by Mary Karr
For nearly an hour, I shoveled that gumbo into him. He’d grind away till I told him to swallow, which he did with effort, needing water through a bendy straw to wash it all back. Then he’d nod for the next mouthful. Getting him to eat felt like a moral triumph, the way having a strange dog come wagging up to you can make you proud, or how a random toddler choosing your knees to climb at a party can seem some innocent and, therefore, final testament to your good character.
I was scraping the bottom of the carton when I noticed one side of Daddy’s jaw swollen up like a squirrel’s. He’d been stashing away the shrimp he couldn’t swallow. He’d leaned his far cheek into the pillow to hide it. The ragged gray wad of shrimp I spied between his lips was approaching the size of a golf ball. I cupped my palm under his lip and told him to spit it out. He’d choke falling asleep with that in there, and his eyelids had already drooped to half mast.
In fact, while I stood there saying spit, he corked off entirely. His mouth lolled open another notch. The chewed-up shrimp had only to shift sideways about three quarters of an inch before his windpipe blocked off. I shook his shoulder: nothing. “Daddy!” I yelled; his eyes stayed closed, glued, sealed. I finally took aim with my index finger at his mouth’s breathing slot. Maybe he’d stay asleep, I thought, if I poked gently enough across his tongue, which felt warm and foreign as a slug.
Then he bit me. Even before his eyes creaked open to thin slits, he clamped down with his slick gums hard enough to hold me by that finger. Like some terrier who’d caught me snitching his biscuit. We stood that way a minute—my finger in his mouth, his black eyes glaring out with no glimmer of recognition. And when I grasped that iron-boned jaw with my other hand as you might grab a horse’s to force it to take a bit, his good hand wrapped around my bicep so tight that in the morning I found the bruised imprint of each finger.
Also the next morning, I overheard the visiting nurse asking what in God’s name had Daddy got in his mouth. But he just gave a loose-shouldered shrug, all the while staring at the wall like she’d lost her mind while she scooped the old shrimp out with a tongue depressor.
The only other evening I spent alone with Daddy I had to get drunk for. Lecia and the Rice Baron had taken me to their country club summer dance, where I’d stomped through the Cotton-Eyed Joe with various doctors and insurance salesmen, intermittently downing whole goblets of a sinister rum punch. A fellow I called Gomez finally drove me home in a convertible black as the Bat-mobile.
Daddy’s eyes lit up when I peeked in on him. “Hey, Pokey,” he said, his words clear as ice. Then, “You fun?”
Mother had left the TV on with the volume cranked down. Why I’ll never know, for that summer the local station played nothing after midnight but reruns of old dog races. The old tube spilled out an aquarium-blue light.
The whippets were pale and lizardy. Their spines sloped down from high haunches, which left the impression that they had spike heels on their back feet. They were being corralled into individual starting pens while I watched. It depressed me no end, I told Daddy. Not only did a whole slew of other people know the outcome of that race before we even saw the gate fly up, but the dogs themselves were probably long since dead. Daddy puckered his mouth into a sour pinch that said he knew exactly what I meant. Those dogs were deader than doornails, I told him, dead or else lying before somebody’s gas heater farting up a storm. He nodded his head like it made him tired to think.
Daddy’s face had shrunk. All his skull’s hollows—temple and jaw and cheekbone—held shadows the color of shale. Maybe I nodded off. Maybe I was woozy and drunk enough to hallucinate over Daddy’s face a death’s head, but for a split second that’s what I saw in his pillow’s trench. Then he sneezed, and I said bless you, and he was back to himself.
I pushed the button to shut the TV off. The picture shrank to a little blue star that hurtled backwards through the swampy dark.
Then I started shuffling through a shoebox of cassette tapes on the floor till I laid hold to the one with “Pete Karr” on the label in red Magic Marker. I wanted nothing so much as to hear Daddy tell a story, to unreel a story in my head like so much sheer, strong fishing line casting me back to times I’d never lived through and places I’d never been except courtesy of his voice.
I held that tape over the aluminum bed rail, in what I guessed was Daddy’s line of sight. “You remember this?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. He grinned on half his face and gave a sharp nod.
“Mind if I play it?”
“Gone,” he said, which I took to be “Go on,” as in, “Go on ahead, honey, and play it if you want.” I popped it in, then pressed the rectangular button so the brown tape started turning.
This all started on the nineteenth day of July in nineteen hundred and twenty. Started at a barrelhouse called Bessie Mae’s back the woods. Place you could get barbecue and strawberry soda pop. Home brew if they wasn’t any government men around.…
Course it actually started when Buck Neelan rode the train down into the logging camp. Buck was what you call a sport. Didn’t work nor nothing. Liked to gamble. Liked to fool with other fellas’ women.
A man name of Nan Crocket and his brother, Ugh, was working with my daddy that summer when Buck come around. He fooled around and got it in his head that Nan was messing with one of his girlfriends. Hell, Nan was married. Didn’t mess with nobody that I ever knew. Think what actually brought it about was Nan beating Buck at Bouray. Which was the card game of the day…
Anyways, Buck finds Nan up there, catches him with a straight razor. Cut old Nan down. Cut him bad. My daddy had to run him over to Evadale to the doctor. Get him sewed up. Hell, it was three weeks or better till Nan come on back to work. Took him that long to get his strength back.
Poppa asked Nan’s brother, Ugh, what Nan was planning to do about it. And Ugh says, “I don’t know what Nan gone do, but I know what I’d do.”
Nan come on back to work. And that rocked on a year or more.…
Then one Saturday morning here come Nan by the house. Poppa was hard of hearing. They’d always come to the gate and holler for Momma. She knowed everybody in camp by voice. “Ruth,” Nan hollers. Them bird dogs was yapping like they fixing to eat him up.
“Come on in, Nan. They ain’t gonna bother you,” Momma says. “Tom’s setting in the kitchen.”
Daddy was setting at that table with a glass of cornbread crumbled up in buttermilk when Nan come in. See, Nan was supposed to work with Poppa in the morning. “Don’t want you expecting me and me not be there…I’m fixing to go out to Bessie Mae’s tonight.”
“What you want with Bessie Mae’s?”
And Nan tells him he heard through the grapevine that Buck Neelan’s coming through. Poppa tells him, “Nan, you go on ahead. Tell Ugh come give me a hand in the morning. But get your ass back down here tomorrow evening.” My daddy knew what was fixing to take place.…
Nan walks into Bessie Mae’s that night. Sees old Buck Neelan way down to the other end. Buck’s sitting on one a them screw-top piano stools thumping on that piano. Wore a black derby hat at that time with a satin band. Buck’s a-thumping, and they’s two women leaning on either side the piano singing.
Well, Nan walks in and that singing flat stops. ’Cause they was all looking this way. But old Buck’s looking yonder way. Them women stop singing and back on up out the way so Buck knows they’s something wrong.…He spun around on that stool. ’Course when he swung around, he was looking right down the barrel of that old. 45. Wham! Wham! Hit him just as square in between the eyes as you could measure. Blowed a hole back of his head you could put a orange in. Blowed him off that stool.
Nan stuck the gun in his britches and walks on out.
He come on over to the house hollering for Momma. You can hear the bed squeak where she’s giving Poppa a shake. He asks her what the hell’s the matter. She tells him Nan Crocket’s out by the gate again.
“Hell, Nan don’t have to talk to me. I done know what
’s the matter. He done killed Buck Neelan’s all.” But Poppa gets on up. He come easing right along them porch boards where me and A.D. supposed to be sleeping. Kept our bunk beds out there all summer. Course we’d heard them dogs start worrying around before Nan even hit the gate. Moon was big around as a skillet. So we seen Poppa come outside in his drawers.
“Tom,” Nan says, “they tell me Mr. Bishop’s coming after me.” Beaver Bishop was the sheriff of Jasper County at that time.
“Aw, Mr. Bishop’s ass,” Poppa said. “Why didn’t you just come on in here and lay down the couch. Then you’d a been here if Mr. Bishop is coming.” Nan said that’d be okay too.
That Monday morning Beaver Bishop calls to say the circuit judge’ll be coming up to our end of the county in a week or so. Wonders was Nan fixing to run off before then. Poppa tells him, “Hell, Nan ain’t going nowheres.”
Sure enough, a week or so later, a black Model T come pulling up in front the sawmill. Was a great big fellow driving it. Hands big around as pie tins. Had the prettiest head of red hair you ever seen on anybody, man or woman. I mean a big mess of it curly. Wore a black suit like a undertaker. Drove that Ford right up to where them rough trees was stacked yea high and still running sap so strong you couldn’t get a whiff of your lunch bucket less you went upwind.
“Nan Crocket,” he says, “you know I can send you to the penitentiary for killing people?”
“Yessir,” Nan said. “But they can also haul me to the cemetery for Buck Neelan whittling on me.” Last thing Nan says, ain’t nobody ever did him nothing but Buck.
And that was the end of it. Never will forget it. They was a killing ever now and again. They always come to my daddy with it. I can see Poppa right now. That silly-assed hat stuck on his head. I can see him.…
I woke to the brown tape unwinding silence.
I’d gone to Houston when Daddy’s old commanding officer came to call. The man we knew as Captain Pearse had retired a colonel out west. The D-Day stuff on TV got him tracking down guys he’d served with. Soon as he heard Daddy was sick, he booked flights down and a room in the Holiday Inn. Lecia was there when the rented Pinto pulled up a few days later. She said Pearse had probably done a lot of sit-ups in his life. He was wearing one of those yellow golf shirts with an alligator over the heart. He actually pulled off kissing Mother’s hand when she came out on the porch to greet him.
Daddy saluted him with a sharp right hand. “Captain Pearse,” he said, his speech clear for the first time in weeks. And Pearse said at ease, Sergeant Karr. Then they were both wiping the wet off their faces, holding each other like a pair of frail old ghosts.
Pearse sat on Daddy’s bed well into the evening, paging through old pictures. Once again, Daddy’s war talk came out clear. The effort tired him, though. He finally dozed off while the colonel was still peeling the foil top off some pudding.
By phone, I heard the colonel’s fine tenor voice. “Your daddy turned down a battlefield commission after the Bulge,” he told me. “He didn’t like the idea of drinking at the officers’ club. Anybody above the rank of sergeant was what he called a poodle.” After I hung up, Pearse drank black coffee from Mother’s bone-china cups till the small hours. He told her more war stories we’d never heard.
Daddy was wounded twice, for instance. Once, a German soldier stuck a bayonet through his forearm, leaving a scar I’d seen a thousand times and never once asked about. Another time, a bridge they’d mined blew early and buried Daddy so completely in rubble that Pearse presumed him dead. They hadn’t even bothered digging for him. But a few days later, Daddy came riding up the road in another fellow’s Jeep. He had a big bandage wrapped around his head, and a grin a yard wide. In fact, Pearse thought the old head wound might have led to Daddy’s stroke. If so, the army might help us with some of our costs. Pearse had testified in a few cases like that, and both times the family got help.
That’s how I wound up in Mother’s attic. We needed army medical records proving Daddy was head-injured in combat. I’d put off climbing up there for weeks, claiming I needed a good rain to cool things off. In truth, the attic scared me.
An attic in East Texas is especially bad. The hot damp in such places accrues over years; all manner of organism can breed. Cardboard gets dappled with green mildew in patterns that put you in mind of chrysanthemums on antique wallpaper. You can hear roaches scuttle through papers in an East Texas attic, can practically feel their threadlike antennae reaching coward you all whispery. Plus you face the slight danger of stumbling across a snake.
The summer before, Lecia’s attic had been infested with them. We’d heard thumps on the ceiling one night. Something heavy was falling from the inside attic rafters, without the scuttling sounds afterwards that a raccoon or rodent would make. Armed with flashlight, she was supposed to poke her head up there, scout around, and report back so she could let her exterminator know what he was in for. The fluffy pink insulation showed no small-animal scat, only what looked like old nylon stockings somebody had peeled off and strewn around. Then the flashlight beam in her hand went level, and they were snakeskins. The house sat close to a bayou, and moccasins had been nesting up there.
So by the time I finally pulled down the spring-hung ladder in Mother’s garage, a spike of cold fear ran through me. Thunderheads had been bearing down all morning in a heavy, iron-gray bank. When the rain came, the whole sky seemed to rip open with a sound like silk tearing. Fat drops pelted on the palm fronds. The honeysuckle and wisteria vines on the redwood fence shivered under it. The patio bricks sent up thin ribbons of steam. I’d sprinted from house to garage and still my T-shirt stuck to my chest.
I pulled the light string dangling from the peaked roof. On the day Daddy had run that electrical cord along the top beam with a staple gun, I’d stood by holding the very lightbulb that still hung there, only webbed in spider silk now. He’d let me screw it in back then, so it had lit in the cage of my fingers. I hadn’t been there since. Nobody had, I figured, except to bench-press boxes up. The stale air was sweltering wet. But nothing fluttered, neither bat nor pigeon nor death’s-head moth. Among the skeletal lamps and rusty kitchen appliances from the Eisenhower era, no corpse sat up. I breathed in the heat, breathed it out. My heart went scamper-scamper.
After a few minutes, I waded away from the light and deeper into the boxes, which held, once I started opening them, detritus of the most generic nature—books, records, Mason jars, dime-store vases. A yellow carpenter’s kit with miniature tools gave the only hint of my childhood. There was an old hurricane lamp still smelling dimly of kerosene, and a sewing machine you powered with a wrought-iron foot pedal. There were endless empty pieces of Samsonite luggage, hatboxes without hats, garment bags containing no garments.
Finally, a camel-backed trunk I spotted under the far eaves gave me a twinge. It didn’t thrum or spill light from its cracks. Still, somebody had slid it back there locked and on purpose. I poked my screwdriver in the hasp and whacked down on it with my old toy hammer. The lock broke open with a snap. I knelt there sweating a minute. An old storybook illustration of Pandora took shape in my head, how from her box demons the size of dragonflies went spiraling up the page while her small hands flew to her cheeks and her cupid’s-bow mouth assumed the standard oval of Victorian surprise.
The trunk lid I raised hit the sloping roof. I let it drop shut, then grabbed the leather side handles. My back and quadriceps muscles strained to drag the whole trunk from its hiding hole. Then I sat down again under the dusty bulb cross-legged and puffing.
Flipping back the lid unleashed no winged demons, only the smell of wet newsprint, like a paper you’d picked off a dew-soaked lawn. The top tray held a scattering of sepia photos and letters tied with twine. I also found four jewelry boxes lined up neat as soldiers. Two were covered in black velvet, one in royal-blue satin, another in a deep raspberry grosgrain. Each clicked wide to show some version of a wedding ring.
The family jewels, I figured. I squatted on
my haunches to lift the whole tray, to tote it down to the kitchen. Mother had fixed iced tea before I’d gone up. I could picture the swollen crockery pitcher beaded with frost in the dark fridge, little pinwheels of lemon floating in the brown tea.
The instant I stood, though, what lay in the trunk bottom startled me into dropping the tray. It fell heavy on the tops of my bare feet, as if some huge fist had smashed down on it dead center. The wedding rings and snapshots and letter bundles went spilling around. At the same time, I stumbled back into a swollen box of Christmas decorations. The box edge caught me behind my knees, which buckled. My hands shot down to stop the fall. They plunged up to the elbows in a rat’s nest of tinsel and colored lights. Glass balls in thin containers crunched under my weight like boxed eggs blown hollow. A spiky plastic star raked a scratch up the inside of one arm.
But all this barely slowed my panicked, backward-scrambling motion, for lying in the trunk bottom was Grandma Moore’s prosthetic leg. The mortician had left the thick stocking stretched on and tied off in a silly top-knot where her thigh should have been. The same stiff black shoe was stuck on the rigid foot, which was carved toeless, like a doll’s stub. Maybe a coiled rattler weaving its head and shaking out a rasp would’ve panicked me more, but I doubt it.
Mother found me standing in the cool green light of the icebox. She bore her laundry hamper of linens into the kitchen behind me. The bleach smell preceded her so I turned from the open fridge door. I’d been scooping out the heart of a deep watermelon round, using my bare hands to claw out chunks, letting the sticky juice go down my chin, swallowing the black patent-leather-looking seeds along with the fruit, which was sweet and cold in a way that made my back fillings ache. If this pose struck Mother as odd, she didn’t say. She just wanted to know did I find anything useful in the attic.