by Lamar Herrin
To please him and to applaud his performance, we all clicked glasses up and down the line.
But Elaine remarked, Isn’t it some kind of frog with a very long tongue that flicks flies out of the air?
Flies and filth! Walter responded. I know at least one toad who does.
And, Molly took it up, just how did James, our Jim here, liberate the place? He won it all back because he told the story and kept the memory bright? Does that make a storyteller a liberator?
Technically, I don’t know whether it does or not, Walter allowed, but the field is ours! The place is ours! Look at it! Look out there! Paradise for a boy, our Jim called it. Paradise minus its toad …
You mean its snake, Molly said.
That’s another story, Walter said.
Is there no end to them then? Molly asked.
Storytelling in the South, Elaine mused.
Correct! Walter exclaimed like a game show host awarding a prize, professing to be pleased. What you drove seven hundred miles for!
Walter stood and poured out the Beam brothers in sacramental measures right down the line. He returned to his seat. By then the stars had begun to swing up. And a waxing moon which cast its first rays over a table of water so still, so unmarred by boaters’ waves or windbursts or untoward behavior of any sort, that it was possible to believe in a sort of universal suspension, in a quiet and collectively held breath. It was then in the hills behind us that the whippoorwills began to sing to each other, clear, glassy notes, three of them, the third assertive, triumphant, which you could time your breath to again. Breathe in on “will.”
Those birds had been common when I was a boy, but I had not heard them much since then. I reached over and held Elaine’s hand.
It’s lovely, Elaine said.
When you come down to it, it’s really nothing special, I confessed. There’re houses up and down the shores. People roar in for a long weekend and roar out. Most of them leave a mess behind. They muddy the waters and give a good goddamn. And yet …
I knew there had to have been a place.
How? How did you know?
By the way everything, really everything, came up just a little bit short.
You didn’t, Elaine.
That’s nice of you to say, Jim.
This really is child’s stuff. You know that, don’t you?
Of course.
Actually, there was this child—
The one with the golden eyes.
Which obviously weren’t golden, they just glittered that way. She’s a sad, middle-aged alcoholic now. Penniless. Living on the sufferance of her daughters, who’ve done all that they could.
With a husband who abused her …
There was such a man.
You mean “the toad.” What was his real name?
I don’t even want to say it. Not here, not now.
Then don’t. But get him out of your mind, too. You’re here, he’s gone. We’re here, he’s gone. Our friends Molly and Walter are here, and he’s gone. How old were you?
When?
When the war ended and the victors gathered and families began to form. How old were you then?
Fresh born, I said.
Elaine laughed, warmly. She squeezed my hand. The whippoorwills sang and I breathed in.
From down the line, her patience exhausted, on an evening out of a picture book or a movie show when no desire should go unfulfilled, Molly demanded, All right! Who’s going to tell me this snake story?
I took refuge in the night, on the far side of Elaine, behind a curtain of crickets and katydids and cicadas and all the insects of a southern summer night, and once again it was Walter who took on the role. For fear of underrepresenting it, he, of course, over-staged the scene. At every turn a southern pine forest, choked with brambly growth, became a bower of bliss, and huge swells of kudzu grew up to the path’s edge so that a single deviation had you sinking into a feather mattress of tendrils so tender and eager and quick to include you that to fight against it would be to declare war against nature itself, as those granite-faced Puritans up north had done. And the little boy, tender and eager and tendril-quick himself, and a little dog, plug-ugly but quicker yet. And then there were two pairs of lovers, one licensed and bringing up the rear, and another taking the day’s license unto themselves and speeding out ahead. Space them out, place the dog and the little boy in the center. A family portrait in the South.
Walter … Molly drew it out, as though taking aim, to let her husband know the risk he was running.
Virginal moans out ahead, veteran moans bringing up the rear, Walter went heedlessly on, honeysuckle or something equally sweet on the air, the cooing of turtledoves overhead, and there at the path’s midpoint, with a marimba rattle and a venomous hiss and a muscular uncoiling that would sound to the little boy like a Lash Larue whipcrack on the air—
Lash Larue? Molly objected with a threatening frown.
It’s Jim’s generation we’re talking about here. Jim?
Lash Larue, I quietly gave my okay.
—a Lash Larue whipcrack on the air, Walter resumed, and the snake struck. And the little bug-eyed dog leaped. And close enough so that Little Jimmy saw snake eyes staring right back at him—and who’s to say that a drop of venom didn’t fly through the air and land on his cherub’s cheek—the dog and the snake met in midair. The battle was fierce, it waxed and it waned, there were timeouts and time-back-in’s, and when it was over the snake lay stretched out at its entire phallic length over the ground and the dog was doing the panting for both of them.
Molly stopped it there. She turned to look down the row of chaise lounges to me.
She said, Does this bear any resemblance to the truth, or is one of the Beam brothers doing the talking?
They weren’t brothers, Molly, I explained. They were fathers and sons.
Not brothers?
Fathers and sons and a nephew. Two hundred years of them. It doesn’t make sense any other way.
A chain of Beams?
A chain.
And how do you break a chain?
I suppose that’s what the snake was trying to do.
And would have, Walter interjected, if a heroic little dog hadn’t sprung to Jimmy’s defense. Of course, the mother and father come rushing up and the mother’s kid sister and her swain—
Her swain?
We’re out in the country, Molly. Her swain. Her beau. The man who went on to found the plant that gave us all of this—and Walter swept it up in one hemispheric gesture, the lake, the hills, the sky—that man, a swain’s swain, and Jim’s favorite aunt, a handful herself with a laugh that wouldn’t quit, came rushing back, and that was what they found. A dead snake, a dying dog, and a little boy who had been spared, leaving one enormous question on everybody’s lips. Spared for what? Spared for what? Anybody care to venture a guess?
Molly grabbed the bottle out of her husband’s hand, and Walter, submitting, enjoying himself enormously, laughed. That still doesn’t answer the question, he said.
Spared so that you could come all the way down here and make a boisterous fool of yourself? Molly said.
That may be true, too, Walter allowed, but that’s not the correct answer. Try again.
So that you could make me regret getting within five hundred miles of you?
That would put you somewhere back north of Mason-Dixon.
So that you could traumatize—re-traumatize—our friend Jim.
It’s an old, old story, Molly, I said. All the damage has been done by now.
Elaine, Walter said, you’re a wise head. You can take the long view. Why was our friend and your soul mate spared? Think of the lifetime that lay before him. If that little Boston bulldog whose name was—Bean?
Bing, I corrected him.
Of course, Bing, Bing, named for the crooner, who sang love songs like nobody before or since. Come to me my melancholy baby …
Don’t you dare, Molly threatened. Why did we ever wake him up?
… cuddl
e up and don’t be blue. All your fears are foolish fancies, baby …
All right! Molly gave in. Enough of the crooning! Tell us straight out. Why was Jim spared?
Why, to take me fishing, Walter declared, overcome by disbelief. What other reason could there possibly be?
To take you fishing? Molly repeated. Eight hundred miles just to take you fishing?
The jumps, Walter said, practicing patience with his wife. To fish the jumps. High noon. You can stand on the shore and applaud.
Molly held the Beam bottle out of her husband’s reach and passed it on to me. I said, Take your choice of a room. Or two rooms, if that’s your preference.
The jumps? she said.
I said, Get Walter to explain it to you. Even with the state he’s in, it’d be hard to exaggerate.
Molly pulled her husband up and, of course, he was nowhere near as drunk as he pretended to be. He was nimbly on his feet. He stopped, took a deep breath, and let the insect-shrilling silence rule. Sleep in and go fishing at noon! he practically cheered. Never in my wildest dreams—
You’ll miss the pancakes if you don’t get up before then, his wife reminded him.
Miss the isums? Are you out of your mind? I’ll be battling Jim for the first stack.
The isums? Molly said.
And yet another story, I said.
There really is no end to them, is there? Molly said.
To the isums? An endless stack of isums? Isums reaching to the sky?
She smiled. No end to the stories.
No, I said. Not lined up here, facing the lake, the air like a bath you can breathe. No end.
Molly took Walter off to bed. Elaine and I remained in adjoining chaise lounges. The whippoorwills appeared to have gone to sleep. Voices had ceased from across the water, not even a dog. A fish splashed, small, incidental, gratifying only in the sense that you could go to bed assured the fish were still out there, waiting for the hour when the minnows would rise and the bass would rise after them and a fisherman might stand in their midst.
So, Jim, Elaine said. Why were you spared?
I reached for her hand. Walter had it right, I said. So that after all these years I could take him fishing.
And you’re sure to catch fish?
No, Elaine. I have a memory, a couple actually, out fishing with my cousin when we caught them in a furious burst. The times we didn’t I’ve forgotten. Basically, I have a memory of marveling at him.
And now it’s Walter’s turn to be marveling at you.
I laughed.
This cousin … Elaine ventured.
It’s far too late to be talking about him. I paused. Elaine sensed I had more to say. What was it not too late to be talking about? It was not too late to be talking about things that spoke for themselves, the two of us sitting there, reclining, half horizontal, in the absence of earlier generations, the Pritchards, the Whalens, here as opposed to anywhere else on the face of the earth, an interlude that wouldn’t last long, made possible because there were interstates and trip-plotting GPS women and aging, mostly retired men and women with time on their hands, in possession of comfortable, air-conditioned cars, and because there were faithful retainers from years past, someone like the Coggins family, who came by and in honor of Big and Little Howie Whalen kept the grass cut and the walls of wild growth cut back and the squirrels and raccoons out of the chimney and the boats in the boathouse suspended above all that would rot them, who let fresh air in and old depleted air out, and kept on hand, in case someone rose from the dead and asked for them, silver spoons and red-striped spoons that dared the devil to keep fish off the hook. But all that paled.
What couldn’t be permitted, I found myself saying, was that someone would come along and let it all go to hell. That someone would speed it on its way. That’s no different than going to the cemetery and before they rot digging up the bones to see how many nickels and dimes you can get for them. We’ve all known people like that.
Have we?
People without an ounce of reverence in their souls. Sure, we have.
I don’t know about reverence, Jim, Elaine replied. There may be too much of it out there. It may run too shallow or too deep. As if in the name of reverence …
Elaine trailed off. We had become accustomed to completing each other’s thoughts. Which could lead to testy moments or to moments of real intimacy, moments which needed little else to complete them, perhaps nothing else.
… people can commit barbarous acts? I said.
Or silly ones.
But irreverence isn’t the answer either, is it? There’s a fine line you have to draw …
… which very few people can.
Keep your reverence private?
Or know your public well if you can’t, Elaine allowed.
We’re private here, I said. Semiprivate if you include Molly and Walter.
But you’ve said it yourself, Jim. We’re in a world full of ghosts. The last thing you want to do is disturb those bones. What if you left the fishing for another day? Another life? Am I carrying this too far?
It’s hard to get a fish to bite, Elaine. If you’d ever tried, you’d know that.
But if they bite and won’t stop? If there is something that happens, some line you don’t want to cross?
I laughed at her, out loud, a little too loud. The fish stopped striking, the crickets chirping. I’d brought on a hush. I put the back of her hand to my lips. A slender hand, an elegant hand, whose darkening veins and age spots wouldn’t show in this light. I told her that she would never know how much it meant to me that she would travel this far, in the company of our voluble friend, to sit at my side—recline, recline—to listen to me and help try to make it all make sense for me while she took nothing away for herself.
And she interrupted me with a quietly incredulous laugh. It had a little purr to it. It was a bit of a moan. Oh, Jim, Jim, she said, I’m taking away all I want.
And she continued to laugh.
Many years ago, I said, I sat right here with my mother and my aunts. They were all beautiful, and if you put them together, the quiet faithful one, the spunky provocative one, the open-handed laughing one, and the mostly tongue-in-cheek sergeant-at-arms one, they added up to one extraordinary woman. But not as extraordinary as you.
And I kissed her before she could laugh again or grumble that she’d had enough flattery for one day. I asked her if I might have the pleasure of her company for the rest of the night. There was an abundance of bedrooms, where either one of us might escape, but what if for old times’ sake we lasted out the night, side by side, in one lakeside bed. Whose sheets would be musty, I warned her in advance, but surely we could sweeten them in our way and wake up to the morning light—and a melodious racket of birdsong—together.
I woke up long before that and carried Elaine out with me into the night. Her arms around my neck, the deep luster in her eyes. Until the last moment, when it all rose over the top and a lifetime of unseized chances and uncertain calculations went flooding away, she wouldn’t take her eyes off mine. Then, as it all came to bear, more than a groan she released what sounded like a deep vacating sigh as her eyes closed and she was gone. In the immediate aftermath she always spoke my name. Not in gratitude, certainly not in reverence, but as a simple act of recognition. Yes, I had been there, I had been there with her right up to the instant she’d gone off, but in the middle of the night I did get out of bed and in bare feet walked out the long dock to the boathouse—and I had always known where Big Howie Whalen kept the key, as the oldest and the first of my generation, that was a secret entrusted to me that would take more than one lifetime to forget. But rather than enter the boathouse, I stepped down onto the swimming float. A swath of moonlight lay down the center of the lake, then scattered out on the margins to a mosaic of silvered scales. There was no wind, just little vagrant breaths of breeze looking for a gust to join. They came to nothing. All that assortment of electric night sounds was confined to the shore. I stoo
d there waiting and listening, scanning the water and moving as the float moved on the insignificant waves. There came a time when the float registered a single abrupt movement, a tilt followed by a righting of the balance. Nonetheless, I kept my eyes trained up that moonlit road. Even when my friend Walter Kidman stepped up to my ear and said, Sure? and I gave it a moment’s thought before answering him that I was, it wasn’t as if we were keeping each other company out on that float. I had swum off that float as a boy, Walter hadn’t, but as middle-of-the-night wanderers risen from our ladies’ beds we both belonged, we had our right to step out onto water without getting wet. Not long later, I felt a reverse tilt and the swimming float returned to my weight, my presence, alone. I stood there a while longer. I had a memory of my aunt Ruth’s husband, Uncle George, a massive man who’d survived the Pacific when his ship was torpedoed by the Japanese, cannonballing into this lake. I could see the crater he’d leave when he hit the water, and I could feel, right then, the sharp angle of the tilt in the float when he’d come down hard on both feet, followed by the float’s release when he’d spring free. Man overboard! was his battle cry, and how Aunt Ruth scolded him for trying to scare us. The war was over, and as Aunt Lily kept reminding us, as though rubbing it in, We won! We won! As children we’d screamed in mock-frightened delight, and begged Uncle George for more, more thrills, more deep, near swamping tilts in the float, more men overboard, more war.
The next morning, Walter knocked at our door to announce that if I wanted to contest with him that first stack of isums, the time had come. I rolled back over, but Elaine rolled me out. Go keep your friend company, she said. Isums, she said, smothering a sleepy laugh in her pillow.
There was a larger kitchen in the new part of the house, modernly equipped, but in the original kitchen, before a small two-burner stove, Molly stood turning pancakes over in a cast iron skillet while Walter sat at a corner breakfast table, really only suitable for two, waiting to be served. Molly was not a tall woman, and she wore what in these surroundings was an elegant robe, while my grandmother might have stood before the stove that early in the morning in something as insignificant as a slip, so that as the pancakes bubbled and the batter sometimes spilled, it all got mixed up in my mind with the overflow of my grandmother’s flesh, rosy in those summer mornings and brightened with a sheen. Her hair came loose from where she’d pinned it up at the back of her neck, wavy, once abundant auburn hair now unruly and mixed with gray. She’d be humming a tune, and to that tune she shifted her weight, or perhaps it was when she flipped the pancakes that her broad hips moved. I must have been panting and pleading like a dog, for she’d send me to the table, and only when I was still and attentive with my eyes full of impending wonder would she place the first golden stack before me. What did I say? I said, Thank you, Mama Grace. What else did I say? I said, What is ’ums? and she said, They’re whatever you want them to be, you darling boy.
