by Tony Earley
“That was the last we ever saw of Bill McKinney in this country. Seeing that sign on the side of the depot pained him so much that he got off the train at New Carpenter and refused to get back on it. They had to send a man all the way from Hamlet to drive it back. They say Bill McKinney walked all the way back home overland, staying on the other side of the river to keep away from Aliceville. He and his wife packed up and moved away from here, and he got a job driving trains in Oklahoma or somewhere, that’s what his people said, and if he ever came back through this country, I never heard of it.
“Everybody felt just awful, and nobody knew what to do. They talked about changing the name back to Sandy Bottom, or changing it to something else, but that just didn’t seem right. They worried about how it would make Bill McKinney feel if they changed it, and they worried that it would dishonor Alice, which nobody wanted to do. But at the same time, not changing it didn’t seem like much of a bargain, either, because the sign reminded everybody of what had happened. So nobody did anything, and the sign stayed up on the side of the depot, and after a while people stopped thinking about it, which is just how people are.
“But let me tell you something, Jim. It don’t happen every day, it don’t happen every week, but there’s still days that hearing that train whistle makes me remember how I felt looking up at Alice that one time. And I remember the awful look on Bill McKinney’s face. I’m forty-three years old now, and all this happened thirty-seven, thirty-eight years ago, but sometimes I can see it just as clear.”
Jim lay back on the rock, his face covered with his arm, pretending to be bothered by the sun.
“Oh, well,” Uncle Zeno said, patting Jim on the leg. “That was a long time ago.”
Jim rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“How old would Alice be now if she hadn’t died?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Forty-four, forty-five, not too old, just a little older than I am.”
“Do you think you would have married her?”
Uncle Zeno looked startled. “What in the world kind of question is that?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Jim. “I was just wondering if you would have married Alice if she hadn’t died.” “I never met Alice. What made you think of that?” Jim shrugged. “Whenever you tell that story, I just wish you could have married Alice.”
Uncle Zeno looked off somewhere and smiled.
“Well, you know, Doc,” he said. “Just between me and you, I wish I could have, too.”
“Why didn’t you and Uncle Coran and Uncle Al ever get married?”
“I don’t know. I guess a man can get too busy when marrying time comes, or there might not be enough girls to go around for everybody. Before you know it you get locked in to what you’re doing and you just keep doing it. It’s best not to think about it too much. You ready to go back?”
An Unexpected Guest
WHEN JIM and Uncle Zeno walked in the back door, Jim knew something was wrong. Jim thought at first that they had stayed away too long, but when Mama furrowed her brow slightly at Uncle Zeno and tilted her head toward Uncle Al’s house Jim knew it had nothing to do with them.
Jim followed Uncle Zeno out onto the front porch, where they found Uncle Coran sitting on the steps, cleaning his fingernails with a knife. Uncle Coran whistled in a descending tone, like a bomb falling, and pointed with his chin toward Uncle Al’s. Uncle Al was sitting on his porch with Whitey Whiteside. Uncle Al and Whitey Whiteside looked over at them and waved.
“What’s going on?” Jim asked.
Everybody seemed as if they were about to laugh at a joke he didn’t quite understand.
“It looks like Whitey Whiteside is going to go to Big Day with us, is all,” Uncle Zeno said. “Is that all right with you?”
Jim didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He shrugged and watched the Ferris wheel turning on top of the hill. It didn’t seem so urgent that he ride it now, although he couldn’t say why.
“Let’s shake a leg, then,” said Uncle Zeno.
Jim led the way up the hill to the school, lugging the peach basket that held their lunch. With each step he took, the basket banged against his leg like a drum. Behind Jim, Mama walked between Uncle Coran and Uncle Zeno, clinging tightly to their arms. Uncle Al and Whitey Whiteside brought up the rear about ten yards farther back. Uncle Al carried a gallon jar of tea in the crook of his arm as if it were a baby.
“What I want to know,” Mama said in a low voice, “is whose idea was it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Uncle Coran.
“You do too know what I’m talking about, Coran McBride.”
“Hush,” said Uncle Zeno.
Jim looked over his shoulder at Mama. He didn’t recognize the look on her face. She didn’t quite look mad, although she didn’t quite look as if she wasn’t mad, either.
“Is there something wrong with your nose, Doc?” Uncle Zeno said.
“No, sir,” Jim said, pointing it again up the hill. The red school loomed above them. The wide doors were propped open; the yard was alive with people.
“I will not be made a fool of,” Mama said. “I will not be ganged up on and humiliated in public.”
“Oh, Cissy,” Uncle Coran said softly, “it’s nothing like that.”
“What’s it like then?” Mama asked. “Tell me, Coran.”
Jim turned around and marched backward up the hill. The uncles looked grim. Whitey Whiteside looked frightened. Mama blinked wetly. It came to Jim then that Mama was upset because Whitey Whiteside was going with them to Big Day. And once he wondered why Whitey Whiteside’s presence would upset Mama, other questions began pulling into his head like trains into a station. Only none of the questions had words, only empty places, followed by empty places where answers should have been. They rushed past him like pieces of fog, things he could see but could not grab. Eventually a huge question began to take shape inside his chest and fill itself with air. He opened his mouth to say something, but did not know exactly what.
But before Jim could speak, Uncle Zeno narrowed his eyes at him and pointed up the hill with his free arm.
“You better turn around and watch where you’re going, Doc,” he said.
“Hush, you two,” he said to Mama and Uncle Coran. “The corn has ears.”
“Jim and I have already had a look around up here,” Whitey Whiteside said when they reached the school yard. “Haven’t we, Jim?”
“Have you?” said Mama without looking at Whitey Whiteside.
“On his birthday,” Whitey said. “Isn’t that right, Jim?”
When Jim looked around to answer, nobody seemed to be paying him any attention. Whitey swallowed uncomfortably. Uncle Zeno took the dinner basket from Jim. Jim led everybody up the wide steps and into the building, which in less than a month had already acquired the chalk and book smell it would always keep. The hallway was crowded. The school still didn’t have ceilings, and most of the people stared up at the thick joists that supported the second floor. The exposed joists were an unexpected, disquieting sight, like bones in a field. Thick steam pipes for the radiators bored through the joists in straight lines and turned suddenly in sharp elbows. Black wires wrapped on porcelain insulators snaked among the steam pipes, waiting for the day the electricity would come. The dead light fixtures hung down from the wires like unlit moons. Above the joists and the pipes and the wires, vague shadows passed back and forth as people walked over the floorboards upstairs. Here and there a flooring nail that had missed a joist poked angrily through a nest of long splinters. Staring up with Mama and the uncles, Jim was embarrassed that his school didn’t have ceilings, although he had never felt that way before, had never thought much about it one way or the other.
“Goodness,” Mama said. “I hope they finish it soon.”
“It looks okay to me,” said Uncle Coran, who made a show of studying the floor.
“My room’s this way,” Jim said, pointing down the oil
ed hallway.
Miss Nanney sat behind her desk as she always did, her posture perfect, as it always was. Jim looked at her and wondered if she ever went home.
“Hello, Jim Glass,” she said gruffly, looking at him over her glasses as if the two of them shared a secret, which she was about to tell.
“Hey, Miss Nanney,” Jim said, looking at his feet.
Mama and the uncles introduced themselves to Miss Nanney and shook her hand.
“And who is this?” Miss Nanney said, peering around Uncle Al at Whitey Whiteside.
“This is Whitey Whiteside,” Uncle Zeno said. “A friend of the family.”
“A friend of my brothers,” said Mama.
“I see,” said Miss Nanney.
“I travel for Governor Feeds,” Whitey said, a little loudly.
Uncle Coran ruffled Jim’s hair.
“Miss Nanney,” he said, “tell us about this knothead right here.”
Uncle Coran had never ruffled Jim’s hair before. Jim made a face.
“Jim Glass,” Miss Nanney said with a dramatic pause, “is a pretty good boy. Sometimes, though, I am tempted to thump his ears.”
“You thump ‘em if he needs it,” Uncle Zeno said.
“Thump both of ‘em,” said Uncle Al.
“Thump ‘em good,” said Uncle Coran.
“He is, however, mostly a good citizen.”
“Good citizenship is important,” said Whitey Whiteside. Then he blushed, excused himself, and left the room.
“Who was that again?” Miss Nanney asked.
“A friend of ours,” said Uncle Al.
“A traveling salesman,” said Mama.
“Miss Nanney,” Uncle Zeno said, “it was a pleasure to meet you.”
Puzzled, Miss Nanney looked from one face to another, trying to figure out what she had just missed. She fluttered to her feet like a plump bird.
“Oh,” she said. “Likewise. Likewise I’m sure.”
News from the Mountain
AFTER THE picnic dinner, Jim grew tired of riding the Ferris wheel, and tired of listening to the uncles talk with other men about politics and weather and crops and dogs; he grew tired of chasing boys who were younger than he was, and running from boys who were older; he grew tired of pretending that he wasn’t showing off when he knew the girls were watching.
He climbed the side steps into the school building, which seemed cool and empty and quiet, and left the noise and excitement of Big Day outside. The low sun at his back gleamed on the polished floor; his shadow stretched almost the length of the long hallway. He wandered into Miss Nanney’s classroom, and was surprised to find it deserted. Miss Nanney did not live there after all. He walked over to the tall, open windows and stared down the hill at his uncles’ houses, at the depot, the store and the gin, the hotel where Whitey Whiteside stayed. He felt full and content and sleepy; he felt a little sad, but not in an unpleasant way. As long as the sun stayed warm, the breeze soft and pleasant, the sky blue, he would have been content to stand at the window and stare down the hill and think about nothing in particular.
He heard a step at the door and turned to see Penn Carson and Penn’s father come into the room. Radford Carson was significantly shorter than the uncles, but more muscular-looking. He was shiny bald on top, but wore a thick, black beard that hung down to the middle of his chest. He wore a crisp, white shirt and a bright red tie. In his hand he carried a fancy felt hat. Aside from his beard, he didn’t look like a mountain man; instead he looked like someone smart enough to marry Penn’s missionary, schoolteacher mother.
“Daddy,” Penn said, “that’s Jim Glass.” Penn said it in a way that made Jim think they had talked about him before.
Mr. Carson crossed the classroom with confident, almost swaggering strides, staring down at Jim out of black eyes that Jim would have found scary had he not detected the trace of a smile hidden within the fierce beard.
“Jim Glass,” Mr. Carson said. “I knew your daddy.”
Jim’s heart beat faster. “You knew my daddy?”
“He was a friend of mine. We grew up together. We hunted and fished and swam and ran through the woods together, getting into boy-devilment.”
Jim stepped closer to Mr. Carson without realizing it. He had heard every story his mother and uncles had to tell about his father so many times that over the years his father had become less vivid. It was as if each story was a favorite shirt that had been worn and washed and hung in the sun so often that its fabric, while soft and smooth and comfortable, was faded to where its color was only a shadow of what it had once been. But because Mr. Carson knew stories that Jim hadn’t heard, Jim’s father suddenly seemed close by, the way he did sometimes, as if he had left the room moments before Jim got there.
“And I know your granddaddy, too,” Mr. Carson said. “Although, if what I hear is right, he ain’t long for this earth.”
“He’s sick?” Jim said.
“Been sick for years, I reckon,” Mr. Carson said. “But he’s dead old. If he ain’t a hundred, he’s nigh on top of it.”
“Oh,”Jim said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
Amos Glass had always been the villain in the stories Jim’s mother told, but suddenly, without knowing why, Jim didn’t want him to die.
“He’s a cussed man, Amos Glass,” Mr. Carson said. “He was always hard on your daddy, especially once he got out of prison and got back up on the mountain. And he was hard on your granny, too. A lot of folks said she died just to get out of living with him, and I reckon there might be some truth to that.”
Jim nodded, less worried now about the sick man up on the mountain and again sorry for the two people he knew best from his mother’s stories — his father as a boy, a good, Christian boy, and his father’s beautiful, sickly mother, Amanda Gentine Glass, the two of them waiting and praying on the mountain while Amos Glass, released from the federal penitentiary, blew toward them like a bad wind.
“Jim Glass,” Mr. Carson said again, still staring at Jim. “You favor your daddy.”
“What was my daddy like?” Jim asked.
“Your daddy was a fine feller. Did what he said he was going to do. Stood his ground when he had to. You could trust him.”
“Was he a good ballplayer?”
“He was an all right ballplayer, but he didn’t have time to play much ball. When Amos was in jail, he had to work all the time to keep him and his mama from starving. Then, when Amos got out of jail, Amos kept him on a pretty short lead.”
“Could he fish?”
“Now there,” Mr. Carson said. “That’s one thing Jim Glass could do. He could fish. And he could hunt. There was times him and his mama didn’t have anything to eat except what he could catch and shoot. And something else he could do was shoot. He was as good a shot as I ever saw.”
“Tell him about that time y’all went squirrel hunting,” Penn said.
Jim stared at Penn in disbelief. Penn knew stories about Jim’s father that Jim didn’t know.
Mr. Carson hung his hat on the back of a chair and leaned against the windowsill. He tugged at his beard as if pulling on it opened a door that let his thoughts out.
“One time, this was right after ol’ Amos had got out of jail and back up on the mountain, me and your daddy were out in the woods a-squirrel hunting, and we just happened to come up on the place where Amos had his still. That was the first thing Amos did, when he got back from Atlanta, was start back up making liquor. Me and your daddy, when we smelled the mash a-cooking and happened to think where we were, we sneaked through the laurel and looked down and seen ol’ Amos down there working. His still was down in a little creek-hollow, and he was making a batch. We watched him for a minute, and the next thing I know, your daddy says ‘watch this,’ and brings up his rifle — we both had .22’s — and aims down in the hollow. I thought he had decided to shoot Amos, and I can’t say that I much blamed him. But what he was aiming for was the boiler. Your daddy never did drink none, and he
thought it was a sin. He takes careful aim, and he squeezes one off, and sure enough, he shoots a hole in the boiler and the mash starts pissing out on the ground. The next thing I know, Amos had jerked up his rifle — he had a .30-30 — and started shooting up into the laurel where we were. Now son, let me tell you something, we lit out of there. We weren’t worried about him catching us — he was seventy-five or eighty or more then — but he durn sure could’ve killed us.
“After we got away from there where we weren’t worried about him catching us or seeing us, your daddy said, ‘Rad, give me a shell. He’s going to count mine.’ And I said, ‘Jim, you’re crazy. He ain’t going to count your shells.’ But he said, ‘No I’m not. The old man’s going to count my shells, and if he comes up one shy, he’s going to kill me.’ So I gave him a shell and we went on home. Sure enough, that night, Amos got a light and came up in the loft where Jim was sleeping and he stuck a pistol right up under Jim’s chin and he said, ‘Boy, give me your shells,’ just like Jim thought he would. Amos knew Jim had a new box of shells, which is fifty, and he knew Jim had brought home four squirrels, and he also knew that Jim was a good shot and didn’t waste ammunition. Amos poured those shells out on the bed and he counted ‘em and the whole time he kept that pistol right up under your daddy’s chin. But when he counted ‘em, there were forty-six, just like there was supposed to be, and ol’ Amos, he takes his light and his pistol and he goes back down stairs, and he didn’t never say anything else about it.”
A Victory of Sorts
FROM HIS place in line with the rest of the fourth graders, Jim could easily see the crisp dollar bill tacked to the top of the greasy pole. The money belonged to the boy who could climb high enough to claim it, a task made almost impossible by the poplar log’s slick sap and smooth wood. A swelling crowd pressed in close and cheered loudly for each boy as he struggled to reach the money, but, despite the crowd’s encouragement, not one of the smaller boys, the first and second graders, had made it more than a foot or two off of the ground.