Eli the Good Read online

  “You bit me,” he said, as if amazed. He ran a forefinger over his lip, checking for blood.

  Josie got up, and halfway through the front door she said, “I’ll be right back.”

  While she was gone, Charles Asher again ran a forefinger over his lip, then held his hand out in front of him. I couldn’t see if there was any blood or not, but he kept putting his lips together as if they were numb and he was trying to get the feeling back.

  Josie came back out, one hand up under her shirt. She pulled her hand out and I saw that she was holding the small bottle of Jim Beam that she kept in her hiding place. She offered the whiskey to Charles Asher, but when he wouldn’t take the bottle, she unscrewed the cap. Standing there before him with her feet planted apart on the porch, she tipped her head back and took a drink like an expert. She brought the pint down, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and widened her eyes to show him she was wild and crazy.

  “Put that away,” Charles Asher said in a loud, angry whisper. “Loretta’ll catch us.”

  “No, she won’t,” Josie said, and sat down heavily on the swing, causing the chains to pop and screech. “Here, take a drink,” she said, handing the bottle to him. He wouldn’t.

  “I don’t want to,” he said, looking around the yard to make sure no one was close by. “I’m not going to do that at your parents’ house.”

  “Goody Two-Shoes,” she said, and took another drink. He grabbed the bottle and pulled it away from her mouth, causing a few amber beads to fall out onto her shirt.

  “God, now I’ll smell like an alcoholic,” she said, wiping at the splotch of brown dots. A moment of silence passed between them before she put the cap back on the bottle and laid it between them on the swing.

  “Why do you want to act that way, Josie?” he said. “Drinking and always biting everyone’s head off and being mad all the time. What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with you, Charles Asher?” she said, and scooted away from him, close to the arm of the swing. “I’ve never seen a boy who wouldn’t do anything. This is never going to last if you keep right on boring the mortal hell out of me.”

  Charles Asher shook his head. He looked weary, beaten. “I wish you’d answer me.” And then: “What are you so mad about?”

  “I just want to have some fun,” she said.

  “No, it’s like you want to get caught with that liquor so you’ll get in trouble,” he said. “Just like with them flag pants. I believe you want to wear them just to make Loretta mad. You act like you’re making a statement with them, but you’re not. You’re just stirring up —”

  “Whose side are you on?” she said, scowling at him.

  “I didn’t know there were sides,” he said. “But I’m getting tired of you treating everybody bad and acting like something you’re not. I love you, Josie, but you’re turning into a different person from who I first loved.”

  Josie looked away from him. Up until this point she had kept her eyes on his, but now she turned her face to the wall of the house as if she couldn’t bear the sight of him. “You don’t know anything about love,” she said. “You don’t know what it means.”

  “If anyone don’t know, then it’s you,” he said. “You’ve got a good family and you’re beautiful and you’ve got anything a person could want and you just stay mad all the time lately.”

  “How would you feel if you all at once found out you didn’t belong to your father?” she said, turning to him. It took me a long time of looking back on that evening to realize that by finally making this known to someone else she had freed herself in a small way. And so that was the beginning of my sister healing. But at that time it was also when the fire of her anger was burning the brightest. That showed in her eyes, too.

  So she does know, I thought. A pang of grief for her ran all through me. And then I realized that it really was true. I had read this in Daddy’s letters, had overheard Mom talk about it to Stella, but until that moment of hearing Josie say this thing, I hadn’t really believed it. I had tried to deny it to myself, I guess. Or maybe it was just that learning my sister was only my half sister didn’t matter to me because it didn’t change anything. I loved her just the same, and so I understood that Daddy did, too.

  “Well?” she said. “Does that surprise you, that my mother got knocked up by somebody else and then Daddy married her, knowing that? That he raised me as his own and nobody told me a damn thing until I was grown?”

  “Why did they finally tell you?”

  “Why? Because I had a right to know, that’s why. That’s what they said. They sat me down and told me and expected me to just say okay and go on with my life. But I’ve been lied to all these years. Why didn’t they tell me before, when I was little?”

  Charles Asher put his arm around her and she laid her head on his shoulder, her hair falling down in her face like a straight, shining curtain of black. “I’m sorry, Josie,” he said. “But Stanton worships you. Just because he’s not your blood father don’t mean he loves you any less. Anybody can see that, man.”

  Josie put her hands up to her face and her shoulders began to tremble. “I know,” she said, her voice hoarse. “But it’s killing me.” She was trying her best not to cry, but now she was and there was no turning back. She was finally letting it out. “It’s my history,” she said.

  It felt like I should do something, but I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there and tried to not look at them for a while. I don’t know what my worst crimes were that summer — the times that I didn’t do enough or the times I did too much. I’ve studied on it for years and can’t arrive at the answer.

  Charles Asher was trying his best to comfort her — kissing the top of her head, rolling the ball of her shoulder around in his hand, whispering into her ear — but there was nothing he could do to make her feel better, and he knew this. His face was pale and blank, like a piece of unlined notebook paper. But he was off the hook before long because the real Josie returned. The Josie who believed in being strong and defiant.

  She straightened herself. Ran her long fingers over her face, then through her hair, and then wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She got up from the swing and stood in front of Charles Asher with her back to me, her fingers slid into the back pockets of her bell-bottoms. “You’re a good guy, Charles Asher,” she said. “You’re too good. It drives me frigging crazy.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to do about that,” he said. There was no joking in all this. They were being completely honest, which people rarely do with one another.

  “Come on, let’s go see if supper’s ready,” she said. And just like that she had shed all her tears and made this secret a solid sentence that had actually floated out onto the air. And she’d be all right, I guess. But not before it all exploded properly. That’s how Josie was.

  They went into the house and the yard was quiet again. Even though there was no one to hide from, I crawled back to the snowball bush and lay on the cool ground. I looked at the white petals above me, listened to the running river, and wished that I were grown.

  I sat on the orange-and-yellow linoleum of the kitchen floor after dinner, playing with my Hot Wheels and my Muhammad Ali action figure, which I was careful to not call a doll, while Nell and Mom and Josie washed the dishes. They discussed everything from the Yablonski murder trials to Jimmy Carter’s teeth to why Josie never had any girlfriends over to the house.

  “I can’t stand to be around them for more than ten minutes,” Josie was saying. “They’re all idiots.”

  “Why do you hang around with them, then?” Mom asked, wiping down the counter.

  “Because everybody’s an idiot,” Josie said. “If I didn’t hang out with them, there’d be nobody.”

  “What makes them idiots, though?” This from Nell.

  “They all love Leif Garrett and the Bay City Rollers, for instance. None of them thinks Steve McQueen is beautiful,” she said. She kept her eyes on the plate she was scrubbing clean
. “They’re just annoying.”

  “What matters is whether they’re a good friend or not,” Mom said. She took the plate from Josie and rubbed at it with her dishrag so that little squeaks pecked at the air.

  “What matters is when you don’t want to sit around and stare at posters of David Cassidy and talk about how dreamy he is for hours on end.”

  Nell laughed. “Well, who needs them, anyhow? You have all of us, and books, and records. That’s all anyone needs.”

  Dirty plates slid into the warm water and emerged shiny and dripping. Their lemon smell filled the kitchen and drifted out to the backyard, where Daddy was whittling with a Case knife and Charles Asher was looking out on the yard. Watching lightning bugs, I suspected. When the women came out, Daddy and Charles Asher carried chairs down from the screen porch and sat them up in a circle near the clothesline, on the cooling yard. After an especially hot day, the smells of the baking woods were stout. I could smell every single leaf, every blackberry that was beginning to lengthen on the vines behind the garden, every tomato and cucumber. I breathed in everything.

  Over at Edie’s house the windows were still unlit. I couldn’t figure out where in the world she had gone off to without telling me. Edie didn’t do anything without informing me first, so I figured her parents had just jerked her up unexpectedly and taken off somewhere. Maybe they had finally worked everything out and had gone off to celebrate. I didn’t know.

  I decided to wander around by myself in the darker parts of the yard, catching lightning bugs. Then I heard some boys letting out high laughs down by the river and knew that it was Paul and Matt flying by on the road. I could hear them pedaling, faster and faster. Just when they got in front of my house, Matt started counting — “One, two, three” — and then they shouted in unison: “Looooooser!” They fell apart laughing and pedaled on. I knew this had been directed at me, and my first reaction was to not care, but some part of me did, I guess. Something in me hurt, even though I didn’t want it to.

  One of the reasons I had stopped playing with Paul and Matt was actually because of an argument we had had over lightning bugs. They always wanted to pull the glowing part off the bugs and smear it onto our faces so that we looked as if we were wearing glow-in-the-dark paints. They also liked to keep the bugs in Mason jars until they had smothered to death. I thought that both options of play were wrong. I saw no use in killing something just for the sake of a few minutes’ fun. Of course I had been deemed a sissy because of this, and I was glad they didn’t come around anymore. Once school started back, I’d have to face them every day on the bus, but for now it was still summer, and I was free of them.

  Instead of murdering or imprisoning the lightning bugs, I liked to cup them in my hand, unfold my fingers, let them walk around on my knuckles until they got ready to leave, and then — my favorite part — watch them take flight again. Seeing something put out wings and sail away was much more satisfying than mashing it between your fingers or stomping it with your shoe. Paul and Matt thought this was nonsense and stopped coming. And I didn’t even care.

  I was letting one of the lightning bugs tremble away from my outstretched finger when I realized that Nell was hovering very close by, partially hidden behind the snowball bush, watching me. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, but for a long while I didn’t let on that I knew she was there. She was standing with one hand balled into a fist on her hip and the other clutching a tall glass of sweet tea. She was looking at me as if memorizing me, as if trying to save this moment for some time in the future when she might need to pull it back out for further inspection. I thought of her cancer, and wanted to ask her if that was why she looked at me so strangely sometimes. But I didn’t have the words for that. When the bug was gone, I twirled on one heel and let out a high “Ha!” to let Nell know she had been caught spying on me.

  A smile covered her face, but she still looked mesmerized. “You are the king of this whole big yard,” she said. “What kind of king name should we give you?”

  “I don’t know. Eli the Great, I guess,” I said. This sounded fine to me.

  “No, I never did like those kings that had ‘the Great’ at the ends of their name.” Nell curled her arm up so that the glass of tea rested against her chest, the ice clinking. “That always meant they had killed the most wives or fought the most wars or something.” She kept looking at me, as if the name would spell itself out above my head in lightning bug – lit letters if she waited long enough. She tapped her pointing finger against the glass of tea. “How about Eli the Good? The kings that were called ‘the Good’ were always kind. They were always good to their people.” She nodded firmly, satisfied. She had talked herself into it. “Yes, sir, that’s it. That’s who you are. Eli the Good, king of his backyard.”

  “I like it,” I said, and nodded. It would be years before I realized — out of the blue — that Nell had heard the boys calling me a loser and had said this to make me feel better. But I choose to believe that she really meant it, too.

  “Your daddy’s fixing to play his guitar,” Nell said, and held out her hand. “Come on.”

  We rushed around to the back, where everyone was sitting. Daddy was tuning the guitar, which I coveted. I wasn’t allowed to touch it, as it was a great treasure. His mother had left him the orange-and-black Gibson. There was mother-of-pearl trim and silver tuning knobs and a deep hollow sound that resonated for a full minute after one of the strings was strummed.

  Daddy didn’t often play the guitar. My mother was always begging him to, but usually he would just say he didn’t feel like it. Apparently he had once played all the time, especially when they first got married. But he never played much after he got back from Vietnam. I hadn’t heard him play more than five times in my life, and it was always like this, completely unexpected. I had no idea why he chose certain nights to play again, but I figured it was when he was in an especially good mood. That’s the way my father was: either in an especially good mood or a very bad mood. There was seldom any middle ground.

  He strummed the Gibson, then plucked each string individually as he tuned the guitar. “Now, what should I play?” he asked, and looked around at each of us in that shy way he only had when he was about to sing.

  “How about some Everly Brothers?” Mom said.

  “Lord, I can’t remember any of them,” Daddy said.

  My mother put a finger to her mouth and thought hard. She was excited about this. “How about ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’?”

  “Naw. Let’s see,” Daddy said, and picked a few notes. Then he seemed to light on a song he wanted to play and nodded, then put his whole hand atop the strings to silence them. “I used to play this one for you all the time when you’s little, Josie,” he said, and then he started in on “You Are My Flower.” There was a full moon, but his face was lost to the shadows when he looked down at the guitar. I imagined that he closed his eyes while he sang.

  “You are my flower, that’s blooming in the mountain for me,” he sang.

  I studied Josie. I don’t see how she could ever doubt he loved her after he sang that song for her. Daddy was pouring everything right out on the yard for everyone to see. He must have known how she was trying to work her way through all this after they had told her the truth. So this was a gift he was giving her tonight. He was her father, and the blood didn’t even matter. Since that night I have come to understand that sometimes the best families of all are those that we create ourselves, the people we choose to be with. But that night I mostly thought about the way Josie was allowing Charles Asher to put his arm around her shoulders even though she rarely held his hand or made any kind of contact with him when our parents were present. Their lawn chairs were pulled up close together.

  My mother closed her eyes and mouthed the words to this song; despite her being quiet about it, I could still hear some hints of sadness in the few words she sang aloud.

  Nell was smoking and staring at Daddy while he played. Her whole heart was laid b
are there on her face as she watched him. I could see how much she admired him, despite their differences. And I could tell how badly she wanted to say all of that to him but could never find the words. She tapped her right foot to the beat of the song.

  When Daddy was finished, everyone clapped wildly.

  “Wow, I had no idea you could play like that,” Charles Asher said, amazed.

  Josie looked like she had just seen a ghost. I thought maybe the song was so full of the way he felt about her that she couldn’t make her mind work around it, considering what she had recently been told.

  “After he went off to Vietnam, I had the hardest time getting you to sleep,” Mom said, her voice so sudden and loud on the stillness that we all started, as if we had forgotten she was there. “You’d cry and go on, and then I realized it was because you missed your daddy singing that old song to you.”

  “So then she’d play that record for you every night,” Nell said.

  “And me and Nell and your mamaw would sing along with the record, and you’d finally go to sleep,” Mom said.

  Josie looked embarrassed because her eyes were wet.

  “Well, now you need to do one for old Eli,” Nell said, leaning forward in her seat and winking at me. “Can you play ‘Mother Nature’s Son’? I’ve been telling him about that song.”

  Daddy raised his eyebrows and let out a loud breath. “I don’t know. That’s a complicated one, and I’ve not played it in forever.”

  “But you used to love that song, remember?” Nell said. Each of her words came out in puffs of blue smoke on the night. “A couple years after you got back from the war, you played it for me one night. You remember that?”

  “Yeah,” Daddy said in a hushed voice. There was something in the way they looked at each other that made me know this had been an important night in their relationship. I wondered if this had been some quell in the storm that was always brewing between them. Every few years they’d grow back into brother and sister, and then a fight would conjure up out of nowhere, like an unexpected thunderhead, and they’d go without speaking for a few months before making up. It seemed that the last time he had played this song in her presence, things had been momentarily good between them. I admired the way they were able to forgive each other, even if the peace treaties didn’t last long.