Shaking the Sugar Tree (9 page)

I signed into Facebook and found a friend request from Jackson Ledbetter, which I happily approved. I spent most of my remaining time stalking his profile, looking at his pictures, inspecting his friends list, looking at which pages he liked, reading all his status updates going back to the beginning of the year as you do when you’re crazy about someone and you want to know all you can.

Before I ran out of time, I searched on Google for Robert “Iron Man” Downey Jr.’s mailing address so that I could put Noah’s letter in the mail. The best I could manage was an address for Paramount Studios.

Back home, I nervously picked up the phone and called Jackson Ledbetter. I was rewarded with his voice mail.

I’m ditzy about phones. They make me nervous, and always have.

“Hi. I wanted to invite you on a date. If you’re not working Saturday, let’s do the Furniture Market. Noah said he saw us kissing. Call me. Bye. Oh, by the way, this is Wiley. So. Bye.”

Pathetic, I thought, hanging up the phone and putting it down on the kitchen table. Could I be more pathetic, as Chandler from
Friends
might ask.

I put rinsed-off baby carrots in a bowl and gave them to Noah as I settled down on the floor with a pillow and
World War Z
. I lay parallel to the television and it wasn’t long before Noah lay down as well, propping his head on my leg, munching carrots and watching Robert Downey Jr. get the bad guys as I read about the history of the Zombie wars, thinking to myself that this was a real horror novel.

When would I ever have such a good idea to work with?

But your best idea is currently using your leg for a pillow, isn’t it?

I glanced down at Noah.

Would writing about him be such a crime?

I thought of a million and one things I could say straight off the top of my head with utterly no prompting and no editorial sweat. I’d have an eight-hundred-page novel in no time. I’d call it something mysterious like
What the Deaf Boy Heard.
I’d talk about the travails of a gay man raising a deaf meth baby in the South.

Only one small problem. To tell his story properly, I would have to confess to what I did. The stupidity of a gay man letting himself be talked into thinking he needed to have a girlfriend, and needed to have sex with her to prove he was a man. The stupidity of crystal meth. Getting a girl pregnant with a child that would have birth defects because the two of you were passing a crack pipe back and forth while “finding” yourselves.

There was no way I’d come across pretty in such a tale. I could easily imagine my mom reading this book and being furious with me for shaming the whole family, washing our dirty laundry in public like redneck trailer trash on the Jerry Springer Show.

And what if Noah could read well enough one day to read with his own eyes what his father did, what his mother did? How would it make him feel, to know that he might have been a normal boy, part of the “normal” world of the hearing, but for the fact that his parents had smoked crystal meth?

I glanced down at him, at the tumble of blond hair falling on my leg, at the way he stared so intently at the television screen as if afraid to miss a single moment.

Would he still love me if he knew the truth?

How much longer could I hide it from him?

T
HE
NEXT
day, after work, I drove to New Albany. Not to see my mom but to see two people who might have been my mother-in-law and father-in-law in another life, Mr. and Mrs. Warren. They lived downtown in a solid brick house with fancy columns holding up the front porch. Carefully tended flowerbeds were sprinkled abundantly with color. A small army of rhododendron plants graced the front porch, hanging at evenly spaced intervals. The smell of crepe jasmine drifted on the air.

I knocked hesitantly on the door.

Mr. Warren answered, and he seemed neither surprised nor happy to see me.

With his clipped fingernails and hint of cologne, it’s safe to say that Mr. Warren was not the sort of man you’d bump into at Walmart, but I could easily picture him sitting in front of his massive flat-screen television watching porn with a shot glass full of Jim Beam in one hand and a great big hunk of Velveeta cheese in the other, or doing whatever else it was these big time small-town sharks did when they weren’t screwing people out of their life’s savings or shooting the shit at the country club and whining about the goddamn Christless communist-loving federal guvmint and patting themselves on the back on how well the darkies were doing in the post-Jim Crow era as they worked at McDonald’s for frikkin’ minimum wage. But we couldn’t all have enough money to burn wet mules, now, could we, and ain’t that just the plain gosh darn truth?

“How are you, sir?” I asked politely.

“I’m about as fine as a frog hair split four ways,” he replied.

“Frogs don’t have hair,” I pointed out.

“Exactly,” he said.

I walked smack into that one.

“May I come in?” I asked.

“What do you want, Wiley?”

“Just to talk,” I said.

He considered this in silence, not moving his solid bulk out of the way.

“Reckon there ain’t much we have to talk about,” he said at last.

“I’m trying to find out where Kayla is,” I admitted. “Her son would like to see her, spend some time with her.”

“You done come to the wrong house, son.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No,” he said. “And frankly, I don’t care to know. That girl is dead to me now.”

“You must have a lot of kids if you can afford to give up on them so easily,” I offered.

“She’s my only child,” he said in a hard voice. “Of course, you know that. I blame you for getting her involved in drugs.”

“I think it was the other way around.”

“You were both doing it,” he said.

“I tried it four or five times,” I said, feeling like Adam blaming Eve. “I was hardly an addict. I tried extremely hard to get Kayla to stop when we found out she was pregnant.”

“That’s what you say.”

“I didn’t come here to argue with you about the past. Noah loves his mother. Don’t ask me why, but he does, and he wants to see her. We’re not asking for child support or weekend visits or anything else. And we’re certainly not asking or expecting anything from you. If she would just give him the time of day once in a while, get her head out of her ass, spend a little time with him….”

“Good luck with that,” he said. “You’d have an easier time getting an audience with the goddamn queen of England.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“I done told you, boy, I have no idea. Wherever she is, she can just stay there. She done embarrassed this family to death. Good-bye and good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“Do you have to be such a prick?” I inquired.

His eyes narrowed.

“I would invite you in,” he said, “but I don’t want your kind in my house. The Bible makes it pretty clear what God thinks about people like you, Wiley. I need not remind you of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for their unnatural crimes. I blame you for Kayla, for that boy—that pitiful, deaf boy, and everything he’s suffered because of you. That’s your doing. That’s God’s answer to
you
, Wiley Cantrell, for embracing unnatural sin and turning your back on Him. I will not invite the wrath of God upon this house by having any doings with
you
. Kayla has paid a heavy price because of you, just as your boy is now doing, and will continue to do. My wife and I want no part of it.”

He delivered this huffy speech, then pressed his lips together as if determined to say no more.

“The only problem with that,” I pointed out, “is that Kayla was addicted to meth before I got involved with her that summer. But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, Mr. Warren.”

“I would ask you not to come here again. You are certainly not welcome.”

“I hate to be the one to break it to you but shooting the breeze with someone who looks like he’s eaten one case of Twinkies too many is hardly my idea of a good time.”

“You always did have a mouth on you,” he snarled.

“And I know how to use it, too. Unfortunately for me, I have a son who happens to be your grandson, a boy who would like to see his mother. If she comes around, perhaps you could tell her to call me or something.”

“If she comes around, Wiley, the last thing I’d do is tell her to call you. I think she’s had quite enough of you. I think we’ve all had quite enough of you.”

He closed the door and I heard a click as he slid the lock shut.

It’s all good, as we say.

I offered the door my middle finger—a completely pointless gesture, but it felt good—and left.

I
DROVE
in the direction of Mama’s house, not knowing whether I would stop to see her or not.

Truth was, I just wanted to be alone for a while, without Noah hanging on my tits, alone, by myself, with my own thoughts, able to hear myself think for a change, some quality me-time.

Before Noah was born, I had read all kinds of books on what it would be like to be a parent, but nothing could have prepared me for the truth. I would love to say it was beautiful and inspiring and life changing and awesome, and it was some of those things, of course, but mostly it was utter hell. Utter, complete, unremitting, agonizing hell. Nothing could have prepared me for the way my life was engulfed by the needs of this new being, this screaming little meth baby who needed constant attention. Day and night, night and day, the crying, the whining, coping with the throes of addiction, the diapers, the pissing, the shitting, the feedings, the vomit, the health concerns, doctor visits, the worrying and fretting, the shots, the teething, the babysitting, up all hours of the night—I don’t know how I survived. I kept thinking it would get better, but it didn’t. It got more complicated, more involved. When he was about two, I began to realize he couldn’t hear a damn thing. I had suspected it for a long time, but there were no tests back then that could be conducted, no way for the doctor to check. But by the time he was two, I knew he was deaf.

If I thought life had been hard up to that point, I had been sorely mistaken.

Like many meth babies, Noah was insecure, fearful, restless, had the attention span of a tomato plant. Learning disabilities followed, clinging, separation anxiety, a tendency to darkness and depression, and sometimes a wild, uncontrolled self-destructive rage. Coupled with his deafness, it was a potent brew to swallow. Only now, with about ten years under his belt, was he starting to settle down, though he was constantly fearful of separation and checked in with me many times each day to make sure I was still there. I could be sitting on the toilet and he’d wander in, wanting to know where I was, wanting to reassure himself. At least he had gotten to the point where he could sleep through the night without waking up and coming to my room and climbing into my bed, although he still did that from time to time.

For all that, he was as fierce as any drag queen, determined to make friends, to not be ignored, to have fun, to be completely alive, to do everything his friends did and more. He had guts. I’m not sure he got them from me.

Kudzu clung to the trees on either side of the road as I drove to Mama’s house. It climbed up the tree trunks, engulfed the branches, choked the trees, covered the forest with a canopy of leafy green death. Kudzu is a beautiful parasite. It grows fast and its roots are deep. It can bring down huge trees, houses, barns, anything in its way.

I tried hard not to think of Noah in the same breath as kudzu.

Still….

Sugar maples were also very much in evidence, sprawling bits of green and brown soaking up the sun and getting ready to release the sap that would become maple syrup and grace a gazillion pancakes over the winter.

I had decided not to visit my mother as we would invariably start arguing, but I hit the brakes when I saw the For Sale sign in the front yard.

Bumblebee announced my presence.

“Are you really selling the house?” I asked in disbelief when my mom came out onto the porch.

“I believe I have the right to do what I want to do,” she said, immediately defensive. “If you lived here with Noah, you could help me keep it up….”

“You’re not going to guilt me into living with you.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“You can’t sell the house!”

“It’s not like I want to, but I can’t keep it up by myself. If you haven’t noticed, some of us are getting older. Would it kill you to come around once in a while and help mow the grass? Don’t you know how hard it is taking care of Papaw all the time?”

I sat down on a rocker, wishing I had a cigarette.

“Why did you come to over here?” she asked. “It wasn’t to visit me.”

“I went to see Kayla’s parents.”

“What on earth for?”

I said nothing.

“It’s not like they’re going to do anything for
you
,” she pointed out.

“I don’t want them to do anything for me, Mama. I wanted to find out where Kayla is. Her son would like to see her once in a while.”

“Why do you bother, Wiley?”

“She’s his mother!”

She shook her head, sat down in another rocker, and regarded me with a sigh and a shrug.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re just a damned fool, Wiley. That’s all. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bigger fool in my whole life and that’s saying something.”

“Thanks, Mama. I want my son to have a relationship with the woman who gave birth to him, and you think I’m a damned fool.”

“Why should you care about that woman? She ran out on Noah. End of story.”

“You never were a big believer in forgiveness.”

“It’s not about forgiveness, Wiley. Why do you go after the wrong kinds of people? Why can’t you settle down? Why can’t you be like Billy and get a decent job and make something of yourself?”

“We all know that what I most definitely do not want is a decent job.”

“You must not want one very badly if you won’t cut that damned hair and stop looking like a girl.”