Littlejohn (20 page)

It takes me a good fifteen minutes to stop, and when I do,
he tells me, “You and me have got to talk. Let’s go down to the rock.”

So I help him find the truck keys, which are never, ever where he thinks they are, and help him down the steps, which is silly, because he does this like a million times without me or anybody else to help him, and we get in his truck. He drives east down the dirt road and turns left on the trail Kenny took when we went to the cemetery that day. He stops the truck as close to the Rock of Ages as he can get and walks over toward it. I follow.

“You have been careless, Justin,” he says when he finally gets his breath and gets settled, leaning back against the rock and looking east, out across the berry fields into the sandhills, which really do look blue this time of day. “This is a good place and a good time to tell somebody, finally, what carelessness can do. And you seem like the right person to tell.”

N
obody knows where the Hittites come from.

Some people claim they was what happened to the Lost Colony, when the white folks went off, or was carried off, and mixed with the Indians. Some say they are descended from Portuguese sailors that come up from Florida even before the English got here, and settled amongst the Indians. Some say they come from thieves and murderers that run off
and hid in Kinlaw’s Hell and raised their families there. Some claim the first Hittites was Frenchmen that fled their revolution. And some say they come from hell.

There ain’t many of them left anymore. Or at least, they have scattered and married outsiders so that you can’t hardly tell who they are now. I’ll read something in the
Post
ever now and then where some Formy-Duval has been arrested for breaking and entering, or a Boudrow has got married or a Devoe got hit by a car up in Eagle Grove. They seem to be all over the place now. I used to could pick them out walking up High Street when we’d go to town, but now everybody’s so mixed up that you can’t tell the whites from the coloreds from the Lumbees from the Hittites.

Nobody even knows why they’re named that. Momma said they told her that it was because of the Hittites in the Old Testament that the Israelites had to fight to get back the Promised Land. Maybe the first folks from England or Scotland that come across the Hittites was reminded of that story. I’m right sure they had to fight them if they come anywhere close.

We used to have this little song that the boys would sing at recess:

They was crazy people, and they lived in a crazy place.

If you was to go east from Maxwell’s Millpond, you’d finally come to the East Branch, which runs into the Campbell just this side of Newport. Up this far, you can walk
across the East Branch just about anywhere, and when you do, you’re on the outskirts of Kinlaw’s Hell.

The swamp, which is just a part of the Blue Sandhills that’s lower than the rest, runs for twenty miles, near-bout halfway to the ocean. It’s got bogs and pocosins and about eight billion water moccasins. It got its name because a fella named Kinlaw is said to have walked in there one day to pick huckleberries. He got lost, and was gone for four days. On the fifth day, two boys on a farm clear down at Saraw come across him lying at the edge of the first cleared field on the other side of the swamp.

“Boys,” he’s supposed to of said, “my name’s Kinlaw, and I just been through hell.” And when they looked at the back of his ankle, there was this big old cottonmouth that he must of drug for miles. He died right after that. At least, that’s the story they tell. It is a scary place. The moss hangs from the cypresses and bay trees, and briars seem like they come out of nowhere to smack you across the face. Daddy got lost in there one time when he was deer hunting, and when he finally got back after dark, one of his eyes was all bloody. It was about the only time I ever seen him scared.

A couple of miles east of the East Branch is the Marsay Pond. There’s a paved road in there now from Cool Spring, but back then, a trail was all there was, and folks would get ambushed along that trail. They used to say that the Hittites was cannibals and would put you in a pot and eat you if you wandered over there, but that was just to scare the young-uns, I’m mostly sure.

The Marsay Pond is right much bigger than Maxwell’s Millpond, about three miles across. Me and Lafe saw it one time when we was hunting over there, about a year before
he died. We come through this clearing and there was the biggest lake we’d ever seen. We’d heard tell of it, but we couldn’t believe that this big old lake wasn’t but six or seven miles from home and we’d never seen it. And there was little houses, more like huts, built right over the water, so that you could of took a pole and fished right off the back porch. There must of been a hundred of them, all with unpainted boards and rusted-out tin roofs. The water, when we looked down at where it lapped over the white sand around our feet, was dark, like rust or blood, even darker than the millpond. We could see women and children in these little shacks, which was maybe two hundred yards away, but we didn’t see no men around. When one of the women that was looking our way started pointing and yelling over to the woman at the shack next to hers, we got on out of there. We didn’t want to be anybody’s dinner.

The Hittites didn’t go to school, at least not back then. They was supposed to, I’m sure, but nobody in the state department of education was crazy enough to go back there and tell them that. They had a funny accent, and when one would come to work in East Geddie at the sawmill, folks would come around just to hear him talk.

The first Scotsmen that come up the East Branch must of been dumbstruck to find all these folks with dark skin and black, straight hair, so black that it looks blue when the sunlight hits it. Some folks called them Blue Hairs. When I hear somebody call a old lady a blue hair, it always confuses me for a second. All the Hittite men I ever saw back then had lean, bony faces, beards and thick eyebrows that met in the middle. They was hairier than the Indians and looked more white, somehow. They said that the Hittites was good-natured
folks so long as they wasn’t drunk or you didn’t upset them, in which case they would as soon kill you as spit.

The women had the same dark complexion and straight, blue-black hair, the same long faces, but on them what was fearsome in the men was real pretty. And Angora was the prettiest one I ever saw.

In November, Daddy would let us have Saturdays off to go hunting sometimes, which was a nice change from cutting ditch bank. That morning, Lafe said he had plans of his own. He had been acting right peculiar, slipping off when we had a free day, or sometimes in the evening, and not telling anybody, not even me, what he was up to. He had got real quiet.

This time, though, I was bound and determined to go with him. I followed him down past Rennie’s, across Lock’s Branch and into the sandhills. He wasn’t too happy about it, but Lafe was too good-natured to stay mad for long.

“Look-a-here,” he told me just before we crossed the Ammon Road, “what we do today is just between you and me. You can’t tell nobody about this, no matter what.”

Of course I told him I’d swear on a stack of Bibles to keep quiet. Secrets was exciting to me back then.

We went across the road and on through the sand and pine straw, headed for the millpond with our Iver-Johnson single-shots over our shoulders, me talking about where we’d seen deer skat in September, him being quiet. It was real warm that day, even for Indian summer, and by the time we had got down to the pond, we was ready to throw our jackets over by the pine tree at the water’s edge. It was about eleven o’clock.

Lafe looked at me right strange, and then he put his fingers up to his mouth and whistled. Before too long, I spied somebody coming out of the woods on down toward the lumber mill. It was a girl, and when she got closer, I could see that it was a Hittite girl. She had that straight dark hair parted in the middle and pulled behind her ears. She had kind of thick lips that made her look all pouty. She didn’t seem real enthused to see me.

“Littlejohn,” Lafe said, “this here’s Angora Bosolet.”

I don’t know how long they’d been meeting like that, or even how they met, except that her daddy worked at the mill. I never got to talk to either one of them about it. Angora put one of her long tan arms around Lafe, and I couldn’t help but wish it was me that she was hugging.

He told her who I was, and then he turned to me and said, “Angora’s going to be my wife.”

I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to ask him what Momma and Daddy would have to say about that, to say nothing of her Hittite family. I asked him when, soon as I got my breath back, and he said soon as he saved up a little money and got up enough nerve. I hate to say it, but I was jealous. I know it sounds peculiar, but Lafe had been the only friend I’d had for most of my life, and now he was leaving me behind. And already I was able to see a world where Momma and Daddy would forgive Lafe for marrying a Hittite, because he always was the favorite.

Angora had a funny accent, talked faster than we did and used her hands and arms more to make herself understood. She had brought a jar of moonshine with her that her daddy had made, she said, and she give us some. Lafe had been drinking for a couple of years, and he’d let me try some of
the stuff one time that the Faircloths sold up by the Mingo Road, but this stuff that Angora had was different; it would set your fields on fire. I choked a little on the first sip and passed it to Lafe, who drunk some and passed it back to Angora. She took a big gulp and wiped her lips off with the back of her hand real slow and lazy, and then she smiled at me and Lafe. I could see what made him want her.

We sat around next to the pond, under that pine with our 12-gauges propped on either side of us, and we passed the jar around. After a while, Lafe sidled up next to me and told me that him and Angora was going to go for a walk, but that they’d be back directly. Said they’d meet me back at the tree in an hour or so.

He took his gun with him, said he might run across a deer or something, but I was thinking that it was right unlikely that any deer in his general direction was in danger of getting shot that day, the way Angora had her arm around him and the way they was laughing and giggling.

I felt right neglected, I don’t mind telling you. I knew a little about girls, from what us boys would talk about and from Alice Fay Cain, who showed me a little about kissing. But it hurt my feelings to think of Lafe going off with a woman (although it turned out that Angora weren’t no older than I was, just seemed older) into a whole ’nother world and leaving me back in that little room at Momma and Daddy’s.

I went down to a place where I’d seen deer skat and walked around a little bit on the bluff that looked down on the millpond. I could see the workers over at the mill walking off in different directions, some up the tram tracks toward McNeil, some toward the Ammon Road, at the end
of their half day of Saturday work. Down at the other end, the pond looked even more lonesome than usual, with a loon off in the distance making me feel lower than I already did. I took a couple of shots at some squirrels that peeked around the side of a sycamore, but I didn’t spy any sign of deer and didn’t much care that I didn’t, to tell you the truth.

I got back to the tree after one, but they was still gone. Maybe they just won’t come back a-tall, I was thinking. Maybe they’ll just go off and get married today. I felt like if I could get Lafe back at the house and talk to him, I might get him to change his mind. I wasn’t thinking too much about Lafe’s happiness.

We’d brought along some dinner. I had a piece of sausage and a couple of Momma’s biscuits and then got a drink of the dark millpond water, which you could still do at that time and not die. Then I set down next to that pine tree and dozed off.

The next thing I knew, the whole world seemed like it exploded around me. There was this loud bang and I felt a stinging feeling all over my face. I thought I might be dead, but I didn’t know what of. My eyes burned, partly from the sand, partly from looking into the sun. When I was finally able to make heads or tails out of it all, there was Lafe, laughing like he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world. And Angora was next to him, laughing harder than I’d ever imagined somebody that pouty-faced could of.

Lafe and Angora had come back and found me asleep by the tree. They told me that they, meaning Lafe, couldn’t help but fire a shot in the sand in front of me just to see what happened.

Now, I take a spell to wake up. I like to of popped Daddy
one time when I was fourteen because he come in and started dragging me by my foot out of bed, just messing around. You got to give me a few seconds. Lafe ought to of known that, but when I saw the empty jar Angora was holding, I knew that they was most probably drunk. Before I noticed that, though, I had already made a lunge toward Lafe and tackled him to the ground. He was still bigger than me, though, and I come to my senses before I was able to hit him upside the head with the piece of wood I had grabbed in my left hand.

After everything calmed down, Angora and Lafe sat and had some dinner. She had brought some smoked fish, which the Hittites would cook over coals outside and dry out so that you could keep it a right good spell. Even though I was full, I tried some.

Angora wasn’t talking much now. Her and Lafe looked over at each other once in a while and kind of smiled, like they knowed something I didn’t, and I felt about as welcome as a ant at a picnic. But I didn’t want to go back by myself. I had this feeling that if Lafe didn’t come with me, he might never come back.

After a while, Lafe kind of shimmied a little lower down the pine tree and said he was fixing to take a nap. Sleep it off is more like it, I thought to myself. But Angora wasn’t sleepy, and she didn’t seem to be much drunk. When Lafe shut his eyes, she started to cleaning up the mess we’d made, and then she asked me if I’d like to take a walk with her.