Down Sand Mountain (30 page)

Reverend Dunn said a lot of this looking at Darla’s mom and Darwin, who were the only ones sitting down except for an old man in a brown suit who kept doubling over and coughing and who I figured out must be the grandfather they were all so scared of, who I hadn’t ever seen. I recognized him from the coughing. He didn’t look anything like a general. He looked like he ought of have been the one whose funeral we were at, and I couldn’t help wondering how somebody so old and pitiful like him could make Darla and Darwin and their mom so nervous all the time.

Reverend Dunn also looked at Mom and Dad and me and Wayne and Tink a lot, too. I guess he didn’t know too many others of the few people that were there except Dr. Rexroat, who seemed like he might fall asleep standing up with everybody else around the grave. He winked at me once, or I thought he did, but it might have just been that his eye twitched. Another guy it took me a little while to recognize was Walter Wratchford. He stood just a little ways behind Mrs. Turkel’s folding chair, and stepped up to hand her a Kleenex or a rag or something when she started crying the hardest. He had on a brown suit, with a brown vest buttoned all the way up the front, and his hair was still long, but he had put some oil in it and combed it straight back and even shaved. Like I said, I hardly recognized him and I also was pretty surprised to see him there with the Turkels like that, out in the open. The grandfather every now and then turned partway around to sort of glare at Walter Wratchford, but Walter Wratchford didn’t even look back at the old man; he just stayed right there behind Mrs. Turkel, which I thought was pretty nice for him to do.

I didn’t see anybody who might be Darla’s dad.

The funniest thing — and it wasn’t really funny, because nothing was funny that day — but the funniest thing, anyway, was Darwin, who didn’t have a suit on like everybody else, but wore a Nehru jacket with a white turtleneck shirt underneath. I hadn’t ever seen one before except in a picture in
Life
magazine of hippies. He wasn’t crying like his mom, or barking out the coughs like his granddad, or looking over everything like Walter Wratchford. He was just sitting there staring at his hands, tracing the lines with his finger. Tink said he looked like a dentist, dressed that way, but she said that a lot later, after the funeral was over. Once, Darwin looked over at me for a minute until I gave him a little wave that I hoped nobody saw and he gave me a little wave back.

The cemetery was a mishmash of gravestones, some of them little white tablets like the one they had for Darla, which didn’t even have anything written on it yet, and some of them big with stuff carved on them, like a lamb or a cross or a baby angel. Most of those were old and had green algae moss all over. In the middle of the whole cemetery was the oldest oak tree I ever saw — even older than the one down in the Boogerbottom. It wasn’t tall, but the branches spread way out and some of them dipped down to the ground where kids could climb on them if their parents would ever let them. There was one mausoleum and that was all, a marble shed with a rusted door that I bet hadn’t been opened in a hundred years. That place scared me, since I figured they just had the coffins sitting in there on big shelves. Wayne had told me that a boy got trapped inside one night and nobody heard him yelling for help, and when they opened the mausoleum the next day, they found him, dead. I knew it wasn’t true, but it scared me, anyway, because you never know — it
could
happen.

I looked over at Darla’s mom another time and Darwin must have been watching me, because as soon as I did, he waved at me again. Wayne elbowed me, but I felt sorry for Darwin so I waved back again, but then I didn’t look at him anymore, just in case.

Reverend Dunn had said some more stuff that I didn’t listen to very well, and then he read from the Beatitudes:

For some reason he left out a couple of verses, including the one I always liked the best because I kind of thought it might be talking about me sometimes: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely —”

Instead, Reverend Dunn skipped ahead to the one about not hiding your light under a bushel, which was the last he read: “‘You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.’

“Darla Turkel lit a lamp,” Reverend Dunn said. “But she never put it under a bushel. She put it on a stand, and it gave light to all in the house.” He rubbed his nose, which was a lot redder now than when he started, then he asked everybody to join him in the Lord’s Prayer. Everybody did, or just about everybody.

Walter Wratchford’s lips moved but I don’t think he was saying all the right words, and Mrs. Turkel was still crying too hard. I didn’t want to look at Darwin anymore, so I looked way off to the oak tree, and that’s when I saw a colored boy over there behind the trunk, sitting on one of those low branches. I studied him even though I should have had my eyes closed for the prayer, but what the heck could he be doing there? I’d been around the Peace River Cemetery enough playing “Taps” to know he didn’t work there. Plus he had on a white shirt, which anybody that worked there wouldn’t ever wear, since they were always digging graves, filling in graves, planting sod, weeding, mowing. He looked like he was Wayne’s age, and I wondered if maybe he was the colored boy that Darla got in trouble with down at the cemetery before I even started hanging around with her, the one that ran away when the police came because him and Darla were setting off firecrackers. If that story was even true.

I wished I could ask Darla about it, and I wished I had asked her about it before, when I had the chance, when me and her were sitting on the Bowlegs Creek bridge one of those afternoons and moving our feet together through the dance steps her mom was trying to teach me.

Standing there thinking those things, that was when I got so sad about Darla myself. It was a hard, hard kind of sad I hadn’t ever felt before, where all the ways you try not to let it get you — fretting about tying your tie right, trying like crazy to figure out how the accident could have happened, getting all the answers to all the stuff you thought were such great mysteries in your town, worrying what people think about other people, worrying what people think about you —

The kind of sad where all that dissolves, and you dissolve, too.

They finished up the Lord’s Prayer and everybody just stood there for a few minutes with their heads bowed, not getting up, just a lot of sniffing, even Wayne, and that made me start sniffing, too. Dad put his arm around me and I let him. Mom put her arm around Wayne and he let her, too. Tink pulled at her little white gloves so they were way down on her hands, but since the fingers of the gloves were kind of stiff, it looked funny, like she had really long hands or something. She did prayer hands with them still long like that, but she wasn’t serious about it; she was just messing around like little kids always do. I couldn’t see what she was up to after that because I guess I must have been crying by then. I didn’t want to get any tears on Dad’s coat, or stuff from my runny nose, either, but he let me bury my face against him, anyway, and he kept his arm around me once everybody started leaving, and all the way back to the car.

DAD LOST THE ELECTION.

Some kids at school said it was because Dad liked colored people too much. Connolly Voss went on and on about that at lunch one day until Wayne pointed his fork and said the next guy to get stabbed at Sand Mountain High School was going to be Connolly if he didn’t shut up — and it wasn’t going to just be in the hand, either. But later on even Wayne said he guessed the colored-people issue was the main reason for how the election turned out. “Just look at the tire fire,” he said.

David Tremblay said it wasn’t about the colored people; it was about the annexation and Dad wanting to close down The Springs. I guess everybody had their own theory. I’d been so sad about Darla that at first it was kind of a relief to have the election to talk about, even though it did turn out bad. But then the more I thought about it, the more I figured the reason Dad lost was because of me. If I hadn’t stabbed Moe, Moe wouldn’t have beat up Wayne, and David wouldn’t have poisoned the roll, and I wouldn’t have got blamed for doing it, and Dad wouldn’t have got blamed for me.

One day after Dad came home from work, I followed him out to the shed and told him that. He listened real careful and nodded — not like he agreed with me, but just to let me know he heard what I was saying. He had a couple of pairs of old roller skates of mine and Wayne’s on his worktable, which he was taking apart, and he held one of them and spun the wheel while I talked. I guess I thought he would tell me I was wrong to blame myself and that it wasn’t my fault at all. That’s what I wanted to hear, but at the same time I wouldn’t have believed him but just known he was saying what dads are supposed to say.

When I finished, though, he stopped spinning the skate wheel but kept nodding for a second, then said he understood how I could feel that way, and that some people probably did hold that Moe business against us, but there were a lot of factors in how the election turned out and it wouldn’t be fair to point to just one and say that was the reason.

“So I guess you don’t get to take all the blame on this one,” he said. “Sorry to have to tell you.”

I kind of laughed when he said that, and him, too. Then he told me it was a lot closer an election than people thought it would be, and they even got out some of the colored vote, which was encouraging. After a while I asked Dad what he was doing with the roller skates and he said he was making us skateboards like he’d seen some kids riding on up in Bartow. He said I could help him if I wanted, and I said sure, and he let me do some sawing and sanding on the boards we needed before he attached the wheels.

Reverend Dunn came over to our house a couple of nights after the election to tell Dad that they didn’t want him on the board of trustees of the Methodist Church anymore. Reverend Dunn and Mom and Dad sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and we couldn’t hear what they were saying after that, but I did see them all three holding hands and bowing their heads while Reverend Dunn said a prayer. After Reverend Dunn left, me and Wayne followed Dad out to his shed again. We caught up with him right when he was unscrewing one of his nail jars, which I figured was the one where he was hiding his cigarettes again. Wayne asked Dad what happened, and Dad said they just wanted some new perspectives on the board and it was good to have that and he’d been a trustee for four years and change was good sometimes. Wayne said, “Did Reverend Dunn want you to be off of the board because of the election?”

Dad shook his head. “No, son. It wasn’t Reverend Dunn. He was just the one who had to tell me about what they decided.”

Wayne asked Dad why he hadn’t been at the meeting, since he was still on the board of trustees before they voted him off. Dad said they must have just forgot to tell him about it, was all. Later Wayne told me he didn’t think what Dad said was true — none of it. I wasn’t so sure, because I didn’t think Dad would tell us a lie about anything but maybe was just confused a little bit. The phone rang a lot the rest of that night and it was people from the church calling to talk to Mom or Dad. I heard them talking about a petition, but nothing ever came of it that I ever knew about.

When we were lying in bed, I asked Wayne if he thought anything else bad was going to happen because of the election. Wayne said no, he didn’t think so. He said people forget about stuff pretty quick, was how he saw it, whether it was good or bad. They just forget about it.

Something else bad did happen, though, which was that Mr. Ellis lost his job at the high school, the same as a couple of years before when he lost his job at the mine because of the strike. Another colored man I hadn’t ever seen before showed up at the school, doing the janitor job one day, only nobody exactly realized it right away because I guess most people just didn’t notice something like that, but I did.

Wayne told me it was because Mr. Ellis helped Dad on the campaign by trying to get out the colored vote — that that’s why they fired him from the school.

Dad made me and Wayne go with him in the car to Mr. Ellis’s house one night, which we were glad at least wasn’t in the Boogerbottom but turned out to be one of the houses I saw that day of the colored soldier’s funeral, down the long dirt road on the other side of the Peace River at the same place as the colored church. A couple of low dogs with long bodies and short legs circled the car as soon as we stopped. In the dark they looked liked sharks but Dad made us get out anyway. It wasn’t too cold. Mr. Ellis was sitting on his front porch with his wife.