Jump into the Sky (30 page)

“I know all the people and friends you have back in Chicago,” my father said. “When I was your age, I loved Hixson’s and going to Uncle Otis’s and all that. Still do.” His fingers drummed on the table and his expression grew more serious like the tough news he had to tell me was coming up next. “Trouble is, you can see Odella’s got her own life these days and there isn’t much room for you and me back there in Chicago anymore.”

My eyes swiveled in his direction. What was he saying? A dizzying hum of noise filled my ears. What did he mean about no room for us in Chicago?

“If I want to stay in the service, the army says they’ll
promote me to first lieutenant and send me for special officer training this winter,” my father went on, noticing nothing. “They want to recruit more paratroopers for our outfit, and they think I could end up being one of the top colored officers they have in peacetime. Who knows, if I keep moving up, maybe someday I’ll get to be general. Wouldn’t that be something if your daddy ended up being General Charles Battle?”

A proud grin crossed my daddy’s face and you could tell he had his whole life planned out ahead of him like a road map. Only thing that road map didn’t include was me.

See, Aunt Odella had been right all along, I realized—the war might have ended, but my father wasn’t giving up the army and returning to Chicago anytime soon. The truth was, he couldn’t stop chasing after bigger things in his life, no matter what he said. If he got to be general, he’d want to try for something else. The moon was always gonna be just out of his reach.

But his next words caught me off guard.

Clearing his throat, my father grew serious again. “What I’m trying to tell you, Levi,” he said, giving me one of his eye-to-eye lieutenant looks, “is that I’d like to stick with the army and I thought maybe you’d like to come along with me this time and see what happens.”

I’m sure I was blinking like a bird that had just slammed beak-first into a window as I tried to sort out what I’d just heard: He wasn’t asking me to go back to my old life in
Chicago. He was asking me to start over somewhere else. He was saying give up Archie and my friends, Aunt Odella and Uncle Otis, the neighborhood I knew every crowded square inch of—even the school I’d gone to since I was a little kid—and come with him.

“So what do you think?” My daddy studied his big parachute-holding hands. “I know it’s a lot to decide all of a sudden.”

I had no idea what I thought. I tried to come up with something else … anything else … to ask.

“Do you know where the army’s sending you?” I held on to a small scrap of hope that it might be a place
near
Chicago, right? On the other hand, it could also be somewhere miles away. Like the South. No way I was going back there.

Honestly, I thought it was a cruel joke when my father said, “Well, it turns out the army’s assigning our battalion back to Camp Mackall in North Carolina.”

What?

All I could do was stare. Out of all the son-of-a-gun places in the entire United States the army coulda picked—and my father was asking me to go back to
the worst place I’d ever been?

It felt like getting a sudden stinging slap across the face. Could feel my whole face getting hot. How could my father even think of asking me to go with him? There was no way I’d do it. No way.

“Why would you want to go back there and put up with
all that?” My arms chopped at the air and my voice was louder than it probably shoulda been. “All those signs and everything all over the place.” It was one thing to stay with the army, it was another thing to go back to the
COLORED
signs and water fountains and being treated like you were less than nothing, you know what I mean?

“Wherever the army sends us, that’s where we go,” my father said coolly, trying to keep up his tough lieutenant bluff—as if the army could send him off a cliff and it wouldn’t much matter to him. Then he added with a trace more sharpness, “If I wanted easy in this life, I wouldn’t strap a parachute to myself every day and jump out of airplanes, now would I?”

There was a long silence. A chilly, wet breeze ruffled through the kitchen. I think Willajean and Mrs. Delaney must’ve been listening in the front room, because they were awfully quiet.

My father’s voice was softer when he spoke again. You might’ve been able to hear some disappointment in it if you listened hard. “If you don’t want to come along with me, that’s fine, Levi,” he said. “I can talk to Uncle Otis or one of my sisters and see if they wouldn’t mind looking after you, if it comes down to that. I’m not dragging you along with me if you don’t want to go. You’re old enough to make some of your own decisions these days. I thought you’d want to give this a try, but if you don’t want to, that’s all right. The choice is up to you.”

More silence.

“And if I was to go back to Chicago, who would you have left?” The angry question flew out of my mouth before I could stop it. Think it took both of us by surprise.

“I don’t know,” my father said, looking confused by what I was asking. “The other troopers in the outfit, I guess.”

“But not me.”

“Right,” he answered uneasily. “Not you.”

More heat pushed behind my voice. “So you’re saying you’d let me go back to Chicago and leave you with nobody?”

My father rubbed his eyes. “What I’m saying is, it’s up to you.”

Well, I couldn’t do it.

No matter how much I wanted to stay in Chicago and no matter how much I hated the idea of going back to the South—I couldn’t tell my father I was leaving him in the dust. Couldn’t say those three words to his face: I am leaving. Even if he was ready to take off and follow the army wherever it went, I couldn’t do the same thing to him.

Tell you the truth, realizing that fact about myself was one of the best things that coulda come out of the bad moment. When you are from a family of people who don’t stick around, it’s easy to start worrying if maybe you have that same quality. But all those years of picking up buckeyes—how I couldn’t leave one behind—that shoulda been my first clue. Because now I could clearly see the one thing I
didn’t get from Queen Bee Walker. Or my daddy. Or the Battle family either.

Some people might’ve been able to put a goodbye note on a car seat and say,
I Am Levin
, but the honest truth was—I couldn’t. When it came right down to it, I might’ve been born into a family of people who couldn’t stick around, but I was somebody who did.

So that was the reason why I didn’t have any choice really. Sitting there in the Delaneys’ little kitchen with the rain hammering down like the Pacific Ocean outside, I had to act like a tough pillow, like nothing could bother me, and tell him yes—

“All right,” I said, trying to keep my voice from falling to pieces. “I’ll go along with you.”

T
urns out, the decision to go along with my father would be the easy part, but the harder parts were still waiting ahead. We made plans to leave Pendleton at the beginning of October, and it was my daddy’s idea to stop in Chicago before we went to his assignment in North Carolina. “I’ve got some furlough time,” he said, “so we’ll spend a few days there.” Think he was trying his best to make me happy, but I was afraid seeing the place would only make me miss it more.

When she heard we were leaving, Willajean acted like her world was gonna end, even though her brothers were expected back home any day. I was packing up the last of my things one night when she came into my room with a folded-up piece of paper.

“Wrote you something,” she said, holding it toward me, her eyes blinking nervously behind her glasses. “You can go ahead and look at it.”

Well, I opened up the paper, and it turned out the girl
had written the world’s longest poem for me—a poem all about stars and peace and everlasting love. Good grief, I had no ding-donged idea what to say.

“What do you think?” she asked after I read it.

I had no idea what I thought. Fortunately, I noticed MawMaw Sands’s sweetgrass basket, which was sitting empty on the bed, waiting to be packed up, and I got a flash of divine inspiration. “I think you should have this basket for your poems.” I pushed the basket toward Willajean. “It was made by an old African lady named MawMaw Sands, whose ancestors jumped off slave ships and lived in the Georgia swamps years ago, and everybody buys their baskets from her because they have things in them you can’t always see. She gave me this basket before I came to Pendleton and now I want you to have it.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” Willajean glared, hands on her hips.

“I’m just saying, sometimes you gotta believe in things you can’t see, that’s all,” I replied, trying to sound mysterious. Swear I was almost as good as MawMaw Sands herself. “Since you want to be a poet someday, I thought maybe you should have something nice for keeping your poetry inside.”

Willajean studied the basket, opening it up and looking inside. “It’s pretty, but I wanted you to have the poem. I wrote the poem for you.”

Heck, girls were impossible. I had to think fast. “Well, how about if you keep the basket and I keep the poem?”

Willajean gave me a melty-looking smile and she took off with that basket like it was a block of gold, telling me, “Thank you, Levi. Outside of my family, nobody has ever given me a real gift before.”

I hoped MawMaw Sands wouldn’t mind me giving away her gift, but I figured she probably already knew I would. Wouldn’t be surprised if she was sitting down there in North Carolina on her viny green porch, making me a new one at that very moment.

I’ll admit I hung on to the poem from Willajean for a long time after leaving Pendleton because it was the first poem a girl ever gave to me, and maybe someday Willajean would be as famous as Emily Dickinson, who knows.

The morning we left Oregon, the weather was clear and chilly, not a cloud in the sky. “Perfect jump day,” my daddy said, glancing upward and shaking his head like it was hard to leave. Willajean was back in school, so it was only Mrs. Delaney seeing us off at the station. She was waiting on pins and needles for her boys to come back. I think she spent more time looking around the train station for the two of them than saying goodbye to us, but that was okay with me.

Now, if you’ve ever come back to a place that you haven’t seen in a while, you know how things change. After all the wide-open spaces of Oregon, the city of Chicago seemed to have shrunk while I was gone. Everything felt smaller. Aunt Odella’s apartment was a shoebox compared to where
we’d been. When we arrived and she flung open the door to welcome us, I looked around the tiny space and thought,
Good grief, how could the two of us have lived here?

Aunt Odella was the real story, though. She looked as if she’d gone back in time and found her younger self. “Levi, look at you,” she said in this soft-edged voice when she opened the door. Swear even the voice sounded new.

When my father stepped through the doorway in his dress uniform, she started carrying on and crying all over his shoulders, which took me by surprise considering the way she used to be. I guess some people must get their waterworks later in life, because Aunt Odella couldn’t stop boo-hooing and telling my father how proud she was of everything he’d done in the war.

After introducing us to her new husband, Paul, she heaped on about a hundred more praises, saying how my daddy was one of the few colored paratroopers in the army and I was one of the nicest boys in Chicago. “I raised him right,” she said proudly.

Paul reached out to shake our hands. He had a weakly grip and sweaty palms, but he seemed like a nice enough fellow. Found out he’d met Aunt Odella in June at a church funeral, where else? And it was love at first sight. You could tell they were crazy about one another from the way they kept giving each other little smiles and looks when they didn’t think we were paying attention.

It made me wonder if the cactus was right after all. Without all the heavy burdens on her two shoulders, Aunt Odella had changed into a bright cactus flower overnight. Like I said, she didn’t even seem like the same person she was before. Which just goes to show you maybe there are times in life when change is what you have to do to survive. Despite what other people might’ve thought about my aunt sending me away so suddenly, I couldn’t hold that choice against her—or anybody else, you know what I mean?

Archie stopped by for a visit while we were there, and I’ll be honest with you, he had changed for the worse. We’d written a few words back and forth during the summer, so I’d heard the bad news about his brother being declared killed in action. Don’t know if it was the pain of losing his brother, or me not being around to keep him on the straight and narrow—or both—but he’d taken up cussing and girls and just about every other bad thing you could name.

When he showed up to see us wearing one of those baggy zoot suits with a fedora slouching over his eyes, Aunt Odella turned right back into her old self. “Can’t believe you are strolling around town looking like that,” she said, hands on her hips. “Putting your family to shame. You can expect next time I see your momma or your granny in church, I’m gonna have a word with them.” After he left, Aunt Odella shook her head and said it was too bad the way he’d turned out. I’ll admit part of me was torn up to see him so different.

Fortunately, Uncle Otis hadn’t changed much at all. Well, except for his wife—she had left and took the green battleship with her too. Uncle Otis had bought his first Buick because he thought maybe the problem was with his automobile, not his wife. Me and my daddy heard all the sorry details of his wife troubles while he was giving us our sharp-looking razor cuts. Then he started pestering us for the reasons why we were going back to the South.

“War’s over. Can’t understand why you’re sticking with the army and moving south, Charlie. Why not stay right here where all your family is?” he said, talking to my daddy like he was my age. “How about if I give you that spot right over there.” He pointed at the empty barber chair next to us. “Teach you everything I know about cutting heads. Let Levi go back to his old school and all his friends. This young man’s got a good head on his shoulders, you know.” As he patted my shoulder, the razor drifted dangerously close to my ear. “How about you? How’d you like to be a barber someday?” he said, looking at me.