On Sunday, Bill and June arrived with their two dogs, Tammy and Heidi, to take us to see Mammy’s brother, Uncle Oscar, who had not yet left his home in Clarence, not far from the farm where Mammy grew up.
Bill sold tractors in Mexico, although he remained a partner—with Harry, Betty, and Mammy—in the lumberyards. Spitting out the windows and clearing his throat, he traveled the countryside with June and the dogs at all hours in a grimy baseball cap in search of round balers to buy and sell. Before he married, he slept in rooming houses run by old widows but lived on the back roads. Late nights found him at a roadhouse in Moonglow or sipping a Bud in some truck stop, mulling over newspapers. He met June at the Black Orchid Lounge in Joplin. A still youngish “widow woman,” she had been a beauty operator before the five farms in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma that she inherited from her first husband made her a rich woman. The owner of a mink stole that I tried on in secret during a Thanksgiving dinner, she always gave me special attention.
June smoked profusely and served her seventeen-year-old toy terrier, Tammy, coffee with cream in the mornings to get her going. “In the mornings,” June would say, “Tammy needs her fuel. Just like me!”
. . .
It was late fall, November perhaps, not long before the winter set in. The Missouri sky was nearly white with smoky lines of cloud. Back home, in Madison, after the trip, there was a curious event, a car in Mammy’s driveway with the windows rolled up and a man behind the steering wheel who would not roll down the windows or speak at all. He just gazed ahead, as if frozen. We had no idea of his purpose here or when he had arrived. It was Wray. He frightened me. I did not want him there.
Bill approached the car, tapped on the window, but Wray remained fixed, oblivious. He did not react. “You all right, Wray?” Bill asked. “You all right?” But Wray did not turn; he ignored Bill completely. For a while, Bill stood by the car. Then June, holding Tammy, went up, knocked gently on the window, and waved the dog’s paw. “Tammy wants to see you, Wray,” she offered. Mammy finally said, “Just leave him. Let him be. He’s not doing anything wrong.” Eyeing Tammy, she turned to me and mimicked strangulation.
I could not take my eyes off Wray’s face, his hands on the wheel, which he gripped tight. Where was he going? He was always on his own.
Inside, Mammy served the burned angel cake to Bill and me. June would not leave Wray. She sat for a long time on a lawn chair on the front porch, holding Tammy and smoking her Dorals. From the window, I watched the smoke from her cigarette eddying through the cold air. “Sometimes,” she said, after finally coming into the kitchen, “if you just sit with a person, you can get ’em to feel a little better.” She poured coffee for herself and Tam, prepared a tray with cake and coffee for me to set on the hood of Wray’s car.
When I came back in the kitchen, June was still talking. She said that Wray had somehow gotten on “the wrong road.” It is easy sometimes, she says, for a person to get on the wrong road. She nearly took such a detour after she lost a baby, Mary Ann, and then her first husband. She said she went through a rough patch. Bill cleared his throat to end the talk. It was getting too personal and he winced, as he had a way of doing if certain kinds of things came up in conversations.
Outside it was getting dark, but Wray still did not move. When Bill and June left, I kept watch at the window. Mammy came over sometimes to stand behind me and try to make out what was going on. Gradually, the car disappeared into the dark. In the morning, Wray was gone.
“It’s just a sickness,” said Mammy of Wray’s affliction, “that’s all.” But it wasn’t. He was more than sick. He was loathed by many, it seemed. He was the kind of man whom our town seemed to hate, though he himself seemed to be the only one he had ever injured. Elsie Van Sickle talked about Wray’s “toots,” his trips to St. Louis on the train, and his stays at hotels downtown where, her voice implied, nothing good went on.
Mammy called Wray every few days. Once he did not pick up the phone for a whole weekend and Mammy sent me to take him a skillet full of eggs and bacon. “Just open the door if it’s unlocked and leave it. Don’t go in unless it seems like he needs help. I can’t do it. He could be in there naked.”