by Greg Howard
* * *
“We need more from the altos, Mama,” I say to her.
“They’re giving you all they got, Button,” she says, standing beside me, directing with one hand, the other resting on her hip. “Barbara Jean has a cold.” She points to a wilting stalk of corn in the front row of the choir and we giggle. “What about those tenors and basses?”
Mama directs the sopranos and altos, and I’m in charge of the tenors and basses.
I make great big U-shaped motions with my arms, and nod down the row to a stalk the wind has knocked on its butt. “Brother Thompson was slain in the spirit, so we lost our best bass. And a couple of the tenors are busy speaking in tongues.”
Mama looks over at me. Her eyes get real big and her lips curl up even though I can tell she’s trying to fight it.
“Button!” She scolds with her eyes but she’s losing it with her mouth. “That’s borderline sacrilegious!”
I swing my arms back and forth. “Is that bad? I can’t tell because you’re grinning.”
That makes Mama lose control of her face and laugh out loud.
“What does sacrilegious mean, anyway?” I say.
She scrunches up her face a second and then looks over at me. “It’s when you poke fun of church stuff out loud, even though it really is secretly funny.”
I grin back at her, directing away. “Use it in a sentence, Mama.”
She points to the corn sopranos like they have a solo, encouraging them to sing out. “Button is a sinner who must repent this Sunday at church for being sacrilegious about speaking in tongues and being slain in the spirit.”
This makes us both laugh hard. Mama’s a real soloist in the North Creek Church of God human person choir. And singing was her talent in all three of the beauty pageants she won—Miss Myrtle Beach (sponsored by Dollar General), Miss Buckingham County (sponsored by Mr. Killen’s Market), and Mrs. Upton (sponsored by Daniel James—Independent Contractor and Daddy). I love to hear Mama sing. Everybody does. She’s especially good on the old hymns of the church.
We turn our attention back to the corn choir, and Mama feeds them the words.
Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
I bring the tenors and basses in and join her on the chorus, shout-singing at the top of my lungs to make her laugh.
* * *
A door slams somewhere behind me, and the memory gets swept up and carried away by the honeysuckle wind. Tucker barks once and runs off to the right. I look over my shoulder. Grandpa waves at me from the back porch of their house, which sits right next door to ours. I turn and aim my raised conducting arms at Grandpa, like I’m waving at him and wasn’t just standing there directing the Pentecostal corn choir. They already think I’m crazy enough around here. No reason to give them more ammo. Something buzzes my ear with a wispy flutter that kind of tickles. I shake my head and slap it away. Probably just a moth. Moths creep me out.
Crossing our backyard, I head over to Grandpa, who gets no farther than the bottom of the porch steps before Tucker attacks him with sloppy kisses and nudges of his huge muzzle.
“That’s my good boy,” Grandpa says, leaning down and kissing Tucker on the top of his football-sized head.
He doesn’t have to lean down too far. Part German shepherd and part Rottweiler, Tucker stands almost as tall as me. Daddy says if he’d known the tiny rescued pup he got me the day I was born would grow to one hundred and twenty pounds, he would have gotten me a cat like he did when Danny was born. The cat wandered off before Danny turned one. I guess she didn’t like my brother very much, not even when he was a baby and rumored to be an abnormally beautiful child.
But Tucker’s different from Danny’s cat. When I’m home, he never leaves my side. The only person Tucker might love more than me is Mama, but he would never want me to know that. He wouldn’t want to hurt my feelings. When I reach them, Grandpa gives me an identical kiss on the top of my head, like Tucker and I are equals, but that’s silly. No human person is as great as Tucker. The wind whips Grandpa’s thick salt-and-pepper hair from side to side like a flag planted on top of his shoulders.
He stands up straight, shoves his hands in the pockets of his faded denim overalls, and cocks his head at me. “What’re you doing out there staring at the corn, darlin’?”
Grandpa calls me darlin’ sometimes. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t bother me the way it might bother other boys. It sounds natural coming from him. Actually it makes me feel special, because he never calls Danny darlin’. He calls Danny sport. I’m definitely not a sport.
I want to tell him that I’m worried about Mama. That I saw Detective Frank today and I don’t think the investigation is going very well. But we’re not supposed to talk about it. Nobody said so, but you can just tell. Daddy, Grandma, and Grandpa never bring up what happened to Mama. At least not when I’m around.
I look back at him and shake my head. “Nothing.”
He eyes me like he might not believe me. I’m not as good a liar as Danny. But I don’t want to make Grandpa sad. Mama is his and Grandma’s only child since Uncle Mike died in Iraq exactly one month before I was born. They really love her a lot and she always made them so proud—straight-A student, church soloist, Sunday school teacher, all her charity work with prisoners and the poor, and a three-time beauty queen. She could have even been Miss South Carolina if she and Daddy hadn’t eloped when she was nineteen. And Mama was their first and only child to graduate from college. She got her degree in social work. When I was a little kid, I used to think she got that degree to help her in her beauty pageants, but it turns out it’s not that kind of social work at all.
I know her disappearance has been really hard on them. Grandpa can’t even talk about her, and he made Grandma pack away all the pictures of Mama in their house. He said it was just too painful to see her face every day. I used to think it was just temporary and that they’ll put the pictures back up when Mama comes home. But I’m beginning to wonder if they’ve given up hope of finding her like Daddy and Danny have. At least Grandpa doesn’t drink anymore. He quit the Wild Turkey cold turkey the day Mama went missing and hasn’t had a drop since. Grandma says she’s thankful for small miracles ’cause she’s been trying to get him to quit for years. Mama told me once that Grandpa started drinking when Uncle Mike died and sometimes it got real bad back then when I was just a baby. He never acted drunk around baby me, not that I can remember, so who am I to judge?
Grandpa clears his throat. “Your grandma is frying up some fatback. Come inside and have some with me.”
“I already ate supper,” I say.
Grandpa gives me the ear. That’s when he can’t hear you, so he cups his hand around the rim of his ear and leans forward.
I point over to our house and raise my voice to Grandpa levels. “Already ate.”
He nods. Less words, more volume usually does the trick with him.
He puts his arm around my shoulders and guides me. “Well then, just come in and say hello to Grandma. You know she loves to see you. She’s making fruit salad too.”
Grandma’s fruit salad is no joke, so I don’t resist. Tucker leads us, making himself right at home, going up the stairs of their back porch and pawing at the door until Grandpa opens it for him. Tucker thinks he’s one of the grandkids. And let’s face it, he is.
Before I go inside, I turn one last time and stare out at the cornfield. Something about the wind tonight—the way it sounds like the ocean in my ears, and the honeysuckle-scented sky, and the Pentecostal corn choir waving their arms at me. It’s like the whole world is trying to tell me something. Maybe it’s trying to help me remember the song Mama used to sing to me every night after she told me the stor
y of the Whispers, but I still can’t remember it, as much as I try. It’s stuck somewhere in the cloudy part of my brain.
I close my eyes, and mouth the wish that’s become my nightly prayer. That the Whispers will speak to me. That they will help me find her. They know all the secrets of the universe, so they must know where Mama is. I wonder if it’s sacrilegious to pray to the Whispers instead of God. I know a lot of people have been praying to God about Mama and I guess He’s been real busy or on vacation or something, because it sure hasn’t helped. I don’t think He’s listening anymore, so I don’t see any harm in praying to the Whispers. Maybe they’re listening.
Mama says she hears them sometimes, but I never have. I’ve always wanted to hear them ever since Mama first started telling me the story. I would go stand out in the backyard at sunset and stare at the tree line beyond the cornfield, waiting for them. Wishing for them to talk to me like they talked to the boy in the story. They never did, so I gave up a long time ago. But since Mama went missing, I’ve started doing it again, every night for nearly four months, when I take Tucker out after supper at twilight. I haven’t heard them, though. Not yet. But I’ll keep wishing. And waiting. And listening. The Whispers are my only hope of finding her. I’m sure of it.
Another wall of honeysuckle-scented wind presses into my face. I lean into it and whisper into the dusky, half-lit world, just to remind them.
“I’m listening.”
4
5-4-3-2-1 FRUIT SALAD
I sit at the kitchen table peeling apples with Grandpa’s antique Swiss Army knife. He lets me play with it whenever I come over, but I’m not allowed to take it out of their house. Grandma would much rather I use a peeling knife, but this one fits in my hand perfectly and I feel like I’m representing the entire Swiss Army when I use it. I don’t know how those Swiss soldiers defend themselves with such tiny weapons, but they’re awfully handy. The handle is made of real wood, not plastic like the new ones. The wood’s been rubbed smooth by decades of use by Grandpa and his daddy before him.
Great-Grandpa gave him the knife before Grandpa left for the war. That’s about as much as Grandpa ever talks about the war. I don’t know which war, because apparently there were several. I just hope Grandpa gives me the Swiss Army knife when I turn fourteen so I can use it when my best friend, Gary, and I go exploring in the woods. It makes sense that I would get it because when Danny turned fourteen, Grandpa gave him Uncle Mike’s old twelve-gauge shotgun. Danny has been on a mission to rid the planet of squirrels ever since. I don’t think there are any squirrels left in a five-mile radius of our house. But I don’t want a gun. Guns scare me more than other boys. Mama doesn’t like them either and was none too happy when Grandpa gave Danny the twelve-gauge.
“How many is that?” Grandma asks, her face drawn downward like it’s been for months now.
“Two,” I say.
I know it’s only supposed to be two apples, but she always asks when I’m working on the last one to remind me. Mama calls that passive-aggressive. Grandma acts like three apples and not two would ruin the reputation of her fruit salad for all eternity. Grandma’s 5-4-3-2-1 fruit salad is simple, but precise.
Five oranges
Four bananas
Three peaches
Two apples
And one package of Birds Eye Deluxe Halved Strawberries (in syrup)
No frozen strawberry substitute will do. Grandma says it’s what makes the whole thing taste right. Once Mr. Killen stopped carrying the Birds Eye frozen strawberries in his store and Grandma wrote him a letter of protest every week for two months until he brought them back. She almost started a petition.
That was one of our words from the calendar—April, I think—but I already knew what it meant because of Grandma.
A petition is a paper that a ton of people sign when they get all riled up about something and want to get their way.
Like, You don’t mess with Grandma’s 5-4-3-2-1 fruit salad unless you want a petition signed by everyone in Buckingham County who has ever tasted it.
“BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER!” Grandpa shouts from the other room.
He took his fatback into the den for Wheel of Fortune, a show he can watch without turning the volume up to high heaven. Every now and then he yells out a random phrase as he tries to solve the puzzles. He sounds crazy in there, but we pay him no mind, like Grandma says.
There’s something I need to ask Grandma, but I don’t know if it will make her cry. I hate it when Grandma cries and she’s cried a lot in the last four months. She doesn’t even try to hide it when she does. Just cries right out in front of God and everybody, like she’s proud of it. She used to cry in church sometimes, but she hasn’t set foot inside a church since Mama’s disappearance. I think she’s mad at God for taking both her children away from her and not answering her prayers to bring them home safe. I think that’s fair.
I wipe the blade of the knife with a dish towel and look up at her. “Did you tell Mama the story of the Whispers when she was young?” I know she did. Mama told me so, but I need a little more information and I have to start somewhere.
Grandma’s face sags even more than usual, but she forces a smile. Her eyes go instantly moist, but so far the coast is clear of full-on Grandma tears.
“I did,” she says. “Same way my mama told me and her mama told her.”
She pours the soupy package of strawberries and syrup into our large bowl of finely cut fruit and stirs it with an oversized wooden spoon like she’s digging through quicksand.
She looks up and squints at me, forcing a single tear out of her left eye. “What made you ask about that?”
“Oh, nothing,” I say, reaching down and scratching the top of Tucker’s head. He moans with pleasure and then shakes out his mane when I stop, like I messed up his hair or something. Grandma scoops some fruit salad into a bowl and sets it in front of me.
“Did you ever think they were real?” I ask.
She grabs a spoon from the drying rack in the sink and hands it to me. “What’s that?”
My impatience slips out in a sigh. Mama says I’m impatient sometimes and that I get that from Daddy. At least I got something from Daddy. Danny got everything else—his looks, being good at sports and hunting. He even got Daddy’s name.
“The Whispers,” I say. “Do you think they’re real?”
I stare at her, filling my mouth with an overflowing spoonful of fruit salad. It’s too good to eat slowly—the creaminess of the bananas, the tangy-ness of the oranges, the sweetness of the overripe peaches, the slight crunchiness of the apples, all marinating in the juicy goodness of strawberry syrup. It tastes so good it makes my jaw ache a little.
Grandma finally answers, kind of matter-of-fact. “Of course they’re real.”
I wipe my mouth with a paper towel and swallow down the half-chewed fruit salad. “You mean like real in the flesh? What do they look like? How big are they? Where do they live?”
She doesn’t answer, her attention drawn to the stove, where a saucepan full of Lipton tea bags begins a rolling boil.
“MOTHER GOOSE NURSERY RHYMES! SOLVE! SOLVE, YOU NITWIT!”
Grandma wobbles over to the stove and moves the pan off the hot burner with a quilted pot holder protecting her hand. She’s always been short and round, but lately she doesn’t walk too good. Bad knees. Bad ankles. Bleeding varicose veins. You name it, Grandma’s got it or had it. Grandma’s what they call a hypochondriac.
A hypochondriac is someone who claims they have every ailment under the sun, whether they really do or not. It doesn’t mean they’re bad people, though. They just can’t help themselves.
Of course everything got worse after Mama went missing. Before that, Grandma was pretty active. She even used to take me and Danny swimming at the community pool in Upton in the summer. Now she only leaves the house once a month to drive d
own to Miss Ethel’s Beauty Emporium to get her hair set and dyed, or to go to her doctor’s appointments. Grandpa does all the grocery shopping now. He never gets it right, though.
I sit patiently as Grandma presses down on the tea bags with the back of a fork, squeezing out every drop of tea flavor possible.
“Mustn’t be wasteful,” Grandma says.
She uses the word mustn’t when she’s trying to sound proper. She always wanted to be a schoolteacher, but she was the oldest of six kids and her daddy made her quit school to help with the younger ones after her mama died.
She pours the tea from the saucepan into the pitcher, her hands shaking a little. Then she dumps in two heaping cups of sugar before adding water from the sink.
“There are starving children in Africa, you know,” she adds.
Somehow I don’t think Lipton iced tea is what those starving kids in Africa need the most. I guess God doesn’t listen to their prayers either. But instead of saying all that, I try to get Grandma back on track. My track.
“Grandma?”
She looks at me while she stirs. “Huh, sweetie?”
I take a deep breath so my words don’t come out sounding cross or disrespectful even though Daddy’s impatience is percolating in my veins. “The Whispers. Have you ever seen one?”
“Well,” she finally says, “I can’t say I ever actually saw them.”
I let out a disappointed sigh. “Then how do you know they’re real?”
She turns the burner off, wobbles back over, and sits down across from me again. She looks me straight in the eyes and her face grows dark. “My mama said she saw ’em one time. Said they was ugly as sin. Small, yes, but with huge yellow, jagged teeth, horns on top of their little bald heads, and wings as sharp as razor blades.”
