Some Sweet Day

by Bryan Woolley

  The loft was shady, except for the wide beam of white light that poured through the open door where Daddy dropped hay into the milk pen. And it was sweltering. I lay on my back on the hay and watched the sunlight gleam through the nail holes in the roof and listened to the chickens caw-cawing sullenly and Old Blue stomping and snorting. I thought maybe I’d just stay there until Mother and Daddy got home and just let them wonder what had happened to me. I’d just lie there and listen to them calling my name while they searched the farm, and I wouldn’t answer. And after a long while, I’d just die in the heat, from hunger maybe, and they would carry my body to the house and lay me down on my bed. They would cry and say, “Oh, if only we hadn’t run off and left him!” It would be too late. I’d be dead forever.

  But the heat really was terrible, and the hay raised an itch on my sweaty back. I climbed down and went to see Old Blue. He stuck his head over the fence, and I rubbed his nose. His mane was tangled, so I got the curry comb out of his shed and combed it out for him. Then he wearied of me and wandered over to the other side of his pen, so I returned to the house.

  I had never been left at home alone before, and I just couldn’t think of anything to do. I searched the yard for Nero, but couldn’t find her. I wandered to the corner where the soft dirt was and played with the red truck I got for Christmas one time that Rick liked so much. But that was no fun without him and Belinda to play with and argue with, and thinking of them made me feel even worse. I lay on my bed and looked at the pictures in my books, but the house was too quiet, and I thought of death again. I considered going down to the branch and falling and hitting my head on a rock and drowning and letting them find me there and bring me back to the house all wet and dead. I pictured the Allisons coming over to help with the burial and all those kids playing hide-and-seek in the redbud trees while Daddy and Bill Allison dug my grave. “Pipe down!” Daddy yelled at them. “I don’t want no laughing while I’m burying my own true son!” Then I reconsidered. Maybe the Darlington cemetery would be better. I’d have one of those pretty tombstones with a little glass window and a picture of the deceased behind it.

  HERE LIES

  GATEWOOD LAFAYETTE TURNBOLT

  (little window and picture)

  STRICKEN

  AT THE AGE OF ONLY SIX

  1944

  “Oh, Will!” Mother cried. “Why did we have to run off and leave him? I just bought those pants at the rummage sale!” And Daddy stood there with Rick in his arms, patting him on the back. And Belinda looked up at Daddy and asked, “Can I sleep on the sleeping porch now?”

  I went back to the yard, picked up a rock and threw it up onto the roof. It bounced high, hit the shingles, bounced twice more, then dropped to the ground. I threw another one, and it did the same. I threw another one, and another one. I threw a flat one that didn’t bounce. It remained on the roof. Then I threw others, trying to knock it off. Then one slipped just as I let it fly, and it shattered the living room window.

  The crash and tinkle of all that glass was the scariest sound I’ve ever heard. I was too frightened to move, or even think. I gazed at that hole where glass used to be but now wasn’t, and I envied Lon Allison.

  Then I remembered a little square orange can on a shelf in the tractor shed, and I remembered that I asked Daddy once what was in the can, and he said it was glue that would glue anything. I got the can and sat down on the living room floor and gathered the slivers in front of me and tried to figure out how they should fit together. I couldn’t make them fit. I seemed not to have enough glass to fill that hole. So I dashed outside again, down the path to the trash pile by the toilet. I raked the pile with my feet, looking for every piece of broken glass, whimpering. I took off my shirt and gathered into it pieces of bottles and vinegar jugs and Mentholatum jars and pie plates and lugged them to the house and laid them on the floor with the broken window. Then I got a knife from the kitchen and pried the lid off the orange can. It wasn’t glue at all. It was powder. Some kind of white powder.

  The car doors slammed. I pulled the shade over the window and frantically picked up the glass fragments and put them back in my shirt. Suddenly Mother and Belinda and Rick were standing there. And Daddy. They just watched me as I knelt, still picking up glass and putting it in my shirt, and whimpering.

  “What happened here, son?” Daddy asked softly.

  “I … The window broke.”

  “How?”

  “I didn’t mean to! You all went off and left me and I didn’t have anything to do and didn’t have anybody to play with and I was just fooling around and I was throwing some rocks up on the roof and watching them come down and this rock slipped out of my hand and hit the window and…”

  I talked faster and faster. I was crying and trying to catch my breath and felt dizzy.

  Daddy smiled. “That’s enough, son. It’s all right.” He lifted me into his arms. “I’ve got to bring the cows up. Come along with me. Your ma’ll clean this up.”

  On the porch he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes. Then he held it over my nose and told me to blow. “Feel better?” I nodded. “Well, let’s go take a look at the damage.”

  He looked up at the window a long time, then looked down at me. “Pretty big hole, ain’t it?” he said. I nodded. “But just one pane,” he said. “It ain’t so bad. I see there’s a rock still on the roof.” I nodded. “But it ain’t doing any harm. I used to throw rocks up there myself when I was a kid. Never broke a window, though.” He laughed, and I smiled back at him. “Come on.”

  We started toward the pasture gate. “Is Lon buried now?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Right in his own backyard. Where’s your new pants?”

  “Behind the hay in the loft.”

  He laughed. “They must have been pretty bad.”

  “Tore out the whole seat.”

  He halted. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I want to get something at the barn. Come on.”

  He closed the feed-room door behind us, and it was very dark. “Bend over that sack there,” he said.

  “No, Daddy! Please don’t! I didn’t mean to!”

  “Now, hush and bend over there. This might have to last you a long time, and it might as well be one you’ll remember.”

  He shoved me against the sack. I’d never been whipped with the quirt before, and it stung like nothing I’ve ever felt. I squirmed all over the sack, my feet kicking. I heard myself screaming and Daddy saying, “Hush, now.”

  He stopped and hung the quirt by the door and waited. “Now, dry your eyes and get on back to the house. We’ll have no more crying today.”

  Despite my stinging ass and legs, I felt calm and clean inside, like a fruit jar that’s just been scalded and is standing empty, waiting to be filled with something. Belinda and Rick were in the corner where the soft dirt was, playing with my red truck. I sat down with them, and they stopped playing and looked at me, and I looked at them. Then Rick extended a closed hand and said, “Here.” I stuck out my hand, and he put into it a limp piece of something stringy and as long as my little finger. It was damp and brown and dirty.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Shoestring potato,” Belinda said. “Mrs. Allison gave us some. Rick saved it for you.”

  I looked at the potato and then at Rick and then at the potato again. It looked like a worm. Rick watched me solemnly from under his dark curls.

  “It’s to eat,” he said.

  I put the thing in my mouth and chewed it up. I never tasted anything so good.

  Uncle Toy and Uncle Oscar drove up in their big green car while we were still at the breakfast table. Daddy heard them first and went to meet them. “I’ll be damned!” he called out the front door. “What brings you slickers out to the country so bright and early?”

  “We got your card yesterday,” Uncle Toy said. “We figured if we were going to have a chance to say goodbye, we’d better hightail it. Left Waco at five o’clock this morning. Hello, Will.”

 
“Howdy, Toy. Howdy, Oscar.”

  “Howdy, Will.”

  “Well, come on in. You had anything to eat yet? We’re at it now.”

  “Haven’t, as a matter of fact. We’d be obliged,” Uncle Oscar said.

  We all jumped up when they came in, and Uncle Oscar picked up Rick and then Belinda and lifted them high over his head. “Lordy, you kids have grown!” he said. “You all are probably too old to be interested in a red sucker now, I reckon…” He reached into the side pocket of his brown-and-white-striped seersucker suit coat and brought out three red suckers, wrapped in cellophane, and examined them quizzically. “What am I going to do with these things?” he asked. “Take them back to Waco, I guess, and give them to some kids that are little.” We watched him silently. “Hate to do that, though,” he muttered.

  “You can give them to us, Uncle Oscar,” I said. “We’re not that big.”

  “Oh? Well, all right, if you say so.” He handed them over.

  “Don’t take the paper off until you finish your breakfast, you hear?” Mother said.

  We laid them by our plates, and Uncle Oscar and Uncle Toy sat down and loaded their plates with biscuits and gravy and fried salt pork.

  “I’ll fry you some eggs,” Mother said, moving to rise.

  “No, no, this is plenty,” Uncle Toy said. “There’s nothing like country cooking to make a man wish he’d never left the farm.”

  Mother and Daddy looked at each other and smiled slightly. Uncle Toy was short and pink and fat and bald, except for a row of yellow curls that stretched from ear to ear around the back of his head. His suit was blue, like a preachers’, even to the little flag pin on the lapel. His shirt and shoes were glistening white, his tie the same red as the stripes on the flag. He ran a funeral home, and as I watched his pudgy hands break more biscuits for gravy, I wondered if he washed them after handling his dead people.

  Uncle Oscar was older, and balding too, but he looked more like Daddy. His narrow shoulders hunched forward while he ate, the rumpled seersucker sagged away from the collar of his white shirt. He wore no tie. His shirt pocket bulged with pencils, fountain pens and bits of paper, yellow, pink and white. The movements of his long arms swung the coat open sometimes, revealing more pencils and papers in his inside breast pocket. He owned a feed store. His skin was brown, like Daddy’s, but wrinkled, and his eyes were larger and looked very sad, even when he smiled at us.

  Business wasn’t too good, they said. The war had made it impossible to get good help, they said. Daddy sipped his coffee and peered at them through the gray-blue smoke of his cigarette. He said nothing, and they didn’t look at him or at any of us while they ate. Finally, Daddy interrupted Uncle Toy.

  “You all didn’t come down here to tell me goodbye, did you?”

  “Well, not just that, Will.” Uncle Oscar glanced quickly at Daddy, then gazed again into his gravy. “We’ve got some business to discuss.”

  “What business?”

  “How’s the cotton coming, Will?” Uncle Toy asked.

  “Fine.”

  “How’s the oats?”

  “Fine.”

  “The hay?”

  “Fine.”

  Daddy’s voice was more tense each time he said it. His cigarette butt sizzled as he pressed it into a little puddle of coffee in his saucer, then he pulled his tobacco sack from his overalls and began rolling another, his eyes squinting and aimed through his gold-rimmed glasses at Uncle Toy while he licked the paper.

  “Well, who’s going to take care of the crops after you go in?” Uncle Toy’s pink tongue licked white gravy from his pink lips.

  “Jim Bob Calhoun… Harley May…the Bowies…”

  “The neighbors, in other words?”

  “That’s right.” Daddy’s eyes flickered.

  Uncle Toy shook his head slowly. “That won’t do,” he said. “Neighbors have their own problems. You can’t depend on them when you need them.”

  “We can.”

  “It could mean the end of your crops, Will.”

  “You mean our crops, don’t you, Toy?”

  “All right, our crops, but…”

  “What Toy’s trying to tell you is that we think we ought to have somebody on the farm full-time while you’re gone.” Uncle Oscar glanced at Mother. “A man, that is.”

  “Where you figuring to put up a hired hand on this place? And who would pay him? You?”

  “We weren’t figuring on a hired hand, Will. A sharecropper, maybe.”

  Daddy reddened. Mother paled. “You kids better take your suckers and go out and play,” she said.

  It must have been about an hour before my uncles left the house, Uncle Oscar looking at the ground and Uncle Toy bowing and walking backward as if conducting the bereaved into the viewing room to inspect his work on their loved one. They shooed us off the fenders of their car and drove away, and I was nearly grown before I really understood the meaning of that morning’s conversation.

  Gatewood Lafayette Turnbolt, my grandfather, had worn out two wives on that farm; each of them had borne two children. The first, whose name I still do not know, bore Toy and Oscar. The second, Louisa Adamson Turnbolt, bore my father and Mary Louise, who died when she was eight and lies buried under the redbud trees near the junction of our lane with the Darlington road. My grandfather was a frugal man, and saved enough to educate two of his sons—Oscar at a business school in Waco, Toy at an embalming school in Fort Worth. They never again put hand to plow or hoe. My grandfather and my father worked the farm, and when my grandfather fell ill and left all the work to my father, he promised he would make a will leaving his farm to his youngest survivor.

  But when my grandfather died that afternoon on his cot in the living room, his face turned toward the window and the redbud trees a quarter-mile beyond, there was no will, and Oscar and Toy returned to bury their father and claim their inheritance. Although they owned two-thirds of the farm, they told my father he could keep it as his home and work it and keep half of all he produced.

  In other words, my father was a sharecropper. His brothers were gentlemen farmers who visited their land during quail and dove season and brought their dead birds into our house to be cooked by my mother and eaten at our table. They weren’t loved and loving uncles come to share the beauty of our land and the taste of our game. They were our masters, shooting their birds on their land. And when my father could no longer husband their property, another sharecropper had to be found to take his place.

  The farm of which my father owned one-third was a hundred twenty acres of dry, dark country. Generally, there were sixty acres of cotton, twenty acres of oats or barley, a small patch of alfalfa, and the rest was pasture. One-third of that is forty acres. There was a large, old but tight barn with several pens around it, a windmill and water tank, a corn crib so old it leaned. It was infested with rats, which meant that it also was infested with copperheads, which often lay glistening across the path that wound from the house, by the corn crib, to the toilet, an ancient structure which sagged amidst a juniper brake fifty yards from the house. There was a tractor shed and workshop outside the front yard fence, and another small shed (the function of which I can’t remember) behind the house, near Mother’s garden.

  The house was of unpainted pine, aged silver-gray. A long, drooping porch was its entrance. There was only one bedroom, a large living room, a kitchen with running cold water and a kerosene range, a long room once used for storage which served as a dining room when the crowd was too large for the kitchen. Rick and I slept there in winter. In summer we slept on the screened-in sleeping porch off the kitchen. Belinda slept always in the bedroom with my parents. The kerosene range and a wood stove in the living room warmed us in winter. Three kerosene lamps were our light. I cleaned their chimneys, trimmed their wicks and filled them with oil every Saturday.

  It was said that Turnbolts had lived on the place since the time of the Civil War. I don’t know whether that is true. It was said that many Turnbolts w
ere buried in the vicinity of the redbud trees. But my father’s sister, his father, his mother and the wife who was before her possess the only markers there.

  It was my birthday. I got up early and peered through the screen to see what kind of day I was going to have. The air was so clear and the sun so bright that you would have thought somebody had come along during the night and given the whole world a fresh coat of paint. The chickens looked like big glistening snowballs wobbling slowly around the barnyard, and Nero, chasing her own shadow or some animal or bird that I couldn’t see, bounded near the back doorstep. The windmill whirred in the warm breeze, and the suckle rod, whispering its gentle “thunk-thunk,” lifted the water and splashed it into the tank. It looked like a good day to be seven on.

  Rick’s dark hair was barely visible at the top of his sheet. He slept soundly. The quiet told me I was the first up, but then the front screen slammed, and soon I heard Daddy’s fiddle. He was playing something slow and sad, something not right for a morning like that. I sneaked out the door and moved slowly toward the front of the house and sat down on the ground near the corner and listened. Daddy finished the sad tune. Then he started a happy one, “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” I think, but stopped in the middle and didn’t play anything for a minute. Then he played another sad one.

  The dog found me and started romping around and climbing on me and licking me, trying to get me to play with her. I tried to shoo her away without making any noise, but Daddy noticed the commotion and came around.

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” I said.

  “I know.”

  He was all dressed up in his blue suit and white shirt and red-and-blue tie, and he had on some new brown shoes and a gray felt hat with a brim that came over his forehead. I’d never seen him so dressed up.

  “You going somewhere today?”

  “Yes.”

  He plunked the fiddle strings with his thumb, as if trying to make sure it was in tune. I began to understand what day it was.

  “To the Army?”