Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  He’s probably right. I mean, like I can’t believe his father fought in the Civil War. Trey’s great-great-great-grandfather fought in it, and I had to borrow Mom’s copy of this “history” that my great-grandmother wrote before Trey would believe it.

  Actually, my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather both fought in the Civil War. My great-great-grandfather was called Captain McCain, but the history said he wasn’t a real captain in anybody’s army until the Civil War, when they let him lead the home guard, which I guess was like the geezers and kids and crips. He was supposed to have led these jokers up to the federal arsenal in Port Campbell and demanded that the Union troops surrender, even though he had just a few old guys with hunting guns with him. According to the history, the lieutenant asked him, “Is that all the men you have brought to take my arsenal?” And my great-great-grandfather was supposed to have said, “The woods is full of them. The Geddie boys is everywhere.” And they surrendered! Of course, my mom said the guys in the arsenal were probably Southerners anyhow and couldn’t wait to surrender and join the other side.

  My great-grandfather, who was called Red John, had lost his leg in the real fighting. He came home and was in the home guard, too. They had this battle, right down in Old Geddie, where the black people live now, when Captain McCain and Red John and a bunch of other dumb shits tried to attack some Union army troops that were doing a little raping and pillaging on their way north. The history said a bunch of the home guard got killed, and the rest escaped over into the Blue Sandhills, where they apparently hid until the Yankees finished burning down everything they could find, including the captain’s house. Smart move, guys.

  Anyway, Granddaddy gets in touch with the Carlsons, and then I come clean with him, except about the dope, because I don’t think Granddaddy can handle that, and he might search my things. But I tell him I flunked English, which is not a flash to him, since the Carlsons already told him, and my girlfriend will never be allowed to speak to me again, and my mom is going to marry a guy who’ll send me to military school for the rest of my life, and she doesn’t care anything about me, anyhow.

  He takes it all except the last part. He gets a little red in the face and starts reading me the riot act about how “ugly” I’m acting toward my mother, and about how hard it’s been for her, getting divorced and all, and about how most children—I guess he’s so old he still thinks of me as a child—would be happy to have a mother so smart and pretty.

  I get mad, too, and go to my room to start packing things, actually just throwing them into the backpack. I’m doing such a piss-poor job of it that half the stuff won’t fit. I storm out the front door like I know where I’m going, a couple of shirts and some underwear still back on the bed. The screen door makes that singing sound it always makes when somebody slams it hard. Granddaddy calls after me, but I’ve got to get out of there. I can get a job somewhere, sleep at the Y, whatever.

  I’m already on the paved road, headed back into East Geddie, when he pulls up alongside me in the pickup.

  “Come on and get in the truck, son,” he says. I keep walking. He keeps moving the truck up in jerks and starts, trying to talk to me. We must go down the road a couple of hundred yards like this. Two cars go by, and now we’re beside this mobile home, and some gap-toothed old hag is sitting on the little wooden steps in front, staring at us.

  I finally get back in to keep him from getting rear-ended by some of the maniacs around here. We go to the little store in the middle of town, and we sit in the truck and talk.

  “The folks that are keeping you said you could stay here if you want to,” he tells me. “I told them I could get you all straightened out about summer school. And they already talked to the man you stole the sunglasses from.”

  I’m crying by now. He goes in the store and comes back out with a couple of Cokes, and we sit there in the shade and talk. He tells me how proud he’s always been of me, and I wonder how anybody could be proud of me right now. He tells me how much I remind him of his brother Lafe, who he says was the good-looking one, and the smart one, in the family. Some family, I’m thinking. He says that he’s never forgotten how I could read when I was five, and he tells me the story, for the first time since I’ve been old enough to understand it, about how he didn’t learn to read until he was like forty years old. He says he still has the story I wrote for him when I was nine, about the little boy who saves his father’s farm by planting magic seeds given to him by an elf that blossom into full-grown pizzas in just three days. Pretty heavy stuff.

  He tells me this is as far as he can go, because he’s not supposed to drive his truck any farther than the store and the church down the road. He probably shouldn’t be driving that far, I’m thinking. He tells me that he has a friend who’s a teacher at the local high school, and he might be able to help me get into summer school down here and maybe get that much back in Mom’s good graces before she comes home. He’s already called the guy, and summer school classes began like today, so I wouldn’t miss by starting tomorrow. If I want to, he says.

  Well, there isn’t much choice, short of just chucking it and starting my lucrative career as a street person. I am not so sure this is going to work out, but at least maybe I’ll meet some good-looking fox to take my mind off Marcia, who I only think of every five minutes. Granddaddy says this guy will even give me a ride every morning, good news since that august institution of learning, Sandy Heath High School, is, as Granddaddy says, a right good ways from here.

  Next morning, we go through the usual routine. Granddaddy asks me don’t I want to dress up a little more the first day, and I point out that my good suit wouldn’t fit in the backpack. He kind of chuckles at that. I think maybe he’s getting used to the fact that his only grandchild is a wiseass. He says maybe he can get Jenny, my second cousin who’s older than Mom, or Harold, her husband, to take me into town, to Belk’s or somewhere, to get some clothes. He says he’ll pay for them, which is fine by me.

  I see this car come tearing down the road, some low, mean machine from the 1960s, it looks like, but in real good shape for something that old.

  “That’d be Kenny,” Granddaddy says. He’s already told me a little about this guy. His name is John Kennedy Locklear, after the old president Mom and Dad think was so great. He seemed like a neat guy—JFK, I mean—but if I see one more television documentary on how the world might just as well have crawled up its own asshole and died after his assassination, I might puke.

  This guy, who goes by Kenny but is Mr. Locklear to me, teaches agriculture at the high school, and Granddaddy lets him farm several rows out back of what Granddaddy calls the carhouse, because the guy like lives in a mobile home and doesn’t have any land of his own. Granddaddy says Kenny’s family used to work for the McCains and lived in the shack down at the edge of the woods. He says Kenny gives him vegetables from what he grows, and that he has gotten more out of the land than any of the McCains ever did. He was in the Army for three years and went two years to N.C. State to study soil science, which doesn’t quite sound like nuclear physics, and he’s trying to get his degree one course at a time at the local college. He doesn’t teach agriculture in the summer, though. How the hell could you fail agriculture? He’s a driver’s ed teacher in summer school. Good. Maybe I can somehow manage to get a driver’s license. I’m sixteen in August, but it’ll be fall semester before I can take the classes in Montclair. I’m a little leery, though, of a guy who teaches ag but doesn’t own any land and who teaches driver’s ed but has a car that’s older than he is.

  Granddaddy walks out with me, being careful to step across the rusty pipe sticking out of the ground that carries the sink water down to the grease trap by the chicken yard. He has to think about every step, it seems like. He speaks to Kenny, who doesn’t get out or cut the engine, and I walk around to the other side to get in. The car’s a beauty, must be about twenty-five years old, I guess, and I’m not too far off. He tells me it’s a 1965 Impala. It’s like white wi
th a red stripe, new red upholstery on the inside, neat as a pin.

  “Your granddaddy is a good old man,” he says to me as we’re heading back out the rut road.

  “He speaks well of you,” I say, not sure how this guy and I are going to get along. He’s a funny-looking dude. He’s got this dark skin, but he’s not black. Mom said the people who worked as sharecroppers for her family were Lumbees, some kind of Indians. Whatever that is, Kenny must be one. His hair is kind of curly and cut real short. He’s wearing a blue shirt and tie, but the shirt’s short-sleeve, and I can see the tip of a snake that’s tattooed below his right shoulder. He’s got some hillbilly music on the radio, and there’s a pack of Lucky Strikes on the dash, less the one he’s smoking like they’re about to repeal them.

  We don’t talk much. When we get to the high school, I see that someone has stolen the last “h” off Sandy Heath so that the name is Sandy Heat High School. Seems more appropriate. Kenny takes me to the principal’s office, where I give them the general details, my version, of how I came to be taking summer school English in Geddie, North Carolina. They tell me they’ll have to have my records from Montclair, which I promise I’ll have sent, but they’re willing to let me start the English course since Granddaddy is my guardian for the summer. Things seem to be a little looser down here. I just hope I can get somebody to send my records.

  I’ve got my textbook, which is more like the one I had in the ninth grade in Montclair. And, praise Jesus, we are going to have Lord Jim for required reading. Piece of cake. I read it two years ago.

  My classmates, though, are something else. There are eighteen of us in the class, and fifteen of the others are black. Three of them are named Geddie. I try to start a conversation with the guy right across from me, guy named Winfrey Geddie who’s blacker than the black people ever get up where we live. I tell him I’m from Virginia and he says, “I’m from Old Geddie,” which, apparently, passes for high humor around here. I told him my great-grandmother’s name was Geddie. “Maybe you and me is related, then,” he says, smiling out of one corner of his mouth. “Maybe I’m the black sheep of the family.”

  I want to tell him I’m not used to living places where all the white people used to own all the black people, but somehow I sense that this would not be appropriate. He does a low five with one of the other Geddies sitting in front of him, and I shut up.

  The class itself is a bad joke. Most of these kids apparently have just landed here from Pluto and are being exposed to English for the first time. Mrs. Sessoms, who must be like a year out of college, is basically happy if nobody walks out in the middle of class or calls her “white bitch” during the day. Already now, three weeks into it, I know that this baby is fail-proof. There are kids in Montclair who have failed grades without being real dumb. Down here, they seemed determined to pass everyone, at least until they quit school.

  Kenny turns out to be okay, though. He said he went into the Army because his father was killed in Vietnam, but after he got in, he knew that three years would be enough. He said he decided to go to State on the GI bill and become a farmer because that was like all his family had ever done. He also said it was too bad that there wasn’t anything there to farm by the time he decided that was what he wanted to do, but that he was saving his money to buy some land. It’s a trip to walk with him on the little plot Granddaddy lets him farm. He’s only got four rows, about a hundred feet long each, but he’s got corn and tomatoes and okra and squash and about four kinds of beans, and cantaloupes and watermelons. He has some peanuts planted that he says won’t be ready to pull up until fall, and there are all kinds of greens, too.

  He has a metal detector, and sometimes he goes down to where the old shack is and walks around with it, trying to find things. I went down there with him one day, and he came up with a couple of old coins and some kind of metal cup.

  One afternoon, he brings me home and, after we have some iced tea, the three of us get in his car and go down past the shack into what they call the swamp. Kenny turns left on a trail beside this big ditch until we get to the family cemetery, a cheerful spot. Granddaddy and Mom and I would come out here sometimes, although Mom never seemed to care much about it; it’s been like five years at least since I’ve seen this part of the farm. Over on the other side of the ditch, we can see people picking their own blueberries, with their cars parked off in the distance. That’s Granddaddy’s berry farm, which Mom says made more money than all the other crops they ever raised here. They take them out in the fields in this big wagon, like you’d use for a hayride, and it’s supposed to be a big deal that they can eat all they want while they pick. Granddaddy says that nobody can eat enough berries to do you much harm like that.

  We help Granddaddy out of the car, and he and I walk over to the tombstones, but Kenny goes right for this big rock sitting like fifty yards off from us that they call the Rock of Ages. Granddaddy says it was the corner of the original McCain land, and that it was mentioned in the first grant one of the Geddies got, back before the American Revolution. He showed me this old piece of paper once, so old that he said when he took it out of his mother’s cedar chest after she died that it almost fell apart into nine pieces. Granddaddy had it put back together and laminated, so that you can pick it up and read it without doing any more damage to it. It’s as brown as Granddaddy’s neck and hands, but you can still read it, and where it says “the old stone corner, next to Locke’s Branch,” the stone corner is the rock, and Locke’s Branch is the ditch.

  “It was here when the first white men came here,” he tells me, looking toward Kenny and the big rock. “It sure looks like it’s going to outlast me.”

  Granddaddy doesn’t know why they call it the Rock of Ages, except that his father called it that and said that had always been its name. The rock is like four feet high, which is maybe three feet eleven inches higher than any of the other rocks I’ve seen around here. There’s nothing but this flat, sandy land anywhere around it, except for the little hill that the cemetery is on. Across the ditch, or branch, or whatever, is the place Granddaddy calls the Blue Sandhills, where the sand is as white as it is at the beach. There’s a big lake back there somewhere.

  Granddaddy is standing there, resting on his cane, which is sinking into the sand so that he’s like leaning to the right. He looks like he’s a billion miles away, thinking about something that happened before I was born, I’m sure. It’s funny. He can remember stuff from forty years ago, but he can’t remember what day it is sometimes.

  I go over to where Kenny is. He’s picking sandspurs out of his trouser leg, some of those nasty-looking purple ones that’ll cure you of wearing shorts down here in about two minutes. He uses the rock to balance with his left hand while he picks them off, one at a time.

  “My grandmother used to talk about this rock,” he says. “I never saw it till I came up to your granddaddy’s one day last year to ask him if I could look around the old place. My great-uncle worked and lived down here until about twenty years ago. Then he went to live with his children until he died.”

  He rubs the old rock, which is kind of a pinkish-orange color, like it might be magic and he’s got three wishes.

  “Where do you reckon they got this rock from?” Kenny asks, but it’s more like he’s really asking himself. “Grandmother said it was a sacred rock. She said her mother used to find arrowheads and pieces of clay pipes and beads and old-timey Indian stuff buried around it, like people used to worship here a long time ago. Before Jesus saved them from all this,” and he gives out a little laugh.

  “She said Great-Grandfather took the job sharecropping here because of the rock. Back then, other Indian families would come here to rub it for good luck when they needed some. Didn’t work.”

  He pushes against it, which is about like pushing against a tree. It doesn’t begin to budge.

  “Some people say it was rolled here from way over in the Piedmont, maybe after our tribe won a battle against another tribe, I don’t know. It
must’ve taken a lot of men a long time to roll this thing here. I’d sure love to know why.”

  It’s getting hot as a bitch out in that open field, so we go and get Granddaddy and head back. I ask him later that night if he’d ever heard about the Indians rolling that rock here from somewhere away off. He gets this faraway look in his eyes and gets very quiet.

  “Yessir,” he says after a while. “I do think Rose told me about that one time. Don’t know whether’s it’s true or not, though.”

  Rose must be some fifth cousin twice removed I’m supposed to know about.

  A week after I get down here, Mom calls. She checked in with the Carlsons, just to make sure the house hadn’t burned down, I guess, and they told her about the Great Escape. I don’t know if she knows about the shoplifting thing or not, but she knows I flunked English. It’s after ten in London, where she says she and Mark the Narc have been pub-hopping. But she seems more concerned than pissed off, wants to know if I’m feeling any better now, how the summer school classes are going, tells me she can’t wait to see me in five weeks. She also says that Mark says hi. I guess it was too long a walk around the table to say it himself.

  She sent Granddaddy a postcard that got here the day before she called, and she says she’ll send lots more now that she knows I’m here, too. Granddaddy gets on for a minute, but he’s not much of a talker, especially on the telephone. I’m just getting used to speaking up so he can understand what I’m saying, and the phone lines across the Atlantic aren’t exactly like making a call across the street. He hands the phone back to me.