Granddaddy is praying. I can hear him right through the wall between his room and mine. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but the sound of his voice wakes me up every morning at 7:30. If I ever live to be that old, I’m going to sleep until noon every day.
I’ve been here three weeks now, and this part never changes. Next, he’ll go to the bathroom, wash and shave, then he’ll start fixing breakfast. He sings while he cooks, and he cooks the same thing every day, almost. There’s fried sausage and scrambled eggs, along with the biscuits he takes out of the freezer for us every night and heats up in the oven the next morning. We have apple jelly and peach preserves—or we did until we ran out this week—and milk. For some reason, Granddaddy puts ice in his milk, and it forms a little skim at the top. I’ve finally gotten him to serve me mine without ice.
He and I clean up the dishes. I watched him wash them the first two mornings I was here, and then he handed me a cloth and said, “Here. Time you earned your keep.”
He finishes getting dressed, then goes out on the back porch, where the overhang keeps out the morning sun, and he reads the local paper. It’s called the Port Campbell Post, and it has about the worst sports pages I’ve ever seen. Nothing about anything out of North Carolina except for the major-league baseball box scores and a couple of paragraphs on every game, and they don’t even have the West Coast night games. But he reads every word. He’s a Minnesota Twins fan, because the Twins used to play in Washington, something I didn’t know, although Dad might have told me once. Granddaddy reads all the world news, commenting on an earthquake in Bolivia or the Russians in Afghanistan, and then he turns to the obituaries.
“Oh, Lord,” he’ll say, “Abel Bullard’s dead,” like I might ever have known or cared to know Abel Bullard. And then he’ll explain to me that Abel Bullard, on the outside chance I didn’t instantly know, was the brother of Miss Hattie Bullard, who used to sing in the choir at church, about a thousand years before I was born.
Granddaddy isn’t completely out of it, though, not by a long shot. It took him about three days to see through that scam I cooked up about wanting to come visit him. I guess he knew the number of times I previously had wanted to come visit him amounted to approximately zero.
It turns out that the Carlsons went apeshit when they found out I had run away. They called all over town, even had the police looking for me. Mom, naturally, hadn’t told them where Granddaddy lived, and all Trey knew was that we had relatives somewhere in North Carolina. Also, Mom, the scatterbrain, didn’t bother to tell them where Dad and the lovely Beverly were staying. Trey knew they were going to South Carolina, somewhere. I was counting on Trey’s failure to comprehend geography. But I guess his parents would have been a little embarrassed to tell Mom that her pride and joy had been misplaced. Not that she’d care. Also, she didn’t give them any addresses in Europe. She didn’t give me any, either.
But Granddaddy had insisted, unknown to me, that Mom give him the Carlsons’ address and phone number. He always wants her to tell him everywhere she’s staying when she travels, but she never does, and it pisses her off that he keeps asking.
Anyhow, he calls the Carlsons after he sends me to the store for groceries, and they tell him what’s been going on. By this time, the store detective and the Montclair school system have filled them in on all the gory details, and they, of course, tell Granddaddy everything. He tells me the jig’s up, an old expression of his, when I get back, and says he’ll give me one minute to come clean or he’s sending me back to Virginia on the first bus out.
It all started when Mom told me she was going to Europe and that I could stay with the Carlsons, like this was some kind of great favor she was bestowing on me. You didn’t even like Europe the last time we took you, she said when I pitched a bitch. That was three years ago, I said. I was a child. You were happy enough to stay with friends the last two times we went, she said, and then she went on about how I was trying to mess things up between her and Mark the Narc. I call him that because Mom never found the dope I keep hid in my room until she started dating him, and I’m sure he put her up to looking. Hell, he might have even searched my room himself, in which case I would never forgive Mom for letting him. Mark the Narc wants me in Fork Union, wearing a smart little uniform and standing at attention, so bad he can taste it. Then he can move in. I tell Mom this, and that she can go to China with him if she wants, just forget about me, and she accuses me of laying a guilt trip on her. We didn’t talk much the last two weeks before she left.
The day of finals in English, I skipped. I meant to go, and I had studied about twenty minutes, which is massive for me, the night before, because I was very close to flunking and facing the heartbreak of summer school. Mom acted like they’d take her job away or something if I flunked English, like if she was a minister and they found out her son was a Satan worshipper or something.
I went to school that day, or got as far as the parking lot, at least. It’s only a six-block walk, one of the reasons Mom moved to the town house after she and Dad split, she’s always reminding me, like this is a great sacrifice or something. But as I walked through the parking lot, here come Tony Linhart and Kyle Waters in Tony’s new red Sunbird his dad bought for him; bastard’s so rich there ought to be a law. And they’ve both passed out of exams, so they have the day off.
“Goin’ up to Washpon,” Kyle says. “Want to come along?”
I guess I’m easily led. Washpon is this lake at the bottom of the Blue Ridge, where everybody from Montclair goes to party. I got in, and English was history.
I forged the grade to a D and got Mom to sign the report card just before she left, and I swear I had every intention of signing up for summer school and having the whole thing straightened out by the time Mom got back.
But then Marcia and I went over to the university two days after Mom left to find this guy we hoped would sell us an ounce. He works in the campus bookstore, and I wanted to find out when he’d be home, so I could come around. While I was waiting for him to take care of a couple of customers, I saw this pair of shades on the rack about halfway down the aisle that I really needed. We’d been doing a little lifting here and there, and it had gotten so it almost seemed like they must know we were doing it, we were so obvious. So, I slipped these shades off their little holder and into the big pocket of my Army surplus jacket. Marcia was standing next to me. She’s a fox, blond page-boy cut, bedroom eyes, body that won’t quit, real tough for fourteen. All of a sudden, there’s this old guy I’ve never seen before, short hair and a white shirt with sweat stains under both arms, clip-on tie, a real dork, and he’s saying, like, come with me, please, except he doesn’t say please the way somebody does when they’re asking. The way he says it, “please” translates as “or I’ll break your arm.”
He also hustles Marcia along, and she’s cussing the guy, telling him to get his goddamn hands off her. He takes us into a room at the back of the store, and there’s this closed-circuit TV where he can see the whole store. He just sits there all day, I guess. Like maybe he gets a bounty for every desperado he brings in.
I’ve got to tell you, I kind of lose it. I beg him not to arrest me, tell him my mom is at Sloan-Kettering in New York being treated for cancer. Marcia cuts me a look, like, what the hell is Sloan-Kettering and where did you dig that one up? He makes us both sweat, insists that Marcia is in on it, too, for about thirty minutes. Then he tells us he’s going to give us a break, but somehow, looking at this guy, I don’t think this is going to be quite as good as winning the lottery. He won’t have us arrested, he says, but he insists that we both bring our parents in so he can talk with them about our little crime spree. I tell him, again, that my mom isn’t home, and that my dad is out of the state. Who am I staying with? he asks. When I tell him, he tells me I’ll have to bring the Carlsons in. He has our names and addresses by this time, and he’s checked the phone book to make sure we’re not shucking him, so we’re caught.
I really feel bad for Marcia, because she’s got to face both parents and deal with this right now, and her folks are so tight they squeak. They will ground her until she graduates and forbid her to see me until she’s like fifty. I also feel bad because I’ve begged and whimpered in front of my girl, in addition to getting her into more trouble than she thinks she can handle right now. I also am not looking forward to telling the Carlsons that their house guest for the next six weeks is an apprehended if not convicted shoplifter. Christ, at that point they didn’t even know they had to help me register for summer school because I didn’t really pass English.
So, faced with a future of being straightened out at Fork Union after being ostracized by polite society and, much worse, Marcia and all her living relatives, I split. I went home that same Thursday afternoon, packed everything I thought I could carry in my backpack, took most of the money out of my account that Mom left there for my summer fun, wrote the Carlsons this spaced-out note about taking a little time to get my head together and left. Trey had been at a job interview or he’d have been in it as deep as Marcia and me.
I’m dumb, but I’m not terminally stupid. There have been kids from here who went to New York and were never seen again. I just wanted to get away, not commit suicide. I wasn’t sure about the best way to thumb to Granddaddy’s, but he was the only one who came to mind for some reason, the only one I thought might take me in, no questions asked. I figured he’d be so out of it, he wouldn’t mind.
I bought a road map at the Exxon station and sat down on the corner to read it. Route 35 would take me south almost to the state line, it looked like, and from there I’d have to take a bunch of dippy little state roads to get to East Geddie. But it was cheaper than taking the bus, and there wasn’t one going that way from Montclair for five hours, the guy at the station said. By then, they’d have my picture on the post-office wall.
So, I walked the mile down to the bypass and stuck out my thumb. It went real well for a while. Two coeds going down to Sweet Briar picked me up and got me almost all the way to Lynchburg. Then a construction worker in a pickup, not as friendly as the college girls, but a ride nevertheless, drove me all the way past Danville.
By this time, it was getting late, about seven, I guess, and I must have stood there, watching rednecks in white T-shirts drive by giving me the fish eye for like an hour and a half before this bubba stops, asks me where I’m going. I tell him East Geddie, North Carolina. It obviously does not compute. I mean, this guy’s probably never been out of the county. It’s a wonder they let him out of the house.
“Don’t know that one,” he says, “but I’m goin’ down to Zion Springs.”
I don’t know Zion Springs from bedsprings, but anything beats standing, so I get in this car you have to open from the inside. We go about twelve miles, just far enough to be away from everything, when he puts on his turn signal, and I see the sign, ZION SPRINGS 8, pointing to the left. I ask him to let me out there, and he gives me this snaggle-toothed grin as I get out, ’cause he knows there’s no way in hell anybody else is going to pick me up out here, especially now that it’s almost dark.
I stand there for two hours. I’ve thumbed a lot around Montclair, and there’s a theory I’ve got about it. You have to believe you’re going to get a ride in order for a car to stop. If you believe you’re not going to get a ride, that you don’t deserve a ride, that you’re not worthy to ride in that fine Buick coming toward you, the driver gets the message sure as hell. When you get to that point, you might as well start walking.
The trouble was, I was still more than a hundred miles from Port Campbell, which is like another six from East Geddie, the best I could add up the little numbers between towns on the map. And the next town south of where I was standing was nine miles away.
So I’m standing there, walking awhile, thumbing awhile, and it’s like eleven o’clock. I get to this white-trash store that’s just closed, but there’s a Coke machine outside, and somebody has thrown an apple, with only one bite out of it, in the trash can. It’s just sitting there on top. I must be pretty hungry, because I take it out, try to pull the skin and meat away from the part that’s been bitten and eat it. That’s supper, and breakfast looks like it might be a long way down the road. I’m kicking myself for not having the construction worker just let me out at a McDonald’s we passed back in Danville. I can taste a Big Mac.
There’s not much left to do but climb the twenty-foot embankment on the side of the road and try to sleep. Even in June, it gets cold as a bitch outside late at night. I put the backpack down for a pillow, take out another shirt and put it over my shoulders, roll a joint and smoke it all. It probably takes me like ten seconds to fall asleep, I’m so wasted.
I dream we’re at the big Fourth of July celebration they have at Michie Park back home, the one we used to go to when I was a little kid. All the fireworks are going off up above us, and I’m sitting between Mom and Dad, who are sitting close enough together that I can feel and smell both of them. I’m kind of scared, and Dad looks down at me and smiles and says something, but I can’t hear him because of all the noise.
And, of course, the way things have been going lately, I wake up in the middle of Bambi, Part II. You know, the one where six raving rednecks freeze a deer with their truck’s headlights alongside a deserted highway at three in the morning, then get out and calmly blast him to Swiss cheese. There aren’t any houses around, but these guys act a little nervous, anyhow, and I hope they don’t see me. Winding up as a road kill is not my life’s burning ambition. They drag the deer over to the truck and manage to lift and push him into the back. Before they roar off, I can see the dark spot on the side of the road, staining the white line, where the deer fell. Then they’re gone, and I’m wide awake, shaking like a bitch, partly from the cold. I wish I was back in Montclair, hassles and all, and I damn near decide to turn my ass around and start thumbing north, although I know by now that it would not be smart to stand alongside this road after dark, at least not without a sign that says NOT A DEER.
About two years later, the sun finally comes up. It’s beautiful from my spot up over the road, but I realize I must have picked the coldest place for miles, because I’m on top of an exposed hill where I can see east for just about ever. I stumble down the embankment, feeling froggy as hell and sore and tired and very, very hungry. In less than five minutes, before I wake up and realize I don’t deserve a ride, an old man, looks almost as old as Granddaddy, stops and takes me all the way to Durham, lets me out right in front of a Burger King. I order a couple of those croissant things, along with a large Pepsi. The croissants make me think of Mom, because on the last trip the three of us took to Paris, she must have spent fifteen minutes with me one morning at our hotel teaching me how to pronounce it, so I could order breakfast for all of us. What I want to know is, why do the French put all those letters in their words if they’re not going to say them?
It takes me until almost lunch to get to Granddaddy’s. One guy is going as far as Benson, another one takes me to Port Campbell, right to Highway 47, and then another one drops me off at a place called the Hit ’n’ Run, right in Geddie. From there, I walk to his house.
He looks older than I remember him, but maybe I just haven’t been paying much attention. I’m already thinking, damn, he needs help worse than I do. He’s obviously got me mixed up for somebody else at first, and when we go inside, I see he’s got notes on everything. There’s a note telling him to turn off the oven, except he’s spelled it “trun”—Mom said he’s had trouble spelling all his life—one telling him how to warm stuff in the microwave, instructions on the washer-dryer on how, step by step, to do the clothes. These seem to be in Grandma’s handwriting, and the paper is kind of yellowed.
But he has his own way of doing things, and as long as nothing gets in the way of his routine, he’s usually all right. Guess that makes me a welcome addition. He gets my name wrong like about half the time, usually calls me Lafe, which was one of his brothers’ name, the one that got killed in a hunting accident, I think. Sometimes, he’ll start off with Lafe, then go to Mom, before he finally gets to me, like “Lafe … I mean, Georgia … I mean, Justin!” After I’d been here two weeks, and he’d done that about a million times, I went to my room, got a sheet of notebook paper out, wrote JUSTIN on it in big red letters and taped it to my forehead. When I came back in the dining room, which is also where the TV is and where visitors sit in cold weather, he looked at me, kind of surprised, with his mouth open a little more than it normally is. Then he said, “Son, if you ever live to be as old as me, you’ll be happy if you can just remember your own name.”
He’s probably right. I mean, like I can’t believe his father fought in the Civil War. Trey’s great-great-great-grandfather fought in it, and I had to borrow Mom’s copy of this “history” that my great-grandmother wrote before Trey would believe it.
Actually, my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather both fought in the Civil War. My great-great-grandfather was called Captain McCain, but the history said he wasn’t a real captain in anybody’s army until the Civil War, when they let him lead the home guard, which I guess was like the geezers and kids and crips. He was supposed to have led these jokers up to the federal arsenal in Port Campbell and demanded that the Union troops surrender, even though he had just a few old guys with hunting guns with him. According to the history, the lieutenant asked him, “Is that all the men you have brought to take my arsenal?” And my great-great-grandfather was supposed to have said, “The woods is full of them. The Geddie boys is everywhere.” And they surrendered! Of course, my mom said the guys in the arsenal were probably Southerners anyhow and couldn’t wait to surrender and join the other side.
My great-grandfather, who was called Red John, had lost his leg in the real fighting. He came home and was in the home guard, too. They had this battle, right down in Old Geddie, where the black people live now, when Captain McCain and Red John and a bunch of other dumb shits tried to attack some Union army troops that were doing a little raping and pillaging on their way north. The history said a bunch of the home guard got killed, and the rest escaped over into the Blue Sandhills, where they apparently hid until the Yankees finished burning down everything they could find, including the captain’s house. Smart move, guys.
Anyway, Granddaddy gets in touch with the Carlsons, and then I come clean with him, except about the dope, because I don’t think Granddaddy can handle that, and he might search my things. But I tell him I flunked English, which is not a flash to him, since the Carlsons already told him, and my girlfriend will never be allowed to speak to me again, and my mom is going to marry a guy who’ll send me to military school for the rest of my life, and she doesn’t care anything about me, anyhow.
He takes it all except the last part. He gets a little red in the face and starts reading me the riot act about how “ugly” I’m acting toward my mother, and about how hard it’s been for her, getting divorced and all, and about how most children—I guess he’s so old he still thinks of me as a child—would be happy to have a mother so smart and pretty.
I get mad, too, and go to my room to start packing things, actually just throwing them into the backpack. I’m doing such a piss-poor job of it that half the stuff won’t fit. I storm out the front door like I know where I’m going, a couple of shirts and some underwear still back on the bed. The screen door makes that singing sound it always makes when somebody slams it hard. Granddaddy calls after me, but I’ve got to get out of there. I can get a job somewhere, sleep at the Y, whatever.
I’m already on the paved road, headed back into East Geddie, when he pulls up alongside me in the pickup.
“Come on and get in the truck, son,” he says. I keep walking. He keeps moving the truck up in jerks and starts, trying to talk to me. We must go down the road a couple of hundred yards like this. Two cars go by, and now we’re beside this mobile home, and some gap-toothed old hag is sitting on the little wooden steps in front, staring at us.
I finally get back in to keep him from getting rear-ended by some of the maniacs around here. We go to the little store in the middle of town, and we sit in the truck and talk.
“The folks that are keeping you said you could stay here if you want to,” he tells me. “I told them I could get you all straightened out about summer school. And they already talked to the man you stole the sunglasses from.”
I’m crying by now. He goes in the store and comes back out with a couple of Cokes, and we sit there in the shade and talk. He tells me how proud he’s always been of me, and I wonder how anybody could be proud of me right now. He tells me how much I remind him of his brother Lafe, who he says was the good-looking one, and the smart one, in the family. Some family, I’m thinking. He says that he’s never forgotten how I could read when I was five, and he tells me the story, for the first time since I’ve been old enough to understand it, about how he didn’t learn to read until he was like forty years old. He says he still has the story I wrote for him when I was nine, about the little boy who saves his father’s farm by planting magic seeds given to him by an elf that blossom into full-grown pizzas in just three days. Pretty heavy stuff.
He tells me this is as far as he can go, because he’s not supposed to drive his truck any farther than the store and the church down the road. He probably shouldn’t be driving that far, I’m thinking. He tells me that he has a friend who’s a teacher at the local high school, and he might be able to help me get into summer school down here and maybe get that much back in Mom’s good graces before she comes home. He’s already called the guy, and summer school classes began like today, so I wouldn’t miss by starting tomorrow. If I want to, he says.
Well, there isn’t much choice, short of just chucking it and starting my lucrative career as a street person. I am not so sure this is going to work out, but at least maybe I’ll meet some good-looking fox to take my mind off Marcia, who I only think of every five minutes. Granddaddy says this guy will even give me a ride every morning, good news since that august institution of learning, Sandy Heath High School, is, as Granddaddy says, a right good ways from here.
Next morning, we go through the usual routine. Granddaddy asks me don’t I want to dress up a little more the first day, and I point out that my good suit wouldn’t fit in the backpack. He kind of chuckles at that. I think maybe he’s getting used to the fact that his only grandchild is a wiseass. He says maybe he can get Jenny, my second cousin who’s older than Mom, or Harold, her husband, to take me into town, to Belk’s or somewhere, to get some clothes. He says he’ll pay for them, which is fine by me.
I see this car come tearing down the road, some low, mean machine from the 1960s, it looks like, but in real good shape for something that old.
“That’d be Kenny,” Granddaddy says. He’s already told me a little about this guy. His name is John Kennedy Locklear, after the old president Mom and Dad think was so great. He seemed like a neat guy—JFK, I mean—but if I see one more television documentary on how the world might just as well have crawled up its own asshole and died after his assassination, I might puke.
This guy, who goes by Kenny but is Mr. Locklear to me, teaches agriculture at the high school, and Granddaddy lets him farm several rows out back of what Granddaddy calls the carhouse, because the guy like lives in a mobile home and doesn’t have any land of his own. Granddaddy says Kenny’s family used to work for the McCains and lived in the shack down at the edge of the woods. He says Kenny gives him vegetables from what he grows, and that he has gotten more out of the land than any of the McCains ever did. He was in the Army for three years and went two years to N.C. State to study soil science, which doesn’t quite sound like nuclear physics, and he’s trying to get his degree one course at a time at the local college. He doesn’t teach agriculture in the summer, though. How the hell could you fail agriculture? He’s a driver’s ed teacher in summer school. Good. Maybe I can somehow manage to get a driver’s license. I’m sixteen in August, but it’ll be fall semester before I can take the classes in Montclair. I’m a little leery, though, of a guy who teaches ag but doesn’t own any land and who teaches driver’s ed but has a car that’s older than he is.
Granddaddy walks out with me, being careful to step across the rusty pipe sticking out of the ground that carries the sink water down to the grease trap by the chicken yard. He has to think about every step, it seems like. He speaks to Kenny, who doesn’t get out or cut the engine, and I walk around to the other side to get in. The car’s a beauty, must be about twenty-five years old, I guess, and I’m not too far off. He tells me it’s a 1965 Impala. It’s like white with a red stripe, new red upholstery on the inside, neat as a pin.
“Your granddaddy is a good old man,” he says to me as we’re heading back out the rut road.
“He speaks well of you,” I say, not sure how this guy and I are going to get along. He’s a funny-looking dude. He’s got this dark skin, but he’s not black. Mom said the people who worked as sharecroppers for her family were Lumbees, some kind of Indians. Whatever that is, Kenny must be one. His hair is kind of curly and cut real short. He’s wearing a blue shirt and tie, but the shirt’s short-sleeve, and I can see the tip of a snake that’s tattooed below his right shoulder. He’s got some hillbilly music on the radio, and there’s a pack of Lucky Strikes on the dash, less the one he’s smoking like they’re about to repeal them.
We don’t talk much. When we get to the high school, I see that someone has stolen the last “h” off Sandy Heath so that the name is Sandy Heat High School. Seems more appropriate. Kenny takes me to the principal’s office, where I give them the general details, my version, of how I came to be taking summer school English in Geddie, North Carolina. They tell me they’ll have to have my records from Montclair, which I promise I’ll have sent, but they’re willing to let me start the English course since Granddaddy is my guardian for the summer. Things seem to be a little looser down here. I just hope I can get somebody to send my records.
I’ve got my textbook, which is more like the one I had in the ninth grade in Montclair. And, praise Jesus, we are going to have Lord Jim for required reading. Piece of cake. I read it two years ago.
My classmates, though, are something else. There are eighteen of us in the class, and fifteen of the others are black. Three of them are named Geddie. I try to start a conversation with the guy right across from me, guy named Winfrey Geddie who’s blacker than the black people ever get up where we live. I tell him I’m from Virginia and he says, “I’m from Old Geddie,” which, apparently, passes for high humor around here. I told him my great-grandmother’s name was Geddie. “Maybe you and me is related, then,” he says, smiling out of one corner of his mouth. “Maybe I’m the black sheep of the family.”
I want to tell him I’m not used to living places where all the white people used to own all the black people, but somehow I sense that this would not be appropriate. He does a low five with one of the other Geddies sitting in front of him, and I shut up.
The class itself is a bad joke. Most of these kids apparently have just landed here from Pluto and are being exposed to English for the first time. Mrs. Sessoms, who must be like a year out of college, is basically happy if nobody walks out in the middle of class or calls her “white bitch” during the day. Already now, three weeks into it, I know that this baby is fail-proof. There are kids in Montclair who have failed grades without being real dumb. Down here, they seemed determined to pass everyone, at least until they quit school.
Kenny turns out to be okay, though. He said he went into the Army because his father was killed in Vietnam, but after he got in, he knew that three years would be enough. He said he decided to go to State on the GI bill and become a farmer because that was like all his family had ever done. He also said it was too bad that there wasn’t anything there to farm by the time he decided that was what he wanted to do, but that he was saving his money to buy some land. It’s a trip to walk with him on the little plot Granddaddy lets him farm. He’s only got four rows, about a hundred feet long each, but he’s got corn and tomatoes and okra and squash and about four kinds of beans, and cantaloupes and watermelons. He has some peanuts planted that he says won’t be ready to pull up until fall, and there are all kinds of greens, too.
He has a metal detector, and sometimes he goes down to where the old shack is and walks around with it, trying to find things. I went down there with him one day, and he came up with a couple of old coins and some kind of metal cup.
One afternoon, he brings me home and, after we have some iced tea, the three of us get in his car and go down past the shack into what they call the swamp. Kenny turns left on a trail beside this big ditch until we get to the family cemetery, a cheerful spot. Granddaddy and Mom and I would come out here sometimes, although Mom never seemed to care much about it; it’s been like five years at least since I’ve seen this part of the farm. Over on the other side of the ditch, we can see people picking their own blueberries, with their cars parked off in the distance. That’s Granddaddy’s berry farm, which Mom says made more money than all the other crops they ever raised here. They take them out in the fields in this big wagon, like you’d use for a hayride, and it’s supposed to be a big deal that they can eat all they want while they pick. Granddaddy says that nobody can eat enough berries to do you much harm like that.
We help Granddaddy out of the car, and he and I walk over to the tombstones, but Kenny goes right for this big rock sitting like fifty yards off from us that they call the Rock of Ages. Granddaddy says it was the corner of the original McCain land, and that it was mentioned in the first grant one of the Geddies got, back before the American Revolution. He showed me this old piece of paper once, so old that he said when he took it out of his mother’s cedar chest after she died that it almost fell apart into nine pieces. Granddaddy had it put back together and laminated, so that you can pick it up and read it without doing any more damage to it. It’s as brown as Granddaddy’s neck and hands, but you can still read it, and where it says “the old stone corner, next to Locke’s Branch,” the stone corner is the rock, and Locke’s Branch is the ditch.
“It was here when the first white men came here,” he tells me, looking toward Kenny and the big rock. “It sure looks like it’s going to outlast me.”
Granddaddy doesn’t know why they call it the Rock of Ages, except that his father called it that and said that had always been its name. The rock is like four feet high, which is maybe three feet eleven inches higher than any of the other rocks I’ve seen around here. There’s nothing but this flat, sandy land anywhere around it, except for the little hill that the cemetery is on. Across the ditch, or branch, or whatever, is the place Granddaddy calls the Blue Sandhills, where the sand is as white as it is at the beach. There’s a big lake back there somewhere.
Granddaddy is standing there, resting on his cane, which is sinking into the sand so that he’s like leaning to the right. He looks like he’s a billion miles away, thinking about something that happened before I was born, I’m sure. It’s funny. He can remember stuff from forty years ago, but he can’t remember what day it is sometimes.
I go over to where Kenny is. He’s picking sandspurs out of his trouser leg, some of those nasty-looking purple ones that’ll cure you of wearing shorts down here in about two minutes. He uses the rock to balance with his left hand while he picks them off, one at a time.
“My grandmother used to talk about this rock,” he says. “I never saw it till I came up to your granddaddy’s one day last year to ask him if I could look around the old place. My great-uncle worked and lived down here until about twenty years ago. Then he went to live with his children until he died.”
He rubs the old rock, which is kind of a pinkish-orange color, like it might be magic and he’s got three wishes.
“Where do you reckon they got this rock from?” Kenny asks, but it’s more like he’s really asking himself. “Grandmother said it was a sacred rock. She said her mother used to find arrowheads and pieces of clay pipes and beads and old-timey Indian stuff buried around it, like people used to worship here a long time ago. Before Jesus saved them from all this,” and he gives out a little laugh.
“She said Great-Grandfather took the job sharecropping here because of the rock. Back then, other Indian families would come here to rub it for good luck when they needed some. Didn’t work.”
He pushes against it, which is about like pushing against a tree. It doesn’t begin to budge.
“Some people say it was rolled here from way over in the Piedmont, maybe after our tribe won a battle against another tribe, I don’t know. It must’ve taken a lot of men a long time to roll this thing here. I’d sure love to know why.”
It’s getting hot as a bitch out in that open field, so we go and get Granddaddy and head back. I ask him later that night if he’d ever heard about the Indians rolling that rock here from somewhere away off. He gets this faraway look in his eyes and gets very quiet.
“Yessir,” he says after a while. “I do think Rose told me about that one time. Don’t know whether’s it’s true or not, though.”
Rose must be some fifth cousin twice removed I’m supposed to know about.
A week after I get down here, Mom calls. She checked in with the Carlsons, just to make sure the house hadn’t burned down, I guess, and they told her about the Great Escape. I don’t know if she knows about the shoplifting thing or not, but she knows I flunked English. It’s after ten in London, where she says she and Mark the Narc have been pub-hopping. But she seems more concerned than pissed off, wants to know if I’m feeling any better now, how the summer school classes are going, tells me she can’t wait to see me in five weeks. She also says that Mark says hi. I guess it was too long a walk around the table to say it himself.
She sent Granddaddy a postcard that got here the day before she called, and she says she’ll send lots more now that she knows I’m here, too. Granddaddy gets on for a minute, but he’s not much of a talker, especially on the telephone. I’m just getting used to speaking up so he can understand what I’m saying, and the phone lines across the Atlantic aren’t exactly like making a call across the street. He hands the phone back to me.
“Justin?” Mom says. “Honey, please look out for your granddaddy, and do what he says. We’ll have a long talk when I get back, maybe go away to the beach for the weekend. And don’t do anything rash. Things’ll get better.”
We hang up, and I’m thinking, Jesus, are things that bad?
School’s a snap, and I am having a little bit of fun here, too. We play basketball after classes while I’m waiting for Kenny to get back from his death-defying day with the Future Drivers of America. Winfrey Geddie and his cousin Blue are okay. They call me Cousin Justin, and tell everybody I’m the white sheep of the family. They’re both on the Sandy Heath basketball team, and if they don’t make it out of summer school, next season is history. They’re both about six two already, so the three of us make a mean front line. I only play church league ball back home, but these guys would make anybody look great. They can both dunk, backwards. I can get two inches over the rim, so I could dunk like a marble. There’s a three-on-three summer league in Port Campbell, and we’re thinking about getting into it.
Mom’s always going on about what a waste sports are. She would only let me play soccer when I was little. They have this thing in Montclair called serendipity soccer, which everyone in town calls dip soccer, for good reason. They have leagues for everyone, five to eighty-five, is what they brag about, and the big thing about dip soccer is, like, they don’t keep score. Okay, I can see not keeping score in basketball. I mean, after a while, who knows if it’s 92–92 or 94–90? But most soccer games I ever played in, the score was either 0–0, 1–0, 1–1 or, if the goalies just didn’t show up, maybe 2–1. Now, how the shit are you not going to know whether you won or lost when only one goal is scored? Gee, Mom, I don’t know who won. We didn’t keep score. But we did kick the ball in their goal once, and they didn’t kick it in our goal at all. Every five-year-old in Montclair could tell you his team’s won-lost record, and I’ve seen better fights in adult dip soccer games than I’ve ever seen in football.
In Montclair, only blacks and poor whites play baseball or, God forbid, football. All the university brats, like me, play soccer. If we’re like real lucky, our parents let us play basketball between fall and spring soccer. Dad and I would throw the football around when he still lived with us, and the kids in the neighborhood would play tag football in the street. I tell you what: Maybe football’s the inhuman, brutalizing thing Mom says it is, but it’s about five times more fun than soccer.
The thing about Winfrey and Blue is, I don’t think these guys are ever going to be pestered by the Rhodes scholarship people, even if they never touch a basketball again. And if they can manage to stay in school for the next two years, maybe somebody will give them some kind of college scholarship to play. Maybe they won’t graduate, but they’ll be there, anyhow, and maybe something will seep through. I know this much: Winfrey and Blue will be making tires at Kelly-Springfield, or dealing drugs, in less than two years if they don’t have basketball. True fact.
I’m their tutor, sort of unofficially. They live over in Old Geddie, which used to be Geddie, according to Granddaddy, but I’ve never gotten that straight. Anyhow, that’s where most of the black people around here live now. Sometimes I go over there, and sometimes they come over here to Granddaddy’s and we study on the porch. There aren’t many blacks in Montclair. Mom’s always telling me how badly they were treated in what she calls “the real South,” which she says starts in Richmond, how our own family had had slaves and all, but we’ve never lived in a neighborhood with even one black family. I guess they just prefer those unpainted little houses over by the railroad tracks. Right.
Winfrey and Blue talk about “axing” questions and wonder if they’re ever going to “gradurate,” but that isn’t exactly the kind of thing you correct in someone else’s house, especially since everyone in both their families talks the same way. If everybody in my family said “ax” all the time, that’s probably what I’d say, too. It’d be almost disrespectful not to. But I can see where they aren’t exactly turning on to the stuff we’re reading now. I mean, Lord Jim? I can’t get into that too much myself. Mom says literature gets better in college, where they let you read things that have been written since the invention of fire. Blue and Winfrey, though, can lay down a line of rap about five minutes long. Too bad they don’t give grades on rap. They’d be tutoring me.
Granddaddy gets along with Blue and Winfrey. Blue’s father worked at the plywood plant that used to be in Geddie, he said. He refers to them as “colored folks” when they’re not around. At least he doesn’t call them “niggers” like about everybody else around here seems to. We go to church every Sunday morning, and last week we were out front afterward. That’s where people seem to do most of their socializing around here. And I’m standing next to Granddaddy, who’s talking with two old guys who are also elders in the church. They’re talking about this “nigger” who used to play for North Carolina, and it’s “nigger” this and “nigger” that, except that Granddaddy uses “colored” instead. Around here, I guess that makes him a liberal. He doesn’t say “colored” in front of Blue and Winfrey, although I guess they’re probably used to worse.