Down Sand Mountain (14 page)

I should have been the one to get in all the trouble, but instead Dad made Wayne and David Tremblay paint the rest of the fence, including the bamboo section. He said if I dumped all that paint on them, they must have done something to me to deserve it. Wayne tried to argue with him: “Honest, Dad, honest. We didn’t do a thing. He just attacked us with the paint. We were standing there minding our own business —”

Dad told him that was enough and it was time to get back to work. Then Dad said for me to come on with him; we were taking the station wagon out to Panther Creek Sod Farm to buy a couple of squares of sod to replace the grass with the paint. It took us a while to get there; the sod farm was out east of Sand Mountain on the other side of the Peace River, way past The Springs.

We brought our own flat-head shovel, and once we got there, Dad had me do the digging — not too deep or you’d get more dirt than you needed, not too shallow or you’d damage the root system. We laid the sod squares on an old canvas tarp Dad spread out in the back of the car. They had a colored man there, who stood around leaning on his own shovel, but I think Dad meant to teach me a lesson by making me do the work instead.

On the way home, Dad cleared his throat a couple of times like he’d swallowed a bug. I kind of knew what was coming. “Son, your mother and I are concerned about how you’ve been behaving since school started up.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I knew he was looking at me but I kept staring the other way, out the window at the sod farm with its sprinkler system set up over top of the field like a giant daddy longlegs, then once we were past that, there were some groves, then cow pastures, then nothing, just that ugly land they had a lot of around Sand Mountain with some stumps and ditches but mostly just acres of flat nothing with what looked like somebody’s sorry old worn-down dirty-green carpet that was grass that didn’t grow any higher than algae.

Dad said, “We don’t feel that you have been acting very responsibly with what happened the first day of school, and now today this episode with the paint — even if the boys did do something to provoke you. Do you think it would be all right at the mine if I threw the survey equipment out of the truck just because I was mad about something, or even hit somebody with it? What do you think would happen if I behaved that way?”

I still didn’t look at him. “You’d get fired?”

“You’re darn right I would get fired, and do you know what? I would deserve to get fired.”

“But what if it was the other guy’s fault?” I knew better than to say that but I couldn’t help it. I wouldn’t have thrown that paint on Wayne and David Tremblay if they hadn’t been whispering about stuff and laughing at me.

“I don’t think you’re seeing the big picture,” Dad said. “If you’re the one that reacts in the wrong way, and if you’re the one that keeps running off and not doing your job, then it’s your fault, not the other guy’s. We’re talking about self-control, Dewey. Self-control.”

“I thought we were talking about responsibility.”

“We’re talking about self-control
and
responsibility,” Dad said, but this time he wasn’t so nice, so I said I was sorry, I understood. And then I said I was sorry again. In the middle of one of those ugly flat fields there was a burnt tree and it had a buzzard on one of the limbs, and that was how I felt right then.

“Well,” Dad said, “here’s what we’re going to do. You’re getting too old for the belt, and I’m not putting you on restrictions. There’s not going to be a punishment. We’ll put down this sod where you dumped the paint, and it’s going to be your responsibility to water it every day until the roots take hold. We’ll consider that your special chore for this week.”

“OK, Dad,” I said. “I promise I’ll take care of it.” I asked if he wanted me to be the one to dig up the other grass, with the paint, so we could put in the sod.

Dad said we would do that together when we got home. Then he thought for a second, and just about the time I figured he was letting me off the hook, he said he guessed there was something else, too, that he wanted me to do — not something that should be considered a punishment, but rather a duty.

He said, “Tomorrow afternoon there’s a funeral at the Peace River Cemetery, and they need you to play ‘Taps’ on your bugle when they lower the casket. I told Mr. Juddy, the dragline operator at the mine — I told him you would be able to do that, and that you’ve done it before. It’s a friend of Mr. Juddy’s, a man he served with in World War II, and they’re having it be a military funeral. You’ll need to wear your Scout uniform and get there early.”

By the time we got back to the house, I had slumped so far down that I was practically lying on my back on the front seat, that’s how depressed I was. I hated being around dead people or people who were sad that people were dead. I hated riding my bike by the cemetery, especially if it was dark, and if for some reason I did have to, I stuck so far to the other side of the road that a couple of times I crashed into the ditch and got all muddy. Also I tried not to even look at the cemetery whenever I rode by, which made it even harder to steer straight, since my head was turned the other way and I was pedaling so fast.

I was supposed to have a dance lesson that afternoon but didn’t want to see Darla, since I had decided I was mad at her for running off with Wayne from the Skeleton Hotel, and I had also decided I wouldn’t tell her or Wayne about seeing that ghost lady when I went back to look for them, and hearing the Howler. The only person I talked to for the rest of the day was Tink, who got me to help set up a tent under the dining room table with a blanket over the top and down the sides, and a bunch of pillows underneath. She also got me to stay under there with a bunch of her dolls while she went for a snack. I lined up the dolls from the biggest to the littlest while she was gone and then lay down next to them on all those pillows. I kind of liked that, hiding under there, and when Tink came back with marshmallows and pickle juice, I told her about what happened at the Skeleton Hotel, although I left out the part about sneaking out of the house, plus I made it sound like the whole thing happened a long time ago.

Tink stared at me the whole time with her eyes open real wide, but when I asked her if she was scared, she said no. I knew she was, though, because when I had to climb out to go to the bathroom later, she said she thought she would just go with me and wait outside the door, and if I left the bathroom door open a little bit that would be OK, too.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” I said, and she said she wouldn’t.

“And don’t tell Wayne, either,” I said, and she said she wouldn’t do that but could she tell Scooty, who was this one friend of hers that was always coming around. I told her no, not even Scooty, and she said I was mean and I couldn’t come back in her tent with her. I said fine, but then she was going to be all by herself under there and was she sure that’s what she wanted, because it was pretty dark and pretty scary. We were having this conversation while I was peeing and she was standing in the hall, and when I finished, she said she guessed I could come back under the tent after all, and she promised she wouldn’t tell anybody about the Skeleton Hotel but I had to let her sock me on the arm. She was always wanting to sock people on the arm, and it never hurt or anything so I said sure. She wound up and socked me as hard as she could and I said, “Ow,” and pretended it hurt, and that made her happy.

AFTER CHURCH THE NEXT DAY, Mom said it was too hot to cook, so we drove down to this colored lady’s house named Miss Deas on a dirt street in the Boogerbottom to pick up a Sunday chicken dinner, which she cooked from her house and sold to people like us. Usually you had to tell her in advance so Miss Deas knew how many dinners to fix, but she sometimes had extras of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, etc. I hated going down to the Boogerbottom as bad as I hated the cemetery. All those houses looked alike to me, with their dirt yards in front and their screen doors and their cement block steps and hardly any of them painted, and their chicken coops on the side or in the back, and sometimes chickens with their heads cut off hanging upside down from a clothesline, tied by their feet so the blood splashed from their necks out on the ground where a dog could lick it up.

Two little colored boys sat in Miss Deas’s yard playing with cars, and one of them didn’t have any pants on, which Tink just had to point out to everybody in a voice so loud even the little children heard her. If it had been me, I would have run away, but they just sat there and looked at us with their big white eyes, and their runny noses, and their gnats that they hardly noticed except to brush away every once in a while. I thought about how me and Wayne were going to have to come back down here to pass out Dad’s campaign flyers in a couple of weeks, and not just on Miss Deas’s street but all of them. I kind of got a sick feeling about it all over.

Tink wanted to know how come the lady was called
Miss
Deas instead of
Mrs.
Deas, since she must be married, because she had those two boys sitting there, the one with pants and the one without pants who had his you-know-what showing. Mom said it was just something people said sometimes when they were talking about colored people, but that Tink had a very good point.

Tink said, “I do?” She started to say something else — she even had her mouth open — but then closed her mouth again, at least for a minute, and then she said, “How come that boy doesn’t have any pants on, anyways?”

Before Mom could answer, I said so he wouldn’t poop in them, so he could just poop in the yard instead. Mom said, “Dewey Markham Turner!” then asked me if I wanted her to wash my mouth out with soap. I said, “No, ma’am.”

Wayne had gone inside with Dad and they came back with a couple of big brown paper bags that were already soaked in grease on the bottom. Wayne handed me one through the window and made me hold it. I wasn’t very hungry when we got home, thinking about the funeral and playing “Taps” on the bugle that afternoon and having to pass out those darn flyers in a couple of weeks in the Boogerbottom, and only ate two wings, a drumstick, and a neck.

Mr. Rhodes, the guy who died who was the friend of Mr. Juddy’s, was a Moose or an Elk or a VFW, I forget. Maybe he was all of them. They had already had the Christian service at his church, so the graveside service later that afternoon was a combination of the military and the Elks and all. First they had the honor guard that came over from a base near Tampa, and the seven-gun salute. Then they had the Elks part, which involved about nine old men in funny hats that looked like something you might see on Jughead in Archie comic books. One of the old men held open a big book and yelled out Mr. Rhodes’s name four times: “Carlton Rhodes, Carlton Rhodes, Carlton Rhodes, Carlton Rhodes.” Every time he shouted, he faced another direction, north, south, east, west. Then he turned to the other eight guys and saluted the one that was the commander, then said, “I have called his name, but he does not answer.” I didn’t see the point of that whatsoever but didn’t have time to think about it too much because the funeral director, Mr. Lauper, gave me the signal, and I wet my lips to play.

You could hear the widow, Mrs. Carlton Rhodes, crying, really sobbing, before I finished. That was the closest I came to missing a note but I held on OK until they got the casket lowered into the grave. You would think when people got that old, they wouldn’t be so upset when their husband died, since they’d had all those years to get used to the idea of it happening, but that’s not how it was for Mrs. Rhodes.

When I finished, I held the bugle down at my side and stood at attention, and for about a second didn’t mind where I was or what I was doing or what was going on, because I figured everybody was watching me and probably thought I looked brave standing over there all by myself after playing the saddest song ever but not showing it on the outside no matter how much I might be feeling on the inside. I wondered if they had a merit badge in Scouts for playing your bugle at funerals.

The last thing they did was the folding of the flag, which they handed to Mrs. Rhodes, who sat under a tent that covered her and the rest of the family and the casket and the grave, and shortly after that the hearse left, and the family behind it, and all the cars drove in a big snake line in the winding road, which kept anybody from going too fast through the cemetery. Mr. Lauper came over and shook my hand and offered me an envelope that he said was from the family. I said I wasn’t allowed to accept any money, my dad told me not to, and he nodded real serious, like a doctor on TV, and stuck the envelope in his pocket.

About a second after he did that, a guy walked up in an army uniform, who I didn’t recognize at first was Walter Wratchford. I don’t know where he came from — I guess he must have been there the whole time watching the funeral and then watching Mr. Lauper with the envelope — but he grabbed Mr. Lauper’s arm and said, “Give it to the boy.”