“Daddy getting those shells ain’t like him saying he don’t think you gonna catch this guy, Titus. But this is Charon. Stuff like this doesn’t happen a lot. People don’t know what to do,” Darlene said.
“I’m so sick of people saying ‘this is Charon’ like everyone around here is a goddamn virgin and no one has ever stepped on a sidewalk crack or stole a grape from the Safeway. Let me tell you something I learned in the Bureau. Doesn’t matter where you are from or where you live, people are people. They can be jealous or hateful or twisted and sick. They steal and they lie, and lie about stealing. They fuck each other’s husbands and wives or sons and daughters. They go to church every Sunday and hoot and holler about brotherhood and living in Christ, then they come right out and call you or me a porch monkey before they go home to beat their kids. Then have the nerve, the unmitigated audacity, to point at somebody else, at some other town, and say, ‘No, those are the sinners, those are freaks, not us, not Charon.’”
“Titus, I didn’t—” Darlene tried to say, but Titus ignored her.
“Flannery O’Connor said the South is Christ-haunted. It’s haunted, all right. By the hypocrisy of Christianity. All these churches, all these Bibles, but it’s places just like Charon where the poor are ostracized. Where girls are called whores if they report a rape. Where I can’t go to the Watering Hole without wondering if the bartender done spit in my drink. People say this kind of thing doesn’t happen in a place like Charon. Darlene, this kind of thing is what makes places like Charon run. It’s the rock upon which this temple is built,” Titus said. He tossed back the rest of his drink and stomped into the kitchen.
Titus rinsed the glass and sat it on the edge of the sink. His shoulders rose and fell as he breathed hard.
He felt Darlene’s hands first on his back, then on his shoulders, her touch feather-light. Titus turned and took her in his arms. She pressed her head against his chest.
“I’m sorry. I know you’re under a lot of stress. I shouldn’t have said—”
“No, I’m the one that should say I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to blow up at you. You haven’t done anything wrong. Look, I love Charon. I know just now it didn’t sound like it, but I do. It’s my home and heart. And because I love it, I’m hard on it. I’m brutally honest about it. Because I know it can be better than what it is. But it can’t get there if we keep pretending that it’s some utopia on the Chesapeake Bay. We have to look at Charon and see the whole picture. Even the ugly parts. That’s how I catch him.”
“I know it’s hard looking at all that ugliness,” Darlene said.
“It’s my job. Let’s go upstairs,” Titus said. Darlene nodded. He took her hand, so small yet so strong, in his bear paw and led her through the living room. Titus paused to grab the remote to shut off the television. A commercial was on the screen.
“This program was brought to you by the National Scleroderma Foundation. To donate—”
Titus pressed the power button and the television winked out. Neither one of them spoke for a few seconds.
“That’s what your mama had, isn’t it?” Darlene asked. The question came out in bite-sized pieces. Titus was familiar with that tone. People were painfully curious about what killed his mother, but they took great pains to hide it. Even his girlfriend had a morbid curiosity about it.
“Yeah. Turned her muscles to bone. It was rough,” Titus said.
He could see himself at twelve years old standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, half-afraid, half-confused, filled with a yearning that is the sole provenance of sons who want a hug from mothers who can’t even raise their arms.
“My aunt used to come by and pray over her. Rub her forehead with anointing oil. She couldn’t stand to be touched, but my aunt did it anyway. Most people with scleroderma can live long, productive lives but my mama had a rare form. It moved fast. She would scream like a dying rabbit every time somebody touched her. Whether it was my father bathing her or my aunt laying hands on her. One time I ran in there while my aunt was jabbering away talking in tongues and drowning her in that oil. I kicked her. Told her to get away from my mama. She slapped me. My mama raised herself off that bed for the first time in weeks and grabbed my aunt by the wrist. She told her not to ever touch me again. But the disease had messed up her vocal cords. It didn’t sound like her, but it was still my mama, you know? Then she told me she loved me. It was the last time she spoke,” Titus said.
Darlene squeezed his hand.
She watched as tremors rolled through his body like tides from a full moon. They went upstairs hand in hand. Darlene pretended she didn’t see the tears on Titus’s face, and Titus pretended he wasn’t crying.
* * *
Later Titus crept downstairs and went to the kitchen. The old Felix the Cat clock on the wall said it was 2:00 A.M. His father was sitting at the table with a jar of moonshine in front of him. The cap was off, but the jar was still full.
“Pop? You okay?” Titus asked. His father was no longer a binge drinker, but he did have a sip of the good stuff every now and then, despite his devotion to the church. He was fond of saying even Jesus made water into wine.
“Huh? Yeah, I’m all right. Got a call a few minutes ago. Gene Dixon died. Heart attack,” Albert said.
“Aw, damn, Pop. I’m sorry to hear that. I know that was your buddy,” Titus said.
“Yeah. Did I ever tell you Gene was the one introduced me to your mama? At a dance at the Honey Drop Inn. A little shot house used to be down bottom of the county. Gene was dating Faye Jones. She and your mama were best friends. They needed somebody to dance with Helen when they went out. Your mama didn’t cotton much to being a third wheel, and I was the lucky man who got the job.”
“I didn’t know that,” Titus said. He sat down across from his father.
“Yeah. Gene was a good man. Lord have mercy, what times these be,” Albert said.
“Season of pain,” Titus said in a low voice.
“What?” Albert said.
“Nothing, Pop. You wanna do a shot?”
“I guess we should do one. For Gene,” Albert said.
Titus grabbed two shot glasses from the cabinet. His father said a toast before they swallowed the ’shine.
“To Gene Dixon, a good friend and a good man and the best pool player I ever saw. May his spirit abide with the Lord from now until the end of time,” Albert said. They took their shots and slammed the glasses on the table.
“What you doing up anyway?” Albert said with a gasp.
“I don’t know. I had this dream. A nightmare, really,” Titus said.
“About them kids in the woods?”
“Nah, they wasn’t in it, but I’m sure it was about them. I’m standing in this field all alone. A wheat field. But the wheat is dead and brown. Brittle as ice. There’s these huge black clouds rolling in like a tidal wave in the sky. And the wind is blowing through the dead stalks. And I’m all alone as the storm rolls in. Lightning and thunder and rain, but the rain hurts. It’s hot, boiling-hot. It burns. And I’m all alone.” Titus poured himself another shot.
“You’re not all alone, son. You got me and your brother and Darlene and, most important, you got the Lord,” Albert said.
“We’re all alone, Pop. We’ve just trained ourselves not to believe it,” Titus said before tossing back the ’shine.
“Titus, that’s not true. God walks with us in every moment of our lives. Even the darkest ones,” Albert said.
Titus didn’t respond. He did not want to get into this with his father, not now and not tonight.
He nodded at his father.
Titus loved his father, he truly did, but it had been a long time since he really thought he knew what he was talking about when it came to the heavenly hosts.
The night his mother had finally, mercifully died was when the blinders had come off for Titus. He still loved the man, but it was in those painful moments that he realized adults didn’t really know more than kids. That everyone was making it up as they went along and religion was just another crutch, like liquor or weed.
After his father had called the doctor who had written Helen Crown off weeks ago and made the official pronouncement and the funeral had come and gone, Albert Crown had said something about Titus’s mama being in a better place with Jesus. Then he had left thirteen-year-old Titus and eight-year-old Marquis alone to go down to the Watering Hole. Jasper’s father had been running it then. By the time Albert came back drunk and crying like La Llorona, Titus had changed the soiled sheets on his parents’ bed and made himself and Marquis some chicken soup. He’d washed the bowls and put them away, then put himself and his brother to bed.
Because someone had to grow up after his mother slipped from this world. His father eventually got it together and even became a deacon, but Titus never forgot that the night his mother died his father had left two little boys alone to fend for themselves with just a vague notion of salvation for their mother.