Slow Way Home (37 page)

Now just yesterday I was thinking about the time she found a baby squirrel and had Poppy fix a . . .”

“I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Nana looked down and then offered a kiss. “All right, then.

Goodnight. I love you.”

Their words jumbled together, my mama’s and Nana’s. They crossed a dividing line I had placed in my mind to keep them separate.

I didn’t need to hear how much she regretted making my mama leave the house. It was already etched in the lines around her eyes and the wrinkles on her forehead. A road map that led to regret.

Nana never did mention Mama again. Not until the day we learned that she had slipped away for good. It wasn’t a rhino that ended up getting her or the collapse of an oil rig in Canada; it was her own demon. A demon too strong for a boy to exorcise.

The end was in Roanoke Rapids, Virginia. She was found frozen to death at a rest stop after trying to walk away from a bar. The day I learned the news we sat on the concrete steps. Poppy’s mouth sprayed a ghostly mist in the January air as the facts flew around as fast as migrating blue jays.

Cold from the concrete seeped through my jeans as I listened to Nana sob and Poppy comfort. The tip of a rock was sticking up out of the red clay that edged the steps. I could only think of one thing—the day I scattered ashes across the garden at Aunty Gina’s mansion. The type of home that was supposed to be reserved for heaven.

Nana kept her arm tight around me. Folds of her stomach vibrated as she cried. But I never cried that day. The tears would come 266

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later in life and at unplanned moments. Some would be shed simply when riding down the road and listening to the words of a Carole King song on the radio. More were shed the day we took my oldest daughter home from the hospital. The piercing blue eyes were as radi-ant as the mother I had wanted but never knew. In the structured cu-bicles of my mind, Sophie Willard would end up being a favorite sister who had left for college and never looked back. Her memory would remain as pure as the patches of snow that clung to the ground that day.

Aunty Gina, Esther, Nairobi, and Winston all came to the funeral.

They sat scattered in the funeral home chapel while the Baptist minister from our new church stood over the silver casket and tried to piece Mama’s life together. When I turned to look for my friends, Aunt Loraine blocked the view. She sat behind us dressed in black from head to toe. A pearl necklace with a diamond chip wrapped around her neck like a dog collar. A possession paid for with the same funds that secured the farm—settlement money from Uncle Cecil’s accident.

She tilted her head, smiled sweet, and slowly shook her head. Mac and Mary Madonna sat next to her and nervously looked away. They sat in the pew draped with the red velvet cloth stitched with the word “Family,” and just when I started to reach over and snatch it off, Mama’s words called out.
“Every day we got a choice to be pitiful
or powerful.”

After the service, we went back to our brick home. The church family had prepared lunch. Ladies with bubble-shaped hair buzzed around the kitchen while Esther directed their moves. A peace lily plant filled the corner of the living room. Like a blind person, I stood in the corner rubbing the words on the card: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Remember, we sure do love you, Sister Delores and God’s Hospital.”

When no one was looking, I pulled the card and placed it in the pocket of the suit Aunty Gina had bought me. She was sitting on the love seat that had a rip down the side talking with Nana as if she had found a new bridge-club recruit. Their shared words of what was best
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for me floated as free as the scent of Aunty Gina’s perfume. Through the window, I saw Poppy sitting on the porch step. With his pocketknife he carved a piece of oak that was beginning to take the shape of Uncle Sam. Winston stood next to him as shavings gathered around the concrete step.

Nairobi’s silky material tickled my hand. She sat on the folding chair next to me and watched Esther line up the food. “You do realize Senator Strickland predicts we’ll see you playing the U.S. Open one day. But I said no, not Brandon.”

Looking up, I saw a sly smile drape across her mouth.

“No, I told her. I predict we’ll see him playing in a different game.

Congress, maybe. And do you know what that woman said to me?

She said, ‘Nairobi, Brandon Willard can do whatever he makes his mind up to do. And he’ll do it well.’ ”

“I believe we’re about ready to eat.” The minister looked over at Esther. She nodded and sucked in her cheeks. “May we say grace,” he said.

As the requests for comfort and protection went up to the One who Sister Delores promised would be both my mother and father, I kept a steady gaze on those hedged around me. Esther’s chin pointed to the ground, but her eyes were wide open. Aunty Gina smiled softly as her eyelids twitched in time with the minister’s words. “Yes, Lord,”

Nana whispered and kept a fist balled at her lips. The bloom from Sister Delores’s peace lily brushed against Poppy’s pants as the ceiling light formed a halo around his bald spot. Nairobi stood next to me, pressing her palms together the way I’d seen little children pray.

With each word the minister prayed, I breathed in deep and pictured a mist going deeper inside me, protecting frayed nerves once and for all. Jesus didn’t have to appear for me to feel God’s love that day. It was found in each of the people who formed a wall around me. While studying their various shapes, colors, and imperfections, I realized I was a part of them. A family joined together by ties stronger than blood and land. Joint heirs of past and future combined.

Epilogue

2003

T
he rusty “No Trespassing” sign is slanted sideways, its words missing sections of black print. From the car I watch it keep time with the February wind, an almost forced dance with the front door. Patches of white paint still cling to the porch railing like snow trapped past its time in the shadows of the sun.

Staring at the weathered farmhouse and its shattered living-room windows, I stuff my hand deep inside the jacket and massage the rough edges of the deed. After all the struggle and cost that dollars can’t compensate for, I think it strange how thin and fragile it feels. As fragile as the end of the porch that once firmly upheld generations of my family, but now bows in submission towards the ground.

Once I thought the house of rotted wood was a palace. A place of safe passage that was as fine as any home I had been introduced to from the television nestled inside the once-cramped living room.

Now, thirty years later, the building looks as tiny as the house of matches I had seen the summer Nana and Poppy took me to Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, and just as delicate.

Cold dirt cracks under my weight, and I pull the top of the jacket closer to my neck. Even the dirt that once produced food and income
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for my family now seems dead to the touch. When a gust burns my face, I suddenly remember Poppy’s favorite thing about our trip to Ripley’s Museum—the warm Florida weather.

A steady screeching noise echoes from the swinging “No Trespassing” sign, but I ignore its order. With the force of my shoulder the scarred door opens, and suddenly I am back in the sanctuary, if only in my mind. The foyer wallpaper that once jumped out to welcome guests in patterns of cheerful daisies is now torn and worn down to mere smudges.

Inside the living room I use my foot to sweep beer cans that have been deposited. “The very idea of drinking in my house . . .” Nana would surely say. But it’s the broken kitchen window, the window that once poured sunlight onto our breakfast table, that shows me how life has really changed.

The crack across the window distorts my view. A bulldozer sits silent and still where the tire swing used to hang. Clumps of trees are left scattered as if the machine had been polite enough to leave a calling card. Flawless homes line the surrounding property like fortress walls protecting a new way of living.

An empty nest, either the home of squirrels or rats, is piled where the supper dishes once rested in the kitchen sink. Although not visible, at least some living force still exists in the house, and for that I am thankful. A section of the linoleum floor sags where tired wood has given way. The cabinets, though covered in years of dust, still retain the same sturdiness they had the day Poppy made them. Wiping away the dirt, I smell the surface, hoping the scent of Nana’s fried chicken and okra remains entombed in the wood. Only the howling wind through the cracked wall reminds me that there are modern-day problems lurking outside.

Walking around the small shell of a home, I force my mind to picture what used to be and try to convince myself that it can still be ex-humed like a chest of treasures.

•

•

•

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Driving towards town, I pass the entrance to Hathaway Plantation. A towering home with a tall American flag rests beyond the stone gates.

A sign next to the entrance says it all. Aunt Loraine and her new husband, Coach Johnson, are standing back-to-back holding matching cell phones. “Plantation Living Starting at the $290s. Jingle the Johnsons and Move in Next Month.”

After Uncle Cecil died, she waited seven months to marry Coach Johnson. When the first wave of transplants arrived in the area, the operation gradually boomed. At first real estate was Aunt Loraine’s side business, a hobby discovered when she developed tennis elbow.

Now, as reported in her last Christmas newsletter, she has a floor of office space and twenty-three employees. She was always spoken of in polite terms at Nana and Poppy’s house. An apparition that would appear with Mac and Mary Madonna each Christmas with courtesy gifts. As Mac and Mary Madonna became older, the relationship became more awkward. They are now more like pen pals from a distant world rather than family from red-colored soil.

It wasn’t until I graduated from the Naval Academy that I began receiving yearly Christmas newsletters from Aunt Loraine. That year her broad letters scrolled above a picture from a Tahiti cruise: “We’re just all so proud of you back home. I knew you could make something of yourself. Keep going!”

Keep going—the one piece of advice I did take from Aunt Loraine.

After Aunty Gina helped secure a congressional nomination to the academy, I became a member of the tennis team. I even used the party manners Miss Helda taught me to marry an Annapolis debutante, a woman whose childhood was filled with tea parties and sailing lessons.

The latest strip mall and brick fast-food restaurant now sit where my friend Poco and his grandfather, Mr. Calato, farmed. Rows of cloned homes jumble together like stacks of dominos ready for the fall. At the intersection where Nairobi’s Child Advocacy Network once was, a dead deer rests in the median, its legs broken and twisted along with the landscape. A tire store has taken over Nairobi’s center.

She now lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches law to the next generation at Georgetown. E-mail and phone calls allow our paths to
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cross, but there are many others I wish I could pick up the phone and call. Age and disease have claimed them as fast as the developers have leveled the farms and shops that I once knew.

Sister Delores comes to mind, as she often does. No matter how many times Nana told her she had joined the Baptist church, Sister Delores refused to take our names off of the membership at God’s Hospital. The last time I saw Sister Delores I was about to graduate from high school and had driven to Panama City with Winston for spring break. As I started to pull away from her house in Abbeville, she ran up to the car and used the back of her hand to clean the side mirrors. “Baby, keep your eyes on the road and don’t keep looking back,” she said. Looking back now, I understand why she never told anyone about the bone cancer. It was not her way, her husband, Harvey, reminded us, when he called with the news of her death.

Sister Delores and I were alike in that respect. Pity was worse than terminal illness.

Aunty Gina and Poppy both slipped away within the past two years. The stings remain fresh to the spirit. Memories tempt me to drive by Aunty Gina’s home too, but I recall my wife’s advice and keep the car straight. “You have to release the past,” my wife tells me.

But she only knows a polite fraction of my story. There is so much to be said. The price for saying it, a stripping of the soul that, at age thirty-nine, I am still not yet willing to pay.

Winston would be a good excuse to pass by Aunty Gina’s neighborhood. I see him most regularly of all. When I can convince him to take time away from his law practice, our families summer together at his home on the Outer Banks. Gripping the steering wheel, I force myself to stay away from the exit that leads to Winston’s old-money world of inside the beltline. Instead, I follow the road towards the ghost of betrayal that Winston has helped to uncover.

Two large portraits hang above the reception desk. A young woman plays with the headset mouthpiece and asks if she can help me in a way that lets me know she has more urgent matters at hand.

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“Brandon Willard. I stopped by to see Loraine. My aunt.”

When she walks towards the French doors in the back, the portraits leap out at me. Mac and his children are sitting on the beach all dressed in matching khakis. The lines on his face favor Uncle Cecil, and I wonder if he still feels the loss of his father. His wife is exactly what someone like Aunt Loraine would prescribe for a doctor’s spouse. In the portrait peeling skin on her tipped nose is held down with makeup, and her teeth are as white as the sand she is standing on.

The other portrait is of Mary Madonna and her three boys. Her blonde hair is curled at the ends and drapes over her shoulder. Di-vorced, she now owns the largest bridal and formal outlet in the Carolinas. At least some things remain the same.