Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  When the reason for my confusion about that picture finally hit me, and it couldn’t of took more than a minute, I started crying, real quiet so as not to wake Sara or the baby. There are times in everybody’s life, probably, when they got it so good that they get cocky and think they don’t even need God anymore, that they’re one of them “self-made men” that did it all on their own and made their own happiness out of scratch. Sometimes, I think that’s the trouble with the United States right now; we got too many self-made men and not enough God-made men. Well, I was feeling right cocky myself there in the early spring of 1948, just back from the war, a pretty young bride and a beautiful baby daughter, until Angora Bosolet’s picture popped up in Lafe’s yearbook.

  I couldn’t do nothing about it then but keep rocking and keep crying. What I wanted to do, when I first understood, was jump up from my chair and run out that door, straight east, through fields and the sandhills and on into Maxwell’s Millpond until it covered me and my shame forever.

  The next morning, I woke up in the rocker with about three hours’ sleep, got dressed and headed for the fields. I shook Sara to wake her up so the baby wouldn’t be by herself when she woke up, but I was out the door before Sara could say anything to me, or even look at me.

  We worked all day plowing. It was one of them windy, nasty March days where the sand is always blowing in your face and it seems like it’s 40 degrees when it’s really 60. Every way I turned with that mule, it seemed like I was turning into a hurricane. Spring has never been my favorite season, and this was not going to be my favorite spring by any means.

  I had took a sandwich out with me, along with some tea in a Mason jar, and I ate out in the field, blustery as it was. I reckon Sara wondered where I was, but she probably had her hands full with Georgia and figured I just had so much to do that I didn’t have no time to come to the house.

  After we unhitched the mules, I went up to Momma’s and washed my face and hands there. It was about six o’clock, and Sara surely would have supper on the table already. I was near-bout starved, but I asked Lex if I could borrow his car for a spell. He asked me what was wrong with my own car, and I told him it was on the blink, and that I’d have his back to him in a hour or so. He give me the keys, and I got in and headed off to find out what I knew already.

  Sara must of seen me go by in Lex’s car. There wasn’t enough traffic down that rut road for anything to be missed. I turned onto the clay road into East Geddie, then turned right at the store, then left on the Ammon Road, into Geddie itself. When I got to the main intersection, where the Ammon Road becomes the Mingo Road, I turned right on Highway 47, headed east, past the post office and the hardware store and the Southern States building, alongside the railroad tracks.

  Mr. Hector and Miss Annie Belle Blue lived on the north side of the road, in McNeil, which wasn’t much except two little stores and maybe fifty houses, and the sawmill and lumber company. There had been a post office there, but they closed it before the war. Mr. Hector run the sawmill and the lumber yard; McNeil was where the tram coming up from the millpond linked up with the C&CS line. The main memory most folks would of had of McNeil back then would of been piles and piles of lumber stacked in big yards next to the tracks. It was a place that always smelled like turpentine.

  Him and Miss Annie Belle must of been close to seventy then, and they wouldn’t live much longer. They hadn’t had any children of their own, and it was a surprise to most folks when they decided to adopt when they was in their forties. I could just barely remember them coming to our church with this new baby, and it seemed like they was its grandparents instead of its momma and daddy. But they had it better than most around here back then.

  Mr. Hector didn’t have to worry none about bad weather or the low price of cotton, and the house they lived in was theirs for free as long as they wanted it. It had been built by a great-uncle of Mr. Hector’s, one of the McNeils that used to own most of this half of the county, and was fancier than most of the houses around here, made out of brick with little round windows on both sides in the front and a gazebo in the back yard. Unlike us and most folks around here, the Blues had a lawn instead of a yard. All we had to do to clean our yard was sweep it with Momma’s broom and pull up the weeds that come up through the sand. Mr. Hector had to hire somebody to come in with a push mower to keep the grass he planted nice and even. He started a trend, and by the time Lex and Connie died in 1968, I was spending four hours every two weeks mowing the centipede grass Momma and Sara set out in 1952. Folks all over town would tease Mr. Hector, telling him that he cost them fifty extra hours of work a year. He’d just smile and tell them that if it wasn’t him it would of been somebody else, or he’d tell them to just buy some concrete and green paint from the Godwin Lumber Company, cover over their yards and paint them green. Even offered to give them a discount.

  I reckon that Mr. Hector knew I had something other than building supplies on my mind that evening. It was 6:30 by the time I got there, bumping over the train tracks in their long front yard and looping around to the back of the house on their circle driveway.

  Mr. Hector was out feeding table scraps to his beagles. It was near-bout pitch dark, and the wind had died down some to where it felt right pleasant for the first time all day. He said that him and Miss Annie Belle had just finished supper, and wouldn’t I come inside and have some banana pudding that she’d just made today.

  “Mr. Hector,” I said to him, “we got to talk.”

  He could see that I didn’t mean inside, so he motioned me over to the pumphouse, where we both could sit, not looking at each other like we would of at the gazebo. So we got settled there at the pumphouse, our feet not quite touching the ground, and I asked him what I had to ask.

  “Mr. Hector, I know you probably don’t want to tell me, but I got to know who Sara’s real momma and daddy was.”

  I could hear the dogs snuffling around, giving out a little yelp now and then when one thought he wasn’t getting his share, and I could hear Miss Annie Belle clinking things together in the dishpan through the half-open kitchen window.

  “I oughtn’t to tell you that, Littlejohn,” he said. “I promised that I never would tell, and I don’t see what earthly good it would do now. I sure don’t think she’d want to know, and I don’t reckon you do, either.”

  “It ain’t a matter of wanting to know, Mr. Hector. I’ve got to know. I can’t rest till I do.”

  I promised him that I would never tell another living soul, and especially Sara. They’d always told her that she come from a orphanage, and that seemed right to me at the time. But now I had to have the truth, no matter what.

  Later, after he had told me everything, I went on home. Mr. Hector was concerned about me never telling Sara. If he had known the whole story, he wouldn’t of had a care in the world about that.

  Sara wanted to know where I’d been. I said I had to talk over some business with her daddy. She said what business, and I told her it was a secret. She kept after me for months to tell her what me and Mr. Hector talked about that evening, but I never did, and it hurt her feelings. It was about the only thing we never talked about. It’s a great open hole in my life now, not having Sara here to talk about things with. Nobody, not even your own child, is as good for that as your wife is. But I couldn’t tell her. She might of hated me, or felt like she had to leave, and I couldn’t of stood that.

  First chance I got, I burnt that picture of Angora in the oil heater.

  Mr. Hector said that one evening in the late summer of 1923, him and Miss Annie Belle had just finished supper and was out on the porch, fixing to take a walk before it got dark, when a man come to the back door. He had a burlap bag with him, throwed over his shoulder. Mr. Hector recognized him from the mill, said he’d worked there for about three years.

  The man wanted to talk to Mr. Hector alone, but when he saw what was in the sack, Mr. Hector fetched his wife. What was in there, wrapped in a diaper, was a baby, although she didn’t ha
ve no name a-tall then. The man said him and his wife had been keeping the baby since it was born, two months before, but that his wife said that she was through raising young-uns, and that if he didn’t do something with this one, she was going to wrap its head around a pine tree, just to keep it from crying.

  It turned out that the man’s daughter had had a baby out of wedlock, and then had run off the week after and hadn’t been seen since. They didn’t even know who the daddy was, and the daughter wouldn’t tell, no matter how much they beat her.

  Mr. Hector said they took the baby because they was afraid that she wouldn’t live long enough for them to think about it. He said he told Miss Annie Belle that they could always give her to a orphanage if it didn’t work out, but that after a few days, there wasn’t much doubt in either of them’s minds that she was a gift from God. They had a friend, one of Miss Annie Belle’s cousins, that was a doctor, and he took care of getting the baby’s birth date postdated. They reckoned that she was born two months earlier, so it went in the books as June 23, 1923, and they named her Sara Joy Blue.

  Mr. Hector said the man that brought them that burlap bundle was a dark-haired, bushy-browed man, fearsome-looking, and that he worked at the sawmill for two more years and never once gave any sign that he had ever seen Mr. Hector except at the mill.

  He said he couldn’t remember his name, but that he had all the pay ledgers for the past thirty years in his office. I asked him if we could see them right then. He looked at me right queerly, but he got his flashlight and we walked across the road to the office. He finally found this dusty little ledger book marked “1923” and went down the names on the payroll.

  “Here it is,” he said directly, his bony old finger stopping halfway down a column. “Marcus Bosolet.”

  I had always believed in God, in His wrath and mercy, but ever since I found Angora’s picture in Lafe’s yearbook and knew who her daughter was, I have continued to be confused as to His intent. Was He punishing me for Lafe’s death by arranging it so that out of all the women in the world, I would fall in love with my own brother’s daughter? Did He mean for me to leave her when I found out the horror of what I’d done? Or was I supposed to look after the truest victim of that shot from my Iver-Johnson 12-gauge by giving her a happy life? I prayed for months, asking for a sign. The only sign I ever got was an ever-deepening love of Sara and Georgia, until I finally told God that if He wanted me to turn my back on my sin, He would just have to damn me to hell, because I wasn’t going nowhere of my own free will. But I did ask Him to help me keep this shame from Sara, and everybody else, and just let me do the answering for everybody. So far, I reckon He’s cooperated.

  And so, Angora never left me. Every time I looked at Sara after that, I could see her momma’s wild beauty, and more than a little bit of Lafe, too. I could understand then why I’d fell in love with Sara. As for Angora herself, I never tried to find her, because she was the one other person that could spoil everything, the whole life we had in East Geddie. But I’d have nightmares where she showed up at our back door, looking just like she did the last time I seen her, crazy-looking and begging for help, and Sara would ask me why I was turning her away, somehow not seeing that Angora looked just like her.

  Twice after that I thought I saw her, and that she saw me. The first time was at the tobacco market in Sampsonville in 1955. I brought Sara along, just to break the monotony, hers and mine. As we was sitting in the hot pickup truck, drinking Coca-Colas and waiting our turn, a woman walked toward us, on the other side of the street by the tobacco warehouse, and looked right at us in the cab. When she smiled, I could of sworn that it was Angora, who would of been near-bout fifty then. But she just kept walking. I looked in the rearview mirror and she had turned half a block down the street and was looking right at my eyes. I held my breath for a second, then she turned around and kept on walking. I have to admit, I didn’t mind missing them trips to Sampsonville after we turned to raising strawberries.

  The other time, it was 1962, and I was shopping at Belk’s in Port Campbell, looking for a Sunday shirt. I looked up, and this old woman was looking at me through the front glass of the store. She looked more like seventy than the fifty-five or so Angora would of been, but it favored her enough that I threw down the shirts I was looking at and walked out of Belk’s the back way.

  For years I’ve looked at the obituaries every day in the Post, and I never have seen her name. I’ve seen two Angoras, one of which might of been her, but probably not, and a handful of Bosolets. A cousin of hers one time wrote a check for strawberries at the shed. I seen the name and asked him if he knew Angora Bosolet. When he told me she was his fourth cousin, I asked if he knew what had become of her. He said he didn’t know, that she run away a long time ago, and that he’d heard that she turned out bad. That’s all he would say. He asked me my name—I reckon he figured I just worked there. I made one up.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  August 8

  I wake up, and it’s cooled off.

  It looks like the Lord wants me to go on living, for some reason. I feel right light-headed, and I wait a couple of minutes before I try to raise myself up off the little stool. It must of clouded up, because I don’t see any shadows, but everything looks bright, like the sun is shining just back of the clouds and making them glow like sunset.

  I’m wondering how come the weatherman didn’t tell me nothing about this cool front a-coming in when I look over and spy that pine tree. It’s as big as it was in my dream, two hundred feet high at least, and six feet across, biggest pine I ever saw. And out from behind it steps Lafe. He’s nineteen again, skinny and smiling, with his red hair all mussed up like it was most of the time. He’s got a scar over his right eye.

  Lafe don’t say a word, just motions to me, and I don’t seem to have no voice right now. I get up, easier than I’ve got up in years, don’t even need my cane. Lafe is walking out toward the millpond, which is clear and blue now, like the water has been purified. And then he’s in the water, except he’s not really so much in it as on top of it. I’m supposed to follow him, but I still remember my dream and I’m still wondering if this is another one. Lately, it’s got harder and harder to tell what’s dreams and what’s real.

  Finally, he’s about a hundred feet out in the water, and he turns around again and looks at me, just looks and don’t say a thing, but it’s like my feet have a life of their own, and they start moving toward him, toward the pond.

  The water isn’t even getting my feet wet. I’m out several yards and I look down and see that I’m just walking across the surface. Lafe somehow makes me understand that I’m supposed to look up. I do, and he nods and smiles, makes a forward motion with his hand and I follow him. That old hymn we used to sing at church, “Walk on Galilee,” comes into my head, the one that had the chorus that went:

  You can walk on Galilee,

  Cross that shining, peaceful sea; If you put your faith in Jesus,

  You can walk on Galilee.

  Now I’m out where the water ought to of been over my head, but it’s like walking on glass, except different, because this feels more like feathers. Lafe points on up ahead, and I can see where we’re heading to.

  There is a mist now, making everything hazy and hard to see, except out in the middle of the pond, where the sun seems like it has broke through and is shining on a whole bunch of people. It’s just like in my dream, only prettier even. There’s Momma, looking like she did at maybe thirty, still in good health and smiling to beat the band, happier-looking than I’ve ever seen her. And Daddy, with the twinkle in his eye he’d get when he would tell us about the war and all, but looking younger than I ever saw him, a lot younger than he was when I was born, I reckon. Him and Lafe don’t look like they’re father and son, but more like they’re brothers, both with their wild red hair and long, bony faces. I can’t figure out how they can all be so clear to me, because they’re smack in the middle of the pond, must still be a quarter mile away.


  I see Angora and Rose, standing side by side, with their different kinds of dark complexions, both looking as pretty as they looked on the prettiest days of their lives. They’re waving at me and motioning me like I ought to hurry up, or like they can’t wait to see me. And I see Lex and Connie and Century, not that long gone from my memory, all looking like they’re young-uns again, or in their twenties anyhow, and they look like they might be getting ready to start a game of run-cat-run.

  I think about the time that Georgia and Jeff took me to see a play that the college was putting on. It was a terrible sad one, with everybody just tore apart at the end from what they had said and done to each other, and I wondered why anybody would want to watch something that made you feel that bad. And then the curtain went down and came up again, and these same folks that was destroying each other just a minute before was all smiling and bowing, with their arms around each other like they’d been best friends for life. Was we all just play-acting?

  Back behind the rest, a little higher up, is my Sara. She has her hand on Angora’s shoulder, in a way that tells me somehow that they’ve found each other and know everything. Sara is even prettier than her momma, as pretty as she was in the parking lot of the Geddie Presbyterian Church when she first let me know that she cared about me, with her dark hair and flashing eyes, misted over now with tears like mine are. She holds out one tan, thin wrist, one of the wrists I used to love to kiss when I’d wake up in the morning with her curled beside me in our feather bed, and I feel like I won’t be able to stand it if this is a dream and I have to wake up old and crazy.