He too talked as if he had learned up North, but more like Mister Harper than the Negro. The boys said nothing. They had stopped in the middle of the field and Mister Leland had taken his brother’s hand.
The man called to them again. “I’m Dewey Willson.”
That’s a lie; Dewey Willson is the General and he’s dead. He gripped Walter’s hand so he winced and protested. “Now you be quiet, Walter. This man may be crazy”…not crazy like Tucker, but really crazy because he thinks he’s a dead man. He pulled his brother along behind him, and presently they could see the man better. He was shorter than their father, but had the same sandy hair, though cut shorter. He was wearing a light blue suit with a great many buttons—three or four—and a drab tie with diagonal stripes.
“Do you know anything about the fire, little boy?” He waited for an answer but Mister Leland gave him none. “I’m a friend of Tucker Caliban’s. Just back from up North. Do you know what happened?”
“You a friend of Tucker’s?” Mister Leland spoke in spite of himself, but did not believe this last statement any more than he believed this man was the General. Still, the man did not sound like he was lying.
“Yes. Look.” The man reached into his pocket, and Mister Leland’s heart jumped—more money!—but the man had pulled out only a piece of paper. “It’s a letter from him. He was a very good friend of mine.” The man grew sad after he said this.
“He was?” They were standing quite close to him now; he looked down at them with the piece of paper extended in his right hand. The flies seemed to drone a great deal louder. “You know why he done it?”
“What did he do?”
And then he could not keep it back any longer because he wanted very much to find out what this man knew. “Why, he burned down his house and killed his animals and all.”
The man only stared at him; he did not believe. “My father was right! Is that what he did?”
“That’s what he done—really.” Still the man looked as if he did not believe it. Mister Leland added, “He done all that two days ago.”
“Two days ago?”
Mister Leland decided the man did not hear very well, not that he did not believe. He asked him to repeat everything. “Uh-huh, I seen it myself. He just burned down his house and shot his animals and—”
“Blood squirted out of them like water out of a pricked balloon,” Walter chimed in.
“Hush, Walter.” Mister Leland squeezed his hand and felt the little boy jump in pain. “Really he did those things.” He turned to the man.
“I believe you.” The man nodded.
“It’s the truth.” Walter chimed in again.
“Hush, Walter.”
“Tell me about it, will you please?” The man looked very sad.
Mister Leland unraveled the tale of salt and killing and burning and the clock (he did not forget it this time) and the sparks going up and disappearing in the sky. But even when he had finished, the man looked no less sad, no less disbelieving. “You a friend of his—really?”
The man nodded his head and looked so very strange that Mister Leland thought it would be best to get away from him as quickly as possible. “We got to go now. Good-by.” He immediately started for the Highway—that would be the safest way to go home because the man might follow them into the woods—and did not hear the man answer: “Yes, good-by.”
When they got to the Highway, he turned to Walter, let his hand go, and yelled very loudly, “Let’s race!”
“I don’t feel like it.”
He leaned toward his ear. “That’ll be our reason to run. He can still catch us and he looks dangerous.”
“All right, let’s race.” Walter looked back over his shoulder.
They ran wildly to the top of the hill; when they got out of the man’s sight, they stopped, heaving deeply. Walter caught up. “He was crazy.”
“How do you know?” Mister Leland did not like his brother to jump to conclusions.
“Didn’t he look crazy?”
“Yes.” He was forced to tell the truth.
“Well, there then, he must be crazy.”
Mister Leland was about to say that this was not always true; that Tucker had done crazy things, even looked crazy, but was certainly not crazy because he seemed to have a reason for doing those things, even though they were both too young to understand the reason, but he decided to let it drop because he did not think Walter would know what he was talking about.
They were a quarter way to the bottom of the hill, walking toward where their road turned off the Highway. They could see the next hill and the Highway coming out of the trees. Then they saw the black car appear, coming just as fast as it had yesterday from the Ridge, just as fast as the coal truck the day before that. The same light-skinned Negro was driving, and the dust swirled at the sides of the road and closed in behind it like Walter’s hands closing too late when Mister Leland tossed him a ball. Mister Leland started to wave, and Walter, thinking it was some kind of game, raised his arms and waved frantically. They both waved until the car passed them, but no one in the car waved back. Mister Leland, in the instant of its passing, even saw the Negro in the back, his blue sunglasses perched on his nose, staring straight ahead of him. Then the car had disappeared over the hill. They walked on.
“What’d we do that for, Harold?” Walter had begun to skip around him in large, uneven circles. “Did you know them?”
Mister Leland had not told Walter about the Negro and his ride in the car because he knew Walter would have told his mother, and would have caused trouble for his father. “Yes. I saw them in town yesterday.”
“What’d they do? You didn’t tell me about that.”
“It ain’t at all important, Walter. You forget it.”
“Well, who was that?”
“Just nobody.” He turned and looked his brother in the eye, trying to make his face honest as possible. “Nobody, is all.”
One Long Ago Autumn Birthday
WHEN DEWEY WILLSON III had blinked full awake on the clear, mistless, autumn morning of his tenth birthday, it was standing in the corner of his room: an American bicycle with bright gaudy colors, shining chrome, and white-wall tires.
He climbed slowly and uncertainly from bed, thinking that if he moved too quickly it would surely disappear. The floor was cold and sent a shiver through him. And then he had reached it, had not shocked it out of existence, and now stood stroking the black pigskin seat. He longed to ride it, but realized painfully he did not know how; Tucker had tried to teach him several times, but finally had given up because Dewey could not balance or steer or pedal.
Watching it constantly, he dressed as fast as he could and then ran downstairs in search of Tucker. This time he would learn if only he could convince Tucker to attempt once again to teach him.
Tucker was in the back yard with John, his grandfather, removing the dried film of recently applied wax from the side of the car. John, white-haired, the many wrinkles in his face making him almost featureless, was nearly seventy-five. Tucker was doing most of the work, though he was only thirteen and could barely reach the top of the car doors. Dewey stood off and watched them, afraid Tucker would tell him he was a stupid little boy who would never learn to ride a bicycle, but finally he got up the courage to ask.
“Can’t now, Dewey. I got to help Grandpap.” Tucker turned around, holding a piece of white toweling in his right hand, a can of orange polish in his left. Already he looked at people in a way that made it seem he was about to lash out and strike at something, although he might be thinking of something completely different; already his eyes were framed by steel-rimmed spectacles.
“I’ll learn this time. I promise.” He fidgeted under Tucker’s gaze and averted his eyes to the rubber toes of his sneakers.
“Maybe you will, maybe not, but later. I got to help Grandpap.” Tucker tur
ned back to the old man, who was puffing as he made desperate swipes at the top of the car. “Later on.”
Dewey spent most of his birthday on the back steps, the bicycle on its stand beside him, watching Tucker at work. He wondered whether Tucker was envious of his having received a new bicycle. He wished he did not have to bother Tucker at all, wished he could get on the bicycle and discover he was part of a miracle and could ride it away, never looking back, never fearing he would fall or crash.
Tucker did not finish his work until late in the day, when the wind was coming off the Gulf, full of the metallic smell of salt. The sun seemed dark and rode just above the horizon in a chariot of clouds. They would not have much time.
They stood near the back steps, Dewey staring up at Tucker, who was looking around the yard, scowling. “Can’t learn to ride here; ain’t enough room. You’ll knock down every bush in sight and get us in trouble. Come on.” He kicked up the stand, grasped the handle bars, and began to wheel the bicycle toward the gravel driveway.
“Where we going?” Dewey scurried after him. He was a little angry that Tucker rather than himself was wheeling his bicycle.
“Come on now. We ain’t got no time to talk.”
They went a half mile north of Sutton to a place just off the Highway where someone had started to build a restaurant but had never finished, had completed only a parking lot, a huge open black space sprouting with several concrete pillars.
By now it was almost dark; the sun had dropped without notice behind the tall trees on their side of the road. Tucker wheeled the bicycle up to one corner of the lot and stopped. “You remember what I told you before?”
“I think so.” He was not sure. Tucker could see it.
“All right, now listen.” He recited the lesson in a high-pitched monotone. “You can’t balance too good when you’re going slow, better when you going fast. But when you going fast you got to remember to steer. It’s real easy if you just keep your head. Can you do it?”
“I think so.”
“All right. Get on and I’ll hold it for you and run alongside, pushing. I’ll tell you when I’m letting go. All right?”
“I think so.”
Tucker helped him up on the new seat. Dewey put his feet on the pedals. Tucker looked at them. “I told you and told you—don’t never ride no bike in no sneakers. Your feet’ll slip and you’ll hurt yourself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Ain’t much you can do about it now.” Tucker sighed. “Well, let’s try it.”
Dewey squirmed on the seat, and Tucker began to push him along. “Now keep your balance. Get the feel of them two wheels. Don’t be scared. And don’t oversteer.”
The handle bars jerked like the horns of a wild bull. Dewey turned to Tucker.
“I’m letting go now.” He did and almost immediately Dewey wobbled from the straight course and Tucker had to catch him just before he crashed into one of the concrete posts. They tried again, and again: Tucker running beside him, breathing hard, coughing now and then; Dewey sitting, not knowing what to do, but trying hard to do something. He wanted to cry, but did not want Tucker to see; that would have made him more ashamed of himself than he was already.
Dusk hung now on the hills; the wind was rising. They had tried countless times.
“We best go on home, Dewey-boy.”
“Please, Tucker, just once more. Please.”
“Now, Dewey, you knows it won’t make your pa happy, us holding up his dinner.”
“Tucker, I GOT to learn.” He could feel hot tears just behind his eyes and perhaps already spilling out, scalding his face, because Tucker looked down at him and nodded, then helped him up and held the seat tightly so the bicycle would not tip over, and started to push. Dewey tried to get the feel of it, and when he thought he had it, turned to tell Tucker to let go.
Tucker was no longer there. Without warning he had stopped running, and Dewey was alone, rolling, riding, gliding, sailing, flying all by himself and could feel the bicycle balanced on the thin white wheels, and pride welling up inside him. And then fear appeared out of nowhere, and dark panic glazed his eyes and stopped up his ears, making it almost impossible to hear Tucker shouting: “Keep straight! Steer now! Keep straight!”
But his confidence had already ebbed from him in small oily drops; he was losing his battle with the fighting handle bars. The black pavement came up to meet him and skinned his knees, but now off the bicycle, safe once more on earth, he could not feel the stinging and was as proud of himself as he had ever been.
“You did it! You did it! You did it!” Tucker ran to him, swooped him up, clapped his shoulder; they danced in huge circles around the bicycle. Tucker shook his hand, and hugged him, even kissed him, and they whooped and hollered until they were tired and hoarse.
They started home then, along the black straight road, their faces lit and shining in the headlight glare of the few passing cars.
“Tucker, would you teach me how to start alone?”
“As soon as you can stop another way besides falling off.”
“Tucker, would you—?” A car went by, glinting light off Tucker’s glasses, turning his face almost white, and Dewey saw the expression of resignation there, and knew Tucker’s mind was already at home, knew he should keep quiet.
When he thought of that day later, Dewey realized Tucker must have known what would happen even when he said they could stay. He was supposed to be the responsible one; it was up to him to keep track of time, but he had not kept track of it or so it seemed to Dewey’s father, who had spoken to John about it, who had instructed his daughter-in-law to make the punishment one to be remembered. And so as Dewey ate dinner that night, he could hear the smacking of the hot strap across Tucker’s buttocks.
Later that evening, Dewey told his father he had learned to ride. He thought his father would be happy, since the bicycle had been his present, but his father had only nodded and had not even looked up from his newspaper. For the longest while, until he went to college, Dewey felt guilty that he had begged Tucker to stay, and wanted to say something to him, but never did. And Tucker never mentioned it.
The Willsons
IT WAS SATURDAY AFTERNOON. The telephone poles, embedded at the edge of the river in the built-up concrete-fieldstone bank, snapped by his window so fast that, after a while, Dewey, eighteen now and returning home from his first year up North at college, stopped trying to think the mounting total, gave up his counting to watch the train race ahead of the river’s current. But soon, as he had done many times in the month since he received it, he began to think of Tucker’s letter. He was still not certain he understood what Tucker meant. Not that the letter communicated many deep or complex thoughts—it was the simplest of letters—rather it brought up a subject and a time he could hardly remember, and he knew in order to understand what Tucker meant he had to remember, examine that time, that day; and not only this, but also the feelings he had experienced that day. He wished those feelings were written down someplace where he could pull them out to read and know them perfectly. And so again he reviewed the particular day Tucker mentioned, and still he could not understand; Tucker’s message, written in a code he could not remember or had never known, evaded him. He started again, took the letter from the now shredded envelope, unfolded the yellow copy paper, and read the typed words, dictated to Bethrah (he was sure), and signed in the hand not of a twenty-two-year-old man, but of a fourteen-year-old boy, the age Tucker had dropped from school:
Dear Dewey:
I hope you’re well. I’m fine myself. So is Bethrah. So is the baby.
The reason I wrote is because I wanted to ask you if you remember when I taught you to ride a bike? That was a very important day for you. I remember you wanted to learn a lot. I am glad I could teach you. But you would have learned anyway, because you wanted to learn so much.
When you we
re home for Christmas you wanted me to write to you. Well, I wanted to ask you about the bike.
Sincerely yours,
Tucker Caliban
It was as futile this time as it had been all the other times and Dewey was still puzzled and disappointed. But he would be home soon and would ask Tucker himself to explain the letter, though it meant he would have to admit his intellect did not possess the lightning snatch he prided himself it possessed.
The train entered the tunnels leading to the New Marsails Municipal Depot. The darkness was lit in round patches by dim bulbs in steel shades. Men worked by lantern with picks and shovels, and one, the foreman, held a blood-colored lamp and waved it as the train went by. Dewey got to his feet, stretched, searched for the tangled arms of his suit coat and the cigarettes he was certain he had left in his breast pocket. And then it was once again late afternoon, and the roar of the tunnel was replaced by the murmuring in the car.
A Different Drummer Page 8