American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Once the service was over, Harold shook hands with Branchwater’s longtime girlfriend, Philomena Kirkland, followed by Jeremiah Branchwater, Alfred Branchwater, Peggy Branchwater, Alice Branchwater, and Portia Branchwater, the last three of whom were Tom’s nieces, all of them now over fifty. Harold had watched them grow up, the same way their uncle had watched him. “Remember, you call me if I can help out with anything,” he told Portia, who’d been the one to call him with the news. “How much do funerals cost? Daddy always said numbers weren’t my strong suit.”

  “You be shush about that. Your father took good care of Uncle Tommy.”

  “I don’t mind paying.”

  “Not another word about it.” She nodded past his shoulder. “Those young folks belong to you?”

  Harold turned around to see Robert. He was wearing a suit that looked good on him, one of those high-booted navy-pinstripe numbers, and by his side was some girl with an oddball haircut, as though she’d done it herself with a mirror and some house scissors. Flushed in the cheeks, either from the heat or the moment at hand—it was hard for Harold to be sure which—Robert said, “I know you said I shouldn’t come, especially since I never met him, but I figured you could use some company.”

  “I’m happy you did.”

  “Hello,” said the girl.

  “I’m sorry. This is my friend Molly.”

  Portia had returned to the fold of her kinfolk, so the three of them, Harold and Molly and Robert, stood on the outskirts of the cemetery, as stoic as the Confederate generals chiseled into a number of gravestones around them. Harold asked, “A girlfriend friend?”

  “Well, she, uh—”

  “That’s right,” Molly said, smiling, her hand like a blood-pressure cuff on Robert’s arm. “A girlfriend friend.”

  “Don’t that beat all.” With a smile Harold shook the one hand of the girl’s that wasn’t presently hooking its way through Robert’s bent elbow. She certainly was a pretty one, with sorrel eyes and a mouth like a tiny bow. I never had a girlfriend, Harold considered saying, and then grew embarrassed at the subsequent thought, No girl ever would have me as a boyfriend. Passing a quick look back toward the Branchwaters, at the freshly stirred dirt of the grave, at the half dozen jars of local blooms, he asked his grandson and his grandson’s girlfriend if they’d like to go for a ride. Maybe they could stop by the Jr. Food Mart for an orange push-up. “And I can tell y’all some good stories about Branchwater. Lord knows there are plenty.”

  * * *

  Although they had not been part of a tribe for many years—whether having left for employment opportunities, to attend school, to avoid jail time, or because a white man once took a liking to their mother—the people of Branchwater’s community still spoke a few words of Cherokee on occasion. Branchwater was in an awful period of what would turn out to be a very long life when they started calling him Nyva Adanvdo.

  His older brother, George, had been “wrong in the head” going on ten years. George did not seem to be getting any better. The hope that he might was mitigated each time he got lost on his way home, put his trousers on inside out, held a spoon with a fist, woke with wet sheets, or forgot the word for those square panes of glass in the side of a house. Sometimes, though, a faint glimmer of the person he used to be would show, his eyes holding steady for a moment, his voice taking on the decisive tone of an adult. That version of George appeared briefly one morning when Branchwater was headed out.

  “I’m late for work, buddy. Can’t take you fishing right now,” Branchwater said, tucking in his shirt as he walked toward the door. “Maybe when I get home.”

  “That’s all right, Tom. I appreciate the thought. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. Have a nice day at work. You’ve been a good brother.”

  In the doorway, Branchwater turned around. “How are you feeling today?” he asked, enunciating each word purposefully, trying to keep himself from looking startled.

  “Fine as a fiddler. Right as raindrops.”

  “George?”

  “Think I may take a bath. Yeah, uh-huh. I’m going to take me a bath.” George lodged his thumb in his mouth, the switch having flipped back to off, and shuffled away from the door.

  Branchwater had taken the role of his brother’s guardian after their father had passed on, in part because he knew his mother was getting too old to take care of a child cursed with a man’s body, in part because of something his father had told him years ago. At that time, everybody in town knew the truth about the two young Branchwater boys, a conclusion drawn from their relatively light skin, the fact their father had been working an oil field in another state at the time they were conceived, and the frequent occasions a circuit judge from Oxford had been seen tipping his hat toward their mother. The gossip wore at Branchwater, a pestle to his mortar, until he’d finally had enough. “How can you keep going about your life knowing what she did?” he yelled at his father. “We’re not even yours.” His cheeks grew damp. “How come you treat us like we’re your children when you know we’re not?!”

  His father pulled Branchwater into his arms and pressed his cheek against his son’s hair. “Because both of you are my children. You and your brother. Don’t you know that?” he said. “You can’t choose who you love and neither can blood.” He pushed his son’s head back so he could look him directly in the eyes. “Blood doesn’t make a family. Love does.”

  Years later, as he got home from work, Branchwater could still remember the look of absolute conviction on his father’s wrinkle-mapped, sun-hardened face. “George, I’m home,” he called out while placing his hat on a hook by the door. “You think we got enough day left to catch a few whoppers at the pond?”

  No answer came from anywhere in the house. The only sound was a horsefly repeatedly crashing into a windowpane, tap, tap, tap, tap, trying to reach the freedom of the outside world. “George?” Branchwater had checked the kitchen and the bedrooms before he noticed the bathroom door was closed. “Two baths in one day?” he asked, opening the door. Because the bathroom shutters were closed, blocking out the daylight, the water in the tub looked brown instead of red. “I guess somebody got themselves awful dirty today. Did you roll around in a bunch of mud?” In the dark, Branchwater could just barely see his brother’s vacant face. His open eyes did not blink. His open mouth did not speak.

  “No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. No.”

  With the same desperation, resolve, and obstinacy he would one day have when putting a snake-bit Harold Forster on the back of his horse, Branchwater lifted George, a marionette unstrung, from the cold, pink bathwater. He knew it was too late as he carried his brother out of the house, across the patchwork lawn, and, with the help of Semper Fi, recently purchased at auction, over miles of North Mississippi hill country. His suspicion was confirmed when he reached the town doctor, Al Phelps, who smelled nauseatingly of liquor and charged double for the visit, citing what he called his “racial sufferance.” He refused to assist in the burial preparations.

  After the funeral, people began referring to Branchwater by a Cherokee phrase that translates loosely as “Stone Heart.”

  * * *

  His grandfather wasn’t kidding about the orange push-ups. On the threadbare bench seat of Harold’s old truck, Robert sat pressed next to Molly, both of them licking at the nearly fluorescent sherbet rising from cardboard cylinders coated with frost. Two notions occurred to Robert at once: this moment was the first he had thought of Harold as his “grandfather” without putting quotes around it in his mind, and today was the first time either he or Molly had referred to their “relationship” in terms of it being an actual thing.

  Even though they’d been dating for three months and rarely spent more than a single night apart—he would sleep at her place in Rooney Heights, a condo complex near campus, or she would make the drive to his place, claiming it was to see Hellion rather than him—neither of them had spoken of the other as a boyfriend or girlfrien
d until earlier that afternoon in the cemetery. Molly seemed to enjoy how much it had surprised Robert.

  “Ever seen a real live cotton gin?” Robert asked her as they passed one. The building consisted mainly of steel beams and corrugated metal siding, unremarkable as sheet cake from a grocery store, except, through an open hanging door, a different world could be glimpsed. Cotton lint, wispy and fine, seemed to grow from every surface like barnacles. It clung to the roof beams, the sturdy columns holding them up, the floor, the walls, even the giant machinery modules, with their fan belts and ginning ribs.

  Molly said, “Feels like I’m catching a glimpse of Narnia.”

  After considering it, Robert decided the comparison was more apt than Molly realized, because he, too, felt as if he were giving her a tour of some mystical storybook world. The South had just the right blend of strangeness and darkness to fascinate and frighten children, didn’t it? It was similar enough to the real world to make a child think, I know this place, yet also different enough for them to go to sleep at night knowing it was only make-believe. Over the next few miles of the ride, as they passed a juke joint named C. Barrett’s Snack Shack, a fried-peanut stand, tin one-sheets for Red Coon and Wild Goose chewing tobacco, a former plantation commissary, a deer-processing center, a hot-tamale stand, and two “undercover” revenue agents staking out a moonshine operation, Robert felt that he was showing Molly not only a world from a children’s book but also the world of his own childhood, the strangeness, darkness, and altogether fucked-up-ness that made him the incredibly well-adjusted person he was today.

  “Look it!” said Harold.

  He pointed up ahead. On a billboard next to the highway, a silhouette of the classic “southern belle” bottle, so named because of its bonnet-like cap, its slim neck, its corseted midsection, and its lower half shaped similar to a hoop skirt, appeared against a simple white backdrop. remember the original? was printed to one side of it, and to the other, we’ve bottled nostalgia. Near the bottom corner of the billboard could be seen the logo for Panola Cola.

  “I thought you said they weren’t going to roll it out till they knew the secret ingredient?” Robert asked his grandfather.

  “Guess they got antsy.”

  Molly said, “There was a secret ingredient?”

  As Robert told her about the H.F. issue, how those initials had been a placeholder in the formula, how the engineers at CarolCorp were convinced Harold must know its identity, how the corporate lawyers had even threatened litigation, he struck at a thought, one so simple it seemed crazy he was only putting it together now.

  “Harold, have you ever noticed that H.F. aren’t just your father’s initials? They’re yours, too.”

  “And?”

  “And, well, I don’t know. Just feels like something. Like maybe you know what the ingredient is without knowing you know what the ingredient is. You know?”

  “Not really.”

  Harold was exhausted from thinking about the ingredient. What did it matter? PanCola was just a memory, something he used to cherish, true, but now he had his grandson, a part of himself that extended into the future rather than the past. Robert wasn’t a memory. He was sitting right there, holding his pretty girlfriend’s pretty little hand.

  “Are you in college, too?” Harold asked Molly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Parents must be proud.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Robert said, “Both her parents passed away.”

  Before Harold could tell her he was sorry, the girl said, “Did you grow up around here?” then licked the last of her push-up. Harold said he sure did. He added that they could stop by the house he’d grown up in, if only it hadn’t burned down back when she was just a baby.

  * * *

  “Nyva Adanvdo,” whispered Mother Shumate in the dream. “Let it burn.”

  Even though Branchwater didn’t believe in premonitions, he still felt, on waking, a sense of the uncanny at what the hoodoo woman had told him in his dream, perhaps because in real life she’d been the last person ever to address him as Nyva Adanvdo. He despised the name. Coined because of his refusal to cry for his brother—Branchwater wouldn’t give a damn thing, especially not tears, to the world that had taken George—the name had faded away around the time he’d become part of a surrogate family, one that helped replace what he had lost. Life always keeps the balance in check: he believed something could only be gained by the loss of something else. And vice versa.

  It was for this reason Branchwater worried, on the morning of November 12, 1969, as he got out of bed, that his dream had something to do with the Forsters.

  The family had been falling apart for a while. Branchwater had stood by helpless as Houghton and Annabelle took up acreage beside each other at Batesville Cemetery. He had stood by helpless as Nicholas steered PanCola toward complete financial ruin. He had stood by helpless as Ramsey, divorced from her husband, was derided for her “bedmate druthers” by the media, and briefly lost her daughter, Susannah, to a radical branch of the New Left. He had stood by helpless as Monty left his little girl without a father. He had stood by helpless as Lance sank steadily deeper into the bottle. What else might befall the family? How else might it burn down? Branchwater realized he had been thinking too metaphorically when he heard sirens in the distance.

  He ran outside and climbed into his pickup, but the worthless thing refused to start. Down the road, a pair of headlights approached—two circles of yellow that, inch by inch, materialized into a long, black hearse. The sight of it caused Branchwater to wonder, in all seriousness, if he was still asleep, trapped inside his dream. His father used to tease him as a boy by speaking of such maladies.

  “Know where the Forster place is?” he asked the driver after flagging him down and getting inside the hearse.

  “Bet your fern.”

  The driver was a teenage boy with a lopsided flattop. Half a dozen empty beer bottles clattered on the floorboard. A small calendar with tear-away months, roughly the size and shape of a cigarette pack, was stuck to the center of the dashboard, a promotional product, Branchwater judged by the name printed along the bottom, for bentonia farm supply. Each month on the calendar featured a Bible verse. Branchwater was reading the one for October, thinking about how “fishers of men” was such an odd phrase, when the driver, noticing the calendar was a month out of date, tore off the top sheet to reveal November’s verse: Ecclesiastes 1:4.

  Wake up right now if this is a dream. Wake up right now if this is a dream.

  If this had begun as a dream, Branchwater thought as they pulled up to The Sweetest Thing, roiling in flames and erupting smoke, it had now become a nightmare. A small crowd had gathered on the front lawn. Firemen aimed hoses at the house, their cheeks coppered by the glare, their suits shimmering from the water misted back on them by the morning breeze.

  “I figure you don’t know my daddy,” the boy with a haircut like a tilted mortarboard said to Branchwater, who was stepping out of the hearse, “but if you do, please don’t tell him I borrowed the company car last night.”

  Branchwater was in too much of a hurry to answer. He scrambled through the crowd of gawking neighbors, searching for the face of Sarah, Montgomery’s widow and the only person still living in The Sweetest Thing. He screamed her name, but everyone shook their heads. Branchwater turned toward the house, the heat so palpable it was like being swallowed by a huge, invisible creature. There was still time. Plenty of time. He began to run toward the front door, plotting the quickest way through the house to the master bedroom, ignoring the screams from the firemen to stop.

  The first fireman to tackle him registered as only a mild pressure on his lower back. Gradually, the pressure spread to his thighs, his knees, and his calves. Five firemen were dragging behind him by the time he fell to the ground.

  From where he lay pinned to the wet grass, Branchwater watched in disbelief as flames ate away the house. It was impossible for him to have dreamed this would happen.
He must have heard the sirens in his sleep. Despite the roar of the fire as it took down the shiplap siding on which Houghton had marked Monty’s height while he was growing up, then the roof constructed of cedar shingles Annabelle had spent weeks selecting from two dozen available options, then the porch where Branchwater and Imogene used to sit and talk about her day, he could hear in his mind those five words from Mother Shumate. “Nyva Adanvdo, let it burn.” He could also hear the last thing she had said to him before he woke up.

  “Ain’t no way to rebuild a house unless it’s ash on the ground.”

  * * *

  In the kitchen of her condo, Molly, while she chopped a bell pepper, asked Robert, who was adding rice to a pot on the stove, “What’s an Estate Heatrola anyway?”

  “It’s a kind of heater they had back then. Ran on coal.”

  She was referring to what his grandfather had told them caused the fire that burned down The Sweetest Thing. Her question was the first thing Molly had said about the ride they’d taken with Harold since they got back an hour ago. She seemed to have liked him. Robert looked at her as she stirred the red beans. Although it hadn’t occurred to him until this moment, he’d never in his life cooked food with another person, not a single pancake breakfast with his dad, no licking the cake batter off a spoon handed to him by his mom. Now here he was playing house with his girlfriend, and the strangest thing was how comfortable it all felt.

  Was he in love? Robert had no idea. The way he saw it, being in love was like walking in a fog bank: you only knew you were in it before and after you were in it; the middle part was an indeterminable haze.

  Into a pan Robert placed two links of andouille sausage. Sure, their relationship wasn’t perfect domestic bliss, okay. She thought he spent too much time obsessing over his research into the history of his family. He thought she was an idiot for selling the occasional dime bag to make extra spending cash. Overall, though, at least they were honest about their faults, each of them aware that past relationships had left dents in the other, a fact they didn’t ignore or criticize but accepted, tacitly if not gladly, as proof that neither of them was at an advantage.