Shaking the Sugar Tree (4 page)

The ride into New Albany was lovely. Endless trees, sugar maples, pines, oaks, their branches choked with kudzu, marched up and down the sloping hills. The woods had a mysterious, dark look. Turkey buzzards slowly circled the sky, homing in on some poor unfortunate animal that had met its end, either on the road or deep inside the forests. Yellow wildflowers crept up from the ditches. Full summer was now bearing down and the green had exploded with fury.

Noah held his hand out in the air, smiling happily.

New Albany was full of stately old homes with spiffy new ones thrown up here and there. The downtown sat next to a river that wound slowly through hills. Biking paths offered a way to escape the modern world.

Mama lived in a large house a few miles from the downtown area. The river skirted her property on the east side, which was about sixty acres of trees and privacy and quite literally in the middle of nowhere. She had inherited the property from her parents. Papaw, her father, still lived with her. He had good days and bad days as he drifted into dementia. When he was in a good mood, he had a wicked, though rather crude, sense of humor.

Mama’s golden lab, Bumblebee, greeted us affectionately, licked Noah’s face.

“Bumple!” Noah exclaimed.

He’d never been able to get her name right.

A stone statue of St. Francis presided over Mama’s roses in the neatly tended flowerbed near the side porch. The roses were a riot of reds and yellows. Pink-and-red crepe myrtles added to the effect.

Papaw sat on the porch. He wore overalls with an Ole Miss hat covering his thinning hair. He looked like he might be on his way to the barn to milk the cows but for the slippers on his feet.

“How are you, Papaw?” I asked.

“I’m still not dead,” he announced. “Your mother might kill me with her cooking, or what she calls cooking. You still a faggot, Wiley?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Good for you,” he said. “Don’t run away from your problems, kid. Just take ’em up the chuff and use a lot of Crisco, eh?”

“Don’t start on me, Papaw,” I said.

“Is that the deaf kid there?” he asked, glancing at Noah, knowing very well that it was.

Noah was a bit afraid of Papaw.

“Don’t call him that, Papaw,” I said, knowing it was pointless.

“Better feed him more beans or you’re going to have a midget on your hands, Wiley,” he said. “It’s bad enough to be deaf, but to be a deaf midget… oh God, help us. I had a dog like that once.”

“You did not!”

“Swear to God. He started off as a hound dog, but he just never grew. And he never listened to a word you said. The dumbest dog we ever had. Course we didn’t know he couldn’t hear a word you said. What a dumb dog he was. We took him down to the government office, got disability payments for him.”

“You did not,” I repeated, smiling.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said, making the sign of the cross.

“You’re full of it, Papaw, and you know it,” I said.

He laughed.

“Oh, sorry, I’m thinking about Cousin Mary. Talk about a dog. That girl was so ugly we had to put a bag over her head when we went to town so we wouldn’t get arrested for public indecency.”

“Cousin Mary was a handsome woman,” I pointed out.

“She was a cow!” Papaw exclaimed. “Every time she opened her mouth, all she could say was
Moooooooo
! The town was scared to death of her.”

“You are so mean,” I said.

“Someone’s got to tell it like it is, don’t you think?” he asked.

Noah and I went inside. Mama, my brother Bill, and his wife Shelly were in the kitchen. Their sons Eli and Josh were out back. The oldest, Mary, was nowhere to be seen.

“Hey y’all,” I said.

“There’s my baby,” Mama exclaimed, leaving off the fried chicken to make a fuss over Noah.

“Memaw!” he squawked happily.

Grandma!

“Oh, my baby’s so big!” she said. “Did you go to Mass today, sweetie?”

Noah nodded.

“When is your father going to cut this hair?” she demanded. “You look like a girl.”

“We don’t like haircuts,” I said.

“Howdy ho,” my brother Bill said. He was three years older than I. He had a shaved head, wore camo shorts and a camo T-shirt, with a pair of sunglasses perpetually perched on the top of his head. He would much rather be fishing, the look in his eyes said. The can of Skoal in his back pocket had left a permanent impression in the fabric.

“I brought some of Eli’s clothes for him to try on,” Shelly said. “They’re in the guest bedroom.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Shelly was a businesswoman and looked like it. Prim and proper, she was a genuine Southern belle, a good Baptist, a firm believer in hard work and never setting a foot out of line. She ran a tight ship.

“The sleeves on Noah’s coat are too short,” Mama complained. “Why do you let him walk around wearing this thing?”

“I can’t buy children’s clothes with food stamps, can I?” I asked.

“Shelly, if you’ll watch the food, I’m going to take my grandson to the bedroom and we’re going to try on some clothes. What’s the sign for ‘try on clothes’?”

I showed her.

“Oh, I can never remember all these signs,” she complained, leading him away.

“He’s getting big,” Shelly observed.

“What happened to Mary?” I asked.

“She went with her church group for some fund-raiser or other. She’s too embarrassed to be seen with us these days,” Shelly answered, a trace of bitterness in her voice.

“She’ll be embarrassed when she goes to school with two black eyes,” Bill added. “Can’t hardly get her out the damned bathroom anymore. She sits there combing her hair like it was made out of solid gold.”

“She’s fifteen,” Shelly pointed out.

“I’ll
fifteen
her,” Bill promised.

He talked a good game, but he would never lay a hand on any of his kids. Well, not under normal circumstances.

“I need a beer,” Bill announced.

Mama didn’t allow alcohol in the house, but I knew Bill kept beer in the cooler in the back of his truck. I followed him through the house and back outside, where we stood on the porch, drinking ice-cold Coors while listening to KUDZU on his radio. Papaw sat in the rocking chair, rocking back and forth like an old woman.

“Do You Want to Go to Heaven?”
floated across the porch.

“How’s FoodWorld treating you?” he asked.

“Not as good as Lane is treating you,” I replied.

He was a shift supervisor at a furniture company and spent all day watching over people who pounded together furniture for a living. It was a noisy, somewhat brutal existence, and he had the muscles on his arms and chest to show he’d spent many years of his life in the trenches putting together sofas and recliners and coffee tables.

“You still looking?” he asked, referring to my on-again, off-again job search.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Noah keeps me busy.”

“You ain’t gonna get a decent job by wishing and fishing,” he observed.

I said nothing to this bit of brotherly wisdom.

Bill is taller than I am, stronger, bigger; always was, always will be. As kids, we fought all the time. As adults, we rarely get into it. He’s a good brother, a good man, solid as a rock. A little religious in his old age, though.

“Could have joined the Marines,” Papaw said. Then he cackled at the thought of me being a Marine.

“Thank you, Papaw,” I said.

“Probably get thrown out for wearing pink undies and lipstick,” Papa added.

“It’s all good,” Bill observed. That was the Southern way of saying that life is crap, so suck it up and deal with it and stop squealing like a stuck pig. He tipped his Coors back, drank it down, and immediately reached for another.

“Probably court-martial you for beating your meat in the mess hall,” Papa said.

“Thank you, Papaw,” I said firmly.

I heard shouts as Bill’s boys played some game or other in the backyard. Bumblebee padded onto the porch, wanting attention.

“Mama’s thinking about selling the house,” Bill said.

“Why?”

“Too big for her. Dad’s gone. We’re gone. She’s here by herself with Papaw. I don’t understand why you don’t come back and live with her so she can take care of Noah.”

“She’s probably just talking,” I said.

“She’s been talking to a Realtor. She loves Noah, you know.”

“I hope so.”

“She worries about him.”

I rolled my eyes.

This again.

“I know you’ve been a good dad,” he said, turning to look at me. “Everybody knows that. But… well, you know. You’re by yourself. Noah needs a family.”

“He
has
a family,” I pointed out.

“You know what I mean.”

“I thought you were on my side.”

“You always were a stubborn shit when you got something stuck up your ass,” he said.

“And you could never see the forest for the trees,” I added.

“What Bill is trying to say is that the deaf boy should have a real man for a father,” Papaw pointed out. “Someone who likes a good set of tits and knows how to scratch his balls, not someone who’s going to teach him how to have sex with a chimpanzee.”

“That’s what your parents did, Papaw, and look how that turned out,” I said.

He grinned.

I turned back to Bill.

“Would you give up your house and move back in with Mom?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Then why should I?”

“It’s not the same.”

“You’re married. You can make babies so you’re better than me.”

“Don’t start with that shit.”

“That’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying you need help. Why don’t you let Mom help him?”

“I have to live my own life,” I said. “You know how I am.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Whatever.”

“Baby brother’s mad now.”

“Bite me,” I said.

“Shelly and I would be happy to take care of him.”

“Oh, thanks. Maybe I could live in your garage.”

“Or maybe you could cut your hair and get a decent job.”

“Not a whole lot of jobs for writers.”

“I meant get a real job, not sit around with a thumb up your ass writing about UFOs.”

“I have never written about UFOs!”

“UFOs, vampires, crops circles, whatever the hell it is, it doesn’t pay the bills.”

“Thank you for believing in me.”

“Bite me.”

“You might want to be careful before you say that to a gay man. Never know what they might do.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Noah came out onto the porch, wearing shorts and a T-shirt that once belonged to Eli.

I want to see the rabbits!

“Come on,” I said. “We’re gonna go see the rabbits.”

“Watch out for the anaconda out there,” Papaw added. “Bastard ate the mailman the other day and now the mail’s always late.”

We walked around the side of Mama’s house out to the back where there was a large barn with a long row of rabbit cages inside. Her chicken coops were full, and dozens more wandered around pecking at the ground. Mama bred both rabbits and chickens and sold them and kept herself supplied with eggs and rabbit stews and a little bit of cash on the side. It was an odd hobby for a former schoolteacher.

We made our usual inspection tour, peering into rabbit cages, checking water bottles and feed bowls, and breathing in the scent of hay and rabbit pellets.

Watch out for snakes,
I warned, because snakes were a problem at Mama’s house what with all these rabbit and chicken McNuggets walking around.

One of the four-wheelers was parked inside the barn, the key still in the ignition. Mama used it to haul away fallen tree branches and other debris that she burned out back.

“Come on,” I said, hopping onto the four-wheeler.

Noah beamed, clambering up behind me. I moved him around so he could sit in front and do the driving while I did the supervising, knowing Mama would have a stroke, but he had to learn sometime.

“L
ET
’
S
SAY
grace,” Mama said when dinner was ready.

Noah was to my right, Shelly to my left. Bill and the boys were on the other side of the table. Mama was at the head. Papaw sat in Daddy’s place.

We made the sign of the cross clasped hands.

“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit.”

We tucked into Mama’s fried chicken, red beans and rice, fried okra, corn on the cob.

“How is Father Gray?” Mama asked.

“He went on and on about abortion today,” I said.

“Rightly so,” Mama said. “All those murdered babies. I’ve been meaning to get over there and see that display of crosses.”

“If they think a clump of cells is just as important as a human being, they’re full of hot stinking crap,” I said.

“Oh, here we go,” Shelly said.

“We respect life in this house,” Mama said crossly. “Life begins at the moment of conception.
All
life is precious.”

She glanced at Noah, as if he were a case in point, as if the extra finger on his left hand and his deaf ears were exactly why life was “sacred.”

“Mama, the Twinkie is older than the idea that life begins at conception,” I pointed out.

“Shut your mouth, Wiley Cantrell!” Mama snapped.

“Don’t start on abortion today,” Shelly begged.

“Every time a woman has a period, it’s a spontaneous abortion because the egg didn’t take,” I said, undeterred. “Are we going to start having a funeral for every used tampon?”

Bill snorted.

His boys laughed like they understood.

Papaw slapped the table.

“How can you talk that way in front of the children?” Mama asked.

“Just keeping it real,” I said.

“Leave it, Mama,” Bill said. “Don’t get him going.”

“I hate the way he talks in this house!” she exclaimed.

“A funeral mass for a tampon,” Papaw said. “Put that in one of your books, Wiley, and you might sell a few copies.”

“You see where he gets it from,” Bill said, glancing at Papaw unhappily.