But Willalee was not entirely helpless, and he gave back about as good as he got. He once took a crabapple and cut the core out of it, put some cow plop down in the bottom of the hole, and then covered it over all around the top with some blackberry jam his mama had canned.
“Jam in a apple?” I said.
“Bes thing you ever put in your mouth,” he said.
My brother, who had seen him fix the apple, stood there and watched him offer it to me, did in fact encourage me to take it.
“Had one myself,” he said. “That thing is some gooooood eatin.”
“I ain’t had nair one with jam in it,” I said.
“Take you a great big bite,” said Willalee.
I not only took a great big bite, I took two great big bites, getting right down to the bottom. Anybody else would have known what he was eating after the first bite. It took me two. Even then, I did not so much taste it as I smelled it.
“I believe this thing is ruint,” I said.
“Nawwwww,” said Willalee.
“Nawwwww,” said my brother.
“It smells just like . . . like. . . .” And then I knew what he had fed me.
Willalee was laughing when he should have been running. I got him around the neck and we both went into the dust, where we wallowed around for a while before my brother got tired of watching it and pulled us apart. No matter what we did to one another, though, Willalee and I never stayed angry at each other for more than an hour or two, and I always felt welcome at his family’s house. Whatever I am, they had a large part in making. More, I am convinced Willalee’s grandma, Auntie, made the best part of me. She was thin and brittle with age, and her white hair rode her fleshless face like a cap. From daylight to dark she kept a thick cud of snuff working in her caving, toothless mouth, and she was expert at sending streams of brown spit great distances into tin cans.
The inside of their tiny house was dark on the brightest day and smelled always of ashes, even in the summer. Auntie did not like much light inside the house, so most of the time she kept the curtains drawn, curtains she had made from fertilizer sacks and decorated with bits of colored cloth. Bright light was for the outside, she said, and shade—the more the better—was for the inside.
I ate with them often, as often as mama would let me, and the best thing I ever got from their table was possum, which we never got at home because mama would not cook it. She said she knew it would taste like a wet dog smells. But it did not. Auntie could cook it in a way that would break your heart. Willalee and I would stand about in her dark, ash-smelling little kitchen and watch her prepare it. She would scald and scrape it just like you would scald and scrape a hog, gut it, remove the eyes, which she always carefully set aside in a shallow dish. The head, except for the eyes, would be left intact. After she parboiled it an hour and a half, she would take out the teeth, stuff the little body with sweet potatoes, and then bake the whole thing in the oven for two hours.
The reason mama would never cook a possum, of course, was because a possum is just like a buzzard. It will eat anything that is dead. The longer dead the better. It was not unusual to come across a cow that had been dead in the woods for three or four days and see a possum squeezing out of the swollen body after having eaten a bellyful of rotten flesh. But it never occurred to me to think of that when we all sat down to the table and waited for Willalee’s daddy to say the only grace he ever said: “Thank the Lord for this food.”
The first possum I ever shared with them was in that first summer in my memory of myself, and with the possum we had fresh sliced tomatoes and steamed okra—as well as fried okra—and corn on the cob, butter beans, fried pork, and biscuits made out of flour and water and lard.
Because I was company, Auntie gave me the best piece: the head. Which had a surprising amount of meat on it and in it. I ate around on the face for a while, gnawing it down to the cheekbones, then ate the tongue, and finally went into the skull cavity for the brains, which Auntie had gone to some pains to explain was the best part of the piece.
After we finished the possum, Willalee and Lottie Mae and I stayed at the table sopping cane syrup with biscuits. Will and Katie had gone out on the front porch to rest, and we were left alone with Auntie, who was already working over the table, taking plates to the tin tub where she would wash them, and putting whatever food had been left over into the screen-wire safe.
Finally, she came to stand beside where I sat at the table. “Come on now, boy,” she said, “an ole Auntie’ll show you.”
“Show me what?” I said.
She was holding the little shallow saucer with the possum’s eyes in it. The eyes were clouded in a pink pool of diluted blood. They rolled on the saucer as I watched.
“Nem mind,” she said. “Come on.”
We followed her out the back door into the yard. We didn’t go but a step or two before she squatted down and dug a hole. The rear of the house was almost covered with stretched and nailed hides of squirrels and rabbits and coons and even a fox which Willalee’s daddy had trapped. I would find out later that Auntie had tanned the hides by rubbing the animals’ hides on the flesh side with their own brains. It caused the hair to fall out of the hide and left it soft and pliable.
“You eat a possum, you bare its eyes,” she said, still squatting beside the little hole she had dug.
I motioned toward Sam where he stood at my heels. “You gone bury it,” I said, “you better bury it deeper’n that. Don’t he’ll dig it up. You might as well go on and give it to’m now.”
“Won’t dig up no possum’s eyes,” she said. “Sam’s got good sense.”
Sam did not, either.
“Know how come you got to barum?” she said.
“How come?” I said.
“Possums eat whatall’s dead,” she said. Her old, cracked voice had gone suddenly deep and husky. “You gone die too, boy.”
“Yes,” I said, stunned.
“You be dead an in the ground, but you eat this possum an he gone come lookin for you. He ain’t ever gone stop lookin for you.”
I could not now speak. I watched as she carefully took the two little clouded eyes out of the dish and placed them in the hole, arranging them so they were looking straight up toward the cloudless summer sky. They seemed to watch me where I was.
Auntie smiled, showing her snuff-colored gums. “You ain’t got to think on it, boy. See, we done put them eyes looking up. But you gone be down. Ain’t never gone git you. Possum be looking for you up, an you gone be six big feets under the ground. You gone allus be all right, you put the eyes lookin up.”
Auntie made me believe we live in a discoverable world, but that most of what we discover is an unfathomable mystery that we can name—even defend against—but never understand.
My fifth birthday had come and gone, and it was the middle of the summer, 1940, hot and dry and sticky, the air around the table thick with the droning of house flies. At supper that night neither my brother nor I had to ask where daddy was. There was always, when he had gone for whiskey, a tension in the house that you could breathe in with the air and feel on the surface of your skin, and more than that, there was that awful look on mama’s face. I suppose the same look was on our faces, too, worried as we all were, not knowing what the night would bring, not knowing if it would be this night or the next night, or the morning following the second night, when he would come home after a drunk, bloodied, his clothes stinking with whiskey sweat.
We sat at the supper table, eating quietly, nobody saying a word, and when we finished, my brother and I went just as quietly into the fireroom and sat in ladder-back chairs, staring into the cold hearthstone where there had been no fire for two months. By the time mama came in to sit with us we had already brought in the foot tub full of water. The only thing we seemed to wash for long periods of time on the farm was our face and hands at the water shelf on the back porch and our feet in front of the hearthstone.
That night as we sat silently together, everybody thinking of daddy, thinking of where he was and how he might come home, I—for reasons which I’ll never know—turned to mama and said: “I want to preach.”
She immediately understood that I didn’t mean that I wanted to be a preacher or to become a preacher, but rather that I wanted to preach right then. She said: “Well, son, if you want to preach, just get up there and preach to us.”
She was always open and direct with us, always kind and loving, even though she was always strict. She believed that if a child did something he knew was wrong, had been told was wrong, he had to be whipped. And she did throughout my childhood throw some pretty good whippings on my brother and me. But she never whipped us when we did not know that we deserved it and, more, when we did not expect it.
Mama and my brother sat there in front of the cold fireplace while I got up and turned my ladder-back chair over and got the crocheted doily off the pedal-driven Singer sewing machine to cover the chair with. The chair covered with the doily made a fine altar from which to preach. I took hold of it with both hands, looked out at them, and started my sermon.
I said: “We all of us made out of dirt. God took Him up some dirt and put it in his hands and rolled it around and then he spit in the dirt and roll it some more and out of that dirt and God spit, he made you and me, all of us.”
That is the way my preaching began. I don’t remember how it ended, but I know it went on for a long time and it was made pretty much out of what I had heard in church, what I had heard the preacher say about hell and God and heaven and damnation and the sorry state of the human condition. Hell was at the center of any sermon I had ever heard in Bacon County. In all the churches, you smelled the brimstone and the sulfur and you felt the fire and you were made to know that because of what you had done in your life, you were doomed forever. Unless somehow, somewhere, you were touched by the action of mercy and the Grace of God. But you could not, you must not, count on the Grace of God. It probably would not come to you because you were too sorry.
I was exhausted by the time it was over, and I was asleep the moment my head touched the pillow. But I heard the pickup truck when it came in. And I heard daddy come through the front gate, the plow points banging and his own drunk-heavy feet on the steps and the front door slamming, and then I heard, as I already knew I would, querulous voices as mama and daddy confronted each other there beyond the thin wall. Finally, their voices raised to shouts and even screams, but since there was nothing breaking, no pots hitting the wall, no glass splattering on the floor, no furniture turning over, I could stand lying in my bed if I concentrated on hell and damnation. This was nothing compared to the eternal fires of hell that God might someday demand that I endure. With my whole self firmly immersed in hell, I could usually go back to sleep.
I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. An enormous and brilliant moon shone over the cotton field where I was standing, still in my gown. It was not a dream and I knew immediately that it was not a dream. I was where I thought I was, and I had come here by walking in my sleep. I came awake that night the way I always have when I’ve gotten up in my sleep and walked. Terrified. Terrified almost beyond terror because it had no name and was sourceless. My heart was pounding, and my gown was soaked with sweat and sticking to my freezing skin. My mouth was full of the taste of blood where I’d chewed my lips.
The cotton bolls were open all about me. As far as I could see, all the way to the dark wall of trees surrounding the field, was a white sheet of cotton, brilliant and undulating under the heavy moon. I stood there for a long time, unable to move. Off there to the left was the enormous oak tree that I had slept under that morning, it, too, brilliant in the moon, and behind the tree was the house, dark in its own shadow. I did not know what to do. I did not cry and I did not scream. I did not think that I could go back there to the dark house where my family slept. I somehow knew they would not receive me. I knew that I was guilty of something neither man nor God could forgive. But it would always be so when I walked in my sleep.
I stood utterly still and waited because I knew if I waited long enough, the terror would find a source and a name. Once it had a name, no matter how awful, I would be able to live with it. I could go back home.
Gradually, the terror shapes itself into a school bus. I can see it plainly. It is full of children. Stopped by the side of a road. I am in the ditch by the side of the road. They do not see me. It is broad daylight and many of the children are looking right at me. But they don’t—they can’t—see me. I have something in my hand. I do not know what it is. I cannot tell what it is. I come slowly out of the ditch and touch the school bus with the thing in my hand. The moment contact is made, the whole bus disintegrates in my eyes. There is no explosion, no sound at all. The disintegration is silent as sleep. When I can see again, the bus is on its back, broken children hang from open windows, and some—the ones toward the back—are drenched in gas from the ruptured tank and they are frying, noiselessly frying. I can smell them frying. And I am terrified at the probable consequences that will follow what I have done, but I am glad I have done it.
Now I can go home, and I start off in a dead run between the rows of cotton toward the dark house beyond the oak tree.
When I got to the door, I opened it quietly and went down the hall to the little room where I knew daddy was sleeping on a pallet. It was where he often had to sleep when he came in drunk and out of control and mama would not let him into their room. He lay, still dressed, curled on the quilt spread across the floor under an open window through which bright moonlight fell. I sat down beside him and touched his face, traced the thick scar of perfect teeth on his flat high cheekbone. The air in the room was heavy with the sweet smell of bourbon whiskey. Sweat stood on his forehead and darkly stained his shirt.
“Daddy,” I said. He made a small noise deep in his chest, and his eyes opened. “Daddy, I’m scared.”
He pushed himself onto one elbow and put an arm around me and drew me against him. I could feel the bristle of his beard on my neck. I trembled and tried not to cry.
“Sho now,” he whispered against my ear. “Everybody’s scared now and then.”
“I was in the cotton field,” I said. “Out there.”
He turned his head, and we both looked through the window at the flat white field of cotton shining under the moon.
“You was dreaming, boy,” he said. “But you all right now.”
“I woke up out there.” Now I was crying, not making any noise, but unable to keep the tears from streaming down my face. I pushed my bare feet into the moonlight. “Look,” I said. My feet and the hem of my gown were gray with the dust of the field.
He drew back and looked into my eyes, smiling. “You walked in your sleep. It ain’t nothing to worry about. You probably got it from me. I’as bad to walk in my sleep when I was a boy.”
The tears eased back. “You was?” I said.
“Done it a lot,” he said. “Don’t mean nothing.”
I don’t know if he was telling the truth. But hearing him say it was something that he had done and that I might have got it from him took my fear away.
“You lie down here on the pallet with your ole daddy and go to sleep. Me an you is all right. We both all right.”
I lay down with my head on his thick arm, wrapped in the warm, sweet smell of whiskey and sweat, and was immediately asleep.
Willalee’s daddy did not drink and almost never left the farm. In fantasy I often thought of Willalee as my brother, thought of his family as my family. His daddy was always there, and everybody in the family had a place and purpose, all of them integrated into the business of making a living in a way that my family was not. My own daddy was easy to love, but he was often drunk and often gone, Willalee’s daddy was easy to love, too, because everywhere about the farm he was there, always steady, never raising his voice, making you feel good to be with him. He never told anybody to do anything. He asked for your help in a way that made you feel as though you were helping him out of a tight spot he could not get out of by himself.
“Reckon you boys could bring Sam and help me doctor a cow?”
Willalee’s daddy had stopped us in the lane between the house and the mule lot. We were in a little two-wheeled buggy pulled by Old Black Bill, the boss goat of the herd we kept. Willalee sat beside me holding two blackbirds we had just taken out of a trap down behind the field.
“Harry got to put up these ’er buds,” said Willalee.
“That be fine,” Will said. “I be in the lot.”
Willalee and I had been down to my bird trap that Saturday afternoon in late July and found the two blackbirds in it. Sometimes the trap would take a whole covey of quail, as many as thirteen or fourteen birds at one time. My Grandma Hazelton taught me how to make it out of tobacco sticks. Those are the sticks, about six feet long and one inch square, that the tobacco is strung on to be hung in the barn and cooked. To make the trap you lay the sticks down, one on top of another with the ends overlapping like the walls of a log cabin. When the four sides of the trap are about eighteen or twenty inches high, you cover it straight across the top, leaving about an inch between the sticks. Now you’ve got a cage six feet square that admits the sun well enough for it to be nearly as light inside as it is outside. For good reason. Birds won’t enter a dark trap.
You dig a hole—a rather large hole—under one side of the square of tobacco sticks. Sprinkle meal or broken corn around the front of the trap, some more down in the hole you’ve dug under one side, and still more inside the trap itself. Birds will come along, eat a little outside, scratch and feed into the hole, and finally go up into the trap where most of the food has been placed. When they get ready to leave, they will never once think of the hole right there at their feet. They could walk out the same way they came in, but when they get ready to go, their only thought is flight.
It always took some doing to get the birds out of the trap, and that morning was no exception. You had to be really careful when you were working with a trap that big or your birds would get away. After a half hour of false starts, we finally got the two blackbirds out and we were taking them up to the house to turn them loose in the little room at the back of the house mama had given over to my brother and me. The room had always been empty except for a couple of broken chairs and half a bedstead, so my brother and I asked her one day if we could have it to keep birds in, and to our complete amazement, she said yes.
Birds, particularly wild birds, are a little crazy when you turn them loose in a room. But if there are other birds already resting quietly in the room, they don’t fly blindly about, bashing into walls and windows. The floor was ankle deep in straw and leaves and twigs and moss for the birds to build nests with in the dead, branching limbs I had nailed around the room. A pair of redbirds I caught built a nest, laid eggs, and hatched them out.
After we turned the blackbirds loose, I was about to put down meal and corn and peas and fresh water when I saw that my brother had already done it. We never had gotten the ownership of the room straight. He said it was his because he took care of the birds. I said it was mine because I took care of the birds. Mama said it belonged to us both and that neither one of us took care of the birds.
When we had gotten rid of the birds, Willalee and I went back out to help Will with the cow that had screwworms. He had her penned behind the corncrib and he was waiting for us there, squatting on his heels in the shade of the fence, watching the cow. She was so poor you could hang your hat on her hipbone. Her lifeless hide cleaved to her ribs and hung in folds down to her widened, shriveled udder which had been torn on one side and was now alive with worms. She backed into a corner of the lot when she saw us, head lowered, showing us the points of her long sweeping horns.
Sam had come with us, and it was up to him to take her down so we could clean her out. If we didn’t, the screwworms would very likely kill her. Screwworms are gone now, but when I was a boy, they were just about everywhere. If any animal got a cut on it from something like barbed wire or in any other way managed to tear its hide in the hot months of the year, a blue-bellied fly about half as big as a man’s fingernail would blow eggs into the wound. From the eggs would come tiny worms, hundreds, sometimes thousands of them. The worms could, and often did, kill whatever animal they got into. The only two things on a farm I never saw screwworms in were chickens and people.
Will left the shade of the fence and came to stand between us. He put his left hand on his son’s shoulder and his right hand on my shoulder. I could feel it thick and strong and warm through my shirt. I thought of that morning when my own daddy had put his hand, the same kind of strong, thick hand, on my shoulder. But with his other hand he had wiped his forehead and I’d watched the sweat drip from the ends of his fingers. He had laughed when he said: “Boy, that’s pure bourbon whiskey running off my hand.” But I had not laughed as I watched him get in the pickup truck and drive off. And now I pretended the hand on my shoulder was his.
“I don’t know what that ole cow’d do if you boys didn’t help me doctor’er.” He sucked his lips and clucked to Sam, his voice coming now low as a whisper. “Sic’er. Take’er down, Sam.”
Sam was as good a catch dog as anybody ever saw work. He circled to the cow’s left, cautiously, growling but not barking. He had to first get her out of the corner, if he was to catch her. We backed out of the lot into the space between the stables and corncrib.
Almost gently, and without seeming effort, Sam soon had the cow trotting round and round, then running as fast as she could given the tight circle she had to make in the lot. He was running right beside her, step for step, when he lunged and caught her high in the right ear. As soon as he had a firm hold, he drew his big body upward. His weight pulled her head down and he went between her front feet. The cow was thrown in a single solid thump onto her back. Stunned, the breath partially knocked out of her, she lay as still as if she were dead.
Sam was a choke dog as well as a catch dog. On command, he would attempt to catch anything, even a mule. But once he took hold there were only two ways to get him off. He always kept his eyes tightly shut, and he seemed to go stone deaf as soon as he caught. Then it was either take him by the throat and choke him off or else pry his mouth open with a little spoon-shaped piece of wood whittled from a shingle.
Will twisted her head until he could brace against her top horn with his leg. He poured the Benzol into the wound, and it worked alive with squirming worms, boiling them out onto the hide. Then he took a fork that was kept with the Benzol and carefully cleaned out the V-shaped wound. The last thing that was applied was a thick, black, turpentine-smelling paste that sealed the hide so it would not be reinfected.
“I reckon she’ll live,” he said.
We untied the cow’s legs and stood back as the cow got shakily to her feet. Will’s shirt was soaking wet halfway to his belt, and sweat ran on his forehead and dripped from his chin.
When we had finished with the cow, Will took us back down to the tenant house, where we cut a watermelon and sat on the front porch eating it while Auntie banged around in the kitchen making supper.