Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  Baseball had just come to be a big thing around Geddie. In March of 1921, Daddy let us off from plowing so me and Lafe could ride in the wagon with some of the other young folks to Port Campbell to see Babe Ruth. He had hit fifty-some home runs the year before for the Yankees, and they was heading north to start the season. They was supposed to play a game against the semipro team in town. Babe Ruth might of been the only name most of us knew in baseball, that and Shoeless Joe Jackson.

  There was a ball park then on a piece of bottom land right by the Campbell River, next to the bridge. The game was at two o’clock, but by noon they said all the stands around home plate was filled up, and men and boys was standing four deep along the foul lines, all the way to the six-foot board fence. The river bank was right behind the fence; the flood washed it away the next year.

  We had got a late start because the McNeils, who we was riding with, never could be anywhere on time. When we got there, about one o’clock, you couldn’t get nowhere near the field. The Port Campbell Grays looked like bugs from the river bridge, and the Yankees were this little-bitty patch of lint over by the bench area on the first-base side.

  “Come on,” Lafe said when we’d crossed. “I got a idea.”

  Me and him and the McNeils’ two boys went around the field. We had to circle almost back to Water Street to get around the crowd. We come up the first-base side, on past the seats. About twenty feet back of the folks that was standing was this big sycamore tree with long white branches like ghost arms going out every which way. One branch, which caught Lafe’s eye from all the way up at the bridge, went level with the ground and about ten feet high, until it near-bout reached the field itself.

  “That’s where we’ll be sitting,” Lafe said, pointing up there.

  Jack McNeil was afraid to climb up and went to try and worm his way through the crowd. Me and Lafe and Jack’s brother Leonidas went to the trunk and started to climbing. Lafe gave us both a leg up, him being the oldest, and then he climbed up to the branch on his own. We crawled way out to about five feet from the edge and perched there on our limb like three crows on a clothesline. We wasn’t but about twenty-five feet from the Yankees’ bench. I can remember feeling like Zacchaeus in the Sunday School song, where he can’t see, so he climbs up in the sycamore tree, and Jesus sees him up there and invites himself to Zacchaeus’ house.

  Well, Babe Ruth didn’t exactly come home with us for dinner. We was all three yelling and hollering his name, and because the noise was coming from a direction he hadn’t expected, I reckon, we got his attention.

  He looked up and gaped at us yelling and screaming. It was just before the game, and the Yankees had been taking batting practice, knocking clean white baseballs we’d of killed for over the fence and into the river. People was out there in rowboats. A man drowned that day when he fell out of his boat trying to catch a ball before it hit the water.

  Babe Ruth walked over to the branch where we was sitting and looked up at us. He wasn’t a fat man a-tall, not then anyway, but he had this round face that made him look that way, and he had this funny little walk, with his toes turned in. Lafe noticed next spring that every player on the Grays had suddenly turned pigeon-toed.

  Babe Ruth looked up, right at us, his eyes all streaked with red veins.

  “Kid,” he said, looking right at me, because I was the farthest out on the branch, “if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m gonna take this bat and knock you over the fuckin’ fence.” Everybody got real quiet around us, not out of respect or fear, ’cause Babe Ruth wasn’t nothing but a ballplayer, but out of shock. Folks around here would give their young-uns a switching in a heartbeat, and men might let a “hell” or “damn” slip now and then, but to use that word to boys, with even a few ladies present, didn’t set too well.

  “Don’t you worry, boys,” come this voice from the crowd after what seemed like five minutes but was probably more like thirty seconds. “Ain’t no Yankees going to mess with you.”

  It turned the crowd against the Yankees, who was hardly a favorite to begin with in a town that still had living Civil War veterans. They beat the Grays 21–2, and Babe Ruth hit a home run to right field that landed close enough to the other side of the river that a fella was able to find it in the shallows. They said it went near-bout seven hundred feet, but they might of exaggerated a little bit. That ball’s in the Scots County Museum now.

  They booed the Yankees when they left, although some folks did try and get autographs. It was the last time they stopped over in Port Campbell. We never told Momma and Daddy, partly because we was afraid they’d never let us go watch a baseball game again, and partly because they’d want to know what the word was that Babe Ruth said. We made the McNeil boys promise not to tell, too, and Momma never did hear the whole story until after Daddy died.

  I never did have no use for Babe Ruth after that.

  I wasn’t what you would call real religious, but it made Momma happy to see me at least go to church, since school was over. By the time I was fifteen, I had a bass voice that would get deeper for a couple more years and cause me to be in the church choir, where I still sit on occasion, although my voice is about gone like the rest of me. Momma used to say she got goose bumps hearing me come in on “up from the grave he arose” when we’d sing “He Arose” at Easter sunrise service.

  It was the catechism that convinced me that I wasn’t retarded. Momma had tried near-bout forever to get first Century and then Lafe to learn the child’s catechism at church. They’d start in on it for a while, then quit, then start again. Now, they were way too old for it, and I was fifteen, almost too old. But over the years, I had picked up about half of it just listening to Lafe and Century. So all that spring, I would get Lafe to read the question, and then the answer, and I would memorize the answer. There was about 170 questions, as I recall, and by May I had every one of them down pat. We hadn’t told Momma, because we didn’t want to disappoint her again. Nobody from our church had memorized the child’s catechism in ten years, and it would mean a lot to her if one of her young-uns did it.

  So, I went over to McNeil one Saturday afternoon. I interrupted Reverend Winstead, that served our church and two more, while he was preparing his sermon, but when he found out what I was there for, he took me into his little study. It smelt like pipe tobacco, books all over everywhere.

  “I thought you couldn’t read, Littlejohn,” he said. “How did you learn the catechism?”

  I told him I memorized it, just like I did all them hymns we sung. He shrugged his shoulders to let me know he didn’t expect much. Then he said a prayer, and then he started asking the questions. I near-bout slipped up on “What is sin?” which is a long answer that I couldn’t tell you now to save me. But when it was over, he had to agree that I’d done it.

  They made the announcement on Mother’s Day, had me come down out of the choir and get the Bible with my name on it in gold. I still got it. Momma didn’t know a thing about any of it until the preacher called me forth to the pulpit, because I had asked him not to tell anybody. It made me as proud as anything that had happened to me in my life.

  After church, everybody come up to congratulate me and look at the new Bible. Finally, I got to Momma. She was crying a little.

  “Son,” she said, “Jesus must have a plan for you, or He wouldn’t of give you the power to learn all that.”

  Now, what I wanted to ask her, when I thought of it, was this: If Jesus got all the credit for me learning the catechism, how come I got all the blame for doing so bad in school? But at least Momma was treating me a little less like something that wasn’t quite good enough, whether she give the credit to me or Jesus.

  Lafe’s dying was something I shut out for a long time after. Hunting accidents happened all the time around here, but to shoot and kill your own brother, and best friend, is something I am not sure I ever have quite got over. The times I prayed to the Lord to make it all a dream, let me wake up and find Lafe laying in the next bed, or to just
put me back there, the split second before I pulled the trigger. But it never done any good.

  Georgia used to tease me all the time about saying “Be careful” every time she did anything, said it ought to be our family motto. But she didn’t know, maybe still don’t, the evil that comes from just being careless.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  August 8

  The day after Lafe’s funeral, we went back to cutting ditch bank.

  It was a Tuesday, so we was already behind because of the burial, and Daddy said there wasn’t any sense in wasting good weather. It was still warm enough to be enjoyed by them that could, not yet hog-killing time by any means, even though Thanksgiving was near-bout on us.

  Lex was working in the lumber yard, so it was me and Daddy and the Lockamys, five of us out there. We had cleared past their house and was headed for the corner, down where we put in the strawberry patches in 1956. Nobody give much thought to the cemetery, maybe because we had come to it the day before from the Ammon Road, going through East Geddie from the church. But when we walked along the branch, headed north to the spot where we had quit working on Friday, we could see the colors up on the little ridge. Everything else in the country is just shades of brown and gray in November, so the flowers by the new-dug grave—the tombstone wouldn’t be there for a week or so—caught your eye right off. We all knew, without anybody saying anything, that we’d be working right by it all day, headed up to the Rock of Ages. If we cut two hundred yards, we’d be there, working right by the cemetery on the little rising looking out over the Blue Sandhills, by dark.

  Daddy was old by then. He’d passed seventy-eight in April and wouldn’t plow another row after he fell working on the roof Momma told him to let somebody else do, the week before Christmas. He looked at the graveyard and said, without looking at anybody—surely not at me—“I reckon we’d be better off cutting the crop ditch today.”

  So we went back in the other direction and spent the next five days bush-axing the crop ditch through to the near fields. By the time we was ready to pick back up on Lock’s Branch toward the graveyard, Daddy told me at breakfast to just go on without him.

  He never talked to me about it, and I never talked to him, after I had told him how sorry I was, how I wished it was me instead, the day it happened. Maybe he didn’t blame me, but he sure didn’t forgive me, either. We just didn’t look at each other much anymore, and we tried not to be alone with each other. Lafe looked just like him, and even though Lex was the oldest and Gruff was going to be the richest, I always thought, even before, that Daddy felt like Lafe would be the one to make him proud.

  Lafe was bright as a dollar, and smart. Around here, you might ought to know, smart don’t mean you’re a genius; it means you work like a mule, even without nobody telling you to. It comes in right handy on a farm. I was smart, but nobody much back then ever accused me of being extra bright. Lafe was both. Things was booming after the war, and Daddy was hoping to be able to send him to the Presbyterian Academy over in Pineland, on the other side of Cool Spring, in another year, maybe even see a lawyer in the family before he died.

  In May of 1927, when Daddy was going fast after he had his big stroke, I’d sit by the bed holding his hand when Momma needed a rest, and sometimes he’d try to talk. He pretty much still had his right mind, but the stroke had messed him up so he couldn’t make himself understood, and that would aggravate him so bad he’d cry sometimes.

  One morning, about ten o’clock, I was holding his hand and he seemed like he was sleeping, when all of a sudden, he opened his eyes wide and looked right at me, and it seemed like he hadn’t looked at me in years. I was struck by how much his bright blue eyes had faded, to where they didn’t hardly have any more color in them than the veins in his hands.

  “Afe?” he croaked out.

  “No, Daddy,” I told him. “It’s me, Littlejohn.”

  “Ere Afe?”

  I reckon I could of lied and told him that Lafe would be back directly, just to go on back to sleep, but his mind seemed so good up to that point that I felt like he must of just woke up from a dream and was confused.

  “Daddy,” I told him, “Lafe ain’t here. Lafe died five years ago. In the hunting accident.”

  Daddy got this look on his face like he was just learning about it for the first time, and I could see his eyes tearing up.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I told him. “I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”

  He closed his eyes, and pretty soon he was sleeping again, or seemed like he was. He was dead six days later, and he never said anything to me again, one way or the other. We put him on the hill next to Lafe and the rest.

  The days after Lafe died seemed about a year long each, with the whole thing coming back to me about every five minutes. But somehow, the days became weeks, the weeks months, the months years. I have heard of folks grieving theirselves to death, but I reckon you have to be old to do that. Young folks got too much working against death.

  I would go out every morning, Monday through Saturday, to work. I found enough barn work and house repairs to get me through until it was time to plant the tobacco beds, and then farming took over until the next harvest.

  Instead of coming back to the house for dinner at noon, I would take some sausage and biscuits or a piece of cheese or a sweet potato and some corn bread out with me and just eat in the field, under the big old oak by the property line if I was working in the near fields, under the sycamores and sweet gums if I was down in the swamp. I’d pump a jug full of water from our pump or the Lockamys’ and leave it in the shade. I’d tell Momma not to wait supper for me, and most days I’d manage to get there later and eat by myself, out on the porch in the summertime after everybody else had finished, in the dining room after the rest was through in the winter. It wasn’t a good time for talking to people, and we all just kind of kept our distance. Momma never come out there when I was eating by myself in the near fields, where she could see me from the back porch, and asked me to come up and eat with the rest of them, although Lex, bless his heart, did try and get me to from time to time.

  What was I thinking about all that time? I could not exactly tell you. Sometimes, I felt like I was talking to Lafe. I know that Rennie would kid me about talking to myself, but it was just that Lafe seemed like he was closer out there in the fields, and sometimes he seemed near-bout alive. In the August heat, I’ve seen him standing in the shade over by the pin oaks at the edge of the woods, I’ll tell you that. I sure didn’t tell anybody about it back then, though. I didn’t hate myself quite enough to want a one-way ticket to the crazy house at Dix Hill.

  The main thing, though, was that, by working hard, I could feel like I was worth something. That always had been my way. Back when most folks thought I was retarded and never would be good for anything, I’d try to make up for not being able to read by outworking everybody on the farm. If I kept at it, kept that ditch bank so clean you could eat out of it, kept the weeds out of the tobacco and corn, got the whole place looking better than it ever had, maybe everybody would forget someday that I’d killed my own brother. Maybe I’d forget, too.

  Church was the hardest part. It was the only place where I had to be around a whole bunch of people that knew what I had done, or what they thought I had done, and wasn’t family. But not going to church would of made things even worse than they was. So, every blessed Sunday, I would go sing in the choir, then walk back home instead of waiting for the buggy, because Momma and Daddy would want to gab for a while after the sermon, and I didn’t have nothing to say to nobody.

  I thought about running away but I just couldn’t make myself do it. In spite of Lafe, in spite of the silences and the cemetery and everything, this was the only home I had, and I couldn’t bear to leave it. It wasn’t just Momma and Daddy and them. It was the place itself. I would of been plumb happy never to leave the farm. Don’t feel much different now. It always amazes me that Georgia could just pick up and move somewhere different every two or three y
ears after college, how she never seems to care if she ever sees this place again. It never was like that with me.

  One time, about 1925, Gruff tried to get me to come down to Atlanta with him. He was already managing a store down there and said it might be good for me to get away from home. I’m sure nobody would of cared all that much, but this is the only place I ever felt comfortable. Maybe if I had been able to read and write, it would of felt different, but I don’t think so.

  There was days, back then, when I wouldn’t say a word to a living soul. I could get up at 5:30, before Momma, cook my own fatback and eggs and biscuits, make a couple of extra biscuits and add some sausage or a sweet potato for dinner, fill up the jug with water, go hitch up old Susie and be in the fields by 6:30. Lex would come out a little bit later with the other mule, Moses, and we’d work all day, Lex going back to the house for dinner and me eating under the shade.

  I don’t mean to make out like the years from 1922 until 1942 was one long row I plowed. There was times when we’d all get together and talk and laugh some, like before. There was days when it would rain, or days in the winter when not one thing needed doing. It’s just that, after a while, there wasn’t much need on my part for company. I talked to Lafe’s ghost or whatever you want to call it a lot more than I talked to the living.

  Neither Lex nor Connie ever did marry. It wasn’t all that peculiar a thing back then, not marrying. Miss Hattie Draughon and her two sisters, Miss Corrinne and Miss Jessie, didn’t any of them marry, just stayed at their daddy’s big house, after their momma died, taking care of each other until none of them could get about and they all had to be sent to the nursing home up on the Mingo Road.