Then it was over. Summer was gone and so was Dad. There was no reason to go to the Domino. I was no longer in the limelight. I was like a drunk without drink.
As usual, I didn’t know where Dad had gone. He just disappeared as far as I knew. Mom made reference to his going to find work in the timber mills, the wheat harvest, the cotton harvest or wherever when anybody asked. She seemed to know where he was and maybe Junior did too, but I never took it in. If there were any letters, I never saw them.
There were other things to take our minds off Dad’s absence. We moved from Galena to Crane for a start. Crane’s about twenty miles north and close to a school Mom got that fall. She always “got” the school. She never referred to getting a job teaching at a school, she got the school. Sort of like getting a cold.
The school was called Cave Springs, a two-room country school with Mom teaching the first four grades. For the first time, we would all three be in school. Junior and I were enrolled in the Crane Grade School which had a room for each grade and was almost as big as the Galena Court House.
My first day in school was the embarrassing day when my teacher held up “Carlton” printed on a piece of paper and I didn’t; recognize my real name. I didn’t think I’d ever live that down, but it wasn’t as embarrassing as the little girl who was sitting in front of me who’d wet her pants because she was too shy to tell the teacher she wanted to make Number One. She may not have known the signals. I told the teacher for her since it was I who discovered it. It was running off her seat into my shoe. Maybe I shouldn’t have told on her, but I was only trying to help. Everybody laughed at her which I didn’t think was right, but it took everybody’s mind off the fact that I obviously didn’t even know my own name.
School was a revelation and I loved it. My teacher soon had me wrapped around her little finger. Along with her knitting wool. She knitted all the time. She knitted standing, sitting, walking, talking, teaching, correcting, disciplining, reading and somehow even when writing on the blackboard. Before my mesmerized eyes, garments grew from circular needles, from three or four small needles overlapping each other somehow, from biggish ones, from bigger ones that she held under her arms and occasionally from a crochet hook. She’d be wearing one day what she’d just started on the day before. It was magical. The tubular shapeless things seemed to have a life of their own, sliding onto her lap, creeping over the side of her thigh, writhing down to the floor like huge snakes uncoiling mysteriously from her flying fingers.
I think I was elected “Postmaster” at Valentines time but whether voted in or appointed or just plain grabbed, I was it. We all made valentines industriously for days. I’d designed and headed the construction of a miniature post office in the corner of the room. We’d rigged a pigeon-hole cupboard out of cardboard boxes with the alphabet pasted on each one and I was in business.
I was so proud of my position as Postmaster that I wouldn’t leave it even at recess time. Anyone could mail a valentine at any time. I’d cut out and colored stamps and everyone in class had cut out circles of paper of various sizes. That was our money. We all took the game deadly seriously. I more than anybody.
Toward the end of the week, just before Valentine’s Day, I was standing at the counter during recess sorting out the last few posted cards when I felt something touch my leg. I jumped back and there crawling behind the counter on all fours was Mary Ann Spritely.
Before I could speak, she put her finger to her mouth, “Sssshhhh. It’s a secret. I’m not really here. Don’t tell anybody.
There was nobody to tell. Miss Dodge was on playground duty. “Are you hiding from somebody?”
“Yeah. Sort of.” She was squatting now, sitting on her heels with her knees wide apart. “Look. I want to show you something.” She tugged on the leg of my short pants. “Come down here,” she whispered.
I saw nobody coming so I squatted down facing her in the same position she was in. Our heads were touching and she still held on to my pants but her fingers were up inside the leg now and wiggling around. She kept saying “Ssshhh” while her fingers groped around on the inside of my thigh tickling nicely and making me giggle. “Shush!” she hissed. “Look.” With her other hand she’d pulled her panties aside to show me a pink slit, just like Bonnie Lou’s only I’d never seen Bonnie Lou’s open like this. “I’ve seen one before,” I said, trying not to seem too interested.
“Put your finger in,” she whispered, as her hand made firm contact with my toy causing me to catch my breath. “Shush.”
“I think I hear somebody,” I whispered back as I lifted my head over the counter. Billy Joe Carter bounded into the room. I stood up straight and blurted “Post office’s closed.”
“I don’t care. Just want my coat.” He disappeared into the cloakroom as the exploring hand took an even firmer grip on my toy and all surrounding parts. I gasped as I squatted down again.
“Come on,” she urged. “Put your finger in. I’m playing with you, so you have to play with me.” I did as I was told. Rather abruptly, causing her to gasp too. “Easy.” She moved her buttocks in a circular motion and my finger slipped in deeper and deeper into a warm moist hole. She continued to move her buttocks and at the same time moved her hand deliciously on me. Our foreheads were touching as we both watched what our hands were doing. She made a funny little sound in her throat and we raised our heads at the same time, bringing our mouths so close I could smell and feel her breath. Suddenly she darted out her tongue and moved it across my lips. I felt as though my hair were standing on end. My toy most certainly was and now she was vigorously moving her buttocks, her hand and her tongue. All three things going with practiced coordination. It reminded me of the game Junior and I played of trying to rub our tummies with one hand while trying to pat the top of our head with the other. It made me giggle.
The bell rang for end of recess. I stood up automatically, breaking contact with her but her hand had somehow got tangled up with my underpants and I was in a slightly bent-over position looking over the counter as Miss Dodge walked through the door.
Caught!
Mary Lou stood up beside me. Both caught. What we were doing couldn’t have been more fun and because it was, it stood to Baptist reason that it couldn’t have been more wrong. What would Miss Dodge do?
“Here’s my dime, Carlton,’ Mary Ann said with shining innocence. “It blew way over here in this corner.” She held up a tiny paper disc. Her lying technique had a professional polish.
“Oh.” I was dumb and dumbfounded. “Thanks.”
“You’re the most diligent postmaster I’ve ever seen, Carlton,” Miss Dodge remarked. “Keeping up the true postal traditions— neither rain nor snow nor recess can keep the mails from flowing.” What did “diligent” mean? Dare I ask Mom? Or would that give me away? “We’ll deliver all the valentines before school is out today and then you’ll be out of a job.” She smiled down at her knitting and moved toward her desk.
Mary Ann smiled prettily and said, “I can’t wait to see how many valentines I got.”
She looked so sweet that I wondered if I’d dreamed what had just been happening. My initiation rites with Bonnie Lou had not included the refinements offered just now—so I couldn’t have dreamed it. Or that there were more to come.
That was the beginning of an alliance that was to last through the second grade. Looking back, it could be called an erotic alliance but then I thought of it as an extension of first-grade “creative play.”
When school was out, the problem of a job for Mom that sum mer was solved by her being taken on as a waitress at the nicest cafe—almost a restaurant—in Crane. Her hours would be erratic so off Junior and I went to stay with one of Mom’s sisters, our Aunt Elsie, in a town not too far north of Crane.
Since neither of our cousins, Claudine (close to my age) or Helen (a bit older than Junior) gave the remotest indication that they were interested in “creative play,” that aspect of my life was dropped for the duration. Not exactly forgot
ten, however, and since it had been my experience that it was the girl who made the advances, I kept an expectant, but unrewarded, eye open for overtures.
The lazy summer passed playing in the sprinkler on the lawn during the day and trying to scare the daylights out of each other in the evening telling ghost stories.
Mom came up almost every week on her day off and it was a wrench when she had to leave early to catch the train. “If we only had a car,” she’d sigh, “all this would be so much easier.”
“Let’s buy one,” I suggested.
“With what?” Junior understood realities.
“Well, we’ve been making some money helping Mrs. Linthicum in the yard next door.” I corrected myself. “Well, Junior has.” I’d done a bit of raking and promptly spent my earnings on a root-beer float. A current and everlasting passion.
“We’ll get a Packard,” Mom teased. “How much have you made?”
“Will eighty-three cents help much?” Mom and Junior laughed into each others’ eyes. They had a special way of looking at each other sometimes—a deep secret understanding look—that excluded everybody else. Even me.
“Hey, maybe Dad will come roaring in in a brand new car.” With that, I dealt the conversation a death blow. Mom cleared her throat and glanced at Aunt Elsie. The subject was quickly changed. Dad’s name—at least as far as I knew—wasn’t mentioned again that summer.
Except once and that was when Claudine confided that she’d heard Mom was trying to divorce Dad.
“Aunt Milly told Momma that she’d divorce him in a minute if she only knew where to find him,” she said.
That meant several things, but mostly it confirmed my suspicion that Mom never did really know where he was and only pretended when anybody asked her.
Changing rooms at school was like moving to another town. The second grade was just across the wide hall from the first grade room but it was another world. A world ruled by Mrs. Webster, who proved from the first minute to be resolutely immune to my charms. She found me so resistible that there was nothing to do but work extra hard, which I did when not working on recruits for Mary Ann’s storm cellar games.
I lacked Mary Ann’s self-assurance and confidence in pooh-poohing those threatening recruits who’d leave our magic circle with an “I’m going to tell on you.” She apparently hadn’t been brought up with the Southern Baptists’ conception of sin. Baptist sin is straightforward and pure. Quite simply, it’s all-inclusive. Everything is a sin. I was, therefore, primed and ready for damnation and repentance when the Scandal—such as it was—finally broke. As luck—bad luck—would have it, it was Junior who brought it home to me. We met at the kitchen door, both flushed and breathless. He by running up the hill from baseball practice and I up the other side of our hill from Mary Ann’s. This was the hour when he was undisputed boss—before Mom got home. Junior had not only made the baseball team, he was the team. He’d already led the Fourth Grade Furies to victory over the fifth and sixth grade teams mostly by employing his unique slide into stolen bases and into home plate. He practiced that slide constantly. It was at first alarming—then embarrassing—to see him run a few feet and fall on his side and slide into flower beds, bushes or trees, leaving devastation in his wake and his clothes a wreck. Women and girls were forever screaming with fake or real concern when he’d suddenly hit the ground. There was a rumor for awhile that he was epileptic, fortunately squelched when his baseball fame spread.
He didn’t slide into the subject that had given him the angriest face I’d ever seen. He hit it right on the head. “It’s written there,” he said accusingly. “Right up there where everybody can see it when they come home from school.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked innocently.
“You must have seen it. It’s chalked up there in letters two feet high on the culvert facing.”
“Well, I didn’t see it. I don’t understand every word I read.”
“First you say you didn’t see it and then you say you don’t understand everything you read. You must have seen it. You had to walk right past it.”
“They didn’t even know how to spell ‘Totsy.’ They put an ‘e’ in it.”
“So you did see it!” Trapped. “Why did you say you didn’t?”
“I meant I saw it, but I didn’t understand it.” I shrugged. “It isn’t in my reading vo-va-cabolary.”
“Cab-u-lary.” He grinned. “Since you claim to have read every book printed in the English language on the second, third, and fourth-grade levels, how can you not know ‘fuck’ when you see it?”
“It’s not in any of the books I’ve read.”
The grin filled into a smile and he shook his head. “You have heard the word?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen it printed?”
“Yes. But I always look away. It’s dirty.”
“You turned away when you saw it printed today?”
“Yes. Pretty fast.”
“But you got the meaning?”
I hesitated. “Not quite.”
“It’s fairly straightforward and to the point.”
“It wasn’t very long. No.”
“Just ‘Totsey’—with an ‘e’ —‘fucks M.A.’ Right?”
“Uh-huh.” My nickname stuck with me everywhere but in the classroom.
“What don’t you understand?”
“Well …” This really was going to be an embarrassing admission. “I don’t honest and truly know what it means.”
“What?”
“Fuck.” That was the first time I’d ever spoken the word. I’d heard it, seen it on walls, giggled about it, knew that dogs sometimes got stuck doing it, acted knowingly when it was mentioned, but the truth of the matter was I really didn’t know what it was. “I sort of know. I think I know, but I’m not sure.”
“Oh, for heavens sakes. You do too know. You’ve seen animals at Grandpa’s and Aunt Amy’s and well, everywhere, do it. What do you mean you don’t know for sure?”
“We’re not cows or horses. They don’t wear any clothes.”
“What’s clothes got to do with it?”
“Well, you can see what the animals have … you know, all the things they do it with. They’re all there, just hanging around. That’s just nature.”
“The point is, do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Fuck Mary Ann?” He was raising his voice.
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t think so!” He resorted to his talking-to-an-idiot voice. “Just tell me what it is you do. You’re down there at her house all the time. They say she has a playhouse in the storm cellar. Are you still playing with dolls?”
I had. Not too long ago. “I am eight years old. What a thing to say.”
“If you aren’t fu—If you aren’t doing what was written on the culvert, what are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why would anybody write such a thing up there?”
“Jealous?” I was pretty sure it has been Darryl Wilson. One of my major errors in recruiting. His toy had had some skin cut off and consequently wouldn’t stand up. Mary Ann had tried everything she could think of and so had I but he was a total failure and Mary Ann might have been just a bit rude about his limitations although I felt sorry for his poor scarred toy.
“OK. Somebody is jealous. They are jealous enough to write that dirty thing up on the wall. What do you do with Mary Ann that would make them write such a thing?”
“We just play.” Explaining was difficult. I almost blurted out the suggestion that he come and join us and see for himself. Then I realized that if ever I was going to make the error of my life in recruiting, that would be it. If he saw us all stark naked, writhing all over each other, giggling and tickling and prodding and poking with every appendage into any and all apertures and crevices, he might have been amazed or perhaps even amused, but mostly I think he’d have been appalled. Particularly when we’d got a mixed bag of three
or more romping bodies going at once. “It’s sort of … Well, it’s like playing puzzles.” That was as close as I could get.
“Playing puzzles? How do you mean?”
“You know. Jigsaw puzzles.” He looked stunned. “You know, putting the pieces together. Fitting all the pieces in their places …”
“And what do you wear when you play puzzles?” A light was dawning in his eyes. He was beginning to understand. Finally. Now I could really explain.
“Nothing! We don’t exactly choose up sides or anything like that, but it’s sort of a game like any sport with winners and losers. The winner is the one that can think up the most complicated puzzle and how it fits together. You see?”
“And you yourselves are the pieces. Is that right?”
“Yeah!” He was getting the picture. “And depending on how many we are, it can get very interesting and exciting. Sort of like a wrestling match.”
“How many are you?”
“Mostly just Mary Ann and me …”
“I.”
“I. And … well, you know, if somebody comes along and wants to play …”
“Play!”
“Yeah. Sometimes three or four. And you know I think it was Darryl Wilson who wrote that up there. His toy was cut when he was a baby and it won’t stand up, so it wouldn’t fit into…”
“It’s true.” He shook his head and turned away. “I can’t believe it. Don’t you understand anything?”
I was getting a gnawing feeling of fear in my stomach—that sort of fear you get when you know you’re about to be caught in a lie. But I hadn’t lied. I’d told the truth. Up to a point. But there was something beginning to emerge from this interrogation—images were floating around in my mind of our swarming bodies on the doll blankets mingled with animals humped on top of each other and the preacher’s voice screaming about sin and pointing a finger at me. My stomach churned and my knees felt weak. I slumped in a chair as Junior turned back to face me.
In Tall Cotton Page 5
