That's me in the corner

“It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” ― Mark Twain

Late May 1987

Grand-Mère peeled potatoes over pages from last Sunday’s newspaper as I sat opposite, painting my fingernails. Mom breezed by tying on a floral apron she had sewn.

“Magnolia, remove that flashy red polish from your hands this instant. I will not have you traipsing around here like a French whore.” Instinctively operating at the margins, I painted my toes instead.

We were preparing to host a church fish fry. I had tentative plans for after supper. But those rested on the mood and driver’s license of my older brother, Baxter. He was filling drink coolers with strong, sweet iced tea. “Two cups of sugar per gallon, and don’t mix old tea with new tea. It’s bad luck,” Mom counseled him.

“Everything looks bright against that fair skin of yours,” Grand-Mère said to me. She took my forearm in her hands and inspected my freckles, exclaiming, “Sakes alive, you swallowed a silver dollar and broke out in pennies!” I had heard this one. My freckled nose matched that of Lafe, my mother’s first husband. Baxter and our younger half-brother, Seth, had glowing olive complexions like Mom.

“I could use some help,” Grand-Mère said. “I’ll dance at your wedding if you slice.”

“You said Baptists don’t dance.”

She belly-laughed. As I sliced a peeled russet into fries, I grumbled to my mother, “Why do I have to be home by eleven? School is out, and nobody cares what time Baxter comes home.”

Baxter had just graduated the youngest in his class and enlisted in the Air Force. Suddenly, everyone was treating him like an adult. It was unlikely he would want to drive me the ten miles home by curfew.

“You are fifteen, and your brother can’t get pregnant,” Mom said. She was determined I would not become a young mother as had she. “Know this, little lady: I will disown you if you ever show up unmarried and pregnant at my door. Besides, you have Sunday school in the morning. As it is, you’re always last to the car with your shoes in hand.” She was not wrong.

“Maybe I should head back to Bossier with you tonight,” I posed to Grand-Mère.

“That would be fine. You could bring Lexi, and we could play gin rummy into the night.”

Mom stepped outside to see if my younger but not little brother was sweeping out the carport as directed. Seth would be in the eighth grade in August. Local football coaches held high hopes for his future high school ball career.

My closest friend, Lexi, arrived with her brother, Henon. Mom greeted and thanked them for coming early to help us set up.

“Hi, Mrs. Ramsay, you’re welcome,” Lexi replied.

“You girls should pick buttercups for the tables,” Grand-Mère directed. She meant daffodils.

“Grab a few peppers and green onions while you’re at it,” Mom said, taking a bite out of an onion and offering it to me. I declined with a moue of distaste. My mother ate strange things. She could slurp brains out of squirrel skulls after cracking them open like walnuts.

Lexi and I gathered redolent daffodil bouquets for the tables and nosegays for ourselves. The yellow flowers grew against picturesque fenceposts in our bucolic setting. After placing the flowers, we checked that the tables were copacetic and skipped off to the garden.

“We picked a peck of peppers,” Lexi said, placing a quarter-bushel basket on the kitchen table. Mom laughed and directed us to wash what we’d picked.

I poked a daffodil into the bib pocket of Lexi’s denim cropped overalls. “Don’t you look radiant?” I gushed. We each stuck a flower behind an ear.

“Daffodils are my favorite fragrance in the universe,” Lexi said.

“I love the scents of gardenias and lilacs, too,” I said, pointing out the gardenia bush under my bedroom window. “Mom grew that one from a piece of the one in front of Grand-Mère’s house.”

“My parents aren’t coming tonight,” Lexi said, her voice trembled.

“Why not?” I asked.

“My mom and relatives are trying to persuade my dad to dry out at a rehab place,” she said. Her eyes welled up.

“All the good vibes I can muster are coming your way.”

“Are we still seeing a movie?” Lexi asked. “It is doubtful we will sneak into the Eddie Murphy one unnoticed. Mr. Brown is onto us now.”

Baxter, Henon, and their friend Mike were setting up tables. As I watched my pensive big brother from my spot in the grass, I worried what life would be like without him living across the hall. It felt like I was being abandoned by the person I depended on the most. Mom was a puddle of tears whenever she thought about Baxter’s plans, but she was undoubtedly the reason he enlisted. He needed out from under her thumb.

Our new preacher’s son, Gabe, arrived in his truck. It had a camper shell on the back and his little brother, Heath, in the passenger seat. On a recent Sunday night, I had inadvertently overheard Pastor Clare scold his eldest, “That camper shell does not make your truck a motel, son!” As the new hunk in town, Gabe had been swooned over in recent months by girls at church and school, including Lexi and me.

During Sunday night worship services, most youths sat in the last two rows at our church. Eighteen-year-old Gabe, unpretentious and convivial, often sat near me on the very back pew. Although Baptists referred to back-row adults as “backsliders,” teens bonded there with impunity.

I avoided the penultimate seats at church so that my pesky brothers couldn’t strategically align themselves behind me. Baxter lost sleep dreaming of ways to prank Lexi and me in church, where we could not yell at him. As recently as February, he had offered us candy conversation hearts that turned out to be soap he had carved. Lexi and I spent half the worship hour spitting in the ladies’ room.

It seemed Gabe was choosing to sit near me, but he was laconic during worship service. Moreover, I might have been reading too much into seating. My family had missed the previous two Sunday-night services for Baxter’s graduation celebration and to study. So, I was privately looking forward to seeing Gabe.

While mine and Baxter’s adopted stepdad finished the frying, the youth had some time to kill. Offering to be “it” first, Seth suggested a game of hide-and-seek running dodge ball. Because I did not wish to be on the receiving end of a ball hurled by Seth, I scurried off to a perfect spot. In route, I threw a shoe. But I didn’t dare stop until I hid behind an uprooted oak.

“Ideal hideaway,” Gabe said, appearing with my lost sandal. My mother bought white Easter church shoes and sandals for herself and me every spring. This year’s white sandals were cute, but not for dodge ball.

“They’ll never find us here,” Gabe said as he scooched close to me. Because he didn’t know my mother well, he wasn’t afraid of her. He lifted my foot, brushed it off, and buckled my sandal around my ankle.

“Thank you, Prince Charming,” I said, immediately disconcerted for having said it.

“Nice toes,” Gabe praised, observing my pedicure. He kept his hand on my leg after putting my foot down. From there, things escalated quickly. Soon, his sexy scruff was reddening my face and neck. When he tugged on the waist of my 501s, I feigned alarm over the sound of my dad calling.

“I hear nothing!” Gabe called after me as I abandoned him in the woods, Fouke Monster and all.

Heath, ball-in-hand, spotted me the moment I stepped out of the woods. He hopped out of a sycamore, giving me quite a start. “How much are you paying me not to tell his girlfriend?” he asked.

“He has a girlfriend?”

“Belinda,” he said. “They’ve been dating a few weeks.”

“What an ass,” I muttered. Heath held out a greedy hand.

“He should come out of the woods any second now, right about there. How’s that?” Heath left me to locate the ideal position for smacking his brother with the ball. Moments later, Lexi emerged from the woods. “You were with Gabe?” she asked, incredulously. “This entire time? You brazen hussy!” she said with a smile.

“I just found out he’s dating Belinda.”

“What an ass,” Lexi uttered.

Lexi and I sat on a picnic table bench. Her brother, Henon Preston, situated himself directly behind me. Gabe stood next to Henon with the dodge ball in his hands.

As Pastor Clare said a long-winded grace, Henon removed pine needles from my hair. Gabe tittered and nonchalantly checked his own unruly thatch. Henon caught on. I could feel my face flushing scarlet, so I closed my eyes and pretended to pray until the preacher ceased speaking.

After supper, my older brother, Baxter, and his friend, Mike, quietly made plans to see the new Eddie Murphy movie playing at the Roy Theater in town. Henon bit his nails while studying my interactions with Gabe.

My mother briefly spoke with Lexi and Henon to say Mr. Preston had agreed to enter inpatient treatment for alcoholism. He had fallen off the wagon after being laid off from the airplane fuel cell factory in Wisteria. Mom encouraged us to see a movie to give the Preston kids an escape for the evening.

Henon offered to let Lexi and me ride with him to the theater. “You’d better clear this with my mom,” Baxter said. “You know how my parents are about Magnolia with unrelated boys.”

“Gabe doesn’t know,” whispered Lexi to no one in particular.

“What don’t I know?” asked Gabe, leaning into our conversation. Lexi fell speechless in his presence.

“That your girlfriend will be here tomorrow,” I said. “My mom alters clothes for her.” Gabe rolled his eyes, bid us a good evening, collected Heath, and left in his truck.

“See you at Sunday school!” Lexi called out as they were backing out of the drive. Gabe nodded and smiled back at her.

“I already asked Mrs. Ramsay.” Henon looked confused.

Lexi and I watched the PG movie playing in Wisteria. Before the film had been twenty minutes underway, Henon touched my shoulder. I handed a popcorn tub off to Lexi so I could speak with him in the crying room. Lexi was immersed in the film and didn’t even notice, at first, that it was her brother who wished to speak with me and not my own.

“Do you like him?” Henon asked when we were alone.

“Gabe?”

“Are there others, Magnolia?”

“Gabe has a girlfriend.”

“Are you dodging the question?”

“Sure, Henon, I like him, but it won’t happen again.”

As she headed to the lobby for Milk Duds, Lexi saw us and approached. Henon asked, “Can we discuss this alone when I take you home?” I nodded.

“Your dalliance with Gabe transformed Henon into a jealous guy,” Lexi said.

Mike and Baxter offered to take Lexi and me along for ice cream and then home to save Henon a trip back out to my house. I declined the ice cream, but Lexi accepted so that Henon and I could be alone. Rather than drive me straight home in his Mom’s Thunderbird, Henon turned onto a familiar pea gravel road and into a red clay oil well site. He cracked the windows and killed the lights but left the radio playing. It was a sultry night under a bright moon.

“Would you like to talk about your dad?” I asked, sensing an upcoming lecture about the evils of being alone with preacher’s sons. Henon scooted his seat back and took a deep breath. “I caught my dad up at Shug’s the other day; we had words.”

Shug was a cheerful, black mason and bootlegger who lived on the edge of town in our dry county. He often contracted on job sites with my dad.

“Magnolia, I was planning to ask you out on your birthday. I already discussed it with Baxter and your parents.”

I slipped off my white Keds, sat cross-legged in my seat, and gazed up at the night sky. Henon silently pointed out a doe and two fawns dining nearby in the moonlight.

“My birthday is months away, Henon, and why didn’t you discuss this with me?”

“I thought we had a tacit understanding and time. Your parents won’t let you date until you’re sixteen. It never occurred to me you might wind up in Gabe’s arms.”

“How was I supposed to know? You took Debbie Glass to prom two weeks ago, Henon. What happened with Gabe today was not planned. I would never have chosen him over you had I known I was making a choice.”

“Will you choose me now, Magnolia?”

“Of course.”

We kissed, and he slid into my seat to hold me. “My heart sank when I thought you wanted him.” As he buried his face in my neck, he took a whiff of my caramel hair. “I just want to inhale all that is you. Is that what Gabe wanted?”

“Stop it with Gabe already,” I said with a pout. “I’m sorry I hurt you, but I had no idea how you felt.”

“Keep this, will you?” He put his senior ring in the palm of my hand.

“I should get going,” I reminded him. We didn’t want my parents to notice I was alone with him. That night in my bed, I accepted that other people had already decided who I would date when I could, and I was okay with that for the time being. Henon was already welcome around my family, and it seemed natural to move in that direction.

That night as I dreamt, a disembodied voice spoke my name. There was a vivid, true-blue light, unlike any known, yet my dream seemed more real than life. Peace and joy flooded my soul, and I thought that perhaps the light was God. As I slept, I began struggling to breathe and awoke out of breath and dripping with sweat.

When Gabe put his arm behind Belinda on the penultimate pew at church the next morning, Lexi and I planted our butts right behind them. Luckily for Gabe, Belinda failed to notice anything unusual about his behavior. But my best friend and I relished watching Gabe squirm.

Henon stopped by with a basket of kittens later that same day as I read the funny papers. Because Baxter was working, I had not expected to see him. The guys worked together and knew each other’s schedules.

At the door, Henon said, “My mom is insisting I locate homes for these guys today. I was hoping you’d take this one or the black one with the socks and white chest. They’re the friendliest. The mama is a skittish farm cat.”

“Come in. Dad won’t spew out an automatic negative if you’re with me.”

Ben had fallen asleep reading the Arkansas Democrat. I moved the paper aside and placed a gray kitten in his lap. He stirred in his recliner and asked, “Whose cat is this?”

“Yours,” I said.

“This is not my cat,” he said, shaking his head and drifting back to sleep as the kitten curled up to rest. I moved to place a second kitten beside the first. It was the black one with white feet.

Henon and I stole back out to the yard. I sat in a single-person swing that hung from a sturdy oak branch. Henon leaned against the trunk and checked to see that Seth wasn’t within earshot.

“Baxter asked me to look after you when he’s gone.”

“Yeah?”

Henon stilled the swing and me.

“If you look at the big picture, Magnolia, you’ll have more freedom with me than without. They know I don’t drink because of my dad.”

“I already said I will be your girlfriend. Will you need daily reassurances?”

“I threw a lot at you last night, Magnolia. I wanted to make sure you weren’t having second thoughts.”

“We are okay, Henon, but we shouldn’t keep Lexi in the dark about this.”

“Lexi knows more than you think.”

Seth stopped shooting hoops to check out the kittens. Meanwhile, I peeked in on the ones with Dad.

“Okay, Bootsie and Gray Boy, I reckon you two are keepers,” Dad said to the purring cats as I approached. Ecstatic, I let Henon know operation get-a-yes was a go.

A few days later, Dad built a covered eating area for the kittens on his workshop’s front wall. Gray Boy and Bootsie climbed a narrow ladder to a tiny house where they could eat safely above our basset hounds, Jake and Elwood. I was watching the kittens in their new eatery when Henon pulled up and offered to take me for a driving lesson in his 1962 Chevy truck.

Dad advised against having me drive a truck without power steering. Not knowing what power steering was, I hopped into the driver’s seat, anyway. “I’m sure I can handle it,” I promised.

That day was Baxter’s last to work at the grocery store. He would spend the rest of his summer working with Dad. The construction business was slated to build a new home for the Coopers, a black family whose son, Ricky, played football with Seth.

“Turn!” Henon directed at the end of the driveway.

“I am turning!” Despite my efforts, I could do no better than roll straight across the main road. The truck came to a sudden halt in the muck. Dad shook his head as he marched out to assess the damage. Seth trailed behind him.

We were still in the ditch when Baxter arrived. He used a winch on the front of his old Ford F-150 to pull Henon’s truck out while swearing I should never have been allowed to drive it. Although filthy, the Chevy was unharmed, and Henon found only humor in the entire episode.

Dad allowed Baxter and Henon to give me a consolation driving lesson in Mom’s Mercury Marquis. Henon called shotgun, and both of my brothers hopped in the backseat. We took the family ride over to the Russell ponds. At the First Pond, we rolled up our pants’ legs, waded into the water, and soaked in the afternoon sunshine. Later, Henon and I hung out on the lower branches of a favorite old pine while Baxter and Seth skidded rocks across the water.

A chameleon skirted across remnants of a campfire and caught Seth’s eye. Baxter checked Mom’s trunk for canning jars and grabbed one to house the lizard as Seth captured it.

“These ponds belong to that dude who produced those bullwhip cowboy movies in Hollywood, right?” Henon asked.

“Yeah, Roy Russell,” I said. “He owns Roy Theaters, too, including the one in Wisteria. Dad was working as head of maintenance for Roy’s theaters when he met Mom in Shreveport. She was the bank teller who cashed his paychecks.”

Seth requested the polka dot ribbon from my hair. Baxter pulled out a pocketknife to poke air holes in the jar lid.

“There is no way it will turn polka-dotted,” I said, letting my hair down.

“I learned to swim in this pond when I was about five,” I told Henon and further explained that the Third Pond was the largest and home to at least one alligator.

“There is never just one of anything,” Henon said with a chuckle.

“What about the Fouke Monster?” I asked.

“The Fouke Monster isn’t real.”

“It could be real,” said Seth. “Maybe sasquatches bury their dead or sink or eat them.”

“Eat them? That is disgusting,” I said.

“Let’s have a weenie roast one night and tell ghost and Fouke Monster stories,” Baxter suggested. “We can stay in the dilapidated cabin at the bottom of this hill for shelter if we need it.” The cabin stood by the Second Pond.

Baxter had written his research paper for senior English on the Fouke Monster and had some information he wanted to relay.

“We should clean up around there first,” Seth said, “might have snakes.”

“What did you write about?” I asked Henon. I meant for his research paper.

“Chernobyl.”

Baxter instructed, “Magnolia, look for the Book of Enoch next time you get up to the library. It isn’t included in our Holy Bibles but is considered scripture by some. Enoch’ walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him,’ it says in Genesis 5. The book describes the fall of the Watchers, who were the angel fathers of the Nephilim. We’ll discuss them at our weenie roast. And read Jude. It’s only twenty-five verses and mentions Enoch.”

“That is enough Fouke Monster Bible study for one day,” Henon said, patting Baxter on the back.