Being Clem

by Lesa Cline-Ransome

  TWENTY-NINE

  Lymon could barely eat his lunch, he was so busy looking at Country Boy.

  “You see him and his daddy first day of school?” he asked us.

  Errol kept eating and shook his head no.

  “How’d you know it was his daddy?” I asked Lymon.

  “Phhhhtt.” He laughed, sounding just like Uncle Kent. Some of his sandwich flew out of his mouth. “His daddy looked about as big and country as he does.” I looked over at Country Boy, sitting by himself eating. He looked so sad he made me think of the way my momma looked some mornings.

  When Country Boy got up from his seat, Lymon stood up too.

  “Watch this,” he told us. Just as Country Boy was making his way to the trash can, Lymon pushed past him, making him fall back. Half the lunchroom started laughing. Lymon came back to our table smiling big.

  “Country Boy ain’t too steady on his feet,” he said, and went back to eating. I looked over at Errol, waiting for him to say something, but I didn’t know what. But he just looked up at Lymon, smiling. The two of them looked like they just invented a new game called Country Boy Kick the Can. I was glad I wasn’t eating, because I was sure my stomach would have started bubbling by now.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” Lymon told us, and we all stood up. It never mattered if we were finished or not, soon as Lymon said it was time to leave, it was time to leave.

  Back in the classroom, Miss Robins started in on us about “How many times do I need to tell you to settle down when coming back into the classroom?” And “Are you in junior high school or kindergarten?” But that only made the class more riled up. It didn’t take much to get Miss Robins yelling and her face to go red, so I think most of us didn’t even listen anymore. But because today was Friday, that meant it was spelling test day and just about everyone was looking for a way to put off taking it. Except me, the girls up front, and now Country Boy. His paper and pencil were lined up neat on his desk and he was sitting still in his desk looking straight ahead at Miss Robins, waiting. I turned in my seat, hoping no one else noticed, because it was going to be worse for him on the school yard if anybody did. But everyone was still horsing around and that got Miss Robins shouting again. Finally, she started reading aloud the spelling words, and the class was silent, writing down answers. I looked over at Country Boy, writing down every word as soon as Miss Robins called it out.

  “Eyes on your own paper, Mr. Thurber,” Miss Robins said like I was trying to cheat. It made me so mad I nearly yelled back at her, but I kept my eyes on my paper after that. When we handed in our tests, I saw his big sloppy writing had filled in every line where a lot of kids left them blank. Country Boy is like the opposite of one of my mother’s mystery books. He ain’t so easy to figure out just by looking at him.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked Lymon, the first day he asked us to stay with him in the school yard after school.

  “Just waiting on someone,” he told us.

  Errol shrugged his shoulders. He’d found a ball over in the bushes in the corner of the school yard near the fence and was bouncing it off the wall. I sat on the steps. Finally, the door opened and out walked Country Boy.

  “Took you so long?” Lymon yelled when he saw him, just like Curtis used to say to me and Errol. I wondered if there was a school for bullies, so they all knew just what to say.

  Country Boy acted like he hadn’t heard, pulled his satchel close, but I could see his mouth get tight around the corners and his shoulders hunch up. He started walking fast. Lymon hit my arm and waved me on. I turned to Errol. “Come on,” I said, walking behind Lymon.

  Lymon walked up close behind Country Boy, trying to make fun of his accent. Me and Errol laughed along like he wanted us to. And then Lymon reached out and slapped the back of Country Boy’s neck. Country Boy was so much bigger than Lymon, I waited for him to turn and bust him in his lip, but he just kept right on walking. But then Lymon stood in front, and we stood behind. Lymon shoved Country Boy into us, and we shoved him back. He was like a big ole rag doll, with us shoving him back and forth like he didn’t mind at all. The more we shoved and the more he took it, the madder I got. Finally, Lymon hit him good one more time and let him go.

  Walking home, Errol and Lymon laughed about Country Boy’s face when he saw Lymon waiting for him in the school yard. “Wait till he sees what I got for him tomorrow,” Lymon said to Errol.

  For the first time since we became the Three Musketeers, I was quiet. Looking at Country Boy in his run-over shoes, sitting at lunch all by himself, looking like he was someplace as far away as my momma on her window-watching mornings, didn’t make me feel like laughing. When Errol and Lymon looked over at me and asked what was wrong, I mumbled something about being sick of Negroes and their country ways, and then I started right in laughing with them, like nothing at all was wrong with pushing and hitting on a boy who wouldn’t even fight back.

  THIRTY

  The very last person I expected to see standing behind me at the library was Country Boy. I looked up from Miss Cook stamping my books and the two of us stared at each other like we’d both seen a ghost.

  “You boys know each other from school?” Miss Cook asked us, and wouldn’t neither of us say we did.

  Here in the library, Country Boy didn’t look like the same boy who sat near me in class. He was big in school, but here, he looked like a giant. At school he looked like he didn’t fit, but here standing in the library room, he looked like he was right where he belonged. He had books in his hand, he was smiling, and he looked like there wasn’t no place he’d rather be than standing here in front of Miss Cook’s desk. I looked at Miss Cook looking at Country Boy, and it seemed she knew him about as good as she knew me. When I left, he followed out behind me up the stairs. I felt like I did with Curtis all over again, and I walked as fast as I could, but he still caught up with me at the top of the stairs. When he snatched my arm, yelling at me to stop following him, I just about laughed in his face.

  Country Boy was so dumb he didn’t even know what the word following meant.

  “Ain’t you the one chasing behind me?” I said, scared but smiling like I wasn’t.

  Scared as I was, I had to know. “This where you come after school?” I asked, feeling bad about all the times I sat waiting for him in the school yard with Lymon and he never showed up.

  Langston nodded, probably not sure how to answer.

  Here in the stairway, I was hoping Country Boy didn’t see me the same way he saw Lymon and Errol. He took a minute, but then he answered. I kept on talking, going on about everything I knew about the library till I saw he was looking a lot less mad.

  “I gotta get on home,” I told him. And he didn’t say nothing else. All the way back I thought about Country Boy, standing up to me like he never did to Lymon. How by myself, I guess no one in their right mind would be afraid of me. And I wondered why he never stood up for himself in the school yard. Why did he let Lymon go on beating up on him every day and not fight back? Big as he was, he had to know he could have knocked Lymon clear into tomorrow if he wanted to, but he just stood there and took it.

  Country Boy might have been at the library, but he was just as dumb as I thought. I didn’t know what they taught in those country schools, but they sure weren’t teaching common sense.

  When I climbed the stairs to my building, I thought again about him running up behind me, mad and grabbing my arm. I stopped. Country Boy didn’t fight back in the classroom or in the school yard no matter how much Lymon bothered him. But he fought back hard at the library. It seemed to me like Country Boy would fight when he had something he wanted to protect.

  I thought it was that I couldn’t find the words to tell Lymon I was tired of beating on the other kids or tell Errol to his face that I didn’t want to walk with him to school anymore, but the truth was, I needed more than words to make my mouth say those things.

  When my stomach started acting up every day, Momma had me stay home from sc
hool to rest. But I felt worse when she had to call out of work to stay home with me.

  “Momma, I’m old enough to stay home by myself,” I told her.

  “Now, what if something happens to you while I’m at work?” she asked, looking worried. “Seems like every day you are having some kind of stomach problem. I wonder if I should take you to see the doctor.”

  “I don’t need a doctor. And it doesn’t happen every day. I’ll be fine, Momma,” I told her.

  But the next day, when my stomach still wasn’t right and she couldn’t call out a second day, she had Mrs. Marshall check in on me from time to time and make sure I was alive until Clarisse and Annette got home.

  Being home by myself all day made the day stretch longer than I ever remembered, but it gave me time to think about going back to school.

  Last year all I wanted was for kids to look up to me, maybe even be afraid of me like they were of Lymon. But now, at Haines, with no one but Errol and Lymon to talk to, and kids in sixth grade walking wide out of our way, not even looking me in the eye, I felt ashamed. Guess it was that I didn’t want people looking down on me more than I wanted people looking up to me. Lymon and Errol didn’t even seem to notice. They looked like they were having the time of their lives, knocking over this one and that one. Teasing and pushing. When I hung back, they looked like they’d start in on me too if I didn’t join in.

  Lymon still wasn’t talking about what was going on with him at his house, but he told us about his daddy back in Milwaukee, traveling all the time with his music. And a grandpa who passed away. And I knew enough about Errol’s daddy to know I didn’t care for his kind. Lymon and Errol had daddies that were either not around when you needed them or around too much when you didn’t want them. But good or bad, what both of them had was something I never had long enough to remember. A daddy.

  And now when I needed my daddy more than ever before, I had no one I could ask how to be brave. How to be a man and fight for myself. All I had was a momma and two sisters. And two friends who thought I was something I wasn’t.

  The tears started before I could stop them. I turned over in bed, holding my stomach. On the bedside table was one of the pictures of my daddy my momma keeps in a frame and I stared at it hard, hoping to find another memory of him. Something that would help me to be stronger when I went back to school. But when I looked at my daddy, it was like I was looking at a stranger in a uniform. Like a picture of a handsome man in a magazine. Momma told me once my daddy said the toughest decision of his life was deciding to go into the navy and leaving behind a good-paying job and his family. But it was a “sacrifice” she told me he said he had to make. I couldn’t spend the rest of junior high school in bed, so maybe that meant I had decisions of my own to make too. For a person with so much to say, when it came time to say something that really mattered, it seemed I couldn’t say nothing at all.

  My pillowcase was wet, so I flipped it over to the dry side. I thought about what Kendrick told me about boys not crying, and I tried to do what he said and think of something that made me mad. First, I got a picture of Curtis’s face in my head, but that only got me partway there. Even without looking at his picture, again and again, I saw my daddy’s face. I sure didn’t feel mad at him, at least I didn’t think I was. But when I thought again about Kendrick and my cousins in Milwaukee, even Errol, I could feel some mad starting up inside about how they all had a daddy and I didn’t. Kendrick was right, though. The tears stopped, but now I felt something worse.

  No matter how hard I cry or don’t, I am never going to have my daddy back again. I don’t have his good looks. I can’t swim. And I sure don’t have his bravery.

  I don’t know if I’m “good folk,” the way Uncle Kent talked about my daddy. There ain’t nothing brave about beating on someone who doesn’t want to fight back. And I know nothing makes me feel like “good folk” when I’m being mean to people who’ve never done one bad thing to me.

  Clemson Thurber Junior. I was hoping Daddy left more of him behind than just his name. Enough that I could feel more like Clemson than Clementine. Than Clem. More than just half his name and just half of my daddy.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Weeks after the teasing and pushing and shoving, one day after school, when Country Boy yelled in Lymon’s face, “Leave me alone,” Lymon got himself so worked up, he went and busted Country Boy’s lip wide open. I was proud that finally Country Boy stood up for himself, but after seeing what Lymon did to him, I didn’t think he ever would again. When Lymon got sent to the principal and missed two weeks of school, me and Errol went back to just being me and Errol. We walked to school quiet. At lunch I talked while he nodded. Something was missing without Lymon in the middle. Lymon was what made me and Errol stick, and without him, it was like we came apart again.

  “Didn’t know you could be suspended for so long,” Errol finally said one day.

  “Me neither. Maybe he ain’t coming back.”

  Errol looked like I slapped him.

  “Why you say that?” he asked loud.

  “I don’t know. Just seems strange. You ever know anybody to get suspended for two weeks for hitting someone in a school yard? Curtis almost killed someone, and he got three days,” I said.

  Errol nodded.

  “Maybe we could stop by his house.”

  Errol sounded so sad, I almost felt bad for him. Almost.

  “He sent you a birthday card with his address on it?” I asked Errol. “Because I sure don’t know where he lives, do you?”

  Errol shook his head no.

  Lymon never let us see much of him past school. We walked together as far as Prairie, and then he walked off alone to his apartment.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Errol the truth. That for the first time in a while, school had started to feel like school again. Without Lymon, we didn’t pay Country Boy or anyone else any mind. My stomach stopped hurting, and in the hallways, kids nodded hello again. As annoying as Miss Robins was, I’d forgotten how much I liked being in the classroom, especially during social studies when she pulled down the map and I could think again about all the places I’d visit once I joined the navy.

  But the best part was that when I went to the library, I saw Country Boy. Only he wasn’t Country Boy anymore to me because he told me to call him Langston. So I did and even though his country accent was so strong that sometimes I had to take a minute to figure out what he was saying, once I did, I was surprised at what I heard. I hadn’t figured out yet how many miles Alabama was from Chicago, but me and Langston got along like we’d been neighbors all our lives.

  But two weeks ain’t no kind of time when you think about it, because just as soon as I was getting used to things going back to normal, I walked into class, handed in my homework on Miss Robins’s desk, and heard behind me,

  “Miss me?”

  And there was Lymon.

  “I thought someone kidnapped you and took you back to Milwaukee.” I laughed, hitting his arm.

  He smiled back. He looked older, tired too. Like he had another one of those Sugar Ray Robinson mornings. “Errol cried every day you weren’t here,” I told him.

  He laughed then.

  “You didn’t?”

  “Nah, I was too busy ce-le-bra-ting,” I said, dancing like I was at a house party.

  “You a fool, Clem.” Lymon laughed. He said low, “I tell you who is going to be crying. Country Boy.” He nodded toward Langston’s empty seat.

  My stomach started up.

  “Sit down, class!” Miss Robins yelled, and Lymon made his way back to his seat.

  Langston rushed in and sat down just before the bell rang. I watched his face as he saw Lymon staring at him.

  At lunch, sitting next to Lymon, Errol was so happy he looked like he just hit the numbers.

  “But why’d you get two weeks?” Errol asked Lymon after he told us the story about getting suspended.

  “I didn’t get no two weeks,” Lymon said. “I just took a li
ttle extra vacation.”

  Lymon nodded his head over in Langston’s direction. “You know what I had to listen to from Robert all week? Because of that crybaby Negro and his daddy sitting up in the principal’s office?”

  That was the first time I heard Lymon mention his momma’s husband by his name. The way he said Robert sounded like poison and I’m betting he was.

  “His daddy came to the school?” Errol asked him.

  As much I liked when Errol was talking, all I could think was, Please, Errol, don’t ask him anything else about Langston and his daddy.

  “Sure did. Had his daddy come up to school and talk to the principal. About me. Well, I’mma give him something more to talk about.”

  Ever since he came back, Lymon didn’t let Langston out of his sight. When we went outside for recess, I watched Lymon watch Langston, even while Errol was talking a mile a minute, filling Lymon in on everything he missed while he was away. I still couldn’t get used to Errol saying more than two sentences at a time, and Lymon looked like he didn’t hear a word he said. When I saw Langston one day walking toward Michigan Avenue, instead of the way he usually walked toward Wabash, I knew he was going to the library. Problem was, Lymon noticed too and asked if we should find out where he was going. Lymon looked at me sideways when I told him maybe we ought to leave Country Boy alone. Back when we were the Three Musketeers, and not some gang trying to scare everybody in the school yard, we could laugh and talk all the way home. Now Lymon was looking every day for someone to put a hurting on, especially Langston, and Errol was looking to help him.

  “C’mon,” he said, to us one day, walking over to a corner of the school yard where I saw Langston sitting, reading a book.

  “Man, you must love suspension. You looking for another two weeks?” I asked, trying my hardest to laugh.