Jim the Boy

by Tony Earley

  “Did they have a war?”

  “Not much of one, Doc. Amos and his boys barricaded the road and waited on the Revenue, but when those Gentines saw just exactly how much Revenue had come, and got a look at that Gatling gun, they decided they didn’t want to secede from the Union after all. Every one of them just disappeared into the woods. Old Amos saw what the score was and tried to hide, but he was old, and nobody would help him, and in just a day or two the Revenue caught him, hiding in a corncrib. They hauled him back to his house and burned his distillery down and made him watch. Your daddy said that watching that fire was the first thing he could remember. This was in 1904, and he was just a little fellow. That’s probably why the Revenue didn’t burn the house down, too. They didn’t want to turn a woman and a little fellow out in the cold. They took Amos down the mountain and gave him life in prison, but let him out in nine years.”

  “And he was still mean when he got out?”

  “Maybe even meaner. Amos didn’t change a bit in Atlanta, except that he got older, and he lost his touch for making whiskey. They say that after he got back up here, he couldn’t get a single batch of Cherry Bounce to turn out right. He either didn’t cook it hot enough, or he cooked it too hot, and not a swallow of it turned out fit to drink. It would make you drunk, but it tasted terrible. They say that’s why he was so bad to your daddy and your grandma. He had lost everything but his meanness.”

  “One time my daddy shot a hole in Amos Glass’s still,” Jim said.

  “Your daddy was a brave man, Doc. People say

  Amos killed a man or two in his day, and for a lot less than what your daddy did to that still.”

  Jim though about his father crouched in the laurel, drawing a careful bead on Amos’s still, and felt himself inflate with pride and bravery.

  “My daddy wasn’t scared of nothing,” he announced.

  “Are you afraid of Amos Glass?” asked Uncle Zeno.

  “Nope,” Jim lied.

  “Good. ‘Cause we’re here.”

  Jim jerked up straight and looked around. They were driving through a cool wood of hemlock and laurel and tall white pine, but there was no sign of a house. Up ahead the road forded a riffling creek. Uncle Zeno stopped the truck in the middle of the ford. From downstream came the breathy roar of a waterfall. Upstream lay a wide, green pool that looked like a good place to swim and fish. On the far side of the pool, in the shallows near a bank of blooming laurel, a muddy cloud roiled the water.

  “This is Painter Creek, Doc,” Uncle Zeno said. “It comes out of three springs right up there. And it looks like something just crawled out of the water and slipped into that laurel.”

  “What do you think it was?” Jim asked.

  “There ain’t no telling,” Uncle Zeno said, driving out of the creek onto the far bank.

  Around the next curve lay a long, unpainted, shotgun house, whose gable end faced the road. Uncle Zeno stopped the truck before they pulled into the yard. The yard had grown up in broom-sedge and stickweed, in which crouched a rusted-out Reo truck. The house looked deserted. It squatted beneath a sagging tin roof, high atop crumbling rock piers. Jim could see daylight beneath it from the yard on the far side. All down its flank, boards had sprung loose and curled back like shavings on a partially whittled stick. It was the longest, funniest-looking house Jim had ever seen. He might have laughed if he hadn’t known who waited for him inside.

  “That’s your granddaddy’s house,” Uncle Zeno said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He built it himself, right after the war.”

  “Why’s it so long?”

  “Well, everybody said Amos knew how to start building a house, he just didn’t know how to stop.”

  “Oh.”

  “Amos just said it was one story high and five stories long.”

  “Is that where my daddy was born?”

  “That’s the place. He lived right there until he went down the mountain.”

  “Is my granddaddy in there now?”

  “I imagine so. I’ve heard he’s real sick. Are you ready?”

  Before Jim could answer, two long-legged girls, fourteen or fifteen years old, sprang out of the laurel and bounded like deer toward the back of the house. Their hair was wet and tangled, and their dresses clung to their switching flanks as they ran.

  “I saw them first,” Uncle Coran called out from the back of the truck.

  “Now we know what was swimming in the creek,” said Uncle Zeno.

  “Who are they?” asked Jim.

  “I don’t have any idea, but I expect we’re going to find out.”

  Uncle Zeno pulled into the yard alongside the old Reo. Through the screen door, Jim could see all the way to the rear of the house, where the back door admitted a brilliant rectangle of light. In between the two doors, the house seemed ominously dark. Uncle Zeno honked the horn, waited for a few moments, then got out and started around the truck. A girl’s face poked out from behind the wall to the right of the screen door, and just as quickly disappeared. Another face, identical to the first, poked out from the wall on the left, and likewise vanished. Uncle Zeno stopped in his tracks.

  “Hello, the house,” he called out.

  “Who are you?” demanded a girl’s voice.

  “Who are you?”

  “We asked you first.”

  “I’m Zeno McBride, from Aliceville. Those are my brothers, Coran and Al, in the back of the truck. That’s my nephew Jim Glass in the front seat. He’s Amos’s grandson.”

  “Amos don’t have no grandkids,” said a second voice.

  “This is his boy Jim’s boy,” Uncle Zeno said.

  No reply came from the house.

  “It’s the boy’s birthday,” Uncle Coran tried from the back of the truck.

  From inside the house Jim heard violent whispering. The two faces appeared in the door again, but after an instant disappeared behind their respective walls.

  “Amos ain’t got no money,” the first girl called out.

  “And if he’s got anything hid, he owes it to our daddy for us living here,” said the second.

  “You shouldn’t have told them that,” Jim heard the first girl hiss.

  Uncle Zeno took off his hat, smoothed his hair, and looked up as if considering prayer. Then he shoved his hat back onto his head.

  “Now look here,” he began sternly. “We didn’t come up here looking for money. If money was lying around all over this yard, we wouldn’t stoop to pick it up.”

  Inside the house everything was quiet. Finally, in unison, the girls slowly extended their heads. They were long-faced, but pretty, with brown eyes and pouty mouths. They looked more alike than Uncle Coran and Uncle Al. They bit their lower lips with their upper teeth while studying Jim and the uncles. Jim thought something about them looked a little wild. He didn’t want to get out of the truck.

  “If you don’t want money, then what do you want?” asked the girl on the left.

  “We just want Jim to meet Amos before it’s too late,” said Uncle Zeno. “Amos and Jim are the last of their kind. That’s all.”

  The girls considered a minute, then turned and looked at each other. After a moment they turned their gaze back to the yard.

  “You can see him, but you have to wait first,” the girl on the right said.

  “We’re wet,” said the girl on the left.

  “Shut up,” whispered the girl on the right.

  “Well, we are.”

  “We’ll wait out here,” Uncle Zeno said. ‘Just let us know when you’re ready.”

  The poison oak shrouding the distillery walls made them almost invisible against the surrounding undergrowth. Jim couldn’t see them until Uncle Zeno outlined their shape in the air with a finger.

  “That’s all there is?” Jim asked.

  “That’s all that’s left,” said Uncle Zeno. “Amos must hate to look at that.”

  Jim approached the ruin as if the poison oak were capable of reaching out and ent
wining him. A tapestry of vines rendered the door impassable, but a Jim-sized gap remained between the vines covering the hole where the window had been and the window’s low sill. He carefully stepped through the gap, stood up, and found himself inside what had once been a long, narrow room. A small forest of ragged poplars had pushed up through the floor; the floor was made of cement, but the cement was crumbling into earth. The trees grew toward a blue rectangle of sky, though they had yet to reach the height of the walls. The inside walls were still free of poison oak, although runners tipped with new leaves peered like scouts over the tops of the walls, and sneaked in through the windows. The sun lit the leaves of the vines covering the windows along the southern wall, and projected shadows tinted with green onto the floor.

  Jim squeezed through the trees toward the far wall, with no other goal in mind than reaching it. He tried to imagine the floor without trees growing through it. He tried to imagine a roof separating the floor from the sky, his grandfather bent over a bubbling still, the Revenue outside with torches, but found that the pictures inside his head held only shadows — vague, unlit forms whose movements made no sense. The building simply seemed too old to have ever been anything else. Not even saying My daddy saw this building burn down restored it enough for Jim to imagine anyone other than himself inside it.

  When he reached the far wall, he slapped both hands against the brick as if reaching base in a difficult game. The floor around his feet was littered with lumps of charcoal, with broken pieces of glass and fragments of earthenware. Jim picked up a piece of cement and scratched “JIM” onto the wall. He threw the cement through the curtain of poison oak covering the nearest window. He squatted and filled his pockets with crockery shards, as if they were the things he had come all this way to find. Across the room, Uncle Zeno’s face appeared in the gap between the vines.

  “You better come on back, Doc,” he said. “It’s time.”

  The girls stood barefoot at the top of the steps, squeezed into little girls’ Sunday dresses, their wet hair combed straight back and clutched by enormous bows.

  “I’m Ada,” said the girl on the left.

  “I’m Beth,” said the girl on the right.

  “Rehobeth,” said Ada.

  Beth whirled angrily on her sister.

  “It’s in the Bible,” she said.

  “Hey,” Ada said, regarding Uncle Coran and Uncle Al. “Are y’all twins?”

  Uncle Coran and Uncle Al turned and looked at each other.

  “No,” said Uncle Coran.

  A wisp of a smile passed across Ada’s face. Her head slowly tipped to one side.

  “How old are y’all?” she asked.

  “How old do you think we are?” asked Uncle Coran.

  “Not to change the subject,” said Uncle Zeno, “but who’s your daddy?”

  Uncle Coran winked at Jim.

  “Robley Gentine,” said Beth.

  “That makes Jim here your cousin. His grandma Amanda was Robley’s sister.”

  “We know,” Beth said regally. She didn’t even look at Jim.

  “How come y’all to live here?” asked Uncle Al.

  “Because our daddy makes us,” Ada said. “We hate it.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Yes, we do. Amos is nasty. We want to live somewhere else.”

  Ada glared at Jim. He was afraid she was going to fly down off the porch.

  “Can we see Amos?” asked Uncle Zeno.

  “You can’t come inside,” said Ada.

  “Our daddy said not to let anyone in the house,” added Beth.

  “You can look in there,” Ada said, pointing at the window to the right of the front door. “He’s laying in the bed.”

  Jim left the uncles and mounted the steps. Ada and Beth moved aside, and he stepped past them onto the porch. His feet did not seem attached to his body. He watched his brogans moving across the weathered boards, and felt as if he were flying above them, watching them from a great height. He reached out and gingerly touched the screen covering the window with his fingertips. When he leaned closer to the screen, a sour stink rushed out and tried to push him back; he could taste the stench and the rusty wire in the back of his throat.

  As his eyes adjusted to the light, he made out a bed pushed close to the window. In the center of the bed lay an old man, naked except for a sheet bunched around his waist. His body appeared to be constructed of sharp sticks, covered with the gray paper of a hornets’ nest. Yellowed claws twisted from the ends of his fingers and toes. His head lay in a matted nest of long white hair; a bramble of scraggly white beard sprouted on his sunken cheeks. From the dark oval of his mouth came a liquid, metallic rasping. Jim realized in a helpless rush that his grandfather was going to die soon.

  While Jim’s mother and uncles had known and lived with Jim Glass, Sr., and Jim had constructed a man named Daddy from their stories, nothing had made Jim’s father so real as the beating heart of Amos Glass. He had always felt as if he were playing a type of game with his father, that his father was just out of sight ahead of him, watching as Jim looked behind this door, or under that bed. And, although he knew that such things didn’t happen, he had always secretly felt as if tomorrow might be the day he tracked his daddy down, that tomorrow he might meet him on a path in the woods, or find him sitting on a rock by the river. But now he understood that Amos made this possible. Once Amos died, Jim’s father would become as ancient and faceless as a man in the Bible, a man walking away until he is finally impossible to see. Once Amos was gone, Jim would be alone in the world in a way he had never been alone before.

  Jim leaned forward until his nose brushed the screen. Amos breathed with the startled desperation of a fish washed up onto a creek bank, searching the harsh light and unfamiliar air for the things he needed but had left behind in the world he knew. Jim saw his young father step out into a road, his belongings stuffed into a sack. He looked toward Jim and waved. Jim softly scraped the screen with a fingernail. He felt weak, as if he didn’t have the strength to push his voice through the wire.

  “Granddaddy?” he whispered.

  His father turned and started down the road.

  “Granddaddy? It’s me. Jim.”

  His legs almost gave way when Amos opened his eyes. Amos’s eyes were the brilliant, fierce blue about which Jim had heard in stories, except now the color was filtered through milky cataracts, like the sky reflected in water, or seen through opaque glass.

  “Hey, Granddaddy,” Jim said. “I came to see you.”

  When Amos didn’t answer, Jim tilted his head slightly in order to align his face with the old man’s stare. But no matter where he moved, his grandfather’s gaze always seemed focused someplace else, in some far distance Jim could not occupy. When his grandfather’s eyes closed again, Jim lifted his fingertips away from the screen and turned to Ada and Beth.

  “He doesn’t know who I am,” Jim said.

  “He don’t know nobody, no more,” said Ada.

  Jim climbed onto a small boulder that jutted out of the mountainside at the bald near the head of the valley. He was almost as tall as the uncles. At their feet the mountain fell away into air. The late-afternoon sunlight seemed to rise from someplace below them.

  “How do you like the view from up here, Doc?” Uncle Zeno asked.

  Jim shrugged. He didn’t know where to look, nor what to say. The green countryside did not contain a shape or a landmark that he recognized. He had spent his whole life in a single place, looking up at a mountain; he had never considered how different that place might look from the mountain’s top. The world he had known all his life did not seem related to the world he saw now.

  “Which way is home?” he asked.

  Uncle Zeno pointed at the valley beneath them.

  “See, there in the middle? That’s the road we drove in on.”

  Jim picked out the road, the red dirt faintly glowing in the sun. Near the road, a small herd of cows pulled their shadows through a pasture. />
  “Now, look on the other side of the road,” Uncle Coran said. “Do you see that strip of brush? That’s Painter Creek.”

  Jim saw water, glittering with sunlight, through an open spot in the trees. He nodded.

  “Now follow the creek toward the river and you’ll find home,” said Uncle Al.

  The creek twisted into the hills they had driven through that morning, and wandered out the other side. Jim traced its course until he was sure of its direction, then allowed his vision to fly ahead until it cut the state highway stretched tight across the countryside. On the far side of the highway lay the railroad. He followed the highway and the railroad east until he saw the corrugated sides of the uncles’ cotton gin glinting in the sun.

  Once he located the cotton gin, Jim easily found the store and the depot and the uncles’ houses; he found the school and the spot of red dirt where the town boys and the mountain boys had played baseball. He cataloged the church and the hotel, the houses, barns, and sheds, until he was sure that everything was in its place. He could not believe how little space Aliceville occupied in the world. He realized that if it had disappeared during his absence, the world would not have noticeably changed. In his mind’s eye he tried to draw the circle around Aliceville that his great-grandfather McBride had surveyed, but found that it didn’t make him feel better. He realized that there was nothing he could do inside that circle that would matter much to anyone outside it.

  As the sun began to set, Jim and the uncles watched the last yellow light of the day slide up the mountain toward the bald, dragging evening behind it. When the light went out of their faces, they turned and watched it retreat up the peak, where at the summit a single tree flared defiantly before going dark. A chilly breeze whipped from nowhere across the bald and flapped the legs of Jim’s overalls. He turned with the uncles for a last look at the view before heading down the mountain. All but the brightest greens had drained out of the world, leaving in their stead an array of somber blues. A low fog had begun to seep out between the trees along Painter Creek. Jim jumped down from the rock and looked again toward home. A single light blinked on at Uncle Zeno’s.

  “Cissy,” Uncle Coran said. “She turned on the porch light.”