Littlejohn (3 page)

Anyhow, Gruff was sitting with me in the living room of mine and Sara’s house, watching the Redskins play the Eagles. Sara was laying down, and Georgia was playing the piano in the sitting room down the hall. And the Redskins was winning, which was near-bout a miracle back then. Late in the game, when it seemed like there weren’t any way even Washington could lose this one, old Sonny went to work. With almost no time left a-tall, he threw the ball to this little halfback, boy named McDonald, and he caught it and must of run past six Redskins, finally just easing into the end zone while the announcers went crazy. I can remember it better than some things that happened last week.

So, I’m just sitting there, gripping the easy-chair arms and about to have a stroke, when Gruff rears back and lets go with a “Goddamn son of a bitch goddamn choking son of a bitch goddamn Redskins bastards.” Gruff always was a rough-talking fella, although I always felt like his cursing lacked a little imagination. He used to get in trouble with Momma all the time about it before he left home for good. Me, I could call a contrary mule a hee-hawwin’, lop-eared, knuckle-headed, dog-meat strumpet and so on for ten minutes without taking the Lord’s name in vain. I knew Georgia and Sara could hear every word of it, because they both got real still. And then Gruff just looks up toward the ceiling, just like he’s looking right through that plunder room in the attic, right through the tin roof, right up to heaven, and he says in a real quiet voice, “Take me now, Jesus; take me now.” Gruff scared me sometimes.

But that’s the way my brain is going right now, come hell or high water. I have lived with it all this time, and there was always a reason to keep on going. Now, there ain’t. Everybody’s fine now. The loose ends are all tied up, and it’d be better for all involved if Littlejohn McCain just meets You and makes his peace.

So, with this boiling sun making my scalp tingle like it used to when Daddy would send me out back of the smokehouse on a cold dark night to fetch more stovewood, me not knowing when one of his hounds was going to jump me and make my heart stop, I can almost see that old monkey coming across Maxwell’s Millpond, and Gruff’s words come back to me, not as a curse but as a plea: Take me now, Jesus; take me now.

W
hen I was a little girl, I used to love to go with Daddy to the Godwin Lumber Yard in McNeil. A man named Arch McMillan was the foreman there, and he was the designated giver of directions to East Geddie.

“Mr. Arch,” I’d ask him, “has anybody got lost looking for East Geddie today?”

More than one tired, dazed farm-implement salesman or
insurance agent had pulled into the lumber yard after foolishly heading east from Geddie on Highway 47 looking for East Geddie. They’d travel past deserted sandhills and scrub pines, and a house now and then, and by the time they got to the lumber yard, after perhaps driving back and forth two or three times looking for the nonexistent side road, Arch McMillan was ready for them. They were his prime source of entertainment.

“No, son, East Geddie ain’t east of Geddie,” he’d say cheerfully, proud to own such knowledge. “East Geddie is east of Old Geddie, which is southwest of Geddie itself, of course. You got to go back west, to Geddie, then go south on the Ammon Road, then turn west again on the Old Geddie Road, and keep headin’ west till you get to East Geddie.”

I used to think that there was a town near where we lived called Geddie Itself, because that’s how people usually referred to the town we were supposed to be east of.

I stopped at the welcome station last time I came down here and got a free state road map, and East Geddie is still, cartographically speaking, east of Geddie. I’m sure lots of people driving through on the way to the beach think the place is one of those ghost towns that cease to exist for several decades before anyone notifies the map makers.

Up in the plunder room at Daddy’s, there’s an old chest of Aunt Connie’s, where the family kept deeds and old letters from back as far as the late 1700s. My grandmother, when she was a young woman, tried to get East Geddie’s history onto a page of lined paper:

I wish I could get my students to write so economically.

Like Red John McCain, I can be a little intractable. Maybe that’s why I’ve made such a pig’s breakfast of things.

I’ve been in Europe for half the summer and am still trying to sort everything out. I didn’t leave any addresses or phone numbers, even though Daddy always wants me to. Even at eighty-two, he wants to know where I am. Even at forty, I let it bother me and try to shut him out.

When I called the Carlsons from England to see how Justin was doing, they told me about his flight to Carolina. I wasn’t a happy camper, but I had a few weeks to cool off. This hasn’t been any easier for Justin than it has for me.

If last year had been a football game, God would have been called for unnecessary roughness. In April, they discovered
Mom’s pancreatic cancer, and by November, she was gone. Also in April, I discovered that I was married to an asshole, a problem that has since been corrected.

Daddy was upset about our breakup, but he was so absorbed with Mom that he hardly had time to concentrate on relatively minor catastrophes. And I spared him the gory details, just told him Jeff had moved out.

Christmas was a bad time all around. Justin didn’t want to come down, although he and Daddy had always gotten along rather well, even if they didn’t have much in common. He sulked most of the time we were at the farm. He was so rude that I couldn’t help thinking, if it had been me at fifteen, someone, probably Mom, would have applied severe corporal punishment. I had to cajole and then threaten him into going in and thanking Daddy for the shirt and baseball bat. Everyone just seemed mired in their own private losses. Disaster doesn’t necessarily pull the survivors together. Sometimes, we just seem to be trying to push each other off the life raft.

Every memento of Christmas, every cloying TV commercial, every single “Merry Christmas” seemed to drive the dagger a little deeper. We’d been watching television, mainly to keep the lack of conversation from being so conspicuous, on Christmas Eve, when
It’s a Wonderful Life
came on unexpectedly at the end of some second-rate college football bowl game. Now we have the movie in our video library; we used to set aside a night to watch it and
Miracle on 34th Street
back-to-back, when Justin was younger. I remember how Jeff used to get kind of choked up by it and pretend he had something in his eye. But the element of surprise made this familiar paean to savings and loans seem
like an unexpected Christmas present. We watched raptly. I didn’t even bother to sneak a peek at my watch to see how many more hours we had left in East Geddie.

But at the end, when all of George Bailey’s friends are filling the basket with money to keep Potter from sending him to prison, and George is holding his daughter, and “Hark the Herald” comes bursting through, Justin got up and stomped out of the room. He didn’t come back for the rest of the evening. No one should be made to endure Christmas within at least one year of a personal catastrophe.

Jeff Bowman and I were married a year after I graduated from UNC—Greensboro, when he was a don’t-give-a-damn political science graduate from Carolina with no visible future plans other than to stay out of Vietnam and I was working toward a master’s in English. We both liked to raise hell and laugh at the rest of the world. But Jeff had to find something to do for a living, and stock brokerage finally offered itself. Soon, we weren’t always on the same side.

We lived together for seventeen years, though, and might have just kept going, me an English professor at Montclair, him a broker with Parks and Sutton, mutually enjoying Justin and, on occasions, each other. Bev Lundquist is what tore it.

Jeff and Bev had an affair not long after we were married, but he’d repented, and I’d had my own affair out of revenge, and we somehow patched things up. Sometimes I think we had Justin just to convince each other that we were a real family.

But when Bobby DeVries told me Bev was now working as a secretary for Parks and Sutton, after her divorce, and that things were not good, I started gathering kindling for the funeral pyre of our marriage. Bobby works with Jeff, and he
offered to “comfort” me, telling me I was “too good” for Jeff. “Well, then,” I told him, “I must be way too good for you.” I was already beginning to plot as I showed Bobby the door.

I am not the worst-looking forty-year-old in the world. I have my mother’s dark complexion (and temper), and I spend enough time in aerobics to have, thus far, avoided the “well-preserved” stage. My specialty at Montclair is American writers of the early twentieth century. If you teach as long as I have, you learn to mix and match, to teach Fitzgerald and Hemingway and T. S. Eliot and Faulkner and Dreiser in several different ways to different levels of students, rearranging old subjects with new themes. Most of my classes now are for graduate students, where, in the time-honored tradition, we teach to produce teachers.

It is not unusual for one of my students to take a course in
The Waste Land
, in which one starts with Eliot, then branches out to find wasteland imagery in
The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises
and
Look Homeward, Angel
. The same student might then take a course in the short stories of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, then a course in research methods, using the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Eliot with an emphasis on the critical reception of their work. Throw in an obscure Jean Toomer or Ford Madox Ford and your career is set. In fourteen years as a professor at Montclair, girl and woman, I have never taught a course that did not include at least one work from either Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Once every year or so, I teach a course on feminism in literature. The main text is
Save Me the Waltz
by Zelda Fitzgerald. Of course, it’s necessary for my students in this course to read
Tender Is the
Night
in order to do an analysis of the Zelda characters in each book.

At Montclair, we use some of the brightest and most obsequious Ph.D. candidates as poorly paid graduate instructors, mostly to commit
Beowulf
on innocent freshmen. One of the instructors, Maxton Winfree, was a twenty-five-year-old protégé of mine with an unpublished novel and half another one. Max intended to subsidize his creative genius by attaching himself to the financial security of Montclair or someplace similar, allegedly as a teacher. I’d read his novel and felt he said little, badly. But he would serve my purpose well.

No one can teach such romantic stuff as
The Great Gatsby
and
A Farewell to Arms
without being the object of a few schoolboy crushes. I had always been flattered by such attention, especially as the years went by. I was always kind but firm; and if Jeff hadn’t resurrected Bev Lundquist, poor Max Winfree would have been let down gently.

Only two weeks before my Great Revelation, Max had made his move. He invited me to his apartment after a faculty meeting, supposedly to get my opinion on a problem he was having with setting in his second novel. (You should set it aside, I was thinking, and get a job.) He fixed us each a bourbon and water, then sat beside me while he described the problem. He slipped his arm behind me on his little student-issue couch as he talked, playing with my hair. Then he moved in, awkwardly, for the kiss. I turned and we bumped heads, causing him to spill half his bourbon. He pledged his unyielding devotion, I gave him my happy-wife-and-mother speech and we parted with a minimum of embarrassment.
Since then, we’d spoken several times, once in private as he slipped into my ten-by-ten office, closed the door quickly behind him and told me how much my friendship meant to him.

After I found out what was keeping Jeff from coming home until seven on Tuesday and Friday nights, though, and who accompanied him to Denver for the business trip in October, my thoughts turned to Max.

“I have to see you,” I told him over the office phone, speaking to the instrument of my revenge three doors away. “It’s very important.… No, not here. Come by my house at five-thirty.… No, I can’t tell you over the phone.”

Back in Cotton Hall at UNC—G, other girls in the dorm would beg me to answer the phone as their proxy when prospective blind dates from Chapel Hill called. Looks come and go, but a good voice lasts. When I say, “I have to see you,” better than Max Winfree have come running.

It was a Friday in April, a week before we found out about Mom. Justin was spending the night with Trey Carlson, three blocks away. Jeff would be at his Friday after-work poker session, a habit he’d started last summer, shortly before Bev Lundquist started working for him. I wondered, grinding my teeth, if Jeff and his broker buddies got a few laughs out of the double entendre of “poker.” At any rate, I would count on him to arrive within five minutes of seven, faithful even in his infidelity. It had been all I could do the previous Friday to restrain myself from dinging him with a Jefferson cup when he came through the door, all fake cheerfulness, so full of guilt I couldn’t believe I hadn’t sensed it on my own.