The Neon Bible (10 page)

Our graduation night was really nice. Aunt Mae went with me and got that woman she knew from the time she worked at the plant named Flora to stay with Mother. Flora was happy because her son came back and married some girl from town instead of a Chinee like she thought he might. They lived with her down in town and had two children. One of them looked like Flora herself, the little boy.

We had the graduation in the hall on Main Street they always used for graduations and wedding receptions. All the lights were on, and they had flowers on the platform and twenty chairs out for our class to sit on. After Aunt Mae got her seat out front, I went up on the platform and sat where Mr. Farney had told me to. Some of the others in my class were already up there, and we said hello. We had been in the same class ever since Mrs. Watkins' room. I had on a suit we just bought and one of Poppa's old shirts. I was the first man in my family to get through eighth grade. Aunt Mae was sitting in about the fourth row. She had on a big hat that tilted to one side and a dress with yellow flowers all over it. A few little yellow curls came down on her forehead to right above her eyebrow. I thought of how good she looked for her age. The only thing wrong was her eyes. They looked tired and sad.

I saw all the people I knew sitting out there. Mr. and Mrs. Watkins were sitting next to the preacher, who was going to give a prayer tonight, but she looked up at the ceiling when she saw me looking at her. Miss Moore was in the front row where she could hear what was going to happen. Her old mother was with her, and she was deaf too, but she had a hearing aid she got in the capital sticking out of her ear, with the cord from it hanging down the front of her dress. One of the women who testified at Bobbie Lee Taylor's the night I went was sitting in the back talking to a little boy who must have been hers. Bruce, the little boy Poppa sent me over to visit, was graduating with me. I saw his mother out front, and she saw me, and we just stared at each other. When Poppa lost his job, Bruce's father stopped being friends with him. I looked back at Aunt Mae and saw that the old man who had the band was sitting next to her and they were talking. I wondered what he was doing at my graduation. Aunt Mae smiled at him a little bit, and I knew he must have been telling jokes. He always told jokes. I never liked people who always were telling jokes, especially ones like he told that weren't even funny, and ones where they tried to imitate people like he tried to imitate Negroes that didn't even sound like Negroes. I know Aunt Mae didn't like him either. She told me so. She'd look at him and listen and smile and then turn her head away and make a face in the other direction.

Pretty soon everybody was there, so we started. Mr. Farney sat at the piano. The preacher got up and started to pray. His back was to me, and I noticed how it was getting round. I thought of how old he must have been getting. He was almost fifty years old when we dropped off the rolls, and that was when we moved onto the hill. He divorced his first wife right before the war ended because he said she drank. He married again a little while later. His second wife was an organ player at some church in Memphis where a friend of his was minister. She was in her twenties and pretty but a little fat. They got married right on the preacher's radio program by his friend. After it was over the friend started joking about what a good organ player he lost, and I turned off the radio. I don't know what happened to his first wife, but Aunt Mae told me she and her daughter were living in New Orleans, where the daughter was going to a Catholic school.

When the preacher finished we all sat down, and Mr. Farney talked about what a fine class we were and said he was glad to have had us for pupils. All the parents clapped. Then we sang "Dixie," and everybody sang with us, and Mr. Farney was wrinkling his nose at the piano. Then Mr. Farney gave us a certificate saying we had satisfactorily completed grade school and could enter any state high school with it, and he hoped we would do just that. We pledged allegiance to the flag and recited the poem. Everybody recited it too fast and ruined the whole thing. Then I was out of grade school.

I passed Miss Moore, and she said she was proud of me, and I went over to where Aunt Mae was waiting. She kissed me, and I looked around to see if anybody saw her, and I could feel myself turning red. Aunt Mae didn't see me do this, though. She was looking for something in her purse. When she brought it out, it was something wrapped like a present. I opened it up, and it was a watch, a real new one that must have cost at least thirty dollars. I thanked her and wondered where she could have got the money to buy it.

We went outside in the still night. It wasn't too hot, because the real hot weather didn't come to the valley until August, but it was just still with the sound of some kind of bug I didn't know the name of. People were coming out of the hall and nodding at Aunt Mae. Everybody knew her from her singing. I started to walk toward the hill, but Aunt Mae said, "Over here, David. Clyde's going to drive us to the hill." I hadn't noticed that he'd been with us all the time. There he was standing next to Aunt Mae. I wanted to walk, but I went with them to his truck.

"Here, David, get in." Aunt Mae held the door open for me, and I got up on the running board.

"No, Mae, there ain't enough room for him up here. Get in the back, boy, but watch out for my fiddle." Then I heard him say to Aunt Mae, "I bet he'd rather ride in the back than up here with us."

"You can ride up here if you want, David." Aunt Mae leaned out of the door. I knew Clyde didn't want it, so I said no and climbed up in the back. We started off, and I sat with my legs hanging down the tailgate. Main Street passed behind me. I looked down at the street and saw it flowing like the river flowed under the bridge at the old war plant when it was flooding. Cars going the other way passed by, and I watched them until their taillights turned into small red points down by the base of the other hill. The truck had a canvas roof and sides, so I couldn't see the stars or the houses passing alongside. Clyde's fiddle was hitting up against my back. I got mad that I didn't get up front like Aunt Mae said. I wanted to ride in a truck, but not in my suit with that big fiddle. I looked through the little window in the back of the cab where Clyde and Aunt Mae were. Clyde kept leaning over and trying to get his face under Aunt Mae's hat. Aunt Mae was almost out her door. I wondered if Clyde was watching the road. I never thought old men still liked women. The boys at school said they couldn't do anything anyway, so I wondered about Clyde again. He must have been a few years older than Aunt Mae, and she was getting old. The truck started going slower and slower.

Clyde kept his head under Aunt Mae's hat for almost a block. I heard Aunt Mae say something loud, and he came from under her hat and looked back at the road. Then a car went by the truck so close the canvas shook. I heard Aunt Mae really curse up front.

The truck stopped. We were at the bottom of the hill. I jumped down and just grabbed Clyde's fiddle before it fell out too. When I had it back in, I walked around to the door. Aunt Mae was saying, "Alright, Clyde, a little while." I put my hand on the door handle to let her out, but she said to me, "Look, honey, go wait there by the path for me. I'm going to stay here with Clyde for a while. Now, don't go off, you hear. I don't want to walk up the path alone. I won't be too long." She was going to say something else, but Clyde pulled her away from the window, so I went over to the path and waited.

The honeysuckle was thick around the old stumps there. It smelled wonderful and strong on the heavy, still air. There wasn't any breeze to blow it away the way it did sometimes. It just hung around there and got in your nose. I sat on one of the stumps and picked a few of the little flowers and smelled them, but you couldn't tell the difference from the air all around. The moon was shining on the honeysuckle and me and Clyde's truck. I looked over there once, but Clyde and Aunt Mae weren't sitting up. I couldn't see either one of them in the cab. I just saw the tip of Aunt Mae's hat sticking up by the window. I wondered what they were doing, and then I thought of when Aunt Mae went with George when I was little. I wondered if they did what the boys said at school. Aunt Mae was so old, though. She was sixty before we ever moved into the hills, and that was eight years ago when I went into Mrs. Watkins' for the first time.

I sat on the stump and looked up at the moon and down at Clyde's truck and smelled the honeysuckle, and I felt like I never felt before in my life. The warm air was all around me, sweet and still. It was so quiet and dark over by Clyde's truck. Clyde was doing something I never had done or even thought about much. Some of the boys at school went out with girls to the movies, but I never had. I never thought about taking one out. I didn't know any, living in the hills away from most of the town. I wondered if they'd like me if I asked them to go out. I was fourteen, and I never thought what I looked like. I knew I was getting tall, though.

Then I looked down at the watch Aunt Mae gave me, and I looked over at the truck. I heard her talking now, but I couldn't understand what she was saying. I didn't hear Clyde, but I could hear somebody breathing. Then Aunt Mae was quiet again. The watch said exactly eleven-thirty. I set it by the clock on the drugstore next to the hall where we had the graduation, and it was still running. It was hurting my wrist, so I loosened the leather band and wondered if it was real leather. Since the war everything was synthetic. They said after the war we were going to have plastic houses and helicopters, but I never saw any, and I wondered if they had them in New York. That was where they had everything. I looked at the watch. It was ten of twelve. Clyde's truck was still quiet. I was getting mad at him. We should have been at the house about an hour ago to see how Flora was doing with Mother. Then Aunt Mae's hat came up all the way. I heard her cough. Clyde came up by the wheel. Aunt Mae said, "Good night, Clyde." She opened the door. Clyde didn't say anything but just started the motor. Aunt Mae got off the running board and closed the door. I heard Clyde trying to shift gears, but his truck was old, bought before the war, and he wasn't having too much luck. Aunt Mae walked over to where I was standing. She took my wrist and looked at the time and said, "Gee." We stood there and watched Clyde trying to get into first. The motor and the noise of the gears broke the still and the honeysuckle so much I wanted to go over and tell him to be quiet. I looked at Aunt Mae, and she was looking at the truck with that line around her mouth she always got when she was mad. Clyde got going at last. We watched him go off with his fiddle bouncing in the back.

We walked up the path. Aunt Mae said the honeysuckle smelled better than Clyde's breath. I didn't answer her because I didn't know what to say to something like that. We walked on a while longer, and I looked down at some of the houses where I knew they were having graduation parties. I wasn't invited to any. I stopped Aunt Mae and turned so the moonlight fell on my face, and I asked her how I looked. She looked at my face for a while, and then she put her hand at the back of my neck and said I was going to be fine-looking in about a year or so. My body was getting some lines, she said, and my face was getting to look like a man's too. We started walking again. I looked down at my suit. The moon was shining on the buttons of my coat. For the first time I noticed they weren't in a line with the opening of my coat. The suit was double-breasted. Then I remembered nobody at the graduation had a double-breasted suit. I was the only one. Most of the boys had on a sport coat with a different pair of pants, a different color, but they cost money.

It seemed like we just started, but before I knew it I heard the cinders under my feet, and I realized we were in the front yard. Aunt Mae stopped at the gate to rest. I waited with her for a while, then I walked on up the porch to see how Mother was. It was late, and maybe Flora had put her in bed. When I got to the door, it was wide open. I wondered what Flora had done that for. I could hear Mother talking in the kitchen, but I didn't hear anybody else. I stood on the porch and waited for Aunt Mae, and when I saw she was going to rest by the gate for quite a while, I called to her to hurry up and come in. She came across the cinders slowly, fanning herself with her big hat. When she got up to where I was on the porch and saw the door open, she looked at me and I told her how I had found it. She said Flora must have been crazy to let the door open like that with all the things in the hills that might run in. Mother was talking louder in the kitchen. We both heard her.

Aunt Mae went in and threw her hat on a chair in the front room while I closed the door. She turned around and said to me that Flora should have got Mother in bed long ago. The only voice I heard in the kitchen was still Mother's. She was answering somebody, it sounded like, only I didn't hear the other person. Aunt Mae was already in the kitchen when I got there, and I heard her asking Mother where Flora was. Mother was sitting at the table looking at the picture of the white crosses. Aunt Mae asked her again. She looked up like she was surprised to see Aunt Mae.

"Flora? Oh, yes. She told me I was crazy, Mae. Right to my face. Can you imagine that? Right to my face. She wasn't here thirty minutes. I've been sitting here waiting for you two to come in. Yes, Flora wasn't here thirty minutes."

Aunt Mae looked at Mother for a while, and I saw just how tired her eyes really were. Then she looked at me. And we just stood there under the one electric bulb and looked at each other and didn't say anything.

Seven

I knew I wasn't going to high school, so I got a job down in town. It was at the drugstore, and it paid almost twenty dollars a week. I delivered and worked behind the counter selling things. I was lucky I got it, because it was a pretty good job. Aunt Mae was glad for me. She stayed with Mother in the daytime, but that wasn't much trouble. At night Clyde got her to go with the band. Most of the people in the valley had heard them, though, and they didn't get so much business anymore. When they did get jobs, it was usually someplace further away than the capital where people didn't know them. Then Aunt Mae would come in at almost four o'clock in the morning, and I'd wonder if it really took that long to drive back or if Clyde stopped along the way. Aunt Mae was really looking tired, I thought. If we didn't need the money, I never would have let her go out with him on the jobs. As it was, we didn't get much money from it anyway.

Flora went all over town and told everybody about Mother. Aunt Mae said she made a mistake in the first place asking her to come up to the house that night to take care of her. I knew if Flora didn't like Chinee people she wasn't going to like the way Mother was. Nobody in town would have known about it if it wasn't for Flora. Mother never went into town anyway, and nobody ever came up to our house, except Clyde sometimes, and he was always paying attention to Aunt Mae and ignoring everybody else. Plenty people in town got to wondering what went on up on the hill with Mother. Nobody in the valley acted strange aside from Mr. Farney, and that was different. People began to come right around the house to hunt until we put up a No Trespassing sign. That made them more curious, but it kept them away.

When I came in from the drugstore in the evening, I'd go into the cleared land behind the house to see Mother. The seedling pines were big now, and you never would think the land was ever cleared. Sometimes rabbits ran under them, and squirrels went up and down their trunks. Mother would be sitting down on the ground under the pines looking up at their branches. I'd sit and talk to her for a while, but I couldn't get her to say much anymore. She just looked at me with a faraway look and smiled. She smiled at everything I said, so after a while I stopped talking, and we would just sit in the pines and watch the sun go down and everything go dark. Then Aunt Mae would come out and sit a while. After that we went in for dinner. Aunt Mae would go upstairs and get ready the nights she had a job, and I'd sit with Mother in the kitchen and listen to the radio. Mother listened to the radio better than she listened to Aunt Mae or me. She followed all the stories and would say things while they were on, like "Just listen to the way that man goes on" or "Who do you think is the murderer, David?" Whoever I said, she would say, "No, I think you have the wrong one." And when the one I picked was the right one, she would say, "Oh, they were wrong about him."

One evening when I went back into the clearing, she got up off the ground and held me by the arm and pointed to the pines that were growing there and said, "You see how they're growing? They're your poppa's." Then she took me down to the front yard, and we stood on the cinders, and she pointed out over all the hills. "You see how they're growing?" I looked at the thousands of pines all over the valley. "From a little seed your poppa planted they're growing all over, but I saw them come up in his clearing first. I saw them first."

I liked the drugstore job. Mr. Williams, the man who owned it, gave me the job mainly because he had heard of Mother. Anyway, that's what I thought. He was nice that way, always trying to help people who needed it. He used to charge the people who lived on the street north of town a lot, but he let some of the poor people owe him for almost a year. I know because I delivered everything he sold. The ones on the street north of town never said anything about the high prices, and the poor ones were happy to get credit, so I guess it was alright.

You don't know how many people you can meet delivering for a drugstore -- or, I guess, delivering for anything. They had all kinds. The women who lost their husbands in the war ordered things like Kleenex and hand lotion and Camay soap. I don't know why, but I almost always delivered things like that to them. They were still quiet, but none of them cried anymore. They always said, "Thank you, son," and didn't even seem to know I was there.

I delivered to Mr. Farney's house too. He ordered the expensive men's powders and aftershave things that nobody in town used. Mr. Williams got it from the company just for Mr. Farney and the other man he lived with who taught music. They came in the drugstore a lot because they liked to look around at everything, even the women's things. When one of them saw something he'd say, "Oh, come here and see this. Isn't this just precious." Mr. Farney always asked about Mother and said it was "tragic," which made me feel bad. But I knew Mr. Farney didn't know it made me feel that way. He wouldn't have said it if he knew I felt that way. Mr. Farney seemed to know when he said something to make you angry or make you feel bad. Then he'd say, "Oh, look at me.
Look
what I've done. Will you
ever
forgive me?" Then he would bite his nails or pick at his face.

One woman I delivered to was named Miss A. Scover. Anyway, that's the name she had on her doorbell. I had seen her before because she worked at the post office selling stamps. Her house was one of the new ones they were building up in the hills. She lived all alone for all I knew, except for a lot of cats that sat on the porch and went in the front door when she opened it. Sometimes she came to the door holding one in her arms. She would kiss it behind the ears and blow in its fur and say, "We're going outside, baby. Outside, outside."

She wasn't over forty years old. She didn't have any gray hair, but her face was thin, with a wrinkled sort of neck and a long nose. When I went there, she always came to the door in her robe. I wondered about it. No other woman in town would come out in her robe. After I gave her what she ordered, she said, "Come in, boy, while I get the money." I went in the first time, and it took about five minutes for her to find her purse. I called to the room where she was that I had to get back to the store. After a while she came out with the money and stared at me. I put out my hand, but she didn't give it to me. She asked how old I was, and I said I was fifteen. Then she asked if we delivered at night. I told her we did on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She didn't say anything, she just gave me the money, and I left. That night I told Aunt Mae about it. She looked at me with her eyes wide and said for me never to go in that house again.

The next week Miss Scover called Tuesday night and ordered some things. I was at the phone in the store. When I heard her voice, I hung up. She called a little while later, and Mr. Williams answered. I heard him say he couldn't understand it, sorry, must have been the operator's fault. He gave me the order, and I left before he gave me the address. When I got to the door, he called to me and asked if I knew where to go. I stopped and thought and said that I didn't. He called out the address I knew backwards, and the name too.

When I got up to Miss Scover's, all the cats were sitting out on the porch in the moonlight. They ran when I went up on the porch and rang the bell. Pretty soon Miss Scover came to the door. She had on a robe like she always wore, except this one looked more like silk or some expensive material. The light was shining out on the porch from the front room. Her face was in the shadow, and I couldn't see it, but she asked me to come in while she got her purse. I told her I had some valuable medicine in my bike basket and couldn't take my eyes off it for a minute. She said nobody around there was going to steal it, and anyway, it was damp outside. I told her no again, so she left to get the money. When she came back, she gave it to me and slammed the door. I got on my bike and rode down to the store and didn't think about Miss Scover again because she always came in the store after that to buy what she wanted.

When I wasn't delivering, I worked behind the counter with Mr. Williams. Sometimes he went out of the store and left me to take care of everything. That was the time I liked. I could look at everything we sold and act like I owned it. The boys I went to school with were mostly going to the high school. When they came in and saw Mr. Williams was gone, they asked me to show them some of the things they always made jokes about, but I didn't know where they were or where Mr. Williams kept them. Then they looked at me like I was silly and asked why I didn't find out and left the store. I wished I did know where they were. I didn't only want to be able to show them to the boys, I wanted to see what they looked like myself, I had heard so much at school about them.

The rest of the time mostly old women came into the store. They didn't always buy anything. They just looked around at the medicine we had on the shelves and read what they had in them and what they were for and how much you should take. Sometimes one would buy a bottle, then almost always return it the next day and say it didn't do her any good. I couldn't give the money back if it was already opened, and they had to open it to try it. Then they got mad and didn't come in again for about a week.

We sold magazines too. I think we were the only ones in town who did, except for the hotel. They sold mostly things like
Time
there, though. We sold movie magazines and comic books and magazines for women and some magazine some preacher in North Carolina put out. That sold pretty well, especially with the preacher's people. We sold more movie magazines than anything, though, those and the romance ones. We had a lot of comic books, but most people just looked at them and didn't buy. Even the old people looked at the comic books, especially the old men. They came in on Saturday afternoons and sat down on their haunches or sat on the floor and read them. By the time everybody had read all our comic books nobody wanted to buy them, so we lost money there. Mr. Williams didn't mind, though. They bought tobacco while they read, and we made a profit on it since they didn't grow it far away and Mr. Williams got it cheap.

The only thing I didn't like about the drugstore job was the people who asked about Mother, and plenty of them did. Even some who didn't know us but who heard about me from their friends asked. Some looked like they felt sorry. Most of them acted like they were afraid of Mother ever coming down into town and just asked me to be sure she was alright up on the hill. I didn't know what to say to the ones who felt sorry, but I told the others she never went far away from home and that they didn't have to worry. Then they said they weren't worrying, they just wanted to be sure she was happy and alright up there. I didn't like to hear people talk about Mother like this, just like she had a cold or fever and they hoped she wasn't suffering too much. I wondered if they thought how it made me feel. When one woman's daughter in town had a miscarriage, nobody even said a word about it. Nobody would ask the woman how her daughter was. That's how I felt about Mother, and I hoped they'd stop talking about it and asking me. I told some of Mother's old friends she knew when we lived down in town that maybe Mother would like to see them if they'd go and visit her, but they all gave some excuse about not feeling good enough to climb the hill, or else they had to take care of their house or something. Most of them never asked about Mother after that.

Flora came in the store a lot to buy baby things for her grandchildren, but she always got Mr. Williams to wait on her. When he wasn't in, she came back when he was. She never talked to me, and turned her face away when I looked at her. Aunt Mae told me she slapped Flora in the face the next time she saw her after the night I graduated. Then Flora began to cry and said she got frightened when she heard Mother talking the way she did, and ran out the house when Mother showed her the picture of the white crosses. Flora showed Aunt Mae a place on her leg where she slipped running down the hill. I looked at it every time Flora came in the store. It was a scar now, and it went almost all the way on her left leg from her knee to her ankle. Aunt Mae told me she felt sorry for Flora then and let her go from the way she had been holding her.

Flora must have spent all her money on the grandchildren. She bought them toys and the little books we sold and all the new baby medicines. I thought it was probably because she was so happy they weren't Chinee. I thought she would have been luckier, too, to get a Chinee daughter-in-law than the ugly one she had. Nobody liked Flora's daughter-in-law except Flora and her son. She didn't even get out of eighth grade, and she was only fifteen when she married Flora's son. Mr. Farney told our class once that that girl was the worst pupil he ever had. I never spoke to her, but I always saw her on the street with those red pimples she had all over her face, even some on her arms.

It was about that time Jo Lynne began coming into the store. She was the granddaughter of some old man I used to see walking around town. Mr. Williams told me she was visiting the old man with her mother and that they were from someplace about fifty miles away, near the state line. When I first saw her, I knew she wasn't from the valley, because she was about my age but I never saw her around school or around the street.

The first day she came into the store I thought I knew her from somewhere at first. Her face looked like someone's face I had seen before. She looked at me, and I looked away, but I don't know why. I wanted to look at her again and see her eyes. They were sort of greenish-blue with dashes of gray that seemed to come out of their center. And it looked like you could see through them to the back of her eye.

Mr. Williams was in the back, so I had to wait on her. I went over to the medicine counter where she was standing, and she gave me a prescription she said she wanted for her grandfather. After I went back to give it to Mr. Williams, I was afraid to go back into the store where she was. I don't know why. I wanted to, because I wanted to have her look at me with her eyes again, but I just stayed around the prescription room. Mr. Williams saw me walking around behind him looking at the labels he had on all the bottles there, and he told me to get back into the store and tell that girl he'd have the prescription ready in a little while.