JEWEL (42 page)

“Alton Skokum what? ” Leston said, and buttered his biscuit.

He was quiet, shrugged again. “Called you a nigger-lover.” He reached for a biscuit himself, started forking it open.

Leston finally looked at him, knife in one hand, biscuit in the other.

“So you fought him? You think I need defending? ” James said nothing, only went at the biscuit. “I don’t know what that means, Daddy, ” he said. “Nigger-lover. But I knew it wasn’t good, the way Alton said it.

That’s why I had a fight with him.”

He had the biscuit open then, steam up off it, and he looked at me.

“Momma, ” he’d said, “you pass me the honey? ” It’d taken a moment or so for me to nod, smile, pass it to him. That was that. End of story, the beginning of James’ life and the revealing even that far back as to who he’d end up being, teaching high-school Ag. in Levelland, Texas, because, Eudine’d written us enough times, that was what he wanted to do.

And there at the sink in our house in Manhattan Beach, where I could smell the sea through the open windows at night, and where the bedsheets were heavy with the damp air, I thought of whoever my grandchild this Elaine was, Billie Jean and Gower’s six-year-old, wondered at what’d happened in her life so far that would already set her and who she was in motion, and I was sorry, too, that there hadn’t been a part of me in there, a hand in raising her and Matthe . And then there were James and Eudine’s children as well, three of them, Judy and Mark and David, all these lives on the face of the earth and me able to touch on them so little, all of them well on their way to not knowing who their grandma was already. We lived in California.

But there were the other grandchildren, the ones I took what comfort I could in when I wasn’t tending to Brenda Kay. All the attention she took every day and the job of driving and assisting Mr. White exhausted me, so that when, on most Saturday mornings, Burton and Sarah showed up with Susan and Jeannie and Jill, and when Wilman and Barbara showed up with Brad and Robert and Timmy, it was all I could do to make a few batches of biscuits and slice up some bacon for their breakfasts while Wilman and Burton worked on the yard, mowed it up nice for Leston, and did whatever else was needed, whether weeding the flowerbeds or painting the shutters or l fixing a shingle. That was all my grandkids would remember me by, I figured, biscuits and bacon, their daddies at work on our yard.

The grandchildren were a hardship for Leston, he didn’t know what to do with them, usually ended up getting mad at them for whatever reason Jeannie and Susan pulling each other’s hair, Robert digging a hole in the yard, Jeannie and Brad just running through the house, getting energy out they otherwise would have spent at the beach. Eventually he’d holler at all of them to be quiet, then’d look to me to provide entertainment of some kind. Sometimes he’d take a child up into his lap, then do the trick of rolling a cigarette with one hand, the child’s mouth open and watching this strange magic take place right before their eyes. Then he’d let that child down, light up the cigarette and hold the smoke in his lungs as long as he could, all the grandchildren down around his knees and counting out loud how long he could hold it, him smiling all the while, winking at them. But that sequence of events’d only last long enough for Burton to get the oleanders over to the side yard trimmed up a bit, only long enough for Wilman to pull a couple screens off the windows before the children’d lose interest, wander off.

Most times they ended up playing with Brenda Kay, scribbling right along with her at the kitchen table with the boxes of crayons I always had for her, the tablets of colored paper I kept. That’s how Saturdays went.

But, finally, Leston got what he wanted out of this life, so far as I could tell. In these eight years he’d come around from the man moving furniture to the Head of Maintenance at El Camino College, seventeen men under him now, he’d come around from the man with his hands jammed into his pockets to the man who could call up either or both sons, tell them he wanted them over of a Saturday morning to change the oil on the Plymouth, to help wallpaper the bathroom, to dig up the little strip of ground along the back fence where Leston grew okra and snap beans and tomatoes. And they came, which, I knew, pleased my husband no end.

They came, usually brought their children along, sometimes the wives, neither of whom much liked the way things went, Saturdays, if Leston so wanted it, were his and his alone, and whatever plans the wives made, whether a trip to the beach or mowing their own lawns or weeding their own flowerbeds, were lost. Burton and Wilman were the sons following Leston off into the woods, it was easy to see, Hilburn and Sons Lumber Company, the company that never happened, but happened in its own way nonetheless.

A little over a year ago he’d come home from work and stood in the kitchen in his gray maintenance uniform and held me tight in his arms, lifted me off the floor and laughed. I’d thought at first maybe he’d lost another job, him gone crazy over so much loss of himself through his days. But no. It was because he’d been told by the president of the school to buy white shirts and dark pants and a slew of new ties, that he’d be wearing that sort of outfit from now on. Starting immediately he was Head of Maintenance. No more pressing uniforms, either, he’d be taking all his clothing to the dry cleaners he had a cleaning allowance now and that was when I’d laughed, too, Brenda Kay laughing right along with us, there at the kitchen table.

That night we’d made love for the first time in over a year, and in his hands I’d felt some return of reason to him, of the power he held over his world. Here was my husband, as good as returned from the dead, that old language of our bodies resurrected. Here was my husband of the years Before once more, though my breasts had long gone the slack of age, my legs up around him merely the flesh and bones of a woman fifty-six years old. It was a slow and pleasant making love, not like when we were children ourselves and on our honeymoon in Hattiesburg, and suddenly I’d remembered the two of us taking a bath together there in the hotel room, naked as jaybirds and quick to make love as many times as we could before we’d have to go back to Purvis.

And as we made our slow love that night, I couldn’t help but think on those days, the days Before, Before and Before and Before, when what Leston and I’d had, I finally saw, was love. Love was what we had, and Leston, finally brought to the point of being ready to move inside me, seemed suddenly filled with the kind of love we’d had then, not the passion of the body, but of the heart. We wanted one another, wanted to feel each other as close as we could, and I marveled at what went on in the world, at how many times this world’d had to spin before the language we knew of each other surfaced in our lives, spoke again.

We made love that night, and we were happy in it. We were happy, and when, finally, he was inside me my husband now sixty years old, even more of his hair gone, the flesh on his back soft and loose in my hands I saw the same twenty-four-year-old I married, the same man I met at Sunday church in East Columbia, Mississippi, the same man with callused hands and dirty fingernails and an easy smile. This was the same man whose sounds mixed with mine our first night together to remind me of my own parents, and here had come the sounds again, the ghosts of my parents in our bedroom in Manhattan Beach, the two of us grandparents eleven times over and living in what might as well have been a foreign country, even after those many years we’d lived in California. Not the life I’d ever thought would happen when we’d made love our first time so long ago, the sounds we’d made that night now old friends come to visit us here, my husband a man who’d wear a tie to work from then on.

And this Saturday was Annie’s wedding, the day after tomorrow, Gene O’Reilly her suitor, the man who’d been nicknamed Frog by his fellow Highway Patrolmen. He was a motorcycle patrolman, and was short, thick, friendly. His was a true and friendly smile, eyes big, mouth wide so that, yes, you could see he’d be called Frog by men who weren’t afraid of him.

So far Annie hadn’t called him that but once, that time on an outing to The Rock, a place Burton’d brought us to our first months here, and which we’d made our own beach since then. It was way up north of Mar Vista, all the way up near Port Hueneme, black rocks and waves crashing and a stretch of sand as well. We’d go there Sundays and picnic, and Leston would fish in the ocean what Burton informed us was called surfcasting and Brenda Kay would set her feet into the cool water.

Usually there was nobody about, nobody for us to worry over seeing her legs, seeing our daughter. Just us.

Gene’d come along that time as a sort of baptism, all the grandchildren screaming and carrying on down to the edge of the water, burying each other in the sand, the wives yapping on about all the food, Leston out at the water with his pole, Burton and Wilman throwing a football back and forth up and down the beach. All of this, and Brenda Kay, too.

But he took to her right off for some reason, a reason I couldn’t figure out, while Annie was helping me and Sarah and Barbara lay out the food, Gene had knelt next to Brenda Kay there at the end of the blanket we always used at the beach, one of those ugly green moving blankets Leston’d brought home one time and’d promised he’d return, baby Timmy and baby Jill crawling round on it, droopy diapers and all.

Gene knelt next to her, touched her back, talked to her in a quiet way, then pulled from the pocket of his Bermuda shorts a small, thin square box, black.

He touched a finger to it, fiddled here and there, and then I could hear a radio station, the call letters KTLA, then some music, Hank Williams’ voice small and tinny, but there.

We women stopped, food wrapped in wax paper in our hands, and watched as Gene handed the thing to her.

“It’s one of those transistor radios, ” Barbara said.

“My, ” Sarah said. She was quiet, then said, “Think it’s a bribe? ” “If it is, ” Annie said, “then I hope he bribes me, too.”

Barbara laughed at that, and I smiled, watched my daughter while they went on unwrapping the food.

Brenda Kay looked up at him. She had on slacks, like always, and l f , a blouse, her feet bare, her last toes jammed together like they would always be, a jumble of toes.

Gene held out the radio to her. She glanced from it to him and back.

Then she looked to me, saw I was watching.

I nodded, and she reached her hand to the radio, took it, held it to her ear.

“You want to hold it that close, ” I could hear Gene say quietly, “then you want to turn the volume down.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off her, not even when she’d looked at me. Gently he took the radio from her hand, touched the side of it. Hank Williams’ voice went even smaller, and he gave it back to her, placed it back in her hand, lifted her hand to her ear. “There, ” he said.

“Hey, Frog! ” Annie called out then, and Gene turned to her, got that smile. “Time to eat! ” Gene looked at the ground, slowly shook his head, poked a finger in the sand. Brenda Kay sat with the radio up to her ear, was already rocking away to the music. Then she let out the first moan, her singing. Gene glanced at her only a moment, looked back at the sand, drew something there with his finger. He was still grinning.

He said, “Annie, I wish you wouldn’t’ve said that.”

“Frog! ” Burton called from down the beach, his arms up to catch the football Wilman’d just thrown. “I heard that, Frog! ” He caught the ball, and already he and Wilman were running up toward the blanket and the food, both of them hollering “Frog Man! The Frog Man! ” Of course Annie was all smiles, and went around the blanket, knelt next to Gene, Brenda Kay still rocking. She said, “But you still love me.”

“Maybe, ” he said, and Barbara and Sarah and I all laughed at that the grandkids swarming up now, all of them calling out “Frog! Frog Frog!

” “Let’s go ahead and eat, ” I said, “before sand gets all in everything, ” and Gene stood, went to the ice chest, pulled from inside it a can opener and started in on cans of soda pop for the kids, Nehi grape and orange and lemon-lime, next, he opened cans of beer for the men, Sarah and Annie taking one right along with them, Barbara making a tsk-tsk sound and grabbing up a Nehi orange for herself.

I went a few feet toward the rocks, where Leston was casting, cupped my hands around my mouth, hollered out, “Come on in, Leston! ” He was reeling in his line, and turned to me. “First quiet I’ve had today! ” he called, his voice nearly swallowed by the wash of the waves.

He was smiling.

“Suit yourself, ” I said, though only to myself, and I turned back to the family, everybody eating now, Gene with his head back and Annie feeding him potato chips one at a time like they were grapes. Jeannie and Susan were giggling, mocking them, Jeannie’s head was back the same as Gene’s, and Susan held a chip just above her mouth. “Oh, Frog! ” she said, and they both fell down, laughing. Burton said, “Now y’all cut that out, ” and Sarah, next to him, a piece of fried chicken in her hands and almost to her mouth, stopped, said, ” Y’all. You’re never going to lose that.”

“Damn right, ” Wilman said, and Barbara laughed, slapped at his leg.

“Bill, ” she said. “Watch your mouth.”

Bill.

Brenda Kay gave out a moan seemed even louder than normal for her, and I went to the grocery bag the paper plates and napkins were in, pulled out one of each. I said, “Now we’ll get you some food, Brenda Kay, ” the words just me talking to myself.

But before I even had a spoonful of potato salad on the plate, there was Gene handing Brenda Kay a can of Nehi grape. She stopped her rocking, smiled up at him, took it.

“There you go, ” he’d said to her.

I had every dish cleaned and put away now, the table cleared and wiped clean. Brenda Kay was still at the table, the transistor up to her ear, Leston in the front room with Annie and Mrs. Zafaris. It was seven-twenty already, and I had pictures in my head of Billie Jean having rolled her car somewhere between Blythe and Indio, that wasteland she’d die in thinking this was all California was, desert and rocks.

Then the doorbell rang, and I went into the front room just as the door pushed open, Brad and Robert rushing in and grabbing me round the knees, the two of them calling, “Gramma! Gramma! ” Next came Barbara, Timmy in her arms, asleep. “Sorry about the doorbell, ” she said, “but Robert wanted to do it. No way to stop.” She smiled, and I patted the boys’ heads, said, “Nothing wrong with hearing your doorbell ring.