Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [31]
Mrs. Hill shut her eyes.
“I said say good-bye because he’ll be going away. Gus has family in Alabama. You see Horace again this year, pigs’ll be flyin’.”
Mrs. Hill couldn’t palm-read worth a damn, and her predictions about the weather were completely cockeyed, but she was right about this. I didn’t see Huddie again for seven years.
PART TWO
Save Love, Catch Light
In Mars, Alabama, at seven-thirty a.m., Uncle Burf’s pale blue shirt, warm and stiff from Aunt Arlene’s iron, was already showing a long wet triangle down the back. The sleeve creases would stay sharp until lunchtime. Burf looked out from the post office window at the magnolia pyramids, three in a dark-green glossy row, each one starred with one lingering white flower right near the top. The only good things about Alabama, Burf said, were the vegetation, the fishing, and the food. Lately, Arlene packed every lunch as if he were going on a long train ride: three pieces of chicken, a peach, a slice of sweet potato pie. He’d get his own soda. Gus would eat like this too if he was still living here. Gus’s boy ate to live but nothing more.
Arlene was in the kitchen like all three kids were still home, pulling out old cobbler recipes and stewed rhubarb and new things from magazines like spinach lasagna and barbecue turkey. And the boy sat there like who died, which was fair, Burf thought, but hard on Arlene, who was cooking up a storm, out of kindness, and hard on Burf, who was practically eating for two, to show appreciation to Arlene. And especially hard to watch the boy sickening right there at the table, knowing that he, Burf, could expect to find a letter, every single goddamn day another letter from the boy to his girl, and would have to tear it in quarters and throw it in the wastebasket during lunch break.
He read the first one all the way through and breathed in the love, that hot, hurting feeling under your ribs, love that made him sneak out of his barracks and slide past his cracker sergeant, risking court-martial for one of Arlene’s kisses through a chain-link fence, going to sleep with a rust-flecked diamond pressed into his face. Love that made life matter, even when you were just looking back at it.
April 2, 1970
Dear Elizabeth Ann,
I love you. I LOVE YOU. I’m in Mars, Alabama. I don’t know if you can get a letter to me. Maybe if they don’t know it’s from you. Can you mail it from the city? I don’t think they’ll check a letter that’s not from Great Neck.
My aunt and uncle are nice folks, I haven’t seen them since I was little. He’s my father’s brother and there IS a physical family resemblance, which means that Nature has NOT favored him.
Dad put me on the plane so fucking fast you wouldn’t believe it! I guess you would, you know Gus. School here lets out in early June. We’re way ahead of them and I don’t have to do any work. The team’s not bad and I’m forward. They’re all big, bigger than me, as always, but slow. These are some slow-moving country motherfuckers. Because this here is the country, girl. Which is how they all (like y’all) talk. They all think I sound funny so by the time you see me—whenever that is—I’ll probably sound like Uncle Remus.
I want to call but they’ll see it on the phone bill and I can’t call you collect, unless we set up a time. I don’t have any money. If you write a certain time that you’ll call or I should call, like Friday afternoon, between 2 and 4, before they get home, I could be here. You have to know how much I love you. Write to me Call me.
From your forever loving, H.
Burf kissed the letter for Huddie a minute before he tore it up, and he tried not to read the rest of the letters all the way through. He watched for letters from the girl, although there couldn’t possibly be any; he hoped, even as he tore Huddie’s letters into sorrowful, greasy strips, that somehow she would get them and write back. No.
Burf pictured Elizabeth Ann as a pale, pink-lidded blonde, like the little white girl who worked