“FIX MY COFFEE,” RYDER JONES SAID TO HIS WIFE.
“All right, hon,” Lee answered.
While she opened the door on the pantry cabinet, she glanced at her husband, who was working at the kitchen table. Ryder was as absorbed with his wires and clocks as son Bobby making a model airplane. Friday was Ryder’s half-day off this month, and he was wasting the afternoon as usual. Up on the cabinet shelf beside the Maxwell Instant, she noticed the cylindrical cardboard box of Morton’s salt.
Stealthily, Lee dumped the sugar out of the sugar bowl and into a cracked cup and hid the cup on a high shelf. She took the salt down, lifted up the metal spout in the lid. As the metal shunt came up, the cardboard creaked a little, but Ryder didn’t glance her way.
Lee’d always admired how neatly made a salt box was—a sturdy cylinder completely closed, except for that one little snout of a spout, the box wrapped round with a nice navy blue label. Like it was dressed up to go out. The box never got out of working order either. She poured the salt into the sugar bowl.
Ryder was still absorbed in reading his bomb directions. She turned and flicked on the gas under the one-quart white enamel pot. She used that pot just to boil water, and it had tan mineral deposits on the inside. Lee had asked Ryder couldn’t she have a little kettle for the stove, but he’d said there wasn’t any need. Around the top of the white enamel pot ran a line of red trim, bright and nice, except where she’d banged it once and there was a black chipped place.
Ryder was reading the directions one of his Klan buddies had printed down for him. Handwriting like a second grader, Lee thought. It had occurred to her that since she had children of different ages, she could figure out at exactly what age each of his Klan buddies had stopped growing up. Ryder himself was about ten, same as Bobby, but Bobby was still growing. Some of the Klan were more like six or seven.
Suddenly she said to Ryder, “You know sometimes I wonder if the kids might be better off brought up Catholic.”
“Catholic!” he yelled and banged the table with his fist. His soldering iron leapt onto the floor. “Now look what you made me do!”
She’d wanted to rile him, and she had. She was bored. He ought to pay more attention to her. Take her out to a movie. At least talk to her, not sit there playing like a child. “Well I was just thinking about it,” she said, completely unruffled.
He responded to her ease with his own good humor. “Kennedy works for the pope.”
She said nothing. Kennedy was the only politician who wasn’t a complete bore, and that was just because he was good-looking. Ryder picked up his iron and inspected the tip for damage.
“That’s one thought you’d better put out of your head, girl,” Ryder said. “Catholics aren’t real Americans.”
She nodded at the mess of buckets and bobbers on the table. “I don’t think they’ll want any more bombs now for a long, long time,” she said.
“You don’t know nothing about it.” The tide of scorn began to rise in his tone.
“How come you don’t already know how to make it, if you done what you said you done?”
“There’s different types.”
“How’d you do the other?”
“It wasn’t easy.”
“I can smell Bobby’s airplane glue all the way in here from the living room,” she said.
“Yeah.” He fell silent.
Lee wandered into the front room. The two little ones were playing Go Fish on the floor, proud that they knew their numbers well enough to compete. But it was Bobby she was proud of. He was 100 percent pure boy with a shock of hair on his forehead; she loved the way he was focused on making his model. Bobby was gluing the little gas tank onto the end of a fighter wing. He didn’t even know she’d come into the room. She’d let him stay home with a cold.
Ryder ought to be proud of his kids, she thought. She imagined her children crossing themselves like Catholics did in the movies and thought how sweet and pious Bobby, Shirley, and Tommy would look. She’d known some Italian Catholics growing up. They were the same as anybody. Maybe happier, with their big families and huge dishes of spaghetti.
“Water’s boiling,” Ryder called.
“You know what, Ryder?” she said, reentering the kitchen. “I think it’s nothing but ignorance to be down on Catholics.”
“I don’t want to ever hear you say that again.” He sounded tense.
“Well what’d they do?” She selected a cracked cup for Ryder on purpose. “They didn’t crucify Jesus.”
“Hurry up, will you? You’re slow as Christmas.”
“Well, what’d they do?” She set the coffee and the sugar bowl and a spoon down in front of Ryder. “You fix the sugar to suit.”
She watched him spoon the crystals into his cup, two teaspoonfuls. He stirred it to help it cool.
“Back in the 1920s, we had to shoot that Father Coyle.”
She laughed. “You wasn’t even alive back in the 1920s. How could you shoot anybody?”
“The Klan. It was a Methodist minister Klan member kilt him.”
“I just don’t believe that.”
“That Father Coyle married the Methodist minister’s daughter to a Mexican, and he was Catholic. He shot him on the porch of the priest house.”
“I never read any Alabama history about that.”
“It’s not all in books, Lee. But people know, and we hand it down, from generation to generation.” He sipped his coffee and yelled, “God-damn son of a bitch! What’d you put in my coffee?”
She smiled prettily, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Same old coffee.”
He licked his finger and stuck it in the sugar bowl, then in his mouth. “This here is salt!”
She licked her finger and tasted, mimicking him. “Why, I believe you’re right.” She was in a fine mood.
Springing out of his chair, Ryder dashed the contents of the coffee cup into the sink. He banged the cup on the drain board, and it broke in two, right along a crack line.
“Don’t break up the dishes, hon,” she said.
“Don’t you stand there like an idiot with your finger stuck in your mouth. I asked you for some coffee.”
“Well, I’ll just have to start over.” She turned her back to him, but she heard him fling open the cabinet doors.
“Where’s the gol-durned sugar!” He was scanning the high shelves.
“I’ll look, honey. You just sit down and figure on your bomb.”
“Here it is!” he announced. “Somebody poured it out of the bowl and into this cup. You do that, Lee?”
“Now why’d I’d gone and did a silly thing like that, Mr. Ryder Jones?”
He sprang at her and slapped her finger out of her mouth.
“Mr. Tough Guy,” she taunted.
He grabbed her hand and twisted her arm behind her back. “You better tell me the truth, woman, or I’m gonna teach you.”
“Teach me what?” He wasn’t hurting her much. “You’re just making a tempest out of a teapot.”
When Ryder jerked her hand up, hard, a switch flipped inside her. Something familiar and intense was beginning, though it was only afternoon.
“That hurts!” she said. “Stop it!” A current of fear like a thrill went through her. But suddenly there was Bobby standing in the doorway.
“Dad,” he said, “whatcha doing to Mama?” He seemed scared but brave.
“Oh, Bobby,” she said, “we were just playing.” He looked small, just a little boy.
He brushed his forelock away from his eyes. “You said it hurts. Just now you said ‘That hurts!’ ” All innocence, he was just asking a question. He had a cold in his nose.
Ryder said threateningly, “Go back in the living room, son.”
Ryder was hurting her worse, but she wouldn’t let on in front of Bobby. She just said to her son, “Please, Bobby, go on.”
After the boy turned to go, the phone rang, and Ryder hurried to answer it. Then Ryder pivoted Lee around in front of him and slapped her hard across the face. “I got to go in to work,” he said.
Then the doorbell rang, and everything sped up. While her head swiveled, she could see Bobby standing at the front door, talking to Bob Chambliss, then calling back to the kitchen, “Daddy, daddy, come quick. Mr. Chambliss says they shot the president.”
Ryder ran through the house—“Hot dog!”—out the screen door—“No lie?”—and down the steps with his friend.
“I’m going, too,” Bobby shouted back at her and ran after the men.
Unperturbed, Shirley slapped down a two of spades on the bare floor.
“What’s happened?” her little brother asked.
“I dunno. Somebody got shot.”