Graceland Read online

  ‘Waah!’ says Elvis, automatically. ‘Baby hungry!’

  ‘Just you wait now, baby,’ says Corinne, arranging herself so she is sitting next to his head. ‘Mama’s busy. You gotta wait.’

  Clinkety-clunk-clunk. And a scrabbling sound. Mama straightening Aunt Leona’s furniture, again.

  ‘Don’t wanna.’

  ‘Mama knows you a good baby, but you gotta wait,’ says Corinne.

  Suddenly he can stand it no more.

  ‘TORNADO!’ he shouts, sitting up and shaking the corn doll in Corinne’s face. ‘TORNADO!’

  Both children are familiar with this game.

  ‘Hide!’ shrieks Corinne, and they throw themselves, face down, in the dirt.

  They’ve heard all about the real tornado that hit Tupelo when Elvis was a baby. Mama loves to tell the story. It lasted just a few minutes but it killed hundreds and destroyed entire streets. God’s wrecking ball had come to town, she says, and it shook the house, the yard, the sky itself. The first she’d known of it was the whispering of the newspaper sheets that lined the walls of their house. She’d stood in the yard, Elvis on her hip, and seen something green and scattered in the sky. The clouds billowed into gigantic mushrooms, then flattened. Vernon’s uncle Noah had collected the whole family in his school bus and taken them to shelter in his brick house, where Gladys had braced herself against the wall, holding Elvis to her, as the tornado came close. She held him so hard he cried, but still she held him tighter.

  ‘Is it passing?’ asks Corinne, her voice subdued.

  ‘It’s coming right this way!’ shouts Elvis. ‘You’d better get on!’

  Corinne hauls herself onto Elvis’s back. She’s almost two years older, and her hot body feels reassuringly heavy. Her hair tickles his neck. The knobbles of her buttons push into his spine.

  He can still hear his mother overhead. There’s a scratching noise, as if she’s cleaning the stove.

  ‘Hold on, now!’ he says.

  ‘Reckon it’s passing over.’

  ‘No. Stay down.’

  As Corinne clings to him, he rocks to and fro, slowly building up speed.

  ‘TORNADO!’ he cries. ‘Hang on!’

  ‘I can’t!’ squeals Corinne.

  One last jerk and she’ll fall into the dirt. He whips himself sideways, but Corinne hangs on, her weight squeezing the breath from him.

  ‘Reckon it’s passed,’ he whispers.

  ‘Naw,’ she says, hopefully. ‘Looks like it’s coming back.’

  There are unfamiliar steps above, now. Heavy and deliberate. They cross the porch and there’s a long pause.

  Then a shout comes from the house. ‘Vernon!’

  Summoning all his strength, Elvis gives a single thrust of his body, and Corinne tumbles off.

  Above them, the screen door is wrenched open, and there’s the sound of running, followed by a long wail. Then he hears nothing at all.

  Elvis stays where he is, sweating and slightly dizzy. Looking at Corinne he announces, ‘Tornado’s over.’

  The room seems much smaller with his father in it.

  Vernon’s face is grey and baggy-looking, and his clothes hang from his bones. He stands by the stove, blinking at Gladys, who has her hands across her mouth, and seems to be propping herself against a chair.

  ‘Glad,’ he says, ‘you ain’t changed?’

  ‘Not one bit!’ Mama says, grasping Vernon’s hands in hers.

  Then Gladys notices Elvis in the doorway. Wiping her eyes she says, ‘Baby, come say hello to your daddy.’

  Elvis twists his fingers together. That leather jacket in the trunk won’t fit this man any more. The man this morning seemed more like his daddy, or, at least, how Elvis imagined his daddy would be when he returned: solid-looking, confident, winking. Driving a loud truck. Perhaps bearing gifts, like the music his mama danced to. This man’s eyes shift from spot to spot, not quite focusing. His pants and shoes are covered in dust. And there’s a nasty new smell in the room.

  ‘Elvis,’ says Gladys, ‘come on over, now, and say hello to your daddy.’

  Elvis considers crying ‘TORNADO!’ again. He hears Corinne, still playing beneath the house, singing a lullaby to her corn doll.

  ‘Elvis …’ warns Gladys.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Vernon. He walks slowly across the room and crouches down before his son, his knees cracking. Elvis notices a small hole in the thigh of his father’s pants and the skin beneath, pink and scaly-looking. The smell grows stronger. ‘Hello, son,’ Vernon says. ‘All right with you if I come live here?’

  Elvis glances up at Gladys, who nods, firmly.

  ‘I guess,’ he says.

  Then his father embraces him, and Elvis feels the hardness of Vernon’s collarbone against his cheek.

  ‘Daddy’s back,’ says Vernon. ‘And soon we can get our own place.’

  Elvis pats his father’s arm. ‘Mama’ll be real happy now,’ he says.

  Vernon laughs, uncertainly.

  ‘I brought you something, son.’

  He fishes in his pocket and produces a piece of paper. Carefully, he unfolds it to reveal a once-glossy image of a man in a pointy green hat with a quiver of arrows slung across his shoulder.

  ‘I saved it for you. From a movie magazine.’

  Elvis takes it in his hands. The paper is soft as cloth, and tatty at the edges, but the colours are bright. The man’s hat sweeps across the page and, beneath his moustache, his teeth are milky white.

  ‘Robin Hood here’s what you call an outlaw, see? A law-breaker. But he’s a good man,’ says Vernon.

  ‘Is his moustache real?’ asks Elvis.

  Vernon frowns. ‘I don’t know. I guess.’

  ‘Say thank you, Elvis,’ says Gladys.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Vernon straightens up. He looks at his wife. ‘Run along and play now, boy. You could pretend to be Robin Hood!’

  Elvis gazes at his mother, but she is too busy smiling at Vernon to notice.

  A low growl comes from behind him. He turns to see Corinne on all fours, pretending to be a dog, her corn doll’s head jammed between her teeth.

  When he looks back, his parents have disappeared into Uncle Frank and Aunt Leona’s bedroom.

  * * *

  As far as Elvis can tell, his daddy sleeps pretty much all the time.

  At night, the three of them share a pallet on the kitchen floor, but as soon as Aunt Leona and Uncle Frank have left for work, Vernon makes use of their bed. While his mama is doing laundry in the yard, Elvis sneaks into the bedroom to get a look at this man, his father.

  He has the Robin Hood picture in his pocket, not because he loves it but because he wants to keep it safe without having to see it, and he fingers its wilted edges as he stands by the bed, watching the hump beneath the quilt. Mama spent some time trying to get Daddy out of the bedroom this morning. First she talked to him real sweet, offering coffee and biscuits and even fried apple pie. Then she raised her voice and asked how long it was going to be like this. Elvis heard no reply. After that, his mama had let his daddy be.

  Elvis moves closer and examines Vernon’s face. It’s creased into the pillow, and is almost the same yellowy colour as the flour sack from which the case is stitched. Elvis tries to recall what this face used to be like, but can picture only his daddy’s dark blonde curls, which are still there. His voice, too, is the same, although Elvis remembers his father singing ‘Clementine’ and ‘I’ll Fly Away’. No songs have been sung in the house since Vernon’s return. There’s that sour smell about him, still. Perhaps he’s been sleeping so hard that he hasn’t had a chance to wash. Mama says he’s tired, after being away so long, and needs to rest.

  Then Vernon’s eyes flick open. They are gummy and red around the rims. Elvis ducks, too late.

  ‘What you up to, boy?’

  Elvis slides his body beneath the bed, and waits.

  ‘Come out and let me look at you.’

  Elvis stays whe
re he is, studying the unswept floorboards.

  ‘You like that old picture I got you?’

  ‘Yessir,’ says Elvis, from under the bed.

  ‘That’s good, son. Did I tell you who it is?’

  ‘Robin Hood.’

  ‘Naw. That’s Errol Flynn, pretending to be Robin Hood. For a movie. You seen a movie, right?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  Gladys sometimes takes Elvis to see a picture playing on the back of the flat-bed truck that parks outside Uncle Noah’s store during the summertime. But he hasn’t seen any movie with this man in it.

  The mattress judders above, and his father lets out a long sigh.

  ‘Shall I get Mama?’ asks Elvis.

  ‘What for?’

  Elvis can’t think of a reason that would sound good.

  ‘Come out, now,’ says his father, gently.

  Elvis scoots from beneath the bed but remains sitting on the floor. His father has his hands tucked beneath his head.

  ‘When you getting up, Daddy?’

  ‘When I’m good and ready,’ says Vernon, gazing at the ceiling.

  ‘You wanna play some? I got a truck …’

  ‘Not now, boy.’

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Vernon’s eyes roll towards Elvis. Slowly, he heaves himself into a sitting position. Before speaking, he takes a long drink from the cup on the nightstand.

  ‘Man name of Orville Bean, owns half of East Tupelo, messed with me. He wrote me a cheque for a hog I sold him, and it said “four dollars”. That hog was worth more like forty. So I changed the numbers on the cheque. That’s all.’

  ‘You got sent to the pen ’cause you changed some numbers?’

  Vernon presses his lips together. ‘Uh-huh. But it was wrong of me to do that.’

  Elvis nods in what he hopes is an understanding way.

  ‘You been taking care of Mama good, I can tell,’ says Vernon.

  Then a loud voice comes from the front of the house.

  ‘I gotta talk to my son,’ it says.

  There’s a slam, and his mama’s voice is pleading, ‘You can’t go in there right now, JD …’

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ Vernon mutters. He looks at Elvis. ‘Fetch me them pants,’ he instructs, nodding at the chair beneath the window. Elvis does as he’s told. From the other room comes the sound of boots treading the boards, his mother offering coffee, and chairs scraping. And the voice again.

  ‘Don’t he know it’s nearly noon? His brain get fried in Parchman, or what?’

  Vernon buckles his belt and pushes open the door. Elvis trails behind.

  Elvis’s granddaddy is sitting in the biggest chair, the one with the fancy cushion Mama made. The sight of this man’s bony behind crushing Mama’s fine embroidery makes Elvis’s breath come quick. The man smooths his hair back with a big hand and blinks through his thick eyeglasses. His eyebrows are black and wiry. Sometimes this man is sitting on the porch when Elvis and Gladys visit Grandma Minnie Mae, but as far as Elvis is aware he has not visited this house before now.

  ‘Daddy,’ says Vernon, from the doorway.

  ‘Son.’

  Elvis has never seen any look other than a scowl on his granddaddy’s face, and today it is particularly impressive.

  ‘My wife fixed you some coffee?’ Vernon asks.

  ‘No need,’ says JD. ‘This won’t take long.’

  Elvis makes a break for it and runs to his mother, who is standing by the bucket and dipper with the coffee pot in her hand. He hangs on to her apron.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Daddy?’ asks Vernon.

  JD cocks his head to the side. ‘We oughta talk private.’

  ‘Anything you got to say to me you can say in front of my family,’ says Vernon.

  ‘If that’s how you want it,’ says JD.

  Gladys puts the coffee pot back on the shelf and presses a hand to Elvis’s shoulder.

  JD narrows his eyes. ‘What I gotta say is this: why ain’t you out working a job, boy?’

  ‘Ain’t found me one yet, sir.’

  ‘I hear the WPA’s looking for men to dig latrines down in town. That sounds like it’d be near perfect for you, with all your experience shovelling pig shit.’

  A strange noise comes from Vernon’s throat.

  ‘JD,’ says Gladys, ‘I’ll thank you to remember that my son is in the room, and his ears don’t need to hear no cursing—’

  ‘You need to get your ass down there,’ JD continues. ‘You just can’t get out the pen and go to bed, boy. Folks is saying you as good as dead in here. You gotta step up. Provide for this family. Your gal here’s been doing it long enough. Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘Like you did, Daddy?’ says Vernon, looking up.

  There’s a silence. Gladys’s fingertips dig into Elvis’s shoulders, making him squirm away.

  JD pushes back his chair and strolls across to Elvis like he has all the time in the world. Crouching down, he peers at his grandson. A powerful smell of tobacco comes off him as he pats Elvis on the chest, hard, three times. ‘You listen to your granddaddy, boy, and listen good. Don’t be like your paw here. You know what he did, don’t you? He cheated. Lied. Stole. Took the easy way out. That ain’t no way to live.’

  ‘Reckon that’s the only way you taught me,’ says Vernon.

  In a flash, JD is up on his feet. He marches across to his son, draws a hand back, and slaps him across the face.

  Elvis pees in his pants, just a little bit.

  Vernon stands there, hanging on to his face like it might fall off.

  ‘Get out of this house,’ says Gladys, her voice trembling. She goes to the door and holds it open, leaving Elvis standing alone, exposed to these two men, one with his head in his hands, the other breathing hard and opening and closing his fist.

  ‘Get out,’ she repeats.

  JD picks up his hat. At the door he turns to Gladys and says, ‘I feel right sorry for you, woman.’

  ‘You ain’t got the faintest idea what he’s been through,’ says Gladys. ‘He don’t deserve no more punishment.’

  ‘Naw,’ says JD, ‘and neither do you, I don’t reckon.’

  Still scowling, he places his hat on his head, tips it to Elvis, then leaves.

  1942

  Gladys’s body is glued to the bed, sweat oozing beneath the flesh of her breasts as she listens to the sounds of the warm June night: Vernon’s breath, shallow and steady as the whirring of the katydids in the trees; the low voices of Vester and Clettes from the neighbouring rooms, quarrelling over how much liquor Vester has consumed. She counts herself lucky that, whatever else he may be, Vernon is not a true drunkard. Unlike her, Vernon will take a drink or two, even though he calls himself Assembly of God; but Gladys has never had cause to drag her husband out of a bar by his hair. There have been times she’s convinced herself he will turn to the bottle. After all, he’s not as strong as she is. Ever since Vernon returned from Parchman, Gladys has felt her age: as the older one she must carry her husband through.

  She hasn’t always felt this way, though. Even now, aged thirty, she fears there is something of the devil in her. Had it begun when she’d thrown that ploughshare blade? She can’t have been more than ten years old when the farm owner went for her daddy and sisters that day they were working his field. His high-topped boots had glinted like new money in the sun as he steadied his horse and brought back his whip. She’d ripped the sharp end from a ploughshare and chunked it right at his head, shocked by the strength that was suddenly hers; she’d wanted nothing less than to kill that man stone dead. She’d missed; the blade had fallen to the ground not far from her own feet. The man had been so surprised that he’d laughed and spared her daddy the whipping. It had been Gladys who’d been hit, later, by her father’s own hand.

  She’d felt it dancing, too, on Saturday nights before she was married, when she’d experienced music as something that entered not just her ear, but als
o her belly.

  Vernon had watched her, then. He was a boy who smiled easily and laughed at nothing at all. After the grief of her beloved daddy’s early death and her mama’s lifelong sickness, meeting Vernon had been like opening a window onto a sunny morning. All the Presleys were handsome but the twenty-one-year-old Gladys had thought Vernon, who was seventeen, too young and too good-looking for her, and she’d tried Vester, his older and more sedate brother, first. But then she’d seen the wanting look in Vernon’s cool blue eyes as he’d watched her dance. Unlike other boys, he didn’t stare at her body, but at her face; it wasn’t until they were alone, around the side of his mama’s house, that he’d glanced down at the front of her dress and said, ‘Gladys Smith, you look more alive than any girl I ever laid eyes on.’ Not two months after that, they eloped to the next county and were married in secret. Vernon added a year to his age to make it legal, and Gladys took three years off hers to make it seem respectable.

  The idea that she was pretty had come as a surprise to Gladys, whose physical shortcomings were often remarked upon by her own mother, who was beautiful and petite all her life. Even in her sickbed, Doll Smith had kept a comb and a mirror beneath the pillow, in case visitors came calling. ‘Gladys,’ she’d say, ‘where in the name of all that’s holy did you get those shoulders? I swear there’s more power there than in your daddy’s whole body.’ To Gladys, it had never felt powerful to be big. It had felt only shameful and awkward.

  But Vernon took away that shame, at least at first. He said he would tell his brother how it was now: he might be younger, but he was smarter than Vester, and had always told him how things were. Gladys had seen no reason to doubt this. Not long after, Vester married Gladys’s sister, Clettes, which had been a load off her mind.

  Five nights of broken sleep have taken their toll. Gladys’s eyelids droop, and, before she knows it, she dreams she’s cradling Elvis, the small baby who loved to sleep on her chest. Like a hot rock, he balanced on her sternum. He was never heavy, but when unconscious he was dense, somehow; his limbs fell into her flesh with the weight of sleep. She would clasp both hands around his back, rest her chin on his head, close her eyes, breathe in his warm baby scent, concentrate on his breathing. It was important to hold him there; she was convinced that if he fell from her chest she would roll in her sleep and crush the life from his beautiful limbs.