Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  Acclaim for Howard Owen’s

  Littlejohn

  “Littlejohn is a beautifully written novel, and Howard Owen has created a character as fully rounded in his quirks and imperfections, his quiet determination and bravery, as any in recent fiction.”

  —Washington Post

  “A sparkling story of a life lived, if not well, then fully.… Howard Owen joins that distinguished stable of writers—Jill McCorkle, Tim McLaurin—whose literary geography encompasses the region bordered by Ashpole and Barbeque, Heel and Colly.”

  —Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer

  “Howard Owen’s fine novel unfolds with grace and subtle energy.”

  —Charlotte Observer

  “[Owen] not only has a felicitous way of writing but treats his characters with simple, lovely tenderness that is both subtle and heartfelt.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “You don’t want to turn the last page, end it, and have to leave this old man.”

  —Denver Post

  “[An] immensely moving tale of the human journey.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “Howard Owen is a gentle writer whose unassuming but first-rate novel catches you off guard, like a clap of thunder on a clear day.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “This compact, poetic first novel sneaks up on you and won’t let you go.… In his quiet, colloquial heroic way, Littlejohn is a wonderful addition to the pantheon of American literary characters.”

  —Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record

  Books by Howard Owen

  Fat Lightning

  Littlejohn

  Howard Owen

  Littlejohn

  Howard Owen was born and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is the sports editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He lives in Midlothian, Virginia, with his wife, Karen.

  Copyright © 1992 by Howard Owen

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in 1992 by The Permanent Press, Sag Harbor, New York. This edition originally published in hardcover by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Villard Books edition as follows:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Owen, Howard.

  Littlejohn/by Howard Owen.—

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79090-3

  I. Title.

  [PS3565.W552L58 1993b]

  813′.54——dc20 93-10068

  Author photograph © Deane Winegar

  v3.1

  To the women of my life:

  Karen Van Neste Owen

  Roxie Bulla Owen

  and Janice Owen Faircloth

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful appreciation goes to Martin and Judy Shepard of the Permanent Press for giving Littlejohn a chance; to Marcia Meisinger and the rest of the staff of the Book Nook for spreading the word; to Max Gartenberg for being a great agent; to Robert Merritt for good advice; to Karl and Penny Van Neste for the computer; to Bill Pahnelas for helping me get acquainted with it; to Sally Biel, Freeman V. Turley and Leslie T. Farrar for their support; to Deane Winegar for the photos; and to Diane Reverand, Jackie Deval, Beth Pearson, Alex Kuczynski and everyone else at Villard Books for helping make a dream come true. And, as always, to Karen.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One - July 31

  Chapter Two - August 8

  Chapter Three - July 19

  Chapter Four - August 8

  Chapter Five - June 27

  Chapter Six - August 8

  Chapter Seven - August 8

  Chapter Eight - August 8

  Chapter Nine - August 1

  Chapter Ten - August 8

  Chapter Eleven - July 19

  Chapter Twelve - August 8

  Chapter Thirteen - August 1

  Chapter Fourteen - August 8

  Chapter Fifteen - August 8

  CHAPTER ONE

  July 31

  Somebody I know but can’t make out is leading me down the old pine-straw-matted road to the millpond. The pine straw is slick as glass, and I keep slipping and falling in the hot sand. I hear that somebody keep saying, “Hurry up, Littlejohn, or you’ll be late,” but I can’t get my legs to work right. I’m half crawling, half running toward the pond, and pin oak and pine branches keep hitting me upside the head.

  Finally, I come to where the road runs out, and there’s Lafe, waiting for me at the edge of the water, laying at that same old pine tree where it happened, except the tree looks like it’s two hundred feet tall and six feet across, and this time, Lafe opens his eyes. There’s a scar on his forehead, over his right eye, but he ain’t dead.

  Lafe don’t say a solid word, just stands up, smiling that lopsided smile of his and brushing pine needles off his backside. He motions for me to follow him across the water, which don’t seem peculiar. It’s like them dreams where you can fly and all.

  I always seem like I’m about fifty yards behind Lafe, and the water ain’t getting any deeper as we walk out. Where, in real life, the millpond is maybe twelve feet deep in the middle, with nothing but boggy muck at the bottom of water dark as tea, we seem like we’re just skimming across the surface now like two slick, flat river rocks.

  And there, up ahead, is Momma and Daddy and them, all smiling and waving at me to beat the band. I can see Sara and Angora and Rose, not gone anymore. It looks like they’re right smack in the middle of Maxwell’s Millpond, which is at least half a mile across. I someway know, then, that they know about everything, all my secrets, and that everything is all right, that there ain’t no shame in heaven.

  But when I try to hurry across the water to meet them, my legs start getting heavy again, and I start to sinking. I look down, and underneath the surface of the water, it’s turned to fire. Lafe is holding out his right hand, showing that same cockeyed grin, but I can’t reach him, hard as I try. I’m going down in flames, and it’s like one of them dreams where you know it’s a dream even while you’re in it. I’m trying to scream and watching myself trying to scream at the same time. For some reason, the fire ain’t burning me, and off in the distance, I can hear this voice. It keeps getting louder, so that finally I can make it out …

  CHAPTER TWO

  August 8

  Take me now, Jesus.

  Georgia and Justin have packed up her blue Honda hatchback, we’ve talked about whether the tires have enough air and when was the last time she checked the oil, and I know they’re ready to put miles between them and here. To tell you the truth, I’m ready to get the good-byes over with, too. I love them both to death, but I am wore out. And besides, I got things to do.

  I hug Georgia, amazed all over again at how bony she is, at how much sharper she feels than when she was married and Justin was little. She tells me to take care of myself, and to do what Dr. McNair says, then lowers herself into the driver’s seat. I walk around to the other side, feeling the sand that bunches up in the middle of the driveway give underneath my feet, and hug Justin, even though he’d probably rather of shook hands. The scars on his face have healed up real good. I remember that I didn’t give them the beans I picked this morning, before it faired off and turned hot again, but they tell me to keep them. Georgia starts up the car on the third try, and I kn
ow the look of relief on her face is from not having to go through all the good-byes again, not because she can’t wait to see her daddy’s ugly face in the rearview mirror.

  They back down the drive and head out the old rut road, trails of dust behind them almost covering their little car. Then they go over the top of the sandhill and dip down the other side, toward the paved highway, their brake lights coming on just before they disappear.

  I turn around to go inside before they can come into sight again, headed north. Never have been able to watch people leave.

  Back up the brick steps to the screen porch now, taking it real slow. Don’t want any broken hips today. Weatherman said it would be 98 degrees after the sun came out, so to be sure it’ll be over 100 where I’m headed. Maybe a lot more than that. Least I haven’t lost my sense of humor.

  The screen door sings as it bangs shut behind me, and I go into the kitchen to get the truck keys. But they ain’t on the counter, nor on the porch table, nor in the overalls I had on yesterday. Then I remember the extra set Georgia had made for me, with the magnet on them so they could be stuck to the underside of the truck, after I’d lost a couple of pair.

  When I get to the truck, though, there’s the keys I was looking for, right there in the ignition from when I went to the store yesterday.

  I crank up the old pickup, same one I’ve had since 1965. The odometer says 39997.4. If I took the paved road today, we’d crack 40,000. The seat’s so hot I can’t hardly sit, and it burns my hand to crank the window down.

  I turn left, away from the paved road, at the end of the circle driveway, past the knobby old crepe myrtles me and Lafe planted so long ago. It’s hard to keep it in the ruts, wrestling this old powerless steering wheel in and out of the sand as we go past the bleached-out barns on the right and the rented hayfields and Kenny’s little garden on the left. The sun is just beating down; must be about one o’clock. When it reflects off this white sand, it makes it even harder to see. I think about the cataract operation I hope I won’t have to have now.

  On the left, a quarter mile from home, is Rennie’s old house, nothing but fat-lightnin’ ruins now. It’s been awhile since I’ve been over the bridge that crosses Lock’s Branch, and I wonder if it’ll hold this old truck and me.

  On past the tenant house, we dip down into the swamp, the rut road dividing fields Daddy and them cleared not long after he come home from the Civil War. You can smell things growing down here. Mackey Bryant’s boy leases the swamp acres for beans and corn now and takes care of the strawberry business. It’s good, rich land; never planted no tobacco down here. To the left is the little hill with our family cemetery on it, where Momma and Daddy and Lafe and them are buried, and next to that is the Rock of Ages.

  Up ahead, a straight line of trees crisscrosses the road. That’s the branch, where my land ends. Beyond that is the Blue Sandhills.

  Just shy of the bridge, I stop the pickup and try to think when was the last time we replaced it. It was 1955 or ’56, I reckon, because Georgia was in the third grade. Miss Louise Hornwright, her teacher, had supper with us, and she wanted to see the new bridge that Lex and me had built, that Georgia told her about, so me and Sara and Georgia and Miss Hornwright got into our green 1952 Chevrolet sedan and drove down here to see it. I suspect Miss Hornwright was a little let down over such a puny bridge, no railing or anything.

  I let myself down out of the pickup and walk up the little rise. Down in the branch, there’s not enough water to drown a ant. A big old garden spider, all yellow and black, has spun her web across the branch twenty feet away. All the slats seem like they’re solid. I punch at them with my cane and they don’t seem to give.

  There’s beer cans all over the place here, and in the bushes I spy something that turns out to be a pair of girl’s underpants. No wonder there’s so much traffic going past the house at night. I can’t get that sorry deputy sheriff, Jake Godbold’s nephew, to go down and run them out. I think he’s scared of the dark.

  Back in the truck, I’m seeing spots from all the sun out here. I look at the sucker-bait watch Jenny got me for Christmas and remember that it stopped last week. I never could remember to take it off when I’d go to pick peas and butter beans, and sweat got in it, I reckon. The truck starts and me and it get across all right, headed into the Blue Sandhills.

  The road goes right up a little hill with sand whiter than any beach you’ve ever been to. I have to know the way by heart, because I can’t see a blessed thing. The Blue Sandhills ain’t really blue, of course, but from off a ways, especially on a day like this, they can be near-bout the color of this washed-out sky. I reckon it’s the dark earth right under the surface that makes them look blue. Nothing amounts to much out here. There’s scrub pines and pin oaks and brambles, all kind of stunted. It goes on like this most of the way to the ocean, forty miles away, with bays and pocosins wherever there’s a dip, and Kinlaw’s Hell right in the middle of it. They say the land’s like this because a shooting star or something like that hit here fifty thousand years ago and changed it all around. I hope I never have to see it again.

  It would of been easier, of course, to go out the way Georgia and Justin did, on McCain Road right into East Geddie, then two rights to the Ammon Road, which this trail I’m on will cross up ahead a little bit. But that same sorry Godbold boy that won’t keep drunks out of my fields at night has told me he’s going to give me a ticket if he catches me driving any farther than the Bi-Rite in East Geddie or the Geddie Presbyterian Church. Told me I was lucky to have a license a-tall, since I didn’t seem to recognize stop signs. Talked to me like I was a young-un or something. The deputy knows I grocery shop on Monday and go to church on Wednesday night and Sunday, and this is Tuesday.

  I finally cross the Ammon Road, all humpbacked and gray like me, with one end headed toward Geddie and the other going deeper into the sandhills. There’s no cars coming either way. A dog could sleep on this highway, if it could stand the heat. I drive across the road, picking up the same ruts on the other side, and head off for Maxwell’s Millpond.

  Here the land levels off a little bit, with the scrubby little pines and oaks not giving much shade a-tall. Nobody lives here now, but this used to be a logging road. There was a sawmill by the pond where folks worked and was given cabins to live in. There was a sawdust pile here that caught fire in 1933 and burned for twenty years. They finally hauled it away a truckload at a time. Everybody called it Yankees’ Revenge, after the sawdust pile of my granddaddy’s that Sherman’s men set fire to.

  Before the loggers, they used to tap these pine trees for turpentine. Somebody’s always tried to find some kind of use for this sad old country back here. A few years ago, they tried to make Maxwell’s Millpond into a resort, like White Lake. They built them a road in from the other side and sold a few lots. They drained all the tea-colored water out and tried to pump clear water in from the East Branch and the natural springs down here. It seemed like it was working for a while, but the old water come back like a bad penny, darker than ever, and Sandy Spring Lake is Maxwell’s Millpond again.

  Closer to the water, I cross a couple of fire lanes they built when the whole place like to of burnt up in 1955. Nearer the pond, the land gets a little boggy and more wild. Finally, the pickup breaks through some tree limbs and I get my first clear look at this place in more than thirty years. We was helping fight one of the fires in ’55, and a forest service truck brought us up here for water, to this very spot where Lafe died, where it all started, in 1922. Until now, once in sixty-six years was a-plenty for me.

  There’s still a sandy beach here, and from the beer cans and burnt places on the ground, folks still come here to raise Cain. There’s cottonmouths here, unless somebody’s killed them all, which I doubt, that’ll get ill just seeing you. Not too far over is where the tram used to be. The woods still haven’t growed back there all the way, so that if you’re headed east from Geddie on Highway 47, just before you get to McNeil, you can look south and get
a glimpse of the millpond through the brush, two miles off. They built the tram to haul lumber from the sawmill to the Campbell and Cool Spring Railroad line in McNeil. By the time Georgia was born, though, they had just about cut all the hardwoods and a lot of the pines around the pond, and they left the tracks to the scrap dealers and folks looking for crossties to line their driveways with. They say there’s still pieces of track left in the hard-to-get-to places.

  And there’s the pine tree where Lafe lay, bigger now, to be sure, but not as big as it was in my dream, the one that got me here and the one I hope to Jesus will be the answer to my prayers.

  “Lord,” I prayed a hundred times, I know, “please show me the way. I can’t keep on like this. One day I’ll fall and break my hip and be like old man Jimmy Ezell, up there in that rest home with nothing but mean colored nurses letting me wet myself and worse, running Georgia broke. Or, worse yet, I’ll get so simpleminded they’ll have to put me away.

  “But I can’t do it myself, Lord. I ain’t afraid to die, but I still hold to that outside chance that you might forgive me, and that Lafe and Angora and Sara and Momma and Daddy and them can, when and if I ever see them again on that other shore. And if I killed myself, there wouldn’t be no hope a-tall.”

  Eight days ago, Jesus seemed to answer me. In the dream, Momma and Daddy and them was real as life, and I was walking across Maxwell’s Millpond, just like Peter when Jesus told him to. Maybe if I’d of had faith enough, it wouldn’t of been a dream.

  But I didn’t, and it was, and the voice I heard when I was sinking was just old Johnny McLamb with the WPCR morning report on my clock radio, and then I was awake.

  While I was laying there on my back, listening to my old heart beat ragged and weak, Johnny said it would be 98 degrees if it faired off. And then he said something that made me feel like he was talking right at me, like he was part of the dream, too.