That there was a world that was not merely an elongation of his own limbs, that there were people in it who were not merely extensions of his own will, he had accepted, in frustration, before the age of two. He had learned by then that he did not make himself bounce merrily in air, nor was the woman’s voice saying, “This is the way the ladies ride. Trot trot trot,” his own. The fingers that made the church and steeple, made the white bear jump out of no place into view, tucked the shiny blanket around his shoulders, were not his own fingers, nor was the man’s voice his that said, “Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, Little Fellow.”
But if this knowledge gradually shrank him, so that he no longer painted pictures in which he towered not only over his stick-legged parents, but over the square house and the round spoked yellow sun; still, to the boy, the world beyond his ken stayed shadowy, and he as indifferent to it as it was to him. Outside Thermopylae there was nothing mapped on the globe but Cowstream to the east, the state capital to the west, the beach, beyond the beach a vague ocean, and, indistinctly, a shape called North Carolina surrounded by an incalculable shape called America, surrounded by, in the first years of his life, that “Overseas” where “We” were trying to win against “Them” before they took over the world and killed everyone in it.
Thermopylae itself consisted of the Crossways and the length of Main Street from his parents’ home beside St. Thomas Church to his grandparents’ big white house beside a Baptist Church; with a few other buildings placed here and there around the town like Monopoly pieces. Thermopylae existed for him to live in, as food was there on tables for him to eat it, and clothes were there in his dresser drawers for him to wear them. St. Thomas Church existed from nine until noon on Sundays when he was inside it; otherwise it vanished, as the school and the teachers vanished in summer. The sidewalks of Thermopylae were there for him to walk on to school, for him to ride his bike or pull his wagon with empty Coke bottles to the store, for the postman to deliver mail to his house. Girls on the sidewalk, their dresses tied with straggly bows in back, their white socks fallen around their thin ankles, were there to chant silly rhymes as they hopped into swinging ropes, “I love coffee, I love tea, how many boys are stuck on me? One, two, three…I asked my mother for fifty cents to see the elephant jump the fence…forty-five, forty-six, fortyseven…” Girls were there so that they could giggle as he walked off the curb to move around them, so that he could ignore their giggles and sock his cousin Jimmy Clay for stopping to chant back, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Raleigh with a baby carriage, haw haw haw, do you like jelly?, punch in the belly,” and sock Raleigh back.
As with everyone else, age did not entirely enlarge the young Raleigh’s point of view. He realized there were a great many other people, up to their vague other business, but he assumed that the world around him was, simultaneously, unremittingly engrossed in Raleigh Hayes, while remaining utterly incapable of penetrating his secrets or understanding his unique personality. He believed both that his teachers noticed no other pupils but him, and that they never saw him down the row of yellow desks, reading “Joe Palooka” comics behind his math book, or nodding off to sleep in warm study periods, or staring heartsick at one of those girls whose rope-jumping usurpation of the sidewalk had once so annoyed him. Believed both that the whole fourth grade stared at him in the halls, and that none of them knew that his parents had divorced. Believed both that his mother had no life distinct from his, and that she had no inkling that he ever hid the evidence of his wet dreams at the bottom of the laundry hamper. Believed both that the entire town of Thermopylae was talking about the fact that he had bought a package of Trojan condoms at the drugstore, and that not a single person suspected what he might want to do with them. Like everyone else, Raleigh Hayes did not realize that most other people heard more and cared less than he imagined, just as he cared less about their secrets than they believed.
In his preoccupation with himself, Raleigh was certainly not unusual. Our hero was, however (particularly for a citizen of a small southern Piedmont town, out of which, or into which—as his aunt Victoria said—almost nobody had budged for two hundred years), rarer in the thoroughness of his indifference to what did not concern him, and even to what did. As the edges of his world moved back and the shadowy figures in it took on color and form, it was his habit to map and neatly label the typography, then explore no further. This disinterest he came to perceive as a virtue: he never gossiped, and would not willingly listen to the gossip of others. Nothing was more distasteful to him, whether at eight, at eighteen, or now, than to be cornered by Ned Ware and sadly told that Stevie Richardson, whose mother drank, had been kept back in third grade, that Bobby Perry hadn’t made the team, that Mandy Dilleton had gotten knocked up and Roy Barnwell refused to marry her, wasn’t it awful? Neither was Hayes interested, at any age, in Mingo Sheffield’s benign babbling about the lives of schoolmates, sisters, teachers, neighbors, puppies, customers, movie stars, movie characters, and strangers in the newspapers. All his life, Raleigh was scrupulously disinterested. He did not ask his parents to explain their divorce. He did not ask his clients for more particulars than were absolutely necessary to warrant their policies and insure his own politeness. As long as his daughters did not violate the Rules (did not endanger their safety and their health, let their grades slip, consort with undesirables, drive without permission, get home after curfew, borrow or lend money, smoke, drink, have intercourse, or fail to keep their rooms clean), he did not require them to detail their days.
All his life, Raleigh congratulated himself that it was not in his character to open mail not addressed to him, to open doors without knocking, to pry when it was none of his business. When his Hayes relatives began chortling together through long evenings of garbled gossip about each other or anecdotes about whatever they had managed to remember or make up about the Family Past (“Tell the one about when Papa went up with the barnstormer and the wing fell off. Tell the one about Aunt Mab and that jibber-jabber bigamist from Chicago”), Raleigh picked up an erector set or a stereo kit or a book. He, frankly, wasn’t interested.
And, therefore, his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, even to a degree his parents (all the adults that had peopled the child’s world), stayed, in some sense, the flat distant figures (however fleshy and noisy) they had seemed to that child: a composite picture of a few poses, a few phrases, a few stories, without precedence or consequence, or connections. His great-grandmother Tiny Hackney, by her own boast just knee-high to a grasshopper, was always to Raleigh the floppy doll sunk in white goosedown pillows in a white brass bed, set up, for reasons no one explained, in the corner of the immense dining room. A thin ancient doll always brushing her long troublesome white hair, always begging for peppermints or for her old tonic (a bottled stimulant called Elixir Vitae, long since taken off the market, as it contained laudanum, kola nuts, Indian hemp, and a dash of belladonna); always shouting her own reminiscences (most of them scurrilous and presumably fabricated) into the midst of the general conversation; always calling, “What? What?” when laughter danced around the dining-room table.
Raleigh’s grandfather Clayton Hayes was always a bald, longarmed man with sky-blue eyes, with distorted speech and a strange uncontrollable laugh. A legless man in a wheelchair listening to Jack Benny on the radio and slapping his armrests with startling glee. A man who, despite the advantages of inherited property and education, had had so little get up and go that he’d never asked people to repay their loans, and had allowed his business to be stolen from him by PeeWee Jimson. He was always the man who’d chosen his wife at the railroad tracks, filled the big white house with thirteen children, and died listening to the Song of Songs.
Ada Hayes, Raleigh’s grandmother, was always the frowning woman who watched for her flowers to bloom, who didn’t know how to read, who had worked from age eight in a factory winding cotton from six in the morning until six in the evening, who called her husband “Mr.
Hayes,” even when she had to feed him from a tray and change diapers on his legless trunk; who said of her husband, “He was just a good man,” with the sighing cluck that made the remark both homage and rebuke, just as his phrase about his wife, “She’s a proud woman; she knows her own mind and God and the devil in cahoots couldn’t change it,” was both praise and lament.
Neither in childhood, nor as a man, had Raleigh any knowledge, any thought, of this couple as they might have seemed to themselves, or each other. He knew nothing of Clayton Hayes, the lanky town dandy—pockets full of money from an indulgent mother—driving the first car East Main Street could claim, pitching baseball in straw hat and striped tie; nothing of the diffident, uncertain college student, the shy lover, the haphazard businessman, the cardplayer who loved the games at which he was continually beaten by better gamblers, and gulled by less innocent—losing money so cheerfully that his wife finally sent Flonnie Rogers to a poker party with his suitcase and the ultimatum that he choose between cards and her; Raleigh knew nothing of the man and father so gentle that his wife despaired of him or his children (despite their skills at sports and music, despite the looks of some, the brains of some, the literacy of all) ever amounting to anything. Our hero had no sense of the pride that made Ada Hackney call her husband “Mr. Hayes,” no sense of her fear that the thirteen children to whom she’d given birth in her bedroom, helped only by Flonnie Rogers and a neighbor, might slide back into the numbing labor and bitter poverty from which at fifteen she’d rescued herself and what little of her kin she had surviving, by marrying Clayton Hayes as soon as he asked her, learning only years later that it was safe to love someone. These two people, Raleigh had never imagined.
Nor were Clayton and Ada Hayes’s children any realer to him, although he’d lived his life surrounded, in fact, hemmed in, by the close community they called The Family. He thought of his aunts and uncles, and his many cousins, primarily in the aggregate, as his “relatives.” Had he ever been asked to let his mind picture them, he would have heard, first, music on the long front porch, then laughter around the dining-room table, then the noisy circus that shared with baseball, eating, talking, swimming, drinking, poker, gossip, tears, and jokes, the two-day carnival called the July Family Reunion. That fumbling, laughing, unrehearsed horseplay that Earley Hayes had named the KNICK-KNACK GEM-CRACK HIGH-TIME CIRCUS. If asked to describe his relatives in a phrase, Raleigh would have quoted Flonnie Rogers. “Pack of fools.”
His individual impressions of his aunts and uncles were only those same few family tags, traditional as epitaphs, those summaries almost unchanged since his childhood, amended only to add wives, husbands, children, grandchildren, to subtract limbs, to conclude with death. The baby twins Thaddeus and Gayle were to him the photograph of toddlers in sailor suits. They were the horrible thought of small coffins in the parlor, and the fear that he too might suddenly die while a child. His godfather Whittier was the photograph of the thin, smiling soldier on the dresser, with the jelly jar of flowers in front of it, the Purple Heart and Bronze Star on either side. Was the elaborately curled inscription (“Welcome, Raleigh Whittier Hayes. Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, That’s all you need to know. Yours, Uncle Whit.”) in the yellowed book The Poetry of John Keats that was still somewhere up on the shelves by the Naugahyde rocker in Starry Haven. Was the horrible image of his grandmother in tears beside the gold star flag in the front parlor window. Was the fear that he too might be shot flaming from the sky when only twenty-three.
Raleigh’s uncle A.A. was the frowning bookworm who’d had “ants in his pants,” and “Gone North,” as if this phrase were synonymous with “gone to the moon,” or “gone insane.” His aunt Serene was a gentle deaf woman who’d died of cancer at forty because she was “too good for this world.” His aunt Big Em was “brokenhearted” since her husband’s death in Germany, but always chuckling. Was the woman who weighed almost two hundred pounds, never came into a house without a lemon meringue pie in each hand and a new dirty joke to share, who astonishingly possessed a cabinet full of old track-meet trophies, who let her children “run wild as Indians,” who inherited her father’s wheelchair when she lost her leg to diabetes, from which unregulated disorder she died at fifty-two. A warning to Raleigh to control his diet.
His uncle Furbus, a radio announcer, long-shanked, wire-thin, blue-eyed, was “the best fun in the world,” and could match Big Em’s obscenity, joke for joke. For Raleigh, he was always hunched over the baby grand piano in the front parlor, Lucky Strike dangling from his full, loose lips, his eyes squinted shut by the smoke, the heel of his white buck shoe shaking the floorboard. The one who would sing to Raleigh and his cousins jingles like “Marezleetoats Dozeleetoats and little itchy heinies,” like “Trickle trickle. Trickle trickle. Nickel nickel. Nickel nickel. Pepsi-Cola hits the spot. Makes you vomit in the pot.” Furbus was the one who died of lung cancer at thirty-nine, a warning to Raleigh to quit smoking.
Furbus’s younger brother Hackney was “another Clark Gable,” who “could have been another Babe Ruth.” Instead, he sailed through life smiling on a sea of beer and Coca-Colas, ate away his looks with mountains of spare ribs and fried chicken wings, smoked when he wasn’t eating, strummed his ukulele and hummed love songs, got his lung punctured in a poker game at the beach, chased married women he didn’t plan to catch, and died of a heart attack at forty-two in a semiprofessional baseball game, chasing a fly ball he didn’t catch either. He was another warning.
The rest of the Hayes children were still (if barely) alive, but Raleigh had already summed them up as well. Bassie the baby, the “sweet as pie, give you the shirt off his back” golf pro, only ten years older than Raleigh himself (and in whose room in the old house Raleigh had often slept—with its pictures of Bobby Jones and Joe DiMaggio on the walls, and its Esquire Petty girl pinup in the closet—Bassie was now a paralyzed, inarticulate replica of Raleigh’s grandfather.
Hackney’s twin sister Reba, legless in her wheelchair, had once had “the voice of an angel,” had once been “the best-looking gal in Thermopylae,” had once (Raleigh had seen the photograph) sat on the porch steps in an oversize white shirt with the tail out, her jeans rolled to her knees, her saddle oxfords raised on their toes as if life were an irresistible dance. Clustered around her, half-a-dozen boys, their jeans rolled at white-socked ankles above loafers or army boots, their wallets in their hip pockets, their long awkward arms a blur of energy, waited to be chosen to take her to the roller rink, the record store, the gym dance, the reservoir where jalopies of lovers parked. Reba was the one who’d sung the solo at her high-school graduation, and the next day married one of the boys in the photograph—the one with the sailor hat. In Raleigh’s memory she was eternally hung with children, in her arms, around her neck, hidden in her skirt, or crawling up her back. “The more the merrier,” she claimed.
Her little sister Lovie had not even waited for high-school graduation to marry Senior Clay, who’d said for the next forty-five years that he never knew what hit him. She gave birth to Jimmy Clay at sixteen, Gayle at seventeen, Thaddeus at twenty-one, and Whittier at twenty-five, at which point Senior wryly and wanly begged his wife’s surviving brothers please not to die until Lovie had reached menopause, as he couldn’t afford any more sons to carry on the names of her dead siblings. This request Furbus ignored, and at thirty-nine, Lovie gave birth to Furbus II. The duplication of all these Hayes names might have made family storytelling confusing, except that Lovie never called anyone by their given names (although, strangely enough, her name really was “Lovie”). She called her husband “Senior” because she called Gayle “Junior.” Thaddeus was Butch, Whittier was Chips, and Jimmy Clay’s name was actually John. She rechristened as well the motherless nephews whom she hauled, for months, for years, at a time, into the loud, clothes-strewn house in Cowstream. Five-year-old Gates Hayes became her Buddy and her Little Lady-Killer and her Sugar Pot.
God, said Lovie, had given her only boys because He knew s
he loved them to pieces, loved everything about boys from their cute little penises to every hair on their head. Everyone thought Lovie was a riot when she’d climb up on the piano, unwind her cheap chiffon scarf from her neck, wring it through her hands, and wail the torch song, “Oh my boys, I love them so, They’ll never know, All my life is just despair, But I don’t care!”
Aunt Victoria would snort, “I don’t know about despair, Lovie, but it certainly is a slipshod mess.”
Dramatically Lovie would sniff under each armpit, then announce as if she were on television, “My life’s a mess, but my clothes are clean. Try Lye. It does the job.” And leaping down from the piano, she’d begin to tap, shake her hands and sing, “ ‘Well las’ Monday mornin’, Lawd Lawd Lawd. I did the laundry. Lawd Lawd Lawd.’ Stand back, boys, here comes the showstopper!” High in the air she’d kick the long tan leg that had once worn the majorette tassel, the Talent Show tap shoe, the carhop’s boot, until her shoe flew off and broke a lamp, or she slipped and fell into the piano, or a boy ran into the room, blood pouring from his nose.
Yes, Lovie was “the Family Clown,” with “more talent than you could shake a stick at,” which Raleigh always assumed meant this abrupt dancing and singing, or her odd tendency to speak in strange dialects, to imitate the way people talked (he was continually anxious that she would single him out for mimicry), to converse loudly and at length with the dead, as well as the imaginary—including a French maid named Fifi, to whom she was always yelling to come clear the table or pour lye down the laundry hamper. “Damn that girl! Fifi! Fifi! Bonejur! Lord, she’s run off again, and forgot to take me with her! She was going to get me a job in the Folies Bergère and out of this boot camp. Oo la la, kick! Oo la la, kick! Watch the leg, boys! Stand back. Well, leave Furbie’s truck alone, Buddy-Gates, and he’ll stop crying!”
Handling Sin Page 49