They came to Jackson at Christmas, or we went to them, bundled into my father’s Ford with starch samples in the back, driving up through the Delta, across the river into Arkansas—five hours plus. We stayed in their big apartment in the hotel. #604. It was festive, jovial, boozy. They all still liked one another—an unusual family. There was a sense of re-uniting and resuming from the time before I was there. Plus I was there, included now. It was the happiest life I’d known.

Bennie, Richard, and Essie, Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1954

In these joint festivities, my father was a son-in-law again—but a father, too. Older. Though now he was 5th—since I was there and much was made of me. Bennie was a boisterous, fat, rakish, pugnacious, sharp-eyed capable man everyone liked, and who cut a swath. A lesser, slightly ludicrous public personage in Little Rock, with his name frequently in the papers. Whereas my father—tall, fleshy, slightly shy, understated but willing, and with the politeness of a more modest-size man—was still a country boy who’d made it to where he’d made it but wasn’t going much further. He stood aside for my grandfather, who captivated me. My father was part of an audience and seemed not to mind.

His brother still lived in town. “Uncle Pat” was heavy, grim-faced, sullen, with a tiny wife crippled by arthritis. Aunt Nora. He booked circus acts for the state fair and had little to say. Terrible things he’d seen in the war were the ostensible reason for his silence. They had no children. On these holiday trips we saw him only in his small house on South Spring Street, and never for longer than an hour. I did not have a brother, so how they were together became the way brothers were. Not close.

On Christmas morning, we always drove to Atkins, to his mother’s, two hours west. We ate Christmas dinner with the likable cousins and his sister and her unlikable pharmacist husband. My father watched his mother stump around her house in fervid insistence that things weren’t the way they were. Dislike or distrust or just dismay with my mother underlay this. Everyone acted polite. I was pronounced to look more like an Uncle William—a deceased Irishman. My father was doted on, teased. Everyone half wished he would stay longer.