know I don’t drink.”
“Yeah, but it would tickle the pure-dee hell outta me to see you do something that’d make Sam Lake have a stroke if he knew about it.”
Willadee laughed, and reached across the bar, and goosed her daddy in the ribs, and said, “Well, give me that beer. Because I surely would like to see you get tickled.”
It was after 2:00 A.M. by the time Willadee left Never Closes and sneaked back through the house. Her mother was just coming out of the bathroom, and the two bumped into each other in the hall.
“Willadee, have you got beer on your breath?”
“Yes, ma’am, I have.”
“Well, forevermore,” Calla said as she headed up the stairs. She was going to have to mark this day on the calendar.
Later on, when Willadee was in her old room, she lay in bed thinking about how the first beer had tasted like rotten tomatoes, but the second one had simply tasted wet and welcome, and how the noise and laughter in the bar had been as intoxicating as the beer. She and her daddy had left the customers to wait on themselves and had found an empty table and talked about everything on earth, the way they used to, before Willadee got married. She had been the old man’s shadow, back then. Now, he had become the shadow. Almost invisible these days. But not tonight. Tonight, he’d had a shine about him.
He didn’t want to die anymore. He certainly did not seem to want to die anymore. He’d just been feeling unnecessary for so long, and she’d shown him how necessary he was, by sitting with him those hours. Joking with him, and listening with her heart, while he poured out his.
“You’ve always been my favorite,” he had told her, just before she left Never Closes. “I love the others. All of them. I’m their daddy, and I love them. But you. You and Walter—” He shook his head. All his feelings stuck in his throat. Then he kissed her cheek, there at the back door of the bar. John Moses, ushering his beloved daughter back into the solid safety of the house he had built when he was a stalwart, younger man. John Moses, feeling necessary.
Willadee was groggy, but it was a pleasant sort of grogginess. Like she was floating. Nothing to tie her down and hold her to earth. She could just float higher and higher, and look down at life while it turned all fuzzy and indistinct around the edges. She promised herself that, one of these days, she was going to have another couple of beers. One of these days. She was a Moses, after all.
Her father’s favorite child.
Chapter 3
Kinfolk started pouring in early the next morning. Pulling up in the front yard, and piling out of their cars, and opening the trunks of those cars with a flourish. Huge bowls of potato salad and dishpans full of fried chicken were produced like rabbits out of hats. And corn on the cob, and squash casseroles, and dilled green beans, and fifty kinds of pickles, and gallon jugs of iced tea, and enough pies and cakes to founder a multitude. Which was what was on hand.
John and Calla’s sons, Toy and Sid and Alvis, had been the first to arrive, along with their wives and offspring. Toy didn’t have any children, but Sid had two and Alvis had six, so what with Willadee’s three, nobody was worried that the family line might fade out any time soon.
“It’s unbelievable how many grandkids I’ve got,” Grandma Calla said, not to anybody in particular.
Willadee sang out, “But not inconceivable!”
All her brothers howled with laughter.
Calla said, “I can see I’ve raised a whole passel of heathens.” She was trying to look as if she disapproved, but it wasn’t any use. She approved of a good time, and everybody was having one.
The womenfolk laid the food out on the tables, and the kids started helping themselves before they were supposed to, so somebody had to say the blessing quick. Nicey (who was married to Sid, Willadee’s oldest brother) was selected, since it would have hurt her feelings if she hadn’t been. She was a serious churchgoer and had been teaching the Sunbeams practically ever since she’d gotten too old to be one. She prayed a fancy prayer, full of Thines and Thous, ending up with “Ah-men.” Sid and Alvis followed that with “Dive in!” which just about gave Nicey the vapors, it sounding so irreverent and all.
“You married into an irreverent family,” Alvis’s wife, Eudora, told her. “You got to take the bad with the worse.”
John had closed the bar just before sunup that morning and had gone straight to bed, figuring that would give him five or six hours of sleep, enough sleep for a well man, and he was certainly feeling like a well man. Calla’s store was operating on the honor system, the way it always did on reunion day. Folks who needed to buy something just went in and got what they wanted, and left the money or a note in a jar on the counter. There weren’t many customers until after church, when folks started drifting in, picking up last-minute items like brown ’n’ serve rolls and whipping cream for their Sunday dinners. It was the most natural thing in the world that quite a few of the customers would drift from the store into the yard, and would visit for a while, protesting that they really had to be getting on home until somebody put a plate into their hands and they were forced to stay and eat.
Swan, Noble, and Bienville had a hard time figuring out who was kin and who wasn’t. The closest relatives they remembered from year to year, but there was this sea of nonrelatives, not to mention second cousins, and third cousins, and great-aunts twice removed. This cracked the kids up. “If that old bird’s been twice removed, how come she keeps coming back?” they would whisper to each other, and then they’d snicker until they got the hiccups or a swat on the pants from their grandmother, whichever happened first.
John Moses woke up just before noon and wandered down to join the celebration. His sons and Willadee all came up out of the yard onto the side porch to greet him. The side porch had been added onto the house way back, shortly after John had walled in the back porch. John said a house wasn’t a home if it didn’t have a porch, a man had to have something to pee off of. Indoor plumbing was fine, as far as it went, but it never would offer a man the same sense of freedom that a porch would. The daughters all hugged John’s neck (Willadee rubbed his stubbled chin lovingly), and the sons all shook his hand. John smiled from ear to ear.
“Somebody said there was a party,” he boomed.
“They was right,” Toy Moses said.
Toy looked nothing like his name implied. He stood six foot four, with muscles that rippled powerfully beneath his cotton shirt. He walked real straight and stiff-starched. Straighter than anyone Swan and her brothers had ever seen. There was a scar on his forehead and a tattoo of a belly dancer on his arm, and all told, he had the look of a man you wouldn’t want to mess with. He was soft-spoken, though, especially when he was talking to his daddy. He said, “You better come on out here and get some grub, before it’s all gone.”
John said, “You won’t have to twist my arm,” just as cheerful as you please, and he led his brood back down the steps.
When everybody had eaten until they were stuffed, the grown-ups flopped down into lawn chairs and onto the grass, and commenced talking about the good old days. The littlest kids all got put down for naps, and the teenagers meandered out to the cars to listen to the radio and talk about things they ought not to know about. Noble tried to join this worldly crowd, but he was coolly rejected, so he slunk off to the creek to think his own thoughts. Swan and Bienville crawled under the house
