“Is it bad news?” I ventured to ask.
Cal sighed and put the letter on the table without even reading it. “It’s my new orders from the army, telling me where I’m going next.”
When he said those words, I knew I was sunk too. No doubt about it. Cal and Peaches would be moving out of the house and I’d be on my way back to Chicago in no time.
Cal stood next to the table with his hands clasped behind his back, staring silently at the calendar on the kitchen wall. Hard to tell what he was thinking, but the month of May coulda caught fire by how hard he was looking at it. A steady drip-drip sound from the leaky kitchen faucet seemed to get louder the longer the silence went on.
“How about if I go down the road and talk to MawMaw Sands for a while? I’ll come back later on,” I mumbled, pushing open the screen door and letting it ease shut behind me. Wanted my own peace and quiet to come up with what to do next.
Nobody answered me.
I’ll admit it was a relief to see MawMaw Sands sitting on her porch as I came slouching down the road like a sad sack. Even from a distance, you could spot her red turban and patchworky dress. Looked as if she was working on baskets like it was an ordinary day.
“How you, Levi?” she called out, without glancing up.
“Fine, ma’am,” I mumbled.
She didn’t seem to notice my down look. Or she was pretending not to. As I came up the steps, she kept on studying the basket she was working on, her face set in a look of concentration. “You know anything about basket making, boy?” she said, her lips pressed together like a tight twist of rope.
“No ma’am, I don’t.”
“Well, come over here and pull up a seat. I’ll show you some things.”
Now, learning how to make baskets wasn’t the kind of help I was hoping for, but I plunked myself down on an old crate sitting in the porch corner and tried to look interested. MawMaw Sands turned over the one in her lap to show me the bottom of it, her fingers tapping on a small brown knot at the center. “Starting a basket, see, that’s the hardest part. Every basket—don’t matter what kind you make—always starts with a knot at its center. Myself, I like to use pine needles for the knot. You twist the needles together, and then you wind your coils around the knot, see?” Her fingers followed the spirals. “Every part leads to the next.”
She reached into a rusty pail of dry stalks next to her feet and handed me a bunch of them. A faint vanilla smell wafted upward. “That’s the smell of sweetgrass,” she said, as if reading my mind. “It comes from the dunes and salt marshes miles from here. Twice a year, I go there and gather it myself because you can’t give the job of pulling sweetgrass to somebody else. You send somebody ignorant out to do it for you, and they’ll bring you back seaweed instead. Best thing to do is collect your own. Put some turpentine on your shoes to scare off all them poisonous snakes hanging around there, find a good spot, and start pulling sweetgrass. None of those snakes will bother you one bit. Nohow. Just dip your shoes in turpentine and you’ll be all right.” A sly smile spread across the old woman’s face, as if she truly loved facing down poisonous snakes.
Tell you what, I was starting to believe the stories about her ancestors living in the Georgia swamps.
“Now, before you can work on a basket, you gotta make the knot first.” She dropped a bunch of long pine needles into my hands and I did my best to knot them together, but it was way harder than you’d think. If you were lucky enough to get something that looked like it might hold for half a minute, then you had to start winding the sweetgrass coils fast around your little bitty knot before it all fell apart.
No matter what I did, I couldn’t get anything close to the start of a basket. Sweetgrass stems sprang outta my hands. The knots came untied. Poked my thumb with one sharp stem and drew blood, for Pete’s sake. Finally I tossed the whole mess back into the bucket and gave up with an aggravated sigh. Good grief. I wasn’t God’s gift to basket making, that’s for sure. I think the orange-striped cat on the porch must’ve felt sorry for me because he came over and rubbed his ears against my knees.
MawMaw Sands jabbed her weaving spoon in my direction. “There now—you see how hard it is to make one of these baskets. Folks always think it looks real easy, that anybody can make a basket, but no sir, it sure ain’t simple. Far from simple.”
Her eyes peered at me from the wrinkled depths of her brown face, two chips of white china staring. “Don’t you forget what a struggle every basket in this life is to make, and how at the center of every single one, there’s a knot of pain. You can’t have one without the other. Pain gets woven right along with the beautiful parts, just like everything else in this world. Sweetness and pain. Same as life.”
Since my right thumb was still throbbing like the devil, I didn’t figure I’d be forgetting about pain or pine needles or her darned baskets anytime soon. Me and the cat were quiet. I think we’d both had enough of MawMaw Sands’s too-deep wisdom for the time being. I’d been hoping for some useful advice, and she’d just given me another big dose of doom and gloom. Standing up, I cast an uneasy glance in the direction of Peaches and Cal’s house. “Guess I better head on back and see what’s happening there.”
MawMaw Sands nodded. “Yes, already heard about you and them leaving.”
Those words stopped me in my tracks.
The old woman studied her basket, still talking. “Now, it might seem far away where they’re being sent to, but nothing’s as far off as it looks on a map, you remember that. People’s the same everywhere, no matter where you go. And someday, mark my words, Levi Battle, you gonna come back here to see me again.” Her foot tapped on the porch planks. “I’m gonna hear your feet comin’ up these steps again loud and clear.”
Her predictions made me so jittery, I know I careened like a row of dominoes down her steps and through her gate without saying so much as a polite goodbye. Probably forgot to latch the gate too. As I was heading back to Peaches and Cal’s house to find out what was true or not, the old woman called out a few final words from the porch. “You stop by before you leave, you hear? I got something to give you.”
21. Blackout Jump
If I wasn’t a believer in MawMaw Sands’s peculiar gifts before that day, I was after it. Because unless she read the official orders of the U.S. Army before they were sent, there was no way she woulda known about Cal being shipped so far away. Not when he hadn’t even read the news himself. And, believe me, if you were asked to draw a diagonal line from one end of the United States to the other, you couldn’t get a line much longer than one going from North Carolina to the place where the army was sending Cal.
Pendleton, Oregon. That’s what the orders said. Cal showed me the letter when I got back. It said Sergeant Calvin R. Thomas was ordered to duty with the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion at Pendleton Air Base in Oregon under the control of the U.S. Ninth Army Service Command.
Now, if I’d been asked to guess the location where my father and the other troopers might be, Oregon was a place that never woulda crossed my mind in a million years, that’s for sure.
“Why there?” I asked Cal, rereading the official words again as if there might be some clue we missed.
He shrugged. “It’s the army. Who knows.”
Later that morning, we walked to the little Southern Pines post office to look up Oregon on the old U.S. map they got hanging on the wall. Probably made people wonder what the heck was going on when they saw the strange parade of me and Cal and Peaches and Victory—with a nappy over her head to keep off the hot sun—coming down the street. Had a couple of neighborhood kids trailing after us too. I remember how all of us crowded into the musty-smelling mail room and squinted at the yellowed map on the wall, which had probably been up there since the Civil War ended, by the looks of it.
Peaches pointed at Oregon. “All the way up there, Cal? That’s where the army is sending you?” The words came out as a quivery whisper. Like a tiny crack opening in a floodwall, you could tell
it wouldn’t be long before everything busted to pieces and a terrible torrent came pouring out. “How could they send you all the way up there?”
Cal tried joking. “Well, it ain’t Japan at least.”
“It’s close enough.” Peaches stabbed a finger toward the map. “Look there. The Pacific Ocean is right next to Oregon. From there, the only place you’d go to is Japan. Cal, they’re sending you to the Pacific to fight, I know it. Cal, you can’t go and leave me. You can’t—”
And then the whole floodwall came crashing down. Peaches and Victory began wailing like a funeral chorus, and the postmaster—who was a nervous-looking fellow—came scurrying from the back, where he’d been eating his lunch, I guess. Sandwich still in his hand and crumbs all over his shirt, he shooed us straight out into the street. “What’s the matter with you folks? Take your arguing outside.” His sandwich-free hand propelled Peaches out the door.
By the time we got home, Peaches’s pretty face was a crying mess and the white collar of her dress was damp with her tears and Victory’s drool. “How can you go so far away from me?” she wailed. The whole neighborhood was taking note of the noise, I’m sure, and wondering what was up.
Trying to soothe Peaches’s nerves, Cal said he’d do some checking around Camp Mackall to see what he could find out about the mission. “Maybe a couple of the fellows have sent back some news by now. I’ll see what the scuttlebutt is around camp.”
Scuttlebutt being gossip. You can see I was getting a good education from the army, even if I was missing school.
Cal was gone the rest of the afternoon, but he didn’t find out much. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just motored around the army post real slowly to get away from Peaches and Victory for a while. When he got back, he told us nobody at Mackall had heard a word from the paratroopers since they’d left, or knew much about Pendleton Air Base and what the army would be doing there.
Not wanting to be one more problem sitting at Peaches and Cal’s table, I stayed outta sight once Cal got home. I stretched out on the porch and read some old Sky Aces magazines from Cal’s collection. Aunt Odella never woulda approved of all the smash-ups and death in those stories, but after reading a bunch of them cover to cover, I decided I could become a big fan.
Inside the house, Cal and Peaches talked for what seemed like hours. Through the kitchen door, I could see the two of them facing each other across the table with Cal’s strong hands reaching across the middle and holding tight to one of Peaches’s hands, as if he was the lifeboat and she was the capsizing ship. The peacock sculpture drooped forlornly on top of the icebox. Victory slept in her crib, being quiet for once.
I caught bits and pieces of the conversation, although I swear I was trying hard not to. Couldn’t help it if some of the words floated out to me, right? Heard my name mentioned a few times. And there were a lot of waterworks, of course—plenty of boo-hooing and don’t leave me. Peaches and Cal talked so long, it got dark and the crickets came out.
When they finally asked me to come inside, I figured the news wasn’t gonna be good. I’d already got myself prepared to head back to Chicago and Aunt Odella again. Slouching into the kitchen, I made sure my face was set in the expression of no emotion it wore most of the time. Nothing they could say would shake me at all.
“Sit down,” Cal said, nodding toward one of the empty chairs.
Peaches pressed her fingers against her temples like she had a bad headache. “I haven’t made us a thing to eat today. It’s way past suppertime and we haven’t had a good meal all day. What’s wrong with me, Cal? I’m just falling to bits and pieces, aren’t I?”
Cal shook his head like he’d had enough of being a lifeboat. Leaning back in his chair, he slowly unwrapped the foil wrapper from a roll of Charms candies. Passed one to Peaches, then me. Tucked the rest back in his pocket and turned to face me. “All right, Legs—”
“Levi,” Peaches insisted in one of her extra-righteous tones.
Now, I’ll admit I kinda liked the name Legs. It had grown on me. But I wasn’t gonna jump in and correct anything between the two of them right then. Just kept myself as tough as a tree and tried to ignore how my heart was starting to slam against my ribs, knowing what words were coming next.
“All right, Levi,” Cal said. “Me and Peaches have done a lot of talking tonight, looking at things from all directions. Thinking about all the possibilities. And what we’ve decided is that we don’t have no choice in these circumstances but to do a blackout jump. You know what that is?”
“No sir.” My heart was knocking even harder. A blackout jump? I pictured them teetering on the edge of a cliff, hand in hand, like two star-crossed lovers in a movie picture. Good grief almighty, they wouldn’t do something dumb like that, would they?
Peaches gave an exasperated sigh. “Just tell it to him straight, Cal. Stop dragging on like you do. Good Lord.”
Cal wasn’t gonna be moved from his storytelling, though. “See, a blackout jump is when a trooper closes his eyes as he jumps outta the airplane. Of course, nobody’s supposed to jump that way, but sometimes, when you’re first training, you can’t help it. You close your eyes outta plain instinct because you’re too darned afraid to look at where your backside is gonna end up. And that’s what they call doing a blackout jump.”
I could absolutely understand that reaction. Not only would I squeeze my eyes shut, I’d stay inside the plane too.
“Anyhow,” Cal continued, “me and Peaches have decided to try something like a blackout jump. Instead of Peaches wandering around Southern Pines by herself after I leave, or going back to live with her folks in Georgia, we’ve decided it’s better to stick together. So we’re gonna close our eyes, jump on a train together, and head out to Oregon. Never been there before, so who knows what we’ll find—but we’ve made up our minds to load up baby Victory and all our belongings and see what happens.”
His next sentence turned my strong tree self into a wobbly stick.
“And we’d like to ask you to come along with us.”
I’m telling you, his words caught me by surprise and almost made me start bawling like a baby. Big tears began burning up my eyes, and my throat felt like I’d got something stuck in it. I started coughing and wiping my eyes, and Cal leaped up, thinking I was choking on the Charms candy, of course. He thumped me on the back while Peaches spilled water all over the checkered tablecloth, hurrying to give a glass to me.
Wherever she was, I hoped Queen Bee Walker was watching and taking careful notes. See, even with all their troubles, Peaches and Cal weren’t taking off and leaving me with a goodbye note. They were inviting me to go along with them. All the way to Oregon.
Cal kept talking while I gulped water. “Now, if you don’t want to come to Oregon, that’s all right with us. We’re leaving it up to you. We can get you squared away and sent back to Chicago if you want. Your choice,” he said. “Shoot, we may get all the way out there to Oregon and have to turn around and come right back if the Japs surrender quick.” Cal gave Peaches a reassuring grin. “But seeing how long it’s been since you’ve spent time with Boots, and how many bad twists and turns this war’s taken, we thought you oughta have the chance to at least see your daddy in person if he’s out there. Maybe he can come up with a good place for you.”
Cal reached for Peaches’s hand across the table. “And me and Peaches want you to know you been a real big help to us ever since you got here. You’re a good kid, Legs, even if some people in your family act like fools. We’d be real grateful to have you along for the trip, especially if I have to ship out once we get to Oregon.”
His last words threatened to start Peaches crying all over again, so Cal finished quickly, before she could get any worse. “So what do you think, Legs? You want to come along with us?”
I nodded, not taking the chance of saying anything dumb.
“Good.” Cal smacked his hands together and jumped up. Tying one of Peaches’s ruffly aprons around his army fatigues, he stood n
ext to the range. “Now how about if we have ourselves some delicious franks and baked beans for supper? After all this talking, I am starved.”
You could tell Cal was already taking off with the whole idea of the trip. As he opened a can of beans and dumped them in a saucepan, he made it sound as if crossing the entire United States would be as simple as making supper from a can. We’d pack a couple of suitcases and some food, and take the train to St. Louis and then another one west. It might take three or four days, he thought.
Mostly I was gung-ho too. Although I’ll admit to worrying about the fact I was leaving the South in the same speedy way I’d left Chicago—without knowing enough about what I was doing or what dangers might lie ahead. Most of what I knew about the West came from the movies—and that knowledge pretty much boiled down to cowboys, Indians, and the movie star John Wayne. Now, I wasn’t dumb enough to think we’d run into John Wayne in Oregon. Or Indians either. Of course, the scorpion of death had come from the West too. Who knows if we’d find any of them scurrying around the state, but I decided this possibility wasn’t something to bring up with Peaches sitting there.
Of course, she perked up once she started making lists of what she’d pack and what outfits she’d take with her. You know how women are about clothes. They start thinking about what they’re gonna wear someplace and their tears dry up faster than a rainstorm in the desert.
22. Ain’t Easy Being the Basket
We had two days to get ready to leave, and those two days were a whirlwind. The U.S. Army wasn’t big on waiting around, I guess—kinda like Aunt Odella—so they didn’t give Cal much time. Mostly it was just me and Peaches doing the packing up in the house, since Cal had his own gear to get squared away at Camp Mackall. To add to our troubles, the weather in North Carolina had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Clouds had moved in and a steady rain fell from the gloomy skies, making it feel more like April than the beginning of June.
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