Jim the Boy (16 page)

Jim swallowed and nodded.

“I hate it,” Whitey said. “I’m just tore up about it, but there ain’t anything I can do.”

“I bet the uncles would give you a job.”

Whitey smiled a little.

“We thought about it, but that probably ain’t too good an idea.”

Jim remembered the night at the tenant house.Mama had never mentioned it. Jim had never mentioned it to Mama.

“I guess not,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Whitey. “I might go up north and I might go out west. Wherever somebody needs a salesman, I’ll go there.”

“That’s a good idea,” Jim said.

“I just wanted you to know that I’ve enjoyed being your friend. I think you’re a good boy.”

Whitey stuck out his hand.

“I might have polio,” Jim said.

“I’ll take that chance.”

Whitey squeezed Jim’s hand in both of his.

“Jim Glass,” he said, “I wish things could have turned out different.”

“I know,” said Jim.

Whitey cocked his head and raised an eyebrow.

“I saw you talking to Mama that night in the woods.”

“You did, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Well. Your mama said she was afraid somebody was going to see us, and I guess she was right.”

“Did you try to marry Mama?”

Whitey laughed, a sad-sounding noise that came up out of his belly in a chuff.

“I tried,” he said. “But she wouldn’t have me.”

“I figured,” said Jim.

“She said she still loves your daddy.”

“He died before I was born.”

“I know,” Whitey said. “It’s a sad thing.”

“I guess so.”

Whitey tilted his head back and locked his fingers behind his neck.

“But we’ve all got to get on with things, don’t we, Jim?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve got to work hard and keep moving and try to do the right thing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You take good care of your mama, okay?”

“I will.”

“And don’t take any wooden nickels.”

Before Jim could say, “I won’t,” Whitey spun on his heel and started across the yard toward the hotel.

BOOK VI

The View from Up Here

Our Boy

L
ATE IN
the morning on Jim’s eleventh birthday, something like a miracle happened: Mama gave him permission to go up the mountain with the uncles. When the time came to leave, she even followed them outside to say good-bye. Uncle Coran and Uncle Al climbed into the bed of the truck and sat down in the straight chairs they had placed against the back of the cab. Mama stepped onto the running board and looked in at Jim and Uncle Zeno. Uncle Zeno pressed the starter and the engine shook itself and growled to life.

“You’re welcome to come along, Cissy,” Uncle Zeno said over the noise.

Mama shook her head.

“Zeno, you know I can’t go up there,” she said. “I don’t think I could stand it.”

Jim tried not to look at Mama and looked down at his baseball glove instead. When he glanced up, she took his face into her hands and peered at him intently.

“Jimmy,” she said. “You just have to promise me you’ll come back.”

Embarrassed, Jim blushed and squirmed and freed himself.

“I’ll come back,” he mumbled.

Mama smiled and stepped back off of the running board.

“Here we go, Doc,” Uncle Zeno said. “You ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“Wave at your mama.”

“All right.”

The power lines along the state highway rose and dipped in rhythmic, swooping loops. Young corn waved from the bottoms along the river. Milk cows grazed in the rich June pastures while new calves butted and tugged at their teats. When Uncle Zeno veered off of the highway onto the Lynn’s Mountain road, a cloud of red dust bloomed beneath the truck and floated back the way they had come. They rolled past the turnoff to Uncle Zeno’s mill and rattled over Painter Creek on the wooden bridge. Jim had never crossed the bridge before, even though it wasn’t far from home; until today he had never had reason to travel through the country on the other side.

They drove through a thicket of scrubby locust trees draped with fragrant honeysuckle, and up a mild grade toward the rounded top of a ridge. When they crested the rise, the road fell away into rolling country. In the near distance Lynn’s Mountain rose up, its shoulders turned slightly from the way Jim saw them every day from Aliceville, almost as if it were moving toward them as they moved toward it.

“There she is, Doc,” Uncle Zeno said.

“Yes, sir,” said Jim.

“That’s where Penn lives. That’s where your daddy came from.”

Jim nodded.

“When he left old Amos’s house after his mama’s funeral, he walked the whole way to Aliceville. Took him all day.”

Jim nodded again.

“You never saw anybody as hungry-looking as he was that first night.”

“Did y’all give him something to eat?”

Uncle Zeno snorted. “Did we give him something to eat. He liked to ate us out of house and home, just like you.”

The road wandered down into a shallow ravine, into the green shade along Painter Creek. The mountain disappeared until they drove back into the sun. “Since your daddy came from up there, I guess that makes you half mountain man, doesn’t it, Doc?”

“I ain’t a mountain man,” Jim said.

“I see,” said Uncle Zeno.

Jim hadn’t meant to speak harshly. He looked at Uncle Zeno and tried to smile, but instead felt his face crumpling into something wrinkled and unrecognizable.

“Everything’s going to turn out all right,” Uncle Zeno said.

“Do we have to go see my granddaddy?” Jim asked.

“We don’t have to, but if we don’t, someday you’ll wish we had. You’ll just have to take my word on that.”

Jim stared out the windshield at the mountain turning slowly away from them as the road moved momentarily to the east.

“What do I say to Penn?” he asked.

“He’s your friend,” Uncle Zeno said. “You’ll know what to say when the time comes.”

“I hope so,” Jim said.

The closer they drew to the mountain, the more uneven the land became. White outcroppings of quartz began to spill from the red banks along the side of the road. The road pitched up and down over short, steep hills, on the sides of which clung upland farms. Corn and sweet potatoes and small, cash patches of tobacco and cotton grew in terraced fields that carefully followed the contours of the hills. On one farm a small, rocky pasture fell almost precipitously away from the barn lot. A single white cow gazed at them peacefully from a serpentine trail that switchbacked through the closely cropped grass. At the next house, an old woman hung out a Saturday wash of overalls and work shirts, printed dresses, and wide, white drawers. A pack of mottled blue and white hounds rolled out from underneath the porch and loped after the truck, baying mournfully.

“Your daddy loved to coon hunt,” Uncle Zeno said. “And he didn’t like to just sit around the fire and listen to the dogs, either. He liked to get out in the woods and run after them. You could see his lantern bobbing out in the dark, and you could hear him hollering. Me and Corrie and Al, we always sat by the fire and waited for the dogs to tree, because that’s what our daddy had always done. But your daddy, he ran with the dogs. He always got to the tree not long after they did.”

“So my daddy was a good coon hunter?”

“He was,” Uncle Zeno said. “Your daddy was good in the woods, he surely was. Of course, he said coon hunting down where we live was nothing like coon hunting up where he came from. He said up on the mountain you had to watch out for panthers. He said panthers lived all over those ridges back then. That’s why they call the creek that comes down off of it Painter Creek.”

“Did you ever see a panther?” Jim asked.

“No, I never did. But your daddy said he saw one.”

“My daddy saw a panther?”

“That’s what he said. A panther or something else.”

Jim felt something cold scurry down his backbone.

“What do you mean, ‘something else?’”

“Well, your daddy wasn’t sure what it was. He said it might have been a panther and it might have been a haint.”

“A haint?”

“That’s what he said, Doc. A haint. He said he wasn’t much older than you are right now, probably twelve or so, when this happened. Amos wasn’t back from prison yet, but your daddy was old enough to be out in the woods at night. Anyway, he and one of his Gentine cousins went coon hunting. It was a cloudy night, and still, no moon, but a good night to hunt. Your daddy and this other boy had no sooner got their fire built than the dogs came back. And the dogs all had their tails stuck between their legs. They slunk into the firelight and wouldn’t go back out no matter how much your daddy and the Gentine boy got after them. Which was unusual, because there ain’t nothing a hound dog likes better than to hunt on a damp, still night.

“Your daddy said that he and his cousin were kicking the dogs, trying to make them go back out, when the panther screamed. It was close by, just outside the firelight. And he said its screaming sounded like a woman. He said he’d never heard anything like it in his life, and never wanted to again.”

“What’d they do?”

“Well, the first time it screamed, whatever it was, the Gentine boy accidentally kicked over the lantern and broke it. So they backed up as close to that fire as they could get. Then they saw its green eyes moving around out there in the edge of the dark. One minute they could see them, and the next minute they couldn’t, but then there they’d be again, behind them this time, or over there. Now, they weren’t carrying a gun because when the dogs treed, they were just going to shake whatever it was out of the tree and catch it and put it in a sack and carry it home. Mountain boys like your daddy ain’t scared of nothing, Doc. Except maybe panthers. So there they were. They didn’t have a gun and the lantern was broke. They didn’t have enough pine knots to keep the fire burning all night, and there was a panther stalking them, just waiting for that fire to die out. And the dogs—and these were dogs that would run a bear to ground—were crawling around their ankles, whimpering, scared to death.”

“What did my daddy do then?”

“Well, just as the fire was about to die out, the panther screamed a second time. And it was closer. This time it sounded like it was right there in the light where they were. And then it spoke.”

“It spoke?”

“It spoke. It said, in a woman’s voice, ‘Help me, for I am killed.’”

“What happened?” Jim asked. “What happened then?”

“Well, what do you think happened then, Doc? Them boys sold the farm. Your daddy, his cousin, the dogs, everybody, lit out for home in a pile. Your daddy said they were running through the laurel, the limbs grabbing at them and hitting them in the face, and they were tripping and falling down and getting up and scratching and kicking and climbing all over each other in the dark, trying to get away. And your daddy said they could hear whatever it was chasing them, running through the leaves right behind them, panting. Every twenty steps or so it screamed. And every time it screamed, your daddy said he just knew that whatever it was, panther or haint, was going to light right in the middle of his back, and that would be that, he would never live to see another morning.”

“Did it get anybody?”

“No, it didn’t. Your daddy said that when they ran out into the clearing at home, whatever it was stopped just in the edge of the woods and wouldn’t come any further. And he said that the next night, Robley Gentine rounded up all the men and boys and dogs and guns he could find on that mountain, and they tramped around all over those woods, and the dogs cast around all over where the panther had been, but they never struck up a trail, and nobody never heard it scream again, and nobody ever saw it.”

Jim stared up at Uncle Zeno. He tried to laugh, but found that he couldn’t make a satisfactory noise.

“Did you make that up?” he asked.

Uncle Zeno shook his head.

“No, Jim, I didn’t. Me and Corrie and Al got after your daddy every time he told that story. We tried to get him to come off of it, but he never would. Your daddy swore up and down it was the truth, and he was never one to lie about anything.”

“How come you never told me that story before?”

“Your mama said she would skin me alive if I did. She said it was too scary.”

Jim didn’t say anything.

“And Al, he doesn’t like it much, either. At least not much since your daddy died.”

“How come?”

Uncle Zeno swallowed.

“Well, you know how Allie is, Doc. He’s a little superstitious. The way he’s got it figured, something bad was after your daddy up on the mountain that night. And he thinks that whatever it was stayed after him and finally tracked him down and got him that day in the cotton field.”

Jim didn’t know what he was supposed to say. The world suddenly seemed a fearful place.

“But that’s just Allie,” Uncle Zeno said. “You know how he is. Everything is a sign and a wonder to Allie.”

“Why’d you tell me?”

Uncle Zeno shrugged.

“I guess I just figured that if you were man enough to go up the mountain and face Amos Glass, you were man enough to hear about the night the panther talked.”

They were close enough to the mountain now that its green flanks filled the windshield. Jim leaned forward until he could see the ridge line again, the familiar blue sky dropping behind it. The mountain seemed to him a live, sleeping thing, lying on its side in the sun.

They crossed Painter Creek on a narrow bridge and entered a long, green valley that ran parallel to the base of the mountain. The valley was checkered by fields and pastures and farmsteads that stretched away into the distance. The creek ran along one side of the valley, its course marked by a ribbon of alder and bamboo and laurel. On the other side of the valley, the mountain reared up out of the lush, tilled bottoms. Jim had never considered before that it was possible to see the exact place where a valley stopped and a mountain began. He studied the line of trees that marked the place the two came together.