I ended up staying with the Candleses for longer than a day or two; it was as if Dudley had forgotten me. One month rolled comfortably into the next. Winter came, wet and cold and icy with some early-morning blows of rare East Texas snow, but the Candleses’ house was warm and cozy, and I felt safe there, and even a little happy.
I felt my father would never be found. They had swept hooks on cables through the lake and come up with nothing and called it a day. New Long Lincoln, the town that had replaced the old, didn’t strike me as a community that wanted to worry much about a murderous father whose son had been rescued from a purposeful attempt to drown him. I began to feel much the same way. Let sleeping demons lie.
Late at night, listening to the cold winds blow and the panes in the windows rattle throughout the house, I sometimes sensed my father at the foot of my bed, for I had been set up with a small one in a storage room for food goods.
There were shelves on either side of my bed and behind me. They were stocked with jars that had been packed with pickles, beets, and jalapeños soaked in vinegar. Above the back-wall shelf was one high window touched gently by the swaying limb of a chinaberry tree. The limb made little shadows in the sunlight, and when the moon was bright, the lunar shadows trickled in.
Some nights Dad would be down there at the foot of my little bed. I put my head under the covers, but I could sense him there. I could feel his touch on my ankle, foot, or leg. The air seemed to smell of water and fish and mildew. I would keep my eyes closed tight under the pillow, and finally the touch of his hand would fade, and the bed would move slightly as if he stood up, and then I could sense him no more.
The stench in the air would be replaced by the faint aroma of cedar, the wood the shelves were made of. There was only the natural cold of winter then, for the fire in the barrel stove had been put out, and the portable electric heaters had been turned off, and there wasn’t any central air.
In time, I learned to live more comfortably with the visits from my father. I couldn’t decide if those visits were false or real, if my father’s wet ghost actually came to see me there in my little warm bed. I couldn’t figure if he wanted me down there in the lake with him or if he was there to assure me that he was all right.
Time plowed on. Ronnie was in school, of course, went there during the week, and me and her went fishing with her dad on weekends, nowhere near the bridge over Moon Lake. I didn’t ask them not to go there; they just didn’t. We fished off the bank or sometimes from a little aluminum boat.
Ronnie liked to box. She loved watching it on TV. Liked gloving up. Her mother didn’t care for it, thought it was unladylike and feared Ronnie would break her nose or chip a tooth, but I could tell her father, who had boxed, was delighted. I was delighted too.
We practiced together. We learned punches and hammered the heavy bag that Mr. Candles kept in a walled-off section of his garage. There was also a speed bag, and we worked that.
From time to time, wearing light gloves and mouthpieces that Mr. Candles boiled in a bucket of water and a dash of alcohol, we were allowed to box inside a circle Mr. Candles drew with white chalk on the floor of the garage. It was about half the size of an actual boxing ring. We didn’t go for the knockout. During our little bouts, we suffered only bloody noses and now and again a split lip, a black eye, or a light blue bruise.
The whole process made me feel stronger, more confident. It felt good to become tired from physical activity. On those nights, I slept deep and my father’s ghost stayed in its new home at the bottom of Moon Lake.
The Candleses bought me some clothes, a few odds and ends. According to the law, I was supposed to be in school, but instead of having me go, the county let Millie, who had been a teacher at the black school before integration, teach me. When the black school folded, so had her job. She told me that for a time, she had been a lunch-line lady at the new school.
She said, “It hurt my pride, after being a teacher. It was honest work, and I was glad to have it, but it was as if I was being punished, demoted, after acquiring an education and teaching kids to spell and write and do math. Next thing I knew, I was serving up tuna surprise and corned beef hash, Wonder Bread and strawberry Jell-O. I didn’t like it. Worse, the food was so bad, the cook they hired might as well have been mixing cement.”
She didn’t work in the lunch line long. She quit and worked from home baking this and that, selling her wares to both black and white customers. Her loaves of bread were brown as autumn, firm and soft as your one true love, and soaked up butter like a brand-new sponge. Her cookies were sweet but not too sweet, and her pies and cakes were like gifts from heaven. Their smell as they baked could almost cause me to levitate.
Fact was, if there was a heaven, something I sincerely doubted, then Millie would have run the bakery there, personally delivering to God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost, bringing cookies to the angels on Sunday. She might even toss a devil’s food cake down to Satan on a friendly day. Bottom line was, they let her keep me in the educational loop, and I had the added benefit of baked goods too.
Millie was sweet, but there was toughness under that sweet veneer. She taught me my lessons—reading, writing, history and geography, the basics of algebra, which I never really understood. My lessons were graded by Millie, then sent to the school and checked over by white teachers who, in the Jim Crow South, were considered more competent. They rarely changed a grade or a suggestion, but it made them feel good to judge the papers she had graded and give them white sanction.
In the history department, there were some mark-outs where I had written about the Civil War from a less sympathetic point of view than most Southerners, had given opinions not in line with the Daughters and Sons of the Confederacy. No doubt those opinions had been the influence of Millie, who gave me numerous books about the war, not just the ones they taught in Texas history class.
On school mornings when it was cold and the mist rose off the wet grass, I watched Ronnie leave to catch the bus.
I normally watched from the window, rubbing moisture off the pane with my sleeve so I could see her. But one morning, we were standing on the porch, waiting for the bus, breathing white foam into the air, and suddenly she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek with lips soft as cotton and warm as a wool blanket. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I had discovered I had acquired the ability to lay painted eggs and pee lemonade.
“I like you, Danny Russell,” she said.
Moments later the bus arrived. The door wheezed open. A black girl in a white dress with a white bow in her gathered-up hair swung down from a front seat onto the bus steps and yelled out, “What you doing with that white boy?”
“He’s a guest,” Ronnie said, stepping off the porch.
“Get on back up in here,” the bus driver said to the girl in white. The driver, who did the same sort of job as Mr. Candles, was a heavy black man with a fedora hat wearing khakis and work boots.
“That white boy staying with y’all?” said the girl, ignoring the driver.
“Get on back up in the bus, Earleen, before I punch you in the nose,” Ronnie said.
Earleen took this as a serious warning and retreated. Ronnie went up the bus steps, turned slightly, looked at me, and smiled. It was like a sharp, sweet dart to the heart.
Then the door closed. I saw her through the steamy windows, moving like a shadow along the aisle of the bus. Then she was seated, and I could see her seated shape through the glass as the bus reeked away, spitting exhaust loud enough to make me jump.