I came home for Christmas that year, like every year, to tiny houses ablaze with Christmas lights, twinkling islands of red, green, yellow and blue separated by acres of pine barrens and dark, empty miles. People who know they don’t have enough money in their coffee cans or bank accounts to pay even their usual electric bill will string them for fifty yards across rain gutters and peach trees and hog-wire fences, lighting my way home from the airport in Atlanta. I smiled every time I passed a particularly garish neon garden, happy and proud that my people had not given in to the pretension popular among people in town, who called such displays tacky.
I love this time. The air, after the balm of Miami, was chill, delicious, but it would be stretching it to call it really cold. It just felt like home, like Christmas. Christmas does not mean snow to me. I have never seen it snow on December 25 in my life. Snow came in a can. We sprayed the tree with it before we put the lights on. If we didn’t have the store-bought kind, Momma just used spray starch.
Momma never strung a lot of lights on the little house we lived in. But through the window, all my life, there has been a weak glow from a single strand of lights on a simple, small cedar tree. I looked for it as I pulled into the driveway, and it was there.
Momma was the same, still worried to death about Mark, but otherwise solid. I asked her when she wanted to go back to the dentist and be fitted for her new dentures, but it was a warm winter and so I had little hope. Mark was the same, still oblivious to the pain he caused her. I told him I wished he would try to do a little better, but he only grinned at me. He said he planned on coming to see me, down in Miami, maybe live with me. I told him it would be fine, but I knew he would never come. It was just as well. Miami would have consumed him, like a puddle of gasoline consumes a lit match. Sam was the same, still working, days, nights, weekends. My aunts and uncles were the same, still asking me when I was getting married, still two or three girlfriends behind.
Only my grandma was different. She was quiet now. She had never been quiet in her whole life.
I know there is nothing special about getting old. Everyone gets old. But you had to know my grandma, had to see the child in her that grinned when we were bad, that would have created the mischief with us if her old bones could have stood the strain, to understand the pain of it, seeing her that way.
If I had been coming home more regular, more often, I would have seen the change coming over years, as she grew older, more frail. As it was, it was as if she suddenly just got very tired. She had never been tired before, either. I would stick my head in the door and she would squeal out my name, year after year, and jump to her feet, or at least she would come as close to jumping as her age and slowly healing broken hip would permit. In minutes, she would have out her harmonica or banjo. She would announce to me, like she was calling a tune on the stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry, that we would now have a little bit of “Boilin’ Cabbage Down.” She plucked the strings a little clumsier every year. It still sounded sweet to me. She would tire of one instrument and grab up another, and sometimes I would sing if I knew the words.
When I was a child, we would sit on her bed and sing “Uncloudy Day,” or at least as close as we could come to it, at the very top of our lungs. We sang so loud that the kinfolks would come rushing in, and she would cackle a little, because she just liked to get a rise out of folks, sometimes. But as we got older we sang it loud to make up for the fact we still didn’t know the words, or had just forgotten them, or didn’t give a damn, because the noise was the thing. Just an old woman and a young man making noise.
Oh they tell me of a home
Where no dark clouds rise
They tell me of a home
Far away
Oh they tell me of a land
Of cloudless skies
Oh-h-h-h they tell me
Of an uncloudy day
It was different this time. She sat in her little room, surrounded by the tokens of love that we bestow on the old. There were pictures and dolls and stuffed animals and more knickknacks than I have ever seen in one room. There were her instruments, the guitar and the banjo and the harmonica, but they lay silent, unused. She did not play for me that day. She never played for me again.
I was so very afraid, as I walked into that room, that she would not know who I was. Her eyesight was not good, so I leaned in real close. I saw a grin spread across her face. “Rick?” she said, and I said, thankfully, “It’s me.”
I only sat with her a few minutes. She asked me how Lisa was, my onetime wife, and I told her that she was fine. She asked me if she had come, and I said no, she was at home. I know that she knew we were not married anymore, but that it just slipped her mind. She had always loved her, and I saw no need to hurt her now, for the sake of clarity. I could stand a lie better than she could stand the truth.
I told her she looked good. She said, no, she looked bad. I told her she looked young, but she dropped her head at that, and said, no, son, I’m old.
I asked her, as I always did, if she had “a feller.” That always got her grinning. This time she just said no, she was too old for that, too.
She had seemed ageless to me. The sun and wind had scoured and grooved her early in life, and as long as I knew her, she was gray. The years tumbled past and seemed to have little impact on her, at least on the outside, but on the inside she was beginning to weaken, to fail.
Both my grandfathers were long dead, and I had never really known my daddy’s mother beyond a quick visit every few years. My grandma Abigail, for all my life, had been my only real lifeline to the distant past. That Christmas, as I sat in the little room and held her hand, I felt more than her hand tremble.
The kinfolks gathered on Christmas Eve, as always. As always, they gave me presents that I needed. Momma, as always, got me nine pairs of white Fruit of the Loom underwear, size 36. Others got me towels, socks, T-shirts, a pocketknife. Sam got me tools, to make up for the fact I had moved so far away he couldn’t come and rescue me. When I am seventy, I hope I am getting a gross of underwear and a dozen pairs of socks, and tools. With presents like that, you can ratchet yourself firmly into place, and remember who you are.
The next day we had Christmas dinner, and I don’t reckon I’ve ever had food as good as we had that year, every year. There was a ham as big as a five-gallon bucket, and mashed potatoes, and pans of dressing (you might call it stuffing), and pinto beans with the ham hock swimming in the pot, and cabbage slaw, and biscuits that were hot and crisp on the outside and soft inside, and cranberry sauce because you can’t have dressing without cranberry sauce, and sweet tea, in a gallon pickle jug.
I ate too much and let Sam beat me, badly, in a game of Horse. The basketball goal had been at the regulation ten feet when he first tacked it to the tree, but over time it had grown a lot, and I claimed that was what had thrown off my shot. He called me a chucklehead again. I noticed his hair was getting thin.
He asked me, as he swished through a perfect twenty-footer, if I was ever coming home to live again. I told him I did not reckon so, at least not for a long, long time. He told me he was sorry about that, and I saw no reason to say what I always said, that I lived away from home because I was doing good, because my career was taking off, not because I was being punished. I lived in Miami because I wanted to, because I could. But to Sam, no one lived away from here, away from these pines, by choice. I am still not sure who is right and who is wrong, or if there is even a right and wrong to it.
I went in and said good-bye to my grandma, and made her say my name again.
I told Momma to call me collect. I didn’t see Mark. As I left for the airport in Atlanta, Sam gave me a last gift. It was an orange plastic hard hat with a plastic screen to protect my face. It was a logging hat, what you wear to keep the falling trees from knocking your brains out and the limbs from gouging out your eyes. I looked at it, then at him, puzzled.
“For them riots,” he said.