The Schooling of Claybird Catts Read online

  Coming from anyone but Mama, this would have sounded like rank sarcasm, but the heck of it was: she really meant it. I mean, she wouldn’t let us use the Ouija board because she didn’t believe our house was haunted, but because she did, and didn’t think we had any business disturbing our ghosts’ rest.

  It was just the kind of nonsense you’d expect from someone with a drop of French Louisiana blood, and try as I might, I couldn’t convince her otherwise. I pouted, I begged, I even went to Daddy to plead our case, though he took Mama’s side, which was odd, for Daddy was usually the voice of reason in the Catts household. He was the one you went to when you wanted to watch a suspect movie or spend the night with someone who didn’t go to the church or go fishing with Uncle Case (who would sometimes get drunk and do goofy things, like run the boat aground, which was the reason Mama didn’t like us going with him). As a rule, Daddy never forbid anything, or hardly anything, and would even talk Mama around. (“Oh, Myra, let ’em go. Quit your worrying. My gosh, they’re only young once.”)

  But on the matter of the summoning up the spirits of our unquiet dead, he was as adamant as Mama, a great disappointment, for by then, I was as convinced as Kenneth that we did indeed live in a haunted house. Maybe even more convinced, for I actually lived there seven days a week, and slept there, too, and over the course of the summer had begun to detect whispers of the supernatural all around me: doors that would shut by themselves, windows left mysteriously opened. The stairs especially creaked a lot at night, though when I asked Daddy about it, he said it was nothing more sinister than a cracked foundation.

  “The real mystery is that it ain’t ever fallen down around our ears,” he said with a grunt, as our stylish old house was really nothing but a thorn in his overworked flesh, always requiring time and money and Uncle Case’s expertise to shore up the sagging floors and dry rot and shifting beams. He claimed to have spent ten times more money in renovation than he’d paid for it, though he never complained too much because the house was Mama’s, the forty acres around it, her kingdom.

  I mean, I’m sure they owned the deed jointly, but Mama was the one who found it, who’d stripped the floors and opened the fireplaces and dug out the apron of lawn and coaxed the St. Augustine grass and camellia and fern. She was the one who’d reclaimed the marble pool and surrounded it in this lush, Louisiana splendor, with phoenix palms and mondo grass and a marble urn that dribbled water like a fountain.

  When I was very small, I hardly remember her ever leaving the house except to attend church or go to the grocery store or cart Sim and Missy around to their endless rounds of ball games. Aside from those outings, she stayed strictly inside, obsessively cleaning and polishing and restoring till the sun began to dip behind the tree line, when she would finally emerge on the front porch, trowel in hand, and spend the next few hours tending her roses in the gray half-light of the long summer night.

  I really never gave it much thought, at least not until that fool Kenneth came into the picture, when, after a month’s worth of fruitless digging for any sign of a coffin, he began to look further afield for the source of our old house’s haunting, would occasionally pose these delicately worded questions to me.

  “Why doesn’t your mother do her gardening in the morning?” he asked late one Friday evening from the perch of the attic window, where we were secretly reading a horror comic, keeping a weather eye on her as she deadheaded roses in the garden below. “Does she work nights?”

  I told him no, she didn’t work at all, and he was thoughtful. “She doesn’t go out much during the day, does she?”

  Well, no, she wasn’t social in any sense of the word back then, but shy and retiring, which didn’t strike me as so terribly odd, though apparently it did Kenneth, who, as the summer progressed, began to watch Mama even more closely, put even more subtle questions to me: Why didn’t she eat? Why didn’t she sleep? Why didn’t she go to the beach or the movies or join the PTA like everyone else’s mom?

  I just shrugged in reply, for my mother was kind of like my house: so familiar that I never thought to question the fact that though she spent an hour each and every afternoon conjuring up these breathtaking suppers, once all that fried chicken and macaroni and cheese was buttered and peppered and set on the table, she’d usually just sip tea while the rest of us dove in. It was just Mama: she didn’t eat.

  She also didn’t sleep, or at least not the way everyone else did, taking catnaps during the day, but staying wide-awake at night, the lamp in her bedroom lit where she was sitting up in bed reading book after book while Daddy snored peacefully at her side. When I was little, if I was ever wakened by a nightmare or got up to pee, there she’d be, or sometimes I’d find her downstairs, standing at the French doors sipping hot tea, or even folding laundry or cleaning windows. She wouldn’t look particularly startled or guilty; would just ask why I was up; ask if I was all right.

  I never thought to ask if she was all right; never thought much about her bizarre sleeping patterns one way or another till Kenneth brought the matter to a head sometime in July, when one of the networks was doing a rerun of Salem’s Lot and he simply insisted that Sim and me spend the night with him and his brothers and watch it.

  “It’s the best vampire movie ever,” he assured me with one of his nutty, knowing looks. “I think you’ll find it very interesting.”

  He kept at us till Mama finally allowed us to go over and spend the night, even though Miss Susan was working that night, and we’d all be on our own. I must say we had a big time running around the woods playing War till nine o’clock, when we all snuggled down on their old foldout couch, Pepsi and popcorn in hand, ready to be scared, and in that, at least, we were not disappointed. For another of Mama’s peculiarities is that she’s never allowed us to watch anything weird or violent or otherwise distressing on any screen, big or small, leaving me and Sim ill-prepared for our first night alone in the woods with nothing but the doofus Brown brothers and Stephen King for company.

  Twenty minutes into the thing, I kept having to get up to pee, I was so scared, and when it came to the part where those vampire boys stick their faces to the window, I screamed like a woman, I really did. I mean, I would have run through the woods in my underwear all the way home, screaming as I ran, if Sim hadn’t shamed me into staying, telling me what a chicken I was; how Mama wouldn’t let us do sleepovers anymore if I told. Kemp and Keith sided with him, and after they barricaded the door and brought me a crucifix to clutch in my sweating little hand, I made it to the teeth-chattering end, though I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night, I was so scared.

  Fortunately, Kenneth couldn’t either, and as we lay there on their little sofa bed, sprinkled with garlic salt and clutching our crucifix, we fell to discussing vampires, the reality and the myth, Kenneth bringing the conversation back to my mother, who was beginning to obsess him as much as our house.

  “Have you ever noticed that she turns off the light when she does her hair?” he asked, for he’d come over so much that summer that he’d gotten to know our household routines.

  I had to admit that yes, she did. I mean, the upstairs bathroom had a big window, not a frosted one, and if you came in and turned on the overhead light while Mama was standing at the sink, brushing her teeth, or her hair, she’d switch it right back off. (“I can see,” she’d say.)

  It was just another of her Mama-things that I didn’t take much notice of, though Kenneth must have found it mighty peculiar, for he offered in this light, suggestive voice: “It’s almost as if she doesn’t want you to see her reflection.”

  Now, I’ve never been what you might call fast on the uptake, and didn’t get his drift, just offered: “She doesn’t like to get her picture taken either.”

  Kenneth made a noise of interest at that, and it was right about then that I finally realized what he was hinting at, and sat up on my elbow. “You thank Mama’s a vampire?” I asked in this tone of gigantic disbelief.

  “No, no,” he said, q
uick to make sure I hadn’t taken offense, though when he saw I hadn’t, he was equally quick to make his point: “It’s just—well, think about it, Clay: she doesn’t come out till dark, doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep. Never goes to town. Doesn’t want anyone to take her picture, or see her reflection.”

  In reply, I just made one of Daddy’s skeptical little grunts, then lay back down, not particularly insulted or appalled, as I knew in my heart that whatever my mother was, it wasn’t a vampire. For one thing, she was too afraid of blood. I mean, it flipped her out if one of us so much as smashed a finger or got a bloody nose. When Sim cracked his head on the diving board that time, Grannie had to come out and drive him to the hospital because Mama was too stinking hysterical, curled up on the couch with her hands pressed to her ears, as if someone was dropping bombs on the backyard.

  So I had a pretty good idea that Kenneth was off base, though it took me a while to come up with a few more concrete bits of evidence in her defense, the most glaring being that to my knowledge, she didn’t sleep in a coffin, had never drunk anyone’s blood, and most importantly: she wasn’t afraid of crosses. I even took him to church that Sunday to demonstrate Mama’s ability to park in the parking lot of Welcome Baptist and walk right in under the shadow of a big old ten-foot cross without a flinch or a glare.

  “She’s a Christian,” I argued. “She teaches Sunday school, for crying out loud.”

  Kenneth just shook his head thoughtfully, for he’s not a hardheaded know-it-all like Missy, but more of a puzzler and a muser on the great parade of life. He never went so far as to insist that Mama was one of the Unquiet Dead, but he didn’t back down either, and over the course of the summer would occasionally hit upon some other piece of evidence, like how thin Mama got that summer; how she’d sit wrapped in an electric blanket sometimes, her teeth chattering like she was freezing to death, even on the hottest day of the year.

  Even her insistence that we not use the Ouija board began to seem kind of suspect. What was she so scared of? Afraid we’d push around the little pointer and her name would come up?

  I mean, we never got scared of her or anything; never went after her with a silver bullet or a stake through the heart, though we did talk about it, muse on it as the summer ended and a new school year was upon us, when in small, peculiar ways, Mama became even stranger, pacing the house every night like a tiger while she waited for Daddy to come home from work, back and forth, back and forth. When she’d hear his car in the drive she’d run out to the garage and stay close to him all night, pieces of their hushed conversation drifting up the stairwell. “It’s just rebound—no, I slept, from two to five. Just jumpy. Jittery. I yelled at Sim—could you talk to him? I couldn’t go to his game today, I hurt his feelings, I know.”

  There would be a fast rush of tears then, strange in Mama as she had never been much of weeper before, not excitable in any sense, but calm and levelheaded, her passion seen, if anywhere, in her lush gardens and ornate designs. It was only that autumn that she began to be overtaken by these jagged emotional outbursts, Daddy having to call one or another of us aside every few days to apologize for something she’d done, some snap of temper, some flash of anger that she bitterly regretted and asked him to explain.

  “Why is she so, like, sensitive all of a sudden?” I remember Missy asking him one night after she’d made one of her typical Missy remarks, accurate but tactless, to the effect that Mama was getting weirder by the day, causing Mama to burst into tears.

  “Oh, baby, she’s just having a rough time,” Daddy replied with a weary rub of his neck. “Thet fool Candace talked her into going off her medicine. But it’ll be all right. It’ll pass.”

  We accepted his explanation easily enough, for Mama took a pill every morning of her life, all of us knew that, even me. I even knew what it was called: lithium, a name so common that it was part of our household routine, Mama having to go to Dr. Williams every month for a blood test, then a stop by the pharmacy to pick up the little bottle of white pills that she was just frantically afraid we’d get into, kept locked in a drawer in the kitchen, as if it was a loaded gun.

  I couldn’t really understand why taking or not taking it would be such a big deal, but it clearly was, her and Daddy discussing it when he came home from work every night, him always asking what the doctor said, Mama nervous but determined, and as the autumn passed into the early days of winter, increasingly triumphant.

  “I slept six hours last night,” she’d tell him at breakfast in this voice of great achievement, as if it were just the coolest thing in the world, sleeping.

  Daddy would indeed seem impressed, with Mama suddenly more confident, suddenly the expert. “I’m only taking Pamelor now, and it’s down to fifty and I’ll just have to stay on that till Christmas, or maybe Easter.”

  “Don’t go so fast,” he’d warn her, though by Christmas it was clear that she was much improved, eating more and even sleeping while the sun was down, the door to their bedroom dark if you got up in the middle of the night, the hallway lit by a night-light. And though she was still overprotective to a fault, and still paced the floor when Daddy was late coming home from Waycross, and still (till this day) turns off the light if you come in the bathroom while she’s doing her hair, she’s never been as isolated as she was that summer, so much the stranger. I doubt anyone would mistake her for a vampire these days, even a doofus kid like Kenneth, who long ago moved on to other obsessions (girls, mostly) and pretty much abandoned his Vampire Theory, except maybe to laugh about it, and how dumb we were when we were little.

  So in the end, you might say that I am the last true believer, for I don’t think I’ve ever really looked at my mother in exactly the same light as I did before that summer. I mean, Gabe used to hammer us about the power of image, the power of myth. It was one of his things that he used to warn us about, and how the South was filled with all these loaded symbols, like the plantation house, the rebel flag, and how powerful they were; how they had formed our identity, shaped our history.

  At the time I never really understood what the heck he was talking about, but maybe I’m beginning to see his point. Because even now, when all Mama’s secrets have been so thoroughly explored with Aunt Candace’s cut-and-dried precision, and the mystery of the pills and the paleness and the aversion to mirrors is so easily explained—still, whenever I think of her, and her life and her sadness, I never think in terms of manic depression or Chattahoochie or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nothing like that occurs to me at all—nothing but a sad, familiar image that must date back to that summer when I first perceived her difference, of her wandering through her roses at twilight: my tired old vampire mother, converted to Christ and condemned to time, tired and haunted, unable to sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  That’s how I came to understand and accept the fact that I did indeed live in a bona fide moss-draped haunted house, though it wasn’t until Daddy died that our household spirits began to rattle their chains, demand their freedom—or maybe it all started a couple of years before that.

  I guess you could say the earliest stirrings—unrecognized by few and certainly not me—began the weekend of my ninth birthday, on a fairly ordinary March afternoon that stands in infamy as the first time in my life that I remember my father ever breaking a promise or getting sick, or so much as uttering the name of the man who would so quickly, so completely, change my life: his brother Gabe.

  Now, Gabe, Gabe, Gabe, I am of two minds on how to approach him. On one hand, I would just as soon leave him out of my history completely, pretend he didn’t exist—but that would never be easy, for he is the kind of personality that it doesn’t pay to ignore. I figure I might as well introduce him here, cleanly and aboveboard, otherwise he’ll creep in, quote by quote, shadowy and pale, and haunt my story like my poor old mother—not that any of us ever thought he was a vampire.

  God, I wish we had. Then, maybe I would have kept him at arm’s length, with a crucifix and a stake handy in cas
e he got too close. But no, Gabe is slick. As a matter of fact, that’s what Bobo and Darius and all the black kids at Lincoln Park used to call him: Slick. They said it with great affection, for they really did come to love their old teacher, recognized him on sight, a heck of a lot sooner than I did, I really don’t know why. Maybe it was a black thing—a migration thing, as Gabe would say (see what I mean about him creeping in?). Maybe they all have uncles just like him, poor boys who’d hopped the bus north first chance they got, looking for a better life: an education; a job that paid. Who’d kept up with their old hometown at first, returning home Christmas or Thanksgiving to show off a new car or a good-looking wife, though over the years they’d gradually lost touch and drifted away, become nothing more than faded ink on old letters; someone for the old folks to brag about, which is all Gabe ever was to me.

  He was just Uncle Gabe: the brother who got out, who headed north and never looked back. He went to Harvard. He was real smart. He was a genius. Those were the rumors I heard growing up, a snip of oral history to support the only actual physical evidence I ever saw of Daddy’s younger brother: a handful of tiny black-and-white photos in Grannie’s big picture box of a grinning little towheaded boy standing next to Daddy and Aunt Candace in different Easter ensembles, and a head-and-shoulders graduation photograph of the same little boy, now grown into a somber-faced man, that had sat on top of Grannie’s television for time out of mind. Daddy’s graduation photograph occupied the opposite side of the double frame, their faces only alike in their very lack of expression, their hair cut back in severe flattops like they wore back then, though the front of Uncle Gabe’s hair didn’t poke up as stiffly as Daddy’s, but curled forward a little, giving him a softer, more melancholy look.

  But that was all I really knew about him; nothing very exciting when you compared him with Mama’s brother, Uncle Ira, who I bragged about all the time, as Lincoln Park is the kind of school that has a prematurely jaded student population that is doggoned hard to impress, let me tell you. I mean, nobody ever gave a flip that my father owned two factories or was a millionaire, or that Mama was a master gardener who could make roses thrive, even in the shade and humidity of a West Florida oak hammock. Nobody gave a diddle about any of that; the only flicker of respect I ever got from anyone was due to my close blood ties to a man doing time in The Joint, though to be perfectly honest, the close part was a little stretch of the truth.