Julia Watts - Finding H.F.

by Julia Watts

  “You’re probably right.” We pass a little concrete-block church with a sign that says, THE CHURCH OF THE LIVING GOD IN JESUS’ HOLY NAME, THE ONE TRUE WAY WITHOUT ARGUMENT. I crack up.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Did you see the name of that church?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I just think it’s funny, all the people in them little churches start arguing about scripture and get all pissed off at each other. Then some people split off and start a new church and give it a name a mile long so everybody will know they’re not them blasphemers at the old church. You know, like they call it The One True Church of Jesus Christ, Not to Be Confused With That Other Church of Jesus Christ, Because All the People Who Go There Are Gonna Burn in Hell.’ “

  Bo laughs. “You’re awful, H.F. You’re the one who’s gonna burn in hell.”

  “If you’re gonna start preachin’ hellfire and brimstone, you might as well drive me home. Memaw’s the one that’s stuck with the job of savin’ my soul. And besides, if what them church people say is right, you’ll be right next to me in hell, shovelin’ coal and complainin’ about how the heat makes your clothes wrinkle.” I look out the window, and a cow standing by an electric fence peers up at me with sad brown eyes. “Hmm. You know, I was just thinkin’, when I get a useless crush on some girl like Wendy, the only thing I do is talk to you about it. I’d be too scared to act on the kinda crushes I get. But you never even talk about yours.”

  Bo and me have been best friends since we were eight years old, and in all that time, he’s never told me about a single person he has a crush on. As early as second grade, I was getting all goo-goo-eyed over the pretty student teachers that got sent over from Randall College to practice their skills on a room full of rowdy kids. I’d spend hours talking to Bo about Miss Tammy, the student teacher, making up crazy, romantic stories about what her life outside school must be like. Bo’s been listening to my overactive fantasy life for eight years now, but he’s never given me so much as a glimpse into his own. Come to think of it, Bo has never come right out and told me he likes boys. He’ll say things like, “bein’ the way I am” or “not bein’ a real masculine type of person,” but he’s never plainly said he likes boys in general, let alone one boy in particular. Instead he rattles on about stuff like how much he just loves that new Celine Dion song. I don’t know who he thinks he’s kidding. If you’re a boy who lives in a place like Morgan, and you just can’t stop talking about how fabulous that new Celine Dion single is, guess what, buddy: You’ve done come out of the closet.

  “Well, I guess if there was anybody around here that was worth havin’ a crush on, I’d talk about it,” Bo says. Honestly, I don’t see why he has to be so mysterious all the time.

  “Well, when you get that music scholarship to the University of Kentucky, I bet there’ll be somebody up there worth fallin’ for.”

  “If I get a music scholarship to UK.” Bo’s little hands grip the steering wheel tighter. “There’s lots of competition for them scholarships...people from all over the state who’ve had lots better music teachers than some sissy little piece of white trash from Morgan County.”

  “Hey, now. Don’t beat yourself up. That’s the football team’s job.”

  Bo grins for a second, but then his face gets all serious again. “Well, even if I do get a scholarship, it still might not be enough money. Daddy wouldn’t pay a plugged nickel for me to go to UK, unless I was goin’ there to play on the basketball team. And if I even mention the word ‘college,’ he starts saying, ‘You think you’re better’n me?’”

  “I guess ‘yes’ would be the wrong answer.”

  “Wrong enough to get me an ass whippin’, and, like you said, that’s the football team’s job.”

  Bo may have a momma and a daddy, but his day-to-day life is a lot worse than mine. His momma works overtime at the bandage factory over in Taylorsville, and his daddy was a logger until he hurt his back. Now he’s a drinker and a yeller and sometimes a hitter. Bo tries to stay out of his way.

  I know Memaw doesn’t understand a whole lot about me, but she don’t yell much, and she’s never hit me. Even if she found out I like girls, I don’t believe she’d beat me.

  Deer Creek Road comes to a dead end. The pavement just stops, and there’s a cleared-out space to turn your car around. A lot of roads around here turn from pavement to gravel to dirt, but not many roads just stop. Bo pulls into the turn-around spot. “So what do you wanna do now?”

  I look outside. Just in front of us is a stretch of woods. The sun is shining in yellow beams through the light green leaves of the trees. I remember hearing somebody say that’s what the light shining through stained glass windows in a church is supposed to look like. “You wanna walk around a little while?”

  “You don’t reckon it’ll be muddy, do you?”

  I look at Bo’s perfectly arranged little waves of blond hair. I swear, it’s like his number one concern in life is being well groomed. The boy irons his jeans, for crying out loud. “What’s the matter, Beauregard? Afraid of messin’ up your snazzy new shoes?”

  “Excuse me, sugar, but some people take pride in their personal appearance.” He looks down at my clothes and curls up his lip. “Yep...and some people throw on any o’ thing that’ll cover their private parts.”

  Bo’s right about the way I look. When it comes to clothes, I couldn’t be less like a teenage girl. Most mornings I get dressed before I even turn on the light in my room. I shuck off my pajamas, grab some socks and underwear out of the top drawer, a T-shirt out of the middle drawer, and a pair of jeans from the bottom. Some water on my face, a quick brush over my hair and teeth, and I’m ready to go. Sometimes I’ve been in school a couple of hours before I look down and notice what I’ve got on.

  There’s a path through the trees. In the mud, which has dried enough not to hurt Bo’s beloved footwear too much, there are tracks from some man’s huge clodhoppers and dainty hoof-prints left by a deer. I head down the trail.

  “Where do you think you’re goin’?”

  “I thought we’d follow this trail a ways.”

  “God, I hate it when you decide you’re Daniel Boone.” Bo steps cautiously over a tree root.

  “That’s Danielle Boone to you,” I say.

  Bo rolls his eyes, but he still follows me. For some reason he always does.

  The sunlight pours down through the trees, warm and bright like melted butter. “You know, this place is probably eat up with snakes,” Bo says.

  “April’s early for snakes.”

  “Yeah, well, with my luck, I’ll probably run into a snake that’s an early riser.”

  “Hush a minute. I hear somethin’.”

  “Omigod, what?” Bo whips his head around.

  I close my eyes and hear a soft whooshing. “Water. Over the hill, I think. Come on...let’s go see.”

  Bo sighs as we climb the hill. “Lord, you’re worse than my daddy. You know, he tried to take me deer huntin’ one time. He made me put on this ugly old camouflage jumpsuit and took me out to the woods. Then he handed me this bottle of nastysmellin’ stuff to smear all over me. I said, `What’s this?’ And he said, ‘It attracts the deers...it smells like deer piss.’ I was like, ‘Excuse me? I don’t think so! I wouldn’t wanna smell like deer piss even if I was a deer.’ I don’t think other deers would find that smell so attractive, do you? Oh...my...God.”

  He says it at the same time I do. We’ve hit the top of the hill, and what we see below us makes our jaws drop. It’s a creek, all right—Deer Creek would be my guess—but at the near end of the creek is what must be a ten-foot waterfall sending a perfect white spray onto the rocks below. It’s so beautiful, it makes my stomach flip-flop.

  I run to the creek, shuck off my sneakers and socks, roll up my jeans, and step into the cool, clear water. It’s a warm day for April—warm enough for the sunshine to have knocked the chill off the water. I love the gentle rush of the creek over my feet and ankles,
the feel of the mud squishing between my toes.

  Bo inspects a big rock, dusts it off, and sits down on it. He laughs at me. “You look about six years old in there.”

  I splash some water toward him, and he ducks, laughing. “I feel about six years old. Except I feel even better than when I was six. You know what I think, Bo? I think us findin’ this place is a sign.”

  “Oh, you and your signs,” he says. “Ain’t nobody believes in signs except old grannies and the girls who get raised by ’em.”

  It’s true that Memaw taught me to believe in signs—in little things that happen because something big is about to happen. The best example of Memaw following a sign is from when she was a young girl, just after she married my papaw. Papaw was off fighting in the war, and Memaw was staying with her mother and daddy, helping to take care of the housework and her younger brothers and sisters.

  One evening Memaw was taking the wash off the line when she heard the rooster crowing from the henhouse. “Now, everybody knows,” Memaw always says, “that when a rooster crows of an evenin’, it means somebody’s fixin’ to die.”

  Memaw dropped her washing on the ground, ran to the henhouse, grabbed the old rooster, and wrung its neck. The next morning she got a telegram saying her husband had been injured in combat and would be coming home after they let him out of the hospital. Later, when Papaw came home, him and Memaw figured out the time when he had been shot: right when that rooster crowed.

  Now, I know I already told you I don’t believe any of that loaves-and-fishes and water-to-wine stuff, but I do believe this. Papaw had to get his foot amputated because of getting shot, but because Memaw killed that rooster when it crowed, he lived to come home and see his three children grow up to be teenagers before he died. Bo can call me superstitious all he wants, but that’s what I believe: Sometimes nature puts a sign in front of you, and when it does, you’d better do what it tells you.

  “Findin’ this place is a sign...a good sign,” I say, running my toes over the smooth creek pebbles. “Think about it. Ever since you turned 16, we’ve been ridin’ around every day after school, drivin’ and drivin’ but goin’ nowhere. Bo, today we finally went someplace. After months of drivin’ we finally found a destination, don’t you see?”

  “Well, I like this place too, and I’m glad we found it. But it ain’t a sign, because except for the ones on the road that say STOP and NO RIGHT TURN and EAT AT JOE’S, there ain’t no such thing as signs.”

  “Well, you can say it ain’t a sign all you want, but I know it is, and I know what it’s a sign of. Bo, our lives are finally goin’ someplace. And just look around you at the water and the trees and the sky...it’s gonna be someplace beautiful.”

  Bo smiles. I can tell he’s trying not to roll his eyes at me. “Well, I sure hope you’re right, H.F.”

  I can feel the sun pouring down on me, the water lapping at my ankles, and the earth under my feet, and I know I’m right. “Of course I’m right, Bo. You know what I’m gonna do?”

  “I’m scared to ask.”

  “I’m gonna start talkin’ to Wendy Cook.”

  “Now, H.F., you’ve gotta be careful. Bein’ the way you are...”

  “I’ll be careful. I’m not gonna tell her how I feel or nothin’...but I figure maybe I can be her friend, and that’s better than nothin’, right?”

  “Yeah.” Bo grins. “Of course, you’re gonna have to learn how to make words come out of your mouth when you see her. As far as I can tell, seein’ Wendy Cook is the only thing on God’s green earth guaranteed to shut you up.”

  “Well, that’s all gonna change today. Today I’m gonna take my shyness and wash it away under that waterfall.”

  I start running through the creek toward the waterfall, with Bo running alongside me on land, hollering, “H.F., you can’t stand under that waterfall! You’ll get pneumonia! And you can’t go home to your Memaw with your clothes all wet.”

  He’s right about the clothes. I climb onto the bank and strip off my jeans and T-shirt, then step back in the water, wearing nothing but the white cotton “granny panties” Memaw buys for me and the bra I’m almost too flat-chested to need.

  “You put your clothes back on!” Bo yelps. “What would somebody say if they walked up and saw me here with you in just your drawers?”

  I strike a bathing-beauty pose and grin at Bo. “They’d say, ‘I didn’t know you had it in you, stud!”

  Bo’s face turns the color of the pickled beets Memaw is always trying to make me eat. I run into the waterfall. The rush of cold water makes me gasp, but when I take in my next gulp of misty air, I feel awake and alive. I close my eyes and stretch up my arms, letting the cold water beat down on me, washing all my fears downstream.

  But I can’t stay under the water for long. My teeth chatter as I wrestle with my jeans, trying to pull them up over my wet skin, which is not cooperating.

  “Lord a-mighty, H.F., your lips have turned blue.” Bo takes off his vest and hands it to me. “I told you you’d catch pneumonia.”

  I slip on Bo’s vest and hug it to my chest. “I d-don’t have pneu-m-monia. The walk back to the c-car will warm me up just f-fine.” My teeth are chattering so bad it’s hard to talk. I realize now that I should’ve stripped off my bra and panties too, before I got under the waterfall, even though me being buck naked would’ve embarrassed the living daylights out of Bo. But at least that way my underwear would’ve been warm and dry instead of clammy and sticking to the parts of my body that hate being cold the most.

  Freezing as I am, though, I still feel good. There’s something to be said for not hanging back, for jumping right in and doing what you feel like doing. Bo may think I’m crazy, but if I had it to do again, I’d still go stand under that waterfall. But this time, I’d do it naked.

  Chapter Three

  I hate milk, but Memaw makes me drink it. I’ve just sat down at the dinette in the kitchen, after sneaking into my room to change my underwear, and there’s this huge tumbler of milk at my place. “Lord, Memaw, how much does this glass hold? A half gallon?”

  Memaw is fixing my plate at the stove. Like always, her steel-gray hair is pulled back in a bun, and she has on one of the plain zipper-front dresses she runs up for herself on her Singer sewing machine. “Them glasses was on sale over at the Dollar General Store. I like big glasses.”

  “It seems to me you might as well just put a jug of milk on the table and stick a straw in it.”

  Memaw shakes her head good-naturedly as she sets down my plate. “You’re a sight,” she says. On my plate is one of her usual suppers: pinto beans, fried potatoes, and cabbage. The corn bread is already on the table.

  After Memaw fixes her own plate, she settles down across from me. Her big glass is filled with the iced tea she makes, which is so thick and sweet, it’s like drinking maple syrup.

  Memaw definitely has a sweet tooth. She always has to have something sugary before she goes to bed. Usually it’s a dish of ice cream, but sometimes if there’s leftover biscuits, she’ll take one and split it and squirt Hershey’s syrup all over it. Memaw isn’t fat exactly, but she’s well padded, like an overstuffed armchair. When I was little, I used to listen to more Bible stories than I really wanted to hear because I didn’t want to leave Memaw’s comfy lap.

  “So how’s your little boyfriend?” Memaw always calls Bo my boyfriend because she knows it drives me pure and tee crazy.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I say around a mouthful of cabbage.

  “Well, he’s a boy and he’s your friend, ain’t he? Even if he does got ruffles on his drawers.” She takes a swig of tea before she says, “And don’t talk with food in your mouth.”

  I think about telling Memaw about the waterfall Bo and me found but decide to keep it a secret.

  “You got lessons tonight?” She always calls homework “lessons,” just like she calls lunch “dinner.”

  “Not too many. About an hour’s worth.”

  “You wanna help m
e blow some eggs after you wash the dishes?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Yeah, I know I’ve got to explain about the “blowing eggs” thing. It almost sounds like something dirty instead of something you’d sit around doing with your memaw.

  You see, Memaw’s always doing these crafty things; I call them her infernal craft projects. The house is littered with the fruits of her labors—the macrame owl she made back before I was even born, the hand-knitted afghans draped over every chair and couch. There are even a couple of those damn dolls left.

  When I was about nine, Memaw got obsessed with making these rag dolls with little gingham dresses and yarn pigtails. The problem was, of course, that I never wanted to play with dolls.

  I’d be playing with my Hot Wheels, and Memaw would keep making these dolls I never touched, until finally there were rag dolls sitting on every flat surface in the house, staring at me with blank, hand-stitched eyes. When I told her I was starting to have nightmares about the dolls, she loaded them all but her favorites into a big green garbage bag and gave them to the church toy drive.

  After the dolls, the needlepoint Bible verses came—there’s at least two in every room in the house, including the bathroom. Then came the animal shapes Uncle Bobby would cut out of plywood so Memaw could paint them. After she got tired of plywood geese and kittens, she started making refrigerator magnets out of bread dough. When those got old, she started in on the felt-and-sequin Christmas ornaments. She made so many we had to put up two trees just so we’d have room to hang them all.

  Now it’s eggs. Well, really they’re egg dioramas. She’s been on this kick for over a year. I think it’s held her attention so long because it’s both tedious and creative—and for a project to keep her interested, it has to be both of those things. The needlepoint Bible verses were just tedious; there’s no creativity in copying words straight out of a book, even if it is the Good Book. The refrigerator magnets were kind of creative, but they were too easy to make—not tedious at all.