yet you had to spend eternity and eternity and eternity reading them. What was
heaven without typewriter paper and a magic box?
Heaven would be hell, that’s what.
These days were not all bleak. The Christmas lights, red and green,
glowed on Merchants Street. Lamps shaped like the head of Santa Claus burned
on the street corners, and silver tinsel hung from the stoplights. Dad got a
new job. He began working three days a week as a stock clerk at Big Paul’s
Pantry.
One day Leatherlungs called me a blockhead six times. She told me to come
up to the blackboard and show the class what I knew about prime numbers.
I told her I wasn’t coming.
“Cory Mackenson, you get up here right now!” she roared.
“No, ma’am,” I said. Behind me the Demon laughed gleefully, sensing a new
assault in the war on Mrs. Harper.
“Get. Up. Here. This. Minute!” Leatherlungs’ face bloomed red.
I shook my head. “No.”
She was on me. She moved a lot faster than I ever would’ve thought. She
grabbed two handfuls of my sweater and wrenched me up out of my desk so hard
my knee hit and sent a shiver of pain through my leg, and by the time that
pain got to my head it was sheer white-hot anger.
With Davy Ray and darkness and a meaningless word called faith lodged in
my mind like thorns, I swung at her.
I hit her right in the face. I couldn’t have aimed any better. Her
glasses flew off, and she gave a croaking cry of surprise. The anger fled from
me just that fast, but Leatherlungs hollered, “Don’t you hit me, don’t you
dare!” and she grabbed my hair and started jerking my head. The rest of my
classmates sat in stunned amazement; this was too much, even for them. I had
stepped into a mythic realm, though I didn’t know it yet. Leatherlungs slung
me, I crashed into Sally Meachum’s desk and about knocked her over, and then
Leatherlungs was hauling me out the door on the way to the principal’s office,
raging every step.
Inevitably, the phone call brought both Mom and Dad. They were, to say
the least, appalled at my behavior. I was suspended from school for three
days, and the principal—a small, birdlike man named, fittingly, Mr.
Cardinale—said that before I could return to class, I would have to write an
apology to Mrs. Harper and have both my parents sign it.
I looked at him, with my parents right there in his office, and I told
him I could be suspended for three months for all I cared. I told him I wasn’t
writing her any apology, that I was tired of being called a blockhead, and I
was sick of math and sick of everybody.
Dad came up off his chair. “Cory!” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Never in the history of this school has a student struck a teacher!” Mr.
Cardinale piped up. “Never! This boy needs a whippin’ to remember, is what I
think.”
“I’m sorry to have to say it,” Dad told him, “but I agree with you.”
I tried to explain to them on the way home, but they wouldn’t hear it.
Dad said there was no excuse for what I’d done, and Mom said she’d never been
so ashamed. So I just stopped trying, and I sat sullenly in the pickup with
Rocket riding in the truckbed. The whipping was delivered by my father’s hand.
It was swift, but it was painful. I did not know that the day before, Dad had
been ragged by his boss at Big Paul’s Pantry about messing up the count on
boxes of Christmas candy. I did not know that Dad’s boss was eight years
younger than he, that he drove a red Thunderbird, and that he called my father
Tommy.
I bore the whipping in silence, but in my room I pressed my face into the
pillow.
Mom came in. She said she couldn’t understand the way I was acting. She
said she knew I was still torn up about Davy Ray, but that Davy Ray was in
heaven and life was for the living. She said I would have to write the apology
whether I wanted to or not, and the sooner I did it the better. I lifted my
face from the pillow, and I told her Dad could whip me every day from now
until kingdom come, but I wasn’t writing any apology.
“Then I believe you’d better stay in here and think about it, young man,”
she said. “I believe you’ll think better on an empty stomach, too.”
I didn’t answer. There was no need. Mom left, and I heard my folks
talking about me, what was wrong with me and why I was being so disrespectful.
I heard the clatter of dinner plates and I smelled chicken frying. I just
turned over and went to sleep.
A dream of the four black girls, the flash of light, and a soundless
blast awakened me. I had knocked my alarm clock off the bedside table again,
but this time my parents didn’t come in. The clock was still working; it was
almost two in the morning. I got up and looked out the window. A crescent moon
appeared sharp enough to hang a hat on. Beyond the window’s cold glass the
night was still and the stars blazing. I wasn’t going to write any apology;
maybe this was the Jaybird showing up in me, but I was damned if I’d give the
satisfaction to Leatherlungs.
I needed to talk to somebody who understood me. Somebody like Davy Ray.
My fleece-lined jacket hung in the closet near the front door. I didn’t
want to go out that way, because Dad might be awake. I put on a pair of
corduroy jeans, two sweaters, and a pair of gloves. Then I eased the window
up. It squeaked once, a hair-raising sound, but I waited for a minute and
heard no footsteps. Then I finished the job and slid out the window into the
bitter air.
I closed the window behind me, but for a thin slice I could get my
fingers hooked into. I got on Rocket, and rode away under the sharp-fanged
moon.
The stoplights blinked yellow as I pedaled through the silent streets. My
breath billowed out like a white octopus before me. I saw a few lights in
houses: bathroom bulbs left on to ease the sleepy stumbling. My nose and ears
got cold mighty fast; it was a night not fit for dog or Vernon Thaxter. On my
way to Poulter Hill, I took a left turn and pedaled about a quarter mile more
than I had to, because I wanted to see something. I coasted slowly past the
house that sat on three acres and had a horse barn.
A light burned in an upstairs room. It looked too bright to be a bathroom
bulb. Dr. Lezander was up, listening to the foreign countries.
A curious thought occurred to me. Maybe Dr. Lezander was a night owl
because he feared the darkness. Maybe he sat up there in that room under the
light, listening to voices from around the world, to reassure himself that he
was not alone, even as the clock ticked through the lonely hours.
I turned Rocket away from Dr. Lezander’s house. I had not pursued the
mystery of the green feather any more since Davy Ray had died. A phone call to
Miss Blue Glass was too much effort in this time of death and doubt. It was
all I could do to fend off my own gathering darkness, much less think of what
lay in the mud at the lightless bottom of Saxon’s Lake. I didn’t want to think
that Dr. Lezander had anything to do with that. If he had, then what in this
world was real and true anymore?
I reached Poulter Hill. The wrought-iron gates were locked, but since the
stone wall around the cemetery was only two feet high, getting in was no feat
of magic. I left Rocket to wait there, and I walked up the hill among the
moon-splashed tombstones. As Poulter Hill stood on the invisible line between
worlds, so, too, did it stand between Zephyr and Bruton. The white dead people
lay on one side, the black dead people on the other. It made sense that people
who could not eat in the same cafe, swim in the same public pool, or shop in
the same stores would not be happy being dead and buried within sight of each
other. Which made me want to ask Reverend Lovoy sometime if the Lady and the
Moon Man would be going to the same heaven as Davy Ray. If black people
occupied the same heaven as white people, what was the point of eating in
different cafes here on earth? If black people and white people walked in
heaven together, did that mean we were smarter or more stupid than God because
on earth we shunned each other? Of course, if we all returned to darkness,
there was no God and no heaven, anyway. How Little Stevie Cauley had managed
to drive Midnight Mona through a crack of that darkness was another mystery,
because I had seen him clear as I now saw the city of stones rising up around
me.
There were so many of them. So many. I remember hearing this somewhere:
when an old man dies, a library burns down. I recalled Davy Ray’s obituary in
the Adams Valley Journal. They said he had died in a hunting accident. They
said who his mother and father were, that he had a younger brother named Andy
and that he was a member of the Union Town Presbyterian Church. They said his
funeral would be at ten-thirty in the morning. What they had left out stunned
me. They hadn’t said one word about the way the corners of his eyes crinkled
up when he laughed, or how he would set his mouth to one side in preparation
for a verbal jab at Ben. There had been no mention of the shine in his eyes
when he saw a forest trail he hadn’t explored before, or how he chewed his
bottom lip when he was about to pitch a fastball. They had written down the
cut-and-dried of it, but they had not mentioned the real Davy Ray. I wondered
about this as I walked amid the graves. How many stories were here, buried and
forgotten? How many old burned libraries, how many young ones that had been
building their volumes year by year? And all those stories, lost. I wished
there was a place you could go, and sit in a room like a movie theater and
look through a catalogue of a zillion names and then you could press a button
and a face would appear on the screen to tell you about the life that had
been. It would be a living memorial to the generations who had gone on before,
and you could hear their voices though those voices had been stilled for a
hundred years. It seemed to me, as I walked in the presence of all those
stilled voices that would never be heard again, that we were a wasteful breed.
We had thrown away the past, and our future was impoverished for it.
I came to Davy Ray’s grave. The headstone hadn’t arrived yet, but a flat
stone marker was set into the bare earth. He was neither at the bottom of the
hill nor at the top; he occupied the middle ground. I sat down beside the
marker, taking care not to trample on the slight mound that rain would settle
and spring would sprout. I looked out into the darkness, under the cold, sharp
moon. In the sunlight, I knew, there was a panoramic view of Zephyr and the
hills from here. You could see the gargoyle bridge, and the Tecumseh River.
You could see the railroad track as it wound its way through those hills, and
the trestle as it crossed the river on its passage through Zephyr to the
larger towns. It was a nice view, if you had eyes to see it. I somehow doubted
that Davy Ray cared much whether he had a view of the hills and river or if
his grave overlooked a swamp bowl. Such things might be important to the
grievers, but not so much to the leavers.
“Gosh,” I said, and my breath drifted out. “I sure am mixed up.”
Had I expected Davy Ray to answer? No, I had not. Thus I was not
disappointed at the silence.
“I don’t know if you’re in darkness or heaven,” I said. “I don’t know
what would be so great about heaven if you can’t get in a little trouble
there. It sounds like church to me. Church is fine for an hour on Sunday, but
I wouldn’t want to live there. And I wouldn’t want darkness, either. Just
nothin’ and nothin’ and more nothin’. Everythin’ you ever thought or did or
believed just gone, like a ripple in a pond that nobody sees.” I pulled my
knees up to my chest, and locked my arms around them. “No voice to speak, no
eyes to see, no ears, nothin’ at all. Then what are we born for, Davy Ray?”
This question, as well, elicited a burst of silence.
“And I can’t figure this faith thing out,” I went on. “Mom says I ought
to have it. Reverend Lovoy says I’ve got to have it. But what if there’s
nothin’ to have faith in, Davy Ray? What if faith is just like talkin’ on a
telephone when there’s nobody on the other end, but you don’t know nobody’s
there until you ask ’em a question and they don’t answer? Wouldn’t it make you
go kind of crazy, to think you spent all that time jawin’ to thin air?”
I was doing some jawing to empty air myself, I realized. But I was
comforted, knowing Davy Ray was lying beside me. I shifted over to a place
where the brown grass was unmarked by shovels and I reclined on my back. I
stared up at the awesome stars. “Look at that,” I said. “Just look at that
sky. Looks like the Demon blew her nose on black velvet, huh?” I smiled,
thinking Davy Ray would’ve gotten a kick out of that. “Not really,” I said.
“Can you see that sky from where you are?”
Silence and more silence.
I folded my arms across my chest. It didn’t seem so cold, with my back
against the earth. My head was next to Davy Ray’s. “I got whipped today,” I
confided. “Dad really blistered me. Maybe I deserved it. But Leatherlungs
deserves to get whipped, too, doesn’t she? How come nobody listens to kids,
even when they’ve got somethin’ to say?” I sighed, and my breath rose toward
Capricorn. “I can’t write that apology, Davy Ray. I just can’t, and nobody’s
gonna make me. Maybe I was wrong, but I was only half wrong, and they want me
to say I was whole wrong. I can’t write it. What am I gonna do?”
I heard it then.
Not Davy Ray’s voice, chiding me.
But a train’s whistle, off in the distance.
The freight was coming through.
I sat up. Off in the hills I could see the headlight like a moving star
as the train wound toward Zephyr. I watched it coming.
The freight would slow down as it approached the Tecumseh trestle. It
always did. It would slow down even more as it crossed the trestle, its heavy
wheels making the old structure moan and clatter.
As it came off the trestle, it would be slow enough to catch if someone
had a mind to.
The moment wouldn’t last very long. The freight would pick up speed, and
