Wade's Family

Wade’s family came from Texas via Mississippi. There were three brothers, of which Wade was the youngest, and two sisters. If you’ve ever seen the movie Bonnie and Clyde, you would recognize their parents as relatives of Bonnie’s mother. They were old beyond their years, I hope, for they seemed more like grandparents than parents. At least the father did. They were thin and ropey and long, all sinew and bone. The father was a lineman for the power company and would come home with terrible tales of men electrocuted at work. When he came home, he liked to begin drinking beer, 16 oz. Falstaffs. His voice was low and gravelly, and he rarely spoke more than a couple of words at a time. There was something mean in him that made him seem dangerous, even though he was the least robust of all our fathers. Perhaps it was merely hopelessness that made him seem that way. He loved professional wresting. I think it was his only true joy. It was something my father derided to anyone at any time. Since he had been a boxer and, perhaps, a Fleet Champion, he knew that nobody could take those punches night after night after night. He would point out all the tricks, make us look at the wrestlers talking to one another as they clinched up in the corners. But to my knowledge, he never had a conversation with Wade’s father as long as we all lived in that neighborhood, more than ten years, something of an amazement to me now.

Wade’s oldest brother was a senior in high school when we were in elementary school. He was the oldest kid in the neighborhood. He was something of an artist and had painted the mural of the school’s mascot on the wall of the gym. It made him famous in a way. He wore his hair in a DA and seemed a James Dean character. He was always going out on dates. One day, Wade and I were hanging out at his house when his mother began berating the brother. She babysitted for a little girl down the street and the brother had been playing with her in his room. I was young and couldn’t make sense of it all, but he was doing something objectionable. I thought it had something to do with the little girl’s belly button which looked all swollen and red, but that doesn’t make much sense to me now. But that was in the last few months after he graduated and soon he had moved away. After that, he was just gone. I don’t remember anyone ever talking about him again.

There was an older sister, a very homely, skinny girl with dry hair the color of straw and of that same texture. There isn’t much to say about her. She was just there. I don’t know if she graduated from high school or not. She moved out soon after the brother and was gone.

The younger sister was a knockout. She wore her hair stylishly in a beehive hairdo and wore dresses that accentuated her full breasts and hour glass waistline. She listened to the radio and read magazines and had a southern voice like lilacs and honey. One night, my parents terrorized me by asking her to babysit while they went out. I was of the age that it was optional whether or not I would even need a babysitter, but they planned on being out late, so they erred on the side of prudence. I couldn’t breathe. When she showed up, I was paralyzed. I stood with my legs and spine locked, my arms rigid by my side. I tried to escape to my room, but the house was small and that was pretty useless. When they were gone, however, she asked me what I wanted to do. I was too young to know, so we listened to the radio. Every Friday night, the radio station ran one of those contests where you got to call in and vote for your favorite song. And that is what we listened to. We called in and made our votes. I voted for the Beatles song “I Saw Her Standing There,” she for George Hamilton the 4th’s “Abilene.” We listened and argued and laughed as the DJ led us up the chart until we finally got close to the top—four, three—and then number two. By that time, we knew that our songs were left. It was only a matter of which one was number one. And the number two song was “I Saw Her Standing There.” Oh, what misery and what fun. She had won , and she was delighted. It was fitting and right, if odd. What witchcraft had taken over things, I wondered, but I couldn’t have been happier than to watch her smile and bask in the glow of her victory.

Jerry was Wade’s older brother. He was two or three years older than I. He was a bully and a brute. When we played football in the yard, he would tackle me as hard as he could. He seemed twice my size and his poundings really hurt. I think I hated him. He was not popular in high school, I was sure, and I hoped he was humiliated by the memory of his brother.

Wade was almost a year older than I, and he was held back in the fifth grade. They don’t do that any more, but when I was in school, there were kids that had been held back two or three times. When I was in the seventh grade, one of the kids in my gym class quit school and joined the army. Wade was destined for such a fate. My worst memory of Wade was the time he sucker punched me in the jaw for picking non-edible berries off a bush in his yard. He told me not to in a tone that pissed me off, so I looked at him and picked another. And to my surprise and dismay, he hit me as hard as he could in the temple. I’d never felt such pain in my life. My jaw locked up so that I thought it was broken. Indeed, that is what I screamed out over and over—“You broke my jaw, you broke my jaw!” I don’t know if it was broken or not. We did not go to the doctor for punches. But I couldn’t talk for quite a while nor chew for much longer. Today, as I sit writing this, I twist my jaw with a pop and a crackle. TMJ. And I am quite sure that it is the result of that punch. Some time after that, I fought Wade and beat him badly. It was s a surprise to me for he was about six or seven inches taller than me according to some old photographs of the time. But he was his father’s child, not thick and strong, just mean and a bit scary.

Long after I moved away, my mother told me that he had been arrested for stealing chickens in a rural part of town. I was in college at the time and couldn’t imagine such a fate.