—
Stokes said that snake must have been a cottonmouth. He said maybe we couldn’t find it at the creek because it was already in the house under my bed. I can’t believe he thinks I would fall for that story. There is no snake under my bed, I checked.
Friday night, I stayed up reading Greek myths, mostly the one about Jason and the Argonauts and the quest for the golden fleece. That’s my favorite. On Saturday, the guys were coming over for a game right after lunch. I jumped out of bed late and went straight to the porch to check the weather.
It was a bright day with a cool breeze, and I thought I smelled corn dogs and elephant ears. It was just wishful smellin’. The fair doesn’t get here till next week, and it’s a long way from my house. Farish and Ginny Lynn love the fair so much, they made up a silly song about it: “The fair, the fair, it’s everywhere! So beware!”
I took a deep breath full of cool breeze and corn dogs and elephant ears and stretched out my arms like an Argonaut smelling a miracle.
“The perfume of the gods!” I shouted.
And there was Dee, raking by the rose bed. He half smiled at me like, “Hello, weird shouting kid.”
I kind of waved and went inside.
“What’s Dee doin’ in the front yard?” I asked Willie Jane. “It looks like he’s just getting started on it.”
“We just got here, sleepyhead. The Buick wouldn’t start.”
“But everybody’s coming over to play football in less than an hour. He’s not gonna be finished in time.”
“You’ll have to talk to your mama about that.”
I thought about grabbing another rake so I could help Dee hurry up, but I decided against it. Then I thought maybe a Coca-Cola would help him go faster. I took him one and he acted like he didn’t want it but drank it down anyway and went right back to work. I wanted to tell him to quit being so slow and careful, but I couldn’t figure out how to say it.
When Mama came back from the grocery store, I asked her if Dee could stop working and let me and the guys have our football game. She said we would just have to wait, that Dee needed to finish what he started, and we could play down at Calvin Stubbs’s house if we were that impatient.
“Calvin’s yard is no good,” I told her.
“Y’all can find another yard somewhere.”
“Everybody else’s is too small or has too many trees.”
“Y’all can figure it out.”
“Well, I don’t see why he couldn’t go work in the back while we’re playin’ and finish the front when we’re through.”
“Because he did the back last weekend, and mainly because I said so.”
“Well, okay…but he’s looking awfully tired out there today. Have you seen him? I bet he could use a break. A long break.”
“What? Dee’s okay, isn’t he?” She looked out the window and brought her hand to her throat. She ran to the kitchen and got a Coca-Cola.
Dee took it from her and drank the whole thing quick like a soldier, handed her the empty bottle, and snapped his hand back on the rake. When she came back into the house, Mama told Willie Jane that her boy was surely a hard worker, and she hoped he wasn’t getting too worn out.
“Oh, he’s fine, Miz Westbrook,” Willie Jane said. “Dee’s tough. And the good Lord knows we need the money.”
I’ve asked Mama before why Willie Jane doesn’t call her Virginia or at least Miz Virginia, as long as they’ve known each other. Everybody else calls her Virginia. She says the people who work for you are not “everybody” and that’s just the way it is.
But Willie Jane doesn’t just work for us. She’s my other mama.
“I don’t have anything to give him when he wants to go see a show at the Alamo,” Willie Jane said.
The Alamo is the colored people’s theater. White people go to the Paramount or the Capri or the Lamar downtown.
I asked Mama why Willie Jane has to wear a white uniform to work in our house when we’re not a hotel or something, and Mama said it’s the proper thing for maids to wear. She said some people have a separate bathroom for the maid like Meemaw and Papaw and at least we don’t do that. When you walk up the steps from the garage to Meemaw and Papaw’s back door, there’s a little bathroom at the top, with a little commode that looks like it’s covered with rust or something.
While me and Mama were eating egg and olive sandwiches, I told her she needed to pay Willie Jane more. She laughed and said she had already gotten that message today.
“You really ought to, though,” I said.
I downed my milk and checked the clock. The guys would be here any minute. I ran outside with another Coca-Cola, but Dee waved me away when he saw it.
—
Oakwood used to be three streets in a row with a creek winding through them and woods on both ends. Now they’re chopping down all the trees and adding on new streets. I miss playing in those woods. Once when we were playing hide-and-seek, I climbed so high in a pine tree, everybody gave up trying to find me and went home to supper.
The two best sounds in the neighborhood are the tinkle of the Popsicle truck and the buzz of the foggin’ machine that sprays for mosquitoes. We used to stop whatever we were doing and run, get right in the middle of that fog where we couldn’t see anything but white and spin around till we were dizzy. It smells pretty sweet. You wouldn’t think it could kill mosquitoes.
Stokes lives right next door, and he’s my best friend, but I’ve got lots of others in Oakwood. When there’s nothing else to do, three or four of us get together and walk all over the neighborhood, sometimes even all the way to the Tote-Sum for an Orange Crush or a candy bar.
Mrs. Sitwell across the street always waves.
Mr. Nelson lives across the corner, and him and Mrs. Nelson are always outside working on their yard. They wave and say, “What you been up to?” and “How your folks getting along?” and stuff like that.
Old Mr. Hollingsworth is always rocking on his porch and him and me always have the same conversation:
“Hey there, Trip!”
“Hey, Mr. Hollingsworth.”
“How’s your daddy doin’?”
“He’s doin’ fine.”
“Your daddy is a fine man.”
“Yessir.”
“Did you know he delivered every one of my grandbabies?”
“He did?”
“He sure did.” And he smiles and shakes his head.
Mr. Pinky lives across the creek behind us. His garden is full of all kinds of vegetables, and he brings us big sacks of tomatoes and cucumbers and says to come pick anything we want. His real name is Mr. Sanderford, but people call him Pinky because his bald head is so pink from the sun shining on it when he works in his garden. Mrs. Pinky is real nice, too.
When I told Stokes today’s game would have to be moved, he got pretty mad. There are lots of big yards in Oakwood, but nobody has a better yard for playing football than mine. The trees leave a great big oval from the rose bed to the driveway. You just have to watch out for the sidewalk in the middle and you can’t mind it too much if a low-hanging branch intercepts a pass now and then. And you can’t hurt Mama’s roses.
“Can’t you get your mom to make the yard boy come back later?” asked Stokes.
“What do you think I’ve been tryin’ to do?”
“You could tell him you’ve seen a whole lot more snakes in the front yard, like the one y’all saw in the back. They hate snakes.”
“That would be completely not true.”
“So?”
Stokes is more likely than anybody I know to make something up. On the day he moved in next door, when we were both five years old, he told me his daddy was a werewolf. He said he had seen his daddy change one night when the moon was full, that he got hair all over his body and his face turned into a wolf face and he howled and busted out the front door and went looking for people to devour.
For the next week, I was afraid to go outside after supper in case Stokes’s dad was out t
here. I couldn’t figure out how to bring it up with my parents, but finally I had to ask Mama about it, and she said Stokes was just having fun with me, and it was only a story, and I should tell him my daddy was a vampire. I tried it, but Stokes never would believe me.
Stokes is taller than me by about three inches, even though we’re both in seventh grade, and his hair is a lot darker, his face is longer, and he has more freckles. He’s thicker than me, too. The only way I’ve ever beaten him in wrestling is with my scissors hold. If I can get him in a scissors, it’s all over. One time I held him in a scissors for about five minutes, laughing the whole time, not being a very good sport, I guess. He got so mad that when he finally said “uncle” and I let him loose, he slugged me in the face and went home. I would have hit him back, but I was too surprised.
The next day he told me he was sorry he had lost his temper. That was the only time we’ve ever had a real fight. It’s not my fault that I have superhuman leg abilities. Daddy says it makes up for the fact that I don’t have muscles anywhere else. Ha, ha. I do so.
We passed the ball back and forth on the side of the yard where Dee wasn’t working, and talked about where to move the game and couldn’t come up with a better yard than Calvin’s.
It’s usually me and Stokes, Calvin, Andy, and maybe some other guys. We let Kenny Tutwiler play, but he’s little and always has a runny nose and gets it on the ball. Stokes is a pretty good quarterback. He can outrun everybody except me.
My favorite team would have to be Stokes at quarterback, me going out for passes, and Calvin snapping the ball and blocking because even though he’s only eleven, he’s as wide as a table. Let’s just say Calvin likes his Twinkies. Andy’s medium tall, skinny, and fast, and probably loves to play more than anybody. He comes around every Saturday chewing on a straw, spinning a football, and looking for a game.
Before they got to be teenagers, the Bethune twins would play. Now they think they’re too cool to talk to seventh graders. Fine with me. They were always complaining about something, saying it was a complete pass when they had scooped it off the ground, or that they had crossed the goal line without getting touched with two hands when they did get touched. The rule is you have to count “one Mississippi, two Mississippi” up to five, loud and not too fast, before you can rush the quarterback. They always said I shortened it up to “one Miss’ippi, two Miss’ippi….” Well, heck, that’s how people in Miss’ippi say it. Maybe they don’t know that because they’re from Louisiana and pull for the LSU Tigers and won’t shut up about it. But they don’t want to talk about how Ole Miss has beaten LSU the last two years—and they’re gonna do it again this Halloween, bet you anything.
The Bethunes live next door to Mr. Pinky, and I heard him tell Daddy, “Them boys ride their bikes up in my front yard like they think it’s theirs. I never know when a firecracker will go off in my garden late at night. Cherry bombs, sometimes. Hurts the vegetables.”
Mr. Bethune is nice, though. One time, Tim showed me his World War II model aircraft carriers, and Mr. Bethune explained all the different parts of the ships. At church, he always gives me a “Chinese haircut,” which means he rubs his knuckles real fast on the top of my head, and calls me a “wisenheimer,” which means “smart aleck.” He learned it from the Germans during World War II. I told Daddy I wanted a model aircraft kit like one of Tim’s, and he said that was the first time he’d heard of a Bethune boy building something instead of tearing it up.
I stood in the middle of the yard and Stokes was on the driveway. He threw one over my head, and it rolled all the way to where Dee was working. Dee picked up the ball and smiled, and all of a sudden I felt bad that I hadn’t asked him to throw it with us, the way we had thrown it last week.
“Where’d you get them pearly whites, boy?” Stokes yelled to him in a colored-person accent like a lot of white people do when they talk to them. I’m pretty sure the colored person can tell.
Dee reared back and threw a pass that hit Stokes so hard in the gut he couldn’t hang on to it.
“Same place you got yours, I reckon.” Dee smiled and picked up his rake.
Stokes stared at Dee, like first of all, he couldn’t believe Dee could throw a pass like that, and second, did this colored kid just hurt his stomach on purpose? Then he picked it up and passed it to me real quick, pretending like nothing had happened. But something had.
“Watch this,” I told Stokes. I walked over to Dee and handed him the ball.
“Tell you what, Dee, I’m gonna run all the way into Stokes’s yard and when I get w-a-a-a-y down there, see if you can hit me with a pass. Okay?”
“Come on, Trip!” Stokes was holding out his arms like I had gone crazy.
“Ready, Dee?”
“Ready.”
I got into my stance.
“Hut one! Hut two! Hut three!”
I tore across the yard and cut to the middle and tore across Stokes’s yard and when I looked back, here came the ball, floating right into my hands.
“Touchdown!” I held up my arms in the signal.
Dee smiled big. Stokes looked annoyed.
“Hey, Dee, how ’bout you stop working for a while and throw with us,” I said.
“He can’t throw with us!” Stokes was yelling and whispering at the same time.
“Why not?” I said.
“He’s the yard boy!”
I spun the ball up in the air and caught it and tried to act all normal and relaxed.
“Come on, Dee!” I yelled. “Whatcha say?”
Dee looked a little bit scared, but he nodded.
I walked to the street to get the most distance between everybody. Stokes stayed on the driveway. I threw to Dee. He reached back and let it fly and hit Stokes in the breadbasket again. Stokes let it drop. He could have caught that one. He picked it up and lateraled it to me and started walking back to his house.
“What are you doing?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Come on! What’s your hang-up?” Stokes was acting like he was caught on something invisible and couldn’t get loose.
“What’s your hang-up?” he said.
“Don’t spaz out on me, okay?”
“You’re a spaz.”
I threw the ball to him and he caught it, and then he squinted at Dee down at the other side of the yard and heaved it so hard, Dee had to backpedal and jump for it. But he brought it down.
“Nice catch!” I yelled.
Mama’s always saying I do things too hard. I play too hard. I sleep too hard. I argue with her and Daddy too hard. I tend to go overboard in general. Sometimes I even do homework too hard, like when I wrote three times as many pages as anybody else on my Moby-Dick paper and made a visual aid of a Popsicle-stick ship, when the teacher didn’t even ask for visual aids, and it had a harpooned whale tied to the side, filled up with blubber made out of Crisco and red food coloring. Today, maybe I wanted to play football too hard.
“Hey, Dee, you wanna play in our game when the rest of the guys get here?”
He looked confused.
“See ya,” Stokes said.
“Wait, wait, Stokes, wait, just listen….”
“He can’t play a game with us, Trip! For crying out loud!” He was yell-whispering again and looking at me like I was crazy.
“Listen, if Dee’s playing football with us, he’s not raking the yard, and if he’s not raking the yard, we don’t have to go over to Calvin’s and play in his crummy yard and put up with his whole family.”
“Yeah,” said Stokes. “And what’s everybody gonna think?”
“Who cares what they think?”
“They won’t do it.”
“So we’ll talk ’em into it. My daddy played with colored kids in New Orleans growing up. And he worked with colored doctors and doctored on colored soldiers at an army hospital in the Korean War.”
“Well, this ain’t the Korean War.”
“I tell you what, I want a guy with an arm like that o
n my team. I don’t care if he’s black, white, or purple.”
Stokes thought for a second.
“He can throw a football, I’ll grant you that,” said Stokes. He learned “I’ll grant you” somewhere, and lately he’s always granting me things. “But I don’t know….”
“Will you just think about it?”
Dee had gone back to work while we were talking. I asked him again to play with us.
“My mama brought me over here to take care of the yard,” he said. “I expect that’s what I oughta do.”
“Let’s go ask her.”
We left Stokes standing there, still thinking it over.
Willie Jane shook her head at first. Then she said, “Dee, you really want to play in their game?”
He didn’t act as sure about it as I wanted him to, but he nodded.
“You sure?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right then. Trip, go see what ya mama says.”
I took a deep breath and went in there. I didn’t know what Mama would say, because I’m not really sure what she thinks about colored people and white people doing stuff together. Also, she doesn’t like to be interrupted when she’s polishing her fingers and toes. She wanted to know why I was bothering her again. Dee had to finish the yard.
“But we don’t just want Dee to quit working on the yard. We want him to play with us.”
“Play with you?”
“Yes, ma’am. Be on somebody’s team. I bet Daddy would say he could.”
She looked all around the room like there might be somebody there she could ask about this. Then she got this look on her face like she was about to do something naughty.
“Well, I…I think it will be fine. It will be fine if Dee plays football with y’all. He can finish the yard when the game’s over.”
Me and Stokes and Dee passed it around, spreading out from each other as far as we could and still be in the yard, not talking a whole lot. Once we got into a rhythm with the ball, Stokes seemed to quit caring who he was throwing it to.
Andy showed up. His legs are always scraped up from playing in shorts. Calvin and little Kenny Tutwiler came together half a minute later.
Yard War Page 3