In Tall Cotton

by Charles G. Hulse

  “That was what you were doing. Don’t you know that?”

  “What? What was I doing?”

  “Fucking Mary Ann, like the writing said, you dummy.”

  “Was I?” I was stunned.

  “And didn’t even know it!” He looked at me slumped in the chair and started to grin. “Games! Puzzles, he calls it.” He threw back his head and roared with laughter. Was it going to be all right? Was it just a joke? Had I committed a terrible sin or not? “When did you start this … these games?”

  “First grade. Valentine’s Day.”

  “That’s appropriate.” He laughed again. “You’re eight now. You’ve been doing this since the first grade. I think I’d better ask you what it’s all about. I’m going to be ten and I haven’t even seen a naked girl.”

  “No!” I was incredulous. I was totally familiar with the female body. I had done things that Junior hadn’t done. “Then how do you know that that was what we were doing? Fu … What Darryl wrote up there?”

  “Because that’s what it is. I know that much.”

  I had to broach the real problem. “Is it … is it a sin?”

  He wasn’t laughing any more. “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Fire and brimstone were going to engulf me. I was a goner.

  “Don’t look so pitiful,” he said as he pushed me gently upright in the chair. “You didn’t know what you were doing. But now you do. So you just have to stop doing it. Just pray for forgiveness and promise that you won’t do it any more. Not till you’re married. Then it’s OK.”

  “You won’t tell on me?”

  “Who? Tell Mom? Don’t be silly. Just pray that the rain washes off that writing before the next P.T.A. meeting. It wouldn’t be very funny if she read it.”

  That was a terrifying thought. “I’ll rub it out,” I suggested.

  “You could try, I guess.” He moved over to the counter where the wash-basin was and began washing his hands and face. I sat feeling empty and bone tired as though I’d been up after midnight like on New Year’s Eve, and no longer had any control over my limbs. Somehow I’d escaped damnation. Junior had seen to that. I’d learned that what we’d been doing was sinful. That really didn’t come as too great a surprise, the suspicion was growing all the time that something was wrong. It was a relief to know for sure. I’d just have to put it out of mind and weather Mary Ann’s scorn. I could hear her making fun of me as she had the others who’d left the magic circle. That would be part of my punishment for my sin. I could take it. School would be out for the summer in less than a month anyway.

  “Hey, Tots,” Junior said through the towel he was rubbing his face with. “What was it like?” He turned around and faced me, still wiping the lower part of his face. “Fun?” His eyes twinkled.

  I just grinned and nodded slowly.

  Chapter Three

  MOM WAS HIRED again at the cafe and since she seemed to have run out of sisters—at least in the immediate vicinity—Junior and I were sent to Grandpa Woods’ farm for the summer. The farm was the Woods’ homestead place in Hi, Arkansas. It could be spelled “High,” I’m not sure. There had been a sign on the one-room school house that doubled as a church but it had faded down to the bare wood. What the population was is a mystery. There were several farm houses but not one close enough to see the other. Grandpa and Grandma Idy did have a telephone but it rang so rarely that I didn’t see much use in it. Mom said it was faster to write than go through the half a dozen operators it took to get the two-longs-and-a-short that was Grandpa’s ring. There was no town center. All shopping was done in Oak Grove, Arkansas, some ten miles away. There was a sign on the road there: Oak Grove, Arkansas. Population 30.

  Junior and I loved being there, at least for a while before the loneliness set in. We could sort of understand why Dad had left home at an early age. But it was difficult for us to understand why he was still gone from us. He’d been out of our lives now for almost two years. Grandpa didn’t talk about Dad much. They’d had some sort of falling out many years ago. Dad’s version of the story was that Grandpa had a violent temper and had once lost it so completely that he lost his most valuable cow along with it. She’d kicked over the milk bucket one time too many and Grandpa picked up an ax handle, hit her between the eyes and she fell dead on the spot. He regretted it, but claimed she deserved it. Therefore, when Dad was in his teens and Grandpa threatened him with a beating for some infraction of the rigid rules, Dad just took off. He’s been wandering around ever since.

  Grandma Idy spoiled us rotten. She’d never had children of her own, so her step-children’s children became hers. Particularly Junior and me. She baked cookies and cakes and pies for us every day. Made fudge with peanuts that they’d grown right there on the farm. There was a big bin of them in the smoke house along with sides of bacon and ham. There was flour they’d ground from their own corn and other grains all in bins with wooden tops that lifted up on leather hinges. It was like going into a country store. The storm cellar was the same—shelves lined with dozens of jars of hand-canned fruit, jams and jellies, relishes, pickles, and sauces. There were crocks of sauerkraut, cheeses hanging in dusty cloth, even meat balls and slices of pork loin were canned in their own juices and fat, all beautifully displayed and enough to feed an army.

  In season, the spring-house which had a cement trough into which hand-tingling cold water was constantly gushing, there’d be watermelons, mush-melons or other fruit chilling in the water, along with freshly churned butter and jars of butter-milk and sweet-milk and cream so thick you’d mistake it for butter.

  They didn’t need stores. They made everything themselves. Grandpa and his father had built the log house back in the 1800’s. There was a huge stone fireplace in the main room which was combination sitting room and bedroom. There was a smaller bedroom off the kitchen where Junior and I shared a bed with great thick feather-beds covered in colorful patch-work quilts that Grandma had made herself. We always ate in the kitchen at a big long table. Grandma always served, never sitting down with us. I could never figure out when she ate.

  Mom marveled at Grandma’s neatness. She wore pretty cotton dresses with long sleeves with lace cuffs and collars winter and summer and no matter how hard she worked or how dirty the job, she always looked clean and tidy. She could wash dishes, clean the stove, polish it with stove black, and never have to roll up her sleeves. Mom said it was a miracle. Mom adored her but explained to us that Dad still held some resentments because she’d replaced his mother. How anybody could resent Grandma for anything was beyond me. I thought she was a saint. Grandpa said Dad was just plain bull-headed. There was certainly no argument about that. The way Grandpa said it made me wonder if he was all that fond of his younger son.

  The long hot summer creeped by. The creek that was one of the boundaries of the property was down to a trickle. Wading and crawdad fishing had lost their appeal. There was one deepish hole where we could splash around and cool off, but not actually swim. Which was just as well since neither of us could. It was waist deep on Junior and chest deep on me and when we’d go there in the late afternoon, I’d kick off my short pants and underwear—we both went barefooted—and jump in naked with only Grandma’s poke-bonnet on that I’d taken a fancy to and wore almost everywhere.

  Junior laughed and said I looked pretty silly stark naked in a poke-bonnet. He was never stark naked. Not if there was the slightest possibility of anybody seeing him. And this miniature swimming hole was sometimes used by the Wilkins boy who lived on the next farm. He was a year or so older than Junior and was dismissed by most people as being “just about half-silly.”

  Junior always wore his underwear at the swimming hole and was sitting in them on a big boulder drying off one day when the Wilkins boy appeared.

  “Howdy,” he said. He was wearing bib-overalls and apparently nothing else because he was out of them in a flash and cannon-balled naked into the pool practically on top of me.

  Junior was on his feet “Watch what yo
u’re doing!” he yelled angrily. “You almost landed on Totsy.”

  “That’s who’s under that poke-bonnet?” I scrambled out of his way and started climbing out of the water. “Why I thought that was a pretty little girl.” I was standing next to Junior on the rock now, shaking out the wet bonnet. “Well, might as well be a little girl for all the pecker he’s got. Look at that little thing. Not bigger’n a crawdad.”

  I glanced down and quickly sat down to hide myself. It didn’t look very big. I could think of nothing to say but, “Well, I’m just eight.” Ordinarily I’d have said “almost nine.”

  The Wilkins boy rolled over on his back and let his hips lift in the water until his thing was visible and I saw that there was hair around it. He took it in his hand and waved it at us. “Now, there’s a pecker. Just looky here.” As he flipped it back and forth it grew bigger. It was the biggest one I’d ever seen. “Hey, Junior. You got hair yet?” Junior was looking up, squinting into the sun, elaborately ignoring the boy who was stroking himself and his thing was getting alarmingly big. He watched himself with a little grin of pride. “Now what about that? That’s a real hum-dinger, ain’t it?” I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Under Mary Ann’s expert tutelage, my fascination with the human body in all its permutations knew no bounds. It certainly was a hum-dinger and I was aware of a humming in my groin and I felt my own getting hard. Now why in the world was that? And nobody even touching it.

  Junior stood up and turned his back and said, “I’m going to find some skimmers.” He turned to me. “You better get dressed.”

  “Hey, Junior, looky here,” the Wilkins boy called. “Watch.” His hand was traveling back and forth on himself purposefully. “Where you goin’, Junior? Hey! Watch!” He was pounding his pecker violently. “Hey! I’m goin’ to shoot! Ya’ wanna’ see it? I’ll bet you can’t shoot. Hey, look!” I was looking. Intently. If it was size that made a pecker, then he had a real pecker.

  Junior jumped down on the other side of the boulder calling, “Come on, Tots, we have to get the cows in.”

  I was riveted to the spot. I couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to. The Wilkins boy had an audience of one whose enthralled attention made up for Junior’s lack of interest. He smiled up at me as he stood up, thrusting his hips forward making his pecker look even bigger and stroked it faster and faster until all his muscles tensed and he gave a little grunt as something shot out of his thing. He did shoot. Whatever it was landed on the water and floated on the surface, a white substance like spit.

  “There! You ever seen that afore?” I shook my dazed head at him as he rinsed his pecker off in the water. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that that’s where you come from.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” I said indignantly, misunderstanding. “I come from Missouri. Galena and …”

  He fell over backwards into the water, howling with laughter. He brought his head up out of the water sending great sprays in every direction with his hair and spurting out mouthfuls with his guffaws. He was choking and laughing and trying to speak at the same time. “Don’t know nothin’,” he hollered, splashing water as he slapped his hands down on the surface of the water, and jumped up and down. “Dumber’n a mule, I’ll swear I never seen nothin’ like it.” He cackled and splashed. “Don’t even know he comes from white stuff off’n his daddy’s pecker.” His laughter was drowned as he fell back in the water again.

  I’d fumbled into my underpants and shorts during this last exhibition. I picked up the bonnet and turned to see Junior on the side of the creek, motioning for me to come on. I glanced over my shoulder and called out, “Bye” as I jumped off the rock. I ran as fast as I could toward Junior. I heard the Wilkins boy calling something like, “… dumb little peckerwood …” as we both lit out across the field as fast as we could.

  We didn’t speak until we’d crawled through two different sets of barbed-wire fencing and had swung out and around behind the grazing cows in the pasture.

  “Did you see?” I asked.

  “See what?”

  “What he was doin’.” The poke-bonnet acted like blinders on a horse. I had to turn my head all the way around to see Junior’s face and then all I got was a non-commital profile.

  “Sure. He was playing with himself.” He sounded disgusted.

  “Is that wrong?” Maybe it was all right if somebody did it for you.

  “What do you think?” I could feel him looking at me through the side of the bonnet. I didn’t turn my head.

  I took the easy way out. I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  We walked along in silence. The cows had spotted us and had begun to move slowly toward the farm buildings that looked awfully small this far away.

  “Can you?” I ventured.

  “Can I what?” He’d raised his voice and I knew he was looking at me again. “Take that stupid thing off your head, for pete’s sake. How’m I supposed to know what you’re talking about if I can’t see you. Besides, it is sissy. It’s a bonnet.”

  “I know what it is. I can even make one.” I’d got him riled. Or at least something had got him riled. If I wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t answer any of my questions. After a few more paces, I tried again, very quietly. “Well, can you?”

  “What?” He stopped. “Make a bonnet?” He let out a whoop of laughter.

  I ripped off the hat and turned back to him. Good, we could make a joke of the whole thing. “No, silly. What he said you couldn’t do. You know.” I mimicked the Wilkins boy’s motions exaggeratedly and I hoped, comically, “Like he did. Shoot.”

  He shrugged and moved forward beside me. “I wasn’t watching.” He didn’t sound reproachful. He kept moving but he started laughing. “Is that what he did?” He hooted. “If that’s the way he looked, like you, just now, it must’ve been pretty funny.”

  I hurried to catch up with him. “Yep. That’s what he did.” I caught him by the arm and turned him around to face me and did my imitation again, making a moronic face. He was really laughing now. “And then it happened. All of a sudden this white stuff shot right out of his pecker. Ker-plop. Right in the water.”

  “We’d better not go swim there any more.” He was laughing but made a face of distaste.

  His distaste at the mention of the white stuff was bringing up more questions. I didn’t know where to begin. I’d never been so confused. I tried again. “Well. Can you? Can you do it? He said he bet you couldn’t.”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged and picked up a rock and threw it toward the last lagging cow. “I never tried.”

  “You mean played with yourself?” He shot me a quick frowny glance. “Well, that’s what you said he was doing.”

  “It’s called jacking-off.” He stumbled a bit on the expression and then muttered, “I think that must be it. What he was doing.” He seemed out of his depth, too. I guessed that he couldn’t do it and was ashamed to admit it. “Well, I guess you have to have hair to do it.”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t look at me.

  We were silent once more, plodding along stepping automatically over the cow patties. I hadn’t got very far. Only learned a new expression that I couldn’t wait to spring on Mary Ann. She thought she knew everything.

  “But he wasn’t right about that other thing he said, was he?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just when we were leaving. Something about us coming from that white stuff off our Daddy’s pecker.” I was having my own trouble saying that. I felt that I was on a dangerous path to knowledge that I wasn’t sure I was ready for. When Junior remained silent, I found myself almost pleading. “That’s just a lie, isn’t it? He was just being dirty. Wasn’t he, Junior? That’s not how it is, is it?” It was dirty. The way the boy’d looked and smiled at me was dirty. “God plants the seed, doesn’t He? He plants the seed in our mothers’ bellies and we grow. Don’t we? We’re God’s children, aren’t we?”

  Junior stopped and put his arm around my shoulder, hugging me to him. “Well, I’m not exact
ly sure how it works myself.” He squeezed me and chuckled at the admission. “Anyway, he’s an asshole.” I jerked my head up and looked at him in amazement. He’d never said anything like that before to me. He laughed at my astonishment. “Well, he is. He may be right, but he makes it all sound wrong.” He waved both arms at a cow that had headed back to the pasture. “We’ll be God’s children until I find out otherwise.”

  “You’ll tell me the minute you know for sure?”

  “I’ll send you a telegram.” We both laughed. “Until then,” he nodded at me and I joined him as we recited together, “God plants the seed in our mothers’…”

  That was our private joke. When there was any reference to sex or procreation that we didn’t quite understand, we’d look at each other and mouth, “God plants the seed …” and nod knowingly.

  The summer spiralled down to a close punctuated by Mom’s infrequent visits and the occasional late-night electric storm. The storms were a delight to the eye but brought a chill of fright right down to the soles of my feet. One particularly terrifying slash of lightning hit a tree not far from the house and the jolt shook the house like an earthquake. Grandpa loved the storms and was as enthralled with them as a child with fireworks. I couldn’t help wondering what the storm cellar was for if we didn’t use it.

  Mom’s visits were not only infrequent, but the last couple turned out to be downright disasters. She’d brought a man with her. A used-car salesman called Lloyd Shults who was obviously trying to sell Mom more than a car. He apparently wanted to be included along with the extras like the spare tire, the jack, the crank and an extra fan-belt. Junior liked the car but not him. We both decided that he deserved the epithet of “asshole” for several reasons. One, because he kept calling me “Topsy” even after I’d spelled my name for him. But mostly we resented the proprietary air he had with Mom. He kept touching her all the time in a way that not even Dad did. Well, not in front of us anyway. Granted Dad wasn’t around and had never been much of what you’d call a real father, but the idea of Shults replacing him—the idea of the divorce made it seem highly likely—kept me and Junior awake several nights discussing the possibility. We decided that having an asshole for a father was worse than having an absent one.