Free The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe Page B

life, how to do certain tasks, and so forth. You can relearn the skills; the memories may or may not return.”
    Since she’d been semiconscious with a feeding tube down her throat, she’d only been able to nod. Really, though, what other response could there be?
    She turned the mandolin in her hands. It was light, and felt fragile compared to the heavy, solid things she’d handled for the past two years. She had refused to take it with her to basic training, and from there to her deployment in Iraq, because she wanted nothing to remind her of Needsville. But now it was more tangible than the metal guns, equipment, and vehicles she’d gotten to know intimately.
    “Shit,” she sighed, and felt her eyes itch as tears tried to form. But like her memories, they never quite appeared.

 
     
    7
     
    Don Swayback sat down at his mother’s kitchen table. He used to think of it as his table, too, but since he’d grown up, he had a hard time feeling connected to this old house, these old things, even this old woman now settling into her own seat across from him. Even the town, Rossell, had grown and expanded until it was unfamiliar and alien.
    “It’s good to see you, son,” his mother said. Her name was Gloriana, although everyone called her Glory. “And it’s not even Mother’s Day. Shouldn’t you be at work? You didn’t get fired, did you?”
    “You know, if you keep picking on me, I’ll stop coming at all,” he teased.
    “Then I wouldn’t have to do dishes more than once a month,” she shot back. She was eighty-two, still self-sufficient except for the twice-weekly cleaning woman.
    Don sipped his coffee and buttered a biscuit. “Mom, can I ask you something? Which side of the family has the Tufa in it, yours or Dad’s?”
    Glory’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Lord, son, why are you asking something like that?”
    “I have to get an interview with Bronwyn Hyatt.”
    “Who?”
    “You know, that girl from over in Needsville who was captured by the Iraqis? Got rescued on live TV?”
    “Oh, I sure remember that. They played it enough on the news. Well, now, that’s just something,” Glory said with a shake of her head. “Hasn’t she been talked to enough?”
    “That’s just it,” Don said as he added homemade pear reserves atop the butter. “She’s been talked about, but not to. No one’s really had an in-depth interview with her about what it was like to be a Needsville Tufa so far from home.”
    “And that carpetbagger you work for wants you to do it?”
    He nodded. “The Tufas don’t cotton to outsiders, so I figure the best way would be to go through family. I know we’re related to some Tufas somehow, but I don’t know the particulars.”
    “Well, what makes you think I do? We don’t associate with that Needsville trash, never have.”
    “Then where’d I get this?” Don said, and tugged on a lock of his black hair.
    Glory sighed. “If you must know, son, it’s through your late daddy’s side of the family. The Swaybacks mixed with the Tufas when your great-granddaddy Forrest married a Tufa widow woman named Benji. I can’t remember what that was short for. They met working on one of them Roosevelt WPA projects during the Depression. Something about ‘documenting the rural lifestyle,’ or some such nonsense.” Her disdain for Roosevelt, Democrats in general, and the Tufa all combined to give her words a sour, bitter flavor.
    “Do you know Benji’s family name?”
    Glory shook her head. “Your daddy’s family never talked about Grandaddy Forrest very much. He’d passed on by the time I met your daddy.” She suddenly snapped her fingers. “But you know what? I bet it’s writ down in the old family Bible that your aunt Raby has. She’s the last of your daddy’s brothers and sisters, so I know she’s got it, probably tucked away in the attic or something. You might drive out there to see.”
    Don nodded. He took a bite of biscuit, and was transported for a moment back