The nature of the conversation that day, the disclosures made, were painful to Truely but not altogether a surprise. In his father’s effort to do the right thing — at his death if not before — he put Truely in an awkward position. His father’s modest will could not be read, his small estate settled and divided, without his mother and sister learning the truth of Mrs. Seacrest. So Truely made the decision to protect them from any news that might cause them to doubt the character of his father or the love he had felt for them. Truely had a substantial bank account by this point. He was in a position to settle this problem with a personal check. And he did. He wrote a check to the lawyer for one-third of the estimated value of his father’s meager estate. The funds would be delivered to Mae Seacrest by his father’s attorney, and Truely hoped to God the matter would be closed forever.
AS TRUELY DROVE HOME from the lawyer’s office he thought of Mose telling him that there was a new club out from town a ways and that they had a girl singer as good as Erma Thompson out there. “I ain’t lying, man,” he’d said. He wanted Truely and Jesse to go over there with him one night and hear the girl. “She can flat sang,” he’d said. “You ain’t gon believe her.” And Fontaine had asked him to come by for supper, meet his little twin girls, see what he had done with his mother’s old place. Some of his other buddies had issued him invites of similar sorts and several girls had said, “We sure hope we’ll see you and your wife at church on Sunday.” For whatever reason, he had understood all along that he would do none of those things.
“It will be good to get back home to California,” Jesse said. They had decided to get a flight out of Jackson earlier rather than wait until the end of the week like they had originally planned. Jesse was busy catching up their laundry, packing their suitcases and labeling Tupperware containers of food to be put out in the garage in the deep freeze. “It will be good to get back to our real lives,” she said.
Truely agreed. His real life was with Jesse. And Jesse lived in California. It had become as simple as that.
Courtney and Hastings agreed to stay on in Mississippi after the funeral until the end of the week, when Hastings would need to leave the foreign terrain of his wife’s people, which he claimed to find charming and amusing, if a little peculiar, and return to the real world and earning the big bucks in California real estate. Courtney would stay longer, just as long as her mother needed her to stay.
Two nights after his daddy was buried, his last night in Mississippi for a long time to come, Truely made quiet love to his wife in the small single bed of his boyhood room with the old cowboy bedspread they had pulled out of the closet, knots and lassos everywhere. Afterward they had fallen asleep slowly, tangled in a hot, cramped embrace.
OVER THE YEARS his visits home became rarer and rarer. His father’s illness had forced him home, and then a few years later his mother’s burial brought him home again. In the long absences Mississippi became less and less a real place to him. He noted the small changes, of course, a new shopping area, a building torn down, a small sea of new houses cropping up in what was once pastureland, the county road widened to four lanes and then six, a red light installed. Individually these edits seemed small to him. But collectively it all worked together to make Hinds County, Mississippi, illusive in his selective and skittish recollection, a place that rose in his memory like waves of heat off the hot asphalt highway weaving lazily through the barbwired landscape in his mind. Time stood still there.
CALIFORNIA
Eight
IN HIS RECURRING DREAM Jesse is walking away from him in a heavy fog. At first he isn’t sure it’s Jesse. He doesn’t recognize her gait or the coat she’s wearing. She’s dragging a large sack. It’s obviously heavy and she’s struggling to pull it behind her. “Jesse,” he calls. But his voice is lost in the shroud of fog. He shouts again, louder, but still she doesn’t hear him. Soon he’s hurrying toward her, screaming her name. At one point she turns and looks in his direction. She looks at him with such disdain that he is momentarily paralyzed. She’s evil. He’s sure of it. She turns her back and continues walking away. Truely runs after her and breathlessly overtakes her. He grabs the sack from her clenched fists and tries to open it, but she fights him, scratching him with her ragged fingernails. When he finally gets the sack open he reaches inside and pulls out what he thinks is a doll. Jesse snatches the doll away from him and it begins to cry. A baby, he thinks. He’s overcome with panic. Blood races through his body. The sack is full of babies. Each one Truely touches begins to wail. This makes Jesse laugh hysterically. Truely wakes up in a cold sweat.
It had been four years now since Jesse had left Truely — not that he was still counting. The dream came less often than it had in the beginning. Sometimes now when it began he would recognize it and could ward it off by waking himself up. He would walk to the kitchen and get a drink of water or turn the TV on.
Still there were those very rare mornings when Truely woke up startled to find himself alone, when he had to slap himself, symbolically speaking, and remind himself that just because his marriage was over didn’t mean his life was. Over time he had become easier to convince. His life was plenty good. More than good.
His on-and-off girlfriend, Shauna, helped him keep perspective, for one thing. She was a self-taught designer who worked out of her home. Jesse had hired her first to design and install some library shelves in the loft, which had been overtaken by books stacked all over the floor. Shauna had designed the shelves on industrial wheels and Jesse had loved the concept. Next Shauna had redone their guest bath using copper metallic tiles. Her last project was to help Jesse plan a nursery, which as it turned out, they never actually needed. Truely remembered writing Shauna a hefty check for her consulting services. Many months later, when he ran into her at the gym, he didn’t recognize her until she asked how the nursery project had turned out. In an uncharacteristic moment, he had told her everything.
Two days later she called to see if he wanted to go with her to an Oakland A’s game. A client had given her tickets. He said yes. The thing that had impressed him was that Shauna liked baseball, had every intention of watching the game like a devoted fan. She was not on a fact-gathering mission where he was concerned. No personal questions. No pressure for him to spill his gut. They ate hot dogs, drank beer, relaxed and enjoyed the game. They’d been more or less together ever since.
Truely had spent a fair amount of time with Shauna’s family down in San Diego. Less than a year ago her family had all gathered to give her baby brother, Gordo, a great send-off. The kid was headed over to Iraq. He had joined the army without consulting any members of the family. Shauna was more than upset. But the deed was done. No amount of crying or begging could change it. All three of his older sisters had given it their best shot. Even his old man, Jerry, had resorted to tears.
Only a couple of months earlier they had all gathered to celebrate Gordo’s nineteenth birthday. What a weekend that had been. Truely and Gordo had worn themselves out playing pickup basketball over at the park. Truely had a height advantage over Gordo. But Gordo — a strong-looking, brown-skinned guy with dark eyes like his Mexican mother and light-colored hair like his Irish daddy — had a surprising vertical jump and knew how to use his elbows too. Besides, he had youth on his side.
Afterward they ate enchiladas and drank beer and Gordo lectured Truely like the devoted younger brother he was. He liked to remind Truely how lucky he was to have Shauna in his life. “Man, you lucked out. You know how many guys would kill for my sister to give them the time of day? And she picks you, man. What’s up with that?”
Truely got a kick out of Gordo. He was sort of like the brother Truely never had. He was proud of Gordo too, enlisting and going over to Iraq. The kid was calling the shots in his own life — and that was to be admired, wasn’t it? Maybe Gordo hadn’t convinced Shauna — but he had convinced Truely.
Truely would be forty-one years old on his next birthday. He was single, in good health, financially b
lessed and more successful than he’d imagined possible. He had a low-maintenance girlfriend who shared her family with him. It could be worse. You wouldn’t catch him whining.
TRUELY STILL COULDN’T GO to Courtney’s house without remembering Jesse — and the way it used to be. In recent years he had tried taking Shauna Mackey to Courtney’s for the holidays in hopes of duplicating those good times. Instead he’d found himself trying to keep things short and sweet. He’d carved the turkey, decked the halls, smiled for the photos and gone home a day early — relieved to go. Shauna hadn’t hit it off with Courtney. She wasn’t as awed by Courtney and Hastings’ large lifestyle and commitment to gracious living. She was a little bit older and wiser than Jesse, maybe, but she was perfectly easy to get along with if you made the effort. Courtney should have gone that second mile if she really believed in second miles the way she claimed to. She had been polite enough, but somehow her efforts had not come across as genuine. If Truely had noticed it, then Lord knows, Shauna had too.
After the disappointment of those occasions Truely had willingly spent at least part of most recent holidays with Shauna’s family down in Southern California. He had come to believe that his ex, Jesse, was the one who had made things right between his sister and him and that without her the best they could do was pretend. Luckily, the high art of pretending was deeply embedded in their gene pool, a talent that rarely failed either of them.
OUT OF THE WILD BLUE Courtney called and asked if he could come down to Saratoga for the weekend. It caught him off guard. It wasn’t Thanksgiving. It wasn’t Christmas. He loved his sister — always had — but in recent years they’d streamlined their relationship so that it fit neatly into one faux-family Thanksgiving dinner and a semifestive Christmas gift exchange, occasions which, to be honest, he’d missed more than a couple of times. Truely’s social life might not have amounted to much since his ex-wife, Jesse, left him, but on occasion he was still lucky enough to get the odd holiday invitation that was impossible to turn down. What his sister liked to refer to as “a better offer.” In spite of his knack for occasionally disappointing his sister on the holidays she still invited him every year anyway, like clockwork, and for the most part he tried to go if he could. Why not? At this point Courtney and her husband, Hastings, were pretty much all the family Truely had left.
Truely and his sister had both lived in the Bay Area for years now — a couple of Mississippi kids who’d set out to seek their fortunes and ended up an hour apart in cool, foggy Northern California living their separate versions of the good life on a major fault line. Both their parents were dead and buried. Mississippi might as well be a million miles away — something they’d outgrown, like a pair of favorite shoes or a bad haircut.
HIS SISTER HAD never called him to come for the weekend just for no reason at all like this. “What’s up, Court?” he’d asked her more than once. “What’s going on?”
“Hastings is off on a golf trip,” she said. “Some business in London. Then three weeks of golf in Scotland with some clients. So it will just be you and me. I thought we could catch up, you know?”
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
“Does something have to be wrong for me to call my baby brother to come for the weekend?”
“I guess there’s a first time for everything,” he said. “It’s just that you’ve never invited me before — you know, for no particular occasion.” It sounded like an accusation but that wasn’t how he meant it.
“You’re right,” Courtney said. “I’m a terrible sister. I should call you more. After all, you’re the only brother I’ve got and I almost never see you.”
He was pretty sure she didn’t think she was a terrible sister. He didn’t think so either. He thought that when it came to her baby brother, the current version, she didn’t have all that much to work with.
“So what do you say, little bro? I’ll cook. I’ll make you a good Mississippi-style supper,” she said. “I’ve already bought the Velveeta.”
“You always were good at dishing out the bribes,” he said. “But look, Court, I’m not walking into an ambush, am I? You aren’t going to take another stab at saving my soul, are you?”
“Truely?” Her voice lifted as if she were scolding him for something. She’d done that ever since their mother died.
“I’m just asking,” he said.
“No sermons,” she said. “I promise.”
About the time his daddy first got sick, everything began to unravel. Courtney and Hastings got born again, and when Courtney and Hastings did something, they really did it. Truely figured Courtney suddenly realized — maybe for the first time in her life — that she was helpless in the face of impending death. And their mother was too. Neither woman took to being helpless. Not at all. They talked on the phone every day. Courtney flew back and forth to Mississippi. She tried to talk their mother into bringing their daddy out to Saratoga, staying in the new guesthouse Hastings had just built. Courtney said she would hire around-the-clock nurses, get their daddy the best Stanford doctors.
But their mother wouldn’t do it. She insisted their daddy needed to die at home in Mississippi in the house where Courtney and Truely grew up, with his vegetable garden in the backyard and the fruit trees he’d planted himself and his half acre of manicured front lawn with the two caught-in-the-headlight concrete deer he had hand-painted himself. She wanted him to be able to look out the window and see the bird feeders he’d built and the blue jays and wrens and crows — and even the renegade squirrels — vying for the handful of birdseed she religiously put out first thing every morning. If their mother couldn’t pray their daddy’s way to a total healing, then she wanted him to die surrounded by his lifelong friends and everything else familiar to him.
Naturally, Hastings had seized the moment to become a hero. He hired a lawn service when it was clear their daddy’s riding lawnmower days were over. He paid for a local woman to come in and clean and cook so that their mother could sit by their daddy’s bedside day and night and give him sips of water, read him the Bible, and wait for him to leave her for the dirt roads of heaven all graveled in gold.
Witnessing all this had torn Truely up. He swore that if it weren’t for Jesse he couldn’t have lived through it. He’d started thinking he needed to abandon the niche he’d made for himself in California and move home to Jackson. He’d started thinking he’d made a terrible mistake moving to the West Coast in the first place, abandoning his roots. Suddenly he’d felt like he was a total fake on the verge of being found out. “You are your father’s son,” Jesse told him a hundred times. “You are not your father.”
She was right, of course. But for the first time ever Truely had looked at his daddy’s homemade, do-it-yourself life and he was just in awe of it. It was like discovering a masterpiece right under his nose — a work of art he had dismissed as the most amateurish, run-of-the-mill, uninspired sort of paint-by-number. How had he been such an idiot? His sudden admiration for the way his daddy had lived just hit him like a bullet in the heart. A lot of men might have made some different choices if they found themselves in his daddy’s place. He saw clearly for the first time that his daddy was a great man in his own humble way. You could be great without being perfect. His daddy’s simple life — his joy in simple pleasures, his devotion to their mother, mostly, despite distraction and temptation, and to his five-acre plot of land, and his belief that no matter what happened, how many mistakes he made, how far away his children moved, that Jesus always loved them all, forgave them when forgiveness was needed, and just generally watched out for them — that was enough. Truely saw the pure genius of it.
The last days of his life Truely’s daddy was mostly unconscious. Anything unsaid would remain unsaid forever. Truely sat by his daddy’s bed some nights, drinking Jack Daniel’s in a coffee cup, holding his daddy’s calloused hand and sobbing his eyes out like a little kid. Jesse would have to come in and get him. “You’re upsetting your mother,” she would say. “You�
�re breaking her heart crying like this.”
AFTER HIS DADDY DIED his mother came out to California and stayed with Courtney and Hastings for months at a time. She made cornbread and biscuits for their friends and joined Courtney’s exuberant Bible study. Courtney took her to the farmers’ market in Los Gatos every week. Sometimes she brought her into the city for the international farmers’ market down on Fisherman’s Wharf, which their mother loved. “I’ve traveled the world today without even getting a passport,” she liked to say.
Afterward she often stayed on until Truely and Jesse got off work. They had tried to wine and dine her — only the very best for his mother. She wanted to appreciate their efforts, they knew, but she hated all the “swankiness,” as she called it. What she liked was to come over to Truely’s loft and do his laundry — wash, dry, fold and — if she was lucky — darn a sock or two. She had never believed it was necessary to throw away an old sock just because it had become threadbare and begun to unravel. Jesse didn’t mind her searching through their drawers with her needle and thread in hand. In an odd way, he thought, Jesse understood his mother. Even if not, she got a kick out of her. For example, his mother could not understand why two nice people with more than decent jobs would want to live in a converted warehouse loft. She thought they needed a yard with a couple of good shade trees and a sprinkler system. “You can afford it,” she was fond of telling them.
Goodness knows she thought they needed some interior walls — lots of them. “What do Californians have against walls?” she’d asked. “You don’t even know where the kitchen stops and the bedroom starts.”
Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi Page 8
