by Tito Perdue
“Yes, sir. But I’m thinking we ought to open the presents first.”
“Are?”
“Yeah.”
The adults all looked up at him.
“Yes, sir, I mean.”
There were but three gifts, sloppy-looking affairs wrapped in birthday paper. It was Lee’s hope and expectation that, once he had seen what was inside them, he’d be better able to focus upon the evening’s major event. Accordingly, he went to the tree and brought back a small, square box addressed to Molly. (There were no presents for the adults, none.) She had been given, Molly, two pale handkerchiefs, very delicate, with her initials on them, together with a tiny but highly articulated jar of French perfume. She lauded these and held the amber-colored fragrance to the light. In color, it resembled the spirituous liquor they had been drinking all night.
It has been said that his father received nothing; truth was, his grandmother has passed a five-dollar bill to Leland’s father earlier that day, an enormous sum according to her memory. It was to fit just about perfectly into the leathern billfold given him by Lee. And in truth Lee could not think of anything adults appreciated more.
His own present was far the heaviest and consisted, once he had opened it, of a really first-class gift. Lee grinned widely. “Good Lord!”
“We didn’t get things like that when I was a kid. Just hope you appreciate it.”
“I think he does. Look at that grin.”
“Gollee!” said Lee. “Thanks a lot!”
Came now the time for his parents’ gift to Leland’s grandmother, an expensive appliance that by the time of Lee’s next visit had been relegated to the barn.
“Good gracious alive.” (Dana.) “Looks like one of those electric things they’re always talking about.”
“And a great big old can of coffee to go with it, too. Shoot.”
He ran downstairs, Leland, and after mustering his fishing equipment, hastened over to Dana’s where, to his chagrin, his brother had gotten there before him. The house was as fresh and neat as a five-dollar bill and boasted a small collection of bird eggs in a glassed-in case. But Lee’s eye was more especially for the rifle that hung over the fireplace, an heirloom that had cost the lives of a pretty good number of Pennsylvania men. Lee gloated over it and hungered for it, and for its sake would have traded away his stamp collection. The man also owned an appreciable collection of government pamphlets and agricultural books, not to mention the stand-up photograph of his two sons then serving in the Atlantic Theater. Lee came closer, recognizing in the younger of those sons the courage and good looks, the indignation, pertinacity, and high intelligence that had always figured so conspicuously in the family. He took up one of the pamphlets and opened it to a woodcut engraving scene of someone gutting a hog.
Dana’s car, it turned out, had no radio, and there was a hole in the floor. Indeed, the vehicle was past its better years and could in no wise be compared to that of Leland’s father. Nor his profession, nor could that be measured against an engineer. He was, however, the root and nub of the family, and his decisions generally given the first consideration by everybody. Entering the car in his lordly fashion, Lee was disturbed to see that his brother had arrived there already and taken the front seat. A congealed paint brush lay on the floor, along with a crumpled-up cigarette package, a few undelivered letters, and other debris.
“I’m going to catch a fish so big . . .” Lee’s brother was saying. He was dressed in a jacket, and the bill of his cap was so far too long that his profile looked more like a duck’s than like his own. “. . . so big.”
“Well, I hope you do.”
It was a serious time, the three of them squinting forward silently into the black, dark night. Lee espied a raccoon caught in the beams, an irrational one who already had crossed the road but who now turned suddenly and ran back whence he had come. The woods were dark and thick, rather like a wall than like anything actually permeable by a human being. The Moon, too, was three-fourths full, and had a counteractive effect on what otherwise had been a chilly night.
Dana’s negro lived in a hill-top shack that overlooked the river itself. Here, too, Lee saw the requisite items—a grindstone on the porch, a yard pot and dog, and a washtub full of unshelled corn.
“It’s me, Blue. So you don’t need to shoot us.”
They went in. It was a standard shack of the Alabama kind, a two-room affair with a mattress on the floor, a stack of firewood (poorly arranged), and a bucket in place of a commode. The home did have good flooring, but no crown moldings anywhere. Apparently, the man had been eating out of a can of beans, but had lost interest halfway through the project. But what was most characteristic of him was his paucity of legs, both of them having been hewn away many years ago in a famous mishap having to do with one of the downriver sawmills. The owner not only paid him for that day but let him suggest his replacement. There was no light in that cabin save what came from a bed of coals pulsing in the fireplace.
“Ready to go fishing, Blue?”
“Yas, sir, ’spect so.”
He had been surprised already that night, Leman, but what followed now surprised him even more—his uncle lifting the man in both arms and carrying him to the car. True, he could not have weighed very much, old as he was and with so much of his previous person buried in the cold, hard ground. Lee followed behind in the wake of the continuing comments that issued from the negro.
“Yas, sir! Awright!”
“We’re going to catch us some fish tonight, Blue. Leland’s brother here, he’s going to catch the biggest one.”
“’Spec so, yas, sir. Hee, hee.”
The drive was short, and by the time they came to the river, the negro had dropped off to sleep. They stood about, Leland’s brother and Lee, as Dana again gathered up the man and stowed him into the boat and propped him up. It was not a large vessel, and the dog had to move back and forth between the bow and transom several times before finding a dry place in which to settle
They pushed off. The river was swift and tended to swirl the boat in a circle before finally choosing its direction. Lee put on a bored face, a stratagem that sometimes served to calm his nerves. His brother meantime had taken up in the foremost position and, with the bill of his cap pointing out the route, was trembling visibly.
“They’re right down . . . there,” he explained, pointing into the depths where the great ones slept.
“Yas, sir! ’Spect so.”
“You’re liable to fall in, too, if you ain’t careful.”
They passed under the branches of a cottonwood, the foliage offering temporary protection against the blasts of moonlight that made the surface of the river like a silver photograph. Down below, colored lanterns glowed in the chambers of Silurian houses. Could aught be more strange than this, a substance too tenuous to support almost anything? That was why the bottom was as it was, which is to say layered in a rich, green precipitate called ooze. Yes, and he could remember his laughter when first he had heard that word.
“Try one of these here catawba wurms,” his uncle said, offering the container.
(And had the man spent his whole afternoon collecting these things?)
“Cast over yonder. You might catch something.”
Lee cast. It was a good area, judging by the ripples that hinted at activities going on below. Lee concentrated, using his Will upon those three or four cubic feet of water. They had to eat, those creatures, and so why not eat worms? Next, he shut his eyes so as better to experience even the subtlest nibbles. Far away he heard an owl blaring and something running barefooted through the woods. Further downstream, he saw what looked like tiny islands or abandoned automobiles bobbing out to sea. That was when Dana brought in his first fish, one of your ordinary crappies weighing about a pound. Many times had he heard, Leland, how good his uncle was at this particular sport.
“Gollee. You must be the best fisherman in the whole state of . . .”
The man snorted at him, saying, “Shoot.
My granddaddy now, he was a whole lot better fisherman than me.”
“Well, sure. Everybody was better in those days.”
They were getting along very well, it seemed to Dana and to Lee. Meantime the man called Blue had brought in a very similar fish that effectively doubled their catch for the day. But apart from the fish, the negro was chagrined to have lost his worm.
“Stolt my wurm!”
“We got more.”
“Stolt it!”
The boat was taking them where it wanted, and meantime Leland had caught nothing. That was when he discovered for the first time that some twenty or thirty further negroes were positioned at intervals up and down the shore, all of them with fishing poles and all, save one, maintaining perfect silence. Hard to discern in the pitch-black night, Lee counted four more on the opposite bank. One, an elderly sort of person, had been blinded by the yellow Moon and was wearing colored glasses. Lee waved, getting no response at all. (He knew, of course, that these people were much less courteous at night when they could be identified but by family members only.) Having been pushed to shore by the tide, Blue began conferring in dialect with two young children who offered no danger to the persons in the boat. Lee listened keenly, picking up just “white trash” and not much else.
The night was clear, the river swift, and by morning time they could have drifted all the way to Florida. Lee was ready for that.
“Tired of fishing already?” his uncle asked.
“Aw, I won’t catch anything.”
“Good gracious alive. I believe you’re just like your daddy was.”
“We could come back later.”
“Hm?”
“Later.”
“My gracious, I believe you’re even worse than your daddy was!”
“He is!” Leland’s brother said, raising his hand for recognition.
They had come a great distance by now and could look forward to a lot of rowing to get them back home again. The river was clean and vacant, and now that Dana and Blue had each caught two or three further fish, Lee could see no reason for tiring himself even more.
“We could come back tomorrow, for example.”
It was just that moment that Leland’s brother lurched wildly to one side, having hooked into what undoubtedly would prove the biggest catch of the night. He had been expecting it, Lee had.
“My gracious!” Dana said.
The dog barked.
Lee spoke no more. In all sincerity, he hoped the fish would get away. It was not a good thing, always to be outclassed by a character of that age.
“He’s going to get away,” said Lee. “I can tell.”
“No. No, I don’t hardly think so.”
They had to use the net. It was, of course, a bass, a three- or four-pound example going through a delirium of joy for being given freedom at last. It was a significant catch, even if in return for it his brother had lost his hat in the water.
They coasted downriver for another quarter-mile or more before Leland opted to bed down in the bottom of the boat. He estimated that it was somewhere between eight and eleven o’clock and that he ought to get some rest before dealing with any further catches. A wind had come up, dislodging some of the minor stars. He heard a train shrieking in the night. Except for time and space, he might himself be on board that train, among the stewards and dining cars and the rest. Time, dread time that turns girls to dust, and light, what on earth was that? And death, yes indeed, and time—which is to say until he remembered that he had already dealt with that one just a few days ago.
Eleven
He woke between clean sheets. He could hear dogs barking, some of them inside the house. And then too, of course, there were those smells of bacon and eggs, of waffles made of buttermilk served with a choice of honey and/or several kinds of jam. He could smell coffee as well, even if he wasn’t yet allowed any. Adults were talking, he could hear an airplane overhead, the tolling of the downtown bells, a rooster, a wagon, and his grandmother’s hogs harmonizing to the Sun. And in short, it was another golden January morning in the Alabama of that day.
He jumped into his trousers and, after reporting to the bathroom and coming back, got into his shirt as well. So much the greater, then, was his dismay to find the waffles gone, all but one, and his people in their Sunday clothes.
“Maybe I’ll stay home today,” Lee offered, reaching for the waffle.
They laughed, the whole room. He had as much opportunity of staying home on a Sunday as of being poured a fresh cup of coffee with whiskey in it.
“I saved a waffle for you,” his grandmother said helpfully.
Lee thanked her.
“I tried to save another one, too.”
She had done as well as she could, given the company. Suddenly Lee jumped back, astonished at the length of his father’s cigarette ash. Indeed, his lap was full of the stuff. And was this not the very same chair in which he had sat as a boy when of about Leland’s age? Indubitably. And on the wall the very same painting of fruits pouring from a cornucopia, of General Wolfe expiring on the Plains of Abraham, and, in a much smaller etching not much larger than a playing card, of a bearded man lost now to family memory. Comparing himself to that one, Lee could see the resemblance between them, of good intentions brought to a close by early death.
This time he chose orange marmalade in place of honey and washed it down with a dense buttermilk full of curds. (Let him stay here but for a single season and he’d have grown as healthy as Cecil.) He had hoped and had expected that his grandmother’s negro would prepare a new bowl of waffle batter, but when after a few minutes had gone past and the woman refused to meet his stare, he gave up on it. No coffee, and in the end he was reduced to a single fried egg with a punctured sac.
How he loathed his Sunday suit! It was a cumbersome ensemble in five parts, much more constrictive by far than his ballroom clothes. There was a tie, too, a highly limp one with someone else’s armorial on it, if armorial was what it was. (Cecil’s tie, on the other hand, bore the picture of a girl in a bathing suit.) Even so, he adorned himself in his shirt and tie and coat and vest, and then spent ten minutes working on himself in the mirror while trying to ameliorate the effect. He still looked like a queer, however. Very glad was he that Gwen and the others couldn’t see him at this minute.
It was a solid piece of work, the downtown Methodist church, as were all the structures made by his grandfather. It gave Lee a somewhat peculiar feeling to know that Poor Albert had driven some of the nails and, under the supervision of his stern father, had mixed the actual concrete. Moving with solemnity, the family now entered the building, with Lee forming the next-to-last person in line. Again he jumped back, this time with greater force than before, upon seeing that his brother had found his fishing hat and was wearing it in these hallowed precincts. Lee nodded to the distinguished-looking woman in the second pew whose own chapeau was even more peculiar-looking than his brother’s. He was aware that people were smiling down upon them with approval, including even the negroes in the balcony, one more result of his extinct grandfather’s reputation among these people. And Lee waved back, too, which is to say until his father nudged him forward.
The church held three hundred people, and a good thirty or forty of them were blood connections of his. The organist, also a family member, was good at his work, and soon Lee began to be affected by the music, which turned his mind back in the direction of a restored Confederacy, except this time we won. Meantime he had descried a pretty girl in one of the middle pews whom he refused to look at, however, never knowing whether she might not also be a connection of his.
He had always admired stained-glass windows, especially those that seemed to exhibit living conditions back when life was so much more vivid and brilliant than in these latter days. Day after day and year after year, the world was growing greyer and greyer, the colors leaching away even as the economy grew stronger—a philosophy of his that was to confirm itself as he grew older.
The ser
mon turned out to be a good one, pretty good, and had served to refresh his grandmother to a considerable extent. And if her hat were the most peculiar of all, and though her purse be made of lace, and though it hang down by a foot or more, and her shoes be black and square and she carry a jackknife in her pocket, even so she had no continuing worries except for her house and its things, and thoughts of her defunct husband. Lee, along with the rest of the congregation, stood now and waited graciously for his family to file out into the Sun. It was a bright day, good for fishing, for hot biscuits and sweet tea and the half dozen pretty girls in their dresses who had come together on the porch of the church that Leland’s grandfather had built. Seldom had he experienced such a sharp desire to go over and join any other such group of people.
“Hi!” he said, striding straight toward them and then, without having to mention its significance, revealing his last name. “But we’re leaving in a few hours, actually.”
The girls came suddenly together in a huddle and whispered to each other. In the beginning he had singled out the one in the yellow dress, but as he approached nearer and could see more clearly, his choice fell upon a brown-headed girl who seemed somewhat more relaxed than the others and had a knowing smile. It occurred to him that she might be intelligent, a new and strange experience for him. Veering away from her at the last instant, he went back to the girl in yellow. She was still sunburned from last summer, and her hands were gnarly and most likely strong.
“I’m one of Dana’s friends.”
They nodded and then rushed together again to consult about it. They were shyer than the big-city girls of his acquaintance, and except for the intelligent one, had been waiting for years, as it seemed to him, for someone like him. He knew of no law, no dictates from his parents, to prevent him from having girlfriends in two different towns.
“Shoot,” he went on. “If I didn’t live in ———” (he provided the name of the town in which he actually lived), “I wouldn’t mind living right here!”