Jim the Boy

by Tony Earley

  “Dad blame it,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Uncle Zeno pulled out of the mill yard and back onto the road. They passed several log cabins and small frame houses before Uncle Zeno pulled into the yard of a large, two-story log house set well back from the road in a grove of tall poplar trees.

  Mr. Carson jumped down from the truck. “I’ll tell Penn you’re here,” he said.

  He hurried across the yard and bounded up the steps two at a time. Jim slipped his hand into his baseball glove. He felt terrible and weak in his stomach.

  Uncle Coran and Uncle Al climbed down from the back of the truck. Uncle Zeno stepped out of the cab and shut the door. Uncle Al rubbed his behind.

  “Boy, Zeno,” he said. “Is that the best you can drive?”

  “I thought I drove all right for somebody born in the last century.”

  “You drove all right for somebody who don’t know how to drive,” Uncle Al said.

  Jim dragged himself out of the truck.

  Uncle Coran pointed at him. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  Jim didn’t even feel like saying his name.

  “Boys,” Uncle Zeno said, “what do y’all say we stretch our legs a bit? Let’s walk back down the road and have a look at Radford’s mill.”

  Uncle Al rubbed his behind again.

  “Beats sitting,” he said.

  “I wish y’all wouldn’t go,” Jim said.

  “We’ll be back before you know it,” said Uncle Coran.

  “I still don’t know what to say,” Jim said. “What do I say?”

  “You’ll know,” said Uncle Zeno, turning away with a wave.

  Jim sat on the running board and stared forlornly at Penn’s house. Although constructed of logs, it was considerably bigger than he had thought it would be. The house was framed by a pair of tall, rock chimneys; a porch whose banisters were made of twisted laurel limbs stretched across the front; above the porch lay six wide windows. Red and yellow flowers bloomed in carefully tended beds beside the porch, and a walkway of large, flat stones led from the porch across the yard.

  Jim had never asked Penn what his house looked like, and had imagined a one-room cabin perched in the woods on the steep side of the mountain, the world falling dangerously away from its door. He had always assumed that the house he lived in was bigger and nicer than Penn’s, and, during the times Penn had edged him in one competition or another, took secret solace in that assumption. He stood up and looked down the road. The uncles had walked out of sight around the curve. He kicked a rock, walked after it and kicked it again. He wondered if Penn was in the house watching him. He wondered if Penn even wanted to see him. He threw his ball into the air and caught it. He took it out of his glove and studied the red stitching, as if some secret were written there.

  The front door opened and a woman Jim took to be Penn’s mother walked down the steps and across the yard. She smiled broadly and waved. She wore a sky-blue dress and a white apron. Her copper-colored hair was tied loosely behind her neck. Jim waved back. When she got closer, he saw that, while she wasn’t as pretty as Mama, something in her face made her nicer to look at. She was wildly freckled, and her smile, which was a little crooked, made Jim want to smile back. She took his right hand in both of hers and held it while she studied him. Her hands were warm and soft. Jim felt himself blush.

  “Jim Glass,” she said, in a pleasant, although strange, accent, “I am so pleased to meet you. Penn speaks of you with great fondness.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Jim said. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

  She put an arm around his shoulder and led him across the yard onto the porch. They stepped into a painted hallway that ran the width of the house. Through one door Jim saw a parlor with Sunday furniture and a piano; in the room across the hall he saw a tall bed with a canopy. Halfway between the front and back doors, two framed photographs faced each other from opposite walls. In one picture, Penn and Mrs. Carson stood on the steps of a large, brick building with a bell tower. Penn was wearing a white shirt and a necktie. The building looked familiar.

  “Do you know where that is?” Mrs. Carson asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “That’s Independence Hall in Philadelphia. That’s where the Declaration of Independence was signed. We were there last summer.”

  Jim gaped at the picture and pointed at Penn. “Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson went up those steps?”

  Mrs. Carson smiled. “They did indeed. A long time ago.”

  “And that’s where you’re from?”

  “It is. I grew up in a house not far from there. I came down here to teach school for a year and met Penn’s father.”

  In the other photograph, Penn and Mr. Carson grinned extravagantly from what seemed to be the edge of the world. Only a metal guardrail separated them from yawning space. Mr. Carson’s beard blew out to the side in a stiff wind. Penn nervously glanced toward the chasm. Far below, an immense city stretched away until it disappeared into a gray haze. Jim had never imagined a city could be so big.

  “Gosh,” he said. “Where’s that?”

  “New York City. The Empire State Building,” said Mrs. Carson. “I wanted Radford and Penn to see Manhattan. I think their mouths hung open the whole time we were there.”

  Jim looked up at Mrs. Carson and blinked. He wanted to tell her about something important, but couldn’t think of anything. He suddenly felt ashamed and small.

  “Why do y’all live here?” he asked.

  Mrs. Carson looked momentarily puzzled. “Because,” she said, “this is our home.”

  “Oh,” said Jim.

  He followed her out the back door and onto a covered mud porch. The yard sloped away toward a small creek. Two rocking chairs faced the creek, and Penn sat in one of the chairs. Jim stopped uneasily at the top of the steps.

  “Is he okay?” he asked.

  Mrs. Carson tilted her head and smiled at Jim as if he were the one she felt sorry for.

  “I think he’s just fine,” she said. “Why don’t you go see for yourself? He’s been waiting for you.”

  Jim trudged down the steps and across the yard. He felt mad at the world. He was angry at the uncles for bringing him up here, and mad at Mama for letting him come. He thought about going to wait in the truck for the uncles to come back, but his legs wouldn’t stop moving down the slope of the yard. Penn had been to the top of the Empire State Building. Penn had been to Independence Hall. Jim had no idea what to say to a boy who had seen the things Penn had seen. And he had no idea what to say to a boy who had polio. When he walked past the rocking chairs, his stomach dropped as if he had jumped off of something high. He took a deep breath and turned around.

  “Hey, Penn,” he said.

  “Hey, Jim,” said Penn.

  The two boys stared at each other and grinned, then shook hands awkwardly, as if a grown-up were making them do it. Jim looked down at Penn’s legs before he could stop himself. Penn slapped his right leg twice with an open palm.

  “It’s this one,” he said. “I can’t move this one.”

  “Oh,” Jim said. “I’m sorry.”

  Penn shrugged. “It’s okay,” he said. “It could’ve been a lot worse.” He kicked his left leg straight out. “This one’s fine.”

  “At first, down in town, they said you were going to die.”

  “That’s what they said up here, too.”

  “Did you think you were going to die?”

  “Not really. I don’t remember.”

  Jim rolled a stick back and forth with his toe. “Will you … ?”

  “Maybe,” Penn said.

  “Really?”

  “The doctor in Winston-Salem says it might come back. You can’t ever tell.”

  “Oh.”

  “You get used to it, though.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Sometimes it hurts. Mostly it just feels asleep.”

  Penn slapped his leg again and stared at it. Jim star
ed at it, too.

  “Oh, well,” Penn said.

  “Oh, well,” said Jim.

  “Why did you bring your ball glove?” Penn asked.

  Jim looked down at his glove as if it had grown there without his knowledge. He shrugged and slipped it off.

  “Do you want to wear it?”

  Penn bit his lower lip and considered.

  “Maybe for a minute,” he said.

  Penn snapped the glove open and closed. He held it to his face and sniffed. He pounded the ball into the pocket. Jim stood and backed up a step and extended his hands. Penn tossed him the ball. Jim tossed it back to Penn. It bounced off of the heel of the glove onto the ground.

  “I’ll get it,” Jim said.

  “I just missed it,” Penn said. “That’s all.”

  They tossed the ball back and forth several times without speaking. Penn didn’t miss it again.

  “Everything works fine except this leg,” he said.

  He threw the ball back to Jim a little harder.

  “You know that day down in Aliceville?” Jim asked.

  Penn caught the ball and held it. He looked down at it and frowned.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “Since Ty Cobb was on the Moon and all, I should have let you use the glove.”

  “It’s all right,” said Penn, without looking up. “It’s your glove.”

  “No, I shouldn’t have been so selfish,” Jim said. “If I hadn’t been so selfish, Ty Cobb could have seen both of us play ball.”

  “Stop it, Jim,” Penn said.

  “I’m just trying to apologize.”

  Penn leaned over and covered his face with the glove. He drew a deep breath, and his shoulders began to shake.

  “Penn? What’s the matter?”

  “He saw me fall down!” Penn wailed into the glove. “Ty Cobb saw me fall down in the mud!”

  Jim ran over and swatted Penn on the back.

  “No, he didn’t,” he said. “Ty Cobb didn’t see you fall down. I bet it wasn’t even Ty Cobb. I bet it was just somebody who looked like Ty Cobb. And even if it was him, he probably wasn’t looking out the window.”

  Penn knocked Jim’s arm away.

  “It was, too, him!” he said. “And you know it!”

  Jim felt a sudden heat rise upward from his neck, and out the top of his head. He felt himself wanting to cry. He scrunched his face up, but nothing happened. He rubbed his eyes with his fists, but his eyes remained dry.

  “All I’m trying to say is that you’re a better ballplayer than I am,” Jim said. “I should’ve let you use the glove.”

  “I told you I didn’t want to talk about it! How many times do I have to say that? Can’t you hear? Are you dumb?”

  Jim opened his mouth to tell Penn that he wasn’t dumb, but remembered that Penn had polio. He looked toward the house, but the back door remained closed. He sat down in the chair beside Penn and rocked. He couldn’t think of one person in the world he wasn’t mad at.

  After a while Penn sat up and leaned back, breathing heavily, his face splotched and red. He wiped his eyes with the back of his right hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” asked Jim.

  “For crying like that.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m not a baby.”

  “I didn’t say you were a baby.”

  “It’s just that I’m tired. I never cry unless I’m really tired.”

  “I’m tired, too,” said Jim. “We had a long trip.” He yawned theatrically, closed his eyes, and leaned back in the chair.

  “Let’s just rest a minute,” Penn said. “Then we can talk some more.”

  “Okay.”

  After a few minutes the fingers of Penn’s throwing hand uncurled, and the ball dropped heavily onto the ground. Jim stood up and walked down to the creek. Its sandy bottom was dotted with periwinkles. He picked up a leaf and dropped it into the current. The shadow of the leaf slid over the periwinkles like the shadow of a cloud. As he turned away he saw a wheelchair parked behind a rhododendron on the creek bank. He started as if it were an animal. He hurried back to the rocking chairs and looked down at Penn.

  Even though Penn’s face was still red, he smiled slightly in his sleep. His breath whistled through his nose with a falling note. Jim reached down and touched his ball glove with a finger. He picked up the baseball and tossed it from hand to hand, measuring its comforting weight, before placing it in the pocket of the glove. He tiptoed away, looked back once, and broke into a run up the hill.

  Uncle Zeno pulled the truck back onto the road. Jim slumped against the door.

  “Are you sick, Doc?” he asked.

  Jim kept his eyes closed.

  “Just tired, is all.”

  “How was Penn?”

  “He was fine.”

  “Where was everybody?”

  “They’re all in the backyard,” Jim said. “I told everybody ‘bye in the backyard.”

  “I see,” said Uncle Zeno, glancing sideways at Jim. “Where’s your ball glove? Did you forget your ball glove?”

  Jim shook his head slowly.

  “I gave it to Penn,” he said.

  A cord of muscle tightened briefly in Uncle Zeno’s jaw. He took his foot off of the accelerator, but then sped up again.

  “Oh,” he said. “I see. Did Penn like it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jim. “He liked it a whole lot.”

  Jim didn’t know which made him feel worse, giving his ball glove to Penn, or his impending introduction to his grandfather. In Jim’s mind, Amos Glass had always shared a room with the other dark figures who haunted his mother’s stories, ghosts and goblins and killers who roamed about looking for bad little boys to catch and take away—Pharaoh, Bloody Bones, Blackbeard. Mama had always sworn she would never let Amos Glass lay eyes on Jim, just as she had always said that, as long as he was good, nobody would come at night to steal him away. But now that he was on his way to Amos Glass’s house, the door to that room suddenly seemed unlocked. For all Jim knew, the next time he went to bed, the awful face of Bloody Bones would appear outside his window, or a panther would say his name.

  “What makes my granddaddy so mean?” he asked.

  “Hmm,” said Uncle Zeno. “That’s hard to say. All of us have got meanness inside us, I guess, but most of us don’t let it come out. Most of us can keep from saying the things we shouldn’t say, and doing the things we shouldn’t do.”

  “Do you have meanness inside you?”

  “Some.”

  “Do you think I might turn out mean?”

  Uncle Zeno made a fist and gently shook it at Jim.

  “Not unless you want to get into a world of trouble.”

  Jim almost smiled. He pushed Uncle Zeno’s arm away.

  “I just don’t want to turn out like my granddaddy,” he said.

  “Do you know why your granddaddy got in so much trouble?”

  “Because he was a moonshiner?”

  “That’s part of it,” Uncle Zeno said. “Do you know why people get in trouble for making moonshine?”

  “Because it’s a sin?”

  “Besides that.”

  Jim shook his head.

  “Because every time a man makes a gallon of liquor, he’s supposed to pay a tax to the government.”

  “Oh.”

  “And if he doesn’t pay the tax, the Revenue comes and busts up his still and puts him in jail. Now, in the old days, the Revenue didn’t bother the folks up on the mountain much, and the folks on the mountain didn’t bother the Revenue. It was just too good a way to get a bunch of people shot.

  “What got your granddaddy in trouble was that he didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. He made a special kind of moonshine called Cherry Bounce, and people liked it so much, they came from Charlotte and Spartanburg and Columbia and all over just to get a jar or two. And Amos was a hard worker, I’ll give him that.
If a wild cherry turned ripe on Lynn’s Mountain, Amos Glass was there to pick it. He worked all the time, making liquor, and after a while he got rich. His downfall was that once he got rich, he wanted to get richer. So he built a big distillery up there on the mountain, right out in the open, across the road from his house. It was a long, brick building with copper stills that he had shipped down here all the way from up north somewhere.

  “Naturally, the Revenue heard about what Amos was up to. Since they didn’t have any choice but to go after him, they sent a couple of their best agents up here to hunt him down. But in a few days those boys came back empty-handed, scared half to death. Amos had caught them and tied them up and told them that the mountain was blockaded. He sent word to their boss that he would kill the next man the Revenue sent. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, he mailed a letter to a newspaper in Charlotte announcing that Lynn’s Mountain had seceded from the Union.”

  “Like in the War Between the States?”

  “Just like that. Amos believed it was his God-given right to make Cherry Bounce. He said that’s why God put cherry trees on his mountain in the first place. He didn’t want the government telling him what to do, and he thought that everybody else hated the government as much as he did. He thought that if he started a ruckus, everybody else in these parts would rise up and fight like the Confederacy did in ‘61. Amos had been a captain under Jeb Stuart, and was still mad about the way things turned out the first time.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, what happened is that nobody except the Revenue paid him any attention. People liked his liquor, all right, but they didn’t much care for him. They were afraid of Amos, but that’s different from liking him. Besides, a lot of people up here had been for the North in the war. And a lot of people just thought he had gone crazy. So only a few old boys, fellows who made their living working for Amos anyway, mostly Gentines, joined his little army and loaded their squirrel rifles and waited for the Revenue to come.”

  “Did they come?”

  “They came, all right. Amos kidnapping those agents and writing that letter to the newspaper had made the Revenue and the governor and everybody else mad enough to spit. They bowed up and sent seventy-five federal marshals and a Gatling gun up the mountain after him.”