The Boys of My Youth (2 page)

When we’d drive down to Knoxville for a visit, everyone would be hale and hearty, the food eaten, the iced tea drunk, the
new rag rugs admired, and then we’d pile back into the car for the hour ride home. Ralph was always grouchy and harsh, with
big fingers that he pointed at everyone while he talked. As soon as we pulled out of the driveway, my mother would look at
my father and say, “That old sonuvabitch, I’d like to
kill
him.”

I went to visit Grandma and Ralph for a week right after having learned how to whistle. I whistled at all times, with dedication
and complete concentration. When I was asked a question I whistled the answer, I whistled along with people as they talked,
I whistled while I worked, I whistled while I played. Eventually they made a rule that whistling was forbidden in their house.
I felt bereft and didn’t know what to do with my lips if I couldn’t whistle. I would blow gently, without making a sound,
while helping my grandmother get dinner. She must have felt sorry for me because she said once, kindly, “Honey, you
can
whistle when you’re outside.” But that was no comfort to me. Part of the joy of whistling was knowing that it was always
available, you carried the equipment right on your own face. If I couldn’t whistle
at all times
, then I didn’t care to whistle outdoors. I couldn’t wait to get home, where no one could make me do anything.

Grandma and Ralph both worked, so when I went to visit I had hours and hours each day to occupy myself. Grandma took care
of senior citizens, some of them younger than she was, shut-ins and disabled folk who needed company and assistance with some
of the necessities — cooking, talking. She was a volunteer. Ralph was a butcher and a sheepshearer. He drove a panel truck
out to people’s farms and killed their cattle for them. Eyes like pebbles, tanned face pulled into a knotty smile, bald head
glinting in the sun, a foot-long knife blade aimed at unsuspecting furred throats. Afterward he would use a garden hose to
spray out the back of his truck. White walls and floor, pools and spatters of brilliant red. I glimpsed it once, without knowing
what I was looking at. I remember thinking, “That looks like
blood
.” It never occurred to me it
was
blood. The sheep, after being sheared, stood stunned, in masses, their sides heaving, long cuts and gashes on their pink,
exposed skin. The wool stank like crazy and lay in mounds everywhere, gray and filthy. I was taken along on his sprees, sent
off to play with complete strangers, farm children, while he went to work with his long knife, his buzzing clippers. I was
known for being sensitive to the plight of farm animals and bunnies killed on the road, but I steadfastly refused to acknowledge
what was taking place on those visits. I never figured out what was going on around me, even when it was written on the walls
in red.

I went along with Grandma sometimes, too. I saw a lady who slept in a crib, curled like a four-year-old, so tiny. She stared
out from the bars at me with blank blue eyes. My grandma helped her husband turn her over. Their living room smelled like
pee and something else. We had a covered dish for the husband in our trunk and I carried it in. The old woman had white hair
that stuck up in patches on her head. I couldn’t get over that she slept in a crib, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. My
grandma called out to her before we left. “Eva!” she called,
“we brung Walter your noodle ring! But it don’t taste nothing like what you made; I didn’t have pumpernickel so I used white!”
The words of grown-ups rarely made real sense to me. But Eva understood, and smiled faintly at us, her blue eyes staring through
the bars.

“Oh, I got her smilin’,” my grandma crowed. Walter walked us out to the car and stood while we drove away, a wide man in overalls
and a pressed shirt. He waved to us by touching his temple gently with two fingers, and then pointing them at us. I waved
back at him that way.

But mostly I stayed behind, at their house, and wandered through the rooms, picking things up and putting them back down.
There were unimaginable treasures there, old things that you didn’t know the purpose of, beautiful spindly-legged furniture,
and things with exotic, lost names. Chifforobes and highboys, antimacassars and lowboys. Every surface of every wall was covered,
and nearly every inch of floor space was, too. Only in the middle of each room was a cleared space for living, a more or less
empty zone. Jars of buttons, every kind imaginable, homemade ones, bone ones, small pink and white ones (“Them’re for a baby’s
dress,” she told me), enormous black ones. They were endlessly fascinating to me, all their colors and textures, the satisfying
churrr
as they poured out of the jar and onto a table. I didn’t quite know what to do with them then; they seemed to call out for
some special kind of play, something that would lend itself to a pile of buttons. But I could never think of what to do with
them next, so I would put them back in the jar, put the jar back on the table or shelf or closet that it had come out of,
and wander on to the next thing. A small drawer in a small dresser, long thin tools with carved handles, a whole bunch of
them rubber-banded together. “Them’re buttonhooks,” she told me, “from when you had buttons on your shoes.” I didn’t know
what she was talking about, and set them back in their small drawer, closed it. On almost
every surface there was an antique vase with a bouquet of flowers in it, set in the middle of a starched doily. Beautiful,
exotic blooms, all plastic, all covered with a heavy layer of dust. “They throw ’em away, just like they didn’t cost money,”
my grandma would explain.

I spent long days of blistering, stupefying boredom in that house, opening the refrigerator and staring into it forty times
in an afternoon. Butter, milk, bowls with clumped food visible through their Saran Wrapped tops. There was stuff to eat to
make you go to the bathroom, stuff to drink to make you go to the bathroom, and then several things to make you
stop
going to the bathroom. Nothing sweet whatsoever. She’d make a batch of cookies before I came and put them in the fat-chef
cookie jar. I would eat all the cookies on the first morning, and then hunt relentlessly the rest of the week for something
sweet. I would remember the cookies — greasy peanut butter ones with peanuts stuck in them, or chocolate chip ones with oatmeal
— with a kind of hysterical longing. I couldn’t believe I had eaten every one of them the first morning. What could I have
been thinking?

I ate sugar cubes from the sugar bowl, one every hour or so. They were actually
too
sugary and each time I ate one I swore I wouldn’t do it again. But another hour later would find me creeping sock-footed
out to the kitchen, lifting the plastic lid of the sugar bowl, and selecting another.

Sometimes I would jump energetically on the beds, two twin ones that were in the room where I slept. I’d kung fu all the embroidered
throw pillows onto the floor, and then jump and jump and jump, saying a Chinese jump-rope chant: “Chicka-chicka China, sitting
on a fence, tried to make a dollar outta fifty-nine cents,” until I was so out of breath I had to collapse on my back and
wait for the rotating fan to turn in my direction.

Oh, the rotating fan.

The lovely rotating fan, something that moved of its own accord in the dead house during the long afternoons. I would set
the rotating fan on a footstool in the long, narrow bedroom. My job was to feed Kleenexes into it and then pick up the shredded
pieces. By the end of one of those stultifying afternoons, I’d have an empty Kleenex box and a whole wastebasket full of soft
pink confetti. Nobody ever questioned where the Kleenexes went when I was visiting, but once my grandma gave me another white-painted
cigar box that was full of handkerchiefs, neatly pressed and folded. Every kind imaginable: flowered, embroidered, ones with
Scottie terriers, ones with lace edges, the whole bit.

They ate terrible food, things mixed together that weren’t supposed to be. Mashed potatoes with corn, pieces of white bread
with gravy poured on top, peas and carrots in the same bowl. Ralph would have a dish towel tucked into his collar and hold
a fork and spoon in his enormous paws. He’d get something on the spoon, a great gob of potatoes, say, and then open his mouth
as wide as it would go, like a bird in a nest getting fed a chewed worm. He had deep creases on either side of his mouth,
and as he chewed, gravy would run down the gullies in rivulets, land on the dish towel, and stay there. It was an amazing
and horrifying thing to watch. I had a sensitive stomach and sometimes, sitting across from him — eyes carefully averted,
fastened on the Aunt Jemima potholder hanging on a hook or on a pan lid with a screw and a block of wood jimmied up for a
handle — just hearing him eat could make me gag. I was in the habit of rising from the table and walking around the kitchen
every few minutes, breathing through my nose, deeply, to keep from gagging. Then I’d sit back down, pick up two peas with
my spoon, and put them in my mouth. This is what my grandma said to me once: “Eat your chicken, why don’t you? And don’t take
the skin off, that’s what’s good.”
They were trying to make me eat something with
skin
on it. At my own house, everyone knew enough not to say
skin
in relation to food.

My grandma, when she was cooking dinner, would send me down to the fruit cellar for jars of home-canned stuff. Then when I’d
bring them up she’d open the jars and smell the contents thoughtfully; sometimes she’d have me take the jar outside to where
Ralph was and have him smell it. He always said the same things: “There ain’t nothing wrong with
that
, tell her” or he’d bawl toward the house as I was walking back in, “Maw, that’ll be okay if you cook it longer!”

Once she served me red raspberries that she’d put up; poured them in a plastic bowl and put cream on them. As I started to
dig in I noticed that there were some black things floating around. “Grandma, there’s bugs in this,” I said. She came over
and looked into my bowl, head tipped back to see out of the bottoms of her glasses. “Them’re dead,” she told me. “Just push
’em to the side; the berries is okay.” And I did, and the berries
were
okay.

At night we watched one show on TV and then had to go to bed, when it was still a little bit light out. They’d go in their
room and my grandma would come out with her nightgown on and her teeth out to tuck me in. I’d be lying stiff as a plank under
the bedspread and here she’d come, without her regular clothes on, with her arms and feet exposed, her mouth folded in on
itself. “G’night, honey-Jo,” she would lisp, pat me on the shoulder, and turn out the light. And there I’d be, while they
snored up one side and down the other in the room across the hall. I’d tiptoe all over the bedroom, gazing for a while out
the window, watching the sky turn black, the stars come out. I’d quietly open all the drawers of all the dressers in the room,
take out things, examine them, put them back. I didn’t dare jump on the bed, although sometimes I said “Chicka-chicka China”
to myself out of boredom. I tried counting sheep like on the cartoons, but I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t for the life of
me imagine what sheep looked like. I knew but I didn’t know, just as I couldn’t conjure up the faces of my long-lost parents
and siblings. I was wide-awake, staring out at the vast Milky Way while the grown-ups snored on and on and the moon rose and
sank.

The strange thing was, I always asked to go there. I don’t remember them ever inviting me, or my parents suggesting it. It
was me. From far away the idea of their house was magical to me, all those nooks, all those crannies, all those things to
play with — the button jars, the lowboy with a little drawer full of marbles, the flower arrangements, the rotating fan. So,
every July I got dropped off on a Sunday and picked up the following Sunday. By Tuesday I’d be counting the hours, sitting
on the backyard glider, staring at the black lawn jockey and the flagstone path that took you to the garden, the broken bird
bath with a pool of rusty, skanky water in it. Their yard had as much stuff in it as their house did, only the yard stuff
was filthy, full of dirt and rainwater.

The last time I went there my parents drove off on a Sunday afternoon as I stood on the gravel sidewalk and waved, already
regretting my visit. My grandma fed us, dinner was the usual ordeal of gravy rivulets and tainted food, and then they turned
Bonanza
on. I lay on the living room floor, in the cleared-out space in the center; on either end of the couch were Grandma and Ralph.
She was knitting an afghan and he was sharpening a stack of scissors.

We were watching my favorite show. The dad, Ben, had a buckskin, Hoss had a black horse, and Little Joe had a pinto pony.
They had Hop Sing for a servant, in place of a mom. Back home my little brother would be humming to himself through the whole
show, “Umbuddy-umbuddy-umbuddy-ummm Bonanza,”
and everyone would be telling him to shut up. My mom would be smoking her cigarettes and drinking beer out of a bottle, my
dad would have his socks off and be stretching his bare toes, drinking his beer out of a glass. My sister would be trying
to do homework at the dining room table.

Here I was with Grandma and Ralph, staying up one hour later than I would the rest of the century-long week. Little Joe falls
in love with a schoolteacher who comes past the Ponderosa in a buggy. He kisses her a long one, it stretches out forever in
the silence of the living room. There isn’t a sound from behind me, on the couch. No one is moving while the kiss is going
on. It’s horrible. I look around the room, at the pictures that cover every inch of wall space, my aunts and uncles and their
families, framed sayings from the olden days, plaques with jokes about outhouses, a pair of flying ceramic ducks with orange
beaks and feet, and on and on. Too much to look at. The pecking-hen salt and pepper shakers, the donkey with a dead plant
coming out of his back, the stacks of old magazines under tables and on the seats of chairs. Underneath me are three scatter
rugs, converging their corners in a lump under my back. Rag rugs, one of them made from bread wrappers. Hoss Cartwright saves
the schoolteacher when her horse shies and now she’s in love with him. Little Joe tries to punch Hoss out. Behind me my grandmother’s
knitting needles click together in a sad and empty way, Ralph’s breathing is audible over the scratch of scissor blades on
stone. In the dim circle of light that I lay in, my head cushioned on an Arkansas Razorback pillow, I feel completely separate
from them because of the simple fact that in seven days I will be rescued, removed from this terrible lonely place and put
back in the noisy house I came from.