I ground my molars. A new family, a new home, a luxurious life with him at the head of the table again. “I’ve had that for a while. After you shot Mama, everything went to hell—”
“Don’t blaspheme, boy. I know all about what happened.”
“Jay had to quit school to support us all—”
“I said I know.”
“Chet—”
He smacked his blotter with an open palm. “God…bless it, I know. You blame me for everything. God forgives, Roger. I took His love into my heart and He washed my soul clean.”
“What about my soul?”
“You can get saved as easy as me. Holding onto the past is bad for you. Jesus will untwist you and work out the knots, until you forgive and are ready to be forgiven.” He began to thumb through his Bible.
I stared at the top of his head and the ears that folded down as if he wore his halo too low. “And, just that easy, you’re blameless for everything you’ve done.”
He traced his middle finger down a page of Scripture, not looking up from the words. “I did hard time in the Big House. I paid my debt, son.”
“And what about your other debts? For keeping a family on the side?” My eyes burned but I kept the tears in check. “For beating us bloody over nuthin?”
“You need to turn the other cheek before anger eats you up. When I accepted Christ into my life, I let go of my anger. I was reborn. You need to put yourself in His hands, Roger. Now listen to this-here—”
“No, you listen! You can’t run us over and say it didn’t matter. You can’t pretend all those awful years didn’t mean a thing.”
“We had some rough times, sure. I reckon it hurt to see your mama get shot.”
A cool blue flame swept through me, burning away any lingering fear of him. Not caring about consequences made me feel powerful. “I saved her when you tried to blow her head off, you bastard.”
“You watch your language. It’s all water under the bridge.”
“Bastard—just like me. You’re no more my father than Bonny Ramsey is my mother.”
A vein throbbed in his reddening forehead. “You’re going too far, son.”
“Son? I guess you never figured out what happened between Mama and Stan Borden.”
Papa swiped his arm like a scythe across the tabletop. His green-shaded desk lamp tumbled over, jerked out of its wall socket, and crashed on the floor. “I knew it! That shit-heel is roasting in hell this very minute.”
Plenty of sunshine still poured into the room, but his shadowed name on the floor had lengthened, creeping up my body. Papa’s clenched hands opened slowly, as if letting go and reaching for the light. His brow, pale again, reabsorbed the pulsing vein. He said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ve always loved you like my own flesh and blood.”
“What you did to me you call love?”
He said, “You were always in your little dream-world—”
“Trying to escape from you.”
“Is this what you wanted? To call me names? To insult me and try to get my goat? Does this make you feel better?”
“I just want to set things right!”
He stood and thrust out his jaw. “Do you wanna hit me? Twice? Three times? How many blows before you’d be satisfied?”
“How many times was it for you, Papa?”
“My conscience is clear. Washed clean in the blood of the Lamb.” He folded his arms and grinned.
I snatched the brass lamp from the floor and wrenched out the cord. The green shade had shattered, so I wielded the base like a club. “Tell me you’re sorry for all you’ve done.”
“I’ve asked for God’s forgiveness and received it.”
“Apologize to me.”
“Are you setting yourself above our Lord? He’s not only forgiven my sins, Roger, but He’s rewarded me. Come home and see what I can give you.”
“Give me back my childhood, you sonofabitch.” I whirled and threw the lamp through his frosted window, destroying the backward letters, wiping the shadow of “Mance MacLeod, Owner” from me, and bathing me in sunshine.
I ground the glass beneath my feet as I stalked to the front gate.
CHAPTER 29
I met Jerry Flynn at the crossroads before sunup, overall pockets weighted down with my savings of sixty-three dollars and ninety-eight cents that I’d dug up from the barn on Sunday night. Instead of climbing onto the seat beside him, I walked around the front of the bread truck. I offered a handshake through his open window.
“What’s this?”
“It’s goodbye—I won’t need a ride any more. I had it out with Papa and quit the mill.”
“Quitting another thing already? Every boy fights with his old man. It’s part of becoming one yerself. Report for duty and you’ll get yer job back for sure.”
“It was damn final, the way we parted.”
“What’chu gonna do?” He snorted. “Sharecrop?”
“A long time ago, I learned when it’s wise to run. I’ll knock around like Chet did ’til I reach seventeen.”
Jerry touched the blue-green anchor on his hairy forearm. “Who said I joined at seventeen?”
“You mean I have to wait even longer?” I felt lightheaded, gripping the window frame.
“I mean you don’t gotta wait one day more.”
“So I could’ve joined when I turned fifteen?”
“You looked like a kid then. That sawmill’s burned off all the peach fuzz.” He turned off the truck engine. Cicadas clicked and buzzed, filling the silence. “What’chu do is take a old Bible and make a family tree inside the front cover. Fake up anything you don’t know and, by yer name, put down a birth date that’ll make you seventeen. Uh—” He traced the air, working the subtraction. “—1929. You tell that Navy recruiter in Albany you was born at home in the country with no doctor to make out one of them birth certificates.”
“Then what?”
“Then get ready for your anchor tattoo, Roger.” He started the truck and pumped the gas pedal a couple of times. He said over the roaring engine, “You need dropping anywhere?”
“I have a Bible at home. I’ll fake it up and hitchhike to the recruiting office.” I offered my hand again. “Thanks for everything, Mr. Flynn.”
Instead of shaking it, Jerry raised his hand edge-on to his eyebrow and snapped off a sharp salute. I imitated him and, by his nod, knew I’d done it right.
*
Roosters had begun to crow by the time I stepped onto Mama’s porch. If Jerry’s scheme worked, maybe I could sign up for duty on the Texas coastline and see Rienzi during a furlough. If it didn’t, I wasn’t sure what to do. I wouldn’t move back in with Mama.
She hadn’t stirred, so I eased through the parlor and slipped into the room across from hers. From under the bed, I took out a stained, moldering Bible from among the books I’d scavenged over the years. I also removed the town-clothes I’d bought for Rienzi’s birthday party and my Blue Cloud cigar box.
I changed clothes and transferred the money to my trousers. No one had weeded or swept the front yard in a long time. I carried my gear over to Lonnie’s former home, now Ennis and Willodean’s place. The field was empty; he and Nat must’ve taken a rare holiday to go fishing on Spring Creek. I heard Willodean out back, getting onto their two boys about not helping with the wash: “Lord help me, children, y’all’s gonna put your mama in a early grave.”
I walked through the front door of the two-room shack. In the parlor, a couple of quilt pallets lay side by side and the air smelled of children who’d spent every day outdoors. I crouched and set my Blue Cloud cigar box between the beds. The Indian chief on the cover looked sadder than I’d noticed before. Inside, her boys would find blood-red marbles, arrowheads, a worthless train-flattened nickel, and the loose change I added from my pocket. I saluted Chief Blue Cloud and walked out with my Bible.
At Nat and Leona’s, I went around back and hugged her neck while she labored over her own washing. Before we said goodbye, I wrote a not
e for her to give to my longtime friend. He didn’t have much schooling, so I kept it simple: “Nat, Thanks for holding my hand until I got used to the dark. I’m sorry I have to let go now. Love, Roger.”
I sat on their front porch and invented my family tree on the inside cover of the Bible. My inventions got bolder as I went along, with Jay and Chet both on the wrong side of twenty and Darlene edging toward thirty. I assigned her a fictional husband and three adoring children and hoped she would be happy.
I varied my writing, even switching hands a few times, so the chart appeared to have been completed over many years by different people. In a few places, I put down only a month and year for a birth. I liked the look of it, a record that simple folks might’ve scribbled down to record who came from whom and if they’d gone to their reward, bless their hearts. For me, I put down February 1929. It seemed fitting that Mama and Papa would leave something off, distracted by a cuss fight or simply neglectful.
With dress shoes slung over my shoulder, I hitchhiked east along Hardscrabble Road. Warm sand pushed from under my bare feet as I tried to imagine life on a ship, with nothing but rolling, pitching steel underfoot, nothing to dig my toes into, no such thing as a natural foothold. I felt conflicted, what with Jay and Chet in the Army, but Jerry’s Bible trick had worked with the Navy, so I kept walking the forty miles to Albany, left thumb sticking out as my arms swung.
Around mid-morning, I caught a lift on the highway from a farmer who took me as far as Newton, and a shoe salesman got me the remaining twenty miles to Albany. He dropped me curbside, across the street from the storefront Navy recruiting station. My shirt and trousers stuck to my skin as I sweated in the noonday sun. The buzz-cut Navy man gave me a small nod through the plate-glass window of his office. As I slipped on my shoes, I said a prayer that I would pull off this trick.
When I opened his office door, the recruiter said, “Took a while to gird your loins?”
“Yes, sir, it’s an important decision, but I’m ready.” I introduced myself.
The Lieutenant Junior Grade shook my hand and said, “You from around here?”
“No, sir. I hitchhiked from Colquitt.”
“That’s quite a ways. You’re seventeen?”
I showed him the inside cover of my Bible and gave him the story Jerry had suggested. He returned it and offered me a chair beside his desk. “You need to pass an aptitude test before you can enlist,” he said.
The officer presented me with a page of questions and a pencil. He gave me a half-hour to complete the English comprehension and math problems, but I only needed ten minutes. I could tell he’d read my answers upside down. “Perfect,” he said. He put my score at the top of the page, signed it, and asked me when I wanted to leave.
Just like that, I thought, I was enlisting in the Navy. I told him, “Right now.”
He laughed and said, “I’ll pick you up on the courthouse square in Colquitt tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred. That means nine in the morning. I’ll get you on a train that’ll leave for San Diego, California, in the afternoon, fifteen-hundred hours. What time is that?”
I thought for a moment. “Three o’clock?” He nodded like a proud parent, and I asked, “Do I bring anything?”
He pointed at the Bible. “You’ll want to bring something to read. It’s a long ride to San Diego. Can I give you a lift back home?”
“I don’t want to put you out, sir.”
“It’s no bother. I need to pick up a friend over there.” He posted a note on the door, locked his office, and showed me to his car, parked in a diagonal slot at the curb. He owned a low-slung two-door Ford Deluxe Coupe in cherry red. I ran my fingers along the sleek fender, and he said, “Stay away from liquor and women, Roger, and you’ll be able to afford some nice things, even on an ensign’s pay.”
My white-lies about school and family mounted as he drove me to Colquitt. Entering town, he said, “Roger, let’s run by the high school.” I glanced over and he was looking at me. He parked diagonally at the curb near a hardware store. “I need to take a look at your school record. Is there a problem?”
I held up my hands. “Sorry, I didn’t graduate with my class. I earned a certificate, not a diploma.”
“It’s not that, Roger. You scored perfect on that test, so I don’t care if you never finished the ninth grade. It’s just that your folks didn’t fill out your birth date in their Bible.”
“I was born on the…sixteenth. Can’t I just write a sixteen in the Bible?”
“It’ll only take a minute to peek in your records. You sound scared. What’ll I find there?”
I laid my hand on the Bible between us, sweat popping out on my forehead. “The family tree’s a fake. I’m not seventeen until next October.” I glanced at the Navy recruiter. “Sorry I wasted your time.”
“You didn’t waste a thing. I expect to see you at my office door next year.”
“You don’t really have a friend around here to pick up, do you?”
He said, “That was my lie. I just wanted to get to know you. Be patient, Roger. I’ll see you next year.” Before he drove off, I saluted him, but he just waved. “Nice form, but we don’t salute civilians, son. I’ll be proud to return it soon, though. Until then, remember: no booze, no broads.”
I waved him around the corner and took the pencil from my pocket. After correcting my birth date in the Bible, I caught a ride south to Bainbridge where I’d often passed an Army recruiting office near the Cottontail Cafe. If the Army didn’t work out, I’d try the Marines or hitchhike to Florida with some vacationing Yankees or stow aboard the Seaboard Railroad and hobo for a time. I was going to exhaust every means of escape.
*
The soldier on duty at the Army recruitment center waved me in when I knocked on his door. I introduced myself to the sergeant and said, “I’d like to enlist, sir.”
“I need a proof that you’re seventeen, MacLeod. You bring your birth certificate?”
“Just this, sir.” I handed him the Bible and gave him the story.
“Good enough.” He hardly glanced at the inside cover before asking me to sit beside the corner of his desk.
I expected his exam to be identical to the one I’d aced, but all the English and math questions were different, some harder and others easier. I got one wrong. Still, he complimented me on my score, signed his name at the top, and said, “When do you want to leave?”
“Right now.”
He glanced at his watch. “You might just make the bus. Hold on a minute.” He rolled a form into his typewriter and, using just his index fingers, clacked out my travel orders. With a yank that made the platen zip like a motor, he pulled out the paper and said, “Let’s go.”
I followed him at a trot down the street to the bus station, going in the opposite direction from the Cottontail Cafe, the orders nestled inside the cover of my Bible. My stomach trembled with a thousand butterflies. I tried to take in everything around me, memorize the smells of car exhaust and suppers cooking and hot tar, the feel of the late-day sun, the scenes playing out of townie men in their suits and fedoras, the women spruced up in skirts, tight blouses, and pearls.
A Trailways bus idled by the loading curb. The slot above its broad front window bore a sign reading “Columbus.”
The sergeant purchased a ticket to Fort Benning for me. He shouted for the driver to hold the door and pressed the paper stub into my hand. “You all right, MacLeod? You look like you’re about to faint.”
“I just can’t believe it’s happening.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen if you miss your bus.” He gave me a small shove toward the bus door.
I took a seat in a middle row, the Bible on my lap. With a screech, the bus door swung closed. Vibrations from the engine carried up through my shoes and made my legs tremble even more.
My travel orders said to proceed to Fort Benning in Columbus for additional examinations and enlistment in the Army if I passed every test. I traced my fingers over the black ink and then
touched the other side of the form, feeling the letters stamped hard into the paper, as permanent as an engraving.
The sergeant tapped on the glass beside my shoulder as the driver put the bus in gear. I lowered my window, smiling down at him. After a loud rumble and a moment of hesitation, the bus pulled away from the curb. The sergeant called, “Good luck, MacLeod. Send me a postcard when you turn seventeen.”
*
I could barely eat breakfast the day after I’d completed the Army examinations and prolonged health inspections at Fort Benning. Just one step away from my escape into the service. After chow hall, a sergeant left us on the drill field where a lieutenant waited. I held my shoulders back and head high and crossed my fingers, hoping to repeat the oath of enlistment. Just as the officer was about to begin, a private trotted out with a clipboard from which a single sheet of paper dangled. The lieutenant glanced at the page and called, “Who’s MacLeod?”
My chin dropped to my chest. I lifted my hand upward with the fatalism of the rabbit watching a swooping hawk. The Army had discovered my real age. If they’d discovered my lie, would they shoot me or throw me in jail?
The lieutenant told me to stand beside him. “You won’t be taking the oath,” he said. “I’ll talk to you in a minute.” I made my feet move as everyone stared, and I hung my head while the other recruits swore their oath of enlistment and became U.S. Army soldiers. They filed out.
“You’ve got to go back to the medics,” the lieutenant told me. “Something came back on one of your tests.”
A private escorted me to the base hospital. He presented me and the clipboard to a medical sergeant, who glanced at the page and said, “You failed your chest X-ray. We need to take another one.”
In the X-ray room, I took off my shirt and the technician pushed the icy metal plate against my chest. I thought I could feel the invisible beams jabbing through my skin and organs and pitting my ribcage. The X-rays also sparked a thought: maybe the Army would tell me I was dying before they sent me home to do it.
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