Calloustown

by George Singleton

  I didn’t respond.

  “Am I staying in the guest room?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You want to pitch some pennies up against the fireplace, just for fun?”

  My crew needed to finish planting day lilies the next day, near what would become a walking path that went straight through the middle of town. According to city council, we would be paving over a set of railroad tracks presently—as soon as CSX freight trains quit coming through—for that “Rails to Trails” program that all the renovating towns had done already, after talking high and mighty about revitalization and quality of living so that Time and Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report could tell retirees where to retire and the health-conscious young where to relocate if they subscribed to a cardiovascular lifestyle.

  What else could I say but, “You want a job, Lee Wayne? Listen, you come work for me. We’ll get you all the pennies you want, and you do what you know what to do, and we’ll split the profits. I don’t have it all worked out in my mind yet, but I will. Can you pretend to run a leaf blower, or an edger?”

  He said, “Well, I don’t know.”

  I said, “Listen, you can bring all the pennies you want, and I’ll set you out where there’s that track, while there’s that track.”

  “I don’t know. Well,” he said.

  Like I said, I normally didn’t drink that much. Maybe I wasn’t thinking correctly. It seemed like a good idea—normally I told half-hearted workers what to do, and then I sat around waiting for everyday citizens to call up complaining about something. My day went like this, mostly: “Hey, guys, today you need to go cut the grass around the fountain, corner of McDaniel and Lanneau.” Ring-ring-ring: “Your men are cutting the grass on the corner of McDaniel and Lanneau, and they’re not wearing shirts,” or “One of them’s cutting the grass while sitting down,” or “My tax dollars shouldn’t be spent on two men eating hot dogs out in the open.” Stuff like that, which didn’t get addressed in nine semesters of college horticulture classes.

  I said to Lee Wayne, “How is this a bad thing? You’ll have a regular income, and you’ll have time to conduct your copper recycling business.”

  Lee Wayne drank from his beer. He shook his head side to side. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking hard about some other options I have.” What options could my evidently new-ex-wife’s brother have? What was on the horizon for a man driving a half-electric car with an oogah-oogah-oogah horn? He said, “I was supposed to show up earlier. I was supposed to show up a couple weeks ago. I’ve been out of prison for a month, and Monica Marie wanted me to show up a lot earlier to beat you up or something.”

  I said, “Why? Why in the world?”

  “That’s exactly what I said. I said, ‘Has he hit you?’ I said, ‘Is he cheating on you?’ I said, ‘Has he taken y’all’s nest egg and turned it into pennies just so he could take them down to a railroad track and flatten them, then turn the things in to the nearest copper recycling center?’ Well, she didn’t have an answer. I know that I’m supposed to be on my blood kin’s side, Clewis, but I’d be willing to bet she’s seeing somebody else, I hate to say. When I was in prison, which was really just the county jail, people were always asking me to go beat up somebody just because they had a new boyfriend. And just because I had fighting arms, what with lugging pounds of pennies for so long. Weird place, prison.”

  We sat there at the dining-room table. When Lee Wayne had come back in the house with two duffel bags he hadn’t closed the sliding-glass door all the way, so through the crack came strains of the neighbors talking, and yelling at one another in a friendly manner. They had traded playing music for a game of charades, it appeared. I went outside to smoke what ended up being my last five cigarettes ever—who knew this was all it would take to quit?—and my brother-in-law followed me out. We took chairs to the backyard, sat down facing the neighbors, and watched. I hadn’t played the game in years, but remembered quickly the signs for “movie,” “book,” and “song” title. Like I said, they weren’t a half acre away, pantomiming out prompts they’d pulled from an empty charcoal briquette bag. This was a mother and father, their son and daughter, and some other man and woman with a son and daughter. The more they reached in and played, the more they got charcoal on their arms and faces, what with the bag’s residual soot. I found myself in love with these people, I’ll admit.

  “I don’t want to impose on you none, Clewis, but I kind of do really need a place to stay. I mean, I got out, I got my money, and I bought that car. I wasn’t thinking! I got that car, not considering that I needed to rent an apartment or trailer or something.”

  I yelled out at my neighbors, “Gone with the Wind!” I yelled out, “Wait—‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ by Bob Dylan.” One of the young daughters looked like she tried to portray “wind.” She kept waving her arms from left to right, floating-like. I thought, maybe she’s doing one of those hula dances. I yelled out, “‘Tiny Bubbles’ by Don Ho.”

  My neighbor smiled at me and waved. The husband waved, that is. I realized it might take time to win his wife over, especially if she’d somehow met Monica and they’d had a conversation that went something like, “I’m your new neighbor,” and Monica said, “I’m planning to leave my husband.”

  Lee Wayne said, “This is what it should be all about. Minus my sister taking off. And having tacos that didn’t include real meat. This is what it should all be about. Hey, Clewis, give me a cigarette.”

  I said, “No.” I watched the neighbors. I stood up and yelled, “Air! The Clean Air Act! ‘You are the wind beneath my wings’!” How come I wasn’t more distressed about Monica leaving? I thought. How come I didn’t get all upset and try to track her down? “‘Pennies from Heaven’!”

  I turned to Lee Wayne and said, “What about wheat pennies? You didn’t put wheat pennies down on the railroad tracks, did you?”

  “There aren’t that many wheat pennies. Most of them are worth two cents, though, if you wanted to sell them at the flea market. Maybe a nickel. It’s not right.”

  I stood up and, as if on automatic pilot, walked over to my neighbors’ house. The smell of steak still hung in our humid air. They didn’t seem fearful of my approach. The young girl said, “It was Grapes of Wrath. It’s a book.”

  I got it. She tried to portray the Dust Bowl. I nodded and laughed. I pulled my arm for Lee Wayne to follow me over and said to the neighbors, “Hey, my name’s Clewis. That’s either my brother-in-law or my ex-brother-in-law.”

  The man said, “That’s an unusual name.”

  I told him how my wife couldn’t take it either. I asked if Lee Wayne and I could join in. They said okay, and I took their turning their backs on us earlier as coincidence. As it ended up, these people weren’t members of an offshoot religion. They were normal. They explained how they believed in the extended family, and how playing games kept them closer, and how it’s what they did back in Michigan before it became apparent that they’d never work there again.

  I stuck my arm in the charcoal bag and pulled out a song I’d never known. Or maybe I couldn’t concentrate, thinking about how I needed to drop by the bank the next day.

  Fresh Meat on Wheels

  Before ceremonially burning down a life-sized replica of the Calloustown Courthouse—which never existed in the first place—built over the previous year in a field adjacent to Mr. Morse’s tree farm and nursery, it was tradition to take every sixth grader to the various attractions nearby. This included the Finger Museum, where a man had severed digits floating in formaldehyde from all the pulpwood men who had chainsaw accidents over the years. Then we would all go, via minibus, to a taxidermist’s place where he’d set up The Safest Petting Zoo Ever. Our sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Whalen, said we were to understand what there is to appreciate about our hometown before viewing what General Sherman could’ve done if he’d understood Calloustown’s meaningfulness, and not veered away on his march between Savannah and Columbia. My heart wasn’t into this ba
stardized field trip because—and it’s not like I had ESP back then—I foresaw the possible arguments, fistfights, and one-upmanship that would occur. If I had extrasensory perception back then I would’ve found my mother in the organic berry field she and my father operated and said something like, “Please tell me the sexual intercourse y’all have told me about is not like sticking your penis in an armpit filled with deep-cleansing moisturizer.”

  Since the invention of the minibus, sixth-grade boys at Calloustown Elementary spent the night at Ms. Whalen’s house, for early in the morning her husband, whom up until this point I’d always thought an otherwise good man named Ben who somehow broke away from local DNA and closed-mindedness, would get us together and drive us around the countryside in order to point out what General Sherman missed by swerving away from Calloustown. The sixth-grade girls, I learned, all stayed at the other sixth-grade teacher’s house, a woman named Ms. Harrell, in order to learn about what was going to happen to their bodies soon. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but before the minibus the Calloustown kids stayed at other ex-teachers’ households for the night before embarking on mule-led wagons. And before the mules, those poor Calloustown kids had to plain walk to, say, the Finger Museum, which probably only held one finger on display.

  “Do not bring up how we’re Democrats, Luke,” my mother reminded me as she pulled up to Ms. Whalen’s house. “If anyone asks you if you’re a Christian, it’s best to go ahead and lie. What’s it going to matter, seeing as we don’t go to church anyway? If your teacher offers you a baloney sandwich for breakfast, just go ahead and eat it seeing as it’s not going to kill you much.”

  I said, “Why am I here again? What’s going on?”

  My mother put the car in neutral, and then seemed to experiment with reverse and one of the lower gears. She said, “Are they not teaching you any existentialism at Calloustown Elementary?”

  I didn’t get it. I said, “Tell me again who Sherman was?” It’s not like I wasn’t from the South—it’s just that my parents watched the news at night, and read books written by people who won awards, and they didn’t sit around moaning about how things could’ve been, like my classmates’ parents seemed to do. “And go through Jesus again, just in case.”

  My mother laughed. She leaned over and kissed my forehead and said, “You’ll be fine. I got you some special gray flannel pajamas packed up for you to wear so you’ll fit in. I tried to draw a stars and bars on your sleeping bag but it just came out a giant X. If anyone asks, say it faded and ran in the washing machine.”

  I didn’t get those remarks, either. I said, “It’s Valentine’s Day. Do they do this everywhere on Valentine’s Day?”

  General Sherman burned Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17, 1865. According to the denizens of Calloustown, he should’ve burned their town on the fifteenth, if he had any sense of the right thing to do, on his way back north.

  My mother said, “More or less.”

  General Sherman didn’t consider our ancestors’ town worthy of torching, and the consequences, over the next seven or eight generations, weren’t unpredictable: a miniscule region of high-voiced men and women whose families intermarried endlessly, producing higher-voiced offspring, ad infinitum, all Yankee-hating, distrustful stumpgrinders and third-shift health professionals at what still got called the Calloustown Home for the Feeble and Discouraged. I exaggerate, but not much. Beginning in sixth-grade civics class a variety of students would blurt out, “Sherman didn’t think Fairview Plantation was good enough to burn! Shows you what he knew! They got them four bedrooms there, and two roomses!” et cetera, their larynxes squealing in such incredulous-filled manners that at times—say later in South Carolina history class, or eleventh-grade American history when the Civil War section took up two nine-week grading periods—it sounded like one of those trick crystal glass band members wet-fingering a rim ceaselessly. It sounded like the emergency broadcast system’s television test most days when the prodigy of Munsons and Harrells wailed out their disgust in regards to William Tecumseh Sherman’s notions of aesthetics: “What’s so good about Atlanta, Savannah, or Columbia? Sherman was stupid! He said he wanted to march to the sea, and Calloustown starts with a C.”

  I hate to think that I’ve always considered myself of a higher ilk than the typical Calloustowner hell bent on grasping worthful arson, but it’s true to a degree. My parents arrived at my place of training only after surrendering law practices right before offers of partnership. They cashed in some savings, did some research, bought the cheapest arable land available in Zone 8 in regards to that Hardiness Scale, began an organic farm long before it became commonplace and chic, and then had their only child—me—in their late thirties. By “long before” I might really mean 1981, right after the Iranian hostages got released. Because of the hostages and a certain doomful outlook regarding economic growth and détente, and without doing research on how vengeful their new neighbors had become, my parents settled on a crossroads neither known to blues songs nor sulfurous flame.

  I grew up with Munsons and Harrells alike pissed off that someone considered our cows, sheep, hogs, and chickens inedible, our women unattractive, our spring houses tainted. Maybe that’s why my mother never allowed me to read the Bible in general, and Job’s story in particular. It’s a wonder that more than a few of us non-Munsons and -Harrells escaped with self-esteem higher than a collard stalk.

  “If they ask you if you hunt, say yes. Fish, yes. Hate everyone north of Virginia, yes. If stupid Bobby Harrell asks you again about your pets, say you own a cottonmouth and a fire ant farm.” My mother had a whole list that she went over daily as I shoved books in my backpack. My father started every morning reciting Latin terms he knew by heart before entering his torporous berry patches. “If one of the Munson boys keeps asking you if you’ve been with a girl, here,” my mother would say, pouring Chicken of the Sea tuna water on my palm. “Tell him to sniff your finger.”

  That was another little action or saying that I didn’t get, of course. But the half-feral cats that lived inside the school liked me, which, of course, got me called Pussy.

  Mr. Whalen sat in his living room with a fishing pole. There were bags of store-bought ice all around the hole he’d fashioned into the floor, and the hook on the end of his line descended down into a crawlspace. Bobby, Donnie, Larry, and Gary Munson held poles, too, as did Lonnie, Ronnie, Billy, and Stonewall Harrell. These were my classmates. These were my sleepover comrades the night before the “What Does Sherman Know?” annual festival.

  “Get you a pole, there, Luke,” Mr. Whalen said. “We’re playing a little game called Ice Fishing in Minnesota. We don’t got no need to ice fish around these parts ever, so I thought I’d teach you boys a little bit about it.”

  I said hello to all of the two-syllable-named classmates. None of them said anything back. I said, “Do you have fish in the basement?”

  “We’re fishing for rats and mice,” Ben Whalen said. He patted the lid to a plastic cooler next to him, as if there were caught vermin inside. “Put you a chunk of cheese on your hook and drop it on down.”

  These were bamboo poles, probably macheted over on the edge of Mr. Morse’s tree farm. I threw my line into the hole and squeezed in between Gary and Lonnie. I tried to peer down into the hole, but couldn’t tell how deep it was. I said, “Did you cut this hole in the floor by yourself?” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Bobby Munson yelled out, “Luke ain’t a Christian!”

  I said, because I’d been taught to do so, “I’m the only one here named after somebody in the Bible. There isn’t a Book of Bobby.”

  “Boys,” Mr. Whalen said. “This is all of y’all, right?” He drank from a plastic cup, and I could smell the booze in it. “Boys, while I got you all here I might as well use this opportunity to tell you about the birds and the bees, it being Valentine’s Day and all.”

  Later on I figured out that because we had no male teachers in the sixth
grade, one of the teachers’ husbands would have to take over. Over at the girls’ sleepover, it probably wasn’t so uncomfortable for a woman to explain sex.

  I think it was Lonnie Harrell who said, “My grandmother has a beehive in her backyard.”

  “I got pictures of my grandmother with a beehive hairdo,” one of the Munsons said.

  “I ain’t talking about real birds and bees,” Mr. Whalen said. “Let’s pretend that I’m talking about mice and, and…I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m talking about mice, seeing as they reproduce like all get-out.” He took a big swig from his cup.

  My sixth-grade teacher came in the room carrying a tray. She wore blue jeans, which kind of freaked everyone out, and said, “Who wants some Pepsi?”

  You’d think none of the Munson or Harrell kids had ever had Pepsi, which might’ve been true. Half of them dropped their poles down into the hole and rushed our teacher. They grabbed and kicked each other out of the way. Me, I sat there thinking about something else my parents had told me: “Pepsi Cola” rearranged came out “Episcopal.” So I said, loudly, “We drink Pepsi Cola all the time at our house because it’s ‘Episcopal.’ That’s what we drink. At my house. Because it’s a Christian drink.”

  Everything seemed to stop. It wasn’t my imagination that all of my male classmates shut up and turned to me as if I’d spoken in tongues. Ms. Whalen—I should mention that her maiden name was Munson—said, “What did you say, Luke?”

  I said, “I mean, we drink Gatorade.”

  I didn’t think I had said anything blasphemous—in retrospect, I think all these children of Pentecostals had never heard of another denomination, except for maybe Baptist. I was glad that Mr. Whalen broke the tension by yelling, “I got one, I got one, I got one,” and then pulling up a fake mouse that, like a blue crab breaking the surface and experiencing air, he somehow got to let go of the cheese and drop back down into the crawlspace.