passed circa WWII. The wallpaper and drapes are still redolent of a VJ-Day home-decorating sale or something similar. Inherited pieces of furniture are on display and in use throughout, old marble-top dressers, walnut tables, and rocking chairs that have felt the fingers and butts of my people on back to the fin de siècle or even earlier, and have come to know the very same parts of me. There’s a closet under the stairs containing firearms, long and short, that have never been let out of the family, though some haven’t been fired in my lifetime. The walls in the front and dining rooms are coated with family photographs, the ancestral eyes from a variety of eras always watching, beckoning it seems to me, as if those long-gone hillbilly forebears had a few deep, ugly secrets or harsh, ruinous criticisms they’d love to pass on if I’d stand close enough for whispers.
Imaru felt funny stirrings inside these walls.
The gang had wanted to go shopping, or the distaff wing of the gang anyhow, so I’d dropped the ladies at the square and me and Smoke went to visit Panda.
Panda was out somewhere in the noon heat, on foot and cane, putting his old body in peril. The heat had gotten up to where the cows had all dove into ponds. A man Panda’s age should’ve been hunkered on the shade porch drinking iced tea, but he wasn’t.
Smoke, his dreadlocks freshly braided, one of Panda’s beers in his hand, studied the wall of our dead. He’d spent more years in this house than I had, and was tied to it by more actual memories than me, though I believe I felt the pull of the blood-kin legends harder.
“Shoo-wee,” he said. “There’s some nasty motherfuckers in our family tree—know it?”
“I know it.”
In the photos there are quite a few fellas in overalls and women in calico. The men wear hats and the women have their hair in severe buns. Redmonds have come always from dirt, worked hard on dirt as a bloodline since probably the days of knights and trolls and wizards and all, long before the U.S.A. even opened for business, so they are all sturdy in appearance. Pinched expressions abound, or happier ones that have a strong hint of predatory gloat to them, often with a nine-point buck at their feet. The ensemble photos were posed so that kids are on one side and the elders on the other, to form a generational fenceline around those in their unbridled prime. There once had been so many Redmonds thatquite a few of the faces stumped us as to names. Local Redmonds had since gotten narrowed down by exposure to the outside world. Mostly they’d started migrating on the hillbilly highway to the auto works of Detroit, the oil fields of Texas, or the shipyards of Long Beach back in the thirties, when word reached the hills a man could earn five bucks or more a day in those far-off places.
Our line hereabouts had thinned and thinned, down now to just Panda, and, I guess, us.
“I remember him,” Smoke said, jabbing a finger at a rough cob with an eye patch. “One-eyed Garland. The roustabout.”
“He used to give us quarters for peggin’ rocks at his empty beer bottles.”
“That’s right,” Smoke said, “A quarter if we hit ’em. It was his wife, wasn’t it? Over in Oklahoma?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Twelve gauge. I think he had it comin’.”
“Maybe. He was good to us.”
We gave ourselves over to the photos, photos that trailed back to the last century. Before a single beer had been drunk we’d identified seven faces related to us on that wall that we knew for a fact had shot or cut men to death (not counting me), and four that had been on the wrong end of the carnage. Panda’s older brother Jeb, for whom Smoke is actually named, had been gutshot near the Jacks Fork in about 1936, never solved. General Jo’s favorite first cousin, Doyle, my namesake, had been found in a ditch on the other side of Egypt Grove in 1947. He’d survived the war in the Pacific with the Marines only to get murdered by a
Imaru felt funny stirrings inside these walls.
The gang had wanted to go shopping, or the distaff wing of the gang anyhow, so I’d dropped the ladies at the square and me and Smoke went to visit Panda.
Panda was out somewhere in the noon heat, on foot and cane, putting his old body in peril. The heat had gotten up to where the cows had all dove into ponds. A man Panda’s age should’ve been hunkered on the shade porch drinking iced tea, but he wasn’t.
Smoke, his dreadlocks freshly braided, one of Panda’s beers in his hand, studied the wall of our dead. He’d spent more years in this house than I had, and was tied to it by more actual memories than me, though I believe I felt the pull of the blood-kin legends harder.
“Shoo-wee,” he said. “There’s some nasty motherfuckers in our family tree—know it?”
“I know it.”
In the photos there are quite a few fellas in overalls and women in calico. The men wear hats and the women have their hair in severe buns. Redmonds have come always from dirt, worked hard on dirt as a bloodline since probably the days of knights and trolls and wizards and all, long before the U.S.A. even opened for business, so they are all sturdy in appearance. Pinched expressions abound, or happier ones that have a strong hint of predatory gloat to them, often with a nine-point buck at their feet. The ensemble photos were posed so that kids are on one side and the elders on the other, to form a generational fenceline around those in their unbridled prime. There once had been so many Redmonds thatquite a few of the faces stumped us as to names. Local Redmonds had since gotten narrowed down by exposure to the outside world. Mostly they’d started migrating on the hillbilly highway to the auto works of Detroit, the oil fields of Texas, or the shipyards of Long Beach back in the thirties, when word reached the hills a man could earn five bucks or more a day in those far-off places.
Our line hereabouts had thinned and thinned, down now to just Panda, and, I guess, us.
“I remember him,” Smoke said, jabbing a finger at a rough cob with an eye patch. “One-eyed Garland. The roustabout.”
“He used to give us quarters for peggin’ rocks at his empty beer bottles.”
“That’s right,” Smoke said, “A quarter if we hit ’em. It was his wife, wasn’t it? Over in Oklahoma?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Twelve gauge. I think he had it comin’.”
“Maybe. He was good to us.”
We gave ourselves over to the photos, photos that trailed back to the last century. Before a single beer had been drunk we’d identified seven faces related to us on that wall that we knew for a fact had shot or cut men to death (not counting me), and four that had been on the wrong end of the carnage. Panda’s older brother Jeb, for whom Smoke is actually named, had been gutshot near the Jacks Fork in about 1936, never solved. General Jo’s favorite first cousin, Doyle, my namesake, had been found in a ditch on the other side of Egypt Grove in 1947. He’d survived the war in the Pacific with the Marines only to get murdered by a
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