James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

Jackie goes, Almost there.

Darlene looked out the window and the whole goddamn view was corn. It had took all night driving to get where they going, but didn’t nobody in the minibus ask how many hours had tiptoed past. Too much enjoyment be happening up in that vehicle to keep track of the time or the place. We wanted to rip ourselves outta times and places anyhow. Someday I wanna switch places with y’all just for a while, so before you die you could feel what it like not to have no body. Sweet Jesus, it take a whole lot of worriation out your head. First ’bout doctor bills, and then ’bout racism and sexism, and most positively, it immediately put a end to all that When Am I Gonna Die bullshit. I told Darlene that the whole problem of humanity is that if you got a body, you gotta have a time and a place. But when y’all got a time and a place, y’all really don’t got shit — time don’t do nothing but disappear. People and places and seasons and events be changing faster than you could recognize em, let alone remember em or appreciate em. How y’all supposed to live on fast-forward all the motherfucking time? Don’t ask me. Scotty don’t got no idea. Better y’all than me.

Edward Randolph Hardison always wanted to get things done quickly. Even his birth came a month too early, right after Labor Day weekend, another event in a week of fleeting expectation in the news — the Viking 2 spacecraft sent the first color photographs from Mars, the Rat Pack reunited for a moment, Mao Tse-tung died. After his parents’ overwhelming experience of the miscarriage the year before, they nearly went to pieces as they waited by the incubator, watching Eddie breathe through a ventilator until his lungs finally developed. Nat and Darlene had wanted to get settled before getting married, but the urgency of Eddie’s medical problems, followed by the tentative elation they felt when they finally got to take home a healthy child, in mid-October, inspired them to hold a small marriage ceremony the following March, not far from the hospital in Shreveport. To avoid the appearance of immorality — finding out they’d been living in sin would shock their new neighbors — Darlene handed Eddie to her sister during the wedding photos. If necessary, she and Nat would sometimes lie about which event had come first, the birth or the wedding.

Once Eddie’s condition stabilized, they rushed back to Ovis to attend to their business. The Mount Hope Grocery was in the wrongest part of a town made of wrong parts, a wooden building with thick greenish beams holding up its awning. It had been a gas station once, but over time Eddie’s father had the pumps ripped out, moved the main building, and added another structure until he’d built a classic general store with an inviting verandah where neighbors would soon gather to play cards and voice grievances. A stream ran behind the store, and back there, while the adults talked business, Eddie often tried to capture tiny fish between his palms and once chased after a talkative tabby cat with green eyes.

Before the store opened, on the nights when people gathered at the blond-brick ranch house they rented in town, Eddie’s parents would send him to bed early, but he would silently pass through his open bedroom door and watch what he could from down the hall, where he’d see men like his father, with straight carriages and resonant voices, and women, attractive like his mother but slouchier, with arch, skeptical expressions, crowded into their living room smoking, watching television, and drinking bourbon. On some occasions Eddie created excuses to get up in order to sneak glances at the fascinating box with its bluish-gray, flickering images. But these adults never watched anything exciting, only white men standing opposite each other at podiums arguing in words he did not understand, or crowds of people in big rooms where balloons fell in the colors of the USA.

More often the men alone would gather to watch a game — the Saints, or college basketball. But the rules and the breaks in action disturbed Eddie’s concentration, and he couldn’t keep his childish attention on anything for very long. When his mother discovered him in the process of sipping from a spent whiskey glass polluted by a cigarette butt, she increased her efforts to keep him in his room during his father’s summits, and during her own more sedate meetings with the ladies.

Once the general store opened, all the activity shifted to the verandah and the side yard there. They would congregate at long forest-green picnic tables outside the Mount Hope Grocery, and Eddie’s parents would speak with their neighbors as they went about their day — people in overalls, women pushing white children in carriages. Nat and Darlene encouraged all of them to write their names down on clipboards. During those times Eddie wandered up and down the main street, or into the thrift shop, where he found toys, or he begged his mother for change to run to the ice cream parlor that drew everybody in with the sweet smell of baking cones.

Eddie’s parents always gave him the sense that they were doing important, possibly risky work. They drew emergency plans for him on the blank pages at the back of his coloring books. They forbade him to trust strangers. Phone calls sometimes came at odd hours, and he would hear his mother panicking, his father rising in the night to secure the doors and windows. Not only did his father keep a shotgun locked behind the counter at the store, he taught his wife how to use it.

But one morning, not long before he turned six, Eddie awoke to find that his father hadn’t come home. He fixated on Darlene as she spoke into the phone, her face pinched with fear and anger, paying him no mind, one fingernail scraping at the corner of a corkboard stuck to the refrigerator, dislodging the brown flakes as her calls to neighbors went unanswered and she grew frantic. Her determination and pessimism came out in tiny fragments: I just know! Lord, how could you let it? Please don’t let him be.

Ma, let’s go to the store and see if he’s there, Eddie insisted.

I called, she said. He didn’t pick up.

Maybe the phone is not working.

Maybe, she responded. Maybe…

Darlene turned her attention back to making phone calls and remained focused on that activity even when Eddie stomped on the floor in front of her and insisted. She wouldn’t leave the house or let him go out by himself. Eventually she agreed to let him go down the street to a friend’s house while she watched from a window.

In the early afternoon, just after Eddie came back, several policemen strode into the house. They’d never come inside on earlier visits, and they seemed to want to say serious things; Eddie knew because they removed their hats. White men nearly as tall as his father crowded around the kitchen table; it was a novelty to have white people in this small space, let alone these authoritative, beefy guys with their safety-goggle glasses, short, cornhusk-colored hair, and tight speech. His mother, who enforced hospitality under all circumstances, offered them coffee and warmed biscuits for them as if they paid house calls every day and insisted that they sit. He hoped a couple of them might be astronauts. When they started talking about identifying something they called it and the body, he did not recognize at first that they meant his father. His mother registered shock, and after a few moments, she collapsed into her own arms, fell to her knees beside the table, and, following an uncomfortable pause, ran outside to the clothesline, where she dashed between the ropes, yanking the laundry down and hollering something that did not sound like language. The men were still talking, to one another now.

After the screen door banged shut, Eddie went to the doorjamb and watched Darlene’s path. He couldn’t see behind the sheets, but he followed the clothespins with his eyes as they snapped and flew off in all directions. Soon the policemen came to the door behind him and stood solemnly, heads bowed the way they might do while saying grace, and his mother tumbled from behind a fitted sheet, clutching a pair of his father’s dungarees, embracing them as if his legs were still in them, smearing them against her face, stifling her cries, dampening the fabric with tears. Eddie ran out to her, but she didn’t seem to see him through her grief.