and give the birds more feeder time, but Marcia indignantly forbade him to so much as threaten the family rodent.
Marcia shook the bed and pulled Raff's thin wool blanket partly off his huddled body.
"Time to get up, Scooter. We're going to church, then we're going down to Mobile to have supper with the family."
Church meant the main Methodist church in downtown Clayville. Marcia and all the relatives on her side were Episcopalian, but the closest services held in that denomination were in Brewton, half an hour's drive away. Visits were made there only on special Sundays. Ainesley was a lapsed Southern Baptist and a sometime private atheist who thought poorly of Baptist pastors. But he dutifully took Marcia and Raff to church every Sunday that he wasn't at his store taking inventory. Usually he dropped them off and picked them up after service. Occasionally, however, he put on a coat and tie and sat next to them, enjoying the sonorous comfort of the organ and good hymns, but fretting through the scripture readings and homilies that seemed planned to go on into Monday. The worst part was that he couldn't smoke or take a sip of anything, sitting there in the midst of two hundred or so righteous Alabamians.
Family to Marcia meant her own Semmes family. Her full name was Marcia Semmes Cody. Her son bore the grand name Raphael Semmes Cody. Marcia had made the decision to name him after the Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes, whose warship the Alabama had savaged Union shipping up and down the Atlantic Seaboard before being sunk by a bigger Union gunship while on a provisioning trip off the coast of England.
Semmes was a big name in these parts. To the north of Mobile was the little town of Semmes; and near Bienville Square in downtown Mobile stood the old Admiral Semmes Hotel and a heroic statue of the man himself. There was even an Admiral Semmes Drive, in the better part of the city, as expected. There were the Semmeses of Mobile and the Semmeses of America, spread out with their collateral lines and spousal surnames like the branches of some great oak tree far and wide across the Republic. Their distinguished heritage extended back in multiple lines for three centuries, almost as long as that of America itself.
There were Codys too, of course, distributed widely across South Alabama and over into Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle and beyond, with one branch of the family having recently colonized Australia. They were successful and Southern Baptist and upright for the most part. One was a doctor living just across the Mississippi state line in Pascagoula, but most of the current generation were solid working class--truck drivers, nurses, real estate salesmen. By Marcia's lights they were below the Semmeses, and there was nothing among them that should give pride to her or Raphael. That is, no admirals, generals, governors, senators, or golf champions. No inherited wealth, second home, or memberships in the right charitable foundations, and no invitations to gubernatorial inaugurations.
Although she never spoke of it quite so bluntly around him, Ainesley knew the way Marcia felt. He sensed that she sometimes regretted the rash decision she had made, as a headstrong young woman, to marry him. It was the unspoken tension that haunted their marriage, but he would love her and Raff without reservation no matter what her social origins or how she expressed them. He didn't care about his own relatives very much anyway, one way or the other. He was, for all his foibles and lack of education, a self-contained man. He was intelligent, and passionate at times, and there was of course his code, which no one who knew him well would wish to dispute within his hearing. Without knowing who Epictetus was, or much about the ancient Greeks in general, Ainesley was an authentic philosophical stoic. As he had explained to Raphael, he really lived by the code he had internalized; he dwelled content within it. Marcia understood this solid core of his character, and it meant a lot to her.
This day, however, Marcia's mind was on Mobile and her parents and the home in which she grew up. She prepared to reinvest herself with the grandeur of the Semmeses.
Ainesley stood by the front door. He had cleaned the cab of the pickup and filled the gas tank, and he was beginning to fidget.
Marcia shouted at her son, "Please come on! We haven't got all day!" A chronically high-strung woman,