Littlejohn (11 page)

In May of 1927, when Daddy was going fast after he had his big stroke, I’d sit by the bed holding his hand when Momma needed a rest, and sometimes he’d try to talk. He pretty much still had his right mind, but the stroke had messed him up so he couldn’t make himself understood, and that would aggravate him so bad he’d cry sometimes.

One morning, about ten o’clock, I was holding his hand and he seemed like he was sleeping, when all of a sudden, he opened his eyes wide and looked right at me, and it seemed like he hadn’t looked at me in years. I was struck by how much his bright blue eyes had faded, to where they didn’t hardly have any more color in them than the veins in his hands.

“Afe?” he croaked out.

“No, Daddy,” I told him. “It’s me, Littlejohn.”

“Ere Afe?”

I reckon I could of lied and told him that Lafe would be back directly, just to go on back to sleep, but his mind seemed so good up to that point that I felt like he must of just woke up from a dream and was confused.

“Daddy,” I told him, “Lafe ain’t here. Lafe died five years ago. In the hunting accident.”

Daddy got this look on his face like he was just learning about it for the first time, and I could see his eyes tearing up.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I told him. “I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”

He closed his eyes, and pretty soon he was sleeping again, or seemed like he was. He was dead six days later, and he never said anything to me again, one way or the other. We put him on the hill next to Lafe and the rest.

The days after Lafe died seemed about a year long each, with the whole thing coming back to me about every five minutes. But somehow, the days became weeks, the weeks months, the months years. I have heard of folks grieving theirselves to death, but I reckon you have to be old to do that. Young folks got too much working against death.

I would go out every morning, Monday through Saturday, to work. I found enough barn work and house repairs to get me through until it was time to plant the tobacco beds, and then farming took over until the next harvest.

Instead of coming back to the house for dinner at noon, I would take some sausage and biscuits or a piece of cheese or a sweet potato and some corn bread out with me and just eat in the field, under the big old oak by the property line if I was working in the near fields, under the sycamores and sweet gums if I was down in the swamp. I’d pump a jug full
of water from our pump or the Lockamys’ and leave it in the shade. I’d tell Momma not to wait supper for me, and most days I’d manage to get there later and eat by myself, out on the porch in the summertime after everybody else had finished, in the dining room after the rest was through in the winter. It wasn’t a good time for talking to people, and we all just kind of kept our distance. Momma never come out there when I was eating by myself in the near fields, where she could see me from the back porch, and asked me to come up and eat with the rest of them, although Lex, bless his heart, did try and get me to from time to time.

What was I thinking about all that time? I could not exactly tell you. Sometimes, I felt like I was talking to Lafe. I know that Rennie would kid me about talking to myself, but it was just that Lafe seemed like he was closer out there in the fields, and sometimes he seemed near-bout alive. In the August heat, I’ve seen him standing in the shade over by the pin oaks at the edge of the woods, I’ll tell you that. I sure didn’t tell anybody about it back then, though. I didn’t hate myself quite enough to want a one-way ticket to the crazy house at Dix Hill.

The main thing, though, was that, by working hard, I could feel like I was worth something. That always had been my way. Back when most folks thought I was retarded and never would be good for anything, I’d try to make up for not being able to read by outworking everybody on the farm. If I kept at it, kept that ditch bank so clean you could eat out of it, kept the weeds out of the tobacco and corn, got the whole place looking better than it ever had, maybe everybody would forget someday that I’d killed my own brother. Maybe I’d forget, too.

Church was the hardest part. It was the only place where I had to be around a whole bunch of people that knew what I had done, or what they thought I had done, and wasn’t family. But not going to church would of made things even worse than they was. So, every blessed Sunday, I would go sing in the choir, then walk back home instead of waiting for the buggy, because Momma and Daddy would want to gab for a while after the sermon, and I didn’t have nothing to say to nobody.

I thought about running away but I just couldn’t make myself do it. In spite of Lafe, in spite of the silences and the cemetery and everything, this was the only home I had, and I couldn’t bear to leave it. It wasn’t just Momma and Daddy and them. It was the place itself. I would of been plumb happy never to leave the farm. Don’t feel much different now. It always amazes me that Georgia could just pick up and move somewhere different every two or three years after college, how she never seems to care if she ever sees this place again. It never was like that with me.

One time, about 1925, Gruff tried to get me to come down to Atlanta with him. He was already managing a store down there and said it might be good for me to get away from home. I’m sure nobody would of cared all that much, but this is the only place I ever felt comfortable. Maybe if I had been able to read and write, it would of felt different, but I don’t think so.

There was days, back then, when I wouldn’t say a word to a living soul. I could get up at 5:30, before Momma, cook my own fatback and eggs and biscuits, make a couple of extra biscuits and add some sausage or a sweet potato for dinner, fill up the jug with water, go hitch up old Susie and be in the
fields by 6:30. Lex would come out a little bit later with the other mule, Moses, and we’d work all day, Lex going back to the house for dinner and me eating under the shade.

I don’t mean to make out like the years from 1922 until 1942 was one long row I plowed. There was times when we’d all get together and talk and laugh some, like before. There was days when it would rain, or days in the winter when not one thing needed doing. It’s just that, after a while, there wasn’t much need on my part for company. I talked to Lafe’s ghost or whatever you want to call it a lot more than I talked to the living.

Neither Lex nor Connie ever did marry. It wasn’t all that peculiar a thing back then, not marrying. Miss Hattie Draughon and her two sisters, Miss Corrinne and Miss Jessie, didn’t any of them marry, just stayed at their daddy’s big house, after their momma died, taking care of each other until none of them could get about and they all had to be sent to the nursing home up on the Mingo Road.

I think it was harder, back then, on the older ones than the younger ones. Lex knew pretty much that he would be taking over the farm some day, so he always was expected to pay more attention to it than Gruff or Lafe when they were boys. He wasn’t a bad-looking man when he was young, although he was more bashful than us younger ones, and I reckon we used to tease him a lot. It’s funny, but I don’t think Lex had a date until he was way past grown, and even then, he would keep it to himself. He’d just go off at night, after we got the car in 1928. Later, when we had to put the car up on blocks because we couldn’t afford to run it, he’d walk somewhere or other at night. Nobody would of thought of locking their doors back then, and nobody really knew when Lex come
back, but he did wake me up coming in as late as three
A.M
. some nights.

Connie wasn’t as pretty as Century, who had Momma’s yellow hair and soft, pretty face. Momma looked like a angel when she was young. I can see that now looking at her pictures. Makes me wonder what she saw in a old, one-legged Civil War veteran like Daddy.

Connie had sharper features, like Lex, a nose like a hawk’s, and she was too skinny. I see girls now trying to get as thin as they can, and I remember how, when we was young, a man wanted a wife with some meat on her bones. If you got too skinny back then, they’d ship you off to the TB sanatorium.

There was a fella come to work in Geddie about the time Daddy died, and he started coming around, like a stray dog. His name was Homer Guinn, and he was one of the sons of this trashy Guinn woman that lived down south of here on the Ammon Road. Nobody knew who half of her young-uns’ daddies was, and no two of them seemed to have had the same one. But this one, Homer, a boy with slick black hair and a complexion dark enough to suggest the worst, seemed to take a liking to Connie, who already was past being give up for an old maid. And the funny thing was, even though Connie always seemed like she was content to cook and keep house right where she was born, she took a shine to Homer. He started going to the Geddie Presbyterian Church and sitting with her, and they’d spend evenings on the old glider we used to have on the front porch, just talking away. He’d leave about 9:30 and walk back to his momma’s.

It all come to an end one day that June. I had walked in from the swamp and unhitched Susie, and I was coming up
from the barn. It was near-bout dark, but there was enough light left to see two people standing out by the carhouse we’d built for the Ford. As I got closer, I could see it was Lex and Connie. Lex had a tobacco stick in his hand that he’d picked up off the ground. Connie had the butcher knife.

“I am going to cut you up like a hog!” she screamed at him. She was as mad as a wet settin’ hen.

“No, you ain’t, Connie,” Lex said, and I could tell he was a little nervous. I was about fifty feet away, and she probably knew I was there, but she was just wild. I hadn’t seen her lose her temper since she got grown.

“I did it for you, honey,” he said as he backed up into the bean rows, being real careful not to trip. “He wasn’t no good. I marked them chickens because they been disappearing for weeks. I never said nothing about it because I knew you wouldn’t believe me, so I had to get proof.”

“You just want me to stay here all my sorry life and cook and wait on you all. And I won’t do it. I won’t do it! I’d rather cut you up and go to jail with him.”

What had happened was that Homer Guinn had been slipping by the chicken coop on the way home and walking off with Momma’s white leg’orns, one at a time. Finally, Lex had put little bands on their legs, not like the usual ones, but smaller, hard to see. When he had counted the night before and come up one short, he sent the sheriff over to Miss Guinn’s, where they found the chicken amongst hers out in the yard. They didn’t keep Homer in jail for long, but Lex let him know he’d be shot if he come sniffing around here again.

Connie cut a shine about it, told Lex she’d wait and catch him when he was sleeping and kill him then, and she didn’t
go to church for a good six months afterward. Sometimes, Lex looked more tired than usual out in the fields, like maybe he wasn’t sleeping good. Connie got over it, though, and she stayed right here for her whole life, waiting on me and Lex and Momma until I got married and moved out, and then Momma died. Then it was just her and Lex. She died in 1968, when she was near-bout seventy-three years old, six days after Lex passed away. It was the only six days of her adult life, I reckon, that she didn’t have nobody to wait on. That’s probably what killed her.

After Daddy died, I felt more responsible than before toward my family. Other than working, I’d go to church on Sunday and Wednesday night and maybe go down to the store in East Geddie on Saturday afternoon as it got a little easier to be with people. About the only gambling I ever did was over Coca-Colas. I love Coca-Cola; Momma said it was my one vice. But I had this special trick, where I could take one of them seven-ounce bottles like they used to have, that really had some kick to them, and drain one in a single swallow. If they could get anybody that didn’t come around the store that much, or somebody that was new in town, they’d get me to bet him I could drink the Coke in one gulp. I remember one time Jack Tatum, who was a farmer just down the road from here, said, “Littlejohn, it’s a good thing you don’t drink liquor. You’d be a drunk.”

And then, of course, there was Rose.

Rennie’s momma had her last baby when I was eleven, in 1917. She was this little Indian girl that used to bring us water when we was all working down in the swamp. She
wasn’t as dark as her brothers and older sister, had kind of a orangish color to her, skin that stayed right tan in the dead of winter and hair that was reddish-blond and curly, but not kinky. She took after the rest of her family so little that lots of people figured she must not of been Amos’s, but if he ever thought so, he didn’t let on, and he seemed like he was crazier about Rose than any of the rest.

Up past the Rock of Ages another hundred yards or so, into McDaniel property, there used to be a pond, not more than thirty feet across, where us boys would run for a quick swim at dinnertime in the summer. I wouldn’t no more do something like that now than I would walk into a fire, with all the cottonmouths and pilot snakes around here, but back in them days, we’d take all our clothes off and jump right in. Some of us, me included, never even learned how to swim, but the pond, it was just a low place where Lock’s Branch run out, and it wasn’t no more than five feet deep in the middle. Just deep enough to cool off in. They filled it in more than twenty years ago when they cut down all the trees there and started to planting soybeans.

I bet I hadn’t been down there in five years or more when, one day in the summer of 1933 when it must of been 100 degrees out and we was working in the swamp, I got this craving to go down there and get wet all over. Rennie and his brothers had gone to the house for dinner, and I was sitting by the sweet gum at the edge of the branch, not a breath of air. You could smell the crops burning.

I followed the branch past the graveyard and on into the thicket where the pond was. I took off my overalls and brogans, my socks and brown work shirt and underwear and
jumped right in. I was twenty-seven then, and had thought myself a man for some time, but that water felt so good that I was splashing around like a young-un at the beach.

I never saw Rose until she jumped in right behind me. Scared me to death. I didn’t know whether it was a bear or a dog or maybe a gator. I jumped and turned around, ready to fight for my life, and here was this Indian girl, who was practically a baby last time I took notice of her, buck naked and all filled out, right in front of me.