It’s always the evenings, when the lights dim and the house quiets, that I feel it most. To describe it as a throbbing is insufficient. It is pent-up energy, primal and magnetic, drawing outward. Always outward. Its pull is like the tide, toward the ocean, toward the moon.
I’ve felt this kind of energy since I was a boy. This is the family energy. I’d like to describe it as something less dramatic, and perhaps others in my family would. They might call it a nervous tic, an itch. We are prone to the constant leg bounce, the shin shimmy, which, incidentally, drives my wife crazy at dinner gatherings and movie theaters. There is and always has been a present discomfort, a stirring tension. I suppose it’s in the blood.
This is what my DNA gave me.
My grandfather wrestled with this same energy; he was a man never at rest. He was equal parts family patriarch, successful businessman, charismatic leader, scratch golfer, house chef, and the consummate North Louisiana conservationist. George Mouk was a man pulled to passion. He was a unifier, a developer, a solution-oriented and outcome-determinative man prone to tell you what you ought to do. And every night, he dulled his obsessive drive, his own pent-up energy, and the worries that came with them, with stiff gin drinks.
I remember the botanical scent on his breath, he pulling me into his lap when I was a boy, rocking in an old wicker chair overlooking the bayou. “Sit here, boy,” he’d say, “and let me tell you about my namesake.” St. George was a war hero during the Crusades, he said. A fierce warrior, a leader of men, he was pulled toward great things too.
St. George once found a damsel in a field, my grandfather told me, she clothed in a wedding dress, bound hand and foot. The maid was to be sacrificed to the dragon, the beast that tormented the girl’s village. No sooner had the maiden declared her plight than the dragon appeared, blue blazes flaring from his upturned snout.
Grandpa Ducky—we called him this on account of the bayou ducks he fed every evening—leaned in, fire on his breath. “St. George was undaunted,” he said. “He charged and lanced the dragon in the heart. He straddled the head of the dragon, roaring and bucking as he was, and with a clean stroke, he separated the beast’s massive skull from his neck.” He paused, let the story settle as the mallards splashed down into bayou water from the western sky. Then, in the cicada crescendo on the banks, he said, “You can slay dragons, boy. You can set things right.”
My grandfather’s storytelling was always marked by the scent of Gordon’s gin, a dry London swill that, when mixed with tonic, tasted like an evergreen forest fire and quinine. Patriarch as he was, noble as he was, when we visited his house, it was the only drink.
Amber traveled with me to meet Grandma and Grandpa Ducky over Christmas break of 1998.
Standing in the kitchen one evening, he grinned across the room and with paternal demand boomed, “Amber, make me a gin and tonic.” This was Amber’s first test, her first running of the family gauntlet.
My mother balked, said, “She won’t know how you like it, Daddy.”
“I bet you my hat, my glasses, and my overcoat she will,” he drawled.
Amber poured a double (perhaps a triple) into a red Solo cup and splashed a bit of tonic on top. No need for the lime, he had told her, so she had dispensed with the pleasantries. He held the cup high, toasted, “Laissez les bons temps rouler,” then sipped, eyes rolling into the back of his head, and he hummed, then broke into a baritone rendition of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Amber blushed. Grandpa had a way with the ladies.
He carried a green ammo crate in the back of a white Ford Expedition. It was his survival kit, his overnight stash: a bottle of Gordon’s, pickled onions, a few limes, Schweppes tonic water, and a bottle of Dry Sack sherry. (“You never know when sherry season might sneak up on you,” he’d say with a wink, especially in the days after my grandmother’s passing.) This was his crate of courage, his magic box. It was endearing, part of his persona and our family lore.
There was never a more joyous group than anyone under the influence of his libations. He was a jubilant imbiber, a loose fellow who’d tell secret stories of the war and breaking codes and young lovers. He’d flirt with the granddaughters-in-law, would tell off-colored jokes in that aw-shucks manner afforded eccentric and accomplished southern elders. It was Gordon’s gin and tonic that most often contributed to these memories, some of my fondest of him.
My grandfather bequeathed me his prominent nose, his flat backside, and his penchant for Gordon’s and Schweppes. I took what afforded him a measure of evening joy and made it the terrible-useful. It quelled the fear, the anxieties that come with fatherhood, steady employment, and more unfixable things.
I used it to quell the fear of losing a son.
In the summer of 2012, as I watched Titus fail to thrive, I thought of my grandfather, who had already made his way to the Call up Yonder. It was impossible not to think of him, to think of St. George the dragon slayer, with every glass of gin I drank. Yet it wasn’t just a children’s tale anymore. Dragons, I knew, were very real things. Titus was floundering, his disease an ever-present shadow, and I had no faith to summon a mortal wound. Instead, the drink took the edge from my waning faith, from the pain of the dragon’s teeth sinking deep.
Some foes seem invincible, no matter what our grandfathers’ folk stories tell us. I suppose we all have these foes. You know, those things that haunt and haunt and haunt?
Tonight I’m sipping tea again, allowing the smoky finish of lapsang to linger, but my brain is misfiring, telling me that the juniper fire of gin is a better fit for this stage of life. Juniper fire is a jealous mistress, and it’s all I can do not to miss her.
I have quit Gordon’s and tonic, and strange as it may sound, I feel like I’ve betrayed a family trust. Perhaps my grandfather would be proud. Perhaps he’d feel judged. I don’t know.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Here’s my heart, Lord; take and seal it.