5
THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY it was Marcia's turn. She let Raff sleep late, then noisily opened the door and walked into his room. Singing to herself, she raised the shade of the single window and let sunlight flood his bed. She paused there, leaning forward to peer at the bird feeder placed in the crepe myrtle tree next to the window. Sure enough, the resident squirrel sat on the feeder platform, while birds perched in the surrounding branches waiting for the monster to leave. On rare occasions, when it was not raining and Raff was not at school or outdoors, he sat on a chair and watched the birds come and go--mostly house sparrows, blue jays, and cardinals, but also the occasional common grackle. Ainesley had offered to shoot the squirrel and give the birds more feeder time, but Marcia indignantly forbade him to so much as threaten the family rodent.
Marcia shook the bed and pulled Raff's thin wool blanket partly off his huddled body.
"Time to get up, Scooter. We're going to church, then we're going down to Mobile to have supper with the family."
Church meant the main Methodist church in downtown Clayville. Marcia and all the relatives on her side were Episcopalian, but the closest services held in that denomination were in Brewton, half an hour's drive away. Visits were made there only on special Sundays. Ainesley was a lapsed Southern Baptist and a sometime private atheist who thought poorly of Baptist pastors. But he dutifully took Marcia and Raff to church every Sunday that he wasn't at his store taking inventory. Usually he dropped them off and picked them up after service. Occasionally, however, he put on a coat and tie and sat next to them, enjoying the sonorous comfort of the organ and good hymns, but fretting through the scripture readings and homilies that seemed planned to go on into Monday. The worst part was that he couldn't smoke or take a sip of anything, sitting there in the midst of two hundred or so righteous Alabamians.
Family to Marcia meant her own Semmes family. Her full name was Marcia Semmes Cody. Her son bore the grand name Raphael Semmes Cody. Marcia had made the decision to name him after the Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes, whose warship the Alabama had savaged Union shipping up and down the Atlantic Seaboard before being sunk by a bigger Union gunship while on a provisioning trip off the coast of England.
Semmes was a big name in these parts. To the north of Mobile was the little town of Semmes; and near Bienville Square in downtown Mobile stood the old Admiral Semmes Hotel and a heroic statue of the man himself. There was even an Admiral Semmes Drive, in the better part of the city, as expected. There were the Semmeses of Mobile and the Semmeses of America, spread out with their collateral lines and spousal surnames like the branches of some great oak tree far and wide across the Republic. Their distinguished heritage extended back in multiple lines for three centuries, almost as long as that of America itself.
There were Codys too, of course, distributed widely across South Alabama and over into Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle and beyond, with one branch of the family having recently colonized Australia. They were successful and Southern Baptist and upright for the most part. One was a doctor living just across the Mississippi state line in Pascagoula, but most of the current generation were solid working class--truck drivers, nurses, real estate salesmen. By Marcia's lights they were below the Semmeses, and there was nothing among them that should give pride to her or Raphael. That is, no admirals, generals, governors, senators, or golf champions. No inherited wealth, second home, or memberships in the right charitable foundations, and no invitations to gubernatorial inaugurations.
Although she never spoke of it quite so bluntly around him, Ainesley knew the way Marcia felt. He sensed that she sometimes regretted the rash decision she had made, as a headstrong young woman, to marry him. It was the unspoken tension that haunted their marriage, but he would love her and Raff without reservation no matter what her social origins or how she expressed them. He didn't care about his own relatives very much anyway, one way or the other. He was, for all his foibles and lack of education, a self-contained man. He was intelligent, and passionate at times, and there was of course his code, which no one who knew him well would wish to dispute within his hearing. Without knowing who Epictetus was, or much about the ancient Greeks in general, Ainesley was an authentic philosophical stoic. As he had explained to Raphael, he really lived by the code he had internalized; he dwelled content within it. Marcia understood this solid core of his character, and it meant a lot to her.
This day, however, Marcia's mind was on Mobile and her parents and the home in which she grew up. She prepared to reinvest herself with the grandeur of the Semmeses.
Ainesley stood by the front door. He had cleaned the cab of the pickup and filled the gas tank, and he was beginning to fidget.
Marcia shouted at her son, "Please come on! We haven't got all day!" A chronically high-strung woman, she was especially keyed up this morning as they waited for Raff. She fidgeted around in the kitchen and living room, lining up objects that seemed even slightly out of place, glancing at herself in the hall mirror, adjusting her hair.
After the church service, which seemed agonizingly long to all three of them, the Codys dodged through the crowd of lingering parishioners and hurried home. They scarfed a light lunch sitting at the kitchen table. There was no Sunday dinner this day; they would all be dining sumptuously at her parents' home in the evening. Without changing from their best clothes, they hurried out to the pickup and headed south on the hour-long drive to Mobile.
They did not, however, go directly to the Semmes family home on the Azalea Trail.
"We're going first to drop by and see your Aunt Jessica," Marcia said to Raff.
"Oh, dear God!" murmured Ainesley. No way I'm going in there, he thought. I'm going to sit in the shade somewhere and smoke, and kill a soldier or two. He'd thoughtfully iced some bottles of beer--soldiers--and stored them under the truck tarpaulin the night before, just in case.
On Marcia's command, they pulled off at Satsuma, an exurban settlement just north of Mobile. After several turns they came on to Savannah Street, in the old section. Halfway down the first block, in a neighborhood adorned exquisitely with mature live oaks and magnolias, Ainesley brought the pickup to a halt in front of a run-down little house set well back from the line of other properties. The structure had a single floor, a slightly sagging front porch with a swing and two rocking chairs, and a roof in critical condition. Weeds fought crabgrass for possession of the spacious lawn. Lovely unpruned azaleas and crepe myrtles added to the overall aura of decaying gentility.
"This place must have looked great a hundred years ago," quipped Ainesley.
Then he announced his escape strategy: "I'll stay here in the truck until I see you go in. Then I'll be back to pick you up in two hours. Tell her I've got business." He looked straight ahead to avoid back talk, and waited for them to get out.
Almost as soon as Marcia knocked on the front door it was opened--and there stood Aunt Jessica, snow-haired, gap-toothed, and encased in an ankle-length flowered smock. She must have seen them through the front window as they approached. Of course she would be there and waiting for anyone who cared to come by. She was known never to leave the house.
"Good Lord have mercy on my soul, look who's here! Y'all come right on in!"
Aunt Jessica was a few years north of ninety. Born just before the turn of the century, she had lived all her life in the Savannah Street house, and even when young had never traveled farther away than the Mobile watering holes of Fairhope to the east and Biloxi to the west. Her grandmother had been a young woman living in Navy Cove at the time of the War Between the States, close enough to Fort Morgan to hear the thunder of artillery and watch Farragut's fleet break through into Mobile Bay. An enemy cannonball overshot the fort and landed in the family's backyard.
After the war, her grandfather had bought a little farm on what was then called the Old Savannah Road. In recalling the occupation, her grandmother allowed to Jessica, "The Yankees never did any harm to us." On one occasion, a trooper was reprimanded for stealing a chicken from the backyard, and his immediate superior apologized to the family. "They were mostly nice boys," she said. "They just wanted to get home themselves." The war had nevertheless devastated the economy, and land was cheap. Sections could be bought along the beach of the Fort Morgan Peninsula, over across the mouth of Mobile Bay, for ten dollars an acre.
Aunt Jessica herself had met and talked to many Confederate veterans when she was a teenager. They were old men by then, and it was customary to address them all as "Cap'n" in the Gulf seacoast manner of respect. She lived through the Great Depression, when much of rural Alabama was still an impoverished developing country, and Mobile little more than a backwater town compared to Savannah and New Orleans. She had witnessed the great immigration during World War II of tenant farmers, black and white, who poured into the city to help build the shipyard and Brookley Field.
Jessica and her family believed that "our people" were superior to all others, as demanded--not just encouraged--by the culture of her youth. Even the poor white tenant farmers who came from upstate were dismissed as "white trash" and "peapickers," with their "towheaded kids." Towheaded meant blond, and it was a strange inversion that the trait should so contemptuously identify that part of the lower class mostly descended from Scotch-Irish pioneers of America.
Black people were given a measure of respect, at least in Jessica's day. They were called Negroes in polite communication, and racial purity within white families of any class who believed it to exist was protected fanatically. The one-drop doctrine was obeyed without exception: one black ancestor made you a Negro. White working-class people were so afraid in particular of losing their perceived birthright of racial superiority that to be called a "nigger lover" was a fighting insult.
Jessica, like most girls of her tribe, had little education in the ways of the world beyond Mobile. She seldom read newspapers or books. Television had not invaded her home, even now. But she was an encyclopedia of local lore and a great storyteller in the congenial Southern tradition. She seldom stopped talking when she got hold of you, and she could render spellbound any who cared even the least for Southern culture in an authentic form.
Jessica was not, as it turned out, Marcia's aunt. That title was traditionally bestowed on any woman, white or black, who was a close and beloved friend. Nonetheless, Jessica was at least a Semmes, and certainly Marcia's distant cousin at some unknown degree of remove. Marcia had been introduced to her when a little child by her father, and she grew up recognizing her as the official genealogist of the Mobile Semmes clan.
As Jessica walked with Marcia and Raff into the parlor, a pale woman of about seventy stood, without salutation. This was Sissy, who had lived with Jessica for longer than anyone could exactly remember. No one was even sure of her surname, although some believed it was Dupree or something close to that. Among the Semmes cognoscenti it was also rumored that Sissy was descended from the first French settlers of Old Mobile. Others guessed, more reasonably, that she came as a young woman with a dissolute sharecropper family, and at some point Jessica hired her and then took her in. None of the Semmes women ever spoke about it in Jessica's presence. It was an old Southern custom to keep improvident elderly relatives and family friends in the house, if such was large enough.
Jessica had no children of her own, so there was no one obligated to inquire into that or any of her other business. If Jessica had money--there had to be some--or a will, no one knew. She never in anyone's memory had given a gift of any value, nor asked for help of any kind.
Sissy was dispatched to bring lemonade and crackers. Marcia and Raff followed Jessica into the parlor, and were struck by the telltale scent of neglected old age, a mix of unwashed flesh and decayed upholstery with just a hint of urine. If this fazed Marcia, her composed features gave no sign. As the two women seated themselves, she gently nudged Raff and commanded, "Give your Aunt Jessica a kiss."
The ten-year-old was well practiced in this drill. He walked over and delivered a peck on Jessica's forehead, sidewise to avoid the hairy mole on her nose.
Jessica smiled. "Thank you, Mr. Raphael." Raff gave the expected response, "Yes, ma'am," and sat in a chair under the parlor window. A cat appeared from behind a pot of plastic ferns and rubbed against his legs, then sat back and stared up at him in hungry supplication.
Marcia drew her chair close to Jessica's, and the two fell quickly into soft, animated conversation. Jessica seemed to have memorized the genealogy of the Semmeses and all their collateral lines back into the seventeenth century. In particular, her archival knowledge of the Mobile Semmeses was total. The two women browsed through episodes about the local family and their antecedents, sharing pleasure in every detail, hopping from topic to topic. Raff was able to catch only fragments.
"Your cousin Tommy on your Aunt Sara's side...No, no, I'm sure of it, she's buried with little Mary Jo right there on the west edge of Magnolia Cemetery...Oh, I know, those were such dreadful days, there was such suffering...Well, believe it or not, I actually met him once, I must have been only five or six...No, I don't know what happened to them after they moved to Texas, that was such a long time ago...A captain? Oh, no, he couldn't have been a captain although I know Cousin Rosalee claims he was, because, think, he was only eighteen when he went in...Oh, my, yes, divorced not once but would you believe it twice...Arrested you say, maybe, but he was back in Mobile the very next morning...A Southern Baptist, now? Lord God have mercy on us all..."
Marcia was enraptured, as befitted an acolyte and the family historian-designate.
Raff tried to listen and learn something about his ancestry on the Semmes side, as Marcia had instructed him to do, but he couldn't hear enough or follow even a single story. He preferred to read comics; he was neither the genealogist nor the mathematician required for such a celebration of the deceased multitude. He closed off his mind and began to fidget. Reached for the cat, crossed and recrossed his legs, squirmed in his chair a lot. Then he let his eyes wander. There in a dim light next to the hallway entrance was an oil painting of the Confederate warship Alabama and next to it a faded photograph of the admiral who had commanded it, Raphael Semmes himself. And all around the room, frame almost touching frame, there were photographs of people, singly or in groups, many hand-tinted. Judging from the style of clothes, the pictures were about a century old, dating mostly to the late 1800s and turn of the century. Interspersed were also a few yellowed newspaper clippings, and above one a framed brace of military medals. Nearby hung a gold-trimned certificate from the Mobile Daughters of the Confederacy. In its center was the battle flag, its red faded to pink. None of the pictures was labeled.
After the better part of an hour, Sissy returned with the lemonade and a plate of soda crackers. "Scooter," said Marcia, "why don't you take your drink and go with Sissy to see the chickens?"
His face brightening with relief, Raff sprang from his chair. He stepped around the cat, which had drifted off into a ball of sleep, and followed Sissy down the hall. They proceeded through a kitchen filled with jelly glasses and cracked enamel cookware, and on out to the backyard. The yard was a small fenced-in enclosure lined by crooked catalpa trees, a broad-leafed species that seemed to thrive best in bare urban yards. Its packed dirt floor was spattered with chicken droppings and shed feathers. Along one side of the yard was a coop with a cast-iron roof and sides made of chicken wire. The interior, crowded with roosts and nest boxes, was a bedlam of hens making chicken noises. The smell of ammonia was overpowering. A rooster and several hens were running loose outside. They scattered as Sissy stepped in their direction and shooed them away with waving arms.
Walking the length of the coop, Sissy began to laugh, pointing to one thing or another, saying, "Look there! Look there!" over and over. Otherwise, she was a lady of few words. Raff tried but could not make out anything special in the places she indicated. When they reached the end of the coop and circled back, Sissy's commands continued and her laughter grew louder. Raff was getting rattled, and started to move past her on his return to the house. Sissy stopped laughing and came to a halt, as if to hold him back. Then she abruptly turned around and chased one of the loose hens down the length of the small yard. She cornered it at the angle of the rear wooden fence, gathered it struggling and squawking in her arms. She grabbed its lower legs with both hands and turned it upside down and held it that way, with its wings flapping and its head hanging down, for Raff to see. Then she walked over to a low wooden table next to the farthest coop, freed one hand, and picked up a small axe lying there. Turning to face Raff, holding up the chicken and axe, she uttered her last word of the day. "Dinner."
Raff was shocked and frightened by what was about to happen. Then he quickly pulled himself together. He was determined not to witness the execution of another large bird, the second in just a week, and this time in an unimaginably grisly manner. So he said loudly, "Thank you, Miss Sissy, that was fun," then walked to the back door of the house and stepped inside. Behind him, the rooster crowed. Sissy stood stock-still and watched him go.
Ainesley returned at the appointed time, and to the minute, afraid that Marcia might call him in to say hello to Jessica. After prolonged goodbyes, with thankfully no kisses asked this time of Raphael, he and Marcia climbed into the cab of the pickup and the family continued on their journey toward the center of Mobile. Marcia was silent, not easily jarred out of the pleasant interlude with Aunt Jessica. As they passed out of Satsuma, Ainesley turned to Raff with crinkled eyes and an ironic smile.
"Hey, Scooter, did you have a good time?"
Marcia scowled, watching her son from the corner of her eye. Raff hesitated. His best diplomatic response was needed to solve this little crisis.
"It was all right, I guess."
Marcia countered, "How was Sissy and her chickens?"
Raff looked straight ahead. He wanted off the hook, fast.
"Okay, I guess. She's a little strange, though."
"Insane, you mean," Ainesley said.
Like a spring-loaded trap Marcia snapped back with the correct upper-class response: "Ainesley, I told you before not to be prejudiced against anyone just because they're different from you."