Lyla Read online

  LYLA

  SEAN DIETRICH

  Copyright © 2013 Sean Dietrich

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1506120261

  ISBN-13: 978-1506120263

  DEDICATION

  I'd like to dedicate this book to the people of North Florida, because it is about them. I hereby submit this work to the gnarled Floridian family tree that I find myself a part of.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First I'd like to acknowledge the many that read my first novel and overwhelmed me with their kindness. Also, my wife for being supportive in the development of this novel, and for having a sense of humor. I also want to thank my editor Amanda, who's contribution, both to this book, and to myself personally, cannot be measured in words. Lastly, I'd like to acknowledge the myriads of dysfunctional families that find a way to march forward, through the muck and mire.

  1.

  Sunset is the most fidgety time of the day. It's when the bay erupts with life upon life, and everything feeds on each other. Trout and mullet can't sit still; they jump right out of the water. If you have a cane pole handy, you can catch all the fish you could ever want at sundown. The pelicans know this too, and they don't need cane poles like we do. They fly above the water, close enough for their beaks to touch the surface, until they find supper. And they always find it.

  At dusk, no fish is safe.

  It was the perfect time of day for an argument.

  “I need to know the truth,” Daddy said. “Yes, or no?”

  Mother waved her hand at him. “I swear, I didn't do anything with that man.”

  Daddy stood on a fat log that poked out of the water. His long legs made him look like an egret that high steps through the marshlands. He gazed across the water at the horizon, the shrimp trawlers were already out. They were heading out for the night to rake in mountains of squirming brown shrimp. The boats had metal armatures that spread outward, just like the wings of the pelicans.

  Daddy listened to Mother, but his body was tense. He only believed her because he wanted to believe her. That's the way things worked sometimes.

  “It's a rumor, Dale,” Mother said. “Nothing more.”

  Daddy looked away from her.

  Rumors. Our town had a way of birthing vicious rumors. It didn't take much doing, either. One person said something to another, and in that instant a rumor was born. The vile thing would plop onto the floor. It would be wet, crying, and unable to crawl, until someone came along and fed it. Before long, it was prancing in dusty streets, looking for left over scraps like a feral cat. Mother watched Daddy's back while he stared out at the bay water.

  “I'd never step out on you, Dale,” she said. “Never.”

  Daddy turned and looked at her with drooping eyes. He could look like a bloodhound when he wanted to.

  “Never, Dale.”

  He gave no answer.

  Mother stood poised with her hands on her round hips, her hair like wisps of honey-colored wheat swirling around her forehead. The smooth muscles in her face strained when she spoke. And she spoke a lot.

  “Alright.” Daddy sighed and looked back at the water. “Let's just forget about it, then.”

  There was no chance of that. She half liked the attention.

  My mother was a woman who got too much attention for her own good. It wasn't that she asked for it, at least not on purpose, though she sometimes did that, too. It was that the attention seemed to find her.

  Male attention.

  Daddy was no fool; he knew that the men in town appreciated her. He knew how they smiled at her and wagged their tails whenever they saw her walk by. She even caught the eyes of clergymen and old codgers.

  “Dale, I don't care what people are talking about, I wouldn't touch Phillip Sams with a hundred-foot pole. He's hideous.”

  Daddy shifted his weight from one hip to the other. “It's not about.... I don't care what the man looks like.”

  Mother sat down on the porch and drew her knees up to her chest. The two of them silent, looking out across the bay instead of at each other.

  I suppose it was more comfortable to look away.

  Each of them took turns exhaling big breaths until they could think of something else to say. But nothing came to them.

  She knew Daddy had her beat when it came to arguing; she was still young, much too young to argue well. You have to know a lot about living to put up a good fight. Her only hope was to close her mouth.

  Easier said than done.

  “I swear,” she said. “I never did anything to encourage Phillip Sams. Nothing whatsoever. He just....”

  My daddy glanced at her again. “I thought we were going to stop talking about it.”

  “We are.”

  “Good.”

  Mother was quiet for a moment, but she wasn't finished. “Dale, I ain't no wanderer, I just ain't.”

  “Lyla, I don't want to talk about it anymore.”

  “But I'm trying to tell you the God's-honest-truth.”

  “I said no more.” His voice sounded firm.

  “I'm a grown woman; you can't talk to me like that. I ain't no child.”

  But she was a child.

  Daddy was older than her, with little room in his person for fibs or jokes. Life had hardened him; he would not tolerate such things. Especially not from his own damn family.

  “Lyla,” he said, in a calmer voice. But it was all that he could say because he loved her. Mother was the beloved pebble in his shoe, she dug into his flesh. His weakness for her was like the weakness some men have for drink. She was tranquilizing, disarming, at times inflaming, but she was easy to love.

  Mother looked over at me. I stood behind the screen door, watching them fuss.

  “Quinn,” Daddy said to me. “Go back inside, son.”

  I stared at him, paralyzed with a slack-jawed snoopiness. I didn't know what they talked about, but it seemed important.

  “Boy, you do as I say.”

  And I did.

  Because I was a child, too.

  ͠

  Gathering oysters is an ancient thing. Ancient man learned how to eat oysters before he learned how to cook with fire. The Apalachee boys used to dive for them out in our bay, and lug them back to shore by the sack-full. But that was several hundreds of years ago. Before the tribes of them disappeared.

  The blue collar stiffs were the ones who gathered oysters in our world. Men like my daddy. They were men with lots of little hungry mouths waiting back home. Most of them lean and humble fellas who acted cocky around each other—humble around women. Men with an affinity for unfiltered cigarettes, strong drink, and the Bible.

  “The pickings are slim today,” Daddy said. He scissored the tongs in the brown bay water, chewing on his pipe.

  He swore again under his breath. It made a little puff of smoke shoot out of his pipe bowl. “Dammit,” he said again.

  My daddy smoked a pipe all his life. When he was a young man, it had been a blonde pipe, a crude one; he'd carved it himself, from a pine knot. But I never saw that one, as he'd retired it before I was born. It sat on the mantle in case of emergency. I'd only seen him use the one Mother gave him one Christmas. The pipe was cherry wood, with a straight shaft and a blood-colored bowl. It was pretty as you please, and it suited him.

  Daddy brought the tongs up again and opened them. Out spilled a dozen rock oysters onto the deck of his boat.

  Daddy surveyed the heap of stone-like creatures. “Hellfire. Ain't enough here to say grace over. I gotta good mind to call it quits for the day.”

  I knew he didn't mean a word of it.

  The idea of Daddy calling it “quits” was ludicrous. He worked like a forty-mule team, come rain, shine, or two-day hangover.

  He stabbed the tongs into the water and brought them up aga
in. The tongs, themselves, weren't heavy. Not until you pulled them in with a load of oysters, then they weighed an elephantine ton.

  “Jeezus, George, and Joe,” he said, tapping his pipe against the side of the low rimmed boat. “Someone's been pulling from our beds. People get killed for that around here. Jeezus.” He let out a sigh. “I reckon it's time to eat.”

  “Sir?” I pointed my good ear toward Daddy.

  “I said let's have us some lunch.”

  Lunch was my favorite task of the day.

  His too.

  Daddy sat down and nudged the bucket of oysters toward me, tossing me a glove at the same time. We popped the cement tops off them, their slimy gray hearts, slippery and ripe.

  He was a lightning-fast shucker, faster than I was, because he had a few decades on me. He could turn over ten faster than your mother could unbutton her overalls.

  Daddy spread out a white towel on an overturned bucket and set his knife down. He reached underneath his seat and brought out a tin of white crackers and a jar of salt. We never salted good oysters, only puny ones that needed it. You could ruin a good oyster with too much salt.

  The two of us slurped the craggy things then tossed the empty shells overboard like skipping stones. He could throw them a mile further than me.

  Not everyone liked oysters, which was something I couldn't quite understand. Once, some yankee folks visiting from Michigan bought a bushel from Daddy. Michigan, Daddy had explained to me, was a long way off. Somewhere between Russia and Texas he said. The man got excited about trying the oysters, but the next morning, the yankee man told Daddy he had no idea how to eat the things. When Daddy showed him how to break the oysters open, the yankee was so disgusted he vomited right on the dock. Or, so the story goes.

  Daddy laughed about it, but we weren't sure if it was entirely true or not.

  “Quinn,” Daddy said. “You ever think about what happens when we die?”

  I turned my good ear toward him. “Sir?”

  “When we die, do you ever wonder?”

  “No.”

  Back then, I never thought of such things. I was too young to even know how they made honey. At the time, I still thought babies came from the United States Postal Service.

  “Well, I think about it,” he said. “I wonder about the animals in the woods. Wonder if they used to be human a long time ago. Apalachee, maybe.”

  “Indian animals?”

  “Why not? It's how the Apalachee believed, in animal spirits.” Daddy slurped from a shell. “The Indians knew more than we gave them credit for. Them Apalachee were smart as whips.”

  He lobbed the craggy thing into the water, and said, “There would've been thousands of them in these parts. Before the Spanish killed'em all. Think of that, thousands of campfires around this bay at night.”

  I took a gander at the bay and imagined such a sight. It would've looked like millions of fireflies from where we floated, so far from shore. Like yellow dots.

  “Maybe the Indians were right,” he said. “Maybe animals are at peace, you know, being animals instead of people.”

  Animals never seemed at peace to me. They were always working, gathering food. That is, except for the lazy feral cats who nosed around our garbage can. Those do-nothings could go full days without moving a muscle.

  Daddy reached under his seat and removed a bag of oranges. He, like many other fishermen, liked to carry oranges on his boat. I was never sure why.

  “You know.” He peeled the orange with his pocket knife. “I reckon I'd want to come back as a heron. Walking all over the bay, fishing whenever I's hungry. Sleeping whenever I's tired.”

  He tossed me an orange.

  “What about you, Quinn?”

  I thought for a moment. Out of all the choices in the animal kingdom, it was impossible to choose my favorite. I was partial to rabbits, possums, also squirrels.

  “A rabbit, maybe,” I said. “Or a squirrel.”

  “A squirrel?”

  “Yessir.”

  Daddy wore a bewildered look on his face.

  “What'n the hell's wrong with you boy?”

  Well.

  I wasn't quite the poetic thinker my daddy was.

  ͠

  Daddy and I rode home in silence; neither of us had much to say. Both of us sat, baked from hours spent in the broiling sun, drifting on the slick bay.

  I sat in the passenger seat, feeling a pleasant soreness settle in my shoulders. It was a fatigue from too much work. My muscles were young and tender. So was my skin. I wasn't tan like Daddy yet, and my joints didn't have the same strength.

  Our brick and plank town whizzed past the truck windows at fifteen miles per hour. Past the city was nothing but woods. The pines of our forest towered over the road like old men with bushy eyebrows. Long, dark shadows flitting over the truck.

  I glanced through the window behind me at the fish I'd caught earlier that day. There in the bed of was a basketful of trout. They flopped against the wicker clinging to life. Their speckled colors shimmered beneath their slimy membranes, their golden eyes open, perpetually shocked.

  “You hooked some good looking 'specks,” Daddy said. “They'll eat good tonight.”

  “Can I be the one who cleans them?”

  A little smile ran across his face. “You feel comfortable doing it on your own?”

  “Yessir.”

  He smiled bigger.

  We were poor—bone-poor. But in our world, being poor didn't affect the supper table much. We were hunters and fishers, with enough gall to get out and find our food. You could harvest an entire supper near the bay, during any season, or any time of day. That is, if you didn't mind eating ladyfish, poke salad, or an occasional possum.

  There was a Depression going around. Everyone talked about it. But, according to Daddy, it wasn't that big of a problem, not for us. It didn't make oystering any harder than it already was.

  Daddy liked to say that the Depression only depressed rich people up north—Godless yankees. To him, the Depression wasn't bad enough to affect poor folks like us. “You can't depress an already depressed man,” he'd often say.

  And he was about right.

  I can't imagine having had any less. And I didn't know what it meant to feel depressed. Not then.

  Daddy drove the truck in silence. His bird-like face was dark against the bright window. Those long, knobby arms of his rested on the steering wheel like pine branches.

  He looked at me and said something. I could see him moving his mouth, but I couldn't hear him, I only saw his lips form the words.

  “Sir?” I turned my good ear to him.

  “I was only saying,” Daddy said, speaking louder. “You'll want to sharpen the boning knife before you gut them trout. It's dull.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You might as well sharpen the others too, while you're at it.”

  “Yessir.”

  He said something else thereafter, but I wasn't able to hear it. I just nodded and smiled. I'd gotten good at pretending like I could hear, even when I couldn't.

  I was as deaf as a stump in my left ear. It was only my left--I was as fit as a fiddle in my right. A series of terrible infections during infancy robbed me of that my left ear forever. All I could hear was a ringing noise that sounded like a choir of crickets.

  Still, being partially deaf wasn't all that bad. And as long as people talked loud, I could hear them in my right side.

  My family accommodated me by shouting things to me. Aunt Patricia called us the Screaming Applewhites because my parents had gotten in the habit of speaking everything with booming voices. We could be heard from across the bay with no trouble at all. As a result, I spoke loud, too.

  We neared our small house, which had been white once, but now it was the faintest mossy green. But that's how everything is down here. Humidity paints our entire world with moldy green dust. It covers everything sooner or later.

  Ours was a small shotgun house, positioned on the edge of
the longleaf forest, on the shore of the bay. Above it, the sunlight poked through the canopy of trees. Light scattered on our roof within a maze of shadows that crossed one another.

  Through the windshield, we saw Mother sitting on the porch. She held Emma Claire, watching the truck bob up the driveway. It bounced with each bump in the path, rattling our bones loose.

  “That mother of yours.” Daddy wagged his head. “She suffers incurable boredom.” He laughed, but it wasn't the funny kind, it was the reflective kind. The kind that had something behind it.

  “Good Lord,” he said. “I swear, it'll be the death of her.”

  ͠

  The three of us sat around the wooden table, staring at our empty plates. They were heavy plates, enameled white, stained with years of use. My plate was as clean as it could be, except for a few discarded pin bones here and there.

  Mother leaned back and ran her fingers through her shoulder-length hair. She yawned and let out a faint moan that suggested fatigue. Creamed potatoes had a way of making everyone a little sleepy after supper.

  “What's the name of that man who sells his squash and strawberries in town?” Mother asked.

  “Bill Anderson,” Daddy said.

  “Yep, him. I heard that he's leaving town and going to visit Ireland.”

  “Where's that?”

  “Practically on the other side of the world.”

  Daddy was silent, packing his pipe with ribbons of black leaves from a small pouch.

  “Yep,” she said. “It's somewhere near England.”

  Daddy frowned. “England.”

  “Oh, Dale, I want to go there, I want to visit Ireland.”

  Daddy lit his pipe, his face enveloped in a fresh swirl of smoke. He crossed his legs and counted the water stains up on the ceiling. Daddy had never been anywhere noteworthy unless you count Wewahitchka or Tallahassee. He'd always been himself, there, with us, unmoving. He never made any fuss about it, either. Daddy was born a boring, old, settled-down man.