The Year the Lights Came On (37 page)

Burn out all the batteries.

There are no batteries. No batteries, Garry. The only batteries we need are for flashlights.

Thomas would be happy, I thought. He would strut around the room and explain everything. He would laugh and tell Mother he had a special surprise for her, and he would hand her a colorfully wrapped present, with paper ribbons blooming into a flower, something electric, something to be plugged into an outlet and something to make her world wonderful.

“Well, you ought to make a speech,” Mother urged my father.

“It’s bright,” my father said. “Maybe we don’t need that much bulb.”

EPILOGUE

WE ARE EASILY DECEIVED.

The REA changed our lives.

The REA made us more comfortable.

The REA also destroyed us.

Destroyed something—some intangible security people have always enjoyed in isolation.

The world came into our house on those shining, singing wires. The world came in, intruding and changing, commanding us to obey its hypnotic lure. The world came in like a torrent, pouring out of every motor and gadget and instant, fumeless light, and it changed us.

Our night games of racing with Bullet and Short Leg through Black Pool Swamp stopped. We stayed inside and developed pretensions about the sophistication of having electricity. We became the Highway 17 Gang, or the Our Side Gang. We tried—it was madness we tried so hard—but we could not consume the spectacle of electricity. It was always too much, and not enough. It drove its Z-ing beams between us, drove us from huddling, stopped our
asking and answering, weakened our dreams. Electricity was sudden. We were not.

There were nights, in the first months, when we could hear Freeman whistling deep in the bowels of Black Pool Swamp, a lonely, mournful whistle, and Bullet and Short Leg would howl at him. Once or twice, Wesley and I walked down to the barn and returned his call, but Freeman never answered. He knew. He knew we had, without intention, betrayed him, and the fight at Emery Junior High School had been a waste of time.

On those nights, without wanting to, we lost Freeman Boyd, and losing him was one of the ways the REA destroyed us.

*

No one was surprised when Megan began to sit with me on the back seat of the school bus, to and from basketball games. The differences between Our Side and the Highway 17 Gang no longer existed, having been healed by the great equalizer of electricity. I did not care what people said about huddling in the dark corner of a school bus, and Megan did not care. We held hands, a jacket or sweater over our arms, as though hiding our hands would hide our caring. Megan’s hand was warm and I memorized its touch forever. She was very gentle. I carved her initials on my tree, above my own, and told her about it. She smiled happily.

We were inseparable, Megan and I. In high school, we began dating (“Oh, there’s a couple now. Megan and Colin. Going steady. You wait. You just wait.”) and Megan’s hands began to coax me away from my boundaries, my boundaries of north and south, east and west. There was an exhilaration in her hands, an exhilaration in the yearning to touch her, to be touched, to not touch and to talk quietly about the little gods of curiosity haunting our thoughts. There was storm and calm in our embracing.

I gave her a floating opal necklace on a Christmas. The man in the jewelry store smooth-talked me into buying a chain that was too short, fitting tight on Megan’s neck. “I’ll exchange it,” I said. “No,” she answered. “I want it.” The opal rested in the pool of her throat.

Our song—
our
song—was “Till Then.”

I think we both knew there was something delicate and fragile between us.

It was not flirtation.

I told her that I loved her, and she returned the words. We knew it was not flirtation.

For years we balanced one another, two people with a delicate and fragile sharing. Then we grew into other personalities (I do not know how, or why) and the balance no longer existed. One night, on the annual hayride sponsored by Emery Methodist Church, the hayride to Wind’s Mill, I told Megan I wanted to date someone else. She buried her face in my chest. Her body tightened against mine, and the moisture of her breathing savagely attacked my equilibrium. I tried to retreat, to retreat back into my circle of isolation and protection, my boundaries of north and south, east and west, my boundaries of Black Pool Swamp and Rakestraw Road. Megan held fiercely to my hand.

*

Years later, I visited Megan three days before she was married. I presented her with a book of poems, a book I had helped compose. They were college-age poems and poor excuses of the Great Emotion, but I had nothing else to offer. We sat in her living room and talked of earlier days of perfect harmony and laughing, racing moods. (“Do you remember…?” “Of course, I do; you were
nervous…” “And you said…”) We had coffee and cake. She was wearing the floating opal necklace I had given her; the opal rested in the pool of her throat. She wanted me to see her wedding dress. It was white and lacy and belonged to a woman I had known only as a young girl. Then, as if by signal, we both became silent. There was nothing more to share. “I should go,” I said. She smiled and nodded, and then she walked with me to my car.

In the awkwardness of that moment, I had a chilling sensation of being lost, of being alone in a place too far away for turning back. I said to Megan, “I will miss you. If you ever need me, find me.” And I meant it.

She tucked her head and nodded. I could see a shudder strike her body. She touched the floating opal with her finger and pressed it against the hollow of her throat, and then she again looked up at me. There were tears in her eyes. Pale green eyes.

She put her hand on my face and pushed the hair back off my forehead, an easy habit recalled from easy times.

“Oh, I bought you so much candy,” she said softly. “Do you remember?”

“Yes,” I told her.

She leaned forward and kissed me. Gently, she kissed me. “I love you,” she whispered.

Then she turned and walked away.

It was one of the rare, clean moments of my living, and it ended the Emery years. Wesley, Freeman, Otis, Paul, R. J., Alvin, Dover, Willie Lee, Baptist, Dupree, Sonny, Wayne, Annie, Granny Woman, Shirley Weems, the fight, the REA, church, Emery Junior High School, the hayride—all of it ended there, there with Megan. Ended with a finality that made me shudder.

From that day, everything was different.

And there are times, so often, when I long to adopt Alvin’s old habit and walk backward—quietly, shyly, as Alvin walked.

On the Big Gully Oath, I would try it. Cross my heart and hope to die.

But I know what Wesley would say. “The problem with walking backward is that you see only where you’ve been.”

AFTERWORD

By William J. Scheick

IN
THE YEAR THE LIGHTS CAME ON,
Terry Kay makes good use of the memories of his youth on a forty-acre farm near Royston, close to Hartwell Lake on the northeastern border of Georgia. His book conveys a vivid impression of the life he knew in the rural South during the late 1940s. But
The
Year the Lights Came On
is not finally autobiography, history, or even a reminiscence. It is a romance, a fictional act of the imagination celebrating the very nature of imagination.

The first clue to this concern with the imagination surfaces in the Author’s Note, which informs the reader that this novel represents an attempt to render faithfully “those sensations of awe and innocence that visited our imaginations—the year the lights came on.” Kay clearly announces that he is not writing a work of mundane facts, but a book of perceptions and impressions, the product of an
imaginative
interaction of mind and place that contains a truth higher than mere facts. Kay’s romance particularly emphasizes two primary acts of imagination: dreaming and remembering.

The very narrative medium of
The
Year the Lights Came On
originates in memory. As in such contemporary American rural portraits as William Inge’s
My Son Is
a Splendid Driver
(1971) and Larry Woiwode’s
Beyond the Bedroom Wall
(1975), Kay’s novel presents memory as a creative power forging patterns of continuity, both real and imaginary, that are like the designs of art. For Kay, memory is as much an act of imagination as is art, but it has for him a somewhat limited capacity. The limitation of this retrospective mode of imagination is emphasized in the closing words of Kay’s novel, where reminiscence is equated to “walk[ing] backward—quietly, shyly.” But as Wesley Wynn, the narrator’s brother, would say, “The problem with walking backward is that you see only where you’ve been.”

In contrast, walking forward, looking forward, anticipating, dreaming—these acts comprise another mode of the creative imagination, the prospective mode poignantly remembered and celebrated in Kay’s romance. The youths of Our Side Gang dream of what progress, specifically the coming of electricity to their homes, will do for their sense of place and honor in their community. They anticipate a kind of golden age in their lives, a personal and social enlightenment surpassing the mere attainment of electric light in their homes. As Colin Wynn, the twelve-year-old
narrator, says, “wondrous changes were taking place…. The REA
was coming, and its thin wires would knit us into the fabric of the huge glittering costume, Earth.” As the word
knit
suggests, Colin looks forward to, dreams of, some ideal pattern of communal integration and identity.

This anticipated pattern is an act of Colin’s and his friends’ imagination, a mental design produced by “a dreamer’s pride” and manifested particularly during “long, dreamy hours” spent in Black Pool Swamp. In their innocent dream of the world, they
are already close-knit, if not to the outside world as they perceive it, at least within their own community. On the first page of the novel, Colin asserts their sense of this bond: “Ain’t nothin’ never comin’ between none of us!” However, the very excess of the too-insistent negatives of this remark spells the doom both of such a naive belief and of the hope that the web of electric wires will connect the Our Side community better to the outside world and
at the same time
preserve their bond to each other.

Colin’s mother predicts the actual result of the coming of electricity. As a mature woman she suffers from what Colin sees as a characteristic problem with adults: the loss of imagination. No longer dreaming the innocent sort of fantasy which youthful imaginations summon, she admonishes her children to
remember
the last rain storm they experience together before their home is connected to the REA wires. “Remember how warm a kerosene lamp can be,” she tells them, because “soon, it’ll be different every time it rains. When we get the REA, we won’t all be bunched up in a corner like this.” She knows that closer ties to the outside world will untie the inside bonding of the Our Side community. And in the Epilogue, Colin admits that the coming of electricity “drove us from huddling” and “weakened our dreams.” This change includes as well the “huddling in the dark corner of a school bus” shared by Colin and Megan Priest, who presumably “were inseparable.” With technological progress as with growing up—“progressing] forward,” Colin says—the imaginative designs of being close-knit fade away with the adult loss of imagination (that is, in Kay’s terms, the prospective imagination).

In Colin’s narrative, one feature of this imaginative pattern which unites people is the perception of boundaries. As Henry David Thoreau indicates in
Walden
(1854), which argues for the
recovery of prospective dreaming, all boundaries are only acts of the imagination, even those borders legally constituted by official land surveys. But whereas Thoreau sees all perimeters as mental constructions—Blakean mind-forged manacles—to be transgressed and transcended, Kay registers an ambivalence about such restrictive bounds. On the one hand, the youthful imagination, looking forward, fails to recognize its role in the generation of perceived borders and seeks only to transgress them. On the other hand, the older, less dynamic imagination, looking backward, acknowledges boundaries as mere mental demarcations and also appreciates what positive factors they provided. That such perceived limits can have at once negative and positive qualities is, in Kay’s novel, one of the vexing complexities of life.

The most obvious boundary in the novel is Highway 17, which separates the Our Side Gang from the Highway 17 Gang. Colin reports that his and his allies’ “perspective was conditioned by boundaries,” and he is correct; but by the end of the novel he also indicates that those perimeters were themselves a matter of Our Side perspective, so that it was imagination governing their perspective all along. At midpoint in his narrative, Colin yokes borders and imagination: “It was a part of the swamp we did not know well, because it was outside our
boundaries,
north of the
imaginary
north line that protected us, isolated us from threat and danger” (emphasis added).

This remark not only correlates borders and imagination, but also points, retrospectively to an un-Thoreauvian positive feature of restrictive perimeters. Whereas the Our Side Gang initially “were very sure boundaries, even invisible boundaries, were meant to keep [them] in,” they become “just as sure those same boundaries were meant to keep outsiders out.” In fact, restrictive bounds
do protect and isolate their inhabitants from threat and danger, to use Colin’s words; they specifically protect the close-knit, boundary-dictated Our Side community. When the REA wires connect Our Side to the outside world, the bonding of that once insulated community dissolves, even as, according Colin’s mother, will the huddling of the Wynn family. As Colin laments in his Epilogue, “The REA also destroyed us. Destroyed something—some intangible security people have always enjoyed in isolation.”