Sweet Talk by Stephanie Vaughn Page A

MacArthur said. “It’s too soon to ask that.”
    “It certainly is not a toad,” my father said. He made a great show of entering a mark against us on the napkin. This was another part of the game, trying to rattle the opponents by gloating.
    “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” my mother said.
    “Yes.”
    “Is it bigger than a car?” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “Is it bigger than a house?” MacArthur said.
    “Yes.”
    “Is it the Eiffel Tower?” my grandmother said.
    Again my father used exaggerated motions to record the mark. MacArthur dropped his head into his arms. This was an unmanly response.
    “Settle down,” my father said. “Think.”
    “Can’t we play some other game?” my grandmother said. “This game is never any fun.”
    “We are not trying to have fun,” my father said. “We are trying to use our minds.”
    So the game went, until we had used up our twenty no answers, and my father revealed the thing he had been thinking of. The thing was “the rocket’s red glare”—the light from exploded gunpowder. Gunpowder, if you analyzed its ingredients, was actually animal, vegetable,
and
mineral—providing you agreed that the carbon component could be derived from animal sources. He poured a drink and leaned back to tell us a story. The first time he had played the game he was a soldier on a ship going to England. The ship was in one of the largest convoys ever to cross the Atlantic during the Second World War. The sea was rough. German submarines were nearby. Some men got seasick, and everyone was nervous. They began to play games, and they played one game of twenty questions for two days. That was the game whose answer was “the rocket’s red glare.” My father had thought that one up.
    That was as close as he ever came to telling us a war story. He had gone from England to NormandyBeach and later to the Battle of the Bulge, but when he remembered the war for us he remembered brave, high-spirited men not yet under attack. When he had finished speaking, he looked at his glass of scotch as the true drinker will—as if it contains a prophecy.
    The spring following the season in which we ate whole generations of doves, MacArthur acquired two live chicks. A Woolworth’s in the town near the post was giving chicks away to the first hundred customers in the door the Saturday before Palm Sunday. MacArthur was the first customer through the door and also the fifty-seventh. He named the chicks Harold and Georgette. He made big plans for Harold and Georgette. He was going to teach them how to walk a tightrope made of string and ride a chicken-sized Ferris wheel.
    A week later, Harold and Georgette were eaten by our cat while we were at church. The chicks had been living in an open cardboard box on top of the refrigerator. No one imagined that a cat as fat and slothful as Al Bear would hurl himself that high to get an extra meal.
    Looking at the few pale feathers left in the box, MacArthur said, “He ate them whole. He even ate the beaks.”
    “Poor chicks,” my mother said.
    “They were making an awful lot of noise up there,” my grandmother said. “They should have kept those beaks shut.”
    Everyone looked to see if MacArthur was crying. In our family, people believed that getting through a hardship intact was its own reward. “This is nothing to be upset about,” my father said. “This is the way nature works.” It was in the natural order of things for cats to eat birds, he told us. Even some birds ate other birds. Some animals ate cats. Everything we ate had once been alive. Wasn’t a steak part of a steer? MacArthur looked away just long enough to roll his eyes at me. My father began to gesture and to project his voice. Now he was lecturing on the principles of Darwinian selection. He used the phrase “nature red in tooth and claw.” He seemed to like that phrase, and used it again. The third time he said, “nature red in tooth and claw,” Al Bear walked up behind him and threw up on