Brambleman (16 page)

“Anything else on?” Charlie asked, hoping for
a Braves game.

“Rasslin, maybe,” Jerry said.

“Oh no,” Charlie said quickly, waving his
hands emphatically. “Believe me. Racing’s fine.”

That’s when Charlie saw Momo for the first
time. Susan’s gargantuan cousin came through the front door into
the living room, shaking the floor with each step. As tall as
Charlie, Momo outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds; a mop
of brown hair sat atop his pumpkin-sized head. He scowled at Jerry,
ignoring Charlie. “Rasslin’s on. Why ain’t you watchin’?” Momo
switched channels.

“Hey, asshole,” Jerry said.

“Fuck you,” Momo retorted. “If rasslin’s on,
rasslin’s on. House rules.”

Charlie winced and glanced at his watch. How
much longer did he have to stay before he could leave? Momo checked
all the channels but couldn’t find Hulk Hogan or Rowdy Roddy Piper.
He grunted in disgust and turned off the TV.

“Turn the race back on, asshole,” Jerry
said.

Momo turned to stare at him. “Don’t make me
go out to my truck.”

“Hell,” Jerry said. “Don’t make me go out to
mine.”

Charlie felt like he was watching a battle
between bad and evil. “Guys,” he said.

Momo looked at him, apparently noticing him
for the first time. “Who the fuck are you?”

“He married Susan,” Jerry said. “You missed
the wedding because you were in jail for stalkin’ that girl.”
(Momo’s mother referred to this as a “failed romance.”)

Momo gave Charlie a once-over with close-set
eyes and grunted, “You lucky.” He stomped off, mumbling about the
lack of pro wrestling in the world. Charlie shuddered. The guy
reminded him of the villain in
The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre
.

Right after he washed down his lemon meringue
pie with sweet tea, Charlie saw a performance of what Bradley Roy
liked to call “the longest-running soap opera in Forsyth County.”
Momo had returned to the living room, and Charlie felt himself
getting pushed out by the toxic aura of the man, who made Jerry
look like a college professor in comparison. Charlie was standing
in the wide passage between the kitchen and living room of the
modest home when the older folks’ conversation seized his
attention.

“They can put me in the poorhouse, for all I
care,” declared Pappy, wearing faded Lee overalls and a blue
chambray work shirt. Wizened, with grayish-white hair, the
seventy-three-year-old man stood at the head of the table, holding
court over bowls of potato salad, bags of chips, ketchup, mustard,
napkins, and a platter half-full of grilled burgers and hot dogs.
On his left sat his only son, Stanley, dressed in white slacks and
a pale blue polo shirt, who was running for a second term in the
Georgia House of Representatives, having wrested the seat from a
Democrat in 1984. On Pappy’s right sat his daughters Evangeline
Powell and Marie Hastings, who was nicknamed Tantie Marie. Both
wore polyester slacks and sleeveless blouses. Stanley’s wife Liz
was outside, smoking a cigarette.

“What about the land?” Tantie Marie cried
out.

“They can have it,” Pappy said, waving his
hand. “I ain’t got no use for it. I quit farmin’, if ya ain’t
noticed.”

His children vehemently shook their heads in
unison.

“What about the house?” Tantie Marie’s tone
grew even more anxious. She shared a mobile home with her son Momo,
and Charlie could imagine the trailer rocking from side to side
whenever the big guy got up to get a beer (although he wasn’t
allowed to drink while on probation).

“They can take the house, too,” Pappy
declared. Meanwhile, Gram, Pappy’s hatchet-faced wife, washed
dishes, apparently ignoring the discussion over the fate of her
home.

“Nobody’s taking the house,” Stanley
said.

“Can’t you fix the taxes?” Tantie Marie asked
her brother.

“Fix them?”

“Talk to the tax commissioner so we don’t
have to pay. That’s what politicians do, right?”

Bradley Roy, passing through the kitchen to
get a piece of apple pie, grunted in disgust.

Stanley shook his head. “That’s not the way
things work. We’ll cover it this year,” he declared, then glanced
at Evangeline and nodded toward her purse. “Anyway, I already got
them to appraise it low. I don’t know how long it will be before
Bill Arnold notices.”

“I’ll have to owe you for my share,” Tantie
Marie said.

Stanley reached over and patted her hand. “I
know it’s been hard since Big Rhett left.”

Charlie turned his head toward Jerry, who was
laying on the sofa, and asked, “Who’s Big Rhett?”

Jerry answered without taking his eyes off
the TV. “Momo’s daddy. Momo is Little Rhett.”

Momo grunted at the mention of his name, but
kept his eyes glued to the TV, apparently mesmerized by the shiny
cars racing around the track. “When did he leave?” Charlie
asked.

“I don’t know. Momo, when did the Forsyth
County Courthouse burn down?”

“How the hell should I know?” Momo
grumbled.

“Nineteen seventy-three,” said Bradley Roy,
now standing across from Charlie, still working on dessert. “And
they never proved anything,” he added, stabbing his fork in the air
for emphasis.

“’Cept that Cutchins women are hard to live
with,” Jerry said, letting out a derisive chuckle.

Charlie was curious, but he didn’t want
Momo’s full attention, so he dropped the subject and turned back to
the kitchen-table discussion. Evangeline was shaking her head
vehemently as she scolded her father: “I don’t know why you have to
put us through this every year.”

Pappy glared at her. She reached for her
purse and pulled out her checkbook. “That don’t work on me,” she
said. “You want the money or not? You don’t have anything to say to
that, do you? Just as I thought.” Evangeline started writing.
“What’s my share plus half of hers?” Evangeline waved the back of
her hand at Tantie Marie like she’d forgotten her sister’s name.
Stanley gave her a number. Evangeline fluttered the check over the
potato salad and placed it in front of her father. “I made it to
the tax commissioner, so don’t get any ideas. Sure you want it?”
Pappy said nothing. Whatever he was thinking was locked away behind
those smoldering eyes.

“Go on and tear it up if you don’t want it,
then,” Evangeline said. “Just go on.” The check remained
undisturbed. “I thought so. I’m tired of this poor-mouth nonsense.
You gonna say, ‘
Thank you, Evangeline, for helping me keep my
land
?’ I thought not. Come on, Bradley Roy. Let’s go.” She rose
and stormed off in dramatic fashion. Bradley Roy took his time
finishing his pie, holding the plate close to his face.

A minute passed before Gram hollered from the
kitchen. “Vange is out there yelling for everyone to come out and
say ’bye to her.”

Bradley Roy sauntered over to the trash can
and threw away his paper plate, then took his time saying farewell
to everyone. On his way out, he turned, winked at Charlie, and
said, “Now you know.”

“Know what?” asked Susan, returning from a
back room heart-to-heart with her sister, Sheila, during which
Jerry’s sins would have been freshly cataloged.

Bradley Roy kissed his younger daughter on
the cheek. “Everything and nothing. Best come out and say goodbye
to your momma. Sheila!” he shouted toward the back of the house.
“Vange is in a snit and she needs you to say ’bye to her. You know
how she is.” He turned to Charlie. “She holds grudges.”

“I know. She’s still mad about our
wedding.”

“Hell, boy,” Bradley Roy said with a grin,
“she’s still mad at me about ours! As for you, she ain’t ready to
admit you exist. Give her a few years … she’ll come around.”

Charlie noticed that his father-in-law
sounded uncertain about that last part.

On the long drive home, Charlie told Susan,
“Your grandfather is
right unfriendly
. I’m not sure he even
said hello. He just grunted when I came up to shake his hand.”

“He and Gram are mad we didn’t have the
wedding up here.”

“Why should they care?”

“They care.” She shrugged and looked out the
window.

“I heard something about your uncle and a
courthouse fire.”

“Just a rumor. I’ve heard it, too.”

“Well, what’s the rumor?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Supposedly,
Uncle Rhett burned down the courthouse and left town. No one’s
heard from him since.”

“Why’d he supposedly do it?”

“Don’t know. Love. Money. Take your
pick.”

“Love? Funny way of showing it.”

“Well, it wasn’t for Tantie Marie.”

Now it was Charlie’s turn to shake his head.
A few seconds later, he had an epiphany. “They’re varmints,” he
declared. “I married into a family of varmints.”

“Don’t call them that,” Susan said. “And
especially don’t call
me
that.”

But the name stuck, at least with him.
Pappy’s place became Varmintville.

That afternoon, Susan told Charlie things
she’d kept to herself until then—the sort of family secrets no
sensible person lets their spouse know until after the marriage has
been consummated. Thus Charlie learned Pappy’s story—part of it, at
least.

In the 1960s, Pappy and Gram moved into a new
Jim Walter home that replaced the cracker box and outhouse that the
family had endured for decades. When Pappy turned sixty-five, he
quit farming, sold his equipment, and told his children to pay his
property taxes if they wanted to inherit the farm—those he still
talked to, anyway.

Missing from family discussions was Pappy and
Gram’s eldest child, a daughter who’d run away when she was a
teenager. “I saw Aunt Shirley once, at Lenox Square when I was
seven years old,” Susan told her husband during that ride. “I was
with Mom and Sheila. Mom said, ‘Lookie, girls, there goes your Aunt
Shirley.’ When the woman saw us, she turned and walked away. Mom
didn’t follow. Instead, she dragged us into a dress shop, like she
was afraid of her sister. I craned my neck to watch the woman. I
only saw her a few seconds before she disappeared. I heard she
didn’t marry but changed her name anyway. Don’t know why.”

That night, back in Macon, Susan refused his
advances in bed. Eventually, Charlie learned to insist on “sex
before varmints.” If he had to go to Forsyth County, he would at
least start out contented, since these trips never seemed to have a
happy ending.

* * *

Charlie, fascinated by Aunt Shirley, had
missed his chance to meet her after Gram died in November 1986—two
months after Jerry Bancroft’s brawl-marred burial (which left
Sheila having to play the dual role of bereaved widow and referee).
Charlie and Susan, having just recently moved to Atlanta, misjudged
the drive time to Cumming, so they were running late that day. When
they arrived at Haynes Funeral Home, Shirley had been gone ten
minutes, but people were still yelling and crying about what she’d
done while there.

According to Bradley Roy, Gram was laid out
in her casket looking pretty, and her friends, neighbors, and
relatives were waiting for the memorial service to begin when in
stormed Shirley wearing a white dress. She went up to the casket,
hocked a loogie, and spat on her mother’s face. Stanley grabbed
Shirley’s arm and ordered her to clean off the spit. She snarled,
“Get your damn hand off me, or you’ll be dead before you hit the
floor.”

Shirley struggled to open her purse with her
free hand, and Bradley Roy saw a pistol butt. “Let her go,
Stanley,” he said. “She just wants to leave. Don’t you,
Shirley?”

“I do,” she said. “Soon as this bastard gets
his damn hands off me.”

“You’re gonna have to answer to God Almighty
for this,” Stanley said.

“I will,” she snapped. “But He got to answer
to me first.”

Shirley spun out of Stanley’s grip and headed
toward Pappy, who had remained seated by the wall throughout the
fracas. She gave him a twisted, scary smile, wagged a finger in his
face, and snarled, “You better hope you live forever, old man,
because when you die, you’ll burn in hell.” Pappy stared past her
like she wasn’t there, and she left as quickly as she’d come.

So said Bradley Roy, which made it the
absolute truth, so far as Charlie was concerned. Unfortunately,
Bradley Roy couldn’t tell his son-in-law what Gram’s sin had been,
and Charlie had wondered about it ever since.

After his wife’s death, Pappy’s life didn’t
change much. He watched rasslin and sat on the front porch chewing
the tobacco Momo brought by when he wasn’t in jail. Every year,
Pappy repeated his set piece on taxes. Stanley and Evangeline
ponied up their portions and loaned Tantie Marie her share at ten
percent interest, the maximum allowed by the Bible, to be repaid
when Pappy passed on to his reward and the farm became theirs, all
theirs, to sell as quickly and for as much as possible. Pappy
listened with characteristic ill humor to the flattery of kinfolk
who came to visit, Charlie suspected, not for love, but for
land.

The stakes grew higher as Forsyth’s
population exploded and real estate values shot up. In the 1990s,
developers showed up on Pappy’s porch, hats in hand, asking how
much money he’d take for his land. For a man who claimed he was
ready to give up his farm rather than pay property taxes, he was
amazingly uncooperative, vowing he’d rather shoot them than desert
his birthright. No doubt they’d heard he kept a gun handy. They
left and didn’t come back.

And so Pappy just kept rockin’ and spittin’
and gettin’ more ornery. The last time Charlie had been in Forsyth
County, exactly two decades after his first visit, he and Momo got
into an argument over flying the Rebel flag on the Fourth of July.
Charlie, who had come to resent even being at Pappy’s house, saw
the flag as an insult to the United States as well as his liberal
Yankee world view. After Momo threatened to kill him with his bare
hands, the old man called Charlie a “nigger-loving cocksucker” and
ordered him to get off the property. Armed with his double-barreled
twenty-gauge shotgun, Pappy followed Charlie outside. Charlie
retreated to his van and stood beside it. Pappy fired once—not
exactly at Charlie, but not away from him either, killing a crow in
a nearby oak tree. As Charlie ducked behind his van, Stanley burst
from the house yelling about hunting out of season. Bradley Roy
came out behind his brother-in-law and calmly took the gun from
Pappy, unloaded the shells, and put the live round in his pocket,
saying, “That’s enough fireworks for today, don’t you think?”