The sunken locale of Porter’s allowed voices from neighboring homes to carry across its muddy banks like a basin-shaped transistor. Those long dead could have still heard the voice of Raymond Simpkins, the six-year-old who lived three doors down, bouncing across the stagnant lake and ricocheting off the cedars below us. Raymond sang “Found a Peanut” twice as loud as anyone needed to. And always, it seemed, in the direction of my backyard.
As popular as that ditty was when I was a toddler, no one in my family was allowed to sing it anywhere near me. I am told I would fly into a blind, seething rage at the mere sound of the first few bars. The whole thing hit a bit close to home since I’d had a morbid fear of death as a young child. Raymond’s woeful tune was overwhelmingly distressing: the fact that a body could be walking around, feeling fine and—just like that—something as benign as a suspect legume could snatch you willy-nilly into the next world.
When I was four, Pauline, at age eighty-two, decided to declare her independence from my rigid great-grandfather by learning how to drive. As we all gathered for a Fourth of July dinner at Aunt Sheila’s on the Alabama River, news arrived that, upon returning to her house from a meeting of the DAR, Pauline had neglected to take her brand-new Oldsmobile out of gear. While making her way down the steep driveway to her front porch, the car rolled over her, taking her life and her independence just like that. Before she expired, as proof that she’d made some sort of a dent in this existence, she wrote her name in the sand and followed it with a big, fat period: “PAULINE CLAIRE STALWORTH.”
Early on, my father had instilled in me the philosophy that if you make a decision, devise a plan, follow instructions, and carry through on all points, the universe will be more than happy to lend you a helping hand. And had my great-grandmother listened to Aunt Sheila’s careful driving tips, read the owner’s manual as advised, and kept an air of calm and stability about her, we would have all sat down to a nice holiday meal of fried chicken and watermelon while watching the boats leaving the dock for their holiday adventures instead of calling Luther Gaynes’s ambulance service and telling him to take his time about it.
It’s a lesson this control freak would never forget.
4
My practice of calling my mother and father by their first names began with a TV show. One night we were watching the first episode of the Cloris Leachman series Phyllis, and her strong-willed daughter referred to her mother as Phyl. I decided then and there I’d do the same and never looked back. Tina never batted an eye, but Garrett would occasionally ask, “What about just Daddy, son?” I soon learned to obliged his request whenever I wanted something. Sis followed suit, making damned sure I wasn’t the only one allowed some show of disrespect.
Tina and I spent our afternoons painting still lifes in the sunroom. That is, until Sis came home from school in her usual state of provocation, and the rest of the day would go to hell in a wailing, weeping handbasket. But in those hours awaiting Sis’s return, I sat patiently as my mother went over the elements of perspective, color, and horizon lines. When Tina was teaching, she was alive—a woman with purpose, a role to fulfill. But even at that age, I knew our times together couldn’t fill the void she carried.
“Don’t it look lonesome outside?” Tina would ask, although it seemed she was asking no one in particular as she stared out the big bay window. A straight line of water oaks dotted the far shore of the lake, barren from another Gulf Coast winter.
“I guess so,” I’d say, waiting for her to chase away her usual momentary lapse into hopelessness with a more cheerful thought, the way she always did.
“There’s a teaching job down at the high school,” she said. “They need an art teacher for the older kids. Annie Stokes is retiring.”
Annie Stokes had been the art instructor for a hundred and thirteen years and had played the organ drunk at the Church of Christ for ninety of ’em.
“You’d be good at that.”
“You’re darn right I would be,” she answered, chewing the end of her paintbrush. “Your father thinks I should stay home.”
“Oh.” I already knew to stay as far away from that one as possible.
“He’s probably right.” She sighed, leaned over my shoulder, placed her hand over mine, and waved my pencil over the outline of apples and pears. The sad, hapless fruit bowl soon began to take on some drastically enviable dimension. “There,” she said, like some contented enchantress. “You’re a genius.”
“Thanks,” I said, brushing the charcoal off my hands, marveling at the miraculous shift of mood in the room.
“You’re welcome,” Tina said, glancing back at the drawing with a smile before shifting her focus once again to the lake beyond the trees.
* * *
Tina had her first breakdown when I was six and a half. Her crises, big or small, invariably came during the month of April, when the blossoming world of the outdoors screamed with possibilities. Her episodes always began on an emotional high, when everything was finally going her way. This usually involved the pursuit and / or attainment of a job working outside the home.
As spring was the season for colossal church revivals, she would allow herself to be sucked into a daily dose of old-timey worship. Her evenings were spent confessing an endless litany of egocentric transgressions while praying desperately for forgiveness. This lethal cocktail of assertion and self-flagellation was a recipe for disaster.
The first time Tina got sick, we watched helplessly as she endured several weeks of sleeplessness and became increasingly agitated. We all respected her wish for silence when she returned each evening from revival. Many nights, she would disappear into the bedroom to peruse her books, refusing to cook our breakfast the following morning, sleeping most days until we came home in the afternoons.
Sitting on the pew as my family took in the final sermon of the revival, I was both captivated and terrified by the visiting evangelist, a converted Orthodox Jew by the name of Abram Appleman. With his dashing good looks and thick Russian accent, he whipped the congregation into a frenzy, which I’d never seen, since we were Baptists, not Pentecostals. The women fanned themselves sensually with the evangelist’s every “thou shalt not” and “lest ye be” like they were in the presence of a movie idol. We children trembled at the disturbing visuals of heaven and hell and the menfolk amened like St. Peter was taking names.
Never one for theatricalities when it came to politics or religion, my father slept soundly against the edge of the pew. At the closing invitational, my mother whispered tearfully for Sis and me to remove our shoes like she had, saying, “We’re on holy ground now.”
Taking us by the hand, she led us what seemed like three interminable miles to the altar below the pulpit. The handsome holy roller knelt next to her, his hands on her head, whispering over her like a parent soothing a fretting child. Glancing back at my father, I imagined when he finally awakened, he would be greeted by a brand-new wife, a companion free from agitation and regret since having her woes sucked out the top of her head by the anointed foreigner.
But the following week told a different story. Tina became weak and disoriented and refused to eat. Dr. Easelle, the family physician, recommended she be committed to an upscale mental health facility in Pensacola called Tranquilaire. I watched from my bedroom window as my father and the doctor strong-armed my mother, flailing and screaming, from the tire swing in the backyard. The waiting Buick Wildcat had pulled into the other side of the carport so as not to alert the neighbors. I shut my eyes tight as a wailing Tina socked the doctor in the jaw. She kicked at the open car door, one of her bedroom slippers flying into the boxwoods. “I’M NOT CRAZY!” she cried. “FILTHY LIARS!!”
I heard somebody else get socked before I turned away from the window.
* * *
We were told Tina would be unable to speak to any family members, including my father, for at least a week. This left each of us to draw our own conclusions. I knew from watching movies of the week that when drug
addicts went away for treatment, their loved ones were told the same thing. But this, I thought, would be different.
“Your mama’s nerves just got the best of her,” Garrett told Sis and me. Like the same thing could befall any of us at any given time. As if the next time I got jumpy on the way to the dentist, we could very well end up taking a detour to Pensacola. Or if Garrett got carried away with a Braves game, he could be carted off, too.
Garrett called Tina’s mother, Ma Cora, to come stay with us while Tina was in the hospital. Ma Cora was a tough cookie, an elementary school teacher and second wife of a widowed Baptist minister who died before I was born. I always wondered how the two of them got together, as any pictures I’d seen of the Reverend Kimbrough suggested an old, thin, sweet-souled man who would snap like a twig if manhandled too roughly by his wife.
After my parents were married, if a week went by without a visit from Tina, Ma Cora would call and ask her, “So, what have you been up to?” And Tina would offer a detailed account of the sick kids, school starting, church functions, or whatever trials had kept her from driving over. Ma Cora would always answer with a high-pitched, disbelieving, “Um-HUH!” The guilt appeared as a red flush on Tina’s cheeks, and she would grab the car keys and head out the door, off to make it all right again with her iron-fisted mother.
It would be years before I would understand the degree of Ma Cora’s cruelty.
* * *
“I heard about your mother,” Mark Powell called after me on my walk home from school. Mark was three years ahead of me and already smoked Pall Malls he took from an open carton his father carried on the dashboard of his truck.
“It’s none of your business,” I said, without turning around.
“Same thing happened to mine.”
I kept walking but kept quiet in hopes he’d keep talking.
“Spent two months in Searcy. Two different times. They had to shock her with electricity until she finally calmed down.”
Even at this age, I knew about Searcy, a creepy state hospital for the mentally ill over an hour away. Searcy was located at the end of a road off Highway 43 near McIntosh. Whenever we passed it on a road trip, Sis would nudge me and say, “This is where we drop you off.”
Against my better judgment, I stopped and turned around.
“Don’t let ’em do that to your mother.” Mark stopped, too, waiting for a response.
“They wouldn’t do that,” I said with conviction.
“What makes you so sure?”
“I gotta go,” I said, and walked briskly across Bellville Avenue traffic.
“Don’t let ’em,” he called out as I broke out into a slow trot. I didn’t even bother to retrieve the notebook I’d dropped in the street.
* * *
On the first day my mother was allowed to leave Tranquilaire for the afternoon, my father took her to the Cordova Cinema to see Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The poster touted something sexy, with a peace sign perched on a woman’s naked legs in high heels. But even I knew the film was a poor choice. My mother detested blood and guts of any kind. She even got weak kneed the time or two she’d watched Marcus Welby, MD with Ma Cora, a show my grandmother never missed.
Garrett came home from his trip morose and dejected. Ma Cora, Sis, and I were seated on the sofa, waiting for a report. Garrett reclined in his La-Z-Boy. “She cried soon after the thing started until she finally said she couldn’t take it anymore. She wanted to go back to the hospital, so I took her.” He looked at us for some kind of salvation. Tears were streaming down his face. “And here I am.”
I crawled up in his lap like I was still three. “Okay, Bo Skeet,” he whimpered. “It’ll be okay.”
“Will they shock her, do you think?” I said.
“What do you mean?” Garrett sniffed.
“Mark Powell said they shocked his mother twice, with electricity.”
“No.” Garrett grabbed my hand and looked in my eyes, making sure I knew he was serious. “Your mama’s at a nice place. They don’t do that. Alma Powell got what she could afford. Do you understand me?”
Sis came around the other side of the recliner and laid her head in Garrett’s lap. Ma Cora got up and quietly went to her room. The three of us stayed there without one more word until it was dark.
Going down the hallway for bed that night, I saw Ma Cora crying facedown on her bed in the guest room. “My baby,” I heard her say as Sis came out of the bathroom and joined me in the hall. Seeing my grandmother in such a vulnerable state was another shock to my young system. Sis went in Ma Cora’s room, and I went on to bed.
“Hanner,” I heard her say, “what are we gonna do?” Ma Cora had a habit of putting an “r” on the end of words ending with “a.” Pulling the covers over me in my bunk bed, I could still hear her wailing in Sis’s arms. “She was my baby,” she cried, like Tina was already dead.
* * *
Tina came home two weeks later. Like a captured animal released into the wild, she spent her days uneasily, like one of those people in the body-snatching movies. It was Tina, but it wasn’t my mother. Garrett explained it was the medication she was on.
She gradually became more affectionate with us, and when we were out of school for the summer, we all began to get back into our routine of swimming, berry picking, and tennis.
Most weekdays after school, Marcie Autman, a friend from next door, came over to watch Dark Shadows. On one particular day, she took my attention away from werewolves and vampires with a poke in the side. She pointed incredulously to the kitchen, where my mother and father were kissing. I rolled my eyes, shrugged, and turned back to the television, pretending what I had seen was no big deal. I heard my father spank my mother once on the butt. And then I heard her giggle.
We were safe.
5
My father’s voice whispers close, like temptation telling me to do something I knew I shouldn’t. “Don’t shoot until his head’s in your sight, Bo Skeet.”
The turkey gobbler fans its tail feathers near two curious hens just this side of the rusty wire fence separating my grandfather’s piney woods from the state game reserve. Garrett was a hunter who followed rules and regulations to the letter. Had the wild bird chosen to preen six feet in the other direction, the odds of its living out the day would have increased exponentially. Even so, a nine-year-old with no kills on record shouldn’t have given the creature any cause for concern.
“Now, don’t pull the trigger, Bo Skeet, squeeeeze it gently. Eeeasy does it.” I can hear his heart beating louder than mine.
The gobbler retracts its feathers, drums a sound of concern, and stops cold. It looks just like a picture on a place mat I’d seen at a log cabin restaurant on summer vacation in Tennessee.
I feel Garrett nod stealthily, and I squeeze the trigger at the same exact time the shotgun kicks me in the shoulder, knocking me into his arms. The earth-shattering report camouflages the sounds any survivors would have made in retreat.
“Thataway!” Garrett shouts. “That’s Daddy’s boy!” He pulls me close into the fold of his big brawny arms. “I didn’t believe you could do it,” he says, cackling, jostling me like an oversized baby. “I swear to the good Lord, I didn’t believe you could do it!”
The hens are nowhere in sight. I step over the bright red shotgun shell as I walk over to the fence where the gobbler had been thrown, one of its brightly colored wings flung like a cape over what once was its head.
“I thought he was gone. I saw the sonofabitch flap his wings once. I says, ‘That’s it, he’s gone.’ But he wasn’t,” my father crows, patting me on the back, squatting to give me another hug. “Daddy’s boy,” he says again as he picks up the kill by a withered foot.
I smell blood as I reach out to touch one of the gobbler’s wings. I take the bird by its other foot, surprised at the weight of the warm, lifeless thing, and gallantly throw the shotgun over my shoulder as the congratulatory whoops of the other hunters ricochet over the hill.
*
* *
The golden brown leg stares back at me from my Easter dinner plate between the mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. The sad, crispy carcass radiates a noxious aura of compunction and shame. I never knew becoming the son my father always wanted would feel so rotten.
“Something wrong with your dinner, son?” my mother asks timidly from across the dining room table. Her face is partially hidden by a carnival-style tumbler made specifically for Southerners and their unquenchable thirst for iced tea.
I attempt to avoid my father’s gawp, his eyes glued to the remains in front of me, a sliver of bright, white breast meat crusted to the side of his mouth. “Everything okay, Bo Skeet?”
“It’s fine.” My eyes connect briefly with Tina’s before I drag a fried onion through its cream of mushroom pottage.
“Oh my goodness, I almost forgot,” Tina says. She grabs my plate and hers and disappears quickly into the kitchen.
“What’d you forget, punkin’?” Garrett says, reaching for the pitcher of tea.
“Just—oh…” I can tell Tina is stalling. The tinkling of glass and jars signal an impromptu symphony of cunning and desperation. “Two seconds,” she says, as Sis sucks the life from the other drumstick, watching me like I’m the rinky-dink intermission act in a two-bit circus. Garrett carves another slab from the cadaver and plops it on his plate, his eyes never leaving mine. It was a pitiful look. A look that said he was going to lose this one.
“Ohhhhhkeydokey…” Just before enough time passes for the whole thing to go straight to hell, Tina reappears at the table with our plates. “I swear, sometimes I think I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on.” Bending like a waiter in a four-star eatery, she returns my plate and her own. Something tells me whatever she’s doing is a feeble attempt to make this whole thing go down easier, both figuratively and literally.
Counting for Thunder Page 3