James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

No need, Darlene told him when he’d finished. No need, she said, in an almost artificially soothing voice that made Eddie wonder for a split second if she had switched her addiction of choice to an antidepressant. I’ll be living at Summerton from now on, she said. I’m looking after Sextus and Elmunda — at least I will be when he gets out of the hospital. Sextus was paralyzed during your escape, and you know Elmunda has always had serious problems. That’s why I’m saying you can come home if you want. She gave him her telephone number at the hospital as well as at Summerton.

The changes she described seemed unreal to Eddie; he lowered his chin when she used the word home to describe Delicious. Home? he said. That place isn’t anybody’s home. They’re brainwashing you, Ma.

His mother explained that she’d called not only to make sure he was all right, but also to ask him back. She had taken charge of all the business affairs at the farm, and things had become a lot better. Many improvements had come to pass already, even in the couple of weeks since Eddie had found his way up to Bethella. Things were changing, she kept saying. Already they had reconnected the pay phones, which hadn’t been broken after all, and most of the workers would get to leave pretty soon if they wanted to, in a few months at the very latest. Sextus and Elmunda can’t run this place anymore, she said. They are sick people.

Doesn’t that mean you can leave on your own? Eddie wanted to know. And come here?

No, no, I have to stay, she said, in a tone that sounded as if she meant to reassure him of something she refused to give life to in words. She laughed. And I don’t think Bethella will have me anyway, she said. Hammer and a few others are going tonight, they found enough money for a bus ticket somewhere. Michelle we don’t know what happened to, but she did what she wanted, and I hope she made it. You really should come back, honey.

Ma, what happened to my hands?

The line went silent. Eddie, I know you know what happened, Darlene finally managed.

I meant where are they. ’Cause I never saw them again.

I don’t think you want an answer to that. You’re just trying to hurt your mother, Darlene said. And maybe your mother deserves it. The silence returned for several moments, then she said, TT. We stopped to smoke somewhere and I think TT put the bag down, and by the time anybody realized — we had to move fast, sweetheart. Is that good enough? Mama fucked up again. But now she’s trying to make things right. It’s much different here, everything’s different now.

Eddie nearly walked away from the phone at that point, disgusted by the thought of the fate of his appendages, but the image of Sextus and his fake bashful laugh came to mind, as well as the corruption his expressions concealed so badly. Eddie could not believe that things had changed so drastically so soon, and he vowed never to return to Delicious regardless. Had the Fusiliers put his mother up to making this call in order to get him to go back, to entrap him and prevent him from exposing them? It made sense that they might try, given his mother’s habit for crack, for Sextus, or for some twisted combination of the two.

Eddie promised himself that he’d get the Subaru back to Jarvis, who would write something in the newspaper that would tell the world what Delicious had done to him and to Sirius and the others, and they would pull his mother out of there even if it was against her will and figure out what had made her go from talking about Delicious as a nightmare to considering it a dream palace in so short a time. Had she ever truly wanted to leave in the first place? Maybe, it dawned on him, she had been pretending to want to leave solely to placate him.

Saying nothing further, Eddie dropped Bethella’s phone onto its cradle with his mouth. But afterward, amid a rising sense of dread, a suspicion that much more had gone wrong than his mother was at liberty to describe, a worry lingered that someone, possibly Sextus or Elmunda, or more likely How or Jackie, might’ve been standing right next to Darlene with some sharp weapon up to her neck. Perhaps Sextus had such a horrifically strong need to get Eddie back to Delicious and to maintain secrecy that they would kill his mother if he didn’t return. A wave of nausea crested in his stomach and chest, and he felt a violent disorientation, as if he were an hourglass right at the moment when somebody flipped it over.

Eddie called Darlene nearly every day after that in an attempt to convince her to leave the farm. Her refusal to allow him to rescue her became deeply frustrating. Had he stayed closer to Louisiana, he might have effected a forced rescue, despite how badly the first had gone. Eventually Darlene refused to speak about leaving Delicious unless he considered coming back. When he rebuffed her, needling her instead, she hung up on him, then stopped answering the phone entirely. Her actions aggrieved Eddie, and with reassurance from Bethella that Darlene was irredeemable, he eventually gave up.

Around that time, a few months after Eddie had left the farm, Jarvis finally tracked him down.

How did you find me? Eddie asked.

Jarvis explained that the St. Cloud DMV had contacted him about a parking ticket, which had provided the first hint. From the ticket I figured you’d run off to St. Cloud. I looked up repairmen and asked around. That’s what reporters do.

I reckon you want your car back.

This is true, Jarvis said, and then he volunteered to come get the car provided Eddie would talk to him about what had gone on at Delicious. He could get the paper to pay for part of the trip and the rest he could deduct from his taxes.

I can’t, Eddie said. I don’t want anything to happen to my mom. She’s still there.

Still there? That’s great! I mean, not great, but what a story.

They spoke further, and ultimately Jarvis told Eddie that he should keep the car for a while. Most of the people I need to talk to are down here in the vicinity of Louisiana, he said. I can use my girlfriend’s car. I’ll pay the ticket.

Late the following spring, when Eddie had been in Minnesota for a little more than a year, ten months after the phone call, Jarvis finally arrived to retrieve his vehicle. Over the course of an hour or two, Jarvis brought Eddie up to date about the exposé. He read to Eddie a section of an early draft of the five-part series that would run in the Chronicle.

Few people ever showed up at Delicious nowadays, he said. Sometimes, one of the Fusiliers’ former business partners might appear at the front gate, which the family kept locked in order to prevent surprise visits. Any visitors who did make it in would most likely have heard pathetic stories about the rapid downhill trajectory of the finances at Delicious after the accident, about the magnitude of the family’s losses, about the strange atmosphere that seemed to have grown up along with the kudzu now gamboling across more than a third of the company’s vast acreage, and so they would have prepared themselves to pity this family for their financial ruin. For the perceptive ones, however, that feeling would likely give way to the inkling that in addition to the sad fate of this husband and wife and their once-prosperous farm, a peculiar and maybe sinister tone of negligence and corruption had not only overtaken the watermelon patches and tomato fields now growing more weeds than crops but also tiptoed up the steps behind every visitor, armed with the ability to disappear at the precise moment before it could be observed. Your head turned sharply and your eyes saw nothing, but the sense of a malevolent presence would linger for an instant, like a streak of glass cleaner evaporating from a mirror.