Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones Page B

from everyone, where I pushed food around on my plate and listened to the women murmuring back and forth in the kitchen while they fussed over the food. After a few minutes, my father’s sister Mary came and leaned on the door between the kitchen and the living room with her back to me. I watched while she rooted in her purse for a cigarette. I heard the match strike, heard her inhale. She was talking to my mother.
    “Is he still playing with those dolls?” I flinched, waiting for Mother’s reply.
    “You mean his marionettes?”
    “The puppets, yeah.”
    “He gave a performance at his school last month. A photographer from the paper came out. I sent a clipping to Mack. I’ll send you one, too.”
    I didn’t wait to hear more. I left the living room by the door that led to the hall that ran the length of the house. At the back of the hall, when I was sure no one could see me, I threw the paper plate, still full of food, in the trash and went out the back door.
    My cousin Mary Maxwell was sitting on the steps. I got her to go with me to look at Uncle Robert’s mule, but it stayed on the far side of the paddock and we couldn’t tease it into charging us where we hung on the fence. When my cousin got bored and went back to the kitchen steps, I decided to go up front where the men were sitting. As unobtrusively as I could, and without looking at anyone, I found a scrap of shade thrown by the porch and squatted down, balancing thighs on calves and rocking back on my heels.
    “Hey now,” one of my uncles said, “don’t he look just like a country fella, a-settin’ there on his heels in the shade. I reckon he must be a real Jones after all, right, Mack?”
    I heard my father’s familiar laugh—as much a tobaccocured bark as laugh. “Yes sir,” my uncle said, “he’s gonna be a country boy. Just like his daddy.” I tried not to grin and I kept my head down while I made a show of casually doodling in the dust with a twig I found lying at my feet. But when I heard my mother at the screen door calling my father’s name, I jumped up like I had been slapped, losing my balance and setting off a chorus of chucklesfrom the porch. “Still getting the hang of it, are you, boy?” someone asked. I grinned and looked down. “‘Ats all right, you stick with your daddy, he’ll teach you.” Mother called Daddy’s name again. I wondered if she had heard what the men had been saying.
    “Come here, boy,” Daddy said from where he was sitting on the worn, unpainted steps that led up to the porch. I found a seat on the bottom step, right between his knees, in his shadow. Even there, I thought I could feel my mother’s gaze on my neck. Daddy was smoking and talking to the other men on the porch. Craning around Daddy’s knee, I took a quick peek at the porch, but in the deep shade, all I could make out was a sea of white shirts, dark slacks and shiny black oxfords. I recognized most of the men there by their voices: Uncle Richard; Uncle Steve, who was married to Aunt Lib; and Uncle Charlie, who was married to Aunt Mary. Uncle Robert, the brother who had shared the family home place with the deceased, sat alone at the end of the porch, not saying anything, and there were two or three men I had never seen before. I was afraid to turn all the way around and stare, for fear they would tease me some more or, worse, interrogate me. I was even more fearful that my mother would call me into the house. Teasing or no teasing, I would take my chances there with the men. Finally I thought I heard her heels clicking back down the hall. My father reached down and roughly massaged the top of my head.
    “Time for a haircut.”
    “Yes, sir.” I liked the feel of Daddy’s calloused hand. Then I lost myself in the easy flow of talk swirling around my head. All of the men were in their shirtsleeves. Some had loosened their ties, and a couple had dispensed with them altogether. The cane-bottomchairs brought out from the kitchen creaked as