Jump into the Sky (16 page)

I busted up too, even though it wasn’t all that funny. It was stupid funny, you know what I mean? Kinda like love.

“Y’all stop making that racket,” Peaches shouted, and rapped on the window above our heads. “The baby’s sleeping.”

Cal grinned and closed his eyes. “See, that’s pure love right there. You heard it.”

Sure it was. I was still gonna keep an eye on the truck.

B
eing stuck on the porch every night gives you a lot of time to think. I swear some nights my brain was like the jazz clubs back in Chicago. It didn’t open until after dark. I’d be lying there, trying to snooze, but my brain would be wide awake and kicking. If one of MawMaw Sands’s imaginary shooting stars had sailed over the house and landed in the garden late one night, I can promise you I woulda been the person to see it.

Sometimes I tried to pass the time by dreaming up things my father might be doing at that moment. Was he sitting on a dark train somewhere in the United States, waiting on orders? Or standing on the deck of a troopship steaming across the Pacific? Or jumping outta an airplane over enemy territory? He often looked more like a superhero than a human being in my imagination. As if a parachuting Captain Marvel had become my father overnight.

*  *  *

When I heard back from Aunt Odella, her words didn’t ease my mind much either. After getting my note in the mail, my aunt sent a speedy reply by telegram saying I should let her know as soon as I got any news from my father—or if I didn’t hear from him soon, she’d send money for a ticket home. The telegram ended with the words
God bless folks keeping you
, meaning Cal and Peaches, I guess. Even being as short on words as it was, the note must’ve cost a lot to send, Peaches said—maybe thinking a little better of my aunt after we got it.

Trouble was, there’d been no word from my father or the other paratroopers since they’d left town. It had been almost four weeks. We weren’t getting much war news either because Peaches had traded away the radio, not long after the president’s speech. In fact, I’d been standing in the kitchen on the day Cal came home to find the radio missing and the worst piece of art you ever saw sitting in its place. A peacock. Painted metallic silver and gold, with wilted feathers for its tail and chips of red glass for its eyes.

Cal asked, “Where’s the radio gone to?”

“Thought something else looked better sitting there instead,” Peaches answered, smooth as meringue on a pie, not letting a hint of shame at what she’d done slip into her voice. I stayed quiet and kept drying dishes, not letting on what I already knew, of course. Figured Cal was smart enough to find out the truth himself. He didn’t need me.

“So you moved the radio somewhere else?” He stepped into the bedroom to look for it.

“Miz Mayberry down the street needed a radio,” Peaches said, still sounding innocent.

Cal’s head poked out through the bedroom doorway, eyebrows rising. “You gave her ours?”

“You can’t put a price on art,” Peaches answered, pulling herself up to her full noble queen height. “Miz Mayberry bought the peacock from a real famous artist in Florida. I told her how I wouldn’t mind having something to brighten up the kitchen, and she gave it to me in exchange for that old worthless radio. Thought it was a fair trade because when all is said and done, art’s gonna be around long after this miserable war ends. Nobody’ll need their radios then.”

We hadn’t had much news since.

Only reminder of us still being at war was the sharp smell of the boot polish Cal used every night. After supper, he’d sit in the kitchen for an hour at least, hunched over the table, shining the brass on his uniform with Blitz cloth and polishing the same jump boots he’d polished the night before.

The cast had finally been taken off his foot, so he was wearing both boots, but he still walked with a slight limp. According to Cal—who could rarely be believed—the army docs had advised him to jump out of a plane and land on a tree stump with his good foot next just to even things out. And if that didn’t work, he was supposed to allow himself
a few days of walking practice, and pretty soon everything would be good as new.

All of us were too busy to realize what that verdict would mean.

On the morning the letter arrived from the army, me and Cal were doing laundry in the kitchen. We’d been trying to keep up with Peaches’s laundry jobs so there’d be extra money still coming in. With our elbows deep in Rinso suds, we probably looked like a couple of girls as we washed dinner napkins from the resorts and starched officers’ dress shirts from Camp Mackall—leaving Peaches to worry about taking care of baby Victory, who was still a wailing handful of trouble.

Coming up the steps, the postman ducked around a row of freshly washed sheets me and Cal had just strung across the porch, still dripping gently. “Mail for Sergeant Calvin R. Thomas,” he announced through the screen door.

Even though the words weren’t spoken that loudly, I’m telling you they silenced the whole house faster than a preacher standing up to talk at a funeral. In the bedroom, Victory stopped in mid-howl. Cal’s hands, in the middle of wringing out a shirt, stopped and sagged into the washtub we were using. I worried about his whole body tumbling into the suds next, from the way he looked.

“You want me to get it?” I asked, not knowing what to think. Had Aunt Odella sent us another message?

“Naw.” He stood up and walked slowly toward the door. “It’s for me.”

As the screen door squeaked open and Cal reached for the envelope, the entire neighborhood suddenly got dead quiet as well. No birds making a sound for a hundred miles. Not a whisper of air moving.

The postman kept his expression carefully blank as he handed over the mail. You could tell he’d practiced giving the right look—keeping his eyes fixed only on the envelope and not on the person getting it. I’m sure he had to play the part a lot with all the bad news he had to deliver in the war.

After the fellow left, Cal kept staring at the letter too. Not reading it yet. Just looking at it. In the bedroom, there was the muffled sound of Peaches crying. My feet began to move on their own, doing a nervous bounce on the black and white linoleum. When Archie’s brother went missing in action in Germany, the news came in a War Department telegram and Archie’s momma collapsed into a heap when she got it. They had to fetch a doctor to revive her.

“Is it bad news?” I ventured to ask.

Cal sighed and put the letter on the table without even reading it. “It’s my new orders from the army, telling me where I’m going next.”

When he said those words, I knew I was sunk too. No doubt about it. Cal and Peaches would be moving out of the house and I’d be on my way back to Chicago in no time.

Cal stood next to the table with his hands clasped behind his back, staring silently at the calendar on the kitchen wall. Hard to tell what he was thinking, but the month of May coulda caught fire by how hard he was looking at it. A steady
drip-drip
sound from the leaky kitchen faucet seemed to get louder the longer the silence went on.

“How about if I go down the road and talk to MawMaw Sands for a while? I’ll come back later on,” I mumbled, pushing open the screen door and letting it ease shut behind me. Wanted my own peace and quiet to come up with what to do next.

Nobody answered me.

I’ll admit it was a relief to see MawMaw Sands sitting on her porch as I came slouching down the road like a sad sack. Even from a distance, you could spot her red turban and patchworky dress. Looked as if she was working on baskets like it was an ordinary day.

“How you, Levi?” she called out, without glancing up.

“Fine, ma’am,” I mumbled.

She didn’t seem to notice my down look. Or she was pretending not to. As I came up the steps, she kept on studying the basket she was working on, her face set in a look of concentration. “You know anything about basket making, boy?” she said, her lips pressed together like a tight twist of rope.

“No ma’am, I don’t.”

“Well, come over here and pull up a seat. I’ll show you some things.”

Now, learning how to make baskets wasn’t the kind of help I was hoping for, but I plunked myself down on an old crate sitting in the porch corner and tried to look interested. MawMaw Sands turned over the one in her lap to show me the bottom of it, her fingers tapping on a small brown knot at the center. “Starting a basket, see, that’s the hardest part. Every basket—don’t matter what kind you make—always starts with a knot at its center. Myself, I like to use pine needles for the knot. You twist the needles together, and then you wind your coils around the knot, see?” Her fingers followed the spirals. “Every part leads to the next.”

She reached into a rusty pail of dry stalks next to her feet and handed me a bunch of them. A faint vanilla smell wafted upward. “That’s the smell of sweetgrass,” she said, as if reading my mind. “It comes from the dunes and salt marshes miles from here. Twice a year, I go there and gather it myself because you can’t give the job of pulling sweetgrass to somebody else. You send somebody ignorant out to do it for you, and they’ll bring you back seaweed instead. Best thing to do is collect your own. Put some turpentine on your shoes to scare off all them poisonous snakes hanging around there, find a good spot, and start pulling sweetgrass. None of those snakes will bother you one bit. Nohow. Just dip your shoes in turpentine and you’ll be all right.” A sly
smile spread across the old woman’s face, as if she truly loved facing down poisonous snakes.

Tell you what, I was starting to believe the stories about her ancestors living in the Georgia swamps.

“Now, before you can work on a basket, you gotta make the knot first.” She dropped a bunch of long pine needles into my hands and I did my best to knot them together, but it was way harder than you’d think. If you were lucky enough to get something that looked like it might hold for half a minute, then you had to start winding the sweetgrass coils fast around your little bitty knot before it all fell apart.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t get anything close to the start of a basket. Sweetgrass stems sprang outta my hands. The knots came untied. Poked my thumb with one sharp stem and drew blood, for Pete’s sake. Finally I tossed the whole mess back into the bucket and gave up with an aggravated sigh. Good grief. I wasn’t God’s gift to basket making, that’s for sure. I think the orange-striped cat on the porch must’ve felt sorry for me because he came over and rubbed his ears against my knees.

MawMaw Sands jabbed her weaving spoon in my direction. “There now—you see how hard it is to make one of these baskets. Folks always think it looks real easy, that anybody can make a basket, but no sir, it sure ain’t simple. Far from simple.”

Her eyes peered at me from the wrinkled depths of her
brown face, two chips of white china staring. “Don’t you forget what a struggle every basket in this life is to make, and how at the center of every single one, there’s a knot of pain. You can’t have one without the other. Pain gets woven right along with the beautiful parts, just like everything else in this world. Sweetness and pain. Same as life.”

Since my right thumb was still throbbing like the devil, I didn’t figure I’d be forgetting about pain or pine needles or her darned baskets anytime soon. Me and the cat were quiet. I think we’d both had enough of MawMaw Sands’s too-deep wisdom for the time being. I’d been hoping for some useful advice, and she’d just given me another big dose of doom and gloom. Standing up, I cast an uneasy glance in the direction of Peaches and Cal’s house. “Guess I better head on back and see what’s happening there.”

MawMaw Sands nodded. “Yes, already heard about you and them leaving.”

Those words stopped me in my tracks.

The old woman studied her basket, still talking. “Now, it might seem far away where they’re being sent to, but nothing’s as far off as it looks on a map, you remember that. People’s the same everywhere, no matter where you go. And someday, mark my words, Levi Battle, you gonna come back here to see me again.” Her foot tapped on the porch planks. “I’m gonna hear your feet comin’ up these steps again loud and clear.”

Her predictions made me so jittery, I know I careened
like a row of dominoes down her steps and through her gate without saying so much as a polite goodbye. Probably forgot to latch the gate too. As I was heading back to Peaches and Cal’s house to find out what was true or not, the old woman called out a few final words from the porch. “You stop by before you leave, you hear? I got something to give you.”

I
f I wasn’t a believer in MawMaw Sands’s peculiar gifts before that day, I was after it. Because unless she read the official orders of the U.S. Army before they were sent, there was no way she woulda known about Cal being shipped so far away. Not when he hadn’t even read the news himself. And, believe me, if you were asked to draw a diagonal line from one end of the United States to the other, you couldn’t get a line much longer than one going from North Carolina to the place where the army was sending Cal.

Pendleton, Oregon. That’s what the orders said. Cal showed me the letter when I got back. It said Sergeant Calvin R. Thomas was ordered to duty with the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion at Pendleton Air Base in Oregon under the control of the U.S. Ninth Army Service Command.

Now, if I’d been asked to guess the location where my father and the other troopers might be, Oregon was a place
that never woulda crossed my mind in a million years, that’s for sure.

“Why there?” I asked Cal, rereading the official words again as if there might be some clue we missed.

He shrugged. “It’s the army. Who knows.”

Later that morning, we walked to the little Southern Pines post office to look up Oregon on the old U.S. map they got hanging on the wall. Probably made people wonder what the heck was going on when they saw the strange parade of me and Cal and Peaches and Victory—with a nappy over her head to keep off the hot sun—coming down the street. Had a couple of neighborhood kids trailing after us too. I remember how all of us crowded into the musty-smelling mail room and squinted at the yellowed map on the wall, which had probably been up there since the Civil War ended, by the looks of it.