“Maybe you were wrong when we got married,” I almost heard my father say. He looked up at my mother’s secret cabinet above the refrigerator. I do know that he said, “You thought I’d only be selling Venetian blinds to convicts, ex-cons, runaways, and ne’er-do-wells. Look how that ended up. I seem to be putting food on the table. I don’t hear you wanting for want.”
My mother stomped around a bit, between running into various pieces of furniture in our den, living room, and kitchen. She asked me for a syllabus, kind of—she said, “Hey, Gary No Yes, get me that long sheet of paper that has y’all’s day-to-day activities typed up on it mimeographed with the goddamn teacher’s name and address on the top of it”—and found Mrs. Latham’s home phone number.
And she called. Only later in life did I find it sad that Mrs. Latham answered the phone, considering. Here it was, Christmas Eve, and she should’ve been either visiting her folks or her in-laws, like every other American with any sense of duty. I hung out by the stolen Christmas tree my father bought from a man on the side of Highway 25, and I pretended to be enamored with a couple gifts wrapped for Judith and me that were obviously either socks or underwear. My mother said, “Hello, Mrs. Latham?”
I assumed that my teacher said something other than, “Get lost, it’s Christmas Eve.”
“Hey, this is Gary No Yes’s mother, and I would like to invite you and Mr. Latham over for some day-after-Christmas turkey hash. I have this recipe I got from my mother’s mother, and she got it from my husband’s father’s father’s father’s father’s mother.” I looked beneath the tree and saw a box that might’ve actually been a set of encyclopedias. “Yes, that is odd how my family could know my husband’s family, but that’s the way it goes. Anyway, we want you and Mr. Latham to come over on December 26. It’s so much trouble for people to take care of everything the day after Christmas, we understand.”
I picked up a package and shook it. The card said “From Mom/To Gary.” This is no lie: glug, glug, glug emanated beneath the box. Booze, I thought. It wasn’t hard to figure out how my mother made it sound that she would bear the brunt of taking on all day-after-Christmas eaters. I listened to my mother listen to Mrs. Latham.
My mother said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. Uh-huh. Well that would be great, then,” like that.
To me she said, “Well that’s settled. She seems to love you, Gary No Yes.” Back in the bedroom later I heard her tell my father, “She has no right to call herself Mrs. Latham. Halt Ma! She’s not even married. What kind of a woman would pretend to have a husband? Most sane women walk around town with their husbands, but pretend like they’re strangers who happen to walk in the same direction at the same pace.”
The next thing I knew, my father got me out of bed, told me to put on some tennis shoes but stay in my pajamas, and we were off in his Dodge to place surprise Christmas gifts on the miniature porches of house trailers. He gave out extra-thin feather dusters, made especially for the Galloway micro-mini-blind. Somewhere halfway to Forty-Five he said to me, “Gary No Yes, it’s important to make people feel like their homes are first-rate. Remember that. Even if the homeowners aren’t clean, it’s important for them to feel that their trailers are first-rate. Am I clear on this?”
I thought, We must turn first-rate into rat strife. We must turn first-rate into tar fister. I said, “Yes,” got out of the car, wove my way through about twenty curs, and propped micro-mini-blind dusters against aluminum doors. I imagined my sister inside the bathroom, painting a picture of Satan Claus with horns and fangs.
THE GLUG-GLUG-GLUG gift ended up being a quart of aftershave, something I would use in about five years. Judith got a new shower curtain, some more watercolors, a white leather Bible, and a slew of knee socks. Me, I got underwear, some knee socks that were probably meant for Judith and mispackaged, and one of those miniature black Magic 8 Balls that you shook to get a Yes or No answer. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but when my father said, “Ask it a question and see what comes up,” I secretly asked myself, “What does the future hold for me, in regards to Gruel?”
I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of how to ask it questions, obviously. The answer came up, “It’s in your future.” I kind of thought how maybe Mrs. Latham came from the family that manufactured these things.
So we sat around the table for a few hours seeing as my father needed to pull off a two-hour grace, he couldn’t carve the turkey right, and my mother kept throwing away entire cans of congealed cranberry sauce when they didn’t slide out unmarred. “It’s bad luck to have dented cranberry sauce,” she said. “We must turn dented into tended.”
Fa la la la la, la la, la la.
My mother shaved, honed, scraped, and pulled what turkey carcass scraps she found soon thereafter, chopped the meat into dust mote-sized bits, set them in a pot of boiling turkey broth she’d saved, added enough jalapeños to cure the world of head colds. The next day she got up earlier than usual, took the lid off her turkey hash, sampled a wooden spoonful, and declared, “One day I might open up a diner here in Gruel. What this town needs is a good diner.”
I waited for my mother to turn one of her words into another, but she didn’t. No, she seemed happy and confident and optimistic.
When Mrs. Latham came over at noon, my mother took off her apron, answered the door, and performed a perfect sweeping arm gesture for my seventh-grade teacher to follow into the den. Mrs. Latham said, “Merry belated Christmas, Mr. Noyes,” to either my father or me, I couldn’t tell. She didn’t use the normal No Yes form of salutation.
“Judith, come on in here and meet Gary No Yes’s teacher,” my mother yelled out, though. I prayed that Mrs. Latham wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom during her visit. Sure enough, Judith had taken her new watercolors and painted a nice representation of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, but instead of a pitchfork the farmer only held up his middle finger, and the farmer’s wife had blood running down both sides of her mouth.
Judith came out all smudged and said, “I guess you’ll be my teacher in two years, if I don’t fail on purpose. My last name’s Noyes, not No Yes, by the way. You have from now until then to memorize it.”
I said, “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Judith got a new Bible for Christmas.”
Mrs. Latham said, “If I’m here in two years you can go ahead and shoot me in the brain, Judith,” as my father pulled the dining room chair out for her. “Did Santa bring you that set of encyclopedias you wanted, Gary No Yes?”
My mother pulled out her own chair and sat down. “How come you insist on people calling you Mrs. Latham when you don’t even have a husband?”
My father said, “Dorothy Marie.” I never knew my mother’s middle name up to this point.
Judith said, “Marie? Marie?” and ran back into the bathroom to paint something else.
I said, “We are humbled by your presence here, Mrs. Latham,” because I’d seen it in a movie.
My teacher scooted up. She looked at my mother and didn’t blink. “My husband was in Special Forces. He was killed in 1968, somewhere in a Vietnamese jungle. I don’t know about you, but where I come from we keep our deceased husband’s name. We’d met in college up in Chapel Hill, and I asked him not to volunteer, but he was too patriotic. His father and two uncles all died in France and Pearl Harbor. My husband had straight A’s right up until he left college his junior year. He studied philosophy and religion, and minored in literature. He had hopes of one day teaching elementary school either in an inner city or way out in the country—kind of like here in Gruel—so kids could have some kind of future. My husband didn’t so much believe in the war in Vietnam, though, let me make it clear. He thought that he’d studied enough Buddhism to talk the enemy into giving up altogether. He’s buried down in Florence, at the national cemetery there, should y’all wish to ever visit and place a small American flag on his grave. The one I placed yesterday should be faded by the end of January or thereabouts.”
My father stuck out his palms to hold Mrs. Latham’
s hand and mine before he said grace. I looked at my mother and noticed how I could’ve taken every available linen napkin, wadded them up, and still not filled the space her open mouth created. My father only said, “Let us remember our heroes and victims. Amen.”
Judith shouted from the bathroom, “Amen.”
My mother let the canned cranberry sauce fall out at will, on a silver-plated stick-butter plate. She served the turkey hash atop cheese grits, with homemade bread to the side. Mrs. Latham finally said, “My husband had straight A’s, just like Gary does. That’s maybe why I’m a little hard on your son.”
My parents said nothing. Even Judith knew not to say anything about how she wanted to be a tattoo artist later on in life. We ate, Mrs. Latham left, and my father and I spent the next week visiting his micro-miniblind customers to see if they’d tried out their surprise feather dusters. When I went back to school for the second semester, Mrs. Latham took me aside on the first day right before we filed off for a lunch of cling peaches, black-eyed peas, corn bread, steamed cabbage, and sloppy joes. She said, “Yes or No—that story I told your parents could’ve gotten me a movie award.”
I looked into my teacher’s eyes and realized that I would be getting such questions for the entirety of my life. I wore my sister’s knee socks that day, though no one could tell seeing as we didn’t have a P.E. class at Gruel Normal. But I felt the smile coming on, and let it go before laughing out loud. I said, “Christmas.” Mrs. Latham put her hand on the top of my head and walked with me toward the cafeteria. She said, “Every day.”
EMBARRASSMENT
EVERY COUNTRY BOY ON OUR LITTLE LEAGUE TEAM could hit that knuckleball during practice. We had no choice. Coach D. R. Pope and both of his assistants had worked in the cotton mill, and all three of them had undergone tragic digit loss due to spinning frames, looms, and/or pneumatic presses of one sort or the other. D. R. pitched batting practice most of the time with his right hand, which had only a thumb and a little finger. So the baseball always lolled toward the plate without as much as one rotation between his grasp and the Louisville Slugger. Our own pitcher during games—a farm boy named Yancey Allison—must’ve thought that the knuckleball was some kind of Forty-Five, South Carolina, miracle, for he’d perfected it, too. Yancey let his nails grow out an inch beyond his fingertips, he dug them into the ball’s seams, and even with the arm movement of a catapult, the ball crossed the plate at maybe twenty miles an hour. Our foes regularly hit Yancey’s pitches a good hundred feet past the outfield fences. Meanwhile, all the rest of us stood stock-still when the opponents’ pitchers threw fastballs, sliders, changeups, and curves in our direction. I wasn’t the only player to take a mighty swing after the ball reached the catcher’s mitt and he threw back to his pitcher. One time I actually got two strikes called on me by the umpire because I stood there and watched for strike one, then fouled off a ball as the catcher threw back and I finally swung.
Let me make it clear that the grounds on which we played needed regular tending before each game, for hunters would steal onto the field at night, regardless of legal hunting season, and deposit salt blocks and mounds of sweet corn to attract deer. If anyone decided to sleep in the bleachers overnight, like my friend Compton Lane and I did once, he’d be awoken an hour before dawn by camouflaged men sporting anything from .410 shotguns to thirty-aught-sixes. D. R. and his assistant coaches sent us out like boys with metal detectors to scour the rye grass between the infield and the cheap outfield signs advertising 45 OFFICE, 45 EXTERMINATION, 45 FLORISTS, 45 LUMBER, 45 GRAVEL and, 45 MEN’S WEAR, 45 DEBS AND BRIDES, 45 JEANS, THE FORTY-FIVE PLATTER NEWSPAPER, 45 TRASH PICK-UP, 45 RECORDS, 45 MODERN BARBERS (who sponsored our Little League team, the Flattops), SUNKEN GARDENS LOUNGE (which used to sponsor our team before Mr. Red Edwards decided he couldn’t afford a losing team’s destruction of his reputation), and RUFUS PRICE’S GOAT WAGON store. We took wheelbarrows out with us while the opposing team got to stretch, run wind sprints, take infield practice, and get ready to raise their collective batting averages.
“Just do the best you can, Mendal,” my father always said as we pulled into the parking lot of the Forty-Five rec center. “I’ll talk to D. R. and see if we can’t get you playing first base, or left field.” More than once he’d said something about how Bennie Frewer didn’t really have head lice, and that it was okay for us to touch the baseball after Bennie threw it in from right field on those odd occasions when somebody from the other team didn’t hit the ball over the fence and Bennie would gather it up and throw it to first or second base.
“I don’t like being catcher,” I said to my dad. “I’m a faster runner than anyone else. Why’s D. R. have me be Yancey’s catcher? A slow fat guy usually plays catcher. I’ve seen it on TV.” Me, I crouched every game, waiting for Yancey to throw one of his knuckleballs. I waved my arm back and forth like a windshield wiper in hopes of only touching the ball coming my way. A blind boy could’ve caught for Yancey just as well.
My father never answered. Years later, I would think that for some reason he knew it would be best for me to hear what went on in the stands, right behind me, as I crouched, eyes closed, while the slow projectiles came my way.
“Hey, Mendal, you might want to get two catcher’s masks,” Coach D. R. Pope said more than once. “Find a way to fashion one over your privates.”
“Yessir,” I always squeaked out. D. R. held up his right hand with that thumb and little finger poked out like the biggest peace sign ever, like a big-time Texas Longhorns fan, like a deaf man saying he loved me, like—I would learn later—a man trying to approximate the length of his pecker. “We don’t want to set no records as to the worst team in Little League baseball, Mendal. You a smart boy. Can’t you not figure out nothing to say back there to avert the batter none?”
I’d think, This is some kind of double- or triple- or quadruple-negative trick on me. And then I’d crouch, and close my eyes, and smile with glee about every tenth time, when I’d actually catch a ball thrown by Yancey that didn’t either get thrown in the dirt or smacked straight over the “45 FEED AND SEED COMPANY” sign in center field.
I sat in front of the umpire two days a week for an entire summer and listened to him bark, “Ball!” unless our opponent’s batter blasted a pitch out of the park. A lot of times I missed catching it completely, of course, and the umpire’s shin stopped the ball. He said often, “Goddamn you, Dawes, I’mo send your daddy my doctor’s bill for bruises.”
And I always said, “A man with his leg stuck hard on the ground isn’t going to go far in life,” like my father told me to say, which wasn’t the smartest thing, of course. Or I thought, A man with his leg stuck hard on the ground will never learn how to fly no matter how hard he flaps his arms. Invariably the umpire was one who’d worked at the cotton mill at one time or another and was missing digits, too.
Coach D. R. Pope wouldn’t get his wish in regard to the team not setting a losing-streak record. Our team had lost all of its games for the three years before I could play and went on to lose until D. R. quit the mill and moved down to Myrtle Beach less than a year later. He got a job, I found out, as the maitre d’ at a fancy shellfish restaurant in Murrells Inlet. He had always talked about his dreams and goals and ambitions after we lost games by enormous margins, but I thought he talked big like that so that we would play harder the next game, maybe win, and not chance losing him for a coach who popped his players’ hamstrings after every strikeout or error.
“My wife’s cousin Sandy married into a rich family down there at the beach. They made they money paving driveways with seashells, you know. And then they thought, Hey, why don’t we open up a big old restaurant, and we can get our clam and oyster and scallop shells for free every night? So that’s what they done. And Sandy’s husband, Claude—he’s no-account, and the family just flat-out give him his place to manage called Sandy Claude’s—he said I’d be perfect for greeting eaters, when the time was right.”
D. R. Pope told m
e his little story after everyone else left the players’ bench, while I tried to stuff my mask, glove, shin guards, and chest protector into an old duffel bag.
“You know what’s keeping him from going down to that restaurant today?” my father asked me as we drove home maybe midway through the 1968 season. This was a time before some touchy-feely psychologist figured out that losing kids would feel better about themselves if a game plain ended when one team was behind by ten runs at the end of the third inning or whenever. We’d lost this particular massacre 49-0. I remember only because their coach kept yelling at D. R., “Hey, we done scored seven touchdowns and every extra point after!”
To my father I said, “Coach doesn’t want to go on to Myrtle Beach until we finally win a game, I guess.”
My father honked the horn at nothing and laughed. “He’d never get to go to Myrtle Beach if he waited for that.” He laughed and laughed. “That’s a good one, Mendal!”
I said, “I ain’t trying to be funny and you know it. Why’s he waiting, then?”
My father pulled into the Dixie Drive-In so we could get milkshakes. “The mill pays those boys a thousand dollars for every missing digit. It’s something like five thousand dollars for an arm from the elbow down. Times get tough, a man like D. R. Pope just grits his teeth and sticks his arm in a machine. I’m thinking that his cousin-in-law wants D. R. to go ahead and lose the matching fingers on his left hand so he’ll look more like a lobster. Or crab. Or any of those other things with pincers. Like a scorpion. And I bet D. R. needs three more thousand dollars in order to make the move, you know. If he puts his other three grand in a bank account, that’s a pretty nice little jump start.”
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