Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  She would come home at first angry, then sorrowful, about conditions at the school, how the state had let it fall into such disrepair that nothing much could save it. Mom had grown up in the building industry, and she knew crappy construction when she saw it. But it didn’t stop there. She saw kids having to share books. She saw the poor food—even by school lunchroom standards—they were getting. She wrote the superintendent a letter spelling it out, chapter and verse, and she was not asked to teach summer school again. When white kids started getting bused to Carver, though, they tore the damn thing down and built Sandy Heath High, for all races, creeds and colors, within another school year.

  It was on the way back from Uncle Gruff and Aunt Martha’s that Daddy hit on his big idea. The farm was not doing all that well; it took a lot of people to work 320 acres the right way. Daddy always said the farm was just big enough to be dangerous. It wasn’t one of those farms in the Midwest where you can’t see from one end to the other, and it wasn’t a manageable little eighty-acre tract. Uncle Lex was over sixty, Daddy had just turned fifty and Rennie’s children seemed to want to leave home as soon as they got old enough to get a job. I can’t imagine why they didn’t want to work for Daddy and Uncle Lex for nothing.

  Cropping tobacco is what you’d call labor intensive. It became more and more of a problem for farmers around here in the sixties and seventies, when federal programs finally gave poor people an alternative to chopping cotton and cropping tobacco for seventy-five cents an hour and all the watermelon they could eat. You won’t find many fans of Uncle Sam around Geddie, unless he wants them to send their sons halfway across the planet to get their legs blown off in somebody else’s war, but, as far as I’m concerned, they brought it on themselves. They could have integrated the schools themselves, and not made such a bloody mess of it. They could have taken care of their own poor, set up programs to teach people how to do useful, productive things and then pay them a living wage.

  The farmers would sit around the store and complain about how nobody wanted to work anymore, but you couldn’t have gotten one of them to pay those people enough to live on if you’d put a gun to their heads. It made them mad that the feds were stealing their slave labor away. Daddy used to tell me about one man, Loftus Bedsole, who had a farm between McNeil and Cool Spring. Loftus Bedsole hated the government so much that he wouldn’t drive on U.S. highways. He drove to Richmond one time to visit his sister and her husband, and he took nothing but state and local roads all the way up. It was a nine-hour drive, and when he got there, he had to call them to come and get him. They lived on a U.S. highway.

  Anyhow, when we were leaving Uncle Gruff’s, he gave us a quicker route back home. We wound up on 301, which took us across a larger, uglier stretch of Georgia. Before we got to the South Carolina line, Daddy was threatening to rename me Kansas or Connecticut or Wisconsin, anything but Georgia.

  A few miles after we crossed the Savannah River into South Carolina, we started seeing signs that said PICK YOUR OWN STRAWBERRIES.

  Since it was March, there wasn’t anything to pick, but the farmer didn’t want to go to the trouble of taking his signs down, I guess. It was getting late in the afternoon, and Aunt Connie was becoming a little anxious to find a place to stay for the night, but Daddy was intrigued by just about anything concerning farming, and he followed the signs. We turned left down a two-lane county road, followed it about two miles, then turned left at another strawberry sign and went up a dirt road that dead-ended at a big farmhouse.

  There were strawberry beds all around the house and room for parking alongside it. A big spitz tried to chew our tires off, and we had just about decided to turn around and leave when a man came out of the house and shooed the dog away.

  Daddy got out and introduced himself, and he and Uncle Lex and the man went off talking farming. The man’s wife, and I never did learn either one of their names, invited Mom and Aunt Connie and me inside for iced tea.

  The rest of the way back, including half the night in the tourist park where we stayed, Daddy and Uncle Lex talked about strawberries. Daddy said the soil along the back side of their property would be perfect for them, but Uncle Lex wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t eager to get into something that would require a loan and would take a couple of years to get going. He was eleven years older than Daddy and said he had nightmares about having to spend his old age in the poor-house. By the time we got back to East Geddie, though, Daddy had talked him into going into the pick-your-own-strawberries business, and had talked Mom and Aunt Connie and me into it, too.

  Daddy and Uncle Lex wound up leasing several acres from the McDaniels, who were just about out of farming by that time, anyhow, and pieced that together with some of the swamp land they already owned. They eventually did well enough off strawberries that they were able to buy twenty acres from the McDaniels.

  Daddy and Rennie and Uncle Lex and one of Rennie’s boys who wasn’t old enough to leave home yet built a big shed off the Ammon Road and ran a dirt road in from that side. Daddy said he didn’t want a bunch of strangers all the time coming up our road and parking in our driveway. They couldn’t plant strawberries until the next March, by which time they’d had to take out a mortgage on the farm to pay for an irrigation system and all the fertilizer and plastic sheeting that Daddy said they’d have to put under the plants. This was something he said he’d read about in the Progressive Farmer, something he said they could do to improve on the operation we’d seen in South Carolina. Taking out a mortgage on the farm worried Uncle Lex almost to death.

  The farmers around Geddie and East Geddie thought Daddy had lost his mind. The last change most of them had made was to switch to tobacco sometime after World War I. They’d kid him, during the two years it took to get the business going, asking him when he was going to bring them some strawberries.

  “You’ll have to pay for them, and you’ll have to pick them,” he’d say. It never bothered Daddy to go against the grain, or the tobacco. It probably bothered me more. Kids whose parents would talk about the crazy McCains and their strawberries would call me “Strawberry,” but Daddy told me not to worry, that those strawberries would pay my way through college.

  He was right, and so was his timing. They were just getting ready to open the interstate that runs a little east of the river at Port Campbell, not more than five miles from East Geddie. Daddy and Uncle Lex paid for space on a couple of billboards, driving Uncle Lex into even deeper depression, I’m sure, as he saw more money flying out the window. But Daddy knew that half the East Coast would come through on the interstate, and if he could just get one in a thousand to take a short side trip, they’d have all the business they needed.

  Which is just what happened. The idea of picking your own strawberries was fairly new at the time, and Daddy picked up one good idea from the man in South Carolina: He advertised that you could eat all you wanted while you picked. Daddy would charge enough to make up for all a starving person could possibly eat. And everybody over-picked. They figured they’d gone to the trouble to find the place (Daddy was smart enough not to mention our town’s name, so we avoided the usual confusion that hits when people go east from Geddie and can’t find East Geddie), so they ought to pick plenty. I’m sure trash cans in rest stops all the way from Maine to Florida were full of McCain strawberries. They probably still are. There’s a sucker passing by every minute on the interstate.

  People from Port Campbell and the Geddies would come and pick, too, and many people would just slip in at night and pick for free, which never bothered Daddy very much.

  “If they need food that bad,” he’d say, “let them pick.”

  All through my high school years, I’d spend afternoons in May and into June out there weighing strawberries and ringing up sales. Daddy or Rennie would load the pickers on a flatbed wagon hitched to a tractor and tow them out to the parts of the patch that were ready to pick. Uncle Lex and Aunt Connie and Mom all pitched in, and they’d have to hire lots of extra help to cut
the runners in the fall and pick off the flowers in the early spring. But Daddy was right. The soil there, on the edge of the Blue Sandhills, was perfect for strawberries. They branched out into blueberries and blackberries later, so that there was always something to pick in warm weather, it seemed.

  Even while we were starting to rake in the money off Daddy’s idea, I didn’t much like the berry business. When we had tobacco, I could avoid doing much farm work, other than picking peas and beans and shelling them, and helping Mom with the canning. Daddy didn’t want his little girl to get her hands all grimy with tobacco juice and be around people that would bite tobacco worms in half for a quarter. But the strawberries were different. It was more meeting people than manual labor, from my end, and it didn’t hurt sales, as I got a little older, to have a cute girl at the counter. But I was never what they call smart around here, meaning I never was too crazy about working from sunrise to sunset. I’d take a book with me and read every second somebody wasn’t waddling up with twenty pounds of strawberries they didn’t need.

  By high school, it really started to grate on me that I was stuck around that shed when my friends were going to the lake or the beach. Looking back, I had it pretty soft, but I didn’t feel that way then.

  CHAPTER TEN

  August 8

  The war cleansed my spirit, for a spell.

  All the dying, big and little, made what had happened with Lafe seem like it was somehow smaller, less awful. At some time in Germany, toward the end, I quit talking to Lafe’s ghost, forgot I’d ever met Angora Bosolet.

  Now, back home in 1946 with February going fast into March and the land waiting to be led into spring, it seemed almost like I was born again. It wasn’t a religious thing, although there wasn’t a day in the war I didn’t pray, first for my own selfish hide, then for the people we saw, then for the whole sorry world. It was more like I really was a new person with a new life in front of me. Momma had failed a lot, was a lot more feeble at seventy-six than she had been at seventy-two, and Lex and Connie seemed like they depended on me to get things going again.

  The farm was doing right poorly. There wasn’t enough help during the war, but the real problem was that Lex wasn’t getting any younger, and he had been spending more and more time working at the lumber yard and less time looking after the farm, which he mostly left to Rennie’s family. Since Rennie and his folks wasn’t hardly making enough off sharecropping to buy food, they wasn’t exactly killing themselves to keep things up.

  So I come home to a house with full electricity, indoor plumbing and a brand-new Chevrolet in the carhouse, because times was good at the lumber yard, and to a farm that was drying up on one end and drowning on the other. They had let the crop ditch get all clogged with weeds so that the near fields wasn’t getting enough water. The swamp, on the other hand, was only being half farmed, partly because it was so wet, without the crop ditch to drain some of the water off, partly because Rennie’s folks didn’t have the time or inclination to do all that ought to of been done.

  They said I’d changed some, and I reckon they were right. I still couldn’t read and write, but there was this feeling that if I’d got through four years of World War II, I must not be a complete idiot.

  I throwed myself back into the farm, but it was out of love of the land instead of needing a place to hide. We was too late to get back the rest of the swamp land for that year, but we did work like the devil and got the crop ditch bush-axed and drug so water flowed to the near fields again. And while Lex and Connie had took care of all the modern conveniences for the inside of the house, they’d pretty much let the outside go to hell, so there was a lot of painting and roofing going on that spring. These old pine farmhouses just drink paint; we must of put three coats on before it looked right. But that was okay by me; I was just glad to be home.

  I went back to my place in the choir, and they said they sure had missed me. Belva was talking to me, but we weren’t likely to get back together, which was okay, too. Everything seemed like it was a little bit smaller now, but that was the way I wanted it. The world didn’t ever have to get no bigger than East Geddie again, far as I was concerned.

  There was new faces. Folks had moved in to work at the mill when the men went off to war, and there was lots of people hanging around the store and going to church that I didn’t know. There was others that had changed so much that I didn’t know them, either, although I’d been around them most all of my life. Sara Blue was one. And even knowing what I knew later, I wouldn’t of done anything different.

  She was eighteen when I joined the Army, near-bout twenty-three when I got back. I barely remembered a skinny, dark-haired girl with eyes like new pennies that didn’t seem to have no respect for her elders. She was always sitting toward the back of the church, usually with a girlfriend or two, passing notes and dropping their heads down to hold in their giggles.

  She was the daughter of Miss Annie Belle and Mr. Hector Blue. Mr. Hector had been running the plywood plant over at McNeil for the Godwins for as long as I could remember. Him and Miss Annie had adopted Sara, and they give her just about anything she wanted. Folks said she was spoiled rotten as a young-un.

  She’d been gone, too, the first college girl from around here. The Blues sent her to Women’s College in Greensboro in 1938, although her and her folks told me it like to of killed them to let her go. She’d graduated from high school at fifteen and was back here teaching at nineteen. I don’t reckon I’d seen her more than a few times since 1938.

  She told me later that even though nobody could of been better to her than the Blues, she had always felt like a orphan, somehow. She said it made it easier to leave home. So I asked her why she come back to East Geddie. So I could have you, she said.

  By the time I got back home in 1946, she was a grown woman, singing in the choir instead of cutting up on the back row. She was a English teacher at Geddie School. At the first choir practice I went to, she introduced herself and called me Mr. McCain, which made me feel right old. I was near-bout forty then.

  I was attracted to her, without really knowing it at first. She was still a young-un in my mind, but there was something that struck a chord, that made me want to be with her. I tried to put the feeling aside, because it was just silly, a old farmer that couldn’t even read and write going after a young schoolteacher with four years of college. I had only been with Rose and a few French whores in my whole life and, until Sara, I figured that that might be it. Me and Lex and Connie and Momma looking after each other.

  Even after four years in the Army, I was a little touchy about not being able to read. Every time the choir learned a new hymn, it was agony for me, because I’d have to learn it all by heart, somehow, just kind of humming along and listening the first couple of times we went over it. Good thing for me we didn’t change songs much.

  But while I was gone, they had picked up a couple that was second nature to everybody else and Greek to me. It shamed me to have to stumble like that in front of the choir, but especially in front of Sara. At about the third choir practice, I reckon, she started standing next to me, managed to change places with Harwood Bryant, which suited me, because she smelled a lot better than Harwood, who dipped snuff. She would read the verses we was to sing, usually 1, 2 and 4, to me beforehand, without making a big deal out of it, and it helped me learn it faster. I could remember, even if I couldn’t read.

  It was after Easter and just before my fortieth birthday that I come to realize that she might see me as something other than a wore-out old bachelor.

  We had choir practice on Wednesday nights, and I’ve got to confess that I did fix myself up a little more than I did before the war. I’d shave, for the second time that day, wash real good, since I had just got in from the fields, and put on a clean pair of pants and a shirt that Connie pressed for me.

  “Littlejohn,” she’d say, “I can’t believe you’re a bachelor. If I wasn’t your sister, I’d marry you myself.” She could still make me blush. />
  So this Wednesday in late April, we’d just finished for the evening and was walking toward the front door when Sara, who had been telling me something about the garden she had at her folks’ house, started going through her pocketbook kind of frantic.

  She put her right hand on my left arm, just above the elbow. I couldn’t believe how warm and nice it felt. It was the first time she’d ever touched me.

  “Mr. McCain,” she said, the edge of a smile showing, “I believe I have lost my car keys. I’m afraid I might have locked them in the car.”

  Her daddy’s Ford was parked right next to Lex’s Chevrolet. We was the last ones out of the church and closed the door—nobody had to lock up churches back then. I walked with her to the Ford, and, sure enough, there was the keys locked up inside, right on the dash.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” she said. “Damn!” Right there in the church yard. I’d never heard a woman cuss at church before. I could smell the honeysuckle that was just coming out across the Old Geddie Road. I told her not to worry.

  Lex had some wire in the boot of his car, and I cut a piece off with the pliers from his toolbox that he carried back there, too. I made a loop and worked the wire between the rubber and the top of the glass enough to drop it down on the lock. It was like trying to pick up the watch with the steam shovel at the county fair. Finally, on the fourth try, I hooked the loop around the lock and pulled it up.

  “You certainly are handy, Mr. McCain,” she said after she thanked me. I was standing by the front door as she opened it, and stepped to one side. Then she reached up and kissed me, right on the lips. She was kind of short, five foot three, so she had to put one of her warm hands behind my neck and kind of draw me down to her.

  “Why don’t you just call me Littlejohn?” I said, my voice kind of hoarse.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that for three months,” she said, and I hoped she meant kiss me, not call me Littlejohn. We kissed each other again, slower this time. If she had told me she wanted me to take Lex’s car and drive it off Meade’s Landing into the Campbell River, I would of done it, no questions asked.