The foster mother had only a grade-school education, but Social Services called her a decent, caring person. God knows those boys could use some decency and caring.
I signed the termination forms and called for the next case.
Shoveling smoke.
5
« ^ » Upon their arrival among their friends and countrymen in North Carolina, Highlanders are kindly received and sumptuously entertained...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
Homemade music permeated all layers of my childhood—Daddy’s fiddle, Mother’s piano, Aunt Sister’s dulcimer, my brothers and cousins and their children, each with banjo, guitar, or mouth organ. “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” “Golden Bells” and “Golden Slippers,” and “Shall We Gather at the River?” Those that couldn’t play could always clap and sing.
They rollicked me out of bed on Saturday mornings with “Hell Broke Loose in Georgia” and lullabyed me to sleep with “Whispering Hope.” I can never hear Soft as the voice of an angel... without getting a warm snugly feeling of peace and utter security.
Mother and Aunt Ida’s daughters had high, clear soprano voices; Aunt Rachel sang alto; Daddy half-talked, half-hummed; and the boys ranged from bass to tenor.
Mother, Aunt Ida and some of the older cousins are gone now, Aunt Rachel lives with her middle daughter over near Durham, four of my brothers live out of state, nieces and nephews are scattered from Manteo to Murphy, and Daddy doesn’t like to leave the farm much anymore.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of us that didn’t roll far from the tree and on Wednesday nights, after choir practice or prayer meeting, anybody in the mood for more music shows up at a barbecue house halfway between Cotton Grove and Makely for a late supper and a little picking and singing with the owner, a second cousin once removed who plays a righteous fiddle. Counting spouses and kids, there’re never more than fifteen or twenty of us at any one time, but we flat-out raise the roof when we all get going.
I can hold my own with a guitar and since nobody’s ever thrown off on my voice, I also sing harmony or lead if we’re a voice or two short.
Outside the barbecue house, the November night was cool and damp. Inside, an open fire, the first of the season, was cheerfully burning on a central glass-and-stone hearth. We had finished eating, pushed back the chairs and table to clear a space in front of the hearth, and now we were working on the second verse of “Have a Little Talk with Jesus,” which is a staple whenever Herman joins us. He has trouble staying on pitch with most songs, but loves to take his deep bass all the way down to the bottom of the well. Since it looks as if his wheelchair is going to be permanent, the rest of us are happy to indulge him.
He and Annie Sue, his teenage daughter, were bouncing the chorus back and forth between them when the front door of the restaurant opened and my brother Zach held it wide while gusts of chilly November air rushed across the warm room and made the fire blaze up before us.
Zach’s the assistant principal at West Colleton High where he also teaches math and science. He knows the physics of heat and cold, yet he stood in the open doorway, letting all our warm air escape into the night.
There were cries of “Shut the door, you fool!” and “Were you raised in a barn?” but Zach just stood there grinning at us till he had our attention good, then all of a sudden, he stepped aside.
And there in the doorway stood another Zach.
It took us maybe ten or twelve seconds before it registered that we really were seeing double.
“Adam?” said Will. “Well, I’ll be double-damned!”
Adam and Zach are six and a half, almost seven years older than me. In our family, they’re called the “little” twins to distinguish them from Herman and Haywood, the “big” twins, who are actually two inches shorter but almost eleven years older. Herman and Haywood don’t look much more alike than Robert or Andrew or Ben, but Adam and Zach are almost identical. We can see their differences, of course, but teachers and casual friends were always getting them mixed up.
As you might gather from their names, Mother and Daddy thought they were absolutely the end of the family and whenever Adam and Zach griped about the A-to-Z teasing they got at school, Mother would tell them, “Just be grateful I didn’t let your daddy name you Alpha and Omega.”
It’d been so long since Adam last visited that if it hadn’t been for Zach’s face keeping us familiar, we might not’ve recognized him.
There were awkward hugs and handshakes and lots of questions and exclamations: When did he get in? Why didn’t he let everybody know he was coming? Had he been home to see Daddy yet? How long was he staying? And where was that good-looking wife of his?
I stayed perched on the edge of a table and watched, so I was probably the only one who saw the cloud pass over Zach’s beaming face when Karen was mentioned. There was something different about Adam but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.
Adam was always a focused, eyes-on-the-prize kid. Family legend has it that at the age of five, when sent to the field to help pick up sweet potatoes before a sudden, and unexpectedly early, temperature plunge could freeze the exposed yams and turn them to mush, he marched up to Haywood, who was happily loading the heavy crates onto the tractor flatbed, and said, “Have I got to be a farmer when I grow up?”
Haywood, with his inarticulate love of plowing and planting, was puzzled. “Well, what else would you want to be?”
“Somebody who doesn’t have to burn up in the summertime or freeze his poor little tail off in the winter,” Adam said resolutely.
From the moment he saw his first hand-held calculator, he knew that he wanted to work in electronics. Will and Jack still say that the real reason he chose computers was because most electronic research is done in a temperature-controlled environment.
“Beats housing tobacco in July,” Adam retorts.
He won all the science medals West Colleton High had to offer, graduated with a 4.0 from NCSU, then landed a teaching fellowship at Stanford. While working on his doctorate, he moonlighted part-time at NorCal Polytronics, which was where he helped design one of NorCal’s first patented microchips. That chip was almost immediately superseded by newer technological breakthroughs, but it got him the doctorate that put him on a fast track at Crystal Micronics International, one of the hottest of the hotshot companies to spring up in Silicon Valley.
Of all my brothers, Adam’s the one that’s prospered most materially. He’s the only one with a Ph.D., and his early fascination with microelectronics has brought him a wealth of fine things—he and Karen have a big sprawling house out near Palo Alto with a pool, a gardener, his-and-her Jaguars in their four-car garage, a boat they keep berthed in a marina over on the San Francisco Bay, and, oh yes, two snotty kids in expensive prep schools who have to be bribed by their mother to come east with her every summer.
So there was a little stiffness after the first spontaneous exclamations. Some of the older boys are resentful that Adam’s been home only four or five times in twenty years.
“Got the big head, didn’t he?” Andrew or Robert or Herman will say. “Staying out there in California with his fancy job and fancy living?”
Envy’s part of it, of course. They can’t help feeling jealous that Adam is so much more richly rewarded when they work just as hard. Mostly, though, it’s a suspicion that maybe Adam has gotten above his raising and turned his back on us.
To cover the awkwardness, Will handed his fiddle over to Adam, picked up his harmonica, and we launched into “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Adam started out rusty, but by the time we got to the first repeat, he was right there with us. And he barely missed a lick when Will took us on over into “Leather Britches.” On “Orange Blossom Special” he had built enough confidence to try some complicated variations as he and Will out-hammed each other on corny locomotive sound effects. We finished the set with a rowdy version of “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.”