How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  We ate meals in the kitchen, the coolest part of the house. For a time, the air conditioner had been wedged in a living-room window, but then one day my mother passed out cooking dinner, so it was moved to the window beside the fridge. At night the parsonage was bearable. A box fan in the attic was cut on so air was always moving through. But during the day, the same rooms settled into a swelter so dense it pushed me outside where shade was hard to come by. The only relief from the heat was the kitchen, and only, that is, when my mother wasn’t cooking, which wasn’t often. In addition to the cornbread and the squash, she had also made poppy-seed chicken and string beans that Sunday. The food sat in dishes shiny with fat while my father said grace. I stared at my hands during the prayer. After he finished, I dug in.

  With eating, I was all boy, or so I had been told by my parents, who were always amazed by the amount of food I could put away, gobbling up whatever they put in front of me: pickled eggs, chitterlings, catfish tails. We’d grown into a plump threesome, my mother the biggest among us. The extra weight fit the frame of her body better than it did my father’s. He was a man who had put on while she was a woman who had filled out. During the meal, she was silent and rueful, gazing at the air conditioner as it droned on and on. My father tried to make conversation, but she answered in hmms. I asked, finally, what we were having for dessert, and she said we had leftover crescent squares in the fridge.

  “Sugar Dump!” I cried.

  My father looked upset. He told me to think about skipping dessert. “You’re getting to be a little big, ain’t you?”

  “Big?” My mother acted like she had never heard the word before. “Boys do better when they are husky, don’t they?”

  I asked what “husky” meant, but neither one said. I had always heard the word in reference to the brand of blue jeans I wore, but here, for the first time, I realized the word had another definition. Something that had less to do with the pants and more in common with the bodies that wore them. My mother shot up from the table and pulled out the tray of crescent rolls from the fridge. She cut out two squares with a spatula and set them on a saucer the size of my fist. When she set the dessert down in front of me, I looked at my father, who was furiously mashing up his cornbread with his fork, and said, “Am I fat, Daddy?”

  He dropped his fork. “No, Rooster, you’re not fat.”

  “See how you make him fret? See?” My mother was putting another square onto another saucer. She brought this one over to him, and his eyes widened when she set the plate on the table in front of him.

  “Do I need to”—I searched for a word I’d heard on daytime television—“diet?”

  My mother threw back her head and roared with laughter, and the serious look on my father’s face broke into a smile. Soon he was laughing, too. I was more confused than ever. He stacked his square on top of mine, and said, “Boys don’t diet,” then after my mother had put her arms around his neck, he added, “Eat, son.” I stared at the three flakey squares, gobs of cream cheese oozing out of their sides. I felt the seams of my own body expanding. The softness rolling over my pants and pressing against my shirt. “Eat, Rooster,” my mother said. She reached over my father’s shoulder and grabbed a square and held it up to my mouth.

  —

  My mother freely admitted that most of her understanding of the Neck came from hearsay and gossip. She reminded me of this when she talked about the moonshiners. “The men,” she said. “Trouble always comes when you bring in the men.” During Prohibition, they began distilling hooch in the Neck. At first, the women didn’t mind. The men let them be for the most part. Sometimes their paths crossed when a moonshiner needed an itch scratched, which cost him, on average, two jars of shine. The women found they liked the drink and wanted to make their own. But the moonshiners, seeing a conflict of interest, refused to share their knowledge. A spat broke out when the women camped too close to one of the moonshiners’ makeshift distilleries by the river. In the dark of night, they crept into their camp and picked over the wares, trying to learn the secret of how to make the product. When a couple of the moonshiners stumbled upon them, they exchanged gunfire. “No one hit nothing important,” my mother said. “Just arms and legs, but everyone was okay.” The skirmish, however, attracted the attention of the law. Police from Weir and West raided the Neck, rounding up only the men, for the women had disappeared into the trees and, as usual, escaped capture. The men were impounded in the Holmes County Jail in Durant. When they were brought before the court, the judge asked where these boys were from, and the prosecutor answered, “The Neck,” an important moment for the history of this area, seeing how it was the first time the place had been labeled as such in official documents. The trial ended with acquittals all around after a nasty dispute between the officials of Attala and Holmes Counties over jurisdiction hijacked the court proceedings. Neither county wanted to take responsibility for the mess, so no one did.

  “Most of the moonshiners moved on, not wanting to fool with the women, but one stayed behind,” my mother said. This one had taken a liking to one of the women, a redhead who claimed to hail from the Great Smoky Mountains. He had often bought her affections and now, free and clear with the law, wanted something more. Not just from her, but also from the Neck at large. Soon after his release, he drew up papers to purchase the Neck and made agreements—unofficial, of course—with the two counties the Neck bordered. The deal was simple: If they (the counties) left him alone to do whatever businesses he wanted out there, he’d get control of the Neck and make sure none of the skirmishes or lawbreaking ever made it into their towns. Amazingly, the counties agreed, but most people doubted he could exert any control over the women.

  He found them by moonlight, the deed to the Neck tucked in his back pocket even though he was skeptical the paper would mean much to the women. He offered, in essence, a merger. He would show them how to moonshine, and they would share the profits of their business with him. He had it all planned out. He had enough money left over from his moonshining to build them a large house. “He wanted to give them a roof,” my mother said, “not knowing that a roof was exactly what some of them were opposed to.” In the end, half agreed to his plan. “I was told the others went on to New Orleans,” she told me. “But maybe they stayed—just got better at disappearing in the trees. A person can find enough spots in the Neck to get lost in if she’s smart.”

  “Were the women and the moonshiner still there when you lived at the Neck?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing left but the stories.”

  I asked who told the stories to her.

  Her mouth pursed. “My mother did.”

  “My grandmother?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Lonely,” she said.

  —

  That night, in a dream, I went searching the parsonage for my mother. My subconscious made the house cavernous, adding rooms that didn’t exist in the real world. Secret rooms through doorways hidden behind furniture. Rooms that mirrored those I half remembered from my waking life: from school or church or restaurants we went to during the week when my mother didn’t want to fool with cooking supper. I somehow found my way inside her closet: a hallway of sorts that went on and on, a wall of clothes on either side of me. I pushed through the dresses and the blouses and the slacks, kept going forward, and was eventually emptied onto the back porch. The hole in the porch, the place where the plywood had collapsed into nothingness, wasn’t teeming with insects like in real life, but was quiet and deep, a circle of night sky in the ground. The outside was another room, a larger one that held the whole world within its walls. My father sat cross-legged on the good part of the porch, his body facing the hole that separated us. He held my mother’s oversize nightshirt to his face, the one she always wore to bed that had Minnie Mouse appliquéd on the front. As I approached, he tossed the shirt into the hole and it was sucked in a
s if by a vacuum. He had a crazed smile, the looniest he’d ever looked. His face screwed into a laugh, but no sound came from his mouth. His lips were stretched over his teeth; his eyes were squinting—and he was totally mute. I asked him, Where is she? And my voice, like his, was sucked from my mouth unheard.

  I woke up.

  My left shoulder and arm were numb from lying on my side. I rolled onto my back. Unlike in the dream, the parsonage had just one bedroom, where my parents slept. My room was not a room at all, but a portion of the breezeway segmented off by a wicker divider we’d inherited from Agnes Musclewhite. The headboard of my twin bed was pushed against the wall beside the bathroom. A light above the medicine cabinet had been left on, and it pooled into the breezeway, bisecting the mattress. So I saw the wet before I felt it. A deeper shade of blue than the rest of the duvet, blooming from my midsection. When I pulled back the covers, I smelled it. Sickly sweet and familiar. I slid out of bed, dizzy with the stink, and peeled away my underwear then my shirt. I tiptoed into the bathroom and shut the door behind me, carefully turning the knob to make as little sound as possible. The mirror showed that the mark on my cheek had shrunk to the size of a dime and faded from red to green. I shoved my damp clothes in the hamper beneath my father’s undershirts and his coarse work jeans. Once awake, I always had trouble getting back to sleep, so there was nothing left to do but sit on the cold linoleum floor and listen to the familiar night sounds of the parsonage: my father’s deep snoring, the box fan’s hum. The bathroom had a large old-timey sink and an even larger tub, both of them porcelain and cool to the touch, the nicest fixtures in the house.

  In my parents’ bedroom, the mattress creaked as someone turned over and got up. Footsteps, light and quick, padded into the breezeway. A pause to take in the wet mattress. Then a voice at the door: “Rooster, boy?” my mother called. There wasn’t any lock to keep her out, but she didn’t come in. And when I didn’t say anything, the footsteps trailed away. A minute later, I went back out to the breezeway and put on a fresh pair of underwear and an extra-large shirt belonging to my father, the hem falling well below my kneecaps.

  My mother was reclining on the couch when I came into the living room, her thick legs propped on an armrest. Most of the furniture was bought at Hawshaw’s Salvation Army store, and my mother prized the couch above the rest because, she claimed, it looked the most expensive, with its deep-set cushions and multitextured patterns. The shapes and colors muted in pastels reminded her of the Gulf Coast. My father argued that the couch looked nothing like a beach. “More like the inside of a sweater,” he said. We usually didn’t sit on the couch unless we had company over. If we did sit on it, the cushions were turned over to protect the whimsical fabric from wear and tear. Tonight my mother lay sprawled across the unturned cushions, one arm tossed across her face.

  “You okay?” I said.

  She sat up and patted the seat beside her. I sat on my knees, worried my sour crotch would pollute her sofa cushions.

  “I had a bad dream,” she said. “Then couldn’t get back to sleep—must be getting old, nugget.” She wore her Minnie Mouse nightshirt, the same one I had seen in the dream, and her toenails matched the hue of red in the big bow between Minnie’s ears. “You reminded me of my baby brother,” she was saying, “when you was up there in the choir. Guess it’s what was cause for me dreaming about him.”

  My parents never spoke much about their families. My father’s people lived in Dallas, and according to him, they found it difficult to maintain a close relationship with him because he was too Holy Rolly for their tastes. “Occupational hazard,” he said. My mother’s people were even more mysterious. My parents spoke of her family in coded ways, peppered with indefinite pronouns and references to events I wouldn’t fully understand until years later. Her parents were dead—this much I knew—but I’d never been given the cause, and for the longest time, I’d assumed it was old age, which most of our members at Second Baptist had died from. I also knew my mother had a younger brother and sister, whom she didn’t speak to. After their parents died, they went to live with people in Nashville since my mother, who was eighteen at the time, had been too young to care for them. I had guessed this caused the rupture between them. My father and I sometimes heard her sister, Maude, on Christian radio when we were out driving. He’d turn up the volume and we would listen to the whole song before he’d grin, and say, “That one is a strange bird,” and sometimes he’d add, “She’s got a pretty voice, though, don’t she?” But nothing more was said about my mother’s family until tonight.

  She told me her brother’s name was John, and I asked her why a dream about John was bad. She said, “John was different.”

  “Was he curious?” My stomach flipped over itself like it did when my father went over hills too fast in the pickup.

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean—no.” She glanced down at her hands. Each fingernail curved a quarter inch from its finger and was French tipped. “I mean, I don’t know.” She said we looked alike, her brother and I. “Same blond hair, same nose and eyes. But I’d not recognized him in you until today, nugget.”

  I asked her why.

  “The dancing. It was something he would’ve done.” She laughed. “The boy was crazy—wore taps on the bottoms of his shoes so if the mood struck him he could do a little number for me and Maudie-girl. Drove Mama and Daddy to distraction with his click-clacking. And, Lord, you might as well hang it up if the boy’s feet ever hit on a slab of concrete.” Her face seized with sadness as she remembered something else, something I knew she wouldn’t share with me. Even when she was at her most open, there were limits to how far she would go. “I feel guilty, I guess,” she said. Her eyes were light blue with a ring of yellow around the pupils. Sunflowers, I called them. “When he passed, I didn’t go to the funeral. You was still very young, but I could’ve gone if I had wanted.” In the dream, she told me, she was at the funeral. “How I imagined it was anyhow. Maudie-girl was singing and I was just so happy to be at a funeral that I didn’t know what to do with myself, you know?”

  I didn’t.

  Extended family was strange to me. I didn’t have brothers and sisters or aunts and uncles. No grandparents active in my life, either, save for the random birthday cards from my father’s parents with five-dollar bills tucked inside. My parents were all I had to help me make sense of the world. I sat on the couch beside this beautiful woman, my mother, who was as bighearted and loving as she was strange and secretive. Now I understand that two women made up my mother: the woman she was and the woman she wanted to be. Oftentimes these women were one and the same. But when they weren’t, the jolliness left her cheeks, and her eyes dimmed. After she told me about her brother, I saw the hardness gripping her face, and I thought about the women of the Neck. The deep-down sadness. I told her about my own dream then. Even though I felt it would be a mistake to share it. I had this notion that speaking the dream aloud was dangerous. Tempted fate to make it come true. And if she left my father and me, we’d crumble from the inside out like the back porch had. Our abiding love for her, though different, was a rare piece of common ground between us on which we could stand and find a way to love each other. Even at seven I knew this. She listened patiently to me as I told her about my dream: “You left,” I said, “and I couldn’t find you. You had joined those women, I think, or fallen in a hole, or just disappeared.”

  “Oh, nugget.” She wrapped me in her arms, enveloping me in the warm pillow of her body. She wore Clinique Aromatics Elixir, and it stayed on her even after she showered, becoming for me her smell. With me safe in her arms like this, she began to tell me of the lost mother.

  “Long after the women and the moonshiners left,” she said, “there lived a family in the Neck.”

  After having her third child, the mother had a case of the deep-down blues. During the afternoon, while her children napped and her husband ran the gas station, she took long walks in the N
eck. Long walks, by themselves, did nothing to abate the unnamable grieving in her heart, but she found the Neck reviving. “From maps,” my mother said, “the place doesn’t look very big—it wasn’t the bigness she was attracted to, but the emptiness.” So empty, in fact, that the Neck could hold all the sadness, all the evil, inside you and still have room left over for more. The mother always returned home in time to make supper for her family, but the father didn’t approve of her leaving. He didn’t understand her need to be alone, to go off gallivanting through the woods like some half-cocked boy explorer. The children didn’t mind so much. When their mother returned, she came back with these amazing stories of the tribe of women who had lived there. “The children’s father,” my mother added, “was not an easy man to live with. He ran a convenience store in the Neck, the only sign of life for miles, that barely broke even in the good months, which made the father even harder to bear. Her stories were good distractions, nugget, cubes of sugar in the brandy.” When the children asked the mother how she came to know the stories, she told them the land kept a better record of events than humans and paper ever did. “The children were too young,” my mother said, “to ask her what the hell that meant.”

  One evening the mother didn’t return at the end of the day. The children ran when the father came home to find her gone. His mood turned violent, his arm striking anything close enough to reach. The children didn’t try to find their mother in the Neck during nighttime, the woods too dark and spooky for them. They spent the night under the porch, listening to their father rage above them like a tornado, knocking over chairs, kicking in walls, screaming. “He was mad at the world,” my mother said, “for giving him the bad business and the crazy wife.” The next morning the children went looking for the mother and found her sleeping by the pond in a hammock she had fashioned for herself out of potato sacks. The mother was surprised when they woke her. Claimed she was dozing by the pond and had no intention of staying there the full night. But the sleep had been peaceful. She felt renewed. She returned home a new woman, keeping up with the chores, never straying too far from the house. The father assumed it had been a phase, the disappearing. A month passed. Then another. But little by little, the dreamy look in the mother’s eyes returned. One afternoon, when the children napped, the mother went back into the Neck. By evening, she had still not returned, but the children weren’t worried. They had come to understand their mother needed these excursions. “She was like a battery,” my mother said. “And the Neck—it recharged her.” The father was devastated to have this happen again. In a rage he doused his convenience store in gasoline from one of the pumps and then threw a lit box of matches through the front door. As the store burned, he made his children pack up as much as they could fit in their suitcases. They loaded into his truck, and he drove them far, far away—so far that the mother would never be able to find them. “And so the next day, or whenever it was, the mother returned to find, what? Ashes. Her whole life gone.”