The Garden of Forking Family


    It was Thursday afternoon. I was in the pea patch checking email, proof irrefutable that rednecks are just like everybody else these days.
    I sold off my Daddy’s cow pasture to a developer who put in a cul-de-sac just shy of our old barn. I’m in a running stand-off with the cable company because they won’t string a line another tenth of a mile to hook me up. The lawyer who lives at the end of the cul-de-sac has everything. If I put a lawn chair somewhere between the old watermelon patch and the corn rows, it’s as if Internet rains down straight from the Almighty to my Dell Inspiron.

    I take classes at the university. Some days I go the garden that fed my Mama for some 60 years to do research for classes or to read the New York Times online, laughing to myself all the while about bringing Jews and liberals to the bean hills of South Forrest County. I haven’t planted a damn thing here except three Big Boy tomato plants that I let go wormy and blighty before I even had the first white bread sandwich. Organic gardening, I called it.

    At a lecture last week I heard that it’s only a myth that every Southern family has a drunk uncle and a crazy aunt. I sat on the porch last night with Uncle Rubin, a twelve pack of Bud, and a bottle of store bought whiskey, telling him he ain’t even true. “You ain’t sorry or no account or liquored up or nothin’,” I said, “you’re just a by-product of the gothic imagination. And Aunt Wilma was too.”

    “Damn shame,” he said.

    “Yep.”

    I had an email from an on-again, off-again, cattin’ around again, no account ex. He wanted to go to my Aunt Wilma’s funeral. Can you even feature such? He didn’t know my Aunt Wilma. Not really. Not more than a nod acquaintance from across the church pot luck the two times a year he went. He and my family had long determined that the path of least violence was keeping as far apart as possible when you lived on the same land and shared younguns in common.
    Either he was hard up for some banana pudding, or he was pushing again to prove I’d take him back after near about anything. My cousin Jan was the one who ratted him out and cussed him out the last time he was up to no good. I don’t know what kind of balls he thought he had on him to show up at her mama’s funeral, but I wouldn’t bet a rusty nail for his chances of getting them past her unscathed.

    His name was Carter, but we called him Cooter. He hated that seeing as how he liked to talk all Dan Rather like and put on the pretense that he didn’t grow up on the creek just like everybody else.

    The way I see it, the only thing Cooter wanted with me twenty-odd years past prom night was to prove somebody thought he still had it. I figure if he has to keep proving it, it ain’t so. I don’ t think so, and he don’t either. By the looks the looks of it, didn’t take his latest blond escapade long to figure that out.

    I tried to think what Jan would say, what my Aunt Wilma would say, what my Granny would say. Granny never did cotton to Cooter. Ran him off with a gun the year we graduated from high school and he knocked up Linda Miller while I was wearing his promise ring.
    “I’m 75 years old,” she said, pointing the deer rifle right at his neck. “I can die on this porch, or I can die at Parchman Prison. Ain’t no skin off me.”

    I try to make a show of being from the New South from time to time. Granny was old school South Mississippi, where the men were real men, and the women beat the stew out of them.

    I got a job at Piggly Wiggly in Wiggins that year. Cooter skipped the county to do a turn off shore, and Linda got smart and passed her baby off as Brian Sellers’. He might not be any bigger prize than Cooter, but he has family land, and he was good for a pulpwood haul whenever his kids needed braces or school clothes. I married him my ownself once for all of fourteen months for less reason than that.

    Granny was a pack rat. I learned in school this was a treatable disorder, but it would have taken better women than me and Jan to say so on a Hudson’s Saturday. We carried her into Hattiesburg twice a month every month from the time we got our learner’s permits to the time we lowered her fat body into the ground. The three of us sorted through the salvage goods like prospectors at a fool’s mine, shopped and unshopped, and hauled home a Buick load of slightly flawed, slightly smoked clothes and beat up canned goods whether we needed them or not.

    When Granny died, me and Jan set fire to her house so we wouldn’t have to clean it out. We don’t own to it as it was not directly done, and our cousin Bud has got himself a good town job with the insurance company that we wouldn’t want to wreck for him. We didn’t really burn it down intentional like so much. We just mentioned how a fire would save us slop-bucket load of troubles, and then we left a sack of fire crackers amongst the overgrown azaleas and set the kids loose to play while we picked blackberries on the fence line.

    Carter Junior, CJ as he is better known, and the cat Foxy lit out like their Fruit of the Looms was burning when the scrap pile under the porch caught flame, but we feared in our hearts the hound dog Brutus was not going to recognize his dilemma in time. We called to him over and over until finally, he sauntered out and sat at my feet, both of us staring in dull amazement as the fire caught hold of the old wood siding.

    The fact that it burnt clear to the ground wasn’t our fault so much as it was on account of Jan forgot and left her cell phone on the kitchen table right next to the moldy sweet potato pie we hadn’t even thrown out yet from the funeral food. Nobody called the volunteer firefighters so they could come stand to the road with us and watch it burn. Jan says we would have thought to do something before the Johnson grass sparked up, but we’ll never know seeing as how Ricky Young happened by and called up all his forest service buddies. They didn’t give a flea’s flip about Granny’s house. They just didn’t want to spend the next week tromping after brush fires. So one and all they come for miles and set to working on containment more such than salvation.

    CJ stood solemn faced taking in the work wrought by his eight-year-old hands. Then when the last flames died down to embers, and we had nothing left but concrete stumps poking up from the ground, he said, “Cool. Can we do this again?”

    I was working at the post office then, and Jan was living with Aunt Wilma and Uncle Rubin while she waited for her settlement for divorcing Greg Pittman. We couldn’t get but two channels on the TV, but we took to drinking vodka punch and watching Oprah in the afternoons. That’s when I decided I was better than my circumstances and told Cooter he better get himself a good job while I went back to school.

    Cooter said he got a night job at a warehouse distribution center, and then come to find out Jan and Ricky Young, who got themselves set up for a date at the fire, saw him at a hotel lounge in Hattiesburg. He was living off the tab of some blonde divorcee who ain’t even got kin in the area. Distribution, my Granny’s fat white butt. Cooter Hill is a one man receiving department.

    I read the email again unable to work up a good enough sense of shock. It ain’t like he was ever right. Comes a time when you just quit expecting a man to act like he knows he’s got on your bad side. He had no business coming to Aunt Wilma’s funeral. Folks would think we were back together. Then I’d have to go around talking up a date for when the divorce would come in. In my life, I’ve divorced the man twice and broke off an engagement with him three times. When he came back this last time, I didn’t go bothering God or the judge with it so as to save myself some paperwork on the next divorce.

    I told people we ran off and got re-hitched on a Florida beach, but we never made it past the Floribama bar, and we near about parted ways there when he danced a little too long with couple of girls from Georgia.

    “Not on my nickel,” I typed into my reply. “Not on CJ’s or Lisa’s or Julie’s neither. You show your face at the church, it’s your own hide.”

    “Mama,” Julie called from the back deck, “Miz Gracie is here with a potato salad. What should I do with it?”

    That was a good question considering my refrigerator and Jan’s too was already full. I gathered my laptop up in my arms like an electronic child and stood to make my way back to the house.
    Julie was twelve, and she belonged to Brian Sellers. She was the only one of his kids that I knew for a fact to really be his. Brian thought Julie was a half-sibling to Linda’s Jonathan, but they weren’t any blood kin. Jonathon was ten years older than Julie and had an untrustworthy chin and dark curly hair just like Cooter. He wasn’t any brother to Julie, but they shared CJ in common as a half-brother, and Brian’s name was on both their birth certificates, so it was close enough.
    Anywhere else that might be strange, but it was a small town. Men that could hold a job and wouldn’t beat on you were in short supply. If you didn’t have a mind to hold on to one, you had no other option but to swap them around. Trouble was they all talked themselves up real good when they were trying to get up your skirt. It was easy enough to forget then and there why nobody’d kept ‘em around for long before.
    Brian is a good man and good father. I shoulda stuck it out with him. If I’d cared an inkling for him, I would have.
    Me and Cooter have a daughter named Lisa who’s three years younger than Jonathan. She was six when I married Brian, and I feared something awful that the day would come when I’d have to tell her the boy was her real brother and not anybody to be messing around with. Turns out he was too much like Cooter to look good to her nohow, and by now we’ve embarrassed her clear out of the state. She got a scholarship to Auburn without even watching Oprah, and off she went. There’s no accounting for some things. The girl is smarter than me and Cooter put together, and I don’t reckon she’ll ever come home again to stay.
    I was looking for her to come in for the funeral, though, and it was a disappointment to get called to the house for potato salad instead of a moved away daughter.
    I thanked Gracie Pittman, Greg’s sister, who must have still been pissed about Jan’s divorce to have brought her funeral food to my house instead of taking it directly to Jan where she could see her own nephews.
    “I’m so sorry for your loss, Kayla,” she said.
    “I know,” I said. “We’ll miss her. She was a nut and a half. But she’d been poorly for some time, and just never was the same after Granny went.”
    “It’s been a rough year for ya’ll.”
    “It has,” I answered for lack of anything more profound to say about Granny and Aunt Wilma giving up the ghost so close together and Cooter and Greg both out chasing tail through it all.
    “This too shall pass.”
    “I sure as shit hope so.”
    Gracie was slow to come up with an acceptable platitude in reply to that. She was a good Baptist who sincere as all get out thought she was a genuine comfort despite having not spoke more than a paragraph to me in ten years on not even made eye contact since her brother ran off on my sister—or vice versa depending on your point of view. She plopped her Tupperware down on the kitchen island and mumbled her goodbyes. I followed her as far as the foyer, watched the storm door thud shut behind her and went back to the kitchen where CJ was beating on the green plastic bowl of potato salad with a blue plastic light saber. It lit up every time he banged into the corner of the bowl, and he made whooshing sounds with his mouth.

    “Lisa hasn’t called?”

    Julie stood with the refrigerator door open staring into it for nary a good reason but curiosity. She didn’t eat enough to care what folks had brought. She just wanted to see. “Oh, yeah. She called while you were outside.”

    “Is she almost here?”

    “Um…not really.”

    “What’s that mean?”

    “She asked to speak to her dad, and I said he lived in town now with a new lady, and she screamed a bad word at me and said we’d see her on a cold Sunday in July.”

    “She what?”

    “She said she was driving past the last Hattiesburg exit as we spoke, and she was headed to New Orleans for a tattoo and a belly piercing.”

    I let out a long breath. She was blowing smoke. I’d get a tattoo before Lisa would. Hell, I had a tattoo on my ankle, and Lisa had come from the womb mortified by it. But there was trouble brewing here.

    “Lisa didn’t know about her dad?”

    “Nope.”

    “Shit.”

    “That’s what she said.”

    I forgot to tell my own flesh and blood that I was split up from her father again? I rubbed my head where a pain had shot up fierce and sudden. I tried calling my child’s cell phone and got a message that the customer was out of service.

    I moved my thumb and forefinger to rub between my eyes just as the potato salad flopped off the kitchen island in a glorious triple summersault that left it splattered in huge globs across the linoleum floor. CJ was backing out of the kitchen, light saber hidden behind his back, and a deadly innocent look about his face. Unlike Lisa, who was nothing like any of us, my youngest was too much like his father. And I had a soft spot for him for miles. Maybe it was because he was my baby, coming to me after I already had one half raised and another near to school age. Maybe it was because I saw in him the possibility of what Cooter could be if he weren’t so good for nothing.

    The upshot of that was I couldn’t fuss on CJ good for anything, and I was raising up another rotten apple that wouldn’t fall near far enough from the tree.

    “Let the dogs in,” I said, and I walked out of the kitchen to sit in the bathroom for no other reason than two minutes of not thinking about what to do next.


...to be continued...