Here is the Church, Here is the Steeple

All morning Taylor had been going in and out of the house to look at Uncle Winn in his hospital bed. The bed was just a rented one, from some medical supply place out on the highway, and set up most conveniently downstairs in the front parlor. The front parlor, though nice enough once, was now a room filled with assorted hospital accoutrements, along with the regular, decades-old, doily-covered parlor furniture.

This last time Taylor went in to take a look, she saw that Uncle Winn was sitting up in his hospital bed, Parkinson’s disease and all, biting off a linoleum tile of chocolate from a rock-hard Eskimo Pie.

The thing she found while going through his things in the room where he lived before the hospital bed had changed forever how she saw him. Every time she went through people’s things, it changed forever how she saw them, and this time was no different.

Under a sky of rumpled Reynolds Wrap tented over a voluminous meringue of lung-sucking heat, Taylor finally settled down outside on a slab of concrete. She shoved down the elastic shoulders of her peasant blouse and sat there flicking off grasshoppers—given that it was the summer of the grasshopper plague—and she flicked off each one like it was a spitball, aiming mostly for the spirea bush (which rhymed with diarrhea).

The reason they were living at Uncle Winn’s farm was that her dad was in awe of the smarts and business wiles of this Uncle Winn, whom he loved way more than he had ever loved his own dad (who had mostly Indian blood, which made him bumble around in life and go broke because of that).

At some 3 a.m., at some dark hour of the soul, right out of the blue, her dad had decided to leave Memphis, leave Memphis altogether, and take all of them and move his ice cream manufacturing business north, all because of this Uncle Winn.

But the thing she had found while snooping around in Uncle Winn’s drawers was really just a silly thing, a little startling maybe if you compared it with the other things that were in there, such as his Lion’s Club pin, an old cracked leather wallet, a tie clip still in its J.C. Penney gift box. What it was, was a little naked Kewpie doll, like from the Little Rascals era, or the Jesse James era, and Taylor quickly figured out that it had a rubber hat that she could pry off and then fill the body up with tap water. She could then squeeze the body and make it go to the bathroom in water-fountain arcs out of its little plastic penis. As she sat there with this nutty thing, she took aim at the grasshoppers, at her scabby knees, at her hot neck, and after a while she just shot it up in the air to see if she could hit the spirea bush.

If she were back home in Memphis, the first thing she would have done upon finding such a thing would have been to show it to her best friend, Kathy Klyce. It was the kind of thing they would have gone “Heh, heh, heh” about, since they were then at the age where they had not yet gotten over the fact of penises.

They would probably take that doll with them to the movies at the Memphian and squirt people sitting in the rows in front of them, and go “Heh, heh, heh” to each other in the dark when the people swatted at their heads and shoulders.

But on second thought, none of that would have happened, because back in Memphis there were far better things to do than bother with stuff they might find going through people’s private drawers. Back in Memphis, they would far more likely have been found riding horses at the polo fields out in Germantown, since Kathy’s dad owned a whole string of those soft-mouthed ponies, and between polo matches...