Thrown-away Child

I thought was a Purse turned out to be a plumber’s toolbox.
    “This is Uncle Bud,” Mama said. The introduction did nothing to explain the matter of a burly cigar-chomping plumber dressed for a date with the ladies’ bridge club. Uncle Bud stuck out a calloused paw, and we shook.
    “So you’re Neil Hockaday, our little Ruby’s new husband.” Uncle Bud puffed some clouds out of his cigar, then removed it from his mouth, lifted a leg and tamped out the butt against the soggy bottom of a rubber-soled boot. He stuffed the cigar down the front of his dress for later. “Vi told me some about you. Says you’re a po-liceman up in New York.”
    “That’s right. And you’re a... plumber?”
    “Finest damn plumber in all New Orleans.“
    “Bud’s half-brother to my late Willis,” Mama said. She patted Bud’s grandly protruding stomach “Bud’s what you call a cook’s fright.”
    “Now come on, honey—I’m a cook’s delight.” Uncle Bud’s weighty box of screwdrivers and steel washers and pipe wrenches clanked as he set it down on the floor. He pulled out a chair, lifted his skirt, and sat down at the table, smoothing newspapers under his sturdy forearms. “What’s for starters, Vi?”
    Mama dished up beans and rice and set this down in front of Bud, along with a fork and some chewy French bread. “Where your wig at?” She asked this of him as if it were a perfectly ordinary question.
    “Ain’t a comfortable day for the topper. I be like a worm in hot ashes if I’s to run around under that wig today. Got it over there in my toolbox, though. You know, case of emergency.”
    “What color’s the wig?” I tried sounding nonchalant.
    “Chestnut brown,” Bud said politely. “With highlights of honey blond.”
    “Ruby hasn’t told you much about the family, has she?” Mama asked.
    “She left out some episodes.”
    “Maybe you want to tell Neil about the dress and all?” Mama suggested to Bud. She shot me a quick roll of her eyes that I took to mean that by-and-by all would become clear. Mama took an iced bottle of pixie out of the sink and gave it to Bud. He flicked off the seal cap with a thumb, like it was nothing more than a penny resting atop the bottleneck.
    Uncle Bud drank down the better part of his beer, then told me, “Well, you know, bein’ a po-lice. A man got to feel safe and sound.”
    “Nothing like a dress for security.”
    “ ’Specially when the Klan’s out for you.”
    “The Klan?”
    “Bud had a little run-in one time up to Mississippi,” Mama said.
    “Little run-in, she call it.” Uncle Bud rubbed his neck with the cool Dixie bottle. “My throat’s still warm from the rope they put ’round it.”
    “You escaped a lynching?” I asked Bud. I looked over at Mama. She shrugged.
    “I had them ofays trippin’ all over they sheets chasin’ after me through the woods.” Bud was drooling beer slightly. “I run away so fast my legs near melted. Ran clear down to here from Hattiesburg. They still be lookin’ to find ol’ Bud.”
    “So the wig and the dress? That’s your disguise?“
    “Well, they ain’t caught me yet.” Bud picked up his fork and started in on the beans and rice.
    “Maybe you living on borrowed time,” Mama said darkly.
    “What’s that s’posed to mean?”
    “You be eating so much you liable to lose that girly figure of yours.”
    Bud, his face stricken, dropped his fork.
    “Shoo,” Mama said, “if I thought of that some years ago I could have saved me a boatload of grocery expense.”
    “I got to go rest, Vi.” Head in his hands, Bud lumbered off into the parlor, where I heard him fall into the couch like a freshly axed tree.
    “Uncle Bud’s story, it’s for real?” I asked Mama.
    “Ask him more about it if you want. Bud don’t take up the rest of your life telling you his lynching tale, he’ll start in on the night the Martians came swooped down from the sky and took him for a ride in their funny plane.”
    “I get your drift. Tell me something, though. Don’t his customers think it’s a little strange when their plumber shows up in a dress to unclog a drain?“
    “Honey, this here’s New Orleans. Nobody’s going to pay no mind to a trifling thing like that.”
    The subject of Uncle Bud seemed at a natural close, besides which we could hear him snoring contentedly. So I asked Mama to further illuminate another family legend, namely that of her sister, Rose, and Toby Jones.
    “Well, I’ll tell you if you sure