Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  “You know,” she said, “Daddy’s getting pretty tired of my taking his car every Wednesday night. He says he and Momma might have somewhere they want to go. Would you mind picking me up on Wednesdays from here on out?”

  I was in a daze. As I tried to walk around to the driver’s side of the Chevy, I slipped in the wet grass and like to of broke my leg. I must of made one romantic sight pulling myself up with the back fender of Lex’s car. I didn’t look over to see if Sara was watching me, but she couldn’t hardly of missed that. Fool, I was saying to myself. Fool, fool, fool.

  On Sunday, I was eat up with anticipation, waiting to see her and talk to her again. In the choir room before the sermon, she only give me a smile that didn’t seem like it meant anything, and I wondered if she’d changed her mind, or if I had dreamed it all. Would I make a bigger ass of myself than I already had by showing up at Mr. Hector Blue’s house on Wednesday?

  But after the service, as we was leaving the room, I felt that hand on my elbow and smelled that perfume.

  “Don’t forget me now, on Wednesday, Littlejohn.”

  So we started going to choir practice together, which was not lost for a minute on the other choir members, including Belva’s cousin Lizzie. From the way some people at my church acted, you would of thought we had committed adultery in the pulpit. I know folks around here that have spent their whole lives worrying about what everybody else at church will think if they do such-and-such. About the only time I let what other people thought get in my way was with Rose. If I paid any mind to what some of the folks around here thought, I’d of been in Dix Hill a long time ago. The people I have known all my life, grown up and gone to school and church with and hung around the store with, they’re good folks, but they can be right narrow-minded.

  We would go back to Sara’s daddy’s and talk out on the porch until eleven o’clock sometimes. She would ask me all about the war, about the people in Europe, and she would tell me how silly and worthless she felt staying back here when everybody was getting killed and all. She said she tried to join the WACs in 1942, that if somebody that knew Mr. Hector hadn’t called him from the enlistment office, she would of.

  She said she was fixing to move to her own place, that Mr. Godwin that owned the lumber yard and plywood plant had a house he would rent her, and that she couldn’t live with her momma and daddy all her life. I thought of Connie and Lex.

  It was June before her folks would invite us inside and offer us some coffee, and neither them nor Momma was too happy about us getting serious.

  “When she’s forty-three, you’ll be sixty,” Momma would say, which made no sense to me. “And how are you all going to live here? This place is just right for four people. It’d be too little for five.”

  I didn’t trouble to mention that we used to have eight of us here, or that at one time or another during the Depression, we’d had three different cousins or uncles living here, including Cousin Livonia, who had a baby with her. I didn’t bother to mention that Momma was twenty-six years younger than Daddy. I just did what I knew was the best thing. No sense arguing with family and getting everybody stirred up.

  What Mr. Hector and Miss Annie was telling Sara, I don’t know, but it got back to me that they wasn’t exactly dancing in the front yard. I reckon they might of asked Sara how she could be sent to college, get a good education, then come back and hook up with a dirt farmer that couldn’t even spell “cat.” Well, she was working on that, too. Sara always had a plan.

  She knew right off, of course, that I was illiterate. That was no big secret around here, but it wasn’t quite the problem it would be today. You could manage to vote if you couldn’t read, long as you was white, and they’d read you the questions on the driving test so you could get your license if you had sense enough to learn them by heart. Not being able to read was just something I took for granted, like Daddy having one leg or Jeff Bullock being blind.

  We had been courting for three months, Wednesdays and Sundays, when she made her first move to do something about the problem, or at least try.

  “Littlejohn,” she said one night when we was sitting on a bench at McNeil Park, looking across the river at the fireflies and listening to the music coming up from the band on Scots Landing, down beneath us, “I’d like for you to do something for me. Will you promise?”

  I reckon I would of promised anything, and I did.

  “I want you to take a little test for me,” she said.

  I told her tests was for young-uns in school, but she kept on, reminding me that I’d promised. She said she’d give me the test the next time we met, four days from then on Sunday.

  That Sunday night, Sara come to dinner at Momma’s. Lex and Connie was as nice as could be, and Momma was tolerable. She might cut a shine about me and Sara when it was just me, but she knew better than to insult Sara. Then after supper, me and Sara went out on the back porch. She asked me to cut on the porch light, and she took out a couple of pieces of paper. One of them had letters wrote on it, big block letters like they have in grade school, which brought back nothing but bad memories.

  “What I want you to do,” she said, “is to copy what’s on this sheet of paper on this clean one here. Just like you see it.”

  I didn’t want to. Nobody wants to look like a fool in front of his girl. What finally persuaded me, I’m ashamed to say, is that she leaned over next to me and whispered in my ear what she would do for me if I would do this for her.

  “And you know I keep my promises,” she said.

  What she had wrote on the paper was that sentence they give you on typing tests: NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY. She kept my version of it and showed it to me years later. ZOM IS EHT TIW EOR RL GOD MEM OT COV DT HEL VIO OE HTR ONTY, except some of the letters weren’t even right side up and forward.

  Sara looked at what I had took fifteen minutes to write. She didn’t laugh, and she didn’t frown like maybe her folks was right after all. Sara just looked up, real earnest, and said, “Honey, how would you like to be able to read and write?”

  First, we spent several nights just working on the letters. But it wasn’t like she’d write them up on the board and I’d try to copy them off. She had me make like I was writing all the letters, capital and small, all the way through the alphabet, except she had me do the motions with my whole arms. We did that for three nights, two hours each. Then, a little bit at a time, she worked me down to where I was just using my right hand to make the motions, so I could wake up in the middle of a sound sleep and make a capital “V” or a little “r” without thinking a-tall.

  After a while, she’d have me do the letters without anything wrote down to go from. Then she had me writing whole little words, then bigger words. I’d repeat the letters as she said them, and then make all the motions that made up each letter. Like if she said “cat,” I’d make motions like a old tomcat walking, with my fingers. After doing that a few times, I felt like my brain knew what the word “cat” looked like.

  Then she’d make me write all the letters of a word without even seeing the word. She used lined school paper so I’d know where to stop each line of every letter. After a spell, she’d make me do it with plain paper. And she had me say the letters while I wrote them.

  When we got to sentences, she’d make me act out the whole thing, then write it out a letter and then a word at a time. I had to show her the meaning of every single word while I wrote them.

  Next, she read to me, just stories for young-uns. She would read every sentence to me, twice in my left ear, twice in my right ear, and then twice behind me. She said she was teaching me to listen, something I thought I was already doing a right good job of. Then she would have me read the same sentence. I was supposed to act out every word of it, and it took us months just to get through a few little Bible stories for children. But when she was finished, I could at least do a passable job of reading and writing.

  Two things was working in my favor.

>   One was what Sara called ego, meaning I didn’t get my feelings hurt easy. Everybody in both families and two thirds of Geddie and East Geddie knew that Littlejohn McCain was trying to learn how to read and write, like some schoolboy, and I reckon we could of made a fortune by charging admission to watch me play-act them words and sentences. In a little town like this, without much going on but work, something like me trying to learn to read and write was more entertainment than a fire. But it bothered Sara more than it did me. They’d tease her right much at school and at church about keeping me after class and such nonsense as that, and that beautiful dark complexion of hers would get even darker, and her brown eyes would look like fire. I told her not to let it bother her, because then the folks that was picking at us would of won.

  The other thing was patience. When I try to explain it, it sounds like something we did in a few weeks. Truth is, we’d been married and had Georgia before I got so I could read a whole book, even a young-un’s book, on my own. Georgia once told me how she thought, when she was a little girl, that all mommas worked with the daddies and children on their reading, although she couldn’t figure what school it was I went to every day in my overalls.

  But there’s something about walking behind a kiss-fired mule several hours and a few miles every day, or spending hour after hour clearing out a ditch or harvesting corn, and knowing it’ll all have to be done over and over again, or you’ll starve, that makes you right calm and patient, although there’s been plenty of impatient farmers, I reckon. I’m just not sure how good a farmer they could of been. But, like I told Sara, I was made for the long haul. Must be about half mule myself. I can work a field all day long, summer or winter, or I can sit on that back porch and look out across the woods for half a day if there’s nothing to do, just thinking.

  Nobody seems like they can wait anymore. Jenny was telling me about her neighbor’s boy the other day. His daddy, Tom McNeil that I went to school with’s son, bought the boy a new car when he was sixteen, because he just had to have one. Then he paid his way to Carolina, where he changed his major three times and never did graduate. Him and his girlfriend got married when he was twenty-two and she was nineteen, and Jenny says that his daddy has had to get him out of trouble with charge cards at least twice that she knows of because if they go out to Circuit City and see something they just have to have right now, they’ll just whip out the little plastic card like it was magic. Now the boy’s twenty-five and his daddy is cosigning a loan for them to buy a house, and the boy has quit his job as a draftsman to go into real estate, which he don’t know the first thing about, because he reckons he can get rich quick.

  I don’t know. Maybe if I was growing up now, I’d be impatient, too. It was easy being patient back then. Lots of practice.

  By the summer of 1946, me and Sara knew we were going to get married. We made it official in August and set the wedding for November. Nobody tried real hard to talk us out of it, although the Blues weren’t doing somersaults. Everybody knew how useless it was to try and change Sara’s mind once it was made up, and I reckon they figured I was right contrary, too.

  What I wanted, although I hadn’t told Momma or Lex or Connie yet, was a house for just me and Sara. We talked about moving into her place that she was renting, but like I told her, farming was my job and I had to be right next to the farm. Finally, I talked it over with Lex, and he agreed to let me have the little patch of land next to Momma’s, between her house and the highway. It wasn’t his to give, but Momma let him make all the decisions by this time. Then I talked with Mr. Hector about lumber and cinder blocks and all the other building material, and he threw in most of it as a wedding present. Sara and me paid cash for the rest. So that fall, after the tobacco had gone to market and in between cutting ditch bank and hog killing and pulling the last of the corn, we started building me and Sara a house.

  It like to of killed Momma. You would of thought we was going to the moon. All of a sudden, that house that would of been too small for five people would seem too empty and lonesome with just three. I reckon four was the only number Momma could abide with anymore. I knew she’d get over it, though, so me and Sara just rode out the storm.

  We got married on November 17, 1946, with Lex as my best man and Jack Tatum and Paul Draughon as ushers. Sara’s daddy give her away, of course. Two of her friends from Greensboro, who were teaching now, too, in Sanford and Charlotte, and Bonnie Cain, her best friend from high school, was her bridesmaids. When I look back at the pictures now, I look like a fella going to the electric chair, which is peculiar, because I know it was the happiest day of my whole life.

  That first winter, we lived at Momma’s, staying in the same bedroom I had all my life, the one I had shared with Lafe and then had to live in alone after he died. It was a room where bad memories was as close as the place on the wall behind the headboard where Lafe had carved both our initials. For years, I just come to that room after supper and went to sleep, then got up in the morning, put on my clothes before I had hardly even opened my eyes, and went back to work. Now, I noticed things. There was the one old pair of pants hanging up in the back of the closet, where Momma never went anymore, that was the only piece of clothes of Lafe’s that was still here. After he died, when I couldn’t bear to even think about Lafe, Momma made me wear his clothes when mine wore out, said there weren’t any sense in wasting money on new clothes when there was perfectly good ones right there in the closet. There was a stack of old newspapers and magazines back in the plunder room that you got to by pulling a piece of my bedroom wall out. It was stuff that Lafe had collected, mostly about World War I, with a clipping from the Port Campbell Post about the time Babe Ruth and the Yankees come to town. There was a big picture with that one, of the whole ball field with the crowd near-bout falling onto the field. Back behind first base, Lafe had drawed a circle around the tree where me and him and Leonidas McNeil had sat, with a arrow pointing to it and some writing above it. Sara read it to me, because I still couldn’t read too good:

  “My brother Littlejohn and Leonidas McNeil and I at the baseball game between the Yankees and the Port Campbell Grays.”

  There was too many memories in that room. When we moved out after the house was done in May of 1947, the only thing I took was Lafe’s senior yearbook. I wish to God I hadn’t took anything.

  Me and Lex and the Tatums and the Williamses and some of the Blues’ younger kin built Sara’s and my house. It wasn’t real big, and since it was built out in the middle of a field, it didn’t have no shade for a long time. We built a big bedroom for us, a little one for the baby that was on the way, a kitchen where we ate, a living room and a screened-in porch facing east, which is where we just about lived the first few summers. We built on a bigger living room later and made the first one into a den, and we built a little sewing room for Sara, where she could go when she wanted to read or grade papers. She never did learn how to sew.

  Momma would come over about twice a day for one thing or another, and she had a perfectly good chinaberry tree cut down from the west side of her house, claiming that she was afraid that the old tree would fall down in a hurricane. It give her a clear view of our porch until Sara bought some floor-length shades. Momma didn’t like that too much, but Sara humored her for the most part.

  The first year and a half we was married, I was just a young-un in a candy store. I don’t mean sex, or at least not just sex. It was more like I was just discovering the world. There was just so much that wasn’t there before the war. I was just getting so I could read; I’d go for the newspaper every day like it was manna from heaven, reading the funnies first, then going to the sports pages, then trying to make out the local news and the national news. Sara helped me with the big words. She had saved her teacher’s salary and bought us a brand-new car, a green Plymouth two-door, and on Saturday afternoons, we’d just go out driving sometimes. We’d go up to Raleigh, or over to Chapel Hill. One day, when we was still living at Momma’s, we went to White Oak Beach
without telling anybody. It was the first time I’d been there since we used to take the excursion train when we was teen-agers. The beach wasn’t so run-down then, and Sara and me had a good time. We rode on the Ferris wheel, which like to of scared me to death, and the roller coaster, which was worse. We hadn’t even thought to buy bathing suits, so we took off our shoes and waded along the edge of the ocean, running up the sand when the waves come in. We ate cotton candy and we felt like we was the Rockefellers. We didn’t get back until after midnight, mostly because I had to change a tire over east of Cool Spring, and when we pulled into the driveway, we saw that every light at Momma’s was on. It turned out that they got to missing us about nine o’clock and figured there was no sensible reason for us to be gone that long without telling anybody, so they had the sheriff looking for us.

  “Mrs. McCain,” Sara told her after we’d rushed in, scared that she’d died or something, “you’re going to lose an awful lot of sleep trying to keep up with us.”

  We had a tractor by now and a little more money, and farming weren’t as rough as it had been, although it didn’t pay very good. But I did have more time to spend with Sara, which was good, especially after Georgia was born. I’d come back for dinner and stay for three hours sometimes. She’d took some home-ec courses at Women’s College, and she was a good cook but in a different way from Momma or Connie. She’d fix things I never ate before, like spaghetti and meatballs or chicken with all kinds of sauces that were so good that you’d sop it up with the biscuits so you didn’t waste none of it. I used to tease Sara about making a chicken last two weeks like that, but she sure was a good cook.

  She said she had studied learning problems like mine at college, and that she had a professor that had all kinds of new ideas on how to teach people to read. Said it would shock people to know how many folks there was that had the same problem I did and just hid it as best they could, all their lives. She used to kid me that the reason she pretended to fall in love with me was so she could use me as a guinea pig. I know this: She could spot it a mile away, and there was more than one student that come into her tenth-grade English class at the high school not being able to read that was able by the time they graduated. She said she was always amazed that they could get that far, but it didn’t amaze me. If you was able to put up with enough abuse, they’d finally just let you move on up the ladder.