Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  Wiping his hands, Buck boasts about her performance. To hear him tell it, she rallied the crowd with her voice. He’s so convincing, in fact, that Forney begins to wonder if it happened just as he said.

  “Do an encore?” Bishop asks her.

  Buck stammers. “Other performers were in the wings—didn’t want to be rude.”

  “Rude? Nothing’s rude in show business,” Bishop says.

  He gazes at the stage, which is empty now.

  There were several performers after Forney’s mother—some horrible, a few mediocre, but none as good as the saxophonist. Or his mother. He’s not about to say that though. Forney’s had enough of this music business. He may never listen to another song for as long as he lives.

  “Let’s get up there,” Bishop says. “What’s stopping us?”

  “Huh?” Forney’s mother asks.

  Bishop admits he can play the piano if she’s willing. “To make up for being late.” He swipes her gin and tonic, and finishes it with one deep gulp.

  “Now wait a minute,” Buck is saying, but it’s too late. Forney can tell that some kind of energy has passed between Bishop and his mother. Forney and Buck have been excluded from the conversation.

  Bishop inquires about what songs she sang tonight, and after she tells him, he huffs, “Those dreary things! What you need is something fiery. Full of spunk.”

  One of her eyebrows arches. “Exactly.”

  “And your hair,” he goes on, waving his hands as he speaks. “The updo doesn’t help anyone.”

  Laughing, she undoes the rest of her ratty bob.

  Buck stands. “I think we should ask for the check when the girl comes back. Forney looks tired.”

  “I do?”

  Forney’s mother says that she has come all this way for this man—meaning Bishop—to hear her sing and, by god, she is going to.

  Bishop interrupts her. “I’ve got the perfect song too.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He sings a little of it, his voice husky and out of tune: “She’s forty-one and her daddy still calls her baby . . .”

  “You got to be kidding me.” Buck rips open a packet of sugar and pours it down his throat.

  * * *

  —

  BISHOP AND FORNEY’S MOTHER perform Tanya Tucker’s “Delta Dawn.” Half-drunk, she slurs most of the words. Bishop, accompanying her on the keyboard, harmonizes during the chorus. The rowdy crowd at the Little Tina has dwindled down to mostly drunks, and a few beefy men catcall her during the song. Afterward, everyone applauds except for Buck and Forney.

  Bishop and Forney’s mother lock arms and bow. Bishop stoops so low in his bow that his hairpiece flops to the floor, revealing a shiny bald head. At this, the crowd becomes ecstatic in their applause. A few even stand.

  Forney’s confused. “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing,” Buck says, “but the utter downfall of mankind.”

  Afterward, his mother returns to the table, shiny with sweat. She slides in beside her son this time, nodding at a couple of flannel-clad men who hoot at her from another table.

  “Most fun I’ve had in a long time,” says Bishop, taking the place beside Buck. He begins to readjust his toupee, but she stops him.

  “I like it—natural.” She rubs his naked scalp, as if it were a crystal ball.

  Forney announces he’s ready to go.

  “Here.” His mother unloops Forney’s bow tie from his collar, then wraps it around her head to keep the hair out of her face.

  “Attractive,” Buck says.

  “Says the man with the body.”

  Bishop places his arm around Buck’s shoulder. “That’s my friend you’re talking about.” He and Forney’s mother share a laugh.

  Buck looks at Forney: His eyes say, Help. But what can he do? Buck’s the adult; he’s just a boy. Just a fatherless boy in a strange city. Surrounded by strange people. For the first time in his life, he longs for the farmhouse. The middle of nowhere. The inside of his closet.

  “I think I’m too young for all of this,” Forney says, and Bishop and his mother laugh even louder.

  “A toast,” his mother says. “To friend Buck! And to friend Bishop!”

  “Yes!” Bishop raises his glass. “To all those who wish us well—and those who don’t can go to hell!”

  “To hell!” she agrees.

  What occurs next surprises everyone at the table, especially Forney. His body knows what to do before his brain does. Or, at least, it seems to happen this way. He can see his hand grip his half-filled glass of sweet tea. He can see his hand raise it and then sling it at Bishop. Hard. The glass pops the side of the man’s head, splashing him, and then ricochets off the table onto the floor. He’s drenched. An ice cube rests, miraculously, atop his head. “You bastard,” Bishop mumbles. He lurches across the table and snags Forney’s collar.

  His mother screams. And Buck, in a feat of acrobatics, twists around Bishop and puts the bigger man in a headlock. Bishop releases Forney at once, and the two men fall back to their side of the booth.

  The waitress returns. “Fucking rednecks,” she says, and tosses the bill on the table.

  * * *

  —

  WHILE BISHOP’S GONE to the bathroom to clean up, Forney’s mother proclaims it’s time, at last, to leave. They shuffle to their feet and walk outside into the steamy night.

  “I’ll be on directly,” she says, waving them away, and it dawns on Buck and Forney at the same time because they both say “No” in unison.

  She gapes at them. “I need to stay behind and smooth over what Junior here did.”

  “Smooth over?” Buck says. “Smooth over how?”

  She smiles. Lipstick stains her teeth. “Easy, cowboy. I’m just going to talk some more with him—like you said, he can help me. Us.”

  Buck says that he doesn’t feel right about her staying behind.

  “I’m not asking permission.”

  “Tell her, Forney.” Buck looks to the boy once again for salvation. “Tell your mother how you want her to come back with us.”

  Please, Forney wants to say, but he knows better. He says, instead: “I don’t care what she does.”

  * * *

  —

  THE PLACE THEY’RE STAYING AT is called the Hunk-a-Hunk-of-Burning-Love Motel and Diner. Elvis memorabilia litters the cramped room: a movie poster from Blue Hawaii plastered over the closet door, vinyl records lined against the walls. The beds are shaped like guitars. Forney falls onto one of them and buries his face in a bright red pillow. Using the phone on the table by the TV, Buck calls room service and orders something, then he comes over and nudges Forney with his knee.

  “I want to show you this,” he says.

  Forney sits up.

  Buck pulls out a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket. On the other bed, he proceeds to unfold it with great care until it covers half the mattress. Forney scoots over for a better look: It’s a map, yellowed and crumbly. All of the countries are faded pastels. Buck points to the salmon-colored blob of Africa. “This is where my boy is,” he says. “Tolliver.” But he’s not pointing at Africa after all but off to the side of it at a scattering of dots Forney has to squint to see. “Cape Verde.”

  Buck yawns and sits beside Forney on the bed. He smells of talcum powder and spearmint. “My son says he wants to be a poet. Can you believe that? I didn’t know people decided to be poets.” He sighs, and when he relaxes his face, Forney can see the man’s sadness, the pureness of it. He wants to look away and does when Buck says, “Thought it just happened to them, or something, like a car wreck.”

  Forney kicks off his shoes and goes to the bathroom to pee. Above the toilet, there’s a picture of fat Elvis in a bedazzled jumpsuit. Under it, the caption reads: EVERY KING DESERVES A THRONE. The map is gone when he returns
, and Buck lies prone on the bed, his arm covering his eyes.

  “If someone can decide to be a singer,” he mumbles, “then I suppose somebody can decide to be a poet too.”

  There’s a knock on the door. Both jump, but they know it couldn’t be Forney’s mother come back to them. “Room service,” a voice trills from the other side. Buck opens the door, and in trots this old woman with orangey clown hair, wearing a poodle skirt. On a silver tray, she carries a steamy cinnamon bun, glistening in pearly white frosting. Buck takes the tray from her and pays in cash.

  With a plastic knife, Buck saws into the pastry. Making two flakey pieces. “Here,” he says, dumping one slice on a napkin, then handing it over to Forney. They eat in silence and keep their ears trained to the noises outside, but they are not fools. They suspect she won’t be back until morning. Maybe later. But for now, they share a cinnamon bun and the ridiculous hope that she might return to them before they finish.

  The old woman takes her time in leaving them. “You boys be good now,” she says, probably thinking—Forney is sure of it—This is the saddest room in the universe.

  THE EXAGGERATIONS

  When I was fourteen, Uncle Lucas decided to take me to a bachelor party. His longtime friend Buddy Cooper was getting married. Buddy Cooper was a real-life cowboy: wore Wranglers and thick-heeled boots and a stiff Stetson hat. He smelled like fresh hay, but his hands were always impossibly clean. During the summer, Uncle Lucas would sometimes drive me out to Buddy Cooper’s farm two counties over in Itta Bena to ride horses and fish for brim in his pond. He was a nice man and got along in a good humor with Uncle Lucas, staying up late into the night on those visits to retell old stories of their past exploits together. Their voices, I remember, were soft and measured with each other—like the whispery crick-crack of old tree limbs being nudged apart by wind—and it was easy to fall asleep listening to them talk in the other room.

  One thing you should know about Uncle Lucas: He liked to exaggerate. His talent was taking ordinary events, the everyday happenings of life, and giving them that spark they needed in order to become memorable, even remarkable. Dressed in the finest of tweed suits, he would regale those who shopped in his department store on the square in town with one story after another, stories about the locals whom nobody remembered exactly but were somehow still faintly known. He had the confidence and air of a learned historian even though—if Aunt Mavis was right—he had barely graduated from high school.

  But with Buddy Cooper, my uncle never exaggerated. The truth of their memories together was a sacred thing to him. I never questioned Uncle Lucas about this because I thought it had something to do with their friendship, the bond between them. The fatherless boy that I was, I knew very little about the world of men and what kept them in healthy fellowship with one another.

  Aunt Mavis did not like the idea of my tagging along for the bachelor party, especially when she understood where it was taking place. “Fay’s,” she hollered. But Uncle Lucas told her that I was old enough to know “some things about this world,” and after he said this, she looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Said if I went I’d be disappointing my parents who had entrusted me to their care.

  “Hardy har har,” Uncle Lucas said to this. “If his daddy was still living, he would have done took him. And his mother—well, his mother—” That was a tender subject, my mother, so Aunt Mavis held up her hand to silence him.

  “Fine,” she said. “I hope you both get so sot drunk your livers turn black and fall out your back ends.” At this, she turned on her heels and huffed up the stairs to her room.

  After she had slammed the door, I asked Uncle Lucas if that could really happen, your liver turning black and falling out, and he said, “Naw,” but then he seemed to ponder the thought for a few seconds more and said, in a more serious tone, “At least I don’t think so.”

  * * *

  —

  THE ONE UNCLE LUCAS used to tell me all the time was about the little girl and her pig. According to Uncle Lucas, the girl was the only child of a dirt farmer, and her parents spoiled her, gave her anything she wanted. And what she wanted one year, at the age of twelve, was to be crowned Little Miss Farm Special at the Mid-Mississippi State Fair. All she needed was a pig. The competition consisted of the contestants, dressed in fine puffy gowns, parading their fattest hog out onto the muddy fairgrounds. They were scored on their attire, their poise, and—of course—their pig.

  The girl’s father cashed out his Christmas Club and bought her a piglet from the man whose fields he worked. The girl tended to the animal all summer long, feeding it cow milk and thick triangles of corn bread and, later, expensive bags of feed to fatten it up. At night, before bed, she would sit on the back porch with the pig’s knotty snout in her lap and rub baby oil into its tender flesh. She named the pig Suzanne, and on the day of the competition, the animal was a behemoth, its skin the color of eggnog and its curlicue tail adorned with an elegant blue bow. To complete the look, the girl wore a matching ribbon in her own hair, and they trotted out onto the fairgrounds, expecting to win the day. Unbeknownst to her, however, it was against the rules to doll pigs up with ribbons, the judges preferring pigs to retain a more natural look, and they were disqualified. To make matters worse, Suzanne had gained a multitude of hungry admirers during her first outing in public. By the time the girl and the pig had made it back to the parking lot, her father—who was angry because of all the money he’d wasted on such a venture—had already sold Suzanne off to the man who owned the local meat locker.

  Needless to say, the girl pitched some kind of a fit when the man came to take Suzanne away. The animal, sensing the girl’s distress, squealed and squealed, roiling its great body back and forth as the man led her off. The girl cried and moaned the whole way home, her dress all bunched up around her in the tiny truck cab like a glittery cloud. Her father regretted what he had done, but he’d made back the money he lost from his Christmas Club twice over and promised her he’d use it to get her a new pet. “A real one this time,” he said. “A pedigreed dog.” At this, the girl cried louder. That night, while her parents were asleep, she slid out of her bedroom window and rode her bicycle all the way across town to the meat locker. The building made a crooked shadow in the night sky, and she was almost too frightened to enter, but she pressed on. There, in a pen beside the rusted meat hooks, she found Suzanne, oinking and snorting, still alive, mingling with a drove of other hogs. “So she set them all aloose,” Uncle Lucas would say. “And there are still feral pigs up in the woods that owe their lineage to that girl.”

  Here, he would end the story, and though I was young, I knew an embellishment when I heard one, knew my uncle could stretch the truth so thin that you could read the newspaper through it. But that didn’t matter much—not to me, at least—when it came to enjoying it for its beauty and humor. Uncle Lucas’s exaggerations had a pull to them, drawing me (and perhaps others) closer and closer to something else, something underneath the story, something that he was trying to communicate indirectly. It wasn’t that he attempted to drop morals in with his exaggerations, I don’t think, or give life lessons exactly, like the parables of Jesus. No, what he was doing with his storytelling was trying to shape the world into something better than it was. In his heart, I don’t think he could face the finalities of life—unexplainable death, loss of love, petty hates and injustices—and so, in memory, he colored events differently. Growing up, I was constantly at war with myself: You see, I knew it was foolish to believe a word he said when he got going on one of his long talks, but that didn’t stop me from desperately wanting to.

  * * *

  —

  HIS LISTENERS KNEW he made up most or all of what he told them, but they forgave him because he was not of them, and I think they found it charming that he took such an interest in their town lore. None of my family was ever considered a part of town; our roots were not deep enough. Fifty years
ago, my widower grandfather left his fledgling law practice and moved to Mississippi, bringing with him his three children—Uncle Lucas; Uncle Lucas’s twin sister, Mavis; and his older brother, Reuben (my father)—to start a new life in this state, where the cost of living was cheap and good lawyers were sparse.

  My family hailed from Illinois, and in the Delta, that might as well have been the moon. Here, even when I was growing up in the 1980s, it’s all about family and who’s kin to whom; here, girls are given double names—Anna-Taylor, Hattie-Frank, Sarah-Burden—so that people will know who their mothers had been before they were married; here, you say you live in “God’s Country” because the endless fields of soybeans and rice and cotton that separate your cluster of a town from other towns gives you this feeling of importance, of significance, that you might matter, that surely God can’t miss you if you are one of only a few looking up at him. But in my family, we didn’t believe in God, so when we glanced above our heads, all we saw was blue sky, ozone, the faint scars of cloud.

  * * *

  —

  MY FAVORITE EXAGGERATION was the one Uncle Lucas told about me. During the summers, I would sometimes go with him to his store to help fold and arrange the new shipments of polo shirts and trousers. When people would come in, he’d sometimes point at me, and say, “There’s my nephew. He’s going to be famous one day. He’s special.” Then he’d wink at me like what he had said was gospel.

  He knew I liked to write, to tell my own stories just like he did, and made it up in his mind that I was going to be a well-known writer. “Another Hemingway! A Faulkner—only my nephew will make some damn sense!” It felt good to live in the warmth of his imagination; however, the truth was a little closer to earth. Each of my stories—if you could call them that—was barely a page long, a sketch of description or a stray thought captured in my own paltry grasp of language, and Aunt Mavis, who was also my seventh grade English teacher, said I had a problem sticking to my subject: “You wander and wander and digress so much,” she wrote once in the margins of one of my themes. “It’s like trying to find a story in a hurricane.”