Five Chairs

Nothing’s better than takin’ a good leak. Not even sex. I remember Uncle Rex telling me this when I was a kid, and I’ll be damned if it ain’t true. I dripped out and zipped up while she, my lady, emptied a can of beans into the cookpot. 

“Dinner’s nearly ready, Earlie!” 

Her voice was as sweet as iced tea in the Mississippi heat and thick enough to coat the inside of the cup. She brought the empty can out to the trash pile and gave me a disapproving look. She hated when I filled the cans that sat close to the house. 

“Clean it up this time, Earl,” she said, eyeing the still-warm foam. “And don’t forget to wash your hands.” 

After the fire, we lost a lot of things, habits o’ hygiene being one of ’em. 

“Course, baby,” I cooed, wiping off on my long johns. “And what we got for dinner? Smells real good.”

“Oh, baby.” She smiled and plated the beans, and they were ’bout as hot as a November night, but she gave me the big plate. She really is sweet, my Lenore.

Now, lukewarm limas ain’t nothing to write home about, but for all the bad people can say ’bout Lenore, can’t nobody hold a candle to this woman’s work in the kitchen. I’m talkin’ roasted wild crow, plucked and buttered, stuffed with pickled acorns. Wild onions, with the roots still on the bulbs, little white fingers that tickle when you swallow ’em whole. Lenore’s biggest talent was taking the nothing, the absolute shit mounds around us, and turning them into magic. Into gold. That’s one reason I married her. And she wasn’t always so nutty. Not when I took her on. Had two good feet too. Her head got turnt backwards when our boy passed. Maybe both of ours did. She didn’t sleep any, neither. Up all hours whisperin’ to the damn housebugs. 

After a good meal, there’s only one thing a man needs. I emptied myself into her, seed and soul. Afterwards, we lay on the sheetless mattress, good and sated, under the heap of blanket scraps and ashy smoke from the collection of cigarette stubs I saved for nights like these. Just enough puffs left on ’em to keep. I was too spent to get up, and the bed, naked as us, was a map of singed black holes and crusted white. 

I shouldn’t have let in the passing thought from the day before, but it’s damn hard. I knew it’d come to haunt me that night, and it did, flames-a-lickin’. 

Rex’s howl—he screamed like a dog when the heat was eatin’ him up. Aunt Sue—her body got all burnt, but the fire got put out before it reached her head. They found her with the plastic from her jockey lot necklace all shelled up on her neck and chest. Thank the good lord, Lenore woke me before the dream kept going. At least I didn’t make it to the stables. 

“Earlie! Oh, Earlie! Wake up. Wake UP! Don’t you know it’s a miracle!” 

She was a spring bee, buzzin’ in short lines, back and forth, back and forth, in front of our mirror, the oversized shard damaged with black, mounted to the wall. She cupped her belly between her skinny arms. 

“Earlie. It’s a baby. We’re having a baby!”

I stared at her from the mattress, half asleep.

“A baby, huh? I thought the midwife told you you couldn’t have no more.” She didn’t seem to hear me. “A baby,” she said. “We been gifted.” 

“It didn’t happen that quick with…” I didn’t say his name.

The gap where his name wasn’t struck her a pause.

“Oh, Earlie, don’t be stupid. Of course it does. It always happens right when…it happens. We just didn’t know right when it happened before.”

“And you know that now?”

“Of course I do, Earlie, or I wouldn’t be fixin’ to make this feast, would I?”

“I s’pose not.” 

“Well, don’t just lay in bed all day.” She fussed at the covers, so up I got. “And make yourself decent. We’re goin’ into town. I’ve been savin’ a good barter for times like this.”

She had on her special dress, the long green one, only a little brown-stained. She even had a hair clip in, her only one, bronze and rusted green, and shaped like a horse. She looked lovely as a spring lily. 

“But how do you know this time?” I asked, brushing her stomach skin with my palm.

“A woman always knows after she felt it once.” Her eyes looked behind me instead of at me, even though there wasn’t nothin’ back there. “Plus, they told me.”

For a second, I was worried she was talking about the roaches again, but I noticed she was touching a photo. It was a photo of them. Of us. Our family, the Johnsons. Together in the flesh. My heart swelled. I kissed her hand.

“Course, baby, course. Let’s go get some fixins.”

Last time we went to town, Tom from Goods on Low wouldn’t even let us buy the shit in our cart. Said we were “welcome to come complete the purchase when we was wearing proper attire.” His eyes kept slidin’ down towards Lenore’s feet. It was the left one his eyes lasered in on. The fire turned it into somethin’ people didn’t like to look at and somethin’ that wouldn’t fit inside any shoes we’d found.

Today she’d wrapped up her damaged soldier, hidden it under the nice dress, and these piggies were off to market.

It was nice to be out with her, walking the long poppy-filled path to town. All kickin’ up dirt, dust, and smiles like we’re kids again, like we’re fuckin’ fourteen. It made me want to take her, fill her up right there, on the road to Tom’s, ’til I remembered that there was a baby inside her. Or she said so anyway. Her moon times had been late on occasion before. Either way, picturing a baby floating around in her belly aroused me a good deal less, and I was happy carrying on walking rather than putting any action towards the sex. 

Goods on Low was in the same spot. When we went in, I didn’t see Tom. Instead, it was a town boy, 16, maybe 17. I contented myself with browsing the hardware selection while Lenore filled the cart. I like the hardware section. Stuff you can use, stuff a man could put to work in his life. And they made it pretty, too. Silver that looked so shiny you’d swear it was melted. Melted… 

“Pa!” The funny thing about having a public breakdown is you kinda know it’s happenin’ but can’t stop it. 

“Pa! Hey, come here!” I felt my side smash into Tom’s scuffed linoleum. 

I moseyed into the stables. Guy was always in the stables.

“What is it?” I was thinking about the busted starter in my Ford. I was only half listening. He was asking to use somethin’ for a project, some dumb shit they were making him do at his school. 

“Sure.” 

And that’s the last thing I said to my boy. The last time I shoulda looked at him. The last time I didn’t listen.

I never could tell Lenore. She’d probably have forgiven me. Or maybe not. For fuck’s sake how many times had I told the boy not to play with Rex’s torch lighters?

Truth is, when you’ve got a kid crawling on you for your whole resting life, there tends to be a good bit of bullshitting attention. I’m ashamed to say that’s where I left it with Guy. 

Pulling out of an episode feels like comin’ up from the bottom of a lake. Sounds gurgly too. I was just coming up for my first breath of air when Lenore reached the counter to pay. She was arguing with the town boy. 

“No, I’m telling you, they’re genuine!”

“Ma’am, I, I can’t take those.” He took a step back.

Leave it to Tom to hire a fuckin’ softy town boy who couldn’t barter. 

“What’s the matter, darlin’?” I asked, approaching the counter.

“She’s trying to pay with…with. She’s trying to pay with…teeth.”

I looked at what was in Lenore’s delicate hand. Guy’s jar of baby teeth. One of her most prized possessions. She’d kept them all, every one of them he’d left under the pillow. 

“Ma’am, I said I can’t take that!” Standing that close to a lady brandishing a jar of human teeth had put some hot air in his gusset.

“Tom barters with us all the time,” Lenore said.

“Tom hasn’t been in for half a year. He lost his toe to gout, and I ain’t hardly seen him leave his couch since.”

“Well, Tom is still the owner of this here establishment, and he accepts barters. Says so on the sign.” She pointed. 

“Tom ain’t takin’ no teeth.” I stepped between them.

“Lenore. You can’t use the teeth. You can’t give those away. Not for anything. Not for some food.” She looked at me. Our eyes locked a second, my dirt-brown and her lake-water hazel. Then, my sweet Lenore, she screamed and flipped the cart, spilling all the unpurchased ingredients. Oranges and herbs scattered into a line between me and the town boy. 

“Shit.” He kicked an egg yolk off his shoe.

“Sorry. She’s, uh…with child.” 

I left without cleaning the mess.

Lenore walked ahead of me on the way home; little puffs of dust rose from each of her right-footed stomps, parallel to the lined smudges of the left drag. She went straight into foraging. She didn’t even look back at me as she disappeared into the brush.

My dreams were all mixed up that night. The town boy’s face, smeared with judgment and disgust, as Lenore shook a jar of teeth at him, pleading. Cans of piss overflowed on the dirty ground, roaches scuttling past, not regular ones but jumbo, the size of big dogs or little kids. They whispered to me. Only I couldn’t understand what the hell they were sayin’. And the stables. A view of the stables from behind, black smoke and bright flame. The stench of burning flesh is worse when you know it’s your own kin. It’s the aroma of what you’d smell like, your cells and hair and bones, if they were on fire. 

When I woke up, our shit-hole house was a new place. I almost thought I was still dreamin’, except the roaches crowding near the piss pots were regular-sized. She’d moved the old flimsy barn door that had fallen off its hinges. And my Lenore, my darlin’ Lenore, with her womanly touch, had turned it into a table, raised up with big cans and old cinder blocks. She’d even laid a tablecloth over the top of it, Guy’s old baby blanket. 

It was one of the only things that survived the fire. He’d left it outside near the big oak the morning of. He and Lenore had been sitting on top of it, eating wild blueberries. There were still little purple stains near the fading horses at the edges, little cartoons blotted with purple like their guts were fallin’ out. 

That was about all of the blanket you could see. The rest was covered. 

I admired the baskets filled with chickweed and pawpaw, with the little yellow sunshine heads of dandelions poking up through the sides. 

My eyes roamed over to a roasted sow—a mother, frozen in roasted time with several of its babes forever attached at the teat. She’d put little sprigs of parsley and wild onions in mama’s mouth rather than the typical apple you might see at Puerto Rican barbecues near town. 

We didn’t have no pigs, nor did it look like she caught them wild—they weren’t turned; their skin was crisp but baby pink, soft-lookin’. She must have snuck up to Flawson’s Farm in the night. 

Now, Lenore wasn’t no thief. But she also wasn’t above doin’ what needed doin’ when it needed doin’.

It looked like she might have gone farther out than Flawson’s. There was a pot of rattlesnake beans, long-podded, the purple stripes cooked out. They looked like the ones old Millie Mae grew down at the North End. There were other signs of Millie Mae’s produce on the table, too—long, pointed red okras. They were seeping slime the way okra does—thick green puddles under the curled, seedy fingers. 

“Well,” she said. Her eyes were on me, hard and squinty, like they get sometimes when she expects somethin’.

“Baby! This looks amazing.” I slid my legs into my long johns, eager to reach the table.

“Oh no, you don’t!” she said.

“What? I’m starving.” She had her arm out blocking me, and I carved around her both ways, eager as a mosquito. 

“Earl, no! Don’t you touch a thing. We’re waitin’.”

“Waitin’? What are we waitin’ for? Be a crime to let it get cold?”

She rushed around, grabbing four mismatched pieces of our clunkier furniture and our one real chair—one of those plastic numbers they keep in tall stacks out by the side of junk stores—and set them around the table while keepin’ a devil’s eye on me.

“Who did you invite? Is it…Millie?” I asked, glancing at the okra.

“Millie?” She whacked me one across the forehead. “Earlie, who do you think this feast is for?”

“I guess for us on account of the new baby.” She looked at me like I’d said to put syrup in the tractor fuel tank.

“It’s for them. They’re coming.” She was looking at the mirror shard.

“Them?” I asked.

“They didn’t talk to you, Earl. They know you ain’t like that. I listen. I’ve always had a way with those sorts of things.”

“What sorts of things? Who didn’t talk to me? The roaches?” This wasn’t it. She rolled her eyes.

“Spirits and that.”

I couldn’t get to what she was sayin’. Then I counted the chairs she’d brought up to the table. Five chairs. The exact right number for a Johnson family reunion. Except our family was dead, all burned up.

“Lenore, they’re gone. There was a fire.”

“I know that!” she said. “And like I said, spirits and that. They’re coming back, Earlie. They want to be here for us, bless the new baby.”

“He ain’t even here yet.”

“She doesn’t need to be here to get blessed, Earl.”

“Who told you they were comin’?” I asked, even though she’d clearly gone full-in, crazy wise.

“They told me in the night.”

“Who? Lenore, the fuckin’ roaches did not tell you our dead family is comin’. Baby, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you carry on.” Usually, I coddled her, tender to her oddities. But this tugged at somethin’ in my gut. 

“Yeah, Earl?” Her typically sugared voice had a sour cut around the edges. “That ain’t all they told me about. They said they know about you…and that day.” She rushed out the door, leaving me with a long john up one leg and a ball of rotten in my belly. I didn’t touch the food.

“Pa! Hey, Pa, come here.” He was up in the rafters of the stables, where we kept the extra bales of hay. The windy week prior made a mess of the yard. Straw strewn every which way, some trees uprooted, even some chickens tumbled down the road towards Flawson’s. We tried raking up the straw; there was enough of it around to rig a makeshift bale or two. We stored them up in the old wood box in the stable rafters. 

But the gas keep. Me and Rex built her back when the land was younger. The official ones, the big steel soldiers, cost more than we had. So we built our own, hiding it in the barn, because who the hell were they to tell us how to build on our land.

In all the storm trouble, one of the goats had gotten into the gas keep. She was going crazy, buckin’ around and shittin’. I knocked over a few fuel bins trying to get her to settle, and the ground was soaked with kerosene. 

The grounds around the barn.

The straw on the grounds. 

The straw blown clear up against the house.

And the straw stored in the stables. 

It was cartoon-like, the whoosh that overtook him. I didn’t see the smile leave his face, the look of delight from finally getting a successful light from Rex’s torch. The smoke and flames were too thick. It ate the old wood box stuffed with fuel-soaked straw and my boy quicker than I could reach him. Quicker than I could understand what was happening. 

Guy gone, I only wanted one thing: to save Lenore. I ignored Rex’s screams and Sue’s calls for help. Ran right past them. They’d been window washing in the foyer. The fire liked whatever Sue’d concocted for a cleaner. When I found her, Lenore was trapped under a fallen cabinet, the flames eating their way up one foot. By the time I’d dragged her outside and tried to go back in to help them, Rex had gone silent, and Sue—Sue was all burnt up from the tits down and melted in her necklace. 

It was all chalked up to an accident, legally, but on account of negligence we didn’t get no insurance money. A couple of times, I almost told her, my Lenore. I’d feel the words in my mouth, but I swallowed them down. She was the only thing left. She had to stay. 

I sat. The feast sat. Lenore paced. The roaches scuttled. She wasn’t bothered on conversation, seeing as how we left things last and I wasn’t keen to push her. At last, she settled. She sat across from me. I gazed around before my eyes stopped on her. She opened her mouth but shut it again, and I wanted her to yell at me, hate me, anything. But she just shook her head, one turn to the left and one turn to the right, and nothing in her expression. The sun moved out of the sky, staying a second on Lenore, her face and her belly. Then the dark moved in. If we had a clock, it would have ticked a thousand times. Maybe we’d have one of those with the tiny bird who jumped out. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. In the thick of the feast smells, I caught somethin’ else, a smoky, cloying rot, and it stuck in my throat. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. CUCKOO.

Then, they were there.

The chairs filled with bodies that were more solid than I’d imagined.

 All but one. Where was he? 

“Lenore! Earl. My God, it’s been too long. What’s it been? Twenty moons?” It was Sue. One moment, nothing, and the next, she was there, stuffing her face with pickled parsnips. “Is that my horse pin?” She reached to Lenore’s hair and took the pin out to examine it. 

“It’s been since the fire,” Rex said, filling his plate. “And this fucker passed us up, didn’t he? Ran right past.” Rex was the same as always. He laughed his big laugh. 

“It’s still got the garnet eyes,” Sue said, fingering the little horse’s face. Lenore showed no sign of taking any of it in. Not even with a god damn ghost’s arm in her face. She just stared. Stared at the empty seat. 

“Oh honey,” Sue drawled, mouth full. “I don’t think he’ll be able to make it. Lenore, I’m so sorry, darlin’.” 

Lenore blinked fast. 

“No, don’t cry now,” she soothed, offering her food-covered napkin. “It wasn’t you. He was hoppin’ out of his skin with excitement when he heard we was comin’. And he misses you too. Even you, Earl.” 

“But the burns—the boy won’t show face because of the burns,” Rex said. “Stays cooped up like he did here. Stable suited him then. I reckon it suits him now.” The talk of stables put a heat up my neck. 

I looked at Rex, and I saw he wasn’t how he’d always been. Faint red marks showed all over his arms, between his tattoos, on his face. Rex fingered the spot where my eyes lay. 

“Yeah, ours healed up pretty good. You can still see them if you look close, but your boy—he wasn’t so lucky.”

Sue tapped her melted chest plate. 

“And why is that, Earl?” Her face had turned nasty. “What did you do, Earl?” 

“I didn’t. I didn’t do nothin’!” 

“Liar!” Rex yelled.

“Liar! Liar! Liar!” Sue screamed.

“LIAR.” A chorus of roaches echoed the proclamation. 

Lenore continued to stare, clutching her gut and face picked cotton-white.

“No!” I yelled.

The table began to shake. The plattered sow, eyes bulging and orifices still stuffed, rolled in her bed of greens. The piglets wriggled and squealed. The okra grew gray, then black, and then white and wormed. The tablecloth—Guy’s blanket—lit up slow at the corner, a line of orange climbing the fabric, turning the little gutted horses to dust. A writhing, rotting dance and the smoke-thick air stinking of roaches, piss, and decayed relatives. Then, in a cough of orange, flames ate up the feast, and all of us with it, whole. 

A roach crawled across my cheek, waking me. Feeling like a fly on a strip of goo, I unstuck the other side of my face from the table. 

A table. There was a table.

It wasn’t all burned. 

Guy’s blanket splayed under the feast’s remains. The food was the only thing wrecked, all strewn across the table and half-eaten. Lenore was sleeping in her chair, her bum leg still wrapped up from the trip to town.

“Baby. Baby, time to get up.” 

She didn’t move. 

“Baby,” I said again. She was always such a light sleeper. My heart took on double time in my chest. What if this was it, my punishment? What if they came and they took Lenore?

“BABY!” I yelled, jumping up to shake her. 

She uncurled slow from sleep and looked up at me, still half in it. 

“What’s wrong?” She rubbed her eyes, then looked down at the table.

“Earl! I told you not to touch anything. You can’t even keep your hands off for one night.”

“Baby, it wasn’t me, it was—” 

“Earl, you can’t lie your way out of this one.” She looked at me, pupil to pupil, and squinted.

Lie. Liar? Did she remember or didn’t she? 

After a while, she said, “I guess they didn’t come. Maybe we was wrong about the baby too.” I didn’t know what to say. She was supposed to be the loopy one.

“Where’s your horse pin?” I asked her. She fingered her hair.

“Guess I lost it out in the woods.”

“You had it when we sat down.”

“I don’t know, Earl. I’ll find it if it’s here. Not now, I’m feelin’ ill.” She cupped her stomach down low near her hip. She headed to the washroom. I just stood there staring at it all. The dregs of the feast, muddled and buggy, and the now empty chairs.

And there it was, a splotch of red on the seat of Lenore’s white plastic chair. I walked over to it and ran my fingers across it. Thicker than water. It was blood. I rubbed it between my index finger and thumb, and on the second swipe, I think it turned to ash.