Some Sweet Day (3 page)

“Time to go home, Gate,” he said. He trudged slowly back up the lane. The circle of light from the lantern swung back and forth over the ground ahead of us. I still couldn't stop crying, and I kept swallowing, trying to get the vomit taste out of my mouth.

“Don't ever believe in happy endings, son,” Daddy said. “There just ain't no such thing.”

One day toward the end of that summer I walked into the kitchen and found Mother sitting at the table with her head in her hands. She was kind of sniffing. I stood a minute and watched her. She didn't look at me and didn't say anything.

“Mother?”

“Hmmm?”

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you crying?” I came closer and laid my hand on her shoulder.

“I'm
not
crying!” She moved her hands away, and her eyes were full of tears, and her face was red and wet. Then she laid her head on the table and cried real hard. I didn't know what to do. I just stood there, kind of patting her, wanting to get away but feeling I shouldn't.

“Mother,
please
tell me what's wrong.”

Her shoulder jerked under my hand, and she sniffed and made little groaning noises like I'd never heard her make before. Then she stopped and sighed and sat there still with her head on the table. She finally said something real low, and I didn't understand her.

“What?”

“Your daddy's going to the Army, that's what,” she said, looking up at me. “A farmer, with three kids and another one coming… You didn't know that, did you? But it's a fact. And they're taking him.” She pointed at the door. “The Allisons sit over there with four grown men to work their farm. Not a single one of them has gone. Why? Because they're too dumb!” She was mad, and she was getting loud. She pointed at the kitchen stove. “And Sam and Louis Bowie sit over there on their place! Both young! Both bachelors! Are they going? No, they're not! Why? Because they're rich, that's why! But Will Turnbolt isn't dumb! Will Turnbolt isn't rich! Will Turnbolt has a wife and three kids and another one coming! Will Turnbolt is going to the Army!”

“Does he have to?”

“Yes, he has to.” She was quieter now.

“Who says?”

“The government says. Now, go outside. I've got a lot of thinking to do.”

Belinda and Rick were making mud pies under the windmill. I started to go over and play with them, but changed my mind and walked around the house and out the front gate. The lane looked all white and trembly in the hot sun. I started walking. The dry dust oozed between my toes, almost like mud, and my feet left footprints so plain that I could look back and see everywhere I'd been.

I was glad Daddy was going to the Army. I pictured him in a soldier suit with lots of medals and ribbons on it. I pictured him sitting in the drugstore, talking to all us boys, telling us what he did to the Germans and Japs. I pictured him with a steel helmet on his head, like the soldier on the war bond picture at school. I pictured him wearing a flat cap with a bill and an eagle on it, like the soldier who came to school one day and told us what to do if we found a Jap balloon in our pasture. I pictured him sending me a German flag like the one Mr. Stoner had hung up behind the fountain at the drugstore and a Jap sword like Jaime Smith's daddy had sent him and also a Jap knife, small enough to take to school. I pictured our window with a banner with one star in it, and people looking at the banner when they drove by our house. I wondered where we could put the banner so that they could see it. I wondered why Mother didn't want Daddy to be a soldier and why we were about to get a baby and what it would be like. I wondered if Daddy would talk to me. I turned and walked back to where Belinda and Rick were playing.

“You know what?” I asked them.

They looked at me, four brown eyes in two brown faces streaked with sweat and mud.

“What?” Belinda asked.

“Daddy's going to the Army.”

“Who says?”

“Mother.”

Rick was patting a mud ball into a pie. Belinda picked up a fruit jar and poured some more water into her bucket.

“You know what else?” I asked.

“What?”

“We're going to get a baby.”

“Who says?”

“Mother.”

“Rick's our baby!”

“Not any more. He's getting big, dummy! Where's Daddy?”

“Down at the barn, I guess.”

I found him under the tree in Old Blue's pen behind the barn. His saddle was slung across the top rail of the fence, and he was wiping it with a greasy rag. A can of saddle soap was in his hand. He looked around at me as I came in the gate and sat down on the ground under the tree, but he didn't say anything. He went on wiping the saddle slowly, carefully, now and then bending to take a good look at a scratch or scuffed place. The dark brown leather glistened, and the flower-and-leaf design looked like carved wood. The silver buckles and
conchos
and the big metal horn shone like diamonds. It was an expensive saddle, and I remember that Mother was mad when Daddy bought it, a long time ago. Daddy rubbed awhile, then stepped back to look at his work, then rubbed again. Old Blue was drinking at his trough over in the other corner. He sucked the water noisily between his teeth. His blue hide twitched whenever a fly lit on him, and now and then he slapped himself across the haunches with his tail. Daddy whistled one of his fiddle tunes real low, kind of to himself, and Old Blue craned his neck over in our direction and pricked up his ears. When he found out what the noise was, he didn't pay any more attention to us. He just ambled over to the fence and stuck his head over the rail and looked off toward the bluff, like he was expecting company from that direction.

“Daddy?”

“Hmm?”

“You're really going to the Army, aren't you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When you going?”

“Soon.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don't know. A long time, I guess.” He looked out toward the bluff, too.

“You want me to soap your saddle for you while you're gone?”

“No. Harley's going to take it.”

“Aw, Daddy! I'd take real good care of it!”

“Yeah, I reckon you would. But you're going to be busy, going to school and all. It's a big saddle for a little boy. Harley'll take care of it.”

“Well, I'll feed Old Blue for you, anyway.”

“Harley'll have him, too.”

“What about Nero? Will Harley have her, too?”

“Yeah, her, too.”

I shut up. I was starting to feel real funny inside I hadn't expected all this. I looked at Daddy standing there in his blue overalls and his straw hat, rubbing that soap into his saddle, and somehow I just couldn't picture him in a soldier suit any more.

“Who says you've got to go?”

“Uncle Sam.”

“Who's he?”

“The government.”

“Does everybody have to do what the government says?”

“Yes.”

“What happens if you don't?”

“You go to jail.”

Nero slid under the fence and trotted over and sniffed my leg. She plopped down beside me, and I rubbed behind her ears for her. She shut her eyes and moaned.

“Let me keep Nero, Daddy.”

He went on rubbing until he finished up the saddle, put the lid on the can, and lifted the saddle off the fence. Then he turned and faced me, holding the saddle by the horn with one hand and the soap can in the other. The shadow of his hat brim hid his eyes. His jaw was brown, and his white teeth were grinning.

“You're about to learn a few things, young man,” he said. “Maybe things ain't been too good on this place with your old man around, but you're about to learn that they can be a damn sight worse without him. And another thing. You're about to learn that a man can even get along without his dog, if he has to.”

My father wasn't a cruel man, although the rest of us, in my memory, cried a lot. I remember each of these occasions very clearly. Yet I don't remember hating my father, or even fearing him. I remember him, during the time we lived on the farm, as my hero, my god. I remember following him across the newly plowed black fields, stretching my legs, trying to step from one of his footprints to another, and feeling proud somehow that I couldn't do it. I envied him his shotgun and begged him often to let me shoot it. He never did. But one day, when several families had gathered at Harley May's house and the women were inside quilting and the men, lately returned from the hunt, were lounging on the front porch, drinking coffee, I found his gun among several lying on the grass and decided to pick it up. As I tried to lift it, the breech slammed shut on my thumb. I squealed and dropped the gun, and it fired. My father whipped me before he sent me into the house to have my mashed thumb fixed, but while Mother was wrapping it in a rag I heard him on the porch, laughing and bragging about my wanting so much to shoot the gun, and I wasn't sorry I'd tried. And then there was that Christmas party in the schoolhouse at that tiny community—was it really called Addlepate?—not far from our farm. A lot of the kids got big dolls and trucks and drums and I got only a little glass lantern filled with tiny pieces of candy. But my father took it off the tree and gave it to me from his own hand, and I was happy. These scenes flash through my mind quickly and softly, like far-off shooting stars. They don't lie there and burn in vivid detail.

One evening about sundown, Jim Bob Calhoun, Joe George's father, rode up to the front fence on his big bay while we were sitting on the porch waiting for supper.

“Evening, Will,” he said.

“Evening, Jim Bob.”

“Been fishing lately?”

“No. Been hunting a lot, though.”

“Well, Jake Cassidy says the catfish are biting down on the Bosque, and some of us figured we might get a bunch together and go down, wives, kids and all. Sort of a going-away party for you.” His saddle creaked as he leaned forward and crossed his arms over the horn. The bay snorted.

“All right,” Daddy said. “When?”

“Day after tomorrow. Bring your quilts and enough grub to last a few days. If Jake's right, we might stay awhile.”

“Fine.”

“Better be ready pretty soon after noon. We'll honk at the foot of the lane.”

“Okay. We'll come running.”

“See you.”

“Stay for supper?”

“Nope. Virgie's probably waiting supper on me right now.”

“Okay. See you.”

Mother had me lugging stuff out to the car pretty near all morning, it seemed. There were piles of quilts and pillows, the frying pan, the Dutch oven, the sourdough crock, and cardboard boxes full of food wrapped in wax paper and salt and pepper and flour and corn meal and sugar in glass jars. Daddy was at the tractor shed untangling his trot lines and mixing a batch of chicken blood bait. Mother had fried the chicken, and it lay in the bread box in the back seat, smelling good. I barely had time to dig up two tin cans full of worms from the wet places around the windmill and horse trough before I heard the horn honk down on the road. Daddy came out of the shed carrying a gunny sack full of tackle and yelled at me to hurry. He tied the sack on the fender while Mother piled us into the car, then we took off down the lane.

Three cars and a truck awaited us. There was Jim Bob and Virgie and Joe George, Harley and Ellen May, and a carload and a truckload of Allisons, whose names I could never remember because they all looked alike. Most of the Allison grownups were crowded into the car, and the truck that Bill Allison used to haul cotton and hay was brimming full of Allison children. I didn't know any of them very well because they didn't go to school. Mother said they were all idiots. They lived together in the same house down on Clear Creek, and they were dirty and slept with their socks on.

Daddy pulled our car into line behind the truck, and Jim Bob led us all down the road toward Darlington. As we rode through the town, I watched for the little banners with the stars on them. Some had one star, some two, some three. One had four. The banners hung in the front windows of the white frame houses, and there was one star for each man that house had in the service. There were a lot of banners and a lot of stars—blue for living soldiers, and gold for dead ones. Mrs. Compton's star had turned from blue to gold.

As we passed the red brick drugstore, Mother turned her head and gazed at the upstairs windows. Daddy looked straight ahead, and Mother turned back toward him and smiled faintly. “It's nothing, Will,” she said, and he reddened under his tan.

Not far beyond town we turned into a narrow road that went by several farms that I'd never seen before. The road was dry, and the dust from the other cars poured in our open windows and threatened to choke us, but it was too hot to close the windows. Rick cried, and Mother pulled him into the front seat and wiped his face with a wet washrag until he quieted. Belinda and I sat on the piles of quilts and talked about what the Bosque River was going to look like. The only running water we had seen was Clear Creek and the little branch that cut across the corner of our south field and ran down to it. But after a while we were too hot to even talk any more, so we just sat and sweated and reamed the dust out of our nostrils with our fingers. The road narrowed, and tree branches scraped the sides of the car. Finally, to keep them away from our faces, we had to roll the windows up partway.

We stopped, and Virgie got out and opened a wire gate and held it until we all passed through. Then we took off across a pasture with no road at all, toward a long grove, and when we got to the trees, we stopped. The Allisons piled out of the truck yelling, and we got out too, feeling groggy and a little wobbly.

“Where's the river?” I asked.

“Through those trees,” Daddy said, and started walking toward them. We waded through weeds that reached clear to my waist, scaring up swarms of grasshoppers that jumped in front of our faces.