The Mean Time
The thing I remember second most about that day is the way the sun blinded me as it passed by Uncle Toby’s hat. He was sitting tall at the wheel of the tractor, his Braves baseball cap square on his head, and the sun split around the worn brim like water in the creek bends around a rock. One hand rested easily on the bright yellow wheel of the John Deere and the other held a cigarette just as casually. This was the mark of my father’s brothers: sweat-stained ball caps and Marlboros. They were simple people who took pleasure in simple things – a lazy summer holiday, a good meal, time with family.
I was just about the age when children start to feel superior for knowing more about algebra and television shows and movie stars – all the important things – than their elders do. I had also just realised that my uncle Toby was mentally slow, what local folks politely called “touched in the head”. For 12 years, I’d just assumed that Toby enjoyed being around us kids, liked playing hide-and-seek and dress-up, and taking us to the store on the hay wagon he hooked to his tractor. That day it had come to me that the reason he never grew tired of playing with his young nieces and nephews was because, in many ways, he was on the same mental level as we were.
A blinding clear light had been turned on in my head, and I’d seen him for what he was: an old retarded man who had never been on a date in his life and who had to have his brothers pick him up on work days because he couldn’t be trusted to remember the way to the warehouse he had worked in for almost 15 years.
The tractor was pulling the hay trailer with me and my 12 cousins in it, all itchy and hot from the summer heat. The road from the house to the store was gravelled and rough. Occasionally, Toby would turn his head over his shoulder to note our collective discomfort. He would smile lazily, and with the sun behind him, I could see the grease and sweat clouding his thick glasses. He was missing a tooth up front, and his grin could be construed as sinister by anybody who didn’t know him. Toby was a big man, his back stretched wide from field work and mill work and every other kind of work poor, white mountain people had to do back then to keep their stomachs from growling. For all his muscle and girth, he was a kind man, as gentle as any giant could be.
We were the city cousins, my sisters and I. The notions we had about hard work were limited to having to clean our room or empty the dishwasher. My cousins were all older than me, a rough lot, the sort of kids I would not be allowed to play with at home. For them, the end of school came when the fields needed to be harvested. Knowing how to kill something good to eat was much more valuable than having written a poem or read a good book. They were as different from me as night from day, yet by chance of blood we spent every holiday together, attended the same funerals, ate too much cake at the same weddings.
My father had done well for himself, using his ability with numbers as a justification for finishing high school, then, when the time came, going to college. When he left his mountain home for a job with a large accounting firm in Atlanta, I imagine it was with a certain foreboding that he looked back at the brothers and sisters he left behind. None of his family could quite understand how he made a living adding up numbers. “If somebody’s dumb enough to pay you for that, then all you can do is be smart enough to take their money,” were the final words my grandfather had on the subject. Still, there was a feeling that my father had got away with something, that he was bamboozling his employers while his brothers and sisters did the honest work that kept the world turning. All his gains seemed ill-gotten, somehow tainted by the fact that he didn’t have to work for it.
Despite their differences, it was obvious that they all loved each other. There were communal memories of suffering, hard times overcome that my father and his siblings shared. We only ever heard stories about his childhood when he was in the company of his family. We would sit quietly on the steps to the front porch as he laughed with his brothers about the time their grandfather was arrested for moonshining or when their uncle was called out in church for beating his wife. If we asked questions or interrupted, the stories would dry up, and my father would look almost ashamed, as if he had not intended for us to know that there was such a thing as struggling in the world, as if he had broken a promise made long ago that we would never know the price he had paid to get us here.
His brothers and sisters were the type of people who thought making more money than what you needed to live on was just plain foolishness. The only honour they knew came from hard work and sacrifice. The new cars and the fancy clothes my mother, my sisters and I wore failed to impress people who figured you were slow or just plain wasteful to pay more than ten dollars for a pair of shoes. Likewise, they set no store by my mama’s buying a frilly expensive dress for my sister, age eight, who just that morning had stepped out of my father’s Cadillac and into a puddle the size of a wading pool.
“Ought not to be buying a child things like that,” my Aunt Anna mumbled. Aunt Becca added, “Cuddah fed my boys for a week on what that cost.” Then, she’d offered my mama that tight smile of hers, the same smile she would offer somebody who showed up at church Sunday morning after missing two weeks in a row. Even as a child, it was clear to me that their disapproval of us was just as great as our disapproval of them.
My father had six brothers and two sisters who looked and acted so much alike that for a long time I was never sure which was which. Rebecca and Anna were compact women, both from the same hearty farm stock. They looked at the world with the same steely eyes, and both braced themselves every time the phone rang or there was a stranger at the door, as if they expected only the worst news to come – a brother in a bar fight, a husband injured at the cotton mill. The only difference between them was that Becca had two boys while Anna could not have children.
I was always uncomfortable around Anna, because she looked at me with such longing in her eyes, such certainty that she could do better with me than my mama had. I suppose now that she could have. My sisters and I were prone to talking back. We questioned everything my parents said and, like many upper-middle-class children whose parents had grown up with next to nothing, we were spoiled rotten and carried about us an air of entitlement. There was nothing we wanted that Daddy did not buy for us, and Mama was so intent on not being like her own mother that we got away with more than any children ought to. In fact, the only time we did behave was when we were around my father’s people, because we saw first hand the consequences of unwieldy children.
Back then, with 13 of us kids running around, any grown-up who was handy was welcome to mete out discipline, and I clearly recall a time my cousin Boyd got into trouble for harassing one of the dogs. My Aunt Becca took him into Anna’s bedroom to punish him. Boyd was about three inches taller than Becca at the time, but she still took him over her knee and beat him with a paddle my granny had always used for whipping. Becca was furious and Boyd had always been more bone than meat, so when the paddle broke, Anna, who’d been brushing her hair at the mirror, tossed over her brush so that Becca could finish the job. This was all done while they planned out the next day’s meal.
Meals were important to the sisters. Where money was so short and affection was so reserved, good food cooked well was equated with love. They spent most of their time in the kitchen whenever the family got together, whipping up potatoes, gravies, collards, pinto beans, black-eyed peas, green beans, cream corn, corn on the cob, ham, turkey, and biscuits that were so fluffy you weren’t sure you’d eaten them until you noticed all the sudden you couldn’t feel your legs because your stomach was so full. And then you’d eat dessert anyway, because Aunt Becca was known for her cobbler, and if you ate some of her cobbler, then you’d have to eat some of Anna’s cake just so you wouldn’t hurt her feelings.
All of this food was prepared while they shooed the kids out of the kitchen, smoked two packs of Kools between them and cast more than the occasional disdainful glance towards my mother, whose claim that she was “useless in the kitchen” was met with agreeable laughs in the city but was seen as a feminine failing to the country women. They had seen their own mother send her boys into the woods for roots to boil so that the family would not go without. Gran had stretched a potato into three meals for her brood, and swept the dirt floor of her house every day. It was no wonder that not a speck of food during those summer holidays went wasted. Nor was there any question that after meals the men would be left alone to nod off in front of the television set while the women gossiped in the kitchen. This was usually the time that Uncle Toby piled us all into his tractor and promised his sisters that he was just going to take us up the road and back. We all pretended we were just along for the ride and not the candy in the store at the end of the road and, for once, Becca and Anna played along.
There was a squealing of brakes as the tractor slowed. I glanced around, noticing that I was the last one in the trailer, my cousins having spilled out into the store before Toby even cut the engine. I kept my distance from them as we tumbled into the dry coolness of the old country store.
The store was not the kind you would find in the city. There were old margarine tubs filled with nightcrawlers, and pickled pigs’ feet floating in a pickle jar by the cash register. Old men sat in the back by the stove, rocking in creaky old rocking chairs, spitting into cups, discussing politics or the farm report. The floorboards creaked under your feet and there was a musty smell of wood and tobacco. Crickets chirped from the case by the door, a hand-lettered sign advising customers to scoop their own.
“Peanut,” Uncle Toby said, his voice heavy in the small store. “Watchu want, girl?” He pronounced “want” like “won’t”, and I always picked up on this when I was around him, despite the fact that Mama had once threatened Daddy that she’d never allow me to visit his family again when she heard me say, “you welcome” instead of “you’re welcome”.
I eyed the candy as my cousins greedily snatched gobstoppers and Big League Chew. My cousin Boyd had already opened a pack of candy cigarettes and was puffing powdered sugar into the air like a sophisticate.
All of the sudden I felt Uncle Toby’s hand, heavy on my shoulder. He was an affectionate man, always ruffling the boys’ hair and patting us girls on the shoulder. This time, his affection was unwanted. I inched out from under him, pretending
I was interested in a Milky Way a few feet beyond his touch. I moved further down, mulling over the Little Debbies as I tried my best to disassociate myself from his loudness, his heavy breathing, his too-close-set eyes, his wild hair and meticulously pressed shirt that he kept buttoned tight around his neck.
“Come on, gal,” Toby prodded, patting me again on the shoulder with his awkward, heavy hand. “We gotta git.”
I flustered not so much at his words as his loud tone, because I could see everyone in the store looking at us. This was a time in my life when I keenly searched for disapproval or agreement in the eyes of strangers. I was halfway into my twelfth year, a walking box of hate and hormones. This was my mean time, and the approval of someone who did not know me mattered much more than the opinions of those who knew me best.
In the store right then, I felt hot eyes burning into me like a brand, and without thinking, the nasty side of me bristled, “Stop touching me, you retard.”
His hand pulled away so quickly that I felt a burn, and I caught the pain in his eyes before he looked away. He took a handkerchief from the front bib in his overalls, and unfolded it. He stared at the cloth the way normal people read books, his eyes moving left to right with intense focus. I turned away, walking towards the cash register as I heard the loud report of him blowing his nose. I blindly grabbed a candy bar as I made my way to the front of the store, hearing Toby’s heavy steps behind me.
The cashier looked at me with outright anger. This was a place of manners, a store where good country folk came, greeting neighbours and strangers alike. These were the people with whom my uncle worked during the harvest, doing more than his fair share of work. They knew that he would help out anybody who asked, no matter what the task, that he’d nearly had to go to the hospital when his mama died, that he had carried a neighbour’s boy three miles to the doctor when the kid had broken out from a bee sting. My humiliation sat at the back of my neck as heavy as Toby’s hand had been, and it took all of my strength to look him in the eyes.
He blinked at me behind his thick, dirty glasses. The same sloppy grin was back, the one that always identified him in a crowd, the kind of smile that showed me he’d been called worse in his life and that nothing I said would ever change the way he felt about me.
“This’n’s got coconut,” he said, trading the bar I had blindly grabbed for a Snickers, my favourite. He shuffled back to the shelves and put the coconut bar back in place, knocking some candy on to the floor in the process. I ran to his side, kneeling to help pick up the liquorice and Skittles that had spilled over, but he stopped me, saying, “I gottum.” There was a certain edge to his tone, a familiar pride that came from all my country cousins that said they could do fine on their own, thank you very much, and that he didn’t need my help.
I sat helpless on the floor as one by one, Tony returned the candies to their proper place. His tongue darted out as he compared the colours to make sure he put the packets back correctly, whispering under his breath as if to encourage himself in the task. The process was maddeningly slow, and everyone in the store seemed to be watching, judging. My hands itched to take over, but somewhere in my mind, I knew that was the lesson Toby was trying to teach me. He wanted to show me that he was capable of doing this simple task in his own time, and my punishment was that I had to sit there quietly and let him.
Finally finished, he stood. My face still burned red, but I took his hand as we made our way back toward the front of the store. When he looked down at me, his smile was infectious, and I returned it with such relief that we both started to laugh. That was the first thing I remember about that day, that we laughed in that small store and people stared, and though I minded the stares, I put my arm around his thick waist as we walked to the cash register. There, he took money from his back pocket and slowly counted out the total for 13 nieces and nephews to have candy and Cokes on a hot summer day. And I counted out the cost of my pride in the meantime.
