The Yellow House

THE YELLOW HOUSE / Andrew Hudgins //TA7HY YELLOW?" I asked as my Uncle Billy walked out of the V V garage, carrying two cans of paint. He was wearing a pair of olive-green, fatigue-pant cut-offs, and he was covered from head to foot with flecks of dried-out white paint that had stuck to his sweatdrenched skin. Some of the flecks had settled in the tight brown curls of his hair and on his eyebrows, making him look older than forty-two. With a flat-bladed tool, I was scraping blistered and peeling white paint off the side of the house. We'd been at it since seven-thirty in the morning, and we were finally ready to start painting. "And what's wrong with yellow, I'd like to know?" "What's wrong with white? Everybody else's house is white." "That's why I got yellow," he said, grinning at me because he had, despite my arguments, convinced Mom to paint the house the color he wanted. For a moment I was afraid he was going to tousle my hair and I'd have to decide whether or not I was going to hit him. I rasped the scraper twice, hard, across a last section of wood, then stepped back, slapping tiny paint chips off the worn-out pair of seersucker pants I wore to work in. The flaked paint was crusty in my hair, and the muscles in my neck were bunched and swollen. At times during the day I'd been afraid I would start crying from exhaustion and humiliate myself. "Give that spot a few more licks, then grab a brush," he said. "I want to get some paint on this house before your mother calls us in for supper. Hell, boy, when I came home on leave I didn't know your mama was going to put me to work painting the house. If I had, I might wouldn't have come." I turned my back and forced the blade of the scraper through a few blisters I'd missed. It made a sound like heavy fabric being torn as the paint shattered into flakes and drifted away from the side of the house. "Oh, sweet hell," he said, his voice low and almost religious. His hands were resting on his hips and his mouth gaped half open as he stared at the house, which looked, after the scraping, like a huge white dog that lost its hair in clumps and was dying of mange. "What's the matter?" "That spot over yonder," he said, not pointing. "Where?" "Under the eaves, dammit!" We'd forgot to scrape the area under the apex of the eaves where the two sides of the roof met. "Hell," he said again and kicked the grass. "And if we missed this 60 · The Missouri Review side, you know goddamn well we missed the other side too. How could we be so stupidl" The muscles in his neck corded and stood out, then suddenly he lashed out and kicked the wall right beside me. He was still breathing hard—deep sucking blasts of air—when Mom opened the door on the other side of the house and called, "Billy? Warren? What was that noise? Are you okay?" "Sure, Bess," he called back. "Warren just tripped and fell against the house. But he's fine. Not even hurt." He gave me a look and sat down, his back against the house. "Can we borrow Mr. Hoskins' ladder?" I asked. "Earl's over to Thomaston, shingling a roof." "Well, why don't we leave this last little bit of scraping until tomorrow and start painting what we've already done?" Clenching his jaw, he glared at me as if it were the most stupid suggestion he'd ever heard. I shifted my weight back onto my heels in case he tried to slap me as he had the night before last. I'd been slouched in the easy chair after supper watching TV when Mom told me to wash the dishes. "I'll get them in a minute," I said. "Your mother told you to do the dishes," Billy said...