Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  Biology attracts me most. I keep an ant farm at home, impressed by how busy the creatures stay, all cooperating as if they share a common brain. I buy Mexican jumping beans, cradling them in my hands to warm them so I can feel the vibrations inside. With a knife I carefully cut one open to find a little worm—life within nonlife.

  I buy a see-through plastic model called The Invisible Man and spend hours painting the liver, kidney, stomach, and other organs with model-airplane paint, using the layered illustrations in the World Book as my color guide. I covet The Invisible Woman, but am too embarrassed to buy one, with those plastic breasts sticking out.

  * * *

  —

  In the sixth grade I encounter my first male teacher, Mr. Roth, who is also the first Jew I have ever met. He acts much like my non-Jewish teachers, only he cares little about science. He prefers English. Peering out from hooded eyes beneath his bushy eyebrows, he leans back in his chair and quotes poetry. My interest in words revives.

  One day Mr. Roth gives us a homework assignment. “Find as many different words as you can by using letters from the word entertainment,” he says. That night, I come up with forty-three: eat, ate, tent, meant, main, taint, and so forth. When I arrive at school the next day I learn that Julie, a girl with long brown hair who plays the violin, has compiled a list of eighty words.

  Since the school bus has dropped me off early, I run to the library and speed through the dictionary, letter by letter, scanning the pages for short words that might qualify. Many of them, like en and em, are new to me, and I have no idea what they mean. Success—I now have 130 words on my list!

  Back in the classroom, Mr. Roth invites me to the front of the class to review my winning list. As I call out each word, students suggest a definition. Julie, the runner-up, sits with a big unabridged dictionary to check the obscure words. The class detects a few repeats and questionable additions, but most of my words pass scrutiny—until my morning’s haste begins to show. When I call out teat, the boys all giggle. When I call out enema, the entire class explodes in laughter, and Mr. Roth suspends the exercise.

  Later that year, he reads us the poem If, by Rudyard Kipling. I’ve never heard anything so profound. Part of it goes:

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

  Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

  If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

  If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;…

  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

  If all men count with you, but none too much;

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  Even though I can’t describe what the poem means, the words themselves stir me. Somehow I grasp that if you can control the inside of yourself, nothing on the outside can get to you. I want that kind of control.

  When I tell my uncle Winston about If, he offers me five dollars to learn the whole poem. I do: it’s the first literature not from the Bible that I’ve ever memorized.

  * * *

  —

  We move again, just as I enter seventh grade. I have to adjust to another new school, my fifth in six years. Our school system has no junior high or middle schools, and so while I finish off my elementary years, Marshall enters high school as an eighth grader. As nomad kids, we both occupy the bottom of the pecking order. By now I am wearing eyeglasses and Marshall has the indignity of bifocals. Now I’m not only “Curly” and “Fancy Pants Yancey” but also “Four Eyes.”

  I sign up as a patrolman, with the task of escorting younger kids across the street when the red light changes to green. My classmates scorn such a do-gooder job. They torment a girl who has six fingers and a boy they call “Tin Man” who wears a metal corset because of childhood polio. When I protest, they swarm around me. “Hey, who do you think you are, a policeman?” “Hey, Four Eyes, I’m talking to you. You don’t like it?” “Hey, you little squirt, watch out—you’re gonna get it!”

  And I do get it. The class bullies ambush me on the way home from school. Three boys knock me down and kick me as I try to cover my head. I see stars, just as pictured in the comic books. I break free and run home, the sound of blood pulsing in my ears. I dread going back to school.

  Two things save me. First, I beg my brother to walk me home after my school patrol duties. He’s in the middle of a growth spurt, and when the bullies approach, he says, “I’m Philip’s brother, and if you pick on him, I’ll pick on you.” No one dares take on a high schooler. I see Marshall through new eyes: my rival has become my protector.

  The second turning point happens during an intramural baseball game when I surprise everybody—especially myself—by turning a tricky double play at second base. Suddenly my tormentors are cheering me on, slapping me on the back, yelling, “Nice play, Yancey.” I can’t believe that’s all it took.

  Mr. Epp, my seventh-grade teacher, is my second male teacher in a row. He has large biceps and a bronze tan and wears his hair in a crew cut. The girls start dressing up and wearing makeup to school. When we boys find out he once played minor-league baseball, he achieves the status of a god.

  Mr. Epp must know I have no father, because several times he calls me aside, puts his arm around me, and asks me to help with a class project. I would walk barefoot to downtown Atlanta if he asked me.

  For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in.

  —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

  CHAPTER 9

  TRAILER TRASH

  Sometime during my elementary school years, the truth hits me that we are poor. That’s why I’ve had to change schools so often. Mother finds a place with lower rent, we move, and a year or so later that rent also goes up, and we move again.

  We live in scruffy neighborhoods of bungalows covered with asphalt-shingle siding. Every so often a family on our block falls behind on rent payments, and they come home from work or the grocery store to find all their belongings piled out by the curb. The rest of us turn away from the sight, as you do when you see someone naked.

  I know military kids—“army brats,” they call themselves—who say moving from place to place makes you tough. Not me. It feels like a kind of amputation. Each time, I think or at least hope: This new school will be different. My teacher will like me; I’ll suddenly be popular; no one will know my real age. Each time, I have to start all over again and seek out new friends.

  You can easily spot the poor kids in the school cafeteria, because we can’t afford the luxury of a cooked lunch. I drool at the smell of sloppy joes, which other kids mock as “train wreck.” Instead, I bring sandwiches from home: canned pineapple one day, tuna fish the next, then banana, dried beef, or bologna. Mother wraps them in wax paper and stuffs them in a brown paper bag that I reuse until its top edge gets too greasy.

  At the time, Queen for a Day is a popular TV program, one I occasionally catch at my grandparents’ house. The host, Jack Bailey, begins by asking, “Would you like to be queen for a day?” and then the women contestants share their pitiful stories. One has a child crippled by polio; another just lost everything in a house fire; a third has been abandoned by her alcoholic husband. After hearing each story, the audience votes for a winner by applauding. Bailey crowns the new queen, drapes her in a red velvet robe, and gives
her a dozen roses and some expensive gifts, such as a refrigerator and a washing machine.

  Watching, I think, We’re worse off than some of those people. Mother often reminds us that we’re living on $120 per month from her widow’s Social Security check, plus a few contributions from supporters at her home church in Philadelphia. “Why don’t you apply for the show?” I ask her. “Think of the prizes you could win.”

  “No, this is just the way it is,” she replies. “Besides, they’ll have to pay taxes on all those prizes.”

  Mother seldom complains, though she gets anxious toward the end of the month when money runs low. “I’m serving the Lord,” she says, explaining why we can’t afford new clothes. “That means we must make sacrifices.”

  * * *

  —

  The summer I enter seventh grade, Mother asks how we’d feel about living in a trailer, or “mobile home,” as she calls it. “They make some beautiful ones these days,” she says. “That way, we can own our home and not have to keep moving.”

  “Yeah, and maybe we can get another dog,” I say, excited by the prospect.

  A few days later we go shopping. Mobile homes, like cars and Christmas trees, are sold on lots. A young salesman in a white shirt and tie greets us, ushers us into one of the more luxurious models, and begins jabbering. “This one has a built-in dishwasher! And notice the beautiful cabinetry in the kitchen. Like a palace, really. Look at the chandelier over the dining-room table, with that lovely bay window to enhance the view as you eat. The manufacturer has spared no expense, believe you me.”

  As he talks, Mother holds her chin in her right hand, stares at the ground, and gives no sign that she is listening. To the salesman, her approach probably seems like stonewalling, but I recognize it as pure terror. She freezes every time she shops for a major purchase.

  Marshall and I dash from one trailer to another, comparing models. “Hey, look, this one’s twelve feet wide, and it has a raised kitchen and dining area.” That’s nothing, that one over there is seventy feet long and has three bedrooms—we won’t have to share. We drag Mother from one mobile palace to another, pointing out the features. In the end, she decides on the smallest and cheapest one on the lot. With a $3,500 mortgage we get a home that no one can evict us from.

  The aluminum trailer, cream-colored with blue stripes, eight feet wide and forty-eight feet long, will be our family home for the next five years. When we move, we’ll take it with us, like a snail toting its shell.

  Once inside, I like our trailer home. It has a fresh, new-car smell, and the fake-wood paneling, linoleum floors, and built-in cabinets outclass anything in the houses we’ve rented. Marshall and I divide up the drawers in the tiny bedroom that we share. The designers have managed to fit a washing machine into the space across from the folding-door bathroom, so we no longer have to frequent the laundromat. All the appliances—washer, stove, refrigerator—are shiny and pink, and they come complete with instruction manuals.

  Outside is a different matter. For most of that summer, we’re parked in a treeless trailer court on a busy street, surrounded by city asphalt. Men in stained T-shirts and women in bathrobes and slippers slam doors and yell at each other, arguments that can be heard at least five trailers away. Scab-picking little kids roam the court on tricycles in their underwear, shooting water pistols at each other. When they get spanked, their howls reverberate from trailer to trailer. We hear TVs blaring all day and all night.

  Mother insists we can’t afford air-conditioning, and I have never felt such eyeball-burning heat. The trailer traps the sun’s rays like a giant bread warmer, and I hear clicking sounds as the metal roof expands. At night I keep flipping my pillow over in search of a spot not drenched with sweat. The only relief comes with rain, which thunks on the roof like hail.

  “How much more would an air conditioner cost?” I ask Mother.

  “Don’t worry,” she assures us, “we won’t be here long. We’ll have a nice lot once our name comes up on the waiting list.” And just in time for the school year, a space opens in a better trailer park. A truck hitches up our home and takes off down the highway. We follow the movers to a shady lot amid ninety-seven other trailers on Jonesboro Road, where the truck guys back the trailer into position and jack it up onto concrete blocks.

  I soon meet the trailer park’s most renowned resident, Gypsy Joe, a Turkish-looking professional wrestler who wears his hair in a ponytail. Gypsy Joe has one of the largest trailers, parked in a prime lot near the entrance. Sometimes my trailer-park friends let me watch him on their TVs as he wrestles against such legends as Haystack Calhoun, Gorgeous George, and Freddy Blassy—fat, hairy men dressed in bikini shorts. We know the wrestlers fake a lot and take dives, but it’s a tough way to make a living, and in our park Gypsy Joe reigns supreme.

  Marshall and I hang out with the trailer-park boys, who smoke cigarettes in the woods and explore the smelly sewage-treatment plant next door. My favorite is a tough little kid named Neil, who always has a runny nose and dirty hair. Neil tells me his parents are divorced, the first time I remember hearing that word. While his mother stays inside drinking, Neil has the run of the neighborhood. He likes to stand in the middle of the street and yell “Car, Car, C-A-R, stick your head in a jelly jar!” as a car slams to a stop in front of him, and then run away from the angry driver. I have only seen Neil scared once. He fled to our place to hide from his father, who had just smashed the windows of a locked car with a beer bottle. Neil’s mother was sitting in the driver’s seat, blasting the horn and screaming for help.

  One day my new friend Larry pounds on our door, breathless. “Marshall, Philip, come quick! You gotta see this.” He leads us to a trailer that’s been pulled over on a dirt pad away from all the others. “A man died in there. I seen the ambulance guys take him out. He’s been dead seven days, they guess, and his guts—they exploded all over the place. The smell could kill you. They sprayed something in it, but it still stinks to high Heaven.”

  Larry proves right about the rotten-sausage smell. I spend the better part of the afternoon holding my nose and peering through jalousie windows at the mess inside. On the dining-room table sits a plate with half-eaten fried chicken and french fries, along with some whiskey bottles. A rumor spreads among us kids that the man drank eleven pints of whiskey and his stomach blew up. There are stains and marks on the walls and floors that look suspiciously like blood and dried organs. To my ten-year-old mind, it’s the highlight of the summer.

  * * *

  —

  Trailer-park kids introduce me to a whole new level of fun. We fight battles with muscadine berries, which leave a bright purple splotch on the enemies’ clothes. When parents complain about the stains (which also happen to smell like wine), we switch to pods from the sweetgum tree, Sputnik-shaped weapons that leave no marks but sting like a wasp when they hit.

  We nail together tree houses and form private clubs with secret passwords. One kid can burp the entire alphabet, letter by letter. Another talks like Donald Duck, and his brother can touch his own nose with his tongue. As a rule no girls are allowed, with the exception of a scrappy eleven-year-old blonde named Linda. We call her “Sharpy Toenails” because she files her nails to a point in order to jab other kids while riding her bike.

  Sharpy shows me how to start a fire by focusing the sun through a magnifying glass on some old leaves. A tiny white image of the sun settles on a leaf, a wisp of smoke appears, the edges of the leaf turn black, and suddenly an orange flame springs to life. I practice on anthills, focusing the glass on an exit tunnel as the red ants charge out, only to curl up, scorched, and tumble down the hill.

  Larry has a collection of model rockets. He starts with miniature Nike Hercules rockets powered by rubber bands and graduates to fabulous launches powered by chemical explosions. The rocket leaps skyward with a great whoosh, and we all run in the direction where it might land, hundreds
of feet away. We experiment with animal payloads—a grasshopper, a beetle, a tiny frog—and most survive, though they act a bit wobbly.

  Courage is our most admired quality. We play “chicken” with fireworks, seeing who can hold a sparkler longest as the lick of fire sputters down toward the fingers, or how many seconds a daredevil can hold a cherry bomb before tossing it clear of danger.

  The trailer-park gang toughens me up during my seventh-grade year. I no longer have to call on my big brother for protection. I have friends of my own. We are the skinned-kneed assault troops, the rocket-shooting, fire-making, muscadine-throwing lords of the trailer park.

  * * *

  —

  I feel a kind of perverse pride about living in a trailer, just as I do about being fatherless. Kids at school know which of their classmates live in the park on Jonesboro Road and scorn us as “trailer trash.” But I’ve never had such loyal friends at school or church, so I wear the label as a badge.

  Sometimes I’m envious when we visit families who live in air-conditioned houses with intercom systems and pool tables and garage doors that close at the press of a button. I fantasize about a room of my own, where I could do homework at a desk instead of hunching cross-legged on a top bunk. Yet their lives seem dull compared to mine, with neighbors like Gypsy Joe and the man whose stomach exploded.

  Although Mother’s income falls well below the official poverty line, we have enough food, a faithful dog, and a crooked basketball hoop without a net. In addition, Marshall and I feel a pull toward two other pursuits, neither of them appreciated by our trailer-park neighbors: books and classical music.