Jim the Boy (18 page)

Jim rolled a stick back and forth with his toe. “Will you … ?”

“Maybe,” Penn said.

“Really?”

“The doctor in Winston-Salem says it might come back. You can’t ever tell.”

“Oh.”

“You get used to it, though.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Sometimes it hurts. Mostly it just feels asleep.”

Penn slapped his leg again and stared at it. Jim stared at it, too.

“Oh, well,” Penn said.

“Oh, well,” said Jim.

“Why did you bring your ball glove?” Penn asked.

Jim looked down at his glove as if it had grown there without his knowledge. He shrugged and slipped it off.

“Do you want to wear it?”

Penn bit his lower lip and considered.

“Maybe for a minute,” he said.

Penn snapped the glove open and closed. He held it to his face and sniffed. He pounded the ball into the pocket. Jim stood and backed up a step and extended his hands. Penn tossed him the ball. Jim tossed it back to Penn. It bounced off of the heel of the glove onto the ground.

“I’ll get it,” Jim said.

“I just missed it,” Penn said. “That’s all.”

They tossed the ball back and forth several times without speaking. Penn didn’t miss it again.

“Everything works fine except this leg,” he said.

He threw the ball back to Jim a little harder.

“You know that day down in Aliceville?” Jim asked.

Penn caught the ball and held it. He looked down at it and frowned.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“Since Ty Cobb was on the Moon and all, I should have let you use the glove.”

“It’s all right,” said Penn, without looking up. “It’s your glove.”

“No, I shouldn’t have been so selfish,” Jim said. “If I hadn’t been so selfish, Ty Cobb could have seen both of us play ball.”

“Stop it, Jim,” Penn said.

“I’m just trying to apologize.”

Penn leaned over and covered his face with the glove. He drew a deep breath, and his shoulders began to shake.

“Penn? What’s the matter?”

“He saw me fall down!” Penn wailed into the glove. “Ty Cobb saw me fall down in the mud!”

Jim ran over and swatted Penn on the back.

“No, he didn’t,” he said. “Ty Cobb didn’t see you fall down. I bet it wasn’t even Ty Cobb. I bet it was just somebody who looked like Ty Cobb. And even if it was him, he probably wasn’t looking out the window.”

Penn knocked Jim’s arm away.

“It was, too, him!” he said. “And you know it!”

Jim felt a sudden heat rise upward from his neck, and out the top of his head. He felt himself wanting to cry. He scrunched his face up, but nothing happened. He rubbed his eyes with his fists, but his eyes remained dry.

“All I’m trying to say is that you’re a better ballplayer than I am,” Jim said. “I should’ve let you use the glove.”

“I told you I didn’t want to talk about it! How many times do I have to say that? Can’t you hear? Are you dumb?”

Jim opened his mouth to tell Penn that he wasn’t dumb, but remembered that Penn had polio. He looked toward the house, but the back door remained closed. He sat down in the chair beside Penn and rocked. He couldn’t think of one person in the world he wasn’t mad at.

After a while Penn sat up and leaned back, breathing heavily, his face splotched and red. He wiped his eyes with the back of his right hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?” asked Jim.

“For crying like that.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not. I’m not a baby.”

“I didn’t say you were a baby.”

“It’s just that I’m tired. I never cry unless I’m really tired.”

“I’m tired, too,” said Jim. “We had a long trip.” He yawned theatrically, closed his eyes, and leaned back in the chair.

“Let’s just rest a minute,” Penn said. “Then we can talk some more.”

“Okay.”

After a few minutes the fingers of Penn’s throwing hand uncurled, and the ball dropped heavily onto the ground. Jim stood up and walked down to the creek. Its sandy bottom was dotted with periwinkles. He picked up a leaf and dropped it into the current. The shadow of the leaf slid over the periwinkles like the shadow of a cloud. As he turned away he saw a wheelchair parked behind a rhododendron on the creek bank. He started as if it were an animal. He hurried back to the rocking chairs and looked down at Penn.

Even though Penn’s face was still red, he smiled slightly in his sleep. His breath whistled through his nose with a falling note. Jim reached down and touched his ball glove with a finger. He picked up the baseball and tossed it from hand to hand, measuring its comforting weight, before placing it in the pocket of the glove. He tiptoed away, looked back once, and broke into a run up the hill.

Uncle Zeno pulled the truck back onto the road. Jim slumped against the door.

“Are you sick, Doc?” he asked.

Jim kept his eyes closed.

“Just tired, is all.”

“How was Penn?”

“He was fine.”

“Where was everybody?”

“They’re all in the backyard,” Jim said. “I told everybody ‘bye in the backyard.”

“I see,” said Uncle Zeno, glancing sideways at Jim. “Where’s your ball glove? Did you forget your ball glove?”

Jim shook his head slowly.

“I gave it to Penn,” he said.

A cord of muscle tightened briefly in Uncle Zeno’s jaw. He took his foot off of the accelerator, but then sped up again.

“Oh,” he said. “I see. Did Penn like it?”

“Yes, sir,” said Jim. “He liked it a whole lot.”

Jim didn’t know which made him feel worse, giving his ball glove to Penn, or his impending introduction to his grandfather. In Jim’s mind, Amos Glass had always shared a room with the other dark figures who haunted his mother’s stories, ghosts and goblins and killers who roamed about looking for bad little boys to catch and take away—Pharaoh, Bloody Bones, Blackbeard. Mama had always sworn she would never let Amos Glass lay eyes on Jim, just as she had always said that, as long as he was good, nobody would come at night to steal him away. But now that he was on his way to Amos Glass’s house, the door to that room suddenly seemed unlocked. For all Jim knew, the next time he went to bed, the awful face of Bloody Bones would appear outside his window, or a panther would say his name.

“What makes my granddaddy so mean?” he asked.

“Hmm,” said Uncle Zeno. “That’s hard to say. All of us have got meanness inside us, I guess, but most of us don’t let it come out. Most of us can keep from saying the things we shouldn’t say, and doing the things we shouldn’t do.”

“Do you have meanness inside you?”

“Some.”

“Do you think I might turn out mean?”

Uncle Zeno made a fist and gently shook it at Jim.

“Not unless you want to get into a world of trouble.”

Jim almost smiled. He pushed Uncle Zeno’s arm away.

“I just don’t want to turn out like my granddaddy,” he said.

“Do you know why your granddaddy got in so much trouble?”

“Because he was a moonshiner?”

“That’s part of it,” Uncle Zeno said. “Do you know why people get in trouble for making moonshine?”

“Because it’s a sin?”

“Besides that.”

Jim shook his head.

“Because every time a man makes a gallon of liquor, he’s supposed to pay a tax to the government.”

“Oh.”

“And if he doesn’t pay the tax, the Revenue comes and busts up his still and puts him in jail. Now, in the old days, the Revenue didn’t bother the folks up on the mountain much, and the folks on the mountain didn’t bother the Revenue. It was just too good a way to get a bunch of people shot.

“What got your granddaddy in trouble was that he didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. He made a special kind of moonshine called Cherry Bounce, and people liked it so much, they came from Charlotte and Spartanburg and Columbia and all over just to get a jar or two. And Amos was a hard worker, I’ll give him that. If a wild cherry turned ripe on Lynn’s Mountain, Amos Glass was there to pick it. He worked all the time, making liquor, and after a while he got rich. His downfall was that once he got rich, he wanted to get richer. So he built a big distillery up there on the mountain, right out in the open, across the road from his house. It was a long, brick building with copper stills that he had shipped down here all the way from up north somewhere.

“Naturally, the Revenue heard about what Amos was up to. Since they didn’t have any choice but to go after him, they sent a couple of their best agents up here to hunt him down. But in a few days those boys came back empty-handed, scared half to death. Amos had caught them and tied them up and told them that the mountain was blockaded. He sent word to their boss that he would kill the next man the Revenue sent. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, he mailed a letter to a newspaper in Charlotte announcing that Lynn’s Mountain had seceded from the Union.”

“Like in the War Between the States?”

“Just like that. Amos believed it was his God-given right to make Cherry Bounce. He said that’s why God put cherry trees on
his
mountain in the first place. He didn’t want the government telling him what to do, and he thought that everybody else hated the government as much as he did. He thought that if he started a ruckus, everybody else in these parts would rise up and fight like the Confederacy did in ‘61. Amos had been a captain under Jeb Stuart, and was still mad about the way things turned out the first time.”

“What happened?”

“Well, what happened is that nobody except the Revenue paid him any attention. People liked his liquor, all right, but they didn’t much care for him. They were afraid of Amos, but that’s different from liking him. Besides, a lot of people up here had been for the North in the war. And a lot of people just thought he had gone crazy. So only a few old boys, fellows who made their living working for Amos anyway, mostly Gentines, joined his little army and loaded their squirrel rifles and waited for the Revenue to come.”

“Did they come?”

“They came, all right. Amos kidnapping those agents and writing that letter to the newspaper had made the Revenue and the governor and everybody else mad enough to spit. They bowed up and sent seventy-five federal marshals and a Gatling gun up the mountain after him.”

“Did they have a war?”

“Not much of one, Doc. Amos and his boys barricaded the road and waited on the Revenue, but when those Gentines saw just exactly how much Revenue had come, and got a look at that Gatling gun, they decided they didn’t want to secede from the Union after all. Every one of them just disappeared into the woods. Old Amos saw what the score was and tried to hide, but he was old, and nobody would help him, and in just a day or two the Revenue caught him, hiding in a corncrib. They hauled him back to his house and burned his distillery down and made him watch. Your daddy said that watching that fire was the first thing he could remember. This was in 1904, and he was just a little fellow. That’s probably why the Revenue didn’t burn the house down, too. They didn’t want to turn a woman and a little fellow out in the cold. They took Amos down the mountain and gave him life in prison, but let him out in nine years.”

“And he was still mean when he got out?”

“Maybe even meaner. Amos didn’t change a bit in Atlanta, except that he got older, and he lost his touch for making whiskey. They say that after he got back up here, he couldn’t get a single batch of Cherry Bounce to turn out right. He either didn’t cook it hot enough, or he cooked it too hot, and not a swallow of it turned out fit to drink. It would make you drunk, but it tasted terrible. They say that’s why he was so bad to your daddy and your grandma. He had lost everything but his meanness.”

“One time my daddy shot a hole in Amos Glass’s still,” Jim said.

“Your daddy was a brave man, Doc. People say

Amos killed a man or two in his day, and for a lot less than what your daddy did to that still.”

Jim though about his father crouched in the laurel, drawing a careful bead on Amos’s still, and felt himself inflate with pride and bravery.

“My daddy wasn’t scared of nothing,” he announced.

“Are you afraid of Amos Glass?” asked Uncle Zeno.

“Nope,” Jim lied.

“Good. ‘Cause we’re here.”

Jim jerked up straight and looked around. They were driving through a cool wood of hemlock and laurel and tall white pine, but there was no sign of a house. Up ahead the road forded a riffling creek. Uncle Zeno stopped the truck in the middle of the ford. From downstream came the breathy roar of a waterfall. Upstream lay a wide, green pool that looked like a good place to swim and fish. On the far side of the pool, in the shallows near a bank of blooming laurel, a muddy cloud roiled the water.

“This is Painter Creek, Doc,” Uncle Zeno said. “It comes out of three springs right up there. And it looks like something just crawled out of the water and slipped into that laurel.”

“What do you think it was?” Jim asked.

“There ain’t no telling,” Uncle Zeno said, driving out of the creek onto the far bank.

Around the next curve lay a long, unpainted, shotgun house, whose gable end faced the road. Uncle Zeno stopped the truck before they pulled into the yard. The yard had grown up in broom-sedge and stickweed, in which crouched a rusted-out Reo truck. The house looked deserted. It squatted beneath a sagging tin roof, high atop crumbling rock piers. Jim could see daylight beneath it from the yard on the far side. All down its flank, boards had sprung loose and curled back like shavings on a partially whittled stick. It was the longest, funniest-looking house Jim had ever seen. He might have laughed if he hadn’t known who waited for him inside.

“That’s your granddaddy’s house,” Uncle Zeno said.

“Yes, sir.”

“He built it himself, right after the war.”

“Why’s it so long?”

“Well, everybody said Amos knew how to start building a house, he just didn’t know how to stop.”

“Oh.”

“Amos just said it was one story high and five stories long.”

“Is that where my daddy was born?”

“That’s the place. He lived right there until he went down the mountain.”

“Is my granddaddy in there now?”