Littlejohn (25 page)

Mr. Hector said they took the baby because they was afraid that she wouldn’t live long enough for them to think about it. He said he told Miss Annie Belle that they could always give her to a orphanage if it didn’t work out, but that after a few days, there wasn’t much doubt in either of them’s minds that she was a gift from God. They had a friend, one of Miss Annie Belle’s cousins, that was a doctor, and he took care of getting the baby’s birth date postdated. They reckoned that she was born two months earlier, so it went in the books as June 23, 1923, and they named her Sara Joy Blue.

Mr. Hector said the man that brought them that burlap bundle was a dark-haired, bushy-browed man, fearsome-looking, and that he worked at the sawmill for two more years and never once gave any sign that he had ever seen Mr. Hector except at the mill.

He said he couldn’t remember his name, but that he had
all the pay ledgers for the past thirty years in his office. I asked him if we could see them right then. He looked at me right queerly, but he got his flashlight and we walked across the road to the office. He finally found this dusty little ledger book marked “1923” and went down the names on the payroll.

“Here it is,” he said directly, his bony old finger stopping halfway down a column. “Marcus Bosolet.”

I had always believed in God, in His wrath and mercy, but ever since I found Angora’s picture in Lafe’s yearbook and knew who her daughter was, I have continued to be confused as to His intent. Was He punishing me for Lafe’s death by arranging it so that out of all the women in the world, I would fall in love with my own brother’s daughter? Did He mean for me to leave her when I found out the horror of what I’d done? Or was I supposed to look after the truest victim of that shot from my Iver-Johnson 12-gauge by giving her a happy life? I prayed for months, asking for a sign. The only sign I ever got was an ever-deepening love of Sara and Georgia, until I finally told God that if He wanted me to turn my back on my sin, He would just have to damn me to hell, because I wasn’t going nowhere of my own free will. But I did ask Him to help me keep this shame from Sara, and everybody else, and just let me do the answering for everybody. So far, I reckon He’s cooperated.

And so, Angora never left me. Every time I looked at Sara after that, I could see her momma’s wild beauty, and more than a little bit of Lafe, too. I could understand then why I’d fell in love with Sara. As for Angora herself, I never tried to find her, because she was the one other person that could
spoil everything, the whole life we had in East Geddie. But I’d have nightmares where she showed up at our back door, looking just like she did the last time I seen her, crazy-looking and begging for help, and Sara would ask me why I was turning her away, somehow not seeing that Angora looked just like her.

Twice after that I thought I saw her, and that she saw me. The first time was at the tobacco market in Sampsonville in 1955. I brought Sara along, just to break the monotony, hers and mine. As we was sitting in the hot pickup truck, drinking Coca-Colas and waiting our turn, a woman walked toward us, on the other side of the street by the tobacco warehouse, and looked right at us in the cab. When she smiled, I could of sworn that it was Angora, who would of been near-bout fifty then. But she just kept walking. I looked in the rearview mirror and she had turned half a block down the street and was looking right at my eyes. I held my breath for a second, then she turned around and kept on walking. I have to admit, I didn’t mind missing them trips to Sampsonville after we turned to raising strawberries.

The other time, it was 1962, and I was shopping at Belk’s in Port Campbell, looking for a Sunday shirt. I looked up, and this old woman was looking at me through the front glass of the store. She looked more like seventy than the fifty-five or so Angora would of been, but it favored her enough that I threw down the shirts I was looking at and walked out of Belk’s the back way.

For years I’ve looked at the obituaries every day in the
Post
, and I never have seen her name. I’ve seen two Angoras, one of which might of been her, but probably not, and a handful of Bosolets. A cousin of hers one time wrote a check
for strawberries at the shed. I seen the name and asked him if he knew Angora Bosolet. When he told me she was his fourth cousin, I asked if he knew what had become of her. He said he didn’t know, that she run away a long time ago, and that he’d heard that she turned out bad. That’s all he would say. He asked me my name—I reckon he figured I just worked there. I made one up.

I
wake up, and it’s cooled off.

It looks like the Lord wants me to go on living, for some reason. I feel right light-headed, and I wait a couple of minutes before I try to raise myself up off the little stool. It must of clouded up, because I don’t see any shadows, but everything looks bright, like the sun is shining just back of the clouds and making them glow like sunset.

I’m wondering how come the weatherman didn’t tell me nothing about this cool front a-coming in when I look over and spy that pine tree. It’s as big as it was in my dream, two hundred feet high at least, and six feet across, biggest pine I ever saw. And out from behind it steps Lafe. He’s nineteen again, skinny and smiling, with his red hair all mussed up like it was most of the time. He’s got a scar over his right eye.

Lafe don’t say a word, just motions to me, and I don’t seem to have no voice right now. I get up, easier than I’ve got up in years, don’t even need my cane. Lafe is walking out toward the millpond, which is clear and blue now, like the water has been purified. And then he’s in the water, except he’s not really so much in it as on top of it. I’m supposed to follow him, but I still remember my dream and I’m still wondering if this is another one. Lately, it’s got harder and harder to tell what’s dreams and what’s real.

Finally, he’s about a hundred feet out in the water, and he turns around again and looks at me, just looks and don’t say a thing, but it’s like my feet have a life of their own, and they start moving toward him, toward the pond.

The water isn’t even getting my feet wet. I’m out several yards and I look down and see that I’m just walking across the surface. Lafe somehow makes me understand that I’m supposed to look up. I do, and he nods and smiles, makes a forward motion with his hand and I follow him. That old hymn we used to sing at church, “Walk on Galilee,” comes into my head, the one that had the chorus that went:

Now I’m out where the water ought to of been over my head, but it’s like walking on glass, except different, because this feels more like feathers. Lafe points on up ahead, and I can see where we’re heading to.

There is a mist now, making everything hazy and hard to see, except out in the middle of the pond, where the sun seems like it has broke through and is shining on a whole bunch of people. It’s just like in my dream, only prettier even. There’s Momma, looking like she did at maybe thirty, still in good health and smiling to beat the band, happier-looking than I’ve ever seen her. And Daddy, with the twinkle in his eye he’d get when he would tell us about the war and all, but looking younger than I ever saw him, a lot younger than he was when I was born, I reckon. Him and Lafe don’t look like they’re father and son, but more like they’re brothers, both with their wild red hair and long, bony faces. I can’t figure out how they can all be so clear to me, because they’re smack in the middle of the pond, must still be a quarter mile away.

I see Angora and Rose, standing side by side, with their different kinds of dark complexions, both looking as pretty as they looked on the prettiest days of their lives. They’re waving at me and motioning me like I ought to hurry up, or like they can’t wait to see me. And I see Lex and Connie and Century, not that long gone from my memory, all looking like they’re young-uns again, or in their twenties anyhow, and they look like they might be getting ready to start a game of run-cat-run.

I think about the time that Georgia and Jeff took me to see a play that the college was putting on. It was a terrible sad one, with everybody just tore apart at the end from what they had said and done to each other, and I wondered why anybody would want to watch something that made you feel that bad. And then the curtain went down and came up again, and these same folks that was destroying each other just a minute before was all smiling and bowing, with their arms around each other like they’d been best friends for life. Was we all just play-acting?

Back behind the rest, a little higher up, is my Sara. She has her hand on Angora’s shoulder, in a way that tells me somehow that they’ve found each other and know everything. Sara is even prettier than her momma, as pretty as she was in the parking lot of the Geddie Presbyterian Church when she first let me know that she cared about me, with her dark hair and flashing eyes, misted over now with tears like mine are. She holds out one tan, thin wrist, one of the wrists I used to love to kiss when I’d wake up in the morning with her curled beside me in our feather bed, and I feel like I won’t be able to stand it if this is a dream and I have to wake up old and crazy.

I’m not more than a hundred yards away when I catch up with Lafe. I put my arm around his waist and he puts his around mine, and we walk toward the light.

This time, I won’t look down.