His speech sounded practiced. I knew that he’d sat up all night working on his words. I said, “Thanks. That’s a good idea. Well, I better get going.”
My father said, “When you’re over at Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon pick me up some pipe cleaners. I’ve been coming up with such good ideas, I might need to take up smoking some Captain Black.”
I guess practicing words was a Dawes family trait: already I’d devised a way to explain to Miss Ballard how the photographs went missing originally, how I had accidentally picked them up off of her desk when I’d meant to pick up my Spanish project—a term paper detailing the life of architect Antonio Gaudí—and so on. I knew that Senora Schulze—bombed out of her mind—would back me up, seeing as she couldn’t remember if or when her muchachos had special projects assigned or not. Then I could blame Miss Ballard for losing my research, and Senora Schulze would have no choice but to give me an A, and so on.
I drove east to school. The sunlight blinded me. All I could see were those buttons on my mother’s dress. Later that day I would explain it all to Compton Lane. His mother had left his father, too, at about the same time. We always wondered if they ran off together, but this was a nice, naïve, quaint, and innocent time, before anyone knew about lesbians who finally figured things out between themselves and their bad marriages. I wasn’t even sure that all of the Nixon Watergate stuff made it into the local weekly newspaper. The Forty-Five Indoor Movie House had been showing Mary fucking Poppins for an entire year.
MISS BALLARD HAD called in sick, evidently. I stood in her homeroom, waiting. Shirley Ebo said, “Mendal Dawes, what you think you are, some kind of teacher now? You can do better than that.”
I said, “Where’s Miss Ballard?”
Shirley said, “Drinking beer with your Spanish teacher, out in your Jeep. I saw them driving around the parking lot, tooting the horn.” She got up from her desk. “Let me see those pictures of yours.”
Shirley lived on an island more deserted than mine. She was the only black girl preintegration at Forty-Five Elementary, and when integration occurred she was shunned by her black counterparts. Shirley survived six years of white kids mesmerized by her white palms and feet, then six years of white kids who no longer found her exotic and black kids who didn’t trust her surrounded-by-whiteys past.
I said, “That’s a good one of you, Shirley. If we had a Xerox machine at this school I might go copy some of these pictures and put them on my wall back home.”
Shirley said, “A what?” Everyone else in the room looked at me as if they’d heard me speak Russian. None of them knew of any copiers besides those mimeograph machines that produced purplish-blue inky facsimiles. Not much earlier—maybe in the 1960s—according to my father, Forty-Five High employed monks to handwrite duplicates.
Shirley slid out the photos and spread them on Miss Ballard’s desk. No one in the homeroom got up to inspect them, which I thought to be odd later on. Were they so respectful of rules that they wouldn’t get out of their desks until they were told to do so? Did they have no curiosity whatsoever? Had one of the dozen P.E. teachers told them that they should conserve energy in order to live a long, long life?
Shirley picked up the one of my mother and me. She said, “This is your momma?”
I said, “You didn’t really see Miss Ballard and Senora Schulze driving around in my Jeep, did you? You made that up, right?”
Shirley turned the photograph ten or twenty degrees to the left and right, which made those buttons shine more so. I made a point not to look down Shirley’s worn cotton dress front. Her nipples poked out like little fried-clam strips I’d eaten at a Red Lobster up in Greenville. She said, “I seen these buttons before. These are buttons a person remembers.”
Then she put the photograph down on top of the picture of Charles Dunn wearing his mother’s high-heeled shoes and wig, walking around the den. I said, “They’re buttons.”
Shirley leaned toward me and whispered, “I can take you to a place that has these buttons, Mendal Dawes. You want to see your mother’s buttons, I know where they is. But you can’t call it a date. We ain’t going out on a date or nothing like that.”
Sergeant Penny Yingling came on and said, “The Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance, to the flag,” as if someone had shot her with a tranquilizer dart. Everyone in the absent Miss Ballard’s class stood up and acted accordingly. I said to Shirley, “Did my father give your mother this dress?”
It wasn’t unlikely. My father and Mr. Ebo were friends. Sometimes Shirley came to school wearing T-shirts that I’d once worn. On those days she made a point not to make eye contact with me. One time she showed up wearing a watch cap I once owned, and another time some pointy wingtips. She said, “I don’t know nothing about the dress. But I know these buttons. Over in the old slave graveyard.”
I said, “Don’t mess with me, Shirley. That ain’t funny.”
She said, “Ain’t ain’t a word. You think you so smart. You can ask Miss Ballard when she comes back from driving around your car.”
Sergeant Yingling finished up the Pledge and went into prayer. I sat down in Miss Ballard’s chair and put my hands out on her desk, the spilled Before photographs within reach. Mr. Botts, the assistant principal, came on the intercom and said, “Good morning. Miss Ballard won’t be in today or tomorrow. Anyone in Miss Ballard’s classes needs to report to the cafeteria for study hall today and tomorrow. If you are on the annual staff, Miss Ballard wants to know if someone picked up her pictures by accident.”
Shirley looked at me wide-eyed and put her right hand over her mouth. She said, “You stole Miss Ballard’s pictures, and she didn’t come in today, I bet, ’cause she’s having a nervous breakdown at home.”
Mr. Botts said, “The Forty-Five High Home Ec Club will be selling handmade crocheted doilies so money can go to the football team’s new jerseys,” and then he went on and on. No one seemed to notice that he pronounced it “crotch-it-ed.”
I said to Shirley, “Just tell me where the graveyard is. I can go by myself.”
“You can if you want to get killed by the spirits there,” she said.
The bell rang and Miss Ballard’s homeroom class ventured off to whatever home ec, shop, or vocational class they needed to attend next. Shirley walked back to her desk and picked up her books. I said, “You want to meet me after school or something?”
She shook her head no. “You leaving Forty-Five for good, ain’t you?”
I said, “Do you mean am I going to college somewhere far from here? Uh-huh.”
“I can’t take you to the slave graveyard until I know that you won’t be coming back. My daddy says I shouldn’t take no one back there in the first place. And I don’t want to make any judgment or nothing, but I don’t think you’ll be able to take what you’re going to see there, Mendal Dawes. I got family back there and it’s tough enough. But what you got back there’s going to drive you over the edge, boy.”
She swished out of the room. I gathered up all of the Before photographs, put them in the envelope, and waited for the hallway to clear. Then I snuck inside the girls’ restroom and set the envelope on top of the Kotex dispenser. I went to Spanish class on time and said “Presente” like any native of Madrid. Later in the period Senora Schulze came over to me and put her hand on my forehead. She said, “Calliente, Mendal. Are you sick, or have you been thinking too hard?”
I MISSED MY final three weeks of high school. Fortunately the Forty-Five school system worked on a weighted absentee basis, and seeing as I’d not officially missed but a couple days between first and twelfth grade—we were allowed five absences per semester—I had built up something like a hundred permitted unexcused absences. If I’d’ve known any of this—like if I had had a sixth-grade mathematics teacher worth a simple equation—I wouldn’t have shown up most of my final semester, or at least not after I’d gotten accepted by a college. I didn’t go to my own graduation. I wasn’t present to pick up my Spanish, English, or hist
ory awards. I wasn’t the valedictorian, seeing as I’d made a B in calculus. Libby Belcher chose to skip a second course in math and made an A in chorus.
I sat at home, then took to realizing how I wasn’t sick, then went with my father wherever he thought it necessary to go. We went fishing. We drove up past the South Carolina–North Carolina border and looked at tracts of land he thought might be worthy of buying. We stopped at Stuckey’s and ate pecan logs. I tried not to think about how when I went off to college he’d either be horrendously alone or show up often at my dormitory unexpected.
On the day that I finally got brave I said, “Do you know anything about a slave graveyard somewhere in Forty-Five, maybe over by the Ebos’ land?” We were on our way to a place called Hickory Tavern, where my father felt sure a superhighway would intersect one day.
My father let up on the accelerator. He said, “I’m sure there are slave graveyards all over the state, Mendal. Why do you ask?”
I thought to myself, You know why I’m asking. “Shirley said something about a slave graveyard. I’d kind of like to see one. I’d kind of like to know. She said that a bunch of her relatives are buried there, and that they don’t have tombstones or anything.”
Dad resumed his reckless driving, dodging potholes like a professional slalom skier. “I don’t have much to do with graveyards. I don’t think there’s enough money in them, really. It’s a dead business, ha ha.” He pulled down his visor, then stuck it back up. “I tell you one thing, though. When the graveyards get all filled up up north, it might be a good thing to start a cemetery and charge a couple thousand bucks a plot. Now you’re thinking, son.”
I didn’t say how I hadn’t thought it up whatsoever. I said, “Okay. Forget it.”
“There’s enough to learn from the living, Mendal. Don’t go get all obsessed with graveyards and tombstones. The only thing you can learn in an old graveyard, if you ask me, is how hard the granite carver had to work.” My father pulled over into some weeds and checked a piece of paper he’d written directions on. In the field to our right, a field-stone chimney leaned alone, surrounded by honeysuckle. Three others stood off in the distance. “You want to know about graveyards—word is an entire family lived here back around 1870. They all got killed by a tornado that skipped from one house to the next. Land’s been passed down from family member to family member until now, and they’re ready to sell it for a hundred dollars an acre.”
I said, “Maybe it’s cursed,” because—although my father’s odd business acumen hadn’t failed to my knowledge—I never saw how any scrubland could end up a golf course, subdivision, or recreational development.
My father walked through beggar-lice fifty yards into the parcel, then took out his compass. He slashed at sweet grass with his cane. I followed him, wary of copperheads. The sun beat down on this parched, cracked red land. We might as well have been tredding across Mars. “Sooner or later Duke Power will want to dam up the Saluda River,” he pointed northwest, “or the Reedy.” He pointed west. “And if this doesn’t become lakefront property, it’ll be close enough for people to want to build bait shacks and boat dealerships. Hell, boy, you might even want to build your first house down here one day, just to get away from the rat race. It would make a nice place for a nursery. This land’s got to be arable by now, doomed and cursed or not.”
I didn’t say, “What rat race?” or “Oh, maybe I forgot to tell you that I won’t be returning to South Carolina anytime soon.” I said, “It would make a nice spot for a brick factory. You wouldn’t even need a kiln.”
My father raised his cane. He turned to me and said, “If I ever catch wind that you and Shirley Ebo go off to that slave graveyard, believe me when I say that I’ll disinherit you faster than a bitch dog its runt of the litter.” He had a look in his eye that I’d not seen in real life before, though I’d once found a book in the public library on abnormal psychology that had a series of pictures of a full-fledged schizophrenic who, according to a panel of experts, could change from Betty Boop to Hitler’s unknown mean brother in a matter of seconds.
“Okay. Okay. I was only asking. Sometimes Shirley Ebo tells me things that she made up in the first place.”
“Like what?” my father asked. He brushed past me on his way back to the car.
I didn’t say, “That you were brought up by wolves in the tree farm across the street from our house.”
On the way back home I kind of wished that I still sat in Senora Schulze’s class. She liked to start off each day telling us about the importance of siestas. Senora Schulze said that if we’d had Spanish class in the afternoon, right after lunch, we’d have had a little thirty-minute nap planned each period. My father and I didn’t speak. I remembered an article I’d read somewhere about how children who hear, “Don’t ever smoke a cigarette,” or “Don’t drink booze,” or “Don’t ever smoke marijuana, seeing as it’ll lead straight to heroin,” are six million times more likely to disregard their parents’ admonitions.
I SHOULD MENTION that a yearbook normally takes more than a month to reproduce. Staff members had already taken pictures of the athletic teams and cheerleaders, and a professional photographer had come in early in the fall term so we could wear our bow ties and/or best dresses while seated in front of a Forty-Five High Speed Fire Ants banner. The Before-and-After collage was a new feature, an insert only, something that had come to Miss Ballard in a dream. Our principal decided to use what leftover money he had at the end of the school year for Miss Ballard’s project instead of buying new books for the library.
“Are you feeling any better?” Miss Ballard called to ask during the last week of regular classes. “Senora Schulze and I are worried about you, Mendal.”
I said, “I think I’m fine.”
“Our inserts came in for the yearbook. Do you think you feel up to coming by school this afternoon and helping us slide them into the front of each book?”
I said, “Oh, what the hell. Okay.” I pointed to my friend Compton to go get me another beer out of the refrigerator. It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. He’d talked his father into letting him get sick for the final two weeks of school, also. Mostly we sat around at either his house or mine, or got stuck driving around with our fathers, both of whom were intent on telling their life stories over and over. On two occasions Mr. Lane and my father swapped sons—which I thought was a little weird even back then. On this particular day, they had gone to Charlotte, supposedly looking for cheap farm equipment to resell, but as Comp and I had found matchbooks from a Charlotte strip joint in both our fathers’ pants pockets more than once, we weren’t convinced. I said to Miss Ballard, “Compton isn’t doing anything this afternoon. Can he come help?”
She paused. She said, “I tell you what. Why don’t we do this over at my house. Why don’t y’all stop by the store and bring some beer, and we can make a little party of it all.” I heard Senora Schulze in the background, making noises as if she had asthma. “Miss Schulze says you can bring anything stronger, if you want, you know. If you know what I mean.”
I hung up the telephone and looked at Comp. I said, “We got us a couple teachers who want to smoke a joint with us. Are you game?”
Like we had any weed. Comp said, “Hey. They went to college over in Graywood. They won’t know any better.” He opened my father’s cupboards, found the Lipton’s tea bags, and grabbed a handful.
We could only purchase Zig-Zag rolling papers at Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon, and we knew that he’d tell on us. Fortunately, though, Rufus Price sold apples, and I had learned how to make a portable pipe out of a cored apple and a scrap of tinfoil a few years earlier, when my father forced me to go to some kind of live-off-the-land summer camp up on Skyuka Mountain, a place that attracted rich kids from all over who had parents drop them off on their way to Florida.
Compton and I walked all high-kneed into the Goat Wagon, and I went straight to the fruit and vegetable bin. Comp picked up two eight-packs of Miller ponies and yell
ed from back there, “I’m really eighteen now, Mr. Price.” Comp had about a pound of loose tea leaves in his front pocket; we didn’t think about using a baggy or anything.
I bought two apples, a roll of Reynolds Wrap, and a thin cardboard sleeve of sewing needles. At the counter Rufus Price wheeled up to the register, eyed our products, and said, “You boys fools.” He jerked his thumb backwards. “Rolling papers don’t cost much of nothing, but if you want to go this route, don’t let me be a road map in your way.”
“Yeah. Yeah. We don’t need a road map in our way,” Comp said. Me, I thought I would pee in my pants, I was so nervous. “You don’t sell rubbers by any chance, do you Mr. Price?” Comp said, looking behind the counter at blue jars of VapoRub, squeeze bottles of Unguentine, and boxes of headache powders.
Rufus Price pointed over toward a small section where he kept cheap toys: squirt guns, bouncy balls, pinwheels, and the like. He said, “I got a pack of balloons over there might work for you boys. They work on my goat peckers. I don’t want to have no more kids around here, my age.”
Compton turned around and walked to retrieve them. I didn’t say anything one way or the other. We were both complete fools.
Outside the store Compton said, “We should ask Mr. Price if he has any of his goats’ horns laying around somewhere. They’re supposed to work as aphrodisiacs. We might should chew on some goat horn before we go over there.”
I got in the Jeep. I didn’t respond. It’s not as though I feared having sex for the second time in my life—and maybe for the first time with a woman who wouldn’t make fun of me—but I kept thinking about those Before-and-After pictures that awaited. And then I started thinking about my mother’s mother-of-pearl buttons and that hidden mysterious graveyard that I knew I’d visit before leaving Forty-Five, led by Shirley Ebo on a disastrous pilgrimage that could only scar and disconcert me forever.
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