by Brad Barkley
“Listen,” I said, “Your money’s not welcome here. Take your business somewhere else.” He breathed through his mouth, the matted ends of his hair quivering like leaves.
“Paying customer,” he shouted. “I say I’d like some goddamn coffee” He smacked his hand on the counter, knocking one of my father’s napkin dispensers to the floor. The spatula rang against the grill as I yanked it by its wooden handle and drew it up, sizzling with grease, in front of Joe Whelan’s face. The ring of metal on metal hung in the air.
“Out. Now,” I told him. Over and over I repeated to myself rule number seven, that we had the right to refuse anyone. My hand shook as if the spatula handle were electrified. Joe Whelan backed off the stool and stood frowning, scratching his beard. He spat on the floor. “Leave,” I said, then watched him pick up and replace the napkin holder, put his hat on his head, and walk out the door.
During the afternoon lull, I carried an armful of grease-spattered aprons toward the laundromat, uptown. I walked breathing diner smells out of the cotton bundle, bumping into people. As I turned the corner by the cafeteria, I nearly tripped over Joe Whelan. He was on his knees, his head pressed against a newspaper machine. Beside him sat a halfempty bottle of cheap fortified wine with roses on the label, and along cracks in the sidewalk ran a stream of reddened vomit. Joe retched, the plastic shark’s tooth tapping his chin, his face as gray and parched as old corn husk dolls. He retched again and brought up a wash of air, then fell on his side and began to shiver. Coins rolled out of his jacket pocket onto the walk—his change from the bottle he’d bought with the five dollars I’d refused not three hours before. My heart shook. I dropped my load of aprons, believing Joe Whelan would die at my feet, that it would be my fault. I pulled him up by his corduroy coat, patched bare in spots, stiff with cold and grime.
“You come with me,” I told him.
I led him back to the Tast-T-Cup, propped him on a stool and got him to swallow black coffee till he stopped shaking and could hold up his head. I pulled a menu off the counter and opened it under his nose.
“Order something,” I told him. “Anything.” He held the menu in his hands, staring at me.
“Coffee,” he said slowly, “Black.” I wrote it down. Sandy walked out of the back holding a cigarette.
“What in hell is this?” she said. “It’s a can of worms, is what.” I ignored her, nodded to Joe Whelan.
“Plate of pancakes,” he said. “Lima beans and buttermilk. A hamburger, hunk of pie and a roll. Toast with honey.”
I fixed it all, faster than my father had ever fixed anything, and laid it out on three plates before him.
“Eat,” I said.
And he did. Mouth nearly level with the counter, shoving in the food with his fork, breathing deeply through his nose as he chewed. He downed two more cups of coffee and the buttermilk; I watched the color and heat return to his face. When he finished, he pushed against the counter, drew a deep breath with his eyes closed. He slapped coins from his pocket onto the counter—eleven cents—and walked out the glass door into the sun. On his way out, he shouted back, “Keep the change.” I dropped his dishes in the big stainless sink.
“Black and blue,” Sandy said, staring at me through her thick glasses. “Your daddy will beat your behind.” She shook her head.
My parents returned with their hams, honey, apples, and corn husk dolls. Sandy kept her mouth closed about what had happened, and I didn’t volunteer it. My father roughed my hair and squeezed my bicep, told me I’d take over as head grillman someday. My mother gave me a geehaw toy she bought at the Tweetsie Railroad gift shop. My father showed me how to work it. I rubbed the notched stick; the propellers spun first one way then the other.
Much of the time, my father cannot remember that Jackie is my wife. When he speaks he calls her Meg, my mother’s name. He insists the cafeteria of the nursing home is his diner; his nurses tell me that twice during the past year, before he was confined to his bed, they caught him in the kitchen of the cafeteria, pulling pots and pans out of the racks. I pretend concern, but as I sit in the dim light of his room at night, closed inside the thin curtain with him, I think of how good it would be if he could get out of bed and rough up my hair, he and I could sneak down to the cafeteria in the dark, whip up a few egg sandwiches and short stacks and then stuff ourselves. But by now he is beyond even standing. I never made grillman.
At the diner, things were soon back to normal, my mother running the counter two days a week, me in school, working weekends and afternoons. Ray and the feed store gang bragged on how I’d thrown Joe Whelan to the dogs. School let out again for Christmas break; I strung lights around the windows, taped a cardboard angel to the inside of the door.
On a Monday morning, out of a cold rain, Joe Whelan walked in. It had been more than two months since I’d seen him. The Tast-T-Cup had a crowd, the men from Westin’s Feed, people out early to catch Christmas sales downtown. Joe scraped his shoes on the tiles, drug his hat off his head so it pulled his hair straight down toward his eyes. His eyes bulged, swollen and yellowed. The hat moved in his fingers.
“Pancakes,” he said. “Coffee, toast—”
“Get the hell out!” my father yelled from the grill. Grease from his spatula dripped. Outside, rain hissed on the sidewalk. Sandy looked over at me; my face burned, and I quickly rang up the check of a gray-haired lady standing before me at the register.
“Out, “Whelan, before I call the law,” my father said.
“Sic the young’un on him,” Ray Wilson said, grinning. I took a five from the woman, my head down.
“That boy’ll feed me. Anything I want.” Without looking, I felt Joe Whelan point at me.
“You know this man, Jess?” my father asked me. “He a friend of yours?” I handed the woman her change. My eyes watered.
“Best meal I ever had that boy fixed me.”
“Oh, I don’t imagine that’s true, now is it, Jess?”
The gray-haired lady smiled and pressed a quarter into my hand. “Here’s a little something for you,” she said. I looked at my father.
“You feed those dogs,” I said under his hearing, my lips barely moving with the words.
“Want to feed him, Jess?” He winked at me. I squeezed the quarter into my palm.
“No, sir,” I said. I looked at Joe Whelan. “Get on out of here.”
The cardboard angel muffled the sound of the sleigh bells as the door swung shut behind him. I dropped the quarter into the pocket of my apron.
Our way home, we are delayed by trouble with the car, and do not start back for New York till afternoon of New Year’s Day. “We said our goodbyes the night before at Seven Springs, where the nurses gave my father a noisemaker and strapped a tiny fireman’s hat to his head. At midnight, they brought grape juice in plastic champagne glasses, and Jackie kissed his cheek. I shook the thin bones of his hand, and noticed the anchor tattoo on his forearm has faded away. The nurse whispered to us that visiting hours were long since over, that we would have to leave. My father slightly raised his head off the pillow and looked at me. “Rules,” he said, and then tried to say it again. I knew it might well be the last thing I’d ever hear him say.
On the road at dinner time, I look for one of my usual places to stop, ignoring a cafeteria with a sign that promises “Open New Year’s,” and the bright fluorescence of the fast-food places Jackie points out to me. Jan’s House, Sarah’s Diner, and Marvin’s are closed, dark except for twinkling lights and a lit-up, plastic nativity scene on the counter of Jan’s. Dusk turns to night, our oldest begins whining, the baby crying. Jackie draws Danny out of his car seat, opens her coat and blouse to nurse him. I give Lisa animal crackers out of the glove compartment and turn up the heater to lull her to sleep.
“Please,” Jackie says. “Can’t we stop for a burger?” She sounds angry and tired. I don’t answer her but keep driving, my own stomach pangs deepening. I pass the golden arches, Burger King, and the others with their blinking s
igns advertising drive-thrus open till three. Of all the things my father taught me to hate, first among them was fast-food restaurants, which in his mind closed us down. When the first fast-food burger stop was put up in town—a red and white tile prefab assembled in pieces off the backs of trucks—my father stood on the sidewalk across the street to watch the construction, smoking and spitting flecks of tobacco off his tongue. He stood there till dusk. The Burger Palace, as it came to be called, was not built on Main Street, with my father’s diner and the other restaurants, but right among the houses in our neighborhood, where Mr. Corgison’s place had been torn down. I could see my father through our living room curtains. He stood watching until long past the time the workers had left. His cigar, I noticed, had gone out.
“I know you don’t like McDonald’s,” Jackie says, interrupting my thoughts, “but would just one time kill you?” Danny makes small sucking sounds.
I remember a cardboard sign inside EAT: Open 24 Hours a Day, 365 Days a Year. But the diner is outside Dover, still more than seventy miles away. I look at Jackie in the dim light. She rests her chin atop Danny’s head, her eyes watery and dark-circled. In a small voice, Lisa says, “Daddy, I’m still hungry.” The road we are on runs past another strip of fast-food joints; I turn the wheel to steer us into the parking lot of one.
Through its glass front the restaurant is a loud mix of yellow and red plastic, cardboard clowns dangling by strings from the ceiling, a stainless steel counter lined with computer registers and inflatable Santa Claus dolls. My father would despise it.
I think of what I will miss not stopping at EAT—the inside full of grease and steam, waitresses sliding past in slippers and white nurse shoes, old men with their shoulders bent over the counter, the smell of my father’s Dutch Masters and Old Spice. Reflections off the yellow plastic shine through the windshield, illuminating the shadowed faces of Jackie with Danny held close, Lisa sleepy-eyed in the back seat. I shut off the car and sit, hearing the engine tick. Such simple things I long for—warm food and hot, bitter coffee. Jackie looks up and smiles, her eyes full of the easy gratitude that hunger allows.
“You’re disappointed,” she says. I shake my head. Now seems like the right time to stop. It’s late, and we’re all hungry.
THE SINGING TREES OF
BYLEAH, GEORGIA
OUTSIDE her house Etta Cayce wears her tattered housecoat without its matching slippers. She is naked except for the housecoat, the open front of it parting and snapping with the breeze. The housecoat and slippers were the last gift from Garrett, in the year before he put the gun in his mouth and ended his days. She remembers that he wrapped the present in butcher paper sealed with freezer tape, that when she modeled the housecoat for him, twirling the silky blue-green folds around her, he laughed and chased after her calling chickie chickie—the name he gave the dozen peacocks that roosted in the trees of their yard.
Etta drags the plastic bucket of kerosene out from the crawl space and hauls it to the side yard. She breaks through the paraffin covering the kerosene, dipping in deep with her soup ladle while rotted crabapples squeeze up through her swollen toes. The sounds of the trees start up, so to shut them out Etta sings the best song she ever knew straight through, “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” She brings up the ladle of kerosene and throws it high into the top branches of the trees. Ladle after ladle she flings in the air, the kerosene raining in drips, filling the air with its oil smell, the smell of their boy, Garrett Junior, long ago sent home from school. She remembers a note he carried from the school nurse, bending him at the sink, pouring the kerosene over his scalp and scratching it in with her fingernails.
She ducks to go inside the trees, the canopy they make above her thick as brocade, their greeny tops woven by the honeysuckle and kudzu that have taken over her yard. All around her are the crabapples, each with a small, perfect bite cored out and then discarded, the birds not liking bitter fruit. The last of the kerosene in the white bucket, the last inch black with dead insects, she pours out in tiny rivers around the roots of the five biggest trees, the ones Garrett planted first, before they pushed him to put the pistol in his mouth. Drips of kerosene fall on her yellowed feet, soreness growing in her joints. Red ants scatter in the path of the tiny rivers. The air under the trees is cooler, like a room with the shades drawn.
The wind thickens and she hears the trees lift their voices, a church choir humming in the rustle of leaves, children singing in far off rooms. She still holds in her mouth like hard candy the best song she knows… Say nightie-night and kiss me…. She shakes as she pulls the matches from her pocket and opens the box. The leaves of the trees shine in the dim light with the oil of the kerosene, the smell heavy in her nose.
The match flares in a whip of light and there is Garrett home from Japan and smoking cigarettes, Lucky Strikes folded in the arm of his T-shirt. Something new he picked up, the way he picked up not sleeping at night, staying awake to watch after the darkness that surrounded the house, sitting on a stack of newspapers in the middle of the dark kitchen with a wet towel on his neck, his pistol held in his lap. This new Garrett who came home, his arm and chest muscles hardened, his skinny sideburns graying, his jokes all wiped away like chalk from a slate. Nights in bed when he stayed soft in her hand.
The match burns down toward her fingers, her swollen joints, and she tosses it, the whispers of the trees finding their way in through the end of her song. He is, he is. She recalls a time when she could not hear the voices of the trees, the year the reporters came, the TV men with their cameras and microphones. Somewhere in the house is the article from Southern Travel magazine, “The Singing Trees of Byleah, Georgia.” She thinks of the Catholics from Atlanta arriving in church vans to hear in the sound of the trees the voice of the Holy Mother, the voice of miracle. Even now Etta sees their hopeful pilgrim faces, the withered priests and nuns, the pink-eared boys, girls in plaid skirts. All grown now, she thinks, the old ones dead.
Flames rise at the base of the biggest tree, climb the trunk quick as a squirrel, heating her long, iron-gray hair. She walks out of the canopy of trees into bright sunlight, back toward the house, the trees’ sound like the murmur of a crowd, voices at a train station. Where is it? she hears them whisper, their words always nonsense to her, like street corner drunks, arm in arm.
On her porch she turns back to them, hearing the crackle of green wood. “Why crabapple?” she asks. Her face is wet, her hands oily with kerosene. For a time the trees gave back to Garrett what it was he lost in the Pacific, brought him out of himself for the six years the trees grew before bearing fruit. His plan was to turn their acre of side yard into a tiny orchard of fifty trees. The saplings he planted on weekend mornings in October, the days edging toward cold, Garrett kneeling in the grass, smoking while he worked, digging out the dirt with a wooden spoon from her kitchen, tamping it down with his fist while ashes shook across his shirtcuffs. When he finished he stood behind her on the porch and curved his dirty hands around her waist.
“McIntosh apples, Etta,” he said. “Right in our own yard. You ought to learn how to make apple butter and apple jelly and apple fritters.” He spoke quickly. “Think apples,” he said.
“Right now?” she asked. He laughed like he’d just remembered how, and rubbed the fronts of her thighs through her dress. “Give yourself about six years,” he spoke against her neck, “then we’ll have fruit.”
Six years till the fruit, she thinks, pulling her housecoat closed. Like he set an alarm clock. And the echo of the pistol’s slap still rebounds through these low hills.
Etta scrubs her hands with borax to take away the kerosene. She moves toward the phone to dial Garrett Junior, away somewhere in Chicago or St. Louis. She remembers Garrett telling her once during a phone call from Japan that the words he said took over a minute to travel around the world. That by the time she heard them he was saying something else she hadn’t yet heard. That’s how it has been since he died, like she is waiting for the next thing he
said to get around to her.
She lifts the lace priscilla curtains to see the blaze, to see that it is not nearing the house, if the neighbors have gathered around. In her yard stands a teenage boy hitting the fire with his flannel shirt, stomping it with his boots. A pitiful fire of brown smoke growing in curls away from the shag grass under the trees. The trunks of the trees are only scorched. With her knuckle Etta raps on the windowpane.
“You stop that,” she shouts, her words fogging the glass. The boy wears sunglasses on a string around his neck, a red bandanna tied to his thigh. He chews on a plastic drinking straw and looks up to wave.
“You let that fire go,” she says, and raps with her knuckle until the windowpane is shot with cracks. The boy lifts tiny headphones from around his neck to his ears and waves again, then gives an okay sign with his fingers. The fire now is only thin smoke, like steam from a kettle. The boy has a red pushcart standing parked in the road, piled up with a lawn mower, hoes and rakes, post hole diggers, hedge clippers, all thrown together and tangled around with garden hoses. He takes a shovel from the cart and tosses gravel from her driveway to cover the last of the fire. Then he gathers his tools on the cart, his head bobbing with the music she can’t hear. On the back of his cart is pasted a bumper sticker dirty with oil, but even this far away she can read what it says: MAKE A FRIEND, BUY A HOT TUB, with a picture of two alligators relaxing in a tub. Garrett always said how her gray eyes were sharp as baling hooks. She thinks of a time in the Chrysler on the road toward Biloxi when out the window, twenty feet off, she saw two dragonflies hooked, flying together blue and silver, keeping up with the car while she tried to point them out to Garrett. Now she watches the boy toss his shovel back among the pile of tools and push off down the road with his cart, one of its wheels wobbly on the packed dirt. She can see the sound it would make.
“That’s my fire,” she says after him. “I got a good mind to call the police.” She follows him with her eye until he disappears back up on the main road.
