Mid-November 1996
There wasn’t much to move, and memories don’t weigh nothin’ really. She took a chrome-and-vinyl couch and chair, leftovers from some doctor’s office, and took her washing machine, which she had nicknamed “Old Smokey,” because the house fire had blackened the white paint. Smokey didn’t look like much, and, like my own machine in Atlanta, was prone to dance across the floor, as if possessed by demons on the spin cycle. But you couldn’t kill him with a gun. “Still runs. Don’t leak,” Momma said, refusing to let us get her a new washer. That was by God that.
I was in Louisiana, I think, on the day she finished moving in. I would have liked to have been there. As it turns out, it was good that I was far away.
The night after my momma’s first full day in her new house, my little brother came to see her. He was drinking, a little bit. We had all asked him not to come there, when he was. I don’t know what right we had to say that, or to expect him to comply.
My big brother, Sam, drove up at about the same time, just to check on her. They faced off in the yard.
I guess they had to fight. They had to, because of who we are.
Sam fought because he believed he was protecting her, because he believed he was fighting in my place, because I had begged Mark to stay away from there when he was drinking. Mark fought because he felt he was being pushed away, unwanted, which I guess is about the worst feeling in the world.
So, on my momma’s second night in her new house, a forty-year-old man and his thirty-three-year-old brother are fighting mean and earnest in the front yard of the very symbol of our new beginning. It was not two blowhards swinging at air and curses between the newsstands on Broadway. I wasn’t there but I can tell you that it was dirty, chilling. Mark choked him until his eyes began to dim, and all Sam could think, as he fought to get loose, was that if Mark hurt him bad he would lose a day’s work at the mill, and if you lose two, you’re fired.
My momma introduced herself to her new neighbors not by taking them a jar of homemade jelly or some pickled banana pepper, but by running to them for help.
And somewhere, my daddy was laughing.
Finally, Sam broke free and they broke apart, and it was just over. No one wanted to fight any more. Sometimes, the anger just dies on you that way. There is no reason, no sense to it.
I heard about it two days later. I don’t know if saying that it broke my heart is strong enough. It made me sick. I hung up the telephone and got in my car and just drove, not to home but away from it, going east on Interstate 20 until I crossed over the South Carolina border. I played the radio and drove. I turned around somewhere this side of Anderson, or maybe it was Greenville, and drove back home again.
Sam only did what he believed I would have done, or would have tried to do, if I was man enough. He did it to keep something good in her life from being tarnished.
But of course Momma didn’t see it that way. She has tolerated drunks all her life; she is good at it. She expects it, like she expects the sun to rise in the morning. Instead of being angry at my little brother, her baby, she was mostly mad at Sam. I had never really seen him beat before, not even bowed, but he was hurt by that.
So, instead of fixing anything, I only built a stage, a prop, for another sadness. I felt an anger at Mark that almost scorched me, raw, but it faded over the days, as the resignation set in. As long as he is alive, as she is alive, she will care for him, nurture him, tolerate him, and that is exactly as it ought to be. How do you tell a mother not to love her baby.
Even though I couldn’t make everything right with the simple purchase of a house, I wanted to believe it would at least be someplace fresh, free, for a while, of that lingering aroma of dusty pain. But what killed me, was when I heard my mother had left her new home, for a little while. She went back to the old little house, as she always had, even though it was empty, and sat in silence. There was no television, no phone, just my momma and an empty little house.
The house on Nisbet Lake Road sat empty for almost a week. My brother Sam would not go near it. My little brother Mark vowed he would never set foot in it again.
I begged her to go back, not to give up, and she told me that she never intended to stay away for long, that she just needed to let that bad beginning fade away, a little bit. But to me it was like all the things I had worked for were wasted.
And then I knew that maybe I had bought this house more to redo the past than to make her dreams come true. I felt sorry for Sam, for Mark, for her, but especially for me.
It got better, of course.
By Thanksgiving, Sam and Momma were working side by side again, again trying to make the house perfect, cosmetically. She held the ladder for him, passed him nails, cooked him biscuits as he did the little things that needed doing. I came home the day before Thanksgiving and hung pictures and fixed a broken lock and carried some broken limbs up into the woods. I felt like part of it.
My momma had fixed me a room. It had a spare bed with a box spring and two mattresses on it, so that it was a good four feet off the floor. When I dangled my legs over the side they didn’t touch the floor, and for a minute I felt like a little boy again. I thought again what I had thought as a child, morbidly comforting: If I should die before I wake, at least God won’t have to stoop over much to jerk me up into heaven. If He is inclined.
We had Thanksgiving dinner that next day, Sam and his family, Momma and me, my aunt Jo and uncle John. They have no children of their own, and have always eaten this meal with us. I guess it was the best food I have ever had. Momma used every rack in the oven and every eye on the stove in her new kitchen, and there were biscuits and dressing and mashed potatoes and pinto beans with a ham bone as big as my fist, and a turkey that fell off the bone … I was full as a tick. For the first time, ever, we all sat in the same room and ate, because it was the first time we, Momma, Sam and me, had ever had a room big enough to gather in. After a while my momma went and sat in a chair in the adjoining den, and Sam looked at me over the table and, without smiling, said: “Look how far away she is. And we’re in the same room.”
We tried hard not to notice the empty chair.
Momma said she slept good in her new house, mostly, but couldn’t sleep on the cold nights. She thought about Mark then, and she has never been able to close her eyes when she is worried. Since his house burned down, he had been sleeping in his truck beside the ruins of his house, and on the cold nights he dressed in some thermal coveralls someone had given him, and shivered in the dark.
How could she sleep, knowing that?
But since his fight with Sam, something has happened to him. He has been cold-sober, working night and day to rebuild his house, this time out of concrete block. I guess it is anger that drives him, I don’t know. But day after day he slaps those blocks together, and at night he crawls into the cab of a truck and goes to sleep.
We started painting the wood trim and concrete-block portions of my momma’s house right after Thanksgiving. My momma paints as high as she can reach, and Sam paints the rest. There is still hurt in their faces, when they see each other, Momma and Sam, but that will fade, too.
She won’t let me hire a painter. It doesn’t bother her that it might take all winter—you can only paint on the warm, pretty days—and it doesn’t bother her at all that the wooden part of the house is forest green in some places and “ivory” in others. She isn’t like me, like I said.
The other night, in a light drizzle, we drove to Gadsden in the Bronco and got her a new couch. It was the first new piece of sitdown furniture she had ever owned.
The end of the couch stuck out into the rain, and my job was to ride in back of the Bronco and cover that end with a rain slicker. My momma held my ankle, to keep me from falling out the back.
For some reason I can’t explain, about halfway home with the rain blowing in my face, I started to laugh, and pretty soon my momma started to laugh, and although I couldn’t see him, in the darkened cab, I am sure Sam was grinning.
“You know, if you scoot on back there and sit on the very end of that thing, it won’t get wet,” he told me.
“I’ll fall out,” I said.
“Maybe not,” he said.
When we got home I went into the guest bathroom—imagine that, a guest bathroom—to dry my face and hands. I noticed that the towel said “Emory University Hospital” on it. Stolen, no doubt, and given to my momma in one of those boxes of throwaway clothes. Just on a hunch I went into the next bathroom, and the towel there said “Peninsula Medical Center,” and I started to laugh all over again. I walked back into the living room laughing, and saw my momma and Sam exchange one of those looks that they used to swap when I was little and did something odd.
Of course you can’t buy respectability with a house. My momma has always been the most respectable person in my life, no matter what kind of shell surrounded her.
I really, truly had wanted her to have a place where she could be more comfortable, where she could more enjoy the good times in her life, and tolerate the bad. And she has that. She has exactly that. But I had to set my hopes on something higher. I wanted to redo the past, wanted to feel like we had won, after all.
Well, we have.
She has a split-level castle with stolen towels.
She has a four-bedroom, brick-façade mansion with vinyl den furniture scavenged from a closed-down doctor’s office.
She has a home, which is more important than any of that other unadulterated pyscho-garbage.
She wanted it to be perfect, too. She even said, tearfully, that when my brothers rolled in the dirt, that “the splendor was lost.” I don’t know where she learned to talk like that. I guess she has been reading the New York Times.
But no, the goddamn splendor ain’t lost. It ain’t no ways lost.
“The thing we got to remember,” I told her, sitting face to face, “is that we ain’t gonna be any different here. We’re just us. We just got a little bit better place to be us, in.”
She smiled at that.
One day Mark will come back here, and while I am sure he and Sam will avoid each other for a while—it has never been unusual in my family for people to drive right on by your house if they don’t like the looks of a car in the driveway—I know it can’t last forever. It is a small county. Our corner of it is even smaller. All our young lives, we lived somewhere near the bottom of our society. We cannot afford, in the middle of our lives, to peck at each other now. Soon, too soon, we will be old men, and how silly we will be, gouging at each other with our arthritic hands, snapping at each other with our dentures. We may have to gum each other, since we ain’t never had no luck at dentures, either.
It’s not a dream. It’s just a damn house, but the roof is first-rate, the heat pump is under warranty and the woods are covered in wildflowers. Some days, when the light is good, she searches the hill behind her house for the dormant plants she will transplant in the spring. She knows exactly where the property lines are, knows which trees and shrubs and weeds are hers.
This spring she can cover it up with flowers, but, it being us, it may just blossom with junk cars.
“No, it ain’t gonna be that way,” she told me. “It’s gonna be purty. It’s gonna be real purty.”
It may be somewhere in between. We will live with that. For now, it is enough to see her walking her acre and a third, a little stooped over, with that ugly, ancient dog.
And I am grateful I could give her this much, before more time tumbled by, lost.
There ain’t no way to make it perfect.
You do the best you can for the people left, a yard-fighting, teeth-gnashing, biscuit-eating, ugly-dog-raising, towel-stealing, television-praying, never-forgiving, hard-headed people that you love with all the strength in your body, once you finally figure out that they are who you are, and, in many ways, all there is.
I met a woman the other day. She told me she had heard me talk at a writing seminar, that I had “inspired” her. I nodded, politely. It seemed that she had grown up like me, kind of. She had been born in Charity Hospital in New Orleans, and wasn’t dead sure who her daddy was. She and her momma had grown up in the welfare projects in Morgan City. She had bought candy with food stamps, waiting for all the other children to leave before paying at the counter, because she was ashamed of who she was. All her adult life, she said, she had pretended that part of her life had never happened, but when she heard me talk about who I was and where I came from, she thought that maybe it was okay not to be ashamed anymore.
“You use it,” she said. “I don’t mean anything bad by it. But you use it …”
Like a weapon, yes.
She said she had trouble with men. She said she was prone to just move on, when people got close to her. I nodded politely, again. She said she couldn’t imagine children. There was just so much to do, wasn’t there? So much to do, so very far to run, away from what? But it is the running that is important, after a while.
She is good. She is driven. She will make it, because what drives her is meaner than what drives most people. She will make it because, as someone told me once, people like you and me, we can’t fail. I strongly suspect there are a lot of us. I never figured I was all that unique.
Several times I have found myself about to call and tell her not to put the nice things in her life on hold, not to wait for a time when she feels she has proven herself enough, has put enough distance between then and now, because that time might never come. I’ve been meaning to tell her not to look for some well-defined finish line, to tell her that sometimes you run right past it and don’t even know it’s there, like fence posts in the dark. I’ve been meaning to warn her, of all of that.
I will.
I like her. I would have liked to have spent some more time with her, but looking at me was too much like looking in the mirror, for her. She could see the strain of it, in my face maybe, maybe my eyes, could hear that old anger and lingering resentment on my lips. I guess it wasn’t pretty, with that well-worn chip on my shoulder still sticking up, like a hump on my back.
But I swear, it seems lighter now. It seems a little bit lighter now.