YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD me,” Livy said. She was angry, but not at him. “You should have told your mama.”
They were sitting in the dirt and leaves in “the woods,” which was actually a stand of trees on the far side of the park. It was the first really hot Saturday in spring, and they’d been swimming with their friends in “the lake,” which was actually a fairly deep and wide enough swelling in the banks of the Obion River to look like a lake to them. They’d needed to talk in private but couldn’t spare the time to go all the way to their secret place.
It was 1959, one of the few specific years he’d never forget. According to Livy, Hawaii had become the fiftieth state and NASA had retrieved two live monkeys from space—after they shot them out there, of course. Castro was taking over Cuba, steelworkers were striking, Lunik II had hit the moon.
But none of that mattered to Brian. None of it changed anything in his life. In 1959 he was nine years old, and in the space of, well, it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes—though when it was happening it seemed like a whole lot longer—his life had become a nightmare.
His dad was sadder than ever. Never happy like he used to be, not even for short periods of time. Sometimes his parents would cry together. It was frightening. Brian didn’t know what to do but tell Livy.
Of course, her seeing the long red belt welts on his back hadn’t left him with much of a choice.
“You’d better tell my mama then. She’ll tell my daddy, and he’ll go over and punch your dad in the nose.”
“No.”
“Yes. You can’t swim with your shirt on all summer. And it doesn’t matter if you made Beth cry, you’re not a bad boy. Not that bad. Mama says you’re the nicest boy she’s ever met. She said she loves you like one of her own. She told Mrs. Costello that.”
“I made him too mad. Usually he just grabs my arm or my neck and yells at me. Once in a while he slaps me. But he never hit me that hard before.” Except for that one time when he’d gotten the black eye and they’d told his mother it was an accident and the other time when he’d been pushed to the ground and kicked in the ribs… did kicking count?
“My daddy will break both his arms and tie his legs into knots and pull his ears clean off his head.”
Livy truly had a picturesque way with words.
“Promise me you won’t tell,” he said, willing to withstand anything but his mother’s tears. “He didn’t mean to do it. He said he was sorry.”
Livy’s face took on a stubborn expression he knew all too well. He reached out and grabbed her upper arm, squeezing hard.
“Promise me.” She shook her head, and he squeezed harder, until she whimpered with pain. “Promise me, Livy.”
“I promise.”
“Let me see your fingers.” She sometimes crossed them to nullify her words. And her eyes. “Look at me.”
Pools of tears clouded her dark eyes.
“I’m sorry, Livy,” he said, dropping her arm immediately, feeling lower than slug slime. But then he saw that the tears weren’t for the pain he’d inflicted on her; they were for him. Sorrowful tears. Sympathetic tears. “Telling will only make it worse. He might even do it again.”
“You have to do something, Brian. You should see your back. Doesn’t it hurt? Take Beth and your mama and run away.”
“Beth can’t run fast. He’d catch us.”
“Not if you take the car.”
“He’d find us.”
She thought a moment. “I wish I knew where Chewy lived. You could go there. Chewy would hide you.”
They both missed Chewy. Wednesdays just weren’t the same without him. He’d turned eighteen over the Christmas holidays and had graduated from high school a few weeks earlier. When he’d passed them the last library book, they found a letter in it addressed to “My Librarians.”
This is the last book I’ll ask you to borrow for me. I’m going to college. I want to be a great historian like Carter Woodson. Maybe I’ll teach and share what I know. That seems right, doesn’t it? You sharing your books with me, me sharing what I learned from them. It feels right. You’ve helped me to feed the hunger I have for knowledge, and for that I will be eternally grateful. Goodbye. Your friend, Chewy.
They’d gone immediately to Chewy’s mother, who cleaned house for the Tuckers. They owned Tucker’s Drugstore and Soda Fountain on Main Street—real nice people, but they went to church on Saturdays and had to go all the way to Union City because they were Jews. Anyway, it turned out that Mrs. Lewis had directed her son to a small state college in Colorado to further his education. She told them there weren’t many blacks in Colorado, and that people in the West didn’t worry so much about the color of someone else’s skin. They checked with her periodically after that, asking after Chewy. Sometimes, if she’d gotten a letter from him, she made them lemonade and read parts of it to them.
Colorado, described by Chewy, was big and wide and open, and the mountains there were nothing like anything he’d seen before. He sounded lonely but determined to be educated. He said there was power in education.
“It wouldn’t matter. Even if we could find Chewy in Colorado,” Brian said, trying to picture Chewy’s “better place” in his mind. “My dad would find us wherever we went.”
“Not if you went to Ohio.”
“Where’s Ohio?”
“That’s where my granddad’s farm is. It takes forever to get there. Daddy has a road map.”
Their experience with quick getaways was pretty much limited to what they saw on The Rifleman and Maverick—and hardly anyone left his horse in front of the bank anymore.
Still, it was a plan. All afternoon. The waiting for midnight. Sneaking out of the house. Livy with her father’s map and some food. Brian with Beth and his mother and their clothes and toys, whatever money was in the house and the keys to the car. They had it all worked out and they were almost positive it would work… until they slammed into Livy’s mother’s kitchen, hot and thirsty and starving for cookies.
They weren’t there five minutes before Mrs. Hubbard spotted the bruises on Livy’s arm. And she wouldn’t buy the falling down explanation. She said the pattern of the bruises wasn’t right. Who knew bruises had a pattern? The closer she came to the truth, the more often her questioning gaze came to rest on Brian and the more guilty he felt.
Livy tried to defend him.
“He was a terrible looking man, Mama. A little like Brian’s daddy, but mean. He was madder than he’s ever been before… and he’d had some beer, we could smell it from his mouth. First, he was just yellin’ at us cause we were throwin’ rocks off the footbridge. Old Miss Bledsoe was there, she saw us. But she was gone by the time the terrible looking man came. And he was so mad and so full of beer that he scared me. I just stood there. But Brian was brave. He grabbed me by the arm, here… hard… real hard and started pulling me away from the man and then he threw rocks at the man, because we had them there on the bridge with us. One went right through his head and another one hit him in the heart and then the man just ran away.”
In the summer of 1959, Brian did go to Ohio. With Livy. To visit her granddad. The driving time was closer to twelve hours than to forever.
You see, Livy was asked to repeat her fabulous story for her father—she embellished a little at the end, until it sounded as if Brian could pitch better than Bob Turley—and then things began to happen.
After the Hubbards spoke with Livy alone, they wouldn’t let Brian go home. They called his mother and got permission for him to sleep on the floor in Livy’s room. It was their first sleep-over. Mr. Hubbard left right after supper, he had “business to attend to.” Mrs. Hubbard made popcorn and let them watch The Twilight Zone with her. She hugged Brian twice, really gently, as if she thought he might break—or she might hurt him—and kissed him on the cheek once, for no good reason that he knew of.
Thinking back, that was probably why he started crying in the middle of the night and why, when Mrs. Hubbard came in to comfort him, he felt so compelled to tell her the truth about Livy’s arm. Wrapped in her motherly embrace on the floor, crying softly and whispering in the dark as Livy slept, that was the night he decided forgiveness was a gift.
He spent most of the next day indoors at Livy’s house. Mr. Hubbard brought Beth over in the afternoon. She sat on Mrs. Hubbard’s lap the whole time, rocking and sucking her thumb. His mother came for them after supper.
They sat on the Hubbards’ couch together, Livy ignoring her parents’ hints to leave the room. His mother said she was sorry, and she cried. She told Brian he was a good boy. The best boy in the whole world. He wasn’t a bad boy. He was a good boy who was sometimes a little naughty and needed to be spanked. Then she explained that there was a huge difference between spanking a sometimes naughty boy and beating him. She said it was wrong for anyone to beat any child, but it was especially wrong to hurt someone as good as Brian.
“Oh, he’s not so good as you think,” Livy said, not wanting the situation to get out of control, always willing to put things in the proper perspective. “Him and Jimmy Lowe have spitting contests at school. Show her how far you can spit, Brian.”
That was pretty much the end of Brian’s bruises. The rest he came by honestly and he didn’t have to lie about them.
Later, he pieced together the facts of that night. His mother had asked his stepfather to leave when Mr. Hubbard went over to their house that night after supper and told her what her husband had done to Brian while she was out of the house. His stepfather had refused to leave and became violent. But instead of having him arrested, Mr. Hubbard arranged to get him into a special hospital where the doctors could help him recover from his sadness.
When school let out for the summer, Mr. Hubbard took Brian and Livy to spend the summer on his father’s farm.
“It was just a maybe,” he said.
“Maybe a divorce? She said that?”
“Yeah. Maybe if my dad doesn’t get better, maybe she’ll have to get a divorce. Maybe,” he said. He wasn’t sure what a divorce was, but it didn’t sound good. He liked that it was only a maybe thing. “And I’m not supposed to worry about it.”
“Well, it just means she won’t have a husband anymore is all,” Livy said, throwing handfuls of hay into the air above them, letting it snow down on them as they lay in the sweet-smelling grass. Granddad Hubbard had the biggest barn ever made. Huge. Livy’s voice seemed to float on the air for miles. “She’ll be like poor Debbie, sad and alone, with Eddie loving another woman.” He turned in the hay to look at her. Who? “Only she’ll have to be careful. She has to stay away from men from now on. Mama says divorced women have a hard time of it, especially with men. And she can’t talk to married men or everyone will hate her like they do Elizabeth Taylor. You know, because of Debbie and Eddie?”
Did his mother know a Debbie and Eddie?
“Nobody hated her when my real dad died. Nobody hated her when she got married again.”
“That’s different,” she said, rolling over onto her stomach and wiggling over to the edge of the loft to look down at the barn below. “When the husband dies you can’t help it, but if you divorce him they think you’re a bad person.”
“Why?” His mother wasn’t a bad person. She was already sad and alone so he figured a divorce wouldn’t be that much different. But he didn’t want people to hate her. She was a good mom. “Why would they think that?”
“I don’t know. Mama says that once, a long time ago, you couldn’t get divorced, no matter how terrible your husband was. And if you just left him no one would ever talk to you again, even if you followed all the rules. So, it’s getting better to be divorced. And if you have enough money, Mama says you can change husbands or wives as often as you change clothes. Like the movie stars do. I’m hungry, are you?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him for a moment, frowning and thinking.
“Boys without a daddy have a hard time, too. You can borrow my daddy whenever you need to.” He didn’t know what to say. “I already asked him. He said it was okay.”
In the end he simply nodded, accepting things as they were. As he always did. He was confident that his mother already knew about being divorced and the rules that went along with it. She was a teacher; she’d know to be careful.
The rest of that summer, like most of his youth, evaporated into that cloud in his mind that was his memory. There wasn’t much to it before meeting Livy, and what shape and form it took after that always had her image in it. She was a constant in his life. Like Beth and his mother and school and church and day and night and summer and winter. She defined the passage of time for him. Clarified it. When she wasn’t with him, time was very, very, very slow. And when she was, she kept him so involved with living his life, challenging him, testing him, defying him, taxing him, amusing and amazing him that whole weeks, months, and years slipped away unnoticed.
Well, maybe not totally unnoticed. Livy was ever a fountain of information.
In the next couple of years lasers, the Lucy-Desi divorce, and the Peace Corps were discussed ad nauseam as he recalled, but for him they were simply words. Words that Livy and television newscasters used. After all, what did any of that have to do with him? He thought building a wall through the middle of Berlin, Germany, to keep the communists away from the rest of the world was… not going to work. But as long as no one was planning to build another one through the middle of Tolford, Tennessee, who cared? Bomb shelters, on the other hand, were a nifty idea—hidden, underground rooms with food in them—though Cuba on a map looked awfully small and way too far away from Tolford to seem like much of a threat. He didn’t care what kind of tricks Livy said those ICBMs could do; Cuba bombing the whole United States would be like him picking a fight with Fred Springer, an eighth grader the size of Livy’s Dad’s garage—not very likely. He was going on ten years old and couldn’t remember the capital of Argentina for more than a second and a half, but Clarabell’s “Goodnight, kids” on television was a sight he’d never forget.
Periodically, Troy Donahue, Fabian, and dreamy Dr. Kildare would hit Livy’s headlines, and he could at least picture them in his mind. And, of course, Kennedy. Every other sentence had Kennedy in it. And Nix’n became her favorite four-letter word.
This was about the time he first realized that Livy, not he, was the oddity in knowing not only who these people were, but what they were selling as well. She had a special interest in the world that few of their classmates shared. In fact, he was beginning to suspect that most everyone but Livy was growing up in the same innocent fog he was.
Be that as it may, if Livy was correct, Kennedy was going to take care of everything. Right all the wrongs, solve all the problems. Put an end to the increasing tension between whites and blacks, integrate everything, and guarantee basic civil rights to everyone. He was also going to take care of the hateful communists—show them up in the space race and put an end to their aggressive attempts to take over the world. According to Livy, Saint John Kennedy was going to do it all.
But before the end of 1960, after Thanksgiving but before Christmas sometime, Brian attended his second funeral in six years. It was cold, and the wind was blowing. His mother was a widow again and he’d lost another dad. But this time there was no American flag to make them stand proud and tall for a hero of war. No guns to hurt their ears and send chills up their spines. It started to rain. A dreary, oppressive sense of waste and guilt mingled with the sadness and the disbelief.
Words like depression, hopelessness, suicide, and hanging floated out of adult conversations and settled into Brian’s heart like hot smoldering coals. He had a vague understanding of these words, knew they didn’t add up to anything pleasant. They made him feel… small. Inside. How big a sadness did someone have to have to not want to live anymore? That his dad had been so unhappy, as ill with it as his mother had explained to him, made him feel… unkind in the worst of ways. Cruel. Heartless.
He knew wishing someone dead didn’t make it so. But what about patience and understanding? If he’d wanted to, Brian could have found a way to make his dad happy. He liked fishing and baseball; they could have done more of that. He’d liked Red Skelton and Perry Mason. Brian could have woke him up when those programs came on. He could have grumbled less and told more jokes. He could have done something.
Livy had known all along how terrible it was to be sad.
Brian should have done something.
It became a part of all her summers to visit her Granddad in Ohio. Her parents thought it was important for her to know her father’s father and she, for the most part, enjoyed going.
However, once she’d spent a summer with Brian on the farm, she let it be known how lonely and, well, frankly, dull it was with only her granddad to talk to. There was no one her own age around to play with, and she was always getting in Granddad’s way, and…
They didn’t have to ask Brian’s mother twice to let him spend a whole month during the summer on a farm in Ohio.
Her Granddad Hubbard was a big, tall, heavyset man with snow-white hair and an equally white handlebar mustache. His voice carried across the Ohio plains like a sonic boom. He called her Sweet Pea, and he called Brian Hellboy.
“Hell, boy, I was pickin’ up bales of hay twice that size when I was half your age.”
“Hell, boy, can’t you move any faster than that?”
“Hell, boy, haven’t you ever seen bull balls before? Those are nothin’. You ought to see mine!”
“Hell, boy, when I was your age we ate dust for dinner. Breakfast and supper, too.”
“Hell, boy, I’ve never seen anyone who could make a picture look as real as you do. You got a gift.”
“Hell, boy, I think you’ve grown a yard and a half since you got here. Your mother won’t recognize you.”
Brian told her over and over that he thought Granddad Hubbard was just about the coolest old man he’d ever met.
“Okay, now listen to this,” she said. She was sitting on a green metal lawn chair in the shade of the elm tree beside her granddad’s driveway. Brian was in the sun, dripping sweat, being manly. “Brian, listen.”
“I’m listening. I’m listening,” he said, tired and testy, his arms aching as he practiced his hoop shots.
“Dear President Kennedy: My name is Olivia Hubbard and I am writing again to tell you that I think bomb shelters are a very good idea.” She looked up to make sure he was listening. “We practice civil defense in our town. My granddad’s name is Ernest B. Hubbard. He lives in Ohio. He says if Ohio gets bombed and he ends up with atomic corn in his fields, he would just as soon die in the bombing. He says he would not be able to lift the atomic corn anyway. I have been wondering how big atomic corn will get and what will happen to my granddad’s cows. Sincerely, Olivia Hubbard. P.S. Please tell Mrs. Kennedy that my mama likes her hats. How does that sound?”
“Sounds fine.” He was getting a little short of air.
“Fine? Just fine? What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothin’.” He went through the motions again. He was starting to look a little pale. “Has he ever answered any of your letters?”
“The President is a busy man. He can’t answer everyone’s letters. That’s why I hardly ever ask questions. I just tell him what I think, so he knows, and then he doesn’t have to worry about answering them.”
“I see.”
“What do you mean, you see? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Gee whiz, Livy. It means I see. I understand. It makes sense to me,” he said, too tired to fight with her, too tired to do more than fall on the grass in the shade at her feet. “Your granddad’s a maniac.”
“He likes you.” She smiled down at him. “You remind him of my daddy.”
“Was your dad a sissy? Did he make him practice basketball this hard?”
“He’s not making you practice. You’re making yourself practice. And he didn’t say you were a sissy. You did.”
“He said I ought to develop my interest in sports. Pick one and get good at it. So people wouldn’t think I’m so different.”
“He’s only trying to help you.”
“Well, what’s wrong with drawing pictures? I’m good at that already.”
“Think about it. You’re a boy who likes to draw pictures, and your best friend is a girl. You know anybody else like that?”
“No.”
“Besides, I thought you liked basketball.”
“I do.”
“Then what are you grumping about?”
“I just don’t want to be a sissy.”