Spooner (13 page)

A month or so before the wedding Calmer suspended hunting and games of catch in the yard and spent every free moment doing
touch-up work outside the house, painting the picnic table, raking pine needles, hanging decorations, and then, on Friday,
while an assembly of Spooner’s aunts and uncles and cousins were inside drinking lemonade and beer in front of the fans that
Calmer had borrowed and set up all over the house, Calmer himself was making trips back and forth to his school to pick up
folding chairs for the party. The chairs didn’t fit easily into the car and it took four trips, and Spooner went along, carrying
one chair while Calmer carried six, three in each hand.

At home, they put the chairs in rows in the backyard, then went back for more. When there were enough chairs, they collected
two card tables Calmer borrowed from his friend Sibilski, who taught mathematics at the school, and then went to the A&P to
pick up ham and cheese and Ritz crackers, then to a liquor store for refreshments.

All week the relatives had been coming into town, most of them checking in to the Baldwin Hotel downtown. In the days before
the wedding, they arrived at the house in the middle of the morning, and Calmer worked like a crazy man, finding reasons to
be somewhere else.

All the aunts from Spooner’s mother’s side showed up, and most of their children. Uncle Arthur, the famous concert pianist,
flew into Atlanta from his home in New York, then hired a taxi to drive him to Milledgeville. He paid for all the family’s
rooms at the hotel.

There was no one from South Dakota.

One night after supper, with the relatives in the house and Calmer doing dishes in the kitchen, Uncle Don, who was a circuit
judge in Birmingham, Alabama, had several drinks and offered the observation that in his experience, a man was best served
to begin all endeavors boldly, particularly marriage. Not running errands like the maid. Uncle Don was a tiny, round-shaped
human much admired in Birmingham legal circles for pronouncements of just this sort, issued in a resonant, deep baritone that
didn’t seem possible, coming from his small, soft body.

The air in the house was heavy and wet from all the relatives inside, and in this sort of proximity to each other the aunts
were like high-strung dogs, snapping blindly at any movement out on the periphery, and if one of them took a step back—showed
weakness to the others—it was
woe is me
for her.

On the other hand, the aunts were all tender for Uncle Arthur. He was famous and rich and talented—the living proof, in spite
of the financial calamities and shame that had befallen the family when they were children, that the Whitlowes were still
an accomplished and exceptional house. He got drunk and would laugh sometimes until he cried, and he hugged his sisters all
the time, occasionally two at the same time (which, to Calmer’s eyes, recalled priming chickens for a cockfight), but the
sisters all seemed to take some pleasure in Uncle Arthur’s hugging, even two at a time, although as a rule the family did
not enjoy the press of one another’s flesh, which is not to suggest that the sisters didn’t hug and kiss hello and good-bye,
as none of them wanted to be seen as the one who couldn’t stand it, an unmistakable sign of weakness, and each of them understood
that any such sign of weakness was an instinctive signal to the others to go ahead and rip out her throat.

Thus by the time the wedding rolled around, the aunts had been bristling at each other and baring teeth and generally mixing
it up for three days, and their husbands had been trying to stay out of the way—all except Uncle Don, who loved the sound
of his own voice too much for his own good and was roughed up several times when he didn’t know enough to shut up—and in the
end things sorted out the same way they always sorted out, which was that Daisy, the oldest, could still make the rest of
them cry.

The wedding was short and hot, and afterward a spectacular bowl carved out of ice arrived in a truck from Atlanta, and Uncle
Arthur filled it with champagne punch and then poured Spooner a glass and gave him one of his black, European cigarettes.
Uncle Arthur addressed him as
Warren, old man
. Spooner’s aunts sat in the folding chairs, getting louder as they drank, two of them recalling that Arthur hadn’t got them
fancy ice bowls for their weddings (not to mention the hundreds of pansies frozen inside it), and remarking with some satisfaction
on the growing number of bugs floating in the champagne, and the pity that the ice had to melt, that the beauty of it couldn’t
be preserved forever. And guessed how much it must have cost him to have something like that trucked in from Atlanta.

And even now Calmer, newly married, went back and forth into the house, making sure everybody had clean glasses and plates
and all the Ritz crackers they wanted. He did not stop moving once. Uncle Arthur was watching this from the back steps, Spooner
sitting on the step below him, each of them smoking a black cigarette. Uncle Arthur put his hand on Spooner’s shoulder and
said, “She’s got him on his toes, hasn’t she, old man?”

Calmer was passing the aunts a minute later when one of them, Violet, the one who was married to Uncle Don and lived in Birmingham,
Alabama, reached out and touched his arm to point out the puddle beneath the table holding the ice bowl. “Calmer, dear,” she
said, “I think it would last longer if you moved it into the shade.”

The sun had shifted now, and the sisters had shifted with it.

Calmer went to the punch bowl and lifted it up without seeming to try, and then Uncle Don made to drag the card table into
the shade of the house near the driveway, but tripped over a tree root as he backed up and fell on the seat of his pants and
claimed to have broken his coccyx, but nobody paid any attention and Calmer waited patiently while he got up and brushed himself
off, checking his behind from one side and then the other, like a woman in a dress shop. Then he pulled the table the rest
of the way to the shade and Calmer set the ice bowl back on top of it, and if the ice had gotten cold or heavy against his
arms or hands, he didn’t let it show.

The aunts applauded his feat of strength, as by now they had been drinking half the afternoon, and Calmer smiled modestly
and walked back into the house for more Ritz crackers and cheese spread, and the aunts commented to each other for the hundredth
time what a godsend it was that he’d come along when he did, one of them even going so far as to call it proof that God existed,
which surprised Spooner, because he had been thinking not exactly that but something like that himself.

And then if more proof of God were needed, a well-known mule belonging to Jaquith the one-armed attorney wandered up Spooner’s
driveway and went straight for the punch. Calmer was still inside the house. The mule had recently rolled in mud and was still
wet, and the steam rose up off his back and the animal commenced licking the outside of the bowl with a tongue a foot long
and a color Spooner recognized as the color of a skinned rabbit.

Uncle Arthur saw it first and laid his hand on Spooner’s shoulder. “Hold on, old man,” he said, “here we go.” As if he’d been
expecting something like this all along.

Aunt Violet noticed it next, the thing’s awful blue tongue flattening itself against the edge of the ice, again and again,
as if it meant to lick through to the flowers inside.

It is perhaps worth mentioning here that while Uncle Don had done quite well as a judge and before that as an attorney, and
lived in a lakeside house and bought a new Cadillac every year just like Uncle Arthur except Uncle Arthur always bought convertibles—all
this, by the way, and Violet still enjoyed torturing Spooner’s mother by saying that she was on a budget too—Uncle Don was
not and never had been in the legal profession for the money. It was love, pure and simple. Love of the law and, more than
that, of the sound of his voice expounding on the law, which he still did at the slightest provocation, from the bench in
his robes or a stool at the drugstore, to anybody who would listen, or had to, even sometimes to Spooner, although it was
not clear that he knew exactly who Spooner was, and always ended with the pronouncement that the law alone stood between man
and anarchy. And was at this moment making that very pronouncement to old man Stoppard, who’d wandered out of the house in
sandals and underpants to see what was going on, but was interrupted by the shrieking of his wife. Uncle Don stopped midsentence—in
fact the entire gathering stopped, even the mule. Aunt Violet pointed at the animal and called to her husband. “Don,” she
yelled, “for God’s sake, Don…”

And Uncle Don looked up from his lecture on anarchy only to find himself staring it in the face. He was stunned at the size
of this affront, not to mention the size of the beast—anarchy personified—not to mention the proximity of the beast’s arrival
to his discussion of the rule of law, and was momentarily at a loss for words. Which, as he would explain later in the evening,
was the reason—not cowardice—he did not take matters into his own hands then and there. Pretty soon, though, he cleared his
throat and made the sort of joke that had won Aunt Violet’s heart in the first place. He said, “Heah now, this is private
property.”

Violet yelled at him again, apparently not having heard him. She said, “Damn it, Don, it’s a darn mule in the punch bowl…”

Violet’s hearing was not what it used to be, so he repeated it. “Heah now,” he said, “this is a private party.”

The oldest sister, Daisy—the only aunt Spooner had who could tolerate him for longer than a few minutes at a time, and vice
versa—stood up and went directly to the animal to give it a piece of her mind. She was the prettiest of the sisters, her hair
prematurely gray and wrapped up into a bun. “You shoo,” she said. “Shoo. Go back where you belong.”

The mule was huge, almost the size of a horse. The steam still came up off its back, and flies circled the oozing spots of
mange it had rubbed raw against a tree or a post, and it turned its head for a look-see at the source of the noise. The mule
saw that Daisy did not have a stick to beat it over the head, and so it went back to the punch bowl without so much as lowering
its ears, but then did a kind of double take just as Aunt Daisy, who was not used to being dismissed out of hand, stamped
her foot. The mule reconsidered Daisy, and plucked the corsage off her blouse and ate it.

Uncle Don took another step closer, not wanting his wife’s oldest sister to make him look like a sissy, but Violet called
out to him to stop. “Don, don’t be a darn fool,” she said. “Let the police handle it.”

Which was when the mule began to hum. It was, for reasons hard to explain, a disturbing noise coming from a mule, and even
Daisy took a step back to reconsider.

“Here now,” Uncle Don said, “that’s enough out of you.” He didn’t mean anything in particular by that, and then he took another
step forward, as if to handle the situation, and a quiver rippled over the animal’s back, which was all Uncle Don had to see,
and he retreated back into the adjoining yard.

Likewise all of Spooner’s aunts except Daisy, who’d given as much ground as she intended to, and they picked up their plates
and drinks and their youngest children and headed for safer ground. The older children, meanwhile, had begun darting in and
out of range, touching the mule’s hindquarters and tail, and one of them—Cousin Billy Damn—even pulled its ear, and the aunts
yelled at them to stop.

The mule, meanwhile, continued to lick at the bowl with its awful, filthy tongue, teeth like Halloween corn, and then Violet’s
youngest girl lay down under the porch steps—right under Spooner and Uncle Arthur—covered her ears and issued a note so shrill
that even Uncle Arthur, who was a professional musician, had never heard anything like it, and a minute later the Shakers’
coonhound, perhaps fetched by the pitch of the little girl’s scream, came loping into the party and began snapping at guests
and mule alike, also urinating on Sibilski’s card tables and the folding chairs Calmer had borrowed from the school.

This, then, was the scene as Calmer came out the screen door carrying a tray of crackers: Beneath his feet a child was making
an unearthly noise, and ahead the Shakers’ coonhound was snapping at anything that moved, and his sisters-in-law were huddled
together with the smaller children in the next yard, where Uncle Don also was, explaining some fine point of property law
to old man Stoppard, and Jaquith the one-armed attorney’s mule was licking the ice bowl and humming.

Plus, Lily’s brother Arthur seemed to have had a breakdown and was sitting on the steps helplessly weeping.

Calmer came down the stairs, turned, and set the tray on the step next to Uncle Arthur. “Excuse me,” he said, and then he
walked straight to the punch bowl, kicked the dog off and grabbed the mule roughly by the tongue, yanked it out and to one
side of the animal’s mouth for leverage, and led it in that fashion, making some unearthly noise, out of the yard and down
the driveway in the direction of Jaquith’s property, which lay beyond the top of the hill and across Macon Highway.