I guess I respected him, too, because he taught me back in school—civics and English. His mind was sharp as a tack then, and his tongue, too. Young and smart and powerful good-looking—already married with kids when the war came. But he joined up. Some folks said it was because the army’d called his brother Elias and the two wanted to go together. I don’t know. Anyway, they weren’t in the same unit. And Elias didn’t come back.
So Garland’s had his share of grief. And he traded his family for a bottle, I know that. But I thought he wasn’t hurting anybody but himself. Now I don’t know.
Soon as he quit wailing and shaking the bars last night, he commenced worrying about his bus. I thought he was just paranoid with the d.t.’s, but he kept saying he’d left the place unlocked and his whole life was in there. Wouldn’t I just send somebody up Cade’s Hill, he said, and not leave it open overnight? Hell, I thought, nobody’d steal books, but it might calm the critter down. So I dispatched Terry Sizemore. Thought he’d be back inside of an hour. I was getting right worried by the time he rolled in.
Turned out the old man had reason to be afraid. Some Messer boys from up Hallspoint Road had not only got in the bus but built a fire in the middle of the skids. Feeding it with books and reading one, too. Hooting and carrying on, drinking whiskey they’d brought or found. Lucky for Garland he had water jugs at the back of the bus, so Terry doused the blaze. Then he brought the boys and their reading matter down to me.
Now none of the Messers has phones, so after making the boys scrub a cell apiece, I had Terry haul them back to their daddy. The news was off by then, so I just sat down and flipped through Garland’s book. Spiral, three sections, like he used to make us buy for class.
First two sections was filled with whiskery writing. I looked at the pages the boys had been reading—you could tell by the smudges and drools. There was a whole page about how beans grow, about vines and veins and chromosomes. Shit, I thought, that’s what happens when you live alone. Then came a part about black holes in space and then, I swear, two pages about his bus being a tank going to come down and save the town. From what? No wonder them boys was a-bellowing.
But so far so good. I won’t fault a man who thinks he’s a pole bean or a rocket or a hero. It’s batty, but if you want to live in a school bus with nothing to nurse but Ezra Brooks, that’s your lookout. Then I flipped into section three.
That’s where I found it, boys, the part that burned off my eyelids, the part that’s going to singe many an ear. Don’t think I don’t feel sorry for Howard Ingle. And his dirty daughter. I told him that on the phone. But what’s putrid has to come out, I say, or there’s no healing. And when it does, it could lock Garland in a jail a lot bigger than this.
CURTIS: Galt called me first thing Monday morning to say he had Garland in jail. He sounded all wound up but wouldn’t say over what, so I took my lunchtime to go find out.
Now I look at people sort of like I look at cloth. It may come to you stained and twisted, snagged or singed, and your first job is to see it for what it is. Then ask questions to find out how it got that way. This is before you do anything. You may think you can tell cherry pie filling from blood, but that’s not always the case. Of course, the person carrying in the clothes won’t always tell you either.
A dress, a suit—it’s personal. After all, it’s your second skin. Lie about one to save your neck and you’ll lie about the other. Human nature.
But Garland doesn’t lie, not in my book. More likely, he’ll tell you truths you wish you hadn’t heard. I thought about this walking up Fox Street that gray first day of December. I’ve thought about it since. Seems like we make some folks bear our stories we don’t want to think about. The war, for instance. I wasn’t there; I can have a clean, clear version, if the soldiers will just keep quiet. Then men like Garland, the ones who paid the price, can go on paying it.
Anyhow, I picked up some hot dogs from the drugstore. I’d hate to be dependent on Galt to fill my plate.
The jail was cold and dingy. Urine and Pine Sol scoured my nose.
“I hope you got some powerful solvent,” Garland said as Galt fumbled for the key.
“You need cleaning?”
“Boiled in oil and baptized in blood,” he said.
“How’s your digestion?”
“Fair,” he answered, spitting at the drain in the middle of the floor. “They don’t give me nothing worth metabolizing.”
“No liquor, either?”
“Not a living drop. I’m hoping Father Connor will bring the Communion cup.”
I let that pass and handed him the hot dogs. He unwrapped one, broke it in two, and gave me half.
“So you were pissing and boozing behind the Valvoline sign?” I said.
“What goes in must come out.”
“That’s not pretty,” I told him, “but it doesn’t sound very criminal to me.”
“It’s practically holy next to what they’re charging me with. ”
“What’s that?”
“Endangering a minor.”
“What?”
“Threatening corruption.”
I began to wonder if he was paranoid from the d.t.’s. “Garland, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s who,” he said, a shiver running over him. “It’s Lawanda Ingle.”
“Not Howard’s girl?”
“The same.”
My heart sank. “What’s she got to do with you?”
“She came to see me.”
“So?”
“She’s fifteen years old.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When did she come to see you?”
“All fall. First she showed up in my garden, selling magazines.”
“What did you do to her?”
“I bought some.”
“That’s not endangerment.”
“That’s not all.”
“Go on.”
I waited for him to explain. He sat hunched forward on the bunk, his big belly shrunken in his shirt like a cantaloupe after frost.
“Think Father Connor would bring me some prayers?”
“Do you want one?”
“No.”
“Then go on.”
“I didn’t do anything to her. Well, I got mad at her a couple of weeks ago, talking about going away to school.”
“Why?”
“She has no cause to go off and leave me.”
“Garland …” I felt around for words. “You’re not her daddy.”
“No. But she’s fixing to leave him too.”
“That’s what kids do when they grow up.”
“Lawanda’s not grown!”
“Well, it’s part of growing—”
“Anyway, I got mad. And she left and I haven’t seen her since.”
“So?”
“But I wrote about her.”
This statement stood and stretched itself before it kicked me in the gut.
“Wrote what?”
“Stuff.”
“Do you have it?”
“They have it.”
“Did you give it to them?”
“No, goddamn it! They broke into my bus! They laid waste my property! They read in my book!”
“I don’t know if that’s legal. ”
“That don’t matter. The law can’t break the law.”
Fierce as he was, Garland looked pale, cornered. It was catching. Oh God, I thought, get me back to the dry cleaner’s. Give me something I can smooth out, stains I can remove.
“Buddy,” Garland said, his voice down from its rage. “You look sick.”
A big fist of spit plugged my throat.
“Aye, gonnies!” he exclaimed, and sent out a dazzling wad for both of us. “The world’s no fit place to live.”
On impulse, I took his hand—not just rested mine on and above it but laced my fingers with his.
“I believe you,” I said.
“I wouldn’t,
” he grumbled in return.
Not till Galt let me out and I turned to wave did Garland lift his hand and show the blistered palm.
I started to exclaim, but he just laughed. “I got tired of reading the same old palm,” he said. “Thought I’d burn it off and start me another life.”
LAWANDA:
Monday
Dear Garland,
I heard at school about you being in jail and the Messer boys breaking in First Bus. I’m really sorry. I’ll go up and check on things if you want.
I want you to know I am not mad anymore. You just surprised me is all, right when I needed somebody on my side. But it’ll be two years before I go to college. Can’t we be friends in the meantime?
I have made some money baby-sitting and I got you this harmonica. I figured you were missing yours.
Take care of yourself. I hope Galt makes good coffee.
See you when you get out.
Your friend,
Lawanda
P. S. I had to tell Dad I knew you to get him to give this to Mr. Ballard to bring you. I am not in a good light.
HOWARD: I got a bad taste in my mouth—metal and burning, like I touched a live wire. On top of everything, Lawanda gives me this letter, gives it to me for Garland, saying, “I know you think he’s bad, but he’s my friend.” When I said, “You weren’t supposed to set foot up there,” she just answered, “A person has to have her own friends. Anyway, I told Mamaw.”
“Then what?” I asked her.
“She said not to see him for a while and I haven’t.”
If this wasn’t so awful, I would have got mad at her then, but I am pure past it. I just took the note and the mouth harp and said, “I don’t know, Lawanda.”
She don’t know either. She thinks they’re keeping him locked up because of the liquor—she don’t dream it has to do with her.
I feel like I been whittling on the front porch while the baby’s room was afire.
Being crazy don’t excuse nobody. Right mind or wrong, Garland could have killed Lawanda or taken her crazy with him, like that bus rolling off the hill.
Which it hasn’t, but I keep seeing it happen, keep thinking I’d like to push it off myself.
Filthy place! Filthy old drunkard’s mind!
Galt won’t let me read what Garland wrote. Says it’s evidence “for the court’s eye alone. But it’ll make your hair curl,” he told me. “It’ll just about stop your heart.”
I want to go up to the schoolhouse and collar that principal and say, Who do you think you are, sending these younguns out to sell magazines? Ain’t you ever heard of the world? But the school didn’t send her. It was Lawanda’s idea. And I let her go.
But I’d already forbid her to go up to Garland’s! Warned her a long time ago. You can’t tie your children in the house, can’t leash them to the bedpost.
And I want to shake the feathers out of that Ada Smith. She knew! Lawanda talked to her! And did Mamaw come to me, Lawanda’s daddy, the one responsible? No. She just takes it in. Offers it to Mother Jesus and tells Lawanda to stay home. Like telling a river to stop rolling, that there’s a waterfall around the next bend.
And Junie. Junie’s got her hands full with the house and the other kids, trying to stretch money and clothes and food. She don’t even know about this. Never has been able to reckon with Lawanda anyway.
So it’s me that knows and has to deal. I go around and around—I run and fall back, a dog going to break the chain or die.
What about Curtis Ballard? He’s Garland’s friend, has been to see him at the jail. For years he’s fed the old man, carried plants to his garden. What would he say to the crop that’s come up there now?
Raising the devil in the rows of his book. Big notebook, Galt said, big as the eighth-grade speller.
Aye Lord, and my Lawanda’s in there! What can I say to her? I’d about worked something out and then she handed me this baby letter. Who’s tricking who? It’s a shame I wasn’t the one that broke in Garland’s bus. If for some cause he ever got out of jail, there’d be nothing left for him to go home to.
FATHER CONNOR: I set off to see Amos in jail with a heavy heart. And some holy oil. He can’t receive the Host, of course, but I thought he might accept a healing. I’ve only got so much to offer: Good News again—God loves you, died for you, for sins you haven’t considered yet….
Galt’s tough flab stopped my musing. Whoever hired this one got him straight from TV. He grumbled and spat, since he couldn’t swear, then picked his teeth with a match before getting out the keys.
Amos was sitting at the head of his bed, back against the wall. He barely turned to see who Galt was admitting.
“Peace be with you,” I said, settling myself in the one chair.
“That’ll be the day,” Amos answered.
“So how’d you merit these accommodations?” I asked him. “I prefer visiting in First Bus.”
“Curtis Ballard’s told you.”
“True, but I’d like to hear your account.”
“Long as you understand I’m innocent,” he said, turning to face me. “I been in here three days and you’re only the second person to ask.”
He couldn’t sit still and tell his story, had to get up and pace what little floor there was.
It’s just another confession, I told myself. Keep your face and voice calm. But we weren’t kneeling, and I had no ledge to hold on to. When he came to the part about the notebook, I got mad.
“Have you, then, no modicum of self-control?”
“On paper, for myself, why should I?”
I let that pass. “For God’s sake, Amos, tell me what it says.”
“I don’t read it,” he said. “How would I know?”
“You wrote it!”
“That’s right. Then I let it go.”
I just sat there.
“You don’t write stuff?” he asked.
“Homilies. Letters, when I have to.”
“Don’t you ever sort of pour yourself out?”
I shook my head. Then I thought of Saint Paul. “Like a libation?” I asked him.
“What are you getting at?”
“It’s Scripture—”
Amos stopped me. “How about you talk out of your own head and I’ll talk out of mine?”
“Fair enough,” I said. “So tell me what you think you might have written.”
“Well, probably … it could have been something about her being a female and all.” He stopped, his back to the cell door.
“Go on.”
“How nothing’s happened to her,” he said.
“In a carnal way, you mean?”
He gave a belly laugh. “We’re good ones to be talking about this—me a hermit and you a priest.”
“It won’t be funny in court,” I told him. “Is that what you mean?”
“That and everything!” he said, flashing from a laugh to anger. “I’m not like you, Your Holiness. I can’t sort out body and soul and big sins and little and light and dark. It’s all together—”
“Then what did you and this girl do} Just tell me that.”
“I swear I never touched her,” he said, and sat back on the bed. “Not, you know, like that.”
“But from the notebook, someone might think—”
“Yeah,” he admitted.
Give him a trapdoor, Lord, I thought. Otherwise, it’s the noose for sure. What I said was, “This is one for Saint Jude. It’s a thousand wonders they haven’t charged you yet.”
Amos put his head in his hands. “Curtis Ballard said writing might not count as evidence.”
“That depends on how riled up people get,” I said, fiddling with my collar. I do that in tight spots.
“You trying to get loose?” he asked.
“No. Actually, it holds me together.”
“Strange, ain’t it?” he said. “All them rings.”
I looked at him, raised my eyebrows. He went on.
“I used to have one on my finge
r. You got one around your neck. They’re outside of planets, inside of women—”
“Brother, you just don’t know when to quit, do you?”
“Truth ain’t quit yet,” he said.
“That being the case, I think we’d better pray.” I closed my eyes. “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all secrets known, be with us in this hour of distress. Give us grace to put our trust in You. If it be Your will, soften the Ingles’ hearts that Amos, Your servant, may go free. We ask this in the name of Your most precious Son—”
Amos grabbed my wrist. My eyes flew open, to find his grizzled face close to mine.
“Get one thing straight,” he said. “I ain’t serving no mutilated boy!”
Given that, I called Galt and left, promising return. Then I petitioned Saint Jude all the way home.
GARLAND: A thousand wonders, the high holy man says. Relax, there’s more terrible things could still happen. It’s crazy—people smashed, lives tore up forever, and folks say, Well, it’s a thousand wonders it wasn’t worse than it was. Yeah. The car that killed her kid could have run into her house, blowed up, and burnt it down. Tell me to be thankful. Count my blessings. Buddy, all my fingers and toes is occupied counting the dead.
There’s that boy from Travis got hit by a drunk driver. Now I drink—I’m no angel on that score—but the only wheel I ever get behind, the only wheel I got, is the one in First Bus. And First Bus ain’t rolled an inch in twenty years. Second Bus don’t even have a wheel. I give it to Curtis Ballard for his little boy.
Then there’s them boys fooling around in a parking lot down at Calvary Creek. Been to a dance or something. I don’t know. Anyway, one of them had a gun. Now I have a gun, too, but I don’t take it off my hill and no stranger comes close enough for me to shoot. Them boys started joking, daring one another—one bullet, six chambers, four boys—and goddamn us all if one of them younguns didn’t blow his head off. Clyde Napier’s boy. Had a scholarship at the university to play ball. Was smart and clean and good to his mammy. And he’s as far underground as if he was ninety years old.
You going to tell me it’s lucky there wasn’t two bullets, lucky his mother’s heart didn’t stop when the preacher brought her the news?
With a Hammer for My Heart Page 6
