Recorded Books Inc. - The Holiday Season

The Holiday Season

MICHAEL KNIGHT

Copyright 2007 by Michael Knight

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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4834-7

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

For George Garrett

A sad tales best for winter.

William Shakespeare,
The Winters Tale

That first full winter of the new millennium, the holiday season in particular, was an awkward time in the history of us Poseys. My mother was three years dead and my father was still bewildered by the loose ends of his retirement, and my brother, Ted, who had a wife and twin daughters and a brand-new house in Point Clear, had decided that this was the year his family needed to start establishing some traditions of their own. Ted tried to include us, of course, extended several invitations, but in the end, Dad couldnt be persuaded to leave Mobile for Thanksgiving. I suggested that Ted bring the girls over for a visit the day before or the day after, whatever he wanted, but he felt provoked by our fathers obstinance and he, too, refused to bend. Telling it now, the whole business reeks of pettiness and folly, but like most family squabbles, it seemed important at the time.

I could just as easily begin this account in a more overtly momentous year: 1994the year of my fathers failed campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. 1996the year the twins were born. 1997my mothers last year on earth. But in a way thats difficult to articulate, those final months of that first year of the brand-new millennium marked a culmination of all those things. In memory, the intervening years seem a sort of holding pattern, after the dust had settled on significant events, but before life cranked back up again in earnest. Though there was hardly an hour door to door between Teds new house and our old place on Mohawk Street, I couldnt help imagining my father and my brother faced off across Mobile Bay like distant nations on the brink of war.

So it was under these circumstances that I found myself pitching horseshoes with my father on the last Wednesday in November. It was early evening, unseasonably warm even for lower Alabama, light melting down through the branches of the trees. I watched Dad draw back, slowly, slowly, watched him let a horseshoe fly, watched the horseshoe catch an edge and cartwheel past the stake.

In a discouraged voice, he said, What are we playing to again?

The ground was littered with fallen leaves, brown and brittle, all curled in upon themselves. I thought maybe I should rake tomorrow, wondered if hed raked at all this year.

Eleven, I said.

I used to be good at this. He rubbed his eyes, gazed over the chain link fence. There was a little yellow house back there, an old woman puttering on her back porch. Well visit your mother in the morning, Dad said, meaning her grave.

We walked the length of the pit, toeing the ground in search of wayward horseshoes. The leaves were that deep. Down in the mulchy yellow grass, I spotted the ID tag from a pet collar. The lettering had weathered off. I showed him what Id found but he just shrugged.

Its five oclock, he said. I need a drink.

And he trudged off toward the house without another word. I sat on the ground to wait for him, rubbed the ID tag between my fingers. You could hardly feel the traces of engraving there. Hardy the Lab, Mullet the mutt, Salmon P. Chase the cat. The long-gone pets of my youth. It was hard to believe the tag could have belonged to any of them, could have remained undiscovered in the backyard all that time. My father drove those horseshoe stakes when I was nine years old. That was nearly a quarter century ago.

Behind me, I heard a woman calling, Allo-o. There was plenty of French accent in her voice. Ooo is that I see?

I stood and faced the voice and saw the old woman closing fast from her side of the fence.

You must be the son, she said. Ted, no?

I told her, Im the other one, and I would have sworn she looked disappointed. She was my fathers age, maybe a little younger. It was hard to tell. She wore her hair in a silver-blond pageboy and her features were all pinched together in the middle of her face.

Frank, I said.

The woman extended her hand. Her fingers were limp and knotty in mine.

Madame Langlois. I am you fathers neighbor. She pointed behind her at the little yellow house. You look like your father very much.

Hes inside, I said.

Madame Langlois fingered the collar of her turtleneck, a gesture made girlish by the tilt of her head and by the fact that her nails were painted prom-dress pink. Your father, he is a good man. Her accent was like something from the movies, all bouncy pitch and rounded vowels, her Ss edged with Zs. There are not so many like him willing to dedicate themselves tohow you say?public service. She bobbed her head to underscore the words.

What she said was true. My father was a twelve-term city councilman, an important man in his way, dedicated, locally connected. There were photographs of him with Jimmy Carter, with Mike Dukakis, with Bill Clinton hanging in the room we had always called his den. The Clinton photo was taken in 1994, the year Dad ran for Congress. The president was in town stumping for local Democrats. Likely his endorsement hurt more than it helped in this part of the world.

Mohawk Street was located in an older part of the city known simply and practically as Midtownhalfway between the bars and the business district and the shipyards down near where the river met the bay and on the other side, the more upscale neighborhoods in west Mobile, the country club, the private schools and so on. My father moved us there when I was six years old in an effort to expose his sons to more diversity. To an old Southern liberal like my father, diversity meant black people, and he wanted to see his boys riding bikes and playing ball with a more colorful group than was handy in west Mobile. Much to his dismay, however, lots of well-intentioned white folk had the same idea and the neighborhood began to gentrify around us almost as soon as we moved in, new paint glistening on the shotgun houses and Creole cottages, contractors banging away all day long, landscapers trucks parked along the curb. The net effect was to drive property values up and most of the black residents to the other, less pallid side of Government Boulevard. The house had tripled in value since Dad bought it and Ted was always pushing him to sell, maybe buy a condo on the bay, closer to him and Marcy and the girls, and sock the rest into a mutual fund or something, set him up big time in his retirement, but Dad refused. He claimed both inertia and nostalgia but I think he was embarrassed by how much the house was worth. I think he was waiting around for the neighborhood to go to pot again.