The Essay A Novel

by The Essay (retail) (epub)

  Coach Battershell stopped stirring his coffee and set the spoon on the side of the saucer. “You need to understand something, Jimmy Lee. Once you go to college, you start with a clean slate.” He put his hand on the table and made a wiping motion. “Nobody knows who your family is or that your brother was in prison, or anything else. You’ll be judged totally on what kind of a man you are. Once you get out of Vinton County, everything’s even.”

  I smiled because I didn’t believe him. “That doesn’t seem possible, Coach.”

  “I’m telling you, if that’s what you’re worried about, then you’re worrying over nothing.”

  “Yeah, but you never had that problem. You were always the star.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, neither revealing anything with their facial expressions. “You don’t know that.”

  “I’ve heard the stories. You were the star quarterback for the O.U. Bobcats. You set all those records. You were all-conference and the team’s MVP. The guys on the team say your picture is everywhere in the football offices.”

  “That’s true, but it doesn’t mean it came easy.”

  “It sure looks like it did.”

  He sipped his coffee and rolled the cup between his palms for several seconds. “Did you ever hear of a guy named Rex Battershell?”

  “No.”

  The conversation halted while the waitress set our breakfasts on the table. After she had warmed up their coffees and left, Coach said, “Rex “The Rocket” Battershell was an All-American quarterback at Pitt. They called him “The Rocket” because he could throw a football eighty yards in the air. He also was my dad. He played a couple of years in the pros with Washington and then went to law school. He was an assistant U.S. attorney for a while and then ran for sheriff of Summit County and won every election in a landslide because everyone wanted to vote for “The Rocket.” He was big, strong, handsome, great personality, a local boy who came back home to live after college and the pros. There wasn’t a single person in the county who was better known than my dad. He was in the newspaper all the time—busting drug dealers, arresting murderers, visiting schools, taking turkeys to poor families at Thanksgiving. When I started playing football in high school, there was hardly ever a story in the paper that didn’t say, ‘Kyle Battershell, son of former Pitt All-American Rex “The Rocket” Battershell.’ That’s who I was—Rex Battershell’s kid. No matter what I did or how well I did it, I couldn’t get out from under his shadow.”

  I listened intently. When he paused to push a fork full of fried eggs and potatoes into his mouth, I said, “I’m not making the connection.”

  “That’s because I haven’t given it to you yet. I had a great senior year—first-team All-Ohio, Akron Beacon-Journal player of the year—and I accepted a scholarship to Ohio University. A bunch of schools offered me scholarships, including Pitt, and that’s where my dad wanted me to go, but I was tired of living in his shadow. Everything was great until three days before my high school graduation when a federal grand jury indicted my dad on a host of felony counts of corruption in office—promoting prostitution, accepting kickbacks from gamblers and drug dealers, and money laundering. They had him dead to rights. The Feds had been watching him for years and had him on video taking kickbacks and payoffs. All of a sudden, the most popular man in the county gets exposed as the most corrupt. Here I am, ready to take on the world, make a name for myself, and every television news show is running video clips of my dad being led into the jail—his jail—with his hands cuffed behind his back. I hardly went out of the house that summer. I used to get in the car and drive for an hour until I found a vacant ball field or a park where people didn’t know me so I could work out. All I could think about was how the guys on the team at O.U. were going to treat me when they found out my dad was the disgraced sheriff of Summit County.”

  “So what happened?”

  “My dad swallowed his service revolver two weeks before I reported to camp.”

  I frowned.

  “He committed suicide. Shot himself. I was devastated and didn’t want to go to college, but my mom made me. She said everything a mom should say, that my life had to go on, that it wasn’t my fault, that I needed to do what was best for me. But I couldn’t get past it. I felt like I was reporting to football camp with a bull’s-eye painted on my forehead. I got to Ohio University and not a single person on that team knew who I was, knew who my dad had been, or gave a rat’s ass. There was another kid from Akron on the team and he never made the connection. Or, if he did, he didn’t say anything. When someone asked me about my dad, I said he was dead and that always ended the conversation. In four years, I had one guy ask me how he died.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. That’s not the point. You’re all concerned about your name being Hickam. That was a hurdle you had to overcome at East Vinton High School. In college, it’s just going to be your last name. You’ll be the only one to determine if people view it in a positive or a negative way.”

  We finished breakfast and headed to downtown Athens, a college town tucked deep into the Appalachian foothills. We parked on a side street three blocks from campus and walked to the Collegiate Corner men’s store. The store was a shrine to Ohio University athletics. Football helmets, autographed basketballs, team photos, and baseball bats adorned the tops of the shelves. When we entered the store, you would have thought that Miss Singletary and I were walking in with a member of the royal family. There were a half-dozen men in the store and they immediately came walking up to Coach Battershell. “They love him down here,” Miss Singletary whispered.

  “No doubt.”

  When his well-wishers had backed away, Coach Battershell shook hands with a distinguished-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair, a crisp white shirt, and a cloth tape measure draped around his neck. “Hello, Kyle,” the man said, holding out a long hand. “Is this our boy?”

  “Jimmy Lee, I want you to meet a good friend of mine, Mr. Tom Lynch. Mr. Lynch, this is Jimmy Lee Hickam.”

  “Hickam, is it? Good to meet you, young man. Come on over here.”

  On a rack in the corner was a navy blazer, five dress shirts— three white and two pale blue, two pair of khaki and two pair of gray slacks, and five neckties, mostly reds and yellows and one green and navy. He handed me a shirt and a pair of the gray slacks. “Try these on for me and let’s see how close we are in size.”

  I did. The shirt fit like it was made especially for me. Never in my life had anything felt as nice as those wool slacks. They needed to be hemmed and cinched in around the waist, but they were soft and comfortable. “What are these things?” I asked, pointing at the waves of material in the front of the slacks.

  “Pleats,” Mr. Lynch said. “Never had pleats before?”

  “I never had anything that fit like this.”

  Mr. Lynch tugged and pulled and marked up the slacks with a piece of tailor’s soap. We repeated the process with the other three pairs of pants. Then he fitted me with the navy blazer. I’m not a boastful person, but I will tell you that I never looked as good as I did with that navy blazer over a white shirt. As he was marking the back, I took a peek at the left sleeve and the hundred-thirty-five-dollar price tag. I looked over at Miss Singletary and silently mouthed, “I can’t afford this.”

  Coach Battershell waved at the ground three times with his right hand, a tacit signal to relax and keep my mouth shut. Mr. Lynch pinched at the material in the back of the jacket and asked, “How does that feel?”

  “Feels great.”

  He held up some ties, showing me how they would look with the jacket. “Do you know how to tie a neck tie?”

  “No sir. I’ve got a clip-on that I wear on game days.”

  “It’s not hard.” He put one around his neck and instructed me to mimic him. “Make sure the tip of the long end is hanging at your crotch,” he said. “When it’s tied it should just cover your belt buckle.” It wa
s easy.

  I stood in the three-way mirror, with khaki slacks, white shirt, navy jacket, and a maroon-and-gold-striped tie. I could feel myself tearing up a little when I turned to Miss Singletary. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re a handsome young man.”

  I smiled. “Don’t say that in front of Coach Battershell. You know how he gets.”

  I changed back into my other clothes, which suddenly seemed woefully inadequate, and Mr. Lynch walked the new clothes to the seamstress in the back room. He came back out to the main desk and began adding numbers and talking to himself. “Let’s see, one jacket, um-hum, four pair of slacks, hmmm, five shirts, pick yourself out an oxblood belt from the rack behind you, five ties, um-hum.” I put the belt on the counter as he said, “How’s a hundred and sixty-five dollars sound?”

  Ridiculously low, I thought, but I said, “It sounds great.” I counted out the money and placed it on the counter top.

  “Thank you. It was a pleasure doing business with you, young man. Are you going to the game?”

  “Absolutely,” Coach Battershell said.

  “Good. I’ll get Alice working on them right now. Stop by after the game and you can take them with you.”

  As we walked away from the building and headed toward campus, I said, “He practically gave me those clothes.”

  “Someday, Jimmy Lee, you’ll have a chance to do someone a good turn. When that opportunity presents itself, do it. It’s called paying ahead.”

  The air was heavy with the smell of burning leaves—the first-burners, shagbark hickory, and buckeye. The hillside that surrounded the campus was still awash in gold and maroon and orange as the maples were only starting to drop their foliage. It was two hours until kickoff and Coach Battershell and Miss Singletary walked me around the campus and through a dormitory and a classroom building. “What do you think?” Coach asked.

  “It’s pretty big. How do you find your way around campus?”

  “If you’re on the football team, they give you a personal chauffeur to drive you around.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really.” He grinned and arched his brows, a little disappointed, I think, that I fell for that.

  “Who cuts all that grass?” I asked.

  “Students on academic probation. It’s part of the university’s program to give them the incentive to do better.”

  I didn’t bite that time. “How many times did you have to cut it?”

  “Never. I was a four-point student . . . almost.”

  Miss Singletary groaned.

  We were buying a hot dog and soda under the stands when the Ohio University band marched into the Peden Stadium. The drum section beat out a cadence that was like rolling thunder out of the hills, reverberating through the stadium. I had goose bumps from the top of my head to my ankles. We climbed the home stands and watched the game, an Ohio University loss to Bowling Green, but it was no less satisfying.

  Afterward, Mr. Lynch was waiting at the store to hand me my clothes. He wished me good luck in the writing contest and we went to dinner at a restaurant outside of town that a hundred years earlier had been a warehouse on the Hocking Valley Canal. I ordered a steak and was the first to put the napkin in my lap.

  Chapter Fifteen

  T

  he Vinton County chapter of the Alpha & Omega Literary Society would host its countywide essay competition on the third Saturday morning of November, the night after our last football game of the season. Although I was not privy to their conversations, I had the feeling that the scheduling of football and the essay competition was creating some angst between my football coach and my writing coach. My football coach, of course, wanted me focused solely on Friday’s game with McArthur Central Catholic. We were both undefeated in the conference. A win would give East Vinton its first conference championship in decades and a chance to make the state playoffs.

  My writing coach, however, was less concerned about McArthur Central Catholic than the Saturday morning competition, which began at 8 am. She was drilling me hard during my study hall and sent time-consuming evening assignments home with me. This dissatisfied the football coach greatly as he wanted me spending my free time watching films of the McArthur Central Catholic Crusaders. As we were jogging out to the field on Wednesday, he said, “You need to be spending more time in the film room.”

  There was no one within earshot. “I know. Do you want to talk to Miss Singletary about it?”

  One side of his mouth curled up and he said, “Not really.”

  On Monday morning of that week, my dad showered, shaved, and put on his only set of good clothes, the same ones he had always worn when we had visited Edgel in prison. As I was leaving to catch the bus for school, he was sitting at the kitchen table staring into a cup of black coffee, a cigarette burning in the crease of his yellowed fingers. He was twisting at the steel wristband of his watch the way he did when he was nervous. “Good luck,” I said as I opened the back door.

  He didn’t look up, but nodded once and uttered a barely audible, “Thanks.”

  On that brisk November morning, Nick Hickam was swallowing his considerable pride and going back to the sawmill to apologize to Mr. Morgan and ask for his old job, or any job he would give him. He didn’t care any longer. He was out of money, out of credit at the bars, and he simply had to work. I would imagine that this was about the most difficult and demeaning task of my dad’s life, but he didn’t have many options. Jobs were scarce in Vinton County, Ohio, and he was ill-qualified for anything beyond the mundane and dangerous confines of a sawmill. Virgil had called him a week earlier and told Dad that he could get him a job with the carnival, which was touring in Florida and Texas during the winter. I always figured that the prospect of working alongside Virgil at the carnival was what motivated Dad to go talk to Mr. Morgan.

  I didn’t like my dad, though I wanted to. In every failed relationship, each party usually carries part of the blame. But the only thing I did wrong was want to go to college. We didn’t have much of a relationship before that pronouncement, but that sealed it. My dad was a bitter man who hated his lot in life, but was unwilling to do anything about it, and he took out his frustration and anger on his sons and wife.

  That afternoon at practice, while I was waiting my turn at a blocking drill, I looked up to see the Farnsworth brothers’ red, flatbed Ford parked along the drainage ditch on the far side of the parking lot. A green Pontiac station wagon with a crushed front end was chained to the bed. Edgel was in the stands watching practice. About once a week, he would stop by to watch when he was passing by and saw us on the practice field. Edgel liked watching me on the field and hadn’t missed a game since getting out of prison, even standing in the pouring rain at the Brilliant Memorial game, wearing nothing but a vinyl jacket and his grease-smudged Farnsworth ball cap.

  It was surprising that Edgel had taken such an interest in me. During the years of visits to the prison, he seemed so indifferent to his family. He had wearily tried to appease my mother by answering her many questions, but was often verbally confrontational with the old man and barely civil to Virgil. I was treated as an afterthought—the little brother that he didn’t know. Now he was acting more like my father than my father. At least he acted more interested. When he got home each night, he stopped by my room and asked about the writing assignments. He read them all, every once in a while stopping to ask me the meaning of a word. I was afraid it would embarrass him, but he liked it. After he read each paper, Edgel would shake his head and say, “I can’t believe a brother of mine can write like this.”

  I enjoyed the visits. I was actually getting to know Edgel. For years, I had been led to believe he was inherently evil. Every time the old man got mad at me for even the slightest infraction, he would slap me upside the back of the head and say, “You’re going to end up in Mansfield, just like your brother.” He intimated that Edgel was the devil incarnate and for years I had no reason to believe otherwise. But now, I found
that I really liked Edgel. He was soft-spoken and thoughtful. He liked to talk about school and football. He wanted to know why I didn’t have a girlfriend. “I thought the captain of the football team always had a girlfriend,” he said.

  “I don’t have time for girls.”

  “Boy, there’s always time for girls.” He winked. “You ain’t funny, are ya?”

  “No, Edgel, I ain’t funny.”

  “Just askin’.”

  Edgel told me on several occasions that he never wanted to go back to prison, revealing bits and pieces about the brutality inside the walls. “It’s no place to be, and that’s all you need to know about prison.”

  He had been working steady for the Farnsworth twins almost since he got home, driving and fetching wrecks and parts and occasionally stripping out cars in the junkyard for customers. The twins paid him cash and it was keeping him busy, which was a good thing for Edgel. He needed to find something a little more stable than the junkyard, but it put money in his pocket and kept him occupied.

  After practice, Edgel was waiting outside of the locker room, leaning against the driver’s side door of the Ford and scraping the grease from under his fingernails with a pocketknife. “Wanna ride?” he asked. “I’ve got to swing past the junkyard and drop off the Pontiac.” He hadn’t seen me since my trip to Collegiate Corner. He pointed at me with the tip of his knife and said, “Them’s some pretty fancy duds, little brother.”

  I was wearing a pair of khakis and a blue shirt. “This is what I spent my money on,” I said.

  “Looks good. Maybe you’ll get ya a girl now.”

  I checked the passenger seat for grease, covered a smudge with one of my blue notebooks, and slid in. Luke Farnsworth met us in the junkyard with a fork lift. Once he had the Pontiac a foot off the bed of the truck, he said, “T-t-take ’er a w-way, E-edgel,” and Edgel pulled the truck forward.