Waiting for Augusta (2 page)

Mr. Talbot's tall form walked around the side of the house, and May and I were alone. She was dressed real nice, like she always was, and I was suddenly shy of my ash-stained clothes. Don't know why I felt that way. She'd seen me like that about a million times. “Hot today,” I said.

“Mm-hm.”

“You draw anything lately?”

“Maybe,” she said, tugging at one ear.

May was good at art. The first time we'd met was when we were both five years old and Mr. Talbot had brought a hog over to the café. I was around back, trying to make watercolors from a load of Popsicles that hadn't made it to our freezer in time and were too melted to sell. She sat right
beside me, and I handed her a stick brush and a piece of paper. She took them, and that was that.

Since then, we'd seen each other at least twice a month during deliveries. As her daddy and my daddy had gotten to know each other, the deliveries had turned into short visits, and May and I had worked our way up from making Popsicle paintings to taking walks and tossing rocks in the nearby streambed. We even made plans to meet at a spot at the creek on some Saturdays.

We'd sit and draw. We'd talk or not talk. Sometimes she'd write words beside her sketches and paintings, cross some out, leaving just a few to make the picture into a story.
Water, rock, hand, splash. Pecans, trees, basket, pie
.
Crane, frog, dive, dinner.
She was the best friend I had in the world, and the day I told her that, she'd said I was hers, too.

But all that had changed over the last year. I wished there was a way of going back to before.

“I'm thinking about running away for a time,” I told her, the words spilling out before I could remind them that May and me weren't the same anymore.

A hint of light hit her eyes, and they flashed. “What problems could you have to run away from?” Her tight mouth burst open and formed a delicate O. One of her hands lifted to cover it. “I mean . . . well, other than your daddy passing. Never mind. I'm sorry about your daddy.”

I shrugged. The truth was, I felt squeezed. Hilltop felt a
whole lot smaller with Daddy gone. Seems like some space should've cleared up with one less person, but I felt tight all over. That darn lump needed to bust outta my throat, darn toes wanted to bust outta my shoes. Seemed like my whole self wanted to bust out of my insides altogether. I didn't want to run away forever. Just for now. Something had been pulling on me since Daddy died, and whatever it was, it wasn't in Hilltop.

She frowned at my neck. “Why do you keep scratching at your throat like that?”

I dropped my hand as Mr. Talbot came around the house corner. We had maybe a few more seconds when it was just us. Sweat was dripping down my forehead and back, and whatever pressure was bubbling inside me couldn't hold back any longer. It had to come out somehow, and it came out with—

“I don't know what I'm supposed to do. It's like everything's changing and I . . . I just don't know what to do.” The ground was a comfortable place to look, so I shoved what felt like my whole self in that direction. I raised my head a couple of feet to meet the answer halfway.

“Well,” she said, arms wrapping around her waist as her father approached. “Maybe you changed, too.”

My ears got hot first, then my cheeks and neck.

Mr. Talbot's hand squeezed my shoulder on the way to his truck. “ 'Bye, now, Ben. May, let's go, honey.”

She stared me in the eyes while Mr. Talbot opened the driver's door and motioned her around the other side. Then she walked away.

I lifted my chin and blinked at the gray-whites and dark blues smeared rough across the sky like brushstrokes being blown straight into Hilltop. Straight into me.

“ 'Bye,” I finally said, staring at the side of May's face as the truck passed by me. She turned in her seat and watched me, her brown eyes soft and wanting, mad and sad and disappointed, and I think that maybe she looked through my body and saw my insides as the Talbots drove away. She was the only one who'd always seen me, and she was leaving.

I decided right then, for certain, that it was time for me to leave, too.

T
he rib pan was half-empty by the time I got back to the porch. Mama wiped her hands on her apron and tilted her head toward the side yard. “Ben, you go inside. Take a break and do your schoolwork, all right, honey? I believe I'll finish with these three coming down the road.” She looked bone-tired, but was holding on. Her crying time wouldn't come until everyone'd left.

“Yes, ma'am.” I walked to the side door next to the hose and dinged the café sign with my foot. Mama refused to put the sign up, but she couldn't seem to bring herself to throw it away either. She'd always hated the name “Putter's Pork Heaven” and the slogan Daddy came up with when he'd taken over the Clay family business:
Where the Best Pigs Come to Pass.

It was humid inside our house. Everything looked and felt sweaty. Daddy's seven iron was getting a little grimy, leaning against the wall next to the pantry. He kept the old
club in the house “in case of intruders,” but mostly used it to take practice swings in the living room and to scratch his back. It hadn't moved from its spot since the night he went to the hospital for the last time. I touched the grip and jerked my hand away when it shocked me with a sharp stab of static electricity.

I let out a Daddy word while jitters traveled up my arm and lingered. I felt buzzy all over, like even my eyebrow hair was reaching for the ceiling. Shaking out the tingles, I poured a glass of water and settled at the kitchen table to think more about running away.

I stared at nothing for a good half minute before my hands took over and reached for my thick watercolor paper, brush, and paint pad. I started with the paints, but a minute later, ditched the brush and picked up a pencil, scrawling five letters underneath the mess of color I'd painted. I stared at the greens and blues and light brown and purple and the lone word.

where

I'd made a decent point. You can't do a good job of running away if you don't know where to go. Flipping to the third-to-last page on my drawing pad, I let a finger outline the pencil portrait there. It had been coming along when I'd stopped working on it. The eyes were perfect. Best eyes I'd ever done. “Daddy might have actually liked this one,” I told the kitchen.
Maybe not, though. He'd always wanted a boy who loved to inhale barbeque smoke and butcher pigs and play golf, not one who squeezed extra ketchup and mustard on the side of his dinner plates and tried to make sunset colors.

“Sure is hot,” I said to the drawing, then caught sight of Daddy's urn settled on its special-built shelf next to the pantry door. He'd been burned up in the cremation place, which had to be even hotter than Alabama.

Instead of spending money on a casket and cemetery plot, Mama'd hired a furniture maker from Mobile to put a small, hand carved platform right in the kitchen, Daddy's favorite room. She said he wouldn't want to be over in the churchyard, so his ashes sat there on the shelf, nice and quiet, which still didn't seem right. He never liked being quiet, and I didn't like seeing him cooped up like a jar of powdered lemonade.

Between the ten-inch-high pewter urn and the ashes inside, Daddy didn't weigh much more than a brand-new baby now, the crematory man had said. It seemed like a strange and awful thing to say, but somehow there was a niceness to it, too, and I noticed later how Mama had cradled Daddy in her arms on the walk to the car.

Feeling the weariness of the day, I leaned forward and let my eyes shut for a second. Maybe a little longer.

“Hey, Ben, that you?”

Jerking up, I looked around the room. Nothing and no one, but the voice had sounded familiar. Eerily familiar. I
stepped out the side door and peeked around to the front. Saw Mama waving goodbye to folks. Saw a few men talking to one another in between bites. Saw that big-eyed girl looking at me, her glare lessened to a stare. Girls had all sorts of things going on in their heads at this age, Mama said, so I didn't pay her much mind.

“Mama, did somebody out there call for me?”

She turned, letting her smile for the customers fade into sadness for us. “No, but I'll need you to cut up that pig Mr. Talbot brought by sometime tonight.”

“Okay, Mama.”

I let the screen door close, sending a cool breeze through the sleeve of my shirt just as the same voice rang out.

“Benjamin Putter, where the heck am I?”

My paintbrush dropped to the floor and made a soft spray of green. I didn't even know I'd still been holding it. All I knew was that the voice sounded exactly like Daddy's extra-thick Alabama accent. And it wasn't coming from outside at all.

It was coming from the urn.

It was hard not to panic. My fingers reached for the fallen brush while I considered the best approach to imaginary voices of used-to-be-real people. Colors. Colors would set me straight. I tried to move, but only managed to twitch a little and sink back into my chair while the room spun and the wall's white blurred with swatches of the countertop's blue, the golf club's silver, and wood floor's brown.
Ben Putter's gone
dizzy
, the room whispered.
His ears have gone bad, and all he can do is rub his throat and try to swallow, swallow, swallow that darn golf ball.
“Quiet, you,” I whispered back.

“I said, where the heck am I?” Daddy's voice boomed again.

There's something in barbecue circles called the meat sweats. I'd seen full-grown men sit down at our picnic tables on a weekend: pulled pork, ribs, loose pork, shaved pork. A pound past their limit and their eyes would glaze over. A half pound more and the sweat started rolling. But the sauce made it go down so nice that they'd keep going and, once in a rare while, we'd get a crazy on our hands who would get the meat sweats, then see and hear things that weren't there. Voices, people. But I'd only had a peanut butter sandwich in between serving folks, so the meat sweats were out.

Through the screen door, I saw two more flashes of lightning, followed shortly by cracks and grumbles. The storm was getting closer. I eyed the urn. “Daddy . . . is that you?” I asked, feeling scared and confused and half crazy, or maybe whole crazy. “You're in the kitchen. You died, remember?”

He didn't talk again for a full minute, and then he said one more word. He said it slow, like it was the most beautiful, perfect word in the world and I needed to understand how much it meant to him, which I did.

Imaginary or not, my dead Daddy'd given me permission to run away.

And he'd told me exactly where to go.

N
ow, I'd been hearing imaginary voices all my life. Mamas and uncles and neighbors think it's cute when you say you hear things talk until you're about six, and then they start looking at you funny, so you either give those voices the boot or keep them to yourself. I kept mine around because they weren't doing any harm and, besides, it felt rude to ignore them just because I was growing up. I knew the voices weren't real—the salt shaker voice and the spatula voice and the dishwater voice and the faucet voice and the paintbrush voice and the pit voice. I knew those were only
me
. But this voice was different. Sounded different. Felt different. Like a memory come back to life.

I wrote down what Daddy'd said, then traced the word with a finger.
Augusta
. Augusta, Georgia was more than four hundred miles away from Hilltop, practically in South Carolina. Might as well be in China. Standing on my tiptoes, I reached for Daddy's urn. I pulled him into my lap
and felt the coolness of him. “This can't be real. You're gone forever.”

“Could be,” Daddy said. “Hope not.”

The sound of men laughing drifted in through the screen window. I closed my eyes, inhaled charred oak blocks and hickory chips stocking the smoker, and saw Daddy laughing and pounding backs at the café. Chopping wood that'd burn down to coals. Hauling hogs and ash-burying them in the pit. Swinging a golf club at nothing and saying he was shooting for heaven.

“I hope not, too,” I whispered.

Daddy always said that when he died, he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered on the eighteenth hole of Augusta National, the most famous golf course in the world, founded in the 1930s by the most famous golfer of his time, Bobby Jones. It was private, but opened its gates once a year for the Masters, a tournament that was legendary.

When Bobby Jones died last December, it cut a hole in my father, and I think maybe that's when the cancer first snuck back in him. Daddy was quiet for most of a week after news of the death came, finally breaking his silence by reminding Mama and me of his final wishes over his turn at dinner grace one night. He'd clasped his hands together, looked to the ceiling, and then said,

“Dear Family, it's best you know that a piece of my heart has departed along with Mr. Bobby Jones's spirit. As you're
both aware, I'd like nothing more, when my time comes, to be spread on the eighteenth green at his magnum opus, Augusta National Golf Club, the place that has brought men to glory and let them know that somebody or something had faith in them.” He looked over the spread on the table, then nodded at Mama. “Holly, I believe you may have outdone yourself tonight. That meat loaf looks divine, those potatoes smell like heaven, and Lord knows I love a green bean casserole. Amen to you and the Ol' Creator, let's eat.”

Still, nobody took his request seriously. It was an impossibility—just something he liked to say, that's all. But he loved golf that much.

Daddy would smack balls toward Mr. Perry's cotton field every morning with his driver after getting the café pit stoked, one slipping through his homemade baling wire net now and then. He'd hit short strokes on the makeshift green behind the café during the day. And Pork Heaven was closed until four p.m. on Sundays so he could drive to PJ Hewett Municipal Golf Course and play a full round. Church, he called it, and Augusta National was the Sistine Chapel to him. Mama hated that he never came to Sunday services with us, but Daddy told her that he and God heard each other the clearest when neither of them were walled in with a questionable interpreter. He only owned one book in the world, and it wasn't the Bible. It was full of photographs and facts about Augusta.