Calloustown Read Free

for the first few years of our marriage, as did I, so maybe she kept forgetting when I told her I was from the Calloustown Reddicks. Maybe she thought I lied, that I paraded an anonymity-prone nature. I don’t know. From those early years I can only recall June looking like she emerged from a shower with Modigliani, and that she pitched a Sunday column called Bar Naked to her editor, which would include the mastery of mixology coupled with True Weird Tales from real-life publicans. The editor said it might work in Portland, Seattle, or Laramie, but not in the South. June quit drinking. I drank more, haunted daily by quilts and samplers on my job at the museum, then by wingtips and cheap canvas boating shoes when I got to Shod America.
    I turned on the radio and tried to scramble past evangelists, country singers, and rappers—who all, oddly, seemed to comment on the same topics—trying to find the Road and Weather Conditions station. June looked at her watch. She said, “There’s no way we’ll make it to the lecture. Damn it. I wanted to learn more about kilns. I’d like to learn how to cook something in a horno, then write about it in my column.”
    â€œKilns get hot,” I said. “They get hot enough to turn dirt into a brick.” I couldn’t pass up the perfect segue, or what in my wet-brained mind I understood to be perfect and serendipitous cause and effect. I said, “You never met my father, but he knew how to turn clay into bricks, and bricks back into ground, kind of.”
    So I had driven around on weekend supply-and-demand forays with Mass Massey and Lincoln, and when I came home on Sundays my mother looked up from her baskets to ask, “What did y’all do this weekend? Did you go fishing?”
    â€œWho names their kid Lincoln in the South?” my father would bellow. “I’m not saying anything racist, but you’d think that more black people would name their kids Lincoln. If I were black, you’d be named either Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, or Brown Versus the Board of Education.”
    And then I’d ask, “How come you named me Reed?” knowing all along—because my grandfather got drunk and told me—that I’d had a brother named Ed who died long before my birth, and that in actuality my name was Re Ed.
    â€œNever mind that. It’s a good name. In those baby books, it means, ‘cleared land,’” my mother would say.
    â€œAnd it means something that grows near the water. So you got it either way, either cleared land or something growing on the land,” my father said.
    We went through this incessant charade for, I guess, about half the Sundays of every year for three or four years. And then one rainy day I returned from school to find my pure and patient mother crying. My father was to have driven her somewhere with her baskets earlier—she’d improved to the point of people asking if she had nimble-fingered Cherokee blood in her background, had three craft galleries carrying her work in towns where people had money to buy baskets that didn’t hold green plastic grass and screw-top eggs filled with cheap chocolate—and she carried them on her lap. She didn’t want them in the back of the truck, seeing as it rained. My father hit a pothole, she lurched forward, the baskets got crushed, and she broke two ribs.
    She didn’t blame him because, for once, it wasn’t his fault. The particular pothole—and I remembered shoveling it out while Mass and Lincoln Massey picked extra hard, out near the center of the blacktop—must’ve been eighteen inches deep. The hole disappeared once rainwater filled it up, at least to an unsuspecting and non-prescient driver.
    My mother’s ruined baskets ended up reparable, as did her ribs. But my father took it as a sign: that he’d been punished by God because of his own shortcomings, failures, and mean-spirited acts that he