And then his long fingers were picking out a melody that sounded to me like a bird taking flight, or waves rising and falling on a dark river. He swayed a little in his wooden chair and tapped his foot, becoming some boy I had never known or seen before. “Will you sing it, Nell?” he asked as he played the introduction.
She nodded, flicking her cigarette out across the yard. I watched its red ember sizzle through the air and dim among the grass where it fell. Daddy played more, a long peaking melody. His shoulders were moving now, his head bobbing to the beat. And then Nell started singing.
“Born a poor young country boy, Mother Nature’s son,” she sang. The sound of her voice spread through me. Hearing her sing felt like warming up after being very cold. Nell’s face was fierce and hard in a beautiful way, and didn’t match her voice at all, which was high and moved through the air like a slender thread of smoke. Nell didn’t close her eyes when she sang this song. Instead, she looked around at each of us with her eyes larger than I’d ever seen them before. She laid her hands — palms up, barely open — atop her legs, and her voice drifted out over the yard and up the ridge, probably to the at-attention ears of the little fox I always imagined watching me, up to the silenced night birds sitting on their chosen tree limbs. She looked at me the longest.
Eventually she began a kind of nonsense chorus that somehow made perfect sense, where she sang, “Duht duht dah da da da duht duht duht duht dah.” Daddy’s picking matched her words perfectly, his fingers completely focused on making each note work. And on this chorus my mother joined in, so that I caught a glimpse of how she and Nell and my father had all been when they first met, when they were young and free and had only their unknown expectations of what their lives would become.
On the last line, Nell’s voice went very high, and then her face and body went back to their normal ways, as if some possessing spirit had sizzled out of her body to float about the world again, waiting for someone else to light upon.
When Nell was finished, everyone clapped again, but quiet this time, as if afraid of breaking the mood. We all knew we had seen my father and his sister come together for a few minutes. And we hadn’t seen that in a long time.
Nell put a hand to her throat and laughed with some amount of embarrassment or modesty and immediately tapped a cigarette out of her pack. She put it into the corner of her mouth and lit the Winston with a squinted eye, speaking after she drew in the smoke. “See there, Eli? That’s your song now, buddy,” she said, and brought the Zippo down in a sharp strike against her leg so that the lid snapped shut. “It’s just like you.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say, but I did want to claim the song as my own. I wanted it to be a part of me.
“That’s my favorite song by them,” Nell said.
“Yeah, the Beatles were a great band until they started all that psychedelic stuff and Lennon got on that antiwar kick.”
Nell moved around in her seat as if trying to find a comfortable spot, and a look passed between her and my mother. I knew that look, the one my mother gave. It meant: Be quiet. Hold your tongue. She had glared at me exactly like that many times.
Nell didn’t possess the ability to let things go, though. To her that would have been a sin, a selling of her own self. “Are you directing that towards me, Stanton Book?”
“Take it however you want it. You were the big-time war protester. You marched through New York City and wound up in a history book. I fought an actual war and nobody ever so much as thanked me.”
“I marched for you,” she said.
“That’s such horseshit,” Daddy spat, his war face suddenly there, all at once, without warning. He wouldn’t look at her. “And you know it,” he added.
“Stanton,” my mother said, her chiding voice.
“What did you expect me to do, Stanton? Set here and keep praying for you? That war wasn’t right and you know it. I protested because I loved you.”
“You didn’t love anybody but yourself.”
I could see these six words hit Nell just as clearly as if he had thrown six rocks at her in quick succession.
“That’s not true,” Nell said, her voice breaking. “You want it to all be that simple. But war is not that simple, Stanton. Life is not that simple. It’s all way more complicated than that.”
“You’re telling me about war? You went off and now you think you’re better than me, smarter than me,” Daddy said. Still he had not looked at her. He put his eyes on my mother and let out a single laugh, as if to emphasize the ridiculous nature of his own sentence. “Than all of us. You think you’re so smart, so high and mighty with your big ideas and your —”
“That’s a black lie!” Nell yelled, standing on the last word. She stood there like a half-prepared boxer. Her legs were firmly planted, her arms hanging down at her sides. “You’re the one who went off on a big adventure. You make me sick, saying you were fighting for your country. You went there looking for a big time, and then you found out that it was a war. It wasn’t an adventure; it was real. And now you’re pissed off at the rest of the world because you think nobody warned you. But we by God all warned you!”
Daddy bolted up, grabbed the Gibson by the neck, swung it through the air in one perfect-circle arc. The guitar crashed into the wooden chair where he had just been sitting, a clanging of strings and wood.
“Mommy’s guitar!” Nell screamed.
The body of the guitar was hanging on to the neck only by the bronze strings. Daddy let his fingers uncurl from the neck and tossed the Gibson aside. He was wild-eyed, breathing hard. He looked down at the guitar as if he had just realized there was a dead body lying at his feet.
He stepped out of the circle of chairs, where only a few minutes before I had been thinking of what a blessed night we were having. I looked at the guitar lying on the grass, and Nell, hunched over in her chair, pulled up inside herself the way she sometimes did. There was my mother at Daddy’s heels as he stormed into the house by way of the screen porch, Josie down on her knees in the yard, holding the neck of the guitar in one hand and clutching the body with the other, looking as if she thought she might be able to put them back together. “He was supposed to give it to me someday,” she said, as if dumbfounded. Charles Asher, suddenly small and stupid, peered down at her.
I couldn’t help it: I hated Daddy.
Nell wasn’t one to cry, but I believe she shed a tear or two before she could take charge of herself. She wiped her face with the backs of her hands and squatted down next to Josie, her hand flat on her back. Josie flinched away from her, and a shocked look spread itself out over Nell’s face.
“I’m sorry,” Nell said. “I didn’t mean to ruin such a nice night.”
Josie stood up, slow and careful, as if moving too quickly would set off somebody else. When she had completely stood, she said, “It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault.” She wasn’t very convincing, and I knew why. Like me, she was always torn between her loyalty to Daddy and what felt like the truth. But we all knew it was the war’s fault. Nobody else’s.
Nell kept her eyes on the guitar. She let out a strange little moan, maybe picturing my grandmother playing the guitar way back in time. Nell tucked the body of the Gibson into the grip of her arm and took hold of the guitar’s neck with one hand. None of us spoke as she walked across the yard, carrying her mother’s guitar with her into the house where she would hide its corpse away in her room.
We were all in bed, but none of us was asleep when the headlights slid through my bedroom window. I could hear Josie’s and Nell’s muffled talking over in their room beside me. There was no noise from my parents’ room, but I knew they were still up. We were never made to go to bed early in the summertime, as my mother believed we ought to wring every moment of freedom out of our days. But none of us could bear to look at one another after Daddy broke the guitar, so we went to bed. We didn’t know why we were all ashamed, but we were.
I was lying propped up against several pillo
ws, writing in my notebook about what I thought of Anne Frank. After finishing a big chunk of diary, I had just written I believe that Anne Frank is becoming one of my heroes when the car pulled in next door. I snapped off my lamp and scrambled up onto my bed so I could look out my open window undetected. As soon as I put my face against the screen, the crickets sounded louder, but I could hear car doors slamming and then footsteps up the side of Edie’s house as people made their way to her back door. All was darkness out there in the space separating our houses, but I knew someone was moving about, even though they weren’t saying a word. When the light popped on in the kitchen windows, I knew that Edie was finally back. I couldn’t imagine where they’d been so late.
I tugged on my cutoffs that I had let crumple to the floor beside my bed and slipped out of my room, easing the door open and shut, tiptoeing down the hall. I scurried past my parents’ room and slid out the back door like a breath, scampering across the backyard with the grass warm beneath my bare feet. The moon that had lit the yard earlier was now high and smudged silver behind a haze that I knew was heat.
Just as I reached her window, Edie’s bedroom light came on. If I put my eye right up to the edge of the shade, I could see in. The window screen was gritty with dirt. There she was, pausing for a moment with her hand still on the light switch, looking at her room as if she had never seen it before. She moved like an old woman over to her dresser, where she pulled off her watch and laid it down, ran her fingertips along the top of a little Holly Hobbie music box she’d had for ages. I thought she might pick up the box and wind the music, but she didn’t.
I rapped on the window with two knuckles, two sudden tap-taps, but she wasn’t startled at all. When she appeared at the window, her face was flat and void of any kind of emotion or hint to give me about where she’d been or what she’d been doing all day. She stared at me for a second too long, and I thought she might just stand there without seeing me, but finally she pointed toward the back door and left her room.
She eased out onto the porch as masterfully as I had onto my own. “Let’s sit by the willow tree,” she said without any sort of hello. She sounded worn out more than tired.
We moved in silence to the base of the willow and were covered up by its scent: green and cool and musky. She put her head back against the trunk and lay her hand palm up on a patch of moss growing over a big root.
“Where you been all day long?”
“We took Mom to the airport,” she said.
“Where did she go?”
“Atlanta,” she said, her eyes on the night sky. “Her sister lives there.” Edie laughed a little. “She’s so psychotic. She thinks she can go down there and become an actress. She really believes that.”
“She’s moving there?”
Edie nodded, and only then did she look away. She had found a small twig and pressed her thumbs together to spin it between them. She studied this for a long, quiet moment when there was nothing but the night sounds pressing in on us from all sides.
“But who ever heard of going to Atlanta to be an actress? I can see New York or Hollywood. But Atlanta? No. She’s crazy, man. And she made a big production out of leaving. Got down on her knees there in the airport and said how much she loved me and how I should always remember that. And she said, ‘You’ve always been my sweet little bird.’” Here Edie paused a long minute, and again there was nothing but the night sounds between us. “She cried and went on and I thought how she really was a good actress. And so then she just walked away and we watched her get on the plane and we left and drove back and Daddy never said a word the whole way.”
“What makes you think she was acting?”
“Because. If she really loved me, she wouldn’t have left me like that, Eli. Real mothers don’t just up and leave you. She don’t love anybody but herself.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?” Her eyes were hard and dark. “It’s the damn truth. I hate her. I hope her plane crashes and she dies.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Stop saying that!” she yelled, then her chin darted around to the back door to make sure her father hadn’t heard. She laid the twig down where she had found it. “Just stop talking, period.”
I put my hands on the ground behind me, acting as if I was about to get up. “I’ll go, then.”
Her hand zoomed out and grabbed hold of my wrist, lingered there. I looked down at her curled fingers, then back up at her.
“Just sit here with me,” she said, “and the willow tree. Until we get sleepy.”
I scooted around so that my back was against the trunk, too. The tendrils of the willow boxed us in, made us feel as if we were in a house made of leaves. It was like being under the snowball bush, except there was wide-open space. And here and there the longing trails of leaves parted so we could see out.
“Look, the moon’s coming out of the clouds,” she said, and pointed. And at the top of the sky the haze of heat was breaking up so that the moon slid out, white as bones. That was the first time that I realized Edie was my family, too. Just as much as Nell or Josie or my parents or anyone. She was my blood, and I would have died or killed for her.
Although the fireworks weren’t supposed to start until dark, we were to leave in the afternoon, when the sky was still white with July sun. I helped Daddy and Charles Asher carry all the folding chairs from the screen porch out to the truck while the women finished getting ready. Daddy and Charles Asher carried two of the little wooden seats at a time, practically dangling the chairs from their fingertips while I struggled with just one.
When I came around to the back of Daddy’s truck, both arms wrapped around the chair, Charles Asher reached down from where he stood on the tailgate and took it from me. “Boy, you’re strong, Eli,” he said, smiling. He slid the chair into the pickup as if it weighed no more than a sheet of paper and hopped down onto the ground, flicking the bill of my Uncle Sam hat. As we walked back up to the house, he put one hand on my back, right between my shoulder blades. “Thanks for helping us, little man,” he said.
I hoped that Josie would start being nicer to Charles Asher, that she might even marry him and then he’d be my brother-in-law and we’d have lots of days of doing things such as loading chairs together.
Daddy and Charles Asher made their place on the screen porch while, back in the kitchen, Josie and my mother and Nell packed us a cooler and stuffed a picnic basket full of sandwiches, chips, and Reese’s cups. There would be all kinds of concession stands set up on the square, but my mother saw no sense in paying good money for things we could bring from home.
The door between the kitchen and the screen porch had been propped open, so I stood against the jamb, where I could listen to either conversation by simply focusing my attention on either the men or the women.
I still find it amazing, how easily and completely a child could disappear back then. None of them even realized I was there.
Daddy and Charles Asher were talking about Mustangs. Their conversation always made its way back to cars somehow. Charles Asher sat differently around Daddy: hunched over in his seat, his hands clasped in front of him while his elbows rested on his knees. He looked like a grown man when he was in Daddy’s presence, because he was always careful to make his posture seem this way. Daddy leaned back in his chair the way he always did, looking like the king of this porch, and asked Charles Asher how his oil was doing and then they started talking about the miracles of a 380 engine block and all the other things that people who worship Mustangs bring up.
In the kitchen, Josie was spreading peanut butter onto slices of Bunny bread while Nell put circles of mustard on the baloney sandwiches. Mom filled the red metal cooler full of bottles of Pepsi, 7UP, and Dr Pepper.
“I read in the paper that the county spent ten thousand dollars on fireworks this year,” Nell said.
“That’s ridiculous,” Josie said.
“It is ridiculous,” Nell said, ripping a piece of wax paper with
great force to emphasize the is. “There’s many a person who could have used that money to buy food or clothes. There’s people around here who don’t even have a box fan, and the county’s blowing that kind of money on fireworks.”
“So we should be the only county in the entire nation that doesn’t have a nice fireworks show?” Mom said.
“No,” Nell said. “I’m looking forward to seeing the fireworks. But my God, Loretta, don’t you think that’s a bit much?”
“Well, I know what you’re saying,” she said, and latched the cooler lid. “But, no, not this year. This year it ought to be done up right. It’s the bicentennial, for God’s sake.”
“Yes,” Josie said in a breathless, movie-star voice as she clumped jam onto the bread. “Let’s spend thousands to celebrate two hundred years of stealing from the Indians, the Mexicans, the — well, everybody. Let’s shoot fireworks off and not even remember all the slaves and the four little girls who died in the Birmingham church and —”
“Stop it,” Mom said, firm and final. “Don’t talk like this tonight, Josie. Please. It’s Independence Day.”
“It’s true, though,” Josie said. She kept her eyes on her sandwich. “I just don’t understand why all that’s being skimmed over, why all that stuff is being forgotten in this big celebration. And if we’re being so patriotic, then why not be true patriots and question all of this —”
“I don’t give a damn if it’s true or not.” My mother never cussed, so I knew she was using this word for special emphasis. It worked; Josie immediately looked up at her, frozen, but with a look of contempt on her face. “I don’t want to hear it. We’re going to have a good time tonight, whether you want to or not.”