The Year the Lights Came On (24 page)

The men did not weep, for weeping would have been unseemly, but it was easy to tell they were emotional. One of them, a giant of a man with a goiter stuck in his throat, volunteered not to patronize Hixon’s General Store until Freeman was cleared of all charges and had received a public apology, and the other men yeah-ed his decision. That vow lasted until afternoon and then it melted in the salty heat of a blistering sun, when the vision of Coca-Cola, bottles slippery with ice, drove the crew to panic. “To heck with it,” one of them said. “We’ll take up a collection.”

And there were those with private agendas—the politics of selfishness. It was trickery of the mind, the attitude that said
I
must do something to help
Freeman, but I
won’t object if it serves me as well.

I was one of those people. I had an idea of appealing to Megan’s
confidence. If she knew anything about a setup against Freeman instigated by Dupree, I believed I could pry the secret from her sealed lips. It was, by all appearances, a noble proposal. Yet, I knew there were two problems: first, how to see Megan and not be seen at that seeing, and, second, how to concentrate on my mission. Megan was an influence I could not trust; I knew I would have to be cold and demanding, and I knew I would have to think only of Freeman—
Freeman, Freeman, Freeman.

Coincidence solved my first dilemma. Megan and her mother came to our farm to buy apples from my father’s abundant orchard, and my father made me go with Megan to gather them. I fussed, dramatically, as Lynn giggled, but I obeyed. “Be quick, now,” Megan’s mother said as she drove away. “I’ll be back soon. And make sure there’s no worm holes.”

I did not speak to Megan until we were well into the orchard and concealed from view by distance and the low limbs of trees bowing with fruit. “Megan,” I began, “I want to ask you somethin’.” She smiled and said, “Yes?” Suddenly my purpose collapsed. Pale green eyes, hair as blond as a full moon. “Yes?” she repeated softly. “Uh—nothin’,” I mumbled. “Just—just—ah, wondered what’s been happenin’ this summer.” She talked of the summer, of girlish things. She made me inspect the apples she picked. She asked if I had spent time drawing (I had not). She wanted to know if Wesley and Lynn and I planned to attend the Emery Methodist Church Youth Fellowship hot dog roast and hayride (we did). Her presence and her questions assaulted my nerves. I tried, I earnestly tried to remember Freeman. Once I even shut my eyes and squeezed his face into focus on the silver membrane of my mind, but Megan touched my arm for attention (“Is this a
worm hole?”) and Freeman disappeared into a pit of gray quicksand.

*

But the thing that kept the political moods and incentives alive was Freeman himself.

Freeman was performing his dreams. He had escaped and no one could find him in the Great Okeenoonoo. He was a defying spirit in the best of defying postures, and he could not resist teasing us. Each night, Freeman confirmed his safety and the pleasure of his adventure by playing messages for Wesley and me—messages of lyrical lightness in cane-flute code.

During those first uneasy nights, the messages occurred almost precisely at nine-thirty. Wesley, faithful in his promise, would tell Rachel Boyd of Freeman’s night tune, and Rachel Boyd would smile her appreciation. To Odell Boyd, the evidence of Freeman’s survival was more than comfort; it was also a braggart’s claim of beating the odds, and everyone in Emery quickly learned of Freeman’s evening concert.

On the fourth night after his escape, three cars crammed with thrill seekers arrived in our yard at nine-fifteen. They were there to hear Freeman and Freeman did not disappoint them. He played a broken song, a wounded lamentation of high, piercing notes, and the crowd answered in a chorus of dog calls and bird imitations. Freeman loved it. He replied with a musical ditty that must have been suggestive; all the men laughed and slapped their thighs and said, “That’s ol’ Freeman.” And they were right. It was Freeman being Freeman, a boy reveling in secrets only men understood; men and Freeman. They left and forgot their worry of Freeman’s plight. “That’s ol’ Freeman,” they repeated the next day. “Ol’ Freeman’s fine.” And then they began again the fiery dispute over class distinction.

“By shot, Freeman proves it. They’s a difference between folks in Emery, all right. They’s people lookin’ down on other people. Maybe it’s electricity, like somebody was sayin’. Maybe that’s it.”

Each night my mother prepared sandwiches and packed them in a paper sack for Freeman, and Wesley and I would carry the food to the end of the day’s cutting by the REA crew. We would leave the food and return home immediately. I was certain Wesley had confessed to our parents about seeing Freeman on that first day of search, because there was never any question about the sandwiches, but I did not ask for the truth. Wesley could be everlasting when explaining truth, and I never fully comprehended his views of such important topics.

*

On Saturday following Freeman’s Monday escape, Laron Crook announced he would conduct an afternoon prayer meeting at Sosbee’s Spring and enlist heaven’s forces to aid Freeman. It was an earnest offer, and we elected to attend—particularly since the novelty of Laron’s conversion had ebbed and adults avoided him as a fanatic who did not have the good sense to know when and when not to be religious. It was our duty to attend, we reasoned. Laron was especially fond of Freeman. Too, Laron was leaving on Sunday to join Preacher Bytheway in a campaign near Augusta; Preacher Bytheway had had problems matching his success in Emery and was in desperate need of a worthy witness, one whose confessions would be unforgettable.

We attended, obediently. Alvin predicted that Freeman would
appear himself, if he knew what was happening. “Freeman would give a week’s pay to see this,” Alvin said.

It was a lively, but abbreviated session. Laron prayed and practiced his laying on of hands, and he was into a few words of speaking in tongues when he slipped and tumbled head-first into Sosbee’s Spring. He told us a stick jumped up from the ground and tripped him, and that it was an omen he would have to ponder as he changed clothes. We wished him good fortune in Augusta and he promised to bring us all souvenirs if he could find something appropriate at the Greyhound Bus Station.

After Laron left, we tried to plot some way to help Freeman, but we knew our planning was useless. Freeman would have to help himself.

“Well, I hope y’all can do something,” Jack said. “There’s nothin’ more I can do. Mama told me to stay clear of it, all of it. If she knew I was here, she’d take a stick to me.”

“Why?” asked Wesley.

“I don’t know,” Jack confessed. “All the fussin’ that’s goin’ on, I guess. Mama said she didn’t want none of us around it and we had to stay at home.”

“Yeah, well, that’s all right, Jack,” counseled Alvin. “I know how that is. My mama used to make me stay home all the time, too. She’ll get over it. Anyhow, Freeman’s all right. He’ll stay put and keep playin’ that flute until somethin’s done to show he’s innocent.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

We all knew Alvin was right. Freeman was stubborn. And Freeman was having more fun than he had ever had in his life.

That night, Freeman did not play his cane flute. There was no message. Wesley and I walked below the barn and whistled, but Freeman did not answer.

“Wonder where he is,” I said.

Wesley frowned. “I don’t know,” he replied quietly. “I don’t know.”

Doom.

I did not know what doom really meant, or why it sounded and looked so uncompromising as a word. Doom rhymed with tomb. When printed, doom had two round, closed white eyes, resting everlastingly between a D-for-death and an M-for-mortuary. Sometimes the blacks we knew lamented the “passin’ over” of a loved one by saying he, or she, had been visited by The Doom, and The Doom was even more final than doom as a single word. There was another character to doom: it could be felt, physically felt, as rain can be felt miles away and hours before it finally arrives. Feeling doom, as we learned in the beautiful folk language of blacks who knew the truth of it, began with a single unexpected oddity—a redbird out of season, hail out of cloudless skies, dogs cowering under the house, a pine tree releasing its needles in a single night. There were dozens of signs, if you knew how to read them, knew the quaint mysteries of their ethereal beginnings. Yet, even if you did read them, you were helpless against the unknown of doom. You simply stopped what you were doing and waited, waited for a warm breath followed by a chilling breath (always on the face), and then you knew it was finished and you had only to discover where doom, or The Doom, had visited. Afterward, you talked about it, and said: “I knew it would happen. I could feel it.”

Freeman had not signaled. He had not answered the pleading
of our own calls, first as whistles and then as yelling. As we stood and waited, Wesley and I both realized the swamp had become suddenly unfriendly, dark as ink. We heard a rolling sigh in the top limbs of the tallest trees, and then we heard nothing. Nothing. Not even katydids or frogs or owls.

Wesley called in a half-voice, “Freeman.”

His half-voice half-echoed once.

“Wesley,” I begged, “let’s go home.”

Doom. What we had been told was incredibly accurate. This was the first sign, the oddity. A premonition of Freeman trapped in the glue of a giant spider web, dangling and trying to cry out but unable to find sound in his body, raced through my mind, and just as quickly I heard the gentle voice of my sister Ruth as she told again of Mother’s premonition of Thomas. Ruth, too, had felt the warm breath of doom that day; she, too, had said, “I knew something had happened. I could feel it.”

Doom. Wesley warned me not to
say anything about Freeman. “Mama’ll just worry,” he explained. “Maybe Freeman sneaked off to go see his folks. Maybe that’s it.”

*

Mother did not ask us if we had heard Freeman’s whistle. It was expected that we had had our boyish, adventuresome exchange and Freeman had retreated to wherever he rested in Black Pool Swamp. Wesley positioned himself in the middle room, near my father and beside the corner window, and pretended to listen to a radio comedy show.

The comedy ended, its laughter pushed away by a music bridge, and a baritone news announcement of the world’s events, and my father switched the radio off. We did not care very much about the
world’s events. The world was a place we heard about in baritone-and-static descriptions.

“How far’s the REA crew, son?” my father asked Wesley.

“Almost out of the woods, down near the branch. Won’t be long before they get to Beaverjam Creek,” answered Wesley.

“They’ll be stringing wire before we know it,” my father said.

“Yessir,” Wesley mumbled.

A strange cat with fur that had the look of pressed black velvet leaped onto the windowsill and stared inside. He arched his back and rubbed against the glass pane, then dropped silently out of sight. And I remembered: “A cat’s a bad sign, for sure,” Willie Lee Maxwell had told us after his mother died. “I knew somethin’ was bad wrong when this cat followed me all day long. Didn’t make no sound at all. Never took them cat’s eyes off me all day. Knew it was somethin’, and that night when I was lyin’ in bed, I was woke by the hot breathin’ of The Doom, hot as fever…”

“Sure quiet out,” Mother said from the kitchen. “Must be gettin’ ready to rain.”

No, Mama, I thought. It won’t rain. The quiet means doom, Mama. Tonight, Mama, someone (Wesley, me?) will feel a shadowy warm breeze, and then a chilling breeze, and it will be over. Freeman will be eternally trapped in The Doom.

“Better go to bed, boys,” suggested Mother. “Church tomorrow.”

Wesley stared at the windowsill as though the cat would return. He answered, “Yes’m.”

*

On Sunday morning, in the wedge between night and day, Wesley and I slipped away to see if Freeman had taken the sandwiches Mother had prepared and we had left at the end of the REA cutting. The paper sack was still there, still on the last stump of the last tree to fall. Wesley opened the sack and scattered the sandwiches for birds. He stood for a moment and searched the swamp, then he turned and walked briskly away, toward home.

“You gonna tell Daddy, Wesley?”

“No, not now.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe Freeman went home.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“We’ll go by his house on the way to church. His mama’ll tell us.”

“What if he didn’t?”

“If he didn’t—I don’t know.”

*

Rachel Boyd stood behind the screen door, her arms folded against her breasts. The screen, stretched and loose from being pushed, distorted her, froze her in the tiny squares of wire meshing. The tuberculosis that had rotted her lungs had also pulled her eyes deep into their sockets and there were times when she appeared completely blind; this was one of those times.

“No, Wesley,” she said. “Freeman’s not been here. Why’d you ask? Is he all right?”

“Uh—yes’m, he’s fine. We’ve not seen him, but Freeman’s takin’ care of himself,” Wesley muttered.

Rachel Boyd stepped closer to the screen door. Her eyes were black, swollen by blue lines sweeping in a quarter moon over her cheeks. “Why’d you think Freeman would come here, Wesley?” she repeated.