The Promise of Jesse Woods (5 page)

“Maybe I should go get Mr. Blackwood,” I said.

Jesse ignored me and told Dickie, “If we do nothing, she’ll bleed to death.”

“They call that something, don’t they?” Dickie said.

“A catch-22,” I said. “It’s from a book about World War II.”

They both stared at me like I was something you’d have to clean out of a barn. Dickie looked back at the horse and said, “Maybe we should pray like those TV preachers. Do a healing service like Ernest Angley.”

“My mama watched him once and said he smacked a man so hard he fell over.”

“He’s not smacking them. It’s the Spirit—”

Jesse grabbed the cutters from him.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“What’s it look like I’m going to do? I’m cutting the wire.”

Dickie tried to get the cutters back, but Jesse pushed him from the bank and he jumped, landing on his feet in the gravel.

“What’d you do that for?” Dickie yelled.

“We don’t have time to argue,” she said. “Y’all want to form a committee, go ahead.”

“Let the record show I protested,” Dickie said.

Jesse moved closer to the fence and out of our line of sight. Dickie and I backed up to see. The horse seemed to sense Jesse meant her no harm.

“I’m telling you, this is a mistake,” Dickie said.

“Steady now,” Jesse said, coaxing and soothing the horse as she moved the cutters near the injured leg. “You’re gonna be all right.”

Snip.

The sound echoed like a gunshot and the horse raised her head.

“It’s okay,” Jesse said gently. “One more cut and you’re free.”

She maneuvered the cutters to the other side and used both hands to clip the wire. Instead of running, the horse, not realizing she was free, allowed Jesse to push and twist the wire out of the wound. She was able to unwind it enough to grab it with the cutters. Then the horse reared and ran into the open field, the wire sticking out of her leg.

“Look at her go!” Jesse said, holding the cutters above her head in triumph.

Dickie ran up the bank and stood at the top, king of the hill. I headed for the easy way to join them.

“Hey,” Dickie said. “Where you going?”

“I can’t get up that way.”

“Sure you can. Try it.”

I took a run but slipped before I got a hand on the tree root.

“Do it again and just take two steps and hold out your hand.”

I wanted to protest. I wanted to go the easy way. But something in Dickie’s face made me try. It was the same encouragement my brother gave when he would throw a pop-up as high as he could and tell me to get under it and square up to catch it. But it usually hit the ground.

“Go,” Jesse said to me, standing beside Dickie.

I ran through the gravel to the bank and took two steps on the incline. Dickie grabbed my hand and Jesse reached for the other and I stepped over the edge and stood, a feeling of victory and power shooting through me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for the preacher’s kid,” Dickie said.

I laughed and caught my breath, looking down at where I’d come from. I could never have done that by myself.

“She looks free, don’t she?” Jesse said, watching the horse.

“She’s limping,” Dickie said. “I still say we should have waited. I heard about a girl who fell on a pencil and it went right in her chest and when they pulled it out, she bled like a fire hydrant.”

Whether it was his upbringing or his station in life,
Dickie took the glass half-empty to new levels. He knew people who had lost eyes and ears and just about every body part because of some regrettable mistake.

“Good thing that horse doesn’t have access to a pencil sharpener,” Jesse said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“That wire could have been pinching an artery,” Dickie said.

“Look,” I said, pointing at the horse.

The mare had turned back toward us and swayed, her hurt leg in the air. She put the injured leg down and then tumbled to the ground, headfirst, and flopped to the side.

“Told you,” Dickie said.

Jesse put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, the poor thing.”

The horse lay motionless in the pasture and the three of us stared in horror.

“You think she’s dead?” I said.

“She probably just passed out from gratitude,” Dickie said.

“Well, at least we did something,” I said. “And the last thing that horse ever saw was three kids trying to help her.”

Jesse set her jaw and tears came to her eyes. “That’s not good enough. We should have been able to save her.”

A low rumble sounded behind us and I turned to see a red Ford F-100 with a white top coming up the road.

“OMB!” Jesse shouted.

The truck paused near the gate, then continued slowly toward us while I tried to figure out what
OMB
meant.
Except there was no
us
now. Jesse and Dickie had hit the dirt and hidden in the grass.

“Get on your bike and get out of here,” Jesse whispered. “Hurry!”

I paused at the edge of the drop.

“Jump and slide down,” Dickie said. “It’s the fastest way.”

I sat on the edge and tried to ease my way to the ground, but my weight and momentum propelled me and I landed on my stomach, air rushing from my lungs. “Ow, ow, ow,” I said, trying to get my breath. By the time I got to my feet, I was staring at Old Man Blackwood through his open window.

“What’s your problem, kid? Can’t you read?”

I gasped for air.

“Speak up!”

“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I can read.”

“Then what do you think ‘No Trespassing’ means?”

I didn’t answer because the question was rhetorical and I didn’t have air. The man had a rifle mounted in the back window of his cab. And if what Jesse had said was true, I had only seconds to live.

“What’s your name, fatty?”

Over the rumble of the engine I heard Jesse whisper something. Blackwood couldn’t see above the bank, couldn’t see the broken fence or the little mare bleeding out. He couldn’t see my new friends.

“Get outta here,” Jesse hissed.

I ran to my bike and picked it up. Blackwood pulled the truck forward, blocking my exit.

“Whose kid are you?” Blackwood yelled. “Answer me!”

I pushed the bike into the road and jumped on it, riding past his open window. The man cleared his throat and spat, but I didn’t stop or slow down.

“That’s right! Get out of here, tub of lard. And don’t let me catch you here again, you hear me?”

I pedaled fast, worried that Blackwood would follow me or run me over. I looked back once but didn’t see Jesse or Dickie.

The death of the little mare was the first secret we promised we’d keep. It wouldn’t be our last.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1984

I drove through the night, fueled by gas station coffee and cold Mountain Dew, the elixir of my childhood. I reached Dogwood Monday morning in time to see truckers and plant workers meeting by the interstate to share rides. There was now one stoplight in town, a sign of progress. I went past our high school and the church of my youth, a thousand questions about Jesse swirling. Could I save her from her grave mistake? Could I turn her heart a different direction before the wedding? It suddenly felt cliché, and a little desperate, me coming back.

I sat in my car, a six-year-old blue Toyota Corolla liftback, and stared at the plane outside the school, a WWII
memorial featuring a real F-86 Sabre. It was under the left wing of that plane that I had asked Jesse to the prom. She had refused, saying, “I ain’t prom material, Matt, and you know it.”

“I don’t know it, Jesse. You’re the prettiest girl in school. You deserve to be queen.”

“Can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” she said.

“If it’s because you don’t have money for a dress, I can help.”

No matter how much I pleaded, the answer was no. And the sight of the plane brought back the old ache.

I passed the ghost of Blake’s General Store, just a shell now. A half mile later I came to the Dogwood Food and Drug where Jesse worked. I knew this, as well as everyone who had died within a fifty-mile radius, from my mother. She clipped obituaries like coupons and sent them, but the names were just as hazy on the page as they were in my mind.

At my grandmother’s house, which my parents had made their own after her death, I pulled halfway up the drive and sat overlooking the creek, water trickling underneath the bridge. The stately walnut trees were still there but the large hickory was a stump. Lightning had done its cruel work two summers before—my mother had sent a snapshot. The pine trees my father and I had planted as a project to replenish the deforested earth were huge. They had been about as big as my hand when we planted them and now they soared above me. Funny how much growth can happen in twelve years.

I was startled by a banging on the window and recognized Jasper Meadows, who lived across the road. He carried a shotgun and had a chaw of tobacco the size of a fist in his mouth. He was as weathered as his coveralls and as faded as the Cincinnati Reds hat that sat crooked on his head. I rolled down my window.

“What are you doing sittin’ there?” he said around the chaw, an edge to his voice.

“Mr. Meadows? I didn’t want to wake my parents.”

He gave a crusty laugh. “You’re Calvin’s boy? The little one?”

“Matt.”

He grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Well, I’ll be. Matt Plumley. How’s everything up in Chicago?” He said the name of the city with an “er” at the end.

“It was still there when I left,” I said.

His eyes were milky in the middle and he cocked his head and pawed at the gravel. “Shame about them Cubs. I thought this might be their year.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“All right. Won’t bother you. Just keeping an eye out on the groundhog that keeps getting in my muskmelons and I saw you sitting here and thought maybe you was up to no good.”

“Not this morning,” I said with a smile. “Are there a lot of people up to no good these days?”

“You’d be surprised. Don’t know what the world is coming to.” He took off his hat and scratched the side of his head with the bill. “Have you seen your mama lately?”

“No, sir. But I’ve talked with her.”

“Well, she’ll be happy to see you, I’m sure. All your family is good people. You ought to come around more often.” He said it to me, but I could tell he meant it for his own children, who had flown and hadn’t returned. “People are way too busy these days, if you ask me.”

I wanted to ask him not to let anyone know I was home, but I figured Jasper would keep the news between him and the groundhog.

He waved a hand without turning around and kept walking.

I pulled up the driveway a few minutes later and parked over the septic tank. There was a garden above the house in full bloom, near the barn. My father’s tools and mower were now in a shed below the house, but not much had changed since my childhood. I took a walk in the yard, the dew wet on the grass and clover.

The back clothesline was empty and the chinaberry tree by the walk had two lawn chairs near it. I pictured my parents here, talking, sharing news of the town and the church. I wondered how many times the conversation had turned to me at this spot.

The back door opened with a squeak and my mother appeared, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Matt, is that you?”

I smiled and hugged her and she laughed and cried at the same time, clinging to my neck like a wisteria vine. “When did you get here?”

“A little bit ago.”

“And why are you . . . ?” She pulled back and I could tell she had figured it out. My mother had an inner sense of everything from politics to which eligible single man belonged with which eligible single woman. She could overhear a conversation and precisely diagnose the relational problem. Call it horse sense or a sixth sense, she was always able to put two and two together.

“Matt, you’re not going to mess things up, are you?”

I had prepared for that question, but I didn’t know it would come so quickly. I used a tactic of my own to avoid it.

“Mom, I’m starving. You don’t have anything for breakfast, do you?”

She knew I was playing her, but she joyfully led the way into the house and fried eggs and hash browns and bacon. She cut two English muffins and put them in the toaster.

“Where’s Dad?” I said.

“You know what he does on Mondays. A man needs to get away from the world’s troubles, Matthew. Every day has enough of its own.”

She said my name as if using it would make me understand the deeper meaning, the Scriptural reference clear as the pain on her face.

In conversations with my mother, through college and beyond, she rarely asked about my classes or work. Most of our conversations centered on the town, the people, her physical problems, and whatever social or political crisis was going on in the world. It seemed easier to talk about these things.

She filled my plate and put it down, still steaming, as if handing me a serving of my childhood. The smell of cooked meat and eggs mingled with the memories and I took a deep breath. There was enough food on the plate to feed a small village, but this was my mother’s way. A child of the Depression, she knew what it was like to be hungry and have next to nothing and still be better-off than most. She took any chance for abundance.