Littlejohn (16 page)

By high school, it really started to grate on me that I was stuck around that shed when my friends were going to the lake or the beach. Looking back, I had it pretty soft, but I didn’t feel that way then.

T
he war cleansed my spirit, for a spell.

All the dying, big and little, made what had happened with Lafe seem like it was somehow smaller, less awful. At some time in Germany, toward the end, I quit talking to Lafe’s ghost, forgot I’d ever met Angora Bosolet.

Now, back home in 1946 with February going fast into March and the land waiting to be led into spring, it seemed
almost like I was born again. It wasn’t a religious thing, although there wasn’t a day in the war I didn’t pray, first for my own selfish hide, then for the people we saw, then for the whole sorry world. It was more like I really was a new person with a new life in front of me. Momma had failed a lot, was a lot more feeble at seventy-six than she had been at seventy-two, and Lex and Connie seemed like they depended on me to get things going again.

The farm was doing right poorly. There wasn’t enough help during the war, but the real problem was that Lex wasn’t getting any younger, and he had been spending more and more time working at the lumber yard and less time looking after the farm, which he mostly left to Rennie’s family. Since Rennie and his folks wasn’t hardly making enough off sharecropping to buy food, they wasn’t exactly killing themselves to keep things up.

So I come home to a house with full electricity, indoor plumbing and a brand-new Chevrolet in the carhouse, because times was good at the lumber yard, and to a farm that was drying up on one end and drowning on the other. They had let the crop ditch get all clogged with weeds so that the near fields wasn’t getting enough water. The swamp, on the other hand, was only being half farmed, partly because it was so wet, without the crop ditch to drain some of the water off, partly because Rennie’s folks didn’t have the time or inclination to do all that ought to of been done.

They said I’d changed some, and I reckon they were right. I still couldn’t read and write, but there was this feeling that if I’d got through four years of World War II, I must not be a complete idiot.

I throwed myself back into the farm, but it was out of love
of the land instead of needing a place to hide. We was too late to get back the rest of the swamp land for that year, but we did work like the devil and got the crop ditch bush-axed and drug so water flowed to the near fields again. And while Lex and Connie had took care of all the modern conveniences for the inside of the house, they’d pretty much let the outside go to hell, so there was a lot of painting and roofing going on that spring. These old pine farmhouses just drink paint; we must of put three coats on before it looked right. But that was okay by me; I was just glad to be home.

I went back to my place in the choir, and they said they sure had missed me. Belva was talking to me, but we weren’t likely to get back together, which was okay, too. Everything seemed like it was a little bit smaller now, but that was the way I wanted it. The world didn’t ever have to get no bigger than East Geddie again, far as I was concerned.

There was new faces. Folks had moved in to work at the mill when the men went off to war, and there was lots of people hanging around the store and going to church that I didn’t know. There was others that had changed so much that I didn’t know them, either, although I’d been around them most all of my life. Sara Blue was one. And even knowing what I knew later, I wouldn’t of done anything different.

She was eighteen when I joined the Army, near-bout twenty-three when I got back. I barely remembered a skinny, dark-haired girl with eyes like new pennies that didn’t seem to have no respect for her elders. She was always sitting toward the back of the church, usually with a girlfriend or two, passing notes and dropping their heads down to hold in their giggles.

She was the daughter of Miss Annie Belle and Mr. Hector
Blue. Mr. Hector had been running the plywood plant over at McNeil for the Godwins for as long as I could remember. Him and Miss Annie had adopted Sara, and they give her just about anything she wanted. Folks said she was spoiled rotten as a young-un.

She’d been gone, too, the first college girl from around here. The Blues sent her to Women’s College in Greensboro in 1938, although her and her folks told me it like to of killed them to let her go. She’d graduated from high school at fifteen and was back here teaching at nineteen. I don’t reckon I’d seen her more than a few times since 1938.

She told me later that even though nobody could of been better to her than the Blues, she had always felt like a orphan, somehow. She said it made it easier to leave home. So I asked her why she come back to East Geddie. So I could have you, she said.

By the time I got back home in 1946, she was a grown woman, singing in the choir instead of cutting up on the back row. She was a English teacher at Geddie School. At the first choir practice I went to, she introduced herself and called me Mr. McCain, which made me feel right old. I was near-bout forty then.

I was attracted to her, without really knowing it at first. She was still a young-un in my mind, but there was something that struck a chord, that made me want to be with her. I tried to put the feeling aside, because it was just silly, a old farmer that couldn’t even read and write going after a young schoolteacher with four years of college. I had only been with Rose and a few French whores in my whole life and, until
Sara, I figured that that might be it. Me and Lex and Connie and Momma looking after each other.

Even after four years in the Army, I was a little touchy about not being able to read. Every time the choir learned a new hymn, it was agony for me, because I’d have to learn it all by heart, somehow, just kind of humming along and listening the first couple of times we went over it. Good thing for me we didn’t change songs much.

But while I was gone, they had picked up a couple that was second nature to everybody else and Greek to me. It shamed me to have to stumble like that in front of the choir, but especially in front of Sara. At about the third choir practice, I reckon, she started standing next to me, managed to change places with Harwood Bryant, which suited me, because she smelled a lot better than Harwood, who dipped snuff. She would read the verses we was to sing, usually 1, 2 and 4, to me beforehand, without making a big deal out of it, and it helped me learn it faster. I could remember, even if I couldn’t read.

It was after Easter and just before my fortieth birthday that I come to realize that she might see me as something other than a wore-out old bachelor.

We had choir practice on Wednesday nights, and I’ve got to confess that I did fix myself up a little more than I did before the war. I’d shave, for the second time that day, wash real good, since I had just got in from the fields, and put on a clean pair of pants and a shirt that Connie pressed for me.

“Littlejohn,” she’d say, “I can’t believe you’re a bachelor. If I wasn’t your sister, I’d marry you myself.” She could still make me blush.

So this Wednesday in late April, we’d just finished for the evening and was walking toward the front door when Sara, who had been telling me something about the garden she had at her folks’ house, started going through her pocketbook kind of frantic.

She put her right hand on my left arm, just above the elbow. I couldn’t believe how warm and nice it felt. It was the first time she’d ever touched me.

“Mr. McCain,” she said, the edge of a smile showing, “I believe I have lost my car keys. I’m afraid I might have locked them in the car.”

Her daddy’s Ford was parked right next to Lex’s Chevrolet. We was the last ones out of the church and closed the door—nobody had to lock up churches back then. I walked with her to the Ford, and, sure enough, there was the keys locked up inside, right on the dash.

“I can’t believe I did that,” she said. “Damn!” Right there in the church yard. I’d never heard a woman cuss at church before. I could smell the honeysuckle that was just coming out across the Old Geddie Road. I told her not to worry.

Lex had some wire in the boot of his car, and I cut a piece off with the pliers from his toolbox that he carried back there, too. I made a loop and worked the wire between the rubber and the top of the glass enough to drop it down on the lock. It was like trying to pick up the watch with the steam shovel at the county fair. Finally, on the fourth try, I hooked the loop around the lock and pulled it up.

“You certainly are handy, Mr. McCain,” she said after she thanked me. I was standing by the front door as she opened it, and stepped to one side. Then she reached up and kissed
me, right on the lips. She was kind of short, five foot three, so she had to put one of her warm hands behind my neck and kind of draw me down to her.

“Why don’t you just call me Littlejohn?” I said, my voice kind of hoarse.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for three months,” she said, and I hoped she meant kiss me, not call me Littlejohn. We kissed each other again, slower this time. If she had told me she wanted me to take Lex’s car and drive it off Meade’s Landing into the Campbell River, I would of done it, no questions asked.

“You know,” she said, “Daddy’s getting pretty tired of my taking his car every Wednesday night. He says he and Momma might have somewhere they want to go. Would you mind picking me up on Wednesdays from here on out?”

I was in a daze. As I tried to walk around to the driver’s side of the Chevy, I slipped in the wet grass and like to of broke my leg. I must of made one romantic sight pulling myself up with the back fender of Lex’s car. I didn’t look over to see if Sara was watching me, but she couldn’t hardly of missed that. Fool, I was saying to myself. Fool, fool, fool.

On Sunday, I was eat up with anticipation, waiting to see her and talk to her again. In the choir room before the sermon, she only give me a smile that didn’t seem like it meant anything, and I wondered if she’d changed her mind, or if I had dreamed it all. Would I make a bigger ass of myself than I already had by showing up at Mr. Hector Blue’s house on Wednesday?

But after the service, as we was leaving the room, I felt that hand on my elbow and smelled that perfume.

“Don’t forget me now, on Wednesday, Littlejohn.”

So we started going to choir practice together, which was not lost for a minute on the other choir members, including Belva’s cousin Lizzie. From the way some people at my church acted, you would of thought we had committed adultery in the pulpit. I know folks around here that have spent their whole lives worrying about what everybody else at church will think if they do such-and-such. About the only time I let what other people thought get in my way was with Rose. If I paid any mind to what some of the folks around here thought, I’d of been in Dix Hill a long time ago. The people I have known all my life, grown up and gone to school and church with and hung around the store with, they’re good folks, but they can be right narrow-minded.

We would go back to Sara’s daddy’s and talk out on the porch until eleven o’clock sometimes. She would ask me all about the war, about the people in Europe, and she would tell me how silly and worthless she felt staying back here when everybody was getting killed and all. She said she tried to join the WACs in 1942, that if somebody that knew Mr. Hector hadn’t called him from the enlistment office, she would of.

She said she was fixing to move to her own place, that Mr. Godwin that owned the lumber yard and plywood plant had a house he would rent her, and that she couldn’t live with her momma and daddy all her life. I thought of Connie and Lex.

It was June before her folks would invite us inside and offer us some coffee, and neither them nor Momma was too happy about us getting serious.

“When she’s forty-three, you’ll be sixty,” Momma would say, which made no sense to me. “And how are you
all going to live here? This place is just right for four people. It’d be too little for five.”

I didn’t trouble to mention that we used to have eight of us here, or that at one time or another during the Depression, we’d had three different cousins or uncles living here, including Cousin Livonia, who had a baby with her. I didn’t bother to mention that Momma was twenty-six years younger than Daddy. I just did what I knew was the best thing. No sense arguing with family and getting everybody stirred up.

What Mr. Hector and Miss Annie was telling Sara, I don’t know, but it got back to me that they wasn’t exactly dancing in the front yard. I reckon they might of asked Sara how she could be sent to college, get a good education, then come back and hook up with a dirt farmer that couldn’t even spell “cat.” Well, she was working on that, too. Sara always had a plan.

She knew right off, of course, that I was illiterate. That was no big secret around here, but it wasn’t quite the problem it would be today. You could manage to vote if you couldn’t read, long as you was white, and they’d read you the questions on the driving test so you could get your license if you had sense enough to learn them by heart. Not being able to read was just something I took for granted, like Daddy having one leg or Jeff Bullock being blind.

We had been courting for three months, Wednesdays and Sundays, when she made her first move to do something about the problem, or at least try.

“Littlejohn,” she said one night when we was sitting on a bench at McNeil Park, looking across the river at the
fireflies and listening to the music coming up from the band on Scots Landing, down beneath us, “I’d like for you to do something for me. Will you promise?”

I reckon I would of promised anything, and I did.

“I want you to take a little test for me,” she said.

I told her tests was for young-uns in school, but she kept on, reminding me that I’d promised. She said she’d give me the test the next time we met, four days from then on Sunday.

That Sunday night, Sara come to dinner at Momma’s. Lex and Connie was as nice as could be, and Momma was tolerable. She might cut a shine about me and Sara when it was just me, but she knew better than to insult Sara. Then after supper, me and Sara went out on the back porch. She asked me to cut on the porch light, and she took out a couple of pieces of paper. One of them had letters wrote on it, big block letters like they have in grade school, which brought back nothing but bad memories.