[title subtitle=”fiction: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
By Mama’s wedding to husband number five, I was finding it hard to muster up even a little enthusiasm. Even so, I showed up at Opella Park just across the county line, on one of those perfect fall days, a sheet cake in tow, Riceland® Rice in a kitchen canister, and blushed a little while the groom’s country relations lined up to see the big to-do. It wasn’t till I was asked to sign as a witness on her marriage license that I realized the groom, Mr. Cleveland Carl Kanaan, was the same age as my own husband. I felt a shiver roll across me and signed my name, Ann-Duddy Prophet.
Mama met young Cleve when she hired him as a cook at the Chow Chow Café, for the morning shift. He was good at eggs, she said. That same week she started coming home late, missing supper and not offering even a half-hearted excuse when I pushed her on it. It got to where I quit setting a place for her at the table, not that she’d notice.
Now here we were, just three months later, in the same park where I caught my first trout, in the same park where my mama lay beside me in an army green sleeping bag the year I turned six and told me the story of my daddy’s death. I stood beside a rusty water pump, gripping a bouquet of red carnations, letting the wood smoke from a nearby campsite ruin my just-washed hair. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened as the water from Sycamore Shoals rushed behind me, sounding like the wind does when it races through treetops. Just behind the groom, on a path that wound around the campground, a boy in a red flannel shirt was kicking a Del Monte® can with the toe of his tennis shoe.
I was crying by the time the cake was cut, but I don’t think anyone noticed. I looked around for Ringer, my husband, just then, and watched as he climbed in his old Ford pick-up, revved the engine, and took off.
We have an agreement: Ringer never stays anywhere longer than he wants to and I don’t have to go to his daddy’s for Sunday dinner. I won’t go into it, other than to say I got the better end of the deal.
Mama and Cleve took off after the cake. Mama in the driver’s seat, Cleve sitting clear on the other side. Some idiot had written “Hot Springs Tonight” across the windshield in big white letters with the kind of shoe polish nurses use, so Mama had her head hanging out the window as she maneuvered down the dirt road.
It’s a mighty unsettling thing when you find out your new daddy is younger than your old husband. I’d married Ringer the year I turned seventeen, when he’d come back from his third tour of duty, beaten up but not a nervous wreck like some of the soldiers I’d seen.
I stayed to clean up and then headed home. Ringer met me at the door, all riled up because our neighbors, the Hadleys, had left their gate open and their chickens were parading down the sidewalk, cocky as you please, just asking for trouble, just asking for the nearest dog to say, “Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”
Wrangling chickens is an awkward job, but we did it, Ringer on the street beside them and me behind, shooing them in the right direction. We got the hens, squawking like the devil, back into the Hadleys’ yard, and then through the gate, and shut it tight.
Afterward, we sat at the kitchen table and shared a piece of wedding cake and an entire bottle of Cold Duck I’d snagged from the reception.
“Nice wedding,” I said, finally.
“I hope this one lasts a while,” Ringer said. His rear end was on the edge of the chair and he was leaned way back, so far it looked like he might slide off. “My suit’s full of rice as it is. I shake my leg and I rain rice.”
“Ringer,” I said. “Don’t.”
“I’d be afraid to marry Lila,” Ringer said. “You marry her, get a few free meals down at the Chow Chow, and before you know it you’re splitting up your belongings in divorce court.” Ringer got up from the table, stretched his arms over his head so high his belly showed from underneath his shirt.
Ringer had a point about husbands two, three and four, although Mama had her reasons, let me tell you. But Daddy was another story.
“My daddy, Tom-Duddy,” I said, feeling the color swim to my face, “was an honorable man. He died in the Massey coal mine. A terrible accident. You know that.” I scooted back in the chair, the metal legs scraping across the yellow linoleum, and looked up at Ringer. He was rummaging through the cabinets where he kept the White Horse whiskey. “Mama said the Arkansas Spy came out and did a story about it. She said she was holding me in her arms in the picture that ran on the front page. Underneath it said something about Daddy ‘just entering the pale of manhood’ when he got sent to the ‘silent city of the dead’. Or something close to that. Something poetical like. I’d show it to you, but the paper got lost when we moved here.”
“Right,” Ringer said. “Stalagmite fell through the roof of the mine and crashed through his hard hat. Seems to me a story like that would end up in something bigger than the Arkansas Spy. Seems like a man dying that way would end up in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
“Stalactite,” I said, tugging at the hem of my rosy pink dress.“Stalagmites grow up from the floor. Stalactites rip through the roof. You can’t blame Mama for that. Maybe God,” I said. “But not Mama.”
“What you going to do when you’re done with me, Ann-Duddy?” Ringer asked. “You got your next victim lined up? Maybe you got a list of your future husbands tucked away in your jewelry box.”
“There’s nothing in my jewelry box except that pouch with my baby teeth, my baptismal certificate, my garnet earrings, and the canceled checks where Mama paid you to redo the carport.”
That’s the grit of being married. One minute you’re saving chickens with your husband and the next you’re defending a list in your jewelry box that ain’t even there.
We were both getting pretty wound up, and it might have got worse if Mama hadn’t come in on us. She was still dressed in her suit that was the minky color of a Weimaraner I once saw at the county fair.
“Where’s Cleve?” I asked.
Mama dropped her purse on the kitchen counter. “I don’t give a dippity-dang where Cleveland Kanaan is,” Mama said, looking toward the front door. “He could be in Ten-Buck-Two for all I care.”
“What in the world?”I said, but she just walked to the table and pulled out a chair.
Ringer looked at Mama and shook his head. He walked to the back door, switched the bottle of whiskey from his right hand to his left, and grabbed the knob.
“Where you going?” I asked.
But instead of giving me a straight answer, he said, “You know what? A wedding ring just might be the heaviest freakin’ piece of metal in the whole wide world.”
Sometimes I hate Ringer a little bit.
I turned my attention to Mama and patted her hand. “So?” I said, kind of open ended like.
“Well,” she said, “we were having a nice meal at The Golden Swan, talking about the future and all, when Cleve starts asking about the Chow Chow and how I got it. I told him I won it from my second husband, Mr. Liberty Funk, in the divorce.
“So Cleve gets all puffed up and starts saying how awful it is for him to work in a place that was once owned by a man who shared my domicile.” Mama got the cut-glass salt and pepper shakers from the center of the table and moved one around the other in a tight circle.
“It got worse from there. And by the time the waitress brought out the surf and turf, Cleve had decided we should sell the Chow Chow and open a little Italian (she said it Eye-talian) place over in Cross Timbers where his people live.”
Mama got up and stood facing the sink. She grabbed a coffee cup from the counter and turned on the water to rinse it out. I could see her reflection in the glass. “Thinks he’s going to tell me what I can do with my business. I didn’t work 24/7 all those years just so I could watch all my cash-o-la disappear.”
Mama says things like “cash-o-la” when she’s fired up.
“Who around here eats anything Italian except maybe spaghetti at the end of the month when you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul?”
“Macaroni’s Italian, I think,” I said, trying to calm things down.
I looked through the glass in the back door. Ringer was standing by the alley, underneath the bright light we put up the year before, petting a white dog that came almost to Ringer’s knees. The wind was blowing the clothesline, making the bag of clothespins sound against the metal pole.
Mama turned around, leaning against the kitchen sink. She was pulling bobby pins from her red hair, letting it fall. She was still a pretty woman, but she’d gone soft along her jaw line and in her upper arms that looked stuffed into the sleeves of her suit. The orchid pinned on her jacket sagged under its own weight. She ran her index finger across her lower lip and I noticed the puffy veins making a dogleg across her hand.
“Why’d you marry him?” I asked, bolstered by the champagne.
She ran her thumb across her forehead, back and forth, and shut her eyes tight. When she opened them, she said, “He’s a beautiful man.”
“He is that,” I said, and it was true. Black hair, cornflower blue eyes, a crooked smile.
“And I kept thinking that he really loved me.”
“Maybe he did.”
Mama shook her head. “Last man who loved me was your daddy, Tom-Duddy. Now there was a good man. Big old guy, tripped over his own big feet, couldn’t see past his own big heart.” She picked up the empty bottle of Cold Duck. “Bad to drink, though. Drank like it was his job. Terrible thing, being a slave to the bottle. Makes you do things you’d never otherwise do, to the people you love the most.”
“Ringer doesn’t think he died in the mine.”
“It was a long time ago,” Mama said, and I felt the room go still.
“But he did die in the Massey Mine,” I said.
“Last time I saw him that’s where he was headed,” Mama said.
“That’s not the same thing,” I said, my mouth dry.
“So he didn’t die?”
“Not in the mine. He didn’t show up to work that day. His foreman called me, thought he was sick. Tom-Duddy never missed a day, hung over or not. He took the train to New Orleans, who knows why. He always loved New Orleans. Spent our honeymoon there. I got another call three days later. From the chief of police. Asking me to come ID his body. Tom-Duddy, big old guy, big old feet, stumbled and fell and hit his head on a concrete floor in a bar called the Cajun Crutch. The band never stopped playing. They drug him out onto the street and called the cops.” Mama laughed a hard little laugh, and wiped her eyes.”What a way to go.”
“Why’d you tell me different?”
“You were a baby. There was nothing to tell. And then when you finally asked, I couldn’t say it.”
“You never took me to his grave.”
“Wasn’t buried. Cremated. Thrown to the winds at Opella Park, up on the bluff where the red-tailed hawks circle all the time. Sometimes I think he watches over me. Sometimes I think he became one of the hawks, but that’s crazy thinking, I know it is.”
“You think he saw you marry Cleve?”
“Sure do,” Mama said, and then she sat again at the kitchen table, slid off her high heels. She sighed. “And I’m starting to think he disapproved.”
“You think he saw me?” I said, and the tears started.
“Oh, honey,” Mama said. “Of course he did.”
“I think you should have told me the truth,” I said, and fought back tears.
“Never wanted to hurt you, honey,” Mama said. “Never wanted one more piece of sorrow for you than the rest of the world was handing out.”
“Ringer’s afraid I’ll end up like you, marrying for sport.”
“And if he knew about your daddy, he might fear you’d take up the bottle.”
When the doorbell rang, we both jumped. Nobody ever used the doorbell at our house.
Mama rose, smoothed her hair. When she opened the door, there stood Cleve, his necktie unhinged, his suit coat slung across his shoulder. He took Mama in his arms, his coat dropping, his hands in her hair, his eyes shut tight.
“Keep the Chow Chow, Lila” he said. “Keep it all, everything any other man ever gave you. Just take me back.”
It was like watching a movie, seeing the two of them there. My mother looked small in Cleve’s arms, and beautiful. She was shaking. I closed my eyes and thought of my daddy, who might now be a hawk. I thought of Ringer, who never threatened to leave me, who worried that I’d leave him.
I left them there, my mama and Cleve. And I ran fast as the Word of God to Ringer, who didn’t say anything, just smiled down at me. The white dog circled us both, yipping like he’d discovered something magnificent and extraordinary, underneath the Harvest Moon, not far from the Chow Chow Café.
