The Year the Lights Came On (6 page)

“You—you want a bite?” I offered.

“No,” she said softly. “You—eat—it.”

I ate the Three Musketeers. It had been touched by Megan’s hands and it was delicious. I folded the wrapper and slipped it into my spelling book. Megan crossed to her desk three rows and four seats over from mine. She began to scribble in her Blue Horse tablet.

“You ever say ‘thank you’ for anything?” she asked as I swallowed the last bite.

“Uh—I’m sorry. Thanks.”

Her back was turned to me. “I bought that with my lunch money,” she blurted.

I didn’t know what she meant. “Why? Thought you said you didn’t want it.”

“I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you eat lunch?”

“I wanted the candy. I still got a dime.”

“That don’t make sense. You didn’t eat lunch and you wanted candy and then you didn’t want to eat it. That don’t make sense.”

She turned in her desk. She looked furious and suddenly dominating.

“You don’t understand the first thing about people, do you?” she said curtly. Her voice dismissed me, and it made me angry.

“I don’t understand crazy people. That’s for sure. That’s for danged sure.”

“You hang around Freeman Boyd too much. You’re as nasty-mouthed as he is,” she snapped.

“Freeman’s my friend.”

“Wesley wouldn’t cuss.”

“I’m not Wesley.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Anyhow, I wasn’t cussin’.”

“Sounded that way to me.”

“Dang’s not a cuss word.”

“It is to some people.”

“I didn’t ask you to come in here with that da—uh, candy. I didn’t ask you.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“You don’t have to get snooty about it.”

She whirled in her desk, ripped the page from her Blue Horse tablet, and wadded it. I slipped out of my seat and started toward the door.

“Where’re you goin’?” Megan asked, pleading.

“Out.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re no different than Dupree. I thought you was. Well, you’ll see. All of you…”

“See what?”

I had said too much and I knew it. “Nothin’.”

“What?” Megan was questioning, apologizing, asking my anger to be calm.

“Just—nothin’.”

“Something’s going on, Colin. I can feel it.”

She had never before said my name. Not directly. Not when the two of us were alone—but we had never been alone before. The sound of my name was a two-syllable song when Megan said it, a velvet reprise of a mysterious musical nerve, and it made my knees tremble. I returned to my desk as violins wept in reverence over the immortality of a note.

“I can’t say nothin’,” I told her. “Not now.”

She did not face me, but I could sense her awful deliberation of what to say, and how to say it, without offending me.

“You didn’t have to say I was like Dupree,” she finally whispered.

She was right. She wasn’t like Dupree. No one was like Dupree. Especially Megan.

“My favorite candy’s a Three Musketeers,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“I know it.” Her voice was moist, quaking.

“How’d you know that?”

“That’s all you ever buy when—when you get a nickel.” There was sadness in her words. I felt like an orphan in rags.

“Heck, I got lots of nickels,” I lied bravely. “I got two or three dollars’ worth at home, tied up in the toe of a sock. I’m savin’ for this air rifle…”

Megan did not answer. She put her head in her hands and gulped air. She then became very still and placed her hands on her Blue Horse tablet.

“Yeah. There’s this air rifle at Harden’s Five and Ten,” I bragged. “I’ll get it. By summer, too.”

Megan did not answer.

“Anyway, Three Musketeers is my favorite candy.”

Megan did not answer.

“I’ll draw you a picture and pay you back,” I suggested.

“I—I’d like that,” she whispered.

“You like dogs?”

She nodded. “I’ve got a cocker spaniel.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Well, I used to have one. Ol’ Red. But he died. One time I knocked Paul Tully’s bottom tooth out because he called Ol’ Red a son of a bitch, and you know what he…”

Oh, my God, I thought. I said son of a bitch. I couldn’t believe it. Everything was going beautifully.

“I’m sorry—I—I…” I stuttered.

“That’s all right.”

“It just came out.”

“I know.”

“He did, though.”

“What?”

“Called Ol’ Red a—a S.O.B.”

“Oh.”

The bell rang and I jumped two feet. Dear God in Heaven, I thought. They’ll be coming in and catch me. Catch me talking
with her, someone from the Highway 17 Gang. Megan turned for one last penetrating look, an I’m-Glad-We-Had-This-Time-Together look. Pale green eyes, hair as blond as a full moon.

Wayne and Dupree were first through the door, laughing, shoving, playing. They saw Megan and me and stopped abruptly. We were both buried in spelling books. Paul and Otis and Freeman and R. J. followed Wayne and Dupree. Then half the population of Georgia slipped noiselessly into the classroom. I wanted to melt into butter, to disappear into another time and place like some victim of Mandrake the Magician’s powers.

Otis walked past me and paused just behind my desk.

“What you been doin’?” he pried, whispering.

“Studying this spelling.”

“What’s she doin’ in here?”

“Otis, you tryin’ to start something?” I hissed.

“Don’t look right.”

“I can’t help it. She come in right before the bell,” I said in an even, mean voice. Who cared about Otis Finlay, anyway? I could whip him and I knew it.

“Shut up,” Freeman ordered Otis, and Otis obeyed.

I did not move my eyes from my desk for two hours. I missed eight of ten spelling words.

No one said anything about discovering Megan and me together in a classroom, but I knew what they were thinking. Aha! was penciled and exclamation-pointed on every face in school. Wesley smiled and gave me an easy, playful shot in the ribs and said, “Aw, forget it. It’s not your fault she came in there.”

Wesley was the only person who believed me, but Wesley was enough. No one would dare question me if Wesley had faith in
my innocence. I felt relieved, but I also felt guilty. I wanted to tell Wesley, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. On the school bus, riding home, I began to imagine I was Judas and that afternoon I stole away into the dark tomb of Black Pool Swamp and hid, and drew a picture of a dog for Megan.

*

I had almost talked of the REA to Megan. Our Side had changed and she knew it. Everyone knew it. The pressure was building.

On Saturday, a man in a Jeep appeared at our home and he and our father walked away, crossing a field to a pine tree stand. Wesley and I watched from a distance. Occasionally the man would stop and gesture toward Emery or Goldmine and I knew from the mime of his arm-waving that he was saying something important. I also thought I had seen the man before and I asked Wesley about him: “Is that the same man who was talking to Daddy about the REA?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Wesley.

“What’re they talkin’ about?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’d you
think
they’re talkin’ about?” I said.

“How am I supposed to know?” Wesley said irritably. “If he’s the REA man, I guess they’re talking about where the lines are going. I don’t know.”

Of course, I thought. There would have to be lines and electric light poles and transformers and fuse boxes and meters. I closed my eyes and heard the deep bass of men at work, saw the statue-like lean of their bodies tilting backward as they worked against safety belts high up on black, creosoted pine poles. I saw their hard hats and equipment holsters and spike boots.

I saw Thomas. Smiling, swinging a rope across his shoulder, jabbing a spike into a pole, and climbing. Thomas. Soundless Thomas.

I opened my eyes and looked for Wesley. He was sitting against a pine. His eyes were half closed and he was holding a braided pine needle, slowly twirling it in his fingers. Sometimes I confused Wesley and Thomas. They were part of my mood and belonging, yet they seemed removed—Thomas by death and Wesley by ordination. It was bewildering. I was inseparably fused with two people, yet they were somehow removed from my offer—my longing—to know them wholly.

“I saw that man pointin’ over to where Freeman lives, Wesley,” I said. “You think Freeman and them will get electricity?”

Wesley opened his eyes and looked in the direction of Freeman’s home across the swamp. “I doubt it,” he answered. “They live too far off the line.”

Freeman lived with his parents in a shotgun house that was wrapped like gauze in tarpaper. The house had been built for a WPA crew during the thirties. After the crew left, finished with its work of draining Black Pool Swamp, Odell Boyd moved his wife and young son into the house and, in the following years, he had piddled with improvements and failed to improve anything. Odell Boyd worked the sawmills and sometimes made illegal whiskey by moonlight, but there was nothing mean about him. My mother said luck ran backward for him and that we could learn a lot by paying attention to the hard times other people had to live with. She was right. I was always learning something from Freeman—even if it meant I had to be corrected after most of the lessons.

“It just don’t seem right,” I protested. “Freeman and them ought to get electricity like everybody else.”

“Yeah,” agreed Wesley. “Maybe they’ll move up to where the Grooms used to live.”

“I wish they would,” I said.

*

We did not question our father about the man, or the REA. We had been taught to honor the adult privilege of silence. Be patient, we were told; be patient and you’ll know soon enough. I think I understood even then that patience was a gift of the Southerner—patience and an instinct for the Right Time. That was what Wesley had said to us: “Be patient, and the time for springing the REA will come; don’t worry, it’ll happen.”

Days eased into a bubble of other days. We were patient. We waited. But we also lived with the fear that someone from the Highway 17 Gang would begin to smart-mouth about the REA. And that would settle it. Too late. Our play for the Right Time would have been lost. We complained to Wesley, but Wesley pleaded with us to wait, to be patient—
more
patient. I thought he was probably testing us, teaching us one of the values of life that was natural with him. He was always doing that. Wesley was born to teach.

*

But still we waited.

Our celebration turned to sulking, our joy peaked and paled into fatigue. Our nerves were frayed. But nothing was as bothersome as the new energy of the Highway 17 Gang in tormenting us. It was more than any of us could tolerate and it became difficult for Wesley to control our tempers.

“Confound it,” Freeman declared one afternoon. “I’m not gonna take much more of all that smart-aleck talk I been gettin’, Wes. I’m not now, and you better know it.”

“Freeman, it’s not gonna hurt you to wait, is it?” replied Wesley.

“It’s not gonna hurt me? Lordamercy, Wesley. It’s killin’ me. You got no feelings, you know that? That’s your trouble, boy.”

“The time will come, Freeman. I promise it.”

*

The time came two days later, on a Friday. It came on a day screaming from the splendor of its blueness, burning with a fever of early summer oozing from the spring ground, and suffocating us with the smell of crushed grass.

On that day, Wesley ended our waiting.

On that day, Wesley caused a riot.

*

It happened at midmorning recess. Shirley Weems was a thin, pale girl who was Wesley’s age but two years behind him in her class in school. One of my older sisters, Amy, who had studied nursing, said Shirley and her brothers and sisters were suffering from a lack of vitamins, or something. They were undernourished and their bodies could not react as quickly as they should. “Never, never, never, never make fun of them,” Amy had warned us. “They’re the poorest people in Emery.” And they were. Poverty had left the Weems family totally, completely defeated. Shirley wore washed-out gingham dresses, colorless and dead. Scabs were always on her arms and mouth. Once, the county nurse had found lice in her hair and Shirley was herded out from the rest of us standing at attention in the auditorium, and her head was powdered until it turned white. She stood very still in one corner of the auditorium and tears rolled off her empty face. Dupree had started giggling and pointing and Freeman gave him a bullet shot in the kidneys. Dupree complained loudly, accusing Freeman of “picking” on
him. Wesley quickly embraced the argument, saying it was Shirley, not Dupree, who was being picked on. Mrs. Simmons agreed with Wesley; she led Shirley out of the auditorium, away from the careless indignity of being an example to those who did not exercise proper hygiene. After that, Wesley was teased miserably by the Highway 17 Gang about being Shirley’s boyfriend, but it never bothered him. He never replied to any of the taunting, and occasionally he would sneak something out of the lunchroom and give it to Lynn to give to Shirley.