How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  Eventually, Mother Maude would get around to the thesis of her talks with me, the proof of her theory for my affliction. “Now I’m no theologian like your daddy, but in the Old Testament, scripture tells us plainly about sin. Deuteronomy, chapter five, verse nine: ‘Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them’—here it means heathen idols, but it may as well be referring to sin in general—‘for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’” She believed my grandparents’ history of whoring and drinking and probably worse tainted their offspring—the most noticeable stain showing up in Johnny’s life and now mine. We have to acknowledge the sins of our forefathers and ask forgiveness—this was to be my first step toward healing, and so it was important, she explained, that she reveal our dark and stormy past to me.

  Mother Maude told me how my grandparents attempted to turn from their sinning but did so in a roundabout, worldly way that ultimately didn’t work. “It happened like this,” she said. “When Mama found out she was pregnant, she decided to leave the Neck. A cathouse was no place to have a baby, and she was determined to keep this one after years of getting rid of them.” When my grandfather discovered her plan, he threw a fit. Surprised all the whores within earshot, including my grandmother Cheryl, by his sudden surge of anger. The real shocker, however, happened in what came next. He told my grandmother he agreed: The Neck was not suitable for a family. Still, he wanted one with her, so he supposed the Neck must change. After she agreed to marry him, he turned out the whores and redid the inside of the juke joint. Mother Maude said, “He transformed it into the kind of place you’d buy fishing tackle and pickled eggs and unleaded gasoline. No small feat. Nearly sent him to the poorhouse, too.” When he was finished with the remodeling, he called it the Filling Station—“though,” Mother Maude was always quick to add, “one or two smart alecks would mispronounce it as the Feeling Station on account of Daddy once being in the business of whores.” Needless to say, the rebranding had a rocky start. Problem was, nobody wanted to stop at a store in the Neck for long enough to fill up his tank even if his vehicle was running on fumes. “Daddy did his best to draw in customers. He ran spots on local radio stations and bought those large wooden signs advertising the store and had them hung on a number of fences that lined the outfields of Little League baseball diamonds.” Nothing worked. “Folks weren’t so quick to forget who he had been, and the Boogeyman is a hard moniker for a man to overcome.” After several years of striving, my grandfather gave up trying to rehabilitate the Neck’s image (and his own) and decided to lean into it. “Did your mama ever tell you their slogan for the Neck? East of West and West of Weir.” She said my grandmother took credit for that gem and many others, such as “The Filling Station—supplying fuel to the fire since 1950.” “They put these slogans on T-shirts and coasters and ashtrays,” Mother Maude said. “They weren’t proud.” The merchandise attracted enough curiosity from locals and lost motorists alike to keep the business afloat during most of Mother Maude’s childhood. “Mama helped it along with her cooking. She taught your mama how to deep-fry everything in corn oil—from potato logs to chicken livers. Mama wanted me to learn to cook, too, but the kitchen never made much sense to me. Oh, I can scramble an egg, but I have to put my mind to it.”

  She would speak of my mother’s birth with equal parts envy and awe. When Debra Rose was born, Mother Maude said, she did much to improve my grandparents’ reputation. In part, because of where they chose to send her for her education: the private school in West, the Christian academy. “Much like the one you have here in Hawshaw,” she said. “I imagine the students and faculty alike didn’t know quite what to make of her at first. She was, after all, the child of a whore and the Boogeyman.” But my mother had a way about her, even back then. “She had many friends, and all everybody ever talked about when Johnny and me were kids was DR this and DR that. She was the best thing since peanut butter and jelly. People said she had a big future. She was the one to watch out for. I got so tired of hearing about it. One time I asked Daddy about my future, and he looked sort of startled, and said, ‘Well, Maudie-girl, what about it?’ Like he’d not once considered I might grow up and make something of myself.” Another sip of Diet Coke was required before she could continue. “Which, you remember, I did. You tell me how many of your kinfolk ended up on the radio besides this one here talking at you.”

  Unlike Debra Rose, Mother Maude argued that she and her brother were unwanted. “We were what people called oops-a-babies, meaning we were accidents. I can’t say what kept Mama from taking the hanger to us, and that’s the plain truth.” My grandparents made it clear from the start to my aunt and uncle not to expect to be sent to the private school like my mother was. They could barely afford tuition for one child, let alone three. So the twins had to get up before sunrise each morning and catch the yellow bus to Ethel, all the way on the other side of the county. “Looking back, I’m glad we went to public school with the blacks. Your daddy is right about segregation—it’s pure evil. Lord, I have enough on my conscience already. But I was happy to go to school with them. They didn’t bother me one bit. They left us alone, and we left them alone, and everybody got along just fine, thank you very much.”

  When my aunt and uncle started school, the trouble with my grandmother started. “I guess the reason your mama made up that business about the lost mother was to spare you the truth. Well, sparing the truth is what got you in your predicament, and I aim to tell you everything.” My grandmother did not fare well at home on the Neck all by herself with her husband, too broke to hire any help, spending long hours at the Filling Station. He came back in the evenings so worn down he seemed to be sleepwalking. My mother was never home, either. The way Mother Maude told it, she was always over in West with her “glut of friends.” “She was a cheerleader, and they always seemed to be throwing pep rallies. So many of them you would think they’d get tired of trying to get everybody revved up for the least little old thing.” Mother Maude and her brother didn’t make it back home from their long journey to the county school until late in the afternoon. My grandmother had so little to occupy her mind. They didn’t own a TV set, and she didn’t like housework or reading. “The walking must have begun with small distances. Little jaunts here and there—to the pasture and back before anybody was the wiser. Each day she must have ventured out a little farther. Circled the lake until her feet were numb with exhaustion.” Then, Mother Maude said, my grandmother stayed gone for longer amounts of time. They would get home from school and she would still be away. The afternoon absences persisted, and she and Johnny didn’t know enough to question it. One evening my grandmother stayed out until my mother “pranced in.” Mother Maude said Debra Rose acted as if it were their fault their mother was gone. “What’d you yard apes do with her?” she wanted to know. When my grandfather got home, my grandmother’s disappearance became a crisis. “He got so upset he hyperventilated. DR made him sit down and press a warm bath cloth against his eyes. The man, I tell you, was calm and steely except when it came to Mama.” My grandmother eventually returned. Each time one of them put the question to her about her whereabouts, she behaved as if she no longer understood the English language. She’d squint, as if something from far off had caught her attention, and say, “Oh, just out.” At this point in the story, Mother Maude would imitate her mother by squinting and saying “out” in some highfalutin accent. “Can you imagine that?” she would often ask me, and I would tell her I couldn’t. “Well, I got mad on Daddy’s behalf when she’d get to talking like some English poetess who’d just come in from the moors.”

  Each time he came home to find her out, my grandfather flew into a rage. “Where you been?” he would ask her when she came drifting in the back door. “Who you been with?” He told her she was stuck in the Neck with him. That she was “plumb crazy” if she thought he’d let her leave him in this
“godforsaken backcountry” with three mouths to feed. “Their fighting could last all night long. Lord, the noise they made. Their voices so loud the words slurred in their mouths. Sometimes words weren’t enough, either, and Daddy used his hands.” The violence had a domino effect. “He’d beat on her, and then she would beat on him, and if Johnny and me were nearby, they’d pull us into the fray and beat on us.” Before I could ask, Mother Maude said they never laid a finger on my mother. “She was hardly around, took to staying overnight with friends in West more and more.”

  The summertime came, and nobody stayed much at the house in The Neck except for the twins. “We were left to ourselves for hours at a time. We became so close that summer I believed we began to read each other’s thoughts.” She told me how all she had to do was shut her eyes to see what was running through her brother’s head. They would remain this close, she said, until the day he left her. “He and I were thirty, and I was singing in a revival in Kentucky.” Before she went on to perform, she hugged her brother close, and whispered, “Your sister’s going to be a wife,” and he said, “With who?” and she said, “That man who’s been following us around to hear me sing.” Her brother smiled and said that was fine—just fine. But Mother Maude knew different. “And he knew I knew—I know it.” By the time she was finished with her song, he had already removed all his clothes from their RV—“plus, he took the liberty of pilfering Mama and Daddy’s picture out from under me. Didn’t say good-bye or go to hell.” Either, she assured me, would have been preferable to the awful silence he left behind.

  It was no great surprise to me when Mother Maude told me my grandparents weren’t churchgoers. “Neither was DR,” she would add, “which makes it all the more surprising she ended up with someone like your father, a true man of God if there ever was.” She and her brother began attending church by accident. “Here’s the thing about living in a place as empty as the Neck: like sin, sound travels.” One afternoon they were alone in the front yard and heard singing echoing off the Big Black River. Having nothing better to do, they followed the song. “We walked and walked—a full two miles away—to a small country church.” The choir director had taken his assembly outside to practice. About twelve of them, they were singing hymns to the trees and the birds. “When we came wandering up, all shy and confused, the leader stopped his choir, and said, ‘Look here, y’all. We’ve done summoned a couple of changelings.’” My aunt and uncle were seven. “A full year before Daddy set the Filling Station on fire,” she said, “and both Johnny and me were as towheaded as you are now.”

  The church took them in. In addition to attending regular service on Sundays and prayer meetings on Wednesdays, they also attended choir rehearsal on Friday nights. “We had to practice with the choir for several months before the choir leader would even consider letting us sing with them. Johnny wasn’t any good, but the choir leader said I had promise.” He taught her scales and how to harmonize. “This will tell you just the kind of heathen I was: I don’t remember the preacher of that little church or a sermon he ever delivered, but I do remember the breathing exercises the choir leader showed me, how to hold the air in my lungs and let it out a little at a time.” Her brother tagged along for the practices, she said, because he was “getting sweet” on the choir director—“already his affliction was rearing its ugly head and we weren’t even in our double digits.” They were encouraged to invite their parents and sister to service, but they never did. “The church was ours,” Mother Maude said. “A place where people told us we were special and not because DR was our sister.”

  While she and her brother found religion, their parents’ bickering worsened. Mother Maude thought it would end this way: by her mother not coming back from one of her walks. “She’d just keep going,” she said. “And maybe it would have been better for all of us if she had.” Instead, the end came more dramatically. This last row of theirs happened in the store when Mother Maude and her brother were eight. Reports on what transpired vary, but Mother Maude believed this version: The night before, her mother had come in so late her father had already fallen asleep and didn’t have a chance to say his piece. “He went to the Filling Station the next morning, huffing mad, and found Mama in the kitchen area around back, frying hushpuppies, surrounded by all these pots and pans. Well, Daddy must have grabbed one of them in a fit of rage. He struck Mama across the head and liked doing it so much that he did it again.” The coroner’s report indicated the blow wasn’t what killed her, but Mother Maude suspected her father thought it had. “Must have been distraught,” she said. “That’s the only way to explain it.” He doused the store in gasoline and set the whole thing ablaze. “I read their bodies were found mostly intact—no, they died from the smoke.”

  Becoming orphans proved to be as much a blessing as a curse for my aunt and uncle. The church helped in placing them with a kindhearted childless couple in Nashville—“the perfect spot for me to end up,” she said. Their lives blossomed in Music City; once out of the Neck, they thrived. My mother had a rougher transition. “I don’t know if she ever told you,” she said, “of what her life was like before she ran across your father.” I told Mother Maude how she was always careful with the details, and Mother Maude said she didn’t blame her sister. “She stayed with a family in West to finish out her senior year with her class, and after she graduated, she went wild. She got work at a lamp factory near the Choctaw reservation and took up with an Indian man—lived in sin with him until he was tired of her and put her out on the road. Oh, how far she fell! I took no pleasure in hearing of her misfortune even though she didn’t want nothing to do with Johnny and me.”

  Mother Maude went on to tell me about the time my mother was chosen homecoming queen. “Our guardians—sweet people—drove us five hours back down to West to watch her get crowned. You should have seen your mama. Pretty doesn’t do it justice for how she looked out on that football field.” After the ceremony, my aunt and uncle were waiting for her on the sidelines with a bouquet of gerbera daisies. “Well,” Mother Maude said, “she gave us one of Mama’s silly far-off looks, the kind Mama had on her face when she’d just come back from one of her walks. DR said, ‘Thank you,’ like she was asking a question.” My mother, the way her sister told it, acted ashamed to have them in attendance. “Didn’t want to know the first thing about how we were faring in Nashville or how my singing was going.” My mother didn’t linger; she followed the homecoming court back to the dressing room in the gymnasium, promising to find her siblings once she’d finished changing back into comfortable clothes. “As she drifted away, I said to Johnny, ‘There ain’t nobody but you and me,’ and he said, ‘Sister, I guess I’ve known that for some time.’”

  Mother Maude would always end her talks on the subject of denial—how my mother thought she could pretend what happened didn’t happen. “She inherited that way of thinking from Mama and Daddy. So did Johnny. Now all of them are dead, dead, dead, and just me and you are left to carry on.”

  She was quiet for a minute and then looked at me, her head cocked to the side. “I think it’d do you good to see the people you came from,” she said. The restaurant below had closed almost an hour ago, and the silence made her words now seem more important somehow, as if the whole world had gone quiet for this last bit of the story. “I’ll show you another picture instead,” she said. “I was going to wait until camp, but I don’t see the harm in you getting a sneak peek.” She had her gym-bag-size purse on her lap and rustled through it for several minutes until she found her leather wallet and flipped it open. “Look here,” she said, and shoved a picture down on the table in front of me. “This is what Drake and I found in Manhattan when we went up there to see about him. Just look at him. He was talking crazy.” The picture had yellowed over the years. The skin on the man’s face—Johnny’s face—was pulled tightly around his cheekbones, and his eyes were hollowed out. He had the faintest wisp of yellow hair above his ears, the only indicator that he migh
t, in fact, be related to me. “His brain was all eat up with the disease. He was saying how my Drake was the love of his life and how he was sorry for me to know it. The only way to calm him down was by singing to him. He’d get real quiet then, and when I finished, I’d say, ‘Now, Johnny, do you accept Jesus into your heart?’” I shut my eyes, but the tears leaked out anyway. She continued talking. Talking and talking and talking—until there was nothing, it seemed, left but the sound of her voice. “He never gave me much of an answer when the room was crowded with all his scary-looking friends, but after Drake cleared them out, I asked him again, and he nodded. He said, ‘Sister, what’re you going to do when it’s only you?’ and I told him not to worry about me. I had the Lord, and I had Drake. Then he’d get to crying again. Lord, the tears—he shed them like you are now, but it was too late for him. Yes, sir. Too late for him but not for you. He died a few days after he accepted salvation, died with the most peaceful of expressions on his face. So peaceful I got my Polaroid from my purse and took a picture of my Johnny in his sweet repose. Open your eyes, my lamb. Look at him. Wouldn’t you say that here’s a man who knew where he was going once his body was gone?”