Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  She barely glances his way when he comes into the kitchen, reporting casually over her shoulder that a man will be joining them for dinner tonight. His name’s Buck Dickerson. “Oh, a friend,” she says, when Forney asks who that is. She ignores his other questions—Where did you meet him? Why is he coming?—giving, instead, the full measure of her attention to the grout around the kitchen sink.

  Her response does not alarm or even frustrate Forney. That is their way with each other: distant, with an air of suspicion. Whatever quality that’s required to bind mother and son in affection lies dormant in them. He and his mother had once been united in their love for his father—the rawboned, benevolent, somewhat clumsy man he was. Perhaps if he had survived the heart attack, they could have kept on ignoring the hollowness between them. Kept on pretending, for his father’s sake at least, that everything was all right. But in his absence, they have become more and more like strangers. The gap, Forney suddenly realizes as he leaves her in the kitchen, is too wide to cross.

  According to the TV, a summer storm is headed their way, and by noon, thunder’s echoing off the river bottom. In the kitchen, New York strips thaw in the sink and half a bag of Russet potatoes soak in a large silver pot in the refrigerator.

  Restless, Forney opens the front door and gazes at the bruised sky and the pockets of light slicing through it. He sprawls out in the breezeway, pressing his bare feet against the loose mesh of the screen door. For a while, he reads A Separate Peace, then dozes, the smell of freshly tilled silt and raw pesticide wafting inside every now and then, tingling his nose. The farmhouse is cornered on all sides by fields and forest. They are what people in the Delta refer to as “rural,” a term his mother despises.

  He can hear her behind him. Bustling about the house. His mother is a tall woman with robust shoulders. She keeps her waves of blond hair sprayed into a great fortress above her head. At times, Forney even admires the heft of it, how it seems to defy gravity. He freely admits that she is pretty. In her own way. And he suspects that eleven years ago she was a knockout. His father, Reuben Culpepper, probably didn’t have much of a chance against her looks. Supposedly, as the story goes, he first saw her at a nightclub in Dallas, the lead singer for an all-female group called the Silver-Ringed Gypsies, a Stevie Nicks cover band. “Heard her sing ‘Gold Dust Woman,’” he told Forney. “That’s all it took.”

  One thing he knows for sure about his mother: She did love his father. Almost as much as Forney did. Overwhelming evidence supports this. She did, after all, leave Texas and move with him to Mississippi, which she calls, on a regular basis, the Absolute Center of Nowhere. And she abandoned her so-called promising music career. To top it off, she even bore him a son and gave motherhood an honest shake. Well, the best shake she could have given it. While there’s not a single doubt in Forney’s head that she eventually regretted each of these decisions, the impetus to make them must have been rooted in love, or something close to it.

  When she finds him half-asleep on the floor, she shoos him back on up to his room. “I can’t have you up under me, Forney. Not today.”

  Not ever, Forney wants to say as he stomps up the narrow staircase.

  Back in his bedroom, he plops down on his mattress while outside his window the sky darkens. He eventually goes to his closet. And locates, in the back behind his khaki pants, his father’s ratty old work jacket. A beige Carhartt. He puts the sleeves to his face and inhales the twang of hemp in the fabric, the scent of the lotion his father once wore on his hands to keep them from cracking during the wintertime. It’s like a time machine, smelling the coat. One deep sniff, and pow: Dad’s there again. After flicking off the light, he slides down to the floor, nuzzling the jacket shamelessly. There’s a desire in him to crawl farther into the closet. Cocoon himself amid the safety of empty clothes.

  Outside, rain slaps gently against the house. Lightning illumines the room—his messy bed, his poster of E.T. and Michael Jackson—and is followed by a clap of thunder.

  Downstairs, the shower in his mother’s bedroom cuts on. The sound of it sickens him. When the water warms up, she will disrobe and step in and clean herself. Get ready for Buck. Before today, it has never occurred to him that his mother would ever have a man over. A man who isn’t his father.

  Buck Dickerson—the name alone suggests that Forney will not like the man it belongs to. Probably one of those übermasculine types. Wide shouldered, protein guzzler. Loud, boisterous. Will call Forney “sport.” Or worse: “son.”

  * * *

  —

  EVENING, and there’s still the steady rain.

  The smell of meat fills the house, eventually luring Forney back downstairs. Also: He’s decided not to hide in his room like some scared child. No, sir. The house is just as much his as it is his mother’s, so he has made it up in his mind to meet Mr. Buck Dickerson face-to-face when he comes traipsing in. Let him know how it is from the start.

  His mother is slicing open baked potatoes and arranging them in a glass casserole dish when he trudges into the kitchen. She looks up at him and smiles, a new woman. She’s wearing a demure navy skirt with a white blouse. Looking churchy. Almost Pentecostal. Gone is the fluffy hair, the heavy makeup. Now her hair’s pulled back into an understated bun, revealing her delicate ears and a wrinkleless forehead.

  “You like?” She models for him.

  He grunts and asks her where all her hair went.

  “Still here.” She shakes her head, and the bun bounces stiffly. “Just better tamed.”

  “Dad liked it big.”

  She slams the last potato into the glass dish. “We are about new beginnings tonight.”

  “Is this a date?”

  She laughs. Tells him that Buck is a special man. Going to be a big help to her. “Big help,” she repeats, for emphasis.

  “Help how?”

  “He’s got connections.” She gives him this look that says: You’re too young to understand. And the thing is, he doesn’t understand. The whole day’s been one bizarre turn after another. He tells her so too. At this, she rubs her temples—which, in her language, means Look out!—and says for him to stop worrying her, for Christ’s sake.

  So he goes into the living room. He sits on the couch and waits. Eyeing the door.

  As the evening wears on, there’s no sign of Buck. And his mother returns her attention to the house. Frantically goes from room to room in her flats. Adjusting the distance between the chairs and the table. Arranging and then rearranging the place mats. Sweeping the rug in the breezeway. Her movements are jerky. Like her body’s running on electricity, Forney thinks. Finally, she retreats to the front porch. Forney follows. She fascinates him the way he suspects a scientist is fascinated by an experiment unfolding in his laboratory. She leans her body over the porch railing and observes the falling rain. She extends her arm and touches it.

  “Maybe he changed his mind,” Forney says.

  She doesn’t respond.

  They stand like this for some time, a few paces apart. Waiting.

  Just before he’s about to suggest they go on back inside and eat dinner before it gets cold, a pair of headlights blasts up the driveway. A horn honks. A Crown Victoria the color of a Sprite can bulldozes through the yard over an untended flower bed and parks beside the porch. A voice calls out from the darkness, begging to be forgiven for his lateness.

  Forney moves beside his mother at the railing to get a better look. Preparing himself for the worst. First thing he notices about Buck is his height. He’s not much taller than Forney is. Which is, for some reason, a relief to the boy. Once under the awning, he shrugs off his raincoat, and Forney blurts out, “Holy moly.” Buck’s body looks like the reflection of a body in a fun-house mirror. All misshapen. Withered. His arms are painfully thin, not much more than skin and bone, and his legs appear too long for his crooked torso. He suffers—Forney will later learn—from se
vere scoliosis. Born with a curved spine that threw the rest of his body’s construction out of whack.

  “You two live out in the boonies,” Buck says to both of them, adding that he got lost about two turns back. Under one of his arms, he’s carrying a green bottle of malbec.

  Forney’s mother takes Buck’s damp coat and leads him inside without comment. Forney trails behind, too stunned for words. This is who she brings home after a year of playing the widow? Of all the menfolk in the world, she has to pick what? A carnival freak is what. A sideshow attraction. Dad is probably rolling in his grave—but then Forney remembers that his father was cremated and can’t roll.

  In the fully lit living room, Buck sets the bottle of wine on top of the TV. “Oh, Felicia, the hair is perfecto.” Then he grasps her left hand and kisses her knuckles.

  The air in the room changes. Forney’s mother stiffens, and Forney explodes with laughter. How can he not? All of it—the strange man, his mother’s appearance—smacks of the absurd. When outdone, his father used to say, “I’m on a ship of fools, and it’s sinking fast, brother!” Looking at these two, Forney almost recites it to them, but the look on his mother’s face stalls him. She snatches her hand from Buck’s as if it were scalded. “You stop that,” she says, and it’s unclear if she’s reprimanding Forney or Buck or both of them. Her cheeks the color of a new radish, she turns away from them. Leaves them staring blankly at each other, wondering who was the one at fault, and plods off to the hall closet to put away Buck’s raincoat.

  * * *

  —

  OVER DINNER, Buck recounts with great relish how he first met Forney’s mother. It was at, of all places, the Country Music Palace, the all-night karaoke bar near the interstate. The night he first noticed her, she was performing “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed,” her clear-ringing voice completely bewitching him. Or so he claims. “Better than Mandrell,” he tells Forney, who is enjoying the story and how Buck calls his mother “Bathsheba” when he refers to her in the narrative.

  It’s like Buck is speaking of another woman. Definitely not the mother Forney has known all these years, the stern-eyed woman who wears—except for tonight—shiny earrings and a mask of colorful makeup. He has had no idea that this singing is still so important to her. Isn’t she too old? Almost thirty. And didn’t she put that behind her when she decided to marry his father?

  From across the table, he squints at her, trying to catch a glimmer of this person Buck sees, this Bathsheba, big and tall, singing karaoke. Still, he can’t picture it. No, not her. He doesn’t know that woman at all. Doesn’t want to either.

  It also occurs to him, turning to study the man’s face, that Buck Dickerson is almost handsome. There’s a delicacy to his nose, the way it hooks above the lips. A richness to the olive-colored skin. All in all, a well-formed face.

  Buck continues to regale them with talk for most of the night. It’s revealed that he, a DJ, hosts a show—Buck Wild in the Morning—that is the second-most listened-to radio program in the Delta. “Right behind Mr. Paul Harvey,” he says. An expert on country and western music, he speaks passionately about the Ryman Auditorium and the sad, misbegotten life of Hank Williams. “His wife—now that woman was something else!” His two favorite singers are Charley Pride and Dottie West. Because, he confesses, they sing mostly happy love songs. “The kind where it ends the way it should.”

  In between stories, he uncorks the malbec and pours it into two tall wineglasses. He passes one of them to Forney’s mother, then raises his own above his head. “To Felicia,” he says. “May her voice one day charm the millions as it has charmed me.”

  She smiles at this but appears embarrassed.

  This pleases Forney, her embarrassment. He lifts his glass of milk, and says, “Here, here.” Most of it’s clear to him now anyway. His mother doesn’t give two hoots about this strange little man; rather, she’s using him for something. For his connections probably. That’s it.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER DINNER, they drift back outside to the front porch. The overhead lights are kept off, and the night hems in around them, alive with squalling bobwhites and the wet patter of rain. Forney dangles one arm off the edge of the porch into the night air, the slow drizzle soothing him.

  Meanwhile, his mother and Buck are on the swing. They cast a strange silhouette in the shadows. Forney can’t stand to look at them. He may as well be on a different planet. That’s how far away he feels from them. He shouldn’t care what they do. But he does care, and he does look back at them. Several times, in fact. And no matter how hard his stare, the darkness remains impenetrable. The only thing he can definitely make out is the steady slick-slack of the swing. Going back and forth.

  Buck says, “Can I trouble you for something sweet?”

  “There’s some ice cream in the freezer.” Forney’s mother’s voice is sleepy and thick. “Forney will get you a bowl.”

  Get? Forney’s no fool. He understands they want him to get lost so they can have a moment of privacy. To perhaps kiss and bump up against each other, breathing hard. Do what adults do in these situations.

  “I’ve got the most prodigious sweet tooth,” Buck is saying now. Almost as an apology. “I just can’t help myself.”

  “Okay, okay.” Forney hurries off toward the kitchen. Using a dirty spoon, he scoops a fat gunk of ice cream into a cereal bowl. He returns as quietly as possible. Hoping to catch them in some kind of embarrassing act. What he plans on doing after such a discovery he’s not sure. Maybe throw the ice cream at them, bowl and all. To his surprise, however, they have left the porch. He cuts on the lights, causing dirt daubers to zip by his ears and congregate around the glowing bulbs. He swats them away, the bowl of ice cream slipping from his fingers and shattering about his feet.

  In the driveway, there are footsteps. Some whispers.

  “You all right up there,” comes a voice. Buck’s voice.

  Forney can see them then. They’re standing beside the large green Crown Victoria. Buck’s leaning against the driver’s-side door, his skinny arms hitched around the rearview mirror for balance. Beside him, Forney’s mother rests her head on the roof of the car, perhaps gazing at the stars. It’s no longer raining, and the night has turned soft. Moonlight makes everything silvery and new looking.

  They pass a cigarette between them, each taking long drags. When they finish, Buck crushes it under his shoe. He looks up at Forney on the porch, who’s watching all of this in a kind of wonder, and smiles. He ambles, in his slow, limping fashion, toward the boy to say good night. It has gotten late, he says. Time for him to hit the road.

  There’s no mention of the ice cream puddle or the flies it’s beginning to attract.

  After settling into his car, Buck rolls down the window, and hollers, “I’ll see you friends later.”

  His fingers sticky with ice cream, Forney waves as the car backs up, turns, and then trundles down their drive. Forney’s mother remains in the front yard until the car has completely disappeared around the turn. She returns to the porch. Humming, half-heartedly, Tammy Wynette’s “Take Me to Your World.”

  Forney says, “That man likes you.”

  “Think so?” She stoops and plucks broken shards of bowl from the gooey ice cream soup puddle. “What a mess, Forney. Jesus.”

  “He’s your boyfriend?”

  “Forney, please,” she says, and slings the broken pieces of bowl out into the bottomless night. “I’m tired of talking.”

  II.

  The second time Buck Dickerson comes around, it’s a Friday afternoon, and he’s all business. He wants to get more acquainted with Felicia’s voice, he says. And he decides they should move the piano into the living room from the hallway. “There,” he claims, “the acoustics are better.” Boxy and cumbersome, the upright piano once belonged to Forney’s grandfather and somehow, through the years, found its way into
their house. After they push the couch against the wall, they situate the piano in the center of the room, adding a metal folding chair in front of it.

  Once seated, Buck rolls up his sleeves. “A little Debussy for our trouble.” He lifts the lid and places his knotty fingers along the yellow keys. He plays. For the next few minutes, the most achingly beautiful sound envelopes the room. Forney and his mother are on the couch, silent. A little awed. Buck seems completely at home at the piano, his fingers plunk away at the keys with a slicing dexterity.

  After he finishes, Forney’s mother is breathless. She asks him for the name of the piece. Buck narrows his eyes at them. Looks disappointed. “Why,” he says, “‘Clair de Lune,’ of course.”

  “Of course,” she says, and closes her eyes, as if just remembering it. But Forney can hear the lie in her voice.

  “Your turn,” Buck says to her. He plays the beginning melody of Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You.”

  Summoned, she rises from the couch and capers over. She tilts her face to the ceiling. Opens her mouth and out comes this voice—the purity of it shocks Forney. He’s lost. Head spinning. So this is her, he finally understands.

  An expert player, Buck unites the sound of the piano with her tone. The notes embrace her singing. Coils around the voice like a protective shield. The performance takes on a texture, a tangibility. Almost like Forney could reach up and catch the song in midair, feel the groves of it moving through his fingers as they passed by. “I’ve got your class ring,” his mother croons, “that proved you cared.” The lyrics give him gooseflesh. It works a kind of voodoo on him. And his mother! She looks so young when she sings. She sways, her eyes still closed. Dad probably saw her this way years ago in Dallas: vulnerable, radiant with talent. This must be how other men see her, how Buck sees her now. Felicia. Forney rarely thinks of her first name. But now it comes to him over and over. Felicia, Felicia, Felicia. Not just his mother but a person, singular.