“So,” Dillon says, “what do you all do with your time?”
When Tom tries to explain about the Cervantes Center, Dillon looks blank. Finally he says, “It sounds like a lot of talking to me.”
“We do more than talk,” Tom says. “Last month we had a demonstration against contra aid. We had our biggest crowd yet.”
“So what?” Dillon says. “There’s a demonstration right over yonder and a hell of a lot of good it’s doing.” He fishes a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, taps the bottom, and chooses a cigarette.
“Don’t you read all the news reports about smoking?” I say. “It’s really bad for you.”
He pauses with his lighter in his hand, a look of irritation on his face.
“Sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to be bossy.”
“Actually we’re in a nonsmoking section,” Tom says.
Dillon sticks the unlit cigarette in his pocket, takes a wedge of dill pickle from a red ceramic jar on the table, and sucks on it. Dillon keeps looking at me. A waitress brings our sandwiches. Then Dillon says, “You like it here?”
I glance at Tom. “It’s okay,” I say.
“You go to these demonstrations?”
“She got arrested in front of the White House,” Tom says.
Dillon keeps looking at me like Tom never spoke. Tom daubs mustard on his sandwich.
“It was no big deal,” I say. “We cleared everything with the police ahead of time.”
“You mean you told the police what you was going to do?”
I shrug. “Yeah.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard tell of.”
“It was moving,” Tom says. His voice is low and tight. “We held candles and called out the names of people murdered by the Contras. Then we sat down in front of the White House gate and linked arms.”
“I bet that ruined old Ronnie’s evening,” Dillon says.
“He was in California,” I say. I am starting to smile.
Tom says, “You got a better idea? We thought about blowing up the Memorial Bridge, but we decided there were too many police around.”
If Tom thinks he’s making Dillon mad, he’s wrong. It’s like they’re playing cards and Dillon knows he’s got a full house. He keeps talking to me, ignoring Tom. “So you went to jail? For how long?”
“Overnight. They put us on probation.”
“That’s play jail. Like Monopoly.”
“It was a damn powreful witness,” Tom says. He leans across the table at Dillon.
“I want to see somebody witness, I’ll go to church,” Dillon says.
“I guess you would have made fun of Martin Luther King, too?”
“Martin Luther King didn’t stand around singing hymns and inviting the police to some tea party.”
I poke Tom with my elbow. “You say the same thing yourself. You’re always wondering if we’re doing any good here.”
Dillon turns to me. “Things are getting rough again back home. You don’t have to look for a cause there. Just set still and something will run over you.”
“That’s a lot more true of Central America than Appalachia,” Tom says.
“You aint in Central America,” Dillon says. He asks me again, “You like it here?”
“No,” I say.
Tom glances sideways at me and a muscle jumps in his cheek. He says, “Why the hell are you hanging around then?”
“I could ask you the same thing. You’re always talking about wanting to be some martyr in Honduras.”
He starts to answer back, then mutters “Shit,” under his breath. He reaches in his pocket, looking for money to pay the bill. Dillon is watching us with his eyes narrow.
Outside, Dillon takes out the pack of Camels. “You know that Justice Clarion?” Dillon says. “Always been a terrible newspaper. Some fellow in Lewisburg just bought it, but he don’t want to move to Justice so he’s looking to hire an editor. Aint had much luck from what I hear tell. Hired one fellow that didn’t last a month. He didn’t care for the coalfields.”
“It’s not for everybody,” Tom says. He is walking fast. Dillon refuses to hurry.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’m getting old. Because I miss you.” He takes out a Camel, studies it, then drops it on the sidewalk. “Tell you what. You come home and I’ll quit smoking.”
He takes the pack from his pocket, crumples it and throws it in a trash can. Tom doesn’t notice. He is already crossing the street, heading for the subway station.
We left Washington about the same time. I took the job at the Justice Clarion; Tom went to the Yoro province in Honduras where the Jesuits were working with campesinos. We didn’t have much of a goodbye. Right after I announced I was leaving, Tom got arrested for occupying an apartment building with some tenants fighting eviction. I wondered if he did it on purpose, so he would be shut away in the DC jail while I packed my bags.
Before I left, I took a cab past RFK Stadium to the modern stone dungeon isolated in a moat of throbbing light, set my hand palm flat against the screen between us and tried to get up the nerve to say I loved him. But his face was set in an expression of studied disinterest, as though my visit were part of the day’s routine. He glanced at a guard, then at the clock on the wall and back at me. I lost my nerve and only said I would write.
“I’m going for language training as soon as I get out of here,” he said. “It will be a few months before I have a permanent address. Maybe I should write you first.”
“OK,” I said, and felt everything slipping away.
He didn’t write for nearly a year, then sent me a letter from Honduras. He said he was doing the most important work he’d ever done. The banana workers at a nearby plantation were on strike, and the campesinos were trying to form a cooperative. Living conditions were hard, he ate beans and rice every day, and worked in the fields in the hot sun alongside the campesinos. He slept in a hammock and banged his shoes against the ground before he put them on, looking for scorpions. He wasn’t complaining, he was bragging.
I wrote back in care of the Jesuits in Tegucigalpa and heard nothing for six months. After a second letter, he stopped writing.
So he was beyond my reach and there was nothing I could do except remind myself that I was the one who’d decided first to leave Washington, that I had not lost him because he was never mine to lose.
BRIDGES AND DAMS 1985 – 1986
HASSEL, 1985
I still yet have in mind to build that Homer Day Memorial Bridge, but I have been bound to play Cupid first. It is something I like to do. I believe different from Louelly, who says that God has made somebody for everyone, but bad luck can get in the way. Like she thinks Ethel aint never got married because the man God picked out for her got killed in that Vietnam War before Ethel had a chance to meet him.
Me, I think love is something that has got to be worked at. And sometimes a person needs a little help. I always reckoned Toejam would be that way. He won’t push hisself on nobody, and they is more push in finding a sweetie than anything else.
Still yet, Toejam’s situation was special. It wasn’t bad luck nor shyness nor even tall mountains and broad rivers that stood between him and his true love. It was that Ronald Reagan.
Nobody in Number Thirteen voted for Ronald Reagan in nineteen and eighty. I seen it in that Justice Clarion where they list how every precinct in the county voted. Only precinct that went for Reagan was Justice town itself, where the lawyers live. At Number Thirteen precinct it was Jimmy Carter 72, Ronald Reagan o.
Now I don’t care what nobody says, a voting machine looks like an upright coffin with a shower curtain hanging on it. We are free to vote but you have got to be careful of it just the same, like picking up a copperhead. When I seen it was just Georgia and West Virginia voted for Jimmy, I told Junior, “Lordy how we stick out. They won’t be nothing out of this government but trouble.”
Sure enough Betty Lloyd lost her black lung check that come a
fter Uncle Brigham passed away and the government said she owed them back the thirty thousand dollars that she’d got from it. But worst of all, Brenda’s disability check was took. I say worst of all because that stood between Toejam and his love.
Toejam has been courting for several years now. It started when Louelly’s TV went bad. Toejam would go to Uncle Brigham’s to watch his “Rockford Files” and his “Mork and Mindy.” Then he got to going every night, even after Junior put Louelly in a new picture tube.
Brenda don’t care a bit that Toejam is shy, and she didn’t mind when he dropped out of school. Toejam always sets on a kitchen chair beside Brenda’s wheelchair. She nods her head and laughs a lot. Sometimes Toejam holds her hand. She twines them skinny fingers through his and squeezes so hard his knuckles turn white. If he catches me watching he will duck his head and grin.
I am watching him now, hauling Brenda on his back, her legs tucked tight under his armpits and her arms wrapped around his neck. It is easier than pushing her wheelchair on the red dog. Louelly is having her Sunday school class over for Kool-Aid and cookies and Toejam is taking Brenda. He stops and waves at me, picks up Brenda’s limp hand and makes it wave. Brenda grins and calls out something I can’t figure out.
Toejam used to be the janitor at the Felco grade school. He loved that job. He liked to wash the green chalkboards and see them come clean. He liked the way the first graders would holler “Hey, Toejam!” when they seen him in the hallway. He didn’t even mind to clean the bathrooms, said the younguns weren’t bad to mess. But the schools was going down because more and more people was moving away from Blackberry Creek. Then Ronald Reagan stopped the school money coming. So the Felco school closed and the younguns had to bus to Davidson. Toejam lost his job right before he was set to marry Brenda.
It had been hard enough to get Betty Lloyd to agree to a wedding. One Sunday after church, Toejam took me and Louelly to call on Betty. We set around the living room and drank coffee.
“Toejam don’t make much,” Betty had said. “And Brenda needs doctoring now and then.”
Toejam sank back in his chair and looked pitiful.
“Toejam has got medical from the school board,” I said. “Brenda has got that disability from the government. And I still yet have the Dew Drop. I can help out if need be.”
That clinched it. I have the coldest beer on the creek and the psychedelic light, except now I call it a disco light. I have a boy sings on Thursday nights as sweet as Eddy Arnold and a band on weekends called the Drive Shaft that can play Alabama songs and Bob Seger too. The Dew Drop has gone down some, like everything else, but it still does a trade. And someday I will have that car bridge.
“I reckon it’s all right with me,” Betty said at last.
Then Toejam smiled and grabbed Brenda by the hand and Brenda laughed. When Brenda laughs, she throws her head back in that wheelchair and cackles like a chicken.
But then Toejam lost his job and the Lloyds lost the black lung and the disability. Betty said the wedding had to be put off. She wasn’t hateful about it, just said it was her responsibility to look after her youngun, and while Brenda was still yet single she could keep her daddy’s Social Security.
Toejam was heartbroke. He tried to get on at the mines but he couldn’t pass the tests and by then they wasn’t hiring no ways. Then he tried caddying at the golf course and he could haul them bags of clubs all right, but he never could keep straight all the different kinds of irons and putters. So the manager put him to janitoring the clubhouse.
The first day after work he come straight to the Dew Drop, where I was mopping the floor, and asked for a beer. That took me back because Toejam is churchgoing and aint much for drinking. I peeled open a Bud and set it on the bar.
“Hit’s different at the country club,” he says.
“Now, Toejam,” I says, “aint janitoring the same everywhere?”
“Naw it aint,” he says. “They done had a big party Saturday night. People throwed up all over the bathrooms. And guess what I found in the closet?” He leaned forward and whispered, even though they was nary a soul around. “It was a pair of panties on the floor. And one of them rubber things, all sticky and wadded up.”
“Son, that’s life.”
“They was some men drinking up there when I left. They was cussing out the miners.”
I nodded. “That’s life too,” I said.
He ducked his head. “Hit’s only part time. I asked about the medical. They said it won’t be none.”
He took on other chores. He cleaned the Dew Drop and I paid him for it. He walked the highway looking for aluminum cans, the way him and his mommy used to pick up pop bottles in the old days. He said the cans was lighter and easier to carry, but he missed the way the bottles clinked together like music.
I couldn’t bear to see him so downhearted and mopey, and it like to broke Betty Lloyd’s heart too. She said Brenda was so tore up she wouldn’t watch TV.
“I don’t like to be mean, Hassel,” she says.
“You aint mean. You’re looking after your own.”
“You reckon we could do something about that disability? Maybe go to Arthur Lee?”
I laughed.
“What about Jackie Honaker?” she said. “She’s at that Justice Clarion now.”
“And writes them editorials that run down Arthur Lee.”
“He’s still yet her stepdaddy.”
“Still yet,” I agreed. “But I don’t see that she can do a thing.”
They was another election and I thought that might do it. We all vote at the country club because they won’t bring the voting machines into Number Thirteen. We have to walk all the way around by Winco bottom, and by the time you traipse up that hill to the clubhouse, you feel like you done accomplished something, but that’s what voting is for.
The two machines was set in the middle of that slick ballroom floor across from the white French doors. Folks tiptoed across careful to keep from slipping on the wax. Toejam peeked out from the kitchen, real nervous. Sometimes he had to come out and mop where somebody tracked in coal dust but he always went back to the kitchen.
Folks nodded when they seen him, said “Hey, Toejam.” They all knew what they had to do. When the votes was counted, Number Thirteen went for Walter Mondale 49–2. I reckoned the two was Doyle Ray Lloyd and his wife. Doyle Ray come back from Vietnam different-turned, and I will tell about that later. Anyway, our 49 votes wasn’t enough and Ronald Reagan tromped that there Mondale.
So we went to see Jackie Honaker. She has got an office across from the courthouse, and it is strange to see her all growed up and her name on the door with “Editor” underneath of it. She is not as skinny as she was, and she must be in her thirties, but she still yet wears blue jeans and sweatshirts and not much makeup that I can tell. I reckon you don’t have to dress up when you set around and write all day.
When Jackie come home a few years back, I hadn’t laid eyes on her since her mommy died. I’d said, “Law if you don’t take more and more after Dillon.”
She had looked surprised and then smiled and said, “I was always afraid I took after my daddy’s people. I’m glad to hear someone say I look like Mom’s side of the family.”
When me and Betty went to call, she set us down on a beat up old couch and give us cups of coffee. It was real bad coffee, bitter like the pot hadn’t been cleaned in a year. Then I told her what we come for. First she looked sad and shook her head. “I barely speak to Arthur Lee. He never has forgiven me for burying my mom in the Homeplace cemetery, and he hates my editorials.” Then she sipped her coffee and got a hopeful look on her face. “I’ve got a better idea. I used to work for that congressman from upstate. I know him and I know people on committees in Washington who might do a favor. I’ll call them.”
And that is what happened. Next month we heard tell one of them judges would look over Brenda’s case, and he put Brenda back on that disability. So we set the wedding date.
Betty s
aid, “Doyle Ray will want to do the marrying.”
It is hard to think of Doyle Ray Lloyd as a preacher, but he come home marked. When a person shoots his sister, does time at Pruntytown, and survives driving a tank in Vietnam, it will take something to save him. Some in Doyle Ray’s shape would become drug addicts. If he was rich, or if he come from someplace else, he might have climbed barefoot up one of them holy mountains in foreign countries or gone to one of them shrinks like everybody does in New York City. But we don’t have none of them, so Doyle Ray become a mean kind of Christian. During the week he drives a coal truck, hauls from the strip mines up on Trace. But on Wednesday nights and Sundays he pastors the Church of God (Prophecy) at Spencers Curve.
I went to a service one time just to be neighborly. It was aggravating because they prayed to save me and called me by name. Doyle Ray don’t even hold with the Holy Rollers. He says they have too good a time, and besides it is un-American to speak in foreign tongues. I tried not to mind all that and just paid attention. When Doyle Ray preached about Hell his face was all twisted up like he was already there. He screamed and beat on that pulpit until he was soaking wet with sweat. He hollered about drugs and rock music, and the alcohol he claimed had killed his daddy, and the Commie hordes that come at him in Vietnam and would get us all if America didn’t turn to God. When he was done he seemed to feel better, like he was safe for a little while, and the congregation seemed to be wore out like they’d been worked hard and to feel better too.
So Doyle Ray did the marrying for Toejam and Brenda. Louelly’s Ethel claimed it sounded like he’d preached a funeral instead of a wedding, they was so much hellfire strowed about. But Toejam and Brenda didn’t notice, they was that much in love.
The Unquiet Earth Page 28