THE LONG BURN - PART ONE

The windswept winter of 1969 was degrees colder than any in recent memory. Colder than a well-digger’s ass, Lorraine told herself as she sat at the head of her own shiny yellow Formica-covered dinette. Except it wasn’t as cheerful a color as the one she really wanted. Chuck had only agreed to so much in their small, plain, two-bedroom whisper-white frame house in Franklin, miles away from where she’d grown up. Miles away in distance and in money.

Franklin was a long 100 miles down I-40 from her family home on the banks of the Cumberland River, but it might as well have been the distance to the moon, especially after Mother had sent her back to Chuck that one weekend Lorraine had finally decided to leave him. Her pitiful suitcase with the faint and delicate yellow daisies printed on it jumped on the seat beside her as she motored over the curving ribbon of blacktop. She was hell-bent on escaping Chuck’s thundering tirades. It seemed she could never do right, so the only right thing she could think of doing was leave him.

But, Mother was spiteful and caustic. Chuck was a Baptist–-a Free Will Baptist–-and he considered her mother and father inexcusable and irretrievably lost sinners; her mother a sinner because she was a Jew and her daddy a sinner because he drank and it was widely known that he had taken a slice or two over the years, humiliating Mother in the process. Chuck Stafford might curse more than any man she’d ever met and he could be cruel in words, but sure as shit, he considered himself sitting at the right hand of the Almighty himself.

Chuck moved them to Franklin not just to start a new life, but to coerce her into forsaking her parents until they sat down and accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, just as Lorraine had done before a ring was even considered. She had even begun to believe Chuck’s calm, measured admonitions to her about Daddy. It was true he did drink his single-malt scotches and even a bit of moonshine almost nightly now. And it was true that she had, on more than one occasion, tip-toed out her bedroom’s French doors and on to the wide second floor porch of their house late at night after doors had slammed only to hear Mother crying in the bedroom next to hers.

***

“You’ve made your bed.  I told you this was not a good match, but, of course, you insisted you know better.  So, since you know better, you need to get back home,” Mother said succinctly as they sat on the bed in her old room upstairs that Saturday afternoon. She had told Chuck that she was going to visit her sister, Maddie for the weekend, although she never intended to go back home. Mother didn’t believe in divorce. She believed in the bliss and sanctity of her marriage so fiercely that she slept in her own bedroom after she’d been delivered of her sixth and final child. It’s easier to believe in marriage when you live in a 120-year old antebellum home with 8 bedrooms between you and your husband.  And easier still when your husband spent at least a few days and nights out of the week down at work in Nashville.

It had been a solid six months since she’d been home and even longer since she had heard Daddy’s voice. The last words they’d had between each other ended with Daddy shouting that Chuck was a “no-count sonofabitch” and was no longer welcome on his property. The slamming of the receiver on the other end had startled her and made her teeth chatter. It had taken her a full minute to hang up her end of the line. She knew that once she did, she’d probably never talk to Daddy again. Maybe Chuck was right after all.

***

Lorraine peered out the window beside her kitchen table and frowned over the memory. Memories were in ample supply, but the present was pressing hard on her shoulders. She’d have to call Chuck and tell him about the stove soon enough. The scene they’d had about the table was bad enough. She couldn’t imagine what he’d do about having to get a new stove. Sitting at the table as the morning light drew lines of shadow across the cheap plastic fruit with its fading color, in the heirloom crystal bowl on the table.

***

“Dammit, Lorraine, can’t I pick anything a man would be proud to show off in his own home? Don’t I work hard enough? Don’t I have a goddamned right to more than your fucking nagging?” Chuck hissed at her in the corner of Tooby’s furniture store downtown, his eyes glowing craziness and marital desperation at intervals as she bit her bottom lip and let her left hand flutter up like gossamer, her middle finger and thumb rubbing her delicate collar bone. Lorraine’s eyes flit between Chuck’s red-faced tantrum and the girl about her age surreptitiously trying to overhear what was going on. For a brief moment, Lorraine’s eyes pleading for her dignity and the other girl’s eyes radiating sympathy met in the charged air of the outrageous scene, but then quickly disengaged. The whir of the ceiling fans in Tooby’s pulled her back, but failed to cool the mood.

“…a goddamned thing in here that I like!” Lorraine caught the whiptail of Chuck’s tirade on the wind of the fan and she smoothed the front of her dress down with her trembling hands in a valiant effort to mentally set everything right again. At 19, she sought to be more like her mother–-composed, concise, and when called upon to keep the peace, contrite.  As much as she hated the way Chuck treated her in public, she hated more that her eyes caught the sexy sway of his narrow hips as he walked away from her, running fingers through his thick black hair.

“Well, Chuck, you work so hard, I just want to make sure you have the best so you can be proud of what you have!” she replied, calmly, to him, penitently, lips pulled so tight over her teeth, she could almost taste her Yardley of London Slicker Westside Lip Polish. She had gotten it on one of her three-times-a-year shopping excursions with Mother to Nashville.

“You’ve been living so high on the goddamned hog your whole life, you don’t know what it is to save or not have two pennies to rub together. Goddammit, just pick out a table!  I don’t have time for this shit.  I have to get back to work.”

***

Lorraine pulled herself out of the embarrassing memory with a sudden abrupt stop and looked again out the window as she tapped a chipped nail on the table. She’d picked out a mustardy yellow table with sleek, tapered silver legs and mod, unadorned chairs that were the same dull mustard yellow on the backs with a contrasting and equally depressing orange, something close to the color of Tang, for the seats. It reminded her of something she’d find in a cheap restaurant with matronly, ever-exhausted, uniformed women approaching retirement age, on a treadmill, refilling half-empty coffee cups. The kind of place where the servers didn’t even bother to smile anymore and none of the patrons expected it. Of course, Chuck liked the table. It cost $75.99 on sale. They’d loaded it into his truck, leaving the pretty and cheerful lemon and white set–-the one she adored–-on the showroom floor for someone else to come along and take away.

***

Lorraine decided they would have chicken and dumplings for dinner. It was one of the few things on the bill of fare at their house that she’d brought with her into marriage.  She had never spent much time in the kitchen with Mother learning how to cook. Not like Maddie. Maddie seemed to divine which measuring cup Mother or Sylvia needed before the words slipped their lips and Maddie had inherited that old southern gene that made the kitchen a place of worship unto itself.

But, Mother’s chicken and dumplings she had learned and loved to make. Besides, it was Daddy’s favorite. It had taken the better part of a year for Mother to get it right. It was nothing like the food Mother ate in Germany, where she was born and raised. But, when Daddy brought her back to Tennessee after the war, one of the first things Mother set out to do was learn from Granny and Sylvia how to make Daddy’s favorite foods. As it turned out, Mother was more successful at learning how to cook the food than heating up any semblance of a good relationship with her new mother-in-law.

Chuck liked her chicken and dumplings. And you can believe that if he didn’t, he’d let you know fast. There was no Southern sweetness when it came to that. The first week they’d been married, Lorraine pried open a can of Chun King Chicken Chow Mein, intending to impress Chuck, only to have him take a forkful of it in his mouth at the table that night and grimace with all the intensity he could muster after a day of working down at the auto-body shop.

“What the hell is this shit?” he half-whispered, half-stammered, as he spit it out on to his plate. Lorraine, horrified, almost choked herself with her slender left hand as it flew up to her neck, grabbing at her delicate alabaster collarbone. They both looked at each other, dumbfounded, across the table—a stalemate across the no-man’s land of intricately cut glass salt and pepper shakers and the napkin holder.

“It’s…chow mein. It’s Oriental. Like Chinese food. I made it!” she finally yelled, defiantly. She watched him look back down at his plate again and then back up at her face. She blinked and blinked again, waiting for the inevitable volley. Chuck saw her, all 110 pounds of her, stand up and put her palms down on the table top.

He burst out laughing. They must have laughed for a good five minutes, in waves, as Lorraine sank down into her chair again. She had been on the knife’s edge, her body trembling with anger and fear before Chuck broke the thunderous intensity of the moment. Maybe she was laughing mostly out of relief. Chuck had found religion after his mother died so there was never any fear of him hitting her or cheating on her. But, religion had not yet cooled his temper or his profanity. Truth is, he had given up the bottle but he was still a dry drunk, all at the age of 26. And finding religion had yet to shut down the verbal slaughterhouse he opened wide when he felt Lorraine was getting out of line.

She knew him better than anybody, though and never forgot to remind people of that when they looked concerned for her, in that way people do when they know they shouldn’t meddle in another woman’s marriage. Chuck could be gentle and earnest. He was also the sexiest, most daring and confident man in Smith County. The way he had pursued her was intoxicating. The way his lips brushed her ears as he cupped her breast on their fifth date awoke something independent and wild inside of her that had never dimmed, even as married life had ended the chase Chuck loved more than anything else when it came to women.

Chuck had struggled to get himself together while taking a long drink of water from the glass set perfectly to the northeast of his plate—the way Lorraine had been taught to set a table by her fancy-dancy kraut mother with the thick accent. All those fussy European manners Lorraine had intrigued him and embarrassed him at the same time.  His daddy was a hog farmer. All they knew about manners was going to church faithfully every Sunday and saying “Yes m’am” and “No, sir” when required and not much more. For him, Lorraine Clay was the biggest catch of his life.  He didn’t deserve her. But, he’d be damned before he let her catch him out on being a fourth-generation farm cracker. She’d learn her place.

And know her place, she did. Her mother taught her about a place for everything and everything in its place. She had pulled out the gleaming stock pot, barely used, from the wooden cupboard with its fresh paint and set it on the gleaming stovetop. And then, turning the dial, nothing happened. No familiar click. No “wooosh!” as the domed blue flames should have lit up one by one around the burner like synchronized dancers, arms lifted to the heavens.

These damned stoves, Lorraine swore under her breath as she switched on each of the four burners, hoping to find one that lit up. Still nothing. They were already down to one working burner as it was. The little two-bedroom house they were able to buy with the help of her parents was built in 1931 and even though some of it had been updated, the range, an ominous white bulwark—a Caloric Ultramatic—was almost 20 years old. It needed servicing, but Chuck didn’t care about anything in the kitchen. It was worlds away from Mother’s kitchen back home, where half Lorraine’s little house could fit and still have room for dessert–where Daddy spared no expense on whatever Sylvia and Mother wanted or needed to keep the plates hot with buttered biscuits and thick sizzling slices of ham on Sundays.

“I’m so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a Memphis mule!” Daddy would exclaim almost every Sunday morning as he sat at the wide hundred year-old mahogany breakfast table right outside the constantly swinging double doors of the kitchen. Sylvia dipped in and out smiling wide as the Cumberland River itself from shore to shore as she set platters on the table. Three generations of doctors and a piece of hard-earned pigskin from Tulane couldn’t keep Henry Clay tamed, nor did he want to be.  Even Mother knew better.

***

“As long as you’ve got a burner that works and an oven that bakes, it’s fine!” Chuck snarled back from the living room impatiently when dinner was late. It was nearly 9 and Lorraine’s nerves had been shot trying to finish dinner on one working burner. Chuck’s impatience only made her bite her lip to stifle back the march of tears lining up for duty at the corners of her eyes. Thankfully, he had finally left her alone in the galley kitchen but she could still feel the roar of his disapproval and the spittle that flew out of his twisted and angry mouth when she hadn’t served him on time and when she’d complained about the stove.

***

And now this. Nothing worked. She had turned all the dials off and sat down in a stand-off with the Ultramatic. After waiting a few minutes as the clock ticked, she got up and twisted the knob again. No click. No flame. She sat down again and smoothed down the jeans she wore only at home when Chuck was gone at work.  He didn’t like her to wear pants. He said they were too provocative for a woman to wear out in public.

Finally, she’d put her finger in the rotary dialer and called up Frank down at McCall’s and he’d come right over. Frank had known Daddy since the war and after he’d come back from Europe, Frank had taken over his family’s business. She’d watched him nervously, fingering the fake pearls around her neck while he lifted up this and that and turned those dead dials over after trying this and that. He sighed heavily and forced half a smile and half a frown.

“Well, I hate to tell you this, Lorrainey, but you’ve got busted igniters. Not only that, but your oven door gasket is shot, too. And looks like some of the wiring is bad. Jesus, this is one old rig. Looks like it gave out on you, finally.” With that, he looked back at the Ultramatic and then up at the ceiling.

Lorraine closed her eyes and then felt herself grind her teeth. When she opened her eyes again, Frank was looking right at her with a mix of pity and tenderness. “How much would it cost to fix?  You can fix it up, can’t you?” she asked, almost desperately.

“Honey, it wouldn’t be worth it to fix this piece of shit. The parts and labor would cost more than it’s worth. Cheaper to buy new. I can try to work something out with you and Chuck if you want me to give him a call or stop down at the garage to talk to…”

“…NO. No. No, that’s fine, Frank,” she interjected quickly, waving her hand like she didn’t want to bother him with something so trivial. The last thing she wanted was to have Chuck fly through the door yelling at her about Frank stopping down while he was under some car trying to “con” him in to buying a brand new stove.  “I’ll talk to Chuck when he comes home. Tonight, I guess we’ll just have to have sandwiches!” she said, a little too brightly. Frank wasn’t fooled although he played along. He and everyone else at the bar knew how hot-headed Chuck Scantland could be, even if he had given up liquor.

“All right then, Lorrainey.  When y’all are ready, come on down and just ask for me. Don’t bother with that new boy I’ve got there. Hard as it is to find someone these days that hasn’t been shipped out to Vietnam, I might have to let him go. Boy’s dumber than a rock. Ain’t got all what belongs to him upstairs. But, I guess he’s better than ol’ Tom Lackey. Anyone’s better than a thief.  The only thing Lackey wouldn’t steal is a red hot stove, and not for lack of tryin’,” Frank sputtered with a laugh layered down with years of chain-smoking. He slipped on his baseball cap and smiled paternally.

“How’s your daddy and momma?  I haven’t seen ol’ Clay in way too long.”

Lorraine drew a long breath and exhaled, suddenly relieved to talk about something else besides the stove. “Oh, you know Daddy. He’s at the hospital in Nashville all the time now that he’s chief of staff. Some nights he just stays in town rather than driving back to Red Hill. Mother’s the same. Always the same. On time. Always right.” She grinned.

“Sounds about right. Well, you tell that daddy of yours he owes ol’ Frank McCall a beer next time you see him. Helluva guy. Well, I ought to get back.  God only knows what that boy has done to my store since I been gone.”

He had closed the door softly behind him and Lorraine crumpled into one of the mustard and orange chairs she hated so much and cried.