The Floatplane Notebooks (3 page)

We finally arrived home without event. My mother said she was relieved the trip was over. She said it with an attitude which led me to believe she didn't grasp the force with which Thatcher and I were in love.

When we were driving back from Florida, Aunt Mildred told Bliss about finding the drowned kitten that time. That was back when me and Meredith were little. She pulled up the kitten out of the well in the water bucket. Meredith done it—drowned a whole litter. Me and him were playing marbles when she pulled it up. She screams, “Oh, my God,” looks down into the well and says, ‘Are they all down there?” She unhooks the bucket from the well rope—it's got water and the kitten in it—and walks to the tool shed. Meredith and me follow her. She gets a shovel, goes behind the tool shed, sets the water bucket on the ground, digs a hole, and pours the water and the kitten into the hole. The kitten floats, then the water seeps down in the ground, leaving him in the hole, sopping wet, with white skin where his fur is parted. Meredith and me stand there watching. Aunt Mildred covers him up and steps on top of the dirt, which sinks down with her footprints in it over and over. “Where's Thatcher?”
she says. “He was supposed to drown those kittens in the pond.”

Then when Uncle Albert comes home, and Thatcher says he didn't do it, that he gave them to Meredith to do it, Uncle Albert finds us.

“Did you drop them kittens down that well, Meredith?”

“No sir.”

“Well, who did?”

“Mark.”

“I did not! That's a story!
You
did! You held them by the neck and dropped them!”

“Sit down on that root,” says Uncle Albert. “Both of you. Thatcher, Noralee, come sit on this root right this minute.”

We all sit. Uncle Albert walks back and forth. He is short and always wears loose overalls. He talks, walking back and forth. Finally he says, “Mark, you go home and tell your mama I'm going to whip you and Meredith and Thatcher. I'll be waiting right here.”

When I get home I can't get my breath to talk because I'm crying so hard. Mother's looking in the refrigerator when I walk in, and then I am holding onto her, crying. I can look through the window and see that they are standing there waiting for me.

Mother walks with me outside to the tree. “What happened?” she says.

“These boys drowned some cats in the wrong place—in the damn well—and I aim to whip mine and I'll whip yourn if you're a mind.”

“I ain't a mind,” says Mother. “I'll tend to Mark.”

We walk back home. Mother walks with her hand on my
head. Meredith hollers that he is going to beat me up. Uncle Albert tells him to be quiet.

I stand at the window and see Uncle Albert talk to them some more and then send them after switches. Then I see him whip them with their pants down, bending over.

Mother sees me looking and tells me to get away from the window. Then she tells me it's wrong to drop kittens down the well, but that she knows I didn't do it, and for me not to ever tell a story.

The other worse time when Meredith lied was when he started the welldigger and got me to lie too. It was all his fault. I just thought we were going to camp out, that's all.

Mother was out on the back porch potting a plant. There was a big, flat black cloud, churning up into itself, but below it you could see the sun setting like a full moon.

“Mother, can I still camp out?” I say. “Uncle Albert says the rain's all blowed around.”

“We'll have to see, son. Oh, look! Mark, look at that sunset. Oh, I don't think I've ever seen one so beautiful. And look what it does to the crepe myrtle.”

“Can I, Mother?”

“Look! Come here. Look at that. Isn't that beautiful?”

“Yes ma'am. Can I?”

“Is it going to be just you and Meredith?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“In the backyard?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Well, if you'll practice your music, and that cloud goes away. But you can't go off. And if you-all want breakfast in
the morning, you come in and eat. I'll fix you some breakfast. Meredith ain't old enough to cook yet. He's liable to burn hisself.”

So I practice my piano music. I'm playing these songs I don't like very much. Minuets and stuff. Meredith thinks it's sissy. I mash on the soft pedal so he won't hear it from outside. I think about what if I could play boogie-woogie songs like Miss Paulson does after church on Wednesday nights sometimes. I see people standing around me when I finish playing some boogie-woogie, smiling at me, telling me how wonderful it was, what a beautiful way I played it, and there is a girl there, waiting for me, who falls in love with me, and then if I die she'll kneel down over me and be dressed in a white dress.

Meredith is putting up the tent on the grass beside the garden over in his backyard.

“Was that you playing?” he says.

“Yeah. I hadn't practiced today.”

Later, we are lying in the tents on our stomachs, looking at the fire, which is almost out.

We talk about what we are going to do when we grow up. Meredith says he's going to be a truck driver and a pilot. I say I'm going to be a doctor and a pilot.

Meredith asks me about my daddy, and says that his mother told his aunt Joanne from Ohio that my daddy had a French girlfriend when he was in the Army. Meredith says it's okay because you can do whatever you want to when you're in the Army.

I tell him it's not true about my daddy, and that you have to follow the rules when you're in the Army.

Then Meredith says we ought to go over and sit in the welldigger in his yard—and pretend it's an Army tank. They're digging a new well. I say okay but I feel worried.

We go through the darkness, across Meredith's yard to the welldigger. When we get there he shines his flashlight on it. “Let's get up in front,” he says.

We climb up into the truck cab. Meredith sits behind the steering wheel. “Let's turn on the well-digging part,” he says. He takes the key from a wire hanging on the mirror. We get out and walk in the dark around to the back of the truck. Meredith shines the flashlight on the motor until he finds the key slot. He sticks the key in the slot. It is almost as high as he can reach. He holds the flashlight with his other hand. “They turn the key, then click that switch over there and it starts.” He turns the key. “Click it.”

“You click it.”

“Well, hold the flashlight then.” Meredith hands me the flashlight and clicks the switch. The machine cranks with this rattling, cranking, popping noise. I turn out the flashlight and start running, stop, then start again—toward the tent. I have to run past Meredith's house to get back to the tent. Meredith hollers at me: “Bring the flashlight back!” But I keep running. Lights come on at Uncle Albert's. The front door opens. I click off the flashlight, duck into a corn row and lay on my stomach and watch. I feel the sand under my belt buckle against my skin, and wet grass blades against my arm. I'm afraid to move.

Uncle Albert comes out onto the porch and stands under the light bulb. He is in his pajamas, and barefooted. His legs are bowed and his fists balled. “Meredith!”

Meredith don't answer. The welldigger sounds like hundreds of pots and pans. Uncle Albert starts down the steps, then turns and goes back in the house. Meredith comes running by me. I call him. He stops, comes back, and ducks into the corn row with me.

“Come on,” he says. “We got to get out of here.”

Uncle Albert, now dressed, comes out onto the porch and yells: “Meredith!”

Meredith drops down beside me.

Aunt Mildred and Thatcher come onto the porch. They start toward the welldigger.

We crawl along the corn row, headed for the far end of the garden.

Meredith says, “Let's go follow them.” I stop, then I follow him. We hide behind a line of bushes, close to the welldigger.

Uncle Albert shines the light on the motor in back, finds the switch and turns it off. The welldigger shakes to a stop.

They start back toward the house; we go running through the garden to the tent. When we get to the tent a light comes on in my house. We duck into the tent and sit on the blankets.

“Where did you go?” asked Meredith.

“I was getting out of there.”

“I couldn't see how to turn it off. You chicken.”

“I am not. Why'd you start it up?”

“To see if it would.”

“He's going to know you did it.”

“No, he won't. Get under here and play like you're asleep.”

We get under the blankets.

Uncle Albert, Aunt Mildred, and Thatcher walk up to the tent.

“Meredith?” says Uncle Albert. “Come out here.”

Meredith throws back his blanket. I don't move. He crawls out.

“Meredith, how come this fresh mud is tracked across here and how come you got mud all over your boots? How come you wearing your boots?”

“We tried to catch a nigger trying to start up the welldigger and then we came back here. That's all.”

“That's a joke,” says Thatcher. “You done it sure as day. You lie.”

I can kind of see a nigger in my mind. “Yeah,” I say, crawling out.

“Let's go to bed,” said Mildred, “and talk about it tomorrow. It won't nothing but them starting up the welldigger, and now it's turned off. Don't crank it up no more, Meredith. And you boys quit fibbin'—your nose'll fall off.”

Mother walks up. “What's going on?”

“Somebody started up the welldigger,” says Thatcher.

“I heard it,” said Mother. “Have you been away from that tent, Mark?”

“Yes ma'am, we had to… to try to see who started the welldigger over there.”

“I told you not to leave that tent.”

“We had to go try to find out who it was,” says Meredith, “and it was a nigger. A big nigger. So we came back. It was. Whether you believe it or not. It was a nigger. Big.”

“I'm going to bed,” says Mildred, starting to the house. “Good night.”

Mother makes us go inside and sleep in my room. Meredith sleeps on a mattress on the floor. We talk some before we
go to sleep and I look through the window screen at the mimosa tree and the stars in the black sky, and wish we were outside.

Those were two times Meredith lied. I don't tell lies. Except I did that time about the welldigger, but it was because of Meredith, and I got to thinking about it. I thought about the nigger until I could see him in the darkness by the welldigger, moving slowly, white eyes in the dark, moving in the darkness around to the far side of the welldigger. The nigger had been there. Jesus would still love me if the nigger had been there and he probably had been. He could have been there, but in case he hadn't been there at all, I prayed: “Jesus, I'm sorry—if the nigger won't there. I think he might have been there, though. Dear Jesus, I'm sorry—if the nigger won't there.”

I'm so glad our wedding could be the day after the gravecleaning so Uncle Hawk and Aunt Sybil could be here for both, and not have to make two trips.

My parents thought the idea was odd, while I supported it fully because it made perfect sense to me. I was therefore left somewhat secluded in my own family since they didn't agree with the general procedure.

“The wedding should be the whole event,” said my mother, sitting at our dining room table, drinking coffee and smoking one of her Pall Malls. “I've never heard of such a thing.”

“Mother, they're a wonderful family. And this is a wonderful tradition.”

“I thought they stopped doing that in the last century.”

“What's the matter?” said my father, walking up to stand in the doorway. He's a handsome man who pouts sometimes.

Mother replied, looking at him over her shoulder, elbow
on table, cigarette in hand: “They want to have the wedding and a gravecleaning at the same time.”

“Who? A what?”

“The Copelands.”

“No, they don't,” I said. “Not at the same time. They want the gravecleaning one day and the wedding the next, so Uncle Hawk and Aunt Sybil can make just one trip instead of two.”

“Uncle ‘Hawk'?” said Father.

“I told you about him.”

“Sounds like an Indian chief.”

“So we're having to move the wedding up,” stated Mother to Father.

“A month,” I said. “That's not much.”

“That's a lot,” said Mother. “You don't know what's involved in planning a wedding.”

“Why couldn't they move the damn gravecleaning?” said Father.

“It's a tradition,” I said. “They always do it the first Saturday in May.”

“Oh, great.” My father turned and walked away. “I didn't know they had traditions,” he said in the hallway.

I am overcome with the black valley between my family and the family of my husband-to-be. There seems to be no bridge in sight. Oh, but for a bridge. We even lack an adequate bridge inside my family. My sister Claire is practically not in our family. She works in Hoover, Alabama, and we never hear from her.

But if there isn't a bridge? “Happy go lucky,” I always say. Although I love my mother and father dearly, I must not be
deflected, when such an exciting new, additional family is in my grasp.

So the whole graveyard-wedding weekend was one of merriment and good cheer. My mother and father stayed, thankfully, in the background somewhat.

It all started with the arrival on Friday (the gravecleaning was on Saturday; the wedding, Sunday) of Uncle Hawk, Aunt Sybil, and—I don't know why—Dan Braddock, who right away told three or four ugly jokes about honeymoons. The three of them drove the distance in Uncle Hawk's used black Cadillac.

Uncle Hawk had two flat tires on the way up from Florida, and at supper he went into a separate story with all the details about changing each one. Then he started telling stories about when they were growing up. They all lived right here at the graveyard until sometime in the thirties when the old road got closed off and a new road came through at a different place.