Everyone knew my father. People would wave as we passed down the curbed
streets named for native trees. They had to,
I later came to understand: they’d given him their children for the measured hours
of the school day. Every now and then he’d take me
on his errands, driving a kid home from school, maybe, or dropping the day’s
deposit by the bank, the teller’s voice static-warmed
in the speakers of the drive-through, asking if I wanted a sucker. My father
declined for me, calling her by name, but she would smile
and it would appear anyway—two of them, crossed neatly on the vinyl money
pouch. The rhythms and transactions of the town
during school hours were a mystery I had yet to solve. People greeted and spoke,
and everyone seemed to know what everyone meant.
It was a small town in the western end of Tennessee, so all of this took place longer
ago than it actually did, if any of it took place at all.
We drove a Pontiac that year, low-mileage, lakemist green on beige. We never
bought new. I loved the car but we wouldn’t keep it. “Burns oil,”
he said as though it were a betrayal, and we never drove another one. I was already
being shaped by the needs of the story, by the knowledge
that even a peaceful life must be turned to something tellable just to be
misunderstood. One day after school he had to take a girl home
to one of the old houses over by where the ball fields used to be, its shiplap siding
blasted raw and paintless by neglect, volunteer mimosas
spindling out of the foundation, hardpack and pokeweed for a yard. I had no idea
why she hadn’t ridden the bus with the other poor kids or couldn’t count on
a parent to come do this. A stack of half what I didn’t know would brush the stars.
She was a year or two older than I was. Those kids had learned
to sound out long words and could write them in cursive—another mystery—their
looping letters coming unblocked, and interlacing. In a town
where I would claim to know everybody, I couldn’t have told you her name. When
we stopped in front of her house, I swung around to my knees
and looked at her over the back of the bench seat. “Here,” she said, and held out
her fist toward me, “put this in the ground
and it’ll grow.” She opened her hand and in it was a butterbean, white and small, a
seed for planting. And it was time for planting,
a bitter spring day, edge-eased and wind loosened, the nearness of summer just
something else we were helpless to do the first thing about.