A Far Piece to Canaan (37 page)

Tears come up in Lonnie's eyes and I kind of looked away when I answered like I didn't know they were there. “Wudn't just you. None of us did right and what happened was all our faults. You're th' best man of all of us, Lonnie. I've thought that for a long time. And I'm always gonna be your friend.”

Then we just kind of sat. He was the same boy I knew before, but somehow now he seemed different. Finally, he slid off the wagon, stuck his hand out, and we shook.

“I best be gettin' home. Pa and me are workin' up wood for winter,” then he moved toward a ventilator, slipped out, and was gone.

I sat on the wagon for a while thinking about all that happened. I wondered if we went back to the start of things, would we have done different. Without knowing all that would happen if we didn't tell, I mean. I couldn't say and that really bothered me. Ben was dead, stock was killed, I went crazy, everybody around got scared out of their wits, and I still didn't know if I would have done things different. People thought high of me now and I was dumber'n owl shit. I went back to the house feeling good about Lonnie and bad about myself.

After Christmas, I started feeling a lot better and by the time the cast come off my arm for good, I was well enough in my head to visit Ben and Cain and Abel's graves. I lay on their graves and bawled, telling them what happened to me, and how I felt about them, and asked Ben to forgive me for letting him down and said that I was going to make it up to him someday.

I
t was about this time that things started going bad for the Mulligans. They hadn't been doing real great since Alfred got sick, but they still managed to get their work done. Also, they were moving to Red Bill Rogers' place a crop year away, and no matter what else happened, that kept them going.

Then Red Bill died. The Franklins got his farm because they had promised Red Bill, if anything happened to him, to take care of the magnolian idiot Red Bill lived with. The Franklins wanted to work the farm themselves, so that left Alfred out.

Alfred took losing the farm awful hard. He had been counting on cropping Red Bill's place and ever' penny he had was tied up in mules and equipment. Wouldn't have been so bad if there was anyplace else for him to rent, but times were changing and the new Ford tractors were really low to the ground and wouldn't turn over in steep places and everybody was quitting on horses and mules. If you wanted to get a good place to rent, you had to have a tractor. For a while Alfred just stopped talking, then he began going into wild spells where he'd tear up the house. He stayed that way until almost May and when he did start talking, it was to a wall. Fred said you could ask him a question and he'd set on that old no-back chair and turn to the wall and start telling it what you wanted to know. After a while, he talked to that wall even if you didn't ask him a question, sometimes gettin' flaming mad and hitting it with his fists, yelling he was being cheated by some guy named Cosmoton. One day Alfred grabbed Annie Lee by the throat and told her if he ever heard of her fooling around with that Rooshian Cosmoton sonamabitch again he'd beat her until she couldn't walk and did she understand that! Fred said it was the first time he'd ever seen Annie Lee scared.

Over the next few weeks, Alfred come around some. He still talked to the wall, but at least he didn't threaten to beat up on anybody. That was a tough summer, boy. With Alfred being like he was, Fred was left with all the Mulligans' work, and Dad and Mom and me with ours, but we finally got the crops out. I saw Fred every day because we swapped work. But that's what it was, work, with never a day off.

Alfred started doing a lot better about the end of tobacco setting time and helped quite a bit with getting in the hay. The crop looked good though, and we figured all the bad things had happened, then it set in raining and rained for two solid weeks. When it dried off enough we could walk through the tobacco again, we saw that half the plants were dying from wire worms. Dad talked about discing it up and doing a total reset, but we didn't have enough plants for that and had to reset by hand, which took two weeks of bending our backs.

The Mulligans' whole strawberry crop got mold from the wet and they lost it all, berries and plants. Fred and me got their tobacco reset and that seemed to help Alfred, who had almost gone plumb crazy.

Dad was feeling a little down and was tired, of course, but the price of hogs had gone to twenty-nine cents a pound. That really helped Alfred because he stood to make a lot more money from his hogs than he thought and said by God he didn't need Red Bill, he'd just rent someplace else. Dad felt good too because we had near a hundred head and they were going to be at two hundred pounds by late September. They looked great until one day Dad come in for dinner through the hog lot. He was quiet and Mom noticed it.

“Is something wrong, Morris?”

“I don't know yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don't know yet,” he answered gruff, and didn't look up from his food.

“Do you think something's wrong?”

Dad kept eating quiet, then said, “I think one of th' sows is sick.”

“What makes you think that?” Mom asked.

“She just seems listless. She ate pretty well this mornin', but she's actin' strange.” He pushed the rest of his food away and got up. “M'dom, I have t' change th' cattle this afternoon, then I'm gonna hoe corn. Can you watch that sow for th' rest of th' day?”

“Sure,” Mom answered.

Dad left the house, then come back and stuck his head in the door. “If that sow looks any worse, have Samuel quit plowing and come get me, okay?”

“Okay,” said Mom.

Dad looked at me, worried. “She looks any worse, you come get me . . . right?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered, and he walked out the door and headed toward the fields.

I'd been plowing about an hour when Mom came and got me. It didn't take a vet to see which was the sick hog because she was coughing and stretched out on her side grunting as she breathed. I didn't know how sick she was until I tried to get her up. She wouldn't move even after I kicked her. Dad tried to rouse her too and when she didn't move, he called the vet.

About an hour later, the vet come and told Dad it was hog cholera. We dug a big pit and poured in slack lime and shot every hog and buried them. The next day, Alfred's hogs come down with cholera too. Dad looked like the world fell on him, and Mom was crying and saying why did these things always happened to us? Just when we were going good something always come along and knocked us down. Alfred just talked to the wall.

At night I could hear Mom and Dad talking, and Dad said if the tobacco didn't sell well we wouldn't be able to buy much of a place at all.

F
or about a week, Dad was sick as a mule over losing the hogs. I could hear him and Mom talking late at night after they went to bed. At first, they talked about not buying and staying on Berman's for another year, but Mom was against it because she said the show Nate was giving us just wudn't good enough and Dad should be on his own place.

By early August, everybody was surprised at how good the tobacco looked. After that, Dad bounced back. Alfred bounced back some too. The bad luck wudn't over though. One day come a really black cloud. First the wind hit, then the hail. When it quit, every stalk of corn and tobacco that wudn't twisted by the wind was tore to pieces by the hail. Alfred went plumb crazy and Dad couldn't eat or sleep.

Fred and me only went fishing once that whole summer. Lonnie was working every day and we never did see him. He didn't go to church anymore. His dad took on another three acres of tobacco on the Madison County side of the river and from what Mrs. Miller told Mamie, Lonnie's pa was going to let him keep half the money it made.

With everything that had happened I was almost as down as Dad. Then Bob come home from engineering camp and that made me feel better. One day he grabbed me around the waist, hoisted me over his head, and asked if I could go anywhere and do anything for one day, where would I go and what would I do?

“Go see th' Reds play and take Fred and Mr. Mulligan along.”

“Done!” he yelled.

“Yippee,” I shouted, and asked if it was all right to tell Fred.

“Sure,” he said.

It was the first happy thing that happened in months and I took off, boy. I was at the barbwire gap before I remembered I didn't ask when we were going. I was turning around to go back when Fred saw me, and came running. “Hidey, hidey,” he said, puffing as he come up.

“Hidey, Fred Cody,” I said. “What you doin' nowadays?”

“Comin' t' see if you wanted t' go fishin'. We ain't been this whole year. I got an extry pole so you don't have to go back for yourn.”

“That's a good idea,” I said, and we walked back to the Mulligans' and began digging worms. While we were digging, I could hear Alfred's old radio blaring away with Waite Hoyt, the announcer, telling about the game between the Reds and Dodgers. Ewell Blackwell was pitching for the Reds and he was great so we went inside to listen a little.

Alfred was where he always was when he was home and a game was on, sitting on the no-back chair, his elbows on a little peeling table. In front of him was the old brown Delco-battery humpback radio. Alfred was yelling with every play and talking to the wall.

Carl Furillo come up for the Dodgers and Alfred said, “Ain't nobody got a hit off Blackwell yet. Come on, Whip . . . I always call him, Th' Whip,” and Waite Hoyt said, “Blackie kicks and fires, and Furillo gets around on it and there's a drive out into deep right-center field, and that ball's up there, it's going . . . going . . . gone, over the right-field wall for a home run for Carl Furillo, his thirteenth of the season, and the score is tied one to—”

Alfred jumped up and screamed, “Shit-far! That dumb sonamabitch! He throwed hit right down th' center,” and he leaped around the room, kicked over the no-back, kicked the bed, and screamed, “Shit-far” again and again, then Blackie got out of the inning.

The Reds scored a lot of runs the next inning and with Blackie pitching, it wudn't hard to know we were going to win, so Fred and me left. Alfred didn't though. He sat right there yelling and talking to the wall and was happy which was good because we only won about every fourth day, when Blackie pitched.

Heading down to the pond I kept trying to find the best way to tell Fred about the trip to see the Reds without showing how dumb I was about not finding out when. While we were unwinding our poles and baiting up I kind of matter-of-fact said, “Fred, how 'bout you 'n' me and Bob and your pa goin' t' Cincinnati t' see th' Reds play?”

Fred looked at me like I was an idiot. “Lordy, yes, hun'ney,” he said, laughing.

“No, I mean it,” I said. “Bob and me are goin' and he said it would be nice if you and your pa could come.”

Fred cocked his head to the side and stared at me, then looked down at his hook as he baited up. He threw in and looked back at me again.

“When?” he said, and this time he wudn't smiling.

“Oh, sometime this month. We'll run up t' Cincinnati and see a game.” The more I talked, the more Fred stared at me because he knew I had never seen a major league baseball game and I was talking like I went to Cincinnati every day.

“Shit,” he said, finally, and moved his bobber closer to a fallen tree branch.

“I mean it,” I said, with kind of a getting-mad voice as I put my own worm in the water. “You ain't makin' out I'm a liar, are you?”

Fred went blank-faced for a second, then his eyes got wide. “Hun'ney, you really mean hit! Bob's takin' us t' Cincinnati t' see th' Reds play?”

“Yep,” I answered, and grinned.

“When?” he yelled.

“Don't know exactly yet, but Bob will tell me soon,” which wudn't a lie.

Fred let out a “Yehoo! I can't wait t' tell Pa.”

We didn't fish too long, because Fred was busting to tell Alfred, and the first time we didn't get a bite for a minute or two he said, “Come on, hun'ney, ain't no use us sittin' here if they ain't gonna bite,” even though we'd caught about twenty big fat brim.

“Yeehoo! Hot dog! When?” Alfred yelled at the wall when we told him.

“Pretty quick here,” I answered. “I'll tell y'all soon as I know.”

“We goin' to a doubleheader and see Blackie pitch,” Alfred said to the wall. “You just wait and see if we don't see Blackie pitch. Hot dog!”

The game was a doubleheader on a Sunday and sure enough Blackie was going to pitch. There were a lot of us going, boy. Alfred and Fred and Bob and me and one of Bob's buddies that Bob had to take because he owned the Jeep. It was a great Jeep. Bob's buddy got it army surplus. It was about six years old and didn't have sides, just a windshield, which was cracked near the bottom, with other cracks running out like a tree branch.

By eleven o'clock, we had crossed the Ohio River. I never saw such a river. It made the Kentucky look like a creek. I never saw anything like Cincinnati either. It seemed like we just went from one big road to another, with Bob and his buddy yelling and talking loud and drinking beer and whistling at girls. Alfred was laughing and talking with them and telling them all the things he done when he was their age, and Jack, that was Bob's friend, whipping the Jeep in and out of traffic, every now and then giving out with a rebel yell.

Pretty soon we come to the ballpark and it was something. Great tall rafters two decks deep and the green field looking like the lawns in the fancy parts of Lexington. Fred and me just stood there gawking, then some guy come around and showed us where to set.

The first game was great. Blackie pitched, and we won by about ten runs, but the second game was close, with Pittsburgh leading two to one in the sixth. It started to drizzle, and the clouds got heavier. In the eighth, Pittsburgh scored six runs and Alfred went wild, screaming about the “dumb sonamabitches” and about how bad they were playing. Bob and Jack kind of scooched down in their seats, then Bob said we ought to go since we had a long distance to travel.