Merritt said, “Gee whiz, Jessie.”
His voice held a tinge of awe.
Daddy said, “Don’t you go being disrespectful now.”
“It’s your name, ain’t it?”
“Don’t you be sassy neither. There’s that woodshed out back.”
He’d never whipped us much, so I called his bluff, “I ain’t scared.”
Merritt gasped, and said, “Doggone, Jessie.”
Daddy said, “I don’t know what this little game of yourn is, but you go right on, if’n it makes you feel better.”
“It does.”
He leaned forward and I jerked back. I didn’t fear him, but that abrupt movement wasn’t like him. For the most part, he didn’t get riled about much; it wasn’t in his nature. Usually.
He pointed his fork at me and said, “Get this out of your system, whatever it is, but by tomorrow, I expect you to call me proper.”
“It’s in my system because you don’t talk about it, won’t talk about it.”
Merritt slid the pepper over, and Daddy sprinkled it over his food till everything was the same color, mounds speckled black. He went back to eating like I’d never opened my mouth.
“See?” I said to Merritt and the room.
The next day Daddy backed up our steep drive, and in the back of his truck sat a big box.
“Look a here,” he said, pointing at it as he got out. “Got us a TV. We’re the first ones around here to have one. What’cha think, Jessie? Merritt?”
Merritt hopped about, his exuberance making up for the lack of mine. Daddy pulled the tailgate down, and Merritt climbed into the back and pushed the box toward him. Between the two of them, they lifted it out, grunting, and straining under the weight of it, and brought it up the couple of steps to the door that I at least held open.
They pushed and shoved it into the corner of the living room, and after it was unboxed, Daddy said, “Plug it in, Son. Turn it on.”
Merritt obliged; then they stood side by side staring at the glass tucked into a wood cabinet. As the TV warmed up, it made a low whistling noise that went higher and higher until the white dot in the middle of the gray screen became black-and-white slanted lines. Daddy slapped a hand on his head, and went back outside. He came in with a smaller box, and out of it he took what he called “rabbit ears.” He set them on top of the TV, wiggled them back and forth, and fiddled with one of the knobs on the front. A grainy picture finally emerged of a man talking behind a desk with the letters NBC above him. Meanwhile, I tried to consider how a TV was supposed to make up for what I really wanted. Little did I know I would soon become enamored with a show called The Untouchables, and wishing for my own Eliot Ness.
The first time Uncle Virgil heard me call Daddy by his given name, he said, “Now that don’t sound proper like.”
By then Daddy had gotten used to me calling him that, and waved a hand like “don’t bother.”
Aunt Juanita pursed bright pink lips, pinched her cigarette out, and said nothing. Cousin Oral and Merritt acted as if they couldn’t decide whether they should be in awe or not. I quit asking him about Mama, even stopped speaking his name unless it was absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, I remained on the lookout for possible hints of her presence. I’d noticed how when Daddy sat at the kitchen table, always on this one chair, he’d get to rubbing a finger over a couple of brown spots where a cigarette had blistered the Formica top. I began to dwell obsessively on that scorched area, wondering who left the mark. Did she smoke? Maybe it was from her very cigarette from when they’d sat at the table together, smoking and enjoying a first morning’s cup of coffee.
Over time I’d noted a couple of other small places about the house and my imagination ran wild. Like the circular stain on the night table in their bedroom, the one opposite the side where he slept. The small fingerprints left in the paint on the wall in the hallway, a happenstance discovery when the sun hit there a particular way, and only at a certain time of year. The day I detected them five little ovals, I placed my own fingers in each one, easily recognizing they were slightly bigger, yet too small for Daddy. I became certain the prints had to be hers, yet these were empty and unsatisfactory findings, especially when Mama’s ghostlike presence was only as tangible as the wisps of smoke from the blaze that took her all them years ago.
Chapter 2
I stared at my new driver’s license reflecting on how any picture could be worse than my school photo. It was early, about an hour before school, and we were in the kitchen where Daddy counted money from the haul he’d made the night before. The radio was on, and the broadcaster sounded as bored as I was as he delivered the news of the day. He droned on about the Ku Klux Klan and the cross burnings along major roads in South Carolina and Alabama over sit-ins at lunch counters. I expected to hear more about such an event, but he moved on to a race car driver who’d died at the beginning of a twelve-hour endurance race in Florida. I got up and fiddled with the knob, looking for a station with music. Uncle Virgil and Aunt Juanita had dropped by, supposedly on their way to town for corn needed at one of the stills. Sometimes this was the inconvenience of them living only two miles away.
Uncle Virgil couldn’t take his eyes off the small piles of cash, and this was the real reason he was here. He had a hard time keeping a job, having worked at the feed store, and then at the factory where they made mirrors, and now he worked at a poultry farm. He had a bit of a drinking problem and Daddy said if it weren’t for him needing to keep Aunt Juanita happy, it would be all he’d do. They were an unlikely pair as I’d ever seen. She came from Lenoir, and you could call that a big city compared to anything out here. The Brushy Mountains where we live are part of a spur off the Blue Ridge. She joked about how they really weren’t mountains at all, more like bumps.
She sipped her coffee, leaving a pink half circle of lipstick on the cup’s rim. Her nail polish matched. She wore another new dress, and kept brushing her hand across the fabric as if she liked the feel of it. Aunt Juanita was slim, and had her hair and nails done once a week at the beauty parlor. She knew better than to make any suggestions about my appearance. We’d had that reckoning a while back.
She’d said, “Jessie, I think it’s high time you start taking better care of yourself.”
“High time to who?”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“I don’t need any help.”
She said, “Don’t you think you ought to do something about yourself? You could start with your clothes, fix your hair.”
“I don’t know why it matters to you.”
She said, “Suit yourself,” and that was that.
My abrupt ways had always gotten under her skin.
I listened in while Daddy told Uncle Virgil about a close call he’d had with a revenuer last night. Uncle Virgil’s head was in his hands. He was unshaven, hair going in all directions, as if the shock of what he’d ingested had it standing at attention. He was younger than Daddy, but looked older. When Merritt and Oral came in from outside, letting the screen door slam, he gave them both a dirty look, but neither one noticed. They were all agog at the sight of the cash stacked on the table. They sat, Oral taking the chair farthest from his daddy.
Merritt said, “Whoa. Looks like a good night!”
Oral pointed, then whined, “How come we ain’t never got that kind of money?”
Uncle Virgil reached all the way across the table to backhand him, but Oral ducked, then shot a hateful look his way. Merritt propped his chin on his hand, watching with apparent adoration the man at the head of the table.
Daddy winked at him and continued on. “I believe it