The Year the Lights Came On (5 page)

*

I was very proud of Wesley. He was my brother. MY brother. And that made me special. I strutted beside him and accepted, with him, the knowing exchanges of Otis and Paul and R. J. and Jack and Freeman, the privileged.

It was a serene feeling, being with Wesley, but something battered my mind, some ethereal thing imprisoned somewhere in my memory.

I asked Wesley about it.

“How am I supposed to know what’s going on in somebody else’s head?” Wesley responded.

“I don’t know—I thought…”

“What is it you don’t understand?”

“Well, I never heard Daddy talking about the REA, but I’ve heard of it before. I know I have. I can’t remember why.”

For a moment, Wesley did not answer. Then he said, “It took me some time to figure that out. Maybe we not old enough to remember much about it, but the REA used to be talked about around home. Thomas was working as a lineman for the REA when he was killed.”

The apparition of Thomas rushed into an eerie, distorted vision—a baby’s vision. I was high in the air, dizzy, flying, falling, falling, falling into Thomas’ face.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” replied Wesley. “That was a long time ago.”

*

Thomas would have understood our joy. He would have celebrated our giddiness.

Thomas would have told us marvelous stories about electricity. He would have made it real for us—real with places and dates and names and wildly funny happenings.

Thomas. My older sisters loved to talk of him.

He had a smile and a laugh and eyes with This Morning’s Sun burning blue. He knew how to say hello and make the exuberance of that hello surround you and follow you everywhere you traveled that day. He had a dancer’s step and there was a dancer’s tune playing forever in some mysterious, secret place in his mind. He was a man-child, or a child-man, and he had a way of making that magical confusion seem distinctly his, and his alone. He was restless and a wanderer, quick for joy and quick for pain.

Thomas was First Son, the family’s Other Man, and he had a fierce temper against threat to his brothers and sisters. Once, when some unknowing fool of a Saturday drunk made a too-teasing suggestion to one of my sisters, Thomas jerked the fellow up by his shirt, hoisted him overhead, and tossed him against a kerosene drum in a service station. He was only fourteen, but Olympian in strength and courage. Even my father knew that. There was a time when my father decided to be humorous and he hid in the old Civil War cemetery with a cotton sheet draped over his head, and waited to leap out when his children passed. Everyone ran. Everyone except Thomas. Thomas scooped up a rock and hurled it at my father, hitting him in the shoulder.

But Thomas had always been an apparition to me. A blur.

There was a face that I thought was his. It was the same face in the photo album my mother kept safe in a cedar chest. The face was below me, looking up. Somehow, in slow motion, I have always been falling into his face, feeling the powerful jolt of fingers sinking into my armpits and the swishing sensation of being dropped and pitched, soundless and weightless, into the air. And there was another baby’s vision: lying peacefully still and reaching for a face—the same face that memory tells me is Thomas and the same face that is in the photo album—and not being able to touch it until he bends in obedience to my reach, and my fingers slide over the ticklish softness of his eyebrows. There was never any sound to any of this. I do not remember the laughing and whistling and singing my sisters tell of. I know they have not lied to me; I simply did not hear it. (The smile of that photo-album face was too explosive not to be noisy and wonderfully musical.)

*

J. P. Wynn drove down from Royston with the message of Thomas’ death. J. P. Wynn was a distant cousin and he operated a small grocery, where we had an account that was more an understanding than a legal contract. He did not always charge for jawbreakers. My sisters agree that Mother recognized Cousin J. P. Wynn’s car as it topped the hill near the old Civil War cemetery, recognized its age and color and keep.

Mother said, very suddenly, “Oh, no. Thomas is dead.” That premonition fascinated me. Mother knew. She knew. It was raining that day. Perhaps something in the rain drove its sound waves into her mind in that moment, and Mother knew the incomprehensible truth. She knew.

Thomas had been hitchhiking and a man in a pickup truck offered a lift and there was a crash and Thomas was flung from the cab of the truck and his head struck viciously and he rolled into a ditch and died hours later in a small country hospital, with my oldest sister, Emma, sitting alone beside his bed.

When they tell of Thomas’ death, my sisters remember the painful irony: only a few weeks earlier, one of Thomas’ dearest friends had been killed in an automobile wreck and Thomas had vowed he would never again drive.

He kept his vow.

He did not drive.

He hitchhiked.

On the day he was killed, Thomas was hitchhiking to another assignment with the REA.

I have watched their faces when my sisters talked of Thomas. The faces of women have a quaint way of expanding when they are in memory. (It is a butterfly of the eyes, spreading wide, powdery, transparent wings.) My sisters’ faces have always betrayed them, betrayed their longing for another time in another place.

Thomas would have understood our joy.

He would have known what we knew, what we thought of, whispered about: the Highway 17 Gang had the Georgia Power Company, and it made everything about them different from us. Their houses had indoor bathrooms. Their mothers had electric washing machines for washing clothes, and electric irons for pressing creases in trousers. Their food came steaming from electric stoves—with four eyes and top-and-bottom coil oven. Electric refrigerators kept their milk from spoiling and made ice that snapped out of trays in tea-size cubes. Electric water pumps
sucked water out of the ground and sent it spurting through iron arteries, ready at the touch.

Our Side had draw-bucket wells and iceboxes in smokehouses and wood-burning stoves and big iron wash pots and outdoor toilets.

Because of electricity, our habits were not the habits of the Highway 17 Gang. The way we bathed, cooked, dressed, looked—even the way we voided ourselves—was different.

At least, with our knowledge of the REA, we had solved one mystery: we knew why all the Boy Scout and Emery Methodist Church parties were held at one of the houses on Highway 17. We could not expect one of them to use the facility of
our
outdoor toilets, but it was a carnival experience for one of us to flush a commode and watch the swirling water vanish somewhere below the ground.

Thomas would have understood our joy.

Thomas would have celebrated our giddiness.

5

WE WERE DRUNK with our knowledge of the REA. The Select Seven. Smirking, preening, laughing demonically.

The Highway 17 Gang thought we were batty.

We didn’t care.

We knew about the REA—knew, fully, the impact of not having electricity—and that was
our
advantage. We were not arrogant; we were smug, and in that smugness, we discovered a kind of new joy. To our delight, we realized an additional benefit in our behavior: it confused the Highway 17 Gang. They could not understand our suddenly patronizing attitude, and we extended our dramatics to repulsive extremes.

One day, Freeman even opened the lunchroom door for Dupree, bowing graciously as Dupree passed, so amazed by Freeman’s unexpected kindness that he tripped over the top step.

*

Wesley warned us often about secrecy. He knew we would be regarded as idiots if—in the loose tongue of anger—we began babbling about electricity. To be dynamic, the telling would require
a dynamic moment, and we had vowed on the Big Gully Oath to permit Wesley that decision.

“I mean it, now,” Wesley said. “We waited all our lives for this, and there’s no need to throw it away just because somebody gets mad.”

Freeman assured him none of us would violate our oath, or the consequences would be terrible.

“That goes for you, too, Colin. I don’t care if you are Wesley’s brother,” Freeman emphasized.

“A team of wild mules couldn’t drag nothin’ out of me,” I promised Freeman. “Shoot, there’s nothin’ that could make me talk a word.”

“You better be right,” cautioned Freeman. “You not big enough to make a good grease spot, but I’d give it a try.”

I believed Freeman. Besides, Wesley was my brother. No one could make me betray a promise to Wesley.

*

Megan Priest could not be considered a No One.

Megan Priest was a girl who belonged, by geography, to the Highway 17 Gang.

And Megan Priest was my girl.

At least, I suspected she was my girl. I did not know for certain how those experiences developed. Megan was kind and gentle and there was a warmth about her that only I seemed to feel. She smiled each time I looked at her and her smile would lodge in my breathing and suffocate me for an eye-blink of time. When we played softball, I could sense her eyes following me and if I stole a glance to the place where I thought she would be, she was always there, watching. (Once in a softball game, I was knocked senseless by a foul tip and when I later regained consciousness, I knew I was on a table with an ice pack on my face, and I knew, even with my eyes closed, that Megan was also there. I moved the ice pack and opened my eyes and saw her. She smiled faintly and I pretended great pain. She oohed quietly. In the thrill of her ooh, I rolled off the table and almost killed myself.)

Megan had been in my mind for a year. I did not care if she belonged to one society and I belonged to another; it was unspoken, but Megan was special to me and I longed for the abstract language of her presence—even if I could never, ever, for all eternity and the rest of my life, permit anyone to know of my feeling for her.

I did not know Megan was in the room that day, two weeks into our silent celebration of the REA. It was lunchtime and everyone was recessed to the invitation of a blazing outside. Because the little kids were using the softball field for a game of dodgeball, I had sneaked back into Mrs. Simmons’ room to complete a drawing I had promised. Mrs. Simmons believed I had artistic ability and she carefully, quietly, begged me to
practice, baiting her encouragement with delicate overpraise. The thought of scorn for drawing bees and horses and dogs at recess haunted me and I perfected excuses for returning early to my desk. Everyone—including Wesley—believed the lies about studying for spelling. The only person who must have known the truth was Megan. She said, from across the room that day, “What’re you drawing?”

Her voice frightened and excited me and the two emotions collided and fell in a clumsy heap in my stomach. I flipped the paper and covered it with a book.

“Drawin’? Who’s drawin’? I’m not drawin’ nothing,” I snapped.

“Yes, you are. You’re always drawing.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Oh, I’ve seen some. I know. Mrs. Simmons showed me some.”

“You better not tell.”

“What’ll you do? What’ll you do if I tell?”

“Well—you’d better not. That’s all.”

Megan crossed the room hesitantly, stopped and moved toward the blackboard and silently read a poster about tooth decay. The Prichard twins, Ed and Ted, had drawn the poster. The Prichard twins had six teeth between them.

“Want a Three Musketeers?” Megan mumbled.

“Huh?”

“A Three Musketeers. I got one and I don’t want it. It’ll just melt.” She turned to face me, holding the candy. It was a beautiful sight, Megan holding a Three Musketeers.

“Naw…”

“I saw you out there lookin’ at the candy. You got a nickel?”

It was a painful question. Megan knew I didn’t have a nickel.

“I don’t want no candy,” I said resentfully.

“I’m just going to throw it away…”

“That’s crazy. If you gonna throw it away, I’ll eat it.”

“I told you I don’t want it.”

“Well, give it here, but don’t tell nobody you gave it to me.”

“I won’t,” she said quickly. “Nobody’s business.”

Megan eased away from the blackboard, cautiously looking toward the door and planning what she would do if someone walked in. She pretended to control the unquestionable treason of approaching me, but her hand was quivering and I knew her boldness had weakened.

“Aw, just throw it,” I said.

She stopped abruptly and looked straight into my eyes. “No. No. It—might get mashed up.” Her eyes were pale green, her hair as blond as a full moon.

“Well, it won’t make no difference,” I replied. “Gets mashed up when you eat it.”

“It was my nickel,” she declared. Then she moved five steps and placed the Three Musketeers in my hand. Her fingernail brushed the length of my thumb and I dropped the candy. She stood frozen, staring at me.

“Uh—I’m sorry,” I muttered, scooping the candy off the floor.

Megan was rigid, not breathing.

“Is it—squashed?” she asked.

“Uh—naw.”

“Good.”

She turned on her heel and swiftly crossed the room. Her body sagged and she breathed deeply.