At the Far End of Nowhere

by Christine Davis Merriman

  My daddy tells me Jimmie’s people don’t trust him. They are not Catholics; he calls them holy rollers. They think he is too old to marry Jimmie; she is much younger. And my daddy doesn’t like Jimmie’s people, either. He calls Aunt Essie sanctimonious. He says her hired hand, Lonny, is a juvenile delinquent who ought to be put in a reform school. One time, Lonny shot holes in Daddy’s shop windows with a BB gun.

  I hear my daddy say to Jimmie, “If I say a single word against that boy, Essie just clucks her tongue like an old hen and tells me, ‘Who are you to judge? Only God can judge.’”

  “Well,” Jimmie says, “she is my only sister.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  CIRCUS

  ABOUT one hundred feet behind our farmhouse, a lopsided red wooden barn leans away from the wind. One part is fixed up as a garage for our Oldsmobile. The other part has old stables in it, with splintery wood walls and three empty stalls. The feeding troughs have moldy hay in them. The floors are made of dirt and you have to walk across bird droppings and rat droppings to get across. One of the stalls has a rusty cow stanchion that’s hanging like an empty noose over a skinny trench that somebody must have dug a long time ago to catch cow pee and poop.

  Another part of the barn is where we keep my granddaddy’s tractor and some rusty farm tools that Jimmie knows how to attach to the back of the tractor. There’s a plow to turn over the dirt in the fields, a disc harrow to break up the big clods of earth after you plow, and a drill for dropping seeds. There’s also a corn crib about two-thirds filled with field corn. Above the stalls, loose planks make a floor for the hayloft.

  Every Tuesday, while school is out, the county library’s bookmobile parks in the drugstore parking lot about a mile from our house. After I finish second grade at the Annex, Jimmie starts taking me and Spence there to borrow books. I like to carry my books up to my secret place in a corner of the barn loft. Here, I can read and take naps and dream up my own stories.

  During the summer months, Essie’s hired hand, Lonny, works the fields for our neighbor, Mr. Clay. In the middle of summer, Lonny invents a game he calls circus.

  Lonny’s circus begins one drizzly afternoon when the fields are mired with rainwater and fog is filling up the ground hollows. Right after our noon meal, I climb up the wall ladder to the loft, toting my latest Nancy Drew mystery book. I’m hooked on Nancy Drew! She’s a girl detective who can do all kinds of things—ride a horse, drive a blue roadster, swim, everything! Nancy and her friends get into all kinds of scrapes and adventures, and she always solves the hardest crime cases. She’s very brave. Kind of like Jimmie.

  Just as I get to the next-to-top rung, who do I see propped up against a hay bale, puffing away at a cigarette? Lonny!

  “What the hell are you doing up here?” Lonny hurries to snuff out his cigarette on his pants leg. I want to escape back down the ladder, but Lonny’s voice is so deep and gruff now, it paralyzes me.

  “Get on up here, girl,” Lonny’s voice booms. I am too scared to budge, so I just stare at Lonny’s thick black eyebrows and slanty green eyes.

  “You’re not gonna tattle on me, are you?” Lonny comes over to the edge of the loft and sticks his head down at me. I look at the splinters in the ladder rung where my hands are holding on. I start to shake all over.

  “Don’t you cry, girl.” I screw up my face and try not to. “You don’t cry, I’ll give you a stick of peppermint gum. Here.”

  I climb the rest of the way up the ladder and into the loft, take the gum from Lonny’s hand, and stick it in the back pocket of my pedal pushers. They are my favorite new outfit—yellow with red-and-white striped piping. Lonny moves away and sits back down, cross-legged. My eyes sting from the pressure of holding back tears. I’m not brave like Nancy Drew or Jimmie.

  “You’re getting to be a big girl now, aren’t you? You probably don’t remember, but I used to play with you when you was just a baby. But you’re a real big girl now. How old you getting to be?”

  “Seven,” I say, and bend to trace a seven in the straw dust on the loft floor.

  Lonny leans back against a hay bale and lights another cigarette. “You’re not going to tattle now, are you?” I shake my head and draw a line through the seven in the dust.

  Lonny blows out a stream of smoke and peers up at the rafters where a rusting pulley system is mounted on a metal track that runs the length of the barn roof. A corroded hook, fastened to the pulley mechanism, dangles from a thick braided rope.

  “You know what that rope’s for?” I crane my neck and shake my head.

  “Your granddaddy used to use it for lifting bales off the hay wagon up into the loft. See that hook on the bottom end of the rope?”

  I nod.

  “Well, it’s rusted away now. Can’t use it no more. But that used to hook into the hay bales.”

  Lonny half-closes his eyes and studies the rope. “I got me an idea how we can use that old rope and have us some fun.” He pulls an empty dirt dauber’s nest off the wall and crumbles it in his fist. “Go get your brother. Tell him I want to see him.”

  I climb back down the ladder, carrying my Nancy Drew book under one arm, knowing that my secret reading place is spoiled forever. I tell Spence, “Lonny wants you to come to the loft.”

  Spence climbs the ladder to the loft. I follow along after him. Lonny tells us, “I got me a brand-new game that’ll be lots of fun. It’s called circus.”

  Me and Spence watch Lonny use his pearl-handled penknife to cut off the rusty old hook from the lower end of the rope. The rope is a dirty brown-yellow color.

  “This will be our trapeze,” Lonny tells us, and he ties a big triple overhand knot at the rope’s bottom end, stands on the knot, and jounces it.

  “It’ll hold.”

  He gets Spence to help him pile hay bales in the loft’s back corner. “This’ll be our takeoff and land platform.”

  Lonny grabs the rope knot and flings it out to test the rope’s swing. It swings like the pendulum of a huge clock. The rope swoops down over the plank floor, then out over an open space, above my daddy’s new garage. The rope knot crosses over the concrete floor; then up to less than a foot away from the far wall; then it comes back across to the hay bale platform.

  Lonny stands on the rope and pushes off. He shrieks a rebel yell as he swings out. He wears his hair combed back into a ducktail. When he flies through the air, two strands of his hair flap over his ears like greasy black wings.

  “It’s tricky,” Lonny says after he lands. He pulls a black plastic comb from his back pocket, slicks back his hair, and pats his ducktail back into place. “You got no place to land on the other side. So, once you start swinging, you got to hold onto the rope until you get back to the bales, so’s you can land.”

  Lonny wipes his comb on the seat of his blue jeans and slides the comb back in his pocket. “If you can’t touch your feet down on the bales, don’t try to jump off or you’re apt to hurt yourself. Just let ’er swing until I can get to you and pull you back over the loft floor. Give her a try, Spence.”

  Spence braces his insteps on the knot and grips the rope with his hands and elbows. Lonny hauls him up onto the hay bale launching pad and gives him a push off. Spence gives an imitation of Lonny’s rebel yell, and swings out.

  “Okay, Lissa. You’re gonna catch your brother when he comes back,” Lonny’s voice roars at me as he picks me up and sets me down on the launching pad.

  I try to grab Spence’s heels, but I can’t get a grasp.

  “Higher up. You got to grab him higher up,” Lonny yells.

  “I hurt my hand.”

  “You do as I tell you, girl, and you won’t get hurt. Now grab him higher up on his legs. Like this.” Lonny catches hold of Spence and tells him, “Leggo the rope!” Spence flops down on the pile of bales.

  “Now you swing on the rope, Lissa.”

  “No. My hand hurts.”

  “She’s scared to,” Spence says. “Lissa doesn’t like to do scary things.”


  “Damn. Why, look. Ain’t nothing to it. Just watch me.” Lonny wraps the rope around one ankle and, standing on the rope knot, launches off. Ankles crossed tightly above the knot, he lets his whole body drop to swing full-length with his head dangling down.

  I watch his face fill with blood and turn an ugly shade of purple. The cords of his neck jut out. The Olds isn’t parked in the garage today—Jimmie took it out to do some grocery shopping at Sweeney’s—so, by stretching out his arms, Lonny can trail his fingertips across the concrete floor and trace a trail of wiggly scrawls in the sifted straw. When the rope stops swinging, he reverses himself and drops easily onto the concrete floor. Then he climbs the wall ladder back up into the loft. “See how easy it is?”

  “I don’t want to do it,” I whisper to Spence. I have what Jimmie calls a “stubborn streak” that she says can be “very provoking.” But today I remember how my daddy always tells me not to hurt myself, and I put on that stubborn streak like a knight’s coat of armor to protect myself from falling off and hurting myself.

  “My sister doesn’t want to,” Spence tells Lonny. “And believe me, my sister won’t do anything she doesn’t want to.”

  “Well, listen.” Lonny runs his fingers through his hair, picks at his teeth with a thumbnail, stares up at the roof beams, then down at me.

  “Okay. Here’s how we’ll work it. You’ll be the official circus catcher, Lissa. Spence and me’ll be the flyers, and I’ll be the ringmaster. That means I run the show.” Lonny walks over to the back edge of the launching pad, squats down, and pulls out a carton of cigarettes that’s wedged between two hay bales.

  “Have a puff?” He lights a cigarette and holds it out to Spence, who swallows too much smoke and starts to cough.

  “Listen, if you’re going to be a circus performer, Lissa, you got to have you some costumes. Go look and see what you got tucked away in your bedroom drawers. Maybe you got something like a bathing suit or a nightie you can wear. But you mustn’t tell your mother or she’ll get real mad at you. Cross your heart and swear you won’t tell.”

  I don’t understand just why Lonny thinks Jimmie will be mad, but I’m too fearful of Lonny to ask him any questions. As scared as I am of Lonny, though, I’m even more afraid of disobeying my daddy.

  “My daddy says ladies are not supposed to swear,” I say to Lonny. Jimmie says that my daddy is the head of the household, and he is always right. I am not ever supposed to defy my daddy’s wishes. If I do, it will make him cross. And I really don’t want to make my daddy cross. The only time I’ve ever see him cross is when me or Spence make a sudden noise—like slamming a door—that makes Daddy drop a watch he is working on. Then he plucks the hairs out of his head, one strand at a time. And his eyes, which are usually a soft brown, seem to flash gold when he’s riled. His mouth swims with ugly curses that terrify me because I understand them, but only partly.

  Over the years, Daddy’s spine has shortened and his once “straight as an arrow” neck and shoulders have begun to hunch; so, his face comes down close over me or Spence when he curses at us.

  “I won’t swear anything,” I tell Lonny.

  One Saturday, when it rains all afternoon, Lonny coaxes me to swing for the first time, sitting down on the rope knot. At first, I am trembly all over, but then I sail out through the air and it feels like I am flying on a trapeze in a real circus. Then I practice swinging again and again, until Lonny shouts at me from behind a pile of hay bales, “Come back here with me, and I’ll show you how to do something else.”

  I crawl behind Lonny through a tunnel in the hay bales that opens into a small space in a corner of the loft. Lonny has been calling this little place my “dressing room,” and this is where I have been changing my “costumes” in privacy between circus acts. Today is the first time Lonny comes with me into the dressing room, and he surprises me by pulling down his jeans and underpants. Then he orders me to “pull down your panties.” I am wearing my favorite lace-trimmed baby-doll pajamas, printed with pink rosebuds, as a circus costume.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You have to because I say so. I’m the ringmaster. And if you don’t do what I say, I’ll tell your mother on you.”

  I shake my head. I feel my eyes sting and fill with tears.

  “Come on and I’ll show you what me and my girlfriend, Cordella, do. Come on now. Pull your pants down.”

  I have seen Lonny’s girlfriend once or twice in Lonny’s car. Her hair is the color of straw and she teases it up high it like a miniature haystack piled up on top of her head. She wears white lipstick that makes her mouth look like a tiny powdered donut. She chews gum and pops it in time to the rock ’n’ roll music on Lonny’s car radio. According to Jimmie, Cordella is a “bad” girl.

  I am afraid to disobey Lonny. My fingers fumble at the elastic waistband of my pajama bottoms. My nervous thumb slips; the elastic snaps back and stings my waist. Above my head, I hear rain beating against the loft window, beating hard and rattling the window frame like a wild animal trying to get in.

  At the same time, I hear Lonny’s voice, repeating, “Don’t you dare tell your mother or she’ll be real mad at you.”

  The two sounds blend together and become muffled as Lonny squats opposite me and scoots me farther and farther back into a corner of the loft until my head scrunches up against a hay bale. My feet slip out from under me on loose chaff and straw. The straw smells moldy, and it scratches my arms and legs. I close my eyes. I draw into myself, rigid and tight. I try to be so small no one can see me.

  Lonny pushes my legs apart, shifts his weight, and keeps rubbing up against me, trying to push into me. I’m not sure exactly what he’s trying to do. But after a while, he moves away from me, and I open my eyes. There is Lonny, towering over me, zipping up his pants. When he sees me looking up at him, he shifts his eyes away and turns his back on me. Then he is gone, and I know he has not been able to do what he wants to do.

  I don’t want to play circus anymore. I think something bad and wrong must be going on here. But I don’t know for sure what is wrong or what I should do. I don’t feel safe. I count to twenty-four over and over in my head.

  “You children spend an awful lot of time in that barn. What do you do in there?” Jimmie asks when Spence and me are sitting at the kitchen table, eating fresh pea soup and dumplings. Daddy has already finished his meal and has gone back to work in his shop.

  “Nothing,” Spence mumbles and walks outside. I finish my soup and run out after him. “Why did you say ‘nothing’ just now?”

  “Lonny said not to tell.”

  “But you lied to Jimmie.”

  Spence lowers his eyes and walks away from me.

  I go around to the front of the house and sit in the tire swing, dangling my feet, scuffing up the dirt. I watch a tractor in the field. It carries a long side blade like a scythe and mows down timothy, clover, chicory. In the distance, I hear chainsaws whine. Then I see they are cutting their teeth on a grove of poplars but sparing the dogwoods.

  After a while I go back to the kitchen where Jimmie sits peeling green cooking apples into a blue earthenware bowl. She has taken to wearing eyeglasses these days—cheap eyeglasses from the drugstore. She looks up from her work to stare out the window, out at the field; her hands keep the paring knife moving over the fruit.

  “What are you staring at?” I ask her.

  “Your old mother is just gazing into the future, honey.”

  I pull my chair up close to Jimmie at the table. “Mommy,” I say.

  Jimmie looks at me, surprised. “You called me Mommy!”

  I am surprised at myself. For some reason, I need her to be my mommy now. My voice sounds funny, thick and furry. I squirm in my seat and begin to eat the apple peels as they drop from Jimmie’s paring knife onto the oilcloth. “Remember when you asked Spence what we’d been doing in the barn?”

  “Yes.”

  From the kitchen window, Jimmie and I can see a well-drillin
g machine going up and down, digging a deep hole in the ground. Behind us on the kitchen wall, the brass pendulum of the Regulator clock marks heavy strokes of time. A drop of water plops sluggishly into the sink.

  Jimmie stops her work and gives me her full attention. “What has been going on in that barn?”

  I pick up two long, coiling peels and dangle one from behind each ear. “How do you like my earrings?”

  She puts her hand over mine. It’s a strong hand, rough from farm work.

  “You can tell Mommy, honey.”

  “Lonny said…not to tell.”

  The two wrinkles between Jimmie’s eyes seem to etch deeper than usual. “He doesn’t try to…to hurt you, does he, honey?”

  I stare at the floor. “He tried to stick his…thing into me.”

  I peek up to see pink splotches form on Jimmie’s cheeks. She swallows hard and says, “He could have hurt you, honey.”

  She picks up her paring knife from the table and an apple from the basket and continues at her work. “Don’t you ever let Lonny do that to you again.”

  I am staring down, counting the cracks in the linoleum, when I hear Jimmie’s chair grate across the floor. I look up to see her go to the black wall phone that hangs under the hall staircase. My mother repeats her sister’s phone number to the operator, bites her lips, and fidgets with the telephone cord while she waits for the call to go through.

  “Hello, Essie. This is Jimmie.” I listen to my story being blurted out. Then I hear, “He ought to be ashamed of himself…he could have injured her for life…well, you just better make yourself deal with him. You don’t, I will…I don’t think so, but I’m going to look her over, just to be on the safe side.

  “Honey, I’m going to take a look at you. And then, maybe this evening, I’ll just take you for a ride over to Doctor Doc’s. I want to make sure my little girl’s all right.” She pauses, looks sharply at me as if she is trying to size up my understanding of the situation. “We won’t worry your father with this, will we? He’d be hurt for life.”