Body and Bread (6 page)

The second story described Houston’s death in 1863, when Otis was ten. “I slept right there on a pallet in his sick room,” Otis said, his hands still. “At sundown, everybody was crying, and I was moaning ‘cause the best friend I had or would ever have on this earth, somebody—’cause I was young, a little under what you are now—somebody I thought of as a sort of papa, he was dying. Even then, while I seen him all yellow and dragged down, I knowed my years working for Master Sam was to be the best of my life. Finally, he whispers, ‘Margaret! Margaret! Texas!’ and that great spirit lifts right off the bed like a light and flies its way out to the beyond.”

Nothing could prepare me for the effect these words had—Otis, so close while he told the story, and slightly younger than I, so he said, when he’d watched his substitute father die. Some nights after I’d relived this scene with Otis, I had a dream. John Wayne, his face streaked red and yellow, held my hands as we danced around a campfire, until he, like Sambo from the racist book my mother gave me, turned into butter, melted into light, a disappearing star.

o

In May 1961, Otis was a remarkable 108, long beyond doing much except shelling peas, emptying the dishwasher, or wistfully telling stories. My mother’s favorite story started on a morning that May when Ruby, Otis’ wife, made a call from my grandparents’ house to Mother, the only adult Pelton she could reach.

Sitting with her legs crossed, holding a cigarette, my mother would begin her performance by explaining that my grandmother had left earlier for Gatesville to lead some prayer group in a close study of Paul’s letters to the Ephesians. Ruby, she said, had called, crying and “jabbering God knows what” over the phone. “After I figured out who the heck it was, all I could make out was Otis’ name.”

Even though they were relatively close in age—my mother was forty-one then; Ruby was fifty-eight—my mother, I should note, never liked Ruby, saying, “That trashy woman’s just plain mean.” The first part of her accusation hadn’t been verified, as far as I knew, and the second part I’d seen demonstrated only once, on a Sunday morning after church.

Ruby had stood with Sam, who was eleven at the time, at my grandparents’ kitchen counter. I watched while talking to Gran’s parakeet, whose cage sat atop a pole in the hall by the door. With a gingham apron wrapped over his Sunday suit, Sam kneaded dough on a strip of wax paper, something I planned to tease him about later. Ruby smiled, plumping her girlish cheeks. She secretly reminded me of Lena Horne, a favorite singer of my mother’s. Mother obviously didn’t notice the resemblance, and would say whenever Lena appeared on TV, “She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.” Ruby patted her curled bangs and handed Sam a rolling pin with the teasing caution, “Best not to squeeze all the breath out, honey. These going to be biscuits, not bullets.” When he grinned, sprinkling flour onto the linoleum, my mother walked in with freshly picked bluebonnets, needing a vase.

“Don’t have a conniption,” she said. “I’m only—” but she stopped, her face the shade of Mercurochrome. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” she asked Ruby, who never liked her coming into Gran’s kitchen. Mother yanked the ties to Sam’s apron. “Go find your brother,” she said, removing the gingham with a flourish. “You’re not allowed to bother Ruby.” Spotting me, she scowled. “You too, skedaddle. What’s wrong with you children?”

Sam rolled his eyes, as if to say, “What’d we do?” and turned to go.

Ruby faced my mother, a slotted spoon in her hand. She held it high, like she did the Marlboros she smoked behind the hedge in Gran’s backyard, her pinky finger crooked. “This be my kitchen, not yourn, and you been told to go.”

“But,” my mother said, backing toward the door.

“Just you leave me be.”

Whatever the complicated source of my mother’s resentment (maybe she simply resented a pretty, opinionated black woman), five years later, she said that on the afternoon Ruby had phoned, she’d sounded so upset, “I told her I’d be over soon as I finished my shower.”

Forty-five minutes later, my mother went directly to the shack behind the main house. “I walked across that lopsided porch and opened the screen door,” she said. She had to squint then she heard moaning. “There was Ruby, dressed in her uniform and lying on the bed next to Otis, her eyes all puffed and bloodshot.” Ruby dabbed her cheeks with a handkerchief while she groaned. Her husband, wearing slacks and an undershirt, lay on his back “curled almost into a ball.” His hands pressed against the sides of his chest. His elbows bent into points “like he’d been doing a chicken walk,” my mother said. Leaning forward, she’d add: “His big eyes didn’t even move.”

Next, she said she asked Ruby, “What’s wrong with Otis?”

According to my mother, Ruby sat up, lowered her handkerchief, sputtered, “He did some jumping and coughing, so I lay down here side him, thinking it’d calm him, you know. Next thing I knew…” Then, my mother said, Ruby shrugged, folded her hands across her lap, moaned. In other words, Otis—a person who’d told me about Sam Houston’s spirit lifting off the bed “like a light flying its way to the beyond”—had died.

My mother had always made fun of the couple’s age difference—“If he’d wanted a nurse, he shouldn’t have married Miss Teenage Hormone”—so she couldn’t understand Ruby’s grief over the death of a husband that much older. To her, the situation—the marriage, in fact—was distasteful, embarrassing. That meant she could turn the tragedy of a woman she didn’t like, for whatever reason, into a comedy. “How long ago did all this happen?” my mother asked.

Ruby pulled Otis’ shirt down, covering her husband’s exposed skin and underwear waistband. “Right after Mrs. Pelton left for her meeting.”

Then my mother would describe how she circled the bed to the other side, her hands on her hips, a sour taste starting in her mouth. She said she remembered the son Otis had by another woman. Ruby had loved the boy, even visiting him and his family on her afternoons off. Both women as well as the son had scurried around Otis in his cottage, “getting him this, serving him that, always waiting for his final word, falling all over themselves with ‘Yes, sir.’ What in the world could Ruby have been thinking of, inviting that other woman and the boy into her home? And I don’t even want to imagine what she and Otis said about that child to one another. Then this morning,
with me standing there,
she actually leaned over and plain as anything, she whispers, ‘Husband, thank you.’ I’ll never understand those people.”

Ruby watched her, she said, then pleaded: “What we going to do, Mrs. Norine?” Such trust didn’t impress my mother as much as the hair on the right side of Ruby’s head. Unlike her bangs or the rest plastered back, this was rumpled, with several strands, my mother said, pointing to the curled body of the husband.

My mother stared into Otis’ face, but she didn’t touch him. His lips turned down; his chin puckered. His skin reminded her of an old horse’s jowl so she turned away. “I’m going to have to go to the big house and call an ambulance to come get him.”

Ruby heaved across the body, grabbed my mother’s arm. “No, please don’t go, Mrs. Norine. We gots to stay here with my poor Otis or I knows something terrible will happen.”

“Get a hold on yourself,” my mother told her. “I’m making that call.” She even patted Ruby’s hand.

Ruby still gripped my mother’s arm, but her head dropped forward, my mother said, as if a line had snapped. She squeezed her eyes closed, and “her lips wiggled, puffing and sucking in air.”

“He can’t stay here like this,” my mother told Ruby. “Don’t you see how all twisted up he is? If somebody doesn’t do something, why, you’ll never get him laid out. We’ve simply got to call for help.”

“No, ma’am.” Ruby started to sob. “He need us here.”

So, my mother said, that was how she and Ruby came to be pulling on Otis’ legs and arms, jumping and yanking on his limbs, trying to straighten him out. “We each pushed a leg at the same time, and I’ll be darned if he didn’t sit right up, like he’d pulled a chair to the dinner table.” So they returned him to his back with his knees still bent, his arms at his sides, the fingers of his left hand permanently angled as though waving. My mother lowered Otis’ eyelids and sat down on a chair next to the bed.

At this point, my mother would tell how all that straining had made her perspire, forming embarrassing stains under the arms of her flowered sundress. Even so, she never took off her high-heeled shoes. Ruby was so grateful, my mother said, that she mixed some lemonade—“Bless her heart,”—and after my mother had drunk a glass, they placed a sheet over Otis and waited for my grandmother to come home.

My mother told her story for the first time a few hours after it took place, as she sat in our kitchen with my father, Kurt, who was seventeen, and Sam, who was sixteen. Having slipped downstairs, I, then thirteen, knelt behind the hall banister. Earlier, she’d told the others to “Quieten down; this would upset Sarah,” so I’d used the doorjamb to block their view of me. My brothers giggled when she imitated Ruby pulling Otis’ shirt down over his underwear. Kurt laughed so hard he wheezed, but my father looked up occasionally from his
Texas State Journal of Medicine
, finally closing it, frowning as he gazed at her.

I can guess what he was thinking. Like Sam Houston was to Otis, Otis had been my father’s surrogate parent. Dad and Ruby were also close, and I know what my mother must’ve thought of that. “Now, Mama, are you sure this is really what happened?” he asked. “You’ve been known to give your stories a little spice.” He glanced at Sam, who snickered.

“I never exaggerated anything in my life,” she said, then puffed her Winston.

“Better duck, boys. I think I see a lightening bolt.” My father rarely stated his opinion. Teasing, proverbs, and questions were his primary modes of expression.

My mother stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer. “Are you going to let me finish?” She scowled. “I
was
in the middle of my story.”

“Excuse me,” he said, his palm in the air. “I was only saying Otis did a lot for my family.” He opened his journal. “And I wonder, how should a good man be remembered?”
And Ruby
, I wanted to say.
Don’t forget Ruby
.

My mother rolled her eyes. “A-ny-way,” she droned, regaining her audience’s attention, “that was when we started pulling on Otis’ legs.”

Sam listened, gaping, his sadness tempered by her theatrics and his fascination with the story’s subject. He loved death or sex or any secret topic, the same way he ate a farm peach: examining stem hole, skin fuzz, coloration; savoring pulp, nectar; finally sucking the pit, knotty and wooden. Any less fervor was, for him, a sacrilege. So while my mother spoke of Otis’ coughing and puckered lips, Sam kept asking for details. Once, out of wonder or uneasiness, he grabbed his stomach, shivering.

Peeking around the banister, I understood that something terrible had happened to Otis, but I didn’t know exactly what. I only saw that, except for Hugh and me, everybody was listening to my mother; I’d purposely been excluded.

When I walked in, she was starting the part about Ruby making the lemonade, but she cleared her throat. My father held a human hand skeleton, its joints hinged with wires; weekdays, it lay with more bones inside a brass kettle in his study. Fingering the metacarpals like rosary beads, he was lost in his weekend ritual. I tried to figure how Otis could be a joke while those clicking bones were somehow holy. Kurt looked at me, his eyebrows raised. I smirked, hoping to make him feel stupid. Sam kept right on.

“His knees popped?” he said. “Like, you think something might’ve broke?” He leaned, squinted his eyes toward my mother.

“Sam, you’re getting too carried away. Besides, your sister has joined us and now would be a good time to plan for Rockport.” Each summer, we stayed at the coast two weeks in my grandparents’ two-story with a screened porch facing a panorama of water.

“You sound like girls,” I muttered to Kurt, knowing how to prick him. Then to her, “But what about all that stuff y’all were saying?”

“We were being silly.” She straightened my collar. “Not ‘stuff,’ sugar. No such word, remember?”

I tilted my shoulder away from her.

She sipped her drink.

“But, Mom, you didn’t finish,” Sam said, scooting down the bench. “Come on, Sar.” I sat beside him. “Tell her the part about Otis the first time,” he blurted, “with his eyes stuck open.”

“No, Sam.” Her protectiveness was equal parts sympathy and a conviction that I be refined, not the ill-bred outcast she thought my grandmother had labeled her. “There are some things you boys are not to discuss in front of your sister. And that’s my final word. Now, about Rockport…”

This was the same person who’d thrown a horse’s reins into my grandfather’s face, and that woman, not this parent, was the one I wanted to emulate.

“But you were the one telling the story,” Sam said, “and
you’re
a girl.”

I leaned on my elbows.

My father’s hand skeleton clattered. “That’ll be all, boy. Remember that galled horse,” he warned. “Rub him and he’ll kick.”

Sam glared, shook his head, and uttered a “Ga-a-ah” as he squeezed from between Kurt and me, then stomped upstairs. His bedroom door slammed.

My mother didn’t know that Sam and I had already talked about death a few weeks earlier, on a day when he taught me how to hit a softball. He stood, pitching it in low, slow arcs. I had little trouble connecting, my target sometimes rising like a bottle rocket. He chased after my lobs and skinners while I ran around the bases.