hands. He’s wearing the double-breasted dark blue suit he used to wear to church. Mama’s wearing her favorite church dress, sky-blue silk with white polka dots—a little tight on her now. Too many pounds in the wrong places, she says, but she still wears that dress to church.
Mama’s feeding him Gerber’s baby food. She dips a spoon into the jar, concentrating her gaze without changing her smile on the spoon sliding over to his open mouth. She wraps the jar in aluminum foil so he won’t know it’s baby food. One time my wife, Sandy, made the mistake of telling him what he was eating. He wouldn’t let Mama feed him that night; he wasn’t having any baby food. Mama spoons out chicken and dumplings, coaxing the stuff past his lower lip. We’re having chicken and dumplings for dinner, Pauley. That used to be one of his favorite meals. Chicken and dumplings, collard greens, corn on the cob, a quart of iced tea to wash it down, you better believe he could put it away.
Mama has him in a diaper when the Reverend Hatcher comes to pray for him. We can’t keep him from pulling the blanket off. The Reverend Hatcher is sitting beside the bed. He takes my father’s right hand in his big ham hands patting it like he was patting a dog if he had one but he doesn’t. He won’t look at the diaper.
My father turns over on one side, that he’s able to do. He cups his chin in his hand, stretching toes out on one stretched out foot, his toenails so long they’re hooking. Pay no attention, Mama whispers, he’s deteriorating, so I try not to. The Reverend Hatcher can’t get up out of his chair. The Reverend Hatcher’s white shirt, it’s stuck to the ladder-back chair.
My father was an enlisted man in World War Two. On the living room wall we have a map of France and western Germany showing his unit’s movements, in dotted red ink, a Third Army patch and his unit insignia superimposed, and a photograph of him in summer khakis and garrison cap.
He told me this story about the war, just after I turned sixteen. He had me learning to drive; he took me down the road a ways and made me keep at it until the gears stopped grinding and I got the hang of it. Then we went to the Dairy Delight in town and he bought me a banana split. I saw him filling up his side of the booth and remembered the photograph of him in the living room, a skinny kid like myself then, and that made me ask him about the war. He said you wouldn’t want to know about it. Then he said—here’s something I think you should know about—and lit up a Camel and started in.
He had a buddy, Denny Maxwell. He told me what had happened to Denny Maxwell. That was in November of 1944, in the fighting in the Hurtgen Forest. It was cold in the Hurtgen Forest. In the mornings they’d have to thaw out their socks, try doing that in a foxhole. He and Denny were on patrol one morning and up ahead they saw a farm house. There weren’t any Germans around. Denny Maxwell was freezing his tail off so he decided he was going to go to that farm house and get warm no matter what. The farm house sat in an open field edged with woods, but that didn’t bother Denny Maxwell. “He told me the bullet that had his name on it hadn’t been made yet.” Denny Maxwell wanted my father to go with him, but my father wasn’t about to do that. He said he didn’t want to be a target. So Denny Maxwell went out there himself and the Germans opened up on him from the woods. He must have had a dozen bullets in him and every one had his name on it.
“You remember Denny Maxwell, Wayne,” my father said to me, grinding his Camel out in a Dairy Delight ashtray, “when you’re about to do something stupid.”
I’ve been married to Sandy for seventeen years. We’ve had a pretty good life together. We have a teenage son, Wayne Jr., who so far has stayed out of trouble. We have good jobs, a good income between us. I’m still parts manager at Fuller Ford and Sandy’s still teaching English at Beauregard High.
My father worked at Uniroyal for thirty years. Before that he worked at the mill hauling cotton bales on a fork lift. He got laid off when the mill closed down, but lucky for him—lucky for me he’d say—he got on at Uniroyal. At Uniroyal, he had job security, and benefits, a pension, a group medical plan, the only bad thing about his job was, toward the end anyway, before he retired, they kept changing shifts on him. He’d work day shift part of the week, then they’d switch him over to the swing shift. That, he used to tell us, can get old pretty quick. He’d tell Mama he ought to quit, take a little less in his retirement package.
I remember him in his blue suit, Mama unfolding her napkin, laying it primly in her lap, her hair gray even then. There’d be this silence when my father said he wanted to quit, fried chicken, fried catfish in front of us, yams, black-eyed peas put on hold while my father studied Mama’s dubious face, knowing always what answer he was going to get yet acting as if he didn’t. As soon as Mama got her napkin arranged, stirred sugar into her iced tea, she’d say “I hear what you’re saying, Pauley, but what would you do if you did retire?” And my father would say, “I’d go fishing.”
After church my father used to tell Marleah Willis how much he enjoyed her hymn singing. Marleah was married to Buddy Willis at the time. Buddy used to sell Chevrolets, but after the two of them split up he moved to Columbus and started his own used car business.
Marleah Willis could really sing high and sweet, and when she did a solo for the congregation, my father would lift his head up and close his eyes, her voice taking him where he wanted to go. He’d sit on the end of the pew so he could get out quick when Marleah came our way. When he complimented Marleah on her singing, heads turned, people noticed it. He wasn’t tall but he was broad in the shoulders He had a gut on him then. He could put away steak and potatoes and corn on the cob, fried okra, a dozen catfish, so he took up a lot of space in the aisle. He’d be pointed one way, toward the altar, and Marleah she was on her way out of the church, the traffic backed up behind her, Marleah trying to get past him, knowing she had to say something back. She’d say, “It’s sweet of you to say that, Mr. Creel.”
Every Sunday it’s sweet of him, Sandy would say, and Mama she’d snap her pocket book shut and shove her hymnal back in the rack.
Mama had talked to Marleah after church because my father, he wanted Marleah to sing a hymn for him, and Marleah said she would come over in the afternoon. She didn’t want to, that was clear. Marleah scooted the piano bench under the piano, closed up the hymnal, and looked the other way from Mama. She looked at me once, me with Sandy, like I’d better be just another married man. Then she went over to Reverend Hatcher. Smoothing out the lumps in her sky blue dress, Mama headed up the aisle toward the pulpit.
That Sunday Mama talked to Marleah in church, I was still thinking about what had happened at Jack Lazenby’s annual Fourth of July barbecue. Jack held it behind his house, which was half a mile down the road from the convenience store he owned and ran, The Lazy Bee—Lay-Z and a striped bumblebee Sandy tells me is called a rebus.
We were sitting around Jack’s barbecue pit, the chigger patch Sandy called it, digesting barbecued pork—y’all come but bring your own lawn chairs and Chigger-Red—that was Sandy’s view of Lazenby hospitality. Marleah was sitting next to me. She was telling me about life without Buddy. They’d been divorced for nearly a year now. She’d had to haul the garbage to the garbage pit down the road, wasn’t that fun, and keep the lawn mowed. Buddy wasn’t making cigarette runs for her Winston One Hundred Lights and his Marlboro One Hundreds.
Big Jack was shooting off bottle rockets. Fire one, he’d boom out, fire two! I heard them whooshing out in the dark, popping over the pines. Marleah shook her last cigarette out and crumpled the pack. “I’m thinking that’s my last Winston, Wayne.”
I’d smoked my last panatela, but I wasn’t about to be her errand boy. I said I wasn’t used to making cigarette runs. She tweaked my shirt below the elbow and said she would go with me. Sandy had gone to the bathroom. We might be back before she missed us.
I decided to stop at the Lazy Bee. Marleah went in with
