Tupelo Honey Read online

  Tupelo Honey

  Lis Anna-Langston

  ~ mapleton press ~

  Fortune is for the brave. ~ Pliny the Elder

  Copyright © 2016 by Lis Anna-Langston

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher,

  except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and

  certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Mapleton Press

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  For Mark,

  the love of my life

  &

  Grace

  Prologue

  In my family, as far back as I can tell, there was no such thing as communication, only secrets. Big, nasty secrets that hid in the closet with the bogeyman, some old Confederate money, and a layer of dust. All of the real players in the drama are dead now, or at least the ones who could tell us what everyone was trying so hard to get away from. Even so, in moments of contemplation I realize that sometimes people are crushed to dust under the burden of their lives and my family was no exception.

  When my uncle Thursgood started boiling frogs alive in big soup pots on the kitchen stove everyone turned a blind eye. When he pulled the tail off of a rabbit while it was alive he later retold the story as something funny. It wasn’t. The problems didn’t stop there. Something in my family’s blood told them they were bad. Misfits woven together with a sanity of the sheerest design. As I grew older I began to realize by natural deduction that something was wrong or, in fact, that nothing had ever been right.

  There would be no warm, fuzzy evenings around a dinner table for me because by the time I entered this world Grand Daddy was dying. Death waited patiently for him on the second floor of our big, turn-of-the-century house. A hospital bed and morphine drip had been installed so he could pass his final days in the comfort of a room wallpapered with hundreds of blue ships sailing to god knows where. He died with his clothes still in the plastic, tucked in drawers.

  This elusive grandfather figure fascinated me, as did the fact that we lived side by side a dead man as if he were coming home any minute to hang up his coat and rest after his long journey into death.

  Later, I would say living that close to death was too much for a family like mine. It was the crack in the teapot, the leak in the dam, and finally the straw that broke the camel’s back. The cancer that killed him ate away at something inside of my family until it mutated and grew into a victim, a paranoid schizophrenic, and a psychotic. A man I never knew had been the thread that wove these misfits together, and when he was gone, those seams ripped under the pressure.

  But not right away. Before Grand Daddy drove that Buick up to the Pearly Gates my mom was busy trying to find herself . . . or so she claimed, by running off to Love Valley to be free and smoke dope with a bunch of other granola-eating hippies. Free love. Yeah, right. Free sex.

  The only thing she found was her way back home, to a chorus of “I told you so,” dragging her teenage boyfriend from Georgia as if she’d hooked him on a weekend fishing trip. They were white middle-class kids who thought their revolution was unique. “Revolution, my ass,” Marmalade said. “They don’t want to start a revolution. They just want to be able to smoke dope out on the front porch without anyone telling them not to.” Marmalade is my granny. That's her nickname and it's got something to do with when she was a baby she snuck a jar of orange marmalade and ate the whole thing, hiding out under the back porch.

  As I was becoming a glimmer in someone’s eyes my parents ran wildly through the tail end of the 1960’s. Or at least they imagined themselves running wildly. They were the product of a semi-revolution, shucking it up with bullshit talks about feeling on a new dimension in Love Valley where they met. It was probably the first and last time the word “love” would ever be used in association with anything they did. But back in 1969, there they were, two high school dropouts hell-bent on freedom, chained to the mother of conformity, toting that hippie bible that reads just like anything else—we like you if you’re just like us.

  No one talks about my conception. My great point of origin. I have never met my father. So, from thus I was conceived . . . Tupelo Honey, 7 pounds, 3 ounces, on a hot summer night. I don’t think I was really social in those days, even though it was the beginning of disco and all. Not many expectations were placed on me just yet. My mother moved us out of the house and in with her new junkie/hippie boyfriend, who I’m sure said the nicest things when he wasn’t high. Then we moved again and then, again. Grand Daddy’s illness surfaced. It killed him quick and from what I can tell, things began to change.

  The family history hit an all-time high of hush-hush. He was in that room dying of lung cancer, wasting away, where he ate less, begging for morphine. He said his mother came to see him every night, the same mother that had been dead for over forty years. He talked about how she brought him angel’s wings and tiny drops that she put on his tongue, making his words spin. With a smile, he recalled how she spoon-fed him hot broth while they talked about his childhood. He forgot the extreme poverty that sucked up his early years, sending him to work barefoot in factories in northern Alabama when he was only nine years old. Blood came up every time he coughed, choking him, and he didn’t mention that ramshackle of a house where he grew up without running water or electricity—just a front porch, a fireplace, pallets made of straw and old blankets they dug from the trash. His fingers were bones. He talked openly to the angel of mercy standing in the doorway.

  When he started talking about how light his body felt, Marmalade called a preacher and he came, praying, touching, forgiving, and Grand Daddy thought he was the plumber finally coming to fix the drain in the kitchen.

  Grand Daddy just stared deliriously at the ceiling, repeating, “It’s a good thing you’ve come. It was working fine and then one day it just stopped. It just stopped . . . ”

  He hallucinated, saw his death, called out, failing, fading, fighting, and ultimately losing, because I don’t think he ever really thought he was going to win. He died in the middle of the night without a word to anyone.

  A few years later I learned how to talk and thus deduce certain things from my environment. The first clue something was wrong with my family was that Preston wasn’t allowed to play at Marmalade’s house when I stayed over on weekends. The second was that in my own home my mother and her new boyfriend Nash decided that financially it would be better if they were dealing drugs.

  It was around this time that my crazy uncle Thursgood left Marmalade’s house one night and reappeared the next morning, wet, with human scratch marks all over him, caked with dried blood, and torn clothes, claiming to remember nothing from the night before except that he’d heard voices. When the news of a murder unfolded on the radio my family met it with the same tight-lipped resistance they used to greet everything else. I was too young to really understand the consequences of murder, but I always wondered who those voices were, and why they always told him to kill people.

  I couldn’t recall a single moment when I had ever felt any affection for Uncle Thursgood, where I curled up in his lap and felt safe or reached up to hold his hand before crossing the street. I would later learn that you don’t cross the street with psychotics—you cross the street to get away from them.

  Psycho Uncle Thursgood hung out with the brothers back when Barry White was being played on the radio and Marmalade still let us use the 8-track player. The brothers thought he was a big fat ass from what I could tell but they were nice to him for t
he same reason everyone was nice to him, which was that you didn’t have to spend more than five seconds with him to figure out he was a few marbles short of a game. And he had weed. When you’re certifiably crazy, you have to possess something that lures people in, and for Uncle Thursgood weed was his only hope.

  My Uncle Randall lived downstairs and wasn’t so bad. He didn’t like Thursgood. Randall was a good paranoid schizophrenic. He refused to take baths because he said it made his skin rot off, and, if someone finally laid down the law, he would plop down in that big claw-footed tub, sitting perfectly still, staring straight ahead until Marmalade sent me to tell him to get out. He lumbered out like a big old bear muttering about how baths put him into a neurotic delirium.

  I loved Randall the way other little kids loved cartoon characters. Even at the age of eleven, I knew you weren’t supposed to admit to liking Spam. Not Randall. He thudded into the kitchen wearing big boxer shorts from the Dollar General Store and ate an entire can, sitting alone at the kitchen table, lost in his own mind instead of the morning paper. He drank soda pop like someone said there was going to be a shortage. He consumed about a bazillion cans of Campbell’s soup, and when we later tried to change brands on him he politely told us that the other manufacturers put poison in their soup, and while we may be fooled, he wasn’t. If you pushed the issue with him, he would also, very politely but with a tone that suggested he meant it, tell you to go to hell. But Randall was different from the rest, and if I laughed long enough and hard enough then eventually he’d laugh with me.

  Aside from the fact that occasionally he’d slice his arm open with a kitchen knife, or that he thought the people who lived next door were shooting his brain with an x-ray gun that gave him terrible headaches, or that periodically he’d refuse to pee in the toilet for reasons that escape me now, he lived in his own world . . . and what a world it was. As far as I knew, he was the only 40-year-old virgin high on Thorazine in the whole neighborhood. And he was great. He liked to go to the zoo and eat candy bars and fried chicken and take rides in the car every Sunday.

  So, aside from the fact that he was a little weird, Randall proved to be about as harmless as Bambi. The rest of my family should have been so lucky.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself . . .

  Chapter 1

  People who smoke a doobie for breakfast are all kinds of annoying. And, of course, that’s an exaggeration because sometimes it wasn’t a doobie, it was the bong that sat perched on our rickety kitchen table. All things considered, my house was slightly better than an orphanage, but still worse than anything else you could imagine. It went on like that month after month until the spring before I entered fourth grade. One night my mother cryptically called me out to the driveway. She’d been ignoring me for days, glued to the t.v., chaining smoke and trying to figure out how to score.

  “Tupelo Honey, come out here. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  It was dark outside but I could see a tall, handsome man. He looked like he’d stepped out of the magazines I shredded to make collages on those long, boring afternoons when everyone was high. I suddenly became conscious of my scraped knees with big ugly scabs and tugged at the hem of my dress. New boyfriends were of little or no interest to me. They came and went like cartons of milk. If they hung around too long they spoiled and stunk up the place.

  The handsome stranger knelt in front of me, extending his hand. “Hi. My name is Nash. What’s your name?”

  It was dark outside and the streetlight behind him glared light against the back of his head. Shadows were everywhere. My mother stood behind me. I felt her eyes on the back of my neck, making my skin tingle.

  I blurted out, “I had a birthday.”

  The handsome stranger shifted, smiling. “How old are you?”

  They were all handsome, shifty strangers to me. “Eleven.”

  Shadows slanted down his cheeks. “What day is your birthday?”

  “April 4th.”

  “Mine’s April 18th,” he said, excited.

  For some reason this made me like him. “What kind of cake do you like?” I asked.

  “Boston cream cake with all of that creamy custard in the middle.”

  “Me too!” I said. “Marmalade buys Boston cream cakes for me and my Uncle Randall because he doesn’t have many teeth. But my Uncle Thursgood only eats...”

  My mother cleared her throat behind me. “Tupelo Honey . . .”

  I turned, “What?”

  “Maybe we don’t need to talk about Randall or Thursgood right now.”

  The handsome stranger butted in, “What do you say we go and get something to eat at a Mexican restaurant?”

  Spring was chilly that year. Suddenly I wanted my poncho and to put on perfume from the sample bottle Marmalade had given me. I turned, running up the knobby gravel, trying to stay upright.

  From behind me I heard the stranger say, “You never told me your name.”

  Without looking back, I yelled, “Tupelo Honey. I was named after the place where Elvis was born.”

  Then I ate dirt. Gravel to be precise. The heels of my palms felt the deep cuts of tiny rocks, and my knees thundered in pain. My cheeks flushed hot. I stood up to keep running. I felt blood trickling down my shins. I ran for the bathroom just as my mother shouted after me, “Hurry up. God, you are the slowest person on earth.”

  I burst through the front door, horrified that I had fallen and even more horrified at how I might look. Once in the bathroom, I slammed and locked the door, looking over at the full-length mirror glued to the wall.

  Oh my God. The front of my legs were red. Blood dripped down into my socks. How embarrassing. Not only had someone just taken an interest in me but now, in a matter of less than a minute, I had fallen flat on my face and was bleeding to death all over my clothes. The only clean clothes available at the moment. I searched frantically for a solution. Quickly I grabbed a wad of toilet paper and wet it under the bathtub faucet. I cleaned all of the blood off my shins, and then I saw the answer. My black corduroy bell-bottoms were lying dirty on the floor.

  “Tupelo Honey!” my mother screamed from outside. “What are you doing in there?”

  “I’m coming,” I yelled, frantically kicking off my shoes. I jerked the cords up, ramming my feet into the shoes, kicking my dress behind the toilet.

  I ran out front as fast as I could. My mother was standing next to the car with her hand on her hip. “What took you so long?”

  I climbed into the backseat. “I had to wash my hands.”

  The Mexican restaurant had blankets hanging on the walls that looked rough and scratchy. The menu had more than a hundred choices on it. “I’ve never been to a Mexican restaurant,” I announced proudly.

  Nash closed his menu. “I recommend the enchilada plate.”

  A man wearing cowboy boots brought chips and dip to our table. For free. That’s when Moochi showed up.

  “Where have you been?” I whispered.

  He cocked an ear to the side.

  “Who are you talking to?” Nash asked.

  “My friend Moochi,” I said.

  My mother rolled her eyes. “It’s her imaginary friend. He’s not real. She just talks to him.”

  I cut my eyes at her. “He is real.”

  Off behind a row of potted plants static crackled. Mexican music started to play. The man in boots passed by our table. My mother held up her hand and ordered a beer with a tequila chaser. I could feel the blood dry on the knees of my pants.

  I didn’t care if my mother thought Moochi was real or not. I was going to eat an enchilada.

  Whatever that was. We didn’t eat out a lot because of our constricted budget and because we lived in Mississippi.

  Moochi was pretty jazzed about the corn chips and wagged his tail.

  That night I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. When I opened the door to go to the bathroom I saw the living room light on. I walked to the doorway. My mother was on the sofa with a spoon and a lighter on
the table. She had a needle in her hand.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  She almost jumped out of her skin. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. What are you doing?”

  “I’m giving myself a shot.”

  “Oh.” I shifted my weight to my other leg. “Why would you want a shot?” I asked, unable to believe that anyone actually wanted to go through that pain.

  Her hands trembled. “It’s vitamins . . . you know. A vitamin shot.”

  “Then why don’t you just swallow them?”

  “Because then . . . I’d have to . . . .” her words drifted off into the silent space between us. “Because then I’d have to take a lot of them. What are you doing up?”

  “I had to pee. And I’m thirsty.”

  She reached for the needle again. “Well go back to bed.”

  I hung around, watching. “Can I go to Marmalade’s house tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, call your uncle and get him to pick you up.”

  I ran off to the kitchen to get a glass of juice. My mother watched me like a hawk.

  “Go to bed,” she instructed.

  “Alright. Hey, I had fun tonight.”

  She nodded but shooed me off.

  The next morning I sprang out of bed to call Randall. The phone rang twenty times before anyone picked up.

  Finally, I heard Marmalade say, “Hello. Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Can you and Uncle Randall pick me up?”

  She was quiet for just a minute. Then she said, “Hold on. Let me see if he’s awake.”

  The muffled sound of her hand covering the phone scratched against my ear. Then she yelled clear down the hall, “Paul Johnson, are you awake?”

  Seconds passed. Finally he yelled back, “Yes, mother.”

  I packed up my hatbox fast and went out front to wait. My mother was asleep on the floor. Her needle, spoon and cotton ball were on the coffee table. I covered her up with a blanket and walked out to the front porch.