5. Memory Leaves (Anomalie, Masego)
“Are you pregnant?” my father asked my sister and the way he asked it suggested that he was just looking for something to say because we had all been watching him and waiting for him to say something. My sister was obviously not pregnant, though to be fair, she could have been in the very early days of a pregnancy before it showed in her belly.
“My fiance is,” my sister said. “Uncle Thomas was our donor.”
“What the hell?” my dad said, his head darting between my sister and my uncle. “You having a baby with your niece.”
“God no,” uncle Thomas said. “I just donated sperm, your daughter is having a baby with her fiance.”
My father shook his head and then wandered to the nearest lawn chair he could find. My uncle and sister followed him and presumably continued their conversation. I wanted to follow them, but Ced put a hand on my shoulder and waited until everyone else was out of earshot.
“Is that messed up or am I just thinking about it wrong?” he asked and I knew that he wasn’t trying to be funny.
“It ain’t like he fucked Ruby’s fiance,” I explained. For my brother, pregnancy was a very straightforward thing; he had sex with a woman and if he didn’t use protection or if she wasn’t on birth control, there was the possibility of pregnancy. He never struggled with infertility and never had to think about the various methods that exist to conceive a child. I had the same experience, so I can understand how jarring it was to hear that your sister’s fiance was pregnant by your uncle. It could sound very Jerry Springer-esque out of context.
“Uncle is gay and so is Ruby and I assume her fiance is too, though I guess she coul be bi or pansexual.”
“It’s so many things nowadays,” Ced interjected.
“So obviously Ruby and her fiance got together and talked about how they wanted to make their family. Ruby is closely related to uncle Thomas so I get why she would want him to be the biological father of her child.”
“Like Ruby and her fiance having a baby, as close as they can get. I see now,” Ced said as we wandered over to our dad, sister and uncle.
“I hope I haven’t said the wrong thing, Ruby,” my father said genuinely. His cheeks were damp and I could tell that he had been crying though he wasn’t as he spoke. “I love you, I always will, and I’m happy you’re happy and I know you’re gonna make your family happy. It’s just a lot all at once. I’m gonna be a grampa and a uncle at the same time.”
“Just a grampa,” Ruby and uncle Thomas said in unison. Then Ruby continued, “Uncle Thomas is the biological father, yes, but I’m gonna raise this child with my wife. She or he will be your grandchild, will call you grampa.”
“I hear you,” my dad said, nodding his head slowly. “I just, I don’t know. I’m glad you told me now so I got time to fix it right in my mind. And thank you, Tommy. You the best brother, I’m glad you there for my kids like you do. I just, I can’t say I understand it all, I’m still catching up and I want to understand, but I can say that this feels really beautiful and I think you did something very special for my Ruby.”
My dad and uncle hugged, and though it wasn’t a dramatic display, both brothers cried tears that they wiped away quickly and it was clear that they had found a new level of love and respect for one another.
Shortly after, my sister broke the good news of her engagement and her fiance’s pregnancy to my grandfather. Uncle Thomas came out to him as well and it went better than any of us expected. My grandfather didn’t say much, but he did express joy that my uncle Thomas was having a baby, “passing down that Livingston genius” as he put it.
The rest of the day went well too, and after we had put the turkey on to smoke, and the ham was glazed and in the oven on low, I sat with my family around my grandfather’s fire pit. My aunt’s husband left to see his relatives in town, so my grandfather, father, uncle, sister, brother, and I sat around the fire drinking cheap beer and piling up aluminum cans as the night wore on.
“Thomas,” my grandfather said at one point when the time became irrelevant and everyone was a few beers in and we were all happy and filled with anecdotes of the past, “did you ever mess with that boy? Umm, what’s his name? His daddy was that football player went to the pros back in the eighties.”
“You talking about Roderick Tatum?” Ruby asked.
“Yeah, everybody called him Frigerator cause he was so big. I knew his daddy, we went to school together and there was this feminine boy, probably gay like you Thomas, but Frigerator’s daddy, name was Larry, Larry used to beat that boy up all the time. You would think that boy disrespected his mama or something the way Larry used to beat him up. I got tired of watching it and when I tried to stop him from beating on that boy who was small for our age, Larry start calling me a faggot. I whooped his ass in front of everybody and I told him, if I’m a faggot then you just got yo ass beat by faggot.”
We all laughed at the story before my grandfather continued.
“But I hear Frigerator got a gay son, everybody thought he was gone be just like his daddy. But once that got out…”
“You talking about Perry,” my dad said and looked at my uncle. “You remember Perry, I know you do. Used to have the biggest mouth, always talking shit ’cause his daddy played in the NFL. That nigga aint spent more than two minutes in the same room with his daddy since the day he was born.”
“He was gay?” uncle Thomas asked. “I remember the whole football team got in trouble at that party.”
“Yeah,” my dad said, “they was going crazy that night. That’s when the rumor started, wasn’t really rumor though. Somebody walked in on him with a dick in his mouth. He tried to kill himself after that, poor fool shot half his face off, still sitting up in his mama house. Lord knows what’s gone happen when she gone.”
Uncle Thomas shook his head, then finished his beer, reached for another.
“It’s hard growing up in the closet,” he said casually, comfortably, and I couldn’t help but smile that my family had reached this point where he could talk like he did. “You don’t ever know how somebody gone take it.”
“Most people don’t cause a problem or nothing,” Ruby added. “Even if they don’t like gay people, most people decent enough not to be too bad, but you right unk. People unpredictable.”
My grandfather groaned and struggled to his feet. I couldn’t tell if the strain was from old age or drunkenness. He lifted a beer toward the fire.
“Fuck everybody got something to say bad to my chaps or my grandchaps. I love y’all.”
I woke up the next day, surprised that I didn’t have a hangover from all the beer the night before. Thanksgiving went well and as my wife and daughters, Ced’s girlfriend and daughter, Ruby’s fiance, and my mother and her sister and husband arrived at my grandfather’s house, we settled into holiday reverie that I never wanted to end.
When my grandmother showed up, she hugged her sons, then her daughter in law and grandchildren. She sat with my grandfather after dinner and they talked for most of the evening in a way that I hadn’t thought possible based on stories of their past together.
When I was stuffed from dinner, I tried to sneak away for a cigarette. I saw my uncle standing at the edge of the trees in the backyard on his cell phone and I wandered closer to him, not wanting to disturb his conversation, but curious nonetheless.
“I’m sorry!” I heard him yell and then he looked at his phone with frustration. I was sure he was about to smash it into the ground, so I made myself known.
“Unk,” I yelled and walked toward him. “Everything alright?”
He looked angry and sad all at once.
“That was Chuck. He’s mad at me.”
“Why?”
“He said I killed his veteran’s garden.”
My uncle Thomas was on the verge of tears.
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