4
AFTER SUPPER, RAPHAEL LAY in bed, worrying. He stared sightlessly at the screen of his twelve-inch color television set, last year's Christmas present from his Uncle Cyrus. Two rooms away Ainesley and Marcia were talking loudly. He could not make out the words, but he knew from the volume and tone that it was an argument. From past experience he was certain that this one was about himself.
During the meal of fried calf's liver, turnip greens, and biscuits, he had averted his gaze from the two adults and uttered not a word. It was not easy being an only child. After the dishes were washed and dried, his father departed for the Delchamps Supermarket in Clayville for groceries. As soon as Ainesley left, Marcia took Raff aside and gently worked out of him the main events of the day. As he described the firing of the shotgun and conquest of the guinea fowl, her narrow, pleasant face turned increasingly grim.
Now his parents were squared off, as they had been many times before, on the issue of how their son should be raised. They were coming at each other from different positions Raff could sense but not understand. It ran a lot deeper, he knew, than just a turkey hunt. The ten-year-old's loyalty was divided by the conflict. That was bad, because the fissure appeared to be insoluble, and he did not know to whom his loyalty was owed.
Raff worried that Ainesley and Marcia might separate, leaving him without a father or a mother, one or the other. Maybe he would have to live with a relative or some stranger. He knew kids at school in that fix. They seemed mostly okay, but in his case, he thought, it would strip away his own security and upset his life completely. He fell asleep trying to puzzle this dilemma.
Toward dawn, as Raphael slept, the rain slackened off. By the time he was roused for breakfast, the wind had picked up and a slight chill was in the humid air. The blond weatherwoman on Mobile Television Channel 5 said with a clipped midwestern accent that the Alabama and Mississippi coasts would be cloudy, but with no more rain. Still, Marcia made Raphael put on a slicker, which he hated, and a rain hat, which he hated even more. They made him look like a sissy, he thought. His father thought the same, an opinion he had let recklessly slip to Marcia more than once.
Raff rode his bicycle down Charleston Street to the first light and then left three blocks to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Grammar School. Once, many years ago, it had been the Robert E. Lee School. Through the day he couldn't think about anything much in class. Geometry, English, and American history churned on past him like the talk of strangers in a shopping mall. During lunch and recess he stayed away from his best friends. He kept thinking about Ainesley, worried about the wrath to come. He feared the angry spells, the way his father occasionally raised his hand as though to hit him, although he never really had. He felt ashamed that he had refused simply to hold the gun with his father's help and pull the trigger. He felt guilty that he told his mother about the incident.
He thought, Am I a sissy? Even though I get in fights with other boys and don't run away? He felt even worse for letting his father down, because he knew Ainesley thought of him as a special and very precious boy, and maybe a little man too, after everything was said and done. Once he had heard Ainesley refer to him in conversation with some neighborhood friends: "I wouldn't take a million dollars for this one or give you a dime for another."
When he arrived home from school that midafternoon, he was surprised to find his father waiting for him. Ainesley had returned home early from the hardware store and was sitting on the porch in the rocking chair, cigarette in hand.
"Git in the car," Ainesley said, "I want to talk to you."
They drove into Clayville, down streets lined with live oak and trimmed hedges, past the Nokobee County Courthouse and on to Roxie's Ice Cream Palace. The latter social center, like the Cody home, was virtually downtown--no surprise, because if you kept on driving you'd come out the other side of Clayville in under five minutes. Inside Roxie's, they squeezed into a booth and Ainesley told Raff to order his favorite dish. It was, they both knew, a butterscotch sundae with chopped walnuts.
As Raff started to eat, Ainesley said to him, "Son, I'm sorry I pushed you so hard yesterday. You're pretty young to be firing guns anyway, and I don't think you'd have a lot of fun at your age killin' a turkey anyhow. It don't count that Junior was willin' to fire the gun and you wasn't. He's older and he's a lot bigger than you, and to tell the truth, compared to you he's dumber than a stump."
Managing a mouthful of ice cream, Raphael nodded and thought, Yeah, that's the truth. Junior was held back last year and was still only in the fourth grade. He'd have to endure another year of disciplinarian torture in Mrs. Maddon's class. Middle-aged, steely eyed behind glasses, her graying hair worn in a bun, she was both strict and given to quick anger. Out of earshot the students called her the Mad Ox.
"What I was trying to do," Ainesley continued, "was not start you huntin' game animals, exactly. You might not like it very much even when you're older. I don't know. I was just trying to show you things that when you grow up you gonna need to know to be a real man, not the kind of girlie man you see all over the place nowadays."
He paused to let that sink in, and--Raff could feel it coming--lit a cigarette. There was more talk coming from Ainesley, he was sure. No matter. Fear and remorse were sliding off him. He had been forgiven. For the first time he looked directly into his father's face--tanned, lines around his mouth, with blue eyes that now had a sad look.
Ainesley took a deep draw into his lungs and turned his head to blow the smoke to the side. He flicked a crumb of tobacco off his lip with a middle finger and continued, "You probably don't know what I'm talkin' about, so I'm gonna add a little bit more for you to think about. And maybe some more later, whenever we get together, so you'll understand about how I feel." How he feels? Raff thought. He was beginning to get anxious again.
"You know I don't have the education your mother and Uncle Cyrus have. You'll be gittin' one like that yourself, for sure, and I feel real good about that. But I want you to grow up to be like me in one important way. When you're on your own, I want you to stand up straight and tall and be the kind of man everybody respects no matter how much money they have, or how many fancy titles they have, or whatever.
"Now, what does that mean? It means honor. It means you keep your promises, you pay your debts, you meet your responsibilities, you do the best you can, even though sometimes things get tough. And you don't talk about it, you keep it inside of you. People meet you and work with you, they don't need to have your word on it. They know they can count on you--all the time, and not just when you feel like it. You understand that?"
Raff said, "Yes sir," and put another spoonful into his mouth, savoring the butterscotch.
"But being a man is more than that," Ainesley continued. "It's bein' a gentleman. Our people have a code that people may laugh at who live in big houses and take vacations in Italy and places such as that. I certainly wouldn't talk about any of it with your Uncle Cyrus, who incidentally I respect a great deal. But it means everything in the world I live in. You might say that code is raw, you might say it's too simple, but it sure stays right there on the surface of things, and it suits me. It's this. Never lie or cheat. Never ever hit a woman. Never hit a smaller man, if you can keep from doing it, Raff. Never hit anyone first, but never back down when you know you're in the right."
He paused, took a sip of coffee, stubbed out his half-burned cigarette, and lit another. Raff was wondering how a man of his father's diminutive size would make out if ever he were hit by anyone, especially a big man. His father stood under five feet eight inches tall and weighed only 130 pounds, "soaking wet," as he liked to say.
In time Raff was to learn that this question was moot. Ainesley carried a long jackknife in his pocket that he compulsively sharpened with a small rectangular whetstone. He kept a .22 pistol in the glove compartment of his pickup, "my equalizer," he called it. He could also produce an illegal blackjack suddenly, like a magician, from a hidden place Raff was never able to discover. If Ainesley on any occasion actually defended himself, Raff was never in future years to hear of it.
Raff took another large scoop of ice cream from the bottom of the goblet, afraid his father's pause meant he was getting ready to leave. But Ainesley picked up again.
"Here's another thing," he said. "Show decent respect to other people. There's something a gentleman down here does they don't do in other parts. You go up to another man, he's working in a filling station, and you ask him, 'Excuse me, but can you tell me where some street or other is located?' And he'll say, 'Yessir, I can.' He does not say, 'Yes, sir, I can.' He does not say, 'Yes sir!' He's not your servant. He says, 'Yessir, I do,' or 'Nosir, I don't know myself.' That means he's polite but he's your equal, and you show it too, you talk back to him the same way. Now, you're specially, extra polite to people who deserve it. That's why your mom and I have you say sir and ma'am to grown-ups, and why we do the same ourselves to old folks."
Ainesley lit yet a third cigarette, and fell silent again and flicked his hand as though to say, Well, there you are, as though his outpouring had gone a bit far and he was afraid Raphael might respect him the less for it. He searched his pocket for a few coins and put them on the table for a tip, stubbed out the cigarette, and got up to leave. Then, holding on to the rear of his chair and looking out the restaurant window toward the parking lot, to really nothing in particular except maybe a rainbow oil streak under the closest truck, he spoke softly, this time with a touch of bitterness.
"Here is what I want to pass on to you, Scooter. They can take away your money, they can take away your freedom, they can laugh at you behind your back, but if you're a man the way I'm trying to tell you to be, not some kind of a girlie man that snivels all over the place and backs off from trouble, they can't take that away from you, and that's why I'm going to keep after you even if once in a while I seem to ride you a little hard."
Raff believed him, totally. He remembered that when he was smaller and scraped his knee and started to cry, Ainesley said, "Stop that, be a little man."
He could just barely recall another occasion--he was perhaps three years old, and sleeping next to his father on some otherwise forgotten occasion--when he woke up during the night and asked to go to the bathroom, and Ainesley said, "Hold it in, wait till morning, like a little man."