“Quite a collection of photographs you have there, MeMaw,” I said.
She turned her head toward the wall and looked at them. “Got a whole nuther room of ’em. I always take pictures of folks. Cheers me, all them I’ve met. I look at them walls, I got memories.”
“Who are they all?” Leonard asked.
“Some family,” MeMaw said. “Most ain’t, though. There’s people come by to check the gas meter or the water or bring the mail, and they’re nice enough, I’ll take their picture and put it up there, try and remember what we talked about that day. This here,” she waved her finger at a row of photos, “is all my family.”
Some of the photos she was pointing to were old and some were new, and some had been taken by someone other than MeMaw, because she was in a number of the photos with her children. In the earlier ones she didn’t look a lot different than she did now until you got to the oldest black and whites, and even then she looked elderly, but with darker hair and more of it, less wrinkles maybe, and a few of her own teeth.
She pointed out and named her children, and there were eight of them, five girls and three boys. The first seven close together, the last, a boy, born when she was forty-five, way past the time she thought she’d have another child.
“Ain’t one more loved than the other,” MeMaw said, “but Hiram, he’s the baby. A surprise. Lives in Tyler, but travels a lot. He’s a salesman.”
I looked at her baby. In the most recent picture she had of Hiram he looked my age and size, but with thicker shoulders. He had a personable face.
The latest photograph of her eldest child, Pleasant, showed a woman who looked seventy-five if she was a day. MeMaw said she was retired and had a little check, but was in business for herself, selling leather-stitched white Bibles.
We got a look at all the grandkids and great-grandkids, and she told us their names and stories about each one.
“How come you started doing this, MeMaw?” Leonard asked. “Taking all these pictures? Puttin’ ’em on the wall?”
“All my family done gone ’cept one boy, Cletus. Moved off tryin’ to get somethin’ decent for themselves. I wanted somethin’ to do, and after my husband, Mr. Carter, died, I took to takin’ even more pictures. Anyone I liked, I took their picture and taped it to the wall. Bet I’ve gone through half-dozen of them Polaroids. Every time I wear one out, my children buy me another. There’s pictures of your Uncle Chester in the other room, and an old one of you. I took it when you was just a child.”
“No joke?” Leonard said. “Be all right I see them?”
“Have to look for them,” she said. “I ain’t aimin’ to get up right now. They’ll be in the other room.”
I went in there with Leonard, and it was stuffy and hot and all the walls were full of photographs, some relatively fresh, some wrinkling from age and heat and turning green. It made me feel a little lonely somehow.
On one wall near the floorboard Leonard found a black-and-white picture of his uncle and himself sitting on a merry-go-round in a park, most likely the park Leonard talked about over on Sheraton Street. Leonard was probably about ten years old and his uncle was our age.
The photograph wasn’t too good, and Leonard’s features faded into his black skin. His teeth showed white in his face and he looked happy. His uncle had caught a ray of sunlight and was more defined. He looked a lot like Leonard looked now. I took a minute to make fun of Leonard, just so he knew I loved him, and he showed me his middle finger to show he cared about me too.
We checked around for a long, hot time and found more photos of his uncle at different ages, and finally, on the way out, we came across one near the door. The Uncle Chester there looked a lot like the Uncle Chester I had seen in his coffin, only a little less puffy and a lot less dead. He was standing next to a tall angular black man about his age, and he had his arm around him. They weren’t exactly smiling. They looked self-conscious, as if preparing for a hemorrhoid operation but bound to make the best of it.
“Who’s that with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said.
MeMaw heard us. “I’m pretty sure that’s Illium,” she said. “Take it off the wall and let me see it.”
Leonard freed the photo and took it into the kitchen and gave it to MeMaw. She said, “That’s who it is. Illium Moon.”
“Who is he?” Leonard asked.
“He and your uncle was near growed together at the hip,” she said. “You seen one, you near saw the other. Illium moved here from San Antonio. He’d been a policemans or somethin’ like that. He and your uncle met at the domino shack up by the highway.”
“Illium still around?” Leonard asked.
She studied on that for a moment. “I ain’t seen him for a bit. Couple weeks, I reckon. Hadn’t really thought about it. Your uncle not around, I ain’t expected to see him. Got so you couldn’t think of one without the other.”
“You know where he lives?” Leonard asked. “Being a friend of Uncle Chester’s, I thought I might like to talk to him.”
“No, I don’t,” MeMaw said, “but he works over to the colored Baptist church sometimes. I know that much. He used to drive the bookmobile too.”
“For the library?” I asked.
“It wasn’t the real library, the one downtown,” she said. “Illium, he was like your uncle. He wanted to do good by folks, so he got this bus… or what do they call them now?”
“Van?” I asked.
“That’s it,” she said. “He had him a van fixed up with his own books, and he went around and loaned books here in the East Side, like a library. I never did take none of ’em, ten year ago I quit reading anything ’sides the good book since I couldn’t get around good enough to go to church. I figured God would let me slide on that, I kept knowledge of His word. But I thought Illium was a good man. Sometimes your uncle helped him out, rode around with him.”
“Can you tell us where this church is where Illium works?” Leonard asked.
“I can,” MeMaw said. “But first, Lenny, you go over there and open that cabinet.”
Leonard went over to the cabinet she was indicating with a cadaverous finger and opened it. There was a snapshot camera inside.
“Bring me that camera,” she said.
Leonard did.
MeMaw looked at me, said, “What’s your name now, son?”
“Hap Collins,” I said.
“Hap, you and Lenny sit together at the table.”
We sat and pulled our chairs close and leaned our heads together.
“Ya’ll’d make good salt and pepper shakers,” she said, raised the camera to her face, grinned, said, “Now, boys, say cheese.”
15.
“Do you remember seeing Illium at the funeral?” I asked.
“No,” Leonard said, “but I wasn’t looking for him. He could have been there.”
“I don’t think so, and if he and your uncle were as close as MeMaw claims, he oughta been, don’t you think?”
I shifted gears on my old Dodge pickup and we climbed a hill full of potholes and crumbling slabs of weather-heaved blacktop. The sun was near midsky, and it shone on the faded gray hood of my truck and made me squint, and the hot wind blowing through the open windows made me sweat as if I were in a sauna. I reminded myself that in another couple of hours it would really be hot.
I had brought my truck back with me when we returned to Uncle Chester’s house from our three days in the country, and I was glad to have it, old and uncomfortable as it was. When I first moved in with Leonard, he had picked me up and brought me here and left my truck back home because it was giving me trouble. Turned out the trouble was burned-out rings and cheap gas and no money to fix it.
But on our return to Uncle Chester’s, Leonard needed a way to haul lumber, so he paid for me to get a ring job and real gas. Now, I was no longer polluting half of East Texas, and felt better about that, and without my telltale cloud of black smoke following me I was less embarrassed to be seen driving it.