“I was thinking,” said Mom the next day, in the diffident way she had when there was something she really wanted to do and was hoping that you would also like to do it, but didn’t want to make demands in case you didn’t, “maybe if you aren’t too tired, we could check up in the attic for the fish print you like.”
I could have been at death’s doorstep and I would have crawled up the stairs to the attic if it meant getting rid of the Confederate wedding. I snapped my laptop closed. “Sure. All I’m doing is reading forums that are two years out-of-date.”
The door to the attic looked like all the other doors upstairs, except that it was about six inches off the ground. Mom opened it and we navigated the steps up, which were cluttered with boxes of coat hangers. (Forget maggots; I am convinced that boxes of coat hangers are the real proof of spontaneous generation.)
The attic was frightening, but not in the ghost-and-goblins way. Mostly it was a testimony to your elderly relatives dying with a whole household worth of stuff. Picture the warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, only a lot messier and with boxes labeled KITCHEN and SENTIMENTAL CRAP. (I recognized my own handwriting on that last one.) Gran Mae had died with an attic full of stuff and Mom had only gotten about half of it cleared out. The back of the attic was hidden behind ramparts of boxes and there were old cedar chests that were probably antiques, but getting to them would have required moving so many boxes that both Mom and I would be antiques ourselves by the time we got there.
Horizontal stacks of framed art leaned against one wall in long lines that stuck out at least three feet. Mom cleared a path to them by shoving more coat hangers out of the way, and we both picked a pile and began flipping.
Mine was a mixed bag of old posters from my childhood bedroom and framed samplers of indeterminate origin. They had to be gifts. I couldn’t imagine Mom buying a BLESS THIS MESS sampler. Mom was not a “Bless This Mess” kind of person. Nor was she a “Live, Laugh, Love” person, and definitely not a “Prayer Is a Family Value” person. On the other hand, she hadn’t been a “Saying Grace” person either, so maybe things had changed.
“One of my coworkers back in the day,” said Mom, when I held up PRAYER IS A FAMILY VALUE. “She made everyone in the office one for their birthdays. She meant well. And it’s so hard to throw out something handmade.”
“I’ll throw it out for you right now,” I offered. “All part of the service I provide.”
“No, it’s fine. One of these days I’ll clear all this out…” She waved aimlessly at the piles of boxes. I accepted this fiction politely.
Once I’d gotten past the sampler layer, I hit a rich vein of embarrassing childhood art, and then got into family photographs. I flipped past my baby photos, my brother’s baby photos, my mother’s wedding pics—god, she looked so young! And her hair was nearly as big as she was!—another stray sampler, a set of very seventies psychedelic posters, and …
“Is this Rasputin?”
“Eh?” Mom looked over. I held out the photo, which was an old-style sepia photo of a bearded man gazing intensely at the camera. She took it, frowning, then her face cleared. “Oh my! No, that’s your great-grandfather.”
“Looks like the mad monk to me.” I took the photo back. My great-grandfather had the same burning gaze with a little too much white around the pupil and the same shaggy beard. He obviously went to the same tailor as Rasputin too: Dusty Black Suits “R” Us.
I flipped the photo over and read the back. “Elgar Mills … Hang on, this can’t be right. It says 1917. Are you sure this wasn’t your great-grandfather?”
“Oh no.” Mom had finished her stack of art and started on the next one. “He was born in … god, I can’t remember. 1870-something. He was over sixty when your grandmother was born.” She frowned down at the art in front of her. “I got the impression it was a bit of a scandal at the time, but Mother would never talk about it. You know how she hated gossip.”
This was not strictly true. Gran Mae was a great fan of gossip about other people. It was only when it got close to home that it became a problem. “Father,” she would say, in a tone so Southern that it could have fallen straight from Scarlett O’Hara’s lips, “would say that you must never allow your good name to be sullied by other people’s mouths.” I have no idea how Father was supposed to stop this from happening, mind you, but she would utter this phrase as if it settled the matter, and then usually sweep dramatically out of the room. Gran Mae had an extraordinary capacity for dramatic sweeping.
“So wait a minute,” I said, staring into the burning eyes of Elgar Mills, “this is ‘Father’? Of ‘Father always said’ and ‘Father would never have allowed’ fame?”
“That’s the one.”
I shook my head, bemused. I hadn’t ever given much thought to my great-grandfather, or even my grandfather, who had died before I was born. My interest in my ancestors is on a rather longer timescale. You want to talk about the Saxons, I’m here for it. Immediate ancestors, meh. Once you get to flush toilets, they don’t even leave a good midden.
On the other hand, “Father” certainly appeared to have predated the flush toilet, and possibly the Saxons. “How long did this guy live, anyway?”
Mom frowned. “He died when Mom was a teenager, so he must have been in his eighties, I think?”
I wondered if he’d still had that intense gaze in his eighties. The man in the photo was definitely not young. Gran Mae had never talked about “Father” as being an old man.
On the other hand, looking at him, you could certainly believe that “Father would never have allowed” a lot of things. It was hard to imagine him doing any of the social things that Gran Mae had considered important. Charity suppers. Debutante balls. That sort of thing. Elgar looked more like the type to organize a cult meeting, or maybe bump off a Russian tsar.
“He certainly looks…” I tried to find a diplomatic phrase. “Formidable.”
“Oh yes. And quite a character too. There were all sorts of rumors back in the day, that he was a wizard or warlock or something like that.”
“Huh,” I said, mildly surprised. I typically associate wizards and warlocks with Dungeons & Dragons, not with my maternal relatives. “What, did he go around turning people into toads? I can’t imagine Gran Mae would have approved of that.”
“Well, obviously the rumors weren’t true.”
“Good to know!”
“I just think he was old and eccentric and a bit of a hermit and you know what people were like back then.”
Generally I would condemn the superstitiousness of small-town folk, but I have to admit that it wasn’t much of a leap, given Elgar’s appearance. If you had to pick a warlock out of a lineup, you’d point at that guy every time.
“Here we go!” Mom crowed, lifting out a frame. The fish glared out, wearing the angry expression common to most large freshwater fish.
I cheered and set down Father aka Rasputin. “There’s my hellgrammite!”
We tromped downstairs with the woodcut. “Shall we take down the Confederate wedding?” I asked.
“I … oh … well…” She stared at Lost Cause: The Matrimony Edition. “I suppose no one would mind for a little while, would they?”
“Who is going to mind? It’s your house.”
“And you love that fish.” Mom pressed her lips together, then rushed into the kitchen and came back with a chair. I helped steady her while she took down the Confederate wedding and handed up the woodcut, wondering why it seemed like such a big deal. Was she afraid of someone seeing it? Was she dating a KKK member and didn’t want to tell me?
No, that was ridiculous. So what the hell was going on?
She hefted the painting. The groom gazed wistfully over her shoulder as she went down the hall, and I heard a door opening upstairs.
Well, small victories. I gazed up at the hellgrammite with great pleasure. They’re a monstrous little creature that will bite your toes if you stick them in the water, but they’re also very useful for assessing water quality. You just don’t get them in polluted water.
Mom came back down a few minutes later, carrying a suitcase. “All right. I’m off to Raleigh. Call if you need anything, honey.”
“If I can get the phone to work. Text if you think of anything I can pick up at the grocery store.” We exchanged hugs and off she went. I sank down on the couch to read forums and bask in the warm glow of a marvelous and underappreciated arthropod.
I put my feet up on the coffee table. In the back of my head, a little voice whispered, “Father would never permit it…”
Screw you, Rasputin, I thought cheerfully. And Gran Mae too. The dead have to keep their feet on their floor. Let the living put their feet on the table if they feel like it.