A Miracle of Catfish (15 page)

He reached up and lifted the kerosene lantern from the coat-hanger hook and used it to light his way to one of the back stalls. His shadow loomed large around him as he walked, throwing scant light into dark corners, the lantern swinging in his hand, the gun heavy with its belly full of lead.

The harness room had a cobwebbed wooden door and Cortez pushed the sliding latch aside and opened it. He stepped up into a walled box that held leather mule collars, his wife's old cracked sidesaddle spewing its stuffing, some singletrees hanging by nails from the walls, and an old trunk of the kind people used to haul around on steamships and trains. He knelt and set the lantern down and opened the trunk.

He started to put the Thompson inside, in the top tray, but then set the gun on the boards of the floor and lifted out the tray instead. It was full of old things: rusted red-and-white bass plugs, a rusted bayonet that
was still sharp. He tested its edge with his thumb. Last time he'd used it was to stab a deer to death. Dried blood still showed on the blade. He set it back and looked around in the tray. He always did. There was a small tobacco sack and he lifted it out. The strings that pouched its mouth he drew open with his fingers. And reached in. Caught hold of the chain and drew it out, then the locket followed it. His knees were hurting, so he sat down. The white gold glowed dimly in the wavering light from the lantern, and he heard an owl hoot down in the woods. The chain was supple in his fingers. The cool of the metal. Money he'd spent on her himself. At Elliott's on the square. He didn't need to open the locket. He didn't need to look at what was in it again. But he'd known all along that he would. And he did.

She looked like she always had, smiling stiffly, standing in a South Carolina photographer's parlor in 1946. Just before she moved here to be with her mother and help her work for Cortez's mother. Just down the road. At fourteen. He said to himself,
I loved a nigger. Damn me but I did.

Cortez sat there for a long time, silent, studying her image, knowing his wife was probably sitting in her wheelchair in the blue glow of the television, wondering where he was. He closed the locket, stuck it back in its little bag, dropped it back in the tray. And started to set it back in there, and then put the gun away, but he didn't. He set the tray aside, and reached into the bottom of the trunk, and pulled a folded quilt up out of the way, and pulled out the long robe. It was yellowing now, and starting to rot, and he brought it closer to his nose, and it still smelled faintly of wood smoke. And pine tar. Maybe even blood. He couldn't tell.

He looked at the once-white hood, its eyepieces making it a vacant mask. It had been a long time since he'd worn it. And he knew he'd never wear it again. Why then did he keep it around? He didn't know. Maybe the same reason he kept the locket. To have something to hold on to. A man needed something to hold on to, even in this world today, which had certainly gone straight to hell.

He sighed, something he hardly ever did. He was hungry and he didn't know if there was anything good to eat in the house. He could have a peanut butter sandwich he guessed. Or a tomato sandwich.
Except he'd fixed one of those for lunch. He could fry some bacon to put on it maybe.

He put everything away and closed the lid of the trunk and shoved it back under the pile of empty feed bags and then scattered some of them over it again. He had money stashed in a bunch of places in the barn. Under bales of hay in fruit jars. Inside old feed bags in Calumet baking powder cans with plastic lids. Hidden from his wife. Inside the house, too. He didn't know how much. Enough.

He got the lantern and shut the door to the harness room and slid the latch closed again. He went out through the hall of the barn, his steps soft in the dry dirt and crushed bits of hay. He slipped out between the two big doors but left the crack open. Wasn't any need to close it. He'd be back out here tomorrow. He had a cow that needed a shot for her cough and he'd have to find the needle in all the shit he had stashed out here. No telling where it was. Then he'd have to get her in the chute and maybe tie her ass up. Sometimes he wished he had a head gate. It would make it a lot easier to fool with one. Especially for something like that. Maybe he ought to just go ahead and get one. He could stick a thermometer up his bull's ass if he had a head gate and there wouldn't be anything the bull could do about it except take it. He had a catalog in the house and he thought he could get a good one for about eight hundred. Then he'd have to get some big posts, dig some post holes, put the posts in the holes, get some concrete, mix it up, pour it in the holes, bolt the head gate to the posts once the concrete set up. It'd be a lot of trouble. Sure would make it a lot easier to give a cow a shot, though. They always liked to try and kick your head off when you did that to them.

The ground was muddy between the house and the barn. Cortez blew the lantern out before he got to the back porch, and he stopped and looked up. The sky was still cloudy and he was hoping the forecast was right. There was some faint rumbling far off in the sky, and he saw blooming yellow light somewhere a long way down the country toward the east. It was very dark. He set the lantern on the back step and went on in.

As soon as he looked at her he knew she was dead. The TV was still playing, and she was still sitting in front of it, but now she was leaned over sideways in the wheelchair, with one of her arms out at an odd
angle, and just as still as could be. He leaned over and lowered the volume some.

He walked around in front of her and looked down at her. She was looking at nothing. She wasn't breathing. He could see her scalp plainly through the thin white hair on top of her head. She was seventy-six years old. She had been twenty-two when Cortez married her. And he was only eighteen then. She must have had another stroke.

There was a daybed in the front room and Cortez sat down on it. He glanced at the TV. That old woman with the sex show was telling somebody who had called in how to lubricate somebody with some jelly and Cortez wondered what flavor they used. He looked at his wife and reached out his hand to touch her on the arm. It was cool. He pulled his hand away. Well. She was gone. After all this time. She couldn't cuss him any more or call him to the house on her bullhorn. But now he'd have to bury her.

He didn't know who to call first, Lucinda or the funeral home. Maybe the sheriff's office? No. He didn't want them out here. But they might have to come take pictures. Seemed like they had to whenever somebody died at home. They didn't used to, but he thought now they did.

He wondered how long she'd been dead. He wondered how long he'd stayed out in the barn. Couple of hours. Reading some of those
Hustler
magazines again before he cleaned his gun. Piddling around looking at that stuff. But when was the last time he actually saw her alive? He tried to think. She was alive this afternoon around four, when he stopped in to get a handkerchief. Wasn't she? Hell, he didn't really know. The TV had been going. Which had always meant she was sitting there watching it. But how did he know she wasn't already dead then? He hadn't talked to her. She hardly ever turned around when he walked in the room anyway, so it was hard to say. She might have been dead since lunchtime, since he didn't actually talk to her at lunchtime, figuring she could roll her wheelchair into the kitchen and get something out and microwave it. She kept stuff you could microwave. Macaroni and cheese. Stuffed potato skins.

Why hell. What was the last thing she'd said, and when did she say it? He had to think. He came in here about the middle of the morning and she was alive then, he knew, because he told her he wished to hell
it would rain, and she said he'd already said that about a million times and wished he'd shut up about it. And then she'd picked up the remote and flipped the channel over to
Bonanza
. It was one he'd seen before, the one where Hoss went temporarily blind, so he didn't watch it. He went on out into the garden and started picking tomato worms off his tomatoes and pulling suckers […].

Hell. No telling when she died. She might have been dead since this morning. It was about eight o'clock now. If that was true, she might have been dead for ten hours. He touched her again to see if she was stiff. Only a little.

Shit. He didn't know what to do. The sheriff came out when all that happened with Raif. But that was a long time ago. God. Damn near forty years. He didn't know who to call. He'd have to go find Lucinda's number if he called her. And she might not be in. He thought she went out sometimes with that retard. She had an answering machine that usually answered if you called. He never had called much after he found out that she was living in Atlanta with a retard. Afraid he might answer.

And where was the damn number at? No telling. He'd have to look. He got up and walked over to the wall and flipped the switch to turn the overhead light on. His dead wife sat there in her chair. The bottoms of her legs were very dark. He looked at that and understood that it was blood that had drained from her upper body down. It was the same thing that happened to a pig when you hoisted him up by his hind feet and cut his throat, only he was upside down and all the blood ran the other way.

There was a table with a bunch of envelopes and junk mail and a small bound book he thought might hold phone numbers for various businesses and people, emergency numbers, that sort of thing. He never had looked through her stuff. A long time ago she used to order flower bulbs and seeds over the phone from some nursery up in Tennessee. He flipped open the book and started looking through it. He didn't have any idea what Lucinda was going to say. He knew they hadn't been real close. Not close like a mother and daughter ought to be. Lucinda rarely wrote. Rarely called. Didn't much want to come home for Christmas. Sometimes didn't. Just stayed in Atlanta with that retard. Had some excuse or other. And when they were here they made
him nervous anyway, because that retard cussed something awful and sometimes he barked like a damn dog and his head jerked and his legs and his feet and he was just a blinking mess. No wonder they didn't have any grandchildren.

He found the old nursery numbers. Some of them had been scratched through. He found some recipes tucked into the pages, one for cat-head biscuits. He pulled that one out and laid it aside. He knew how to make gravy but he never had been able to make biscuits. She could, when she used to be able to cook and get around in the kitchen. Made good ones, too. For about fifty-four years. His wouldn't be worth a shit.

He raised his head and looked at her. And the phone rang. Loudly. Right beside him. Without even thinking he almost picked it up. But then he thought,
Hell, what if it's Lucinda?
It rang again, and he started to pick it up. It was probably just one of her friends. The other old biddies she talked to and checked on throughout the day. They called each other so much that Cortez had gotten to where he almost never answered the phone in his house. It rang again. He had his hand on it. Whoever was calling was going to hang up if he didn't answer it in a few more rings. It wouldn't be Lucinda, surely. Hell, she never called. It rang again and he picked it up.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hey, Daddy,” Lucinda said.

“Oh,” he said.
Oh crap.
“Uh. Hey.”

“What are you doing?” she said. Sounded pretty happy.

“Not much,” he said. He sat on the day bed. “Setting on the day bed.”

He looked at the TV.

“Watching TV,” he added.

He could hear some kind of music in there with Lucinda and he could hear what sounded like a bunch of people talking, too. He didn't know what he was going to say. He didn't know how he could tell her like this, unexpectedly, without being ready, exactly what was going on. He didn't know how to do that. He wasn't good on stuff like that. Never had been.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I just called to check on y'all. What's Mama up to?”

“She's done conked out on me,” he said. Okay. There it was. She could pick up on it if she wanted to. But she didn't.

“Oh,” Lucinda said. “Kind of early for her, isn't it? I thought she always stayed up half the night watching TV.”

“I reckon she was wore out,” he said.

“I got you,” Lucinda said. Somebody laughed really loudly behind her and somebody else yelled something that sounded like
Bust it open, baby, just bust it open!
Lucinda said, “Well, I hate I missed her. I know I ought to call and check on her more. How's she been doing on that new medicine the doctor gave her?”

“She never did say.”

“Tell her I called,” Lucinda said.

“Is it hot in Atlanta?” Cortez said.

“Lord yes,” Lucinda said. “It's been awful. Albert's gotten a really good tan working in the yard this summer. You and Mama should come visit sometime. You could get somebody to drive you to Memphis and it's only a one-hour flight. It's about fifty minutes, actually. I live ten minutes from the airport and I'd be right there to pick you up when you got off the plane. Albert would love to show you his new paintings.”

“I ain't getting on no airplane,” Cortez said.

“Oh, Daddy,” Lucinda said. “There's nothing to it. I've taken Albert on flights with me before. You know if he can do it, you could, too.”

“I thought he throwed up on one one time.”

“He just had a little bit of an upset tummy that day.”

“Why don't you come over here?” Cortez said, not knowing what else to say, trying to decide what to do. It was kind of awkward over the phone like this, because you were having to juggle two things at once: keep up your end of the conversation by listening to whatever she was saying while at the same thing trying to figure out what the hell to do while she was talking. And then you had to come back with something, wham, bam! It didn't leave you enough time to think. He was kind of sorry he'd picked up the phone now. He could have just let it ring.