4

THE GREAT DEPRESSION and World War Number Two had been our only experience with the Larger World, and we had inherited—through some curious process of osmosis—a possessed sense of belonging. Belonging was our constant defense, our way of warding off the suspected Great End. The Larger World had issued messages that we lived in a temporary time, that we, ourselves, were temporary. (The atomic bomb was one thing; now, in 1947, there was rumor about a bomb of such unpredictable destruction that certain international scientists were afraid it would create a molecular reaction and Earth would disintegrate in a series of explosions, like a string of Chinese firecrackers.)

Because of the Larger World, and what it said to us in the voices of the Radio Evening News Network and eight-point type of The Anderson Independent, we had been mightily influenced and had adopted the habit of clustering, as though clustering was an affirmation of our existence: if we saw one another, spoke with one another, then it must be true—we had survived.

In clustering, we became isolationists; in isolation, we assumed identities; in identity, we were assigned value; in value, we learned of imperatives; and, in imperatives, we realized perspective.

To the members of Our Side, perspective was conditioned by boundaries. Boundaries gave us reach, held us, dared us; boundaries tutored us in the deeper significance of belonging.

Wesley and I lived by the boundaries of Black Pool Swamp, circling us in a horseshoe from the south and east and west. To the north we were somehow contained by Banner’s Crossing and Rakestraw Bridge Road.

There was a sense of being centrifugally leashed to the center of our north and south, east and west boundaries; the center was Home and Home would spin us out, but only to the invisible, protective edges of where we wandered, and then Home would draw us back again.

We could not mark those boundaries by stake and flag. They were not taught by a line drawn in shoe-edge, or plotted on some map from the Official Office of Official Boundaries. Our boundaries were established by instinct. We knew. We simply knew. We could chase after laughter and echoes of laughter until we were exhausted with exhilaration, and we could wander farther and farther away, safe, protected, until that one step—that one step too far, too threatening—and then we would retreat. No one told us to return. We knew. We simply knew. We knew when we had ventured too far, as though our sense of equilibrium had been savagely attacked.

But the Highway 17 Gang did not understand about boundaries. Highway 17 was alive with people moving, going great distances, and once having passed, whizzing by in their automobiles, they were not likely to return that way again. The Highway 17 Gang watched those passing people and believed directions—north and south, east and west—were gray concrete roads drawn in heavy lines on service station maps.

The Highway 17 Gang did not have boundaries. They had yards. Somehow, they believed they were blessed.

*

To Dupree and his friends, we were mutants, outsiders, and when we argued or fought, it was to defend against the hurt of our treatment. We won our battles, those private, quick, angry battles, but we could not assuage the ache. We wanted to know why—really why—we were mutations. Why plagued us. Why gnawed at us, made us wonder about our traditions of Christian forgiveness. Why made us doubt our birthrights as premium Southerners, whose bloodlines had been purified in the mating beds of humble but bold English and Irish emigrants, with an occasional Indian partner to make the claim of being American a genetic fact as well as an assumption. Why was a forever question. Why was an initiation chant we learned as first graders, when we were tiny and frightened and willingly asked anyone who would listen, “Why?”

We were told excuses, not answers.

And as we grew older and perhaps more vulnerable, the Highway 17 Gang continued its assault. They laughed at the way we dressed. They giggled when one of us committed an embarrassing error in school. They made obscene little tooting sounds and pointed accusing fingers at the smaller children of Our Side.

They called us white trash, or hicks. And no one could tell us why—really why.

Until spring, 1947, when Time became placeable for us. Until Wesley’s year.

*

Two weeks after our first day of softball practice, as competition festered for positions on the team, Jack Crider slapped a double past Wayne Heath in a choose-up game. Jack belonged to Our Side; Wayne was a member in good standing of the Highway 17 Gang. As Jack stood on second, clownishly accepting our cheers, Wayne retrieved the ball, rushed to second, pushed Jack off base and tagged him out.

Jack did not appreciate the tactic. He determined that Wayne should be retired from softball and proceeded to administer the service. Dupree rushed to Wayne’s aid and Freeman sprinted after Dupree to even the conflict.

Jack was dismissed from the softball team for two weeks. Freeman was sternly lectured. Wayne was sent home to get a shirt with buttons. And Dupree’s eye was dressed in an ice pack.

It was an ancient argument, and it had occurred too often.

At recess the following day, Wesley led Our Side below the school lunchroom and canning plant, into a small stand of new ground pines and oaks. Freeman kept his rabbit tobacco buried there in a Prince Albert tobacco tin and at recess he loved to get in a couple of quick puffs.

“It ain’t right,” complained Jack. “Shoot, Wesley, I didn’t do nothin’ to Wayne. I was just standing there on second and he come and knocked me off and tagged me out. It just don’t seem right.”

A chorus of yeahs endorsed Jack’s anxiety. Wesley nodded his head and picked up a pine needle and began to braid the three slender shoots. Freeman rolled a cigarette out of a torn front page from a Grit newspaper.

“Somethin’ ought to be done,” Freeman declared, tipping a kitchen match to his cigarette.

Wesley stared at the braided pine needle. He ran his fingers over the sharp intertwining. He said, “Well, I guess I might know somethin’ about what’s wrong.”

“What, Wesley?” I asked.

Wesley dropped the braided pine needle and picked up another. He began to twirl it. He was being deliberate. “I got a notion why everybody living on Highway 17 thinks we’re different,” he said simply.

“Well, that’s easy, Wesley, they got a paved highway. Makes ’em think they’re better’n everybody else,” replied Freeman, puffing frantically to keep his rabbit tobacco burning.

R. J. spat through the slit in his top teeth. “Yeah, they think dirt roads is for hogs, or somethin’.”

“Maybe. I think it’s more’n that,” countered Wesley.

Freeman blew a smoke ring that grew into a perfectly round cloud and stood swirling six inches in front of his face. He then blew three smaller smoke rings through the center of the big one. He thought Wesley was playing. “Well, we’re waitin’, Wes.”

“Yeah,” I added.

“It sounds crazy…”

“C’mon, Wes,” Freeman urged.

“Freeman, if you laugh you’re gonna have to fight me right here, and I mean it,” Wesley vowed.

“I’m not gonna laugh, Wesley. Shoot, not me. Cross my heart. What is it?”

Wesley tied his pine needle into a knot. He folded his arms around his knees and laced his fingers together. He looked intently at each face surrounding him.

“It’s because they got electricity and we don’t,” he announced somberly.

Freeman started to smile, then remembered Wesley’s warning. He could easily have defeated Wesley in a fight, but it would have been embarrassing. He sat back against a tree and a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces crawled into his frowning face. “What?” he asked.

“It’s because they got electricity and we don’t,” Wesley repeated. “Electricity, that’s what it is.”

“Why you think that, Wesley?” asked Paul.

“Simple. It’s the one thing we don’t have, but they do. Paved roads are paved roads. Anybody can ride on a paved road. Electricity is somethin’ else. You got electricity and you got somethin’.”

“Yeah,” Freeman exclaimed quickly. “Yeah, Wes. It don’t make sense, but, by shot, I’ll bet that’s it.”

Paul whistled softly in disbelief. We sat stunned, looking at one another.

“By granny,” R. J. muttered, and spat through his teeth again.

Freeman began laughing easily. “Wes, old boy, you may be right. I never thought about it before. Electricity. I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Been hangin’ there all the time, big as day, and we never saw it because we was lookin’ at it.”

R. J. tried to spit through his teeth, but couldn’t. He was dry. “By granny,” he repeated.

“How come you never said anything, Wes?” asked Freeman. “You knew, why didn’t you say somethin’?”

“Because there wasn’t nothing we could do about it—until now.”

“Now? Why now?” I wanted to know.

“Well—” Wesley hesitated. “You got to promise me you’ll keep it quiet. All of you.”

We nodded eagerly. “I’ll shuck corn for a whole year if I say anything,” I promised. I was the youngest of the group. Sometimes I said things that didn’t make sense.

“I’ll bust their butts, they say anything, Wesley,” Freeman volunteered. “On the Big Gully Oath, boys. Cross your hearts and hope to die.”

We crossed and hoped.

“Well,” Wesley began, satisfied with our pledge, “I heard this man talkin’ to Daddy last month, and he was saying that the REA was comin’ through for sure this summer, and by fall we’d all have electricity.”

Otis moved closer to Wesley. “What’s the REA, Wes?”

“It means the Rural Electrification Association, or Authority, or somethin’ like that,” Wesley explained. “Daddy said Franklin D. Roosevelt got it started because he got mad about how much electricity used to cost down at Warm Springs, where he went for them hot water treatments for polio.”

“Yeah, I heard about that place,” Otis said, whispering the words as though Warm Springs were a leper colony.

Freeman pushed his cigarette into the ground, burrowing it under some pine needles with his thumb. He began to giggle happily. “Boys, we have got the answer,” he declared.

“I mean it,” Wesley warned. “Don’t nobody say nothing about this until the time is right.”

“They promise,” Freeman said. “Electricity. I swear. That’s it.” For the rest of the day, Emery Junior High School was a whisper, and there was a rippling laughter that never quite surfaced, was never quite heard. The only suggestion that something remarkable had taken place was the again-and-again winking and exaggerated crossing of hearts.

*

I was very proud of Wesley. He was my brother. MY brother. And that made me special. I strutted beside him and accepted, with him, the knowing exchanges of Otis and Paul and R. J. and Jack and Freeman, the privileged.

It was a serene feeling, being with Wesley, but something battered my mind, some ethereal thing imprisoned somewhere in my memory.

I asked Wesley about it.

“How am I supposed to know what’s going on in somebody else’s head?” Wesley responded.

“I don’t know—I thought…”

“What is it you don’t understand?”

“Well, I never heard Daddy talking about the REA, but I’ve heard of it before. I know I have. I can’t remember why.”

For a moment, Wesley did not answer. Then he said, “It took me some time to figure that out. Maybe we not old enough to remember much about it, but the REA used to be talked about around home. Thomas was working as a lineman for the REA when he was killed.”

The apparition of Thomas rushed into an eerie, distorted vision—a baby’s vision. I was high in the air, dizzy, flying, falling, falling, falling into Thomas’ face.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” replied Wesley. “That was a long time ago.”

*

Thomas would have understood our joy. He would have celebrated our giddiness.

Thomas would have told us marvelous stories about electricity. He would have made it real for us—real with places and dates and names and wildly funny happenings.

Thomas. My older sisters loved to talk of him.

He had a smile and a laugh and eyes with This Morning’s Sun burning blue. He knew how to say hello and make the exuberance of that hello surround you and follow you everywhere you traveled that day. He had a dancer’s step and there was a dancer’s tune playing forever in some mysterious, secret place in his mind. He was a man-child, or a child-man, and he had a way of making that magical confusion seem distinctly his, and his alone. He was restless and a wanderer, quick for joy and quick for pain.

Thomas was First Son, the family’s Other Man, and he had a fierce temper against threat to his brothers and sisters. Once, when some unknowing fool of a Saturday drunk made a too-teasing suggestion to one of my sisters, Thomas jerked the fellow up by his shirt, hoisted him overhead, and tossed him against a kerosene drum in a service station. He was only fourteen, but Olympian in strength and courage. Even my father knew that. There was a time when my father decided to be humorous and he hid in the old Civil War cemetery with a cotton sheet draped over his head, and waited to leap out when his children passed. Everyone ran. Everyone except Thomas. Thomas scooped up a rock and hurled it at my father, hitting him in the shoulder.

But Thomas had always been an apparition to me. A blur.

There was a face that I thought was his. It was the same face in the photo album my mother kept safe in a cedar chest. The face was below me, looking up. Somehow, in slow motion, I have always been falling into his face, feeling the powerful jolt of fingers sinking into my armpits and the swishing sensation of being dropped and pitched, soundless and weightless, into the air. And there was another baby’s vision: lying peacefully still and reaching for a face—the same face that memory tells me is Thomas and the same face that is in the photo album—and not being able to touch it until he bends in obedience to my reach, and my fingers slide over the ticklish softness of his eyebrows. There was never any sound to any of this. I do not remember the laughing and whistling and singing my sisters tell of. I know they have not lied to me; I simply did not hear it. (The smile of that photo-album face was too explosive not to be noisy and wonderfully musical.)

*

J. P. Wynn drove down from Royston with the message of Thomas’ death. J. P. Wynn was a distant cousin and he operated a small grocery, where we had an account that was more an understanding than a legal contract. He did not always charge for jawbreakers. My sisters agree that Mother recognized Cousin J. P. Wynn’s car as it topped the hill near the old Civil War cemetery, recognized its age and color and keep.

Mother said, very suddenly, “Oh, no. Thomas is dead.” That premonition fascinated me. Mother knew. She knew. It was raining that day. Perhaps something in the rain drove its sound waves into her mind in that moment, and Mother knew the incomprehensible truth. She knew.

Thomas had been hitchhiking and a man in a pickup truck offered a lift and there was a crash and Thomas was flung from the cab of the truck and his head struck viciously and he rolled into a ditch and died hours later in a small country hospital, with my oldest sister, Emma, sitting alone beside his bed.

When they tell of Thomas’ death, my sisters remember the painful irony: only a few weeks earlier, one of Thomas’ dearest friends had been killed in an automobile wreck and Thomas had vowed he would never again drive.

He kept his vow.

He did not drive.

He hitchhiked.

On the day he was killed, Thomas was hitchhiking to another assignment with the REA.

I have watched their faces when my sisters talked of Thomas. The faces of women have a quaint way of expanding when they are in memory. (It is a butterfly of the eyes, spreading wide, powdery, transparent wings.) My sisters’ faces have always betrayed them, betrayed their longing for another time in another place.

Thomas would have understood our joy.

He would have known what we knew, what we thought of, whispered about: the Highway 17 Gang had the Georgia Power Company, and it made everything about them different from us. Their houses had indoor bathrooms. Their mothers had electric washing machines for washing clothes, and electric irons for pressing creases in trousers. Their food came steaming from electric stoves—with four eyes and top-and-bottom coil oven. Electric refrigerators kept their milk from spoiling and made ice that snapped out of trays in tea-size cubes. Electric water pumps sucked water out of the ground and sent it spurting through iron arteries, ready at the touch.

Our Side had draw-bucket wells and iceboxes in smokehouses and wood-burning stoves and big iron wash pots and outdoor toilets.

Because of electricity, our habits were not the habits of the Highway 17 Gang. The way we bathed, cooked, dressed, looked—even the way we voided ourselves—was different.

At least, with our knowledge of the REA, we had solved one mystery: we knew why all the Boy Scout and Emery Methodist Church parties were held at one of the houses on Highway 17. We could not expect one of them to use the facility of our outdoor toilets, but it was a carnival experience for one of us to flush a commode and watch the swirling water vanish somewhere below the ground.

Thomas would have understood our joy.

Thomas would have celebrated our giddiness.