by Don Keith
It was probably a given that Jimmy Gill and his grandmother would be chased from the shack where he had been born. It was the only home he had known except for the impossibly fictional ones that flickered out at them from Grandmama’s tiny television screen. With Daddy dead and buried in the little cemetery behind the Holiness church, his mother's final party a fatal one, and Grandmama's Social Security check hardly enough to pay the rent, it was a safe bet they would soon have to move on. Barely a year had passed since his mother’s death when his grandmother broke the news to him.
"Your great-aunt Flora down in Birmingham’s found us a little house, Jimmy," she cheerily announced one fine spring morning. "Half as much rent as this pile of slabs is costing us, too."
He was busy, getting himself ready for school, trying to iron the wrinkles from the thin overalls he'd already worn twice that week. He pretended not to hear, hoping the notion would die if only he ignored it.
"And mind you turn off that iron or you'll burn down this cow-stall before we can get moved out of it."
"When are we gonna move?" Jimmy asked. He was already afraid of the prospects of leaving the few friends he had, the school where he had managed to make the fourth grade, the muddy little river town that was home, no matter how simple and plain it might be.
But Grandmama was gone already, her attention absorbed again by Dave Garroway and his chimpanzee cavorting around inside her television set. The set she had sacrificed and saved up for and had finally bought only a few weeks before Momma died. The old lady had given up snuff and quit smoking for a while to accumulate the fortune it must have cost her. Then, she had climbed up on the roof herself in a sleet storm, tying off the pipe that held the antenna to the house and twisting and turning it around to pull in the best picture while Jimmy yelled co-ordinates to her from inside the house.
For as long as Jimmy could remember, and before the TV came into the house, Grandmama had spent most of her waking hours sitting in front of her big upright Zenith console radio, totally lost in the soap opera characters and voices and singers that spilled from its booming bass speakers. But then, when she got the television set, she was even more a captive of this new medium that dominated one corner of the living room. After his mother died, his grandmother would sit for hours on the sagging living room couch, rocking back and forth hypnotically, a crossed leg bouncing, a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee or glass of sweet iced tea always within reach. She would be swept away, mesmerized by the wavering picture on the round screen, its swirling, hissing snow reflecting in her eyeglasses. She would talk with the tiny people captured inside the wooden box, fuss at them, argue with them, ask them questions, treat them much the same as she would anyone else she had invited into her house.
Jimmy’s spirits plunged at the news of the coming move, but he dared not complain. It was not his way. And there was no one who would listen anyway. He stepped into the hot, sticky overalls, buckled the galluses, tied the laces of his brogans as best he could with their knotty broken strings, and was out the door, slamming it hard behind him to try to cut off any more bad news. But he could still hear Grandmama laughing and talking to the people in the television set as he dodged mud-puddles in a mad zigzag run through town to the schoolhouse.
Somehow, she managed to talk Wiley Groves, their nearest next-door neighbor, into bringing over his old pickup truck and helping them move. A few of the men who had worked with Jimmy’s father at the sawmill came by to give them a hand, pitching in to help load the few sticks of furniture they had. As the men worked, they talked quietly among themselves about James Gill's death, his trashy widow’s craziness, obviously unaware that their boy was close enough to overhear everything they were saying.
Jimmy’s father’s right arm had been severed cleanly one day when he slipped on something and fell into a buzz saw. His blood had been soaked up by the dirt and sawdust as the life flowed out of him in rhythmic spurts. The men remembered him lying there, next to his detached arm, telling each of them goodbye one at a time while they stood idly by, helpless and crying. They mumbled to each other about how his beautiful young wife had done a quick one-eighty after her husband was gone, turning to no-good.
Then the men apparently caught Jimmy listening and hushed their reminiscing before they got to the rest of the story. About how she came to be floating face down in the muddy Tennessee River, her hair like blonde moss as it billowed about her. Jimmy didn’t care what the men said, though. He knew already what had happened.
All Jimmy Gill’s clothes fit into one pillow case. It seemed as if it took the men only a minute or two to load and stack their few sticks of nicked-up furniture onto the truck bed. Jimmy was embarrassed that this was all there was. All there was to show for Grandmama’s years of living, the combined lives of his parents and all their accumulations. A few rickety sticks of furniture, a couple of stained mattresses, a dusty television set, and all of it hardly filling the bed of an old rust-spotted pickup truck.
Jimmy sat on top of the furniture with the pillow case on his lap, tucked between the splintered chiffarobe and the musty-smelling couch, lodged in next to the truck cab. He refused to cry, no matter how sad it all was. He couldn’t. At least he was sitting up high, though. He loved climbing willow trees, scaling sand hills, sitting up as high in the sky and as far away from the mud and dust and dirt as he could get.
When they were ready to go, Grandmama did not appear to be sentimental about the situation at all. She swung up onto the running board and into the patched-up passenger seat of the truck like a pioneer woman climbing aboard a Conestoga wagon heading westward toward the new frontier. Wiley Groves walked around to the driver's side, checking the air in the tires, testing the rope that held the household aboard.
"Sure you got everything, now, Miz Rutherford?" he asked, apparently surprised how small the load had turned out to be. “Don’t want to be forgetting anything or we can’t be coming back for it.”
"Yeah, that’s all there is, Wiley. Let's get going so we can get there before night. Hate to be on the highway at night with all the drunks out after dark," she urged. Then she smiled at a sudden thought. "And maybe we can get there in time to look at some of Ed Sullivan."
From his exalted seat on top of the load, Jimmy could see through the dusty front window of the house. Grandmama’s old Zenith console radio still sat in the living room, all alone and quiet against the back wall. It seemed to be sadly, silently watching them leave.
"The radio, Grandmama! You forgot the radio!" he yelled, just before Wiley ground the truck’s starter to life.
"We don't need that old pile of junk since we got the TV set, Jimmy," she answered, motioning impatiently for Wiley to get on the way. They had miles to go and there were television shows to watch.
But Wiley turned off the ignition, popped open the truck door, climbed back up the shaky porch steps and wrestled the big brown box outside and down to the truck. He carefully tied it upright on the lowered tailgate with a length of grass rope so it couldn’t jump free and escape.
"Might want to listen to the news or some preaching sometimes," he said, red-faced from the exertion of hugging the radio onto the truck. He winked up at the boy. "Might need to wrap some of this rope around you too, boy, skinny as you are, or you're likely to blow out of the truck between here and Birmingham."
Wiley winked again, took a moment to adjust the ride of his overalls and get himself a pinch of snuff, and then they were off. Jimmy Gill’s life to that point disappeared in the blue exhaust smoke of the pickup. The only lasting image left him was the cottony river mist and a squadron of black crows circling above the cemetery behind the Holiness church. He knew there were two cheap grave markers hiding under the elms where his momma and daddy once again lay side by side. Even from his seat high on the back of the truck, he couldn’t quite see their tombstones. He doubted if he would ever see them again.
“‘Bye,” he said quietly, the whispered word snatched away by the wind that whistl
ed around the truck cab.
No matter. He knew they probably would not be listening to him anyway.
By the time they had crossed the river on the rusty old bridge south of Chattanooga, Jimmy Gill had a thumb in his mouth and the music of the rushing wind and the rocking of the truck bed had lulled him to sound sleep.
Two
Jimmy Gill immediately despised their new home. There were signs that it had once been in a nice neighborhood of well-kept wood-frame houses. Homes which had once upon a time been owned by steel workers who had prospered during the war and the boom years afterward. But gradually, as their owners moved to suburbs far away from the smelly smoke of the steel mills and the encroachment of the colored people, their homes had been converted into row after row of run-down duplexes. Houses that had once been proudly loved and coddled had now been snapped up by absentee landlords, divided for multiple families, and rented out to those who flooded in from failed farms and backwater small towns.
They were hard-luck people desperate to find work in the mills or in the shops and foundries that fed on the steel plants like lichens on an oak. Beaten people whose hopes had been slapped down by circumstances or chased from their farms by dirt-cheap produce prices and the inevitable chants of the auctioneers.
A few of the original owners held on, unwilling to move from the plot of ground where they had planted their families years before. People like old Mr. Polanski, who lived two doors down from where Jimmy and his grandmother had moved. He and his quiet wife maintained an oasis in the middle of the weeds and heaped-up garbage. They grew big banana trees that waved in the front yard with the summer breeze, daffodils that boldly announced spring, fragrant hyacinth and rosebushes all decked out in carefully tended beds along the crumpling sidewalk. Their yard itself was a carpet of soft, cool, green zoysia, always neatly mowed and edged.
But apparently not everybody appreciated the beauty of Mr. Polanski’s yard. Several times a week, it seemed that someone in a loud, angry car would spin across the corner lot and rip up the flowers and bushes and grass, as if their glory was some kind of personal affront to them. The vandal always managed to steer around the big limestone rocks that lined the edge of the street to try to block such an assault, and he came and went without anyone being able to see who it was or do anything to stop him.
Mr. Polanski would usually be out in his yard later in the day, after his long shift at the steel mill, trying to salvage what he could before darkness cut off his rescue. He would talk to himself under his breath in a strange, guttaral language and occasionally shake his fist in the direction in which he imagined the car that had done such damage might have fled. His wife, who barely spoke English herself, brought him ice water and sat in the shade of a nearby maple, listening as he cursed, allowing him to vent his rage on the dirt clods and severed limbs of his plants. Sometimes she supplied him with the foreign curses that time and anger had made him forget.
The Polanskis were the first people Jimmy met in the neighborhood. He made an instant friend when he walked over and volunteered to help him clean up the mess. He suspected Mr. Polanski simply wanted to have someone to talk with, and talk he did. He told Jimmy how it used to be when everyone in the neighborhood did as he still tried to do. Kept up their places with pride. Of a recent time when everybody on Wisteria Street knew everybody else. When they held neighborhood picnics and block parties and watched out for mischief anytime someone was away from home.
“They would never have allowed such as this to happen, Jimmy,” he said. “Together, me and the Angelos and the Kauffmans and Sammy Corkus down there on the corner, we would have stopped such damn foolishness before someone is hurt.”
He'd wipe the sweat from his face with a bath towel, take a big drink of water so cold it claimed his breath for a moment, and then look wistfully up and down the street that had been his home for forty years. He told Jimmy how it now seemed to him to be a strange, foreign land out there just beyond his flower beds. An avenue of ill-tempered, unhappy aliens too sullen to speak, too disillusoned to care for much of anything, and especially each other.
And he would talk of his own daughter and son, moved away to Atlanta and California, who only came home on Christmas and called once a month to check on him and their mother and to talk of the grandchildren. How they would fuss at him endlessly for not retiring, for not moving away to Florida, for refusing to leave the place that was plenty good enough for them when they were growing up.
Jimmy would be on his knees in the dirt beside the old man, holding the trunks of new replacement azalea plants while he buried their feet in the dark loam, and the man’s tears would fall on the fragrant earth like a sudden spring rain. Jimmy would pretend to study the shapes that the clouds spun over their heads to try to keep from embarrassing the old man, to keep from letting him know that he had noticed his crying.
From that first dreary, rainy day when they had unloaded their things into the damp duplex on Wisteria Street, with its musty mildew smell and cold linoleum floors, Jimmy had ached to ride right back up old U.S. Highway 11 in the back of Wiley Groves’ coughing pickup truck. Back to his friends, his playground along the Tennessee River, the drafty shack that now seemed a palace in comparison to this dingy place.
The only stream here was the junk-filled ditch that snaked through the vines and weeds just out the backdoor. He doubted it would be much good for frog-gigging or minnow-catching. There certainly were no big catfish to catch with a chunk of soap on a hook. No well-worn war-trails winding through jungles of honeysuckle and grape vines. No tall trees to climb and claim a lofty limb to cling to and gaze off into the distance. Just dirty cement, cracked asphalt, scrawny trees, and mean, surly people who did not seem to want to be in this damned place any more than he did.
Jimmy was so lonely he hurt. They had lived in the duplex at least two weeks before he saw any other kids in the neighborhood. It was a steamy hot Saturday afternoon and he sat on the front steps, being careful to stay on his side of the invisibly divided porch.
Neither Grandmama nor he had met any of the loud, dirty people who lived only a paper-thin wall away from them. There was a drawn-looking, skinny woman, a coarse, loud-talking man, and a set of identical twin boys who were probably in their late-teens. They were usually locked tightly behind pulled window shades, quiet except for occasional violent explosions from the old man and answering salvos from the boys. Then one or the other or all three would storm and stomp out the doorway and rattle angrily off in one direction or the other in one of their collection of old, loud cars that they kept parked all over the sidewalk and on the muddy front lawn.
The name "George" had been penciled on a piece of paper Scotch-taped to their mailbox near their front door, but Jimmy had no way of knowing if that was a first or a last name. It did not matter. He had already made up his mind to stay out of their way after his only encounter so far with any of them.
Grandmama rarely slipped far from the television set so she had not made their acquaintance. The only time Jimmy had tried to be friendly had been on their second or third day there. The frail woman who appeared to be the wife and mother had slipped out her door to throw wet, gray sheets over the porch railing to dry. She seemed preoccupied and apparently did not see Jimmy sitting there in his regular spot, high up on the front steps, where he was enjoying a rare shaft of sunshine.
"Hi, ma'am," he chirped cheerfully, trying to be friendly, the way he had been taught.
But she was either deaf or chose to ignore his greeting. She finished her task hurriedly and was quickly back inside the house with a dismissing slam of the ripped screen door behind her. It would be a while before he saw her again. And if she and the rest of her family were that unfriendly, then that was perfectly fine with Jimmy Gill.
Except for the humid heat, that particular Saturday had turned out to be a nice day. Leaves were finally sprouting on the sycamores that lined Wisteria Street, a full month later than those on the chartreuse ridges that lined up
like a collage in the distance. Mr. Polanski's tulips and azaleas and cannas shouted happily from the corner, a beautiful island of bright colors along the otherwise gray block.
Jimmy almost missed the approaching sounds. The once-familiar noises of kids playing, squealing, daring each other, singing and shouting. Sitting there drowsily in the hot sun, it was so much a sound from his old home, his previous life, that he was not at all surprised to hear it.
Then he saw them.
Five or six colored kids were spinning around the street like a pack of dwarf circus clowns, darting at and dodging each other on funny, patched-together bikes. Some of the cycles had mismatched tires, one sported handle bars that were cocked at a funny, impossible, crooked angle. The kids were laughing, screaming, doing wheelies, splashing through the ever-present mud puddles, obviously carefree and happy.
Jimmy could not help himself. He was grinning at them, and then laughing out loud at their antics.
One of the kids, the tallest, the one with the wacky handle bars, suddenly spotted Jimmy sitting up high on the steps, as if he was some dignitary on a reviewing stand observing their gleeful parade. And the colored kid had caught him laughing at them.
He stood there in the middle of the street and warily eyed this giggling white kid. Jimmy managed to suppress his laughter and stared right back. He had never seen a colored person this close before, let alone one that appeared to be near to his own age. There simply had not been any black people in their little river town, and the school had been segregated. But this kid appeared to be the leader of the band and, furthermore, seemed to pose him no real threat. And they were kids. He desperately wanted somebody, anybody, to play with.