THANKSGIVING 1961. On the way home from the football game at the fairgrounds, my father suggested to his cousin Louis Mudge that we take a detour. Dad wanted to see a steam locomotive that was parked in the Louisville and Nashville yards, a 4-8-2 that the L&N, an all-diesel line by then, had borrowed from the Illinois Central for an anniversary excursion. He didn’t seem to notice that most of the day’s light had fled or that cold mist fuzzed the air. It didn’t matter to him that he’d be riding the excursion train to Nashville a few days later; he wanted an early peek. I looked at the hair standing up on the back of his head, like a woodpecker’s crest, and I thought that a person whose hair sat flat wouldn’t have proposed a side trip like this.
Uncle Louis, whose brown felt hat was speckled with confetti, said that seeing the IC engine parked in the L&N yards would be like seeing a movie star in her house clothes.
My father said, “I’d pay full dollar to see Ingrid Bergman in dungarees.”
Crawford, my older brother, who was almost twelve, spoke up from the farthest corner of Uncle Louis’s Ford sedan, which smelled of tobacco and dogs and old newspapers. “Who’s Ingrid Bergman?”
My father didn’t answer Crawford’s question, perhaps because the prospect of seeing the IC engine had made him deaf to voices from the backseat.
I watched a raindrop slide down the window and thought about a halfback named Perryman jittering through a confusion of pads and helmets and then flying free across stadium dirt. Perryman played for Male High, a school my father and his cousin had attended twenty-five years before, when it was all boys and all white. Perryman’s shoes had been wrapped with tape to make it look as if he were wearing spats, like a drum major. The Manual High defenders hadn’t had a chance.
Uncle Louis chuckled, maybe at the idea of Ingrid Bergman in dungarees, maybe at the earnestness with which my father expressed himself. Uncle Louis had been chuckling all afternoon, in between sips of coffee from a Thermos. Not too many months before, he’d been in Arkansas. I’d heard my mother say to somebody that he’d gone there to “dry out.” I’d imagined him lying on a plank, baking in the sun. When I asked Crawford about this, about what it meant to “dry out,” he said, with a certain authority, “It means he needs to get some air. His bones are damp and achy.”
Our father had driven his cousin to Arkansas. On the way back, Dad had spent a couple hours in the rail yards in Memphis, taking pictures of rusting, coal-burning locomotives and their diesel replacements. That night, he’d written his cousin a letter on Peabody Hotel stationery. The letter, which mentioned a “beautiful” 4-8-4 Dixie Line locomotive he’d seen that early autumn afternoon, had ended up in the rear seat of Uncle Louis’s sedan. My father had signed it, “Devotedly, Bill.”
Uncle Louis turned off Second Street onto St. Catherine. The L&N yards were toward the west side of downtown, near cigarette factories and distilleries, not far from where Ida, our maid, lived. She’d spent the morning in our kitchen, helping my mother prepare dinner, and then we’d driven her home on the way to the game. When we drove through her neighborhood after the game, I didn’t see anybody on the streets, except for a man who was looking under the hood of a car.
“They’re rolling up the sidewalks, Billy,” Uncle Louis said. “Hardly any place for us boulevardiers to go except the rail yards.”
My father said, “We’ll make it quick.”
When we got out of the car, the mist had become drizzle. Uncle Louis pulled down the brim of his hat; it shielded his glasses but not the tip of his beak. He wore a long wool overcoat and baggy trousers held up by suspenders. Like my father’s clothes, Uncle Louis’s always looked as if they’d been tailored for his shadow, or for the person he might become if only he would eat three square meals a day.
My father didn’t wear a hat or suspenders, but he bore enough of a resemblance to his cousin that they were sometimes mistaken for brothers. It wasn’t just their noses or the glasses with the thick lenses or their slightly stooped, unathletic builds. They’d grown up next door to each other, on a bluff above the river, separated only by an acre of lawn. After they graduated from Male High, they temporarily parted ways: my father went to college out East and Uncle Louis attended an art school in Cincinnati. During the war, when my father was back home, studying law, and Uncle Louis was painting landscapes that looked as if they’d been done by someone with an astigmatism, they’d served together in the Kentucky militia. They’d trained on weekends. “We were going to mow down the Krauts as they boated across the Ohio River on a Sunday afternoon,” Uncle Louis said. He also said that the brigade’s commander had described my father as the worst soldier he’d ever seen and him as the second worst.
My father zipped up his plaid jacket and strapped his camera across his chest and led us toward the roundhouse, where he believed the IC engine was being kept. We passed between strings of freight cars that seemed to go on forever, into the gloom. Crawford said, “This is boring.” He kicked at the gravel. He was wearing basketball sneakers he’d scissored the tops off of because he thought he’d look cooler that way. Our mother had yelled at him for ruining a good pair of shoes.
Our father, who moved at a meditative pace when not around trains, was traveling at a near trot now. Uncle Louis said, “Billy, if the Pinkertons come after us, I’m not going to be able to outrun them.” Uncle Louis had always moved as if tomorrow was a fine time to get somewhere, and his stay in Arkansas hadn’t made him any faster. He stopped to light a cigarette.
My father turned around and said, “The Pinkertons are having Thanksgiving dinner now.”
Uncle Louis said to me, “Your father is a model citizen, except when it comes to trains.”
The locomotive and its tender were, as my father had predicted, outside the roundhouse. An L&N diesel switcher sat some yards in front of the IC engine, almost protectively. I’d seen a number of steam engines in my short life, mostly by the light of day, and I didn’t think this one was more impressive than the others. Or less so. It had eight driving wheels and they were all taller than me by a foot.
My father hopped back and forth across the tracks, shooting pictures from different angles, trying to stay ahead of the dark, which kept coming down, along with the rain. “I trust you opened your aperture wide,” Uncle Louis said. He borrowed Dad’s camera and had us stand in front of the engine, with its moon face and tarnished silver bell.
“Père et fils sans chapeaux,” Uncle Louis said, fiddling with the lens. “Soaking up the atmosphere in the L&N yards. 1961: near the end of the steam age.”
“Say it ain’t so,” said my father, who smiled through the drizzle.
Crawford didn’t smile. It was my older brother’s policy to present a solemn face to the world, when he could manage it.
Uncle Louis put his hat on my head. For a second, I felt like I’d just walked into a warm, smoky room with big chairs to lounge in. My father asked Crawford if he wanted to pull up the hood of his coat, but my brother said he was fine.
We walked back to the car and got in. When Uncle Louis turned the key, the motor made no sound, not even a click. My father, who sometimes complained about the corrosive effects of the internal combustion engine on modern life but knew little about repairing one, said, “Must be a wiring problem.”
Uncle Louis said, “Could be.”
“Maybe it’s the radiator,” Crawford said. “Or the valves.”
Uncle Louis said, “Could be.”
We went to look for a pay phone. We didn’t get far before Uncle Louis remembered that there was a pie in the trunk. Robert, the black man who kept house for Uncle Louis, had cooked it. Uncle Louis had intended to deliver it to a friend of his late mother on the way to the game.
Uncle Louis got the pie, and we walked out of the yards and along a dimly lighted street toward Broadway. My father led; he walked briskly, at close to his rail-yard pace. A skinny, sallowish dog waited for us at a corner, next to a bus bench. Uncle Louis said to me, “If it’s mean, we’ll give it a slice of pie.” The pie was pecan.
When we passed, the dog lifted its nose slightly. Otherwise, it showed no interest in us.
“It was hoping for banana cream, I bet,” Uncle Louis said.
We turned up Broadway, which was better lighted but not any less deserted. We passed a vacuum cleaner store, a loan company, a wig shop with silver and red hair hanging on eyeless plastic skulls. We found a phone in a White Castle, the kind of place my mother, who had never seen a french fry she approved of, might skin my father alive for taking her children into. There were two black men at the window counter, eating dinner.
I said we should call Ida. Maybe her son Alvin, who drove a garbage truck for the city, could come get us.
My father said Ida didn’t have a phone.
“Duh,” Crawford said.
Uncle Louis ordered Cokes for me and my brother and a coffee for himself while my father called my mother. Dad said “Honey?” and then explained where we were. Eventually he said, “We’ll just hail a cab.”
“Sounds like you’re in the doghouse, Billy,” Uncle Louis said.
Dad called a Yellow Cab and then bought a nickel carton of milk and sat down on a window counter stool between me and Crawford. He wiped his glasses with a napkin. Without his glasses he looked grim, as if he were waiting for the next blow to fall.
The two black men finished their meals and lit cigarettes. One saw the purple Male High booster button on Uncle Louis’s coat and asked if Male had won.
“Thirty-four to thirteen,” Uncle Louis said.
“Perryman ran wild,” my father added.
“That Manual coach don’t have the brains of a housefly,” one of the men said. They got up and went out the door.
A radio was playing in the back of the restaurant. It was tuned to a station that Ida sometimes listened to when she was ironing in our basement. I watched out the window for the cab. Crawford sucked at the last drops of his Coke through a straw, as intent as a scientist working on an experiment. Uncle Louis sipped coffee and picked confetti off his hat. Then he asked me if I’d ever heard the story about the goat my father’s family had kept when he was a boy.
I didn’t recall any stories about goats. I was trying to listen to the song on the radio—some man trying to say how much he loved a girl. My brother sucked on his straw until Dad said, “Crawford, that’s enough now.”
Uncle Louis said, “Well, your grandparents had a goat named Cyril. He was named after a fellow your granddad and my father played bridge with.”
My father said, “That goat was the sorriest creature.” The recollection seemed to have cheered him up.
“In the summer,” Uncle Louis said, “Cyril liked to sleep under a car, where it was cool. Oil would drip all over him and he’d get filthier than he already was. So then he’d decide he needed a bath and he’d amble over to our house and take a dip in the pool.”
I didn’t understand how a goat could decide it needed a bath, but I didn’t say anything. I watched a man wearing a hooded blue windbreaker come through the door. The drawstring in the hood was pulled so tight you could see only a portion of his face. He went to the order window and asked for a hamburger.
“Just one?” the lady asked. Most people ordered six or seven at a time; one was about one bite’s worth.
“Yes, ma’am,” the man said.
“Anything to drink?”
“No, ma’am.”
When she brought him the hamburger in a little white box, he asked her to put the box in a bag. She did, and just when she was about to hand it to him, he said, “Give me everything you’ve got in the register, except for the pennies and nickels and that kind of shit. Just put it in the bag, please.” He was pointing something at her; it was hidden under the windbreaker.
My father and his cousin were laughing. Now they were talking about a dog Uncle Louis had owned a long time ago, a terrier, that somehow got trapped in a utility pipe and had to be extracted by a plumber.
“Don’t give me those fuckin’ quarters,” the man in the windbreaker said. “They’ll break the bag. Just the bills.”
“Yessir,” the woman said.
I tapped my father on the arm and said, “Dad?” I noticed that he had nicked himself shaving, just above his Adam’s apple. I glanced back at the man in the windbreaker. He was looking at me, at all of us. Only the center of his cold-reddened white face was visible.
My father and Uncle Louis didn’t stop talking about the terrier until the man in the windbreaker said, “Don’t do anything dumb, mister.” He sounded like somebody trying to sound older than he was, like my brother did, when he tried to explain to me a scientific principle like gravity, for instance. The man in the windbreaker was addressing a large man in an apron and a white paper hat. The robber was backing up toward the door, the hamburger bag with the money in one hand and a silver-barreled gun held high in the other. The gun looked like one I no longer played with, a cowboy six-shooter that came with a tooled leather holster that had a thigh string. When the man was abreast of us, Uncle Louis, who was closest to the door, swiveled on his stool and said, “You don’t need to hurt anybody. Just take your money and go.” Uncle Louis was between me and the robber. My nose was close enough to Uncle Louis’s overcoat that I could smell the whole day in it—that and my own fearful breath coming back at me. On the robber’s nose, I saw a red dot, like a pimple or a boil.
Uncle Louis later said that his first mistake had been to open his mouth. His second was to open it again. He said to the robber, “Why don’t you take this pie along, too? It’s pecan.” Then he reached behind him for the plate.
AT THANKSGIVING DINNER six years later, my second cousin Gee asked Uncle Louis to tell the story that my mother sometimes referred to as “A Series of Bad Decisions on Your Father’s Part.” My father took a drink of milk from a green goblet. Gee’s mother, whose husband had died the year before, said, “Maybe we should save that for after dinner, Gee.” Everybody in the family, even the second cousins’ second cousins, knew the story—or parts of it.
Gee said that Martin might like to hear it. Martin was a high school student from England who was spending the fall semester with us. He was handsome and self-confident, with smooth cheeks and a wide mouth that a steady flow of mockery had seemed to warp slightly. (To annoy me, Martin would refer to Ida as “your Negro slave.”) It had taken Gee, who was two years younger than Martin and me, about five minutes to fall in love with our guest from overseas. Before dinner, she’d gone into the bathroom to make herself look more stunning than she was in her miniskirt and boots. Martin had said to me, “The lipstick is a bit whorish, but she’s not bad for fourteen.”
My father hadn’t yet said the blessing. We were waiting for my mother to emerge from the kitchen with the turkey, which she was carving with a new electric knife. She wouldn’t permit my father to carve the turkey, because she believed he would make a mess of it. She thought I had a future as a carver of meat but that my day had not yet come. I was sixteen and lacked finesse. Crawford, who was at college out West, as far away as he could get, was not a candidate for other reasons.
My grandfather, my father’s eighty-two-year-old father, jiggled the ice in his glass, in the hope that more Scotch might somehow materialize. He’d had his limit, and unhappiness was growing in the fold between his white eyebrows.
Martin said, “I’d love to hear the story, especially if it’s sordid and violent.”
Uncle Louis lowered his chin to the napkin tucked into his collar and chuckled. Martin amused him, it seemed—a guy who didn’t know jack about anything, except what he’d read in books or seen on the movie screen.
Granddaddy said, “Is this the story about Louis falling asleep at the Toddle House? In that plate of eggs and hash browns?”
“No, Dad,” my father said, sitting a little taller in his chair at the head of the table, as if by doing so he might somehow absorb Granddaddy’s question and cause it to disappear. “Why don’t you tell Martin about Cyril the goat? He might enjoy that.”
“God save us from goats,” Granddaddy grumbled. The crease between his eyebrows deepened and he sank into silence.
Gee said to Uncle Louis, “I’ll show you my etchings if you tell the story.” She fluttered her eyelashes. They were long and swooping, worked on.
“Oh, Virginia,” her mother said, using her daughter’s given name. “Don’t be so silly.”
Uncle Louis laughed more than was called for. His shoulders shook under his cardigan; the soft flesh under his chin vibrated. Perhaps, I thought, believing I was wise, he laughed to hide his disappointments. I’d learned a few things while leaning in doorways, skulking around the house. I knew, for instance, that Uncle Louis had forgotten to pay his taxes the last few years. I knew that he’d lost all but a couple of his private art students and that an artist whom he’d rented space to in his house had made off with a box of heirloom silver when she moved out. I knew that my father had driven Uncle Louis back to Arkansas again, two years before. I knew that to help his cousin my father had commissioned a painting of a steam engine. (The result hung in my father’s basement office, not being suitable, in my mother’s view, for a more prominent wall.) And now I knew, as did everybody else at the table, that Uncle Louis had passed out drunk at the Toddle House, though whether this incident was post- or pre-Arkansas I couldn’t have said. Tonight, anyway, Uncle Louis was drinking water.
My mother said from the kitchen, “Go ahead and say the blessing. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Dad said, “We’ll wait, honey.”
My grandfather came swimming up out of his silence and, snorting derisively, said, “They caught him with his pants down.”
It was unclear whom Granddaddy was referring to. It might have been a politician—sixty years before, he’d been beaten up by thugs when he was working as a poll watcher; he hated politicians, particularly Democrats—or he may have been thinking about somebody at the nursing home. Anyway, nobody asked. My father told Granddaddy about the football game he and Uncle Louis had attended that afternoon. I’d begged off and gone with Martin to see Bonnie and Clyde at the Rialto.
“Male is in decline,” my father said. “Manual seems to have all the horses nowadays.”
My grandfather considered this, lifting his chin high, and said, “You still have that dog, Louis?” I wondered if he meant the dog that had got stuck in the pipe.
My father said Louis had two boxers now.
“They’re supposed to be guard dogs,” Uncle Louis said. “But they act like pussycats.”
“I wish that place would let me keep a dog,” Granddaddy said. He meant the nursing home.
My mother came in with the platter of turkey, saying, “I don’t see what’s so great about an electric knife.” My father said grace, his holiday version, which went on for a bit. Then Gee announced with her red lips that Uncle Louis would tell the story of the time he offered a pie to the White Castle thief and nearly lost an eye.
“That again?” my mother said.
“I’ll tell the expurgated version,” Uncle Louis said, putting a scoop of stuffing on his plate.
LATER THAT EVENING, after I’d taken Granddaddy back to the nursing home, Martin asked me to tell him the unexpurgated version.
We were in the den, watching a TV variety special that featured Dusty Springfield and Burl Ives. My father and Uncle Louis were downstairs in the rec room, looking at slides of trains my father had photographed in Europe that summer. The women, except for Gee, were in the kitchen.
“The robber called Uncle Louis a ‘fucking four-eyed faggot,’” Gee said. She giggled. Her bare thigh was within an inch of Martin’s leg.
“‘Fuck-faced,’” I said. “Not ‘fucking.’” When the robber swore at Uncle Louis, I’d lifted my nose from the damp wool of his overcoat and turned to look at my father. Light bounced off the lenses of his glasses, the hair in his nostrils seemed to quiver, his Adam’s apple rose and fell, but his mouth was shut tight.
“And then the bloke hit your uncle in the eye with the cap pistol?” Martin said.
“He’s my father’s cousin, actually,” I said. “We just call him ‘Uncle.’”
“So the bloke hit your dad’s cousin, right?” Martin said impatiently.
“Yeah.” The robber had swung the gun, knocking Uncle Louis’s glasses to the floor and opening a cut under his eye. The gun was a toy—or so we found out later—but its parts were metal. Cheap, tinny metal, but metal nonetheless.
“And then,” Martin said, “the Negro bloke, the cook, descended from the flies like a deus ex machina and saved the day, right?”
In Uncle Louis’s description, the cook, who was built like an icebox, wrestled the robber to the floor and sat on him until the police came. Under his paper hat, which fell off when he jumped on the robber, the cook was bald. His skin was a purply black shade, the color of some vein of ore deep within the earth, a rich and fearsome color. When he had pinned the robber and the robber had stopped flailing, the cook said, “If you say one word, pus-head, I’ll put my fist through your motherfuckin’ face.”
The cook’s comment hadn’t been included in the Thanksgiving table version of the story. Nor was Uncle Louis’s confession, made to my father while holding a handkerchief to his swollen eye in the back of the police cruiser that took us home. He said he’d been so frightened he’d thought he was going to soil his trousers. My father, who had his arm around me and held the pie in his lap, said, “You deserve the Croix de Guerre, Lou.” My father was shivering. Crawford sat up front with the policeman, asking him questions, whether he’d ever been in any high-speed chases, for instance.
Now Martin said, “I love America. So violent and yet so sentimental.” And then he flopped around on the sofa like a rag doll, eyes popping and warped mouth agog, the way Bonnie and Clyde had done, in slow motion, at the end of the movie, when the Texas Rangers pumped them full of bullets. When Martin was finished, he laughed in self-appreciation. Gee laughed, too, of course.
I went outside to smoke and discovered that the crumpled pack in my pants was empty. I wondered if there might be a cigarette in Uncle Louis’s car. He still smoked, as my mother would sometimes note when my father came home from a night of cribbage with him. I explored the front and back of Uncle Louis’s Ford wagon, the car he’d bought to replace his old sedan. I looked on the dash and in the glove compartment and under the seats. I found an ice scraper from Mr. Wendell’s Sinclair and a tin of peanut brittle and a Thermos and some National Geographics and an empty box of Parliaments. In the luggage space, there was a fifty-pound bag of dog food and overalls dappled with paint. In a pocket of the overalls, I found a pistol.
I sat in the backseat and looked at the pistol under the car’s dome light. There were no firearms in our house, aside from the BB gun my father had bought at the urging of my mother for the purpose of shooting at a Great Dane that ran loose in the neighborhood and sometimes attacked Felix, our dachshund. (The gun was in my father’s basement office, still in a shopping bag.) The pistol had a pebbly grip and a short barrel that I couldn’t quite fit my pinkie into. Had Uncle Louis bought it for protection? Perhaps the White Castle thief turned up in his dreams. When he’d told the story at the dinner table, he’d made a comedy out of it, cleaned it up the way he’d cleaned up stories about my father and himself in the Kentucky militia. He’d claimed he hardly ever thought about the incident, except when he drove past a White Castle. I didn’t believe him. What else would have led him to buy a gun?
I pointed the pistol out the door at the dark. Then I put it back in the overalls.
I took a longish butt from the ashtray and smoked it down to the recessed filter. I went back into the house, through the rec room door. The slide projector was on, beaming a picture of a SNCF electric locomotive onto the stand-up screen. My father and Uncle Louis had gone down the hall, into Dad’s office. I could hear them talking.
“Here it is, Lou,” my father said. “I sometimes read this for consolation.” I tried to think what my father read for consolation, aside from histories of railroads and the meditations of certain jurists. He attended church, of course, but mostly, I’d always assumed, out of duty.
Uncle Louis was silent. Then he said, “Some earnest fool tried to convert me at that drunk farm. I said, ‘It’s hard enough giving up bourbon. Don’t make me give up my disbelief, too.’”
“Jesus was a wise man,” my father said, though not with any fervor. He didn’t have a future as an evangelist.
“But does Jesus know anything about sinking funds and outstanding debts?” Uncle Louis made an odd, gassy noise, like a chuckle spoiled by indigestion. Then he said he was thinking of selling his house and moving away, possibly to New Mexico.
“I hope you won’t do that, old bean,” my father said.
“I might, Billy. I might move out there and paint steer skulls, like Georgia O’Keeffe.”
“I hope you’ll paint more train pictures,” my father said.
UNCLE LOUIS DIDN’T SELL his house or come within five hundred miles of Georgia O’Keeffe. He did try to go out West for a month’s vacation in the summer of 1968, but his dogs were stolen from his car at a diner in Missouri and then the car died in Kansas, so he gave up and came home, only to discover that Robert, his housekeeper, had had a stroke.
Not long after, Uncle Louis was hired to teach art at a girls school. With my father’s help, he was able to pay off taxes in arrears. He bought a new car and got a dog from the Humane Society.
By 1969, the year I left for college, he had acquired a new housemate, a young woman who did the cooking in exchange for room and board. Cora was from Floyds Knobs, Indiana, across the river. She was a teacher’s aide and did volunteer work for a downtown jobs program. She was also a potter. Uncle Louis said to my father, “I don’t think she’s going to run off with what’s left of the silver.”
When I came home from college that November, my mother was laid up with a bug and Granddaddy was feeling too low to venture out of the nursing home, so it was decided that we’d have Thanksgiving dinner at Uncle Louis’s. We’d take some dishes Ida had made in advance. Cora, whose virtues didn’t seem to include good relations with her family across the river, had agreed to cook the turkey. Not that I’d be able to eat it. A month before, in a conversion inspired by some late-night reading, I’d decided to become a vegetarian. Crawford would eat my portion—eat it and say something smart.
Even though I was an intellectual now and had lost interest in football, I went with my father and Uncle Louis to the Male-Manual game. (Crawford skipped it; he didn’t get up until noon, anyway.) My father drove his gray three-on-the-tree Chevrolet sedan, a car so drab he hadn’t bothered to have a rear-end dent repaired. The radio had only a tuning knob, no buttons. When Uncle Louis got in the car, he said to me, “It’s good for the souls of our elected officials that they not ride around in style.” Uncle Louis’s own soul appeared to have departed him during the night; under his brown hat he was pale and drawn.
It was a bright fall day, a day that felt like the last warm breath of the year. Uncle Louis said Cora had kept him in the kitchen all morning, shelling chestnuts and crumbling stale bread for stuffing, when all he wanted to do was sit outside in the sunshine with a cup of coffee and watch for the pileated woodpecker that lived in the woods below his house. “You know all the trouble you have to go to just to shell one damn chestnut?” Uncle Louis said.
My father let the clutch out too quickly as he turned onto River Road, and the car bucked a little. We drove in silence past the Pine Room and the KingFish and Mr. Wendell’s Sinclair, the bountiful sunshine lapping at the car. Then Uncle Louis said, “I tied one on last night, Billy. Cora gave me a taste of her Mateus and one taste led to another, as they say. I fell off the wagon onto my pitiful face.” He turned around to look at me. “Did your dad ever tell you I’m a grisly old boozer?”
I saw that a stem of Uncle Louis’s eyeglasses had been secured to the frame with a gob of black electrical tape. Perhaps he had actually fallen on his face. I said, “No.”
“Your dad is the epitome of discretion,” Uncle Louis said.
Dad said, “You’ve gone a long time without taking a drink, haven’t you, Lou?”
“A long time would be accurate if you don’t count a number of episodes you don’t know about.”
My father told his cousin not to give up the ship.
“This old ironclad?”
ON THE WAY BACK from the game, my father took a route that led us past the railway museum he’d helped found a few years before. The museum, which was on a patch of once-industrial riverside, had just acquired an L&N steam engine, a 4-8-2 Baldwin that had carried passengers around the Southeast between the world wars, and my father wanted to show it to his cousin.
“It’s on the homely side,” Dad said, pulling into the dirt parking lot and stopping next to the chain-link fence that enclosed the museum. “We need to give it a coat of paint and spruce up the cab.” He asked Uncle Louis if he wanted to take a closer look at the engine. He had a key to open the gates.
Uncle Louis said, “I think we better get home and check on the turkey.” There was confetti on his hat and raincoat. He’d sat stiffly in his seat for most of the game, sipping coffee. Late in the second half, he turned to me and said, “The problem with football is that there are too many discussions and too many people falling down too often.”
As my dad attempted to put the Chevrolet in reverse, he ground the gear and then stalled the car. “Doggone it,” he said.
“Give me an automatic any day,” Uncle Louis said.
When we got to Uncle Louis’s, my father remembered he needed to pick up the dishes Ida had prepared. He dropped us off and drove away, stirring up leaves, narrowly missing a boxy old Rambler parked beneath a sycamore. Uncle Louis didn’t know whose car the Rambler was. It didn’t belong to Cora, who drove a VW.
As we went up the cracking, moss-laden brick steps to the front door, we heard music, and then Uncle Louis remembered that Cora had invited a boy to dinner.
When we went inside, he said, “It’s her only serious flaw.” I thought he was referring to Cora’s choice in boyfriends, but he meant the music. “I think she might have a tin ear.” The music was In a Silent Way, by Miles Davis. I owned the record myself; I’d found the melancholy trumpet consoling.
Uncle Louis laid his hat on a low, wood chest that was long and deep enough to store a knight’s armor, or so I’d imagined as a child. But when I’d lifted the heavy lid, it had contained only yellowing newspapers and an umbrella. Probably it still did.
We walked through the sitting room, where the hi-fi was, and into the kitchen. Cora sat at the table, peeling the skins from cooked yams. Steam rose from the yams, whose flesh was a dark, lush, underworld orange.
“So, who won the game?” Cora asked, after Uncle Louis had introduced me. Cora had long, straight, dark hair parted in the absolute middle of her head and sharp cheekbones that made her seem older than she probably was. She was pretty, in a country kind of way.
“Manual won,” Uncle Louis said. “We were about the only white people there.”
“Hmm,” she said, pulling a strip of yam skin free. She had long fingers. I imagined her throwing pots, the wet clay rising, dilating, fluting.
Uncle Louis asked where Jacques, the dog, was. Cora said Jay had taken him for a walk.
“Jay? Did I hire a dog trainer named Jay?” Hatless, his gray hair matted, his stomach sticking out beyond the panels of his raincoat, Uncle Louis looked as if he’d spent the afternoon asleep in a movie theater. He went into the pantry.
“Jay’s my friend,” Cora said, glancing at me. “He’s having dinner with us. Remember?”
“Yes, your friend. You told me about him. Though I could use a dog trainer, if he’s available.” A cupboard door, its wood swollen, scraped open. Glass clanked against glass.
“He’s studying welding at JCC,” Cora said. JCC was a community college. “But he likes dogs.”
“A dog is man’s best friend,” Uncle Louis said. I heard the glug-glug of liquid flowing into a receptacle.
“I’m going to excuse myself and go take a bath,” Uncle Louis announced. I watched his raincoated figure slip out of the pantry, tumbler in hand.
Cora said, “I think we may be all out of cooking sherry now, but I have some beer Louis doesn’t know about, if you’d like one. Jay brought it.” She was slicing the skinless yams, making wheels of them.
“I could go for a beer,” I said. I would have to drink it before my father arrived, however. I wasn’t legal—you could be drafted in Kentucky at eighteen, but you couldn’t drink—and my father minded about such things. Even Crawford, who was a year and a half closer to being legal, didn’t drink in Dad’s presence.
Cora spooned a sauce over the yams. It smelled lemony. Then she put the sauce pan down and went into the back hall. When she returned, she said, “Louis went down to the Pine Room last night after I made the mistake of giving him a hit of wine.” She saw me looking at the embroidery bordering the neckline of her thin white peasant’s blouse. I adjusted my gaze upward. “I didn’t know he had a problem.” She handed me a can of Sterling.
“It’s not your fault,” I said, pulling the pop-top.
The back door opened and Jacques entered, followed by Jay. Jacques was some sort of terrier mix. His ashy-gray coat was stiff and harsh, and he had goatish chin hairs. Jay undid the leash, and Jacques shot out of the kitchen, as if he’d just seen a cat stealing through the sitting room.
Jay had long hair and a patchy beard that didn’t conceal a skin condition, and his eyes would have been visible through fog. I thought he might be stoned. I thought there was an unpleasantness in the fixity of his mouth. I also thought I’d seen him before, a long time ago. I was sure of it.
CORA ASKED ME TO CARVE the turkey. I said that I didn’t think I should, since I was a vegetarian. Crawford said, “But he wishes he wasn’t.” Then she asked my father if he would do the honors and he said, “I’ll give it a try.” While at home, fetching Ida’s dishes, he’d put on a necktie, a blue one decorated with the C&O cat nestled in a quarter moon. It flopped against the turkey’s browned skin as he hacked meat from the breast. Cora lifted the tie from the turkey, brushed it off, and tucked it inside Dad’s shirt.
Crawford stood over by the stove. He’d come with a girl he’d known in high school named Libeth. He was stoned. He was sucking a Life Saver, and kept touching his earlobe, as if its existence baffled him.
Jay stood by the refrigerator, drinking a beer, looking steadily at Crawford’s date. Libeth went to college in Boston. She was a serious girl, who was known to laugh in your face if you said something ignorant. When he wasn’t drunk or stoned, Crawford was a serious person, too, and he must have enjoyed the idea of having someone to laugh at the ignorance of humanity with. Three years on the East Coast seemed to have sharpened certain parts of Libeth’s face. She stared back at Jay.
Jay pulled at the collar of his flannel shirt and scratched his beard. He’d hardly said a word since entering the house. Then he said to me, “The last turkey I had was at Eddyville. It tasted like crap.”
My father looked up from his carving. Eddyville was a state prison.
Jay opened the refrigerator and leaned in, as if he wished to escape from his confession, which was loose in the room like a bat.
Libeth said, “What’d you do? Knock over a store?” She was wearing a Peace Now button on one lapel of her blue-jean jacket and an Eldridge Cleaver button on the other.
Crawford giggled. Too much pot made him giggle.
“Something like that,” Jay said, refrigerator light washing over him.
Cora said, “Jay made a mistake and he paid for it and now he’s doing fine.”
When Jay shut the refrigerator and I saw his eyes again, the dark gleam of them, I understood why I thought I’d recognized him earlier. I believed he was the guy who had come through the door at the White Castle, eight years before, his face all but hidden under his windbreaker hood. I wondered if my father recognized him, or if the beard threw him off. Neither my father nor Uncle Louis had testified at the trial; Uncle Louis had even asked that the assault charge be withdrawn. I remembered my father saying after the White Castle thief had been convicted and sent away that the boy who had done it was barely eighteen. But he’d had a juvenile record, and he’d been given a stiff sentence. The judge hadn’t been moved by the fact that the weapon was a toy.
Had Jay recognized my father? When Cora introduced them, had the name Judge Dupree given Jay a jolt? Whatever the case, my father, a proponent of keeping the conversation flowing away from danger, started telling the story about Cyril.
Cora stirred gravy. She had a busy, mistress-of-the-kitchen look on her face. The kitchen was very warm and I could see sweat building up under her blouse. “Goats are the most useless animals,” she said, as if she’d had a lot of experience with them. “I don’t know why anybody would want to keep one.”
She asked Jay to get a basket for the rolls out of the pantry. He seemed happy to have something to do. I was relieved when she sent me upstairs to fetch Uncle Louis.
CRAWFORD CAME WITH me as far as the staircase. I said, “It’s him, that guy, the one who stuck up the White Castle. I swear. Don’t you recognize him?”
“No.” Crawford’s pupils had taken over most of his eye sockets.
“You’re so messed up, you wouldn’t recognize yourself if you bumped into you.”
“It’s how I get through these family dinners.” He grinned. If there was a positive side to his increasing use of drugs and inebriants, it was that it had made him more amiable for certain stretches of time. (Two summers later, when he became a Buddhist and a vegetarian in a bit of an about-face, he became grouchy again.) He said, “Last night, Libeth and I made it. Even though she has a boyfriend in Boston. Even though I could hardly get near her in high school. It was so great. I couldn’t believe it was happening. What’d you do last night, Morg?”
• • •
JACQUES LAY ON Uncle Louis’s unmade bed, his tail whisking the headboard. Uncle Louis was in the bathroom. The door was open a crack. Water dripped into the tub—buh-lip, buh-lip.
I said dinner was ready.
“The turkey has been burned to a proper crisp?” I heard him rearrange himself in the tub.
“Dad’s carving it,” I said, studying a framed black-and-white photograph on the dresser. It was of my father and his sons—père et fils sans chapeaux, soaking up the atmosphere in the L&N yards, November 1961. The picture was grainy, a bit underexposed, but my father’s happiness was evident.
“Tell him to save a drumstick for me,” Uncle Louis said.
I said, “I met Cora’s boyfriend.” Jacques regarded me with terrier ears upraised.
“Is he a vegetarian like you or a dirty old meat eater like me and your old man?” He farted, rippling the water like an outboard starting up. “Excusez-moi.”
“Meat eater. And an ex-felon. He told us the last turkey he had was at Eddyville.”
“Cora has an ex-felon for a boyfriend?” Uncle Louis seemed less shocked by this revelation than by her taste in music—or perhaps it only confirmed something about her taste in music. “What’d he do?”
I saw him again, the cold-reddened center of his face. “He looks like the guy who popped you at the White Castle.”
“Is that right?” He sounded almost amused. Then he said, “Are you sure? I thought that boy’s name was James. James Becker. Or Beckett. Something like that.”
“Maybe I’m wrong.” I didn’t recall Cora having mentioned Jay’s last name.
“It would spoil dinner if you’re right,” Uncle Louis said.
Water sloshed as he moved in the tub. “I hope you won’t ever find yourself in a situation where you have nothing to drink but cooking sherry. It’s god-awful. And you have to drink a gallon of it to feel the least bit giddy.” He chuckled. “However, it’s probably better for you than aftershave or Sterno juice.”
Though I’d never tried aftershave or Sterno juice, it seemed probable to me that I would turn out more like Uncle Louis than my father, who never drank anything stronger than a Coke, who didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, who lost his head only in the presence of trains, who would drive his cousin down to an Arkansas drunk farm at the drop of a hat and write him letters of encouragement on hotel stationery. I might turn out to be an improvement on Crawford, but I still didn’t feel it was within me to aspire to what my father seemed to represent: sobriety, honor, loving-kindness. I didn’t think I stood a chance of becoming like him.
I said, “Maybe we should pretend we don’t know who he is—the robber. If it’s him, I mean.”
“We could do that,” Uncle Louis said. “It might make dinner go more smoothly.”
I’d opened the top drawer of the dresser, not quite absentmindedly. It was a weakness of mine to want to open other people’s drawers. In Uncle Louis’s, I found a heap of thin silklike socks. This style of sock, which my father wore, too, which had to be held up by a garter, seemed dandyish for a man who was so careless of his appearance. Perhaps it was all that was available at the downtown men’s store where he and my father shopped. Or perhaps Uncle Louis felt tenderly about his feet and ankles. I’d heard it said that he was a homosexual. (Martin, the foreign exchange student, had said, “Your dad’s cousin seems like a poufter. Is he?”) I wasn’t uninterested in this aspect of Uncle Louis’s life, and yet it seemed less interesting than some of the other things I knew about him.
Near the bottom of the drawer, I found a handful of bullets. I held them in my palm and felt their weight and purpose.
Uncle Louis lifted himself out of the tub, dripping, groaning. “I guess I should come meet the company.”
I put one of the bullets to my nose. It had a cool pleasant smell.
“Goddamnit,” Uncle Louis said. He’d hit his foot or leg against something.
“You all right?” I put the bullets back.
“I’ll be fine as soon as I can get some real alcohol in me,” he said.
WHILE WE WAITED for Uncle Louis to come to the table, my father told the story of how a horse Uncle Louis’s parents had owned had wandered next door onto my grandparents’ property and dropped dead. The horse, Isabelle, had remained in my grandparents’ yard for several days, rotting in the summer heat, until somebody could be found to haul her off.
“Isabelle had two gaits,” Uncle Louis said, entering the dining room. “One was standing still and the other was walking in the direction of food. I think she was hoping to eat some of your mother’s flowers before she passed on.”
My father laughed and said, “I think she was revenge for Cyril.”
Uncle Louis was wearing a clean white shirt and khakis held up by suspenders. He’d shaved. His shaggy gray eyebrows flickered above the rims of his eyeglasses. He greeted Crawford and Libeth. He asked after Libeth’s mother, whom he used to see at the opera in the days when he went. We lived in a big upper-South city that was actually a small town, I realized.
Cora introduced Jay to Uncle Louis. She said, “This is my friend Jay Beckman.”
Uncle Louis shook Jay’s hand and said it was nice to meet him. Neither gave any sign of recognizing the other. But Uncle Louis excused himself and went into the kitchen and then out of the house. Maybe he was going to get a bottle he’d remembered he’d hidden in the garage some years ago. Or maybe he was going to drive down to the Pine Room and spend the evening there, without his relatives and without Cora and her ex-felon of a boyfriend. It would be simpler to sit on a bar stool, having removed oneself from the complications of life, its idiotic coincidences and mean symmetries, having cast aside all ambition except that of drinking oneself senseless.
After a while, my father said, “Maybe I should go find Lou.” He got up from his chair. His tie was still tucked inside his shirt. The white napkin he clutched in his hand suggested a small nightgowned figure, a puppet ghost.
“I’ll get him,” I said, looking at Crawford, who had found something in the middle distance to gaze at. My father sat back down.
I met Uncle Louis coming back inside through the kitchen door. He had one of Jay’s Sterlings in his hand. He looked confused. He said, “I can’t remember where I hid my gun.”
“You have a gun?”
“I bought it at a truck stop near Covington. Don’t tell your dad. He wouldn’t approve.”
“Maybe we should eat now. We can find the gun and shoot Jay later, if necessary.”
“I suppose that would be more polite.” He took his glasses off and inspected the crudely taped stem. “I used to have an extra pair, but I couldn’t find them this morning.”
When we returned to the table, Uncle Louis with his beer in a glass, my father said grace, the holiday version. When he was done, Crawford, suddenly roused, said, “And while you’re at it, God, how about stopping the war in Vietnam. Merci beaucoup.”
“Amen,” Cora said. The a in “amen” was soft as a pillow, as sweetly formed as the breasts beneath her peasant’s blouse.
“Right on,” Jay said, not loudly, almost as if he were muttering to himself.
My father and his cousin were silent for a moment. I spooned yams onto my plate. I didn’t want to discuss the war. My father always routed me when we argued. (He routed Crawford, too, but my brother didn’t recognize it.) I wanted to put Cora’s yams into my mouth. I wanted Jay to disappear.
“As soon as we pull out,” my father said somberly, “the Communists will gobble up the country like seven-year locusts.”
“We’re killing peasants in rice paddies while propping up a corrupt government,” Libeth said. “It’s shameful.”
“It gives me a headache just to think about it,” Uncle Louis said, rising from his seat. He’d polished off the beer and was heading to the kitchen for another. My father watched him go. Perhaps he’d decided that he couldn’t keep his cousin from blinding himself and walking off the edge of a cliff. Perhaps he’d decided that all he could do was wait at the bottom for when Uncle Louis stopped falling. And then maybe he could get him to go back to Arkansas.
Crawford, who was warming to the subject, said, “Who cares if the Communists take over, Dad? It’s their country.”
“They’re just a bunch of slopes,” Jay said. “Fuck the war and fuck them.”
My father stiffened. He had a long face, which became longer when vulgarities disturbed the air around him. I heard a hiss: Uncle Louis opening a can of beer.
“Jay!” Cora said. “God!” Her cheeks and throat had turned a becoming pink.
Jay stared at the chunks of turkey on his plate. The middle of his face was knotted with anger, as if he knew Cora wasn’t going to be able to save him from whoever he was. She’d dump him sooner or later, and then he’d just be an ex-felon trying to get a job as a welder if he could first pass the course at JCC. He wasn’t the kind of clay you could really work with.
Jay got up from his place and went toward the kitchen, his boots digging into the thin Oriental. Cora followed.
A draft from somewhere made the candle flames shiver. Uncle Louis’s house wasn’t exactly airtight.
Libeth said, “He’s kind of scary. I wonder why she hangs out with him.”
“Maybe she likes a challenge,” I said.
Crawford said, “Are you sure it’s him, Morgan, and not just another homicidal maniac we get to spend Thanksgiving with? Or maybe it’s his twin.”
“What?” my dad said, breaking his silence. “Whose twin?”
In the kitchen, Cora said, “Where do you think you’re going, Jay?” She sounded like my mother when furious.
“Do you like being around these rich people and listening to their dumbshit stories about goats and horses? This is too grand for me, Cora.” He took a breath. “Maybe if you bang him, they’ll let you be a member of the family.”
Crawford giggled.
My father got up from his seat, shooting a look at me. Had he assumed, as I had, that it was me Jay was talking about Cora banging? Did he even know the term “banging”?
Uncle Louis said, “You can’t talk like that here. Please leave my house.”
“Is that my beer? You can’t drink my beer, you fuckin’ alky faggot.”
“Stop it, Jay,” Cora shouted. “Don’t do that.”
My father went toward the kitchen with his napkin in hand. Crawford and I got up from our seats and stood around like rubberneckers. By the time our father reached the kitchen, Jay had gone out the door, with Cora right behind him. They yelled at each other in the dark. Then they drove off in their cars.
Uncle Louis came back into the dining room. His shirt was splattered with beer, and there were spots on his trousers. “Excuse me while I go change,” he said. But he didn’t come downstairs again.