Littlejohn (12 page)

She reached down between my legs, where no woman had reached before.

“If you want me,” she said, “you can have me.” Plain as that.

And so I did have her, right there in the sand and swamp grass along the edge of our own private play pool. Because Rose didn’t have no brothers or sisters anywhere near her age or any friends within a mile, she had pretty much had the pond to herself for the last few years, after the rest of us thought we was too old for such foolishness. She said later that she had never seen another soul there until she followed me down that July day in 1933.

Maybe it’s like this with all men. I don’t know, because I come from a generation where you won’t supposed to kiss and tell. But every woman I have ever been with has known more than me, has led me down that path, starting with sweet Rose. If you had looked at it from outside, not knowing everything, you’d of said, here’s this cradle robber taking advantage of this poor little sixteen-year-old Indian girl. He ought to be horsewhipped.

But Rose taught me everything. I was her plaything, not the other way around. I don’t know where a girl that age
learned such things, but after I got over the shock of sharing myself with another human being after being locked up inside myself for years and years, I was just glad that she had.

Nobody ever talked about anybody being a virgin back then. Everybody just took it for granted that you was, especially if you was a woman but probably if you was a man, too, and there wasn’t all this stuff like them
Playboy
and
Penthouse
magazines and X-rated movies to keep people’s minds on sex all the time like there is now. People didn’t seem to think about it that much, and it probably wasn’t all that strange for a old bachelor of twenty-seven like me never to have done it. At least, that’s the way it seems to me, looking back.

The hardest thing to do was to keep it quiet. I would go all the way to Lennon’s Drug Store in Port Campbell, where I didn’t know anybody, to buy rubbers, and then I’d hide them behind a timber in the back of the little workshop me and Lex built behind the carhouse, stopping by to pick up one every time I planned to meet Rose down at the pond.

In warm weather, we’d get together whenever we could. We had this message system. If I was working by myself in the swamp or knew Rennie and his brothers was going to be way off at the other end of the farm where we wouldn’t be together at dinner, I’d put this red bandanna around my neck that Rose could see all the way up to her folks’ yard. Then, if she could get away, between housework and fixing dinner for the men, she’d tell her momma she was going for a walk. When she got a ways from the house, headed for the pond, she would do the only thing that ever made me remember that she was a Indian. She’d give a mourning-dove call. That was my signal. When I heard the mourning dove, I knew it was time to tie up the mule and head for Rose’s pond.

In cold weather, we had another plan. There was a old slave cabin, now long since tore down, back farther in the McDaniel woods, where we could be alone and warm. Sometimes we’d both slip out at night, with her giving a owl hoot as the okay signal, and go do it in the tobacco barn farthest from the house.

We went on like this for five years, and, to my knowledge, didn’t nobody ever find out. Lex might of been puzzled that I’d volunteer to work in the swamp, where the air was so heavy and still, so far away from the house, but he was glad for me to do it. And Rose had got so wild and independent as she growed older that her folks, who was getting on in years, just about give up and let her go where she pleased, no questions asked.

It all ended in 1938, one bright blue October morning at the slave cabin. The first frost was barely off the ground. I was supposed to be clearing some of the thorns out of the graveyard and took a chance that nobody would notice that I’d gone into McDaniel’s woods. Rose was waiting for me, and she didn’t beat around the bush.

“Johnny,” she said—that was what she always called me—“I’m going to have a baby.”

I started to declare that I’d been careful, when she stopped me.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “it ain’t yours.”

I knew that Rose would leave from home sometimes for a week or more, and I didn’t fool myself that I was her only lover. But it was a shock to hear that she was carrying another man’s child. She said she was two months gone, that her momma and daddy didn’t know nothing about it yet. She said she was aiming to marry Gentry Locklear, who she saw now
and then, and move in with his people. She didn’t love Gentry near as much as she did me, she said.

I could of married her. I know she’d of gone along with it. I could say it might of killed Momma and them, but looking back now, it was pure lack of guts that kept me from marrying that wild, beautiful girl. If it’d been my baby, then I might of said to hell with what people say and married her anyhow. We could of had a pretty good life together, I think. But I was right sure that baby wasn’t mine, since we’d been real careful, and I couldn’t stand the snickers, didn’t think I ever could go back to Dawson Autry’s store again on a Saturday afternoon. I was a coward.

Rose and Gentry, who was about Rose’s age and a Lumbee like her, did get married, and seven months later, she give birth to this little baby that was lighter-skinned than her even. And you know what she named him? Johnny. Not John. Johnny Little Locklear. I saw her one time when the baby was little, walking down High Street in Port Campbell with her husband by her side. She didn’t speak, just looked down at the baby as we passed on the street, looked up at me and winked. Rose never come home much after she got married, and her momma and daddy didn’t live much longer. Johnny lived around Port Campbell until he joined the Army. He got killed in Vietnam, left a wife and three young-uns at home.

If I ever had a son, his name was Johnny Little Locklear.

When the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, I was thirty-five years old, a bachelor that worked hard six days a week, sang bass in the choir on Sunday and saw Belva Culbreth on Sunday nights. Belva was a widow who went to Geddie
Presbyterian, too. After Rose, she was a cold bucket of water, but it looked like everybody expected us to get married, an idea I found no pleasure in.

Lex was the eldest son, and forty-six years old to boot. No way he was going into the Army. I probably could of missed World War II myself, but I didn’t want to. If me and Belva had got married, it might of carried some weight, and if they’d come to understand that I couldn’t read and couldn’t even write my own name real well, that would of done it. But that’s not the way it happened.

It would be unfair to Belva to say that I preferred Hitler to her, the way some hateful, spiteful people in our church said I did. What it come down to was duty. Granddaddy had lost his money and Daddy his leg in the Civil War, and Gruff had went overseas in the First World War. I felt like I ought to go. There wasn’t any feeling of volunteering for certain death. It was more a feeling of excitement. The only thing I would miss, I knew, was this old farm.

When I went before the selective board in Port Campbell, I already had got some coaching from a couple of boys that hung around the store and couldn’t read much better than I could but still managed to get in the Army. I knew what to expect. The biggest problem was my name. For years, I had just signed it L. J. McCain, making such a mess of my last name that folks couldn’t tell if I’d spelt it wrong or not. I was still a heavy favorite to get Littlejohn wrong.

So when they asked me my name, I told them L. J. McCain, which was what I had put on the census last time.

They wanted to know what L.J. stood for. I told them it didn’t stand for nothing, just L.J. Period. It wasn’t totally unheard of. There was people back then that didn’t have a
name except initials. And the only place my whole name was registered the way it was supposed to be spelt was in the family Bible at Momma’s. So, they bought it. They must of known I couldn’t read, the mess I made of stuff, but I was a big, healthy farmer, and the U.S. Army wasn’t being too picky in early 1942, I don’t reckon.

I left in April for basic training, where they give me dogtags reading “L (only) J (only) McCain.” For four years, I was either “McCain” or “Eljay.”

Why they sent me to cook school, I don’t know. I reckon they figured that at my age I’d be a better cook than a fighter, although it seemed to me like I was in better shape than them twenty-year-old city boys that was always complaining about the food.

For me and a lot of other farm boys just out of the Depression, we never ate so good. No more poke salad, no more pork three times a day if you were lucky.

I spent the rest of 1942 and 1943 and part of 1944 in parts of the United States that might as well of been a foreign country to me. We guarded Italian and German prisoners in Texas, helped civilian workers process sugar at a factory in Cairo, Illinois, did desert training in Arizona. It seemed like we never was going to see any fighting. Finally, though, we got our turn. I can remember walking down streets in Brooklyn, New York, waiting to ship out, and the houses would have signs out front:
NO DOGS OR SERVICEMEN
. There wasn’t a day I didn’t feel a little homesick. I could always get away back into some dark corner of myself and get by wherever I was, though. I would carry on conversations in my mind with Lafe, and that helped a lot.

We sailed for Marseilles, France, which everybody on the
ship pronounced “Marcells.” France was a filthy place. Women going to the bathroom right alongside the road, everything dirty and nasty. Georgia tells me it’s a beautiful country now, that she’d live there if she could figure a way to make a living. I must of just caught it at a bad time.

It was the only chance I’d ever had to meet people from all over. My best friend was a crazy Polack from Toledo, Ohio, named Lewandowski. Edward Joseph Lewandowski. Me and him was together from basic on, and old Lewandowski saved me more than once. I wasn’t a bad cook, considering what we had to work with, but I couldn’t read much better than when I walked out on Miss Hattie’s class in 1917. So Ski would read the ingredients to me. He usually didn’t have to do it but once, and because I tended to go more on taste than measurements, him and me was able to improve on a lot of the stuff. He helped me through cook school, and we was together all through the war.

He’d cash my paycheck for me and help me in sending money home and, more important, in writing letters. The ones he sent Momma and them, and to Century and her family, he didn’t mess with, but he did get me in some trouble with Belva, who already thought I’d invented World War II just to get away from her. I had told Ski enough about her, I reckon, that he knew there wasn’t much between us. So one day in France on our way to Germany, he wrote some things to Belva that I don’t reckon she’d ever read before. I never found out all of it, but it was enough so that she sent me a Dear John letter right quick. All things considered, I reckon I owe Ski for that one.

I’d cover for him, trying to pay him back for looking after me. If he had a date with some French girl, which he usually
did despite being married, I would finish cleaning up for him and get everything ready for breakfast. A few times, I must confess, I went with him. One time, I kept Ski from a court-martial by hitting a water tower with a rock just as the lieutenant was about to catch him sleeping on guard duty.

I see these old Army movies where everybody becomes friends for life after they met in the war. Well, I haven’t seen but one of my Army buddies since we all mustered out in January of 1946. The last time I saw Ski, he was fixing to get in a fight with some guy we didn’t even know in Louisville, Kentucky, over something Ski had said about the fella’s girlfriend. I just walked away, headed for the bus station, and by two
A.M
. I was on a Greyhound headed for Port Campbell. He wrote me two times, and another guy in my unit, guy named Barrera from Providence, Rhode Island, stopped by and looked me up in 1948 on the way to Florida. But Ski knew I couldn’t write and didn’t hardly expect a letter in return, and Barrera—I can’t even remember his first name anymore—didn’t have a whole lot in common with me, once the war was over.

We was luckier than most, didn’t have to be right on the front lines pushing through France. Something happened toward the end, though, and maybe it affected us so much because we had let down our guard and wasn’t braced for death no more. We were assigned to a mobile hospital unit, like what you see on the
M*A*S*H
TV show, and while we didn’t risk our lives every day, we saw a awful lot of blood and gore. Most of us wasn’t prepared for all we saw on the way to Germany, and more than one orderly or cook tried to get sent where he could meet the horror head-on instead
of having it brought to him in bits and pieces. I think the farm boys, who had got their hands dirty a little more, maybe helped birth a calf or two, had it a little easier, but there was days nobody much felt like eating.

But as the fall of 1944 turned into winter, we could tell, just by how we was moving into the rising sun, that we was pushing them back toward the Rhine. Our casualties seemed like they was getting smaller and smaller, and we’d be taking that mess tent down and setting it up again so fast we didn’t hardly even have time to make the meals. We was picking ’em up and settin’ ’em down, as Lex used to say.

A feeling come over us that we just might beat the Germans, and we suffered more from the cold and damp than we did from incoming fire. Even the cooks had to carry M-ls, and be ready to use them, but when we crossed the Rhine and didn’t meet a whole lot of Krauts where I was, we thought we must be home free. It was hard not to think about being back home, something a lot of us hadn’t let ourselves do for a while.

Years after the war, when I could do it, I looked up the places we were at, because I didn’t have any idea where we were at the time, just that we’d crossed the Rhine and was moving farther into Germany every day.

I had bought a cheap camera in France. Most of us had one, and the old pictures are still in the cedar chest at home. I looked at them the other day, and a lot of memories come back.