Littlejohn (2 page)

On the left, a quarter mile from home, is Rennie’s old house, nothing but fat-lightnin’ ruins now. It’s been awhile since I’ve been over the bridge that crosses Lock’s Branch, and I wonder if it’ll hold this old truck and me.

On past the tenant house, we dip down into the swamp, the rut road dividing fields Daddy and them cleared not long after he come home from the Civil War. You can smell things growing down here. Mackey Bryant’s boy leases the
swamp acres for beans and corn now and takes care of the strawberry business. It’s good, rich land; never planted no tobacco down here. To the left is the little hill with our family cemetery on it, where Momma and Daddy and Lafe and them are buried, and next to that is the Rock of Ages.

Up ahead, a straight line of trees crisscrosses the road. That’s the branch, where my land ends. Beyond that is the Blue Sandhills.

Just shy of the bridge, I stop the pickup and try to think when was the last time we replaced it. It was 1955 or ’56, I reckon, because Georgia was in the third grade. Miss Louise Hornwright, her teacher, had supper with us, and she wanted to see the new bridge that Lex and me had built, that Georgia told her about, so me and Sara and Georgia and Miss Hornwright got into our green 1952 Chevrolet sedan and drove down here to see it. I suspect Miss Hornwright was a little let down over such a puny bridge, no railing or anything.

I let myself down out of the pickup and walk up the little rise. Down in the branch, there’s not enough water to drown a ant. A big old garden spider, all yellow and black, has spun her web across the branch twenty feet away. All the slats seem like they’re solid. I punch at them with my cane and they don’t seem to give.

There’s beer cans all over the place here, and in the bushes I spy something that turns out to be a pair of girl’s underpants. No wonder there’s so much traffic going past the house at night. I can’t get that sorry deputy sheriff, Jake Godbold’s nephew, to go down and run them out. I think he’s scared of the dark.

Back in the truck, I’m seeing spots from all the sun out here. I look at the sucker-bait watch Jenny got me for
Christmas and remember that it stopped last week. I never could remember to take it off when I’d go to pick peas and butter beans, and sweat got in it, I reckon. The truck starts and me and it get across all right, headed into the Blue Sandhills.

The road goes right up a little hill with sand whiter than any beach you’ve ever been to. I have to know the way by heart, because I can’t see a blessed thing. The Blue Sandhills ain’t really blue, of course, but from off a ways, especially on a day like this, they can be near-bout the color of this washed-out sky. I reckon it’s the dark earth right under the surface that makes them look blue. Nothing amounts to much out here. There’s scrub pines and pin oaks and brambles, all kind of stunted. It goes on like this most of the way to the ocean, forty miles away, with bays and pocosins wherever there’s a dip, and Kinlaw’s Hell right in the middle of it. They say the land’s like this because a shooting star or something like that hit here fifty thousand years ago and changed it all around. I hope I never have to see it again.

It would of been easier, of course, to go out the way Georgia and Justin did, on McCain Road right into East Geddie, then two rights to the Ammon Road, which this trail I’m on will cross up ahead a little bit. But that same sorry Godbold boy that won’t keep drunks out of my fields at night has told me he’s going to give me a ticket if he catches me driving any farther than the Bi-Rite in East Geddie or the Geddie Presbyterian Church. Told me I was lucky to have a license a-tall, since I didn’t seem to recognize stop signs. Talked to me like I was a young-un or something. The deputy knows I grocery shop on Monday and go to church on Wednesday night and Sunday, and this is Tuesday.

I finally cross the Ammon Road, all humpbacked and gray like me, with one end headed toward Geddie and the other going deeper into the sandhills. There’s no cars coming either way. A dog could sleep on this highway, if it could stand the heat. I drive across the road, picking up the same ruts on the other side, and head off for Maxwell’s Millpond.

Here the land levels off a little bit, with the scrubby little pines and oaks not giving much shade a-tall. Nobody lives here now, but this used to be a logging road. There was a sawmill by the pond where folks worked and was given cabins to live in. There was a sawdust pile here that caught fire in 1933 and burned for twenty years. They finally hauled it away a truckload at a time. Everybody called it Yankees’ Revenge, after the sawdust pile of my granddaddy’s that Sherman’s men set fire to.

Before the loggers, they used to tap these pine trees for turpentine. Somebody’s always tried to find some kind of use for this sad old country back here. A few years ago, they tried to make Maxwell’s Millpond into a resort, like White Lake. They built them a road in from the other side and sold a few lots. They drained all the tea-colored water out and tried to pump clear water in from the East Branch and the natural springs down here. It seemed like it was working for a while, but the old water come back like a bad penny, darker than ever, and Sandy Spring Lake is Maxwell’s Millpond again.

Closer to the water, I cross a couple of fire lanes they built when the whole place like to of burnt up in 1955. Nearer the pond, the land gets a little boggy and more wild. Finally, the pickup breaks through some tree limbs and I get my first clear look at this place in more than thirty years. We was helping fight one of the fires in ’55, and a forest service truck
brought us up here for water, to this very spot where Lafe died, where it all started, in 1922. Until now, once in sixty-six years was a-plenty for me.

There’s still a sandy beach here, and from the beer cans and burnt places on the ground, folks still come here to raise Cain. There’s cottonmouths here, unless somebody’s killed them all, which I doubt, that’ll get ill just seeing you. Not too far over is where the tram used to be. The woods still haven’t growed back there all the way, so that if you’re headed east from Geddie on Highway 47, just before you get to McNeil, you can look south and get a glimpse of the millpond through the brush, two miles off. They built the tram to haul lumber from the sawmill to the Campbell and Cool Spring Railroad line in McNeil. By the time Georgia was born, though, they had just about cut all the hardwoods and a lot of the pines around the pond, and they left the tracks to the scrap dealers and folks looking for crossties to line their driveways with. They say there’s still pieces of track left in the hard-to-get-to places.

And there’s the pine tree where Lafe lay, bigger now, to be sure, but not as big as it was in my dream, the one that got me here and the one I hope to Jesus will be the answer to my prayers.

“Lord,” I prayed a hundred times, I know, “please show me the way. I can’t keep on like this. One day I’ll fall and break my hip and be like old man Jimmy Ezell, up there in that rest home with nothing but mean colored nurses letting me wet myself and worse, running Georgia broke. Or, worse yet, I’ll get so simpleminded they’ll have to put me away.

“But I can’t do it myself, Lord. I ain’t afraid to die, but
I still hold to that outside chance that you might forgive me, and that Lafe and Angora and Sara and Momma and Daddy and them can, when and if I ever see them again on that other shore. And if I killed myself, there wouldn’t be no hope a-tall.”

Eight days ago, Jesus seemed to answer me. In the dream, Momma and Daddy and them was real as life, and I was walking across Maxwell’s Millpond, just like Peter when Jesus told him to. Maybe if I’d of had faith enough, it wouldn’t of been a dream.

But I didn’t, and it was, and the voice I heard when I was sinking was just old Johnny McLamb with the WPCR morning report on my clock radio, and then I was awake.

While I was laying there on my back, listening to my old heart beat ragged and weak, Johnny said it would be 98 degrees if it faired off. And then he said something that made me feel like he was talking right at me, like he was part of the dream, too.

“But if you think it’s hot in Port Campbell, folks, just be glad you’re not in St. Louis, Missouri,” he said. “Yesterday, it was 104 in the shade there, assuming you could find any, and four people died from the heat. One of them, a fifty-eight-year-old woman, apparently wandered from her house, which didn’t have air-conditioning, out to the banks of the Mississippi River, collapsed in the sun and died before anybody found her.”

Around here, they’d say that the monkey got her. Many’s the time, out in the tobacco patch, I’ve seen Lafe or Lex or one of the Lockamy children look up from cropping, pale as a ghost, and say, “I see them monkeys comin’ over the trees there.” And they’d go to the shade at the end of the field,
up by the pump, where somebody’d wet a rag and put it on their head, and maybe we’d cut into the watermelons early.

And sometimes the monkey would sneak up on somebody, and they wouldn’t get out of the sun in time. My cousin Bert Averett, she had a heatstroke so bad that she never could talk right again, or use her left arm and leg like she could before. Clarence Curry, he was in school with me, died of a heatstroke back in 1938 and a colored man died of it last summer over past Cool Springs.

So, if a fifty-eight-year-old woman in St. Louis, Missouri, can be got by the monkey, and if he can sneak up on men in their prime out cropping tobacco, couldn’t he make short work of a eighty-two-year-old dirt farmer who comes to the millpond here in the middle of the Blue Sandhills on the hottest day of the year and dares him to do his worst? And if the monkey does get me, wouldn’t it be like lightning? Wouldn’t it be a act of God? And if You want me to go on living, I reckon You’ll spare me, just like You did Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. Although why You’d want to do a thing like that, only You would know.

So, I’ve just been waiting for Justin and Georgia to leave. And if they think I just didn’t have the guts to stick it out, that’s not the worst thing they could know. And this will make it so much easier on everybody. I feel right bad about the will, but it was the right thing to do, no matter how crazy folks might think it is. Besides, how much crazier is all this than some of the other stuff I’ve been doing here lately? Like forgetting all about that stop sign in East Geddie and near-bout getting run over by a log truck, although looking back, that might of been the best thing, long as the fella driving the truck didn’t get hurt. Or leaving the burners on the stove
turned on so much that I finally had to put a big sign on the inside of the kitchen door that says
TURN OFF BURNERS
.

The worst, though, was what happened at the Bi-Rite, in front of everybody. I don’t make out a list like Sara used to, although I reckon I ought to. Once a week, I go down to the store in my truck and get what looks good to eat. The Army taught me how to cook right good, but one old man don’t eat a whole lot, and my appetite ain’t as good as it used to be. So, I was wandering down the aisle. I had just put two cans of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup in my cart and was looking for the self-rising flour when I just blanked out. I couldn’t quite remember what I was doing there. It had happened once or twice before, but never this bad, or this public, at least. I looked around, and there at the end of the aisle was the meat counter. It seemed like I recognized it, so I went that way.

When I got there, though, I somehow had it in my head that it was Mr. Allen Butler’s store, which went out of business in 1961 and burnt to the ground two years later. I can remember asking the meat-counter man where Mr. Allen was, and when he looked as mixed up as me, I asked if they had any of that good souse meat that Franklin Junior Bradshaw sold to them. The Bi-Rite, of course, is way too uptown to carry souse meat or liver puddin’ or anything like that most of the time, and Franklin Junior was run over and killed by his own tractor more than twenty years ago. Then I reckon I got kind of wild, and somebody must of called Jenny, my niece, because her and her husband, Harold McLaurin, come and got me and carried me home.

Later on, I could remember most of what happened, and it made me feel so bad that I couldn’t go to church for two
Sundays, I was so ashamed. Jenny, bless her heart, brought me groceries, and Reverend Carter and a couple of the elders come by to see me, so that finally I got so I felt like I could stand to see people again.

I asked Jenny and them not to tell Georgia, but I expect they did anyhow. Everybody around here knows about it. It aggravates me the way people act like you’re not even there sometimes if you’re old. After my spell at the grocery store, it seemed like I could say something in the yard after church and folks would just smile like they was humoring me or something, or like they weren’t quite sure what I said was right, since it was a crazy man saying it. Some of them have even talked to me about going to a rest home, but I told them the only home I expected to live in for the rest of my life was the one that my granddaddy built. I would sooner be dead all at once than die every day in some old folks’ home, which is what I told that Miss Bulla from the Senior Citizens when she come to visit me.

So, I get out of the pickup, which is parked maybe fifty feet from the water. In the truck bed there’s the little wood stool, a foot and a half high, that I made a long time ago to sit on picking butter beans in the swamp.

I prop my cane on the side of the pickup and lift the stool out, then tote it to the middle of the clearing, between the truck and Lafe’s pine that stands right by the edge of the millpond.

I take off my straw hat and sit and wait, looking out across the pond. The haze is so bad that I can’t hardly see the south shore. Nothing is moving—nary a bird, nor the wind through the trees, nor the water. The only noise out here
now is the locusts, sounding like bacon frying in a spider. I can’t even hear a mourning dove.

For some reason, I think back to Gruff, and something he said one time during a Redskins game. It was sometime during the early sixties, because that boy Snead from Wake Forest was Washington’s quarterback, and Sonny Jurgensen was still with the Philadelphia Eagles, which is who the Redskins was playing that Sunday. Gruff had come up from Georgia to visit. Him and me was big Washington fans; that was all you could get on television down here or in Atlanta until Johnny Unitas come along and made the Colts good in the late fifties, so just about everybody that could stand to watch them lose week after week pulled for the Redskins. You could catch the Atlantic Coast Line excursion train from Port Campbell of a Sunday morning, about five
A.M
., get up to Washington in time to see the game, then come back, just about everybody dog drunk, and be home by midnight. Me and James Lassiter did it a couple of times. Now I hear you can’t even get a ticket.