Neverland (18 page)

“I guess somebody just wanted it that way. Somebody just decided that they liked the kitchen there and the stairs where they are. The guy who musta built it.”

“Well, there y’are.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Nobody gets it, you just got to take it like it is.”

“Was your daddy really some kind of god?”

“Beau, you’re how old?”

“Old enough.”

“Nobody knows who my daddy was, and some folks’ll tell you he was just some man who came and went like a summer storm. My mama believes different, and even some other friends believe different.”

“How about you?”

“I believe. . . .” She paused, and her nostrils flared like she was taking in a whiff of something strong and good. “I believe there are windows and doorways, and sometimes . . . if the doorway’s big enough . . . you can go from the outside to the inside. The Bible tells us that the House of the Lord has many mansions. Who’s to say what lives in some of them mansions and whether all their windows are opened or closed?”

“I didn’t think . . . ”

“What, that somebody like me was a Bible reader? Well, surprise, surprise, Beau, learn something new every day. And now you come sniffing around me. I know something about you.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve looked through one of them windows, but it ain’t one of the mansions, no sir, it’s a different house altogether. Down in the West Island we got stories about that place.”

“I know.” I remembered the tales of the Gullah graveyard near the site of Neverland.

“You think you know a lot, but you don’t. We got stories that keep children up nights, scared. You stay up nights?” She returned to her paperback, not interested in my answer. “Beau, do you stay up nights, thinking about what you’ve seen through that window? ’Cause one day, somebody on the other side might just lift up on the pane, and then you’re gonna go through and there won’t be no coming back, I can tell you that. What waits on the other side ain’t gonna let go of you, no matter how much you holler.”

Finally, Sunday morning, Sumter actually began tossing a few words my way. Daddy had gotten doughnuts down at the bakery in town, and this always put us in a good mood. Aunt Cricket wanted us all to go to church over in St. Badon, but Mama said she didn’t really feel like sitting through an hour-long sermon nor did she want to suffer through the new green prayer book this week. So instead, Grammy Weenie wheeled into the great room and read from her little Bible. For all Grammy Weenie’s faults—and she had many—she did have a knack for finding perfect entertainment in the Good Book. She read the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, which we loved because not one of us liked Lot’s wife and we cheered when she turned into a pillar of salt. Then she read the tale of the Seven Plagues on Egypt and Salome’s dance. Grammy Weenie almost never ventured into the New Testament, much preferring, she said, “the Old God who got angry with the Jews and fought His own people tooth and nail. That was back when God was really
God.
Before He was for every fool who walked the face of this earth.”

But undoubtedly Sumter’s absolute favorite part of the Old Testament, which he would put in a request for each Sunday morning, was when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac. “Of course, God
nixed
that,” Sumter said to his teddy bear in a huff, “and there went human sacrifice. What a waste.”

Grammy Weenie fixed him with a stern look, slamming her Bible shut. “Thou shall not kill, Sumter Monroe, do you understand? Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. He didn’t say it’s Sumter Monroe’s. He said ‘vengeance is mine.’ Abraham would’ve sacrificed his son for the Lord, but the Lord did not want him to. Man must not kill. It is the Lord who kills, if He so chooses.”

Sumter whispered in Bernard’s ear: “
I beg to differ with the Weenie
.”

After a lunch of lemonade and cream cheese and pepper-jelly sandwiches, Uncle Ralph brought out some gloves and the baseball bat. “You boys want to play some ball?”

“No,” Sumter stated flatly.

“Oh, be a good sport, why don’t you.”

“I’ll play,” Missy said, even though she knew Uncle Ralph never liked it when the girls played. She’d been picking at a scab on her knee while she sat next to Daddy on the porch swing. I was on the floor beside them, flicking at big black ants just like I was punting paper triangles in a game of desk football.

“Yeah, let’s choose up sides,” Nonie added. She grabbed the bat from Uncle Ralph’s hands and twirled it like a baton. “I want to be team captain.”

“We’re not talking whiffle ball, girls, or underhand,” Uncle Ralph snapped.

“Afraid?” Nonie grinned. There was something in her eyes besides challenge. There was some kind of power that must’ve been passed from woman to woman and daughter to daughter from Great-Gramma, the Giantess from Biloxi, down to Grammy Weenie, to Mama and Aunt Cricket,
and to my sisters—some kind of spirit that never broke stride. Uncle Ralph was scared of these women, all of them, and I could not say that I blamed him. “Afraid?” she repeated. “We could make it girls against boys. Mama, you want to play?”

Sumter said to Bernard, “Yeah, and we could use the Weenie as home plate.”

My mother was sitting on the front porch steps eating a small triangle of sandwich while she bounced Governor on her knee. “I’m not sure I’m up for it.”

“I’ll play if you will,” Daddy said as he got off the swing.

“All right, then.” Mama half smiled. Then she turned to Grammy Weenie, who was knitting up on the porch. “Mama, would you mind holding Governor?”

Grammy Weenie looked up at us as if we were all crazy, but nodded and said nothing.

“Oh boy.” Missy rolled the hem of her culottes up around her thighs. “Our team is red hot.”

“Cricket, you got to play, too,” Uncle Ralph called to her.

From the kitchen window she shouted, “What?”

“We got a game going out here, and it’s got to be four against four, boys against girls.”

“I don’t play
baseball.”

My mother said, “You used to. Now you get out here Crick and be a sport or I’ll tell them about the Kiss of Death.”

Aunt Cricket let out a little shriek. “Oh, don’t you dare, dear Lord God!” But she was laughing, too, in a way I rarely heard, the way sixteen-year-old girls laugh among themselves.

“Kiss of Death?” Uncle Ralph raised his eyebrows. “Keeping secrets from me, honey?”

“Oh.” Aunt Cricket came outside, taking her smudged apron off and tossing it on the porch swing. “I’ll tell you someday, Ralph, but this is hardly the time or the place.”

Grammy Weenie said, “She was almost asphyxiated by a masher eighteen years ago while she was selling kisses at the Tri-County Fair.”

“Moth-
er,
”
Aunt Cricket giggled, “the
children
.”

“Nearly smothered to death, and me without my smelling salts. I told her that nice girls don’t go around selling kisses, but she was almost seventeen and no boy had even attempted to kiss her yet.”

Aunt Cricket blushed, and she and my mother kept on laughing.

“You sold
kisses?”
Sumter said incredulously.

“It was for a good cause. But, lord, I thought I would die, just
die.
”

Aunt Cricket shot my father a warm glance. “And then a nice boy gave me mouth-to-mouth.”

Mama stopped laughing and coughed a couple of times. She pushed wisps of her brown hair up behind her ears. Her ears were red as if it were cold, although it was going to be broiling if the sun stayed in the sky much longer.

Dad said, “Let’s get this show on the road.” He tossed the baseball up and down in his right hand.

The game was doomed from the start.

I was bad at sports but competitive by nature. I couldn’t throw or catch to save my life. And in my heart, I wanted to win. Win! And I never would.

The girls were up first, and none on their team was fiercer than Nonie herself. Why she was such a flirt with boys I will never understand, given the fact that she was such a tomboy when it came to sports. Dad was catcher, and kept saying, “Batter-batter-batter-swing!”

Uncle Ralph pitched to her underhand at first, and she took it as a strike and rolled her eyes. “Let’s play for
real.”

“You want it, you got it,” he said, and pitched the next one low and fast.

She swung the bat. It made a sound like a lightning crack when she hit the ball. She dropped the bat and ran to first. I was near third and I watched the ball go up and up until it seemed to head right for the sun.
We all shielded our eyes to see where it would come down. Nonie was running to second and Mama was shouting, “Go! Go! Go!”

Sumter stood by second, his glove floppy and loose on his left hand, his teddy bear leaning against his ankles. He was not watching the ball at all.

“It’s yours!” his father yelled to him.

Sumter looked at Uncle Ralph like he was speaking a foreign language.

“Goddamn it, it’s yours!” Uncle Ralph started running over to second base.

Nonie was already to third, and even she looked back to see why Uncle Ralph was cussing.

“Home!” Mama cried out. “Home! You can do it!”

“You goddamn weak sister!” Uncle Ralph shoved his son out of the way and caught the ball himself. Then, turning back to the rest of us, “You’re out! I caught it! Yerrr-out!”

My father tossed his glove down and said, “Jesus, Ralph, Jesus.”

Sumter picked up Bernard and was off and running, out to the bluff, out to the woods, off to Neverland.

Dad took off after Sumter, and Uncle Ralph said, “Aw, let him go, he’ll get over it.” I dropped my glove and followed, and Uncle Ralph said, “Hey, what’d I
do
?”

We caught up with Sumter at the edge of the woods; sunlight thrust sharp white spears between each tree, and Sumter was half in and half out of the light. He was facing a bent and haggard tree trunk like he was counting down in a game of hide-and-seek. His shoulders rose and fell, his head was low. He appeared smaller than I had remembered him being.

“Sumter,” my father said, “you okay?”

As my father approached him, he turned around. He wasn’t crying like I thought he’d be, but he was doing something that seemed far worse: He was laughing his head off. “Fooled you!” he said to us. “I think it’s funny. My daddy’s so funny!” He slapped his knees.

“Beau,” my father turned to me, “son, maybe you should leave us alone here.”

“No,” Sumter said, “let him stay. I think it’s funny, is all. Really hilarious. A barrel of monkeys.”

“Sumter, your father . . . ” Dad had apology all over him.

“Don’t you make excuses for him.”

“He’s just not good with being a father.”

“I think it’s funny.”

“But it doesn’t mean he’s a bad man. He loves you. He just doesn’t know how to do it right.”

“Don’t you tell me about my daddy. I
know
about him. I know
everything.
That man ain’t my daddy. Don’t pretend. I don’t want to hear it. And what about you? You such a good daddy?”

“Sumter.”

“You such a good daddy?” Then Sumter pointed a finger at me. “You think
him
with all his problems is the son of a good daddy? You get drunk and you fight with Aunt Evvie and you think you’re so good? I never once seen you hold that baby—you ever hold any of your babies? Were they all accidents? ’Cause I know what’s true here. I know about how you were the one who gave my mama mouth-to-mouth. I know you were in
love
with my mama when you were in school. You ask me, I think you’re
bad.
You gonna abandon
his
mama like you abandoned
mine?”

“I was
never
in love with your mother.”

“She said you were. I heard her tell Daddy once. And Daddy slapped her for saying it. He’d like to kill you.”

“Beau,” Dad turned to me and crouched down, his hands resting on my shoulders, “I was never in love with your Aunt Cricket. We were friends, and that’s all. I have never been in love with anyone except your mama.”

“No,” Sumter said, “my mama said you loved her, but her own sister stole you from her. But she says you
still
love her.”

“That’s just not true.” My father looked into my eyes, and I did not know what to believe.

A voice in my head like Sumter’s told me what to believe.

I watched my father lead Sumter back to the house. He had his arm on my cousin’s shoulder and was saying comforting things to him. My father was always trying to be the peacemaker. I knew even then he would later explain to me that he had to do things like this for Sumter because Uncle Ralph would never do them, and
someone
had to. But it didn’t matter to me. I felt like Daddy had let me down at that point; I felt like he was more concerned with Sumter’s feelings than with mine.

As they walked away, Daddy turned and nodded to me as if this were understood between the two of us. “
Sometimes
,”
he’d said to me more than once,
“
other people need attention more than you
,
and you’re strong enough, Snug, to stand by yourself.”
But I never felt that way. I wondered if I had made the scene and run off into the woods, if he would now have his arm around my shoulders and tell me that it was all going to be okay.

I went to Neverland by myself.

Your daddy’s a liar.
Sumter’s voice had leaked into my brain.

Neverland was, of course, locked. Sumter had the key. I went around and tried the windows, but short of breaking them, there was no way in.

Then I remembered the crawl space, behind the crate. Just a small tunnel that led to a square opening. I went around to the back of the shed. The wood on that side was so thin and warped that when I touched it the walls gave a little. There was a small square opening at the base of the wall, camouflaged with a coiling wire of dried-up blackberry bushes. Yellow jackets spiraled around my fingers as I carefully lifted the thorny vines and scrunched down between the bushes and the opening into the crawl space. A wire screen on a small wood frame leaned against the opening. I pushed it aside; a daddy longlegs scampered out, and rolypolies slogged into the dark space. The opening was just big enough for my head to go in, although
its splintered sides pinched my ears. The crawl space smelled like moth-balls and rat dung. Invisible webs tickled my nose and eyes.