“You be careful, Will,” Mother said. “No telling what that Shipp might do. I wouldn’t trust him for a minute.”
Daddy, now at the bottom of the steps, peered up from under his new hat. “No need to worry, Lacy,” he said. “I’m just going out there for some information, that’s all.”
“I know. But I know you’re not going to like him, too. You watch your temper, you hear? Remember, no matter how bad things look, we can always fix them up after we get out there.”
“My temper?” Daddy pretended to be surprised. “Why, Lacy! You’re talking about a helpless cripple! What’s all this carrying on about temper? I’m harmless!”
Mother’s frown unfolded into a smile. “You’ll never be harmless, Will Turnbolt,” she said. “You just mind what I say and be careful, you hear? And drive carefully, too. It looks like it might shower before you get back.”
Daddy bowed slightly over his sticks. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”
Mother smiled all the time I helped Daddy into the car and carried his sticks around and got in myself. And still smiling, she waved as Daddy backed the car into the street. Rick still peered silently from behind her skirt.
“Aw, women are funny, Gate,” he said. “They worry and worry and worry, but a man can kid them out of anything.”
“How come?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t really want to believe anything’s wrong, and they’re just looking for somebody to tell them everything’s all right.”
“Is anything wrong?”
He grinned. “Very little, I guess, all things considered. For a while there, things looked pretty dim, but they’re looking better all the time. I guess when a man’s been in the hospital as long as I was, it just takes a while for him to start feeling like a man again. I been thinking a lot about some of the other folks in that hospital, and I know things could have been a hell of a lot worse for me. I’ll be on my tractor plowing again before some of those guys figure out who the hell they are. Some of them never will figure it out, I reckon.”
“Could I go hunting with you sometime?” I asked.
“You might. By the time I get ready to go again, you’ll be big enough, I reckon. Me and you and Harley’ll just sit by the fire and listen to the dogs all night.”
We were passing the churches now, and all three congregations were singing. Gran was there, I knew, and I tried to find her car, but we passed too fast.
“The Christians sure are making things hot for the devil today, ain’t they?” Daddy said.
“Did you have to go to Sunday School when you were little?” I asked.
“Nope. My daddy didn’t believe in it. My mother neither. It’s no place for a man.”
“Gran says you’re not going to heaven.”
He laughed. “She’s probably right.”
“What would you do if Jesus came back?”
“Offer him a smoke, I guess.”
“Doesn’t it worry you? Going to hell, I mean?”
“No. The company’s liable to be better there. The Baptists will be up there looking sour and singing and I’ll be down there chasing foxes with Harley, like I always have.”
“Brother Haskell says people burn in hell, in lakes of fire, forever and ever.”
“Well, that’s just what he hopes it’s like, since he ain’t going there. He sees people like me and Harley sleeping late on Sunday, and going hunting, and carrying on, and he says, ‘Well, those sinners seem to be having a lot of fun. More fun than me. That ain’t right, since I’m good and they’re bad. Why do you reckon the Lord lets them get away with it?’ So he sits and figures, and then it dawns on him. ‘I know!’ he says. ‘The Lord’s going to make me happy when I die, and he’s going to make Will Turnbolt as miserable as hell when he dies.’ And that makes him feel better. Trouble is, he can’t think of any way to be happy, even after he dies. He just talks about walking on golden streets and resting in the bosom of the Lord. If I had my druthers, I’d pick somebody else’s bosom.”
“How do you know all that if you never went to Sunday School?”
“I went to a revival once, right after your ma and I married. Brother Haskell wasn’t preaching, but they all preach alike. Let’s stop here a minute.”
We were on the old plank bridge that crosses Clear Creek. Daddy killed the engine and looked at me. “What do you hear?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Listen harder.”
“I hear the creek.”
“Yeah. You hear the water splashing over the rocks under this bridge. When I was your age, this bridge wasn’t here. We had to ford the creek in the wagon. But the noise of the creek was the same. Water falling over rocks. The rocks down there are round and smooth. All the corners have been worn off of them by the water. They were already that way when I was your age. They were already that way when the first Turnbolt was born. Maybe even when the first man was born. And when the last man dies, they’ll still be there, just like they are now. Maybe just a tiny bit smaller. Now, I reckon that tells us something about God. He made some things that last forever, but man ain’t one of them. And as for that bosom-of-the-Lord business, I can’t think of any reason why the Lord would want any one of us anywhere near his bosom or any other part of him. I just can’t see the Lord getting all excited about the Haskells of this world. Understand?”
“I guess so.”
He grinned. “You really don’t, do you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, you will someday. You just try to remember and see if your old daddy ain’t right.”
He started the car again and drove across the rickety old planks, on down the road to home that I hadn’t traveled in almost a year. It was a rainy summer, and the Johnson grass and sunflowers stood higher than the fence posts between the road and the fields. Daddy drove slowly, trying to keep the tires in the deep ruts that no amount of county gravel could keep from being rolled into that soft land in a rainy season. The country looked familiar to me, and yet somehow new. When we had moved to town, it had been later in the summer—almost the end, in fact—and things were more brown and gold than green. It had been a drier summer, too, probably.
When Daddy turned into our lane, he stopped again and pointed through the windshield. “Well, there it is,” he said. “By God!”
Our name was still on the mailbox, but somebody had scratched an X through it with a nail, and the X had rusted. “Turnbolt,” Daddy said. The wind was whispering in the redbud trees and parted the Johnson grass sometimes, revealing the white stone beyond the fence that I knew stood over the grave of my grandfather. The house and tractor shed at the end of the lane were very dark under the clouds, almost the color of the earth itself. I could see four light forms moving in the yard. Some of Shipp’s children, playing, probably, in the soft dirt in the corner where Belinda and Rick and I used to play. It started sprinkling, and Daddy turned on the windshield wipers and moved the car toward the kids, his eyes glistening behind the gold-rimmed glasses.
He saw Shipp’s rump sticking out from under the hood of the tractor in the shed and stopped. The three girls and the little boy stopped their playing and watched me through the fence as I got out and brought Daddy’s sticks around to his door and waited while he got out. The front gate was off of its hinges, I noticed. Somebody had tried to tie it back up with baling wire, but it still slumped open. Shingles had blown off of the porch roof, leaving a hole as big as a bushel basket that nobody had taken time to fix. Shipp had come out from under the tractor hood and was walking toward us, wiping his hands on a rag. Grease streaked his face and matted his shaggy blond hair. He didn’t recognize me, I knew. And I guess he’d never seen Daddy, because he nodded and looked at him kind of funny when he came around the car and saw him hunched over his sticks.
“Howdy do,” he said.
“Something wrong with the tractor?” Daddy asked.
Shipp nodded. “Carburetor, I think. Gas squirts
out all over the engine when I crank.”
“Hmpf,” Daddy said, kind of smiling. “I’m Will Turnbolt. I own this place.”
Shipp nodded curtly. “I’m Jack Shipp. I work it.” He looked down at his hands, rubbing very hard at the edges of his fingernails with the rag.
Daddy watched him, kind of smirking. Then he asked, “How are things?”
Shipp still rubbed. He nodded again. “Okay, I guess,” he said. He looked up. “Want to come in out of the rain?”
It was falling harder. The children left the corner and scrambled up the porch steps. They stood in a row there, watching us. Water dripped from my hat brim now, and Daddy’s, and I could hear it drumming on the tin roof of the tractor shed.
“I didn’t come out here for no visit,” Daddy said. “I just want the answers to a couple of questions. When do you think you can get your crops in?”
Shipp shrugged. Water was trickling down his cheekbones now, and spattering at our feet. I was getting pretty wet and wished Daddy would hurry so we could get back in the car. “It’s too early to tell,” Shipp said. “You ought to know that.”
Daddy smiled and nodded. “Well, I just wanted to tell you to get them in as soon as you can, because we’re moving back. You better start looking for another place to go.”
Shipp squinted. “Says who?”
“Says I. I’m giving you notice, man. Be out of here, lock, stock and barrel, by Christmas.”
Shipp grinned and stuck the rag in the hip pocket of his overalls. “And who’s going to work this place then? You?” His eyes started at Daddy’s eyes and traveled down his body, down the rain-darkened khakis to the shit-and-mud-covered boots, planted now in a shallow puddle.
Daddy sneered back. His grip tightened on the crooks of his sticks. “That’s right,” he said slowly. “Me.”
Shipp giggled. “Somebody’s been telling you stories, Mr. Turnbolt. Jack Shipp works this place. And them that put him here tells him he can stay as long as he wants to. They been telling him he might get a visit from some cripple in town. They been telling him to tell the cripple to come and talk to them if he had to talk to anybody. ‘Don’t let him make you no trouble,’ they said. ‘Just tell him to see us, and we’ll put him straight.’ I don’t know if you’re that cripple, Mr. Turnbolt, but it appears like you could stand some straightening out. I recommend those two gentlemen to you.”
Shipp jumped back as Daddy’s stick swung out and up. He held it high over his head like a saber. He bared his teeth and groped forward with the other stick, slowly following it with one foot and then the other. Shipp took another step back, his grin fading. “Shit, man,” he said, “What you up to?”
“I’m going to kill me a fucking sharecropper,” Daddy said softly.
Shipp stepped back again, then stopped and grinned when he saw how slowly Daddy had to move. “Is that the way you did it in the war, soldier boy?” he said. “No wonder it’s taking us so long to get it over with.”
Daddy swung his stick hard. He missed, and the other stick slipped. His body swerved, shuddered and fell, slowly, it seemed, like a tree, belly down, in the mud. I yelled and ran to him, but he pushed me away. His mouth, now muddy, flashed a strange grin, and tears filled his eyes. He planted his hands in the mud, lifted his top half, and dragged his legs slowly toward one of the column posts of the tractor shed.
Shipp glanced nervously at me, and then at Daddy. “Shit, man, I’ll help you,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing.”
“You keep away from me, white trash!” Daddy hissed. He wrapped his arms around the post and pulled himself slowly to his knees. “Bring me the sticks, Gate,” he said. He was breathing real hard. I held out the sticks, and he took one, and, bracing himself between it and the post, finally pulled himself to his feet. He stood puffing, looking at Shipp, then at me. Then he started through the mud toward the car. “Pick up my hat, Gate,” he said.
When he’d lifted his legs over the running board and closed the door, he started the engine and turned on the windshield wipers. As I trotted around the front of the car, he was staring through the rain at the kids on the porch, and they were staring back at him. If they’d moved a muscle since the rain started, I couldn’t tell it.
Shipp came around to Daddy’s window. “I could have kicked you in the head while you were down,” he said.
Daddy nodded. “Someday you’re going to wish you’d did it,” he said.
He didn’t speak all the way back to town. He just hunched over the steering wheel, trying to keep the tires in the ruts and out of the soft mud. We’d left the windows down while we were at the farm, and the seat stank and felt clammy against my wet clothes and warm skin. I wiped the fog from my window sometimes, trying to see out, but there was nothing worth seeing, so I quit and laid my head back.
He turned at Pearly White’s and parked in front of the little white telephone office behind the drugstore.
“You wait here,” he said. “I’m going in here and call your Uncle Oscar.”
Daddy had broken down his shotgun on the kitchen table and was cleaning and oiling the parts the next day when Uncle Oscar and Uncle Toy knocked. I was sitting with him, watching. He’d said I could if I wouldn’t ask him any questions. Daddy paused and cocked his head when he heard the knock and Gran going to answer the door. When he heard Uncle Toy saying hello, he started wiping the piece he held in his hand again.
Gran came to the kitchen door and said, “I think you’d better come out, Gate, so the men can talk privately.”
“He’s all right, Gloria,” Daddy said. “Let him be.”
Gran pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, then disappeared.
Uncle Toy was mad from the start. “What do you mean calling us down here like this, Will? What’s the emergency?”
Daddy didn’t look up from his work. “Afternoon, Toy,” he said, “Pull up a chair. You, too, Oscar.”
Uncle Oscar’s sad eyes shifted nervously around the room. He raised his hand in a little wave to me and formed “Hi” with his lips but didn’t say it. He saw the two chairs over by the cabinet, moved them over by the table, motioned Uncle Toy toward one and sat down in the other with a sigh. His face was gray and haggard.
Uncle Toy was flushed and splotchy, and the yellow curls that ringed his head seemed to stand out like little springs. They jiggled when he moved. He had on his blue funeral suit with the flag on the lapel, but his collar was unbuttoned, and his red tie hung loose at the throat. He folded his arms on the table and glared across at Daddy.
“All right, Will,” he said. “Let’s get to it right now. You told Oscar there’s an emergency. What is it?”
Daddy swung the shotgun barrel up toward the window over the sink and peered through it like a telescope. “It’s amazing how dirty a gun can get just sitting in the closet for a year,” he said. “Rust and moth do corrupt, don’t they, Oscar?”
Uncle Oscar smiled faintly. “Yeah, Will, I reckon they do,” he said. “Leastways, that’s what the Good Book says.”
“Did Toy tell you that?” Daddy asked. “He knows all about the Good Book, don’t you, Toy? Couldn’t hardly run your business without it, could you, Toy?”
“Never mind my business!” Uncle Toy yelled. “I want to know why you called us down here!”
“My business,” Daddy said, laying the gun barrel on the table.
“Your business?”
“Stop playing like you’re a goddamned idiot, Toy. I need to talk to you about the farm.”
Uncle Oscar’s hand started shaking. He took an Eversharp pencil out of his shirt pocket and twisted the eraser, running the lead up and down. Uncle Toy calmed down a little.
“All right,” he said. “The farm. What about it?”
“Me and Gate took a ride out there yesterday.”
“What for?”
“To see how things looked. And to tell Shipp to get off.”
“Why?”
“Things ain’t too good out there, you know. T
hat son of a bitch don’t even know how to crank a tractor right.”
“Why do you want him off, Will?” Uncle Toy was quieter now.
Daddy picked up the trigger mechanism and squirted some solvent into it with an eyedropper. “I want to move back,” he said quietly.
“You…” A wave of Uncle Oscar’s hand cut Uncle Toy off.
Daddy looked up at Uncle Toy. “I want to be back on that farm by Christmas,” he said. He glanced at me with a very slight smile. “Shipp was very polite. He told me I should talk to you about it.”
Uncle Toy’s pink hands flew into the air. “Impossible!” he yelled. He jumped up and walked to the other end of the table and leaned over Daddy, shaking his finger. “You talk about me being a goddamned idiot! What do you think of talk like that? You don’t know how hard it is to get help these days! We’re damned lucky Shipp is out there! No, Will, you ain’t going back!”
Uncle Oscar waved his pencil back and forth, like he was trying to erase Uncle Toy’s words. “Now, take it easy, Toy,” he said. “Will just wants to talk, that’s all.”
“No, it ain’t all!” Daddy yelled. “I want to go back!”
Daddy’s sticks were leaning against the table beside him. Uncle Toy grabbed them up like a bouquet of funeral flowers and shook them in Daddy’s face. “What are these?” he asked. “Are they planters? Are they harrows? Are they even shovels? No, by God! They’re walking sticks! They’re your walking tools, Will! You couldn’t get across this room without them!”
“I ain’t always going to be this way!” Daddy yelled. He started to try to get up, then didn’t. “I’m getting better! I’m not going to be using those things always!”
Some Sweet Day Page 8
