by Tony Earley
All three of the uncles wear the small, pocketless, old-fashioned baseball gloves they have had since they were boys. Uncle Al’s mitt was made for a right-handed fielder, but he has worn it on the wrong hand for so long that he no longer notices that it doesn’t fit. Each uncle would still gladly play a game of baseball, should anyone ask, although no one has asked for years. They keep their tiny, relic gloves properly oiled, however, as if such invitations were not only commonplace, but imminent.
The boy studies Uncle Zeno until Uncle Zeno’s face seems to light up from the inside, weakly, like a moon seen through clouds. It changes into a hundred unfamiliar faces, twists into a hundred strange smiles, until the boy blinks hard and wills his eyes to see only what is there.
“Okay, Doc,” Uncle Zeno says. “Keep your eye on the ball. Here it comes.”
The baseball in Uncle Zeno’s hand is almost invisible, a piece of smoke, a shadow. The woods on the far side of the pasture are already dark as sleep; the river twists through them by memory. Uncle Zeno tosses the ball gently toward the boy, who does not see it until its arc carries it above the black line of trees, where it hangs for a moment like an eclipse in the faintly glowing sky. The boy is arm-weary; he swings as hard as he is able. The bat and ball collide weakly. The ball drops to the ground at the boy’s feet. It lies there stunned, quivering, containing flight beneath its smooth skin. The boy switches the bat into his left hand, picks up the ball with his right, and throws it back to Uncle Zeno.
“I hit it just about every time,” the boy says.
“Batter, batter, batter, batter,” Uncle Al chirps in the field.
“Say, whatta-say, whatta-say, whatta-say,” chants Uncle Coran in the ancient singsong of ballplayers. The uncles are singing to the boy. He has never heard anything so beautiful. He does not want it to stop.
“Okay, Doc,” says Uncle Zeno. “One more. Now watch”
BOOK II
Jim Leaves Home
The Wide Sea
JIM AND Uncle Al did not set out on their journey until after supper, when the heat of the day had broken at last, when the evening air would make traveling seem more adventure than hardship. Jim did not know where they were going, only that it was far away. Mama had packed for them a dozen ham biscuits in waxed paper, and filled a gallon jar with water. A paper bag behind the truck seat contained a pair of underwear, a pair of socks, and a clean shirt for Jim. Uncle Al had filled two vacuum bottles with black coffee, and in his pocket carried Uncle Coran’s pistol. The pistol was verification of the journey’s high seriousness: it usually nestled in the cash drawer at the store, and appeared, like a rare and dangerous bird, only when one of the uncles needed to shoot a snake.
Uncle Al would say only that they were going to see a man about a dog. Jim knew from experience that wasn’t their true destination — there never was a dog — but he did not mind the mystery. He had never traveled more than thirty miles away from Aliceville in any direction; he thought he would be happy to see the sights at whatever place their travels landed them.
They passed through Shelby an hour after leaving home. For Jim, it was the point in the east beyond which lay new worlds. He had visited the town twice before, and again found it superior in every way. Unlike Aliceville, Shelby had wide, paved streets; big, painted houses with green lawns watched over them from beneath the cool shade of old trees. Downtown, Jim was surprised to see many of the stores still open for business, even as darkness approached. As they circled the courthouse, he briefly glimpsed, through an open door, the polished counter of a soda shop. Jim could no more imagine sitting inside a soda shop than in the house of a king, and did not ask Uncle Al to stop.
As they headed again into the red-hilled, open country, they passed a sign pointing the way to Charlotte. Uncle Zeno had taken Mama there one Saturday before she married Jim’s father. She had bought her wedding dress in a department store. She had ridden elevators. She had almost been run down by a streetcar, which clanged past with blue electricity spitting and sparking from the wires overhead. Jim had heard the story about Mama’s trip to Charlotte all his life.
He leaned over so that the warm wind whistling in through the open window blew directly into his face. When he closed one eye, the black line along the edge of the state highway disappeared into the front fender of the truck, as if the tire inside were coiling it up like a rope. When he stuck his head out of the window and looked back, he saw the line unrolling neatly behind them, marking the way they had come. They would be able to find their way home.
Small, well-tended farms, much like the ones Jim had grown up among, sat along both sides of the highway like strangers whose faces seem familiar. The farmhouses were unpainted, and sat up off the ground on red brick pillars. At the back of each house, a dim kerosene glow lit a single window. Black strings of cooking smoke uncoiled from the chimneys and disappeared into the dusky sky. Jim knew that the people who lived inside those houses were sitting down to supper and talking about the day. They worked in the cotton fields through which Jim and Uncle Al traveled. Jim studied the farms carefully; each served as last outpost along a moving frontier.
Two thoughts came to Jim at once, joined by a thread of amazement: he thought, People live here, and he thought, They don’t know who I am. At that moment the world opened up around Jim like hands that, until that moment, had been cupped around him; he felt very small, almost invisible, in the open air of their center, but knew that the hands would not let him go. It was almost like flying. The expansion strips in the road bumped under the wheels of the truck in a rhythm that said, “Char-Lotte, Char-Lotte, Char-Lotte.” The wind was rich and fragrant, familiar with the smells of dirt and fertilizer and mules, although they were a long way from the place Jim had naturally considered the source of those smells. He heard himself say out loud, “It tastes good,” but Uncle Al apparently did not hear him. By the time they reached Kings Mountain, Jim was asleep.
The fierce clacking of a textile mill outside Gastonia briefly roused Jim from his slumber. The mill was three stories high, and longer than a train; the whole town of Aliceville could have fit easily inside its brick walls. It sat on the far side of an ominous, still pond, whose water disappeared without warning over the tall side of a dam. The blazing windows of the mill were reflected with alarming clarity in the pond’s black water. The noise of the machines was frightening, even above the comforting grumble of the truck. Jim lay down and put his head in Uncle Al’s lap. “I don’t want to go in there,” he said.
“I hope you don’t ever have to,” said Uncle Al.
By the time Jim swept his dreaming clean of noise, Uncle Al pulled on his ear. “Jim,” he said, “wake up. Charlotte.”
Jim rose up and tried to look. The truck floated down a peaceful river, through a deep ravine, but the ravine was filled with fog, which made it difficult to see. Trees grew thickly in the shadows along the river’s banks, and dim lights hung from their branches like ripe fruit. Streetcars floated all around them. The streetcars were sound asleep, and Jim hoped the truck wouldn’t wake them up. The river smelled cool and inviting; it reminded him of rain on a road at the end of a hot day. He wanted to float down it until morning, when the fog would burn off in the sun and he could see everything. He wanted to pluck a light from a tree limb and take it home. Mama had not told him about the river and the trees and the lights; she had not told him that streetcars floated through the streets of Charlotte. From somewhere along the bank a horse spoke to him kindly.
He woke to a silence as loud as the clanging of a bell. Not until he sat up and found Uncle Al standing in the glow of the headlights, along the black edge of the world, could he hear anything at all. Uncle Al was drinking coffee and eating a ham biscuit. Beyond him lay perfect darkness, night without trees or mountains or stars, nothing to keep the sky from settling onto the ground. It had collapsed already onto the road behind them. Jim climbed out of the truck and hurried into the light. Uncle Al fished into a pocket, pulled out a biscuit,
and handed it to Jim.
“Where are we?” Jim asked.
“South Carolina,” said Uncle Al. “Not much to it, huh?”
“No, sir.”
The air was warm and thick, a coat you couldn’t take off. The light vibrated with moths; the darkness shook with the rhythmic sawing of crickets and cicadas.
“Good dirt through here, though. Can you smell it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I always did love the smell of dirt. I can tell good dirt just by smelling it. I can smell weeds, too. Did you know I could smell weeds?”
“No, sir.”
“Weeds. Boll weevils. Grasshoppers. Whatever. I can smell everything.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I wish I could wake up, though. That’s what I wish right now.” Uncle Al took off his hat and hollered out into South Carolina, “OH, LORD, I WISH I COULD WAKE UP!”
They waited, but not even an echo answered back. God was asleep. It was the middle of the night. Jim giggled.
Uncle Al put his hat back on. He took another swallow of coffee and turned quickly on Jim. He said, “Do you ever wish you had a daddy?”
The words stung Jim as if they had been made of bones and meat.
“My daddy’s dead,” he said.
“I know, Jim,” Uncle Al said. “Your daddy was a good man, and everybody wishes he was still alive. What I meant was, do you ever wish you had somebody else for a daddy?”
Nobody had ever asked Jim that before. It was not a question his mother would have allowed. He gave the idea some thought.
“No,” he said finally. “I’ve already got three daddies.”
Uncle Al stared at Jim but didn’t say anything.
Jim thought he had said something wrong. “You and Uncle Zeno and Uncle Coran.”
Still, Uncle Al did not respond. Uncle Al did not even appear to occupy the face that stared back at Jim.
Jim swallowed. “Boy,” he said, “South Carolina sure has a lot of bugs.”
Uncle Al laughed suddenly: a lone, sharp noise, like a bark.
“Let me tell you something, Jim,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody says. You’re all right. Now eat your biscuit before I jerk a knot in your tail.”
Jim woke slowly, rising through a comfortable lull of noise toward a star he realized he had been watching for some time. The truck motor droned; warm air rushed in through the window and over his cheek and whistled back out. Uncle Al was in the middle of a story whose beginning Jim already knew; Jim closed his eyes and stepped aboard as it passed:
“… so Zeno did what Cissy asked and did not write Amos Glass until after we had buried Jim and you were born. And in the letter Zeno told Amos not to come, that Cissy was upset and not well at all and did not want to see him. But Amos, who probably never once in his life did anything somebody else told him to do, showed up at the store one afternoon right after dinner. He had hired Robley Gentine to bring him down the mountain.
“All three of us were at the store that day, we just didn’t get a lot done farming that summer, and Amos comes hobbling in, old as Methuselah, using an old hoe handle like a staff, and he says, ‘I’m Amos Glass. Take me to the boy.”
“And Zeno says, ‘Amos, I told you in the letter that Cissy didn’t want you to see the boy.’
“So Amos says right back, ‘I ain’t going to tell you again.’
“Now all three of us stand up then and Coran eases open the cash drawer because we don’t know what’s going to happen next, except that we weren’t going to be pushed around on our own property, not by Amos Glass nor anybody else. But Robley Gentine, he’s your great-uncle on your daddy’s side, he backs up a step and says, ‘Now wait a minute, boys. I ain’t got no dog in this fight,’ and Amos sees what the score is right quick. There was three of us and one of him and he was old. So he stares at us for a minute with those blue eyes of his, and you could see the very devil looking out, but then all of a sudden he starts to cry, just sobbing right there in the middle of the store, and he says, ‘My Jimmy’s gone. My Jimmy’s gone. Please let me see the boy. Please let me see the boy.’
“Now, we didn’t know what to do then. We knew that Cissy would kill us all if we brought Amos Glass in the house, but on the other hand the old man was so pitiful, it would just break your heart. So we told Amos to hold on and wait a minute and we went back in the storeroom and talked about it, and Coran remembered that Cissy was asleep, she slept most of the day for a long time, and we decided that maybe it wouldn’t do any harm if we let Amos look in through the window.
“So we took Amos down to Zeno’s, and we got a chair off the front porch, and we peeked in Cissy’s window to make sure she was asleep, and then the four of us together, me and Zeno and Coran and Robley Gentine, we get Amos Glass up in that chair and we hold on to him and he looks in the window and he sees you lying there in the bed beside your Mama, it was the only time he ever saw you, and we hear him whisper, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy …’”
And Jim smiles and steps off of the story and listens to it move out of hearing as he slips again into sleep.
The first bright sunlight of the new day found them at an abandoned country store near Florence. The small, weathered building sat hard by the highway, beneath an old oak tree with wide, spreading limbs. A single crow sat in the top of the tree, and flew away when they pulled into the lot, as if to tell someone they had come. Uncle Al drove the truck into the shade of the tree. The engine, when he turned it off, ticked hotly in the quiet morning.
The store crouched among broad, fallow fields coming up in cockleburs and broom straw and small cedar trees. Jim knew that the presence of cedar trees meant that the land was cotton ground that had been farmed too many years in a row. Now the ground was too poor to make a crop; the farmers who had tilled it were gone, and the store where the farmers shopped was closed. The uncles never planted cotton on the same ground two years in a row, and tended to look down on farmers who did.
Uncle Al took off his hat and laid it on the seat beside him.
“I’m going to take a nap,” he said. “Can you keep a good lookout until I wake up?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now you better not let anything sneak up on you. If something gets a hold of me while I’m asleep, you’re in big trouble.”
Jim climbed out of the truck where it would be easier to keep an eye on things. He left the truck door open in case he had to get back in a hurry. The oak tree he stood beneath seemed to mark the exact center of the empty fields; the blue bowl of the sky balanced directly above it, which made the place seem important, even though nothing in the landscape, save the tree itself, suggested import. A dark line of undergrowth in the distance to the east marked the passage of a creek, but nothing else called out to the eye for notice; the old store leaned slightly toward the tree, as if dependent upon it for company.
On the porch of the store Jim found a thermometer advertising Red Rock Cola nailed like a message to the middle of the door. He studied it seriously; already it read eighty-five degrees. “It’s going to be a hot one,” Jim said out loud, for no other reason than to make himself brave. For all he knew, a hobo or a robber or a ghost was hiding inside the building. There was a depression on. Mama said depression made people mean. Jim tiptoed to the building’s only window, sucked his lungs full of courage, and peeked through the glass. Inside was a counter made of rough lumber and a few rickety-looking shelves, but nothing else. So far, Jim thought, so good.
Behind the store he found the bleached skull of a small animal; he could find no evidence of what had killed it, and decided the culprit must have been a snake. Jim put the skull on the end of a stick and poked through the weeds around the store, but the snake evaded his searching. Twice he heard cars approaching on the highway, and both times he ran and hid behind the front of the truck, ready to wake Uncle Al, but both times the cars passed without slowing. Jim watched until they disappeared from view, just to make sure the drivers weren’t trying to trick him.
Mr. Harvey Hartsell’s place wasn’t hard to find. He lived at the end of a long dirt road whose only purpose seemed to be taking travelers directly to his plantation. The house was red brick, with tall, white pillars and porches upstairs and down. It sat at the end of a long white driveway of crushed seashells. The drive was shaded by pecan trees, whose long limbs met above it; the trees formed a cool, green tunnel through which Uncle Al drove. Jim felt suddenly ashamed of his overalls, and of the sweat ring around the crown of Uncle Al’s straw hat, and of the ham biscuits they had just eaten. Mr. Harvey Hartsell’s plantation did not seem to be a place they belonged. Uncle Al knocked at the tall double doors of the house for a long time. Jim was glad when no one answered.
Back at the main road, Uncle Al turned the truck toward a collection of cabins and farm buildings in the distance. The cabins they passed on the way to the main barn seemed locked up tight, although a dog slept on the porch of one, and a load of wash hung from a line in the yard of another. Uncle Al stopped beside an old truck parked in the shade of the barn. Nobody answered when he called out, but when they walked behind the barn they found an old man leaning against the whitewashed gate of a corral. Inside the corral lay two dead horses. A single buzzard sat immobile on top of each horse as if waiting for the old man to say a grace. Jim pinched his nose and held it closed. The scaly red heads of the buzzards were fierce and ugly.