Sometimes they hunted deer, sometimes they hunted grouse. This year they would hunt deer. They didn’t have a bird dog ready for the field.
Idlewild was a ragtag, run-down place but Ajay and Waycross loved it. And Hope loved it for them. Mount Bayou, one of Way-cross’s doctor friends, who each year met them in Idlewild, liked to say, “There’s something in the smell of the northwestern Michigan woods that makes your balls hang big and low and cool. Fertile.” Hope teasingly referred to “y’all’s black Hemingway thing,” but she said it in a voice that suggested she wanted to celebrate all that was hanging low and cool.
The Blackshear family Thanksgiving Festival began with a single meal that stretched across two calendar days. It started with spiced almonds that Hope blanched, then rebrowned, in a mixture of brown sugar, pepper, and Jack Daniel’s. The nuts, served with stuffed dates and cheese crackers cut into the shape of acorns, kicked off the festivities at exactly five on Wednesday.
Not having Thanksgiving on calendar Thanksgiving and doing all the cooking herself were tribute to her aunties, long dead, who, working as domestics, had often been obliged to cook for strangers and serve strangers on the fourth Thursday in November. The aunts had moved their family holiday to Wednesday and Hope, in solidarity, had kept hers there—except for the years she had been married to Abel. Drinking (cases of champagne and sparkling cider) and eating, mainly turkey (roasted, smoked, fried, and confit), continued into the early hours of Thursday morning, when a second round of sweet potato pie baked into a crust of homemade gingersnaps was served. Later on Thanksgiving Day, just before noon, Hope served a less elaborate but still big breakfast—egg casserole, twisted bacon, and blueberry crepes, all recipes the aunts had perfected working in other folks’ kitchens. Only then would the hunters, laden with sack snacks, extra spiced almonds, and man-bought provisions, leave for Michigan.
“Thank you for the luscious plenty,” one tipsy old lady had gasped, most earnestly, just after midnight one Thanksgiving morning after getting so high and tired she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to say. She couldn’t remember the word “supper” or the phrase “Thanksgiving dinner,” so she said what she felt, loudly and high-pitched, with an old woman’s exuberance, and everybody waiting to get their car laughed with her and started calling the meal, and the house, and occasionally even Hope, in honor of her expanding waistline, Luscious Plenty too. So many morsels of compensation attempting to eclipse so many minutes of neglect.
Now halfway through packing the breakfast sacks for the Idlewild trek, a once-a-year, middle-of-the-night task, Hope was exhausted with kitchen labor and kitchen routines. The job had never previously been disturbing or difficult, precisely because it tied her back to her aunts who had taught her to savor cooking in her own kitchen for her own family, only this morning it didn’t tie her back.
She wondered if her discontent had more to do with a bad month of day-trading or more to do with being hungry for her “white meal,” the last meal of the family’s ritual Thanksgiving Festival. Usually by now she had already eaten it. Usually by now she was already alone. This year wasn’t usually.
First, CeCe, her best friend, hadn’t made it. CeCe’s plane had been delayed so long departing Paris that CeCe had decided it wasn’t worth traveling for two days, for two days’ play.
Second, Waycross had a favorite patient in the hospital. He didn’t want to leave until the woman had safely delivered her several-days-overdue-but-she-doesn’t-want-to-be-induced twins. He was going to be up and stuck in Nashville half their driving night.
To save the trip, Ajay had volunteered to drive the first eight hours while Waycross slept. If they were on the road by three A.M. they would be in the field just in time to catch the last few hours of daylight Friday afternoon. The twins arrived just after midnight. Waycross got in before two. Everything was on schedule but everything was just a little too different. Yet and still, they were good to go.
Sacks finished, Hope poured both her men a big thermos near full of chicory coffee, topped it off with steamed milk, then plunked in a handful of sugar cubes. Chicory coffee, Café du Monde brand, with just enough milk to turn it the color of Ajay, was an innovation Hope had added to the Blackshear Thanksgiving hunt tradition. After twisting the tops on the thermoses, she shook one, then the other till she guessed the sugar was dissolved. Jobs done, she refilled her cup with the last of the big pot.
The cup, a long-ago wedding present from West Virginia, was between her lips when she heard a rifle shot, then the cup was in four pieces on the slate countertop.
Banjo’s bed under the kitchen table was empty. She saw just barely the large vague dimple his body had left on the pillow without knowing when he had left or how she had failed to notice.
She ran toward the front of the house, in thin gray wool pants and a thinner black silk sweater, stabbed by cold she wouldn’t let distract her.
Arriving at the front, she first saw Ajay standing at the truck washed in floodlight. Then she saw the silhouette of Waycross standing on the lawn, shotgun by his side. Finally she saw a huge coyote dead on the lawn. Everyone was alive.
But no one was moving. Something was still wrong. In the quarter moonlight she could just barely make out a smaller coyote, Banjo in his teeth, leaping over one brick wall— the lawn was a series of sloping terraces—headed beyond the lower wall and to the wooded wildlife preserve that abutted their property.
Waycross lifted his rifle. Another shot. The coyote was down, clipped in the hip. Banjo wriggled free, bounding on a hard diagonal, out of the line of fire and up the lawn. Waycross took aim, this time at the coyote’s head, and fired again. Waycross dropped to his knees. Banjo jumped into his lap. Waycross scratched the drever’s head, then felt his bones. The dog didn’t yelp. There was no obvious blood. Everything was probably all right.
Waycross handed the dog to Ajay. Ajay handed the dog to Hope. She kissed the little dog’s head. Her men, in their matching Barbour coats, looked more alike than usual as Banjo gave his first pleasure bark of the morning.
Waycross began to unload his weapon. “I went for the big coyote and the pip-squeak almost got Banjo. Beware the little man.” With the gun empty he put his arm around his wife.
“I better go get a shovel,” said Ajay, who had recently become acutely embarrassed by any physical display of affection between his mother and his stepfather. As Ajay jogged off in the direction of the garages, Waycross kissed his wife.
“I’ll take him to the vet to get checked out in the morning,” said Hope.
“I’m glad you didn’t have to do that,” said Waycross.
“Kill the coyote?” asked Hope.
“Kill the coyotes,” corrected Waycross.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” said Hope.
“Yeah, you would,” said Waycross.
“I am past ready for this house to get quiet,” said Hope.
“I know that’s right,” said Waycross.
The sacks were in the car, the coyote corpses were in black plastic, and Hope’s marathon carving session was about to begin when the phone started ringing in the glass house. A crazy patient calling. Or CeCe. Hope’s cell phone started ringing. Had to be CeCe. It was not unusual for CeCe to forget the time difference. Or maybe she remembered, but also remembered when she and Hope had routinely begun conversations at two in the morning. “I would call the heifer back when she’s supposed to be sleeping but she doesn’t sleep,” said Hope.
Her words were hardly out when Ajay’s phone started ringing. He checked the number before answering.
“Dialing drunk, again, Aunt Tess,” said Ajay. After flipping open his phone Ajay added, “Morning, Auntie.” What ever Tess said in response was unheard as Ajay clumsily dropped the phone to the ground and more clumsily bent over to pick the phone up. Then he vomited. Hope reached for her son. Waycross grabbed the phone.
Abel was dead. As Tess told it, her brother had collapsed during Thanksgiving dinner and been taken by ambulance to the hosp
ital but had died along the way of an asthma attack. They had been eating dinner at a restaurant called the Rebel Yell. He had gotten up from the table saying he wasn’t well. At the end of the performance, when he hadn’t come back, Samantha had found out a man had collapsed in the bathroom and been taken to the hospital. He had died on the way to the hospital. The attendants had thought he was having a heart attack and they had treated him for that but he was really having an asthma attack. Abel’s sister began to sob.
Waycross said, and meant, he was sorry for her loss. By habit his tone was professional. Waycross had known Tess since she was a very little girl, when he had lived next door to her family while he was going through med school. His coldness made her sob louder. He repeated the words, “I am so sorry for your loss,” but this time he stripped them of the sound of his distance from the loss, the sound of his surgeonness.
Ajay’s silence broke. The boy was wailing— an explosion of sound more shocking coming from Ajay’s body than a flood of feces.
Hope’s arms were fumbling about Ajay’s torso. Mother wanted to carry her son, cradle him with her body, carry him safe inside the house, bring him as close as she could get to back into the womb, turn back time, but he wouldn’t stop moving and she couldn’t get a grip.
Waycross lifted the boy. They were both six feet tall but Waycross had almost a hundred pounds on his stepson. He carried the wailing boy low in his arms. Ajay tried to punch him but Waycross tilted his chin higher and continued walking toward the house.
Ajay’s snot was on all of their faces as they passed through the sliding glass doors into the kitchen.
Hope wanted Waycross to give the boy an injection of something or to call someone to give the boy an injection of something. Waycross didn’t think that was a good idea. It was two thirty in the morning but Hope insisted that Waycross call Opelika, Ajay’s pediatrician, to see what he thought.
Opelika thought it was best to let the boy cry until he cried himself tired enough to sleep. He turned clinical on Waycross as Waycross had turned clinical on Tess. “When you lose a child everyone needs drugs. When you lose a parent most people don’t,” said Opelika. Then he turned soft. “Ajay’s gonna be all right,” he said. Waycross held the phone up to Hope’s ear so Opelika could say that again and Hope could hear him say that.
When Waycross took the phone back and walked into the other room, Opelika said, “The Rebel Yell. Hard to swallow that. He was allergic to horses back in the day. Why he go to a place like that?”
Hope and Waycross took turns sitting and watching Ajay as he screamed or holding Ajay as he screamed depending on what he would allow. Minutes were long and hours were too long. Hope could sit with him for thirty or forty-five minutes, then Waycross would spell her for eight or twelve minutes. When Ajay showed no signs of tiring after three hours, and it was still not even six or light, Waycross made the boy a toddy of whiskey and honey and lemon and poured it into his mouth with a spoon like it was 1950 in Waycross, Georgia.
Waycross fed the boy what and how he had seen his doctor daddy do in a shack kneeling beside a dresser drawer that held a baby wrapped in a clean shirt, a shack that had probably fallen down by now, but that croupy baby had lived to see morning.
Waycross would do all in his power to ease the pain of this night; even a little abatement would be precious little. Hope held Ajay most of the hours but Waycross did his share of the minutes.
When it was Hope’s time off she made calls. She needed to hear voices say what she had said, “It can’t be” or “What do you mean Abel’s dead?” until they said “Go to sleep” and “There’s nothing to do now” and she knew she wouldn’t be going to sleep, and then they would know it too. Each friend she called offered to come over. Each time she said, “Don’t come over now. There’s nothing we can do in the middle of the night.”
The expectation was there would be something they could do in the morning. Hope knew that the only thing she wished would happen in the morning was she would wake up and none of this would have happened, wake up and have all of this be a very bad dream.
But it wasn’t. The neighborhood dogs barked all night, the other coyotes howled, the stars disappeared behind clouds. Abel was dead and the earth was sad.
THREE
THE FUNERAL WAS odd.
The church, south of Abel’s natal city, Nashville, and north of Abel’s adopted town, Ardmore, Alabama, was a concrete and brick behemoth.
The dark red Expedition was just past the turnoff to the Jack Daniel’s distillery when Hope and Waycross saw the stainless-steel cross. Steve Earle’s Train a Comin’ was in the CD player. Earle was slur-snarl-singing . . . they told us that our enemy would all be dressed in blue, they forgot about the winter’s cold and the cursed fever too.
Abel’s body was waiting for its November burial not so very far down the road from where the bodies of four Confederate generals, Cleburne, Granbury, Adams, and Strahl, had cooled on a porch waiting for their November burials.
Hope appreciated the coincidence Abel would have appreciated, as Waycross steered the SUV off the big road and into the driveway.
Abel’s last church home reached abruptly, angrily, awkwardly skyward, signaling the rising dominance and increasing significance of a zealously middle-class in their origins, committedly middlebrow in their thinking, chosen by God, suburban southern, predominantly, but not wholly, white, led-by-their-men, Christian elite.
To Hope, on closer view, the giant doors looked like a mouth. Knowing Abel’s coffin was inside, Hope imagined Abel gobbled up by hardworking, churchgoing pale people. Clearly the Xanax had not kicked in. She checked her cell phone for the time. Any minute.
Expensive tackiness and plain loud ugliness aside, Hope had to give the edifice its due: anybody who drove up or even just drove by had to be impressed with the size of the thing.
Hope imagined Abel, smiling with one eyebrow cocked, stating the obvious to him: “If the architect was directed to display the wealth, the prosperity, the blessed by God of the godly-ness of the congregation, without incorporating any of the vainglorious trappings of beauty, he, most assuredly, succeeded.”
Hope laughed out loud, startling the almost un-startle-able Waycross, as she imagined Abel spitting that acid ball of words at his baffled parson.
VIP parking was designated. While Hope took offense at funeral guests being ranked beyond the classic categories “immediate family” and “other,” Waycross wheeled their fancy truck through the opening between the barricades onto which hand-lettered VIP signs had been taped.
“It’s not like we’re bringing Ajay,” said Hope.
“I’m bringing you,” said Waycross.
Waycross reached toward his wife and deftly slipped his hand beneath her black suit jacket, grabbed a hunk of black-silk-shirt-covered waist, and squeezed. He was ready, if need be, to drag her out of wherever she was, by the hair of her head or the fat of her high hip.
“VIP is just another way of saying HNIC,” said Hope. Way-cross shook his head. Abel had said that. Waycross thought Abel was just about the last man on earth to use the phrase “Head Nigger in Charge.”
“Ain’t no pill for that, sugar. Ain’t no pill for that,” said Waycross.
It was a long walk down a hall wide enough for a parade from the front doors of Abel’s church to the actual sanctuary.
There was a pulpit and a stage. There was a bandstand ready with amps and cords and instruments to back up the choir— electric keyboard, electric guitars, synthesizers, and drum sets, plural. Hope cringed.
Bad rock love songs, power ballads addressed to God, repelled Hope almost as much as over-big mega-churches. She considered it an affliction particular to living in Nashville that she even knew this sub genre of music, “Contemporary Christian.”
She loved and sang loudly, when given the opportunity, the old black spirituals, “This Little Light of Mine,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Go Down, Moses.” She had learned these going to church wit
h her aunts, after her father had died, in Washington, D.C. She also treasured the old-timey white hymns “I’ll Fly Away” and “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Amazing Grace,” which she had sung as a girl in West Virginia. Faux-rock vanilla gospel mess she could not abide.
Hope glanced at one of the seating charts, spotted five or six color zones, and wished she hadn’t peeked. Certain groups of pews, indicated by colored marker, were designated for specific categories of mourners.
Waycross and Hope took their place, as directed, in a section of pews apparently designated for black people in expensive-looking clothes, slightly to the side and halfway to the front. Hope was beginning to think, as she scooted past familiar knees, belonging to prominent members of old black Nashville, that it was good to have semi-assigned seating at a church service, that it would be nice to sit with people they knew.
And maybe Abel had chosen the church because its Sears and Roebuck aesthetics fit his new family perfectly. Maybe it was a sweet thing. And all the people in uniform were a comfort. Maybe it was a good thing his youngest stepson and his pregnant fifteen-year-old girlfriend were getting married. The Xanax had kicked in.
The service began. The immediate family, Ajay leading the way, took their place in the front row. A telegenic blond parson-man with a newscaster accent pronounced a bland yet somehow grandiose prayer, then took a seat on the stage for the opening eulogies.
The first eulogist, a white man, Abel’s best friend from Duke law school days, a Houston oil lawyer’s son, now a sports agent in Los Angeles, launched, in his south-coast Texas singsong, almost too exuberantly, into his theme as soon as he reached the lecturn.
“Law school lecture. ‘Where is Abel?’ Abel was back at the apartment watching daytime soap operas. Exam time, Law Library. ‘Where’s Abel?’ Playing backgammon. Graduation day. ‘Where’s Abel?’ Finally off studying. Abel was always off somewhere he was not supposed to be, doing something he wasn’t supposed to do, always just a little behind, till he showed up ahead of you, right where we all wanted to be.
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