My Magic Summer

Chapter One

Chapter One

“It’s not real syrup, you know,” my dad said as I filled the grid in my waffle. I liked the symmetry of it. Small squares within a larger. It looked right. It felt right.

“I know, but it tastes good.”

We were sitting in a booth at The Waffle House, our last pitstop before Still Bayou, and I sensed he was dragging it out. Taking his sweet time. It’s not that he wanted to avoid his brother or put off getting back to Mom. I think it was more that he knew he wouldn’t see his son again until at least July, and he wouldn’t be back together with the whole family until September. I didn’t imagine he looked forward to the next three months as much as I did. I foresaw a bleak future for him, waiting on Mom through the most difficult parts of her treatment. And she would be spending so much of her days in the clinic. How would he keep busy in the meantime? I imagined him taking a lot of sad walks alone under the Vermont foliage. Not saying anything, kicking at the dirt with his hands in his pockets and trying not to think of everything. My heart sank for him.

“No, it does not,” he said this with a smile. “It tastes like what it is, which is high fructose corn syrup.”

“But isn’t corn good for you?” I asked. “It’s a vegetable, right?”

“It’s a starch, Connor. It has its good qualities, but processed like that, it’s like white bread.” He grimaced, shaking his head in dismissal. “No nutrients.”

“Well, I guess up in Vermont you’ll get plenty of the good stuff. Real syrup, right?”

I was cautious about mentioning anything to do with Vermont, but it was unavoidable.

“Oh sure. I mean, it’s not in season, but you can bet they hoard buckets.”

He did not wear his emotions on his sleeve, this old Green Beret turned mechanic. He was always matter of fact about everything. Even when he first told me about Mom, it was as though he talked about somebody else. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but that he had a way of maintaining his composure, sticking to the simple truth without complicating things with a bunch of sap.

I didn’t mind. I supposed I veered that way myself. Especially around family.

* * *

Still Bayou’s a smallish town, I guess. Then you drive past that green sign signifying the city limits, see the “POP. 32,353” and it’s like, huh, where do they put all the people? Maybe because it’s a sprawling community with people all over the place. Just because there’s no bustling metropolitan downtown doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people around. Still Bayou is a quiet place about forty miles from Houston, with more trees visible than people despite what the sign said. The lonely east of the Lone Star State. We kept passing a Whataburger or a Walmart, but it still felt sparse, in a comforting, quiet way. I liked it.

The bayou itself was no mean or insubstantial thing. A long, weaving body of water, snakelike in its curves and versatility. Here and there it ran alongside the highway with naught but a sliver of grass between road and water, as if it were another lane. Down the line it cut away from civilization, heading toward the woods, where the cypress trees with Spanish moss hung over either side, framing it like guests at a wedding. Here lay the toads and gators and what-have-yous of the swamp primeval. Dinosaurs lurked below, or so my cousins and I used to pretend when we were little and wandering about where we weren’t allowed.

The bayou grew from a trickle into a mighty river and finally ended with a pool at the foot of Burnet’s Mount, a modest hill, greater in width than height.

We started to get more residential when we passed the Still Bayou Public Library, a short but long, beige building with a row of tinted windows. It looked like a modest establishment, but something about it was endearing, and I already knew I would be spending a lot of time there. I closed my eyes as we drove past, imagining the quiet interior and the smell of the bindings. Some people prefer new cars. I like old books.

My heart lifted with recognition of the familiar old places.

“There are the bowls!” I shouted over the radio, which had been playing Rush Limbaugh through three states.

The bowls.

Such a distinctive landmark at the entrance to my grandparents’ neighborhood, now my uncle’s. As you drove in, sitting atop a hedge, were two massive stone bowls on either side of the road.

“Yes, there they are,” Dad agreed.

“How long have they been there?”

“They were up when Willard and I were kids.”

“I guess it’s like a sculpture by the city?”

He shrugged “Yeah, something like that.”

Uncle Willard was waiting for us in the front yard, idly picking weeds when we arrived.

“Well look what the cat dragged in!” He grinned from ear to ear as Dad parked. Uncle Willard was a thin man, and he always had an easy-going disposition. “Con Man, get your butt over here and give your uncle a hug!”

I smiled and walked over.

He slapped me on the back and held me close. “Sweet sixteen, boy! You grown on me. What are they feeding you up there in DC?”

“Uh, you know, this and that. We don’t have Whataburgers and Big Red, so…”

“Got some catching up to do.” He laughed hearty and walked over to my Dad. “You have a good drive, Russell?”

They shook hands.

“Well, Will, it’s a straight shot from Mobile. I kept on the 10.”

“When you were going through LA, you and Con Man stop at Critter’s Roadhouse?”

“You know we did.”

I grinned. “I had a gator po’ boy.”

“Well how about that!”

Uncle Willard’s house was old and full of memories. Sepia photos of my grandfather in uniform and my grandmother, the war nurse, hung on the walls, as did various crosses, many Celtic in nature. I liked the red shag carpeting and cheap wooden panels. Uncle Willard kept his beers and steaks in a fridge in the garage next to his weight set. I glanced at the dumbbells and kettle weights as we walked inside and vowed to get some use out of them during my stay. I could bulk up. It’d be healthy, and, you know, for the girls.

An antique piano stood in the sitting room, a quiet place with a velvet couch and nothing going on. Nobody ever went in there. It was well-preserved, as were the cabinets set aside for the fine china and my grandmother’s ceramic figurines.

We ate a brief, light dinner with scant conversation, and I heard, with ringing clarity, what wasn’t being said. Uncle Willard wanted to know how Mom was doing, but he didn’t want to ask. Dad wanted Uncle Willard to know, but he didn’t want to say. So, they made small talk about roads and the Houston Oilers.

Afterward, Uncle Willard showed me the guest room I’d be staying in. He called it “The Break Room” because it was a little rectangular cave that jutted out of the den with no door. We walked past the pool table and ran my hands across the soft green felt, cherishing it.

“Keeping up with your pool?” Uncle Willard asked.

“I don’t get much practice up in Virginia, but I’m looking forward to playing again.”

“Well, you’ll be a regular shark by the end of the summer! Hustler style.”

When I was younger, my cousins and I had a lot of fun times at the pool table. We even slept under it. Everything felt so empty now with. Quiet.

Grandparents and aunts and so many cousins, first, second, something removed, and many friends of the family. Now, only the three of us, and my father would be leaving early in the morning. I thought of the prospect with melancholy and wonder. Uncle Willard was an easy-going man with few demands, and I imagined there’d be freedom ahead of me.

After saying goodnight, I lay in the little twin bed, idly rereading a Narnia book (The Horse and His Boy, for the third time) by the light of a crow lamp (that is, the light bulb perched on a base of a beautifully carved wooden crow). I kept losing my place because I was giddy with the possibilities ahead of me. I said a prayer for my mother and tried to temper my joy, but I couldn’t get over it. Three months! Just me and my uncle! This was the first week of summer, and it had barely begun. I could get a job. Make new friends. Meet a girl. Spend whole days in the water. Make camp at Burnet’s Mount. Be a mallrat over at the Sam Houston Galleria. Catch up on my reading at that delightful library. Uncle Willard could let me borrow his truck and take me to R-rated movies. I could get in better shape. I brought my journal. I could write stories. This summer was going to be The Magic Summer.

And then my smile turned a fraction sad because it hit me, once again, the finality of it all. I was on the edge of seventeen and just finished 11th grade. This was it. In September I’d be starting my senior year. A year from now, I wouldn’t be on some kid’s vacation. The brief interval between high school and college was for adult stuff, with the crushing weight of responsibility and being a grown up sucking the fun right out. For better or worse, this would be my last summer.

Better make it count.

I turned off the crow light. My mother and my youth were thoughts for another day. For now, to sleep and dream of other things.

Before my mind drifted off to the land of nod, I gazed out the window and up to the sky. The stars were out but not the moon, lending the night a somber emptiness.

At the time, I had no idea, I hadn’t even dreamt, of how full the sky could get, and how bright the night.