The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“He figured you’d be home this week. I just give him his sedative, so he won’t be able to talk with you too long. After he takes his nap and has his supper, he can talk a lot better to you.”

“How bad is he?”

“He ain’t good. But maybe you better wait on the doctor. He’s coming out tonight with your sister. She stays with him on my night off.”

“Thank you.”

“Mr. Iry, he talks funny because of that medicine. He’s all right after his supper.”

I walked up the stairs into his room. It was dark, and the only light came from the yellow glow of sun against the window shade. Small bottles of urine were lined on the dresser, and there was a shiny bedpan on a stool at the head of the tester bed. His curved pipe and tobacco pouch rested against the armadillo-shell lamp on the nightstand. I didn’t know that his face could look so white and wasted. The sheet was pulled up to his chin, and the knobs of his hands looked like bone against the skin. He ticked a finger on his stomach and squinted into the glare of light from the open door with one watery blue eye, and I saw that he couldn’t recognize me in the silhouette. I eased the door closed behind me. He smiled, and his lips were purple like an old woman’s. He moved his hand off his stomach and tapped it softly on the side of the bed.

“How’d they treat you, Son?”

“It wasn’t bad.”

“I thought you might be in yesterday from your letter. I had that nigra nurse make up your room for you. Your guitars are on the bed.” His voice clicked when he spoke, as though he had a fishhook in his throat.

“How they been treating you, Daddy?”

“They like my urine. The doctor takes it away every two days after the nurse puts stickers all over it.” He laughed down in his chest, and a bubble of saliva formed on the corner of his mouth. “They must not have much to do down at the Charity except look at somebody’s piss.”

“Daddy, did Rita and Ace put you in at Charity?”

“They got families of their own, Iry. It costs fifteen dollars a day to keep that nigra woman out here. They ain’t got money like that.”

I had to clench my fingers between my legs and look away from him. My sister and brother had married into enough money to bring in the best of everything for him.

“Look at me, Son, and don’t start letting those razor blades work around inside you. The one thing I regret is that my children never held together after your mother died. I don’t know what they done to you in the penitentiary, but don’t take your anger out on them.”

His watery blue eyes were starting to fade with the sedation, and he had to force his words past that obstacle in his throat. I looked at his white hair on the pillow and his thin arms stretched down the top of the sheet, and wondered at what disease and age could do to men, particularly this one, who had gone over the top in a scream of whistles at Belleau Wood and had covered a canister of mustard gas with his own body.

“Why don’t you go to sleep and I’ll see you later,” I said.

“I want you to do one thing for me this evening. Cut some azaleas by the porch and take them down by your mother’s grave.”

“All right, Daddy.”

“I know you don’t like to go down there.” The light in his eyes was fading away like a quick blue spark.

“I was going down there anyway,” I said.

His eyes closed, and the lids were red against the paper whiteness of his face.

I had heard stories about the effects of intestinal cancer and how fast it could consume a man and his life’s energy, in spite of radiation treatments and the morphine shots to take away the pain, but you had to look at it to make it become real.

I walked down the hall to my room, which he had kept as it was the day I went on the road again with the band and ended up in the penitentiary. My over-and-under, with the .22 magnum and .410 barrels, was propped in the corner, my clothes hung limply in the closet, the creases on the hangers stained with dust, and my double guitar case that held the Martin flattop and the dobro sat on top of the bed, with the gold-embossed inscription THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD across the leather surface. I opened the case, which had cost me two hundred dollars to have custom-made in Dallas, and for a moment in the crinkled flash of the Confederate flag that lined the inside and the waxed shine off the guitars, I was back in the barroom with the scream of voices around me and the knife wet and shaking in my hand.

I stripped naked and dressed in a pair of khakis and a denim shirt and slipped on a pair of old loafers. I put everything from Angola inside the suit coat, tied the sleeves into a hard knot, and pushed it down in the wastebasket.

Downstairs, I found the bottle of Ancient Age that my father always kept under the drainboard. I poured a good drink into a tin cup and sipped it slowly while I looked out the window through the oak trees in the yard and at the sun starting to fade over the marsh. Purple rain clouds lay against the horizon, and shafts of sunlight cut like bands of crimson across the cypress tops. I had another drink, this time with water in the cup, and took a butcher knife and the bottle outside with me to the azalea bushes by the side of the house.

I snipped the knife through a dozen branches covered with red flowers and walked down the slope toward the graveyard. It was close to the bayou, and ten years before, we had had to put sacks of cement against the bank and push an old car body into the water to prevent the widening bend of current from eroding the iron fence at the graveyard’s edge. There were twenty-three graves in all, from the four generations of my family who were buried on the original land, and the oldest were raised brick-and-mortar crypts that were now cracked with weeds and covered with the scale of dead vines. The graves of my mother and sister were next to each other with a common headstone that was divided by a thin chiseled line. It was brutally simple in its words.

CLAIRE PARET AND FRAN

NOVEMBER 7, 1945

There was a tin can full of rusty water and dead stems on the grave, and I picked it up and threw it back in the trees, then laid the azaleas against the headstone in the half-light. It had been seventeen years, but I still had dreams about the fire and the moment when I raced around the back of the house and tried to break open the bolted door with my fists. Through the window I could see my mother’s face convulsed like an epileptic’s in the flames, the can of cleaning fluid still in her hand, while Fran stood with a halo of fire rising over her pinafore. Alcide, the Negro who worked for us, threw me backward off the porch and drove a pickax up to the helve into the door-jamb. But the wind blew the inside of the house into a furnace, and Fran plunged out of the flames, her clothes and hair dissolving and streaming away behind her.