up for an ordinary Saturday night supper to the tune of the Family Gospel Quartet.
But not yet. Billie reached for the piece of mirror that Dessie had set on the desk. Her head tipped back, her dark hair settled along her neck, and she parted her lips ever so slightly, rehearsing her most mysterious smile. Her outstretched hand with the cigarette swayed to the music, back and forth in the chilly air. the last few beats of the organ and guitar, the final chords of the number one song in America. The music swirled and drifted like the warm strands of smoke, like those wraith-like, almost O’s in the cool evening air, out toward the vast universe, toward the distant planets, then gone.
THREE
IN A FLASH (1967)
Ten
Saturday the twentieth of May, 1967, the morning so hot the sweat drains down my spine, I sit back against the driver’s seat, Dessie riding shotgun, and off we go, heading up a logging road to the summit of Chestnut Ridge, stopping after we crest the ridgetop. A field of hay waves in the breeze, spring green, tassels shining, the morning sun above us, not a cloud in the sky and not a soul in sight.
My arm across her shoulder, her arm across my waist, our bodies fitting together, we make our way across the long narrow ridgetop field. From the far edge of the field, a trail weaves through pine-woods. The forest floor slopes down on the right as well as the left. The trail narrows, the trees turn scrawny, finally the woods give over to sky, the hillside drops off on both sides of the path, the soil changes to flat stepping stones of crumbling shale.
We stand at the edge of a windswept cliff. A couple hundred feet below, Decker’s Creek shimmers in the sunlight. A red-tailed hawk soars overhead, then swoops a wide circle toward the tree canopy beneath us in the valley.
Nine
Alan Ray sits at the AmVets, holding America’s best, a PBR. He is smoking his last Marlboro. The crumpled pack and his last three dollars are on the bar.
He stares at me like I’m off my nut. “Y’already lost an eye, now you want to cut your balls off, too? Go ahead, then,” he says. “Just don’t let me find out you dropped down on one knee and begged for it.” Then he says, “What the hell, it’s your life. Hey, I’ll buy. Drink up while you still can.”
Eight
My mother counted her babes like the months of the year, the ones she had and soon after lost. In January, Peter, in February, Ruth, in March, Mark, in April, April, named after the month she was born and the month she died. All laid out, little graves, fieldstones in a row up the hill, a gate of saplings wired together by Pa, some plastic flowers that bloom forever. Then I came along, the one who lived, the one who sucked her teeth right out of her mouth, as she used to say. She loved us equal, those who lived for only a day or two, those who lived a year, and me, walking on the shoulders of the other four. She called me Luther. She said it sounded holy.
After me, two more gone, Simon, Eliza, and then the stones were laid side by side for her and the one who did not receive a name.
Seven
Bertram stands beside his workbench in the barn. He and I puzzle over how to get the carburetor off the International Harvester, in the hopes that we can replace the fouled intake manifold and get the old SOB to keep running once it starts.
He cracks a grin, tells me, “You can’t have just her hand, Ace, you got to take the whole package.”
Later, with Bertram at my side, Rose sits on the piano bench. A narrow silver cross made from hand-hewn framing nails is mounted on the wall on a pine plaque.
Her gray owl eyes meet mine. She says, “There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things, Luther.” Then she says, “Do you mean to be a proper Christian husband to Dorothy? Will you be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and will you take the Lord into your life as your Savior?”
Six
As a boy, I used to race to keep up with my mother. I used to watch the backs of her legs, her straight-seamed stockings knotted at the knees as she knelt in the church pew, the tied bow of an apron behind her waist as her Sunday heels clacked from room to room on our milled pine floor, swirls of dust in shafts of light.
As I grew older, both she and Pa began to change. Her fingers shriveled like bent twigs. His steel-gray eyes narrowed to slits, as if the light of day would scar them. Her slim face sagged, deep grooves chiseled her brow, hollows dug into her cheeks. His beard grew white in shapeless strands. Bit by bit, the knotted cord that held her slight form together began to fray.
One night a month before she passed, Pa took the cast-iron pan to her when she served supper too cold, and I laid into him. By that time I was almost fourteen, as strong as he was, a head taller and sober. I knocked him flat and drug him into the Ford to sleep it off, locking the house door against him. I cleaned the floor, wiped the walls, set her down with a cool washrag on her brow. From then on, I slept with a baseball bat under my bed, although I was not afraid.
The day I first felt fear, the day the pounding in my chest began, was the day I lost my compass and began spinning free. It was the day my loving mother died.
Five
We take it all in. She holds my hand tightly, a little out of breath, but pleased to stand beside me. I could tell by her broad smile, the excitement in her eyes. She would be the one to take me forward into life. I could no more stop than I could stop my own birth, than I could stop the locust limb that took my eye, than I could keep my mother’s spirit in her body, than I could stop loving this sweet girl.
I reach for it all. I say, “Des, what if we wanted to get us some land?”
She shakes her head like she was trying to get the sense of my words. I feel bold to even try. I feel scared to get it wrong. I feel the weight of each beat of my cowardly heart.
She looks up at me. She says, “Lux, what in the world are you going on about? Do you mean like a business? Like we buy us a little farm somewhere?”
I know what I have to do. I have to say the words, to make it real. Under the bluest of all skies, in the brightest light of high noon, and the spirit of my mother with me at all times, I look at Dessie. “Well, I suppose, we would probably have to get married then,” I say, stepping back up the trail a good yard or so, to give her room, not because I wanted to, but because the words push me, they drive a space between us, a space as solid as my fear.
She is quiet. The breeze holds off. The air is still, the only sound the drum of a woodpecker on a hollow tree behind us. “Lux, you did just say what I thought you said?” she asks.
Four
No one knows for sure what took my mother’s mortal soul. They think her heart gave out. She laid herself down in the middle of the day, pulled up the quilt, and passed from this earth on the tenth of September, 1964, while Pa was on the porch in his rocking chair, swigging from a bottle, and I was at school, too far away to hear if she cried out for help.
That fall, Pa slept on the porch in his rocker, swore he wasn’t asleep when I tried to wake him to come to bed. When the moon was right and he was well, he and I went coon hunting, a momentary truce, us halfway up some logging road or setting out the night beneath that hit ’n’ miss gas well, drinking and waiting for the hounds to bay and the chase to begin. He’d run on about fighting in France and Italy. Though he would never
