American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  The first time Branchwater made the acquaintance of Mother Shumate she was preparing his brother George for burial. He had watched as she washed his skin with a piece of flannel, put on the grave clothes, placed a coin on each eye, and set a dish of salt on his chest to keep the body from purging. In the root doctor’s double-shotgun cottage almost two decades after his brother’s death, Branchwater could still remember her idea of condolences—“This must have been a smart boy,” she had said, “if he knew to cut longwise rather than across the wrist”—as he placed Haddy on the rug at her feet.

  He looked as fragile as a cicada husk, eyes rolling behind closed lids, sweat dotting the ridge of his pale brow. Still short of breath, Branchwater explained the situation to Mother Shumate, who, sitting calmly in a Morris chair with a sampler, responded, “Did you bring the snake?”

  “No.”

  “Why must I be the only one who knows,” she said, interrupting her words with a well-formed tsk, “the best way to fight venom is with venom?”

  As she tossed her needlework to the dusty pine floor Mother Shumate mumbled something about doing it the old-fashioned way. She got down on her knees, bared her gold tooth to the wan light of the room, leaned toward Haddy, placed her lips to his neck, and, as though a character from one of the penny horrors Branchwater used to read at the general store as a child, sucked at the wound. Afterward she walked to the window and watered a box planter with a mouthful of blood.

  Even mettle as legendary as Branchwater’s was tested by such an image. He managed to regain a handle on his inner workings when Mother Shumate ordered him to muddle a patch of magnolia blossoms. “They’re over on the shelf with all the blackamoors.” From a silver plate attached to the arms of a bejeweled, turbaned figurine of some African servant, a decoration Branchwater considered a bit odd to find in Hobson Crossing of all places, he picked up a magnolia flower as big as a fist. He plucked the large white petals, dropped them into a mortar, and ground them with a pestle, releasing the smell of lemons into the air.

  Back in the main room, he handed Mother Shumate the mortar, now filled with a floral paste. Haddy was still unconscious. On top of the wound was affixed a small glass cup, and on top of the small glass cup was affixed a lit candle. Mother Shumate said the heat would draw out the remnants of the venom, the logic of which seemed reasonable enough to Branchwater. Minutes later, she removed the cup and candle and, with her fingers, daubed paste from the bowl onto the wound. Branchwater said, “I didn’t know magnolia blossoms had healing properties.”

  “It’s not the blooms that have the power to heal. It’s the souls trapped in the statues where I keep them.”

  Branchwater decided to let the logic of that last bit stand for now. He remained quiet as Mother Shumate finished her treatment. She pulled a piece of red flannel from a pecan hull, covered the wound with it, and leaned back with a slump to her shoulders. Now all they had to do, she explained, was wait until he woke. The boy would make it just fine.

  “Well, how have you been otherwise, Nyva Adanvdo?” she said as Branchwater retrieved something from a chair across the room.

  “Nobody calls me that anymore.”

  He was speaking the truth. Nearly two decades had passed since anyone had referred to him by that name. He hated it as much as the event that had inspired people to use it. On the floor of the cottage, while his pulse slowly ratcheted down, Branchwater lifted the head of the young man who as a toddler he’d bobbed on his knee, who as a child he’d carried to school on his shoulders, and, using the same care he had for those other activities, placed a pillow beneath it.

  * * *

  Ramsey took what happened to Harold that day in the barn far worse than Lance did. Of course the whole thing was their fault. She knew it as surely as the texture of cotton. Were they not the ones who’d tricked Haddy into entering the old barn? Had they not made a mask by cutting holes in a sugar sack? Were they not the ones who scared the poor boy into falling on the woodpile? Yet, even though the two of them had almost killed their brother, Ramsey was the only one of the twins to show any remorse, taking Haddy to the swimming hole after school, reading him his favorite storybooks before bed. Lance behaved the opposite, constantly mocking Harold. He behaved as if he wanted retribution for something he himself had done. None of his attempts, however, seemed to have any effect.

  On the evening of June 16, 1928, half a decade after the incident at the barn, Lance finally got his revenge, the means for which was five feet four inches tall, twenty-three years old, 115 pounds, and, at the moment, walking around the dinner table with a tray of butter beans.

  “Second helping, sir?”

  “No, thank you, Lurlene.”

  The housemaid continued on from Houghton at the head of the table, next asking Annabelle if she wanted any, and then moving to Ramsey, Harold, and Lance, all but the last of whom politely refused. “Guess I’m the only one not full, Lurlene. Can’t get enough of your side dishes.” Lance held up his plate for a second helping of beans. He didn’t make eye contact with the woman serving them.

  Six months prior to that night, Lurlene Culp had arrived at the Forsters’ home, The Sweetest Thing, with a haversack slung across her shoulder. That a petite woman of such innocent appearance used baggage favored by steely war veterans was only the first of many seeming paradoxes to her character. Lurlene was a sure hand at cooking southern fare despite having grown up in the Midwest. Her vocabulary was unusually learned for a person of color. In the evenings, unbeknownst to the heads of the household, she unwound with a bottle of raisin jack, cigarettes she rolled herself, and the occasional visit from seventeen-year-old Lance, a relationship that, given her propriety while serving him that evening, few could have discerned, even as Lance’s hand, the one not holding his plate, breached her dirndl skirt and slid up her inner thigh, causing no visible reaction other than a slight lowering of her eyelids.

  The only person at the dinner table who might have noticed was Ramsey, but she was too busy plotting how to leave before the serving of dessert. Otherwise she would be late. That evening the annual Moonglade Serenade was being held at the club. A part of her resented the fact that she even had to ask permission. At seventeen, she considered herself an adult, practically ancient. “May I be excused early?” Ramsey asked her father.

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “How much you’ve learned this past year at school.” Houghton wiped his mouth with a napkin. Only recently had his daughter arrived home from boarding school, and he had been looking forward to fresh rounds of their usual banter. Smiling, he said, “Count to twelve in Latin.”

  “Oneyay, otway, eethray, ourfay, ivefay, ixsay, evensay, eightyay, inenay, entay, elevenyay, elvetway.”

  “What were the last words of Socrates?”

  “‘That wine tasted funny.’”

  “If a man travels by foot at ten yards per minute, starting in New Orleans and heading due north, where will he be after one day, two hours, and six minutes?”

  “Lost.”

  “King Lear, comedy or tragedy?”

  “A laugh riot, old man.”

  At that answer, Houghton lifted his hand to his chest, as though giving the Pledge of Allegiance but with fingers splayed, a parody of taking offense. “Old man?” His little girl still had the stuff, he could gladly affirm, despite her altered appearance. It was true, he did not wholly approve of her modern new look, an indiscreet use of paint on her lips, knees visible above rolled stockings, a small cloche hat atop her shingled hair, but thus far he had avoided the topic, trying to keep dinner a peaceful affair. Ever since Monty had been called to the colors eleven years ago, meals in the house had become a frequent place of drama, even more so after Lance and Ramsey entered puberty.

  “Okay, you can go, but I want you back here by midnight,” Houghton said to his little girl who no longer looked like one. He did his best not to think of jazz babies, champagne baths, and petting parties, what pundits on th
e wireless called the Problems of the Younger Generation.

  “Thanks, Daddy!”

  Ramsey, who knew when to use that name for her father the way a seasoned gambler knows when to play a trump, stood from the table. “You coming?” she asked Lance.

  “Think I’ll stay in tonight. Feeling a bit peaked.”

  Although she could not recall her brother ever turning down a party, Ramsey did not give it more than a passing thought, she was so eager to get there herself.

  “What about me?” Harold asked. “Can I come?”

  With half a weak smile, Ramsey ruffled Haddy’s hair, saying he wouldn’t like it. She told her twenty-four-year-old brother, “This party’s just for big kids. ’Kay? I’ll bring some cake home for you.”

  Harold didn’t want to go to the stupid party anyhow. He told himself that while listening to Ramsey’s heels clack through the hardwood foyer, the front door rasp open, and her roadster, Volstead, cough out a backfire as she drove away. In the following silence he tried to picture her route, which turns she would take, which bends she would round, but he could only see one long ribbon of road going nowhere, just darkness ahead, the way he remembered thinking the future must look.

  The future. During Harold’s childhood, the idea of the future, whenever he considered it, curdled inside him, rank, viscous, sour, because he knew the future was something that did not belong to him. Ramsey had a future. Lance had a future. Monty, Dad, Mom, Branchwater, all of them had a future, but Haddy only had the right now. While his sister got to go to boarding school, learning all kinds of smart things, while one of his brothers debated which college he should attend, Harvard or Yale or Princeton, and the other went off to war, where he got to fight for his country, Harold stayed behind at The Sweetest Thing, yesterday becoming today, today becoming tomorrow.

  Years earlier, after he realized he was different, Harold decided to spend every one of his todays insuring his family’s tomorrows. Doing so kept the future from curdling inside him. On the days when his mother, reading the newspaper or overseeing dinner, smiled in the strained way, keeping her lips closed, that meant she was upset, Haddy would offer to “teach” her how to play solitaire, though they both knew he had long since given up on understanding the rules. Whenever Monty acted lonesome and distant for no reason, Haddy would ask him to tell the story of Oliver Twist again, and on the evenings his father looked discouraged from work, Haddy would beg him for another clue about the secret ingredient.

  If the future were a road, Harold thought while attempting to imagine Ramsey’s route to the Moonglade Serenade, then he would make certain it was straight and smooth, as well lit as a doctor’s office, free of fallen tree limbs and blown tires and anything that could make a Forster sad.

  The road disappeared when someone snapped by his ear. “You’ve been staring at your plate for five minutes,” Harold’s father said. “Go off into one of your thought rambles again?”

  “Yes, sir. Guess so.”

  They were the only two left at the table. All the plates but Harold’s had been cleared. His father said, “I’ll be in the study taking my cigar. If you’re going to play with your cards on the porch, be sure to close the door when you come back in, understood?”

  Glad for the suggestion, Harold nodded, asked to be excused, sprang from his seat, and grabbed a deck of Tally-Hos from the kitchen. He situated a rocking chair and side table on the porch, where mounted oil lamps, orbited by mayflies, provided just enough light. He shuffled the cards via the faro method and then cut the deck using only one hand. Over the next hour, as the candlelit windows behind him went dark in the order of his father’s walk from the study on the first floor to the master bedroom on the second, Harold laid out the cards, hardly taking notice of the cicadas shrieking throughout the countryside, such was his resolve on finding a pattern.

  Oftentimes it seemed the cards had personalities and his job was to facilitate the drama of their interactions. Tonight he was focused on a story developing between two numbers, the sevens and the eights, but he was having trouble figuring out the exact details. They didn’t add up. With the advent of a six, laid down impulsively but which nonetheless felt right, Harold was close to understanding the cards’ narrative, a feat he might have accomplished if only he had not been distracted by the neigh, pleasant and unmistakable and soothing, of Rocket the Miracle Horse.

  That was not her original name. Prior to the rattlesnake accident, the horse had been known as Semper Fi, so christened by her breeder, a Kentuckian fond of reminding people he had served. Afterward, though, everyone in the county began to call the horse Rocket, owing to that was what people said she resembled on the day she blasted into Hobson Crossing, Branchwater at the reins and Harold on her back, a fiery cloud of orange dust kicked up in their wake. The additional descriptor of “Miracle” was a secret act of modesty. In the weeks following the accident, the citizens of Batesville lauded Branchwater as a hero, a reputation he found burdensome. So, rather than abide his role in the events, Branchwater deflected praise to Rocket, noting how she had run faster than any horse he’d ever known and that, neither bidden nor guided by the likes of himself, she had instinctively found her way to Hobson Crossing. Everyone loved the story, none more so than Harold. That evening, his game of solitaire cut short, he recounted the details in his mind, the rhythmic thud of unshod hooves racing across a field, the glint of sunlight in big hazel eyes too focused to blink, as he stroked Rocket’s nose.

  “A horse that can do miracles,” he whispered in her ear, “is its own miracle in my book.”

  Except for the two of them, the stable was quiet, nary a swallow stirring in its rafters, nothing but hay covering its floor. Harold liked the thought of them being the only two things awake. A boy and his horse, a horse and her boy: the only open eyes in the entirety of Eden. The thought reminded him, however, that it was past his bedtime. He brushed his fingers through Rocket’s forelocks one last time for luck.

  Harold made certain to close the stable doors slowly enough to avoid their usual creak. On his walk back to the house, he was so intent on being quiet, keeping to the soft grass instead of the noisy gravel, he almost didn’t notice the red dot, rising and falling, of a lit cigarette over by the servants’ quarters.

  “Want to play a game, Haddy?” came a voice across the way. Harold knew the answer before he could even see the person asking the question. Of course he wanted to play a game. Harold wouldn’t turn down the chance to play a game for the whole wide world. As he got close to the quarters, a body materialized from the air gone blue with smoke, followed soon after by the smiling face of Lurlene Culp.

  She wore nothing but an envelope chemise, her shoulders, neck, and ankles bare to the elements. One of her hands was pressed against her cocked hip.

  Despite her attire and stature that night, Lurlene did not bring about unease in Harold, because of the extent to which he trusted her. She had always treated him like one of the grown-ups. In the mornings she would offer him coffee even though the other servants of the house automatically poured him a glass of milk, and before church service she would tell him his tie was crooked even though people in his family just straightened it themselves. “What kind of game?” Harold asked, no longer seeing her naked skin but a mental list, one full of names like tic-tac-toe, seven-up, auntie over, and tiddlywinks.

  “Any kind you want.”

  Lurlene reached toward his collar and ran her fingers down the buttons of his shirt. Her hands slid toward the place where Haddy’s mother had taught him his own didn’t belong.

  What happened next seemed the funniest thing. Inside him, right where this woman he had always liked so much was gripped, his body got too hot to hold its shape, melted, and then somehow grew into a new part, a puddle of wax becoming a candle. The funny thing wasn’t that it felt wrong. The funny thing was that it felt so good.

  Lurlene inched toward Haddy’s cheek, her breath smelling of grapes that had begun to turn, her voice underscored by
the clicking of a zipper. “Do you know what this is?” she asked. “An occasion.” The clicking slowed and stopped. “Are you going to rise to it?”

  Haddy provided an involuntary affirmation.

  Her hand wrapped around Haddy’s new part, tugging on it gently, and her cigarette burning on the ground, Lurlene led him into her room, which contained a bed with unmade sheets, a wall closet whose door was a set of cretonne drapes, and a desk strewn with writing implements. The ceiling was painted bluish-green, a color that Lurlene’s predecessor, an octogenarian so prone to dropsy she looked made of dough, had told Haddy was called “haint blue.” She’d said it kept people safe.

  Near the foot of the tick mattress Lurlene began to undress Haddy as though it were time for a bath. He could no longer recall why he had always hated washing time. Once done with him she did herself. In the candlelit room, he kept his eyes open for the second it took her chemise to hit the floor, and then he shut them tight. I’m not supposed to see such things, Haddy thought at the same time as he told Lurlene, “I’m not opposed to see such things.”

  “Few men would be.”

  She placed her hands on his shoulders, guided him onto the bed, and situated herself astride his hip bones. All the sensations of the next few minutes jumbled together without the anchor of sight. Inside Haddy it felt as if a snowball were rolling through his anatomy, down and down, between his lungs, past his heart, over his stomach, down and down, getting bigger as it rolled, except instead of snow this snowball was made of fire.