Little Altars Everywhere (5 page)

I had deliberately not taken a single drink. Wanted to come home sober, wanted to see Siddalee myself—sober.

I said to Vivi, Get off your high horse. That’s my daughter in there too.

She screamed, You cheap sonovabitch, you didn’t even want to pay for the surgery! I’m the one who handled everything, don’t you show up here now acting like you’re Ozzie-goddamn-Nelson. You were gone when I needed you. I don’t need you now.

She started to slap me, but I caught her hand. It was
shaking. I looked at my wife and she looked tireder than usual, thinner.

Then Siddalee was standing there at the doorway between the den and the living room. She was holding on to the doorsill and I could see her feet on the tile floor. I wanted to slip something up underneath those little bare feet because I knew that floor must of felt cold, with her just out of bed. The bandages and her bathrobe made her look like a real short war veteran. It like to tore my heart out.

I let go of Vivi’s hand and she went over to Siddalee, put her arm around her. My little girl looked so pale, and someone had braided her hair so it wouldn’t get in her face. She couldn’t see me anymore.

I started to move toward her, and then she said: Daddy, don’t hurt me.

Those words killed me. They stabbed me in the neck. My little girl was scared of me, and my marriage was rotting in the fields.

I said to Viviane, What have you been doing to this child to make her say that?

I went to grab my wife by the shoulders, not to hurt her, but to shake out whatever words she’d filled my daughter with to turn her away from me.

And then the child started crying, terrified. Tears squeezing their way out from under those bandages.

Vivi said, Now look what you’ve done. She’s not supposed to cry. It’s not good for her eye. Are you satisfied, Shep? Well, are you?

Then Siddalee was leaning against Vivi. Her legs were shaking under that little robe, goosebumps on her freckled calves. I should of picked her up in my arms and carried her gentle and placed her back into that four-poster bed with all the pillows. But I didn’t, goddamn it. I didn’t.

And then it was too late, the moment up and went, like time always does. They took the bandages off and Siddalee’s eye didn’t wander anymore. She had to wear a patch for a little while, but my daughter didn’t end up with any scars you could see.

Sometimes, when I’d wake up in the middle of the night wheezing from the asthma, sitting up in the chair because I couldn’t breathe lying down, I would think: I can’t breathe because of all the things I’m too scared to do. But after getting up and pouring a drink or two, I quit thinking that way. I just kept putting cotton in the ground and hunting and doing what my Daddy raised me to do.

Then one regular day after Siddalee’s been back in school a couple months, Pap tells me to go check on the hoe-hands at the lower place. He says, Son, you gotta learn to keep your eyes open. Farming isn’t no goddamn New Orleans house party.

That riles me, like he knew it would, him always acting like I’m the biggest playboy in the state of Louisiana. He knows just how to get under my skin. Here I am, a grown man with four children, and he has
to watch over everything I do, like I can’t tie my own shoes.

I say, Awright, Pap, I’ll take care of it.

And my Daddy takes off out of the field. I guess after that he stopped at the post office to get his mail, then drove on home. It was August and sticky hot, getting on toward noon. I guess he figured he’d read his mail and have himself a glass of ice tea. He was sitting in that white rocker out in the breezeway. Had his shoes and socks off to let his feet relax. They say the radio was playing, so I guess he was probably listening to the noonday farm report.

He must of felt the pain in his chest for only a minute before he slumped over and fell out of the rocker. That bottle of nitroglycerine pills he’d been carrying around in his shirt pocket for years didn’t do him one bit of good. That bottle rolled out of his grasp over toward that big old pot of hen and chicken that Mama’d been growing forever. He couldn’t get his hands on that bottle to un-screw the lid and put one of those pills on his tongue, which might of stopped all the rest of it from happening.

They say Mama was at the Piggly-Wiggly. She drove up in the blue Oldsmobile in a hurry because she didn’t want to be late with his noon meal. He always liked to eat his meals on time. She found him there laying in the breezeway.

She tells me she remembers thinking, I got to put this sack of groceries down careful. I got six bottles of RC Cola in here and I don’t want to break them.

Chaney, my right-hand man, and his wife, Willetta, are the ones who come out to the field to tell me. I’m standing under that big pecan tree where we always set up the water cooler. When they pull up in the flatbed truck I start to thinking, What the hell is Letta doing out here? She’s supposed to be cleaning up at the house.

Chaney and Letta walk over, Chaney’s head hanging down the way it does when he’s ashamed. When he gets to me, he takes off his cap and wipes his face with a rag out of his pocket. Your daddy done passed, Mister Shep, he tells me.

What you talkin’ about, man? I ask him, thinking maybe he means Pap had driven by in a car.

He says, Mister Baylor Senior done passed, boss. Your daddy dead.

He is standing there with that blue denim cap in his hands, fingering the bill of it. And he’s crying like you wouldn’t expect a worker like Chaney to do. Letta hands me a cup of water from the cooler. I can taste the tinniness of that water and hear the hoe-hands mumbling in the distance. For a second the specks of cotton I can see out of the corner of my eyes confuse me. They look for a minute like snow in another climate far away from the land where I was born and raised.

By the time I get over to Mama and Daddy’s, his body has already been taken to the funeral home. The only thing left is his shoes next to the rocker. Big black
broke-in Red Wings sitting there, pair of white socks tucked inside. I bend down to pick one of them up and I can still smell the Ammons’ Heat Powder he’d sprinkled on the inner sole that morning. I can see how his wide feet had pushed out at the sides of those shoes, just the way my own do.

The funeral feels like a strange political cook-up. Hundreds of Pap’s friends from North and South Louisiana are there. Hell, even Russell Long puts in an appearance. And you can’t count the number of colored people there, babies hanging on their mamas’ hips. Vivi tells me what to wear, and my kids are dressed like little royalty. I think, How did my children turn out to look so damn blue-blooded?

We get home that evening and I go back to the bedroom. I bathe and get ready for bed and don’t say nothing to nobody. I climb in the bed with a copy of
U.S. News and World Report
, propping up my pillows like I do so I can breathe.

And then my children start coming back there. I can hear their feet slapping against the wood floor. First Siddalee. Then Baylor, then Lulu, and finally Little Shep. Every one of them, climbing up on the bed with me like we hadn’t ever done before. We’re not the kind of family that does cozy things. But they all pile up in there with me like a little bird had come and told them to do it. They don’t say anything. And I sure as hell don’t have any words that can get unstuck from my throat.

Then Little Shep says, Read us what you’re reading, Daddy.

And so I start reading out loud from the damn magazine, don’t even know what I’m reading about. I just read out loud whatever words are there on the page.

Vivi comes to the door then, rubbing cold cream on her face like always, and I see her look at the five of us. I can smell Siddalee’s hair, all clean from just being shampooed, and her eyes are focused on the page I’m reading. Like she understands all about world affairs. Then Vivi walks over and sits on the edge of the bed. I keep on reading out loud, and somewhere in the middle of that article I start to cry. Slow tears, like my body isn’t exactly sure how to do it. I keep reading till I can’t read anymore, and then my wife takes the magazine out of my hands and lays it on the nightstand. She takes that magazine from me and lays it down, and she does the whole thing like she loves me. She makes that one little gesture with tenderness I’ve never seen before. Maybe she’s been doing things like that all along, and I just haven’t seen. Then she climbs up in the bed with us. I can feel all my children’s bodies still warm from their baths, and smell the sachet smell of Vivi’s gown. They’re like little animals, we’re all like animals on that bed in the back bedroom. Nobody says much of anything. I know we’re all crying, but you can’t tell where one person’s crying leaves off and the other person’s begins.

My Daddy has just died. He’s left me three plantations to run. I thought he’d live forever. I am thirty-
three years old and half the time I can’t even breathe. But this one night with all my family in the bed with me is like living on a safe island. It’s the least lonely I’ve been in my whole life.

I wish I could have more times like this to tell about. I’d give them to my children, gift-wrap them myself to put in front of their eyes.

Baylor, 1963

I
t’s summer at Spring Creek, and Sidda, Little Shep, Lulu, and me are getting so good at stilt-walking that I bet Ringling Brothers is gonna call us before school starts up again. Maybe we’ll get hired to perform for a bunch of money and Mama and Daddy will let us travel all over the world. And we’ll only come home to Louisiana for trips to Spring Creek.

You have to understand that Spring Creek is heaven on earth for a Louisiana summer. It is always ten degrees cooler than any other spot in the state, everybody swears to it. We talk about it all year long. When things get bad crazy in the middle of winter and the windows are all shut, and Mama has her nervous stomach, she will sometimes say: Hey yall, come over here and let’s talk about Spring Creek! And then everything gets a little better.

Every year on the day after Memorial Day, our maid
Willetta helps us pack up the car to head out to our camp at Spring Creek for almost three solid months. The T-Bird is stuffed to the gills with our swimsuits, the first-aid kit, tons of Six-Twelve, stacks of funny-books, and the picnic Willetta has fixed for us. And even though there’s that hump in the back seat where it’s only supposed to fit two, three of us sit back there without pinching or fighting or anything.

Mama says, Oh, I just wish this car was a convertible! Don’t yall?!

Yes ma’am! we all say back.

We’re so happy to be leaving Pecan Grove. We might live on a nice plantation, but sometimes it can wear you out.

She says, Well, let’s just roll down all the windows and
pretend
we’re in a convertible!

And we pull out of the Pecan Grove driveway with the car air-conditioner cranked up full-blast and the windows rolled down—which is a sure sign that Mama is ready for a good summer.

All the rest of the stuff that can’t fit into the car—the town water in huge glass bottles with cork stoppers, the linens and clean towels, the tractor inner-tubes, folding chairs, ice chests full of food, and the extra rotary fans—Chaney drives all that stuff out in the pickup. He never stays long in Spring Creek because they don’t have colored people out there.

Mama begs Willetta to come out every year and stay for the summer, but Willetta says, Thank you, but no
thank you, Miz Vivi. I rather have my teefs all pulled out than spend the night in that parish.

Caro with her kids and Necie with hers follow right behind us all the way out there. Mama honks the horn and we wave out the windows, and we’re a wagon train heading to summer—leaving all the daddies in town to work and only come out every couple of weeks. Which is fine with me, because Mama and the Ya-Yas are lots more fun without the men around. They don’t wear makeup when we’re at Spring Creek, just a dab of lipstick and toenail polish. And they don’t use hairspray at all. They wear men’s big shirts and short-shorts and ratty old tennis shoes, and at night they sleep in tee-shirts and panties. They only cook when they feel like it, they read tons of paperback books, and if one of them farts, they laugh their heads off and yell out: Kill it! Step on it! Don’t let it get away! When Mama is at Spring Creek, she does only what she wants to.

But when Daddy and the other men come out for a weekend, the Ya-Yas start getting ready on Friday morning. Fixing little appetizers and tweezing their eyebrows, and Mama gets all nervous. It’s the only time that Mama makes me put Vitalis on my hair, and she tells us exactly what we can and can’t tell Daddy about what we’ve been doing.

See, Mama and the Ya-Yas all came out to Spring Creek when they were little. All their families had camps and their mamas brought them out here while their daddies worked in town. When they were
teenagers, the Ya-Yas just owned Spring Creek during the summers—that’s how they put it. You should see the pictures of Mama and Necie and Caro, and sometimes Teensy, how pretty they were then with their hats and sunglasses. Mama drove a Willys jeep and Caro had a red convertible, and they did anything in the world they wanted. We egg them on to tell us stories about the trouble they used to cook up back then.

Spring Creek has always been in a dry parish, the Ya-Yas say. And it’s our job to moisten the place up!

Our camp is named
Sans Souci
, which means “without a care.” We have a carved wood sign hanging out in front. All you have to say is “Sans Souci” and everybody knows where it is. It’s real big and right in the middle of the piney woods, just a short hike away from three different swimming holes.

When we open up the camp at first, it smells the same as ever: all musty and old and good. It is dirty from being empty for nine months. But the Ya-Yas give us our assignments and we get right to work. Daddy-long-legs are crawling out everywhere, and there’s so much dust that Sidda has to take out her wheezer.

Mama always has us clean the kitchen up first. She says, A good camper always does her kitchen right from the get-go! She’s right, too. Because once we get the kitchen spotless, then we can go in there and wash our hands and eat Letta’s ham and cheese sandwiches and lemonade and cookies and kick our feet up while the rest of the place is still a mess.

Mama and Necie and Caro do everything themselves, with only us to help them. They hook up the well, turn on the electricity, and get rid of the dirt-dobbers that have built nests under the eaves. They just take over, and they don’t call Daddy or any servicemen to help, even though we do have a phone out there. (That phone is the oldest phone in the universe. If you got hit in the head with that big black phone, it’d knock you out cold and you’d die dead.)

Sans Souci has screen windows running all the way around it. It’s like living in a porch the whole time. There are smooth plank floors and a huge, long sleeping porch with three ceiling fans. All the beds are lined up, one after the other, plenty for everyone.

Two-dozen people can sleep at Sans Souci, if they’re not picky, Mama says.

Each bed has a little reading lamp just behind your head. And the way the fans hang from the ceiling, every one of us gets this nice little breeze. We never suffocate from the heat unless there’s a storm and the electricity goes out. We do our best sleeping at Sans Souci.

We’ve got a dressing room and a shower in the middle of the camp, but they are awful hot to spend much time in. The toilet is in a little green closet off the side of the sleeping porch, and we keep a thousand funny-books and
Reader’s Digests
in there. You have to pull down on a chain to flush, and the water is brownish from the well. You can’t drink that water without boil
ing it because of all the germs you can’t see. There’s a little basin just outside the john, and when you wash your face, the water has a tinny smell to it. It’s the kind of water that makes your skin squeak. When we get through brushing our teeth, we always have to wrap our toothbrushes in tinfoil so the bugs won’t crawl on them.

Oh, but let me tell you, the front room is the best. It’s huge and long with a glider at one end and two couches and a rattan chaise longue, which Mama calls her “Throne.” And at the other end, there is a long table covered with a yellow-and-white-checked oilcloth, and it doesn’t matter what you spill on it because it just wipes clean. You don’t ever have to worry about what you break or spill at Spring Creek. It’s not like at home, where you get a whipping if you drop a mayonnaise jar on the tile floor. In front of the camp, we have six Navy hammocks strung between the pines around the fire pit. You can lay up in those hammocks all day long and read funny-books. Or get somebody to push you real fast and then jump out and feel like you’re flying for half a second. And at night, oh, at night! You can lay there (after you’ve put on plenty of Six-Twelve) and watch the lightning bugs and the fire, and sometimes we sing and dance and tell ghost stories.

We keep our stilts with our names painted on them under the camp so they won’t get rained on and warp. But we keep the huge wooden electrical spool that Daddy got from the phone company outside, no mat
ter what the weather. I can walk backwards on that spool all the way to the gate and back without falling. Me and Sidda can walk on it together like a real circus act. While we’re performing on the spool, Necie’s kids get Sidda to sing like Little Brenda Lee and they sit there and clap for us.

At Spring Creek, I get to do what I want, when I want. Go to bed when I want and wake up when I want. When I wake up I just put my swimsuit right on without even fooling with clothes. All of us kids share the same clothes at Spring Creek. We just have a big chest full of shorts and tee-shirts and seersucker pajamas and that’s it. Mornings are good at Spring Creek. Sometimes when I wake up, the sunrise streams in through the screen windows so full of all these yellows and oranges and pinks, and I lay there in my bed. And before I’m all the way awake, I think that I’m in the back seat of the T-Bird at the Roxy Drive-In watching color spread across the screen! That is just the way it is at Spring Creek.

Mornings at our camp Mama isn’t shaking all over, trying to fix a big breakfast like she does at Pecan Grove. I just walk out to the table and there’s a bunch of cereal boxes lined up with sugar and peaches. And I get the milk out of the short old icebox that has a good hum to it, and I fix just what I feel like. My throat never closes up on me at the camp. I eat all day long.

I can take my cereal outside and eat in the sun. And Mama and the Ya-Yas are sitting on the steps drinking
coffee and smoking cigarettes. Mama rubs the top of my head and says, How you doing, sleepy-bones?

Then she starts singing “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’!” from
Oklahoma!
, one of her favorite musicals.

Mama leans back on the steps and says: I adore every single one of yall! I adore Spring Creek! This is how I was
meant
to live! No responsibility! I hate responsibility! And she laughs and leans her face back in the sun and says, Yall don’t forget to put on your Coppertone! And Lulu, put that zinc oxide on your nose!

I finish my cereal and head out for the creek for a morning swim with Necie and the rest of the kids, eleven of us in all. See, at Spring Creek, Mama isn’t the only Mama I have. I’ve got my pick of whatever Ya-Ya is around. We walk through the woods for our early swim. We go down the hill and I always stop at this little place where water comes out of a concrete culvert and makes a little pool. The farmer who lives by there has got it dammed up. I count tadpoles in there and rinse my face, and on the way back from swimming I stick my feet in there to cool them off. I think it’s a magic pool, because one morning I was there and counted twelve tadpoles and when I came back there was nineteen! All kinds of things like that happen at Spring Creek.

The best swimming hole is Little Spring Creek. You’ve got Big Spring Creek, Little Spring Creek, and Dido Creek, but Little Spring Creek is the best. It has a sandy beach where we lay our towels and stuff, and
the ladies set up their chairs and the ice chest. Right around there is the shallow part where the little babies can play. And then there’s this big log that divides the shallow end from the deep end. You can sit on that log and watch everything—the ladies rubbing on their oil, big trees on both sides of the creek, dogs sleeping in the sun on the bank, turtles lined up sunning themselves on the slimy log that none of us fool with. We call it the Turtle Log. It’s all theirs. We have our log, and they have theirs. You can look down at the deep end where there’s a rope swing hung from a huge tree, where you can swing out like Tarzan and holler before you drop down into the water below. You’ve got to be sure and let go of that rope, though, because one time a little boy whose brother was a friend of my cousin got scared and wouldn’t let go, and he hit into the tree and smashed his skull in! We didn’t see it, but we all knew about it. So it doesn’t matter how scared you are, you’ve got to let go of that rope and drop down into the deep end.

Your first dive into the water in the morning is the finest thing in the world. It’s never too cold. It’s Louisiana summer creek water, not some northern-state water—where I’ve never been, but I know it’s so cold it takes your breath away and would give Daddy a heart attack. Little Spring Creek is the kind of water that lets you wake up slow, lets you roll over on your back and float and stare at the clouds without getting the shivers, without having to swim fast to keep from
freezing to death. Mama says, This is the kind of water that spoils Southerners for any other part of the country.

All that happens in Little Spring Creek is that your skin comes all alive and maybe a dragonfly lands on your shoulder with the blue-green colors of their wings shining in the sunlight. You don’t swat dragonflies because they’re the good bugs. They go around eating up the bad ones that itch you to death.

Man, we have the best tractor inner-tubes in the state of Louisiana. They’re from my Daddy’s farm machinery and Mama painted “Walker” on them with white paint, but we still let other people use them. They’re big enough for four of us to sit on, and you can paddle out into the deep end and then—real careful—you can stand up on the inner-tube! Sidda and me do it the best: stand up real slow and hold hands and balance ourselves. We stand there on that tractor inner-tube perfectly balanced, with the sky a big blue tent over our heads. We stand real still and then we start rocking back and forth as hard as we can and still try to stay on. We see how long we can do it and how hard before we fall off. The only thing is, those inner-tubes have got those little nozzles where you put the air in, and if you aren’t careful you fall down on them and scrape your body up something awful. Almost every kid in Spring Creek has got one of those long scratches on their bodies. You’re just lucky if it doesn’t make you bleed, because then one of the Ya-Yas will make you
get out and they put Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid on you from the blue tin first-aid kit. And then you have to sit on the blanket with them, and they all say, I just hope he’s had his latest tetanus booster.

Anyway, what we usually do is this. We swim in the morning. Then when it starts to get around noon, we pack up and walk over to Spring Creek Shop-and-Skate, which is your only roller rink and grocery store in Central Louisiana. Inside the store it is all cool, with the concrete floor under your feet and the jukebox playing in the skating rink. And they have wooden boxes with screen lids filled with crickets, and next to that they have worms and shiners for fishing. All the Ya-Yas have known Nadine, the owner, forever. And we get our bread and milk from her, and the big blocks of ice that you have to carry out to the car with these big iron tongs. If you drop that ice on your foot you’ll be crippled forever, so you better be careful. Then we go back to the camp during the heat of the day, and play with the old slot machine that Mama rigged up so it doesn’t cost a nickel to play. And we have bologna sandwiches and Fritos and Cokes and maybe take a nap or do whatever we plain feel like.