A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Part 5

In the years since Maize, I have tried to see things right, but there is never a clear, clean line between what is mine and what belongs to others. In New Ulm, Texas, I spent three weeks in jail, and later-alone, dried out-I borrowed a man and his car in the Carraba.s.sett Valley.

The Users of Memory.

Netta Cartwright believes these are the things that will bring her husband Franklin back from the dead: thick Velveeta sandwiches, fresh air, plenty of talk and music. She throws the windows open, though it is October in Boise and the smoke-filled breeze whips the lacy curtains, makes them dance in the near-cold. Netta works the radio dial the way other retired women learn to spin the Bingo basket up at St. Mark's on Thursdays-90 percent wrist, 10 percent luck. She turns up the radio's volume when something good comes in: Johnny Paycheck or "The Wabash Cannon-ball." She taps her foot and tries to find the music's rhythm and then tries to pa.s.s it on to Franklin.

"You hear that, honey?" she yells, her foot cracking thunder, louder than the radio now.

Carlene, Netta and Franklin's eldest daughter, watches her mother and shakes her head, amazement and disgust and weariness all rolling up into one big ball. "How can you be sixty-three and not know anything?" she asks Netta. Carlene is sorting through a bowl of b.u.t.ter mints, picking out the pinks and slowly eating them.

Netta is too busy to answer or to even listen. She must concentrate on the slippery rhythm, pick it up, then get it all the way down to her foot.

Just an arm's length away from the women, Franklin lies on a bed near the living room window, and in the strictest sense he isn't dead, of course, but he's close enough: low vitals, a complete loss of hair, a mouth that won't form a single word. The left side of his body is soft and slack, useless as a flat tire. Netta has been known to walk right over and smack that arm or give a half-soft karate chop to the withered leg, hoping for even the slightest reaction. She'd appreciate a blink or even a nod from Franklin-thank you-but he just lies there, silent, not even a half-light s.h.i.+ning from his old, whiskered face.

Carlene finishes a mint and says to Netta, "There's got to be a special place in h.e.l.l for you." She moves next to her father, or someone that used to be her father, and lightly strokes his arm: his knuckles, his k.n.o.bby wrist, then the big, bare root of his elbow.

"Don't get him too comfortable, now," Netta says. "He's just about ready for his bath."

Carlene offers to take a turn cleaning him up, but Netta, as always, says no. To be honest, she doesn't trust Carlene with people. Dogs-yes. People-no. Netta considers her granddaughter Mandy a prime example of how Carlene can take a good person and screw her up, turn her inside out. During all the time that Mandy was growing up, she chewed her fingernails until they had to be iodined and taped; she ate her own long, brown hair; she would sit in front of the TV with her knees up in front of her and suck on them like a child trying to consume herself. Later, on Mandy's small body, the scaly patches of eczema bloomed.

Carlene won't admit to being a poor mother, but Netta thinks she has gotten the message, because after Mandy, Carlene doesn't have any more children; she turns to raising Australian Blue Heelers. They're a breed that cozies up to Carlene. They lick her face when she bends down to them. They bark and yelp for her when she crosses the yard. Her brown station wagon is scattered with dog kibble, and it doesn't even bother her; she just brushes the driver's seat clean and drives away.

When Netta comes back to the room carrying a big spaghetti pot filled with warm-bordering on hot-water, Carlene quickly steps aside like a pedestrian moving out of heavy traffic. Netta has generously added some of her Peaches and Cream bubble bath to the water, and a small eruption of sweet bubbles glides down the side of the pan and plops onto Franklin's sheet, but Franklin doesn't complain. He hasn't complained about anything in over four months, hasn't fed himself, hasn't been able to stand and take the short stroll down the hall to the bathroom, hasn't even been able to hold his own pruned-up p.e.c.k.e.r to pee since they put the catheter in.

Months ago, the doctors advised Netta to find a good nursing facility, but all their words were like Chinese to her. She brought him home from the hospital and started at the beginning with him. "Your name is Franklin. You're seventy-two years old. That's the TV the kids gave us a couple of Christmases ago. We can't get channel nine because the d.a.m.n antenna's no good."

For once, Carlene and Netta agree on something: no hospitals, no old folks' home. Carlene's suggestion is to put Franklin in the living room, right by the window so that he can see out and-she doesn't tell her mother this part-so that he can gently make his escape from Boise and what must be to him a pretty dreary world.

Carlene believes these are the things that will push her father into the next best world: absolute quiet, smoldering pine incense, warmth and coaxing and a big window through which his soul can slip away. She pulls up a folding chair, sits next to his big bald head, and whispers to him: "Look out there and let go, Pop. It's time to let go."

The first time Netta overhears her whispering those things to Franklin she walks up and kicks Carlene's chair, would kick Carlene in that little, skinny, two-bit b.u.t.t of hers, but she can't get her leg up high enough. "Don't you dare," she hisses at Carlene.

Carlene turns on her mother. "Well look at you, all dressed up like the d.a.m.n Red Cross! Making him hang on so you won't have to be alone."

Carlene and Netta would gladly part company. They have managed to live as adults in the same city for the past twenty-two years, sidestepping each other except for Christmas and birthdays, but in their plan to bring Franklin home they suddenly need each other. Carlene comes over and spends the days with her father. Netta takes evenings and nights.

Both women are silent as Netta pulls the sheets back and prepares to wash Franklin. It's always a shock-that first, biting look at him: a scarecrow in T-s.h.i.+rt and socks; a pale, bony joke gone bad. Franklin, a licensed electrician for almost forty years, used to have a b.u.mper sticker on his white Ford truck. Electricians don't grow old. Their wiring just goes bad. Carlene says that for her that's almost the worst part-the blank, dragged-out look on her father's face.

"It takes time to get well," Netta says, mostly to herself and to the walls. She looks for hope in the smallest of her husband's gestures: a hiccup, a sudden, uncontrolled blinking of the eye. She knows the stories of people who have come cras.h.i.+ng up out of comas, big and sleepy as bears at the end of eternal winters.

She begins scrubbing Franklin's feet, starting on his soles, rubbing in much the same way as she cleans her kitchen linoleum. Carlene half expects to see her lather up a Brillo pad.

"Be a little gentle, will you?" Carlene tells her.

"He likes it," Netta says. "He likes the stimulation. It's good for him."

Carlene has to go out and sit in her station wagon to cool down-Netta makes her that mad. She leans her head tiredly against the driver's window. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply the earthy, tranquilizing smell of her dogs.

Netta is preparing for Halloween, which is in four days. She puts her chubby hand, with four fingers up, in front of Franklin's face. "Four days," she says to him, loud and slowly. "One, two, three, four," she counts, making each finger bob. She gathers brown, crinkly leaves and randomly sprinkles them like fairy dust over the living room end tables. She sets a big, uncarved pumpkin on top of the TV so that the rabbit ears stick up behind it. She rolls Franklin temporarily away from the picture window while she decorates it with packaged cobwebs, then pushes him back in place.

She is surprised at how Franklin fits in with the holiday decor. Paper-skinned and mummy-like, he lies in front of the webbed window, already fitting in, contributing his best to Halloween. Netta can see that. She can see him struggling to come back, to move, to talk again so that they can have those crazy morning conversations that make him laugh and shake his head and threaten to go see if his old girlfriend, Danielle Berry, will take him in. Netta thinks, h.e.l.l, if it would make him recover any faster, she'd double-time Danielle right over to his bedside, tie her there, feed both of them mashed potatoes and the baby-soft food of recovery.

Carlene can feel Halloween out there, the air thin and solemn, but unlike Netta she just can't get the heart for it. Nothing out of the ordinary decorates her living room. Drake and Faye, her two favorite Blue Heelers, snooze at the end of the Herculon couch, though they aren't really festive in any way, except for their braided brown and orange collars perhaps. Drake's eyes are closed but they twitch, indicating-somewhere-the murky dreams of a dog.

Even though Carlene and her husband Ham have been invited to a costume party, Carlene decides that she won't be anything this year. Last year she was a Viking, and Ham hung a potato six inches off his belt and told everyone he was a dictator. This year Ham has gone down to a local playhouse and rented a King Neptune outfit. For days he has carried his mock trident around the house, goosing Carlene with it, trying to get her in the mood.

"Can't you see I've got other things to think about?" she tells Ham, who, as Neptune, is only momentarily put off.

The fact is, she cannot get her father to let go, despite the incense she burns, despite the calming voice she uses to tell him that everything is okay here, that all of his work is finished, that he can stop holding on. She waits, of course, until Netta has left the house for the morning.

She rummages in Netta's haphazard filing drawer and finally fishes out what she's after. She carries a green vinyl packet marked Riverside Memorial Garden back to her father's bedside. She opens it to a page with a photograph of marble statuary, shows it to him, and reminds her father that everything has been taken care of. It takes Carlene a few minutes to find it on the down-to-scale map, but she finally pinpoints plot 124D, puts her finger on it, and shows her father. "Kinda on the hillside," she tells him, "looking down over the river. Remember? It's real nice. You helped pick it out a long time ago." Carlene hopes that this will be one more string cut for the old man who seems not her father, but only a man using her father's name.

She gets down at bed level and looks right into his face, but it's like peering into a cavern. He looks back at her with the blank, rheumy eyes of sheep or cows, and suddenly she wants it done, she wants to take a kitchen towel and shoo his soul right out the window. "Go on. Bye-bye. Vamoose." She imagines a white steamy haze scooting out the window, then rising higher and higher above the yard, a gauzy hand waving back at her. She knows that absolute relief could come for her in a moment that quick.

Midmorning, Carlene feeds her father applesauce, which is pure torture for her-feeding a man she once thought put the stars in the sky. He would lead her out into the darkness when she was young and they would lean against the house and look up. Holding his cigarette, he would extend his arm up into the blackness until the faraway, orangy end of his Viceroy seemed to burn a star into place. "There. Another one for you," he would say, a sudden twinkling appearing way out there, and even when she was older-a woman lying in Ham's arms, a mother fixing endless baby bottles-the stars, in some sense, were still from her father.

When Netta arrives home for lunch, she wrinkles up her nose, wants to know what that smell is. "Kinda like Pine Sol," she says, looking behind the couch, then lifting the throw pillows.

"It's nothing, Mom. Nothing," Carlene says, knowing that Netta in no way could understand how pine eases and lifts a person from this life.

Netta has enrolled in a morning crafts cla.s.s at the Y, and Carlene asks her how it was.

"I left at the break," she tells Carlene. "Making grapes out of colored pipe cleaners is not a craft. Here," she says, bends and takes some books from her tote bag. "This is what I did."

She has checked books out of the library. The All New Book of Muscle Recovery. Better in 30 Days. The Home Care Manual. The lending period is three weeks, and Netta intends to memorize it all.

Carlene can feel the determined heat rising off her mother. She notices a thin line of perspiration on Netta's upper lip. Under the sleeves of her mother's cotton dress, there are the delicate beginnings of sweat rings. If Netta were not so dominating and petty, Carlene believes, she could feel halfway sorry for her.

All the little packages of saltines around the house, however, are there to remind her who her mother is. Netta, like some bag lady, shamelessly slips the little crackers into her purse whenever she goes to JB's or The Rib House, as if they are as complimentary as matchbooks. She says it's just automatic for her to take them; it's from the days when she had teething babies to always think about.

"Get over it, Mom. The last time you had a teething baby was more than forty years ago," Carlene tells Netta.

Carlene also notices how her mother slyly stashes away the last little piece of pie or cake or pizza, as if somehow she hasn't gotten her fair share. Weeks later Carlene finds these little treasures still unwrapped in the back of the refrigerator, mushy as jam and covered with soft, green fur.

"Honest to G.o.d," Carlene tells Ham on the night before Halloween when he surprises her with a six-pack of Old Milwaukee, "if I start squirreling things away like my mom, shoot me, please. You'll be doing everyone a favor." She grabs a pencil and uses it to open the flip-top can so she won't break her nail. She holds the beer up in a quick toast to Ham, then leans back and takes her first long, cold drink.

"Tell you what," he says. "I'm going to shoot you if you don't get a costume ready for tomorrow night."

Carlene's doorbell starts ringing at twilight the next evening. Goblins and rabbits, witches and ballerinas crowd her front porch, then drift noisily away when it is apparent that no one is going to answer. Carlene has exactly seven mini candy bars in a bowl, which means she has popped thirteen of them herself while sitting at the breakfast nook, feeling black and weightless, listening to her doorbell as it becomes one long, fluid ring.

Later, when Ham comes out of the bedroom dressed in a sea-blue off-the-shoulder robe with a cardboard crown barely balanced on his head and the gold trident flaking glitter everywhere, Carlene turns around on her stool, gawks at him, and finally claps. She knows that this is as good as Halloween will get for her.

Although Carlene is dressed in everyday jeans and a s.h.i.+rt when they leave for the party, Ham doesn't say a word, doesn't suggest disappointment in the least. In a tight spot Ham's discretion always comes through. He reaches down and puts his arm around her shoulder and as they walk toward the driveway they watch a tiny lion scurry down the street swinging an orange lantern, making bright arcs in the night.

On the way to the party, Ham suggests dropping by Carlene's parents' house since it is still early. Netta answers the door wearing an ap.r.o.n, the pockets stuffed to the top seams with Sugar Babies and Atomic Fire b.a.l.l.s. She throws her hands back and cannot stop laughing at Ham, who basks in her attention, strolling this way and that, thumping his trident on the wood floor.

Carlene walks over to her father in his bed. The polyspun cobwebs s.h.i.+mmer in the window next to him. His eyes are open, but she can't get him to look at her, and automatically her hand comes up, she snaps her fingers and softly swipes at his nose, a technique that never fails to get a dog's attention.

Carlene, for the life of her, can't explain whether she is watching a reverie or some tangled predicament. He is down to 117 pounds, his big, bare collarbone holding up the frailest of necks, and still he won't let go. All at once the anger that rises in her is so swift and complete that for a moment she can't get her breath. Her lips part and her shoulders lift two or three inches. She backs away from him, whoever he is, until she feels the chair behind her and sits down. She picks up a Golf Digest and fans herself and the air comes back to her in small, bitter waves.

Netta is feeding Franklin miniature marshmallows that night-a Halloween treat, she says-depositing them by two's and three's until his mouth is full. Franklin chews by rote, making a soft white soup which sticks in the corners of his mouth.

By the time Carlene and Ham leave, Carlene has her breath back and is brooding again, ready to wring Netta's neck. She sees that if nothing else works the old woman is bound to keep him alive with sugar.

There is a turkey scare two weeks before Thanksgiving. The news has reported a gross shortage of both fresh and frozen birds, which sends Netta into a tailspin. She hits five markets on her side of town, comes home with three frozen b.u.t.terball toms, six pounds of cranberries, enough yams for the block.

When she pulls into her driveway and stops the car, the memories start up, like a tune she can't get out of her head-Franklin bustling out the front door to help her carry in groceries. He'd be peeking in the sacks before he even had them into the kitchen, hoping for licorice or peaches or a dark, resinous bottle of Old Crow. Netta wants him back so bad she can taste it-a shallow sweetness in the back of her throat, a raw craving. She opens the trunk and carries in the groceries herself.

"Want one?" she asks Carlene when she is inside the house, pointing at a turkey.

"What are these?" Carlene is holding up a deck of flash cards. Turkeys and Thanksgiving are lost-a million miles away.

"Oh, watch this," Netta says excitedly, taking the cards from Carlene. She sidles up to Franklin's bed and s.h.i.+mmies a thick hip onto the mattress. She does a quick, fancy card shuffle-something she learned in Atlantic City, turns the pile face up, looks at the top card, then centers it in front of Franklin's face. "Tree," she says, "tree," bending her head forward with each hard t.

When there is no response from Franklin, Netta swivels around and says, "It may not seem like anything is happening, but the brain is a sponge, Carlene, and he's soaking up our every word, and when he's good and ready he'll start spitting it all back."

Netta moves to the next card. "Mouse," she says, at least three times, pointing to the picture, which simply infuriates Carlene.

Before Netta can get to the next card, Carlene stops her. "Okay, okay," she yells, "that's enough." Her arms are stiff at her sides. Her hands are balled into the tight fists that have started to dominate her life. "How can you do this?" she asks her mother. "How can you humiliate him? He is not getting better."

"Well, I'm glad to hear you have a medical degree now, Miss Smart-a.s.s," Netta shouts. She turns her back to Carlene and stops the argument flat, her usual tactic.

Before she really has time to think about what she is doing, Carlene glides past her mother and scoops up the thick, blocky, first-grade cards right out of Netta's hands. She walks to the front door and opens it, then pushes back the screen and throws the whole stack, Frisbee style. They catch the air and go down slowly. The rose card spirals. The hat card catches high in the privet. The zebra almost touches the ground and then is caught up again and carried to the neighbor's yard.

Netta puts her hands on her hips and walks to the door and both women stand there looking out at the white whirlwind of litter across the brown gra.s.s. Sorrow has hammered its way so far into their chests that a moment like this-a sudden mess, something that now has to be picked up off the lawn-is strangely welcome in their lives.

Carlene turns to her mother and says that, yes, she will take one of the turkeys.

Each evening, in the voice of a librarian that she once knew from Okinokee, Netta reads the newspaper to Franklin. She polishes the vowels, repeats any important names, and in general tries to make sense of the world to Franklin.

"Ice Palace Collapses" she reads to him, an article sadly detailing how the local Jaycees' icy Christmas wonderland melted due to a puzzling electrical short. "In only a few hours," she reads, "the life-sized ice reindeer were reduced to winter slush." She abbreviates the articles, tries to keep the news short and to the point for Franklin, who dozes often and unexpectedly. She is especially on the lookout for uplifting news-lottery winners, dogs that roam two thousand miles to find their owners, job openings down at the canning factory. She doesn't actually see a smile on Franklin's face, but for a moment his cheeks seem to draw up, he seems to want to smile, and certainly that counts for something.

Another thing that Netta is convinced he enjoys is the family pictures. From the attic, she has brought down several old alb.u.ms and she is teaching him his family all over again. "You have two brothers, Franklin. Their names are Clarence and Reed. Clarence is in the nuthouse, I'm sorry to say, and Reed still drives for Greyhound Bus."

She points and turns the alb.u.m pages slowly, lingering on some, getting teary-eyed over long-gone uncles and the way that all the couples loop their arms loosely, though the knot between them is tied deeply elsewhere. When she grows tired, she moves Franklin over and climbs up onto the bed with him. He has blankets up to his chin. He has lost his eyelashes and his eyes have receded back into the sockets, dark pools with no understanding. She lays her arm over him and thinks of peas in a pod, b.u.t.tons in b.u.t.tonholes, her crochet hook with the thread wound tightly around it.

That's how Carlene and Ham find them when they arrive at the house bringing the surprise three-foot spruce. Carlene walks over to the bed, appalled, her mother dwarfing her father as she has never seen before. And Netta's freckled arm pinning Franklin as sure as ground ropes.

When Netta wakes up, Carlene wants to give her h.e.l.l, but she steadies and calms herself and gives Netta the Christmas tree she and Ham have brought instead. "See how it's nice and full all the way around," Carlene says, holding the top of the tree and spinning it so that a few dry needles go flying.

The tree sits there undecorated, untouched. Day after day Netta often looks over at it and Christmas has never seemed so small to her. The tree barely reaches to her waist, won't hold more than a handful of ornaments. It's not like the trees they used to have-bushy ten-footers, trunks thick as a thigh.

In the weeks before Christmas, in the stone-cold winds that sweep down from the north, Boise gets lively. Rum-filled carolers totter from house to house. Quiet holiday c.o.c.ktail parties mushroom into entire block parties. Stray crepe paper and tinsel blow down the streets in the early mornings. The mood infects Netta and even Carlene. Netta gives herself a holiday goal: to get Franklin to sit up. She starts out small-five minutes at a time-the surgi-bed cranked up and Franklin secured with a soft rope of dish towels. His head droops miserably to one side or the other, but Netta knows she can't have everything all at once. When she has him up, she sets an empty coffee cup on his lap, stands back, and the results are impressive. To her, enough hope, an empty cup, and their lives are back again.

Carlene doubles her efforts on the days she spends with her father. She gives him short, hushed pep talks: "Go on. There's not a thing to be afraid of." She turns his head to the side so that he has to see out the window, so that he can't avoid the broad, welcoming sky. Cones of incense burn around him, the sweet smoke nudging him away.

What is usually a flurry to get the shopping done and the gifts wrapped becomes just Netta and Carlene moving frantically around the old man, cranking his bed up and down, bringing their separate messages to him: stay, go. Netta plies him with raw cookie dough and spoonfuls of half-cooked divinity, sings for him and dances-as well as she remembers how. Carlene brings him clear broth and melba toast and lays a warm cloth on his forehead.

It's finally Ham who decorates Netta's Christmas tree when he sees it won't get done otherwise. He goes for something novel-he can see that this is no ordinary year, no run-of-the-mill Christmas. At a nearby Sprouse Reitz, he chooses plastic chili peppers and little white lights. He is slow and meticulous with the spruce, taking all of an afternoon to arrange it.

Ham gathers everyone that night for the tree's unveiling. He springs for pizza, and even before the tree is lighted Netta's house is full of the celebratory smell of pepperoni, rich and spicy. Drake has been allowed to come; he sits at Carlene's side and gulps the oily pepperonis that she tears off her pizza for him.

When they gather in the living room for the lighting ceremony, Netta has a surprise: she has managed to drag Franklin into a chair and prop him up with pillows. Most of his body is still uncooperative and any similarity he has to a man sitting in a chair is coincidental, but Netta doesn't care. She thinks that from where they have been it's a step forward.

Carlene has to bite her lip when she sees him. She decides not to interrupt Ham's program, but as soon as it is through, she intends to march Netta out to the kitchen and shake her out of the tree she's been living in all these months.

Ham turns off the overhead light. He feels his way back along the wall, bends and plugs in the tree. His work has paid off. The spruce looks larger, its boughs suddenly thick. The chilis hang in red, open-heart cl.u.s.ters and there, on the tree, become the essence of Christmas itself. The hundreds of tiny white lights pulse and glitter and shoot through the room.

For minutes, all of them are still and transfixed, caught in their private hopes and remembrances as they stare at the small, brilliant tree. Slowly, Carlene looks around and then Netta, and they see the old man with the white light from the tree s.h.i.+ning right through him-his big head as clear as an aquarium, his eyes blinking as if on a timer. Drake gets up from the rug where he's been lying and barks twice at Franklin, not sure what he's looking at.

All at once Netta has to sit down-her legs are shaking, her chest heaving, and her first thought is, she hopes Carlene is happy. There's Franklin, empty and transparent as a bread wrapper, sitting up in his living room six days before Christmas. Just half a man, Netta knows, which, of course, is no man at all.

Carlene stands there and pulls her sweater tighter and tighter around her. She can see that the window has worked, that her father has been gone for at least weeks, maybe months, but that Netta has won her claim, too. Like a salty rind, Franklin's body has stayed to find its way through Valentine's and Easter and beyond to who knows when.

Ham messes with the top of the Christmas tree and rearranges a couple of lights. He turns to Netta and Carlene and wants to know who'll put on the star.

Exactly Where I Am.

I don't know where I am-on the porch, at the screen door, standing on the backyard walkway-but I know that I'm there when Daddy and Uncle Gill find RayAnn's fingers in the gra.s.s. Where I am standing seems less important than the way the flashlight steals the gra.s.s from the night, studies it slowly, then names it green. Daddy holds the light and Uncle Gill bends from a lifetime of factory work into the gra.s.s for his daughter's fingers-RayAnn who has cried all the way to the hospital, her hand wrapped in what was a clean bath towel. I'd call her a big, fat crybaby, but I'm half-sick myself, wherever I am-porch, screen door-the half-grown daughter of another factory worker, the one who holds the flashlight and yells at me to get back into the house. "Mind your own business," he says. "Go watch the kids."

I think my cousin's fingers are my business. I think my cousin's fingers, strangely enough, are the proper study of this night. She didn't even realize they were gone until her brother started screaming. She had run past the metal storage shed, and on the torn corner where Uncle Gill had accidentally backed the Buick too fast two winters ago, she had caught her hand, the metal sharp and cold and always just beyond Gill's fixing. That's constantly the way it was-more to get done than there were hours in the day: the storage shed, the roof, the upstairs window. In the garden nearby, potatoes swelled, then rotted in the ground.

And then so fast that even a moment seems too long an explanation, RayAnn's fingers were gone and she was running past the tree, beyond the gladiolus to the rock driveway. Slender and turning dark as peach pits, two fingers lay in the cool, thick gra.s.s. Cory screamed with every ounce of breath in him and pointed, not at the driveway as we first believed, but at the setback in our lives that night: RayAnn's hand in its new shape.

Before pain or shock or understanding, before RayAnn's shorts streak completely red, I know where I am. Barefoot and half-grown at Uncle Gill's birthday and these are the two families of factory workers in a summer yard and when we sing we are thieves and castaways. Our rendition of "Happy Birthday" is the one where everyone draws the last word out, fighting against breath, letting the trick candles have their time to pop and spark. Gill closes his eyes when he makes a wish. That deep, that strong. One layer of chocolate and one layer of white to please everybody, my Aunt Jen says, and we are pleased, cake in our hands, a wish, the box fan whirring in a kitchen window.

My uncle is not even forty the night he finds his daughter's fingers in the gra.s.s after we have sung to him with the voices of country radio where all the songs are sad or humbled or on the very verge of drifting. Daddy takes the flashlight down off a pantry shelf, and Gill kneels near the shed out of necessity, and the light falls between them, cold and pale as dishwater. The doctor has sent them back here to work the gra.s.s, to hold the light, to grow old, and to be sung to. I have been born to watch the kids, though instead I am watching two men from some place beyond my memory, beyond the rock driveway. The TV is on in the background and in front of me is a moment that cannot be relieved by time or surgery. Gill takes his handkerchief and wraps the fingers like small mementos which he and Daddy will drive through twenty miles of a summer night to deliver.

My business takes me out there-porch, screen door, walkway-to watch what happens after a party when the men are given the odious task of picking up. They search the gra.s.s quietly because they know how to get a job done, having been trained at J & B Manufacturing. Gill is in Quality Control and Daddy operates a lathe, and together in the yard their figures speak of labor that takes ten years off their lives. Inside the house their kids eat ice cream from paper cups and watch TV.

My uncle's handkerchief could be the center of this night, and the gra.s.s, the bare feet, the cake, the wish, the kids' voices doubling and tripling into a choir, even summer as it is threaded through the box fan in the kitchen window, are all periphery.

"Go watch the kids," Daddy says. He doesn't return the flashlight to the shelf, and when he backs the car from the driveway, my uncle holding the only darkening gift that will matter in his life, our dusty world is caught in headlights: two seconds of a house, a flash of tree, the tremor of pink gladiolus.

I'm left with the kids. I'm left tall for my age, a gunnysack figure and the disposition of a handful of weeds. Pretty is not a word that I think of here. I don't know the word for being young and tall and in the dark, half-woman, half-sick.

Left with me in charge, the younger kids drag the party on, unwilling to let the night go, reluctant to believe that anything has an end. They finish the ice cream and throw their cups out the window. They box each other, run the stairs for fun, appoint a temporary king, gather sheets right off the beds to make a tent. I consider using brute force. I consider RayAnn crying the twenty miles of a summer night, Mama and Aunt Jen in the back seat clutching their purses. What more can they do?