The Year the Lights Came On (36 page)

*

There was the gleeful night when an old dream was partly realized, a night of ambush against a group of older boys from Royston, who had begun raiding my father’s apple orchard under the mask of darkness. They rode in an open Jeep, lights off, and talked about the “dumb country hicks” who were too stupid to know what was happening. They had no idea we were hiding all those nights, watching and listening. And they had no idea we were waiting, on that night of ambush, with stout flips and pockets filled with green chinaberries. We caught them totally unawares in a crossfire. They yelped and screamed and drove into a ditch. But they never returned to raid our orchard and we secretly regretted it. We had devoted hours to strategy and we had become expert in hit and run, hit and run, like boy guerrillas defending our honor and, yes, our boundaries. We were very sure boundaries, even invisible boundaries, were meant to keep us in, and we were just as sure those same boundaries were meant to keep outsiders out.

There was too much happening, happening everywhere we looked.

*

And nothing was as magnificent as the REA. The REA was coming. Let the players of the Truth of Distortion strut their worth. Let them be puffed up by their illusions of heroics. The REA was coming. Any fool knew the REA was more important than anything that had ever—ever—happened.

19

THEY HAD BEEN THERE
with their tripods and telescopes and their pantomime of “Left” or “Right” or “There” and they had amazed us with the stubborn accuracy of their line, straight as a ruler’s edge. Straight from there to there. Another angle. There to there. Straight. Electricity must run in straight lines, I thought at the time. And then the right-of-way crew, swinging their axes and sling blades, pulling their crosscuts, following those straight lines, there to there, there to there, working in inches. The men of the right-of-way crew had become faces and voices we knew and we had followed them as boys followed famous baseball players in large cities. They had tolerated us, answered our questions, fooled us into helping them drag limbs and brush. We served them with peaches from our orchards and with watermelons from our fields, the watermelons made cool by leaving them in spring water for a day. But they had sliced through the woods leading from Emery, and they had crossed Black Pool Swamp and Beaverjam Creek during the time we spent searching for Freeman, and now they were gone, met by another right-of-way crew cutting from the
opposite direction, like some east-and-west railroad track fusing together in a dot on a map.

Now other men arrived, men with huge post hole diggers, men with muscles, men uttering “Uhhhhhhhhhhhh” with each thrust into the ground. They were brooding, introverted men, as though the physical torment of digging was an assignment of madness. They were like convicts who worked the road gangs. Always another road, another hole to dig, and the sense of Never Ending closed over them like a coffin. They did not talk with us, and we shriveled under the hardness of their stern faces.

One morning a tractor trailer, pulling a flatbed loaded with long creosoted black pine poles, appeared above our house, near the old Civil War cemetery, and we knew the REA was not a fake. Men may play cruel games by surveying and cutting and digging holes, but men would not waste long creosoted black pine poles on a hoax.

And, so, we watched the REA arrive. Poles being hoisted and packed and guy-wired. Great rolls of shining wire, like spun thread, pulled and stretched and attached by strong-faced linemen, perched godlike on limbless creosoted black pine poles. In each of the linemen, I saw Thomas, remembered Thomas, believed Thomas could be touched. I wanted him to speak to me, to speak from the top of his godlike perch, but there was never any sound when the man on the creosoted black pine pole became Thomas. There was only his face and smile and eyes with this morning’s sun burning blue.

The REA arrived in my father’s labor, in days of pipe-cutting for the plumbing we would use, with steel shavings from the pipe cutter falling into silver curls on the floor of the barn, and in the afternoons of uncrating bathroom fixtures—slick, white
enamel instruments of belonging, each instrument having small brown envelopes of guarantees, brightly printed and scripted like a diploma, promising promises of luxury and durability.

The REA arrived with a heavy-set electrician, binding our house with his crisscross of wires, boring holes in our walls, popping the metal slugs out of receptacles (I collected those slugs and gave them to Garry and told him they were the same as nickels), and, finally, in an act that was both theatrical and remarkably honest, he fitted each light switch and receptacle with a covering, and then he left. We could not avoid staring at those coverings; behind them a million-trillion Zs would pile up, spinning wildly, their sharp edges buzzing like a finishing saw.

The REA arrived in the wind, whistling and dancing through the shining, pull-and-stretched-and-attached wires. We would sit in late evenings in the pine tree windbreak that pinched off at one end of skinny oaks in the new ground, and listen to the wind get its roaring charge at the hill. The wires had been tied off in that section as though someone had tuned them for a violin. If you closed your eyes and listened, you could hear the wind playing its solo concert against the wires, a concert of funeral and eerie and distant moods.

*

School began, the session after cotton blooms had curled into brown cocoons and were being nudged off their pedestals by tiny bolls bulging with the white fabric. We always had that school session, that awkward between-session of waiting for the full opening of the boll. During the wait, we attended school. When the bolls opened, school closed, and we began the slow, boll-by-boll, stalk-by-stalk, row-by-row picking of the cotton, backs bending, drawn to one side by a guano sack strapped to our shoulders. To
boys who could hear the voices of creeks and understood the teasing wink of the sun calling them to play, the between-session of school was a cruel apprenticeship to the preparation for life. There was no real holiday: we worked in school while waiting for the cotton, and then we worked the cotton while school waited for us.

But this between-session, Indian summer of 1947, was different. Alvin and Lynn and a few others had graduated from the ninth grade and were attending Royston High School. We missed them, especially Alvin, but we had all moved up—“progressed forward” according to the progress reports we had received in spring—and we were learning the size and contents of new books (old books with new hands opening them). There was a new teacher, pretty, young, a girl out of college who had mesmerizing blue eyes and who wore a perfume that caused young girls to sigh with envy and young men to stutter. In her class, Otis and Paul immediately became attentive students after years of lackluster scholastic pursuit. And there were two new basketball goals, with new backboards, that William Pruitte had helped Wade Simmons build. With that evidence of confidence, we, the players, dedicated our athletic futures to a vigorous effort to master the fundamentals and “go all the way.” All the way meant the Eden County Tournament, played in Edenville High School’s gymnasium. We had been there before, in the same tournament. We had taken a bye in the first round and were slaughtered in the second. We lost to New Hope in that game because we did not have “finesse,” as William called it. We knew how to toe-heel-toe-kick, but we did not know a great deal about the game as an organized competition. We had been seduced by thoughts of rah-rah-rah-ism, and by the promise of a Hershey’s candy bar before games and a
bored-out orange rilled with confectionery sugar at halftime. But this required a willingness to be organized, and that was a problem. Organization demanded painful adjustments and too often imposed bewildering restrictions. Playing the Standing Guard, for example—the guard who never crossed center line and dedicated his share of glory to
defense. Dear God, there was time enough to be a Standing Guard. Most of the adults we knew were Standing Guards.

And always there was the REA—the REA running in angles of ruler-edge straightness from Emery and into Black Pool Swamp, south of Banner’s Crossing. The line was there, during that between-session of summer school. A few more days of tinkering. A hookup to this house, or that house. A few more transformers to be placed. The inspection by the inspectors. A few more days and the REA would serve us a sacred communion, a very special blessing.

We—Our Side—tried to be humble. Humility makes the man, Wesley declared, and he gave humility one of his finer efforts: he spent hours at school with Dupree, attempting to prove forgiveness. But we all realized humility had met its match, if not its master, in REA pride. Jack observed it was like the Christians and the lions: the Christians believed and meant well, but the lions didn’t know from Adam what was happening, and didn’t care as long as the catering continued.

It was a far-fetched comparison, but there was a tidbit of fairness in the view. We had Christian intention (Wesley ensured that), but we also had a lion’s hunger. As the days passed, and we waited, the lion in us began to devour the Christian.

We were not uppity. We were smug. We posed. We dribbled casual hints about
our
new appliances being more modern than
their
old appliances. We volunteered to host Boy Scout meetings and, if anyone cared, a group of us were planning a hayride and a night yard dance, to be held in one of
our
yards and lighted by one of
our
outside spotlights. That is, maybe we’ll have a yard dance. Ho-hum, there’s so much to plan. Can’t tell what we’ll think of. I heard that Betty Tully has a new electric record player. Hey, did you know Jack Crider’s thinking about entering the 4-H Club countrywide contest on experiments in electricity?

Megan did not like the smug me, the lion at feast. At recess one day, she said, “Well, you sure changed. If you had any notion what you sound like, you’d take another look at yourself.”

“Changed?” I countered. “What makes you think that?”

“The way you act, all stuck-up.”

“Stuck-up? Who’s stuck-up?”

“You are.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Fair or not, it’s true. It’s true, all right.”

“You saying you don’t like me? That it? You gone back to liking Dupree? That it?”

She was furious. “You’re not worth liking. I don’t know why I liked you in the first place.”

“It is Dupree,” I said.

She exploded. “No, it’s not. It’s you.”

“Me?”

“You.”

I did not know how to handle this temper. No person in the entire world had ever confused me as much as Megan, not even Wesley.

“Megan…”

“What is it?” she said sharply.

“Uh—nothing.”

“What is it?”

“I was just wondering…”

“What?”

“Uh—would you—uh—let me have a—ah—picture of you?”

Her eyes softened. “A picture?”

“Yeah.”

“You really want one?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Can I have one of you?” she asked.

“You’d probably just throw it away.”

“No,” she said quickly. “No, I won’t. I’ll keep it…”

“Well, I guess…”

“Will you keep mine?”

“Uh—sure. If you don’t tell nobody.”

“I won’t.”

“Megan?”

“Yes?”

“Uh—this year, when we go to the basketball games, will you—ah—sit with me on the bus?”

She smiled. Asking a girl to sit with you on the bus was first question in a three-question series. “Will you go steady?” was the second question, and “Will you marry me?” was the third question.

“I guess,” she answered.

The commitment began to crush me. “Well, you don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” I said.

“I want to.”

“Maybe we’d just better see how things turn out.”

“You taking it back?” she asked.

“Me? Naw. Just can’t tell how things might work out.”

“All right.”

“You still mad at me?”

“About what?”

“Being stuck-up.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. You’re not bad stuck-up.”

The recess bell clanged. Megan smiled and walked away. Oh, God, I thought, what have I done?

It didn’t matter what I had done. Nothing could be stopped. Too much was happening.

The announcement was printed, front page, in
The Eden
County Garden.
The headline was:

NEW POWER LINES TO BE TURNED ON

The REA had completed its spider-webbing and its hookups. On a given date, at a given hour, the main switch, off somewhere beyond our imaginations, would be pushed, or pulled, in a ceremony featuring speakers and officials and a ribbon-cutting (there was always a ribbon-cutting), and electricity would leap along miles of wire to flood our homes.

We invited Freeman to join us in the middle room of our home to celebrate the announced date and the announced hour. Wesley had been right about the Boyds’ not getting electricity; they were too far off the line.

There were five of the twelve children still living at home that day—Louise, Lynn, Wesley, me, and Garry. When the hour arrived, whoever did whatever he was supposed to do, wherever it was, and the 100-watt bulb located on the ceiling, in the exact center of the room, exploded with light. No one said anything. The light blinding, a small sun in a new universe. Lynn, standing beside the wall switch, flipped it to OFF. The room called back its gray shadows. She snapped the switch to ON and the shadows raced away into hiding, disappearing in the brightness. She snapped the switch from ON to OFF, OFF to ON, again and again. The shadows skipped in and out of the walls with the suddenness of magic. Finally, Garry tugged at Louise, who was his particular sister-mother, his protector and comforter, and said, “Lynn better quit doin’ that. She’s gonna burn out all the batteries.”