Atticus

***

On December twenty-third, Atticus skidded the great yellow barn door aside and One Sock and Pepper pranced inside to their wooden box-stalls, their horseshoes clopping on the floor planks. A hairy steam rose up from One Sock as Atticus took off the tack and gently scuffed a currycomb along his glossy chestnut back. Scott scooped oats into a tin bucket and said, “I don’t remember the measurements.”

“A half quart of oats, four pounds of hay. And put some pebbles in with the oats or she’ll feed too fast and she’ll scour.” Atticus watched his son step inside the stall and patiently hold the oat bucket up to Pepper just as he would years ago, as though the pinto couldn’t swallow uphill. Atticus said, “Hay first; but that’s okay.”

“She’s very hungry,” Scott said.

“She’s just flirting with ya. She probably wants sympathy. Wants to poison you against One Sock.” Atticus squatted with a horse blanket in order to dry the snow from One Sock’s flanks and quarters, and he heard Scott soothingly talking to Pepper in Mayan, words like ichpuchtla and patli and yol. Atticus stayed as he was for a while, trying not to listen, his blue eyes on the straw, and then he stood up and trued the green horse blanket over One Sock’s withers and croup. His son’s eyes were shut and he was pressing his nose into the pinto’s long jaw when Atticus asked, “You okay?”

Scott’s glance caught sight of his father’s misgivings and he grinned. “Hell, I’m crazy as a loon.”

Atticus hooked the currycomb on a nail and slowly walked out of One Sock’s stall to the oat sack. “Are you taking your medication?”

“You mean right now?”

“Ever.”

Scott sagged against a railing, blowing heat into his fingers. “The trouble is, lithium makes me so dopey that I have to pat my face to know where my mouth is. And there are side effects, too. Hand tremors, slurring, blackouts, fatigue.”

Atticus scooped oats into another tin bucket. “We could go into town and have your prescription—”

“My prescription’s just right, Dad. I have pills that make me harmless and stupid, pretty much the kind of guy who sits on a bench and feeds croutons to the pigeons. I’d rather walk in a southerly wind and not know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Atticus carried the tin bucket to One Sock and held it for him until all the feed was gone.

The Codys gathered together for Christmas Eve in the great, white, three-story house that Atticus grew up in, that was inherited by his older brother and was owned now by State Senator Frank L. Cody and his wife, Marilyn. She had given birth to three girls and a boy and was the fourth of six children, so there wasn’t room at the dining room table for all the company, and her brothers Merle and Butch and Marvin hunched toward their TV trays from the sofa, and Scott, in spite of many pleas and objections, chose to eat at a card table with his nieces. Oyster stew and crackers would be served, then Marilyn’s Waldorf salad and spinach quiche, Esther’s ambrosia, Cassie’s scalloped potatoes with Kraft cheese slices, and Connie’s stalks of broccoli in a hollandaise sauce, but before all that there were green magnums of a fancy champagne that Scotty had traveled all the way into Denver for just that afternoon. “Well, I be go to hell,” said Marvin. “Denver.”

“We call this nose tickler,” Merle told Scott.

“Champagne gives me the most gruesome headaches,” said Esther.

A few minutes later Frank herded his four-year-old over to her Uncle Scott and blandly asked, “You sip any of that Veuve Clicquot, Jennifer?”

She saw her father’s cue and nodded.

“What’s your opinion of it?”

She hesitated and then recited, “It lacked a certain je ne sais quoi." And she flinched when she heard sudden laughter from all her uncles and aunts.

“Oh, you, Frank,” Cassie said. “Did you put her up to that?”

Then the family found their places. All held hands as Frank recited the blessing before the meal, and at the finish Marilyn mentioned Serena: “We still miss you, Mom.”

Children looked at Atticus and at Scott.

Then Frank held forth from the head of the dining room table, being funny and hectoring and omniscient in his English suit and European tie and his ring from the Colorado School of Mines. Atticus heard later from Marilyn that Scott watched with jealousy as Atticus and Frank huddled together over black coffee to talk about income tax write-downs on their Cody Petroleum partnership and figure out how many heifers the cattle operation ought to breed in the fall.

At eight o’clock Midge played Santa Claus underneath the giant pine tree in the teal, high-ceilinged living room, giving out a great stack of presents. Luciano Pavarotti grandly sang carols, and pretty wrapping paper was loudly torn, and children’s toys rattled and zinged and nickered across the carpet. Atticus carefully peeled away the red paper on his present from Scott and popped open a box containing a Swiss wristwatch that, according to Connie, was worth one thousand dollars. Atticus scowled and asked his son, “Are you trying to throw your money away?” but Scott was sticking a green cigar in his mouth and hugely grinning into Butch’s videotape camera and saying, “Isn’t this great?” Then Atticus jiggled a grandchild on his knee as Scott got his gift from his older brother and ogled a handsome Winchester twelve-gauge shotgun with checkering on its hardwood stock. “Wow! Heat! Won’t those banditos be surprised!”

Atticus stared with irritation at Frank, who justified the shotgun by saying, “I heard Dad got you out hunting again. And I figured you probably had havelina and deer and poisonous snakes down there.”

His kid brother sighted down the dark barrel and said, “Yeah. In the jungle. Snakes are called yellowbites.”

Atticus hefted a heavy box from behind his chair and presented it to Scott. “You may not want to haul it down to Mexico with you on the plane. I’ll ship it maybe.”

Scott hastily tore off the green wrapping paper just as he did as a child, and he blushed when he saw an off-brand cassette player. “Wow, Dad! Thanks! A Radiola!”

“Earl—you remember Earl at the hardware—he told me it plays just as good as a Sony or an Aiwa and the others, and Radiola’s an American brand.”