Littlejohn (17 page)

“What I want you to do,” she said, “is to copy what’s on this sheet of paper on this clean one here. Just like you see it.”

I didn’t want to. Nobody wants to look like a fool in front of his girl. What finally persuaded me, I’m ashamed to say, is that she leaned over next to me and whispered in my ear what she would do for me if I would do this for her.

“And you know I keep my promises,” she said.

What she had wrote on the paper was that sentence they give you on typing tests:
NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY
. She kept my version of it and showed it to me years later.
ZOM IS EHT TIW
EOR RL GOD MEM OT COV DT HEL VIO OE HTR ONTY
, except some of the letters weren’t even right side up and forward.

Sara looked at what I had took fifteen minutes to write. She didn’t laugh, and she didn’t frown like maybe her folks was right after all. Sara just looked up, real earnest, and said, “Honey, how would you like to be able to read and write?”

First, we spent several nights just working on the letters. But it wasn’t like she’d write them up on the board and I’d try to copy them off. She had me make like I was writing all the letters, capital and small, all the way through the alphabet, except she had me do the motions with my whole arms. We did that for three nights, two hours each. Then, a little bit at a time, she worked me down to where I was just using my right hand to make the motions, so I could wake up in the middle of a sound sleep and make a capital “V” or a little “r” without thinking a-tall.

After a while, she’d have me do the letters without anything wrote down to go from. Then she had me writing whole little words, then bigger words. I’d repeat the letters as she said them, and then make all the motions that made up each letter. Like if she said “cat,” I’d make motions like a old tomcat walking, with my fingers. After doing that a few times, I felt like my brain knew what the word “cat” looked like.

Then she’d make me write all the letters of a word without even seeing the word. She used lined school paper so I’d know where to stop each line of every letter. After a spell, she’d make me do it with plain paper. And she had me say the letters while I wrote them.

When we got to sentences, she’d make me act out the
whole thing, then write it out a letter and then a word at a time. I had to show her the meaning of every single word while I wrote them.

Next, she read to me, just stories for young-uns. She would read every sentence to me, twice in my left ear, twice in my right ear, and then twice behind me. She said she was teaching me to listen, something I thought I was already doing a right good job of. Then she would have me read the same sentence. I was supposed to act out every word of it, and it took us months just to get through a few little Bible stories for children. But when she was finished, I could at least do a passable job of reading and writing.

Two things was working in my favor.

One was what Sara called ego, meaning I didn’t get my feelings hurt easy. Everybody in both families and two thirds of Geddie and East Geddie knew that Littlejohn McCain was trying to learn how to read and write, like some schoolboy, and I reckon we could of made a fortune by charging admission to watch me play-act them words and sentences. In a little town like this, without much going on but work, something like me trying to learn to read and write was more entertainment than a fire. But it bothered Sara more than it did me. They’d tease her right much at school and at church about keeping me after class and such nonsense as that, and that beautiful dark complexion of hers would get even darker, and her brown eyes would look like fire. I told her not to let it bother her, because then the folks that was picking at us would of won.

The other thing was patience. When I try to explain it, it sounds like something we did in a few weeks. Truth is, we’d been married and had Georgia before I got so I could read
a whole book, even a young-un’s book, on my own. Georgia once told me how she thought, when she was a little girl, that all mommas worked with the daddies and children on their reading, although she couldn’t figure what school it was I went to every day in my overalls.

But there’s something about walking behind a kiss-fired mule several hours and a few miles every day, or spending hour after hour clearing out a ditch or harvesting corn, and knowing it’ll all have to be done over and over again, or you’ll starve, that makes you right calm and patient, although there’s been plenty of impatient farmers, I reckon. I’m just not sure how good a farmer they could of been. But, like I told Sara, I was made for the long haul. Must be about half mule myself. I can work a field all day long, summer or winter, or I can sit on that back porch and look out across the woods for half a day if there’s nothing to do, just thinking.

Nobody seems like they can wait anymore. Jenny was telling me about her neighbor’s boy the other day. His daddy, Tom McNeil that I went to school with’s son, bought the boy a new car when he was sixteen, because he just had to have one. Then he paid his way to Carolina, where he changed his major three times and never did graduate. Him and his girlfriend got married when he was twenty-two and she was nineteen, and Jenny says that his daddy has had to get him out of trouble with charge cards at least twice that she knows of because if they go out to Circuit City and see something they just have to have right now, they’ll just whip out the little plastic card like it was magic. Now the boy’s twenty-five and his daddy is cosigning a loan for them to buy a house, and the boy has quit his job as a draftsman to go into real estate,
which he don’t know the first thing about, because he reckons he can get rich quick.

I don’t know. Maybe if I was growing up now, I’d be impatient, too. It was easy being patient back then. Lots of practice.

By the summer of 1946, me and Sara knew we were going to get married. We made it official in August and set the wedding for November. Nobody tried real hard to talk us out of it, although the Blues weren’t doing somersaults. Everybody knew how useless it was to try and change Sara’s mind once it was made up, and I reckon they figured I was right contrary, too.

What I wanted, although I hadn’t told Momma or Lex or Connie yet, was a house for just me and Sara. We talked about moving into her place that she was renting, but like I told her, farming was my job and I had to be right next to the farm. Finally, I talked it over with Lex, and he agreed to let me have the little patch of land next to Momma’s, between her house and the highway. It wasn’t his to give, but Momma let him make all the decisions by this time. Then I talked with Mr. Hector about lumber and cinder blocks and all the other building material, and he threw in most of it as a wedding present. Sara and me paid cash for the rest. So that fall, after the tobacco had gone to market and in between cutting ditch bank and hog killing and pulling the last of the corn, we started building me and Sara a house.

It like to of killed Momma. You would of thought we was going to the moon. All of a sudden, that house that would of been too small for five people would seem too empty and lonesome with just three. I reckon four was the only number
Momma could abide with anymore. I knew she’d get over it, though, so me and Sara just rode out the storm.

We got married on November 17, 1946, with Lex as my best man and Jack Tatum and Paul Draughon as ushers. Sara’s daddy give her away, of course. Two of her friends from Greensboro, who were teaching now, too, in Sanford and Charlotte, and Bonnie Cain, her best friend from high school, was her bridesmaids. When I look back at the pictures now, I look like a fella going to the electric chair, which is peculiar, because I know it was the happiest day of my whole life.

That first winter, we lived at Momma’s, staying in the same bedroom I had all my life, the one I had shared with Lafe and then had to live in alone after he died. It was a room where bad memories was as close as the place on the wall behind the headboard where Lafe had carved both our initials. For years, I just come to that room after supper and went to sleep, then got up in the morning, put on my clothes before I had hardly even opened my eyes, and went back to work. Now, I noticed things. There was the one old pair of pants hanging up in the back of the closet, where Momma never went anymore, that was the only piece of clothes of Lafe’s that was still here. After he died, when I couldn’t bear to even think about Lafe, Momma made me wear his clothes when mine wore out, said there weren’t any sense in wasting money on new clothes when there was perfectly good ones right there in the closet. There was a stack of old newspapers and magazines back in the plunder room that you got to by pulling a piece of my bedroom wall out. It was stuff that Lafe had collected, mostly about World War I, with a clipping from the
Port Campbell Post
about the time Babe Ruth and the
Yankees come to town. There was a big picture with that one, of the whole ball field with the crowd near-bout falling onto the field. Back behind first base, Lafe had drawed a circle around the tree where me and him and Leonidas McNeil had sat, with a arrow pointing to it and some writing above it. Sara read it to me, because I still couldn’t read too good:

“My brother Littlejohn and Leonidas McNeil and I at the baseball game between the Yankees and the Port Campbell Grays.”

There was too many memories in that room. When we moved out after the house was done in May of 1947, the only thing I took was Lafe’s senior yearbook. I wish to God I hadn’t took anything.

Me and Lex and the Tatums and the Williamses and some of the Blues’ younger kin built Sara’s and my house. It wasn’t real big, and since it was built out in the middle of a field, it didn’t have no shade for a long time. We built a big bedroom for us, a little one for the baby that was on the way, a kitchen where we ate, a living room and a screened-in porch facing east, which is where we just about lived the first few summers. We built on a bigger living room later and made the first one into a den, and we built a little sewing room for Sara, where she could go when she wanted to read or grade papers. She never did learn how to sew.

Momma would come over about twice a day for one thing or another, and she had a perfectly good chinaberry tree cut down from the west side of her house, claiming that she was afraid that the old tree would fall down in a hurricane. It give her a clear view of our porch until Sara bought some floor-length
shades. Momma didn’t like that too much, but Sara humored her for the most part.

The first year and a half we was married, I was just a young-un in a candy store. I don’t mean sex, or at least not just sex. It was more like I was just discovering the world. There was just so much that wasn’t there before the war. I was just getting so I could read; I’d go for the newspaper every day like it was manna from heaven, reading the funnies first, then going to the sports pages, then trying to make out the local news and the national news. Sara helped me with the big words. She had saved her teacher’s salary and bought us a brand-new car, a green Plymouth two-door, and on Saturday afternoons, we’d just go out driving sometimes. We’d go up to Raleigh, or over to Chapel Hill. One day, when we was still living at Momma’s, we went to White Oak Beach without telling anybody. It was the first time I’d been there since we used to take the excursion train when we was teen-agers. The beach wasn’t so run-down then, and Sara and me had a good time. We rode on the Ferris wheel, which like to of scared me to death, and the roller coaster, which was worse. We hadn’t even thought to buy bathing suits, so we took off our shoes and waded along the edge of the ocean, running up the sand when the waves come in. We ate cotton candy and we felt like we was the Rockefellers. We didn’t get back until after midnight, mostly because I had to change a tire over east of Cool Spring, and when we pulled into the driveway, we saw that every light at Momma’s was on. It turned out that they got to missing us about nine o’clock and figured there was no sensible reason for us to be gone that
long without telling anybody, so they had the sheriff looking for us.

“Mrs. McCain,” Sara told her after we’d rushed in, scared that she’d died or something, “you’re going to lose an awful lot of sleep trying to keep up with us.”

We had a tractor by now and a little more money, and farming weren’t as rough as it had been, although it didn’t pay very good. But I did have more time to spend with Sara, which was good, especially after Georgia was born. I’d come back for dinner and stay for three hours sometimes. She’d took some home-ec courses at Women’s College, and she was a good cook but in a different way from Momma or Connie. She’d fix things I never ate before, like spaghetti and meatballs or chicken with all kinds of sauces that were so good that you’d sop it up with the biscuits so you didn’t waste none of it. I used to tease Sara about making a chicken last two weeks like that, but she sure was a good cook.

She said she had studied learning problems like mine at college, and that she had a professor that had all kinds of new ideas on how to teach people to read. Said it would shock people to know how many folks there was that had the same problem I did and just hid it as best they could, all their lives. She used to kid me that the reason she pretended to fall in love with me was so she could use me as a guinea pig. I know this: She could spot it a mile away, and there was more than one student that come into her tenth-grade English class at the high school not being able to read that was able by the time they graduated. She said she was always amazed that they could get that far, but it didn’t amaze me. If you was able to put up with enough abuse, they’d finally just let you move on up the ladder.

When I get upset about something, or get in a hurry, I still mess up. I won’t likely ever win any spelling bees, and I try to keep my notes short and sweet. I don’t send Christmas cards, now that Sara’s gone. And it took me a year to finish
Huckleberry Finn
, when I was forty-two. But in the summer of 1947, with me and Sara sitting in our new house and the baby on the way, there wasn’t nothing on God’s earth that I wanted for. I had it all.