The Essay A Novel (10 page)

Edgel heard me coming up the back steps and as I reached for the doorknob he said, “Here comes the football star.” He was seated at the head of the table, a lopsided, alcohol-induced grin on his face and a cigarette dangling from the middle of his pouty lips. He was wearing blue jeans and a gray, pullover sweatshirt, which fit him much better than the saggy prison garb I was used to seeing him wear. “Hey there, little brother, help yourself to a Pabst.”

“He can't have any beer,” my mother chimed in. “He's too young and besides, the coach don't allow that.”

“One beer isn't going to kill him,” Edgel slurred.

“When'd you get home Edgel?” I asked, anxious to change the subject.

He stood up and shook my hand, hugging me tight with his left. “They cut me loose this mornin'. Can you believe that shit?”

My dad seemed more sullen than the others and just sat between the twins, drinking from a bottle.

“He called me at seven o'clock at the truck stop,” my mom said. “He said to come and get him, and he'd be standing out front of the prison. I drove up there as fast as I could and sure enough, there he was, sitting on the front steps with his duffel bag.”

Edgel looked at me and shrugged. “They got my ass up at five o'clock this morning and told me my time was up and they were letting me go. I think they've run out of room and I was next on the list to be released, so they busted me out a little earlier than expected. Ain't that the shits? I said that was fine with me. The quicker I could get my ass out of there, the better.” He snorted into his half-empty beer bottle, creating a humming sound like a riverboat horn. I pulled out a chair next to Edgel and sat down. He reached out and patted me twice on my shoulder. “Damn, my little brother ain't so little any more, is he?”

“Y-y-you should see him p-play f-f-football,” Luke said. “H-h-he can knock a g-guy's d-d-dick off.”

Edgel nodded. “That a fact?”

I shrugged. “I'm having a pretty good year.”

Mom set a plate of ham, boiled potatoes and green beans, and biscuits in front of Edgel. He pushed it toward me. “Let's feed the football player first. He's the one workin' up an appetite. I want to see you play Friday night. Who do you play?”

“Clearcreek Local.”

“Look out! Them Clearcreek Local boys are always tough.”

“We'll take 'em.”

“Atta boy.”

Mom took the plate and slid it back in front of Edgel. “You eat that. This is your special dinner for your special day.”

“Is that what it takes to get my special dinner—nine years in the joint?”

He snorted a laugh and mom slapped him on the shoulder with the serving spoon. “Hush up and eat.”

Edgel sank a fork into a boiled potato and popped the entire, steaming orb into his mouth. As my mother dished out plates of food for the Farnsworth brothers and my dad, I wrapped my hands around the gold medal that was in the pocket of my varsity jacket. She handed me a plate, then fixed one for herself and, after hugging Edgel around the neck and kissing him on top of the head, sat down to his right. I said, “They had this contest at school, an essay contest, and you had to write a paper on a place and time you'd like to visit again.” I pulled the medal from my pocket and held it by the lanyard so my mom could see. “And, I won first prize out of the entire high school.”

“Oh, that is so nice, Jimmy Lee.” She turned her head back to Edgel and said, “Are you getting enough, sweetheart. You're so skinny. You need to eat.”

My dad had barely looked my way. I slid the medal back into my pocket and started cutting my ham. Edgel slapped at my elbow and wiggled his fingers, indicating he wanted to see the medal. “Lemme see that, junior,” he said, a little slur to his words. I retrieved it from the pocket and dropped it into his hand. He frowned as he read the engraved back of the medal. “Alpha & Omega Literary Society Essay Contest. First Place. East Vinton High School. James L. Hickam.” He looked up at me and said, “Damn, boy, that's fine. You got this for writin'?”

I nodded. “An essay.”

“Well, hot damn, that's gotta be the first time in history that a Hickam's ever won an award for writin'.” The Farnsworth twins laughed. “And this is first place out of the whole school?” I nodded. He continued to inspect the medal, rubbing a thumb over the gold quill and inkwell relief on the front. “What did you write about?”

“It was about the time Uncle Boots took me fishing in his canoe.”

“Where is it? I want to read it.”

“Uh, it's still at school. Miss Singletary is grading it for class. I should get it back in a week or so.” When I wrote the essay, I had no idea that I would end up reading it in front of the entire school and I had stumbled over the reference to my dad and brothers' drinking and my dad's fits of anger. I would have to rewrite the essay and change those passages before I brought it home.

“Don't forget,” Edgel said, pointing at me with his fork. “I want to read that.”

“I won't.” I thought it odd that my ill-educated, semiliterate brother, who hadn't made it through the tenth grade, actually wanted to read the essay while neither parent expressed any such interest.

“That Miss Singletary you talked about, is that Amanda Singletary?”

“Uh-huh. She said she went to school with you.”

“She did. She's as smart as they come, too. You stay close to her. She's solid; she'll do right by you.” He looked up and frowned. “Is that other English teacher still there, Gloria Johanessen?”

“Yeah. She teaches ninth- and tenth-grade English. She doesn't like me very much.”

Edgel's brows arched. “She was a piece of work, that one. I don't think she cares much for me, either.”

Given Edgel's checkered history at East Vinton High School, that didn't surprise me.

After admiring the medal for several minutes, rubbing the surface with the tip of his thumb, Edgel set it on the edge of the table between us and neatly arranged the ribbon under the medal. He tapped the thick nail of his index finger on the table next to the medal and said, “Jimmy Lee, this is important.” He used the same digit to point at the varsity letter on my jacket. “That right there, your football award, that's nice, but it ain't important. Okay? But this . . .” He pointed back to the medal. “. . . this is important.” He picked up the medal and dangled it six inches in front of my face. “It's important, because it's a ticket. You understand?”

I did. Perfectly.

“A ticket to where?” Dad snorted from the far end of the table.

“A ticket off Red Dog Road,” Edgel said.

The Farnsworth brothers extended their arms, toasting me with their Pabst Blue Ribbons, and Luke said, “H-h-hear, hear.”

Chapter Seven

M

ost of the teachers at East Vinton High School thought Miss Singletary had a big chip on her shoulder. As a student at the school, she was quiet and reserved. When she returned to her alma mater as an English teacher, her colleagues and the administration expected her to be the same Amanda Singletary who had spent her free time in the library and was president of the Future Homemakers of America.

Much to their surprise, and in some cases, dismay, a totally different Amanda Singletary emerged from college. The mousy girl who dutifully obeyed all authority figures had turned into an outspoken, opinionated hellcat. Most annoying to her employer was the vociferousness of her belief that the East Vinton Local School District did a poor job of preparing its students for college and a life outside of Vinton County. The school district, she contended, expected too little of its students and set the bar for graduation far too low.

The caste system still lived in the hills of Vinton County. With few exceptions, we understood our predetermined lot in life. If you dared to dream, you dreamt in silence, keeping those fantasies to yourself, lest they die upon the derisive laughter of classmates. There were those few of whom you believed success was a certainty. No one doubted that Roy Otto, our handsome class president, the quarterback, straight-A student, and the lead in the senior musical,
Li'l Abner
, would graduate from college and someday make a million dollars in business. Or, that Lindsey Morgan, by virtue of her beauty and money, would someday dance on stage in New York in front of thousands of people. To those select few, success seemed plausible. But those dreams were beyond most of us.

We lived in a community where for years the girls graduated, got married, and pregnant. The boys, whether or not they bothered to finish school, went to work in the coal mines, timber operations, or paper mills.

The East Vinton Local School District was formed in 1946 with the consolidation of four small, extremely poor school districts— Brown Township, Moonville Local, Wilkesville Village, and Zaleski Village. Together they created East Vinton, a slightly larger, but still extremely poor school district. The former Moonville Local School, a two-story, coal-heated building built in 1903, became East Vinton High School. It was not pretty or sleek, but it was solid, built from sorrel-colored bricks fired on the property. Millions of footfalls had worn trough-like grooves in the gray and white marble steps leading to the two front doors, which were ten feet tall and so heavy that skinny girls needed both hands and a foot brace to pull them open. Students referred to the school as “the sweat shop” because it had no air conditioning, making the late spring and early fall days stifling, and the custodians never managed to regulate the heat pouring out of the coal furnace, causing teachers to open windows in the dead of winter. A few years after the school opened, a new gymnasium and a wing to house the wood and auto body shops were added to the original structure, and the people of eastern Vinton County were content. Education was not seen as a transport to greater opportunities. Rather, it was something endured to meet the requirements of a state mandate. Graduating from East Vinton High School could be assured simply by showing up on a regular basis.

But Miss Singletary wasn't satisfied. At a Parent-Teacher Association meeting her second year at the school, Miss Singletary addressed the crowd and said the school district was doing a poor job of preparing students to meet the challenges of life after graduation. She said, “Parents, you must demand more of the teachers. And teachers, you must demand more of our students. Otherwise, how can we expect them to achieve at their highest levels? The coal mines are closing, we have only a handful of timber mills in operation, and the paper mills are moving to the south. If we don't get these children ready to meet the challenges of the real world, and that means preparing them for college, we are failing them.”

Forest Brubaker, the industrial arts and auto body teacher at the school, stood and said, “Miss Singletary, I think your heart is in the right place, but most East Vinton students are not college material. When you suggest that we need to prepare them for college, you're just setting them up for failure.”

Red blotches broke out all over Miss Singletary's neck, which her students recognized as Mount Singletary getting ready to blow. “Mr. Brubaker, you should have your teaching certificate revoked for making such an asinine statement,” she said to the auditorium full of teachers and parents. “We must demand more, or these kids will all end up in Vinton County, living on welfare.”

It was not a popular stance and she had the entire community in an uproar. The
Vinton County Messenger
got wind of her speech and followed up with an article, which brought the school board members and the superintendent to a boil, but she never backed down. She had done her homework and had statistics showing East Vinton's poor drop-out rate and a history of poor performance on the state's standardized tests. For those who did graduate, a ridiculously low percentage went on to college or technical school.

Her English and literature classes were the most difficult in the school. She constantly preached to us the need to strive for excellence. “You are capable of achieving much more than you realize,” she was fond of saying. “Geographical location needn't be an impediment to success. Show me that you want to achieve. Prove to me that you want to succeed, and I will walk with you every step of the way.”

She was a powerful ally.

“Jimmy Lee, Principal Speer wants to see you in his office right away.” Abbie Winsetter was wearing a green jumper and a smug grin when she delivered the summons. The Bull Elk Club had just finished fifty minutes of running and calisthenics; I had sweated through my T-shirt and drops of perspiration were falling in rapid succession from the tip of my nose, forming a small pool on the gym floor. “All right,” I said.

“He said right now.”

“I heard you, Abbie. I'll be there in a minute.”

She stood there for a long moment, squinting and looking as though she had gotten a whiff of something unpleasant, then spun on her heel and left.