Littlejohn (21 page)

“After all, we are going to be family, are we not?” she said. She had the funniest way of talking I ever heard. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know what she meant by “take a walk.” I had a feeling that her and Lafe had been doing more laying around than walking, from the looks in
their eyes and the pine straw that was still stuck in Angora’s hair.

But she was such a pretty girl that she made my head spin. All the girls I went to school with seemed so plain and predictable. Even the good-looking ones was fat with two or three babies by the time they was twenty-one or twenty-two, it seemed like, and you could see them turning into their mommas even before they got out of high school. Maybe Angora had a fat old momma back in Kinlaw’s Hell, but I somehow doubt it.

We took the trail that I had gone on earlier, walking alongside the pond on the west side. I asked her where she came from, and she pointed east, over toward the Marsay Pond. She said her daddy, which she called her papa, worked for the lumber mill, and that she would walk with him to work sometimes, and then go fishing in the millpond, which had better and bigger fish in it than the Marsay did, probably because it had better water. The fish that was there didn’t have anywheres else to go, since there weren’t any creeks feeding it, and they got to be pretty big. It was all fished out twenty years ago, but now they’re trying to bring back the bream and perch and even some bass.

I felt a lot like them fish right then, kind of locked in.

She told me that she liked to take water jugs up here with her and bring a bunch back, because the water in the Marsay was bitter and full of iron. I told her about the time me and Lafe had walked to the Marsay and was scared we’d be caught. I didn’t tell her about being scared they’d eat us.

“The Marsay folk, we just want to be left alone,” she said. She told me a story I hadn’t heard before, about when the Klan tried to “straighten out” the Hittites. I didn’t
know, until I met Angora, that the Hittites didn’t call themselves that. They called themselves the Marsay folk.

Anyhow, Angora told me that right before she was born, the Ku Klux Klan got mad at the Hittites because one old boy went back into Kinlaw’s Hell to hunt and got beat within a inch of his life. So they figured they’d have a little cross burning right there by the Marsay Pond. Angora said the Hittites let them come on in, down the only trail leading in from the main road, let them set up their cross, everybody with their robes and hoods on, and then they attacked. She said they closed off the only road with a few logs and then they went after the Klan. She said most of the Klansmen went running through the woods after they was attacked by about a hundred Hittite men and women toting everything from tree limbs to knives, and that the Hittites still had horses that was bred from what the Klan left behind that night. She told me that one of the Hittites, a great-uncle of hers, was killed from one of the Klansmen firing into the crowd, and that two Klansmen was killed, one when he got caught between the Hittites and the lake, tried to swim away and drowned, the other one beat to death. She said they hadn’t heard tell of the Klan since then, and didn’t expect to, neither.

She seemed like she talked more when Lafe wasn’t around, and I couldn’t help but like her a little.

“Maybe you can come live with us,” she said, “after we are married.”

We walked on through the woods. All of a sudden, there was a crash in the brush up ahead of us, and this beautiful buck deer, must of been a eight-pointer at least, broke through. The afternoon sun hitting him made him look red.
I was toting my gun, but the whole thing caught me so much by surprise that I didn’t even get it off my shoulder. It’s funny, but now I can ride up to Montclair and they’ll take me for a ride up on the parkway, where we can see deer all over the place. Back then, I probably hadn’t seen four live deer in my life.

We stopped and listened to the noise die away. It seemed real quiet all of a sudden, and a wind was picking up. Angora shivered and moved closer to me.

In a day that didn’t seem to have no end to surprises, Angora leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You are so pretty, like your brother,” she said. I wasn’t much used to being kissed, and I sure wasn’t used to men, and especially me, being called pretty. Then she reached up with one of them berry-brown hands of hers, turned my face toward hers and kissed me right on the lips. I had never tasted nothing so sweet. I was as drunk as if I’d chugged all that moonshine myself.

“We’re family now, eh?” she said, and I told her I reckoned we was. And then she laughed like she was dying, like she couldn’t stop. I thought she was mocking me and moved away from her, but she grabbed my arm and pulled it around her.

“You English are so funny,” she said. That’s what the Hittites called us. The English.

It was about two o’clock when we got back to Lafe, and he was still passed out by that pine tree beside the pond. I was feeling my oats pretty good by this time and was still about half drunk from Angora’s kiss.

“Look at Lafayette,” she said. I don’t think I had ever heard anybody use Lafe’s whole name before, not even
Momma when she was mad. It always made me wish Littlejohn could be shortened, because it sounded so much worse when Momma would say, “Littlejohn, you come here,” than it did when she called Lafe.

“He’s still sleeping,” Angora said; and then she added, “How good a shot are you, Littlejohn?”

It hadn’t occurred to me until she mentioned it, and if she hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t of done it, because Daddy taught us never to mess around with guns, and I was always more careful than Lafe was.

But here was this beautiful girl, practically daring me to scare Lafe so bad he’d pee in his pants, and the idea wasn’t all that unattractive to me, when I remembered how bad he’d scared me when he had the chance.

“I ain’t a bad shot,” I told her. “Watch this.”

I took the 12-gauge, the one I’d got for my twelfth birthday, off of my shoulder, picked it up and aimed. But I didn’t aim down on the ground like Lafe did. I picked out a spot about two feet over Lafe’s head, right in the middle of the pine tree, so that he’d hear the shot and feel the bullet explode into that tree at the same time. I was about sixty feet away. I could pick off a squirrel at two times that distance.

But then the thing happened that you never can plan for, the thing that can happen when you’re careless and don’t have no leeway left. Angora, thinking about how silly old Lafe was going to look, I reckon, started to laugh before I even pulled the trigger. It was that same laugh that she had back in the woods, like she couldn’t stop. I started to squeeze the trigger at the same time that Lafe woke up, hearing Angora laughing, and saw me pointing an Iver-Johnson right at him. He must of jumped up to try and get away, still half
asleep and not knowing anything but that somebody was aiming to shoot him.

He jumped the two feet it took, and the last thing my brother ever saw was me pulling the trigger of my shotgun, pointed at him.

Angora was real quiet for a few seconds. Then she started making this little sound like a hurt kitten. Finally, she squawled like a panther and turned and started running.

Lafe twitched just once. I threw down the gun and walked toward him, and I could see the black blood oozing out of a hole no doctor could ever fix, right over his eyes. Angora was going in smaller and smaller circles, screaming words I had never heard before, some of it not even words. She fell in the sand directly, looked over at me and spit out, “God damn you to hell.” She went over to where I was kneeling next to Lafe, just stood there and stared, then turned and started running again, this time in a straight line. I looked down at Lafe, felt one more time for a heartbeat, and when I looked up, she was gone.

A loon cried way off in the distance like a soul making tracks. My last hope was that it was all a dream, and if I started running too, maybe I’d wake up. So I run up toward the sawmill. Even if it is a dream, I thought to myself, I ought to try and get help. By the time I got to the mill office, I was pretty sure it wasn’t any dream, but there wasn’t nobody at the mill; even the foreman had already locked up and gone home.

I thought about just running into the millpond until the water covered me up, or just heading off into Kinlaw’s Hell, never to be seen no more. But I didn’t. No guts, I reckon. I run for home. It was a good two miles, but I stopped when
I got to the Ammon Road, thought about running up into Geddie to get help there, or about just turning around and going back into the Blue Sandhills for good, just plowing into Kinlaw’s Hell until I disappeared. But I didn’t. I kept running for home.

It was late Saturday afternoon. A chill had come up, and the sweat was starting to turn cold under my shirt. I had left the jacket back next to Lafe. I run by Rennie’s house, and thought for a minute about just having Rennie and them hitch up the mule and go after Lafe’s body, but I could see the house from there, so I kept on going, just slowing down long enough so that when Rennie’s brother come toward me, ’cause he could see that something was real wrong, I could tell him Lafe had been shot.

Momma and Connie was in the kitchen fixing supper. I come in by the back-porch door, closing it real careful behind me, I reckon so that there could be one more second of peace before everything ended. Then I turned the doorknob, walked in the kitchen and they both knew something terrible had happened.

“Where’s Lafe?” Momma wanted to know before I could tell her anything. “Where’s Lafe?” she asked me again.

“He’s been shot,” I told her, and I couldn’t hold the rest of it in. “I think he’s dead.”

Momma went all to pieces, sat right down on the kitchen floor with the wooden soup spoon still in her hand. Connie said that Daddy was out in the near barn shucking corn. I had run right past him on the way to the house, but I reckon he didn’t hear me for the corn sheller, and I didn’t hear him for the wind and my own breathing.

So I went out to get Daddy. He was sitting there gathering up corn off the barn floor to shell, and he looked so peaceful there, the old tabby cat sleeping over in the corner. I couldn’t hardly bear to tell him what I had to tell him.

“Daddy, Lafe’s been hurt bad. He’s shot,” I told him. He tried to get up quick and fell when his wooden leg got caught under him. I helped him up.

“Where?” was all he could say.

I didn’t know which where he meant.

“At Maxwell’s Millpond. In the head.”

He hitched up the mules to the wagon and yelled for Connie to have the Williamses send for Dr. Horne. Then me and him headed back east to get Lafe’s body.

I told Daddy that Lafe had been cutting through some vines when he tripped and the gun went off.

“Don’t lie to me, Littlejohn,” he said, not taking his eyes off the rut road in front of him. “I can stand anything. Just don’t lie to me.”

Well, I told him, and it turned out that he really couldn’t stand that after all. What I told him, though, was that we was hunting for deer, and all of a sudden Lafe come through some brush to the side of me, and I thought he was a deer.

“Son, how could you mistake your own brother for a deer?” he asked me, like it was a insult to Lafe to do that. Actually, it happens about three times every deer season to somebody in the state. I didn’t say anything a-tall; the whole idea of what I’d done was starting to sink in, and I started to shivering from more than the cold. I sat there all the way to the pond, shaking. Daddy was crying.

It was just about dark when we got there, and for a
minute, I had this crazy feeling that Lafe was going to pop out from behind a tree and scare us half to death, and we’d all laugh about what a joke he’d played on us all.

But there he was, or his body was, lying right by that pine tree, not moved since I run off, his head kind of twisted to one side. Daddy walked up to him, felt his body and said, “I wish you had of shot me instead.”

Then he grabbed his legs and said, “Help me load him into the wagon. He’s gone.”

He didn’t say another thing all the way back to the house, which was where Dr. Horne was waiting, since neither me nor Daddy had told anybody where Lafe’s body was.

There wasn’t anything to do except have him hauled to the undertaker’s, which one of the Williams boys did. I had to tell that story about ten times before they buried him, to every blessed relative that come by, and every time I told it, I could feel Momma’s and Daddy’s eyes on me, and I knew right then and there that it would take more than one lifetime before they got over it. They might forgive me or at least stop blaming me, but they never would get over it.

We ain’t much on sensitive around here, or at least we weren’t back then. Times was tough, and nobody thought about sending a boy to see a psychiatrist because he shot his brother by accident. I doubt if there was any psychiatrists around here back then. You was supposed to mind your manners and say yes sir, no sir; be polite and tell the folks how come it was that you shot your brother dead.

“Littlejohn,” my aunt Ida, who we saw about four times a year, said, “how in the world did you mistake your own brother for a deer?” And I was supposed to sit there, patient
and calm, and tell her how it happened, or how I said it happened.

The worst thing about the shooting, or maybe the second worst, was that, to this day, I can’t look you or God in the eye and say, for sure and certain, that I didn’t have a little spite or meanness in my heart when I pointed that Iver-Johnson at Lafe. Oh, to be sure I never meant to kill my brother. But maybe I tried to cut it a little too close. If I’d of aimed three feet over his head instead of two, I’d of still missed him a foot when he jumped up. It just shows what comes from going too close to the edge. You can fall off.

I’m only sure that I saw Angora Bosolet two times in my life after that. Both times was within a month of Lafe’s death.

There wasn’t any sign of her at the millpond, although I reckon somebody looking for a third person could of found them little footprints of hers in the sand, and they might of found the wrapper around the smoked fish and wondered where that come from. But the sheriff was more gentle about it all than my family was, figured that nobody would be stupid enough to lie about shooting his own brother to death because he was a deer, I reckon.