“She was going to get something to eat and go to the can, and she didn’t want none of these redneck boys around here to steal the fish or the jug,” he said in a loud enough whisper for everyone to hear.
For some reason that struck me as ridiculous, all that money laying around loose on a table and someone gonna steal a fish. But as Jackson explained, with one jug and one fish a person could make all that money and then some. We walked back across the midway, and he told me that he was from Baltimore, the home of the Orioles, and that he’d been to college in western Maryland for a couple of years. He was studying business. He was interested in making money someday, but just now he didn’t think he wanted to go back to school in the fall. Jackson said he wanted to live life instead of reading about it in books. I told him I felt the same way. But he said no. He was jealous of me, I had it good, he said. I had something that he didn’t have. I had a real life. I was part of the land, I was in touch with the earth and could take control of my destiny.
No one ever said that kind of thing to me before. And that made me think about my life, and what I wanted to do with it. I flipped through the pages of my dreams like the color photos in a Life magazine. Actress? Model? Movie star? Well, the fact was, I was eighteen, I got my diploma, sometimes I babysat Dessie’s two little ones and worked the garden for Mom, and one day a week I watched my old aunt Nelda for pay on the nurse’s day off. She broke her hip but was still pretty sharp for seventy. I was ashamed to admit to Jackson or myself that I had not gotten started on any real plans at all. I didn’t even have a driver’s license. I had thought that all those plans could wait until after the summer. But here it was, almost the end of the summer, and I felt so stupid, so trapped, living at home, having to make excuses and sneak out to go to the fair. Dessie had her own house by the time she was eighteen, her own life; she had her babies and everything.
“Hey, you!” A large woman in a polky-dot blouse that hung out over the top of her polky-dot pants yelled over at us. “Stop a minute. Hey, you kids,” she yelled again. I stopped dead still and looked at her, instantly feeling a stab of something, the heat lightning coming down from the sky splitting me in half, or maybe she was going to scold me, to tell me I didn’t belong here, or that my sweater was too tight, or I should be home at this hour. It must have been half past midnight by now. But, amazingly, she didn’t. Instead she asked us if we were hungry, if we wanted some leftovers before she put them in the trash and cleaned up for the night.
“Sure,” Jackson said, smiling his bright white smile. She dished out two big paper plates piled high with Belgian waffles, whipped cream, and topped with strawberries, maybe even twice the regular amount. That was when I knew I had died and gone to heaven. Every year, when we passed by that booth, I begged for Belgian waffles. One year I cried tears for Belgian waffles, and Dad got so mad at me, he took me right home.
Praise be to God for small miracles and heavenly signs. Jackson and me sat down on a picnic bench away from the lights where no one much was around and watched the sky go from bright to dark to bright again. Maybe Jackson Childs was a magic charm, I was thinking. People wanted to give him things, to treat him nice, to wave and smile and offer him food. He seemed like the kind of guy could do anything he set his mind to. The waffles were cold, but the sweet cream and strawberry sauce was the best thing I had ever eaten in my life. I ate ’til I was stuffed full. There was too much to finish. Then I started watching Jackson, who was holding his whole waffle in his fingers. He hadn’t even tried using the fork. He had a white whipped-cream mustache. I laughed out loud. I couldn’t stop myself, I liked watching him eat so much.
“Just who are you laughing at?” he said, and I said, “You.”
Just as I was thinking about how I could never have laughed that way at Alan Ray, Jackson Childs popped the last bite into his mouth, then leaned over and kissed me, for what seemed like a very long time, all the while wiping his whipped-cream mustache everywhere over my lips. And I kissed him back, getting into the fun of it, taking licks of the whipped cream off his cheeks and his chin. This was not the way Alan Ray kissed me at all. Alan Ray’s kisses were hard presses against the lips, serious, usually over pretty quick, only one or two and then it would be good-bye till next time. He never even seemed to want me to kiss him back. But Jackson’s tongue felt like it was checking every bit of my mouth for hidden bits of waffle and cream.
Suddenly Jackson stopped kissing, and he got a serious expression on his face. “What would you do with your life if you could do anything?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. What I thought was, I’d keep kissing you. But I could tell that he wanted a thoughtful kind of answer. So I wiped my mouth and said, “I’d have a farmhouse, maybe some animals, like a horse and a dog. I’d have children, too, and I would teach them important things, like how to garden, and how to live by the golden rule, and how to ride horses, too.”
“How are you going to get that stuff?” he asked, and I shrugged. “Do you have plans?” Jackson asked.
“No,” I said, “not really, not yet. Do you?”
“You bet I got plans. I got great plans,” Jackson said, and he was going to let me in on them. There were things he wanted out of life. Things he wanted to do. He was going to buy him a cheap piece of land back here in the hills, and have a little homestead, live a simple life, and make a huge profit from an amazing cash crop.
“An amazing cash crop?” I asked. “Tobacco?”
“Nope. Better. Just come with me,” Jackson said. He led me up to the horse stalls, where he’d been working cleaning up after the prize Belgian pulling horses, the cutting ponies and the 4-H lambs, past the shaggy goats and fancy long-hair rabbits, and the pink-and-black piglets grunting and sucking at their mother. He waved friendly-like to the few farmers and the livestock owners that were bedding their animals down for the night. “What do you see here?” he asked me. One of those mares we’d passed was Chance, the mare that Alan Ray had got off of Lux Cranfield. I knew Alan Ray’d brought her down here; I’d heard that Alan Ray was going to ride her in the barrel racing on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t mention Alan Ray or the horses, instead I looked around and my eyes caught the hog pen.
“I don’t know,” I said, “I think it’s some kind of registered sow.”
“No, silly,” Jackson said. “I mean all over here, this whole barn.” I shrugged. I mean I knew the answer, I thought. At least I knew that there was some pretty expensive livestock in this barn. And I was starting to feel nervous now, like Alan Ray might show up any time to feed and water his precious Chance. I mean, I was starting to like Jackson Childs pretty well, but I had two good years built up on Alan Ray, and one guy doesn’t just wipe another guy out of your mind that quickly. But then again, Jackson was not your average guy.
“No, no,” Jackson said. “You don’t get it, do you? Not these animals. I’m talking about all the shit. All these animals crapping their little hearts out, chowing down on all this good hay and feed. I’d just bet you that people might even pay me to haul away all that shit.”
I was stumped. What the heck for, I wondered. But I didn’t have to wonder for very long. He could hardly wait to tell me. Back at the end of the livestock shed was his motorcycle, Jackson said, and locked into the saddlebags was a coffee can full of the best pot seeds from the world over, Hawaii, Turkey, Mexico, Jamaica, even India. His plan was that he would clean out stalls, all the hog pens and horse stalls in the county, even come back each year just to clean out the stalls. He’d figure out any way he could to get truckloads of shit, and make all that shit into new dirt. “Have me some great big compost piles, and let Mother Nature do the work,” he said. And then with that soil he’d grow the best reefer in the state. He could sell composted topsoil as his cover, meanwhile sell primo reefer to all his college friends in Baltimore, who paid top dollar, thousands of dollars a pound. “We’ll be rich, girl, rolling in dough, before one year is out.”
And I looked down
the long livestock barn, at all those animals, each of them just chewing away, and I thought about thousands of dollars, and I didn’t doubt him for a second.
WE SET out for home on Jackson’s bike, and the summer storm was finally beginning to look as if it meant business. There was lightning in every direction, but so far there wasn’t much wind, and the tree leaves hadn’t started to turn over yet. Sometimes we’d hear a real loud clap of thunder, and once Jackson turned off the motor of his bike to listen to where the storm was coming from. “Where to, girl?” he asked me, and I thought, we could actually go anywhere. We could drive around the country, from Texas to Florida to Alaska together. I could send everyone postcards of state capitals. And so I said, “I don’t want to ever go back again. Let’s go out to your tent. Let’s sleep outside tonight.”
And the storm broke as we rounded the last hill before his campsite, and it was glorious to watch from Jackson’s pup tent as the lightning split the air over all that water in the reservoir, and each time the world flashed brighter than daytime. And we didn’t sleep a wink that night, and by the morning, sitting awake, watching the sky go from pitch black and full of stars, to a rosy haze, with just the morning star Venus shining in the east, I was sure I wanted to marry Jackson Childs instead of Alan Ray.
JACKSON WOKE up with a smile on his face and eggs and sausage gravy on his mind. As soon as we made it to town to get us some breakfast, a squad car pulled up to the Biscuit World and the two deputies, Forrest and Lamarr, arrested me and Jackson. I heard later that Alan Ray had stopped by my house looking to take me to the fair, and when he heard that I was at Coral Hine’s, he went there. I sure was surprised to hear that. He must have really wanted to see me. Then he went back to my dad, who went to the town police. They’d looked for us all night.
When the law found us, at first they were going to get Jackson for kidnapping a minor, though I wasn’t kidnapped and wasn’t a minor. Then they were going to get us for illegal camping, and that wasn’t any worse than a ticket, but when they searched his stuff they found his coffee can. It was a stroke of dumb luck, but they really had something to haul us away for.
“Don’t you worry about nothing, my sweet little missy,” said Jackson Childs, looking worrieder than I ever seen him. “My daddy’s got a lot of pull in this state,” he said right before they took me off to the woman’s detention area, and then I could hear him say to Deputy Forrest, “If you pigs fuck with my bike, you’re all going down.”
After two days and nights in jail, Alan Ray came in to visit me and proposed marriage, telling me how it had come to him that it was all his fault that I went off with a lowlife like Jackson Childs, and that if only he’d’ve spoke his mind earlier and declared his intentions to me, this thing would never have happened. He looked like his eyes were brimming over, and he smelled like he about took a bath in beer, his face as red as his hair, standing outside the bars, reaching his hand inside to hold my hand, and not letting go for the longest time. He must have spoke his mind to my parents, too, because him and them had my whole marriage planned out before I knew what happened. And what could I say but “Yes, I do.”
Jackson Childs’s dad came to bail him out. The deputies said he was a famous doctor from Baltimore. I was still in jail, waiting for my pap to get the bond approved on his house. I was hoping Jackson would have to come back for trial, but from what everyone told us, even though we both had charges, it would be hard to make them stick on me, and hard to prove that Jackson was going to sell the coffee can of seeds. After two days, Deputy Forrest said that all the charges would be dropped against me, that Dad did not need to put his house up for bond after all. I heard the charges would be reduced to a five-hundred-dollar fine against Jackson, since he owned up and said they were his seeds.
The bad part was the wedding, like I said, which had no church or organ music, no matching bridesmaids in lilac. My mother said she didn’t want the day turning into a three-ring circus, a chance for all the nosy biddies in the church to attend, acting happy or friendly and meanwhile saying, “I told you so” about any number of things. Like Mom said, the ink was barely dry on the first piece of news.
So we had a short and sweet courthouse wedding the day they let me out of jail, Deputy Forrest standing by to keep the peace. Then we all went back home. Dessie baked an applesauce cake, Coral Hine was there, and Lux who stood up for Alan Ray at our wedding, and Alan Ray’s parents were in from Moundsville, and his aging uncle Herman, who seemed to have a pretty good time talking to my aunt Nelda about the time they ran the scrap drive during World War II. After supper, four of Alan Ray’s guard buddies from Moundsville showed up with a case of beer in the back of their pickup. They called us out of the house and stood beside the barn, shirtless, with polky-dot beach towels draped around their waists like skirts while they sang “Stand by Your Man.”
Alan Ray and I drove back to his little apartment in downtown Fairchance. It was in an attic of an old house, with three floors of stairs to get up there and a view of the downtown buildings lit up all night, including the Washington Cafe, Sutton Drugs with the loafers’ bench, and wouldn’t you know it, the jailhouse, those little windows on the second floor, all that cinder block and black steel bars. Alan Ray took the day off work so we could sleep in together. And my only regret, though I love Alan Ray dearly, and though he has put me back on the straight and narrow, and I swear I’ll never stray, is that the last I ever saw of Jackson Childs was from behind those bars of my little jailhouse window as he loaded the pieces of his Yamaha, tailpipes to motor, sunburst paint job gas tank, handlebars, chrome sissy bar, all of it, into a U-Haul-It with Maryland plates, and that I never got to kiss him good-bye.
SIX
THE GOSHEN ROAD (1971–75)
What Love Is
My mother used to say I was so hardheaded that no one could tell me anything. It was her daily declaration. When she got herself worked up, she would cry out to the Lord above that there wasn’t a human being alive that could save me from myself, it was up to Him and Him alone to do something with me. Dad said things like, “For the love of Pete, Dessie, if it ain’t broke, why the hell are you trying to fix it?” But me and him had an understanding about these things, and especially if I got him alone, he’d give his big old head a shake and agree with me that experience was the best teacher. If I look back, I can say that although I was raised up right, whatever choices I made were the ones I wanted to make. I do not blame either of them in the least for how things turned out when we moved to the head of the hollow, up on the Goshen Road.
I never paid my mother any mind, not even as a child. I must’ve been born that way. I did know that she meant the best for us girls, that she never wanted to see us work too hard or struggle in life. Growing up, she told us girls to marry a fellow with his mind set on a profession, or one who came from good stock, and that if we did, we would never have to lift a finger. There was something so irksome about the way she looked at life, I’d as soon stop up my ears than listen to Mom’s version of happily ever after. She was by my side, with her loving and watchful care, with her dreams, but she never realized that all the while I was already struggling. I was struggling against her motherly goals for my life of idleness and ease. I wanted to earn my keep in this world, work hard as I needed to, to see the results of my work and to be proud of them.
Through the spring of my junior year in high school, my mother prayed that God would lead Jerry Higgs to propose. I heard her morning and evening, adding that plan to the sad, sweet list of bedridden relatives and community members she prayed for. Praise God, if He was listening, He did not show His will in that regard. That prospect filled me with dread. Jerry Higgs did not impress me. To spare my mother distress, I pretended to like talking to him, but whenever I said anything, it didn’t feel like me talking, the real me. Every word that came out of my mouth felt pitiful, like a script from a TV show or phony words from some book written fifty years ago for only girls to read. It did not make a bit
of difference what I said to Jerry Higgs anyway, I barely got a word in edgewise.
One afternoon before I started going with Lux, Jerry followed me to the bus line and asked if he could drive me home. He had a gold Chevy Nova that his daddy, Jerry Sr., a hotshot at Consolidation Coal, had bought him for Christmas. His mother was my math teacher, and it entered my mind that things could get uncomfortable in class if I refused to take a ride from her son. I also knew my mother would want me to. Jerry revved the engine, popped the clutch, and the wheels of the car spun mud and gravel all over the school parking lot. I swear he thought he was Steve McQueen, speeding around corners, never paying attention to any of the road signs that showed speed limits or twisty roads up ahead. All the while he ran his jaw about how he was headed to West Virginia University and planned to go on to medical school. Seemed like he never cared to hear what I had to say back.
Halfway home, Jerry stopped at a pull-off on the top of Peckinpaw Ridge and began to slide himself over to my side of the front seat. I inched away until I was crammed against the door handle on my side of the car. He acted like I should let him put his pudgy roamin’ hands up my skirt because someday he would be a medical doctor, and because he had such a shiny new Chevy to drive around in. His breath smelled sour like overripe onions. Worst of all was this blank, greedy look in his eyes that put me in mind of a boar hog, ready to gobble down his evening feed before he even checked to see what was set out before him. I crossed my arms over my chest, and my legs clamped themselves together. Then I said, “Take me home right now, Dr. Higgs, or I will walk and get there just fine on my own.” Those were the last words I ever said to him, but I did not only blame Jerry Higgs. I blamed myself, too. The time for make-believe was over.
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