U. G. LET ME play the radio in the afternoons if there wasn’t too many customers. When I was unpacking boxes or counting eggs into paper cartons for shipping, I wasn’t supposed to listen to the radio. “You’ll lose count if you’re tapping your toe to a banjo,” U. G. said.
But in fact the radio stayed on most of the time. I think some customers come to the store just to hear the radio. They wanted to gather by the stove and listen to country music and to gospel music. They wanted to listen to news about baseball, about Babe Ruth. I liked to listen to reports from London and from the Philippines. I even listened to sermons some afternoons and sometimes to a symphony orchestra.
I was listening to organ music on the radio one day and dusting the shelves with a feather duster when somebody walked into the store. I looked up and seen Annie and her mama. The spit caught in my throat and I had to swallow.
“Howdy, Mrs. Richards,” I said. Mrs. Richards had light brown hair that was dusted with gray. And she still had fair skin. You could tell how pretty she was when she was younger. But she had big rough hands that showed how much work she had done.
“I brung you some butter and eggs,” Mrs. Richards said.
I glanced at Annie, but she was looking at the candy bars inside the glass case. Her mama placed two baskets on the counter. One was filled with brown eggs and the other with butter wrapped in waxed paper.
I hadn’t tried to go with Annie since she rode back to the house with Moody that day. She had done it just to spite me, because she hadn’t gone with Moody since. If she had I would have heard about it. Moody would have told me.
I got an egg crate from behind the counter and begun counting the eggs into its cups. Mrs. Richards usually brought about ten dozen at a time.
“How you doing?” Annie said. She leaned against the counter in front of me. “We missed you at prayer meeting,” she said.
“Had to work late,” I said.
I figured if I was just polite with Annie, that was the thing to do. I’d show her I was too growed-up to be mad. She liked to flirt with everybody and tease everybody. It was just her way. But I was determined I wasn’t going to be fooled by her again.
After I counted out eleven dozen eggs and wrote the number on a sheet of brown wrapping paper, I got out U. G.’s little scales and weighed the butter. Mrs. Richards always packed her mold extra full, so each cake weighed more than a pound.
“That’s almost seven pounds of butter,” I said. I figured with a pencil on the sheet of brown paper. “That comes to four dollars and seventy-five cents,” I said.
“I need sugar and coffee and baking soda,” Mrs. Richards said. “And some raisins and a new sifter.”
“I want a Hershey’s bar,” Annie said.
“Might make you fat,” I said. I knowed Annie was awful proud of being slim. She was slimmer than any girl in the valley.
“Do I look fat?” Annie said. She turned sideways so I could see how slim she was and how her sweater come down over her hips. She was slender as a flute and she had the prettiest figure I’d ever seen.
I measured out the coffee and sugar into bags and tied them up. And I got a can of baking soda and a box of raisins.
“Ain’t seen you driving your car lately,” Annie said.
“What else can I get for you?” I said to Mrs. Richards.
“Hank wants some shaving soap,” Mrs. Richards said.
I looked on the shelf near the front of the store where the soaps and toilet articles was. Annie followed me on the other side of the counter. “The circus is coming to town two weeks from Wednesday,” she said. She leaned on the counter and watched me sort among the soaps and tooth powders, jars of face cream and bottles of shampoo and lotion. I didn’t look back at her, but I could feel my face getting hot. I found the shaving soap and turned around.
“I have to work at the store,” I said.
“It only comes once a year,” Annie said.
“I might be able to get the car,” I said. It just come out. I didn’t mean to say it. I put the shaving soap in the basket and added up Mrs. Richards’s purchases on the sheet of brown paper.
“I owe you a dollar and twenty-one cents,” I said.
“And give Annie a candy bar,” Mrs. Richards said.
I reached into the case for a Hershey’s bar.
“I don’t want no candy,” Annie said. “I want a Co-Cola.”
I give Mrs. Richards a dollar and sixteen cents from the register. Annie took a bottle from the cooler and opened it and followed her mama to the door. Just before she went out she turned back to me. “I hope you can go to the circus,” she said.
Fifteen
Ginny
I HAD KEPT Moody’s letter in a drawer of the bureau for years. I took it out again to read it.
July 17, 1918
Dear Mama,
I take up pensil in hand to right you a letter on the fine tablet I paid the guard a nickel for. Somebody has likely told you already where I am. But I figured you would never know the truth unless I rote you.
I cutt one of the Willards in a fight at Chestnut Springs. He needed to be cut is all I cann say and I done it. It’s simple as that. Reckon I sliced his guts deeper than I meant to was all.
You can tell fokes I’ve gone off on a vacashun if you want to. You can tell them I’ve gone tramping in the woods and camping like Muir does. You can tell them I’m gone out west to dig for gold. I don’t care.
But the upshot of it was that after I fit with Sandy Willard and cut him the deputies arrested me and took me heer to the Greenville jale. They couldn’t have arrested me. They wouldn’t even have knowed about the fight unless Peg Early or one of hers had told them.
Sometimes I think Peg Early and the Willards are in cahoots against me. That’s what I think.
But the upshot was that cause Sandy was so bad cut and had to be sewed up by the doctor in Traveler’s Rest, they give me thirty days in jail heer. That was Peg Early’s doing, if I don’t miss my guess.
The Greenville County jale is not hell. These July days it’s worser than hell and hotter. It’s so hot you have to lay still on a bunk just to keep your hed from swimming. I reckon if you moved around you’d just lose your breth.
Ain’t complaing about my commodations. But whatever anybody done they don’t deserve the Greenville County jale. Rations is some stale bread and watery otemeal that tastes like rotten newspapers. And for dinner they give you pinto beans that are half raw and a cup of stumpwater for coffee.
I won’t tell you about the smell heer, with all us men inside and the sweat and no water to wash with. The place smells like pee and puke when they bring a drunk in and he throws up his guts. The stink of this place would make you sick, even if you was well, which I ain’t.
Now I’m just a dog. I admit I’m just a dog. Ain’t never done nothing but get in trouble and get looked down on. I’ve been a shame to you ever since I was a youngun. I don’t give a damn.
After Daddy died it was like I never done nothing rite again. That’s a fact. Daddy would sometimes take up for me, but after he was gone nobody else did.
I don’t want you to try to get me out of heer. And don’t get U. G. to try. The judge said it would be thirty days, and by God it will be. Don’t spend none of Daddy’s money on me. I have got free room and board from the people of Greenville County and I will take them up on it. Don’t spend none of Daddy’s molasses money on me. No sir.
If somebody here gives the guard any sass they get rapped with a billy club drove into their gut. You don’t answer a bull he’ll ram you with a club in the belly. If they want to they can wait a day to bring you any water. In this heat you sweat out every drop in a few hours, and then you are so weak you just lay still and feel the air has teeth.
I was laying heer righting this and somebody grabbed my pensil and broke it in two. I had to pay a guard four cents for that pensil, and now I have to right with the stub. Since they took my knife I can only sharp the led by rubbing it on the fl
oor. I naw away the wood and rub the led on the seement to give it a point. Never thought a little peece of pensil would be so dear. When I get out of heer I’m going to buy a box of yallow pensils.
The big feller that broke the pensil has it in for me. He has a grudge cause I’m from North Carolina. He says people from North Carolina ain’t Tarheels they’re shit heels. He’s a big feller named Warren that will blow snot on his hand and wipe it across your mouth. He was caught peeping into people’s windows is why he is heer.
“I will teach you a lesson before I’m done,” he will say. I would fite him except they took my knife when they put me in heer.
A drink of licker would sooth me. A drink of licker would be like a frend to comfort me. But I don’t want to get any more licker till I get out of heer. The other day Wheeler and Drayton come to see me. Now I knowed Wheeler had something in his shirt cause of the way the shirt pooched out at his side. I kept looking at his shirt and when he leaned up close to the bars he reached into his shirt and brought out a half pint bottle.
I stuck that bottle in my own shirt fast as I could, but another prisoner had seen it. Soon as Wheeler and Drayton was gone, and soon as it got dark, Warren started in on me. “Ain’t you going to be sociable?” Warren whispered in my ear.
I pulled away from him and pushed myself up against the wall. His breath stunk like the floor of a chicken house.
“Powell don’t want to share with his buddies,” Warren said to the others. He muttered something to the other prisoners and they grabbed hold of me. Sixteen hands held me to the bunk while Warren twisted the bottle out of my shirt.
In the dark he drunk most of the licker hisself, and then he give the others a little sip. And when the bottle was empty they held me against the bunk and crammed the neck of the bottle in my mouth.
“Now you have something to piss in,” Warren said. “Save your piss and drink it.” In a fair fite he knows I could beat him easy. And when I get out of heer I will.
I will see you uns in a month, after my vacashun, your son, Moody
After I got the letter me and U. G. drove down to Greenville and paid Moody’s fine. We got him out of jail and brought him back. I never showed nobody the letter. When I mentioned the letter to Moody he said he had never wrote a letter. He said he wouldn’t know how to write a letter while he was in jail, even if he had wanted to. But I had seen the letter, and I remembered every word of it. It was the year Jewel died of the flu. I remember it well.
Sixteen
Muir
“YOUR FRIEND HICKS died last night,” Mama said.
“Hicks?” I said.
“He died when he was milking. They found him in the stall with the cow standing over him.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
I had seen Hicks the day before at the store. He had been playing checkers with U. G. as usual. He was a good friend and was somebody you could always depend on to say something funny and friendly. He liked to play checkers, and he was always ready to take a drink, and he was always ready for a laugh. But he wasn’t a mean drinker. Far as I knowed he’d never hurt nobody. He loved a good story as much as anybody you ever seen, and he never teased me about trying to preach. People said he stayed at U. G.’s store so much because him and his wife, Jevvie, quarreled. Every time he took a drink she run him out of the house. But I never seen him quarrel with nobody else. I remembered how tall and stooped Hicks was, and how he made a little extra money sharpening saws for people. He could sharpen a saw until it melted the wood it touched. And he took pride in his checkers playing.
Mama said Hicks’s funeral was tomorrow evening.
Hicks lived up on Mount Olivet, and though I hardly knowed the rest of his family I seen I had to go to his funeral. I’d spent too many hours with Hicks at the store to stay away from his burial service. I would go and wear the old suit I had bought to preach in.
“I’m going to need the car tomorrow,” I said to Moody at supper.
“You may need the car, but I need it worser,” Moody said.
“I have to get to Hicks’s funeral,” I said.
Of course Moody got up before daylight and drove away in the Model T, and I ended up walking to Mount Olivet on that November afternoon. The church was right on top of the mountain, and it was about five miles from the house. I knowed it would take about an hour and a half, and I give myself plenty of time, since the funeral was to begin at three. I started out right after dinner.
The walk up to Mount Olivet was easy. It was a calm and mild afternoon with gathering clouds. The haze on the far mountain hinted there might be rain. People setting on their porches after eating Sunday dinner spoke to me as I walked past. Everybody knowed it was the day of Hicks’s funeral. But most wasn’t going to the service, maybe because Hicks was a drinker and wasn’t a regular churchman.
I liked the way the suit fit over my shoulders and hips as I walked. I hadn’t wore if for a long time, but it still fit. The sun gleamed on the delicate herringbone pattern. I turned up the dirt road that run along Freeman Creek and started climbing.
“Hey, Muir, going to your wedding?” somebody hollered. I looked back and seen Blaine walking behind me. I stopped to let him catch up.
“That’s a humdinger of a suit,” Blaine said. “You going to preach the funeral?”
“Only if they ask me,” I said. “A man needs one good suit in his life.”
“So they’ll have something to bury him in,” Blaine said.
“Hope to wear it a few times before that,” I said.
“Better hope it don’t rain,” Blaine said.
“It rains, I’ll just stand under a tree till it stops,” I said.
I expected to see more people on the road going to Hicks’s funeral. But we didn’t run into anybody else till we come around the bend a few hundred yards below the church. There was a cluster of men and boys gathered by the road. One was pulling the wire of a kind of trolley that carried buckets of water from the spring far down in the holler. “Howdy,” I said.
“What say, ’fessor?” one of the men said.
“You boys getting any?” Blaine said.
“Getting any what?” one said. And everybody laughed.
“Getting a drink of water,” one of the Jenkins boys said.
“That’s what I meant,” Blaine said.
I watched one of the MacDowell boys pull on the trolley contraption. It was strung on pulleys attached to trees right down the steep mountainside. The buckets was wired to hooks and they filled their-selves in a reservoir of rocks down at the spring. It was a fancy device. The bucket in the reservoir filled, and then it took the MacDowell boy several minutes to reel it up the mountainside to the road as the other bucket was lowered to be filled.
“I never seen one of them before,” Blaine said.
“Old Hicks invented it,” the MacDowell boy said. “Thunk it up and built it.”
“Then we should have a little ole drink in his honor,” the Jenkins boy said.
“Not of springwater,” Blaine said.
“Branch water and bourbon,” somebody said.
“What if we ain’t got no bourbon?” Blaine said.
“Then just plain liquor will have to do,” the MacDowell boy said. He reached into the water bucket and pulled out a dripping jar.
“Why, you sneaky son of a bitch,” the Jenkins boy said.
“I wouldn’t want ole Hicks to be funeraled without a toast,” the MacDowell boy said. He passed around the bottle and everybody had a sip. I pretended to have a taste, just enough to wet my tongue, because I didn’t want to show no disrespect by refusing a drink in Hicks’s honor. And I didn’t want to show no disrespect to the family or the church by coming to the funeral smelling like corn liquor neither. I dampened the tip of my tongue and passed the bottle on to Blaine.
“Here’s to Hicks, wherever in hell you are,” Blaine said and raised the jar in the air.
“I hope they have good drinking liquor in hell,” the MacDo
well boy said.
“If they have good liquor, then it ain’t hell,” I said, and everybody laughed.
“Wherever Hicks is there’ll be a drink of liquor,” the MacDowell boy said.
I took a dipper of water from the bucket and drunk it. “We better get to the church before we miss his funeral,” I said.
“Don’t reckon Hicks would grudge us a little sip,” Blaine said.
SEVERAL MEN IN suits stood outside the door of the little church. One that I recognized as the pastor at Mount Olivet stepped forward to meet me. I was surprised he knowed who I was.
“Hey buddy,” the preacher said, “could you help us out?”
“If I can,” I said.
“We seem to be short a pallbearer,” the preacher said. “Could you fill in? After all, you was a friend of Hicks.”
The pastor showed me where to stand, and I found myself opposite to U. G. I nodded to U. G. and he nodded back. I nodded to the other pallbearers too. There was the MacDowell boy, a Willard, a Freeman, and somebody I thought was a Griffith.
The pastor told us what we was supposed to do. When they brought the casket in the wagon we would slide it out and carry it to the table in front of the church. Then we would set on the left front bench while the family set on the right. After the service was over we would tote the casket out and the family would follow.
I stood in line and nodded to the people as they walked into the church. I tried to look dignified and clasped my hands in front of my waist. I had been to a lot of funerals but never served as a pallbearer before. I stood up straight as I could.
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