield, who nevertheless had the keys to the Pinto in his jacket pocket.
Hayes wandered brooding through the house, past the dining room where the same bowl of faded wax fruit sat on the table, where the baby shoes of all Lovie’s sons still hung in dusty bronze on the wall. He wandered down the steps to the Wreck Room, past gilt-framed photographs: Lovie, with baton, high-hatted, raising a bare leg in white-tasseled boot. Lovie holding the year-old Jimmy in one arm and his new baby brother Junior in the other, while Senior, her dazed teenaged husband, stared down at his two-toned shoes. Lovie and Reba, handsome and festive, Red Cross volunteers, thrusting up magazines at soldiers, who leaned out, grinning, glad to see girls, three to a window in a transport train. Lovie and the five-year-old Gates, both in hobo costumes, holding hands, set to go out trick-or-treating. Jimmy, all arms and legs and ears, leaping—twenty years ago—with a Wake Forest basketball in one splayed palm.
Jimmy! An idea came to Raleigh, as he caught a glimpse of Mingo now slow-dancing with Tildy Harmon, dips, spins, and all, while everyone else in the Wreck Room was singing “That Old Black Magic” around the piano, or throwing cards and chips all over the new poker table that still had an enormous red plastic bow tied around a leg. Mingo was dancing in his sweat-soaked shirtsleeves, and his madras jacket (with the key in its pocket) was thrown over the couch. Perhaps on top of Uncle Bassie, who wasn’t visible.
Quickly, Raleigh ran back up to the kitchen. “Jimmy back?”
His aunts Vicky, Reba, and Lovie said no. They were rolling and patting high stacks of hamburger patties. Reba (now wearing as a little surprise Lovie’s red-and-white popbeads) was crying. So was Lovie. He assumed it was onions.
“Well, Vicky,” Lovie sniffed. “I guess you want me to go trotting up and down the sidewalk, eating germs. That’s what yogurt is, you know, germs. But if I can’t go on with what I call living, I’ll just drive on over to the cemetery and lie down with Mama and Papa and Serene and—”
Handling Sin Page 18