by Howard Owen
I think it was harder, back then, on the older ones than the younger ones. Lex knew pretty much that he would be taking over the farm some day, so he always was expected to pay more attention to it than Gruff or Lafe when they were boys. He wasn’t a bad-looking man when he was young, although he was more bashful than us younger ones, and I reckon we used to tease him a lot. It’s funny, but I don’t think Lex had a date until he was way past grown, and even then, he would keep it to himself. He’d just go off at night, after we got the car in 1928. Later, when we had to put the car up on blocks because we couldn’t afford to run it, he’d walk somewhere or other at night. Nobody would of thought of locking their doors back then, and nobody really knew when Lex come back, but he did wake me up coming in as late as three A.M. some nights.
Connie wasn’t as pretty as Century, who had Momma’s yellow hair and soft, pretty face. Momma looked like a angel when she was young. I can see that now looking at her pictures. Makes me wonder what she saw in a old, one-legged Civil War veteran like Daddy.
Connie had sharper features, like Lex, a nose like a hawk’s, and she was too skinny. I see girls now trying to get as thin as they can, and I remember how, when we was young, a man wanted a wife with some meat on her bones. If you got too skinny back then, they’d ship you off to the TB sanatorium.
There was a fella come to work in Geddie about the time Daddy died, and he started coming around, like a stray dog. His name was Homer Guinn, and he was one of the sons of this trashy Guinn woman that lived down south of here on the Ammon Road. Nobody knew who half of her young-uns’ daddies was, and no two of them seemed to have had the same one. But this one, Homer, a boy with slick black hair and a complexion dark enough to suggest the worst, seemed to take a liking to Connie, who already was past being give up for an old maid. And the funny thing was, even though Connie always seemed like she was content to cook and keep house right where she was born, she took a shine to Homer. He started going to the Geddie Presbyterian Church and sitting with her, and they’d spend evenings on the old glider we used to have on the front porch, just talking away. He’d leave about 9:30 and walk back to his momma’s.
It all come to an end one day that June. I had walked in from the swamp and unhitched Susie, and I was coming up from the barn. It was near-bout dark, but there was enough light left to see two people standing out by the carhouse we’d built for the Ford. As I got closer, I could see it was Lex and Connie. Lex had a tobacco stick in his hand that he’d picked up off the ground. Connie had the butcher knife.
“I am going to cut you up like a hog!” she screamed at him. She was as mad as a wet settin’ hen.
“No, you ain’t, Connie,” Lex said, and I could tell he was a little nervous. I was about fifty feet away, and she probably knew I was there, but she was just wild. I hadn’t seen her lose her temper since she got grown.
“I did it for you, honey,” he said as he backed up into the bean rows, being real careful not to trip. “He wasn’t no good. I marked them chickens because they been disappearing for weeks. I never said nothing about it because I knew you wouldn’t believe me, so I had to get proof.”
“You just want me to stay here all my sorry life and cook and wait on you all. And I won’t do it. I won’t do it! I’d rather cut you up and go to jail with him.”
What had happened was that Homer Guinn had been slipping by the chicken coop on the way home and walking off with Momma’s white leg’orns, one at a time. Finally, Lex had put little bands on their legs, not like the usual ones, but smaller, hard to see. When he had counted the night before and come up one short, he sent the sheriff over to Miss Guinn’s, where they found the chicken amongst hers out in the yard. They didn’t keep Homer in jail for long, but Lex let him know he’d be shot if he come sniffing around here again.
Connie cut a shine about it, told Lex she’d wait and catch him when he was sleeping and kill him then, and she didn’t go to church for a good six months afterward. Sometimes, Lex looked more tired than usual out in the fields, like maybe he wasn’t sleeping good. Connie got over it, though, and she stayed right here for her whole life, waiting on me and Lex and Momma until I got married and moved out, and then Momma died. Then it was just her and Lex. She died in 1968, when she was near-bout seventy-three years old, six days after Lex passed away. It was the only six days of her adult life, I reckon, that she didn’t have nobody to wait on. That’s probably what killed her.
After Daddy died, I felt more responsible than before toward my family. Other than working, I’d go to church on Sunday and Wednesday night and maybe go down to the store in East Geddie on Saturday afternoon as it got a little easier to be with people. About the only gambling I ever did was over Coca-Colas. I love Coca-Cola; Momma said it was my one vice. But I had this special trick, where I could take one of them seven-ounce bottles like they used to have, that really had some kick to them, and drain one in a single swallow. If they could get anybody that didn’t come around the store that much, or somebody that was new in town, they’d get me to bet him I could drink the Coke in one gulp. I remember one time Jack Tatum, who was a farmer just down the road from here, said, “Littlejohn, it’s a good thing you don’t drink liquor. You’d be a drunk.”
And then, of course, there was Rose.
Rennie’s momma had her last baby when I was eleven, in 1917. She was this little Indian girl that used to bring us water when we was all working down in the swamp. She wasn’t as dark as her brothers and older sister, had kind of a orangish color to her, skin that stayed right tan in the dead of winter and hair that was reddish-blond and curly, but not kinky. She took after the rest of her family so little that lots of people figured she must not of been Amos’s, but if he ever thought so, he didn’t let on, and he seemed like he was crazier about Rose than any of the rest.
Up past the Rock of Ages another hundred yards or so, into McDaniel property, there used to be a pond, not more than thirty feet across, where us boys would run for a quick swim at dinnertime in the summer. I wouldn’t no more do something like that now than I would walk into a fire, with all the cottonmouths and pilot snakes around here, but back in them days, we’d take all our clothes off and jump right in. Some of us, me included, never even learned how to swim, but the pond, it was just a low place where Lock’s Branch run out, and it wasn’t no more than five feet deep in the middle. Just deep enough to cool off in. They filled it in more than twenty years ago when they cut down all the trees there and started to planting soybeans.
I bet I hadn’t been down there in five years or more when, one day in the summer of 1933 when it must of been 100 degrees out and we was working in the swamp, I got this craving to go down there and get wet all over. Rennie and his brothers had gone to the house for dinner, and I was sitting by the sweet gum at the edge of the branch, not a breath of air. You could smell the crops burning.
I followed the branch past the graveyard and on into the thicket where the pond was. I took off my overalls and brogans, my socks and brown work shirt and underwear and jumped right in. I was twenty-seven then, and had thought myself a man for some time, but that water felt so good that I was splashing around like a young-un at the beach.
I never saw Rose until she jumped in right behind me. Scared me to death. I didn’t know whether it was a bear or a dog or maybe a gator. I jumped and turned around, ready to fight for my life, and here was this Indian girl, who was practically a baby last time I took notice of her, buck naked and all filled out, right in front of me.
She reached down between my legs, where no woman had reached before.
“If you want me,” she said, “you can have me.” Plain as that.
And so I did have her, right there in the sand and swamp grass along the edge of our own private play pool. Because Rose didn’t have no brothers or sisters anywhere near her age or any friends within a mile, she had pretty much had the pond to herself for the last few years, after the rest of us thought we was too old for such foolishness. She said later that she had never se
en another soul there until she followed me down that July day in 1933.
Maybe it’s like this with all men. I don’t know, because I come from a generation where you won’t supposed to kiss and tell. But every woman I have ever been with has known more than me, has led me down that path, starting with sweet Rose. If you had looked at it from outside, not knowing everything, you’d of said, here’s this cradle robber taking advantage of this poor little sixteen-year-old Indian girl. He ought to be horsewhipped.
But Rose taught me everything. I was her plaything, not the other way around. I don’t know where a girl that age learned such things, but after I got over the shock of sharing myself with another human being after being locked up inside myself for years and years, I was just glad that she had.
Nobody ever talked about anybody being a virgin back then. Everybody just took it for granted that you was, especially if you was a woman but probably if you was a man, too, and there wasn’t all this stuff like them Playboy and Penthouse magazines and X-rated movies to keep people’s minds on sex all the time like there is now. People didn’t seem to think about it that much, and it probably wasn’t all that strange for a old bachelor of twenty-seven like me never to have done it. At least, that’s the way it seems to me, looking back.
The hardest thing to do was to keep it quiet. I would go all the way to Lennon’s Drug Store in Port Campbell, where I didn’t know anybody, to buy rubbers, and then I’d hide them behind a timber in the back of the little workshop me and Lex built behind the carhouse, stopping by to pick up one every time I planned to meet Rose down at the pond.
In warm weather, we’d get together whenever we could. We had this message system. If I was working by myself in the swamp or knew Rennie and his brothers was going to be way off at the other end of the farm where we wouldn’t be together at dinner, I’d put this red bandanna around my neck that Rose could see all the way up to her folks’ yard. Then, if she could get away, between housework and fixing dinner for the men, she’d tell her momma she was going for a walk. When she got a ways from the house, headed for the pond, she would do the only thing that ever made me remember that she was a Indian. She’d give a mourning-dove call. That was my signal. When I heard the mourning dove, I knew it was time to tie up the mule and head for Rose’s pond.
In cold weather, we had another plan. There was a old slave cabin, now long since tore down, back farther in the McDaniel woods, where we could be alone and warm. Sometimes we’d both slip out at night, with her giving a owl hoot as the okay signal, and go do it in the tobacco barn farthest from the house.
We went on like this for five years, and, to my knowledge, didn’t nobody ever find out. Lex might of been puzzled that I’d volunteer to work in the swamp, where the air was so heavy and still, so far away from the house, but he was glad for me to do it. And Rose had got so wild and independent as she growed older that her folks, who was getting on in years, just about give up and let her go where she pleased, no questions asked.
It all ended in 1938, one bright blue October morning at the slave cabin. The first frost was barely off the ground. I was supposed to be clearing some of the thorns out of the graveyard and took a chance that nobody would notice that I’d gone into McDaniel’s woods. Rose was waiting for me, and she didn’t beat around the bush.
“Johnny,” she said—that was what she always called me—“I’m going to have a baby.”
I started to declare that I’d been careful, when she stopped me.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “it ain’t yours.”
I knew that Rose would leave from home sometimes for a week or more, and I didn’t fool myself that I was her only lover. But it was a shock to hear that she was carrying another man’s child. She said she was two months gone, that her momma and daddy didn’t know nothing about it yet. She said she was aiming to marry Gentry Locklear, who she saw now and then, and move in with his people. She didn’t love Gentry near as much as she did me, she said.
I could of married her. I know she’d of gone along with it. I could say it might of killed Momma and them, but looking back now, it was pure lack of guts that kept me from marrying that wild, beautiful girl. If it’d been my baby, then I might of said to hell with what people say and married her anyhow. We could of had a pretty good life together, I think. But I was right sure that baby wasn’t mine, since we’d been real careful, and I couldn’t stand the snickers, didn’t think I ever could go back to Dawson Autry’s store again on a Saturday afternoon. I was a coward.
Rose and Gentry, who was about Rose’s age and a Lumbee like her, did get married, and seven months later, she give birth to this little baby that was lighter-skinned than her even. And you know what she named him? Johnny. Not John. Johnny Little Locklear. I saw her one time when the baby was little, walking down High Street in Port Campbell with her husband by her side. She didn’t speak, just looked down at the baby as we passed on the street, looked up at me and winked. Rose never come home much after she got married, and her momma and daddy didn’t live much longer. Johnny lived around Port Campbell until he joined the Army. He got killed in Vietnam, left a wife and three young-uns at home.
If I ever had a son, his name was Johnny Little Locklear.
When the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, I was thirty-five years old, a bachelor that worked hard six days a week, sang bass in the choir on Sunday and saw Belva Culbreth on Sunday nights. Belva was a widow who went to Geddie Presbyterian, too. After Rose, she was a cold bucket of water, but it looked like everybody expected us to get married, an idea I found no pleasure in.
Lex was the eldest son, and forty-six years old to boot. No way he was going into the Army. I probably could of missed World War II myself, but I didn’t want to. If me and Belva had got married, it might of carried some weight, and if they’d come to understand that I couldn’t read and couldn’t even write my own name real well, that would of done it. But that’s not the way it happened.
It would be unfair to Belva to say that I preferred Hitler to her, the way some hateful, spiteful people in our church said I did. What it come down to was duty. Granddaddy had lost his money and Daddy his leg in the Civil War, and Gruff had went overseas in the First World War. I felt like I ought to go. There wasn’t any feeling of volunteering for certain death. It was more a feeling of excitement. The only thing I would miss, I knew, was this old farm.
When I went before the selective board in Port Campbell, I already had got some coaching from a couple of boys that hung around the store and couldn’t read much better than I could but still managed to get in the Army. I knew what to expect. The biggest problem was my name. For years, I had just signed it L. J. McCain, making such a mess of my last name that folks couldn’t tell if I’d spelt it wrong or not. I was still a heavy favorite to get Littlejohn wrong.
So when they asked me my name, I told them L. J. McCain, which was what I had put on the census last time.
They wanted to know what L.J. stood for. I told them it didn’t stand for nothing, just L.J. Period. It wasn’t totally unheard of. There was people back then that didn’t have a name except initials. And the only place my whole name was registered the way it was supposed to be spelt was in the family Bible at Momma’s. So, they bought it. They must of known I couldn’t read, the mess I made of stuff, but I was a big, healthy farmer, and the U.S. Army wasn’t being too picky in early 1942, I don’t reckon.
I left in April for basic training, where they give me dogtags reading “L (only) J (only) McCain.” For four years, I was either “McCain” or “Eljay.”
Why they sent me to cook school, I don’t know. I reckon they figured that at my age I’d be a better cook than a fighter, although it seemed to me like I was in better shape than them twenty-year-old city boys that was always complaining about the food.
For me and a lot of other farm boys just out of the Depression, we never ate so good. No more poke salad, no more pork three times a day if you were lucky.
I spent the rest of 1942 and
1943 and part of 1944 in parts of the United States that might as well of been a foreign country to me. We guarded Italian and German prisoners in Texas, helped civilian workers process sugar at a factory in Cairo, Illinois, did desert training in Arizona. It seemed like we never was going to see any fighting. Finally, though, we got our turn. I can remember walking down streets in Brooklyn, New York, waiting to ship out, and the houses would have signs out front: NO DOGS OR SERVICEMEN. There wasn’t a day I didn’t feel a little homesick. I could always get away back into some dark corner of myself and get by wherever I was, though. I would carry on conversations in my mind with Lafe, and that helped a lot.
We sailed for Marseilles, France, which everybody on the ship pronounced “Marcells.” France was a filthy place. Women going to the bathroom right alongside the road, everything dirty and nasty. Georgia tells me it’s a beautiful country now, that she’d live there if she could figure a way to make a living. I must of just caught it at a bad time.
It was the only chance I’d ever had to meet people from all over. My best friend was a crazy Polack from Toledo, Ohio, named Lewandowski. Edward Joseph Lewandowski. Me and him was together from basic on, and old Lewandowski saved me more than once. I wasn’t a bad cook, considering what we had to work with, but I couldn’t read much better than when I walked out on Miss Hattie’s class in 1917. So Ski would read the ingredients to me. He usually didn’t have to do it but once, and because I tended to go more on taste than measurements, him and me was able to improve on a lot of the stuff. He helped me through cook school, and we was together all through the war.
He’d cash my paycheck for me and help me in sending money home and, more important, in writing letters. The ones he sent Momma and them, and to Century and her family, he didn’t mess with, but he did get me in some trouble with Belva, who already thought I’d invented World War II just to get away from her. I had told Ski enough about her, I reckon, that he knew there wasn’t much between us. So one day in France on our way to Germany, he wrote some things to Belva that I don’t reckon she’d ever read before. I never found out all of it, but it was enough so that she sent me a Dear John letter right quick. All things considered, I reckon I owe Ski for that one.