Drowning in Gruel

by George Singleton

"That's a myth!" my father bellowed. He turned to me, almost touched my shoulder, and said, "Bring that wood in, son. Stack it up on the hearth."

  Even out in the driveway I could hear my mother say, "Where are all your rings? Where's your wedding band?"

  I heard my father say, "Oh." I imagined him looking down to his own hands. "Bane's got them all."

  Right before I picked up three pine logs I looked down at my hands and noticed the Masonic ring, the high school ring, the Insurer of the Year ring. Where was Dad's wedding band? I checked my pockets, looked on the floorboard of the Plymouth, even felt inside my ear seeing as sometimes I thought about getting an ear pierced, even back then. Then I remembered a ping sound on the Piggly Wiggly plate glass window right after I threw my first snowball.

  I came inside with my logs and Mom said, "Hey. You got your daddy's wedding ring?"

  I shook my head no. I started to cry, I think. "It's at the Piggly Wiggly in Ware Shoals. It fell off when Dad assured her about everything."

  "What woman?" My dad had gone to the bathroom.

  "He said he was going to try to give her assurance, but then he said her boobies were so big he decided against it. I guess he didn't want her calling him up when she stretched out on her back like a turtle one more time."

  My mother stared at me, then looked back at the bathroom, then looked back at me. I had never seen her eyes so big, not blinking. She pushed her hand through what used to be a permanent hairdo, then began shoving that pine into the fireplace. It might've been thirty degrees in our house, both literally and figuratively now that I look back on it all. Dad came out of the bathroom still all hunter-gatherer, hoping to be commended, whistling a sound-track song, smiling. He said, "Them sandwiches should still be warm enough. If they ain't, I'll show you how to put a stick in them and hold them over the fire."

  My mom said, "I can't believe that you would take our boy with you while you're out scalawagging around looking for loose women."

  My father stared at me and turned his mouth in a way that looked like a dog playing tug-of-war with rope. He said, "What lies you told, Bane?"

  I said, "I didn't say anything. I ain't said nothing."

  "Buck, I want to know why you threw your ring down to meet a woman at the Piggly Wiggly. Why would you throw away all we've done in our lives? We were talking about a lake house, for God's sake!"

  I said, "I think it fell off when I threw that snowball at you, Dad. Please don't touch me, please don't touch me, please don't touch me."

  "Bane!" my father yelled. And then I ran out the door wearing his Masonic, high school, and Insurer of the Year rings still on my fingers.

  Outside I heard my parents yelling at each other for a good five minutes. Then it sounded more like cooing, like all of us performed when Ricky Timmerman got through with his dove verse that one morning. I don't know what happened inside. Me, I had damn near scooped up every granule of snow from our front yard and piled up a snowball arsenal should either of my parents emerge from the front door or garage, or sneak from around the back, in order to grab me from behind, drag me down to the ground, and hold me in place. I had other things in mind. There were chunks of our gravel driveway in most of them.

  My parents seemed to know better than follow me, though. I'm not sure what they did inside. My friends Watt, Louis, and Andy trudged over at dusk and Watt said, "Where you been? We went over to the old sand pit and slid down with our cardboard. My daddy says this kind of day won't happen again for fifty years. Are you still in trouble for making fun of God touching your ass?"

  I said, "Uh-huh."

  "Y'all have wood in your fireplace?" Louis said. He pointed up. I looked back behind me. I said, "I guess."

  "Man. You're lucky," Andy said. "We just keep looking for more sweaters. My mom says she knows she didn't sell all the sweaters at the last yard sale. We already burned up all our extra Forty-Five Platter newspapers, plus some unused rolls of toilet paper and what branches fell in the yard."

  I looked up at the smoke billowing out. At the time I felt proud, seeing as I had something to do with the chain saw operation. But I also felt bad that I didn't invite my friends inside to warm up, maybe drink some hot chocolate. I feared we might find my parents either coupled up, or punching one another out, nothing in between.

  All three of my friends said, "How come you don't have any snow in your yard?" in unison, like they practiced, as if they were the Three Wise Men at Gruel Normal's yearly Christmas pageant.

  Andy said, "My mom says your dad's one with Satan. She says y'all don't go to church and you'll all fry in hell." Watt and Louis stood there. They didn't add on to what Andy said, but they didn't take up for me, a boy who already had to slump down in the Plymouth most days embarrassed. Andy said, "That's why you ain't got no snow in your yard. The ground's too hot from hell's nearby flames."

  I don't know if my parents still cooed, or argued, in the house or not. I shook my head, said nothing, and fired my now ice-covered snowballs until my only three friends ran home crying.

  ***

  I helped my father take the air compressor out of the trunk. He filled the Plymouth's tires almost to normal PSI, though he wouldn't go all out, in case. We waited for the worst snowfall in upstate South Carolina's memory to melt down—which meant by one o'clock in the afternoon the next day when it reached about sixty-five degrees outside—and then got in the car in order to go find Dad's wedding band. My mom had said earlier in the morning, "If you don't find it, that's all right. I believe there's a little motel in Ware Shoals where y'all can spend the rest of your lives."

  Halfway down Old Old Greenville Road my father said, "Whatever goes bad for you in the rest of your life, Bane, I want you to think back to this day. Or to the day before this day. Anything wrong or immoral or unjust that happens to you, I want you to think back to the time you threw a snowball at your daddy and lost his wedding band."

  I watched him say his little speech and didn't see his lips part once. Unfortunately for me, I said, "You look like a dummy talking like that."

  My father threw his Masonic, high school, and Insurer of the Year rings out his open window, into a slight two-inch drift on the roadside. He said, "Will you never learn? Will you never learn?" but didn't punch my arm.

  I wasn't old enough to say, "Maybe when something bad happens to me I'll think about how my father hit me on the arm all the time." In actuality I was old enough to think that, but back in the early 1970s it wasn't considered child abuse or endangerment. I said, "I didn't mean to say that Bible verse wrong."

  My father looked in his side-view mirror, as if memorizing the location of his three cherished rings. He said, "I think there's one in there about how a guy saddled his ass to a tree and walked three miles into town. Something like that. You should've read that one. It's funny. Mr. Hard-on wouldn't think so, but the rest of the world outside of Gruel would."

  We turned onto Main Street in Ware Shoals, and pulled into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. For some reason I found it necessary to say, "Dad, if that woman's here you made run the red light, I promise I won't tell Mom."

  We searched the parking lot for ten minutes, and looked down a grated drain hole as much as possible. My father leaned back a soda machine and I got down on my hands and knees. We waited for two cars to move, and checked beneath their tires. Somehow the sun blazed, and would've glinted anything this side of sandstone. I said, "Maybe someone turned it in. Maybe they got a lost and found inside."

  My father stood up from the asphalt. He had an impression on the side of his head. "Who would keep a wedding band?!" he said. "Hotdamn, that's the kind of Bane I've been looking for all these years. No married man wants another, and no single man in his right mind wants even one."

  We went inside and walked to the lone cashier, a girl who had "technical college aspirant" written on her blank forehead. She wore a Piggly Wiggly pink and white striped smock. Her nametag read MAUREEN HUFF.

  I said, "Hey, More Enough." That's how
it came out.

  My father said, "Don't mind the boy. Say, did anyone turn in a wedding band from outside in the parking lot? Do /all have some kind of lost and found?"

  Maureen Huff didn't smack gum. She turned the sides of her lips up and stared at my father with her large, round blue eyes. She said, "You ain't from around here."

  My father said, "Bane, go down to the end of aisle six and see if you see anything. I'm betting we need something."

  I looked up to scan the signs. "In the automotive repair section?"

  "Yeah, uh-huh. Go on down there and get us some oil or something."

  I slinked away just as More Enough said, "You think it's going to snow anymore?" Later on in life I would realize that Maureen Huff's parents screwed up by not enrolling her in one of those scam modeling agencies.

  I heard my father say, "Little snow bunny like you don't need to worry about no more bad weather," and then her giggling. My father said, "I sell assurance, Maureen, but I can tell that you have more to spare."

  What else could I pick up on aisle six but can after can of Fix-A-Flat? I loaded up. I found an abandoned shopping cart parked against the frozen chicken section, brought it back, and put a good fifty canisters of tire goo in. I turned around, looked at my father, then backed out toward aisle three. There, I loaded up on feminine napkins and diapers. My father was about halfway down on one knee proposing when I returned. I yelled out, "Mom says you're about out of denture cream, Dad, but I couldn't find it." I wasn't old enough to bring up suppositories, my father not old enough to need them.

  More Enough walked from behind her island to the lost and found, picked up a wedding ring, and rolled it on the linoleum counter to my father. She said, "I'm assuming you been hit in the head too many times to know any better what you just done."

  I raised my hand and smiled. I pushed my cart up to the register. In years to come I would remember our drive back home, how my father passed his three other rings on the roadside with only a sideways glance, how he transferred his wedding band from right to left ring finger as we hit the square in downtown Gruel. I would think about how I needed to move far away, where men weren't automatically infatuated with women at intersections or cashiers who gave out trading stamps, where odd weather didn't throw everything out of balance in regards to rational behavior. I vowed to study harder, apply to colleges, and move away from my parents'—and every other Gruelite's—unhealthy, awkward, and skewed influences to a place where more was never enough.

  I opened my father's glove compartment, pulled out the map, and blindly stuck my finger down to West Virginia. I shook my head, did it again, and hit Kentucky. Two out of three, I thought. I tried to visualize New York or California, maybe somewhere near the Canadian border. My finger landed in the middle of Louisiana.

  "What the hell are you doing, Bane?" my father asked. He took his hands off the steering wheel and banged against his door.

  I didn't say anything about how I needed to start taking French classes in order to communicate with Cajuns. I said, "Mom will be happy."

  He said, "Your mother. I don't know why she doesn't trust me. Never marry a jealous woman, Bane. I wish the preacher had given us some kind of test beforehand."

  I refolded the map and set it back in the glove compartment. In a weird way I wished that my finger had landed right on Gruel proper. In a way I wanted to be able to stick it out, and change some things later—maybe become principal of Gruel Normal. When we pulled in the driveway my mother sat in a cheap woven fold-out aluminum chair right in front of the carport. She wore cheap pointy sunglasses and lifted a martini glass our way. My father rolled down his window and held his ringed hand out like a five-legged octopus, like a starfish. I got out of the car and looked up at a blue, blue cloudless sky, but realized that other storms might come. I knew that, thirty years later, I would hear about the house of my upbringing burning down, that the pine tar soot and all of its dormant qualities finally ignited.

  The Novels of Raymond Carver

  ONCE I FINALLY got to explain the family dynamics of my childhood homelife back thirty years earlier—I'm talking I started with my first memory of tracking sand into a Myrtle Beach motel room on summer vacation, and ended with my waving an invention covered in flypaper for my father in order to clear dust motes and imaginary speckles from the air the day before I left for good—the magistrate only sentenced me to 180 hours of community service for attempted grave desecration. The security guard and subsequent sheriff's deputy believed wrongly that I wanted to steal my dead father's rings, watch, or lucky change he insisted fill his postmortem pants pocket. They didn't notice my recently deceased mother's crematory ashes balanced atop the headstone. This was two in the morning on the outer edge of Gruel Cemetery on the first day of spring—a day, traditionally, that my father made Mom and me scrub the entire house with ammonia, then Clorox, then Texize pine cleaner: walls, furniture, appliances, floors, even ceiling. Back when I had an indoor dog named Slick, it was my job to vacuum him every morning before school, every afternoon at feeding time. Slick took to watching the front door endlessly, and finally escaped through the legs of two Mormons one summer day. He never returned.

  "What you're saying is, your father had a phobia against germs," Judge Cowart said as I stood before him without a lawyer two weeks after the incident. "There's a name for that kind of behavior now." Judge Cowart wasn't a real judge seeing as magistrates got voted into office, either Democrat or Republican. In real life he owned Gruel Modern Men's Wear, one of the last businesses on the square to evaporate.

  I said, "Yessir. And he was plain mean, too."

  The deputy and graveyard security guard had stood at the other desk to recount their version of events. There was no jury, but the magistrate's courtroom was packed. My arrest made the weekly Forty-Five Platter newspaper, the next town over. The deputy, a boy I grew up with named Les Miles, pretty much went over everything that happened in his life on up to taking me to the Graywood County Detention Center. I think Les liked having such a large audience.

  Say "Les Miles" real fast. It's one of those names like Mike Weir. Or Derrick Rapp. Ben Dover. Mike Hunt. I hadn't noticed growing up that maybe it built up inside him so much that his only options in life appeared to be cop, professional gambler, or sad mime.

  Judge Cowart said to the deputy and security guard, "What you're saying is, he only got a good two feet down in one spot. It wasn't like he popped chalk down and dug up the entire site."

  "We measured it out to be a two-foot-by-two-foot piece of sod," said the security guard, an older man named Niblock who moved down to Gruel from somewhere in Pennsylvania with his wife in order to semiretire. I couldn't imagine how bad his life must've been up there to make such a drastic choice. "I keep a measuring tape on my belt at all times," he said. "Sometimes I get time to build bluebird houses up in the office during my shift."

  I remained seated until the magistrate asked if I would like to question either man. I stood up and said, "Everything they've said is true," which brought about a massive gasp from the pewed spectators, followed by accusations of my being a Satan worshipper and ungrateful son. I said, "All of that is true, but it was for a good, moral, spiritual, ethical, bighearted reason." I had practiced my speech ever since posting bail.

  Judge Cowart said, "Let's hear your side of things. Go ahead and loosen that 100 percent silk tie bought over at Gruel Modern Men's Wear on the historic square, unbutton your Botany 500 sport jacket, and let all us in on what's of a higher purpose."

  Of course I wasn't about to say that I wanted to pour my mother's ashes into my father's grave so that he would have to live forever covered in a fine dust. No, I went through my daddy's stories of germ-free insistence, how he one time covered the entire exterior of our brick house in Saran Wrap. I told the judge, cop, guard, and seated guests about the times my father installed window fans in every room, blowing out, until our electric bill from Duke Power came in at over four hundred in 1968 dollars. None of th
ese stories were false or exaggerated. I offered midstream to take a lie detector. Some time after I left Gruel for good my father got it in his mind that Mom's skin peeled off microscopically in their bed, and he bought a neoprene diver's suit for her to either wear at night with him or sleep in the guest bedroom with the door closed. He'd gone so far as hanging transom-to-floor thick clear plastic flaps at every entranceway in the house—the kind usually found in warehouses, drive-through car washes, and between where a butcher cuts his loins and meets the public—in case he needed to hole up by himself.

  Judge Cowart finally said, "This is all very interesting in a woe-is-me kind of way, Mr. Cary. I'll give you exactly two minutes to find a point."

  In retrospect I think I should've requested a jury. Swaying the gawkers wouldn't matter, I supposed, but I followed through with my plan. "My father got electrocuted while trying to rewire a central heat and air system backwards so it sucked dust out of his living space. That happened some fifteen years ago. My mother believed that caskets and funeral plots cost too much money, and she requested to be cremated. I followed through with her desire. On the night that I got arrested in Gruel Cemetery, I only wanted to pour her ashes on top of my father's final resting place. I knew that they needed and wanted to be together. Nothing else. She had already sold the plot directly next to Dad. That's it."

  Luckily no one called me on the lie detector test; the final section of my defense—and I got my voice to crack a few times—was not quite as sentimental or melodramatic as the truth, like I said. I really only wanted to envelop my father so he'd be bothered and distracted for eternity.

  I'm pretty sure that I heard more than a few women behind me go 'hahhh," like that. Judge Cowart wrinkled his brow and looked at Les Miles and Mr. Niblock. They shrugged in unison. "Well. I got to say I have no precedent to work with. I believe you, Mr. Cary. But we, as a democratic society, can't allow people to take up shovels at their whim." He went on and on, said something about both King Tut and the remains of Confederate soldiers trapped inside the Hunley submarine, banged his gavel, and gave me community service.