A Southern Place (23 page)

“Claudette leaves, Cal. She gets in her car, and drives away, leaving those three little boys alone, for hours. It ain’t right. What kind of a mother would do something like that, and why?”

Cal was silent, staring at his niece, who had once again began to stack the colorful shapes onto the top of the hollow box. Mary Jane had but one parent, but there was no doubt she would never go unwatched for a single minute. He could see his sister’s concern, yet his heart went out to another woman, the one who would take such precious chances—for him.

“Imogene’s mother don’t know everything,” he said. “I’ll bet if she goes, there’s somebody else in the house. I’m sure there is,” he said, though without much conviction.

“You know Imogene’s mother, Cal. She’s got eyes like a hawk and a mind like a steel trap. If there was any chance of those boys being watched over, she wouldn’t say anything. She even kinda likes Claudette, but she’s worried for those boys. She’s been thinking ’bout saying something to Rodney.”

“Why that nosey old bat,” Cal said. “If she says one word to Rodney, the Fair clan’ll have the whole courthouse turned against her. Rodney don’t want or need those boys, but he’d love to take ’em away from Claudette, just for pure meanness. You can’t let her say anything!”

“It ain’t like I can do anything about it, Cal. Mrs. Sanderson does what she thinks is right, and can’t no one—” Delores dropped to the floor and grabbed the baby, who was coughing and making gutteral sounds. “Spit it out, baby, spit it out to Mama,” she said, reaching her fingers into Mary Jane’s mouth and extracting a red star and a green circle. The child screamed as Delores further probed her mouth and throat.

“I’m sorry, baby, but Mama’s gotta make sure you didn’t swallow anything,” she said, the baby shrieking louder as Delores gagged, pried open her little mouth with both her hands, then turned her upside down, shaking her as screamed, her cherub face turning beet red.

“No harm done,” Delores said as she uprighted the child. “The pieces really are too big to swallow, but not too big for this little bugger to try. We might need to put this up for a few more months.”

Cal was already on his knees, gathering the shapes and placing them back into the box. “Damn, Delores, guess I really screwed up this time,” he said, standing up and holding the box with his hook.

Delores reached up and hugged him, Mary Jane stepping between them and hugging both their knees. Cal leaned down and gathered her to his shoulder with his good arm, leaning forward to hand her over to her mother. “Go see your mama, now, baby girl,” he said. “Unka Cal’s gotta be going now.”

“Calvin,” Delores said. “But you just got here.”

“Got some things to take care of. I’ll come by and see ya’ll later in the week,” he promised. “And I’ll take this back to my place, ’til she’s a little older.” He motioned to the plastic box hanging on his hook. He reached over and gave them both a peck on the cheek, then headed out the door.

He never made it to Claudette’s for supper.

And so it ended. Calvin never went back to Claudette’s house. He didn’t return her calls, and he tried to dodge any place he might run into her. When she finally tracked him down, on a Friday night at home, he delivered the lie he’d planned for the inevitable occasion.

“Look, Claudette,” he said, glancing about the room and never meeting her eyes. “You’ve got the wrong idea. I ain’t in love with you, and I ain’t never gonna be. You got some good little boys, but they’ve got their own daddy, and I ain’t lookin’ to be one. You and me are just buddies, it’s all we’ve ever been, but you got the wrong idea and just took it too far. So it’s probably for the best we just don’t hang out anymore for a while.”

Her rough, tanned face turned a ghostly pale, her eyes misty. “But, Cal,” she said, “we’re been the same for going on two years. My boys love you, and I thought we got along just fine.”

“Well, they don’t
need
to love me, they’ve got their own daddy, just a mile away. And it ain’t fair to him to have them boys thinking I’m—”

“Did Rodney say something to you? Is that what this is about?” Claudette went from awkwardly frightened to downright mad, which was a little easier to deal with. Cal had always hated to see a woman cry, no matter what the reason.

“Rodney ain’t never said a thing to me, but I wouldn’t blame him if he did. They’re his boys, Claudette, and it ain’t fair to ’em for you to go confusing ’em, making me out to be more than I am to ’em, with their real daddy right up the road.”

“Cal, you’ve been more of a daddy to my boys, taking them fishing, taking care of things they needed, than Rodney ever—”

“Well then I was wrong, too, but it’s over. I’m not confusing those pore younguns anymore, Claudette. I ain’t their daddy, and they don’t need to think I am.”

“But you’re so good with them, and they love you, and who knows, maybe one day—”

Cal hated to do it, but figured it was better to go on and get it over with instead of stretching it out. Like pulling a tooth. Jerk it hard and get it on out.

“One day, my ass, Claudette. Listen to yourself! I ain’t never said the first thing to you about moving in, or getting married, or for God’s sake, making myself them boys’ daddy. I’ve never said anything of the kind, ever, but obviously you had your own plans for me, without letting me in on ’em, right, Claudette?”

Claudette’s strong, man-like posture wilted like a wet dishrag, tears streaking her face as she nibbled her chapped lips. Trembling, she reached out to touch Cal’s shoulder, but he slung her arm back at her, pulling away from her touch as though disgusted.

“Keep your hands off me, you nympho. Haven’t you even noticed how I can’t stand that shit?”

“But, Cal,” she sniffled, “I know you don’t like to be all touchy-feely in public, but you’ve never—”

“I’ve never what? I never told you I liked being felt up and slobbered on, have I, Claudette? But have you stopped to think about it? No, not as long as you’re getting what you want.”

“But Calvin, we’ve been together, alone, we’ve been making love for—”

“Look, Claudette, get real. We don’t ‘make love.’ Has it ever crossed your mind that I’ve never been able tolerate your taking off you clothes unless I’ve been totally shitfaced?”

The room went still. Suddenly Calvin was aware of the clock ticking on the wall, the full moon glistening on the river through his picture window, the baby-powdery smell of the lotion Claudette favored.

And the hefty, strong woman who could lift an engine block was now reduced to a damaged moth dried onto a headlight.

But not without a swansong.

Blinking back tears, Claudette sucked in once, then, trembling, made a fist, drew it back, and punched Calvin’s left eye with all her might. Then she turned and left.

Calvin saw stars, but still watched through the window as she threw herself into her car and drove away. She would never know that on that night, it was Calvin who couldn’t stop his own tears.

Chapter 16: September 1974

Mojo

When the next flood came, I was in high school, an old soul pretending to love Three Dog Night, love beads, and hip-hugger jeans, but still listening to my uncle’s Hank Williams albums and wearing cast off clothes from girls at the local Baptist church. When this flood came, Mama packed up
everything,
even the yard sale appliances that didn’t work, and we took it all to Uncle Calvin’s.

Uncle Cal didn’t work during that flood; in fact, by that time, he seldom left his house at all. It was then that we found out just how bad off he was, almost a hermit. The moody guy who would laugh and joke, then yell and slam doors was gone, replaced with a sickly old man I hardly recognized. His skin was pasty and yellow, and the hair he had left had turned white. He seemed partly asleep even when he was awake. It made me want to cry that Mama’s long ago prediction had come true. God knows she never
wished
it to happen. It just did. It was hard to believe he was not even forty—he looked twice as old.

A colored boy from my school brought his staple goods once a week: Jim Beam, Coke, Lucky Strikes, VanCamp’s pork and beans, Premium Saltines. And this had been going on for months. I’d never really noticed Roosevelt Hawkins except to hear his name called in a class or two; he never said much out loud, that I’d heard. But here, he seemed more like a grown man than a kid my age.

Every day he brought Uncle Cal his few necessities and helped him bathe, if Uncle Cal felt like it. Then he sat in the chair beside the bed and explained everything he could think of about the goings on in Nolan that week. Sometimes it was farm stuff—lots about the weather and whose crops were looking the worst. Uncle Cal asked a lot of questions about Oakland Plantation. He smiled when he heard they might be doing poorly, but he never stayed smiling long. Talk about Oakland always ended with Uncle Cal getting mad, ugly mad.

That’s when Roosevelt would change the subject, which he was pretty good at doing. Sometimes it was politics, what the folks were saying about running the sheriff out of town, or moving the town square further uphill in case of floods, or closing the high school and shipping us off somewhere else. Sometimes it was pure out gossip. Mama’d try to make me leave the room when it got too bad, but it didn’t matter. I could hear good enough from anywhere in the house. They’d talk about whose wife caught him cheating, who stayed out all night drunk, whose wives stayed gone a lot or spent too much money. Some days I’d wonder where a boy like Roosevelt could find out all these things, but not bad enough to ask him. He was like a drug Uncle Cal needed just to keep drawing breath. Rosie, as he called him, stayed until Uncle Cal was asleep, then silently nodded his head at me and Mama and left.

At first Mama said she was gonna let Roosevelt go, that she could take care of Uncle Cal. But after she watched just one night of their ritual, she changed her mind. He needed Rosie’s stories like we needed a place to stay.

We never moved from the house on stilts after that. Mama did her best to make Cal eat better and help him cut down on the booze, but she must’ve known it was too late.

It was Sloppy Joe day in the lunchroom, not my favorite, but by far not the worst. Standing in the cafeteria line with a plastic tray, I touched my milk carton to my sweating face. The two goons in front of me talked about football, and Melissa Moorhead, our resident beauty queen wearing a pantsuit seen in
Seventeen
and too much Love’s Baby Soft perfume, left a space the size of an invisible person behind me. I was used to it. She had to be careful: being poor could be contagious—I sure
wished
it was. Beyond the serving room, the intercom boomed a warbled message.

“Mary Mullinax. Mary. Jane. Mullinax. Please report to the attendance office.”

I walked out and headed for the attendance office. I knew something was wrong when I saw Mama on the bench outside the door. I could tell she’d been crying.

“Get your things, your books or whatever,” she said. “You won’t be back for a few days.”

“Why?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

“Just get what you need, I got Cal’s—“ she gasped, then breathed out, “I got the truck out at the front of the building. I’ll meet you there.” She took off without waiting for an answer.

There in the cab she took both my hands in hers, looked directly into my eyes, and whispered, “Baby, your Uncle Cal passed away this morning. It’s just me and you now.”

Tears fell down her face as she pulled me to her. We stayed just like that for a while, my thoughts going willy-nilly all over the place. I guess I’d known for a while that my uncle’s days were numbered and that I’d never see the old Uncle Cal again, but I fought facing it head on and fell into just watching my mama, holding her thin, strong body and just imagining the pain inside her. Sure, it hurt me, but I still had
her,
though she was crying her eyes out, I knew she’d bounce back in a heartbeat if needed to, if it was for me. I had her to lean on—but all she had was me, and what good could I do? I held her tighter, it was all I could do; then she drew away.

Her gray-blue eyes were streaked with red, and her cheekbones looked painfully sharp under her pale skin. As always, her long ash-blonde hair was drawn back in an old elastic band, and for maybe the first time in my life, I saw what a beautiful woman she still was, even crying.

“Now Cal had friends ever where, and I imagine they’ll come as soon as they hear the news. We need to clean up the house good, and they’re expectin’ us at the funeral home tonight. The next few days is gone be hard, but we’ll do it cause it’s what we have to do.” Mama handed me a handful of Kleenex, then she wiped her face with her own. “Cal was a pistol, but he had a heart of gold. This is the last thing we can do for him, so we’ve gotta do it right.”

She cranked the truck and we headed home.

I cried like a baby over Uncle Cal. It seemed like every inch of the house triggered some memory of him—funny stories, old songs, day-to-day stuff that wouldn’t be much to tell about, but was precious all the same. Mama cried too, but she never broke down in front of anyone but me, at least that I knew about. At home, there was a navy blue skirt and two blouses hanging in my closet, and a pair of cheap flats to match. They looked new.

“Wear the white one to the funeral home,” Mama said. “Go ahead and get you a shower and wash your hair now. Cal set a sight in you, and you want to look good for his last get-togethers. Wear the one with the flowers to the funeral Saturday.” She walked out of the room. I did as I was told.

She was right about my uncle’s friends. The phone started ringing around three, and the first casserole arrived at four thirty. People we barely knew, and didn’t think Cal knew either, brought more food than that house had ever seen at once. Pans of fried chicken, pitchers of tea, hams, vegetables, desserts of all kinds. I wasn’t hungry at all, but Mama made me eat. She drank a glass of tea and then disappeared into the bathroom, running the water for a long time. Mama never could eat when she was upset, but she sure thought that I could. Guess I did, back when I had her around to make me.

We arrived at the funeral home early, to talk with the preacher about the service on Saturday. It seemed weird, talking to a preacher about Uncle Cal, who never went to church. It was the Methodist preacher, who I’d never met, since the Baptists had the biggest “outreach” programs for Bible school and such, but I was glad we got this preacher instead. He talked in a whispery voice about “Mr. Mullinax,” and for a minute I didn’t realize that Mr. Mullinax was Uncle Cal. He said he’d been talking to several of my uncle’s friends, and that he was certainly loved by a lot of people. I liked that, and Mama did, too. He said he’d like to use “the Lord is my shepherd” as the scripture verse, and Mama was okay with that. Then he asked if her brother had any favorite hymns. Mama’s eyes opened twice as wide, then she just kind of sighed.

“Cal was crazy about Hank Williams,” she said, “but I’m afraid I can’t tell you about his favorite hymns. It’s just something we never talked about.” Mama looked like a frightened child, younger than me, as she explained herself.

The preacher smiled, a smile so kind it made me think of Uncle Cal himself. “I’m a big fan of Mr. Williams as well,” he said. “I’m sure I can find something appropriate to say, and those are really all the questions I have for you. Do you have any for me?”

We didn’t. He led us into the viewing room, where Uncle Cal was resting on a white pillow in a shiny brown box. He wore a blue shirt with a collar, dressy-like, but it wasn’t buttoned at the top and he wore no tie, thank goodness. He had on clean blue jeans and a belt with a tractor on the buckle, one I hadn’t seen him wear in years. The room was kind of cold and smelled like flowers in a refrigerator. My uncle’s face was pale, but the lines around his eyes and mouth had simply disappeared. His thin hair and thick beard were shiny and combed, the white strands glowing like silver. He looked like he was sleeping—a good, peaceful sleep with happy dreams.

Mama leaned over and kissed him. She looked back to me, but I shook my head. She was okay with it. I knew he would be cold and clean-smelling, like the room. I wanted to remember the real Uncle Cal, the one who made pirate jokes about his missing arm, treated his pets like people, and quoted Hank Williams like some folks quote scripture. The familiar mannequin in the wooden box looked nice enough, but he was not my uncle.

We walked about the room and into the outside area, talking with the people who came. A lot of them were Uncle Cal’s friends, but there were women from the factory who came to see Mama, as well. Mr. Danner, from the 4-H club at school was there. I figured he might be a friend of my uncle’s but he talked to Mama for a long time, and then to me, too. They talked about the time Uncle Cal raised a pig for 4-H, how he was the Grand Champion and won a hundred dollars, but then Uncle Cal wouldn’t eat bacon or pork chops for the next six months, afraid that he might be eating “Wiggly.” He said Calvin was one of the hardest workers he’d ever known, and that he was proud to have known him. That meant more to me than anything else I heard the rest of the week.

Mr. Danner was a Baptist, I’d seen him leading the singing at revivals I’d been to. He always dressed nice and drove a nice car, and talked more like a teacher than a farmer, always putting the words together just right. But he wasn’t too fancy to know a good man when he saw one, and he went out of his way to let us know how he felt.

The funeral was a graveside service at the Nolan Cemetery. A dark green tent shielded the casket, a few plants, and twenty folding chairs covered in velvet and sitting on a carpet that was supposed to look like grass. Beside my grandma’s grave, Uncle Cal’s wooden box was covered in lapping branches of the blossoming cotton plants, long brown grains of wheat, and tasseling corn. It took my breath away: Mama hadn’t prepared me for it, but the moment I saw it I knew it was just what he’d have wanted. We looked at each other and smiled.

“From Mr. Danner,” she whispered. “Cal loved to watch crops grow, they used to talk about it.” I nodded. “But I’m glad there ain’t any peanuts,” she added.

That was a given. The way I saw it, picking peanuts took a big chunk of my uncle away, years before he was finally laid to rest.

My uncle’s friends seemed uncomfortable and out of place under the tent, so most of them stood around it, shifting from one foot to the other and staring at the dry grass. The preacher welcomed them and they gathered a little closer, but not much.

The preacher read from the Bible and then prayed. Then he talked about living and dying and saying goodbye. “Cal was a man who loved nature, and beauty, and life,” he said. He was calling him Cal, like he knew him, I thought. I was hoping he really did.

I gazed at my mama, pale as a ghost. She was staring at the group of Uncle Cal’s friends and looking like she’d seen one herself. There, in the middle of the clump of obvious farmers, wearing overalls, or khakis, or Dickies’ coveralls, was an out-of-place fellow in a sport coat, a tie, and grey trousers. He was a bit haggard, but handsome nonetheless. All the men knew him, though he seemed nothing like them.

And Mama—Mama stared straight at him, and him at her. I watched from the corner of my eye, wondering who he was and how this unknown man could take her concentration away from her only brother. In one way, I wanted to thank him; it was like she stopped hurting for a minute or so, but I wanted to hit him, too. Who the hell was he to come between Mama and Uncle Cal?

Then the weirdest thing happened; just as I watched, while trying to seem like I wasn’t watching, they saw each other. Their eyes locked. Finally, Mama smiled the tiniest smile, then nodded in such a way that you had to be staring to notice it at all. The man smiled—he had a warm, beautiful smile—and nodded, bigger than Mama. Then they both turned away.

And they never looked back at each other again.

The preacher was deep into his message. “He lived simply and kept a good attitude. Despite a number of hardships, he had never lost his faith in his Creator or in seeing his mother again, in their new home in the sky.”

Mama’s tears were like a faucet then, but she never made a sound.

Then the preacher started talking about light. He said that Jesus was the light of the world. He said that people with near-death experiences often remember only a great light, and spoke of the joy of stepping into the light. I didn’t really understand what he was getting at, but I kept listening.

One of the men outside the tent stepped closer, taking an object out of his pocket. He held something shiny and put it to his mouth. Quietly at first, then louder, the sound of a harmonica filled the air. He was playing a melody I’d heard before, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

The preacher wasn’t preaching anymore, he was talking in a sing-song sort of way. Like men-English teachers who read poetry out loud, ’cept this preacher sounded more like he meant it, not like he was showing off, the way
they
do. He and the harmonica weren’t together, like the words of a song go with the music, but they fit together like they were carrying on a conversation. Sometimes one would talk, sometimes the other. Sometimes they’d talk at the same time, but you could always tell they were listening to one another all the while. Sometimes the harmonica would hold one long note and then move just a little toward another one, back and forth, over and over, where you never could tell where one ended and the other begun. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and I wanted it to go on forever.

Before long I recognized the words, practically knew them by heart, but didn’t sing along in my head, the way I usually would have. They made it a different song, one that had never been sung before, and probably never would be again. It was for Uncle Cal. He could hear them, and it was something as beautiful as he deserved.

The song went on as we all listened, those awkward fellows looking up now, looking at each other, at the sky, at the preacher, at the harmonica player, at me and Mama, even at the casket. And though some of them were crying as well, they were smiling, too. Sad to see him go but glad they were alive to be here with this song and this moment.

“Now I’m so happy,” the preacher said. “No sorrow’s in sight.” His eyes were closed and he seemed to have finished, and the harmonica was winding down, when all of a sudden he stopped—not faded, stopped, as if to signal some important statement that would change the rest of the world.