Sweet Dream Baby (5 page)

Grandpa Hollister is finishing breakfast when I come downstairs. He frowns at me over his coffee cup and looks at his watch. He has on the same black pants and white shirt and gold badge he wore to pick me up at the airport, and his black suit coat is folded over a chair. His eyes expect the worst. I stand at the bottom of the stairs and wait. Marvadell comes out of the kitchen and smiles at me. “Sit down, Child, and tell me how you like yo eggs.”

I look at Grandpa Hollister, and he nods. I tell Marvadell sunny side up. Grandpa Hollister picks up his newspaper and hides his face like my dad. Marvadell brings my eggs, and they look good, and I say, “Thank you, ma'am,” and she smiles and stands over me with her hands on her big hips. There's bacon grease and flour on her apron, and I can smell her perfume and sweat and butter. She smells good. She waits, and I look at her, and finally Grandpa Hollister says, “Eat boy, so Marvadell can go on back to the kitchen and start cleaning up.”

Marvadell doesn't look at him, but I see in her eyes how she feels about him. About what he said. There's something hard in there, but it's not hate. It's just who she is and who he is. I know she won't move until I spear an egg, so I take a bite and smile and say, “Wow, ma'am, they're really good. They're as good as my mom makes them.” The eggs are good.

Marvadell smiles and looks at Grandpa Hollister and says, “No they ain't, Travis. Nobody cooks for a boy as good as his momma does.” She winks at me, or maybe she doesn't, I can't tell, and then she turns and walks into the kitchen. Grandpa Hollister drinks the last of his coffee and says, “Travis, white boys don't call Negro women ‘ma'am.' It's the way we do here. You call her Marvadell. You be nice to her like we all do. I don't ever want to hear about you showing her any disrespect, but you don't call her ma'am. That's what you call your Grandma and your Aunt Delia and the other white women you meet here. Do you understand me, Son?”

I don't, but I nod. He doesn't like it, so I nod again and say, “Yes, sir.” My eggs are getting cold. I watch him until his eyes are finished with me, and then I get on with breakfast.

Grandpa Hollister stands up and stretches and looks at his watch. “I've got to go to work, Travis.” He looks at the stairs. “I don't know what's got into that lazy bones Delia.” He looks at me like I might know. I just look back like the lonesome wayfaring stranger Delia said I am. He says, “I suppose she's up there moping. She's a teenager, Travis. Don't ever let it happen to you. Jump right over it and become a grown man. Save yourself a lot of trouble.”

I don't know if I should smile. I just say, “Yes, sir.”

Grandpa Hollister leaves, and I hear the Buick light up in the garage, and then I hear it whisper slowly down the street.

Marvadell comes out of the kitchen and stands over me looking at my plate. Her face is shiny black, and there's sweat on her temples and on her upper lip, and she's got little brown moles along her hairline. She's the first black lady I've seen close up. She says, “You doan like my grits, Nebraska boy?” She's going to be different with me now that Grandpa Hollister is gone.

I say, “I don't know. I didn't try them yet.”

She says, “Well?”

So I scoop a big fork full of the grits and close my eyes and shove them in. I'm ready for the worst, and I'm ready to be polite about it. They're warm and they taste like butter and pepper, and my eyes come open as the smile gets my face. I look at her and nod and spoon in another bite and say, “Eeese griphs are vurr…”

Marvadell says, “Boy, don't you talk to me with your mouth full of food,” and she's gone.

I'm finished eating when Grandma Hollister comes out of her bedroom wearing her nightgown. Her hair is up in a plastic shower cap, and she's holding two fingers to her forehead. She looks at me and blinks like she forgot I'm here. “Travis?”

I say, “Good morning, Grandma Hollister.”

She smiles a kind of sicky smile and says, “Oh, Travis, your grandma has such a headache this morning. I always get them when the storms come through. The doctor says it's something about the barometric pressure.” She gets a little brighter. “Did they teach you anything about weather in school, Travis, Honey?”

I tell her some things I learned about clouds and snow and seasons, and she seems happy with my education so far. I don't want to think about it. It's summer, and a kid has a right to forget what he knows.

Grandma Hollister goes into the kitchen, and I hear her tell Marvadell all she wants is coffee and toast, and I hear Marvadell say, “Humph!” That's all.

I'm out in the front yard, sitting on a root under the oak tree. The ground is soaked from the storm, and there's a bird's nest in a puddle over by the road. A big black cat was eating one of the baby birds when I came out here after breakfast. It made me sick. The mother blue jay tried to kill the cat with her beak. She dove and pecked at him, but he ignored her. He just pulled his ears in close to his head and hunched over and kept eating.

I'm thinking about my dad. I'm wondering what he had for breakfast and what he's doing without me this morning and what my mom is doing in that hospital. I don't even want to think about the food they give her there. When I was in the hospital with the flu and almost died, the food was awful. It makes me sad thinking about the incense my dad gave my mom. I wonder if they let her burn it, and if it makes the pee and Lysol smell go away. I take out my wallet with Roy Rogers and Trigger on it. It feels good in my hands, and I smell it to see if my mom is on it, but it just smells like leather. It's still got the five dollars my dad gave me in it, and I wonder how much a boat costs.

I could put the empty nest back in the tree. Maybe if I climb up and put it on a limb, the mother blue jay will come back and lay more eggs and have some more chicks. She's perched in a tree across the road, watching the nest. She's as sad as I am, I think. The black cat is sitting in a patch of sun on a driveway down the street. I want to go down there and kick him in the head, but I know he just did what cats do, and he'd run before I could land a good kick.

In the backyard, there's more red dirt, and it's shady under the oaks, but the sky is high and white and hot, and I'm sweating. Green vines hang from a big wooden frame in the backyard, and they have grapes on them. I want to taste the grapes, but they don't look ripe. I look at the little house, the one Grandma Hollister said was necessary. I pull open the door and it's dark inside, and it stinks so bad my eyes water, and I can't see why it's necessary. There's a roll of toilet paper stuck on a long nail and a couple of old
Life
magazines beside a board seat with a round hole cut in it. I back off and take a deep breath.

“Exploring, are you?”

I turn, and it's my Aunt Delia. She's wearing jeans, and they're cut off and rolled up above her knees, and she's wearing white socks rolled down and her white tennis shoes with the pink laces. She's got on a white blouse like the one she wore yesterday and lipstick that matches the laces on her tennis shoes. When she bends down to me, the gold cross swings out from her neck.

“Ever seen one of those before?” She means the little house.

I shake my head. I'm remembering last night, the storm, my Aunt Delia crying. All of it. She remembers, too, but she isn't acting like it. She looks happy and fresh except for her eyes. They're a little red and swollen, and they tell me not to mention what we did. She looks up and down the hill through the backyards. I look with her, and I can see two more necessary houses. “Kind of dumb, aren't they?” she says.

I nod. I don't know where this is going.

“Well, Travis old Killer, you're learning about country people. You're learning about the southern branch of the Hollister family.”

“What branch am I?” I ask her.

“You're the uprooted midwestern branch. That's what your grandpa says, anyway. He never wanted your daddy to leave Widow Rock.” She points at the little house. “Your grandpa comes out here about once a week just to keep in touch with his heritage.”

“We don't have those back home.”

“Good,” says my Aunt Delia. “Would you like to go for a ride with me?”

I've been out in the yard since Grandma Hollister went back to bed with her headache, and all I've seen is a couple of cars go by, and some people wave at the house, and no kids. I was hoping there'd be kids. I say, “Yes.”

My Aunt Delia says, “Just yes?”

I say, “I'd like that.”

My Aunt Delia takes me for a ride. She says she wants to show me the confines of her prison. She wants me to see how small the town is. We drive down the street where the Hollisters live and turn on another street just like it, and at the bottom of a hill we come to the railroad tracks. There's a gate across the tracks with red reflectors and a big silver weight that raises and lowers it. Down the track, there's a little station, and I can see boxes and crates waiting to be loaded on some brown Seaboard Coastline freight cars. The crates have Sifford Container and Packing Co. written on them in big white letters.

We cross the tracks and turn right, and there's a barber shop with a red and white–striped pole that looks like a candy cane, and a drugstore with green glass windows and a big sign on the front door that says, Cool Air. The blue letters of the sign are dripping with white-painted icicles.

“That's Tolbert's Drugstore,” my Aunt Delia says. “That's where the kids all hang out. All ten of them.” My Aunt Delia doesn't look at me when she says it, and her voice is bored and maybe sad but not that sad.

She turns on the radio and tunes it, and some scratchy music comes through. “We get the stations from Tallahassee and Birmingham,” she says. “Sometimes Jacksonville comes in pretty good. It depends on the weather, I guess.” I hear someone singing about being a teenager in love, and I ask, “Is that the Killer?”

My Aunt Delia looks at me, then she throws her head back and shakes her hair. “Oh, you mean Jerry Lee? No, Honey, that's Dion and the Belmonts. They're cool though, don't you think?”

I watch my Aunt Delia. She wants to know if I think Dion and the Belmonts are cool. It's called rock 'n' roll music, and my dad doesn't like it. When Elvis was on Ed Sullivan, before our old Philco broke, my dad turned him off. For a second, I wonder if Aunt Delia is making fun of me, like grown-ups do, but her eyes say she isn't. She wants to know what I think. I say, “Yeah, they're cool, but not as cool as the Killer. When can we hear the Killer?” I like saying that word, “Cool.” It reminds me of the sign in the drugstore window. It makes me feel grown up. It makes me like my Aunt Delia more than I already do, and that's a lot.

We listen to the rest of the song, and my Aunt Delia sings along. She's got a pretty voice. “If you want to make me cry, that won't be so hard to do. If you should say good-bye, I'll just go on loving you.” I love the dreamy look she gets in her eyes when she listens to the music.

When it's over, a man comes on talking about buying a Ford at some place in Tallahassee, and Aunt Delia's eyes wake up. She says, “We'll hear the Killer soon enough. He's got two songs in the top ten right now.”

“That's okay,” I say. “Dion's pretty cool.”

Aunt Delia looks over at me and smiles. We drive on through the town, past the mercantile, the sheriff's office, an ESSO gas station, a post office with a sign that says, Notary, and a doctor's office, and suddenly we're out in the country. We pass houses that look like the ones in town, only there are pens with pigs in them, and big vegetable gardens, and fields of corn and men on tractors in the fields plowing and throwing up curls of red dust behind them. We come to a crossroads and stop. “Well, Killer,” my Aunt Delia says, “this is where the citizens of Widow Rock make the big decision. You can turn right, and about a mile down there's a juke joint called Luby's. That's where the bad boys go and some of the bad girls, too, but nobody I know.”

She winks at me and smiles, and it's the look she gave Grandpa Hollister when she drove too fast into the garage yesterday, and I thought he was going to be mad. It's a look ladies give men in the movies. It's a look that says they know what the men are thinking, and they don't mind it at all. I don't know. I don't understand it, but I like it when my Aunt Delia looks at me like that.

“Not you,” I say. “You'd never go down there.”

“No, not me,” she says, and smiles again.

I say, “What's juke?”

My Aunt Delia shuts her eyes and thinks about it. Then she opens them and wiggles her shoulders, and it's like she's dancing right in the car, and she says, “You know, it's what you do in juke joints. You juke.” And she wiggles some more, and it makes my throat get thick.

I look up the road. “What's in the other direction?”

She says, “The river's down there, Honey. And Widow Rock's down there, the promontory for which our little hamlet is named. I'll tell you the story of Widow Rock, but not right now. I don't want you to be overcome by excitement on your first day.”

I think about telling her all I've got to look at most of the time where I live is the miserable Pultneys and a wheat field and a dead farmer's silo. I think about telling her sometimes I stand at the edge of our yard with my back to our house and the miserable Pultneys and just stare at that silo because it's the only thing out there that's not wheat. The only thing that's not flat.

I think about telling her I love the warm air blowing through the windows when we drive together, and the smells of things alive and scary and waiting for me out there. I think about telling her I love the Chevy's red upholstery, and the scratchy, far away music coming from the radio, and the shiny chrome on the front of the radio, and the way her black hair whips around her face in the wind. I think about asking her a lot of questions. Why does Grandma Hollister have headaches, and when is Grandpa Hollister going to smile, and will he ever let me shoot his gun, and what does he do when he goes to work, and are we going to talk about last night? I just say, “I like it here. It's exciting.”