by Tony Earley
Copyright © 2008 by Tony Earley
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: March 2008
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-02910-0
Contents
Also by Tony Earley
Dedication
Epigraph
In memory of Gordon Kato 1961–2006
Prologue
BOOK I: Indian Summer
At the Top
A History Lesson
Norma
What Strange Country
BOOK II: The Secrets of Women
Call to Glory
The Abandoned House
Jim and the Beanstalk
Uncle Zeno and the White Mule
Dance Lessons
BOOK III: Unexpected News
Target Practice
Bucky Comes Home
The Red Canoe
The Girl on the Bridge
Mill Hill
We’re Married Now
“Heroes of Mathematics”
Injun Joe
BOOK IV: The Blue Star
The Sunny Side of the Mountain
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Also by Tony Earley
Jim the Boy
Here We Are in Paradise
Somehow Form a Family
For
The girls who live in the blue house
I got a pig home in the pen
And corn to feed him on
All I need is a pretty little girl
To feed him when I’m gone
Arthur Smith,
“Pig in a Pen”
In memory of Gordon Kato 1961–2006
Prologue
March 12, 1918
Lynn’s Mountain, NC
Dear Zeno,
It is a cold day up here, and though a few trees are starting to bud and a few brave wildflowers are coming up in the sunny places, I’m afraid it will never be spring again. There is still snow on the other side of the hollow and I don’t think it will ever melt. I still feel awful about the fight we had last Sunday when you rode all the way up here on your white mule in the mud just to see me and you got so cold, and I wish that I felt different from what I said then but I still don’t. I will never understand as long as I live why you do not want to do your duty and join up for the fight with our boys “over there.” Boys from NC and this county are being blowed up and shot in the head by the Germans, even boys from this mountain, like poor Alfred Summey. You even rode by his house on that handsome white mule you’re so proud of and saw that awful wreath on the door. Zeno, I thought I loved you with all my heart forever but maybe I don’t anymore if I ever did, because I don’t really know who you are. All the other boys I know have either been drafted already or have joined up or are getting ready to. Even Alfred Summey’s little brother William is raring to go fight the Huns and he is only twelve years old and he is afraid the war will be over before he can get to France and make up for his brother who was killed, and he just breaks my heart. Don’t you feel awful, Zeno, when everybody else is doing their part and you don’t do yours? If there was a dam about to bust and wash everybody’s house away and you saw all your friends working trying to fix it, would you ride on by on that big mule and just tip your hat howdy or would you get down and help? Zeno, I don’t think I can be married to a man who would just ride by that dam and let everybody else’s house get washed away, especially when there are twelve-year-old boys begging to help dig. I don’t know how you can live with yourself in these awful times and I don’t know how you expect me to live with you either, the way things are. I intend to marry a man I can be proud of, and right now I just don’t think I can be proud of you because of the decisions you have made. Everybody up here is already calling you a “shirker” and worse and they say your daddy paid and fixed it so your number wouldn’t come up, and how do you think that makes me feel? Is riding up here pretty as you please when you know everybody you pass on the road hates you the only brave thing you can do? (I have heard people say that if you keep coming up in here anymore, somebody is bound to shoot you!) This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say in my life but it is the truth. If you had joined the army when everybody else did, I would have waited on you until the end of the earth, but I can’t wait on you anymore. When I hear about somebody I can trust going down your way, I will send the ring with them. I cannot keep it anymore or wear it on my finger. I am very sorry and I hope that someday you will be able to see that this is right and forgive me in your heart.
Love always,
Nancy
November 21, 1941
Dear Jim
Hey old buddy I bet you never expected to hear from me did you? Have you started getting ready for baseball season yet? It’ll be here before you know it so you better get in shape! Now that I’m gone I guess shortstop is all yours. You ought to be able to handle it after watching “the master” play it for three years straight. Ha!
I just got stationed on the USS California I guess you heard. It is the best ship in the navy. Where else would you expect me to be? Ha! You would not believe how beautiful Hawaii is. Is it cold there yet? Not here boy. I would bring a palm tree and the ocean home with me if I could. The food on the ship is “OK.”
Hey Jim a little “birdy” tells me that you’ve been sniffing around Chrissie Steppe. As you know she’s my “girl” but maybe you just forgot. Don’t forget that I’m not dead I’m just in the navy! They’re not the same thing! Ha! Anyway the last thing you want to do is make a sailor mad. Don’t forget to cover the old “sack” like I taught you once the season starts!
Your friend,
Arthur Bucklaw Jr. USN
BOOK I
Indian Summer
At the Top
BECAUSE THEY were seniors and had earned the right, Jim and his buddies stood on the small landing at the top of the school steps, squarely in front of the red double doors. Every student entering the building, boy or girl, had to go around them to get inside. The boys pretended not to notice that they were in everyone else’s way, and moved aside only when a teacher climbed the stairs. They had ruled Aliceville School for less than a month but now held this high ground more or less comfortably. The first few days of school, Jim had halfway expected some older boys to come along and tell them to get lost, but during the preceding three weeks, he had gradually come to appreciate that there were no older boys. He and his friends were it.
The school overlooked the town from atop a steep hill. Jim tilted his face slightly into the clear sunlight and tenderly considered the world below him. At the foot of the hill the houses and barns and sheds of Aliceville lay scattered around the town’s small tangle of streets. Near the center of town the uncles’ three tall houses stood shoulder to shoulder. (Jim lived with his mother and her oldest brother, Uncle Zeno, in the middle house. Uncle Coran and Uncle Al, who were twins, lived on either side.) Beyond the town itself, across the railroad track, the uncles’ corn and cotton crops filled the sandy bottoms all the way to their arable edges; beyond the fields the neatly tended rows unraveled into the thick gnarl of woods through which the river snaked. The corn, still richly green, stood taller than any man, and the dark cotton rows were speckled with dots of br
ight, emerging white. West of town the engine smoke of an approaching train climbed into the sky.
Jim could not see Uncle Zeno or Uncle Al in the fields, nor Uncle Coran in the store, but he knew they were there, the same way he knew that when the time came to pick cotton they would not ask him to skip school to help. Just as he wondered what his mother was doing, Mama came out the front door of Uncle Zeno’s house with a bucket and dipper and began watering the chrysanthemums blooming in the pots on the porch steps. She glanced at the orange bus from Lynn’s Mountain as it turned off the state highway and ground its way up the pitched drive. Jim was glad she didn’t look all the way up the hill toward the school. Had she seen him and waved, he not only would have been embarrassed, but he would also have been tempted to weep with some mysterious, nostalgic joy. The warm sunlight on his face seemed to remind him of something — but he couldn’t explain what — and some vague but pleasant longing filled his chest. Already he could sense the end of these good days rapidly approaching, like a mail train filled with unexpected news.
“Hey, Jim,” Buster Burnette said, “there’s your mama.”
Dennis Deane squinted as he looked down the hill. “What’s she doing?”
“Daggum, Dennis Deane,” Jim said. “You can’t see a lick, can you?”
“I don’t need to see,” Dennis Deane said. “I’ve got an extra eyeball.”
Everybody grinned, but nobody said anything. They all knew better.
Dennis Deane batted his eyes innocently. “Ain’t you going to ask me where it is?”
Jim shook his head. “Ain’t no way.”
“Cowards,” Dennis Deane sniffed. “The whole bunch of you.” He cleared his throat. “Now, where was I?”
“The secrets of women,” said Larry Lawter.
“Oh, yeah. Like I said, I know the secrets of women. I can make any female I want to fall in love with me.”
“Bull,” Buster said.
“I’m telling you,” Dennis Deane said. “I’m the Large Possum. The King of the Squirrels.”
“You’re a nut is what you are,” said Jim.
“The Head Nut,” Dennis Deane said. “Twice as much for a nickel. Try me just once and you’ll know why.”
The bus grumbled to a stop at the bottom of the steps. The doors swung open and the students from Lynn’s Mountain climbed off and curled around the front of the bus. In the distance the train announced itself at the state highway crossing with a long blast from its whistle. Jim wondered about the train because it was not one that was regularly scheduled. Like everyone else who lived in Aliceville, Jim knew the timetables of the trains and noted when they passed, even in his sleep.
“Prove it,” Larry said. “What you said about women.” He jerked his head toward the bus. “How about one of these mountain girls?”
“How about her?” Buster said, nodding at a freshman girl with green, shrewd-looking eyes who came around the front of the bus with her books clutched closely to her chest. A pack of third- and fourth-grade boys chattered by her and up the steps into the building. The girl did not look at the seniors on the landing, but Jim could tell she knew they were there.
Dennis Deane squinted again. “Who is it?” he asked. “What’s her name?”
“Ellie,” Buster said. “Ellie something.”
“Okay,” Dennis Deane said. “Ellie something. Watch and learn, boys.”
When the girl reached the landing, Dennis Deane said, “Hey, Ellie Something.” When she looked up, he closed his eyes and contorted his face into an enormous pucker. “Kiss me,” he said.
Jim winced when he saw the stricken look on Ellie’s face and stepped out of the way to aid her escape. She jerked open one of the doors and ran inside.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Dennis Deane,” he said, although, despite his better judgment, he laughed along with everybody else.
“I knew it wouldn’t work,” Buster said.
“Of course it worked,” said Dennis Deane. “Ellie Something is now in love with me, although, bless her little heart, she would never, ever admit it. She’s just too shy.”
Otis Shehan and Horace Gentine climbed the steps and joined the group. The mountain boys were also seniors. “Howdy, men,” Horace said. “How’s it hanging?”
“Try it on her,” Larry said, nodding toward Christine Steppe.
No, don’t, Jim thought, but he didn’t say anything. As far as Jim was concerned, watching Chrissie Steppe climb the stairway was the best part of the day. And because this information seemed valuable to him in some way he could not name, he had never told the other guys.
“Try what on her?” Otis asked. “I wouldn’t try anything on her. That’s Bucky Bucklaw’s girl.”
“I don’t care if it’s Franklin D. Roosevelt’s girl,” Dennis Deane said. “Hey. Chrissie Steppe. Kiss me.” He squeezed his eyes shut and puckered up.
Chrissie stopped and her large, dark eyes blinked slowly as she considered Dennis Deane. Her black hair reached almost to her waist. She shifted her books to her left arm.
Jim noticed that her right hand was balled into a dangerous-looking fist. “Hey, whoa,” he said, stepping in front of her. “Don’t hit him.”
Dennis Deane flinched. “Hit me?” he said, without opening his eyes. “Is somebody about to hit me?”
Chrissie’s shoulders rose and fell with her breathing. “I’m about to beat you all over this schoolyard, you little worm,” she said. “I will not be talked to that way.”
Dennis Deane covered his head with his arms and whimpered, “Don’t hurt me, you big, strong, she-girl.”
“He didn’t mean anything by it,” said Jim. “He’s just a little, well, insane, is what he is.”
“I’ve got an extra eyeball,” Dennis Deane said. “Do you want me to show it to you?”
Chrissie turned away from Dennis Deane and stared levelly at Jim with what he took to be an expression of slight disappointment. “Are you his friend?” she asked.
“Sort of, I guess,” he said. “More like his guardian. Something like that.”
Jim caught a slight whiff of vanilla and wished she would step even closer. He felt himself beginning to smile and thought, wildly, We’re almost close enough to kiss.
Chrissie did not smile back, but she opened her fist. “Well. You tell your little friend that I will not stand for anyone talking to me like that. Ever. You tell him that if he talks to me that way again, I will beat him like a borrowed mule.”
“Hee-haw,” Dennis Deane said from behind Jim.
“Dennis Deane,” Jim warned over his shoulder. “Shut up.”
“I mean it, Jim Glass,” Chrissie said.
“I know you do,” said Jim.
“You tell him.”
“I will.”
Chrissie nodded once, turned on her heel, and pulled open the door. Then she was gone. Nobody laughed, although Jim wanted to. He felt wonderfully, inexplicably happy.
Dennis Deane stepped out from behind Jim and made a show of adjusting his shirt collar. He blew into his palm, checking his breath.
“Well,” he said. “She loves me. Write it down in the big book, boys. Write it down.”
“She was going to knock you out,” Larry said.
“I should have let her hit you,” Jim said.
“Don’t mess around with that girl,” said Otis. “I’m serious. If she doesn’t beat your ass, then Bucky will when he gets home on leave.”
“Bucky Bucklaw,” Dennis Deane scoffed. “How am I supposed to be afraid of somebody with a name that stupid?”
Larry pointed down the hill at the long passenger train drawing a thick silver line through town. “Hey, look at that,” he said.
The windows of the coaches were open, and men in uniforms, their shirtsleeves rolled up, were hanging out most of them. Soldiers. A whole trainload of them. Jim wondered what they saw when they looked at Aliceville, if anything would make an impression worth remembering; he wondered where they were going.
&n
bsp; “Troop train,” he said.
“What?” Dennis Deane said. “Has the train got soldiers on it?”
The bell rang. The boys picked up their books.
“You’re blind as a mole,” Jim said.
“I don’t need to see,” said Dennis Deane. “I’ve got an extra eyeball.”
A History Lesson
AT THE start of fifth period Jim was already seated in history class when Chrissie Steppe walked through the door. She sat every day at the desk immediately in front of his. This was another, although brand-new, reason that Jim thought history his favorite subject. As he watched her make her way across the room, Jim slid his desk forward until it bumped against the back of Chrissie’s chair. He opened his history book without looking at the page and pushed it forward until it, too, touched the back of her chair. He opened his mouth to say something as she approached, but she didn’t look at him; he closed his mouth without ever knowing what it was he would have said.
When Chrissie sat down, she leaned forward, slid both hands beneath her hair at the base of her neck and flipped it away from her body over the top rung of her chair, almost hitting Jim in the face, so that she would not lean back against it. It spilled onto his open book just as he had hoped it would. He sat and gaped. Chrissie’s hair almost obscured the pages about the blockade of Wilmington during the Civil War.
Miss Brown — who had taught Mama and all three of the uncles and, so far as Jim knew, Moses and Aaron — shuffled into class before the bell rang and began calling the roll. She was tall and stooped and thin as a broom handle. She never waited for the bell to ring before calling the roll, no matter how often the students complained. She had spent most of her career teaching in two- and three-room schoolhouses without electricity and apparently either did not understand what the bell was for or simply refused to acknowledge its existence. When she reached Jim’s name, he said, “Present,” in a loud voice. He liked to say present instead of here because it aggravated his friends, particularly Dennis Deane, who said it was a teacher’s-pet kind of thing to say.