The Night the Lights Went Out

by Karen White

  Merilee pulled the door open and stood close to Sugar in case she wanted to lean on her to get in without asking for help. “Did Curtis not mind?”

  “Oh, he minded. But that never stopped Jimmy.” Her fingers, bony and sharp, dug into Merilee’s shoulder as she hoisted herself into the passenger seat. “He minded a lot.” Sugar turned to Merilee, an odd smile on her lips.

  Merilee pulled herself into the driver’s seat and started the minivan, then drove home slowly as Sugar began to speak.

  Eleven

  SUGAR

  1939

  I jiggled the reins attached to our old cart horse, Grace, trying to get her to go a little faster. I had a wagonful of chickens I was trying to sell, and if Grace didn’t get a move on, they’d bake in their feathers under the August sun.

  After the boll weevils ate all our cotton fields and most other people’s, from what I could tell, Daddy had been busy figuring out what else he could do to make some money to at least pay the taxes on the farm and maybe buy up some of the abandoned farms dirt cheap. I thought he was crazy, and might have even said so, but he laughed and said the hard times wouldn’t last forever and land would be worth something again. I hoped he was right, because if he kept on buying, we’d own most of the county pretty soon.

  We still had our mama’s vegetable garden—even though I did all the tending now—so we wouldn’t starve to death, but he said we should get some more cows and hogs. We could keep what milk and meat we needed, sell what we didn’t, and maybe even give a job to a few of the poor souls who knocked on our door just about every other day. Daddy believed in being a good Christian by practicing charity and letting Lamar stay in the house he’d shared with Rufus. Or maybe that was because he knew that the circumstances responsible for the way Rufus died weren’t all accidental.

  It had been my idea to sell chickens. We had so many, and I ended up giving away a lot of eggs. I told my daddy if we could sell chickens, people would at least have eggs to eat, and maybe something to fry up once in a while. When I was little it would have hurt to see my chickens go live with another family, but I was long past being sentimental. Watching farms get abandoned, and whole families walking barefoot down dirt roads, carrying satchels and looking for work and food, put everything in perspective. It helped that I’d stopped naming the chickens when I was a little girl after Harry told me I had just eaten my favorite hen, Martha, when I was still chewing.

  Happiest day of my life was when Harry was sent to live with relatives in Cairo, Georgia, to work at the lumber-planing mill. Daddy could’ve used his help on the farm, but he’d begun to run a little wild with Curtis Brown, and this was Daddy’s way of clipping his wings. At least for a little while, anyway. But we were stuck with Curtis, who was now running the little tenant farm my daddy owned. Running it into the ground, I’d heard Daddy say to Dr. Mackenzie more than once. But he felt sorry for poor Mrs. Brown on account of her husband running off, and couldn’t see fit to turn her and her little girls out just because her son was a no-account. When Mrs. Brown got sick and died and the county people came and took the girls, Curtis promised Daddy he’d do his best to maintain the farm. It was a good thing Daddy didn’t put much store in Curtis’s words, because he would have been sorely disappointed.

  The chickens were really just an excuse. Although it was Sunday and I wasn’t technically supposed to be working on the Sabbath, I was on a mission to find Jimmy—and Lamar, since the two separated only when it was time to go to sleep—before Daddy found out that he’d run off still in his Sunday clothes right after church. To ruin a good pair of church pants was like a sin to Daddy, and I’d brought along a pair of dungarees for Jimmy to change into.

  I knew he was off looking for birds, and that was why he didn’t want to wait to go home and change before setting off. With Harry gone, everybody had to do more work, even Bobby, who did things so slowly and so poorly it was hardly worth having him take up space on the farm.

  We were all working can to can’t—from when you can see in the morning to when you can’t see at night—which was why Jimmy never had the chance anymore to find his birds. I didn’t blame him one bit, but if he got a hole in his good pants, there’d be trouble and more work for me to mend them. And if I passed a house and they wanted to buy a chicken or two, then my time wouldn’t be wasted and I wouldn’t be lying if Daddy asked me where I’d been.

  Even if I hadn’t known where I was, I would have known I’d reached the Brown farm by the fence that was supposed to mark the outside boundary. Or what was left of it. I knew they’d burned most of the rails last winter when it got so cold and Mrs. Brown was doing poorly. The woods were heavy and dark on the south side of the property, but Curtis was too lazy to lift an ax and get busy making firewood. I sure didn’t want to be around when my daddy found out what had happened to the fence.

  Grace stopped without me telling her—she was always looking for an excuse to stop—at the beginning of the drive. It was rocky and rutted because nobody had bothered to smooth it over, and it didn’t look like a cart had passed over it in quite some time.

  Pop. Pop. Grace barely raised her head at the sound of gunshots, but the air vibrated inside me like the string on a fiddle. What seemed like an entire flock of crows flew out of the trees on the edge of the woods just at the same time I saw something that looked like a person fall from one of the trees.

  I’m not really sure what happened next. All I remember is how quiet everything was, like the birds couldn’t sing because of their own sadness, and how I forced Grace into a trot before leaving her and the chickens under the shade of a half-dead oak. I remember that much. That tree, with the black slick of bark slashed across its trunk from a lightning strike. I remember falling against it as I jumped off the cart and began running as fast as I could toward the woods.

  I ran past the run-down house, hardly noticing Curtis standing on the rotten back porch with the missing steps, his hunting rifle still resting on his shoulder like he wasn’t done. I kept running, daring him to shoot me in the back. Because if he did, I’d have a reason to tear him apart with my bare hands like I wanted to.

  His angry voice shouted at me as I ran. “Tell your idiot brother and his nigger friend to stay out of my trees if he don’t want me to think he’s a squirrel. And if you all don’t get off my property I’m gonna shoot you for trespassing.”

  “Go to hell, Curtis,” I shouted without slowing down, knowing he was too much of a coward to shoot me in the middle of a field, because then he couldn’t say he thought I was a squirrel in a tree.

  I was a fast runner, most probably because I had older brothers who were always chasing me down, trying to put dead snakes (sometimes live ones) and other irritations like that down my dress. I thought this was normal until Willa Faye told me her boy cousins (she only had a sister) would have gotten a whipping if they’d ever tried such a thing.

  I ran so fast that I didn’t notice Lamar until I almost stepped on him, squatting down near the ground. It was a good thing his face was so dark, because it was easier for him to hide in the woods. I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that Curtis would have shot him, too, if given half the chance. That’s when I noticed he was squatting next to Jimmy, my brother’s face looking up at the tree toward his beloved birds, his legs turned at places they shouldn’t have been.

  “Are Granddaddy’s field glasses all right?”

  I almost cried to hear him talk, because I thought he surely must be dead from a fall like that. There was no blood or anything, so I was thinking he must have fallen on a big pile of leaves and as soon as he caught his breath again, we’d walk out of those woods and tell our daddy what Curtis had done.

  And then I got angry because Jimmy could’ve died and all he cared about was those glasses not being broken. Because Granddaddy had given them to him and told Jimmy to take care of them.

  The glasses still hung around his neck, res
ting on his chest all in one piece as if he’d put them there on purpose. “They’re fine. Are you hurt?”

  Lamar gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, his eyes moving from me to Lamar. “I don’t feel no pain,” he said with a little laugh, like he couldn’t believe his good luck at falling from a tree without getting hurt. “He missed me,” he said. “He’s got such a bad aim he’d miss the water falling out of a boat.” He laughed again. “Startled me some, so I let go of the danged tree.”

  He put his hands flat down on the ground, then bent his elbows like he was trying to sit up, but then he stopped. “Are my legs still there?” His voice sounded like that time we’d seen a comet streak across the night sky like a ball of fire. Sort of a mixture of excitement and fear and the knowing that the universe was a much bigger place than we could ever even think about.

  “Of course they’re . . .” My eyes moved over to where his legs were still attached to his body, but looking like my favorite rag doll after Harry and Will had gotten hold of her.

  Lamar reached over and pinched Jimmy’s leg. “Can you feel this?”

  “Feel what?” Jimmy asked, his voice sounding very far away.

  My eyes met Lamar’s. “We got to get him home,” I said, my own voice sounding like somebody else’s. Somebody who knew what to do. “Lamar will run get Dr. Mackenzie and he can fix your legs.” I swallowed. “He will. I know he will.” I said it twice, like that could make it true. I kept thinking about Daddy’s favorite horse, Horatio, who’d broke his leg jumping over a fence. I remembered what the leg had looked like, and how my daddy had been pretty close to crying. And how Rufus had been the one to put poor Horatio out of his misery. It was the first time I’d learned that not all broken things could be fixed. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try.

  Lamar looked over to the porch, which was now empty of Curtis and his rifle. “I can carry him on my back.”

  I nodded. “Jimmy, you got to use your arms to hang on real tight, you hear? I’ll help Lamar get you up there, and then we’ll put you in the cart with my chickens. They’re real sweet and won’t bother you, so pay them no mind.” I was talking fast as I moved, like I always did when I was scared or nervous, but it seemed to calm Jimmy—and Lamar—as we pulled him up and onto Lamar’s back, his legs hanging funny. I could now see the dark patches of blood on his Sunday pants but didn’t say anything because I didn’t want him to notice his legs. I don’t think I could have stood it if Jimmy had cried.

  We got him home, and Dr. Mackenzie came to look at him, but there was nothing he could do but set the broken bones. Whatever it was that made the legs work had been broken in the fall from the tree.

  Curtis didn’t go to prison because he told everybody it was an accident and he’d been squirrel hunting, and Willa Faye’s mama gave Jimmy an old wheelchair that had belonged to her aunt, and everybody sort of thought things had worked out in the end. Except for me.

  That’s when Bobby, with all his book learning, told me about karma and how all good and bad things come back to you sooner or later. It put some of the joy back in my life, knowing that sooner or later, Curtis Brown would get what was coming to him.

  Twelve

  MERILEE

  Merilee watched the lamps in the house flicker on and off as the storm dumped rain while performing a rather impressive percussion and light show in the sky. The children were with Michael tonight so she could go to the gala committee meeting. She hoped that Lily wasn’t scared and that Michael knew enough to keep Colin from running outside with a kite and a metal key.

  Glancing at her watch, she realized she had fifteen minutes before she needed to leave and still be early. It was amazing how fast she could get dressed and ready to go without two children in the house. She glanced into the hallway, where the stacks of books still waited for Wade’s shelves in piles against the wall, her four high school yearbooks now sitting on top of one of them.

  Wade was due back that weekend, and she wanted to be prepared for any curveballs he might unintentionally lob at her about where he thought he’d seen her before. Without thinking too much about it—mostly so she couldn’t talk herself out of it—she picked up her cell phone and dialed her parents.

  Her mother answered, and for a brief moment Merilee considered hanging up and trying again to see if she could get her father. Usually, but not always, he was easier to speak to and could smooth the transition to her mother.

  “Hello, Mama. It’s Merilee.”

  After a short pause, Deanne said, “Well, it couldn’t be anyone else calling me ‘Mama,’ could it?”

  The sting began in the back of Merilee’s nose, traveling up to her eyes. She wondered how old she’d have to be before her mother could no longer make her cry. “How are you and Dad?”

  There was a long sigh, as if her mother barely had the energy to force out words. “Nothing’s changed. Your daddy’s gout has been aggravating him a bit, and I have a doctor’s appointment on Monday to examine a spot on my neck that I don’t like the looks of. We both try to stay busy to keep our minds off of . . . unpleasant thoughts. Daddy’s golf game is improving, my garden is looking beautiful, and my bridge partner and I won a trip to Branson, Missouri, for winning the most hands in last month’s bridge tournament.”

  She sounded almost manic as she listed everything, as if she was trying to prove that despite Merilee and “unpleasant thoughts,” they were still managing to have productive lives. The clink of ice cubes in a glass carried through the phone, and Merilee knew the drink they were cooling wasn’t sweet tea.

  “You’d know all this if you called or visited more often. It’s not like anybody knows you here.”

  At least the rush of anger made the stinging stop. “It’s hard for me with my job and the children’s schedules. You know you’re welcome to visit anytime. Colin’s going to be playing flag football this fall, and Lily’s going to be playing tennis. She’s also trying out for cheerleading.” Merilee had almost left that part out but changed her mind. She was so tired of doling out and holding back in her conversations with her parents. It was exhausting. “I’m sure they’d both love for you to come and watch them—”

  “Cheerleading? Now, that surprises me. You always told me you hated it and resented me for pushing you to try out. Remember that? Even though it was the best thing that could have ever happened to your social life, not that I ever got any thanks for that. Whatever changed your mind?”

  A crack of thunder shifted the air around Merilee, and she was fourteen again and her mother was piercing her ears with needles and ice cubes because all the popular girls had pierced ears. It had hurt, and then both ears had become infected, but she’d always worn earrings after that, irrationally believing that her mother might like her more if she did.

  “Because Lily’s new friend is trying out, so she wanted to try out, too. She didn’t ask my opinion. I’m more excited about her playing tennis. When she played it at summer camp, she was really good and enjoyed it.”

  “Yes, well, there’s nothing quite like being a cheerleader, especially captain, as you know.”

  “Oh, right,” Merilee said, hoping her mother could hear the sarcastic note in her voice. “Look what it did for me.”

  “It did everything for you.” She paused, and Merilee held her breath, waiting for it. “And watch your tone with me, Merilee. Dave’s not here anymore to tell me I’m not the terrible mother you always told me I was.” The clink of ice cubes was louder now, and Merilee pictured her turning the glass upside down to make sure she’d drained all the vodka.

  “I didn’t call to argue with you, Mama.”

  “Then why did you call?”

  “I wanted to ask you a question. About Sandersville.”

  “Why on earth would you need to know something about Sandersville? We haven’t lived there in twelve years. Sadly.�
��

  Merilee took this last dig without comment. “I just wanted to know if you remembered a William and Sharon West. They’re older than you and Dad, but they lived there for a long time, so I was just wondering if you knew who they were.”

  “Of course we knew them. Not well, because they were older, but they belonged to the country club, too, so we knew them in passing. Why are you asking?”

  Merilee waited for a moment, searching for the right words. “Do you know if they were still living there when you left?”

  “I don’t know. Really, Merilee. What is this all about? I feel another one of my migraines coming on.”

  “It’s just that somebody here knows them. And wanted to know if I knew them. And when he asks the Wests about me, I wanted to know what they might tell him.”

  She could picture her mother holding on to her crystal tumbler, her long, painted nails wrapped elegantly around it, the tips bloodless from pressing too hard. “Yes, well, I guess it would depend on how good their memory is. And how much they read. It’s been fourteen years, so it’s quite possible they don’t remember. We can at least hope so.” Clink-clink. “So, when are you and Michael getting back together?”

  Merilee bit her tongue before she told Deanne about Tammy’s pregnancy. She didn’t have the strength to deal with her mother and that bit of news just yet. “Not anytime soon. We’re . . . still working things out.”

  “Good. A woman shouldn’t be on her own. Thank goodness for your father. I don’t know what I would have done without him. At least you have a son.” She waited for a moment to let the arrow find its target. “Before I forget, I thought you should know that we’ve decided to sell the Tybee house.”