The house was of unpainted pine, aged silver-gray. A long, drooping porch was its entrance. There was only one bedroom, a large living room, a kitchen with running cold water and a kerosene range, a long room once used for storage which served as a dining room when the crowd was too large for the kitchen. Rick and I slept there in winter. In summer we slept on the screened-in sleeping porch off the kitchen. Belinda slept always in the bedroom with my parents. The kerosene range and a wood stove in the living room warmed us in winter. Three kerosene lamps were our light. I cleaned their chimneys, trimmed their wicks and filled them with oil every Saturday.
It was said that Turnbolts had lived on the place since the time of the Civil War. I don't know whether that is true. It was said that many Turnbolts were buried in the vicinity of the redbud trees. But my father's sister, his father, his mother and the wife who was before her possess the only markers there.
It was my birthday. I got up early and peered through the screen to see what kind of day I was going to have. The air was so clear and the sun so bright that you would have thought somebody had come along during the night and given the whole world a fresh coat of paint. The chickens looked like big glistening snowballs wobbling slowly around the barnyard, and Nero, chasing her own shadow or some animal or bird that I couldn't see, bounded near the back doorstep. The windmill whirred in the warm breeze, and the suckle rod, whispering its gentle “thunk-thunk,” lifted the water and splashed it into the tank. It looked like a good day to be seven on.
Rick's dark hair was barely visible at the top of his sheet. He slept soundly. The quiet told me I was the first up, but then the front screen slammed, and soon I heard Daddy's fiddle. He was playing something slow and sad, something not right for a morning like that. I sneaked out the door and moved slowly toward the front of the house and sat down on the ground near the corner and listened. Daddy finished the sad tune. Then he started a happy one, “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” I think, but stopped in the middle and didn't play anything for a minute. Then he played another sad one.
The dog found me and started romping around and climbing on me and licking me, trying to get me to play with her. I tried to shoo her away without making any noise, but Daddy noticed the commotion and came around.
“I wasn't doing anything,” I said.
“I know.”
He was all dressed up in his blue suit and white shirt and red-and-blue tie, and he had on some new brown shoes and a gray felt hat with a brim that came over his forehead. I'd never seen him so dressed up.
“You going somewhere today?”
“Yes.”
He plunked the fiddle strings with his thumb, as if trying to make sure it was in tune. I began to understand what day it was.
“To the Army?”
“Yes. To the Army.”
“Will?” Mother's voice drifted through the front door.
“Yeah?”
“Come on in. Breakfast is ready, and the kids are getting up. You seen Gate?”
“Yeah. He's here.”
“Tell him to come on in. We don't have much time.”
Daddy grinned and reached out and messed up my hair. “Go get some clothes on,” he said. I'd been standing there in my drawers.
They were all around the table, pouring Post Toasties into their bowls, when I got there. Rick and Belinda were still yawning and rubbing at their eyes.
“I wanted to fix you a good breakfast this morning,” Mother said, “but we got up so late, and you don't have much time.”
“This is okay,” Daddy said.
We ate quietly and fast. When he had finished his cereal, Daddy took out his watch and looked at it. “I ought to have time for another cup of coffee before Jim Bob gets here,” he said.
“I could have taken you in,” Mother said. “The mail truck won't leave Darlington for two hours. You'll just have to sit around and wait.” She poured his coffee.
“Well, Jim Bob was going in anyway, and there's no use wasting gas.” He rolled a cigarette and lit it and slouched back in his chair and looked at us all, one by one. “You kids behave yourselves while I'm gone,” he said. “Don't give your ma a hard time.”
“We won't, Daddy,” Belinda said solemnly. Rick shook his head.
Daddy grinned and blew a cloud of blue smoke toward the ceiling. “Make sure you remember that,” he said. He finished his coffee and put out his cigarette in the bottom of the cup. “Well, I'd better hit the road.” He got up. Mother looked kind of funny, kind of small and scared and sad, and Daddy put his arm around her and said, “Don't worry, Lacy. I'll get a leave pretty soon.” He kissed her on the cheek and then walked around the table and kissed us all on the cheek, then walked into the living room. We all followed.
Our old brown leather suitcase was standing by the front door. Daddy picked it up and started to leave. Then he turned and put the suitcase down and kissed all us kids on the cheek again and gave Mother a long kiss right on the mouth. It made me feel uncomfortable, like I was seeing something I wasn't supposed to.
“Goodbye, Lacy.”
“Goodbye, Will. Take good care of yourself.”
“I will. You, too. Goodbye, kids.” He picked up the suitcase again and opened the screen door, and then just stood there holding it open and looking at us. “Come along to the road with me, Gate,” he said.
When we passed by the tractor shed, he stopped and took a long look at the old Farmall sitting there, the big toothlike lugs on its iron wheels glowing in the shadow. Then he turned and looked toward the house. Mother and the kids were out by the fence, and I could tell that Mother was crying. They all waved, and Daddy waved back, then we started down the lane again. “I ain't going to look back no more,” he said. We walked along quietly and slowly, and Daddy looked at everything as we went by, as if it was all new to him and he was trying to find out what it was all about. He looked real good, dressed up like that.
“Are you going to stay gone a long time?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody knows for sure.”
“Where are you going? I mean, where is the Army?”
“North of here a-ways.”
“Will you send me a Jap knife, when you get a chance?”
He laughed. “Yeah,
if
I get a chance. It'll be a while, though, so don't go running to the mailbox every day.”
The lane stretched clean before us. The sunflowers couldn't have been yellower and the sky couldn't have been bluer, and Daddy looked at it all. “Pretty day,” he said. “Don't remember a prettier one. I wish it was raining.”
“Why?”
“I don't know. I guess it would be a little easier to leave if it was raining. Maybe not, though.”
We sat down by the mailbox, but we weren't there long before we saw Jim Bob's old blue pickup coming down the road. We stood up, and Jim Bob stopped.
“Ready, Will?”
“Ready as I'll ever be, I guess.”
Daddy threw his suitcase into the back and opened the door. He had one foot on the running board and was about to climb in when he turned and looked at me.
“Today's your birthday, ain't it?”
“Yeah.”
He stuck his hand into his pocket and pulled out his old bone-handled pocket knife and grabbed my hand and put the knife in it. He kind of grinned and messed up my hair again. “It ain't a Jap knife, son,” he said, “but happy birthday.” He climbed in, and Jim Bob slammed the pickup into gear and took off. I watched until they disappeared over the hill.
When Harley and Ellen came to get Nero and Old Blue was when I really knew we were moving. Harley stepped out of the pickup and hollered to the house.
“We're here to get them, Lacy,” he said, and Mother just waved at him through the screen, and he walked to the barn and saddled Old Blue and rode him back to the house. Then Ellen opened the pickup door and tried to whistle Nero in with her. Nero just stood there wagging her tail, looking at Ellen, then looking at Harley up on Daddy's horse. We were all standing at the living room window, staring out, and I asked Mother if I could go say goodbye to Nero.
“No,” she said, “because then she wouldn't go, and things are hard enough without that. Just keep still.”
Harley and Ellen kept trying to talk Nero into jumping in with Ellen, but she wouldn't, so finally Harley climbed down and picked her up and threw her into the pickup and slammed the door. Nero yelped and jumped against the window, but Ellen threw the pickup into gear and took off down the lane. Harley mounted and followed her at a lope.
The next day, Bill Allison came with his truck and his two boys and hauled our stuff to the little white frame house on the hill by the schoolhouse in Darlington, where Gran lived. A greasy sharecropper named Shipp and his ugly wife and about fifteen kids moved into our farm like a band of Comanches. Mother and I walked around the place with Shipp, and Mother showed him where things were and told him what to do. “They're white trash,” she said as we drove back to town, “but they're all we could get.”
Then school started and I was in the second grade. My new room was next to my old one, but I didn't like it as much, and I didn't like my new teacher. Her name was Mrs. Potter, and her hair was always messed up and she smelled like cooking cabbage and had a mustache. Sometimes during recess I would go back to my old room and talk to Mrs. Brim, and she would try to get me to like Mrs. Potter, but I never did.
All I had to do in the morning was walk out the back door and across a little pasture and crawl through a barbed-wire fence and I was on the school ground. Sometimes I'd go over there on Saturdays, too, and play around on the slide and swings, but it wasn't much fun.
Gran took me to church every Sunday. Sometimes she would take Belinda, too, but she always took me. It was time I learned about Jesus and all he did for me, she said.
“Hurry up, Gate. Your Sunday clothes are on the chair in the living room. Drink your milk.”
“Can I have some coffee milk, Mother?”
“Drink it down some first. There's not room for coffee in that glass.”
I closed my eyes and drank it down about an inch. It stuck to the inside of my mouth. Mother filled up the glass with coffee, and I reached for the sugar bowl.
“One
spoonful,” Mother said. “Unless you've got a pocketful of sugar stamps on you. Where's Rick?”
“On the pot,” Belinda said. “He's always on the pot.”
“Ricky!”
“Huh?”
“Get up and eat.”
“Okay. Through.” He staggered in, pulling up his drawers, and sat next to Belinda.
“Oh, Rick!” Mother said. “Why didn't you wait until I wiped you? Damn it. Come on, Gate. I've got to get you ready. Bring your coffee with you.”
I put on my Sunday shirt and sat down to button it. “Your fingernails are filthy,” Mother said. She took her toothpick out of her mouth and started digging with it.
“Ouch!”
“Hush. You want to go to Sunday School looking like Filthy McNasty?” She spit on her hand, wet my cowlick and combed my hair. Then I stepped into my blue Sunday pants and Mother hooked up my elastic suspenders and the elastic band of my tie. “There,” she said finally. “Now you look like a gentleman.”
The downtown street was deserted, except for a few cars headed toward the same place Gran and I were going. The drugstore, Thompson's Texaco, the Helpy-Selfy Laundry, Pearly White's blacksmith shop all were locked with big padlocks. The Johnson grass in the cracks of the concrete floor of the old burned-out bank building had turned brown, and shivered slightly in the cool breeze. We played marbles around chalk-drawn circles there in the spring, but I knew all those circles had been washed away by now.
Gran parked in the big gravel square in front of the big white frame Baptist Church. The square was always full of cars on Sunday, because all three of Darlington's churches were thereâthe Baptist on the west, the Methodist on the north, the smaller Camp-bellite church on the south. On the east was the tabernacle where all three took turns holding revivals in the summer.
“Have you got collection money?”
I shook my head, and Gran dug in her purse and handed me a penny. “Now, give it to Mrs. Arnett when she asks for it,” she said, “and don't lose it.”
We were late, and the Primary Class was almost through singing when I got there.
I've got that Bap-tist boos-ter spi-zer-inc-tum
Down in my heart
,
Down in my heart
,
Down in my heart!
I've got that Bap-tist boos-ter spi-zer-inc-tum
Down in my heart
,
Down in my heart to stay!
It was the song we always sang during the revival, when the Primary Class became the Baptist Booster Band and we banged sticks together, clanged cymbals, and hit triangles with ten-penny nails.
Mrs. Arnett's rump was bothering her again. She had a little inner tube that she brought to Sunday School to sit on when her rump was bothering her, and she was sitting on it today. She told us the story about Moses and the bullrushes. The girls always loved that one, but the boys liked David and Goliath and the one about the man who killed all those guys with the jawbone of a jackass. After the story, Mary Jean Haskell passed the basket around for us to put our pennies in. She got to do this because her daddy was the preacher. Then we colored until the bell rang. I colored a picture of Noah letting a bird go while all the animals watched. I colored the bird blue.
“Oh, Gate, you never color right,” Mary Jane said. “Doves are white.”
“I haven't got a white Crayola. Blue's better, anyway.”
“And Noah's face isn't black. It's white, too. He wasn't a nigger.”
“I told you once, I haven't got white!”
“You can't even stay inside the lines!”
“Leave me alone!” I was getting pretty riled, and Mrs. Arnett got off of her inner tube to come over and shush me, but the bell rang, and she had to go stand by the door and hand us a picture when we went out. Mine showed Jesus talking to a man up in a tree.