August 2004

I could hear them, through the plate glass of the living room window, at the bottom of the hill. The redneck family was fighting again, this time about race issues. It was a familiar argument to me, but I wondered how my family was dealing with it. I approached the window slowly, not wanting to be spotted, and used the curtains to shield me. Beyond my mother at the porch table, out through the canopy of trees, and down the steep embankment, I saw the redneck family positioned around their picnic table like game pieces, none of them facing the other. The drivers of the argument appeared to be the grandson and his grandfather, the latter of whom was even now calling the adolescent a jackass for even suggesting this was about race.

"Just cause he ain't white ain't no reason," insisted the grandson, pacing back and forth over the leaf-covered yard. The mother shook her head and got up to check the food on the grill. Who were these creatures? At least three generations, all living in the same house. They had been here forever, these forest dwellers, and had nothing but themselves and their old house. It felt like we were encroaching on a much older way of life... but I couldn't help a feeling of vague superiority.

The grandfather had his back to his own family, facing my direction. It was he from whom I hid behind my curtain. Even so, I positioned myself to get the clearest view of the proceedings. The grandson wasn't satisfied, and verbally attacked his grandfather again, his voice raising to shrill levels.

Great, I thought. Mom's really going to love this. All the effort it had taken to get our family out here, and now she had to put up with this? My eyes flicked back to our porch, and... that wasn't mom sitting at the table at all. Was it grammy? I looked over my shoulder to my right, and saw that my family was actually sitting at the dining room table. If mom could hear the commotion outside--and I suspected she could--she wasn't reacting to it.

The grandfather had had enough. I looked back down the hill and saw him struggling to move. What I'd taken to be a chair was actually some kind of intricate wheelchair, and he was presently pulling himself back toward their house, straining as his wheels encountered bumps in the dirt. He grumbled something about the grandson not knowing anything. "I was in the war, you know. Things were different then." The grandson merely leveled more vulgarity at the man.

Somehow the old man managed to negotiate the porch steps, and his wife limped to his assistance, holding the screen door open for him. She was a frumpy creature, all but mute, and wore a shiny metal brace that ran from the bottom of her fleshy left leg all the way up under her copious floral print muumuu.

The son, disgusted with the whole affair, turned back to his mother, who was still at the grill keeping an eye on the food. He made a comment that I couldn't hear, and his mother shot back, "Well there's nothing I can do for you." The apathy in her voice was so foreign to my own experience, and I chuckled nervously and looked back at my own mother. I'm not sure she'd heard.