Whittle

WHITTLE / James Harkness THIS WAS 1963, this was spring, Warren just hitting fourteen and all of them sweating the lump inside his great-uncle's cheek. As far back as anybody could remember, Uncle Rudi had smoked a little clay pipe, thin and black as a thorn. The lump had gotten in there, festering where hot smoke curled under his tongue year in and year out, until the old man seemed to have caught a mild case of mumps. They drove him to the hospital on a day when stubby hyacinth shoots were breaking through the crumbly black mud by the mailbox. It took forty-eight hours for the biopsy to come back. Halfway into the resident's fast flat explanation of the results, Warren's great-aunt began gasping and clutching her shoulder. The doctor bustled her off to check her angina, chaffing visibly at the interruption. "It isn't something over which you people need be unduly concerned. I'm confident we've spotted it in time." When he said you people the resident shot the cuffs of his white coat. When he said time he looked at his stainless steel watch. "I expect chemotherapy will do the trick. If not, we can always go in and whittle." To Warren the whittling sounded much more horrible than the lump itself. His family crowded the ward until visiting hours were over. Uncle Rudi sat up stiffly in bed, sucking in his cheek, leafing through a disintegrating catalog of fishing gear. He had a long sad-sack body with papery skin. The crown of his head was oddly flat, fringed with spiky stalks of ash-colored hair, and his wispy sideburns gave out just short of his earlobes. Over a negligible chin his collapsed mouth worked constantly back and forth, giving his wedge-shaped face the innocent rapacity of a praying mantis. Warren and his folks coaxed Aunt Eva back home. They lived as they had to all together on Lambeth Avenue in a sagging square home sided with slate-blue asbestos, near the uneasy frontier between the ChemPark wasteland and real countryside. Their street was narrow with deeply rutted shoulders, dead-ending in high weeds a hundred feet past Warren's house. Alongside the pavement red-winged blackbirds rode calmly on milkweed stalks. At the sound of the car they flushed with a feathery clatter, as if someone had tossed ash and embers into the sky. It was too hot, hot for so early in the year. The rank smells of 118 · The Missouri Review ChemPark were already getting worse. A quarter mile beyond the end of the road, the fields had been cleared and planted. Emerald soybean runners were starting to snake along the crust. The red muck soil baked and turned lighter as it dried, bleaching toward the horizon. Everything was getting the seared faraway look of coming summer: thin, shimmering treelines, bean rows dusty and alternating with tracts of fallow land. Behind the house a rusty trunk railroad angled away toward a vanishing point at infinity. Public works came around and sprayed new creosote on the telephone poles. Somehow Warren got it on his knees, where it left black burning holes that became pin-sized scars of the purest white. For the next several days Aunt Eva floated between rooms, more ghostly than ever. When she helped set the table, her mouth twitched at one corner just enough to see. Below the hem of faded skirts the veins of her ankles swelled too vividly blue below the chalky flesh. Warren's father wondered aloud whether Uncle Rudi had kept up the payments on his life insurance. Warren's mother cupped her face and moved her knuckles hard against the ridges above her eyes. "All Tm saying," Warren's father told her, "is it pays to look ahead." "Look anywhere you want," said Warren's mother. "I never asked they be made welcome in your house but that is something I won't be the one to say to either of them." For a few minutes Warren's father sprawled silently in his armchair. Then he rose and went out to stake the garden tomatoes. When school...