By the time the field was covered with corn about an inch high I was able to do without the buggy frame and the constantly burning light. Dr. Sharp also said I could stay out of bed all I wanted to if the pain was not too bad.
Then two things happened in the same day: I saw my first grapefruit, and daddy went briefly crazy. I always remember the two things together. They got mixed and twisted in such a way that in the months to come, my nose would sometimes fill with the oily, biting smell of grapefruit.
My brother was going to the schoolhouse a half mile away on the same dirt road as our farm, and every other Thursday the federal government sent out a big truck filled with food of one kind or another, mostly in cans, for the children to take home.
“What all was it in the commodities truck?” I asked immediately upon seeing my brother’s face when he came home from school.
“It was everything it ever was. And something else besides, too.”
Mama had come in the room where we were. She stood wiping her hands on her apron.
“Did you git your commodity?” I asked, knowing he would never have come gloating into my room like that if he had not. But I’d really asked just so I could say the word commodity. All of us loved the word and put some pretty good mileage on it every other Thursday during the school year. I didn’t have the slightest notion of what commodity meant. To me it meant: free food that comes on a truck. I’ve since managed to find the several definitions of the word, but in my secret heart I’ll always know what commodity means: free food that comes on a truck.
“What did you git, son?” mama asked.
“Oh, I got my commodity,” Hoyet said, drawing the whole thing out for as long as he could.
“You lost it. You lost your damn commodity,” I said in a choked, accusing voice, hoping that saying he’d lost it would make him produce it. Which he did. While mama scowled and warned me about cursing—a habit I’d developed with some vigor because my nearly mortal hurts made everybody spoil me, even mama—my brother whipped his hand from behind his back.
“Godamighty,” I said. “Is it a orange or just what?”
“That commodity right there,” said my brother in a voice suddenly serious as death, “is a grapefruit.”
The words grape and fruit did not seem to me to cover it. We all stood silently staring at the round golden thing in his hand, so strange there in the tag end of winter, when everything in Bacon County was burned brown with cold and broken in the field. Then I began to smell it, really smell it, a smell full of the sun and green leaves and a sweet tongue and a delightfully cool bellyful of juice.
“See,” he said. “We could have a can of Campbell’s pork and beans or one of these.”
“And you took this,” I said.
“It don’t look like pork and beans, do it?” he said. Then: “It’s just like a orange, only bigger.”
We knew all about oranges, or not all about them, but we did see them from time to time, little, shriveled, discolored things. But this was orange to the tenth power, which was precisely the way we thought about it even though obviously we could not have said it.
We all smelled it, pressing it against our noses, and felt it and held it longer than was necessary. Mama had brought the butcher knife from the kitchen.
“You reckon we ought to wait for daddy?” I said, a genuinely optimistic question since we hadn’t seen him in almost a week.
“Ain’t no use to wait,” Hoyet said. His expression did not change. He raised the plump grapefruit to his face and peeled it back. Then we halved it and lifted off carefully and deliberately one slice at a time. The slices, which we called slisures, were dripping and yellow as flowers.
But I only had to touch my lips to my piece to know that something was wrong, bad wrong. “Damn if I don’t believe my slisure’s ruint,” I said.
“Do taste a little rank, don’t it?” Hoyet said.
Mama made me come over to her so she could hit me. She said: “Come over here so I can slap your head, boy. You cain’t talk like that in my house.” She liked to make you come to her to get your lick sometimes because she knew the humiliation made it worse. Soon as she had my head ringing like a bell tower she gently and sadly explained the bitter truth about certain grapefruit. “But they tell me,” she said, “grapefruits is real good for you. Howsomever, to me they do taste a lot like a green persimmon.”
We stood there in the room and gagged down that whole sour thing, slice by slice. It wouldn’t do to let a commodity go to waste. The federal government had hauled it all the way to the schoolhouse, and Hoyet had deliberately chosen it over pork and beans and then brought it home in the empty syrup bucket with the wire bale on top he used to carry his lunch to school. That was why it had to be eaten, as mama carefully explained, while we chewed and swallowed, swallowed and chewed.
Finally, it was over. All that remained were a few seeds, a little pulp, and the skin. As soon as I could do it without either of them knowing, I went outside, leaned over the fence, and threw up. When I finally raised my head, I saw Willalee. His back was to me, down in the dirt lane by his house, too far to call him. It was the last time I ever saw him because that night daddy shot the mantelshelf off the fireplace with a twelve-gauge shotgun.
I heard the pickup truck and heard him when he came in and knew without thinking it was going to be a bad night. For about an hour, things were bad in the way they had been bad before: incredibly imaginative cursing between mama and daddy delivered at the top of their voices; pots and pans bouncing off the walls of the kitchen, where daddy had gone to feed the long bout he’d had with whiskey; dishes breaking; the dull unmistakable thump of flesh on flesh. The old house was shaking and I was shaking and my brother, who had started sleeping in the same bed with me again now that my burn had pretty much healed, my brother was shaking too.
Then the shotgun, the eye-rattling blast of a twelve-gauge, so unthinkably loud that it blew every other sound out of the house, leaving a silence scarier than all the noise that preceded it. The sound we had all waited for and expected for so long had finally come. It literally shattered our lives in fact and in memory.
We left in the dead of night, mama, my brother, and I, daddy behind us, silhouetted by the kerosene lamp and raving in the doorway. It had all happened quickly in confusion and fear, all of us rushing through the smell of gunpowder, putting something—I don’t remember what—in a little pasteboard box for my brother to carry. Mama jerking me into my overalls and tying the string on a tiny straw suitcase at the same time.
Daddy had followed us about the house, alternately begging mama to stay and threatening to shoot something else if she did. There was no doubt in my mind that what he might shoot was me or all of us. But I still loved him. For all I knew, every family was like that. I knew for certain it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife. It was only unusual if he hit her. I had heard enough stories—many of them told by the same wife the shot had barely missed—to know that.
But this was the first time daddy ever fired the gun in the house, and certainly it was the first time mama—her face utterly pale except for her blue lips—had bundled us out in a chilly, moonless night to walk the half mile to Uncle Alton’s house. My brother and I tried a few questions on the way, timid, unsure questions that brought no answer. My scalded legs were not hurting, but I was scared and unable to stop crying, so I said they were. I stumbled along in the deep ruts behind mama, following her in the dark by the sound of her strained, constricted breathing. In one long, strangled sob I told her that all my burns hurt and that my infantile paralysis hurt and that I wished I could go back home.
She never slowed or broke her stride, and I could tell by the muffled quality of her voice that she didn’t even turn her head to look back at me when she said: “Wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first.”
It was not like mama to talk like that to a youngun exposed to the night air, and I knew once and forever that nothing in our lives would ever be as it had been again. So right there in the road, unable to see my hand in front of my face, I came apart a little more. The seams began to fray and unravel along all my joinings. Further, something that had never happened before, I began to feel myself as a slick, bloodless picture looking up from a page, dressed so that all my flaws whatsoever but particularly my malformed bones were cleverly hidden.
I knew that it was not true, that it was made up, and that also it was a kind of cheating to go about pretending you were what you were not. But there seemed to be no alternative. It only needed to be done with enough conviction to keep from going crazy. The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making. For a long time after that, the next six months, from March to August, lived in my memory as a series of scenes, flashes of actions lit down to the most brutal detail under a blinding light.
We stood in the lane, not going near the yard gate while two cowering hounds bayed at us from under the front door step. Finally, we saw the flare of a match and then the steady light of a kerosene lamp. Uncle Alton, only one strap of his overalls gallus strapped over his longjohns, stood in the door with the lamp held high as he called to the hounds.
Mama marched across the yard and up the steps, stopping inches from Uncle Alton. Her face was turned up under the high-held light, showing her blue, unreal mouth. And when her lips moved, it was as though they were controlled by nothing so subtle as a mind but instead by something mechanical and arbitrarily calibrated like the strings of a puppeteer.
When finally she did speak, her voice held hate enough to break the backs of all the peoples of the world. “If I’d a been six inches taller, you’d be talking to my ghost. He taken the gun and shot the mantelshelf.”
The next day in the afternoon we left Bacon County—packed onto the bus with two old suitcases and some stuff tied up with string and a shoebox full of chicken and biscuit on the road to Jacksonville, Florida, 100 miles away. I had not heard of Hitler’s cattle cars then, but when I think of that trip, I remember it most often in that image. Tired people savaged by long years of scratching in soil already worn out before they were born. There was no talk in the crowded hot bus. When we had to slow down for traffic or for one of the little towns along the way where everything looked temporary, as though it might all be taken down during the night and hauled away, the greasy odor of burned fuel floated in through the open windows, choking us where we sat. But even on the straightaway, driving steadily between stunted forests of second-growth pine, an unbreathable, malodorous fog of combustion seeped up through the paneling at the bottom of the bus. Babies and little children moaned in their sleep when they breathed it.
Mama reached over and shook me gently where I sat by the window. “Wake up and look at that,” she said. “It’s the border keeping Georgia and Florida separate.”
But I had not been asleep. I’d just had my forehead pressed against the window, which was not cool, but it was not as hot as everything else. It was after sundown, but there was plenty of light to see the river, and when mama touched me, I was already staring at its black surface, wondering what it would be like to fish from one of the little black boats I could see as the bus hurtled over the bridge, and wondering, too, about the marvel of the river, long and slow and snaky, pouring between banks of oak and black gum and sometimes cypress, pouring under bridges and on past little towns and maybe big ones—all the time keeping everything that was Georgia away from everything that was Florida.
It was a magic moment for me because I had always been fascinated with boundaries and borders—the Little Satilla, for instance, separating Appling County from Bacon, made me feel safe and good when I started to sleep at night, knowing that it was keeping all of us in and all of them out—but the St. Marys River was a border that went beyond fascination. Before mama spoke to me, I had recognized the river although I had never seen it before. I knew also it formed the border although I don’t remember anybody ever telling me that it did. The vague shapes of streets and houses and buildings and factories began to filter down behind my eyes. I knew I had never seen any of it before, but if I concentrated, I could see all of it.
Still seeing the streets and buildings I had never seen before, I suddenly shocked myself by saying: “We gone go right on over to the Springfield Section.”
I knew absolutely, without knowing how I knew it, that something called the Springfield Section of Jacksonville was where all of us from Bacon County went, when we had to go, when our people and our place could no longer sustain us.
I was seeing the streets and houses and factories, and I knew we would go to the Springfield Section, because I had spent a lifetime hearing about the city. Jacksonville came up in conversations like the weather. Farmers’ laconic voices always spoke of Jacksonville in the same helpless and fatalistic way. It was a fact of their lives. They had to do it. Everybody had to do it. Sooner or later everybody ended up in the Springfield Section, and once they were there, they loved it and hated it at the same time, loved it because it was hope, hated it because it was not home.
“It’s some good, some bad, I reckon.”
“A man can make a dollar there.”
“And Godamighty, I tell you the truth being able to git up in the morning like that and turn you on some water or piss right there where you sleep, well Godamighty.”
“Yeah, but I cain’t get used to hearing the feller next door ever time he breaks wind.”
“Or walk out the front door ever morning of your life and see right across the road that it’s five or six other front doors looking dead at you.”
“Still, it is nice to give water in the house.”
They loved things the way only the very poor can. They would have thrown away their kerosene lamps for light bulbs in a second. They would have abandoned their wood stoves for stoves that burned anything you did not have to chop. For a refrigerator they would have broken their safes and burned them in the fireplace, which fireplace they would have sealed forever if they could have stayed warm any other way.
But it seemed dreadfully unnatural to them to stand on their front porch and be able to talk to somebody else standing on his front porch. It sometimes happened back in the county that a man could see another house from his front porch, but not often. In the city, though, they were forever cheek to jowl. They felt like animals in a pen. It was, they said, no way for a man to live. But that was not the worst part of the city. In a way that was beyond saying, what they missed the most was their county’s old, familiar smell: pine sap rising in trees, the tassels of corn topping out, the hard, clean bite of frost on dead and broken cotton stalks.
Everything everywhere in the city was tainted, however faintly, with the odor of combustion. To their country noses it seemed that a little oily gas had been added to everything. They could smell it vaguely in their clothes; they could taste it in the food. It got into the drinking water and onto their hair. It hung about over the streets, a blue fog, undulating and layered.
Finally, after a little while in the city they started to long for the society of animals. They caught themselves at odd moments thinking about hogs or goats or calves.
But there was nothing to be done for all that, and everybody knew it. The little shotgun row houses were waiting in the Springfield Section and the factories were waiting and they knew their time was coming—maybe there would be many times before it was over—for them to fill the houses and offer themselves up to the factories.
In a matter of hours after we got off the Greyhound bus mama had us settled into one of the shotgun row houses. The thing was about twenty feet wide, split down the middle with a narrow hallway on either side of which were tiny, criblike rooms, four of them, one of them a kitchen with a two-burner oil stove and a midget refrigerator into which the iceman would deposit a tencent cake of ice twice a week, and one a clothes-closet-sized bathroom jammed full of a foreshortened tub and a toilet that leaned dangerously to one side and a deep tin sink that had two faucets. I was immediately curious about the faucets.
“How come it’s got two?” I wanted to know.
“It’s some places in the world you can git hot water out of one and cold water out of the othern.”
“All the time?” Of all the marvels I’d seen or heard, that seemed the finest.
“All the time,” she said.
We stood out in the hall for a long time looking at the faucets before I finally said, “I don’t reckon them right there’s got hot and cold.”
“I don’t reckon,” she said. “We ain’t quite that grand yet.”
But we were grand enough. It was a dizzying thought that the toilet was right in the house. Every morning on the farm underneath every bed there was a chamber pot. My brother and I took turns carrying them out. Here you just squatted in a little closet, cranked a handle, and then everything was gone in a rush of water.
The toilet was better than the telephone, but not as mysterious. The one in the Greyhound Station was the first telephone I’d ever seen. I’d heard about them, but I never believed what I heard. I didn’t believe it while mama called one of our relatives (one good thing about going from Bacon County to the Springfield Section of Jacksonville, some of your relatives would always be there, not always the same ones, but somebody would be waiting. On any day of my life, including the day I was born, I’ve had blood kin in Jacksonville. I do today) and the relative mama spoke to gave her another number to call and we took a long ride on a stinking city bus out Main Street to Eighth and east on Eighth to Phoenix Avenue, where on a narrow dark street the landlord’s overseer (he could only be called an overseer, never a manager) met us on the porch of one of the shotgun houses. He got mama’s money, holding matches while she carefully counted it out of her cloth purse.
Everything was new and grand, even the things that did not work, and that made up a little for daddy not being with us. Mama said that daddy was supposed to finish up the crop year and that Uncle Alton would manage to look after her things. Uncle Alton remains the most beautifully stoic and courageous man I’ve ever known. He inevitably found the time and the wherewithal to do whatever was asked of him. Years later, when mama got bone cancer and had to stay in bed a year in a full body cast, Uncle Alton took me in with his houseful of children, keeping me and loving me as one of his own.
Shortly after we were in the house, mama gave us one of her terse, elliptical explanations of how things were.
“Me and your daddy’s separated,” she said.
“Separated?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Separated from what?” I said.
“Each other,” she said.
Well, hell, I knew they were separated from each other. Hadn’t I just been on a bus for three hours? It would be awhile before I understood she was talking about more than distance.
In a little over a week daddy showed up in the middle of the night. My brother and I were sleeping in the same bed when we heard the banging at the front door. We knew immediately that it was daddy. He was doing some serious begging out there on the front porch. But mama’s voice was coming low and hard and abrupt right behind his as he wildly tried to explain why he had shot the mantelshelf off the fireplace.
As soon as I knew he was sober and heard him asking to come through the door instead of kicking the door off its hinges, I went back to sleep. During the night I woke up several times and drowsily followed the course of the argument. Once he was squatted out in the moonlight, his hat pushed back on his head, singing an old Jimmie Rodgers song. He had one of those good country voices: part drunk, part hound dog, part angel. The next time I woke up he was whispering ninety miles a minute on the other side of the front door; on this side mama was whispering the same way. Just as I was falling asleep again, one of them giggled. Sometime just before day I woke up and found the little house shaking, the thin walls humming with a low, lilting croon, a lovely sound that put me happily and profoundly back to sleep.
We all ate breakfast the next morning jammed together in the kitchen. Daddy was silent and contrite. Mama was sullen and full of frowns, darkly muttering so that only a word or two came through to us now and then. Fascinated, we all listened to grumble grumble shotgun grumble grumble grumble kill grumble never grumble grumble split his grumble. Daddy’s face went tighter and his mouth thinner, but he didn’t say anything.
But he might as well have gone on and said whatever was on his mind, though, because mama ran him off again anyway before the day was half over. He went quickly and seemed to take pleasure in his going, the hot urgency of the night before considerably cooled. I don’t know how long he might have got to hang around if she had not caught him bubbling a bottle of whiskey in front of the green wavy mirror in the bathroom. He dearly loved to drink in front of a mirror. I don’t know why. He never said; I never asked. But mama had caught him more than once at the mirror. He was pretty helpless and easy to trap there, his head thrown back, his eyes walled and turned down, trying to see the bottle raised over his face. His vision would be blurred from watering eyes, his other senses warped and crippled from whiskey roaring in his blood. Which was a hell of a time to have somebody run right up his back. Which is exactly what mama would do. He could come home drunk and not catch much heat at all, but if mama caught him bubbling a bottle in front of the mirror, she went right up his back.
The sight of whiskey in her house drove her to inspired heights of outrage and violence, so much so that she would sometimes take daddy right off his feet with a broom handle or whatever she could lay hand to. He barely missed taking a plate in the ear as he went out the door this time, his bottle in one hand, his hat in the other. The tension and anger coming off the two of them like sparks off a stove brought the unmistakable smell of grapefruit into the house. It was the first time, but it was not to be the last.
Mama went straight to King Edward Cigar Factory for a job and got it. The women of the Springfield Section, at least the Bacon County women, all worked for King Edward. Women were thought to be defter and quicker at handling the various processes—filler, rolling leaf, packaging—and since the factory was right there in the same section of town where the Georgia women lived, they ended up working for King Edward almost exclusively.
Mama’s job was to spread a single leaf of tobacco evenly on a metal plate of a machine which in turn rolled previously shaped filler into a finished cigar. She did piecework: the more cigars she rolled, the more money she made. I cannot remember how much she was paid, but it was little enough so that when help was offered to keep us fed, we were glad to accept it.
What little help there was came in the form of food baskets and secondhand clothing from various charitable agencies, including the Baptist Church. Sometimes it came on holidays, sometimes not. But whenever it came and whatever it was, it always looked good and felt even better.
That may seem strange to those who have a singularly distorted understanding of the rural Southerner’s attitude toward charity. The people in the South I come from, those who knew what it meant to be forever on the edge of starvation, took whatever they could get and made whatever accommodations they had to make in their heads and hearts to do it.
Back in the county there was no charity. People gave things to each other, peas because they couldn’t sell them or use them, same with tomatoes, sweet corn, milk, and sometimes even a piece of meat because it was going to turn rank in the smokehouse before they could eat it. But nothing was made out of giving or receiving. It was never called charity or even a gift. It was just the natural order of things for people whose essential problem, first and last, was survival.
They accepted what was offered them in Jacksonville the same way, as the natural order of things. We ate the food with relish and wore the clothes with pride. Farmers relocated from Georgia, most of whom had spent their lives working somebody else’s land, felt right at home with overalls that were perfectly good except for maybe a rip in one knee and a section in the bib made rotten by bleach.
While mama went off to the cigar factory every morning at six and my brother went off to school at eight, I went out into the street with the other children too young for school. I was bigger than most of them because not only would I soon be six, I was also big for my age. Most of the shotgun houses were empty during the day. Everybody who was old enough to quit school was at work, women and men alike; the rest were in school, except for those of us too young for work or school and so spent the day trying to find odd jobs or stealing or pressing flesh in unthinkably erotic games of our own devising inside the empty shotgun houses.
My best friend was Junior Lister, who was not a junior in the sense that his name was the same as his father’s. Junior, a particularly common name in Bacon County, was his real and only name.
“Shit no,” he told me. “It don’t stand for nothing. It ain’t nothing else there. I ain’t even got a damn initial.”
Junior had a head as blunt as a snake’s, with a broad, flat forehead, that he claimed he could break a brick with. I saw him butt through several things, including a door. And while I never saw him break a brick, I never doubted he could. His neck was as broad as his head so that the whole thing from his ears down drove right into his meaty little shoulders. He was bigger than I was, but then he was bigger than any of the other children who roamed the broken streets of the Springfield Section during the day. Junior had become six in January and hadn’t been old enough to start school the previous year. So besides being a naturally big boy, who was already showing the arms and shoulders that would make him the terror of Bacon County a decade later, he was also older than any of the rest of us. He was meaner, too. He smoked cigarettes and cursed and ran down little girls, groping them right in the street, and was afraid of nobody, not even his parents, who periodically beat him savagely whether he had done anything or not, because as all our parents said, a beating will loosen a child’s hide and let him grow.
It was a great thing in the neighborhood to become Junior’s friend and wonderful beyond anything to be his best buddy, which I became shortly after I met him. I’ve never known precisely why it happened, but I suspect it was because it never occurred to me to question anything he said or did. He was seldom without a scheme, and I was always anxious to do what I could to help.
“Can you git out tonight for a little while?”
We were sitting on a curbstone on Phoenix Avenue. It was sundown, already an hour past the time when I should have been home.
“I reckon,” I said.
“I got a place I can sell a set of hubcaps off a new Plymouth car,” he said. “It’s got to be a set, though. Two or three won’t do us a bit of good.”
He never stole anything unless he knew where he could sell it. And if he saw something particularly nice that he knew he could steal fairly easily, he would go out and find somebody willing to pay. I found out later that was what happened with the hubcaps. He had seen some that were eminently stealable, and by asking around he heard that his older brother had a friend who was building a car that new Plymouth hubcaps would fit.
“What time?” I said.
“How bout nine?”
“Ma ain’t gone let me out of the house at nine,” I said. “We either got to do it by seven-thirty or else wait till leven.”
Mama would be deep in an exhausted sleep by eleven and I could sneak out. There was no need to explain anything to Junior. We’d been through it all before. My brother, who slept in the same bed with me, wouldn’t say anything about it, either. He didn’t care what I did as long as I didn’t want to do it with him. Boys from the farm didn’t have anything to do much with their younger brothers, especially when there was as much as four years’ difference in their ages, unless the older one was feeling especially violent and didn’t have anybody else handy to beat.
“I’ll meet you here at leven,” Junior said. “It’s over yonder by Eighth Street. We oughta be back in a hour.”
It was easy enough to get out of the house, as I knew it would be. Mama was lying on the bed, one arm thrown across her eyes, when I came in.
“Where you been?” she said, without taking her arm down.
“We was playing marvels,” I said. Two or three years later I would be shocked to find out that other people in the world pronounced the word marbles. “I didn’t see how late it was gittin.”
“You ain’t got no marvels,” she said.
That was true. I’d given up my marbles when I started to steal. The two didn’t seem to go together.
“No, ma’am,” I said. It wouldn’t do to lie about anything she had direct knowledge of. Mama would get up and beat you no matter how tired she was for telling an obvious lie. “Junior let me borry some of hisn.”
“You ain’t been playing with Junior Lister again,” she said.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “He was just passing by where I was at.”
“You ain’t gone make it in life as a liar. You a sorry liar.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She didn’t move on the bed, not even her arm covering her eyes, while she told me the stock was bad. Stock was the final leaf the cigar was rolled in. Mama’s job was to spread that leaf out smoothly, nothing else, just that single spreading movement, about 6,000 times a day. If the leaves were soft and pliable, she came home carrying nothing more serious than exhaustion in her bones. But if the leaves were brittle and broken, if they resisted being spread on the metal plate, then you kept your mouth shut and walked softly around her. No strategy was too complicated if it kept you from being noticed. On days when stock was bad, you could easily end up paying the price for 6,000 broken leaves of tobacco, for 6,000 moments of frustration that had the effect of producing in her a crushing anxiety and paranoia.
Which is pretty much the same effect it had on the other women in the neighborhood. That was why I knew the stock had been bad that day before I got home. That’s why I stayed out on the street as long as I thought I possibly could without getting my head caught between her knees. I’d seen kids being beaten and slapped about all afternoon in the Springfield Section by women you could smell as far away as you could see them. They smelled, stunk, of tobacco, their hair, their clothes, their skins, probably even their hearts.
“You gotta git another clock,” Junior said when I met him at midnight.
“She had a headache,” I said. “She couldn’t go to sleep.”
“That bad stock,” he said. It was not a question but simple affirmation. He had caught a couple of licks from his own mama.
“Where is it at we’re going?” I said when he headed off toward Eighth.
“Market,” he said.
“That’s a long ways,” I said.
“All the time’ll be walking over there and gittin back. The job ain’t gone take but a minute.”
When we’d got to Eighth, we went west to Market Street and then turned left. It was in the third block, a little confectionery store, not as long nor as wide as our house. A brand-new Plymouth was at the curb in front of the store.
“Old lady that runs the place lives in the back.”
“You mean she lives right here.”
“We ain’t got nothing to worry about.”
I was glad to hear it, but not entirely convinced, because the store was so short and the curb so close to the front door, I was sure she would hear us, and I told Junior so.
He didn’t even look up at me as he squatted beside the right front wheel with a screwdriver. “You ain’t been caught yet, have you?” he asked.
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Just cetch it when it pops off.”
I did. We moved to the next one. He worked the screwdriver and another hubcap slid off into my hands. He’d had some practice at it, and he was good. Too good, because when he popped the third one, I hadn’t yet got into position and it hit the pavement and rolled. Simultaneously with the hubcap hitting the pavement, a light came on in the rear of the store.
In a flat, inflectionless voice while he moved to the last hubcap, Junior cursed people who couldn’t hold onto things.
“I give you the easiest goddamn part of it,” he said.
But I was babbling by then. “A light’s come on. They turned on a light. It’s. . . .”
“You ain’t got nothing to worry about. Shut up and squat down here.”
Whether the light made him nervous and fumble-fisted, or whether it was stuck, Junior couldn’t pop it right off. He was mumbling and prying at the hubcap when the front door of the store opened and an old, cracked, woman’s voice floated out to us on the night air.
“Boys, please don’t steal my hubcaps. Please don’t. Ohhh, boys.”
The old lady had turned on the lights in the front of the store, and we were very near where she sat now in her wheelchair sharply silhouetted in the door.
“Junior,” I said. “She’s in a wheelchair.”
Junior looked up, his face radiant in the dim light from the store. “I know,” he said. “She ain’t even got a telephone neither.” He stood up with the last hubcap, looked over casually at the old lady, who begged in a continuous broken voice. He kicked the tire a couple of times. “Too bad we cain’t steal the whole car.” He ambled off down the sidewalk, and I followed him.
Half a block away, I turned and called: “I’m sorry, lady.”
Junior stopped and stared at me. “If you so sorry, it may be we oughta take’m back. Course Bernie’s gone give us eight dollars cash money for’m.”
“It didn’t hurt to tell that poor old thing I was sorry,” I said and kept on walking.
There were a few weeks in which we sold to the same man we stole from. The man owned a junkyard, three square blocks of parts of tractors and parts of cars and parts of washing machines, seemingly a little bit of everything in the world that was made of metal. He bought his own copper from us with great enthusiasm. He would buy any kind of metal, but he paid the most for copper. He was nuts about any kind of copper.
“I found out where they is some copper,” Junior said to me one day at our place on the curbstone.
He had found out about the copper being piled up under a shed, which not only had no doors, it had no walls.
“We can just walk in there and git us some and then sell it back to’m. They like that pipe the best. If we can steal us a mess of them copper pipes, we’ll be in high cotton.”
And we did. We stole and we sold. The man we sold it to knew that it was stolen. How else could children our age, a couple of six-year-olds, get so much copper? But he didn’t know where it was coming from and thought he didn’t want to know. He didn’t even want to know our names. He just beamed when we came in with his copper. He’d pay us—knocking down the price he would have had to pay anybody but children, which we knew—and happily send us on our way.
He was glad to be getting a cheap supply of copper, and we were glad to oblige his larceny. But it couldn’t go on forever. Either Junior or I or maybe both of us had talked it around that we were stealing at the back door and selling at the front door. Somebody called the cops—probably a kid Junior had dragged down the street by his heels, he being habitually disposed to beat up on any child he could run down without too much trouble.
The cops came to his house but found nothing. They did, however, scare him witless. Both his mama and his daddy beat him, but he told me he was still so scared by the cops he hardly felt it and he had to concentrate to cry. His parents, like all the parents from Bacon County, used crying to determine when they should stop. It wasn’t how loud the crying was, but a whole complexity of factors: how genuinely contrite did it sound, how hopeless, how agonized and full of grief, how well did the child understand that he was worthless and that only by the Grace of God and the slash of the whip, both administered for reasons of love, could he expect to get near people again, most of whom—he was given to understand—were his moral superior. That Junior was able to bring his voice to the proper sound after he’d just been visited by cops of a foreign country astounded me.
“If I don’t cry when daddy whips me,” Junior said, “if I don’t git it right, he never will let up. There for a while when I couldn’t git my mind on it, he had me down on the floor whoppin me hard as he could with that razor strop. He’s beatin me across the head and everything, hard as he can swing, and all the time he’s yelling: ‘Don’t play with me, Junior. Don’t play with me.’”
It made a believer out of Junior. He said we ought to bear down and get us something regular to work at. Many of the children had jobs, an hour or two a day cleaning something up in a store or cleaning up the pen where the stores put their garbage, anything a kid could be trusted with doing, and doing quickly, since it was against the law to work them too long.
A few days later I was out in the end of Phoenix Avenue and I passed a little grocery store that had a butcher shop in the back. I went inside and convinced the man who owned it that he needed me to clean up the butcher shop. The day after I went to work for him I was in the back scrubbing down the butcher’s block and sweeping up the sawdust on the floor, because it was only about twenty minutes until quitting time, when a man came into the store and sprinted down between the aisles to where I was working. Everybody in the store stopped to watch, such was the look in the man’s face of raw, wild desperation. When he got to the back, he came right behind the counter and slid to a stop. He was wearing faded overalls, brogans, and a felt hat. His upper lip was weighted with a heavy, stained mustache. His wrists and hands seemed much too large for his emaciated body.
“Knife,” he said to me.
“Knife,” I said.
“Where?” he said.
“Butcher block,” I said.
I was as motionless as a stuffed bird. Only my eyes moved, and they only moved to follow him. The customers from the store, including Mr. Joseph, who owned it, came rushing back to the meat counter. They were terrified as I was, and all we could do was watch as the man went to the butcher block and withdrew from a rack nailed into the side of it a very long knife, honed until the blade was thin and sharp as a razor. He brought the knife up and jammed it into his chest. Strangely it did not go in very deep. Everybody gasped and one lady fainted when he made that first plunge. He walked in a little circle like a dog looking for a place to lie down. He walked that way for a long time, making a little track in the sawdust. The lady who fainted came around and was led away. Then the man stopped in his circle. He held the knife steady with one hand and struck it with the other hand, palm down, driving the blade a little deeper.
“He’s gone puncture his heart!” one of the ladies screamed. As if on signal they all ran out of the store. Mr. Joseph, who owned the place, called back over his shoulder that he was going for the police.
The man had started circling again, but he stopped. “How come that feller to go for the police?” He no longer looked angry or desperate, only very sad. The knife had calmed him down. I remember thinking it was like medicine. He’d run in here hurting, but he slipped that blade into his chest and the pain went away. “How come him to go?” His voice was little more than a whisper; his eyes wet and bright but calm.
“I don’t think you allowed to do it,” I said.
“What?” he said.
“Stick youself.”
When he spoke, his voice was subdued. “I reckon I shouldn’t a come in here and taken his knife. That’s near bout stealing.” He casually raised his open hand and tapped the knife a little deeper. After he put another little bit of the blade in his chest, he almost smiled.
“The knife ain’t how come him to go for the police,” I said. “You cain’t stick your own self in a store or out in the middle of the field or anywhere. It’s agin the law.”
“Law ain’t studying me,” he said, beginning to circle again.
“You from Bacon County?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think of to say.
He smiled at me as he turned in his circle. “Sho now, boy.” He tapped the knife a little more. He was really bleeding now, his overalls full of blood all the way to his knees.
“I’m from Bacon County, too,” I said, desperate to stop him.
“I’m a Pitfield,” he said.
“I’m a Crews,” I said.
“I mought know your people. I probly do.”
“Myrtice is my mama and Pascal is my daddy,” I said, watching the door, hoping for Mr. Joseph and the police.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. It is some Crewses up around the Harrikin I known.”
“You don’t need to do this,” I said. “You can always just quit an go on home.” I was a little beside myself to think of something to get him to stop.
“Home,” he said in a quiet, bemused voice, addressing whatever came before his eyes as he turned the circle. “It ain’t nair nail left in the world where my hat is welcome.”
He turned his eyes toward me. “Come over here, boy.” I stood where I was. “Come on over here.” I stepped closer. He leaned just perceptibly. “You don’t have to worry about this. I don’t want you to worry about this.” I didn’t say anything. “You know why it ain’t no reason for you nor nobody else to worry about this?”
“Why?” I said.
“The knife feels good.”
“Godamighty,” I said.
“It feels good.”
He said something else, but I didn’t hear him. I knew it was hopeless. I could not have said it then, but I knew in my bones that he was caught in a life where the only thing left to do was what he was doing. He had told himself a story he believed, or somebody else had told it to him, a story in which the next thing that happened—the only thing that could happen—was the knife. It was the next thing, the right thing, the only thing, and the knife felt good. If my life to that moment had taught me nothing else, it had made me understand exactly what he meant. Talking wasn’t going to do any good.
He took another little slap at the top of the knife and seemed to relax all along his bones as the blade went deep. His face grew calmer still.
“Well, I’m through with it all now,” he said. He hit the knife particularly hard, and he stopped in his circle as though he had run into a stone wall. “I’m through with it. Somebody else is gone have to look after it.”
Like a folding chair closing, he sank slowly to his knees. He turned his face, the whitest face I’ll ever see, toward me. “I’ve kilt myself,” he said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice.
He stayed just that way, on his knees, his bloodless face turned to me, as Mr. Joseph came running through the store with a policeman. As they came around the counter, the man gave himself a little more of the blade and pitched forward on his face into a ring of blood-soaked sawdust.
The cop, red-faced and breathing heavily, walked over and turned his face out of the sawdust, glanced at it briefly, and stood up.
I went over to Mr. Joseph and gave him my apron. “Quittin,” I said, and rushed out of the store.
Shortly after I quit my job in the butcher shop, we were evicted. Mama came home one evening and there was a notice nailed to the door explaining it. She glanced at it a moment and threw it in the garbage. The overseer came by four or five days later to inquire about our plans. But the stock had been bad that day and he never should have come.
“I seen it,” mama said.
“You ain’t got but four more days,” he said.
“Four more days to what?”
“Move out.”
“I ain’t moving out,” she said.
“We’ll just have to start tearing the roof off then because the landlord’s building something else here. He’ll come down and talk to you hisself.”
“Anytime he wants to,” she said, and went back to the bed to lie down but not without first telling the overseer that he was the sorriest man ever to shit behind two shoes.
The landlord, a short, plump man with tiny feet and tiny hands, showed up two days later.
“It’s just me and these younguns here, and we ain’t got nowhere else to go,” mama said.
“I’m very grieved to hear that,” he said, “but I’m afraid we’ll have to tear the roof off anyway.”
He stayed around for another half hour and told mama he was very grieved about her life and what was happening in it. Finally, he waved as he was leaving and said over his shoulder in a pleasant singsong voice: “We won’t put you in the sidewalk, Mizz Crews, if you don’t make us. No sireeee.”
Even though mama had never missed a rent payment, or even been late with one, when I came home later that same week from selling newspapers, a job I had got at the Jacksonville Journal, everything we owned, which was precious little because all the splintered, stick furniture belonged to the landlord, was piled out on the sidewalk. The doors and windows were nailed shut. It was just beginning to mist, but by the time mama got home from work it was raining hard. She was soaking wet after walking from where the bus let her off. Everything we owned was soaked. It was cold. My brother and I were sitting on the front steps of the boarded-up house. Mama had stopped by the store on the way home. The bag of groceries she was holding had split. A package of Spam was showing out of the bottom.
“Junior’s mama said we could stay over with them,” I said.
“I’m staying right here,” she said, walking past my brother and me. She set the sack down on the floor and without any apparent difficulty ripped off the boards that had been nailed over the front door. “You two boys bring that stuff back in here.”
My brother and I both were scared to death that the landlord or his man would show up that night. If they did, neither of us had any doubt that mama would attack. In her state after seeing her things pitched onto the sidewalk, she would have chewed their throats out. Fortunately, they did not come that night. But they did come the next day, and when we got home, all our stuff was on the sidewalk again. Mama sent word to Junior’s mama that we would stay there until we found a place, if it was all right. In two days we had another house, identical to the one we had been forced out of.
The landlord never did get around to tearing down the house we’d been living in before, nor had we expected him to. Within the week another family was living there. If a landlord in the Springfield Section got an offer of $2 more than he had been getting, he’d throw one family out and let another family in. It was done all the time. With such regularity, in fact, that a pile of things—sheets and pillows and pans and maybe a chest of drawers and clothes—piled on the sidewalk turned nobody’s head. Unless you happened to know and like the people who had been evicted. Then you tried to help. Usually, if it was not in your block, you ignored it.
Shortly after we had been evicted, daddy—not knowing we had moved—crawled in through one of the windows of the little house and ended up scrambling around in the bed with the man and woman who had moved in behind us, whom it nearly scared to death. It scared daddy pretty good, too.
“Scared my pony,” he said. “Damn if I didn’t think he meant to kill me.”
He had come banging on our door at ten o’clock Saturday morning. Mama let him in because the stock had been good the past few days and also because it had been over two weeks since she had let him in the last time.
Daddy had been around pretty regularly of late. He had even stayed with us a few times. But generally it was swooning and crooning on the sidewalk and at the bedroom window, or whispering frantically through doors and walls. And then, once he was inside, it was a continual mad rush through the house, senseless and crazed.
But I never thought too much about it all, one way or the other. Certainly it did not cause me any shame. How could it when half the fathers and husbands at any given moment were swooning and crooning along the sidewalks and at the bedroom windows of the Springfield Section and later rushing madly about, senseless and crazed? Junior’s own daddy, Leland Lister, almost never used any other entrance to his house except the side window after first giving himself a medium to heavy hurt with whiskey. He would immediately attack his family savagely until he had punched them all enough to make them listen. Then he would commence to say in a broken and poorly voice that he was doing the best he could, saying that it wasn’t his fault. He always ended with: “I’m just like Godamighty made me.” All the men of Springfield Section went about it pretty much the same way. Daddy was neither better nor worse than the rest. He was simply one of them.
But finally the night came when not only was the fight different from any I had heard before, it was the worst. It lasted longer, too, about five hours. It would stop for a little while and then start again. The other fights had risen straight to the top and exploded. This one rose and fell, rose and fell. When the screaming quit, a murderous murmuring started up.
Sometime toward the end of that exhausted night, daddy came into the room where I was alone on the bed. My brother had gone to the bathroom and stayed, because you could never be sure the fight would not spill over into whatever room you happened to try to hide out in. Except the bathroom. For some reason the fighting never came into the bathroom after you.
Strangely, daddy was almost sober. His eyes were red as coals. He seemed to stand with a curious resignation, curious because when he had been drinking, he stood and walked like a bandit, a kind of strut that invited violence.
“Well,” he said, “I reckon that about does it.”
He did not sit down and left my door open, through which a wedge of dim light fell from the hall. He stood next to my bed but did not look at me.
“You all right?” I asked.
When he had been drinking, he sometimes thought there were men waiting outside to kill him. When he was like that, mama would always ask him if he was all right. The question popped out of my mouth because it scared me to have him come into my room like that in the middle of a fight. He’d never done it before.
“It ain’t nothing the matter with me,” he said.
But I’d heard him say the same thing when he was shaking with fear of the men outside armed with shotguns, men who were not outside at all.
“I ain’t gone be by to see you no more,” he said.
“Never?” I said.
“Never,” he said.
I thought about that for a moment. It was clearly impossible. “Daddy,” I said, “you got to come by.”
“Cain’t,” he said. “Have the law on me I do. You ma’s gittin a divorce. She got a peace bond on me now.”
It didn’t make sense to me. I knew what a divorce was well enough, but when he mixed it with a peace bond, the purpose of which I had no notion, and said too that he would never see me again, it only scared and confused me.
“I never was your daddy, but I tried to be one to you.” He shook his head. “It just wasn’t in me, though.”
I felt myself burn all along my nerves. Was not my daddy? Not my daddy? Is that what I heard?
“What?”
I have lost most of the rest of whatever passed between us, lost it in the same way that I lost the fact that he was my stepfather. I must have known it, must have heard it somewhere, perhaps more than once, but if I did, I somehow managed to forget it.
But I remember clearly how it all ended.
“My daddy was who?”
“My brother.”
“Brother?” I could only think of my own brother. It didn’t make sense.
“I was your uncle.”
“Uncle?” I could only think of Uncle Alton. It didn’t make sense.
“I won’t be by to see you no more,” he said. “I won’t be seeing you.” I didn’t for a second believe him because it made no sense.
But he was as good as his word, and it taught me not to give a damn for what makes sense. I didn’t see him again until I was out of the Marine Corps and going to the University of Florida. I had not thought of him in years when I woke up one Saturday morning determined to do whatever was necessary to see him.
I found him in the Springfield Section of Jacksonville not far from where I lost him. He was sitting in the back of a tiny store, huddled beside a stove in a huge overcoat. He was very nervous. He did not want to talk. I left minutes after I got there. We never touched each other, not even to shake hands.