Sweet and Low

by Nick White

Uncle Lucas sat back in his chair and studied the man. “Well,” he said to him. “That’s the only way I know it.” I nodded and wanted to tell the man with the shiny mustache that I’d heard about Dr. Rosamond for as long as I could remember. My uncle usually told it on Halloween, and it hadn’t changed much over the years. I stood, ready to speak, when Buddy Cooper came out of nowhere and shoved me back into my chair.

  “You’ve had enough there, Bert,” he said, speaking to the man with the mustache. “You know you always go sour when you drink that dark liquor.”

  The man told Buddy Cooper to shut his mouth, and his voice had changed, gotten deeper. The racket hushed. Everyone gazed at their drinks. I shivered all over in the new quiet. “Way I hear it,” Bert went on, “it was his pecker that got shot off.” He pointed at me and hissed. “You hear me, boy? Changed him from a gamecock to a hen.”

  Some of the men chuckled, but Buddy Cooper and I, loyal to my uncle, remained silent. Finally, after a long pause when everyone seemed to be trying to figure out what to do next, Uncle Lucas spoke: “Everyone knows it was, in fact, his heart.” He drank what was left in his glass. “I don’t like the way of that story you tell one bit.”

  More silence followed, then the sound of men shifting in their chairs.

  Bert fingered his mustache, itched it for a while, and then grinned. Over the years, I would come to see other people give grins like that one: a hateful, cold smile. “I’ve heard many a story about you, Lucas Culpepper.” He stood and turned, and I thought he was looking at me, but no: He looked at Buddy Cooper who stood beside me. “Have heard many stories that I don’t spec I’d like repeated if it were me and I’s unmarried.”

  Someone flipped the table, and I slid out of my chair, landing on my back, and didn’t see any of what happened next. I heard yells. A slap. A hard, bone-deep thump. I jumped back to my feet but was still blinded from the commotion by a pair of tall shoulders. Then some of the men moved out of my way, and I saw that Buddy Cooper held Bert in a brutal headlock, the man’s face turning all shades of red and purple, his mustache flapping about his mouth as if it were trying to fly off to safer territory.

  Uncle Lucas stood behind them, speaking in a low voice to Buddy Cooper. “Come on now,” he was saying. “Ain’t worth it, Bud. Not this one.” Buddy Cooper’s eyes went big, and he seemed to realize what he was doing. The rest of the men followed Uncle Lucas’s lead, telling Buddy Cooper to let the poor bastard go. Finally, he did. When released, the man crumpled to the ground, panting for breath. Under our feet, all of a sudden, the floor began to shake—this time in earnest—and the windows rattled in their panes. It was midnight, and I remembered the train. It blew past us, screeching. The shrill whistle sliced through Fay’s, through all of us. Everyone watched Buddy Cooper, and Buddy Cooper watched the floor. No one toasted anything.

  * * *

  —

  AUGUST: six months after my uncle died. The fair opened that night, and Aunt Mavis, for as long as I knew her, had never been one for the fair—“Too much bustle and fried food,” she said—but I was a senior and would soon be leaving her for college. She claimed to be feeling nostalgic, so we went. An unexpected cold snap had settled over the Delta, so we wore our jackets, with the collars turned up high against the sharp wind. That night, we ate deep-fried Oreos and frosted funnel cakes. We rode the scrambler and the Ferris wheel and the tilt-a-whirl. We kept our heads spinning, our stomachs in a ceaseless churn. We tried, I think, to work ourselves into such a frenzy that we’d forget what we had lost earlier that year.

  After touring the tornado-safety exhibit, we went to the coliseum. Inside, under the bright yellow lights, young girls in sparkling gowns and long gloves marched their pigs out into the center of the stadium amid the smell of the dirt floor and livestock. Entranced, we sat down in one of the first rows. Aunt Mavis rested her arm on the rusted railings and observed each one of the girls as she guided her pig up the stairs to the little podium and announced her name and her pig’s name to the judges, as well as who her parents were, who was sponsoring her, and what she wanted to be when she was grown.

  We stayed for the whole show. When they finally crowned that year’s Little Miss Farm Special, Aunt Mavis cried. Her tears lasted until we got back to the car and started for home. During the drive back, she said, “You know, your uncle loved that pig as much as I did. Hell, he went with me that night to set it free.”

  After that, we were silent, keeping our eyes on the road. The defroster rattled, defogging the windows. The radio played a country song by an artist my mother had claimed to know. A great wealth of things existed between Aunt Mavis and me that we had decided, at some point or another, to leave unsaid—it had been our way—and having her talk now left me unsettled. I was no fool—of course, I’d always known something like this was the case, but actually hearing her reveal the truth behind one of my uncle’s exaggerations felt like a betrayal of him and his memory. Like blasphemy. Still, I couldn’t help myself.

  I cut off the radio. “Go on.”

  “When we got there,” she said, “it was too late, of course. The man had already hung Suzanne up by her hind legs. Cut her up something awful. My god, I never knew a pig could bleed so much.”

  * * *

  —

  THE BACHELOR PARTY, if that’s even what it had been, ended with the last trills of the train whistle. The man with the mustache stumbled out the side door before anyone else, the first to disappear into the darkness. One by one, they all left, and when Buddy Cooper went to settle our tab, Uncle Lucas placed his arm around my neck, brought me close, and said, “How you feeling?”

  I thought about this question for a long time. Then I said, “My teeth. My teeth are numb.” Also, my head felt like someone had filled it with water, but I kept that to myself for some reason.

  The girl frowned at me as I passed her going out the door. She said, “Come back and see me, little one.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, my face tingling. Buddy Cooper and my uncle roared with laughter as I slipped out the door ahead of them.

  Once outside, Buddy Cooper told us his truck was close by. We should follow him, he said. My uncle clutched the back of Buddy Cooper’s loose shirttail, and I held on to the back of my uncle’s. We walked like this, in the dark, tethered to one another. Our feet made loud, slushy noises as we plodded through the debris of leaves and sticks. Trees crowded us on all sides, the color of bone. An animal moaned from its perch or nest behind us—a frog? A bird? I wasn’t sure. I wondered, then, if I had died. Wildly, and perhaps drunkenly, I imagined I had croaked at the bar—my Culpepper heart finally giving out, going kerplunk for the last time—and this, then, was my afterlife: wandering around through the woods for time eternal. It was not an altogether unpleasant thought. I decided there must be worse fates. After all, I was here with my uncle. When we found Buddy Cooper’s old blue Ford pickup, I almost suggested we camp there for the night, near the woods, shielded from the human world completely.

  Buddy Cooper handed my uncle his keys. “You drive,” he said. “I’m still too shaky from that bastard back there.”

  “Where we headed?” Uncle Lucas said.

  “Sailor’s choice. Anywhere, my friend, but here.”

  The inside of the truck smelled like chewing tobacco and motor oil. I sat squashed between them and watched bleary-eyed as the headlights blasted through the night, the lonely road opening up to receive us. I didn’t know where we were headed until my uncle turned off onto Highway 51. He asked me when was the last time I’d been out to my parents’ house in the country—the large farmhouse my mother could never sell or even rent.

  As we pulled up the long driveway, the headlights caught most of the house in their beams. It seemed alien to me now, this large empty house, and with my buzz fading, I didn’t have the heart to go in and longed, more than ever, to return to the safety of the trees.

  We park
ed in the yard directly across from the front door so the headlights could shine into the house. Buddy Cooper said he didn’t think this was such a good idea. “Hey, now,” he was saying. “Let’s us ease back over to my house. We can camp out there. Lois won’t mind.” Lois was the woman he would marry.

  Uncle Lucas got out of the truck and walked to the front porch, then up the front steps.

  My mother had given him a key to the place before she left. “Just in case,” she had said, and I closed my eyes and pictured my mother’s face, layered with makeup, her bleeding-red lips turned in a smile the last time I saw her, that day she left me with my aunt and uncle. My uncle unlocked the door to the house and walked inside. I hunched over my knees. I felt sick.

  “You okay, kid?”

  I sat back up and nodded.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I think your uncle is like that doctor man, looking for the pieces of his heart even in places where he knows he won’t find them.”

  “Do what?” Nothing made sense to me: the house, my uncle, what Buddy Cooper was saying. I felt like I had entered another person’s life, stumbled into another story, one that refused embellishment but had to be told plainly and absolutely.

  Buddy Cooper scratched my head and laughed. “You are Cooter Brown drunk.” Then he slid out of the cab, and I followed him inside.

  “Careful you don’t fall,” Uncle Lucas said to us.

  The headlights illuminated the living room, revealing covered furniture, a broken clock on the wall, and duct-taped boxes scattered here and there on the floor. It was a ghost house, choked with the remnants of people I didn’t know or care to know anymore even though I had once been one of them.

  “Look,” Uncle Lucas said. “There’s a couch for each of us.”

  “We’re sleeping here tonight?” I said.

  “You want us to go home to Aunt Mavis like this?”

  Buddy shuffled from one foot to the other. “We can go back to my place. Drink some Crown and Cokes. It’ll be fine.”

  Uncle Lucas waved this away. “Go if you want, Coop,” he said. “We’re camping here tonight.”

  “No, no. I can’t leave y’all out here. I’ll stay, I’ll stay.”

  Once I got settled into one of the love seats, I didn’t mind the house so much. Sleep came quickly, and I drifted off to the familiar sound of Uncle Lucas and Buddy Cooper whispering to each other. That night was my first alcohol-induced sleep, a cold sort of slumber I’d come to appreciate years later because, in the throes of it, I rarely dreamed.

  When I awoke the next morning, I heard crying. The daylight came pounding through the shuttered windows, bright and horrible. I had to pee, badly, so I rolled off the love seat and ambled to the front porch, still half-dazed with sleep. On the porch swing, I found Uncle Lucas and Buddy Cooper in each other’s arms. I said, “Hey, is it all right if I piss off the front porch?” But they didn’t hear me at first because Buddy Cooper had his head back, sighing, and Uncle Lucas was kissing his neck.

  Uncle Lucas slung himself off the swing. As if an invisible hand had snatched him by the scruff of his neck and thrown him. “Get back inside, goddamnit,” he told me. He wiped his face and spit.

  Frightened, I stumbled backward inside the house and perched awkwardly on one of the couch’s armrests. They talked outside for about half an hour, whispering so I couldn’t hear. I was embarrassed and felt like I had hurt them, offended my uncle, in seeing what I had seen. My head ached, and my bladder needed relief from all the gin and tonics the night before. Finally, I could take it no longer and went out back to relieve myself. When I returned, Uncle Lucas was leaning in the doorway, his eyes darting about the place, never settling on me or anything else. In the yard, Buddy Cooper’s pickup rumbled to life.

  My uncle said, “He’ll call Mavis to come get us when he gets home.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He kept standing. I sat down. We waited for nearly an hour without speaking. With great relief, we heard the crunch of gravel as Aunt Mavis’s sedan pulled up the driveway. I stretched out in the back seat and pretended to fall asleep. Halfway home, Uncle Lucas rolled down his window and let the wind slap at his hair.

  “You’ll get the earache,” Aunt Mavis said.

  “Sick.” He let back his seat and closed his eyes. “Carsick.”

  Aunt Mavis clicked her tongue. “Boys, boys,” she said. “If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.”

  * * *

  —

  A WEEK LATER, Uncle Lucas moved out.

  On the day of the move, he cleaned out his closet and chest of drawers and packed up everything he owned. I didn’t know about it until it was too late to ask him to stay. Even if I had known earlier and tried to say something to him, I’m not sure that I would have. I was reading in my room when Aunt Mavis called me from downstairs to come say goodbye. She and I stood side by side, stock-still, as he paced in front of us saying that it would be better this way. More room for all of us. After he toted his last bag out to his truck, he came back and hugged Aunt Mavis. “I’ll just be across town,” he said. We could see him every day if we wanted. He shook my hand briskly. “You,” he went to say but then stopped. He glanced back at Aunt Mavis and shook his head. “We are a strange sort, the three of us,” he said, and with that, he left.

  * * *

  —

  I’VE BEEN TRYING to tell the story of my uncle for some time now. He comes and goes in my thoughts perhaps more than anyone, even my mother. I always, finally, come back to that night at the hospital morgue, his body recently delivered from Canada. Aunt Mavis had asked me to go with her. “Please,” she had said, so I went.

  A fat nurse led us to the cold room where they kept the bodies before the funeral home fetched them. My aunt clung to my arm as the nurse unceremoniously slid the body out from the metal lockers on one of those shiny slabs. Suddenly, there he was: Uncle Lucas.

  “Can we have a minute?” Aunt Mavis said to the nurse. She nodded and told us she would come back in ten minutes or so after rounds. When she was gone, we inched closer to the body. “It’s just us now,” she said. “We are the last.”

  Then we heard a cough and jumped. Standing behind us was Buddy Cooper—a little fatter than when I last saw him but still wearing his tall cowboy hat. “I called him,” Aunt Mavis explained to me.

  Buddy Cooper couldn’t meet my eyes as he stepped toward the table. His boots made loud click-clacks against the linoleum floor. He looked down at my uncle’s body for the longest time.

  “You better go on and touch him now,” my aunt said. “Because he won’t feel like himself when the funeral home gets through with him.” So Buddy Cooper placed his hand on Uncle Lucas’s smooth forehead. Like this, we quietly waited for the nurse to come back to us.

  * * *

  —

  UNCLE LUCAS’S FUNERAL caused enough of a stir in our lives to bring home my mother from Nashville. According to her, things were good in Music City: She had landed a gig as the backup singer for Tanya Tucker and was slated to go on tour with her next month. “Soon,” she told me, “we are going to be golden.”

  Seeing her for the first time in nearly eight years, I didn’t know quite what to make of her, this woman, my mother: All that makeup made her look much older than I remembered, and her hair was dyed a frightening white blond and had been teased into great whorls above her head. “What are you?” I wanted to say to her. “What have you become?”

  The only thing solid she knew about me was that I made good grades, that I hadn’t made a B since the fifth grade—my aunt had dutifully mailed her copies of my report cards every nine weeks—so when people came up to us at the visitation service, she led off with this information. “My son here,” she’d chime. “The scholar!” I really didn’t know what to say to her; she asked me about college and I told her which ones I’d applied to. She asked
about majors, and I listed off several that I thought would impress her. It soon became apparent to both of us that we spoke different languages, and trying to translate proved too painful.

  For the graveside service, my mother had asked the Methodist preacher to say a few vague words about goodness and mercy. “Just in case,” she said to Aunt Mavis. Besides the preacher and the workers at the funeral home, it was just the three of us huddled around the open mouth in the ground; I was standing between my aunt and my mother, each of them had an arm laced in mine. When the preacher finished, the workers slowly lowered the casket. Then something unexpected happened: My mother broke from us and began to sing, impromptu, “Love Lifted Me.” Her voice fell off-key at times but was still beautiful and pure. My aunt and I looked up, following the delicate sounds as they floated up and up and over our heads.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I TELL THE STORY of my uncle, I want to end it there: my mother singing. It seems right to me. But I can’t. Truth is, Buddy Cooper never showed up that night at the morgue, and my mother never sang in the cemetery. In fact, she never even made it to the cemetery; she went back to Nashville the night of the visitation. It was just Aunt Mavis and I: at the hospital, at the grave. In the real story, there was no repentant lover for dead Uncle Lucas and no song for me, only the hard silences left by the people we wanted—the people we craved the most—who had already moved on in their lives without us.

  BREAK

  We followed I-55 the whole way, a seemingly straight shot of blacktop cutting up northwest Mississippi—the part of the state that on maps resembles a protruding forehead. The first two hours were made up of hill after hill bleeding red clay and deep ditches soldiered by tall weeds. We had decided to take Forney’s car, a dusty Honda Accord, and Regan sat beside him for the entire trip and sang with the radio, her eyes hidden by a large pair of sunglasses. She never offered to switch places with me even though the tiny back seat, filled with our luggage, had forced me to contort the great bulk of my body into the shape of a pretzel. I finally dozed off during the last half of the drive when the hills started to level out into fields complete with irrigation machines and faraway tractors and bulbous mounds of hay. When I woke up, my bad knee was throbbing, and there, outside my window, was Forney’s Delta: flat, wide, mosquito heavy.