Presenting the Swaddled Baby

“We’re sorry for your loss, Miss Victoria,” said Mr. White as his color guard presented the flowers. One corner of the arrangement, a casualty of the battle with the threshold, dangled limply.
“Taz was a great man,” he said. “A true pioneer. A patriot.”
Mr. White then motioned for one of the other Klan members to step forward. He ceremoniously unwrapped a medium-sized American flag and presented it to Gammy. She took it in her hands as if it were a swaddled baby.
John Tazwell Latham, Sr. was not known as a “joiner” and had never actually gotten around to officially putting his name on the Klan rolls, although he had attended a meeting or two. This wasn't surprising. T.J.'s grandfather had never been a member of any organization that anyone could remember. He wasn’t even officially a member of his own church. But the Klan (and the church) had assured Mrs. Latham that such formalities wouldn't be necessary. Mr. Latham had been a pioneer citizen, after all.
“Would you say grace for us, Mr. White?” Birdy asked.
This was the invitation Frank White had been hoping for. He assumed the somber, slightly slumped stance one was expected to put on prior to invoking the name of the Lord. But a sudden commotion erupted in the kitchen before he could clear his throat.

Ker-Clomping With the Klan

A team of horses ker-clomped into the driveway as T.J. stepped outside. A dozen men unloaded a tangle of red carnations, twisted into the shape of a cross.
T.J. held the door for the little army. They carried the oversize floral arrangement like Romans, hoisting it like a battering ram. The siege to the front door was all grasp and strain, positioning and re-positioning their massive red phallus, but in the end a little bruising force purchased their entrance.
T.J. could hear his grandmother’s gasp before he rounded the corner. Queen Victoria Brown Latham was a large woman, with dense bones and massive hands, much like her son Abijah. She had a coarse, full-bodied voice like Abijah’s, too; when she spoke, the windows rattled.
T.J. recognized the red-headed captain of the men as Frank White. Mr. White served as a deacon at T.J.’s church, along with T.J.’s father and Mr. John Evans. Mr. White and Mr. Evans also served as the three trustees of the Philadelphia Church School. T.J. knew that Mr. White had never much cared for his father. T.J. knew that it had something to do with his mother. Apparently Mr. White had accompanied her home from church a few times and had even been invited by her parents to have supper with the family, before Tom Latham came along and ruined everything. T.J. noticed that his mother always found an excuse to leave the room whenever Mr. White was present. Today was no exception.
Frank White also led the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, or what was left of it. It was in that capacity that he was here today.

A Row of Ducks

T.J. hoped he was old enough now to just blend in with the other men as they paraded into the back room like a row of ducks.
Usually at family events a few of his uncles would gang up on Victor, who drank too much. Just as often, they would pile on Bije, who provided Victor –- and every other so-inclined man up and down the Big and Little Tallapoosa rivers – with liquor. But today would probably be a little different.
From what T.J. had pieced together, his father was going to be asked to take over the family farm. Now that Pappy was dead, there was no one to oversee the stables and the crops, the negroes and sharecroppers. Tom's brothers either lived out of town or were too slack or disinterested. Tom had run all the way to Milledgeville to break free from those ties, but now that he was back, he would make a too-easy target for them.
After his father and all of his uncles filed in, T.J. tried to hide in the corner, in Hoke's shadow. But Edgar, the eldest, pressed a firm palm to T.J.’s breast.
“I’m sorry, T.J.,” he said, pushing him as he shut the door.
T.J. spun around. The girl with the faded pink flowers was working her tongue around a red lollipop while she waited for Hoke.
T.J. thrust his hands into his pockets and slunk out to the porch without saying a word.

T.J. Latham

"Cackling Their Way Into the Kitchen"

In a flash it was all over and the family dispersed, with the women cackling their way into the kitchen and the children cat-and-mousing one another in and out of creaky screen doors. The men shuffled and shifted their weight, looking at their shoes, nodding, each waiting for his turn to speak. Occasionally a contemptuous snort would roll out over the steady, low rumble of mutters, grunts and farts. T.J. looked at his father. He was out of place. In a room full of doughy pastiness, Tom Latham’s red skin stretched over his bony frame like a roped-down tarp.
T.J. wanted to follow his mother into the kitchen, like he used to as a child, listening in on the gossip about cousins and uncles jumping on trains or getting into fights or drinking themselves to hell.
But T.J. would go with the men today. He knew that he was no longer welcome with the women. He was too old.
So he would follow his father, but he would be thinking of Aunt Lillie’s hair, the waif in the homespun dress, and Beatrice, the girl in the window.

T.J. Latham: "Hoke's Sexual Passions"

T.J. recalls Hoke Latham. Listen.

"The Blond One"

A squeal of yimmeryammers announced Hoke, the Blond One, as he strode in through the foyer like a prince. Hoke hoisted a half-eaten chicken leg in one hand while his other picked at a splinter of bone lodged between his broad, white teeth. Hoke had a young girl with him, following a few steps behind. She was unusually thin, wearing a light homespun dress, pink flowers in a frayed hat. T.J. averted her eyes. The scouts of the heart. Was this the girl he had glimpsed in the window? T.J. didn’t think so. He was pretty sure the girl in the window was Beatrice Evans, whom T.J. had not laid eyes on for the better part of two years.
Hoke strutted across the room to help the men lift the body back into the coffin. T.J.'s father smiled and squeezed Hoke’s arm, muttering something to him as he glanced over his shoulder at T.J., who pretended not to notice.
T.J. looked to his feet as a kind of refuge. His laces had come undone. He crouched down to tie them. And there, leaning against the wall opposite, was the girl with the pink flowers in her hat, pressing her scourpot hands against the wrinkles in her dress, her eyes flitting around the room like a child looking for its mother.
T.J. fiddled with his laces and the blood from his wound dribbled out onto the floor. He wiped it against his pants leg and looked up to see if she had noticed. The girl’s eyes pinned him to the floor like the insect he knew he was.
T.J.'s grandfather had been tucked back into the coffin now. T.J. sucked the last of the blood away, stood up, and took his place again in the back row. No one asked him to help hold up the body this time. Instead, Hoke assumed T.J.’s position beside his father.
Hoke winked back at T.J.
“How are ya, Slick?” he asked.
T.J. hated it when Hoke called him that.

T.J. Latham: "Dad Was Just Like a Cricket"

T.J. Latham remembers his father. Listen.

"Gravity Wants What It Wants"

“Grab hold, T.J.,” his father told him as the men eased back the coffin so that Pappy could stare into the camera with the rest of them.
“You men hold on,” said the picture man as he took his position behind the camera. T.J. was surprised by just how heavy the coffin was. Surely he must be getting a disproportionate share of the load, he thought.
About 30 people gathered around. T.J. clenched his wet right hand around the sharp corner of the coffin. He caught another quick glimpse of his aunt’s bottom. His eyes darted around to make sure no one was looking.
“All right, now. All right, now. That’s good. Everyone hold it right there, now,” said the Jew.
Sweat streamed down T.J.’s forehead, sending his glasses sliding down his nose as the coffin weighed down on him. He clinched his thin fingers more tightly, trying to find his grip, but it was like trying to hold onto an oil-soaked piano. Gravity wants what it wants.
“Hold it right there!” said the camera man once more.
Just take the goddamn picture, T.J. thought.
He glanced out the lone open window, hoping for some type of divine intervention. A blond-haired girl, about his age, obliged. She was holding something. She looked a little scared, peering in like the blacks often did before knocking. Then she was gone.
A barb shot through T.J.’s right hand like a snakebite. He recoiled, sending the coffin tumbling onto the floor with a splintering crack amid yelps of shock from the women in front. One of the babies shrieked from all the noise.
Pappy’s corpse plopped at the feet of the children in a most unnatural position. The children clambered over the body and clung to their mothers like frightened monkeys.
T.J. looked down at his right hand. A tiny splinter protruded from the webbing between his index finger and thumb. He pulled it out and popped his bleeding hand into his mouth. He peered up at his father. Granite.
His father motioned for the other men, mostly T.J.’s uncles, to hoist the body back into the coffin. T.J. stepped forward but his father shook his head and shooed him away. T.J. slunk backward, seeping into the crevices.

"Kitchens and Sweat"

Aunt Lillie was licking her fingers again. T.J. always liked the way she did that. Even as she fought off 40, her lips were still tender and pink, not a line anywhere. T.J.’s eyes followed Aunt Lillie’s hands as they swept through his uncle’s frazzled mane, down to her wide, inviting hips. Her red hair spurted like lava from her black mourning hat.
He took his place in the middle row with the other teenage children.
“You,” said the photographer, a round, bearded man with a dark complexion. Jewish? T.J. had never seen one that he knew of, but this man fit the description given by Uncle Virgil: dark and hunched over, smoothed with oils, peering out of his sleepy eyes like a hungry weasel, waiting for some kind of opportunity. They and the Catholics were the worst. They were in league. It all went back to the Pope. Everyone had a theory.
“You, move back to the back. To the back. No, to the back! Back there!”
What a loud, insistent little man, T.J. thought.
T.J. had never been in the back row before, but he didn’t mind. He took his place directly behind Aunt Lillie, who smiled at him, flashing those straight, yellowed teeth of hers. Now that he was closer to her, T.J. could spot some grey ash in the lava bed, but it didn’t matter. Her eyebrows were like Louise Brooks’, T.J. thought. Slight, slender arches. And her smell. Underneath the dime store perfume, it was all kitchens and sweat.

Pappy As an Old Man

T.J. remembers that his grandfather liked "sweet milk and cornbread."

Pappy As a Young Man

Missing Buttons

T.J. kissed his Pappy’s cold forehead. The skin reminded him of those white turtle shells he’d stumble over in the woods. The kiss was perfunctory. Best not to linger too long over the dead.
The young man straightened his tie so that his two missing buttons wouldn’t show. He did not feel as sad as he thought he should. He wondered if anyone could tell about that. Or the missing buttons.
The family members all filed in the same way, with pots smelling of butter and gravy tucked under pale, flaccid arms; atrophied limbs outstretched to hug a neck, grasp a clammy hand.
Birdy had found the old daguerreotypes and she’d propped them up on a table near the coffin. The Pappy in the grey metal pictures was dark and puffy, with silver eyes and slick black hair; he held his King James Bible upside-down in his lap. This was a man with important work to get back to, not the broken remnant T.J. had known, the ghost who sieved milk through his long, white beard while babies dribbled spit onto his splayed chicken legs.
Birdy, she’d dyed her dress black. It had been a spring dress, blue and white, with bows, T.J. recalled.

"Deranged"

Canto I

Midway on my journey through life, I find myself within a forest dark, for the straight path has been lost. The forest is savage, rough, and stern, and I don’t know how I stumbled into it. I think I was asleep at that moment, when I abandoned the true way.
I have not slept well. The night pierced my heart. I dreamed I had reached the mountain's foot, where the valley terminated. My soul was fleeing onward, dragging me up the mountain, but my weary body needed to rest.
Before I could begin my ascent, a mad dog, a ghost dog, her fur and skin white as death, stood in my way and growled at me. She’d come against me, snapping her jaws, head uplifted, ravenous, so that even the air was afraid of her. I knew I could not pass, and so I grew despondent. The dog lashed against me by degrees, thrusting me back where the sun is silent.
I need my hammer. Then I can hammer in the morning, hammer in the evening, all over this land. First I will crack the skull of this mangy dog. And then I will kill my poor family. They will be free of me and my sins, at last. Amen.