Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  “Look-a-here,” he told me just before we crossed the Ammon Road, “what we do today is just between you and me. You can’t tell nobody about this, no matter what.”

  Of course I told him I’d swear on a stack of Bibles to keep quiet. Secrets was exciting to me back then.

  We went across the road and on through the sand and pine straw, headed for the millpond with our Iver-Johnson single-shots over our shoulders, me talking about where we’d seen deer skat in September, him being quiet. It was real warm that day, even for Indian summer, and by the time we had got down to the pond, we was ready to throw our jackets over by the pine tree at the water’s edge. It was about eleven o’clock.

  Lafe looked at me right strange, and then he put his fingers up to his mouth and whistled. Before too long, I spied somebody coming out of the woods on down toward the lumber mill. It was a girl, and when she got closer, I could see that it was a Hittite girl. She had that straight dark hair parted in the middle and pulled behind her ears. She had kind of thick lips that made her look all pouty. She didn’t seem real enthused to see me.

  “Littlejohn,” Lafe said, “this here’s Angora Bosolet.”

  I don’t know how long they’d been meeting like that, or even how they met, except that her daddy worked at the mill. I never got to talk to either one of them about it. Angora put one of her long tan arms around Lafe, and I couldn’t help but wish it was me that she was hugging.

  He told her who I was, and then he turned to me and said, “Angora’s going to be my wife.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to ask him what Momma and Daddy would have to say about that, to say nothing of her Hittite family. I asked him when, soon as I got my breath back, and he said soon as he saved up a little money and got up enough nerve. I hate to say it, but I was jealous. I know it sounds peculiar, but Lafe had been the only friend I’d had for most of my life, and now he was leaving me behind. And already I was able to see a world where Momma and Daddy would forgive Lafe for marrying a Hittite, because he always was the favorite.

  Angora had a funny accent, talked faster than we did and used her hands and arms more to make herself understood. She had brought a jar of moonshine with her that her daddy had made, she said, and she give us some. Lafe had been drinking for a couple of years, and he’d let me try some of the stuff one time that the Faircloths sold up by the Mingo Road, but this stuff that Angora had was different; it would set your fields on fire. I choked a little on the first sip and passed it to Lafe, who drunk some and passed it back to Angora. She took a big gulp and wiped her lips off with the back of her hand real slow and lazy, and then she smiled at me and Lafe. I could see what made him want her.

  We sat around next to the pond, under that pine with our 12-gauges propped on either side of us, and we passed the jar around. After a while, Lafe sidled up next to me and told me that him and Angora was going to go for a walk, but that they’d be back directly. Said they’d meet me back at the tree in an hour or so.

  He took his gun with him, said he might run across a deer or something, but I was thinking that it was right unlikely that any deer in his general direction was in danger of getting shot that day, the way Angora had her arm around him and the way they was laughing and giggling.

  I felt right neglected, I don’t mind telling you. I knew a little about girls, from what us boys would talk about and from Alice Fay Cain, who showed me a little about kissing. But it hurt my feelings to think of Lafe going off with a woman (although it turned out that Angora weren’t no older than I was, just seemed older) into a whole ’nother world and leaving me back in that little room at Momma and Daddy’s.

  I went down to a place where I’d seen deer skat and walked around a little bit on the bluff that looked down on the millpond. I could see the workers over at the mill walking off in different directions, some up the tram tracks toward McNeil, some toward the Ammon Road, at the end of their half day of Saturday work. Down at the other end, the pond looked even more lonesome than usual, with a loon off in the distance making me feel lower than I already did. I took a couple of shots at some squirrels that peeked around the side of a sycamore, but I didn’t spy any sign of deer and didn’t much care that I didn’t, to tell you the truth.

  I got back to the tree after one, but they was still gone. Maybe they just won’t come back a-tall, I was thinking. Maybe they’ll just go off and get married today. I felt like if I could get Lafe back at the house and talk to him, I might get him to change his mind. I wasn’t thinking too much about Lafe’s happiness.

  We’d brought along some dinner. I had a piece of sausage and a couple of Momma’s biscuits and then got a drink of the dark millpond water, which you could still do at that time and not die. Then I set down next to that pine tree and dozed off.

  The next thing I knew, the whole world seemed like it exploded around me. There was this loud bang and I felt a stinging feeling all over my face. I thought I might be dead, but I didn’t know what of. My eyes burned, partly from the sand, partly from looking into the sun. When I was finally able to make heads or tails out of it all, there was Lafe, laughing like he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world. And Angora was next to him, laughing harder than I’d ever imagined somebody that pouty-faced could of.

  Lafe and Angora had come back and found me asleep by the tree. They told me that they, meaning Lafe, couldn’t help but fire a shot in the sand in front of me just to see what happened.

  Now, I take a spell to wake up. I like to of popped Daddy one time when I was fourteen because he come in and started dragging me by my foot out of bed, just messing around. You got to give me a few seconds. Lafe ought to of known that, but when I saw the empty jar Angora was holding, I knew that they was most probably drunk. Before I noticed that, though, I had already made a lunge toward Lafe and tackled him to the ground. He was still bigger than me, though, and I come to my senses before I was able to hit him upside the head with the piece of wood I had grabbed in my left hand.

  After everything calmed down, Angora and Lafe sat and had some dinner. She had brought some smoked fish, which the Hittites would cook over coals outside and dry out so that you could keep it a right good spell. Even though I was full, I tried some.

  Angora wasn’t talking much now. Her and Lafe looked over at each other once in a while and kind of smiled, like they knowed something I didn’t, and I felt about as welcome as a ant at a picnic. But I didn’t want to go back by myself. I had this feeling that if Lafe didn’t come with me, he might never come back.

  After a while, Lafe kind of shimmied a little lower down the pine tree and said he was fixing to take a nap. Sleep it off is more like it, I thought to myself. But Angora wasn’t sleepy, and she didn’t seem to be much drunk. When Lafe shut his eyes, she started to cleaning up the mess we’d made, and then she asked me if I’d like to take a walk with her.

  “After all, we are going to be family, are we not?” she said. She had the funniest way of talking I ever heard. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know what she meant by “take a walk.” I had a feeling that her and Lafe had been doing more laying around than walking, from the looks in their eyes and the pine straw that was still stuck in Angora’s hair.

  But she was such a pretty girl that she made my head spin. All the girls I went to school with seemed so plain and predictable. Even the good-looking ones was fat with two or three babies by the time they was twenty-one or twenty-two, it seemed like, and you could see them turning into their mommas even before they got out of high school. Maybe Angora had a fat old momma back in Kinlaw’s Hell, but I somehow doubt it.

  We took the trail that I had gone on earlier, walking alongside the pond on the west side. I asked her where she came from, and she pointed east, over toward the Marsay Pond. She said her daddy, which she called her papa, worked for the lumber mill, and that she would walk with him to work sometimes, and then go fishing in the millpond, which had better and bigger fish in it than the Marsay did, probably because it had
better water. The fish that was there didn’t have anywheres else to go, since there weren’t any creeks feeding it, and they got to be pretty big. It was all fished out twenty years ago, but now they’re trying to bring back the bream and perch and even some bass.

  I felt a lot like them fish right then, kind of locked in.

  She told me that she liked to take water jugs up here with her and bring a bunch back, because the water in the Marsay was bitter and full of iron. I told her about the time me and Lafe had walked to the Marsay and was scared we’d be caught. I didn’t tell her about being scared they’d eat us.

  “The Marsay folk, we just want to be left alone,” she said. She told me a story I hadn’t heard before, about when the Klan tried to “straighten out” the Hittites. I didn’t know, until I met Angora, that the Hittites didn’t call themselves that. They called themselves the Marsay folk.

  Anyhow, Angora told me that right before she was born, the Ku Klux Klan got mad at the Hittites because one old boy went back into Kinlaw’s Hell to hunt and got beat within a inch of his life. So they figured they’d have a little cross burning right there by the Marsay Pond. Angora said the Hittites let them come on in, down the only trail leading in from the main road, let them set up their cross, everybody with their robes and hoods on, and then they attacked. She said they closed off the only road with a few logs and then they went after the Klan. She said most of the Klansmen went running through the woods after they was attacked by about a hundred Hittite men and women toting everything from tree limbs to knives, and that the Hittites still had horses that was bred from what the Klan left behind that night. She told me that one of the Hittites, a great-uncle of hers, was killed from one of the Klansmen firing into the crowd, and that two Klansmen was killed, one when he got caught between the Hittites and the lake, tried to swim away and drowned, the other one beat to death. She said they hadn’t heard tell of the Klan since then, and didn’t expect to, neither.

  She seemed like she talked more when Lafe wasn’t around, and I couldn’t help but like her a little.

  “Maybe you can come live with us,” she said, “after we are married.”

  We walked on through the woods. All of a sudden, there was a crash in the brush up ahead of us, and this beautiful buck deer, must of been a eight-pointer at least, broke through. The afternoon sun hitting him made him look red. I was toting my gun, but the whole thing caught me so much by surprise that I didn’t even get it off my shoulder. It’s funny, but now I can ride up to Montclair and they’ll take me for a ride up on the parkway, where we can see deer all over the place. Back then, I probably hadn’t seen four live deer in my life.

  We stopped and listened to the noise die away. It seemed real quiet all of a sudden, and a wind was picking up. Angora shivered and moved closer to me.

  In a day that didn’t seem to have no end to surprises, Angora leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You are so pretty, like your brother,” she said. I wasn’t much used to being kissed, and I sure wasn’t used to men, and especially me, being called pretty. Then she reached up with one of them berry-brown hands of hers, turned my face toward hers and kissed me right on the lips. I had never tasted nothing so sweet. I was as drunk as if I’d chugged all that moonshine myself.

  “We’re family now, eh?” she said, and I told her I reckoned we was. And then she laughed like she was dying, like she couldn’t stop. I thought she was mocking me and moved away from her, but she grabbed my arm and pulled it around her.

  “You English are so funny,” she said. That’s what the Hittites called us. The English.

  It was about two o’clock when we got back to Lafe, and he was still passed out by that pine tree beside the pond. I was feeling my oats pretty good by this time and was still about half drunk from Angora’s kiss.

  “Look at Lafayette,” she said. I don’t think I had ever heard anybody use Lafe’s whole name before, not even Momma when she was mad. It always made me wish Littlejohn could be shortened, because it sounded so much worse when Momma would say, “Littlejohn, you come here,” than it did when she called Lafe.

  “He’s still sleeping,” Angora said; and then she added, “How good a shot are you, Littlejohn?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me until she mentioned it, and if she hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t of done it, because Daddy taught us never to mess around with guns, and I was always more careful than Lafe was.

  But here was this beautiful girl, practically daring me to scare Lafe so bad he’d pee in his pants, and the idea wasn’t all that unattractive to me, when I remembered how bad he’d scared me when he had the chance.

  “I ain’t a bad shot,” I told her. “Watch this.”

  I took the 12-gauge, the one I’d got for my twelfth birthday, off of my shoulder, picked it up and aimed. But I didn’t aim down on the ground like Lafe did. I picked out a spot about two feet over Lafe’s head, right in the middle of the pine tree, so that he’d hear the shot and feel the bullet explode into that tree at the same time. I was about sixty feet away. I could pick off a squirrel at two times that distance.

  But then the thing happened that you never can plan for, the thing that can happen when you’re careless and don’t have no leeway left. Angora, thinking about how silly old Lafe was going to look, I reckon, started to laugh before I even pulled the trigger. It was that same laugh that she had back in the woods, like she couldn’t stop. I started to squeeze the trigger at the same time that Lafe woke up, hearing Angora laughing, and saw me pointing an Iver-Johnson right at him. He must of jumped up to try and get away, still half asleep and not knowing anything but that somebody was aiming to shoot him.

  He jumped the two feet it took, and the last thing my brother ever saw was me pulling the trigger of my shotgun, pointed at him.

  Angora was real quiet for a few seconds. Then she started making this little sound like a hurt kitten. Finally, she squawled like a panther and turned and started running.

  Lafe twitched just once. I threw down the gun and walked toward him, and I could see the black blood oozing out of a hole no doctor could ever fix, right over his eyes. Angora was going in smaller and smaller circles, screaming words I had never heard before, some of it not even words. She fell in the sand directly, looked over at me and spit out, “God damn you to hell.” She went over to where I was kneeling next to Lafe, just stood there and stared, then turned and started running again, this time in a straight line. I looked down at Lafe, felt one more time for a heartbeat, and when I looked up, she was gone.

  A loon cried way off in the distance like a soul making tracks. My last hope was that it was all a dream, and if I started running too, maybe I’d wake up. So I run up toward the sawmill. Even if it is a dream, I thought to myself, I ought to try and get help. By the time I got to the mill office, I was pretty sure it wasn’t any dream, but there wasn’t nobody at the mill; even the foreman had already locked up and gone home.

  I thought about just running into the millpond until the water covered me up, or just heading off into Kinlaw’s Hell, never to be seen no more. But I didn’t. No guts, I reckon. I run for home. It was a good two miles, but I stopped when I got to the Ammon Road, thought about running up into Geddie to get help there, or about just turning around and going back into the Blue Sandhills for good, just plowing into Kinlaw’s Hell until I disappeared. But I didn’t. I kept running for home.

  It was late Saturday afternoon. A chill had come up, and the sweat was starting to turn cold under my shirt. I had left the jacket back next to Lafe. I run by Rennie’s house, and thought for a minute about just having Rennie and them hitch up the mule and go after Lafe’s body, but I could see the house from there, so I kept on going, just slowing down long enough so that when Rennie’s brother come toward me, ’cause he could see that something was real wrong, I could tell him Lafe had been shot.

  Momma and Connie was in the kitchen fixing supper. I come in by the back-porch door, closing it real careful behind me, I reckon so that there
could be one more second of peace before everything ended. Then I turned the doorknob, walked in the kitchen and they both knew something terrible had happened.

  “Where’s Lafe?” Momma wanted to know before I could tell her anything. “Where’s Lafe?” she asked me again.

  “He’s been shot,” I told her, and I couldn’t hold the rest of it in. “I think he’s dead.”

  Momma went all to pieces, sat right down on the kitchen floor with the wooden soup spoon still in her hand. Connie said that Daddy was out in the near barn shucking corn. I had run right past him on the way to the house, but I reckon he didn’t hear me for the corn sheller, and I didn’t hear him for the wind and my own breathing.

  So I went out to get Daddy. He was sitting there gathering up corn off the barn floor to shell, and he looked so peaceful there, the old tabby cat sleeping over in the corner. I couldn’t hardly bear to tell him what I had to tell him.

  “Daddy, Lafe’s been hurt bad. He’s shot,” I told him. He tried to get up quick and fell when his wooden leg got caught under him. I helped him up.

  “Where?” was all he could say.

  I didn’t know which where he meant.

  “At Maxwell’s Millpond. In the head.”

  He hitched up the mules to the wagon and yelled for Connie to have the Williamses send for Dr. Horne. Then me and him headed back east to get Lafe’s body.

  I told Daddy that Lafe had been cutting through some vines when he tripped and the gun went off.

  “Don’t lie to me, Littlejohn,” he said, not taking his eyes off the rut road in front of him. “I can stand anything. Just don’t lie to me.”

  Well, I told him, and it turned out that he really couldn’t stand that after all. What I told him, though, was that we was hunting for deer, and all of a sudden Lafe come through some brush to the side of me, and I thought he was a deer.

  “Son, how could you mistake your own brother for a deer?” he asked me, like it was a insult to Lafe to do that. Actually, it happens about three times every deer season to somebody in the state. I didn’t say anything a-tall; the whole idea of what I’d done was starting to sink in, and I started to shivering from more than the cold. I sat there all the way to the pond, shaking. Daddy was crying.