“Mountains”

Her stories would always put him to sleep. They didn’t put him down because they were boring or slow or because he didn’t want to keep listening. All he wanted to do was to hear the rest of the story. They put him to sleep because he was listening so closely to her voice, for the moments when her accent would come out just a little bit more, and for the moments when she sounded just like him. He didn’t know where she got her material from because she hadn’t been a farmer. At that age, he probably didn’t even know what she had or hadn’t been, just that she was from Georgia and that all he knew about Georgia was Atlanta and the Braves and boiled peanuts and the long drive on the interstate to his other grandparent’s house in South Carolina. He would listen so hard to the twang and the rhythm and the names that he would fall asleep in her bed after a minute or two. He never remembered the end of her stories even she asked him about them in the morning and his parents would ask me about them when they came to pick me up from her little apartment with the green tree with the pink flowers and the black iron gate in front. “It was about Farmer Green and his cows,” he could say, or “It was about Farmer Johnson and his son and the fair,” he could say. But he would never remember what happened to Farmer Green of Farmer Brown or Farmer Johnson or Farmer Dillon. “Farmer Johnson woke up one morning and wanted to plant some peas. The day was bright, the soil was empty, and his had a mule.” After a sentence he would be asleep. “Farmer Brown wanted to but his wife a new pig. She was tall, she had been nice, and she wanted a new pet.” The next thing he could remember after those beginnings was her tapping him on the head in the morning to get out of bed. “Wipe the sleep out of your eyes,” she would say and hand him a cold washcloth before reminding him that she knew he didn’t want to but she had to get him up and dressed for church with his mom and maybe his dad if it was an important day. He didn’t remember the beginning or middle or end of church because he spent too much time drawing a farmer or his cow in the hymnal and trying to remember how her story began and imagining what happened after he fell asleep.

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His third second cousin was born to his mother’s sister’s daughter when he was twelve. Sometime he felt like he had too many cousins to know them well and sometimes he wanted more cousins. But this was a second cousin and his name was Malachi. Malachi’s brother was named Joshua. His aunt thought Malachi sounded Jewish but she didn’t tell her daughter, just his mother. “But it’s from the Bible,” his mom had said. “I don’t care, it sounds too Jewish. Why not Joseph? Joshua and Joseph would sound nice. It would sound right because they both begin with J.”

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They had liked London and Paris. They said that London felt very American with its English and well-dressed people and tradition and fried food at the fish and chips shops. Paris was nice because the people treated the tourists so well and because they had had low expectations about the manners of the people in France. The restaurant across the street from the hotel opened ten minutes early one night to serve them drinks and to serve him a Coke and they were surprised at how polite the owner was and how happy the service was. South America wasn’t like London or Paris because no one spoke English. He thought he could try Spanish but then he was too embarrassed and this parents thought they would give it a try. They mostly butchered simple orders and asking for directions and he felt embarrassed and they acted like it was all part of the plan. He read an article about Che and found out that he had travelled to Peru and visited Macchhu Picchu. He asked his parents if they knew about Che and they mumbled to each other before saying they had heard of him and seen those t-shirts. He said he was a communist and many people in Peru had loved him. They said he was a communist and that they were not a communist family.

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The house in South Carolina was green with a brown roof. It was hide, spreading out in a half circle in front of a driveway that was a full circle of grey rocks. They were white with black lines and looked like little bits of marble that hurt his feet when he walked outside without shoes to swing on the swing or throw rocks at the trees or walls. It sat low behind the street and looked small and flat from the curving mountain road. Inside, it was large and wide and had a porch on the back that was supported by tall wooden beams and overlooked the low mountains beyond the backyard. People they met in Colorado and Utah when they went skiing called them hills, but his grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles always called it “Going up to the mountains” no matter if they were really mountains or not. He and his parents and grandparents always went to a nice dinner up on one of the nearby hills or mountains the first night they were at the house in the summer. He peeked at the bill one night. It was $686 and some change. That number stuck in his head every time they drove up to the house and every time they drove out of the driveway, the little marbley rocks crunching and rumbling under the tires of the SUV as they pulled away from the front door. His parents had friends who also had souses nearby. Some were in the next town, fifteen minutes away, and others were a couple hours away, near the North Carolina border farther to the western part of the state. He visited one of those houses one night. Usually he stayed with his grandparents when his parents visited friends. It was more fun when his cousins and ants and uncles were there and his aunts and uncles went with his parents so his cousins and him could have fun and eat dinner with his grandparents. The house they visited was huge but his parents said it was tacky and didn’t look good in its town.

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At lunch after church on Sundays his mom and his aunt like to sit close together and talk quietly. They thought they were being quiet but he could always hear them. Sometimes when he heard them talking about him he would tell his mom, sometimes if he wanted to hear the rest of what they were saying he wouldn’t say anything so they would keep talking and not get quieter. Usually they talked about the sermon and why they didn’t like it or who they had seen at church whom they hadn’t seen in weeks or who hadn’t been coming to Bible study or Christian book club. All those names put him to sleep so he ordered coffee. Every week one of his aunts would ask him when he started drinking coffee and he would look at his grandparents. They usually were playing with one of his cousins so he just said he thought he would give coffee a try.