William Junior manned the barbecue thing, arid Burris was in the kitchen drumming his hands like a Congolese on the top of her radio while Jeanine concentrated on making a salad. Mrs. Houston cast her heart adrift amid a fluid affection, surrounded by all her sons. From her big chair in the living room, formerly Harold Carter Sandover’s big chair, she could see her eldest making chicken, and hear her youngest in the kitchen—“Co-mo be-bee light my fi-yer,” Burris was screaming — and see, out front, her middle son James, who had poked his torso under the hood of the green junked Ford out there. The baby was sleeping on Mrs. Houston’s bed in the back of the house, and James’s wife Stevie had her boy and Jamie’s little girl in the bathroom, trying to get them cleaned up for supper. Mrs. Houston loved them all. It failed to disturb her, in this moment out of time, that some of these people had abandoned themselves to fate and become dangerous. It failed to trouble her just now that she had seen these pow-wows before among such men: in the midst of family gatherings they spoke casually and curtly just out of earshot. Terrible things happened later.
And suddenly out of nowhere, Jamie’s little girl was standing there in front of her. It seemed she was about to say something. In the cool of the living room before the words came, distanced from the other voices and other sounds of the world, Mrs. Houston felt herself and the child enveloped in an utter loneliness, and she knew the others had forgotten all about them. “Can I take the hair off the corn?” the little girl asked her. Before Mrs. Houston could form any notion of what she was talking about, she was gone and might only have been a ghost.
Thy will be done, she said inside herself. And lately, in the last few years, she’d been able to mean it.
At the supper table, Jamie had sat on the floor instead of in her chair. “Hell of a thing,” she was saying. “What the fuck here now,” she said. “Whole place is greased, or something.”
Stevie stood beside the table, waiting for folks to get arranged so that she could sit down. “You got a handful there, don’t you?” she asked Bill Houston, who was helping Jamie up.
“Well, it’s just temporary — you know, kind of an adjustment thing or whatever, I guess.” His own eyes, drowned in gin, were like two setting suns.
Stevie said, “Just temporary means you can remember back when it was different. But it’ll never be the same.”
Everybody was crowded around the table in the kitchen now, except for the baby Ellen — and Burris, who, of all people, was in the back room feeding her some milk from her bottle. They ate the chicken and corn-on-the-cob off paper plates, and Wyatt spilled the sliced tomatoes of his salad into his lap. Burris came in after a while with the baby and sat jiggling her on his knee, making it hard for her to drink from the bottle he held to her mouth. “Look at them hands. Look at them fingers,” he said. “They’re just like for-real fingers, ain’t they?” He ate nothing.
“Burris would make a great dad,” Jeanine said. In the way of a reply there was a shocked silence. She said, “Well, he would. He’s got this little model airplane that he made. He made it himself.”
“I just wish Harry could be here to say grace,” Mrs. Houston said. “But they got him up there with all the killers.” She looked at no one, and appeared to be talking to her food.
“With all the other killers,” Stevie said, irritated.
It was nearly six now, and the sun was turning the western rim of the sky to pink. Bill and James Houston stayed in the shadow of the old Ford’s hood out front and watched while Burris moved off slowly down the street in James’s pickup. “He won’t be back,” James remarked.
“He won’t?”
“Not tonight. You give him any money?”
“I loaned him twenty dollars,” Bill said. There was nothing further to add. It was one of those occasions for pretending your loved ones were without problems, and so one of those times when Burris could be expected to take swift advantage.
“Well, we ain’t gonna fix this with these itty bitty pliers,” James said. “And he’s got all my tools.”
“You fixing to tinker with this piece of shit? I mean seriously?”
James laughed and threw the pliers up and caught them one time. “I just hate to be in amongst all that mayhem in there.” He gestured at the house. Over the little distance between it and them, no sound carried. Softened under the later light, its colorlessness was starting to appear subtle rather than drab, and something about the quality of its peace would have given the passerby to know that a family was gathered within. Inside, Baby Ellen slept. The other two children sat by themselves on the living room floor, looking at an enormous picture-book Bible, while Wyatt described the story of David and Goliath for Miranda. Nobody had yet turned on any lights, though it was beginning to grow dark. In the kitchen the two younger women sat with Mrs. Houston. Jamie was balanced in her chair, looking something like a huge Raggedy Ann, staring out of the jungle of hammers and white blindness in her mind. Stevie drank a cup of coffee and nodded rhythmically at her mother-in-law’s talk: “I’ll be seventy come August, God willing.” Stevie knew Mrs. Houston would be seventy next August. It was Stevie’s policy to cut her off before she got started, to remind her that everybody had heard it all before, but tonight Stevie felt stayed by the lethargy of familial sentiment, to be here with her husband’s mother in a darkening house, and she was content to let her mother-in-law persist in her delusion that she was entertaining Jamie, as if Jamie were capable of feeling entertained.
“I was thirty-three years old before I ever bore a child,” Mrs. Houston was saying. “I cried out in my heart to the Lord that I was a waste of a woman, married twelve years — and the Reverend John Miller laid his hand across my forehead on my birthday of 1945—in a holy church, I’m ashamed to tell you, that has since been turned into some kind or other of a skating roller-rink. And one week after that laying on of hands, they dropped the biggest bomb ever on the Japanese.” She picked up a piece of celery and then, as if startled by the feel of it, let it drop. “And on that day when they told about the bomb on Japan, I knew without ever asking no doctor that I was growing a boy inside of me.” She was talking to her home, and not to either of these women, from whom she felt estranged and by whom she felt mildly despised.
In the yard, the two men talked of the future. “Man named Dwight Snow,” James was saying, “you ever hear of him? Dude’s a maestro.”
“A maestro? I never heard of him. Was he in Florence?”
“Nope.” James tossed his empty beer can into the car through its rear window. “He was not in Florence.”
“Well, I don’t know if I want to work with somebody who don’t know the same people I know. Who does he know? Where was he away?”
“He don’t know anybody. He wasn’t away anywhere.”
Bill Houston put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and started walking in a tight circle. “I don’t get it, James,” he said.