Man of the House

Abstract

Man of the House Kim Coleman Foote (bio) his muh was barely a week in the ground when his phone rang with Verna on the line. “Jebby, how soon can you come by the house?” she said in her sugary telephone voice. “I need you to remove your things from the yard.” A sick feeling came to Jeb’s stomach. For the first time since they had moved into their childhood house, it was inhabited by a single person and she thought she owned it. Verna had paid the property taxes, but Jeb had helped their mother with household expenses since he was a teenager. And the deed was technically still in their mother’s name. That meant Jeb [End Page 65] had a right to the place. He’d used the yard for storage for decades, so why should it bother Verna now? Not wanting to risk her winter mood, which could make her go off on you at the drop of a dime, he asked calmly if he could move some things to the basement. “It’s full already.” Lyin ass. “What about the bedrooms, then?” “I’m using them too.” “Come on, Verna. Ain’t you sleepin in the parlor like Muh was? What you doin with both those rooms upstairs?” “That’s my business.” Hands starting to sweat, he scrambled for an alternative. Maybe build a fence? But it would take too long to collect wood. The pieces would be mismatched. That wouldn’t suit her either. “When are you coming, Jeb?” Her words had taken on that ragged edge like their mother’s at her exploding point. “My girlfriends are joining me for tea next week and I don’t want them looking at all this junk.” Her friends had been by before and seen the yard, along with everybody else in Vauxhall. And their mother never called it junk. She didn’t exactly offer compliments, but she once compared it to artwork in a museum she visited over in New York with the family she kept house for. But the man who created the work in the museum was white, and an artist at that. Jeb didn’t consider his things art. They were simply what people no longer wanted— what they thought was worthless. When he started working as a trash man, he was shocked at what people threw away. The broken chairs and rusted doorknobs, patched tires and dented pots, scrap metal and auto parts, used cans and bottles. So much of it could be mended and resurrected, unlike people when they die. “Muh didn’t mind my stuff,” he muttered. “Mother didn’t mind nothin her baby Jebby did.” There it was: the real reason she wanted his things gone. Jeb could acknowledge that their mother did beat and yell at him less, but he figured it was because their daddy had given him more than his fair share. Jeb had practically been the old man’s whipping post. And it was natural for their mother to defer to Jeb about matters after their daddy died. After all, Jeb became the man of the house. He tried to get Verna off the subject by proposing the fence, but when she hissed the word “junk” again, and “eyesore,” their conversation dissolved into yelling and cussing, with Verna dropping more of her g’s. Before slamming the phone down, she said: “I’m gon get a dump truck over here tomorrow and I’m movin it all out, motherfucker.” [End Page 66] This coming from the queen of lies, Jeb didn’t believe it—who in God’s name did she know with a dump truck? But he never knew when to call her bluff. That afternoon, he rounded up his closest friend Booker, his hunting buddies, and a former coworker. As they congregated in the yard on Waldorf Place, surveying his life’s savings, Jeb noticed Verna peeking from the kitchen window at back. Glowering at her, he mumbled for the men to choose items as payment for helping him. They made their selections and Jeb cringed, especially when his coworker, who also had an eye for the salvageable, indicated the brass...