"Git in the car," Ainesley said, "I want to talk to you."
They drove into Clayville, down streets lined with live oak and trimmed hedges, past the Nokobee County Courthouse and on to Roxie's Ice Cream Palace. The latter social center, like the Cody home, was virtually downtown--no surprise, because if you kept on driving you'd come out the other side of Clayville in under five minutes. Inside Roxie's, they squeezed into a booth and Ainesley told Raff to order his favorite dish. It was, they both knew, a butterscotch sundae with chopped walnuts.
As Raff started to eat, Ainesley said to him, "Son, I'm sorry I pushed you so hard yesterday. You're pretty young to be firing guns anyway, and I don't think you'd have a lot of fun at your age killin' a turkey anyhow. It don't count that Junior was willin' to fire the gun and you wasn't. He's older and he's a lot bigger than you, and to tell the truth, compared to you he's dumber than a stump."
Managing a mouthful of ice cream, Raphael nodded and thought, Yeah, that's the truth. Junior was held back last year and was still only in the fourth grade. He'd have to endure another year of disciplinarian torture in Mrs. Maddon's class. Middle-aged, steely eyed behind glasses, her graying hair worn in a bun, she was both strict and given to quick anger. Out of earshot the students called her the Mad Ox.
"What I was trying to do," Ainesley continued, "was not start you huntin' game animals, exactly. You might not like it very much even when you're older. I don't know. I was just trying to show you things that when you grow up you gonna need to know to be a real man, not the kind of girlie man you see all over the place nowadays."
He paused to let that sink in, and--Raff could feel it coming--lit a cigarette. There was more talk coming from Ainesley, he was sure. No matter. Fear and remorse were sliding off him. He had been forgiven. For the first time he looked directly into his father's face--tanned, lines around his mouth, with blue eyes that now had a sad look.
Ainesley took a deep draw into his lungs and turned his head to blow the smoke to the side. He flicked a crumb of tobacco off his lip with a middle finger and continued, "You probably don't know what I'm talkin' about, so I'm gonna add a little bit more for you to think about. And maybe some more later, whenever we get together, so you'll understand about how I feel." How he feels? Raff thought. He was beginning to get anxious again.
"You know I don't have the education your mother and Uncle Cyrus have. You'll be gittin' one like that yourself, for sure, and I feel real good about that. But I want you to grow up to be like me in one important way. When you're on your own, I want you to stand up straight and tall and be the kind of man everybody respects no matter how much money they have, or how many fancy titles they have, or whatever.
"Now, what does that mean? It means honor. It means you keep your promises, you pay your debts, you meet your responsibilities, you do the best you can, even though sometimes things get tough. And you don't talk about it, you keep it inside of you. People meet you and work with you, they don't need to have your word on it. They know they can count on you--all the time, and not just when you feel like it. You understand that?"
Raff said, "Yes sir," and put another spoonful into his mouth, savoring the butterscotch.
"But being a man is more than that," Ainesley continued. "It's bein' a gentleman. Our people have a code that people may laugh at who live in big houses and take vacations in Italy and places such as that. I certainly wouldn't talk about any of it with your Uncle Cyrus, who incidentally I respect a great deal. But it means everything in the world I live in. You might say that code is raw, you might say it's too simple, but it sure stays right there on the surface of things, and it suits me. It's this. Never lie or cheat. Never ever hit a woman. Never hit a smaller man, if you can keep from doing it, Raff. Never hit anyone first, but never back down when you know you're in the right."
He paused, took a sip of coffee, stubbed out his half-burned cigarette, and lit another. Raff was wondering how a man of his father's diminutive size would make out if ever he were hit by anyone, especially a big man. His father stood under five feet eight inches tall and weighed only 130 pounds, "soaking wet," as he liked to say.
In time Raff was to learn that this question was moot. Ainesley carried a long jackknife in his pocket that he compulsively sharpened with a small rectangular whetstone. He kept a .22 pistol in the glove compartment of his pickup, "my equalizer," he called it. He could also produce an illegal blackjack suddenly, like a magician, from a hidden place Raff was never able to discover. If Ainesley on any occasion actually defended himself, Raff was never in future years to hear of it.
Raff took another large scoop of ice cream from the bottom of the goblet, afraid his father's pause meant he was getting ready to leave. But Ainesley picked up again.
"Here's another thing," he said. "Show decent respect to other people. There's something a gentleman down here does they don't do in other parts. You go up to another man, he's working in a filling station, and you ask him, 'Excuse me, but can you tell me where some street or other is located?' And he'll say, 'Yessir, I can.' He does not say, 'Yes, sir, I can.' He does not say, 'Yes sir!' He's not your servant. He says, 'Yessir, I do,' or 'Nosir, I don't know myself.' That means he's polite but he's your equal, and you show it too, you talk back to him the same way. Now, you're specially, extra polite to people who deserve it. That's why your mom and I have you say sir and ma'am to grown-ups, and why we do the same ourselves to old folks."
Ainesley lit yet a third cigarette, and fell silent again and flicked his hand as though to say, Well, there you are, as though his outpouring had gone a bit far and he was afraid Raphael might respect him the less for it. He searched his pocket for a few coins and put them on the table for a tip, stubbed out the cigarette, and got up to leave. Then, holding on to the rear of his chair and looking out the restaurant window toward the parking lot, to really nothing in particular except maybe a rainbow oil streak under the closest truck, he spoke softly, this time with a touch of bitterness.
"Here is what I want to pass on to you, Scooter. They can take away your money, they can take away your freedom, they can laugh at you behind your back, but if you're a man the way I'm trying to tell you to be, not some kind of a girlie man that snivels all over the place and backs off from trouble, they can't take that away from you, and that's why I'm going to keep after you even if once in a while I seem to ride you a little hard."
Raff believed him, totally. He remembered that when he was smaller and scraped his knee and started to cry, Ainesley said, "Stop that, be a little man."
He could just barely recall another occasion--he was perhaps three years old, and sleeping next to his father on some otherwise forgotten occasion--when he woke up during the night and asked to go to the bathroom, and Ainesley said, "Hold it in, wait till morning, like a little man."
5
THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY it was Marcia's turn. She let Raff sleep late, then noisily opened the door and walked into his room. Singing to herself, she raised the shade of the single window and let sunlight flood his bed. She paused there, leaning forward to peer at the bird feeder placed in the crepe myrtle tree next to the window. Sure enough, the resident squirrel sat on the feeder platform, while birds perched in the surrounding branches waiting for the monster to leave. On rare occasions, when it was not raining and Raff was not at school or outdoors, he sat on a chair and watched the birds come and go--mostly house sparrows, blue jays, and cardinals, but also the occasional common grackle. Ainesley had offered to shoot the squirrel and give the birds more feeder time, but Marcia indignantly forbade him to so much as threaten the family rodent.
Marcia shook the bed and pulled Raff's thin wool blanket partly off his huddled body.
"Time to get up, Scooter. We're going to church, then we're going down to Mobile to have supper with the family."
Church meant the main Methodist church in downtown Clayville. Marcia and all the relatives on her side were Episcopalian, but the closest services held in that denomination were in
Brewton, half an hour's drive away. Visits were made there only on special Sundays. Ainesley was a lapsed Southern Baptist and a sometime private atheist who thought poorly of Baptist pastors. But he dutifully took Marcia and Raff to church every Sunday that he wasn't at his store taking inventory. Usually he dropped them off and picked them up after service. Occasionally, however, he put on a coat and tie and sat next to them, enjoying the sonorous comfort of the organ and good hymns, but fretting through the scripture readings and homilies that seemed planned to go on into Monday. The worst part was that he couldn't smoke or take a sip of anything, sitting there in the midst of two hundred or so righteous Alabamians.
Family to Marcia meant her own Semmes family. Her full name was Marcia Semmes Cody. Her son bore the grand name Raphael Semmes Cody. Marcia had made the decision to name him after the Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes, whose warship the Alabama had savaged Union shipping up and down the Atlantic Seaboard before being sunk by a bigger Union gunship while on a provisioning trip off the coast of England.
Semmes was a big name in these parts. To the north of Mobile was the little town of Semmes; and near Bienville Square in downtown Mobile stood the old Admiral Semmes Hotel and a heroic statue of the man himself. There was even an Admiral Semmes Drive, in the better part of the city, as expected. There were the Semmeses of Mobile and the Semmeses of America, spread out with their collateral lines and spousal surnames like the branches of some great oak tree far and wide across the Republic. Their distinguished heritage extended back in multiple lines for three centuries, almost as long as that of America itself.
There were Codys too, of course, distributed widely across South Alabama and over into Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle and beyond, with one branch of the family having recently colonized Australia. They were successful and Southern Baptist and upright for the most part. One was a doctor living just across the Mississippi state line in Pascagoula, but most of the current generation were solid working class--truck drivers, nurses, real estate salesmen. By Marcia's lights they were below the Semmeses, and there was nothing among them that should give pride to her or Raphael. That is, no admirals, generals, governors, senators, or golf champions. No inherited wealth, second home, or memberships in the right charitable foundations, and no invitations to gubernatorial inaugurations.
Although she never spoke of it quite so bluntly around him, Ainesley knew the way Marcia felt. He sensed that she sometimes regretted the rash decision she had made, as a headstrong young woman, to marry him. It was the unspoken tension that haunted their marriage, but he would love her and Raff without reservation no matter what her social origins or how she expressed them. He didn't care about his own relatives very much anyway, one way or the other. He was, for all his foibles and lack of education, a self-contained man. He was intelligent, and passionate at times, and there was of course his code, which no one who knew him well would wish to dispute within his hearing. Without knowing who Epictetus was, or much about the ancient Greeks in general, Ainesley was an authentic philosophical stoic. As he had explained to Raphael, he really lived by the code he had internalized; he dwelled content within it. Marcia understood this solid core of his character, and it meant a lot to her.
This day, however, Marcia's mind was on Mobile and her parents and the home in which she grew up. She prepared to reinvest herself with the grandeur of the Semmeses.
Ainesley stood by the front door. He had cleaned the cab of the pickup and filled the gas tank, and he was beginning to fidget.
Marcia shouted at her son, "Please come on! We haven't got all day!" A chronically high-strung woman, she was especially keyed up this morning as they waited for Raff. She fidgeted around in the kitchen and living room, lining up objects that seemed even slightly out of place, glancing at herself in the hall mirror, adjusting her hair.
After the church service, which seemed agonizingly long to all three of them, the Codys dodged through the crowd of lingering parishioners and hurried home. They scarfed a light lunch sitting at the kitchen table. There was no Sunday dinner this day; they would all be dining sumptuously at her parents' home in the evening. Without changing from their best clothes, they hurried out to the pickup and headed south on the hour-long drive to Mobile.
They did not, however, go directly to the Semmes family home on the Azalea Trail.
"We're going first to drop by and see your Aunt Jessica," Marcia said to Raff.
"Oh, dear God!" murmured Ainesley. No way I'm going in there, he thought. I'm going to sit in the shade somewhere and smoke, and kill a soldier or two. He'd thoughtfully iced some bottles of beer--soldiers--and stored them under the truck tarpaulin the night before, just in case.
On Marcia's command, they pulled off at Satsuma, an exurban settlement just north of Mobile. After several turns they came on to Savannah Street, in the old section. Halfway down the first block, in a neighborhood adorned exquisitely with mature live oaks and magnolias, Ainesley brought the pickup to a halt in front of a run-down little house set well back from the line of other properties. The structure had a single floor, a slightly sagging front porch with a swing and two rocking chairs, and a roof in critical condition. Weeds fought crabgrass for possession of the spacious lawn. Lovely unpruned azaleas and crepe myrtles added to the overall aura of decaying gentility.
"This place must have looked great a hundred years ago," quipped Ainesley.
Then he announced his escape strategy: "I'll stay here in the truck until I see you go in. Then I'll be back to pick you up in two hours. Tell her I've got business." He looked straight ahead to avoid back talk, and waited for them to get out.
Almost as soon as Marcia knocked on the front door it was opened--and there stood Aunt Jessica, snow-haired, gap-toothed, and encased in an ankle-length flowered smock. She must have seen them through the front window as they approached. Of course she would be there and waiting for anyone who cared to come by. She was known never to leave the house.
"Good Lord have mercy on my soul, look who's here! Y'all come right on in!"
Aunt Jessica was a few years north of ninety. Born just before the turn of the century, she had lived all her life in the Savannah Street house, and even when young had never traveled farther away than the Mobile watering holes of Fairhope to the east and Biloxi to the west. Her grandmother had been a young woman living in Navy Cove at the time of the War Between the States, close enough to Fort Morgan to hear the thunder of artillery and watch Farragut's fleet break through into Mobile Bay. An enemy cannonball overshot the fort and landed in the family's backyard.
After the war, her grandfather had bought a little farm on what was then called the Old Savannah Road. In recalling the occupation, her grandmother allowed to Jessica, "The Yankees never did any harm to us." On one occasion, a trooper was reprimanded for stealing a chicken from the backyard, and his immediate superior apologized to the family. "They were mostly nice boys," she said. "They just wanted to get home themselves." The war had nevertheless devastated the economy, and land was cheap. Sections could be bought along the beach of the Fort Morgan Peninsula, over across the mouth of Mobile Bay, for ten dollars an acre.
Aunt Jessica herself had met and talked to many Confederate veterans when she was a teenager. They were old men by then, and it was customary to address them all as "Cap'n" in the Gulf seacoast manner of respect. She lived through the Great Depression, when much of rural Alabama was still an impoverished developing country, and Mobile little more than a backwater town compared to Savannah and New Orleans. She had witnessed the great immigration during World War II of tenant farmers, black and white, who poured into the city to help build the shipyard and Brookley Field.
Jessica and her family believed that "our people" were superior to all others, as demanded--not just encouraged--by the culture of her youth. Even the poor white tenant farmers who came from upstate were dismissed as "white trash" and "peapickers," with their "towheaded kids." Towheaded meant blond, and it was a strange inversion that the
trait should so contemptuously identify that part of the lower class mostly descended from Scotch-Irish pioneers of America.
Black people were given a measure of respect, at least in Jessica's day. They were called Negroes in polite communication, and racial purity within white families of any class who believed it to exist was protected fanatically. The one-drop doctrine was obeyed without exception: one black ancestor made you a Negro. White working-class people were so afraid in particular of losing their perceived birthright of racial superiority that to be called a "nigger lover" was a fighting insult.
Jessica, like most girls of her tribe, had little education in the ways of the world beyond Mobile. She seldom read newspapers or books. Television had not invaded her home, even now. But she was an encyclopedia of local lore and a great storyteller in the congenial Southern tradition. She seldom stopped talking when she got hold of you, and she could render spellbound any who cared even the least for Southern culture in an authentic form.
Jessica was not, as it turned out, Marcia's aunt. That title was traditionally bestowed on any woman, white or black, who was a close and beloved friend. Nonetheless, Jessica was at least a Semmes, and certainly Marcia's distant cousin at some unknown degree of remove. Marcia had been introduced to her when a little child by her father, and she grew up recognizing her as the official genealogist of the Mobile Semmes clan.
As Jessica walked with Marcia and Raff into the parlor, a pale woman of about seventy stood, without salutation. This was Sissy, who had lived with Jessica for longer than anyone could exactly remember. No one was even sure of her surname, although some believed it was Dupree or something close to that. Among the Semmes cognoscenti it was also rumored that Sissy was descended from the first French settlers of Old Mobile. Others guessed, more reasonably, that she came as a young woman with a dissolute sharecropper family, and at some point Jessica hired her and then took her in. None of the Semmes women ever spoke about it in Jessica's presence. It was an old Southern custom to keep improvident elderly relatives and family friends in the house, if such was large enough.
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