Jim the Boy (3 page)

In town, Jim swung wide of the uncles’ houses. An early appearance at home would worry Mama. She would make him lie down, and put her hand on his forehead to see if he had a fever. Sometimes she made him wear a jacket when it was warm outside. She had not wanted him to go to the cornfield, and relented only when the uncles promised to watch him every minute. Often the uncles had to rescue Jim from her tender care.

To Jim’s relief, Aliceville, in the long hour before noon, was almost deserted. The dogs who might have barked or wagged their tails when Jim passed were asleep in the round holes they had dug in the cool dirt beneath some porch. The men and boys who might have been about at some other time of the day were off working. The women, Jim knew, were cooking dinner for the men to eat when they came in from the fields. The town squatted quietly in the sun as if tied to the ground by the web of crisscrossing power lines stretched between the houses.

The only person in sight was Pete Hunt, the railroad station agent. Pete was a small man with a big mustache. He sat on the porch of the depot reading a magazine. He did not like kids much. If a kid looked in the window of the freight office while Pete was using the telegraph, Pete pulled the shade down. Sometimes Pete let Jim search through the coal piles for fossils, but sometimes he came out of the depot and ran him off. Jim could never tell with Pete. He never noticed that Pete only ran him away from the coal pile when he was with another boy. Pete looked at Jim over the top of his magazine.

“Hey,” said Jim.

Pete nodded once, but didn’t say anything. He moved the magazine upward until it covered his eyes. Pete had wired the uncles’ houses for electricity when Jim was a baby. Mama said Pete had almost lived with them for the month it took to do the job, yet he hardly spoke the whole time.

Jim moved slowly down Depot Street toward the store, although he didn’t particularly want to see Uncle Coran, either. He did not want to have to explain himself. He stared at the ground, but with little interest in trying to follow any of the tracks left in the dirt. Today, Jim couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do, a game he wanted to play, or a place he wanted to be. He felt sorry for himself because his birthday was turning out so poorly. He kicked a rock, but didn’t watch to see how far it rolled.

Jim was in front of the hotel when Whitey Whiteside called his name from an open window upstairs. The hotel was a skinny, brick building where salesmen and railroad crews stayed while waiting in town to catch one train or another. Whitey Whiteside was a drummer for Governor Feeds. He took orders for the sacks of feed and seed that the uncles sold in the store. His given name was Ralph, but he said it was harder to forget a salesman named Whitey than it was to forget one named Ralph. Jim liked Whitey because Whitey carried rock candy in his coat pocket, and always gave Jim a piece. The uncles said Whitey Whiteside was honest; they would not buy feed or seed from other drummers.

“Hey,” yelled Whitey Whiteside from the window. “Hey, Jim Glass.”

Jim looked up at the hotel window. He smiled slightly before remembering how unhappy he was.

“Hey,” Jim called back. “Hey, Whitey Whiteside.”

“Where you going?” Whitey asked.

“Nowhere,” said Jim.

“Hang on a minute, then,” said Whitey. “I ain’t going nowhere, either.”

Jim waited while Whitey Whiteside clomped down the stairs of the hotel and came out into the street. He was tall and skinny like the uncles. His brown hair was going gray, which he said was a good thing, even though he was young. Gray hair on a young man, he said, coupled with the name Whitey, would make people remember him even better.

“What happened to you?” Whitey asked. “You’ve got dirt all over your face.”

“I’ve been hoeing corn with the uncles,” said Jim.

“That’s good, Jim,” Whitey said. “Hard work’s good for a man. Hard work will grow hair on your chest.” He studied Jim closely. “But you know,” he said, “you ought to carry a bandanna in your pocket, and wipe your face off with that, instead of your hand. That way, if you run into a pretty girl on your way home, you won’t have dirt all over your face.”

Jim shrugged. He liked Whitey Whiteside, but didn’t always know what to say to him. Whitey Whiteside talked to Jim like Jim was grown. He had even asked Jim to call him “Whitey,” and not “Mr. Whiteside.”

“Well,” Whitey said, “I don’t guess it matters.”

Jim shrugged again and looked at his hands. He wiped them on the legs of his overalls and then stuck them in his pockets.

Whitey Whiteside always wore a suit and a starched white shirt. He wore big fedoras with stiff brims, felt in the winter, and blazing white straw in the summer. Jim thought Whitey Whiteside must be rich.

“I mean,” said Whitey, “it’s probably more important to a pretty girl that a man has a good job and works hard and looks after things, than whether or not he has a little dirt on his face. Don’t you guess?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said.

Jim and Whitey stood in the street for a long moment without talking.

“The uncles let me off a little early today,” Jim said. “It was almost dinnertime, anyway.”

“I see,” said Whitey.

Jim studied one of his footprints in the dirt. He could see the nail marks around the outside of the sole. Jim could feel some of the nails sticking through on the inside of his shoe. The nails didn’t bother him unless he thought about them. He wiggled his toes.

Whitey took his watch out of his pocket and looked at the face as if it were unfamiliar.

“Let’s see here,” he said. “It’s still a little bit until my train pulls in, so why don’t we walk up the hill and have a look at that new school?”

Whitey covered his routes by riding trains all over North Carolina. He had even ridden the Carolina Moon, which was the newest, fastest passenger train on the Great Southeastern Railway. The Moon did not stop in Aliceville.

“Okay,” Jim said. “I guess we can go look.”

The new school was the biggest building in Aliceville. It was two stories high and made from red brick. The hotel was the only other brick building in town, but it was narrow and dirty and sad-looking. The new school sat on top of the hill like a fortress. You could see it from all over Aliceville. It had been under construction for as long as Jim could remember. It was supposed to open in the fall. Jim and Whitey walked up the dirt street toward the school.

“That’s some building, huh, Jim?” Whitey said.

Jim didn’t say anything. He was nervous about going to the new school. The old school he had attended since first grade had only two rooms. Jim knew everybody who went to school there, even the older kids. But when the new school opened, all the country schools around Aliceville would close down, and the kids who went to those schools would come to school in Aliceville. They would ride to town on buses. Even hillbilly kids from Lynn’s Mountain would come to the new school. Jim had often seen hillbilly kids with their fathers at the store. They stared at Jim as if they hated him already; he didn’t like them, either. Jim’s grandfather lived on Lynn’s Mountain. Jim had never laid eyes on him, and did not think he ever would. Mama would not permit it. Jim was a little afraid of going to school with kids who might know his grandfather, but he had not told anyone that.

Jim stopped at the edge of the school yard, but Whitey Whiteside marched up the steps and tried the wide front door. It was locked.

“Shoot,” Whitey said. “I was hoping we could get inside.”

Whitey walked down the steps and over to the nearest window. He was just tall enough to look in. He pushed his hat back and cupped his hands around his face and peered through the glass.

“That’s the principal’s office, I guess,” he said. “You’ll need to make sure you stay out of there, Jim. You want to see what it looks like?”

Jim shook his head. He did not want to look inside the principal’s office. His old school didn’t have a principal, just two teachers, and they were both nice.

Whitey walked farther down the side of the building and stopped at another window.

“This’ll probably be a classroom right here,” he said. He peered inside and whistled. “Boy, this is something, Jim,” he said. “Come have a look.”

Jim shook his head again.

“Oh, come on,” Whitey said. “You’re not going to get into trouble for looking in the window.”

He made a low step with his hands. Jim put his foot into it and Whitey hoisted him up. Jim pressed his face against the glass. The glass was warm from the sun. He had watched the school going up, but he had not looked inside before. The first thing he noticed was that the room did not have a proper ceiling. The beams holding up the second floor were visible.

“What’s that up there on the ceiling?” Whitey asked.

“It doesn’t have a ceiling,” Jim said.

“You know what I mean,” said Whitey.

“Electric lights,” Jim said.

“You got it,” said Whitey.

The uncles said that electricity would come to Aliceville when the new school opened, but Jim had his doubts. The town had been wired for years, but still hadn’t been connected to the power plant in New Carpenter. Jim wanted to go to a school with electric lights, but he wasn’t getting his hopes up.

“And look at the size of that blackboard,” Whitey said. “There’ll be plenty of room to do arithmetic problems. You won’t have to worry about running out of space when you do algebra.”

The room was empty save for the lights and the blackboard. It did not have desks in it yet, or pictures on the walls. Jim pushed away from the window and Whitey lowered him to the ground.

“Shoot, Jim,” Whitey said, “you’re going to get so smart you won’t be able to stand it.”

“The uncles are going to teach me how to do geometry,” Jim said. “They’re good at geometry.”

“They’re smart men,” Whitey said, seriously. “You do what the uncles say and you’ll turn out all right. That’s for sure.”

Jim and Whitey turned away from the school and started back toward town. They could see almost all of Aliceville from the top of the hill. Pete Hunt stood up on the porch of the depot and stretched and looked up and down the street. Uncle Coran walked out of the cotton gin and into the store. He would lock the store soon and go to Uncle Zeno’s house for dinner. Smoke was rising from the kitchen chimney. Uncle Al and Uncle Zeno would come in from the field and tell Uncle Coran and Jim’s mother about the morning. Jim felt something cold, like a fog, ink out through his belly. Only his mother would believe he had gotten sick in the field. The uncles would not have much to say because they would be ashamed of Jim. The tall houses on Depot Street were the last place Jim wanted to go.

Whitey suddenly slapped Jim on the arm.

“Hey,” he said, “I heard it might be somebody’s birthday today. You hear anything about that?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “What did you hear?”

“I heard that a certain boy might have turned ten years old today.”

“I guess it’s me,” Jim said, as if confessing to a crime.

“It’s you?”

“Yep.”

“You don’t say. Ten years old. You get any presents yet?”

“Nope.”

“You mean your mama and the uncles didn’t get you anything for your birthday?”

Jim had not considered the possibility before. If the uncles had gotten him something, they might not give it to him now. And if his mother had a present for him, why hadn’t she given it to him at breakfast?

“I guess not,” Jim said. The fog in his belly climbed his backbone toward his neck.

“That’s terrible,” Whitey said. “To have a birthday, to turn ten years old, which is pretty old, and not get one present. Don’t you think that’s about the most terrible thing you ever heard?”

Jim nodded. He didn’t want to cry in front of Whitey, but thought he might have to.

“Well,” said Whitey, “we’re going to have to do something about that. Hang on a minute.”

He stopped in the middle of the street. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out half a plug of tobacco.

“You chew?” he said.

“Nope,” said Jim.

“Hmm,” said Whitey. He reached into one of his coat pockets and pulled out a small pad. “You got any use for a receipt book?”

Jim shook his head.

“Didn’t think so,” Whitey said.

He reached into his other coat pocket and rummaged around. When he removed his hand it contained a new baseball. “How about this?” he said. “Can you use a baseball?”

Jim gasped. “That’s for me?” he said.

“If you can use it,” said Whitey.

“I can use it!” Jim said. “I can use it! I can use it!”

“Good,” Whitey said. “I’m tired of carrying it around. It made my pocket lumpy. I got it for my granny for Christmas, but she didn’t have a bat.”

He handed the baseball to Jim.

“Thanks, Whitey!” Jim said.

He stared at the baseball in his hand as if it were made of gold. His baseball at home was as heavy as a cannonball. He had accidentally left it out in the rain, and was afraid to ask for another one. But this baseball was brand-new. It was shinier than Whitey’s hat. He felt like he could throw it a mile.

Jim tossed the baseball up into the air. Whitey reached out and caught it before it came down. “You’re sure you can use it?” he said.

“WHITEY!” Jim yelled.

“All right,” Whitey said. “Just checking.” He handed the baseball back to Jim, and together they started back down the hill.

Baptism

W
HEN THE
uncles came in at midday, Jim didn’t mention the baseball Whitey Whiteside had given him because he had begun to suspect that taking it was wrong. The uncles and Jim’s mother ate without talking much, until late in the meal. Nobody said anything to Jim about what had happened that morning in the field. Jim decided he would hide the baseball in the barn until Whitey Whiteside came back to town. Then he would give it back.

“Pretty good morning, wasn’t it Allie?” Uncle Zeno said.

“We got a right smart done, I reckon,” said Uncle Al.

Uncle Zeno stirred a slice of butter into the apple cobbler Jim’s mother had made for dessert. Jim had noticed already that she hadn’t baked a cake.