Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  “But if you think it’s hot in Port Campbell, folks, just be glad you’re not in St. Louis, Missouri,” he said. “Yesterday, it was 104 in the shade there, assuming you could find any, and four people died from the heat. One of them, a fifty-eight-year-old woman, apparently wandered from her house, which didn’t have air-conditioning, out to the banks of the Mississippi River, collapsed in the sun and died before anybody found her.”

  Around here, they’d say that the monkey got her. Many’s the time, out in the tobacco patch, I’ve seen Lafe or Lex or one of the Lockamy children look up from cropping, pale as a ghost, and say, “I see them monkeys comin’ over the trees there.” And they’d go to the shade at the end of the field, up by the pump, where somebody’d wet a rag and put it on their head, and maybe we’d cut into the watermelons early.

  And sometimes the monkey would sneak up on somebody, and they wouldn’t get out of the sun in time. My cousin Bert Averett, she had a heatstroke so bad that she never could talk right again, or use her left arm and leg like she could before. Clarence Curry, he was in school with me, died of a heatstroke back in 1938 and a colored man died of it last summer over past Cool Springs.

  So, if a fifty-eight-year-old woman in St. Louis, Missouri, can be got by the monkey, and if he can sneak up on men in their prime out cropping tobacco, couldn’t he make short work of a eighty-two-year-old dirt farmer who comes to the millpond here in the middle of the Blue Sandhills on the hottest day of the year and dares him to do his worst? And if the monkey does get me, wouldn’t it be like lightning? Wouldn’t it be a act of God? And if You want me to go on living, I reckon You’ll spare me, just like You did Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. Although why You’d want to do a thing like that, only You would know.

  So, I’ve just been waiting for Justin and Georgia to leave. And if they think I just didn’t have the guts to stick it out, that’s not the worst thing they could know. And this will make it so much easier on everybody. I feel right bad about the will, but it was the right thing to do, no matter how crazy folks might think it is. Besides, how much crazier is all this than some of the other stuff I’ve been doing here lately? Like forgetting all about that stop sign in East Geddie and near-bout getting run over by a log truck, although looking back, that might of been the best thing, long as the fella driving the truck didn’t get hurt. Or leaving the burners on the stove turned on so much that I finally had to put a big sign on the inside of the kitchen door that says TURN OFF BURNERS.

  The worst, though, was what happened at the Bi-Rite, in front of everybody. I don’t make out a list like Sara used to, although I reckon I ought to. Once a week, I go down to the store in my truck and get what looks good to eat. The Army taught me how to cook right good, but one old man don’t eat a whole lot, and my appetite ain’t as good as it used to be. So, I was wandering down the aisle. I had just put two cans of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup in my cart and was looking for the self-rising flour when I just blanked out. I couldn’t quite remember what I was doing there. It had happened once or twice before, but never this bad, or this public, at least. I looked around, and there at the end of the aisle was the meat counter. It seemed like I recognized it, so I went that way.

  When I got there, though, I somehow had it in my head that it was Mr. Allen Butler’s store, which went out of business in 1961 and burnt to the ground two years later. I can remember asking the meat-counter man where Mr. Allen was, and when he looked as mixed up as me, I asked if they had any of that good souse meat that Franklin Junior Bradshaw sold to them. The Bi-Rite, of course, is way too uptown to carry souse meat or liver puddin’ or anything like that most of the time, and Franklin Junior was run over and killed by his own tractor more than twenty years ago. Then I reckon I got kind of wild, and somebody must of called Jenny, my niece, because her and her husband, Harold McLaurin, come and got me and carried me home.

  Later on, I could remember most of what happened, and it made me feel so bad that I couldn’t go to church for two Sundays, I was so ashamed. Jenny, bless her heart, brought me groceries, and Reverend Carter and a couple of the elders come by to see me, so that finally I got so I felt like I could stand to see people again.

  I asked Jenny and them not to tell Georgia, but I expect they did anyhow. Everybody around here knows about it. It aggravates me the way people act like you’re not even there sometimes if you’re old. After my spell at the grocery store, it seemed like I could say something in the yard after church and folks would just smile like they was humoring me or something, or like they weren’t quite sure what I said was right, since it was a crazy man saying it. Some of them have even talked to me about going to a rest home, but I told them the only home I expected to live in for the rest of my life was the one that my granddaddy built. I would sooner be dead all at once than die every day in some old folks’ home, which is what I told that Miss Bulla from the Senior Citizens when she come to visit me.

  So, I get out of the pickup, which is parked maybe fifty feet from the water. In the truck bed there’s the little wood stool, a foot and a half high, that I made a long time ago to sit on picking butter beans in the swamp.

  I prop my cane on the side of the pickup and lift the stool out, then tote it to the middle of the clearing, between the truck and Lafe’s pine that stands right by the edge of the millpond.

  I take off my straw hat and sit and wait, looking out across the pond. The haze is so bad that I can’t hardly see the south shore. Nothing is moving—nary a bird, nor the wind through the trees, nor the water. The only noise out here now is the locusts, sounding like bacon frying in a spider. I can’t even hear a mourning dove.

  For some reason, I think back to Gruff, and something he said one time during a Redskins game. It was sometime during the early sixties, because that boy Snead from Wake Forest was Washington’s quarterback, and Sonny Jurgensen was still with the Philadelphia Eagles, which is who the Redskins was playing that Sunday. Gruff had come up from Georgia to visit. Him and me was big Washington fans; that was all you could get on television down here or in Atlanta until Johnny Unitas come along and made the Colts good in the late fifties, so just about everybody that could stand to watch them lose week after week pulled for the Redskins. You could catch the Atlantic Coast Line excursion train from Port Campbell of a Sunday morning, about five A.M., get up to Washington in time to see the game, then come back, just about everybody dog drunk, and be home by midnight. Me and James Lassiter did it a couple of times. Now I hear you can’t even get a ticket.

  Anyhow, Gruff was sitting with me in the living room of mine and Sara’s house, watching the Redskins play the Eagles. Sara was laying down, and Georgia was playing the piano in the sitting room down the hall. And the Redskins was winning, which was near-bout a miracle back then. Late in the game, when it seemed like there weren’t any way even Washington could lose this one, old Sonny went to work. With almost no time left a-tall, he threw the ball to this little halfback, boy named McDonald, and he caught it and must of run past six Redskins, finally just easing into the end zone while the announcers went crazy. I can remember it better than some things that happened last week.

  So, I’m just sitting there, gripping the easy-chair arms and about to have a stroke, when Gruff rears back and lets go with a “Goddamn son of a bitch goddamn choking son of a bitch goddamn Redskins bastards.” Gruff always was a rough-talking fella, although I always felt like his cursing lacked a little imagination. He used to get in trouble with Momma all the time about it before he left home for good. Me, I could call a contrary mule a hee-hawwin’, lop-eared, knuckle-headed, dog-meat strumpet and so on for ten minutes without taking the Lord’s name in vain. I knew Georgia and Sara could hear every word of it, because they both got real still. And then Gruff just looks up toward the ceiling, just like he’s looking right through that plunder room in the attic, right through the tin roof, right up to heaven, and he says in a real quiet voice, “Take me now, Jesus; take me now.” Gruff scared
me sometimes.

  But that’s the way my brain is going right now, come hell or high water. I have lived with it all this time, and there was always a reason to keep on going. Now, there ain’t. Everybody’s fine now. The loose ends are all tied up, and it’d be better for all involved if Littlejohn McCain just meets You and makes his peace.

  So, with this boiling sun making my scalp tingle like it used to when Daddy would send me out back of the smokehouse on a cold dark night to fetch more stovewood, me not knowing when one of his hounds was going to jump me and make my heart stop, I can almost see that old monkey coming across Maxwell’s Millpond, and Gruff’s words come back to me, not as a curse but as a plea: Take me now, Jesus; take me now.

  CHAPTER THREE

  July 19

  When I was a little girl, I used to love to go with Daddy to the Godwin Lumber Yard in McNeil. A man named Arch McMillan was the foreman there, and he was the designated giver of directions to East Geddie.

  “Mr. Arch,” I’d ask him, “has anybody got lost looking for East Geddie today?”

  More than one tired, dazed farm-implement salesman or insurance agent had pulled into the lumber yard after foolishly heading east from Geddie on Highway 47 looking for East Geddie. They’d travel past deserted sandhills and scrub pines, and a house now and then, and by the time they got to the lumber yard, after perhaps driving back and forth two or three times looking for the nonexistent side road, Arch McMillan was ready for them. They were his prime source of entertainment.

  “No, son, East Geddie ain’t east of Geddie,” he’d say cheerfully, proud to own such knowledge. “East Geddie is east of Old Geddie, which is southwest of Geddie itself, of course. You got to go back west, to Geddie, then go south on the Ammon Road, then turn west again on the Old Geddie Road, and keep headin’ west till you get to East Geddie.”

  I used to think that there was a town near where we lived called Geddie Itself, because that’s how people usually referred to the town we were supposed to be east of.

  I stopped at the welcome station last time I came down here and got a free state road map, and East Geddie is still, cartographically speaking, east of Geddie. I’m sure lots of people driving through on the way to the beach think the place is one of those ghost towns that cease to exist for several decades before anyone notifies the map makers.

  Up in the plunder room at Daddy’s, there’s an old chest of Aunt Connie’s, where the family kept deeds and old letters from back as far as the late 1700s. My grandmother, when she was a young woman, tried to get East Geddie’s history onto a page of lined paper:

  Malcolm Geddie run the Tavern on the old Indian Trail, for them that came from Cool Spring to Port Campbell. He come from Scotland. It was called Cole Geddie’s, because they didn’t serve meals. They got to calling the hole area Cole Geddie’s. Then it was Cole Geddie. Then it was Geddie. Then folks come up from the Blue Sandhills to work at the Sawmill. They bilt east of Geddie, so they was East Geddie. Then they bilt the Rail Road from Cool Spring to Port Campbell, but Neil McNeil wouldn’t let them have any of his Land, so they bilt the Rail Road north of Geddie, and they called the Town at the Rail Road station Geddie Station. Geddie Station grew, and it become Geddie. The first Geddie become Old Geddie. East Geddie stayed East Geddie. They tried to change it, but my husband, Mr. John McCain, knowed as Red John; said at the meeting in 1904, We was East Geddie because we was East of Geddie. We ain’t moved. We are still East Geddie. And so they nevver changed it.

  I wish I could get my students to write so economically.

  Like Red John McCain, I can be a little intractable. Maybe that’s why I’ve made such a pig’s breakfast of things.

  I’ve been in Europe for half the summer and am still trying to sort everything out. I didn’t leave any addresses or phone numbers, even though Daddy always wants me to. Even at eighty-two, he wants to know where I am. Even at forty, I let it bother me and try to shut him out.

  When I called the Carlsons from England to see how Justin was doing, they told me about his flight to Carolina. I wasn’t a happy camper, but I had a few weeks to cool off. This hasn’t been any easier for Justin than it has for me.

  If last year had been a football game, God would have been called for unnecessary roughness. In April, they discovered Mom’s pancreatic cancer, and by November, she was gone. Also in April, I discovered that I was married to an asshole, a problem that has since been corrected.

  Daddy was upset about our breakup, but he was so absorbed with Mom that he hardly had time to concentrate on relatively minor catastrophes. And I spared him the gory details, just told him Jeff had moved out.

  Christmas was a bad time all around. Justin didn’t want to come down, although he and Daddy had always gotten along rather well, even if they didn’t have much in common. He sulked most of the time we were at the farm. He was so rude that I couldn’t help thinking, if it had been me at fifteen, someone, probably Mom, would have applied severe corporal punishment. I had to cajole and then threaten him into going in and thanking Daddy for the shirt and baseball bat. Everyone just seemed mired in their own private losses. Disaster doesn’t necessarily pull the survivors together. Sometimes, we just seem to be trying to push each other off the life raft.

  Every memento of Christmas, every cloying TV commercial, every single “Merry Christmas” seemed to drive the dagger a little deeper. We’d been watching television, mainly to keep the lack of conversation from being so conspicuous, on Christmas Eve, when It’s a Wonderful Life came on unexpectedly at the end of some second-rate college football bowl game. Now we have the movie in our video library; we used to set aside a night to watch it and Miracle on 34th Street back-to-back, when Justin was younger. I remember how Jeff used to get kind of choked up by it and pretend he had something in his eye. But the element of surprise made this familiar paean to savings and loans seem like an unexpected Christmas present. We watched raptly. I didn’t even bother to sneak a peek at my watch to see how many more hours we had left in East Geddie.

  But at the end, when all of George Bailey’s friends are filling the basket with money to keep Potter from sending him to prison, and George is holding his daughter, and “Hark the Herald” comes bursting through, Justin got up and stomped out of the room. He didn’t come back for the rest of the evening. No one should be made to endure Christmas within at least one year of a personal catastrophe.

  Jeff Bowman and I were married a year after I graduated from UNC—Greensboro, when he was a don’t-give-a-damn political science graduate from Carolina with no visible future plans other than to stay out of Vietnam and I was working toward a master’s in English. We both liked to raise hell and laugh at the rest of the world. But Jeff had to find something to do for a living, and stock brokerage finally offered itself. Soon, we weren’t always on the same side.

  We lived together for seventeen years, though, and might have just kept going, me an English professor at Montclair, him a broker with Parks and Sutton, mutually enjoying Justin and, on occasions, each other. Bev Lundquist is what tore it.

  Jeff and Bev had an affair not long after we were married, but he’d repented, and I’d had my own affair out of revenge, and we somehow patched things up. Sometimes I think we had Justin just to convince each other that we were a real family.

  But when Bobby DeVries told me Bev was now working as a secretary for Parks and Sutton, after her divorce, and that things were not good, I started gathering kindling for the funeral pyre of our marriage. Bobby works with Jeff, and he offered to “comfort” me, telling me I was “too good” for Jeff. “Well, then,” I told him, “I must be way too good for you.” I was already beginning to plot as I showed Bobby the door.

  I am not the worst-looking forty-year-old in the world. I have my mother’s dark complexion (and temper), and I spend enough time in aerobics to have, thus far, avoided the “well-preserved” stage. My specialty at Montclair is American writers of the early twentieth century. If you teach as long as I have, you lea
rn to mix and match, to teach Fitzgerald and Hemingway and T. S. Eliot and Faulkner and Dreiser in several different ways to different levels of students, rearranging old subjects with new themes. Most of my classes now are for graduate students, where, in the time-honored tradition, we teach to produce teachers.

  It is not unusual for one of my students to take a course in The Waste Land, in which one starts with Eliot, then branches out to find wasteland imagery in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises and Look Homeward, Angel. The same student might then take a course in the short stories of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, then a course in research methods, using the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Eliot with an emphasis on the critical reception of their work. Throw in an obscure Jean Toomer or Ford Madox Ford and your career is set. In fourteen years as a professor at Montclair, girl and woman, I have never taught a course that did not include at least one work from either Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Once every year or so, I teach a course on feminism in literature. The main text is Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald. Of course, it’s necessary for my students in this course to read Tender Is the Night in order to do an analysis of the Zelda characters in each book.

  At Montclair, we use some of the brightest and most obsequious Ph.D. candidates as poorly paid graduate instructors, mostly to commit Beowulf on innocent freshmen. One of the instructors, Maxton Winfree, was a twenty-five-year-old protégé of mine with an unpublished novel and half another one. Max intended to subsidize his creative genius by attaching himself to the financial security of Montclair or someplace similar, allegedly as a teacher. I’d read his novel and felt he said little, badly. But he would serve my purpose well.

  No one can teach such romantic stuff as The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms without being the object of a few schoolboy crushes. I had always been flattered by such attention, especially as the years went by. I was always kind but firm; and if Jeff hadn’t resurrected Bev Lundquist, poor Max Winfree would have been let down gently.