The war cleansed my spirit, for a spell.
All the dying, big and little, made what had happened with Lafe seem like it was somehow smaller, less awful. At some time in Germany, toward the end, I quit talking to Lafe’s ghost, forgot I’d ever met Angora Bosolet.
Now, back home in 1946 with February going fast into March and the land waiting to be led into spring, it seemed almost like I was born again. It wasn’t a religious thing, although there wasn’t a day in the war I didn’t pray, first for my own selfish hide, then for the people we saw, then for the whole sorry world. It was more like I really was a new person with a new life in front of me. Momma had failed a lot, was a lot more feeble at seventy-six than she had been at seventy-two, and Lex and Connie seemed like they depended on me to get things going again.
The farm was doing right poorly. There wasn’t enough help during the war, but the real problem was that Lex wasn’t getting any younger, and he had been spending more and more time working at the lumber yard and less time looking after the farm, which he mostly left to Rennie’s family. Since Rennie and his folks wasn’t hardly making enough off sharecropping to buy food, they wasn’t exactly killing themselves to keep things up.
So I come home to a house with full electricity, indoor plumbing and a brand-new Chevrolet in the carhouse, because times was good at the lumber yard, and to a farm that was drying up on one end and drowning on the other. They had let the crop ditch get all clogged with weeds so that the near fields wasn’t getting enough water. The swamp, on the other hand, was only being half farmed, partly because it was so wet, without the crop ditch to drain some of the water off, partly because Rennie’s folks didn’t have the time or inclination to do all that ought to of been done.
They said I’d changed some, and I reckon they were right. I still couldn’t read and write, but there was this feeling that if I’d got through four years of World War II, I must not be a complete idiot.
I throwed myself back into the farm, but it was out of love of the land instead of needing a place to hide. We was too late to get back the rest of the swamp land for that year, but we did work like the devil and got the crop ditch bush-axed and drug so water flowed to the near fields again. And while Lex and Connie had took care of all the modern conveniences for the inside of the house, they’d pretty much let the outside go to hell, so there was a lot of painting and roofing going on that spring. These old pine farmhouses just drink paint; we must of put three coats on before it looked right. But that was okay by me; I was just glad to be home.
I went back to my place in the choir, and they said they sure had missed me. Belva was talking to me, but we weren’t likely to get back together, which was okay, too. Everything seemed like it was a little bit smaller now, but that was the way I wanted it. The world didn’t ever have to get no bigger than East Geddie again, far as I was concerned.
There was new faces. Folks had moved in to work at the mill when the men went off to war, and there was lots of people hanging around the store and going to church that I didn’t know. There was others that had changed so much that I didn’t know them, either, although I’d been around them most all of my life. Sara Blue was one. And even knowing what I knew later, I wouldn’t of done anything different.
She was eighteen when I joined the Army, near-bout twenty-three when I got back. I barely remembered a skinny, dark-haired girl with eyes like new pennies that didn’t seem to have no respect for her elders. She was always sitting toward the back of the church, usually with a girlfriend or two, passing notes and dropping their heads down to hold in their giggles.
She was the daughter of Miss Annie Belle and Mr. Hector Blue. Mr. Hector had been running the plywood plant over at McNeil for the Godwins for as long as I could remember. Him and Miss Annie had adopted Sara, and they give her just about anything she wanted. Folks said she was spoiled rotten as a young-un.
She’d been gone, too, the first college girl from around here. The Blues sent her to Women’s College in Greensboro in 1938, although her and her folks told me it like to of killed them to let her go. She’d graduated from high school at fifteen and was back here teaching at nineteen. I don’t reckon I’d seen her more than a few times since 1938.
She told me later that even though nobody could of been better to her than the Blues, she had always felt like a orphan, somehow. She said it made it easier to leave home. So I asked her why she come back to East Geddie. So I could have you, she said.
By the time I got back home in 1946, she was a grown woman, singing in the choir instead of cutting up on the back row. She was a English teacher at Geddie School. At the first choir practice I went to, she introduced herself and called me Mr. McCain, which made me feel right old. I was near-bout forty then.
I was attracted to her, without really knowing it at first. She was still a young-un in my mind, but there was something that struck a chord, that made me want to be with her. I tried to put the feeling aside, because it was just silly, a old farmer that couldn’t even read and write going after a young schoolteacher with four years of college. I had only been with Rose and a few French whores in my whole life and, until Sara, I figured that that might be it. Me and Lex and Connie and Momma looking after each other.
Even after four years in the Army, I was a little touchy about not being able to read. Every time the choir learned a new hymn, it was agony for me, because I’d have to learn it all by heart, somehow, just kind of humming along and listening the first couple of times we went over it. Good thing for me we didn’t change songs much.
But while I was gone, they had picked up a couple that was second nature to everybody else and Greek to me. It shamed me to have to stumble like that in front of the choir, but especially in front of Sara. At about the third choir practice, I reckon, she started standing next to me, managed to change places with Harwood Bryant, which suited me, because she smelled a lot better than Harwood, who dipped snuff. She would read the verses we was to sing, usually 1, 2 and 4, to me beforehand, without making a big deal out of it, and it helped me learn it faster. I could remember, even if I couldn’t read.
It was after Easter and just before my fortieth birthday that I come to realize that she might see me as something other than a wore-out old bachelor.
We had choir practice on Wednesday nights, and I’ve got to confess that I did fix myself up a little more than I did before the war. I’d shave, for the second time that day, wash real good, since I had just got in from the fields, and put on a clean pair of pants and a shirt that Connie pressed for me.
“Littlejohn,” she’d say, “I can’t believe you’re a bachelor. If I wasn’t your sister, I’d marry you myself.” She could still make me blush.
So this Wednesday in late April, we’d just finished for the evening and was walking toward the front door when Sara, who had been telling me something about the garden she had at her folks’ house, started going through her pocketbook kind of frantic.
She put her right hand on my left arm, just above the elbow. I couldn’t believe how warm and nice it felt. It was the first time she’d ever touched me.
“Mr. McCain,” she said, the edge of a smile showing, “I believe I have lost my car keys. I’m afraid I might have locked them in the car.”
Her daddy’s Ford was parked right next to Lex’s Chevrolet. We was the last ones out of the church and closed the door—nobody had to lock up churches back then. I walked with her to the Ford, and, sure enough, there was the keys locked up inside, right on the dash.
“I can’t believe I did that,” she said. “Damn!” Right there in the church yard. I’d never heard a woman cuss at church before. I could smell the honeysuckle that was just coming out across the Old Geddie Road. I told her not to worry.
Lex had some wire in the boot of his car, and I cut a piece off with the pliers from his toolbox that he carried back there, too. I made a loop and worked the wire between the rubber and the top of the glass enough to drop it down on the lock. It was like trying to pick up the watch with the steam shovel at the county fair. Finally, on the fourth try, I hooked the loop around the lock and pulled it up.
“You certainly are handy, Mr. McCain,” she said after she thanked me. I was standing by the front door as she opened it, and stepped to one side. Then she reached up and kissed me, right on the lips. She was kind of short, five foot three, so she had to put one of her warm hands behind my neck and kind of draw me down to her.
“Why don’t you just call me Littlejohn?” I said, my voice kind of hoarse.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for three months,” she said, and I hoped she meant kiss me, not call me Littlejohn. We kissed each other again, slower this time. If she had told me she wanted me to take Lex’s car and drive it off Meade’s Landing into the Campbell River, I would of done it, no questions asked.
“You know,” she said, “Daddy’s getting pretty tired of my taking his car every Wednesday night. He says he and Momma might have somewhere they want to go. Would you mind picking me up on Wednesdays from here on out?”
I was in a daze. As I tried to walk around to the driver’s side of the Chevy, I slipped in the wet grass and like to of broke my leg. I must of made one romantic sight pulling myself up with the back fender of Lex’s car. I didn’t look over to see if Sara was watching me, but she couldn’t hardly of missed that. Fool, I was saying to myself. Fool, fool, fool.
On Sunday, I was eat up with anticipation, waiting to see her and talk to her again. In the choir room before the sermon, she only give me a smile that didn’t seem like it meant anything, and I wondered if she’d changed her mind, or if I had dreamed it all. Would I make a bigger ass of myself than I already had by showing up at Mr. Hector Blue’s house on Wednesday?
But after the service, as we was leaving the room, I felt that hand on my elbow and smelled that perfume.
“Don’t forget me now, on Wednesday, Littlejohn.”
So we started going to choir practice together, which was not lost for a minute on the other choir members, including Belva’s cousin Lizzie. From the way some people at my church acted, you would of thought we had committed adultery in the pulpit. I know folks around here that have spent their whole lives worrying about what everybody else at church will think if they do such-and-such. About the only time I let what other people thought get in my way was with Rose. If I paid any mind to what some of the folks around here thought, I’d of been in Dix Hill a long time ago. The people I have known all my life, grown up and gone to school and church with and hung around the store with, they’re good folks, but they can be right narrow-minded.
We would go back to Sara’s daddy’s and talk out on the porch until eleven o’clock sometimes. She would ask me all about the war, about the people in Europe, and she would tell me how silly and worthless she felt staying back here when everybody was getting killed and all. She said she tried to join the WACs in 1942, that if somebody that knew Mr. Hector hadn’t called him from the enlistment office, she would of.
She said she was fixing to move to her own place, that Mr. Godwin that owned the lumber yard and plywood plant had a house he would rent her, and that she couldn’t live with her momma and daddy all her life. I thought of Connie and Lex.
It was June before her folks would invite us inside and offer us some coffee, and neither them nor Momma was too happy about us getting serious.
“When she’s forty-three, you’ll be sixty,” Momma would say, which made no sense to me. “And how are you all going to live here? This place is just right for four people. It’d be too little for five.”
I didn’t trouble to mention that we used to have eight of us here, or that at one time or another during the Depression, we’d had three different cousins or uncles living here, including Cousin Livonia, who had a baby with her. I didn’t bother to mention that Momma was twenty-six years younger than Daddy. I just did what I knew was the best thing. No sense arguing with family and getting everybody stirred up.
What Mr. Hector and Miss Annie was telling Sara, I don’t know, but it got back to me that they wasn’t exactly dancing in the front yard. I reckon they might of asked Sara how she could be sent to college, get a good education, then come back and hook up with a dirt farmer that couldn’t even spell “cat.” Well, she was working on that, too. Sara always had a plan.
She knew right off, of course, that I was illiterate. That was no big secret around here, but it wasn’t quite the problem it would be today. You could manage to vote if you couldn’t read, long as you was white, and they’d read you the questions on the driving test so you could get your license if you had sense enough to learn them by heart. Not being able to read was just something I took for granted, like Daddy having one leg or Jeff Bullock being blind.
We had been courting for three months, Wednesdays and Sundays, when she made her first move to do something about the problem, or at least try.
“Littlejohn,” she said one night when we was sitting on a bench at McNeil Park, looking across the river at the fireflies and listening to the music coming up from the band on Scots Landing, down beneath us, “I’d like for you to do something for me. Will you promise?”
I reckon I would of promised anything, and I did.
“I want you to take a little test for me,” she said.
I told her tests was for young-uns in school, but she kept on, reminding me that I’d promised. She said she’d give me the test the next time we met, four days from then on Sunday.
That Sunday night, Sara come to dinner at Momma’s. Lex and Connie was as nice as could be, and Momma was tolerable. She might cut a shine about me and Sara when it was just me, but she knew better than to insult Sara. Then after supper, me and Sara went out on the back porch. She asked me to cut on the porch light, and she took out a couple of pieces of paper. One of them had letters wrote on it, big block letters like they have in grade school, which brought back nothing but bad memories.
“What I want you to do,” she said, “is to copy what’s on this sheet of paper on this clean one here. Just like you see it.”
I didn’t want to. Nobody wants to look like a fool in front of his girl. What finally persuaded me, I’m ashamed to say, is that she leaned over next to me and whispered in my ear what she would do for me if I would do this for her.
“And you know I keep my promises,” she said.
What she had wrote on the paper was that sentence they give you on typing tests: NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY. She kept my version of it and showed it to me years later. ZOM IS EHT TIW EOR RL GOD MEM OT COV DT HEL VIO OE HTR ONTY, except some of the letters weren’t even right side up and forward.
Sara looked at what I had took fifteen minutes to write. She didn’t laugh, and she didn’t frown like maybe her folks was right after all. Sara just looked up, real earnest, and said, “Honey, how would you like to be able to read and write?”
First, we spent several nights just working on the letters. But it wasn’t like she’d write them up on the board and I’d try to copy them off. She had me make like I was writing all the letters, capital and small, all the way through the alphabet, except she had me do the motions with my whole arms. We did that for three nights, two hours each. Then, a little bit at a time, she worked me down to where I was just using my right hand to make the motions, so I could wake up in the middle of a sound sleep and make a capital “V” or a little “r” without thinking a-tall.
After a while, she’d have me do the letters without anything wrote down to go from. Then she had me writing whole little words, then bigger words. I’d repeat the letters as she said them, and then make all the motions that made up each letter. Like if she said “cat,” I’d make motions like a old tomcat walking, with my fingers. After doing that a few times, I felt like my brain knew what the word “cat” looked like.
Then she’d make me write all the letters of a word without even seeing the word. She used lined school paper so I’d know where to stop each line of every letter. After a spell, she’d make me do it with plain paper. And she had me say the letters while I wrote them.
When we got to sentences, she’d make me act out the whole thing, then write it out a letter and then a word at a time. I had to show her the meaning of every single word while I wrote them.
Next, she read to me, just stories for young-uns. She would read every sentence to me, twice in my left ear, twice in my right ear, and then twice behind me. She said she was teaching me to listen, something I thought I was already doing a right good job of. Then she would have me read the same sentence. I was supposed to act out every word of it, and it took us months just to get through a few little Bible stories for children. But when she was finished, I could at least do a passable job of reading and writing.
Two things was working in my favor.
One was what Sara called ego, meaning I didn’t get my feelings hurt easy. Everybody in both families and two thirds of Geddie and East Geddie knew that Littlejohn McCain was trying to learn how to read and write, like some schoolboy, and I reckon we could of made a fortune by charging admission to watch me play-act them words and sentences. In a little town like this, without much going on but work, something like me trying to learn to read and write was more entertainment than a fire. But it bothered Sara more than it did me. They’d tease her right much at school and at church about keeping me after class and such nonsense as that, and that beautiful dark complexion of hers would get even darker, and her brown eyes would look like fire. I told her not to let it bother her, because then the folks that was picking at us would of won.
The other thing was patience. When I try to explain it, it sounds like something we did in a few weeks. Truth is, we’d been married and had Georgia before I got so I could read a whole book, even a young-un’s book, on my own. Georgia once told me how she thought, when she was a little girl, that all mommas worked with the daddies and children on their reading, although she couldn’t figure what school it was I went to every day in my overalls.
But there’s something about walking behind a kiss-fired mule several hours and a few miles every day, or spending hour after hour clearing out a ditch or harvesting corn, and knowing it’ll all have to be done over and over again, or you’ll starve, that makes you right calm and patient, although there’s been plenty of impatient farmers, I reckon. I’m just not sure how good a farmer they could of been. But, like I told Sara, I was made for the long haul. Must be about half mule myself. I can work a field all day long, summer or winter, or I can sit on that back porch and look out across the woods for half a day if there’s nothing to do, just thinking.
Nobody seems like they can wait anymore. Jenny was telling me about her neighbor’s boy the other day. His daddy, Tom McNeil that I went to school with’s son, bought the boy a new car when he was sixteen, because he just had to have one. Then he paid his way to Carolina, where he changed his major three times and never did graduate. Him and his girlfriend got married when he was twenty-two and she was nineteen, and Jenny says that his daddy has had to get him out of trouble with charge cards at least twice that she knows of because if they go out to Circuit City and see something they just have to have right now, they’ll just whip out the little plastic card like it was magic. Now the boy’s twenty-five and his daddy is cosigning a loan for them to buy a house, and the boy has quit his job as a draftsman to go into real estate, which he don’t know the first thing about, because he reckons he can get rich quick.
I don’t know. Maybe if I was growing up now, I’d be impatient, too. It was easy being patient back then. Lots of practice.
By the summer of 1946, me and Sara knew we were going to get married. We made it official in August and set the wedding for November. Nobody tried real hard to talk us out of it, although the Blues weren’t doing somersaults. Everybody knew how useless it was to try and change Sara’s mind once it was made up, and I reckon they figured I was right contrary, too.
What I wanted, although I hadn’t told Momma or Lex or Connie yet, was a house for just me and Sara. We talked about moving into her place that she was renting, but like I told her, farming was my job and I had to be right next to the farm. Finally, I talked it over with Lex, and he agreed to let me have the little patch of land next to Momma’s, between her house and the highway. It wasn’t his to give, but Momma let him make all the decisions by this time. Then I talked with Mr. Hector about lumber and cinder blocks and all the other building material, and he threw in most of it as a wedding present. Sara and me paid cash for the rest. So that fall, after the tobacco had gone to market and in between cutting ditch bank and hog killing and pulling the last of the corn, we started building me and Sara a house.
It like to of killed Momma. You would of thought we was going to the moon. All of a sudden, that house that would of been too small for five people would seem too empty and lonesome with just three. I reckon four was the only number Momma could abide with anymore. I knew she’d get over it, though, so me and Sara just rode out the storm.
We got married on November 17, 1946, with Lex as my best man and Jack Tatum and Paul Draughon as ushers. Sara’s daddy give her away, of course. Two of her friends from Greensboro, who were teaching now, too, in Sanford and Charlotte, and Bonnie Cain, her best friend from high school, was her bridesmaids. When I look back at the pictures now, I look like a fella going to the electric chair, which is peculiar, because I know it was the happiest day of my whole life.
That first winter, we lived at Momma’s, staying in the same bedroom I had all my life, the one I had shared with Lafe and then had to live in alone after he died. It was a room where bad memories was as close as the place on the wall behind the headboard where Lafe had carved both our initials. For years, I just come to that room after supper and went to sleep, then got up in the morning, put on my clothes before I had hardly even opened my eyes, and went back to work. Now, I noticed things. There was the one old pair of pants hanging up in the back of the closet, where Momma never went anymore, that was the only piece of clothes of Lafe’s that was still here. After he died, when I couldn’t bear to even think about Lafe, Momma made me wear his clothes when mine wore out, said there weren’t any sense in wasting money on new clothes when there was perfectly good ones right there in the closet. There was a stack of old newspapers and magazines back in the plunder room that you got to by pulling a piece of my bedroom wall out. It was stuff that Lafe had collected, mostly about World War I, with a clipping from the Port Campbell Post about the time Babe Ruth and the Yankees come to town. There was a big picture with that one, of the whole ball field with the crowd near-bout falling onto the field. Back behind first base, Lafe had drawed a circle around the tree where me and him and Leonidas McNeil had sat, with a arrow pointing to it and some writing above it. Sara read it to me, because I still couldn’t read too good:
“My brother Littlejohn and Leonidas McNeil and I at the baseball game between the Yankees and the Port Campbell Grays.”
There was too many memories in that room. When we moved out after the house was done in May of 1947, the only thing I took was Lafe’s senior yearbook. I wish to God I hadn’t took anything.
Me and Lex and the Tatums and the Williamses and some of the Blues’ younger kin built Sara’s and my house. It wasn’t real big, and since it was built out in the middle of a field, it didn’t have no shade for a long time. We built a big bedroom for us, a little one for the baby that was on the way, a kitchen where we ate, a living room and a screened-in porch facing east, which is where we just about lived the first few summers. We built on a bigger living room later and made the first one into a den, and we built a little sewing room for Sara, where she could go when she wanted to read or grade papers. She never did learn how to sew.
Momma would come over about twice a day for one thing or another, and she had a perfectly good chinaberry tree cut down from the west side of her house, claiming that she was afraid that the old tree would fall down in a hurricane. It give her a clear view of our porch until Sara bought some floor-length shades. Momma didn’t like that too much, but Sara humored her for the most part.
The first year and a half we was married, I was just a young-un in a candy store. I don’t mean sex, or at least not just sex. It was more like I was just discovering the world. There was just so much that wasn’t there before the war. I was just getting so I could read; I’d go for the newspaper every day like it was manna from heaven, reading the funnies first, then going to the sports pages, then trying to make out the local news and the national news. Sara helped me with the big words. She had saved her teacher’s salary and bought us a brand-new car, a green Plymouth two-door, and on Saturday afternoons, we’d just go out driving sometimes. We’d go up to Raleigh, or over to Chapel Hill. One day, when we was still living at Momma’s, we went to White Oak Beach without telling anybody. It was the first time I’d been there since we used to take the excursion train when we was teen-agers. The beach wasn’t so run-down then, and Sara and me had a good time. We rode on the Ferris wheel, which like to of scared me to death, and the roller coaster, which was worse. We hadn’t even thought to buy bathing suits, so we took off our shoes and waded along the edge of the ocean, running up the sand when the waves come in. We ate cotton candy and we felt like we was the Rockefellers. We didn’t get back until after midnight, mostly because I had to change a tire over east of Cool Spring, and when we pulled into the driveway, we saw that every light at Momma’s was on. It turned out that they got to missing us about nine o’clock and figured there was no sensible reason for us to be gone that long without telling anybody, so they had the sheriff looking for us.
“Mrs. McCain,” Sara told her after we’d rushed in, scared that she’d died or something, “you’re going to lose an awful lot of sleep trying to keep up with us.”
We had a tractor by now and a little more money, and farming weren’t as rough as it had been, although it didn’t pay very good. But I did have more time to spend with Sara, which was good, especially after Georgia was born. I’d come back for dinner and stay for three hours sometimes. She’d took some home-ec courses at Women’s College, and she was a good cook but in a different way from Momma or Connie. She’d fix things I never ate before, like spaghetti and meatballs or chicken with all kinds of sauces that were so good that you’d sop it up with the biscuits so you didn’t waste none of it. I used to tease Sara about making a chicken last two weeks like that, but she sure was a good cook.
She said she had studied learning problems like mine at college, and that she had a professor that had all kinds of new ideas on how to teach people to read. Said it would shock people to know how many folks there was that had the same problem I did and just hid it as best they could, all their lives. She used to kid me that the reason she pretended to fall in love with me was so she could use me as a guinea pig. I know this: She could spot it a mile away, and there was more than one student that come into her tenth-grade English class at the high school not being able to read that was able by the time they graduated. She said she was always amazed that they could get that far, but it didn’t amaze me. If you was able to put up with enough abuse, they’d finally just let you move on up the ladder.
When I get upset about something, or get in a hurry, I still mess up. I won’t likely ever win any spelling bees, and I try to keep my notes short and sweet. I don’t send Christmas cards, now that Sara’s gone. And it took me a year to finish Huckleberry Finn, when I was forty-two. But in the summer of 1947, with me and Sara sitting in our new house and the baby on the way, there wasn’t nothing on God’s earth that I wanted for. I had it all.
We lived in that little house for twenty-one years, until Momma and then Lex and Connie died and Georgia was a junior at Women’s College, which by now even had a few boys at it. I never wanted to move back into the old house, but Sara had some ideas that she’d been sitting on since she first saw the place, and she talked me into moving everything we owned fifty yards away, to Momma’s, and we rented out our place.
We’d saved right much, between her salary and the farm, especially with the berry business doing better all the time, and it didn’t cost that much to send Georgia to a state school. Anyway, we had rent money coming in, too, from white-trash families, one of which eventually burnt the house down. So we were able to put in baseboard heat and a new kitchen, have the tile took up and the old oak floors stripped and redone so they probably looked better than they did when my granddaddy and them built the place. We put jacks under the floor in places where the termites had done the most damage, and it creaks something terrible, but we put on a new roof, good for twenty years, and it looks like me and it are going out together.
Our little house burnt down in 1972. We had gone out to eat at the fish camp on a Friday night in late October.
Coming back, we turned left at the store and had gone just a little ways when we saw all the commotion. There was four fire trucks from the Geddie Volunteer Fire Department, which meant that there had better not be a fire anywheres else, and about twenty cars, mostly belonging to the firemen that weren’t important enough to ride on the trucks. The Registers, that had been renting the place since June, had burnt it up trying to make a fire. They had to take the seal off the front of the fireplace to even get to where they could start a fire, and when they did, the chimney, full of about ten years of trash and bird nests, caught, which sparked the roof right quick, and by the time the fire trucks got there, it wasn’t nothing but a shell, all the windows out and everything all black around them.
We took the insurance money and got out of the rental business. In the spring, we paid Godwin’s men to level what was left and haul it off. It’s field again now, rented out for hay the last six years, and you couldn’t ever tell our little house was there, except for one thing. Right after we moved in, when we was planting everything we could find to make it look less like a field, Sara put crepe myrtles in the front yard because they liked the sun so much. After the house burnt down and we had it leveled, we decided not to plow under the biggest and prettiest one, and when we rented the land for hay, we told the man not to hurt the crepe myrtle, even though it was in the middle of the field. They liked to of killed it twice coming too close with a tractor, so we finally got some landscape timbers and made a eight-foot square around it. That crepe myrtle comes out every summer all pink and beautiful, just when everything else is dying, and it helps me remember what a fine life we had, in spite of everything.