The Floatplane Notebooks (22 page)

I need to know where I can talk to her tonight and all that, maybe eat breakfast with her tomorrow before heading back—after she's had time to calm down and think about what she wants to do. And if she wants a ride back, then she can ride back with me.

“What the hell are you doing down here?” she asks. “You following me?”

“No. I just came to give you a ride back, maybe. They were all worried about you, you know, and I volunteered to drive down here. I been down here a couple of times. Nice place.”

“They ain't worried about me. They're worried about Meredith and Ross. You know that. Man, it was like I was tied in a straight jacket. I can't—” She starts crying.

“Why don't you get in and I'll take you wherever you're going, unless you're with those guys.”

“I ain't with those guys. They're just in the band. We had a great gig last night—at Sloppy Joe's.”

She waves bye to the guys waiting, walks around the car and gets in. Her hair is pulled up on top of her head and these little ringlets hang down on the sides. She gets in and pulls out a joint. “You ever smoked one of these?”

“Yeah.” I don't tell her only one.

I start thinking, and I try to stop thinking what I am thinking, but I figure I'll just wait and see how things go. Rhonda's been stuck in a very bad situation for several months, actually over a year. And she's a sensuous woman. And we're both in Key West alone, and if she says she's not going back, I'll call Bliss, and if Rhonda really needs me in a bad way, then what the hell am I supposed to do? It's all a matter of physical geography. I mean, if I'm thinking it, and she's thinking it,
that's
the
sin
, as they say. Why the hell deprive yourself, and in this case, nobody gets hurt. That's the real situation. Nobody is getting hurt. That's more obvious than anything.

Bliss went into the guest room the afternoon that Rhonda left and hung up my clothes and made up the bed and straightened things out. Ross stayed in the house with Mama that night. Thatcher rolled me out to the guest room and helped me get in bed. At different times, different people put me to bed, and if Old Blue flops out of my underwear when it's Bliss's turn, she says, “We're all family.”

Ross was doing good. It's not hard for him to be kept clean and happy when Noralee, Mama, Aunt Esther, and Bliss are all looking after him. They put him in my lap for a good bit of the time and he smiles at me. I get Bliss to hang a rattle from my stump—safety-pin it to my sleeve—and I can play with him as good as anybody, especially if I'm on the floor.

At about nine o'clock on the second night, Mark called Bliss from Key West. I was in my spot at the end of the counter in the store when she took the call down at the other end. They talked for all of a minute and Bliss says
to me, “Come on, let me roll you out to the guest house.”

On the way over we met Thatcher. He stopped and stood while Bliss rolled me toward him.

“Sorry, Meredith,” he said. “I was on the phone line. But maybe it'll be a little more relaxed without her around.”

Sure, Thatcher.

When Bliss rolled me into the guest room I thought about killing myself somehow, but when she turned on the light, I saw Ross's striped T-shirt on the bed—and Bliss had her hand on the back of my neck—and I knew it won't no more than a thought.

She walked over and sat down on the bed. “Rhonda's not coming back.”

I nodded.

Bliss talked about how everybody would help, that she was sure I could come live with her and Thatcher if I wanted to, that when I learned to walk and got the arm I'm supposed to get, things would get better. She didn't know I was just getting lower and lower. I felt like I was at the bottom of the barrel, end of my rope, end of the line. I didn't even have the energy to hold my mouth closed. I nodded toward the bed.

She rolled me over to the bed, clicked out the brace, stood me up in the walker, took off my coat, unbuttoned my shirt, pulled it off, unbuckled my belt, unzipped my pants and when she started pulling them down over my hips I got a hard-on. She moved the walker, held my arm, pulled back the covers, helped me sit on the bed and then lie down. She covered me up, turned me over to face the wall, walked over to the door, turned out the light, stood there a minute, then left. In a few seconds she came back in, closed the door, locked it. She took
off her coat—I could hear her, my good ear was up—and got into bed behind me. She was wearing a silk-feeling blouse. She put her top arm under mine, her hand on my chest and squeezed. God, oh God, I needed it. I needed that. She massaged my chest, then my stomach, then the back of my head with her other hand; then she worked my shorts down. It was a little cumbersome. I was ready to come if she touched me, I knew. She got her other hand under my waist and found me with both her hands at the same time and began to move them first very, very slowly…. It was like heaven.

The splendor of the wisteria has not abated one iota.

This summer's gravecleaning group was small but proud. Aunt Scrap was there, bless her heart, with her powerful presence and her walker, which meant two walkers in all, since Meredith likes to have his along so he can stand for awhile and maybe move a few feet. He's decided not to order an electric wheelchair because he believes he'll be walking before too long. I'm not sure, but I'm hoping. His progress has been remarkable. He tried an artificial arm and leg and gave up on both. What he has been through would have killed a lesser human being for sure, but he's charged back from the abyss and is now able to clearly say some single words, and move very slowly from one spot to another by leaning over in the walker, putting his weight on his right elbow, steadying the walker with his short left arm and skipping forward with his right leg, then lifting the walker with his stub and moving it forward.

Throughout his ordeal, from the day he got back, I have seen the old Meredith in his eyes, and now when he says one word I can usually read the rest of the sentence in his eyes, which move on beyond what he's saying.

Taylor loves him because Meredith buys him something out of every government check he gets, the last thing being a baseball glove, and too, Meredith points his stump at Taylor and wiggles it and Taylor thinks it's the most mysterious and unusual thing in the world. Where the skin is sewed over the end makes a little
X
.

Ross was along on the gravecleaning, rolling in the truck bed on several blankets. He crawls and rolls all over the place and can pull up, but he's not big enough to fall out yet. Next year he will be. He's a sweet pretty, as Aunt Scrap would say, and looks exactly like Meredith's baby pictures. He and Meredith both are living with Thatcher, Taylor, and me. It works out because Taylor and Ross have one bedroom, Meredith the other, and Thatcher and me the other. Noralee had rather babysit than eat, so she keeps one or both of the boys over at Mr. Copeland's—enough to give me genuine relief. She helps with Meredith, too, and enjoys it, except for an occasional frustration.

Nobody made it up from Florida for the gravecleaning this year because Uncle Hawk had complications with his cataract operation. And Thatcher couldn't be there at first because he was busy at Strong Pull, where his job is taking on more and more of an administrative cast.

So the only ones there to start with were me, Meredith, Mildred, Mr. Copeland, Aunt Scrap, Taylor, Ross, and Noralee.

Mr. Copeland had come over late Friday afternoon, the day before, got Thatcher, and they went to the graveyard and did some work. Mr. Copeland knew there was going to be only a small crowd the next day, so he wanted to get some of the work done. Very early the next morning, Saturday, he went back by himself, and so it turned out that a good bit was already done when the rest of us got there.

What happened was that it turned into one of those days when the sun is bright and warm but the air is cool, and thin. It set Aunt Scrap off to talking about how there used to be more days like that around the turn of the century when she was a little girl and lived just down the road from the very spot upon which we sat.

“I guess I was about eight or ten when Tyree and Loretta started having all their children: Little Hawk, Albert, Esther, Henry, Content, Spruce, Lucy. That the right order, Albert?”

“That's right.”

“I won't but three or four houses down the road, and for some reason, Papa and Mama didn't have but two of us, so I spent all the time I could at Tyree's.

“And then of course the typhoid of 1911. You ought to know about some of this,” she said to Taylor, who is nine now. “You too,” she said to Noralee.

“I know a lot of it,” said Noralee. “I knew about the typhoid.”

Aunt Scrap spat. “I remember walking in and seeing Aunt Loretta, pregnant, boiling water for Tyree, and Grandma Caroline trying to help out, refusing to take to bed, getting sicker and sicker herself, and Helen standing around wringing her hands, and Ross sitting on the porch. You know, Loretta's the one finally threw away those baby fingers that used to sit
behind the clock, and it won't long after that that the fever came through.

“Son, go shoo that dog off there.

“Lord, Tyree and Grandma Caroline both died. Typhoid. And then within six weeks, those two lovely children, Henry and Content. That was Loretta losing a husband and two children within six weeks. And Ross, his mama and a son. That was a busy spring and summer in this little graveyard. Don't you know. There was Tyree dying, while all the time Grandma Caroline was giving him skunk cabbage and finally his tongue turned black and he broke out in purple spots and all the time stuck under four or five quilts sweating like nobody's business. And then Grandma Caroline gone herself within a couple of weeks.

“It was happening all through here. People dying like flies.

“Will somebody do something about that dog?”

Noralee got Rex by the collar and pulled him away from a grave.

Aunt Scrap started in again. “Then within two years Loretta married that Rogers fellow and they were all off to town. I stayed with the children the day Loretta married old man Rogers and I remember little Lucy saying something about them getting married and I asked her if she knew what getting married was and she said, ‘Laying down together and getting dirt throwed over you.'

“Lord a mercy, and then in two years they were back from town with the cow. Had to leave old man Rogers to his preaching. Aunt Loretta got sucked in by him being a preacher—her so straight-laced and all.”

“I remember that cow,” said Mr. Copeland. “People came
from all over the place to see it—in town, I mean.”

I had heard all of this many times but it never failed to interest me greatly, because my parents were born twenty years later than Thatcher's parents and these stories of child labor laws and tent preaching and a cow in town were so enticing, so authentic, and it is a major part of Taylor's heritage. He was listening attentively to the part about how they left town in a caravan with the cow, and moved back here to the old homeplace which was being rented by a family of Indians who were then allowed to live in the kitchen until they found somewhere else to live.

Then Aunt Scrap leaned over, and looked around at all of us. “I'll tell you something about Hawk you all ain't ever heard. Since he ain't here, I'll talk about him. You know he worked for a while down at Lowrey's store—about a year, I suppose. Well the fact is, he was taking things, and you know, I don't reckon I ever told this, you know, he stole me a dress out of that store. A pretty blue dress. Color of the sky. You remember that, Esther?”

“No, can't say as I do.”

“Well, it's true.”

“It was Albert working down there, won't it?” said Aunt Esther. “Won't it you, Albert?”

“No, it was Scrap.”

“No, it was Hawk,” said Aunt Scrap. “He gave me that dress and I didn't pay him nothing, and he stole one for Cousin Teresa because she took a suitcase down there one day and he filled it up in a back room and made her walk out the door with it.”

“Cousin Teresa?” asked Mr. Copeland.

“Yeah, little Cousin Teresa.”

“She won't old enough, was she?”

“Yes, she was.”

“Why don't you tell some nice stories?” asked Miss Esther.

“I like ugly ones,” said Noralee. “Nobody ever tells any of those.”

“I'll tell you a ugly one,” said Mr. Copeland. “Esther, you remember Hawk telling us about where babies come from?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“We all
thought
they came from a stump—stump in the swamp.”

Mildred was tending her fingernails and looking up every once in a while, listening. She looked over at me. We have wondered together about some of the beliefs and customs that formed this family.

“Then Hawk got us together,” said Mr. Copeland, “under the sycamore tree—sitting on the root over there—me and Esther, and told us that a baby started growing in a woman's stomach after a man peed in her mouth, and nine months later the baby came out her asshole.”

“Albert!” said Mildred.

“Don't be telling that,” said Esther.

“Well, it's true,” said Albert.

“Gross,” said Noralee.

“That shouldn't be repeated,” said Esther.

“Lord, have mercy,” said Scrap. ‘At least
we
thought they came out your navel.”

“That
is
stupid,” said Noralee.

“My mama would have slapped your face for saying that,” said Mr. Copeland.

“She slapped your face more than once,” said Aunt Scrap.

“She did, I guess.”

“It won't stupid,” said Esther. “People didn't talk about those kinds of things back then. Nobody told us about anything.”

“Some people talked about sex and stuff, I'll bet,” said Noralee. “Just y'all didn't.”