The Last Road Home

by Danny Johnson

  A dirt clod hit me in the shoulder. I heard a giggle from Mr. Riggsbee’s tobacco patch on the other side of the road. “Oh, want to play, huh?” I dived in between the rows, bombing her with dirt balls. I accidentally knocked over a tobacco stalk.

  Fancy grabbed my hand. “Let’s go. Folks don’t like somebody tearing down their crop.” We ran until we were out of breath.

  An hour and a half later, we made it to the church, but it was still another half mile to Mr. Seagrove’s farm. It never seemed this far riding in the truck. By the time we got there, both of us were worn out, soaked with dusty sweat, and in a foul mood. “Damn Lightning,” Fancy said. “I know it ain’t this far to Mr. Ferrell’s place.”

  Fancy stood back in the yard while I walked up to Mr. Seagrove’s door and knocked. His wife came to the porch, a big woman, thighs wide as two fat hams and a voice deep as a man’s. She sang in the church choir and you could hear her a mile away. “Junebug, what are you doing here? Is your grandma with you?” She looked out at Fancy.

  “No’um, she’s at home. We’re trying to collect some Coca-Cola bottles to sell, and wanted to see if we could look around your place.”

  “You’re welcome to look. I’d try around the tobacco barn if I was you. Just go down that path.” She pointed beside the house. “When y’all get through, stop and I’ll have some iced tea for you.”

  When we reached the barn, we took a break in the shade of the overhanging shelter before starting the search. I heard a noise and looked up to see a dog standing in the path watching us. He reminded me of Grady.

  “Junebug, if we get a sack load how the heck are we going to tote ’em?”

  “Don’t know, and right now I wish I’d never brought it up.” We rambled in the bushes and briars around the barn, managing to find fifteen bottles that weren’t broke and a lot more that were. Fancy came across an empty whiskey bottle, screwed off the top, and stuck her tongue inside to taste. “Aaah, that’s nasty.” She smacked her mouth in disgust, then pitched it back in the weeds.

  I began to understand Granddaddy and Grandma’s smile this morning. “I figure we’ve made about thirty cents.”

  The best thing we found was a blackberry patch. Each of us picked a couple of handfuls and sat on the dirt floor under the shelter to eat. Dark juice ran down our chins onto our clothes. The flies wanted a taste. We couldn’t swat fast enough. Fancy got up. “Come on, I’m ready to go home, had enough of this dumb mess.”

  We didn’t bother to stop at Mrs. Seagrove’s house for tea; blackberry juice had quenched our thirst. I carried the half-full sack a ways and Fancy carried it a ways. She talked nonstop most of the walk home, about church or how she was anxious to go back to school so she could be around somebody other than Lightning. With Fancy, life was never lonesome.

  Lightning was already sitting at the stumps. I didn’t see any bottles and he didn’t look happy. “What happened? You couldn’t find any?” Fancy showed him ours.

  “I went over to Mr. Ferrell’s and told him what I wanted to do. He told me to get my black ass away from his house, said he didn’t want no niggers nosing around his place.” Lightning wouldn’t look at me.

  My face turned warm and flushed. I held out our bag. “Here, Lightning, you can have my share.”

  He took the sack and went home.

  Fancy got up to follow him. She held her arms out from her sides like she wanted to say she was sorry. “ ’Bye, Junebug.”

  We didn’t meet on the path for a long time after that.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Can I go with you and lend a hand?” It was November and a bitterly cold day. One of our neighbors, Mrs. Luter, fell off her back porch two days before, broke her neck, and died on the spot. She was eighty-six and everybody in the community called her Granny May. Her ninety-year-old husband had to leave her on the ground until he could walk a half mile to get help. Granddaddy loaded his pick and shovel in the truck. He was headed to the church to help dig her grave.

  The yard grass crunched with morning frost. “You stay by the fire, ain’t enough starch in them fourteen-year-old britches of yours yet to break frozen ground.” It took him three tries to get his old Chevy truck cranked. I was too cold to argue.

  Grandma had started to cook dinner, the house smelling up with collards and fatback, expecting Granddaddy to be home any minute. The men could usually get a grave dug in three or four hours. I’d just added a couple of oak pieces to the potbellied stove when somebody knocked on the screened-in-porch door. I saw Mr. Jackson, Mr. Wilson, and Preacher Mills standing in front of the steps, hats in their hands.

  “Morning.” I looked out, expecting to see Granddaddy’s truck in the yard.

  Mr. Jackson said, “Junebug, we need to talk to Miss Rosa Belle.”

  A knot twisted in my stomach. “Where’s my granddaddy?”

  Grandma came up behind me. “Come in and get warm.” We went to sit in the living room close to the stove. Wood cracked and popped as it burned.

  Grandma sat on the couch, and Preacher Mills squatted in front of her. He took her hands in his. “Miss Rosa Belle, we got some bad news.” He looked down at the linoleum. When he raised his head, he said, “Ernie fell over a couple of hours ago while the men were digging the grave for Mrs. Luter. By the time the ambulance got to the church, it was too late. The medic suspects he had a heart attack. They just left a little bit ago; they’ll carry him by the hospital first, then to Apex Funeral Home. We figured you’d want to go to him.”

  I couldn’t have heard him right. I stood up. “My granddaddy’s dead?” I wanted to hit Preacher Mills in the face.

  Grandma pulled her hands from the preacher’s and grabbed my arm. “I’m grateful to you for coming to tell me. Let me change my clothes.” She went into the bathroom. I knew she’d do her crying in private, it was her way.

  Nobody talked as Grandma and I rode in the backseat of Mr. Jackson’s car. I listened to the whine of rubber tires on the pavement and watched pastures of brittle brown winter grass and fields of sad-looking cornstalks, dried up and bent over like a crowd of cripples, pass by the window.

  At the funeral home, heavy gray carpet and whispered conversation made for unsettling quiet. I held Grandma’s cold hand while the man in charge guided us to a room in the back of the building. When he opened the door, I could see Granddaddy’s body covered in a white sheet on a rolling metal table. I stopped. Grandma tugged on my elbow. “It’s all right. We need to say good-bye, Junebug.”

  I had to make myself look when she pulled back the sheet. His skin was a pale off-white. There was a big purple bruise on his chest and scratches on the side of his face. What struck me the most was the unnatural stillness of him, how it was so different from a person who was just asleep, how strong you could feel the absence of life. Grandma rubbed his head and used her fingers to comb his gray-specked dark curly hair. She stroked his face, her lips moving but making no sound. I gripped his arm, and when I let go, the skin stayed indented.

  At his burying, snow mixed with sleet rode on a freezing wind. Sitting beside Grandma in the ice-covered cemetery, I thought about six years before when I watched my parents disappear into this ground. Now I watched Granddaddy’s box being lowered into a hole, and heard the preacher say to Grandma it was “God’s Will.” I looked at the dark sky, and bit my tongue. Granddaddy had been the fence post I’d leaned on since Momma and Daddy died. “Junebug,” he’d said back then, “when things are hardest, all a man can do is not quit, even though nobody would blame him if he did.”

  That night I dreamed I saw Jesus standing on a mountain. Lightning bolts flashed around him. He held out a long staff and roared, “I AM THY GOD AND YOU WILL BOW DOWN.” On the other side of the valley stood the devil, a giant dark being with a river of fire shooting from his hand. He pointed back at Jesus. “YOU ARE THE GOD OF PROMISES, I AM THE GOD OF TRUTH.” I jerked awake shaking, and lay there until daybreak with the light on.

  * * *

  The followin
g summer, after a morning of helping Mr. Wilson harvest tobacco, I sat at the dinner table with them. Grandma always told me never to take the last of anything when I was eating at somebody else’s house, so, as much as I wanted that chicken leg, I laid my fork and knife in my plate. “That was mighty good, Mrs. Wilson.”

  “Glad you liked it, Junebug.” Mrs. Wilson was a frail, fidgety woman with a sharp nose, and hair too white to be natural. She could never be still, constantly getting up to check to see if the coloreds eating at the outside bench needed something, or refilling Mr. Wilson’s tea glass.

  I pushed away from the table. “Think I’ll go sit on the porch swing until it’s time to go back to work.”

  “Good idea, Junebug, everybody needs to rest an hour.” Mr. Wilson reached for the chicken leg. His jaws were already full, puffed out like an ugly squirrel’s, but that didn’t stop him from packing in more. He’d always acted with kindness to Grandma and me, but over time, I’d come to have an inkling of distrust for him, nothing I could put my finger on, but it was there just the same. He’d stopped by the house yesterday to ask if I would help. Since I was broke as usual, the five dollars for a day of priming tobacco would come in good. Mr. Wilson was a short, thick-legged, red-faced man with a floppy face and a full head of straight black hair. He looked like he toted a five-pound sack of flour in his belly, made me wonder how he could see so as not to piss on his shoes.

  I put on my hat and went out the side door to the yard. Fancy was eating at the plank table with her momma, daddy, and the other half-dozen coloreds. I was curious why I hadn’t seen Lightning this morning at the tobacco field. I gave her the eye before walking around to the rear of the house.

  I settled into the wooden swing, shut my eyes, and laid my head against the top rail, pushing back and forth with my toes. A soft breeze stirred through the trees that shaded the yard. Jaybirds squawked at squirrels that chased each other up and down a giant oak, and noisy carpenter bees hunted for dead wood along the eave of the house. It was a good country band.

  Footsteps shuffled through the leaves. I pushed up my hat. “Hey, Fancy.”

  “Hey.” She watched the ground as she walked.

  “Is Lightning sick?”

  “He’s sick all right—sick in the head.” She had on a red cotton dress frayed at the hem, and wore pigtails tied with yellow strips of cloth. “He’s gone.”

  I stopped the swing. “Gone where?”

  Fancy sat down on the bottom step of the gray-painted plank porch, smoothing the dress under her legs. She let out a big sigh and shrugged her shoulders. “Took up with some migrant workers at Old Man Jackson’s place last week. They moved on and he went with ’em, said he needed to see something other than Chatham County before he died.” She used her big toe to mash piss ants that crawled along the ground.

  “What’d your momma and daddy say?” Maybe he’d got one of his mad spells and just decided he’d had enough of white folks.

  “What could they say?” Fancy scratched her foot where one of the ants bit her. “Lightning had made his mind up to go, so Daddy gave him a good pocketknife and told him to watch his self. Said he was nigh on a grown man and didn’t reckon it would do him harm to learn his way. I could tell it hurt Daddy, but he wouldn’t let on. Momma and me cried.”

  Lightning had always talked about seeing the world, so maybe this was his chance. “Did he say where they were headed?” The three of us had turned fifteen, them in May and me in June. Fifteen was considered adult in farm years.

  “Said they’d be working toward Florida by wintertime and out of the cold.” She slapped her leg. “Just plain stupid.”

  I went to sit next to her and mash ants. “Hope he makes out all right. Wish he’d have stopped in and said good-bye. Sure will miss sitting in the woods and shooting the bull.”

  She clamped her big toe over mine and we foot-wrestled, giggling at each other. “I’m still here.”

  “Figured you’d be scared to be traipsing around the woods after dark by yourself.” I tickled her ribs.

  She slapped my hands away. “You won’t let nothing happen to me.” Fancy turned her face up. “I ain’t scared.” Her face had lost its baby fat, leaving high, sharp cheekbones and a slender jawline that made her blackberry-sized eyes look bigger. Her teeth still bowed some, but her head had caught up, giving Fancy a smile to warm your heart.

  “Won’t be the same without Lightning,” I said.

  She covered her top lip with her bottom one. “Going to be mighty lonesome for me.”

  Lightning had always been the windbreak between us, that constant reminder there would be no us without him. I wasn’t sure how Fancy would handle him being gone. “We’ll find something to pass the time.” I squeezed her shoulder.

  Fancy pushed off the step. “I better get back.”

  “Tell you what. If Mr. and Mrs. Wilson take me to Apex in the morning, I’ll bring you something. Meet me tomorrow night on the path, and we’ll sit and talk some.”

  That got a little smile. “I appreciate that, Junebug.”

  I shrugged the gallouses off my shoulders and pulled the dirty T-shirt over my head, no longer needing it since the sun had dried the dew from the tobacco. “You like to read?”

  That gave her the mad-face. “Read better than you, I bet.”

  I held up my hand, laughing at the fire in her eyes. “Wait now, I just wanted to be sure not to waste money.”

  She took a play swipe at my head and grinned. “See you tomorrow night.”

  I watched her walk away, the stride purposeful, long legs that made her almost as tall as me. She was getting to be a handsome woman, like her momma.

  * * *

  Mr. Wilson came around the house, and I followed him, Fancy’s daddy, Roy, and the two other colored men back to the tobacco field. Priming tobacco was a boring job, up one row and down the next, pulling yellow ripe leaves from head-high stalks and dropping them into a tobacco slide dragged along by the mule. The sound of men picking and slapping leaves had a certain rhythm to it, sort of like radio music. I listened to the colored men joke back and forth with each other; it helped pass the time.

  My granddaddy had taught me everything about how to work a tobacco crop, from planting to selling. He also showed me how to fix a window, nail tin on a barn roof, and most other things a man needed to know so he could look after himself. Then he up and died on me last year. I missed him a lot, and thought about him while we sweated beneath a baker’s-brick-hot August sun.

  There was plenty of daylight left when we finished priming the ten acres, and we headed to the barn to hang the tobacco for curing. Mr. Wilson asked who wanted to go high.

  “I will.” I liked to prove myself as much a man as the rest. The log barn stood about thirty feet high at the tallest point of the gable roof, and was about twenty feet square. Smooth, round tier poles ran from front to back on each side, four feet apart so the tobacco sticks could hang between. I pulled up on the lower tier poles, stretched my feet across, and waggle-walked to the top. Fancy’s daddy came behind. It was hell-hot in the roof.

  “Ready?” Roy looked up. He was a powerful but no longer young man, close to Mr. Wilson and Grandma’s age I imagined. His black hair didn’t start until halfway to the back of his head. I hadn’t asked about the situation with Lightning, not sure if he’d appreciate me saying anything in front of the other men.

  “Shit.” My sweaty foot slipped on the pole. “Whenever you are.” By the time the barn was full, water ran off Roy and me like we’d been dunked in a pond. The end of the day was welcome.

  Mr. Wilson took me aside and slipped me a ten-dollar bill. I tried to hand the money back. “I ain’t got no change.”

  He pulled the wad of chewing tobacco from his cheek, tossed it away, and spit. “Not looking for any. You ain’t scared of hard work. I have an appreciation for that, and the way you’re looking after Miss Rosa Belle since your granddaddy died. I got to get these niggers home; expect your supper’s waiting
. The missus and me are going to town in the morning if you want to ride along.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  Grandma did have supper on the table. She’d cooked pork chops to go along with boiled potatoes and greens. The chops were in thick slices. Granddaddy always cut them that way, said he liked a little chew to his meat.

  Grandma sat and looked at me like she was giving an appraisal. “You’re growing into a good-sized man, son. Folks can’t ever say I don’t feed you good.” She sounded pleased with my progress.

  I had noticed the growing bulge in my arms, and the ridges that had started to line my stomach. A new mark for the top of my head on the door to my bedroom measured six feet from the floor, and when I used Grandma’s weight scale, it showed a hundred and seventy-five pounds. “Don’t want to eat us out of house and home.”

  When Grandma grinned, her nose wrinkled and pushed up the gold-rimmed eyeglasses. “Don’t you worry, we’ve got plenty. Did the Wilsons say if they are going to Apex tomorrow?”

  “They’re coming by to pick me up in the morning. You need anything from town?”

  Grandma got up and started piling dishes in the washbowl. She was broad across the shoulders and wide in the butt, built sort of like a square, a bit heavy but never slow or lazy. There was a picture of her hanging in the living room. She was young then, around sixteen she said, and sat on a buckboard smiling at the world. I was always surprised at how pretty she was in those days.

  She gazed out the window over the sink, watching a big orange sun drop lower on the horizon. Maybe she was thinking about Granddaddy too. “Wouldn’t mind having some fresh peaches. Haven’t made a cobbler since last year.”

  “I’ll check at Salem’s.”

  “Pick up a few if they ain’t too expensive. I’ll give you money.” She looked over her shoulder at me.

  “No need. Mr. Wilson paid me a little extra today.”