American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Robert pulled a book from a nearby shelf. As he flipped through it, he didn’t consider the words there, but rather the ones Jane had used. The more he thought about them the angrier he got. He could hardly believe the audacity of Jane. Only the most selfish people in the world said things like “I need to think about me.” Everybody always thought about themselves! It took a truly self-centered person not to realize how self-centered everyone was each second of their lives. “I’ve thought about me too much” was what someone ending an affair should say. Jesus Christ. Robert jammed the book back into its place on the shelf, grabbed his bag, and, fully aware he was throwing his own little tantrum, marched out of the stacks self-consciously and self-satisfyingly clomping his feet.

  Not until he was outside, climbing into his car, did he register the title of the book he’d been looking at, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger. On his drive home, Interstate 55 to Highway 16, Robert repeated the words Heidegger Kant in his mind until they morphed into two different ones, “high-digging cunt,” their lack of sense matched only by his shame in thinking them. It was the kind of thing his father would have said.

  A man prone to violence, against himself as well as others, Jimmy Vaughn had been born with that perennial southern handicap: pride in circumstances undeserving of it. He took pride in the color of his skin. He took pride in his lack of education. “The only break I got in life was when my father snapped my arm for leaving the back door unlocked,” he once told his son. “Your cunt of a mother running off after you showed was the best thing ever happened to you.”

  The only advantage to his father’s undue pride was that Robert grew up not realizing how disadvantaged he was in life. Pride in one generation became dignity in the next. At school, he routinely breached the unspoken caste strata represented by the different colored lockers, kids whose families owned land congregated by the yellow ones and kids whose families worked that land congregated by the blue ones, with the various gradations of class demarcated by the green, red, purple, and orange lockers in between. Whenever townsfolk called his father “nothinbutadronk” he figured it for praise in the local slang. Robert and his father were Vaughns. Why would anybody ridicule someone descended from the town founder? It would take years for him to begin to see his life as a “shadow box of degeneration,” the last line of a poem he published in a literary magazine at Millsaps, where he became, as far as he knew, the first person in his family to attend college. His father would have considered the poem—correctly, in Robert’s current opinion—awful, but to do that he would’ve, of course, had to have cared enough to read it. Sometimes Robert wondered if he chose such an impractical major as a way to spite his father. Philosophy, after all, couldn’t win a lawsuit, fix a car, cure a disease, or build a house.

  By now the flip-book animated scenery that was Robert’s drive home had transitioned from urban to rural. Cotton modules studded the edges of cotton fields. A rusted tractor sat stuck in the same ditch it had been stuck in for the past ten years. A country mile down a country road called Fugates, so haphazardly paved its asphalt looked as though it had been smeared on with a giant butter knife, he turned into his driveway, Hellion’s barking detectable by the time he’d parked.

  Robert considered it a shame the trailer’s heater had not magically fixed itself. “You cold, buddy row?” he said to Hellion, who jumped on him, propping his one front paw on Robert’s thigh. “Let’s get your supper.”

  In the kitchen, he filled Hellion’s dog bowl and then opened the fridge. Robert took out a pint of turtle soup his neighbor had given him last week as thanks for filling in when her bridge club was a player light. Guess the hare won this race, he thought, taking a whiff of the soup. Aesop must have put in a fix. Robert poured half the pint in a bowl and placed it in the microwave. Due to the noise of a golden retriever scarfing kibble and a microwave nuking turtle soup, Robert almost didn’t notice the knock at the door.

  He checked his watch. Who’d be stopping by at six in the evening? Folks from Yazoo County respected dinnertime nearly as much as the Sabbath. Although he’d been too embarrassed to bring Jane to the trailer, Robert thought for a moment it might be her—that she’d looked up his address and had come to say she wanted him back. Yeah, right. Of course it wasn’t her, he told himself as he ran a hand through his hair, wiped off the kitchen counter, closed the silverware drawer, and tucked in his shirt before yelling what he hoped was a not too hopeful, “Coming!”

  Robert opened the door to the sight of a man who seemed oddly familiar. He must have been in his eighties, dressed in a suit that looked new, his hands shoved in the pockets. With a nervous smile the man cleared his throat.

  “You’ve never met me,” Harold Forster said to Robert Vaughn, “but I’m your grandfather.”

  Part 4

  4.1

  Prairie Burial—A Noise That Would Never Come—Arabian Sand

  A sixteen-inch blade made of tempered steel, long and narrow, with a rolled top edge for foot placement, D-grip, and twenty-four-inch North American ash handle: the garden spade was just right for digging a child-size hole.

  Charles Culp had found it hanging from a peg in the barn. On his walk back to the house that night, he held the spade in one hand and, with the other, clenched the front of his jacket shut. March was always cold in Kansas.

  Inside the house, which Charles’s grandfather had built shortly after his emancipation, the scene had not changed. His mother, Tabitha, was still boiling water on the stove, her pinafore stained red near the waist, and his father, Arnold, was still pacing in front of the icebox, swigging at a glass of bonded bourbon. Two cousins from his mother’s side, Katherine and Selma, had gathered medicinal substances, flake tar camphor and Epsom salt and milk of magnesia, on top of the Florentine cabinet set, ready to be distributed when called upon. A cousin from his father’s side, Timmy, six years old, peeked out from a door across the room, where he’d been sent to shield his virtue. In the middle of the scene, atop a thin mattress that had been pulled from one of the beds, lay Charles’s sister, Lurlene, sweat coursing down her face, knees raised, legs spread, nothing but a sheet covering her underthings. The man in front of her, looking beneath the sheet and calling out orders, was Dr. Henry Blair.

  Everyone called him the Angel Maker. On his arrival at the house earlier that day, Dr. Blair had told the Culp family that, due to the fact Lurlene was so far along, the operation would cost double, a sum of a hundred dollars. “The fetus is crowning,” he said now, hours after he had administered an injection. “I need another towel.”

  The next few moments passed like many another stressful time Charles had been through during his short eighteen years in the world. Sounds grew loud and quiet all at once. The held breath of each person in the room seemed to be holding its own breath. On the ground, Lurlene, following Dr. Blair’s request, pushed so hard the veins rose in her arms, forehead, and neck. Every member of the family, standing as though in vigil, listened for a noise they understood would never come—the crying of a newborn.

  Instead, they heard the doctor’s muted voice say, “It is done,” as he held a small body, pink-skinned and grime-covered, as lifeless as a washbasin.

  He began to swaddle it in a blanket. Once finished, Dr. Blair set the body aside and checked on Lurlene, who had passed out. He appeared satisfied with the rate of her pulse. As he prepared to leave, toweling blood from his hands and gathering up his instruments, the doctor casually asked why he had not been informed the child’s father was white, a question that drew blank stares from the family.

  “Up until then, you see, they had no idea the father was white. The Culp family was strangely respectful of their girl Lurlene,” Tom Branchwater would later tell Harold Forster, who would repeat the story to Robert Vaughn. “They never asked about how she got pregnant. They never asked why she changed her mind and wanted to get rid of it so late.”

  Dr. Blair took the lack of a response as indication the family had not b
een aware of the father’s race. He glanced under the swaddles to confirm that, yes indeed, the baby had a complexion so fair, ruddy white, it had to have been the result of miscegenation. His plans would have to be adjusted. In his distracted state, the doctor gave the family instructions on how to care for the patient—“She’ll be out for at least another few hours,” he said, “so I suggest tidying up before she wakes”—until he noticed a young man across the room with a shovel in his hands.

  “What is that you have there?”

  “It’s for the, uh”—Charles coughed—“for the burial, sir.”

  “Entirely out of the question!”

  His color rising in the soft light of the prairie house, Dr. Blair turned to the parents of his patient and explained that, given the legalities of the operation he had just performed, the “by-product” had to remain with him. He assured them it would receive a proper burial. In addition to keeping both the family and himself safe from legal repercussions, the doctor noted, the lack of a reminder of the ordeal often mitigated the emotional toll on patients, consequently aiding their physical recovery. Did they understand?

  One parent did. To keep his sobbing wife from snatching the bundle away from the doctor, Arnold Culp wrapped his arms around her, making hush-now sounds and giving Dr. Blair a look that asked, Can you blame her? He nodded in the direction of the door.

  Outside was dark as a cellar. Dr. Blair figured it must be close to midnight. He shuffled down the split-log porch steps, tossed his medical kit in the back of his automobile, placed the bundle in the passenger seat, and started the engine by turning the hand crank, each action underscored by howls of “That’s my grandchild!” echoing out of the house like the sound of the ocean from a shell.

  Even though he kept the gas pedal to the floor, it took almost an hour for him to reach the highway, his car, nothing but a flivver, dawdling through the countryside at twenty miles an hour. The doctor would soon be able to afford a new car. Yes indeed. He was considering what type he would buy, a Lexington or a Briscoe, a Templar or a Maxwell, when something moved in the seat next to him. The swaddling cloth began to unravel. Without taking his eyes from the road, Dr. Henry Blair, maker of angels, reached across the seat and, humming a lullaby, stroked the baby’s twitching face, all while trying to decide what color his new car should be, Arabian sand or Niagara blue.

  4.2

  Heir to a Dynasty That Was—A Mythic Trinket Finds Its Way Home—The Linchpin of a Downfall

  In a trailer near Vaughan, Mississippi, sitting across from a strange man who claimed to be his grandfather, their breaths visible because of the broken heater and a dog with three legs panting at their feet, Robert asked, “So the doctor only pretended to give her an abortion?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’d he do with the baby?”

  “Sold him to a family named Vaughn.”

  Harold took a sip of the tea he’d been given by his grandson. In contrast to the relaxation he felt as the tea’s warmth seeped throughout his chest, he grew upset thinking that this young man, heir to a family name that had once been synonymous with wealth, could not afford to heat his own home. The trailer was freezing cold. Harold’s lips dipped toward his mug like divining rods. For how long had he stood by doing nothing as his only grandson shivered to sleep each night? He should have been here to help the boy. If only he’d known.

  The story Harold had just told Robert had first been told to him in his least favorite place: a hospital. Five months earlier, during a particularly slow afternoon at the museum, Harold had received a call from Branchwater’s niece, Portia, saying her uncle had suffered a heart attack and, though he would pull through, wanted to see him. Not even locking the door, Harold ran out of the museum, got in his truck, and drove the fifty-minute trip to Memphis’s Baptist Memorial in just over half an hour.

  “That you, George?” Branchwater had asked on first seeing Harold. “Come here closer.”

  “Branchwater, it’s Haddy.”

  “Haddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s something you need to know.”

  From his white-sheeted hospital bed, tubes coming out of his arms and nose, Branchwater, looking suddenly every bit of his nearly one hundred years, told Harold what had happened to Lurlene Culp. “I never said a word about the day your mother had me take that girl to the train station,” he said. “The reason I finally tracked down the truth was so you wouldn’t be alone when I’m gone.”

  In the trailer months after that day at the hospital, Harold sat on the couch across from Robert, and on the ground between them lounged Hellion, periodically thumping his tail for some love. The day had by now eased off into night, leaving the trailer to be lit by two lamps in the living area, so cluttered it could hardly be called that. Harold watched his grandson as he took in all he had just told him. The only part of the story Harold had left out was how, a few years before either of them died, Branchwater had spoken with Robert’s father, telling him not only the truth of who he was, but also why Robert had not known till then.

  “Get the hell out of my house!” Jimmy Vaughn had yelled immediately after asking Branchwater, “You’re telling me I’m part nigger?”

  There were a thousand things Harold wanted to say to his grandson, that he was sorry the boy’s father had passed away, that he wished he could have met Jimmy despite what he’d been told of him. He wanted to say how he’d always dreamed of having a child or grandchild to call his own. He wanted to say he would’ve been there for Robert if only he had known about him. He wanted to say nothing in the whole entire world could have made him prouder. But instead of those true sentiments, he told his grandson one that wasn’t.

  “Your grandmother was a kind woman.”

  Robert crossed his legs. “Lurlene Culp,” he said to himself, thinking, Now there’s a name that can’t be said in anything but a southern accent.

  He’d always found it helpful to make jokes in difficult situations, and this was most definitely a situation that could be called difficult. Was this guy for real? Robert couldn’t tell. In his suit, which appeared to have been bought for the occasion, speaking so deliberately it was like the words were slow to come, Harold Forster seemed legitimate out of sheer awkwardness, but then again, now could be the time he’d mention an expensive operation he needed. “I’m short just a couple thousand dollars,” he’d probably say, or he might go with, “If only there were a viable kidney donor.”

  Despite Robert’s concerns, Harold behaved, throughout their conversation, suspicious of him, Robert, instead of the other way around. He even mentioned that a month ago, on the advice of a retired lawyer who was an old family friend, he had hired a private investigator.

  “That was probably rude of me. I’m sorry. With my situation, folks tell me, some people might try and take advantage. Can’t never be too safe.”

  “Your situation?”

  “Good news is the investigator said you came across trustworthy.”

  “What situation?”

  “He gave me a great big file on you. Copy of your birth certificate. Yearbook pictures. Your dad’s police record. Your mom’s coronary report.”

  So overwhelmed with the information—birth certificate? yearbook pictures?—Robert nearly missed the last bit of it. “My mother’s dead?” he asked Harold, who immediately looked down at his lap, as though he’d been scolded.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  The aggregate number of fucks Robert gave about Tonya would hardly fill a marble bag. That was how he usually put it when people asked about her. Less than a month after she gave birth to him, Tonya Nichols, who never married his father, left town without explanation, abandoning Robert to be raised by a “man” unworthy of the handle. Fiend was a better fit. On rare occasions, when he hated himself for hating his mother, Robert would go back to the time, twelve years ago, his father had tree’d him like a squirrel. He was in third grade. In spite of his father’s repeated warnings, h
e had taken his car for a joyride on Scotland Road and accidentally clipped an eight-row planter, leaving the front bumper behind as somebody’s lawn ornament, and after his father saw the car, Robert had run out of the trailer, climbed a tree on a farm called Three Oaks owned by one of their neighbors, and tried to stay quiet, ignoring the sound of a trunk strap getting popped. “Come on down, son,” Robert’s father said on finding him six limbs high in a mockernut hickory. “Promise I won’t hurt you.” He continued making that promise for half an hour. So, eventually and reluctantly and hopefully, Robert climbed down from the tree, at which point, with the trunk strap that had never been used for travel, Jimmy Vaughn whipped his back until the skin broke.

  Over the years to come, Robert would remember that day not because it had been the first time his father had beat him, which it wasn’t, nor because it had been the last time he had trusted his father, which it was, but because the half hour he spent in the tree that day had been the only time in his life he did not worry that, should he fall, somebody would be there to catch him.

  “I want to believe you, sir, but you have to understand, this sounds, well, it’s a bit hard to swallow,” Robert said to the man claiming to be his grandfather.

  “Fair point.”

  “What is it you want from me?”

  Harold said to the young man he knew to be his only heir, “You’ve got it all wrong. I don’t want anything from you. It’s what I’ll be leaving behi—”

  It was the weirdest thing. One second, the old man was talking to Robert, making eye contact like a normal person; the next, his mouth dropped open, forehead striating, his gaze fixed on something past Robert’s shoulder, his hand latched onto his ear.

  Robert worried he was having some kind of stroke. “You okay, mister?”

  “Where’d you get that?” The man stood from the couch and walked to a shelf on the wall. Placed along it was a row of knickknacks from the old feedlot out back, rusty horseshoes, a dirty soda bottle, broken locks, empty frames, the antique type of clothing iron that had to be heated on top of the stove. Gently as plucking a flower, Harold picked up one of the items, a metal figurine shaped like, from what Robert could tell, some kind of bird.