on the night shore

nah we cousins

.

.

.

"me, mostly. but he ain't mean it"

Smoke feels oddly traditional about wanting to carve the meat before dinner and goes to wash dishes in the kitchen when the noise of the crowd becomes too much.

Annie has been very anxious about making everything nice, but finds that her workload is smaller because of the extra help from her two boyfriend’s, leaving her to have more time to sit back and enjoy the festivities than she had anticipated.

All of Annie’s siblings/cousins/nieces/nephews come up from NOLA to see her new house and even though Stack is the more natural “roughhouse with the kids” type, something about Smoke naturally draws the kids in. He ends up helpless with 5-6 misc. children crawling all over him.

They have Annie’s older male relatives build a fire in the fireplace (Smoke, Stack, and Annie could have all done this, but they knew they’d need a task to keep these guys occupied) and it turns into a debate about how to build a proper fire.

Annie’s grandma taught her how to bake (between rootwork lessons) and, between her contributions and those from misc. family members, they need a good 1-2 6 ft plastic tables for the dessert spread alone.

Sammie and Pearline stop by on their way to Sammie’s house (Jed is probably the type of hardline preacher to call Christmas pagan, but years back Ruthie held him at gunpoint until he agreed to submit to her demands for a proper Christmas) to lead carols.

If anybody wonders why she is cohabitating with two identical twins, and only one of the bedrooms in the house looks lived in at all, nobody comments on it.

their abusive father zeroing in on stack as the outlet for his beatings, smoke killing their daddy, half way done burying him by the time stack came to - smoke being the BIG BROTHER from the start, keeping stack safe - stack becoming who he is - bit reckless, full of charisma and whimsy because of smoke, in a way, shielding him from the world ("doesn't know how to watch his own back").

thinking of smoke saying how stack is the best thing about him, how stack talks a big game but how it's smoke who kills the snake, smoke who shoots two men for stealing out of his truck, smoke who pulls a gun on sammie and pearline. does he ever think he got more of their daddy in him than stack? where stack can connect with people in a way smoke can't quite follow. stack laying out clothes for him, doing his hair, rolling his cigarettes- giving smoke back some of what the war took.

but I also can't help but think that there is this slight ....almost paternalistic element at times - the way stack looks around for smoke when he's with mary, worried he'll be caught, worried he'll displease him and yet that thing he says when he's turned "don't let that witch come between us again" - there's no doubt that stack loves annie and is clearly DISTRAUGHT when smoke kills her but ...was there ever resentment? did he ever feel betrayed? was it ever only meant to be the two of them against the world?

"he was the best thing about me" "i ain't doing it without you there ain't no me without you" "sorry for not keeping you safe - you always did" the way stack is just that one person smoke can't kill, the way the only time he wavers in his resolve is when his vampire brother talks with him.

“What?” Sammie’s mouth is opening and closing and he’s looking a little dazed. He laughs again and Stack laughs too. “So what I wanna go to Chicago? You did…”

best thing about me was him.