Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  Bachelor Living

  My father was a quiet man. If he put more than two sentences together, that was a speech. There was nothing forbidding or taciturn about his silence, though. On the contrary, it was somehow companionable, almost comforting. He wore his quietness lightly, like a windbreaker. So when I think of him, I think not in words but in images. I don’t hear him. I see him. I remember the way he sat, the way he slept, the way he smelled: of aftershave, hair tonic, pipe tobacco, cigarettes, sometimes whisky and always shoe polish. Drunk or sober, he was the best-groomed man I’ve ever known. Without ever looking fussy, he managed to keep his shoes spit-shined and his nails manicured. He used brass polish on his belt buckle, and he never looked like he needed a haircut. Mostly, though, my memories of him are of a man in motion. I loved to watch him walk. He was big, six foot two, broad-shouldered but lean and lithe and never clumsy. He had that ex-athlete’s unconscious ease with his body. He didn’t walk so much as glided, moving on the balls of his feet, center of gravity canted slightly forward. You never heard him coming.

  As long as he was alive, I could never think of my father without at least some low-level hum of anxiety—not even when he sobered up for good for the last twenty years of his life, not even after he undertook his longest and most successful career, as an addiction counselor in an alcohol treatment center. Well before I started school, I made a habit of keeping an eye on him. I studied him like the weather, and I learned to see trouble in a cloudless sky long before I learned to read. If I came home from school and found him sitting on the sofa playing solitaire, I exhaled a little—not all the way, never all the way. Those were good days. He might or might not have had a job, but he wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t missing. There were more good days than bad, but the good ones weren’t inevitable and the bad ones were. I probably came home to find him drunk and passed out maybe a dozen times, but those are the days I remember most vividly. The worst were the afternoons when I came home to an empty apartment, because then I had no idea where he was or when or if he was coming back. Sometimes he would be gone for hours, sometimes for days, and sometimes he would have packed up and gotten on the bus to South Carolina without telling anyone. And as good as I got at knowing what he was going to do before he did, that, in the end, didn’t count for much, since it was never a question of if he was going on a drunk—it was a question of when, and it was the waiting for things to go wrong that wore me out. Living with an alcoholic, you never can tell when they’re going to fall off the wagon, or go missing or for how long. My father always slept like a baby. It was the rest of us who lay there with one eye open.

  In the summer of 1962, when I was ten, I spent the summer with my father in South Carolina. It was the longest uninterrupted time we ever spent together. He had been gone longer and longer every time he left us in Winston-Salem, so much so that he almost seemed like a visitor when he came home. Sometimes he went away to dry out. Sometimes he moved in with his mother in her apartment in Lancaster. That summer, two months after Uncle Buddy’s funeral, Daddy was still bunking with Uncle Robert at Jones Crossroads outside Lancaster.

  The old farmhouse where they lived was small, one story, unpainted and raised up on pilings with the living room and kitchen taking up one side and two bedrooms on the other and a hall down the middle. Uncle Richard lived just down the road with his wife, who clerked in town at the five-and-dime. Richard ran a general store at the five-point intersection called Jones Crossroads, named after their grandfather, a former state legis lator.

  When you entered Uncle Richard’s store, you went temporarily blind while your eyes adjusted to the gloom. He never turned the lights on during the day, so the only illumination came from the windows that flanked the front door. The walls and shelves were packed with groceries, tools, farm supplies and a few spare auto supplies—fan belts, antifreeze, motor oil. As soon as you walked in, you were ambushed by the rank smell of rat cheese. Uncle Richard kept a big hoop of that vile stuff under a glass cake stand beside his cash register. Farther down the counter stood big jars of candy, which sort of made up for the cheese smell, and on the shelves behind the register, he stocked fireworks, which would have made up for anything. A little farther back in the shadows, he kept one of those old fire-engine-red, tin-lined coolers in which bottles of soda pop stood submerged in icy water so cold that your hand hurt when you searched for a bottle.

  “You bachelors better behave,” my mother cautioned me on the ride down to South Carolina. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it sounded appealing. My life to that point had been spent in a world of women. My father, when he was around, and my uncle Tom, who was too old to play catch and who was challenged by anything more mechanically taxing than changing the ribbon in his typewriter, were the only men in my life. Otherwise I was surrounded by what seemed like endless legions of aunts and grandmothers. I was ready for some bachelor life.

  My mother was ready to leave as soon as we got there. The house smelled of unemptied ashtrays and old bacon grease. The beds weren’t made. Dishes stacked up in the sink. It looked like one of those “what happens when the wife’s out of town for the weekend” cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post. Mother hugged and kissed me like she was selling me to Gypsies, and fled.

  I was surprised to find that, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t altogether sorry when she drove away. But there was that other part of me—the part that craved certitude, that found comfort in routine—that wanted to go with her, because I wasn’t in any way sure what I was in for in this strange place, with a father who was more shadow than substance and uncles I didn’t know at all.

  By the time I turned ten, I had faced down most of the fearful things that had made me a fretful, uneasy little boy. I was no longer scared of wolves, spiders, pirates or escalators. I knew how to swim and how to ride a bike. I was not afraid of getting a shot from a doctor or losing a tooth (especially once I discovered Turkish taffy at the movies: quite by accident I found that if I bit into that hard, almost bricklike candy, a loose tooth stuck to the candy when I opened my jaw; it became my favorite method of losing teeth). By the time I made that trip to South Carolina, I had only one phobia I couldn’t lick: I was terrified of mayonnaise. I wouldn’t touch the stuff, which made eating in a Southern family problematic, since, as far as I could tell, for Southerners, mayonnaise was one of the basic food groups. Luckily, I lived with an accommodating family—my aunt and uncle, at least—that was willing to serve me tuna fish straight out of the can while everyone else got it mixed up with mayo, olives, celery and Lord knows what else. I didn’t have to eat congealed salad or French dressing or anything else with mayonnaise. I thought I more than made up for this by eating calf’s liver and spinach without complaint. My mother thought otherwise and smuggled mayonnaise into food that I was fond of, cackling like a victorious guerilla leader whenever she tricked me into eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich into which she’d surreptitiously ladled mayo. Somehow, though, I’d held my own at home. Here, in a strange house in a different state, I wasn’t sure what we’d be eating. Mayo straight from the jar? Squirrels with the heads still on?

  So it was with great trepidation that I helped my father move my two suitcases into the room I would share with him. He’d cleared out a drawer in the bureau for me, and after I unpacked, he took me back to the kitchen and gave me a Coke. Things were looking up. Soft drinks were a treat back home. My aunt and uncle kept ginger ale in the icebox—no one I knew called it a refrigerator—and at home my mother limited me to orange juice.

  With drinks in hand—mine sweating pleasantly in my fist—we went back out to the front porch, sat down in a couple of cane chairs in the shade, and then got down to the business of doing what we would do all summer, which was nothing much. I couldn’t believe it at first. It took me the better part of a week to accept that here there was no schedule. We got up when we felt like it, went to bed when we got tired. Daddy made sure I said my prayers at night, but otherwise he left me to take car
e of myself. No one was ever in a hurry to do anything. Dishes and clothes got washed when there were no more clean ones. The living-room coffee table held ashtrays, newspapers and sometimes a carburetor or a fishing reel—whatever anyone was fiddling with, absently trying to fix while they watched television after supper. But while there was a complete lack of tension in that house, things did get done. Meals were cooked and eaten. Uncle Robert’s fields got tended and his mule got fed. Daddy performed a series of small repair jobs with so little fuss and noise that it was like the repairs took care of themselves. Best of all, no one paid any attention to me, or if they did, I took no notice. Perhaps I was too happy.

  Uncle Robert had the back bedroom, and Daddy and I slept in the room that looked onto the front porch, the room that had belonged to Uncle Buddy. Uncle Robert was a lot older than Daddy, but he still farmed a little, plowing with his mule. Like my father, he didn’t talk much. It was a quiet household. He also seemed most comfortable outdoors, or so I gathered, since he disappeared after breakfast, came in for dinner, and then disappeared again until suppertime. My father did the cooking, and we watched television while we ate in the cramped dining area off the kitchen, where the walls, like the walls in the living room, were lined with paper printed to look like pine paneling. Every night at supper we watched Flatt and Scruggs. I liked the Martha White theme song that started the show (“Now you bake right with Martha White/Goodness gracious, good and light, Martha White/For the finest biscuits, cakes and pies/Get Martha White self-rising flour/The one all-purpose flour/Martha White’s self-rising flour’s got Hot Rize”), because what was not to like about a song about biscuits, cakes and pies?

  On the weekends, to ensure that I would not miss church, I suppose, I was sent to stay with Daddy’s sister Lib, who lived with her husband and two daughters out in the country on the other side of town. Their home was more like what I was used to: clean sheets, vegetables at supper, regular bedtimes. They made homemade ice cream on the Fourth of July, and we shot off firecrackers on the big lawn that ran down to their church next door (a modest graveyard lay between the house and the church, but my cousin said we couldn’t play there, it would be disrespectful). Most nights after supper we ran around in the yard catching lightning bugs and putting them in Mason jars with holes poked in the lid so the bugs could breathe (they died anyway). During the day we plucked Japanese beetles off the rosebushes and tied strings to their legs and let them fly around, like little kites with motors.

  Since I was about to enter the fifth grade that fall, the grade my mother taught, she had equipped me with a small library of Landmark history books and biographies from the “Childhood of Famous Americans” series. I had my own room, on the side of the house away from the morning sun, and most mornings I lay in bed reading about young Thomas Edison and striving little Alexander Hamilton while the leaves of the tree (mimosa? china-berry?) right outside my room brushed against the window screen. Because my room was on the second floor, it was, as far as I was concerned, like living in a tree house with a soft bed and a bathroom right outside my door.

  It was an easygoing well-run household, and everyone there was kind to me. I got into trouble only once, early in my visit, when my uncle asked if I would like some more milk one night at supper, and I said no. “Son, I’m going to have to teach you some manners. Now what do you say to me?” “No, sir.” “That’s right. No, sir. Don’t let me hear you say just no again.” “No, sir, I won’t.” That week, when I wrote to my mother, I reported to her on which books I’d finished already, and I reported that Uncle Steve was teaching me manners. I knew that she would be proud of that.

  My father was not much of a disciplinarian. I remember his whipping me exactly twice, and both times after my mother insisted. He’d take his belt off, bend me over, give me a couple of whacks and that was it. He didn’t seem any happier about it than I was. (My mother, on the other hand, was an enthusiastic paddler; she would chase me around the apartment until she cornered me, and then thrash me even harder for being a coward, using a paddle that a former student of hers had made in shop class and given to her as a gift.) For that matter, he was not much of a dad. He fell down in all the categories by which fathers are judged. He wasn’t dependable, he didn’t dispense sage advice and he didn’t know how to play with kids. Board games and cards were about as close as he got. When I was small, he’d lie on the bed, raise his legs in the air and balance me on the soles of his feet, an act that left me screaming with equal parts terror and delight. By the time I started school, he and I had settled into a comfortable, if somewhat mutually exclusive, existence. We happily coexisted, each leaving the other one alone. This drove my mother nuts, since it did not fit her idealized image of how fathers and sons should act toward one another. Once in a while—usually when she had had enough time to forget how miserably her last experiment had failed—she would force us together in some ill-advised father-son enterprise. The incident I recall most clearly occurred when I was nine and we drove for two hours one Sunday to meet my father outside Charlotte, where he was living then. It was one of those soggy autumn afternoons that always threaten rain that never comes. The three of us drove to a three-par golf course, where we wandered the links, my father trying to teach me the rudiments of golf while my mother trailed behind us, keeping up a steady stream of chatter that grew more irritated as the afternoon wore on. Plainly she regretted her inspiration as soon as we set forth with our clubs, but seeing no immediate way out of her plan—exit plans were never part of her strategy—she settled for needling my father (“Mack, help him! Show him what to do”), while I drove one ball after another into the rough. After a while, it was more fun to hunt for the golf balls than to try to hit one—the noise level dropped considerably the farther I got into the weeds. It took us an hour to get to the fourth tee, where my burgeoning golf career reached an abrupt end. They had had enough of each other by then as well, and a few minutes later, my mother and I were on the road home.

  That summer in South Carolina was nothing like that. The first few days were stiff and awkward. As always, I felt as though I were introducing myself for the first time. I had to bring him up to speed on the most basic aspects of my existence (“How long you been wearing glasses, boy?” “A whole year, Daddy, almost”). An apartment kid, I spent my time finding what it was like to have all outdoors to play in. My orbit widened every day as I got comfortable around the barn, the fields, the woods behind the house. Mostly I was alone, and happily so, but nearly every day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in late afternoon, he would come and find me in the little open-air shed between the house and the barn. The shed had been built as a garage but had no car in it (Uncle Robert’s Studebaker sat in the grass beside the house), and now it served as a toolshed and workshop, and I spent hours in there. There was a whetstone on a wheel with a crank, and I liked to grind small pieces of wood against the spinning stone until they caught fire.

  “Dig some worms,” Daddy would say, and I’d grab the coffee can and the spade by the back steps and run to the paddock and dig up a couple of dozen worms in the time it took him to fetch the cane poles from the barn. Then we’d make our way down the path—me looking everywhere for snakes—that led to the pond behind the house. In the pond were bream, bass, catfish and turtles—we called them cooters—that seemed to live on my bait. Sometimes we fished from the bank, and sometimes from the dam. At first I jabbered along, anxious to fill the gaps in conversation, but my father explained that to catch fish, you had to be quiet and patient. After that, we never spoke much, we just fished, and I learned the pleasure of sitting with my father for an hour or so, the two of us watching our bobbers in companionable silence. Near the end of the summer, he let me try the rod and reel, but I never got the hang of it. I preferred the cane poles, with their limber flicking action that could land a worm-laden hook precisely beside a rotten log where, if some cooter didn’t make off with the bait, I stood the best chance of hooking a catfish. Mostly we caught littl
e bream that we threw back, but some we kept, if they were big enough, and ate after Daddy gutted and scaled them by the back steps and then fried them up in cornmeal. I did catch a catfish once, a big slimy thing with whiskers that looked like something out of a horror movie, and once I fought a bass as long as my forearm for five minutes that seemed like an hour before my father scooped him up in the net.

  Uncle Richard was his brother Robert’s opposite: heavyset and a talker. I suspect he talked even when no one was around. He was also one of those grownups who communicate with children through teasing. The first time we walked down to the store, only a few hundred yards from Uncle Robert’s, Richard was sitting behind the counter. I didn’t see him at first, there in the crepuscular dimness. Finally he stirred, lumbering up like a bear coming out of hibernation—he was big enough to be a bear, taller than six feet and carrying over 200 pounds. He shuffled to the counter like a man who weighs every motion in his head before he makes it, trying to decide if it’s worth it. Given the deliberate way he did everything, I would say those were nearly split decisions.

  “Who’s that you got there with you, Mack?”

  “That’s my boy.”

  Richard braced his hands on the glass-topped counter and peered over at me.

  “Hello, My Boy. That’s a funny name for a child, Mack. How’d he get it?” I could tell that he was really talking to me, and I started to explain that it wasn’t my name, but Richard went right on talking.

  “My Boy, I hear you’re allergic to Coca-Cola. That true?”

  “No sir. And my name—”

  “Well, that’s what I heard. Must’ve been some bad information. If you think it won’t kill you, go back there in that chest back there and fetch you one out. No, keep going. On back. More. Air you go.” I had all I could do to hold the heavy top up while I prospected in the black icy water, where just the tops of the bottles remained unsubmerged so you could tell what you were selecting. I thought about taking a Cheerwine or an Orange Crush, but he’d told me to get a Coke, and I was afraid that if I came back with something else, it would set him off on another barrage of questions about whether I could read or some such. I needn’t have worried. He was done with me for the time being. When I went back to rejoin them at the front of the store, he didn’t so much as look at me when I said thank you. When we left, though, he made me stuff my pockets with jawbreakers.