Hambone

Nov 30, 2013 | Southern Verse

[title subtitle=”fiction: Marla Cantrell”][/title]

As soon as Cletus Burkhart crossed the Arkansas border he was no longer Cletus. Everyone he knew here called him Hambone, a nickname his older brother had given him one Sunday when he was four, while he was sitting at the kitchen table eating the last of the ham. He didn’t remember gnawing on the bone, but when you’re the baby in the family your stories are never yours. They’re hand-me-downs, worn rough at the knees, ripped at the elbow, patched on the rear end. Cletus gripped the steering wheel harder.

In the backseat of Cletus’ Chevy pickup was the Santa suit he inherited from his dead daddy, who used to put the suit on and come through the kitchen door every Christmas morning, an old feed sack across his shoulder, the white beard crooked, and hand out the presents, stopping to read the tags. “Got a box here for Hambone,” he’d say. “I’ll bet there’s some drawers in here, maybe some long johns.” And then he’d laugh and tussle Cletus’ blond head.

After the kids grew up, his daddy kept up the tradition, the suit getting looser and looser as the years passed. After Cletus’ mama died, he quit buying presents and started handing out cold hard cash. A hundred dollar bill for his kids, twenty dollar bills for the grandkids, fifty dollars for anybody who married into the Burkhart clan.

Why Cletus ended up with the suit he couldn’t say. But it arrived in May, inside an old Montgomery Ward box. Before that day, he thought he’d spent his last Christmas in Tisdale. The funeral in March had been a terrible thing. His sister Wanda doubled over on the casket, and then accused Cletus of not coming home enough once their daddy took sick. His brother Murl rushed everybody from the cemetery so they could go back to the house and divide up what was left in their old childhood home. No, he did not think he’d be coming back for Christmas.

When he opened the box, the smell of his daddy rose out of it. Tanned leather, Ivory soap, Old Spice. Cletus dropped to his knees then, and cried the way he hadn’t at the funeral. And now, all these months later, he knew his daddy would expect him to go home at Christmas. In his glove box were twelve envelopes. The exact same amount of cash his daddy would’ve handed out to the raft of relatives gathering at Wanda’s house. He stopped at a gas station outside Needmore and bought a box of candy canes. He changed into the Santa suit in the bathroom, amidst the graffiti and the dripping faucet. When he returned the key to the middle-aged clerk, she looked up and smiled. “Mr. Claus,” she said, “I’ve been a very good girl,” in a way that suggested she certainly had not.

He handed her a candy cane, an automatic reaction, he thought, brought on by wearing the suit. She took it and then pulled off her eyeglasses. “Happy Christmas,” she said, touching her throat, touching his hand. She had eyes so blue they looked unreal. “I get off at five.”

It unnerved him, the attention, the Happy Christmas. Only around here did folks say Happy instead of Merry. “That’d be really nice, miss,” Cletus said. “But me and Rudolph will be clear across the ocean by then.”

Back inside the truck, he turned on the station playing Christmas songs. His daddy’s hat was on the seat beside him and he put it on. It was velvet, worn in spots, the rabbit fur only a little yellow.
In Pottsville he stopped again, pumping gas. He was the only customer there. Across the street was the Hard Times Café. He looked at his watch. Three in the afternoon. He wasn’t supposed to be at his sister’s until six, and he was only an hour away. Three truckers were inside the café, each on a stool at the counter. Cletus took a seat in a wide booth. The waitress came over.

“Nice hat,” she said, and Cletus bloomed with color.

“You one of them store Santas?” she asked.

“Nah,” he said, and slipped the hat off. “Just a family Santa. Over in Tisdale. Got a passel of nieces and nephews. Thought I should fatten up a little before I got there.”

“Kids come in, see you without the beard, they’ll get confused.”

“Never thought of that,” Cletus said.

“You could slip the jacket off,” the waitress offered.

So he did, stripped down to his T-shirt and red velvet pants. The boots were his, black ostrich cowboy boots.

When the three truckers headed out, all together, the skinny one stopped and looked Cletus over. “Hambone?” he asked.

“That’s me,” Cletus said.

“It’s Buck. Buck Heffington. I used to date your sister Wanda. How is that old girl?”

Cletus smiled. “Old,” he said, the two men laughed.

“Tell her Buck asked after her. Ask her if she remembers watching Field of Dreams at the old drive-in theater.”

When they left, the Hard Times was empty except for Cletus. When the waitress brought his food, she slid into the seat opposite him.

“You mind?” she asked, and Cletus shook his head.

“I need to get off my feet.” She looked at him, swiped at the tabletop with a rag attached to her apron. Leaned back against the bench and closed her eyes. Even tired as she was, she was a thing of beauty. Red hair in a pony tail, cheekbones like the women in the J.C. Penney catalog. Lips that turned up, so even now, slack-jawed and reclining, it looked like she was smiling.

Cletus paused. He eyed his burger. He considered asking her if she wanted a fry, but surely she could get her own, so he dug in, finishing the burger in no time flat.

“You got a name?” he asked, finally, and the waitress opened her eyes.

“Madonna,” she said, and then laughed. “Try to live that one down. I had to either become a saint or a material girl. When I moved here from Kentucky I shortened it to Donna. Nobody expects much from a Donna.”

“My name’s Cletus, but everybody around these parts calls me Hambone.”

“My mama used to sing me a song, ‘Hambone, hambone, where you going? Got some tugboats need some towing.’”

“Never heard that,” Cletus said.

“She might of made it up.”

“I never saw a man young as you wear a Santa outfit.”

“It’s my daddy’s,” Cletus said.

“Why ain’t he wearing it?”

“He’s gone to the grave.” Cletus paused, he rubbed the knee of the velvet pants. “In March.”

“Must hurt.”

“Something awful,” Cletus said, and felt his throat close. “I don’t much want to be Santa,” Cletus said. “But my daddy left me the suit. There was a note with it. Happy is the heart that gives much and expects little. I doubt those were his own words, probably found it in a magazine when he was getting his hair cut, or heard it from one of those radio preachers. But I guess it’s how he felt when the grandkids tore into the envelopes, pocketed the cash, and then headed over to Minnie’s Quick Trip to load up on candy and who knows what else.”

“I met Santa once,” Donna said. “Mama was working Christmas Eve, at a rest home where she washed sheets and mopped floors. I was nine. Alone. Miserable. I heard bells, just like they say you do, and when I walked out of my room, there he was, his back to me, his red suit sparkling. He left me a pair of turquoise boots, a jumbo Hershey bar, bubble bath for Mama. I stood in the hallway transfixed. And then he just vanished. I swear to God.”

Cletus looked at her. She was close to tears.

“I don’t tell that story to many people. They think I’m crazy.”

“I got an aunt who saw a leprechaun. Right after a big rain washed out the road to her house.”

“You’re joshing me.”

“No, she really did.”

“Life’s a mystical thing,” Donna said, and then wiped her eyes.

Cletus thought about his own life. The last mystical thing he could remember happening was winning six dollars on a scratch-off ticket he bought when he went to Colorado to hunt elk.

“You got plans tonight?” Cletus asked, and his heart pumped a little harder.

Donna smiled. “There’s a guy said he might stop by.” She looked at her hands. “He says a lot of things he never does.”

“Then come with me,” Cletus said. “Meet my family. My sister Wanda’s a mess, a little high strung, but she has a good heart, I believe. Even my brother Murl has his plusses, though I can’t think of one right off the bat.” Cletus’ brow furrowed. “Wait,” he said, “there was this one time, about four years ago, when he sent me a fifty dollar check, out of the blue. Wrote a note with it. It said, ‘You’re the best brother I got. Course you’re the only brother I got.’ I was down on my luck then. Out of work. Sad as if somebody had died.”

Donna tapped the table with the spoon. “I guess I could. You’ll need some help pulling that getup off. The real Santa is much smaller and much rounder, but I have a couch pillow at home that could help. And you could slump a little.”

“I could do all that,” Cletus said.

“Meal’s on the house,” Donna said. “Santa doesn’t pay for food at the Hard Times. My rule. Just made it up, but it’s mine.”

The kindness welled up inside Cletus. He reached over and touched Donna’s slender hand. “Happy is the heart,” he said, “that gives without expecting something in return.” Donna blushed. “That right there is magical thinking,” he said. “That’s the key to a mystical life. My daddy taught me that,” Cletus said, and then paused, “though I only realized it at this very moment.”

Donna stood, untying her apron as she did. “I think it’s going to be a happy Christmas,” she said, and Cletus slipped on his Santa jacket.

She rose to her tiptoes. She kissed Cletus on the cheek, and then his arms were around her, and they stood like that in the Hard Times Café for what seemed like forever, and didn’t seem like long enough, all at the same time.

“I can all but guarantee it,” he said. “A happy, happy Christmas.”

Do South Magazine

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