Originally published in This Land Vol. 3, Issue 23. Dec. 1, 2012.
My mother’s brothers married odd birds. Frances was a wild-eyed zany with a voice like a trapped cat and a way of haranguing young boys that kept me on edge. She stood tall and broad, like a dark, autumn oak, all limbs and dry leaves.
“Duck,” real name of Ida Mae, spoke softly, kept a shiny kitchen of fluorescent lighting and tight linoleum. Duck stuck close to the ground, ruffled few feathers, seldom rattled the cage.
And Nita, Hack’s wife, the one he brought back from Germany along with the contraband sword he tucked away in blue velvet. Nita would juggle oranges against the living room wall, would wail at our dour young faces and sob wildly at things that barely warranted attention. The family smiled at her in jubilant horror, as we might have ironic images of the war from which she’d eloped.
All our people fried chicken, not all of them well, but all of them good people.
Frances tended to burn hers at the edges, I think through a combination of fear—of the undone breast and its buried tender—and considerable loathing. By the look on her face, she couldn’t have much enjoyed cooking. The table she set for us, laid out with something less than aplomb, creaked from heavy bowls of limp beans, soggy fried potatoes, and beaten-down squash, not to mention the main event, the oil-charred chicken with the mealy exterior tasting of paste and carbon. Crust it never had a chance to be.
Not long after Howard, her husband and Barney’s eldest, died, Frances returned to her native West Virginia. Poor Frances, screaming at her boy, my pale cousin Mickey of the slamming screen door, the junkyard of Hot Wheels, the folded poster of Raquel Welch circa One Million Years B.C. Mick was among the impediments to her setting a good spread.