He didn’t smile, but he nodded some. Then he said, “It’s no need to speak about it.”
I said, “Yes, sir,” and he said, “Plenty of worse things than that,” and I said, “Yes, sir,” again.
“You love your mama?” he asked me.
I said, “Yes, sir.”
“Love your daddy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Love Jesus?”
“Yes, sir. I try to.”
“Well then,” he said, “you going to be all right.”
And he turned and went inside.
“Is he your friend, Dad?” I said after we’d been driving a little while.
“I like to think he is,” Dad said.
Wayne said he was glad Dad was friends with Mr. Ellis. That kind of surprised me. Except for that story about Darla and the colored boy, I hadn’t thought I knew anybody that was friends with anybody colored. But then I got thinking about what all Mr. Ellis had done for Dad’s campaign, and how he lost two jobs from trying to help people, and how he never even mentioned to Dad about me peeing in the bushes at school, and I said I was glad Dad and Mr. Ellis were friends, too.
Then I said, “I don’t think Mrs. Ellis liked us, though.”
Dad was hunched over the steering wheel like he needed to get closer to what he was looking at to help him drive up the dirt road. It was so dark I could hardly see Wayne in the front seat ahead of me, even when I leaned way forward.
“Mrs. Ellis is upset about the situation,” Dad said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with us directly. Just the situation.”
“It’s a lousy situation, then,” Wayne said.
Dad said that yes, it was. I wanted to say something, too, something like they were saying, but didn’t know what.
I got lonely sitting there in the back by myself, so I asked Dad if I could climb over the seat to be with him and Wayne in the front. He said OK, but just be careful when I did. Wayne scooted way over so I wouldn’t fall onto him, and once I got settled in the seat, he didn’t even seem to care that our shoulders and arms were touching. We rode the rest of the way home like that all together — Dad driving, Wayne shotgun, me in the middle.
I HAD DREAMS ABOUT DARLA. I couldn’t remember most of them when I woke up except that she was somewhere and I was somewhere else and I couldn’t get to where she was. Mom took me to see Dr. Boughner again, and I told him about the dreams. He asked me, “Can you remember more about where you and Darla were and what else was going on in these dreams?” and he even got a watch out and tried to hypnotize me. But it didn’t work.
So he said, “Well, never mind, then, but what do you think the dreams mean, Dewey?” I said I didn’t know, but couldn’t he just tell me? It was probably in one of his books, like the phallus symbol he also kept talking about, and that I finally figured out, and now I saw those things everywhere I looked. He wouldn’t give me the answer, though, so I said all I thought about my dreams was that I must just miss Darla and I guess I wished I could have been there and saved her from that phosphate train that blew the whistle and scared Bojangles, and from that car that hit them.
“Is there anything else?” he said.
“You mean like anything to do with my mom?” I said.
He nodded.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so this time.”
He seemed pretty disappointed, but he tried to be nice, anyway, and said he thought it was understandable that I missed my girlfriend and that I had the grief about it in my dreams. I tried to explain to him that Darla wasn’t ever my girlfriend and I didn’t know where the heck he got that idea anyway, but Dr. Boughner just smiled like he knew better.
After about another week I had a different dream, and this one I did remember. There wasn’t much to it, just me and Darla tap-dancing on the stage of the Sand Mountain High School auditorium. That dream didn’t make any sense, though, because I hadn’t ever tap-danced with Darla or had a lesson in it from her mom or anything. When I woke up that night, I didn’t know where I was. The room was almost as bright as the day and I went to the window and saw it was a full moon. Somebody was banging on something outside and I didn’t even think about it; I just followed the noise even though I was in my pajamas — out the front door and down the steps and into the front yard, where the grass was wet from the dew, and I saw my shadow even though it was in the middle of the night. There was a woodpecker hammering on a telephone pole over by the street, and I watched him for a pretty long time, and the longer I watched, the sadder I felt about Darla not being there anymore, and someday Mom and Dad not being there anymore, and Wayne, and Tink, and even me. I got cold all of a sudden. Maybe it was the wind, or how wet my feet were, or how lonely I was. This sounds crazy, but I wished God would have been there — God or just about anybody — to pat me on the head and tell me everything is going to be all right. I went back inside and then into Mom and Dad’s bedroom, which was something I hadn’t done in a while but used to do all the time. I wanted Mom to wake up but couldn’t make myself make her wake up, I don’t know why. I just needed for her to know I was there, and for her to pull back the covers and let me crawl into bed with her and Dad. But she didn’t, and Dad didn’t, either, and for a second I got worried that they weren’t even breathing and what if something had happened to them, but then Dad snored and Mom rolled over and I went back to my own bed.
I didn’t sleep much, and the next day, after school, I did something that Mom had been trying to get me to do ever since the funeral, which was go over and play with Darwin. I thought maybe I had a guilty conscience, and maybe that was what was making me have insomnia.
When I got to their house, Darwin opened the door and said, “Hey,” like he was expecting me. I said, “Hey,” back, like it was just the usual thing with us, and then we went up to his room to find something to do. I was worried that he would want to play that Turn Off the Lights game of his, but he never even mentioned it. Instead they had an old chessboard he hadn’t ever used, and I taught him how to play. Dad had taught me when I was about in first grade. I hadn’t ever beat him, though, and one time he beat me in three moves, which I always remembered. Darwin learned it pretty quick, and since I felt sorry for him, I let him win. We didn’t talk much, and when it was time for me to go, he said, “You don’t have to come over here. I know you only liked Darla and not me.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, even though it was true. I asked him if he ever played cribbage, which my dad also taught me when I was little, and always beat me at, too. Darwin said no, and I said I would teach him next time I came over if he wanted.
“OK,” he said.
Their mom was downstairs and she hugged me so hard when I was leaving that I couldn’t barely breathe. Her voice was hoarse when she talked. She said, “You promise me you won’t stop coming over here for dance lessons. Darla would have wanted you to keep practicing. She speaks to me in my prayers. Did you know that, Dewey?”
I didn’t know that, and it scared me for her to say it, but I said, “Yes, ma’am,” anyway. I hoped she wasn’t going to turn into a crazy person. Darwin kind of rescued me from her. He pulled her hand off my arm where she squeezed so tight it left marks of her fingers on my skin. When I was finally actually leaving, Walter Wratchford came driving up in his old blue Ford Fairlane. I guess Darla dying made it OK for him and Mrs. Turkel to be together and not just in the middle of the night on top of the Skeleton Hotel. He gave me a salute like we were both soldiers.
The granddad died in December; I think it was his cough that finally killed him, and it wasn’t too long after that that Mrs. Turkel sold their old house and took Darwin and moved away to Tampa. Walter Wratchford moved over there, too, after a little while, at least that’s where I heard he went, but I don’t know if him and Mrs. Turkel got married or what they did. I didn’t ever hear from Darwin, but one day I was watching TV and on the Tampa station they had a commercial for Del Webb’s Sun City, where all the old people lived, and in the commercial there wa
s a boy standing next to a shuffleboard with an old lady who was smiling at him. They were both holding shuffleboard sticks and he said, “My gramma has so much fun at Del Webb’s Sun City, I wish I could live here, too.” I couldn’t believe it, and neither could anybody else, but the boy in the commercial was Darwin.
One night in bed I asked Wayne if he ever thought about Darla much. The mattress springs creaked like he was turning over on his stomach. Finally he said that he did, but he guessed he didn’t want to talk about her right now. I said that was OK, and then I asked did Darla ever tell him that me and her went sneaking out one other time when Wayne was asleep and we discovered who the Howler was?
Wayne kind of laughed and said no, she never told him about that.
I said, “Well, we did,” and I bet he couldn’t guess who it was.
Wayne said he bet he could and I said how much did he want to bet? He said, “A buck-two-ninety-eight,” which was this dumb thing he was always saying when you asked him how much anything cost, and then he said heck, everybody in town already knew who the Howler was a long time ago.
I said, “They did?”
He said, “Yeah. Walter Wratchford. When he drank liquor sometimes, he yelled and stuff up on top of the Skeleton Hotel. It was probably from being in the war and all.”
I asked him why he hadn’t told me and Darla that to begin with and he said he just thought it was funny us sneaking out like that to find out and he figured he would just go along to see what might happen. I didn’t tell him about Walter Wratchford and Darla’s mom up on the Skeleton Hotel. Except for Darla and me, I guess nobody ever knew about that.
One thing that bothered me for a long time was I hadn’t ever given Darla one of my school pictures. Mom said maybe I should write to Mrs. Turkel and send her one; she said she bet Mrs. Turkel would like to hear from one of Darla’s friends. So I did that. I wrote the letter and sent the picture. Mrs. Turkel wrote me right back a note thanking me, and she gave me one of Darla’s pictures, too, from when we were in sixth grade. I guess nobody had burned them like Darla wanted.
At first I was happy to have it. But the longer I looked at it, the less it seemed like Darla to me, and more like just some other girl, until finally I put it in my bottom dresser drawer and didn’t look at it again.
Our church had a live Nativity scene at Christmas and they set it up on the lawn of the high school, facing First Street, because there wasn’t enough room at the First Methodist. The men from the church built a real stable that was open in the front facing the road, and a manger inside, and a pen where they had real animals from somebody’s farm out in the county: a couple of donkeys, a couple of goats, a couple of sheep, a couple of cows. It was too bad there weren’t any camels around for the “Three Wise Guys”— that’s what Wayne called them — but people were pretty impressed anyway. The roof of the stable was chicken wire stuffed with palmetto fronds, and they built a little platform up there with a stool and sort of a cross where the Angel of the Lord could sit and put her arms on top of the cross so her wings spread all the way out without her arms getting too tired holding them up. On the programs they printed up, they wrote, “The Angle of the Lord,” instead of the Angel, but nobody noticed in time to fix it.
Wayne was one of the Wise Guys and had a box he held with FRANKINCENSE written on the side. At least they were able to spell that right, even though David Tremblay kept calling it “Frankinstein.” I was never sure if he was joking around or if he really didn’t get it. I was supposed to be a shepherd. Wayne got a fancy costume that the church ladies made, but I just wore an old bathrobe, with a towel on my head and a rope tied around it. That was what was supposed to happen, anyway, except that on Christmas Eve the girl that was the Angle got sick, so they made me do it instead. “You’re the only one small enough,” Mrs. Ryland said, right in front of everybody. We were in the high-school office putting on our costumes and eating doughnuts, before they sent us out one at a time to replace the kids on the shift before ours, which was for an hour. Mrs. Ryland was the Burning Bushes Sunday School teacher and a boy named Skip Ryland’s mom. Skip was a Wise Guy with Wayne and David Tremblay on our shift, and he laughed the hardest about me having to be the Angle, until his mom snatched his doughnut and made him apologize because it wasn’t Christian to be that way.
I said I wouldn’t do it, and some of the other kids said I shouldn’t have to, too, including Boopie, who I had kind of been friends with lately and who was also a shepherd like me. But then Reverend Dunn showed up and you couldn’t say no to Reverend Dunn when he wanted something, so they put me in the white nightgown with the gauze sewed all over it, and attached to the sleeves were the big wings made from goose feathers glued to cardboard painted white and gold, and the next thing I knew I was climbing up the back of the manger and sitting on the stool on the platform they had up there and spreading my wings out on the cross.
Once we got to our positions, we weren’t supposed to move, even to scratch our nose if it started itching, so that’s what I did. They had a record player with about a thousand feet of extension cord from the high-school office, and Mrs. Ryland put on the Christmas album that played through the loudspeakers they also had set up there: “We three kings of Orient are,” “Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining,” “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright,” “Good King Wince the Louse looked out on the feet of Stephen.”
From where I sat on top of the stable, I could see everybody who came by, and it seemed like just about the whole town did during that hour we were there, either walking or sitting on a bench across the street or driving in their cars. At first I was embarrassed because I knew everybody would tease me about being a girl after the Nativity was all over, even though in the Bible the angel was a guy, not that my telling people that would make any difference. After a while I didn’t think about it, though, I just liked being up there in the sky with my wings on, looking down on the whole world, or at least the whole world of Sand Mountain.
I saw David Tremblay’s mom sitting on that bench across the street. She looked so tired but also looked like she could sit there forever instead of going home, which was nice and sad at the same time, especially when I thought about David’s stepdad and how things were at their house. Boopie’s mom came along and sat with David’s mom and they started talking, and you could tell David’s mom liked that a lot because of the way she kind of turned toward Boopie’s mom and didn’t look so tired anymore.
My mom and dad came along, too, and Tink and that little friend of hers, Scooty. Tink and Scooty snuck over to the pen and tried to pet the animals. They got kind of loud, saying stuff like, “Here, cow. Come over here, boy,” which I could hear all the way up on top of the stable until Dad told them to hush. I could see Mom studying the shepherds, wondering where I was, and then finally realizing it was me as the Angle. She pretended to reach up and brush some hair out of her face but really it was to give me a little wave that nobody would see.
I saw W.J. Weller, the kid that got his arm broke by Darwin that time. He went by with his family and their old dog, whose doghouse I hid in that one time for a while on the first day of school, back in August. And Mr. Juddy the dragline operator with his wife, who I hadn’t noticed before walked bowlegged just like him. And Connolly Voss with his four sisters and his mom, who was taller than his little dad. And that colored lady who made the Sunday dinners, Miss Deas, with about a hundred kids piled in an old black Chevy like my grandmother had up in Virginia. And Officer O. O. Odom, also, all alone in his police car. He drove back and forth a bunch and I figured he must really like the live Nativity and the Christmas music and all, but Wayne said later he bet Officer Odom just wanted to see if he could get some of our doughnuts.
Of course I started thinking about Darla after a while — the real Darla, not the one from that sixth-grade picture — who more than anybody in the world would have loved to be the Angle of the Lord. She would have been good at it, too — better than me, bette
r than Shirley Temple, better than anybody. All you had to do was sit on top of the stable in the costume for an hour and not scratch your nose, but with Darla you know it would have been a lot more than that; it would have been like in the Bible: “And an angel of the Lord appeared before them and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid.” Only I wouldn’t have been sore afraid to see her there instead of me. I would have just been happy.
I WAS SAD ABOUT DARLA FOR A LONG TIME, and just about stopped going to certain places like Sand Mountain and Bowlegs Creek because when I did I couldn’t help thinking about her, which led to me missing her, which led back to me feeling so sad. I was always thinking about the funerals over the past year, too — Mr. Rhodes’s way back in the early fall, and the colored soldier’s when Walter Wratchford told me there was only one category for dead, and Darla’s.
Maybe all that’s why I didn’t get upset or anything when Dad told us we were going to be moving. It was in the early spring. He had a new job lined up in Crystal River, which was a ways north of Tampa, almost on the Gulf of Mexico, and he said we would stay in Sand Mountain to finish out the school year and then pack everything up in June. He didn’t tell us the other part — Mom did later — that they were having layoffs at the mine and they hated to do it but they had to let Dad go. Wayne said, “Who else did they let go?” and he bet there wasn’t anybody else, or not any of the engineers, anyway. Mom said, “Never you mind. Your father says we’re going and that’s all there is to it. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you planned, but we have a job to go to and I don’t want your father to hear any of you children complain. Now, count your blessings and go set the table for dinner.”
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