IN THE HOUSE where Gene and Miller grew up, one wall had been crowded couch to ceiling with portraits of long-dead ancestors. Many of the black and white and rust-colored photographs hung in their original wood frames, and some contained clumps of colorless hair bundled and fastened behind the glass, like relics in religious shrines. These were the grim faces Gene put to the family stories his mother told them as children. Everything he knew about his family came from Elizabeth, who was a compulsive storyteller and first-class exaggerator, and, as he continued to witness every week at the slobber house, sometimes an out-and-out fabricator. He had always loved the family history and didn’t care how much was actually true. He especially loved that all the stories, generation after generation, were set on the little-changed family land where he now lived and worked. It was easy to picture his ancestors riding buggies down the same old roads, sitting beneath shade trees, or wringing chicken necks in backyards. When he thought of these stories, as he so often did, as if remembering them for the children he would never have, he heard them in his mother’s drawling little-girl voice. Now, heading south toward Metropolis, Gene realized his memory was all that was left, and he told himself the stories once again.
After the Civil War, Joseph Miller, who had been a personal aid to General Grant, returned to Carmi with a war wound and a goodly sum of money. Nobody else in Carmi had any money, so Joseph set up business as a loan shark and promptly made substantially more money, enough to start First National Carmi Bank. He bought up thousands of acres of farmland, which he rented out to tenants or worked in sharecropper arrangements. Despite the searing hot and humid Southern Illinois summers, he always wore a large camel-hair coat—even to bank board meetings—to stave the chills of his opium addiction. According to family lore, Joseph had started injecting opium even before the war ended, sometimes smoking it, to blur the pain in his shoulder from the wound that never quite healed. Elizabeth said he lived the rest of his life in an opium haze that deteriorated his nerves but never dulled his business acumen. He accumulated more and more farmland, buying out his neighbors or foreclosing on their property through his bank, until he owned everything as far as he could see from his front porch in any direction.
Joseph’s wife, Willamina, also smoked a pipe, but she puffed tobacco, not opium. Gene often imagined them sitting on the porch of a house no longer there, a few cultivated acres from his place, Joseph in his camel-hair coat and Willamina smoking her favorite corncob pipe, both of them surveying the thousands of shallow-hilled acres stretching from the Little Wabash all the way to the outskirts of Carmi.
Gene was now the oldest male on this side of the family—and one of the longest-lived in the whole family history. Miller had been until yesterday. All of Joseph Miller’s male offspring lived short lives of decadence and disrepute. One of his progeny died of syphilis complications while reading a book in a bathtub, where he spent his last years soaking the burning torment of his sins. Another fell off a yacht in the Florida Keys, intoxicating nearby carnivorous sea-creatures with his blood-bourbon level. Another died of an infection after a duel over a married woman 170 miles north in Champaign, a woman to whom neither duelist was married. All drank too much and died young, a tendency which didn’t stop when it branched into the Barnes line of the family, certainly not with his brother Miller.
Joe Barnes, a descendent of Joseph and Willamina Miller’s daughter, married Lizzie Cross—Grandma Lizzie, as Gene’s mother called her in these stories, her namesake. Lizzie came to Carmi with her mother from Kentucky after the Tennessee Valley Authority flooded their home, an inn famous for putting up politicians stumping through the hick electorate. The most famous politician to stay at their inn was Abraham Lincoln, and even though he’d been a Republican, Gene’s mother talked right up to her last coherent days about how the family still owned a bed that had once been slept in by Abraham Lincoln. Gene guessed that if the bed remained in the family now, it belonged to Miller’s ex-wife.
He glanced behind him as a silver Ford Explorer with tinted windows came up fast and passed him—someone obviously more anxious to get to their destination than he was.
Lizzie and her mother had arrived in Carmi with plans to set up a new inn, which is how she met Joe Barnes, an attractive and independently wealthy young lawyer whose two primary afflictions were reading and drinking. All the Barnes men were notorious readers and drinkers, and Joe Barnes was the most accomplished in both but not without his charms. Lizzie, however, coming from a backwoods Kentucky holler, was rough-hewn at best, and before they got married, Joe sent her to finishing school where never-married schoolmarms tried to polish her Kentucky accent and tame a tongue that had more than a little taste for profanity. Lizzie learned how to dress in polite society, how to wear gloves and hats, how to serve tea, and how to curtail her exuberant streams of profanity—at least in polite company.
Lizzie was also a diabolical cook and brought a rich lore of southern cuisine with her to Carmi, and her instincts with wild game were accented by more continental flavors she learned in finishing school. Her cooking was known all over White County: raccoon in barberry sauce, Grand Pacific Game Pie (with woodcock or snipe), herb-roasted otter, Spanish fricasseed rabbit garnished with roses. Lizzie used the finishing, finery, and presentation they taught her to sneak the savagery of wild game in right under the noses of Carmi high society. She made roast haunch of venison, roast possum with cranberry sauce, hare pie, quail on toast points, merkel turtle stew, and her most famous dish of all: cherry blossom gravy, dumplings, and beer-battered squirrel.
Gene only remembered eating her dessert, specifically peach cobbler with a dollop of “mode,” and licking the last smears from a blue depression-glass plate he held up to his face. His mother typically frowned on such behavior, but Lizzie thought it perfectly appropriate, a compliment even, to lick the plate clean, and no one would correct her, especially in her own house.
Lizzie had been a large, big-bosomed woman, laughing and vivacious, the center of a swirling political whirlwind of loyal FDR Democrats. She continued the family tradition of putting up politicians and debating and plotting political fortunes late into the night—concealing from everyone political ambitions of her own. Their young son, Frank, stayed up, too, lurking under the heavy-legged Arts & Crafts furniture in the dining room. Lizzie’s husband, Joe Barnes, had no interest in politics and preferred to drink and read in his basement, where he spent increasing amounts of time, especially as their three-story Victorian house grew busier and busier. By the time Joe was in his late twenties, he wore nothing but a ragged old bathrobe, which barely went around his burgeoning gut, and rarely ventured into daylight or Democratic company.
Lizzie left him meals on the kitchen table. Joe assembled a small bed and furniture and often stayed in the basement days and nights at a time, climbing the stairs to the main floor less and less often. Since he rarely went upstairs and never outside, no one knew how he obtained his books, but he read the best that was written at the time. Lizzie assumed his friends, mostly drunken novelists, drunken ragtag philosophers, and just plain drunks, delivered the books—along with beer, bourbon, and bottles of Bordeaux—when they stopped by to talk.
Once Lizzie noticed a rare flurry of activity and, curious, went down the stairs after a few days to find that Joe, who had never done a lick of work, had taken it upon himself to put in his own plumbing—a toilet, sink, and even a small shower stall, and after that Joe Barnes never walked up from his basement again. She took to leaving his dinners on a tray at the top of the stairs—heaping platefuls swamped in sauces and gravies, generously portioned from her parties or those rare times she spent alone and cooked for herself. And each morning she picked up from the top of the stairs a tray of dishes mopped clean.
This routine went on for two years, and the most she ever saw of her husband was a dark-robed shape, a broad back lumbering down the stairs. Lizzie never said a word and refused to discuss the subject of Joe Barnes with anyone. She kept busy, her bosom swelling, laughing, the figurehead on the prow of her party’s ship, three-year-old Frank playing with wooden people carved from spools beneath the oaken table.
One day she found the tray untouched, but since it wasn’t unlike Joe to miss a meal from time to time, she thought nothing of it. Several untouched trays later, she finally ventured downstairs and discovered Joe dead on the couch, his robe a mess of stains. The county coroner pronounced him five-days dead, euphemistically of acute indigestion, and when they tried to bring him up they found they couldn’t bend his body around the stairs up through the steep cellar doorway. Joe Barnes had hardened stiff as timber. They couldn’t cut up the stairs and support beams, nor could they squeeze him through the basement window, through which all his thinner friends came and went as they pleased any time of night.
“Do whatever it takes to get him buried,” said Lizzie. “Saw off his legs if you have to, just don’t tell me about it.”
And that’s what they did, carrying him up to the light of day in pieces. The bookcases had been ransacked and the store of liquor plundered, leaving Lizzie with the bulk of Joe’s old family money and the freedom to pursue a political career, which she began as a parole officer and worked her way up, traveling over the Illinois cornfields to attend every state and county fair and political convention (where she also accumulated her enormous clutter of blue knickknacks and doodads) and feeding and entertaining America’s most prominent Democrats until she was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1952, Illinois’ first woman state senator.
This story of the legs still made Gene laugh, as it did when his mother told it to the boys over and over, though he now wondered if it were true or evolved to ridiculous proportions in all the retellings, as Miller claimed. Miller had frequently protested that they were exaggerations, but both boys had always enjoyed listening anyway. Now the stories their mother told were pure fantasy, and Gene wondered what Miller would have made of them, if he would have rolled his eyes in disdain or laughed at the outrageous imaginative detail.
In addition to the plate-licking incident, Gene had one or two other fleeting memories of his great-grandmother Lizzie. The first was the big-bosomed woman sitting on a light blue couch and stringing green beans with one of those blue rooster mixing bowls in her lap as he, Miller, and their mother walked in the door. She was always cooking, and as they walked in they were surrounded by blue dishes, blue knickknacks, blue doodads, blue ashtrays, cracked blue tiffany lamps, and creaking old blue furniture like the couch she sat on and which, after being reupholstered several times, now rested in Gene’s living room, covered in piles of clean but unfolded laundry. This world was a wash of blue, and Gene had decided that moment, at the age of three, that his favorite color was also blue. It still was as he sped on his blue BMW motorcycle with a blue helmet and shiny black visor, all under the faded-denim sky.
Looking into his rearview mirror, Gene saw a White County Sheriff’s Department cruiser coming up fast behind him.
“Shit!” he thought. “They’ve found him already!”
His heart walloped against his ribcage and sweat trickled down his back as he slowed and started to pull over. Maybe he’d only been speeding. Maybe they hadn’t found Miller. Maybe—but the sheriff’s car didn’t slow down at all. As the brown and green car passed him, Gene saw Justin Poole, a deputy who he still thought of as a kid, raise his hand in greeting and keep right on going. Gene realized Justin didn’t even have his lights on. He felt like an idiot and knew he needed to calm down, not be so jumpy or panic so quickly, or he might give himself away. Once he got to Metropolis, he couldn’t act suspiciously or make stupid mistakes or he might end up back in his own hog shed with Miller.
Speeding up again on the highway, he looked at his shadow in the morning sun, long but faint, stretching over the shoulder, the ditch, and the sea of cornstalks stirring from nothing but his own motion. Gene returned to where he’d left with his great-grandmother, like picking up again on a morning dream after being awakened. He didn’t want to dwell on the dangers ahead, and family history was a good distraction. His only other memory of her was lying in a big trapezoid-shaped room upstairs in her huge house, his brother in a mirror image room across the hall, and falling asleep to Lizzie’s loud laughter tumbling up three stories, two flights of stairs, and through the big wooden doors. He could hear the floorboards creak as Miller, angry at having to go to bed and not be part of what was going on, crept out of his room and down the stairs only to be shooed back to bed.
Lizzie’s son Frank eloped to Edwardsville with a woman named Chantal Blanche Fischer (which she pronounced Chantle), against Lizzie’s wishes, then stayed briefly in St. Louis, where he had graduated from law school at Washington University. After Lizzie simmered down, they settled in Carmi, where Frank practiced law and Chantal gave birth to Elizabeth, a name of appeasement as well as a nod to family history. Elizabeth was two when a strep infection reached down from Frank’s throat to his heart and throttled him. This occurred in 1944, right when penicillin was first being tested, but not in Carmi, Illinois. Frank died leaving his daughter with no real memories of him, and Chantal spent the rest of her life feuding with Lizzie. Chantal had never been good enough for Frank, and then he died and Lizzie was stuck with his worst half.
Lizzie’s animosity continued when Chantal remarried, and the two never spoke again. Many Barnes family members, not just Miller and Elizabeth, had waged long silent cold wars. Chantal died the bitterest woman in Carmi. Frank had died a few years after they married. Her second husband suffered a stroke two years after they married, and she spent the rest of her life taking care of him, a man who, with the exception of one blood vessel in his brain, had the constitution of a draft horse. He lived a long life as a semi-invalid who could barely walk and who couldn’t speak. She also endured a double mastectomy, a hysterectomy, cancer of the sinus passages, a number of small strokes, and gout. Chantal died a year after her second husband, which Gene now realized was the last time he’d seen Miller. Chantal had requested she be buried with her cat, which she wanted killed and stuffed and put with her in the coffin.
“Does she think she’s an Egyptian queen?” Miller had asked.
“She loved that cat more than anything,” Elizabeth had said. “Or anyone.”
“Well, I’m not killing it,” said Gene.
“Me either.” Miller stuck his hands in his pockets. “You kill it.”
Instead they buried Chantal with a bag of Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses, though Gene hadn’t been able to resist opening the bag and popping a couple in his mouth.
“Gene!” Elizabeth scolded in a shocked whisper.
“You think she’ll notice some missing?” Miller’s eyebrows rose as he helped himself to a handful. Before the Vongottens closed the lid on Chantal’s casket, even Elizabeth had shrugged and helped herself to a chocolate kiss.
Miller’s inexplicable death, his body ripening in a hog shed with an Over/Under on his lap, was a ridiculous end to a ridiculous family history. No wonder cactus choked the family plot. Gene imagined the long dead lying in their neat little rows while prickly tentacles grew out of their hearts, cracked open caskets, bore through the dirt, tilted tombstones, and reached into each other’s graves to throttle one another.
As he plowed through the wind, it occurred to him that, since their parents never took them to church, the religion he’d been raised on had been family. With no more worshipful offspring and none of it written down, their religion, like so many other tribal religions, would soon become extinct. And then what would happen to the little family plot, the fields around it, and the prickly pear? Miller’s big idea had been to reforest all the land around the plot and return it to its original sylvan state. When Gene first heard his plan over a holiday dinner, he had scoffed, and their mother had started to cry.
“It’s been in our family for seven generations!” she exaggerated.
“It’ll still be in the family. It just doesn’t have to be cornfields.”
“It’s been our farmland for generations!” she wept.
“You know, Miller,” Gene said, pointing a fork his brother’s direction, “that’s the stupidest idea you’ve had yet.”
Miller shrugged. “It never makes any money. Whatever Mom might say now, the farm loses money every year.”
“It most certainly does not!” Elizabeth’s eyes widened, offended her son would even suggest such a thing.
“You tell us it does.”
“How do you think I paid for your college?”
“I thought it was money Dad put away.”
“Well it wasn’t.”
Gene and Miller had looked at each other, not sure where to find the truth.
“Come on, Mom, you complain about how you lose money every year. Why not turn it into forest and have the taxes waived?”
After a few moments of stunned silence, their mother fled to her room and collapsed on the bed, her sobs so loud they carried throughout the house despite the locked-shut door. The two brothers sat and looked at each other across the table.
“Why’d you have to go upset her?” Gene narrowed one eye at his brother. “You always have to make trouble.”
Though Gene hated to admit it, Miller had been right. The farm was a burden, and it didn’t make any money these days. If it had gone to Miller, he would have reforested it and started some kind of a wildlife refuge. Gene could have no heirs, and now, after generations, it would go to strangers, most likely corporate shareholders of the neighboring farmland.
As he rode on, it dawned on him that Miller’s suggestion had been a turning point for their mother. She never forgave Miller for his attitude toward the land, and that day she had probably taken the first emotional steps toward cutting her eldest son out of her will, out of his inheritance, and out of the family. Although being disinherited probably suited Miller just fine, at the very least he deserved to be buried with the rest of them in the silt, among the cactus.