March 22, 2008

• The Scott Family Reunion

  My daughter Marie and I had been on the bird ranch with my mother and her husband Grady for a couple of months.  I had looked unsuccessfully for a job, and resigned myself to staying at the ranch and helping out with the work there.  “Little Granny,” my mother’s eldest sister, Alice, was visiting from Kansas.  As Thanksgiving approached, my mother and her sisters, Alice and Flora, started planning for a big family meal at the ranch.

  My mother was no more of a pain in the ass than usual, which was quite enough anyway.  I had been out from under her thumb long enough to be able to ignore a lot of her manipulation and bossiness, and Grady had become an unexpected ally.  He laughed at her fears as my father had.

  On the day before Thanksgiving, I baked a 3-layer German chocolate cake with coconut pecan filling and chocolate butter cream icing, three pecan pies, and some peach, apple, and cherry pies.  Mama made pumpkin and mincemeat pies.  We had killed, plucked, cleaned and dressed two of the biggest tom turkeys and had them ready to go in the oven before dawn Thursday morning.

  Grady was handling all the ranch chores and looking after Marie.  By the time the family started to arrive, Mama and I were sweaty and footsore from running between the kitchen and dining room.   She showered and changed first, then I took a shower, put on my best clothes and cleaned Marie up.  I was finishing that task in the bedroom when I heard the first raised voices.

  I don’t recall who was arguing with whom when I came out into the big living/dining room.  It wasn’t a big surprise that hostilities had broken out.  The Scott family always fought when a big group of them got together.  All those brothers and sisters had been born before the U.S got into The Great War to End All Wars (WWI) — and Uncle Frank fought in it — so they were in their forties to sixties at the time, but they had never gotten over their adolescent sibling rivalries.  “Good-natured insults” were their habitual style of relating, but the “good-natured” part was just a hypocritical euphemism.  They went for blood.

  I went back to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on the meal.  I was at the stove, stirring gravy or something, when I heard the swinging door open and close.  Nobody spoke, and there were no other sounds, so I looked over my shoulder to see who had come in.  My mother was standing in the center of the room, shoulders stiff, arms down at her sides, fists clenched, with her mouth and jaw clenched so tight that her lips were ringed with white, and her cheeks were flaming red.

  Maybe I asked her what was wrong, or maybe I just raised my eyebrows.  Anyway, she said one word through tightly gritted teeth:  “Jack.”  My ex-uncle Jack had disowned Mama years before.  She had felt at the time that the circumstances of their falling out were entirely his fault, and the grudge she held had been compounded through the years whenever one or another member of the family told her how Jack had been badmouthing her.

  Mama was a staunch advocate of putting a good face on things, not saying anything if she couldn’t say something nice… or at least she paid lip service to all that hypocritical bullshit.  She assigned a few tasks to me and sent me out to the front room while she took over stirring the pot, and worked at composing herself.  I don’t know whether she wanted to throw Jack out or murder him, but it’s a good bet that the very last thing she wanted to do was welcome him to the party.

  I was placing a pie or cake on the buffet table when Jack, breathing whiskey fumes, sidled up to me, introduced himself and asked me who I was.  I sidled away from him, gave him a long head-to-toe look, taking in the scuffed shoes, rumpled clothes, body odor and food stains.  Then I brought my eyes back up to make contact with his, and said I was his ex-niece, Kathy Lynn.  Then I went back to the kitchen for another load of food.

  We got the buffet loaded, and people started filling their plates and finding places to sit.  Mama and I had been picking and snacking all day, so neither of us filled a plate for herself.  I saw her perch on the arm of the couch to rest her feet, and I took Marie from one of my aunts for a while.  The only sounds in the room were cutlery on crockery and animal feeding noises.  Marie was sleepy, so I put her to bed.  When I went back to the front room, I noticed that the butter dish was empty, so I took it to the kitchen for a refill.

  I had my head in the fridge when I heard the door open and swing shut, and somebody groped my butt none too gently.  I let out a yelp, jumped and bumped my head, then turned to see a fat slack-mouthed Jack Scott leering at me.  Just then, the swinging door opened and Grady came through to see what I’d yelled about.  I told him.  He told Jack to get out of his house.  Jack started back toward the swinging door, and Grady stopped him.  He grabbed Jack by the shoulder, turned him, and pointed to the back door.  “That way,” he said.  Jack went.

  I was still in the kitchen, filling the butter dish from the big bowl of fresh homemade butter, when I heard the phone ring.  I carried the butter through, and saw Mama holding the old black phone out toward me.  “It’s for you,” she said, “…Ford.”

  Continued….

  

  • 4:18 pm
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