The Promise of Jesse Woods (21 page)

She cursed. “Mama never went to them parent-teacher things. They’d probably faint if she showed up. I’ll just say she’s sick. Half the kids’ parents don’t come to those meetings.”

“And what about when Daisy Grace starts school? You going to handle all that?”

“I ain’t figured it all out yet. I’m going to take it a step at a time. And the first step is me going to school in the fall.”

“I still don’t understand why you won’t take help. There’s a verse in the Bible that says the truth will set you free.”

“The truth will get your sister taken away is what it’ll do. Sometimes you got to work your way around the truth.”

“But what would be so bad about you and Daisy going to live with a relative you trusted?”

“If my mama had any living kin, we’d go. But she don’t. The only people I got is my daddy’s side. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I let them take Daisy.”

“Why?”

“First of all, if Blackwood finds out my mama passed, he’ll get the land. He’s tried all kinds of tricks and she fought him tooth and nail. Second of all, they’ll take Daisy over to the Branches. We used to go there when I was younger. And my cousins are boys who . . . do things to you. There ain’t no little girl safe at that place. Do you understand?”

I swallowed hard and nodded, trying to take in what she had just revealed.

“I can fend for myself but Daisy can’t. She’s not strong enough. I got to figure out a way to stay at my house.”

“But what if there was a way to keep Daisy safe
and
keep you two together?”

She stood so fast it took my breath away. “If you’re gonna sit there and argue me about something I know, then you ain’t helpin’.”

“Sit down,” I said, holding up my hands for calm. “This is just like the horse. You’ve got barbed wire wrapped around your leg and we’re trying to figure a way out without somebody bleeding to death.”

I regretted using that analogy after what she’d gone through with her mother, but the words calmed her and she sat.

I took a deep breath. “Okay. You can get by the rest of
the summer. I can help. But when school starts, it’s a new ballgame. We have to have an adult.”

“I told you—”

“Just listen. We have to pool resources. We bring Dickie in, for instance.”

“No, Dickie can’t keep a secret. Plus, if you and I can keep it from Dickie, we can keep it from anybody.”

I thought about it for a moment and something percolated deep inside. Something scary to think and say, but I did. “What do I get out of the deal?”

She furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

“You haggled with the guy over the bike. I’m haggling with you over this.”

“Are you serious?”

“Look, if I’m going to put my neck on the line, if I have to keep this from my parents and everybody who would want to know about it and to help, I want to know what’s in it for me.”

Jesse’s face fell. “I never thought you’d stoop that low.”

“It’s not stooping. It’s just the way things work. You do something for me, I do something for you.”

“What do you want?”

I wasn’t prepared for the question, partly because I had been taught that
wanting
was forbidden. I couldn’t express my desire to stay in Pittsburgh because that was selfish. I couldn’t even want my brother back or talk about him because of all that had happened. I had lived beating down the feeling of
wanting
anything. But Jesse’s question opened a door and soon an impetuous thought waltzed through
my mind. It was meant to be funny, and coming on the heels of her admission, it was sophomoric. But when you’ve just turned fourteen, you tend to blurt whatever comes to mind, whether it makes sense or not.

“Marry me,” I said.

She shook her head like a dog with a tick in its ear. “Say what?”

“Not now. Just promise that someday you’ll marry me.”

A look came over her face like she had just seen the Mothman and her mother playing Rook on a tree stump. “Wouldn’t that be something?” she said. “Somebody on my side of the tracks marrying somebody on your side.”

“What do you say?”

She shook her head again like it was so far out of the realm of possibility she couldn’t consider it. Then she set her jaw. “All right, then. I’ll marry you someday.”

“You gotta promise,” I said.

She dipped her head with a frown. “Tell you what, Matt. You keep my secret and help me with Daisy Grace, let her keep picking daisies and bringing them home, and one of these days I’ll say, ‘I do.’”

“Cross your heart and hope to die,” I said.

“Stop it.”

“No. If you want my help, you have to do it.”

She thought a moment, frowned again, then raised her hand and with fingers crossed swished them across her chest. “There. Satisfied?”

I spit in my hand and held it out. She shook with me, stood, and dusted off her shorts.

“You’re disturbed, you know that?” she said.

“Yeah, but a promise is a promise, Jesse. I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll plan. School will start before you know it.”

“Come to the house,” she said.

She walked down the hill into the darkness. I spent the rest of the night wishing that instead of spitting in my hand I had kissed her.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1984

I awoke from a fitful sleep to find sunlight streaming into the room. The small window was positioned high on the wall, like a prison window that was there only to let in light.

The news about Jesse’s pregnancy made the puzzle pieces fit, at least in my head. No wonder she felt like she had to marry Earl. If she was finally on the inside of the church instead of looking in from the outside, she’d have to keep up appearances. She’d have to do the dutiful thing and commit to Earl for the rest of her life. In my mind, that was no way to start a lifelong relationship—out of obligation.

It was too late to catch Jesse before her shift at the store, so I crossed off a task on my mental to-do list and drove to Uncle Willy’s house, marveling at how the neighborhood had changed and how much it hadn’t. His home was across the street from the Holiness Church of Christ in God our Savior, which, having known some of the attendees, was more holy sounding than it actually was. The building had morphed and someone had constructed a steep wheelchair ramp to its front door. Uncle Willy had been a longtime elder. He had given only tacit approval to my father’s ecclesial return to Dogwood, and it struck me how hard it must have been for my father to return as a spiritual leader to the town of his youth.

My uncle grew the largest watermelons and pumpkins in the region and won blue ribbons at the county fair, though there was talk among several Primitive Baptists (who also raised pumpkins and watermelons) that his special fertilizer should be investigated. I never asked my uncle about his growth concoction, but I would not be surprised to discover that his chemistry background had something to do with it. He had worked for forty years in research at Union Carbide and had recently retired.

He opened the screen door and wandered onto the porch, exercising his sixth sense about people driving up or walking onto his property. He was taller than my father and lanky, and his arms hung to his sides like drapes covering unopened windows. It was said he could eat any amount of food and not gain an ounce, and judging from the many times he had come to our house on a whim and
received a piece of pie or cake, I believed it. He had the metabolism of a ground squirrel and teeth to match.

“How are you doing there, Matt? I was hoping you’d come by. Come on up and sit awhile.”

He spoke with his teeth together, so you had to concentrate to translate his words. I had been in conversations with him in my teen years when he was out the door and home before I deciphered what he had actually said.

I sat in the metal lawn chair on the porch, the Indian summer humidity enveloping us, and he crossed his impossibly thin legs and rocked, the rusty chair squeaking with his mosquito-like weight.

“How much you weigh now, Matt?”

This was the central question of Uncle Willy’s life. His preoccupation was so legendary I wondered if he kept a diary as part of a government program. He didn’t follow baseball, football, or golf. He rarely hunted or fished. He was a spectator of other people’s weight and seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the ebb and flow of the community. To be honest, it was a pastime that kept him busy, for there were more than a few people who struggled.

“I actually haven’t been weighing myself lately.”

“Is that right?” he said, almost unintelligibly and with a certain amount of incredulity.
Is that right?
was a statement more than it was a question in Uncle Willy’s vernacular.

He smiled and I could see my father in his eyes. There were hints of the family tree in the size of his ears, the way he held his mouth when he searched for an answer, and the
wispy hair that barely covered his bald spot. He had eyes like armor-piercing bullets.

“Saw that pretty little girl you used to run around with is getting married. What was her name?”

I didn’t want to answer because he knew her name and probably her dress size. He probably knew Jesse didn’t weigh 120 soaking wet. But to be respectful I said, “Jesse?”

“That’s her. Works over at the Food and Drug in the meat department. She’s a Woods, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is.”

“Used to know her father. Shame about the family. Some people go through more than their share. Seems to have come out all right, though.”

“Yeah, I guess she did.”

“What don’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“Unless it just makes you scared,” I said.

“Heard she’s marrying one of the Turleys.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“What in the world has gotten into her? Why would she want to hook up with that bunch?”

“Maybe she loves him,” I said, playing Turley’s advocate.

“You think?” He leaned forward and studied a gopher hole near the porch. “The Turleys kind of went squirrelly, if you ask me. Hog wild. They bought guns and ammo back when the Iranians took hostages. I heard they dug a bunker and stocked it with food and water and a little mountain dew, if you know what I mean. Some of them left your daddy’s church.”

“Where did they go?”

“Up to the valley. Nazarene church, I think. Might have been with the Holy Rollers.”

That my uncle referred to another church as “Holy Roller” seemed like the pot calling the kettle black. His church was known to get animated, though they didn’t allow musical instruments. All of their singing was a cappella, but the running up and down the aisles filled in the musical gaps.

“You were sweet on her, weren’t you, Matt?” he said, smiling and squinting, the lines in his cheeks like odd-numbered interstates running north and south. Perhaps it was his theology or some stray gene from the family DNA that disencumbered him from genial propriety, but Uncle Willy asked the questions nobody would ask but everyone was thinking.

“One fifty-five,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Last time I stepped on the scale I was 155.”

“Is that right? How tall are you? About five-eleven?”

“Close to it.”

“You’ve grown up and thinned out, haven’t you?” When I didn’t respond, he said, “Boy, you ought to see Buck and Imogene.” He pointed a crooked finger three houses and a cornfield away. “She’s bigger than a Winnebago. They came this close to taking the front window out to get Buck to the hospital for his hernia surgery.”

“Is that right?” I said, glad that he was onto someone else’s weight. Glad that he was onto anything else.

“Whole family just puffed up like blowfish. Thyroid
problems, they say, though I have my doubts.” He rubbed his wrinkled hands. “Talk around town is you’re not too happy about Jesse. You’ve come back here to kindly change her mind.”

“Is that what you hear or what you think?”

“Maybe a little of both,” he said. “I remember the three of you riding up and down the road. Peas in a pod. What was the colored boy’s name?”

“Dickie Darrel Lee.”

“His mother still lives in town, I think. See her every now and then. She thinned out a little over the years.”

My mind wandered as we sat, silently listening to the wind move my aunt Zenith’s chimes that hung under the eaves. Uncle Willy had once come to our house after I had bought a used minibike. My father had paid half. I rode it to the barn, showing him what it would do, and it must have looked like so much fun that my uncle asked for a turn.

“You sure you know how to ride that thing?” my father, the younger brother, asked innocently.

He received a look of disdain before my uncle mounted the bike like an older child will try to fit on a tricycle, his knees sticking out. He was not as coordinated as he thought and not as adept with the concept of the accelerator and brake, which I showed him before he sped away. The trip up to the barn was uneventful. The return trip was horrifying. He gained natural momentum coming down the hill but instead of pulling on the brake, he increased the gas and the engine revved. Instead of a gentle halt, he sped up, his hair flying. He looked terrified as he put out
his feet to stop. Ten feet past my father and me, he did the only thing he could do and ran the minibike into the ground. The smell of gasoline and exhaust overtook us and we ran to him, my uncle tumbling head over heels toward the hickory nut tree. The metal clamp securing the handlebars snapped. My father helped him up and inspected him, looking for broken bones.