Littlejohn (7 page)

“Your granddaddy is a good old man,” he says to me as we’re heading back out the rut road.

“He speaks well of you,” I say, not sure how this guy and I are going to get along. He’s a funny-looking dude. He’s got this dark skin, but he’s not black. Mom said the people who worked as sharecroppers for her family were Lumbees, some kind of Indians. Whatever that is, Kenny must be one. His hair is kind of curly and cut real short. He’s wearing a blue shirt and tie, but the shirt’s short-sleeve, and I can see the tip of a snake that’s tattooed below his right shoulder. He’s got some hillbilly music on the radio, and there’s a pack of Lucky Strikes on the dash, less the one he’s smoking like they’re about to repeal them.

We don’t talk much. When we get to the high school, I see that someone has stolen the last “h” off Sandy Heath so that the name is Sandy Heat High School. Seems more appropriate. Kenny takes me to the principal’s office, where I give them the general details, my version, of how I came to be taking summer school English in Geddie, North Carolina. They tell me they’ll have to have my records from Montclair, which I promise I’ll have sent, but they’re willing to let me start the English course since Granddaddy is my guardian for the summer. Things seem to be a little looser down here. I just hope I can get somebody to send my records.

I’ve got my textbook, which is more like the one I had in the ninth grade in Montclair. And, praise Jesus, we are going to have
Lord Jim
for required reading. Piece of cake. I read it two years ago.

My classmates, though, are something else. There are eighteen of us in the class, and fifteen of the others are black.
Three of them are named Geddie. I try to start a conversation with the guy right across from me, guy named Winfrey Geddie who’s blacker than the black people ever get up where we live. I tell him I’m from Virginia and he says, “I’m from Old Geddie,” which, apparently, passes for high humor around here. I told him my great-grandmother’s name was Geddie. “Maybe you and me is related, then,” he says, smiling out of one corner of his mouth. “Maybe I’m the black sheep of the family.”

I want to tell him I’m not used to living places where all the white people used to own all the black people, but somehow I sense that this would not be appropriate. He does a low five with one of the other Geddies sitting in front of him, and I shut up.

The class itself is a bad joke. Most of these kids apparently have just landed here from Pluto and are being exposed to English for the first time. Mrs. Sessoms, who must be like a year out of college, is basically happy if nobody walks out in the middle of class or calls her “white bitch” during the day. Already now, three weeks into it, I know that this baby is fail-proof. There are kids in Montclair who have failed grades without being real dumb. Down here, they seemed determined to pass everyone, at least until they quit school.

Kenny turns out to be okay, though. He said he went into the Army because his father was killed in Vietnam, but after he got in, he knew that three years would be enough. He said he decided to go to State on the GI bill and become a farmer because that was like all his family had ever done. He also said it was too bad that there wasn’t anything there to farm by the time he decided that was what he wanted to do, but that he was saving his money to buy some land. It’s a trip to walk
with him on the little plot Granddaddy lets him farm. He’s only got four rows, about a hundred feet long each, but he’s got corn and tomatoes and okra and squash and about four kinds of beans, and cantaloupes and watermelons. He has some peanuts planted that he says won’t be ready to pull up until fall, and there are all kinds of greens, too.

He has a metal detector, and sometimes he goes down to where the old shack is and walks around with it, trying to find things. I went down there with him one day, and he came up with a couple of old coins and some kind of metal cup.

One afternoon, he brings me home and, after we have some iced tea, the three of us get in his car and go down past the shack into what they call the swamp. Kenny turns left on a trail beside this big ditch until we get to the family cemetery, a cheerful spot. Granddaddy and Mom and I would come out here sometimes, although Mom never seemed to care much about it; it’s been like five years at least since I’ve seen this part of the farm. Over on the other side of the ditch, we can see people picking their own blueberries, with their cars parked off in the distance. That’s Granddaddy’s berry farm, which Mom says made more money than all the other crops they ever raised here. They take them out in the fields in this big wagon, like you’d use for a hayride, and it’s supposed to be a big deal that they can eat all they want while they pick. Granddaddy says that nobody can eat enough berries to do you much harm like that.

We help Granddaddy out of the car, and he and I walk over to the tombstones, but Kenny goes right for this big rock sitting like fifty yards off from us that they call the Rock of Ages. Granddaddy says it was the corner of the original McCain land, and that it was mentioned in the first grant one
of the Geddies got, back before the American Revolution. He showed me this old piece of paper once, so old that he said when he took it out of his mother’s cedar chest after she died that it almost fell apart into nine pieces. Granddaddy had it put back together and laminated, so that you can pick it up and read it without doing any more damage to it. It’s as brown as Granddaddy’s neck and hands, but you can still read it, and where it says “the old stone corner, next to Locke’s Branch,” the stone corner is the rock, and Locke’s Branch is the ditch.

“It was here when the first white men came here,” he tells me, looking toward Kenny and the big rock. “It sure looks like it’s going to outlast me.”

Granddaddy doesn’t know why they call it the Rock of Ages, except that his father called it that and said that had always been its name. The rock is like four feet high, which is maybe three feet eleven inches higher than any of the other rocks I’ve seen around here. There’s nothing but this flat, sandy land anywhere around it, except for the little hill that the cemetery is on. Across the ditch, or branch, or whatever, is the place Granddaddy calls the Blue Sandhills, where the sand is as white as it is at the beach. There’s a big lake back there somewhere.

Granddaddy is standing there, resting on his cane, which is sinking into the sand so that he’s like leaning to the right. He looks like he’s a billion miles away, thinking about something that happened before I was born, I’m sure. It’s funny. He can remember stuff from forty years ago, but he can’t remember what day it is sometimes.

I go over to where Kenny is. He’s picking sandspurs out of his trouser leg, some of those nasty-looking purple ones
that’ll cure you of wearing shorts down here in about two minutes. He uses the rock to balance with his left hand while he picks them off, one at a time.

“My grandmother used to talk about this rock,” he says. “I never saw it till I came up to your granddaddy’s one day last year to ask him if I could look around the old place. My great-uncle worked and lived down here until about twenty years ago. Then he went to live with his children until he died.”

He rubs the old rock, which is kind of a pinkish-orange color, like it might be magic and he’s got three wishes.

“Where do you reckon they got this rock from?” Kenny asks, but it’s more like he’s really asking himself. “Grandmother said it was a sacred rock. She said her mother used to find arrowheads and pieces of clay pipes and beads and old-timey Indian stuff buried around it, like people used to worship here a long time ago. Before Jesus saved them from all this,” and he gives out a little laugh.

“She said Great-Grandfather took the job sharecropping here because of the rock. Back then, other Indian families would come here to rub it for good luck when they needed some. Didn’t work.”

He pushes against it, which is about like pushing against a tree. It doesn’t begin to budge.

“Some people say it was rolled here from way over in the Piedmont, maybe after our tribe won a battle against another tribe, I don’t know. It must’ve taken a lot of men a long time to roll this thing here. I’d sure love to know why.”

It’s getting hot as a bitch out in that open field, so we go and get Granddaddy and head back. I ask him later that night
if he’d ever heard about the Indians rolling that rock here from somewhere away off. He gets this faraway look in his eyes and gets very quiet.

“Yessir,” he says after a while. “I do think Rose told me about that one time. Don’t know whether’s it’s true or not, though.”

Rose must be some fifth cousin twice removed I’m supposed to know about.

A week after I get down here, Mom calls. She checked in with the Carlsons, just to make sure the house hadn’t burned down, I guess, and they told her about the Great Escape. I don’t know if she knows about the shoplifting thing or not, but she knows I flunked English. It’s after ten in London, where she says she and Mark the Narc have been pub-hopping. But she seems more concerned than pissed off, wants to know if I’m feeling any better now, how the summer school classes are going, tells me she can’t wait to see me in five weeks. She also says that Mark says hi. I guess it was too long a walk around the table to say it himself.

She sent Granddaddy a postcard that got here the day before she called, and she says she’ll send lots more now that she knows I’m here, too. Granddaddy gets on for a minute, but he’s not much of a talker, especially on the telephone. I’m just getting used to speaking up so he can understand what I’m saying, and the phone lines across the Atlantic aren’t exactly like making a call across the street. He hands the phone back to me.

“Justin?” Mom says. “Honey, please look out for your granddaddy, and do what he says. We’ll have a long talk
when I get back, maybe go away to the beach for the weekend. And don’t do anything rash. Things’ll get better.”

We hang up, and I’m thinking, Jesus, are things that bad?

School’s a snap, and I am having a little bit of fun here, too. We play basketball after classes while I’m waiting for Kenny to get back from his death-defying day with the Future Drivers of America. Winfrey Geddie and his cousin Blue are okay. They call me Cousin Justin, and tell everybody I’m the white sheep of the family. They’re both on the Sandy Heath basketball team, and if they don’t make it out of summer school, next season is history. They’re both about six two already, so the three of us make a mean front line. I only play church league ball back home, but these guys would make anybody look great. They can both dunk, backwards. I can get two inches over the rim, so I could dunk like a marble. There’s a three-on-three summer league in Port Campbell, and we’re thinking about getting into it.

Mom’s always going on about what a waste sports are. She would only let me play soccer when I was little. They have this thing in Montclair called serendipity soccer, which everyone in town calls dip soccer, for good reason. They have leagues for everyone, five to eighty-five, is what they brag about, and the big thing about dip soccer is, like, they don’t keep score. Okay, I can see not keeping score in basketball. I mean, after a while, who knows if it’s 92–92 or 94–90? But most soccer games I ever played in, the score was either 0–0, 1–0, 1–1 or, if the goalies just didn’t show up, maybe 2–1. Now, how the shit are you
not
going to know whether you won or lost when only one goal is scored? Gee, Mom, I don’t know who won. We didn’t keep score. But we did kick the
ball in their goal once, and they didn’t kick it in our goal at all. Every five-year-old in Montclair could tell you his team’s won-lost record, and I’ve seen better fights in adult dip soccer games than I’ve ever seen in football.

In Montclair, only blacks and poor whites play baseball or, God forbid, football. All the university brats, like me, play soccer. If we’re like real lucky, our parents let us play basketball between fall and spring soccer. Dad and I would throw the football around when he still lived with us, and the kids in the neighborhood would play tag football in the street. I tell you what: Maybe football’s the inhuman, brutalizing thing Mom says it is, but it’s about five times more fun than soccer.

The thing about Winfrey and Blue is, I don’t think these guys are ever going to be pestered by the Rhodes scholarship people, even if they never touch a basketball again. And if they can manage to stay in school for the next two years, maybe somebody will give them some kind of college scholarship to play. Maybe they won’t graduate, but they’ll be there, anyhow, and maybe something will seep through. I know this much: Winfrey and Blue will be making tires at Kelly-Springfield, or dealing drugs, in less than two years if they don’t have basketball. True fact.

I’m their tutor, sort of unofficially. They live over in Old Geddie, which used to be Geddie, according to Granddaddy, but I’ve never gotten that straight. Anyhow, that’s where most of the black people around here live now. Sometimes I go over there, and sometimes they come over here to Granddaddy’s and we study on the porch. There aren’t many blacks in Montclair. Mom’s always telling me how badly they were treated in what she calls “the real South,” which she
says starts in Richmond, how our own family had had slaves and all, but we’ve never lived in a neighborhood with even one black family. I guess they just prefer those unpainted little houses over by the railroad tracks. Right.

Winfrey and Blue talk about “axing” questions and wonder if they’re ever going to “gradurate,” but that isn’t exactly the kind of thing you correct in someone else’s house, especially since everyone in both their families talks the same way. If everybody in my family said “ax” all the time, that’s probably what I’d say, too. It’d be almost disrespectful not to. But I can see where they aren’t exactly turning on to the stuff we’re reading now. I mean,
Lord Jim?
I can’t get into that too much myself. Mom says literature gets better in college, where they let you read things that have been written since the invention of fire. Blue and Winfrey, though, can lay down a line of rap about five minutes long. Too bad they don’t give grades on rap. They’d be tutoring me.