My situation was more precarious than I let on. I had arrived in California on a tourist visa and overstayed my welcome. You don’t have to lie about it, Mel said, they’re not going to turn you in to Immigration. But I couldn’t tell the truth. When Mike asked about my prospects over dinner, I said I had started out in San Diego only because some of my compatriots found it appealing — it was a lot like Durban, they said — but I had a job waiting for me in San Francisco. Once Mel finished college we might move up there. The two of us had discussed this fantasy, but the details were borrowed from a fellow South African, a university acquaintance with a degree and a career in computers.
The conversation soon strayed from my imaginary future, sparing me the discomfort of having to elaborate the lie. The evening passed pleasantly and I seemed to make a good impression. When the meal was over, Mike carried the coffee tray through to the living room and switched on the TV for the sports results. ‘Go and smoke a cigar with Dad,’ Mel said, giving me a quick kiss and taking the gravy boat out of my hands. ‘Do the stuff the men are supposed to do.’
As I was leaving the room, I noticed the candles in silver sticks on the dresser. I blew one of them out and was bending to blow out the second when Mel grabbed my arm. ‘What are you doing? They’re supposed to burn down on their own!’ She scrabbled in the drawer of the dresser for matches. We could hear her mother loading the dishwasher in the next room. I fumbled for my lighter and relit the candle, while Mel waved a napkin to shoo away the fumes of the wick. ‘Idiot!’ She was smiling but there was an edge of annoyance in her voice.
‘How was I to know?’
We laughed about it afterwards. Stop fretting, she said, it’s not as if you threw a brick through the window of the shul!
But the blunder unnerved me. It made me realise how anxious she was that I fit in. We had fun that weekend, visiting her old haunts and looking up old friends, and I got on with her parents, talking books with Hedda and suspension bridges with Mike. But in their home I kept thinking: are the curtains meant to be open in the middle of the night? Does that thimble of salt have some ritual purpose unknown to me? Am I allowed to use this cup?
On the Monday, Mel decided we should make a trip to see her Uncle Colley. Supposedly, we were giving the Honda a test run before we braved the long drive home, but there was more to it than that.
We stayed overnight in a motel off the I-40 just across the Arkansas state line and drove up into the mountains the next morning. We had missed the full blaze of the fall colours, but the muted reds and yellows of the trees had a smouldering beauty of their own. As soon as we left the interstate, we seemed to have gone off at a tangent from the modern world. We passed tumbledown shacks with screen doors closed on their dim interiors and smoke creeping from their chimneys. The further we went, the more primitive they looked. Don’t expect neon lights and running water at Colley’s, I’d been warned, it ain’t the Best Western. Still, I had no idea that people lived like this in Ronald Reagan’s America. It might have been some remote corner of the Transkei. The deer-hunting season had started and the woods were full of hunters. Flickers of gunmetal through the trees, a glimpse of a crouched figure in a bright jerkin stalking through a clearing, the occasional shot thumping down off the heights convinced me that we were driving back into another century.
Colley lived alone. He was — I hesitate to use the term — the black sheep of the family and they were embarrassed by him and proud of him at the same time. He was no close kin of the Liebmans: one of Hedda’s aunts had married some cousin or half-brother of his. The fact that he was not a blood relation, and did not have to be accounted for in their genes, made it possible to claim him for the family history as a living link to what was rough-hewn and untamed in the American spirit.
I was under strict instructions not to use the word ‘hillbilly’ in Arkansas. But that was only part of Colley’s ambiguous charm. The other part — the main part — was his hair. He had too much of it. I don’t mean he had more hair on his head than the average man: his entire body (so I’d been told) was covered with it. The condition was so severe that as a young man he’d joined a freak show and been displayed at state fairs as the wolfman — dogman — apeman — depending on the preferences of the day.
Mel had told me Colley’s story long ago. Everyone who found out we were going to see him had given it another twist. I wasn’t sure what to believe. When his name came up, people swapped glances or suppressed a laugh. Sometimes the whole thing felt like the kind of prank you play on foreigners to show how gullible they are. For all I knew, I was being initiated into the family through a test of my humour or forbearance.
The road had dwindled to a track and I was starting to wonder how much more we could expect of the car when we finally reached Colley’s ramshackle cabin. As we drew up on the bare patch of ground that passed for a front yard, he rose from a rocking chair and came to the edge of the porch.
At first glance he seemed disappointingly ordinary, not even bearded, a big man in washed-out dungarees and a checked shirt. His face had something raw about it, like a vegetable that has been blanched and hastily peeled, and his long, pale hands hung down at his sides, tapering towards the earth like taproots. A joke at my expense, I thought. Or has his condition — I didn’t know what to call it — abated over the years? But when he greeted me, and my fingertips pressed against the soft, greasy back of his hand, it occurred to me that the skin had been shaved.
He gave Mel a hug. Then he pulled his hat over his brow and helped me fetch the bags from the car. He wanted to carry them into the cabin, but she insisted we’d sleep in the RV as usual. After a tussle of wills, we all went round to the back where an old motorhome stood on blocks. It was damp and mushroomy inside. The bare mattress looked like a block of old cheddar.
Colley wanted to show us off. He led me out front, pointed to one of the rockers and took the other. There was coffee left over from breakfast on the stove, and Mel poured us each a cup and brought out a chair. We spent the rest of the morning on the porch, where the hunters passing in their pickups could note that he had company.
Everyone stopped to talk. They wanted to know about the deer, about who had got lucky yesterday and where, but mainly they were curious about the visitors. Once their memories had been jogged, a few of them recognised Mel, who’d been coming here since she was a little girl.
Colley’s neck of the woods was not on the tourist route and he was particularly proud of me. ‘This boy here’s from Africky,’ he said more than once. ‘He’s from plumb across the pond.’ It wasn’t long before I disappointed him.
A man called Mason and his son, who farmed together on the other side of the valley, came along in a pickup and Colley decided I should join their hunting party. He insisted; he even went to fetch a rifle. I would have gone too — being shown off like a curiosity was making me irritable — but while he was inside Mel leant over and said in my ear, ‘Don’t leave me alone with him.’