Thanksgiving, 1962
AS HELEN AND CJ applauded, Mrs.
Stevenson set the turkey in front of her husband. The bird was
golden-brown and aromatic, large enough to feed three times their
numbers.
CJ had never seen anyone use an
electric knife before. Instead of picking it up, Mr. Stevenson looked
at CJ and asked, “Would you do the honors, Carlton?”
“Excuse
me?”
“Say
grace?”
CJ had never said grace in his
life. He shot a glance at Helen across the table, who nodded.
“Of
course,” said CJ.
Mrs. Stevenson smiled at him.
CJ closed his eyes, getting ready,
then opened them.
“Thank
you,” he began. He stopped and started over. “Dear
Lord.
Thank you for the bounty of food we enjoy today and for the
opportunity to share it with family and loved ones. Let's not forget
the noble savages whose kindness got us through our first winter,
even though we later rewarded them with a policy of genocide that--”
Mr. Stevenson bolted to his feet
with such effort that his chair toppled to the floor.
“That's
enough!” he said.
He was so red in the face that CJ
wondered if he were having a stroke. He turned and hurried out of the
dining room.
Helen was on her feet, also red
but rising more carefully, and chased after her father.
CJ closed his eyes again. What had
possessed him? How could he be so stupid?
When he looked up, Mrs. Stevenson
was smiling at him.
“Carlton,
would you carve the turkey, please? You do know how to use an
electric knife, don't you?”
***
The Epistemological Uncle
Whirlwind (May, 1994)
Charles Deemer
IN THE CAREFREE IDYLL of my youth, when Appletons twenty strong gathered at my grandparents' house each Thanksgiving Day, Uncle Buck always drank too much and never failed to do something that would embarrass Aunt Betty. He would return from the bathroom with his fly open, or belch during grace, or tell a very dirty story, or dribble giblet gravy on the tie he wore only on holidays, before grumbling, "I knew the goddamn thing was good for something. Kept the shirt clean, didn't it?"
Aunt Betty, who was my mother's sister, would begin the process of coaxing him home then, and she usually succeeded before the pumpkin and mincemeat and apple and pecan pies were passed around the table.
A bit later, after grandfather began to fidget prior to suggesting that the men retire to the basement, where whiskey and cigars awaited them, the loud backfiring of Uncle Buck's ancient pickup could be heard outside and soon thereafter the slamming of the pickup door in the driveway and then the idiosyncratic howling that was my uncle's habit whenever he had too much to drink, which was often:
"Do you really knoooooooooow?," he howled.
Everyone knew that Uncle Buck was back.
My soul brother, the late Dick Crooks, had a relative very much like this, whom I met in a bar in Idaho and witnessed his howling myself. It stuck with me and years later, this story. Dick loved the story. He didn't always like what I did with "his material" but this one worked for him. Sometimes I wonder what in hell I would have written about early in my career if I hadn't met him. I borrowed excessively from his logging country roots. At first, a wannabe writer himself (but a barroom storyteller instead), he begrudged me my early success with literary short stories, 3x Roll of Honor in Best Amer Short Stories very early in my career, but he came to realize 1. he wasn't a writer and 2. I was doing "his material" justice ... The Idaho Jacket (Roll of Honor, 1974, published in Prism International, my favorite lit mag at the time, where I wanted to be more than anywhere short of the New Yorker) may have been the turning point, where the relationship between us is dramatized.
