We reach a bunch of thick stalks that Mom calls a canebrake. Dillon is in front. He parts the cane with his sickle and stops to hold it back for us. Mom tells how Papaw and the neighbors made molasses from the cane at the wheel and the pan, how she and Dillon ate the meat of the cane stalks for the sweetness. Dillon breaks off a stalk and I taste, try to imagine him and my mom being kids like me. The cane isn’t as good as a candy bar. I throw it down, cut ahead of Dillon, and head toward the willows. I want to be the first one to spy the foundation.
Then I feel a board under my foot and it snaps with a loud crack when I step down on it. I drop so fast it is like my stomach jumps up to my throat. My arms hit the board and I try to hold on, but my right arm slips and I kick out. My legs are hanging in space. My arms hurt and I slip farther, splinters bite the skin above my elbow, the board sags. I kick again and scream. Then Mom grabs my arm, Dillon throws himself flat on his belly with his head stuck down in the hole, reaches out, and catches hold of a belt loop on my jeans. Mom leans over and slips her arms under mine. They drag me up and we fall in a heap.
Mom holds me tight. Dillon gets up slow and finds a rock. He drops it in the hole. It gets real quiet and then we hear a faraway splash.
“It’s the old well,” Dillon says.
“It almost took my baby,” Mom says. “So much for living in the past.”
“I suppose it’s my fault.”
“I want to leave.”
“Fine. We’ll leave. We’re only ten yards from where the house set, but if you’re going to be pigheaded about it, we’ll leave.”
“I don’t think I want to move to Number Thirteen.”
They have forgot about me again.
“Fine. Why don’t you go back to that sonofabitch Tony?”
“I’m making a big change in my life and I almost lost my daughter down the Homeplace well. It’s not a good sign, it doesn’t bode well.”
“Jesus Christ, you yell at me for living in the past and here you turn superstitious on me. You want a sign, I’ll give you a sign. We pulled that girl out of the well together and here we stand, just the three of us, on our land. Tell her what she needs to know. This is where she should hear it.”
They look at me for the first time.
I dance around yelling “Tell me, tell me,” but something hard in Mom’s face stops me cold.
“I’m going back to Aunt Carrie,” she says, and pushes her way back through the canebrake. Dillon picks me up and sets me on his shoulders. I can see above the cane, across the bottom to the mountains on the other side of the river.
“One thing I want you to know,” Dillon says. “This is your land. They’s a piece of paper at the courthouse in Shelby says otherwise, but don’t never believe a piece of paper. Land belongs to them that love it. I want you to love this land.”
“I do love it,” I say. I want to make him feel good after Mom has been so mean. He pats my knee.
Mom waits beside the railroad track. Dillon stops when he sees her and sets me down. “Run on ahead,” he says. I skip down the track, bouncing from one cross tie to the next, pleased that I have had an adventure on my land. Someday I will come back and look down the well. I stop once and glance back down the track. They are standing with their arms around each other and Mom puts her head on Dillon’s chest and starts to cry.
On the way home, we stop at the Grace Hospital in Justice so Mom and Dillon can give blood. Mom says it is to help people who are sick but I hate needles so I think they are crazy. Then I have to get my finger stuck to make sure I don’t need iron pills, even though the doctor did that when I had my checkup. Afterward we stop at an office on the first floor and Mom talks to a woman.
“Wanda’s mother is one of my patients,” Mom tells Dillon. “She’ll look at Tony’s records for me.”
We walk down the hill to the Flat Iron Drugstore and Dillon buys us chocolate sodas. I tell him about my baseball cards while Mom talks on the phone. When she comes back she stirs her soda with her straw.
“I’m O positive,” she says. “You’re A positive. Jackie is A positive.” She bites her fingernail. “Tony is A positive. So it doesn’t prove a thing.”
Dillon’s knuckles are white where he is holding onto the table. I am scared because I have been reading about leukemia in Reader’s Digest.
“Is somebody sick?” I ask.
Mom puts her hand on my head. “No, honey. Nobody’s sick.”
Book Two
THE ROVING PICKETS 1962
JACKIE
When we first moved into our new house at Number Thirteen, I figured I would be a writer. The new house has got white bookcases built right into the wall. It has a bedroom downstairs where Dillon sleeps sometimes, with a bed that Mom says is oak. The doctor left the bed with ugly white paint all over it but Mom took the paint off and she says it is an antique. The house has got big bedrooms upstairs with sloped ceilings. You can walk right into the closets and there are smelly old trunks the doctor left behind. There’s nothing in the trunks but they look like what you would take on a sea voyage in a wooden ship or strap onto the back of a stagecoach. When I looked at the trunks I started to think up lots of stories about princes and princesses in faraway lands.
There is a boy in Number Thirteen named Toejam Day. His father works at the mine with Dillon. Toejam isn’t real smart, and his family is poor. Toejam’s teeth are so rotten they have got black streaks all over them and Mom says when he gets big he will have dentures.
Toejam delivers the newspapers for Number Thirteen and sometimes I help him. I let him borrow my bicycle and he doubles me. Toejam is little but he is strong. He stands up and pumps the pedals while I sit on the seat and throw newspapers on the porches. The streets are made of mud and chunks of red dog from the slate dump, so it is rough riding but Toejam has never wrecked us. He only wrecks when he is by himself.
While Toejam pedals I tell him stories I made up about the people who live in the houses. They aren’t good stories because you can’t tell good stories about people around here, but it is what Toejam likes. His favorites are about the people who live on Hunkie Hill. They are Hungarians, Russians, and Czechoslovakians. Toejam can’t even say “Czechoslovakians.”
There is a church with a gold dome in main Davidson for the people from Hunkie Hill. Mom says it was an Orthodox church but now it is closed up. I tell Toejam they still go there and they have got a secret radio transmitter in the dome with a direct line to Nikita Khrushchev. Sam Chernenko is a real old man who lives in the last house on the hill and he still speaks English with an accent so strong you can’t hardly understand him. He whitewashed the rocks and tree trunks in his yard. Mom says Sam Chernenko is eccentric. I told Toejam that Sam has witch ceremonies at midnight and dances around the painted rocks in a white gown and sacrifices groundhogs with a curved sword. Toejam is scared to death of Sam Chernenko.
They are just silly stories I tell Toejam, like the dumb old hillbilly story Uncle Brigham Lloyd tells. Uncle Brigham and his family live just across the street from our new house. Uncle Brigham has a big chest and skinny legs. He leans forward when he walks, like a stiff chicken. He comes onto his front porch every blue evening in the summertime, leans over the rail, coughs a while, and spits out icky black gobs that Mom says is coal dust from his lungs. Then he sits on the metal glider with the faded green plastic cushions and leans back with his legs straight out in front of him.
I like to sit on our front porch swing and read Nancy Drew mysteries from the library. Nancy Drew is real smart, smarter than anybody in Number Thirteen.
But Uncle Brigham will holler, “Hey, Jackie, come on over here, gal!” I hate to interrupt Nancy Drew and it is nice on our porch with the ivy and rose bushes and flower boxes all around, but I don’t like to be rude. So I walk across the red dog road to his bare old porch. I pull open the gate that is almost off its hinges in the wire and wood fence and sit on the front stoop. When Uncle Brigham leans toward me, I can smell his breath sweet with
alcohol.
He tells the story of the Big Toe like this:
“Once upon a time, they was a man put in a potato patch right over yonder in the bottom by Lloyds Fork. He lived in that big old house of yourn. And this feller lived all by himself, no wife nor younguns. One night he had a hankering for fried taters and wild onions. So he goes out to his garden and he hoes and he digs him up the finest big tater you ever did see. That feller pulled him some wild onions and went back to his wood stove and fried himself up a whole mess of taters. And after he et all that, he didn’t feel like doing nothing but sleeping. So he dragged himself up the stairs and went to bed.
“Hit was sometime around midnight he woke to a thumping noise, coming from the kitchen. He set right up in that bed.
“ ‘Who’s there?’ he hollers.
“First he didn’t hear nothing. Then they come a low moaning. ‘O-o-o-o-h!’
“ ‘Who’s there?’ he hollers again.
“Then he hears a faraway voice. ‘I—want—my—big—toe.’ ”
Uncle Brigham stared over my head like he saw something horrible in the dark. Lightning bugs floated by.
“ ‘Hit’s the devil at your door and I want my big toe. I’m on the first step. I’m on the second step.’
“Now that feller was shaking so hard his bones rattled.
“ ‘I’m on the third step. I WANT MY BIG TOE! I’M ON THE FOURTH STEP!’
“Feller tried to hide under his bed but hit was built too low to the floor.
“ ‘I’M ON THE FIFTH STEP!’
“That feller was back in the bed with the quilt pulled plumb over his head.
“ ‘I WANT MY BIG TOE! I’M ON THE EIGHTH STEP! I’M—’
“GOTCHA!”
I almost did scream when he grabbed a hold of my neck.
“I scared you, girl.”
He started laughing like it was real funny. I have to admit I was a little nervous but I was younger then. I wasn’t that scared. But he kept teasing me while I rubbed my bare feet back and forth in the gritty coal dust on the floor and wouldn’t look at him, I was so mad.
Then he had to quit laughing because he started coughing. He wiped his mouth in a red bandana, then said in a wheezy voice, “They aint no escaping the Booger man, youngun. Hit’s a waste of time to try.”
I ran across the road and settled on our front porch swing. And every time I go to Uncle Brigham’s, he tells the same dumb story about the Booger man, and no handsome prince to rescue anybody. It’s not a real story like you would hear someplace else.
When I got back from his house I’d get a notebook and figure I would write a real story with a happy ending. But it never worked. I’m not a real writer. Real writers live in New York apartments or sit at sidewalk cafés in Paris.
Sometimes I study Number Thirteen from my front porch. The houses used to be white, but now they are faded gray with coal dust and their paint is peeling. They sit all close together. In the dusk I can pretend it is not Number Thirteen, it is the German village where the Grimm brothers told their stories, and the coal camp houses are really cottages like where Hansel and Gretel lived, cottages lit with candles and lanterns instead of cheap lamps from the five-and-ten.
But it is still the same old Number Thirteen. In one house Homer Day reads the Bible while his wife Louella heats up bacon grease for the wild greens Toejam picked for supper. It is all they will have to eat. Nearby Homer’s brother Hassel and his friend Junior Tackett sit on a vinyl couch outside Hassel’s trailer. Across the street, Uncle Brigham Lloyd is getting drunk and I can hear the TV turned up loud through the open screen door. Betty and the kids are watching “Bonanza” and Uncle Brigham is hollering at them to turn down the goddamn noise. My mom is working her half-acre in the camp garden, trying to finish hoeing the tomatoes before it gets dark, and Dillon is walking the railroad track toward her. She stops hoeing to watch him come on.
So there is not a thing to write about, only hillbillies, and nobody cares to hear about hillbillies. I go inside to watch TV.
I don’t know what I’d do without my mom. One day when she was late from work, I was sure she was dead. I imagined a car wreck. I stood in the screen door watching down the hill and pictured the glass scattered like shiny popcorn and red sticky blood puddling with the coal dust in the road. I am a Christian. I was saved when I was ten at the Felco Methodist Church Sunday School. So I got down on my knees and promised Jesus that if my mom came back safe I’d go off to Africa and be a missionary. I was sorry for that promise as soon as she walked in the door and said she’d had a flat tire.
I knew I’d have to figure something out. Louella Day says when people break promises to God, He squashes them flat. But I wonder if God can be got around. Like the story where God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Sure Abraham went through the motions, laid his son on the altar, and even raised up the knife. But who’s to say he would have gone through with it? Abraham had to have an eye cocked toward Heaven waiting to hear ‘Don’t Bother.’ Anybody who hears a lot of stories could see it coming. I considered that maybe God didn’t want any more missionaries in Africa and was aggravated at me butting in. Or maybe I could convince Him I’d be a second-rate missionary and He’d want to fire me. I decided to test my call on the Lloyds. If I succeeded, there’d be more souls in Heaven, but I’d also have to find another excuse for not going to Africa. I wasn’t too worried, though. The Lloyds would be tough nuts to crack, and God would understand that I was a failure.
The Lloyds never go to church. Neither does anyone else at Number Thirteen except for the Days, since Homer pastors the Holiness church on the hill and his congregation walks in from up Lloyds Fork. It’s not that people here are heathens—they all believe in God. But Dillon says they don’t like to be preached at unless they’re ready to die and need to be whipped into shape for Heaven. Everybody reckons to go to church some day. It is just something they’ll get around to when they’re too old to have fun. It’s the preacher’s job to remind them that some will be caught unawares.
There were four Lloyds for me to save, and I decided to go after one of the kids. Doyle Ray, the oldest, is the most obnoxious person in Number Thirteen, always picking fights and throwing red dog. At school he hit me in the face with a hunk of red dog and broke my glasses. The doctor said I was lucky I didn’t lose an eye.
Doyle Ray needed saving, but I couldn’t muster enough charitable feeling toward him to do it. The Bible says to return good for evil, but after Doyle Ray hit me in the face I gave him a glass of Kool-Aid made with creek water. The creek is full of mine acid and sewage, so it wasn’t very Christian of me.
That left Brenda.
Brenda is in my class at the Felco Grade School. She sits at the desk in front of me, so she would be easy pickings. Besides, I like Brenda and thought I would enjoy saving her. She is real short and skinny. Her black hair is cut straight across in bangs and she has a mustache of little black hairs on her upper lip. She wears short-sleeved cotton dresses that her mother makes off the same pattern, no matter what time of year it is.
Brenda is the best arithmetic student in the school, which means she is also the fastest. Miss Cox, the fifth-grade teacher, believes in speed. She taught us the steps of long division and sends us to the blackboard in teams—boys against girls, one row against another—to see who can get the right answer the fastest. Brenda always finishes first. When she works long division at the board she has to reach high because she is so short. Her dress rides up her back, the material pulled up by the belt, until her panties almost show. Her long skinny arm skips across the blackboard like a monkey looking for bugs on tree bark that I saw on “Wild Kingdom.”
I decided to save Brenda a little at a time. I would start by asking questions like “If Jesus knocked on your door this evening, what would you be ashamed of that you done today?” That is Preacher Johnson’s favorite line.
But every time I had a chance, like walking home from the school bus, the words stuck in my throat
. I did manage to ask Brenda if she’d like to go to church.
“Not really,” she said.
I felt awful uncomfortable trying to save Brenda, like I thought I knew more than she did. I talked to Dillon about it, and he said anyone who tried to save someone else was a snob and he wished Mom wouldn’t take me to such a narrow-minded church. So I didn’t have to fool God into thinking I would be a wash-out as a missionary. It was an actual fact, and I was off the hook.
Mom doesn’t like the Lloyds. Uncle Brigham is Dillon’s first cousin, but from his daddy’s people. Mom says the Lloyds are Dillon’s rough side. Uncle Brigham’s face is wide, and he has a big fat nose with a wart stuck on one side. He’s got a blue scar he calls a coal tattoo on his forehead where he was hit by a chunk of falling slate. Mom feels sorry for his wife Betty, because Uncle Brigham stays drunk. A long time ago, he ran off his first wife with his drinking. Sometimes he and Betty fight with dishes and brooms and frying pans. Dillon lives too far away to help, so the kids run across the street to Mom and beg her to make the peace. She comes back after half an hour, shaking her head, and is in a bad mood the rest of the day. Usually she does our ironing after she’s been to the Lloyds and smites our clothes with a strong right arm like God did the Philistines.
Once after she came home from the Lloyds, I snuck across the street and found Uncle Brigham slumped on the front porch glider.
“Uncle Brigham, how come you drink so much?”
“Hey, Jackie.” He stared into space.
I felt real brave so I asked him again.
“Aw,” he said, “hit aint as final as a bullet and tastes better than rat poison.” He rocked back and forth, smiled in a way that made his lips go thin. “My back hurts, youngun. Broke it in the mines oncet, you know.” He waved his hand slow and tired like. “Come up on this here porch. Let me tell you a story.”
The Unquiet Earth Page 12