I turned on the radio and tried to scramble past evangelists, country singers, and rappers — who all, oddly, seemed to comment on the same topics — trying to find the Road and Weather Conditions station. June looked at her watch. She said, “There’s no way we’ll make it to the lecture. Damn it. I wanted to learn more about kilns. I’d like to learn how to cook something in a horno, then write about it in my column.”
“Kilns get hot,” I said. “They get hot enough to turn dirt into a brick.” I couldn’t pass up the perfect segue, or what in my wet-brained mind I understood to be perfect and serendipitous cause and effect. I said, “You never met my father, but he knew how to turn clay into bricks, and bricks back into ground, kind of.”
So I had driven around on weekend supply-and-demand forays with Mass Massey and Lincoln, and when I came home on Sundays my mother looked up from her baskets to ask, “What did y’all do this weekend? Did you go fishing?”
“Who names their kid Lincoln in the South?” my father would bellow. “I’m not saying anything racist, but you’d think that more black people would name their kids Lincoln. If I were black, you’d be named either Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, or Brown Versus the Board of Education.”
And then I’d ask, “How come you named me Reed?” knowing all along — because my grandfather got drunk and told me — that I’d had a brother named Ed who died long before my birth, and that in actuality my name was Re Ed.
“Never mind that. It’s a good name. In those baby books, it means, ‘cleared land,’” my mother would say.
“And it means something that grows near the water. So you got it either way, either cleared land or something growing on the land,” my father said.
We went through this incessant charade for, I guess, about half the Sundays of every year for three or four years. And then one rainy day I returned from school to find my pure and patient mother crying. My father was to have driven her somewhere with her baskets earlier — she’d improved to the point of people asking if she had nimble-fingered Cherokee blood in her background, had three craft galleries carrying her work in towns where people had money to buy baskets that didn’t hold green plastic grass and screw-top eggs filled with cheap chocolate — and she carried them on her lap. She didn’t want them in the back of the truck, seeing as it rained. My father hit a pothole, she lurched forward, the baskets got crushed, and she broke two ribs.
She didn’t blame him because, for once, it wasn’t his fault. The particular pothole — and I remembered shoveling it out while Mass and Lincoln Massey picked extra hard, out near the center of the blacktop — must’ve been eighteen inches deep. The hole disappeared once rainwater filled it up, at least to an unsuspecting and non-prescient driver.
My mother’s ruined baskets ended up reparable, as did her ribs. But my father took it as a sign: that he’d been punished by God because of his own shortcomings, failures, and mean-spirited acts that he wouldn’t divulge completely. I remember only his getting home, having me help him try to bang out the damaged left front rim of his truck, and saying, “There are some incidents for which I need to atone.” I remember all of this because it came out so grammatically correct and biblical. “I’ll probably need your help.”
My father fixed his wheel as best he could. He checked in on my mother, fetched aspirin and ice packs, asked if she wanted any gum, and handed me a ball-peen hammer. Out back, below the homemade fire tower that at this point stood eight or ten feet high, my father kept a stack of broken bricks. He retrieved a washtub and two old stumps for us to sit on like ancient narcissistic whittlers. He stood up and stared at an outbuilding, told me to go fill up a wheelbarrow with some sawdust he had piled up in case I ever decided to become a pole vaulter or high jumper, and came back with a bag of cement. I said, “There’s no way we can glue these pieces of brick back together.”
“No,” he said. “No, we’re doing the opposite.” And then my father told me to break the bricks up further and transfer any pieces smaller than dimes into the washtub. We worked hard together, and played a guessing game with our plink-plink-plinking. “Three Blind Mice” was easy to make out, but not so songs like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” or “Back in the U.S.S.R.” My father mixed the brick crumbles, sawdust, and cement together, and three hours later we loaded the heavy, impossible mixture into the back of his truck and took off with a hoe, two broken shovel handles, and a dozen plastic jugs of water.
I said, “Why don’t we just call the South Carolina Department of Transportation? Why don’t we go over to Lincoln’s daddy’s house and tell him about the potholes? He works a job telling people to fill the things in.”
My father didn’t say anything about Mass Massey being communist, Catholic, atheist, or werewolf. He said, “Mr. Massey has enough things to do besides having someone outside of his work tell him he doesn’t have enough things to do.” And then, mostly beneath his breath, he said, “I need to do this in case there’s really a Heaven.”
Was he feeling guilty about naming me Re Ed, and dooming me to live up to my unknown dead brother’s prospective reputation? Had he wronged my mother more than what was perceptible? Was my father feeling guilt for never living up to my grandfather’s expectations? I never learned the truth. We found the first overt and culpable hole, filled it up, poured water on top, and mixed it together into a foul ashen sludge. Drivers slowed and veered.
“How long will it take for this to dry? Maybe we should borrow some of those orange cones and put them around this thing so people don’t drive into it,” I said. “I know where to get some. Mr. Massey keeps a bunch of cones in the back of his work truck.”
My father stretched his back and groaned. He said, “I didn’t think about that. Huh. Damn, I didn’t think about that, Reed. Good thinking. It’ll stay gummy too long for us to hang around waiting.”
I stood there alone while my father drove to my best friend’s underground house. He tied a red oil rag to one of the broken shovel handles and said, “Stand in front of the hole and wave this around. If it looks like someone’s not going to slow down or move over, jump.”
It all worked out well. People saw me and they slowed. A few drivers asked if I was okay, I explained the situation, and they thanked me. One guy said there should be a Boy Scout badge for such community-spirited causes. My father returned, we put up two cones, and we drove onward to the next potential disaster.
“Did your father explain it all to Mr. Massey?” June asked me in the traffic jam. An ambulance, driving on the sidewalk, passed us with its lights on but no siren blaring.
“I have no clue. I asked him, he said I asked too many questions, and that was it. He said it might be best if I never brought this up to Lincoln’s daddy, so I have a feeling he plain stole the cones,” I said.
“You come from a fucked-up place,” June said. I looked forward. The driver in front of me put on his left-hand blinker and crept slowly ahead. June said, “First off, you could’ve potentially killed people with the potholes, and then your father could’ve gotten you killed — or kidnapped — leaving you there in the middle of the road.”
I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t mention how Calloustown wasn’t the kind of place, back then, where hit-and-runs or kidnapping occurred.
When we got to the site of the wreck, June rolled her window down. She said, “Is everyone all right?” to a highway patrolman who brandished an unlit flashlight.
He said, “Mexicans. Three dead, one unconscious. One of them might be all right, unless the emergency room doctor does the right thing. Maybe they’ll send him back before he wakes up.” I had never known a highway patrolman to offer the results of a car wreck to passersby and wondered if he’d committed some kind of misdemeanor.