there.”
“You mean the Lady?”
“Yeah. Her. I think she’s whipped up some kind of spell and put it on us,
because of… you know… the trouble.”
“The burnin’ cross, you mean.”
“Uh-huh.” Mr. Hargison shifted into the shadows, because the sun was
hitting his leg. “She’s workin’ some of that hoodoo on us, is what I think.
It’s spooky, how come nobody can catch that damn monkey. Thing screamed like a
banshee one night outside my bedroom window and Linda Lou about had a heart
attack!”
“That monkey gettin’ loose was Reverend Blessett’s fault,” Dad reminded
him. “The Lady didn’t have anythin’ to do with it.”
“We don’t know that for sure, do we?” Mr. Hargison tapped ashes onto the
grass, and then the cheroot’s tip returned to his teeth. “We don’t know what
kind of powers she has. I swear, I believe the Klan’s got the right idea. We
don’t need that woman around here. Her and her petitions.”
“I don’t side with the Klan, Gerald,” Dad told him. “I don’t go in for
cross burnin’s. That seems to me like a cowardly thing.”
Mr. Hargison grunted quietly, a little plume of smoke leaking from his
lips. “I didn’t know the Klan was even active around here,” he said. “But I’ve
been hearin’ things lately.”
“Like what?”
“Oh… just talk. In my profession, you hear a lot of lips flap. Some folks
around here think the Klan’s mighty brave for sendin’ a warnin’ to that woman.
Some folks think it’s high time she got sent on her way before she ruins this
town.”
“She’s lived here a long time. She hasn’t ruined Zephyr yet, has she?”
“Up until the last few years she’s kept her mouth shut. Now she’s tryin’
to stir things up. Colored people and white people in the same swimmin’ pool!
And you know what? Mayor Swope’s just fool enough to give her what she wants!”
“Well,” Dad said, “times are changin’.”
“My Lord!” Mr. Hargison stared at my father. “Are you takin’ her side,
Tom?”
“I’m not takin’ anybody’s side. All I’m sayin’ is, we don’t need attack
dogs and fire hoses and bombs goin’ off here in Zephyr. Bull Connor’s days are
done. It seems to me that times are changin’ and that’s the way of the world.”
Dad shrugged. “Can’t hold back the future, Gerald. That’s a fact.”
“I believe those Klan boys might argue the point with you.”
“Maybe. But their days are done, too. All hate does is breed more hate.”
Mr. Hargison sat in silence for a moment. He was looking toward the roofs
of Bruton, but what he was seeing there was difficult to say. At last he stood
up, picked up his mail satchel, and slung it over his shoulder. “You used to
be a sane fella,” he said, and then he began walking back to his truck.
“Gerald? Wait a minute! Come on back, all right?” Dad called, but Mr.
Hargison kept going. My father and Mr. Hargison had graduated in the same
class from Adams Valley High, and though they weren’t close friends, they had
traveled the same road of youth together. Mr. Hargison, Dad had told me, used
to quarterback the football team and his name was on a silver plaque on the
high school’s Honor Wall. “Hey, Big Bear!” Dad called, using Mr. Hargison’s
high school nickname. But Mr. Hargison flipped his cheroot stub into the
gutter and drove away.
My birthday arrived. I had Davy Ray, Ben, and Johnny over for ice cream
and cake. On that cake were twelve candles. And sometime during the
cake-eating, Dad put my birthday present on my desk in my room.
Before I found it, Johnny had to go home. His head still hurt him
sometimes, and he had dizzy spells. He had brought me two fine white
arrowheads from his collection. Davy Ray had brought me an Aurora model of the
Mummy, and Ben’s gift was a bagful of little plastic dinosaurs.
But on my desk, with a clean sheet of white paper gripped in its roller,
was a Royal typewriter as gray as a battleship.
It had some miles on it. The keys showed wear, and Z.P.L. was scratched
on its side. The Zephyr Public Library, I later learned, had been selling some
of their older equipment. The E key stuck, and the lower-case i was missing
its dot. But I sat at my desk in the deepening twilight of my birthday, and I
pushed aside my tin can full of Ticonderoga pencils and, heart pounding,
laboriously typed out my name on the paper.
I had entered the technological age.
Soon enough I realized typing was going to be no simple task. My fingers
were rebellious. I would have to discipline them. I kept practicing, long
after the night had thickened and Mom said I ought to go to sleep. COERY JAT
MACKEMAON. DAVY RSU CALKAN. JIHNMY QULSON. BEM SEARS. REBEL. OLF MOSES. THE
LADT. BURNUNG CROSD. BRAMKINS. GREEN-FEATHRED HAT. ZEPHIR. ZEPHTR. ZEPHYR.
I had a long way to go, but I sensed the excitement of the cowboy heroes,
Indian braves, army troops, detective legions, and monster squads within me,
eager to be born.
One afternoon I was riding Rocket around, enjoying the steam that rose
from a passing shower, and I found myself near the house where Nemo Curliss
lived. He was out front, a small figure throwing a baseball up in the air and
catching it as it hurtled down again. I eased Rocket onto its kickstand, and
offered to throw him a few. What I really wanted was to see Nemo in action
once more. A boy with a perfect arm, no matter how frail that arm might look,
surely had been touched by God. Soon I was encouraging Nemo to aim for the
knothole in an oak tree across the street, and when he zoomed that ball right
in and made it stick not once but three times, I almost fell to my knees and
worshipped him.
Then the front door of his house opened with the ringing of chimes and
his mother came out onto the porch. I saw Nemo’s eyes flinch behind his
glasses, as if he were about to be struck. “Nemo!” she shouted in a voice that
reminded me of the stinging wasp. “I told you not to throw that ball, didn’t
I? I’ve been watchin’ you out the window, young man!”
Nemo’s mother descended the porch steps and approached us like a storm.
She had long, dark brown hair, and maybe she’d been pretty once but now there
was something hard about her face. She had piercing brown eyes with deep lines
radiating out from their corners, and her pancake makeup was tinted orange.
She wore a tight pair of black pedal-pushers, a white blouse with big red
polka dots, and on her hands were a pair of yellow rubber gloves. Her mouth
was daubed crimson, which I found peculiar. She was all fancied up to do
housework. “Wait’ll your father hears about this!” she said.
Hears about what? I wondered. All Nemo was doing was playing outside.
“I didn’t fall down,” Nemo said.
“But you could’ve!” his mother snapped. “You know how fragile you are! If
you broke a bone, what would we do? How would we pay for it? I swear, you’re
not right in the head!” Her eyes swept toward me like prison searchlights.
“Who’re you?”
“Coryth my friend,” Nemo said.
“Friend. Uh-huh.” Mrs. Curliss looked me over from head to foot. I could
tell by the set of her mouth and the way her nose wrinkled that she thought I
might be carrying leprosy. “Cory what?”
“Mackenson,” I told her.
“Your father buy any shirts from us?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Friend,” she said, and her hard gaze returned to Nemo. “I told you not
to get overheated out here, didn’t I? I told you not to throw that ball,
didn’t I?”
“I didn’t get overheated. I wuth jutht—”
“Disobeyin’ me,” she interrupted. “My God, there’s got to be some order
in this family! There’s got to be some rules! Your father gone all day and
when he comes home he’s spent more money than he’s made and you’re out here
tryin’ to hurt yourself and cause me more worry!” The bones seemed to be
straining against the taut flesh of her face, and her eyes had a bright and
awful shine in them. “Don’t you know you’re sickly?” she demanded. “Don’t you
know your wrists could snap in a hard breeze?”
“I’m all right, Momma,” Nemo said. His voice was small. Sweat glistened
on the back of his neck. “Honetht.”
“You’d say that until you passed out with heatstroke, wouldn’t you? And
then you’d fall down and knock your teeth out and would your good friend’s
father pay for the dentist’s bill?” Again, she glared at me. “Doesn’t anybody
wear nice shirts in this town? Doesn’t anybody wear nice tailored white
shirts?”
“No, ma’am,” I had to say in all honesty. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, isn’t that just dandy?” She grinned, but there was no humor in it.
Her grin was as hot as the sun and terrible to look upon. “Isn’t that just so
very civilized?” She grasped Nemo’s shoulder with one of her yellow-gloved
hands. “Get in the house!” she told him. “This minute!” She began to haul him
toward the porch, and he looked back at me with an expression of longing and
regret.
I had to ask. I just had to. “Mrs. Curliss? How come you won’t let Nemo
play Little League?”
I thought she was going to go on in without answering. But suddenly she
stopped just short of the porch steps and spun around and her eyes were
slitted with rage. “What did you say?”
“I… was askin’… how come you won’t let Nemo play Little League. I mean…
he’s got a perfect ar—”
“My son is fragile, in case you didn’t know! Do you understand what that
word means?” She plowed on before I could tell her I did. “It means he’s got
weak bones! It means he can’t run and roughhouse like other boys! It means
he’s not a savage!”
“Yes ma’am, but—”
“Nemo’s not like the rest of you! He’s not a member of your tribe, do you
understand that? He’s a cultured boy, and he doesn’t get down and wallow in
the dirt like a wild beast!”
“I… just thought he might like—”
“Listen, here!” she said, her voice rising. “Don’t you stand on my lawn
and tell me what’s right or wrong for my son! You didn’t worry yourself crazy
when he was three years old and he almost died of pneumonia! And where was his
father? His father was on the road tryin’ to sell enough shirts to keep us
from bankruptcy! But we lost that house, that pretty house with the window
boxes, we lost that house anyway! And would anybody help us? Would any of
those churchgoin’ people help us? Not a one! So we lost that house, where my
pretty dog is buried in the backyard!” Her face seemed to shatter for an
instant, and behind its brittle mask of anger I caught a glimpse of a
heartbreaking fear and sadness. Her grip never left Nemo’s shoulder. Then the
mask sealed up again, and Mrs. Curliss sneered. “Oh, I know the kind of boy
you are! I’ve seen plenty of you, in every town we’ve lived in! All you want
to do is hurt my son, and laugh at him behind his back! You want to see him
fall down and scrape his knees, and you want to hear his lisp because you
think it’s funny! Well, you can find somebody else to pick on, because my
son’s not having anythin’ to do with you!”
“I don’t want to pick on—”
“Get in the house!” she shouted at Nemo as she pushed him up the steps.
“I’ve gotta go!” Nemo called to me, trying desperately to keep his
dignity. “I’m thorry!”
The screen door slammed behind them. The inner door closed, too, with a
thunk of finality.
The birds were singing, stupid in their happiness. I stood on the green
grass, my shadow like a long scorch mark. I saw the blinds on the front
windows close. There was nothing more to be said, nothing more to be done. I
turned around, got on Rocket, and started pedaling for home.
On that ride to my house, as the summer-scented air hit me in the face
and gnats spun in the whirlwinds of my passage, I realized all prisons were
not buildings of gray rock bordered by guard towers and barbed wire. Some
prisons were houses whose closed blinds let no sunlight enter. Some prisons
were cages of fragile bones, and some prisons had bars of red polka dots. In
fact, you could never tell what might be a prison until you’d had a glimpse of
what was seized and bound inside. I was thinking this over when Rocket
suddenly veered to one side, narrowly missing Vernon Thaxter walking on the
sidewalk. I figured even Rocket’s golden eye had blinked at the sight of
Vernon strolling in the sun.
July passed like a midsummer’s dream. I spent these days doing, in the
vernacular of my hometown, “much of nothin’.” Johnny Wilson was getting
better, his dizzy spells abating, and he was allowed to join Ben, Davy Ray,
and me on our jaunts around town. Still and all, he had to take things easy,
because Dr. Parrish had told Johnny’s folks that a head injury had to be
watched for a long time. Johnny himself was just as quiet and reserved as
ever, but I noticed that he’d slowed down some. He was always lagging behind
us on his bike, slower even than tubby Ben. He seemed to have aged since that
day the Branlins had beaten him senseless; he seemed to be apart from us now,
in a way that was hard to explain. I think it was because he had tasted the
bitter fruit of pain, and some of the magic carefree view that separates
children from adults had fallen away from him, gone forever no matter how hard
he tried to pedal his bike in pursuit of it again. Johnny had, at that early
age, looked into the dark hole of extinction and seen—much more than any of us
ever could—that someday the summer sun would not throw his shadow.
We talked about death as we sat in the cooling breezes from the ice house
and listened to the laboring lungs of the frosty machines within. Our
conversation began with Davy Ray telling us that his dad had hit a cat the day
before, and when they got home part of the cat’s insides were smeared all over
the right front tire. Dogs and cats, we agreed, had their own kinds of heaven.
Was there a hell for them, too? we wondered. No, Ben said, because they don’t
sin. But what happens if a dog goes mad and kills somebody and has to be put
to sleep? Davy Ray asked. Wouldn’t that be a hell-bound sin? For these
questions, of course, we only had more questions.
“Sometimes,” Johnny said, his back against a tree, “I get out my
arrowheads and look at ’em and I wonder who made ’em. I wonder if their ghosts
