Lunch-Box Dream

by Tony Abbott

  “Shelled? You mean—”

  “Fired shells at. Cannons. That was the beginning. Armies spread out after that, all over the South.”

  “And stuff is happening at the battlefields now?”

  “Look.” Ricky unfolded a creased clipping of yellow newspaper that he slipped from inside one of the books in his suitcase. The headline read: “Civil War Battlefields Tour: Two Weeks of Leisurely Driving Through Famous National Shrines.” The article was dated April 5, 1953, and had been saved a long time by their father before he gave it to Ricky, who then kept it pressed between the pages of the atlas. The paper was browned at its edges and stiff. Ricky held up the map that accompanied the article. It was labeled “Highways to American History.”

  “And because most of the fighting was in the South,” he said, “there are lots of battlefields to visit.”

  “Because the South lost,” said Bobby, pulling his own red suitcase out from under his bed.

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Ricky said, sounding annoyed. “It’s because most of the fighting was down there. I told you that, too. The real big northern battle is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but we won’t be going that way. But some of the best are on the way to where Grandma lives. Even Kentucky has a couple. But Tennessee and Georgia, oh boy.”

  Bobby didn’t care so much, except that he was supposed to care. It was battlefields. The bluecoats and the graycoats. Cannon blasts and cavalry. Swords and pistols and flying bullets. You were supposed to want to walk around where so many fought and died.

  Ricky had already taken two shelves of their small bookcase for the Civil War. Worst of all were the collections of photographs their father had bought for him: bodies lying in fields, bodies in shadowy dens, bodies stacked next to one another near fences, bloated and unreal, their hips twisted the way they fell, their stiff hands reaching to touch something that wasn’t there. Did shovelers break those hands and arms and legs to get them into coffins? Bobby imagined the sound of snapping bone, the pop of swollen flesh. Or did they dig oversize graves and just shove the dead, body after body, into the trenches? Did chocolate men dig graves back then, too? Didn’t they have to, if someone told them to? Wasn’t the war about them?

  “We’re going to see all these fields. Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga. Chickamauga is huge and right near Lookout Mountain,” Ricky said. “Kennesaw Mountain is outside Atlanta, which we’re driving through.” He started to breathe over his pictures.

  “Neat,” said Bobby, slowly opening his drawer of the dresser and looking inside at the folded clothes. “As long as we don’t have to take the bus. Chocolate people always sit behind you.”

  “We won’t,” his brother said. “But that’s how they all come here.”

  “What do you mean? On the bus?”

  Ricky didn’t look at him. “Clam up and let me read.”

  Friday, June 12

  Five

  Louisa

  Jacob rode the bus from Atlanta north to Dalton this morning. He left with my husband Hershel. Then Hershel will come back home and Jacob will stay in Dalton.

  It will only be for one week.

  Let me tell you about it.

  I went to the bus terminal with Jacob, in the colored door. The man at the ticket window must have been thinking about something else. After I paid him, he passed only a single ticket to Dalton through the hole and not a ticket back. “Next,” he said. But I didn’t leave my spot. I reminded him politely what I had paid and asked for the return ticket, and he apologized and pushed it through to Jacob.

  Jacob doesn’t own a fishing pole, but I had packed Hershel’s old lunch-box with Hershel’s tackle from when he was a boy in Dalton. It was settled neatly inside with socks in between. I told Jacob to be careful and not eat the baits and flies.

  He looked at the red lunch-box and laughed. “Weeza!”

  He had a brown suitcase, too.

  “Uncle Frank and Aunt Olivia will meet you at the bus station,” I told him when we took our places on the platform, “so don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Jacob said. “I’m not afraid of anything. Poppa will be with me.”

  “That’s right, as soon as he gets off night work.” I saw the time on the waiting room clock, and I remembered thinking that since I had money only for Jacob’s ticket, Hershel still needed to buy his. But I wasn’t worried. Hershel wouldn’t be late for this. I kissed Jacob twice while we waited on the platform.

  Jacob calls Hershel Poppa, but Hershel is not his poppa. Jacob is my little brother, not our son.

  Hershel has a big family. His mother Ruth and stepdaddy Ellis live with us in Atlanta. His brother Frank is married to a nice girl named Olivia, and they live outside Dalton with Olivia’s family, including her mother and father and her younger sister Cora, who is fifteen.

  I have only my Jacob.

  I am Louisa.

  Weeza.

  Then Hershel hurried onto the platform, shaking his head and waving his ticket. “Just in time,” he said. “They made me do extra.”

  “We weren’t worried,” I said to him.

  “Naw,” Jacob said. “We weren’t worried.”

  I kissed Jacob once more before he went up the steps onto the bus with Hershel. I watched him go to the back and find a seat near the last open window. Hershel sat on the inside of him. Then the white passengers got on, then the driver.

  “Goodbye, Jacob,” I said up to him.

  “Bye, Weeza.” He waved. The window was open a crack at the top. There was a man in one of the front seats, and I could tell he looked at me from the window because I have a figure and I can’t hide that. I knew Hershel saw him looking because he stared at the back of the man’s head when he was looking at me. “Bye-bye,” I said to Jacob. I blew a kiss to Hershel, too. Then the man looked back at Hershel, but Hershel looked only at me then.

  The bus drove off. I watched until it was out of sight. Then I left the platform.

  Jacob is nine years old and tall for his age, but he is still a boy to me. Hershel loves Jacob like I do. They grew up hard together, Hershel and his brother, Frank, and they don’t always get along now. I know stories about their daddy hitting them, but Hershel won’t say much about it.

  Like Hershel and me, Frank and Olivia have no children, but they did have one who died a baby. A boy. That’s why Jacob is visiting them now that school is over, to be like a family with them. There are creeks in Dalton, and the country is cooler in the summer and open, and safer. Jacob has known only Atlanta, though he might remember a little of Mobile from when he was very young.

  He has lived with Hershel and me now since Momma went to Ohio to be with my grandma when she got sick. Hershel said Jacob would stay with us until Momma returned. But Momma never left Ohio when Grandma died five years ago; she just stayed in Columbus. She says it’s because up north she can work at the counter in a white store and not have so many problems.

  Hershel and I were married not long after she left, and it has been fine having Jacob live with us like our own son. I don’t talk to Momma as often as I should, and Hershel never does.

  I love Jacob with all my heart and want him to have a good stay in the country, but I already miss him. He promised he would call every day from Dalton, and I know he will.

  Frank and Olivia don’t have a telephone, though there is one in a Negro clothing store, which they’ll let Jacob use every afternoon. I’ll wait anxiously for his call just before supper, except for Sunday when the store is closed.

  What else? Well, we have been to Dalton a few times over the years, all of us together, but not since the car has stopped running. I laugh sometimes when Hershel’s stepdaddy Ellis tries to fix it (heal it, he says). He’s no good with that car, but he tries. But since we walk to our jobs and the open market is near and Ruth is picked up by Mrs., we don’t need a car much anyway.

  I just miss my little Jacob and wish he was home again.

  Monday, June 15

  Si
x

  Bobby

  When Monday came, their mother promised they would get going early, but the whole first day turned out wrong. She had said they would drive out of the city right after morning traffic, but they didn’t end up leaving until afternoon, and even then it was late afternoon. Why had they waited? There was another phone call from his father midday; was that it?

  The car had mostly been packed the night before and the rest was done in the morning by his mother and grandmother, but hour after hour it just sat in the driveway getting hot. Bobby had eaten four times already, waiting to get on the road.

  Finally about three in the afternoon there was the sound of something breaking in the kitchen. “We’ll start tomorrow,” his mother said sharply, and something in Bobby’s chest fell. Ricky threw his suitcase on his bed, growling like a dog. Then, just as they got used to the idea and Ricky grabbed the tennis ball and headed for the back door, the phone rang again and, not answering it, their mother stormed from room to room, getting everyone into the car.

  What had just happened? There was no answer except the jumbled scene of the four of them piling out of the house and into the car, Ricky hooting softly to himself as his mother slammed and locked and relocked the front door.

  The car roared to life. Under the sound of the grinding engine they were all quiet as they drove down Green, then Cedar, past houses and churches and parks and more houses and endless streets in the neighborhoods south of their house, then on Northfield Road into Shaker Heights and Maple Heights, past Southgate Shopping Center and Handel’s Ice Cream, and Bedford Heights, then railroad tracks and factories and everything getting tangled in Northfield Center until all the streets slowed in end-of-the-day traffic and it seemed they would never get out of the giant city, and then they were out.

  They were out, free of the close streets. Even at suppertime, summer was full-blown in the long valley you entered after you left Cleveland on the way to Akron. Green wet heat had settled over everything, and the white roadways had already thinned of cars now that school was over. The constant dipping and rising on soft tires made the big car seem like a boat as they sailed out of neighborhoods and past fields of dry grass alive with the late afternoon hiss of insects.

  Soon they were traveling through small towns separated from one another by woods and plank-fenced and wire-fenced fields and overgrown meadows and old gray trucks, doorless and wheelless on blocks. It was new, all new, Bobby thought when the sharp smell of Queen Anne’s lace came in through his window. It was pungent and sweet and full of summer, but cut sometimes by the faint smell of garbage or the closeness of exhaust fumes.

  Early on, Ricky cranked his window all the way down, pushed a pillow to his cheek, leaned into the air, and breathed openly. The wind pushed his hair back.

  Coming from Cleveland, Bobby knew what a city was. These were not cities. West Salem. Lodi. Many looked like villages that held no more than a few hundred people. The centers of town were all piled up to the roadside and ugly, except for a trim brick bank or post office, and, because they were making such good time, soon gone.

  “I’m so hot,” Bobby said, fanning himself with a folded map, because the car still hadn’t lost the heat it had built up all day.

  “And one of us stinks,” said Ricky. “Hint, hint, it’s not me.”

  Bobby shifted his head to the right and pulled in a sour smell. He did the same to the other side which was not as bad. “It’s the Hungarian in me,” he said. “I sweat because of the Hungarian. I’m half—”

  “Yeah, well, so am I,” his brother said. “And I don’t stink. You have to wear deodorant.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if I did use it,” said Bobby. “Mom said some people just normally perspire more. That’s what sweating is. Mom said Hungarians—”

  “Stop it!” said Grandma. “Stop it!” She turned around in her seat, her hawk nose silhouetted against the sunlight glaring against the windshield, her eyes moist and small. “Marion! Vhat are you telling them?”

  Their mother shook her head quickly and kept her eyes on the road. “Bobby, keep quiet. Please. Or play a game. I want to make it past Columbus before we stop for the night.” Bobby felt a slowing of the car, then a speeding up as his mother pressed down on the gas pedal. Was she mad at him again? He kept making mistakes. “You still stink,” Ricky whispered. “This is the only way I can breathe,” he said, and he pushed his face back into the wind. Bobby knew it was hard to breathe with the wind blowing full in your nose, but Ricky kept doing it.

  Shut up, he thought. Just shut up.

  It was after that, thinking about his Hungarian blood and sweating and secretly sniffing his armpits again, and then watching the back of Grandma’s head after she asked that they stop and she hurried into a restaurant to use the bathroom, that Bobby realized that Grandma’s car wasn’t even Grandma’s car.

  Why had it taken him so long to work that out? Two slow hours of getting used to sharing the backseat with Ricky before he understood that Grandma’s car wasn’t even Grandma’s car? Grandpa had bought the long green two-toned light-dark Chrysler for traveling the highways between Youngstown and Florida. Grandpa had bought it!

  When the car door swung open and Grandma slid back in, Bobby now remembered seeing a snapshot of his grandfather, his features tight, his eyes obscured behind glinting spectacles, standing next to this very car, its high fins, heavy chrome, and wide white sidewalls. It was made for traveling long distances on turnpikes, and Bobby had known this—or should have known—from the moment the car first appeared in their driveway, but the surprise of realizing it now made him speak out suddenly.

  “Was this Grandpa’s car?”

  “Dummy,” whispered Ricky as they pulled quickly onto the road again. “What’s wrong with you?”

  There was quiet for a while, then Grandma said, “Yes. It vas Puppa’s car.”

  His mind was grinding so slowly. If it had been his grandfather’s car, was it the same car stuck in the sand on the bridge?

  Of course it was!

  Grandpa had died because of this car!

  Sitting forward on the seat, Bobby remembered the day his mother got the phone call. She said nearly nothing into the receiver, then put it down, not in the cradle, but on the table, the distant voice still speaking. Her face bunched up, her hand moving up to hide her eyes, she went to her bedroom and closed the door. It was the middle of the day. He and Ricky were quiet and stayed in their room. He heard her crying all afternoon and into the evening. His father went in and out of the room, closing the door each time. Bobby was afraid his mother was somehow changing herself inside that closed room, becoming a different person. Later, when she reappeared, her face was red and puffy, and she was quiet. He and Ricky had to stay at a relative’s house while his mother flew to Florida and his father went back to school. (“What do you think, I can just leave my work?” “I don’t know,” she had said. “No, I can’t do that. They don’t care about that. It’s the new semester. This is graduate school.”) The man Bobby and Ricky had stayed with was a wide-faced, mustached Hungarian with wiry eyebrows who grew angry when Bobby did not eat fast enough. “Gerta!” he said, which wasn’t a word Bobby had ever heard.

  Leaning forward on the edge of the seat as they drove past brown farmland, Bobby imagined the big car stuck in a sandbank on a new bridge. Maybe only a few cars were driving over the bridge. Maybe none. Maybe Grandpa was out there alone. No, he remembered. There was someone else. There was a man.

  Was it the rear bumper that his grandfather had been gripping, trying to lift it, when his heart failed? Another question: Had he been facing the car or away from it? Had he hooked his hands under the chrome bumper? His grandfather was not a large man. He was short and thin. Were his slender handprints and finger marks, those fingers that held the gentle pencils of his drafting kit—the empty one he had given Bobby that smelled of powdered graphite—somehow still there, smudging the chrome?

  Or had he taken up position on one side
of the car, his back to the fender, lifting the wheel well with upturned palms, as the passerby who had stopped to help (a truck driver, Bobby had heard), sat behind the wheel and depressed the accelerator to try to dislodge the car from the sand?

  He finally didn’t know any more than this: the car he was sitting in right then was the car that had killed his grandfather.

  Seven

  Cora

  Don’t look at a white person the wrong way or any way.

  Yesterday afternoon Jacob and I didn’t go to the Negro store, since it was Sunday and the store is closed on Sundays. So after the rain Jacob went fishing with his uncle Frank, and Olivia and I went right to town from church.

  A family was walking down our sidewalk, so Olivia crossed the street, trying to pull me along with her fingers. But the cars honked at her running in front of them, so I was scared and kept back. Because of my new shoes I did not step into the wet gutter. And this family comes on up, a man and his wife and two boys around Jacob’s age. I nearly held my breath. I knew the man’s eyes were on me, you always feel that. I wouldn’t look up until he was past.

  Finally I looked up. It wasn’t the man anymore, but it was his wife, and the look in her eyes! As if I’d have anything to do with her fat old man! She wore a pillbox hat of powder blue with white pleats around it. A short blue buttoned jacket. I wouldn’t say she spat on the sidewalk near my shoes. I wouldn’t say it if anyone asked me about it. But she did. Her two boys didn’t notice.

  Maybe we should move again. I don’t want to live my whole life in Dalton and be buried near the train yard. Not when there are stores like Miller’s in downtown Chattanooga.

  But I did have a good time in the choir loft with Jacob yesterday morning, looking down on those heads with red necks and all that perspiration running in the crisscross cracks. The bald men sweated! Tamping their necks with wet hankies. I nudged Jacob and he rolled his eyes and I knew right then I liked him lots. I wonder now if the man who walked by, looking me up and down, was sweating in one of those pews. I don’t remember seeing that pillbox hat on any lady’s head, but then I wasn’t looking for it, either. Those folks never knew what we whispered up there. I tapped Jacob and told him that being in the loft, Negroes were a little bit closer to God than those fat men were.