Littlejohn (24 page)

Besides, I sense that he is completely right about this, even if I don’t know all the details. He can’t remember where he
puts the truck keys half the time, and he’s called Justin “Lafe” ten times since I’ve been here, and Jenny pulled me aside before church Sunday to tell me about an incident at the grocery store that is more disturbing than anything I’ve seen myself. In some deeper sense, though, he seems to be completely in control.

It’s funny, considering his lack of education and his generally passive nature—he always let Mom make the day-to-day decisions—but I’ve never been led wrong by Daddy. Oh, there have been times when I haven’t followed his advice, such as when he told me that Jeff Bowman might still have some growing up to do, after we told him we were getting married. He told me I might have some to do, too. Right on both counts, but it took me five years to forgive him and eighteen years to concede that he was right.

The sun is below the horizon, the sky a reflected blue, by the time we finish talking. I help him to the truck. His leg is stiff now, and he asks me to drive back. It is the time of day that sums up all my best memories of East Geddie and the farm, a time when you can drive along with the windows down, your left arm hanging out, and feel a cool relief that seems to spring from the crops and pines and dark, narrow streams. It is a sweetness of high school dates, of hope and promise.

I
f I hadn’t of kept Lafe’s yearbook, I never would of learned more than I ever wanted to.

Georgia was born on December 6, 1947, not much more than a year after we was married. We had planned on having two or three; would of wanted more than that, but I was forty-one already, and Sara reckoned that it would be nice if I didn’t have to be pushed in a wheelchair to any of our
children’s high school graduations. She didn’t mind teasing me about being old, because she knew it didn’t bother me a bit. I never felt younger in my life.

But Sara had to have a caesarean section, and the doctor told us we shouldn’t have any more children. It bothered Sara more than it did me; whenever I’d get a little blue thinking about no little boys to teach farming and baseball to, I’d think of how hard I prayed to God to make her, just her, not even the baby, all right when she was having that caesarean. I had no right to ask for more happiness than He’d give me in Sara.

Georgia was a colicky baby, and with Sara still recovering, I did a lot of rocking and walking at all hours in early 1948. Some mornings, I’d just tell Lex to go on without me, which was about the only day’s work I’d missed since I quit school, I reckon. It was Georgia’s colic that led me to the one secret I’ll die with.

I developed a plan where I would put her bassinet with the rockers on it in front of me while I sat in my own chair in the living room. Then I could just reach out with my foot and rock her to sleep and maybe catch a few winks myself. If she started to crying too loud, so that I was scared she’d wake up Sara, I’d pick her up and hold her in my arms. But I didn’t have to do that much.

While I would be rocking Georgia with my foot, it would leave my hands free, and it was a good time to try and improve on my reading, which was near-bout to the first-grade level by now. Anything with words on it was good practice, so I’d pick up a atlas, or a
Farmer’s Almanac
or a Bible, anything.

One night, must of been late March, because Georgia was
over the colic by April, I picked up Lafe’s senior high school yearbook, which I had toted over from Momma’s when me and Sara moved, and started reading every single thing in it, reading stuff about people I had known when we was young-uns. It was still a great joy to me to be able to see anybody’s name in print and know it was a name I had heard all my life, to see what Robert Wayne Hairr or Jessie Maxwell looked like in letters.

There was plenty of pictures of Lafe, of course. He was senior class president, and he was in the honor society, and he was on the baseball team—didn’t have no football in Geddie back then. Near-bout all the boys and girls seemed like they signed his yearbook. Then I turned to the single pictures of all the seniors, and when I got to Lafe’s page, I seen this other picture that wasn’t part of the book wedged in there next to his, so that they was facing each other. I reckon Momma might of found it at some time over the years, except I had hid the yearbook right after the accident, because I didn’t want anything reminding her of him, and of what I did, like either one of us needed a reminder. And then I forgot it was hid, until we started moving stuff and I found it in back of the plunder room.

The picture was of Angora. It was one of them cheap photographs like people would have taken of themselves away out in the country when a traveling photographer would come through. I reckon one of them fellas was brave enough to go to the Marsay Pond in Kinlaw’s Hell.

At first, I was confused. The picture was familiar, right off, but I wasn’t sure why or how, and I was about half asleep. It had been more than twenty-five years since I’d last seen Angora, but after the war, it seemed more like a thousand.
I had blocked it out of my mind, I reckon, and the face I was so smitten with that day in 1922 had ceased to be a part of my life. I thought all them years with Rose and all the bad years in the war had wiped that part of my life clean away. Sometimes, though, I think that nothing ever really goes away, that we don’t do nothing in our whole lives that we don’t answer for one way or another.

When the reason for my confusion about that picture finally hit me, and it couldn’t of took more than a minute, I started crying, real quiet so as not to wake Sara or the baby. There are times in everybody’s life, probably, when they got it so good that they get cocky and think they don’t even need God anymore, that they’re one of them “self-made men” that did it all on their own and made their own happiness out of scratch. Sometimes, I think that’s the trouble with the United States right now; we got too many self-made men and not enough God-made men. Well, I was feeling right cocky myself there in the early spring of 1948, just back from the war, a pretty young bride and a beautiful baby daughter, until Angora Bosolet’s picture popped up in Lafe’s yearbook.

I couldn’t do nothing about it then but keep rocking and keep crying. What I wanted to do, when I first understood, was jump up from my chair and run out that door, straight east, through fields and the sandhills and on into Maxwell’s Millpond until it covered me and my shame forever.

The next morning, I woke up in the rocker with about three hours’ sleep, got dressed and headed for the fields. I shook Sara to wake her up so the baby wouldn’t be by herself when she woke up, but I was out the door before Sara could say anything to me, or even look at me.

We worked all day plowing. It was one of them windy,
nasty March days where the sand is always blowing in your face and it seems like it’s 40 degrees when it’s really 60. Every way I turned with that mule, it seemed like I was turning into a hurricane. Spring has never been my favorite season, and this was not going to be my favorite spring by any means.

I had took a sandwich out with me, along with some tea in a Mason jar, and I ate out in the field, blustery as it was. I reckon Sara wondered where I was, but she probably had her hands full with Georgia and figured I just had so much to do that I didn’t have no time to come to the house.

After we unhitched the mules, I went up to Momma’s and washed my face and hands there. It was about six o’clock, and Sara surely would have supper on the table already. I was near-bout starved, but I asked Lex if I could borrow his car for a spell. He asked me what was wrong with my own car, and I told him it was on the blink, and that I’d have his back to him in a hour or so. He give me the keys, and I got in and headed off to find out what I knew already.

Sara must of seen me go by in Lex’s car. There wasn’t enough traffic down that rut road for anything to be missed. I turned onto the clay road into East Geddie, then turned right at the store, then left on the Ammon Road, into Geddie itself. When I got to the main intersection, where the Ammon Road becomes the Mingo Road, I turned right on Highway 47, headed east, past the post office and the hardware store and the Southern States building, alongside the railroad tracks.

Mr. Hector and Miss Annie Belle Blue lived on the north side of the road, in McNeil, which wasn’t much except two little stores and maybe fifty houses, and the sawmill and
lumber company. There had been a post office there, but they closed it before the war. Mr. Hector run the sawmill and the lumber yard; McNeil was where the tram coming up from the millpond linked up with the C&CS line. The main memory most folks would of had of McNeil back then would of been piles and piles of lumber stacked in big yards next to the tracks. It was a place that always smelled like turpentine.

Him and Miss Annie Belle must of been close to seventy then, and they wouldn’t live much longer. They hadn’t had any children of their own, and it was a surprise to most folks when they decided to adopt when they was in their forties. I could just barely remember them coming to our church with this new baby, and it seemed like they was its grandparents instead of its momma and daddy. But they had it better than most around here back then.

Mr. Hector didn’t have to worry none about bad weather or the low price of cotton, and the house they lived in was theirs for free as long as they wanted it. It had been built by a great-uncle of Mr. Hector’s, one of the McNeils that used to own most of this half of the county, and was fancier than most of the houses around here, made out of brick with little round windows on both sides in the front and a gazebo in the back yard. Unlike us and most folks around here, the Blues had a lawn instead of a yard. All we had to do to clean our yard was sweep it with Momma’s broom and pull up the weeds that come up through the sand. Mr. Hector had to hire somebody to come in with a push mower to keep the grass he planted nice and even. He started a trend, and by the time Lex and Connie died in 1968, I was spending four hours every two weeks mowing the centipede grass Momma and Sara set out in 1952. Folks all over town would tease Mr.
Hector, telling him that he cost them fifty extra hours of work a year. He’d just smile and tell them that if it wasn’t him it would of been somebody else, or he’d tell them to just buy some concrete and green paint from the Godwin Lumber Company, cover over their yards and paint them green. Even offered to give them a discount.

I reckon that Mr. Hector knew I had something other than building supplies on my mind that evening. It was 6:30 by the time I got there, bumping over the train tracks in their long front yard and looping around to the back of the house on their circle driveway.

Mr. Hector was out feeding table scraps to his beagles. It was near-bout pitch dark, and the wind had died down some to where it felt right pleasant for the first time all day. He said that him and Miss Annie Belle had just finished supper, and wouldn’t I come inside and have some banana pudding that she’d just made today.

“Mr. Hector,” I said to him, “we got to talk.”

He could see that I didn’t mean inside, so he motioned me over to the pumphouse, where we both could sit, not looking at each other like we would of at the gazebo. So we got settled there at the pumphouse, our feet not quite touching the ground, and I asked him what I had to ask.

“Mr. Hector, I know you probably don’t want to tell me, but I got to know who Sara’s real momma and daddy was.”

I could hear the dogs snuffling around, giving out a little yelp now and then when one thought he wasn’t getting his share, and I could hear Miss Annie Belle clinking things together in the dishpan through the half-open kitchen window.

“I oughtn’t to tell you that, Littlejohn,” he said. “I
promised that I never would tell, and I don’t see what earthly good it would do now. I sure don’t think she’d want to know, and I don’t reckon you do, either.”

“It ain’t a matter of wanting to know, Mr. Hector. I’ve got to know. I can’t rest till I do.”

I promised him that I would never tell another living soul, and especially Sara. They’d always told her that she come from a orphanage, and that seemed right to me at the time. But now I had to have the truth, no matter what.

Later, after he had told me everything, I went on home. Mr. Hector was concerned about me never telling Sara. If he had known the whole story, he wouldn’t of had a care in the world about that.

Sara wanted to know where I’d been. I said I had to talk over some business with her daddy. She said what business, and I told her it was a secret. She kept after me for months to tell her what me and Mr. Hector talked about that evening, but I never did, and it hurt her feelings. It was about the only thing we never talked about. It’s a great open hole in my life now, not having Sara here to talk about things with. Nobody, not even your own child, is as good for that as your wife is. But I couldn’t tell her. She might of hated me, or felt like she had to leave, and I couldn’t of stood that.

First chance I got, I burnt that picture of Angora in the oil heater.

Mr. Hector said that one evening in the late summer of 1923, him and Miss Annie Belle had just finished supper and was out on the porch, fixing to take a walk before it got dark, when a man come to the back door. He had a burlap bag with him, throwed over his shoulder. Mr. Hector recognized him
from the mill, said he’d worked there for about three years.

The man wanted to talk to Mr. Hector alone, but when he saw what was in the sack, Mr. Hector fetched his wife. What was in there, wrapped in a diaper, was a baby, although she didn’t have no name a-tall then. The man said him and his wife had been keeping the baby since it was born, two months before, but that his wife said that she was through raising young-uns, and that if he didn’t do something with this one, she was going to wrap its head around a pine tree, just to keep it from crying.

It turned out that the man’s daughter had had a baby out of wedlock, and then had run off the week after and hadn’t been seen since. They didn’t even know who the daddy was, and the daughter wouldn’t tell, no matter how much they beat her.