“Yeah, exactly!”
“I see.” Paul thought for a minute and went on. “Well, it was physically easier at the school with everything set up for blind students—that’s for sure. It might have been a little easier in public, since there were so many of us people didn’t seem so surprised to come across us.” He picked up a twig and threw it into the fire. “But it’s not a home, you know. You graduate. You move on.”
“But aren’t there places you could live—?”
“Institutions?” Paul sat up a little. “Well, yes, there was a time blind children were sent off to live with the mentally deficient and the insane. A few still are.”
“But wouldn’t you be happier—?”
“No. I would not feel happier locked away somewhere. But I get the feeling what you really mean is that you would be more comfortable if I were. Isn’t that it?”
I couldn’t believe how matter-of-fact he was.
“Well, yeah, and not just me.” For once, I didn’t get the feeling Henry was baiting Paul. He was thinking so hard I could practically hear the wheels grinding. “But for your own sake too. Instead of walkin’ around with people thinkin’ you’re some kind of circus spectacle. Wouldn’t you at least be better off just stayin’ home, then, and lettin’ your folks tend to you?”
Paul crossed his legs stretched out in front of him. “John, remember asking me where I got the money to buy the automobile?”
“Yeah.”
“And I told you I got some when Grandfather died, but most of it came from my parents giving me money for Christmas and birthdays?”
“Yeah . . .” That day in April seemed years ago.
“Well, I threw a fit when I was ten, and they gave me a cloth doll for Christmas. Ten years old. A ten-year-old boy. After that, they gave me money because they couldn’t imagine what I might want. Because they don’t have a clue who I am, really.”
“Oh—”
Paul cut me off. “No, no, no. I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just trying to explain. Mother sent me away to school when I was six. Father didn’t care where I went, as long as he didn’t have to look at me. Twelve years later, I graduated and was suddenly around. This millstone hung around their necks.
“Henry, you can think I’m a freak all you want. Those goons in Kansas City can threaten me because the very fact that I exist scares them. That’s nothing compared to living with my parents and being completely alone.”
His blank eyes seemed like a drawn curtain, hiding whatever he felt.
The fire was almost dead, and none of us reached to add more wood. It just faded into embers, into silence, into dark, into sleep.
I woke up at first light to a crack of lightning so close my hair stood on end. The three of us clambered to stuff bedrolls into wads, gather clothes off tree limbs, and pick up pans and utensils, beaten by a driving rain. Fast as we worked, the ground was already getting sloppy by the time we had loaded the car and started wrestling the canopy top up for the first time since Paul and I had done it for practice at home.
“Goddamn it, Henry, you can’t just bully the thing up!” I yelled, and I don’t think his elbow in my ear was an accident.
We struggled putting the top into place and then started the engine. The tires moved three inches and rolled back into the ruts they’d made just since the rain began. “Shit. Piss. Damn.” I beat the steering wheel hard enough to hurt the heel of my hand.
Then I jumped out and said, “Well, get movin’ and lighten the load, would ya? Sittin’ there like a couple of jackasses.” I blinked rain out of my eyes again.
Henry barked, “No, you stay there, Paul. Get over and steer while we push.”
Paul slid over behind the wheel.
Henry positioned himself with his hands on the front axle. “Get over here and push, Nelly!” Henry threw the crank at me, and I ducked just in time. “Paul, you got it in reverse?”
Paul moved the hand lever and kicked at a foot pedal. “I do now.”
“Fine,” Henry spat. “Give ’er gas.”
He did, and when the Ford got to the end of the three inches it had moved before, Henry gave a mighty push and kept it going. They were halfway to the road before I had my hands on the axle. We bumped up the embankment.
Henry yelled, “Whoa!” just before the car started down the other side.
Paul stood on the brake and took the car out of gear.
Henry nudged him over and jumped in, whacking his head on the canopy. He looked at me like it was my fault. “You gonna go get the crank or stand around lookin’ pretty?”
I bolted back for it, if you can call it that when you’re suck-stepping in mud.
It rained all morning while we took turns driving and getting out to push. The last of the cornbread was all we’d saved for breakfast, and it was ruined, watered into meal inside a pillowcase. By noon we were starving.
We saw a light up ahead for the first time in so long I might have feared I imagined it if Henry hadn’t said, “What the hell you suppose that is?” It gave us something to aim for the next two times we got out to push.
Shadowy outlines that might have been woolly mammoths finally took shape as a farmstead—house and barn—and it looked like heaven driving up that lane toward dry shelter.
Henry’s face was way closer to normal than it had been even the day before, but I still made a better representative for the group. He and Paul hunkered down in their seats.
I ran through the rain to the back door of the house and knocked hard. There was no gutter above the stoop, and the rain poured off the roof onto my head in a solid sheet. June or not, I was chilled to the bone.
A farmer about my dad’s age and size opened the door. He looked me up and down, squinted past me at the Ford, and then settled on my face and waited.
I said, “Good morning, sir. There are three travelers—I mean three of us and we’re travelers, you see. And, well, sir, we’re cold and hungry and we’re not making much headway in this rain. Could we trouble you? For some food and shelter, I mean. We’ll work. Whatever you need done.”
He squinted past me again and then looked down at my shoes.
I followed his line of sight. I was nothing but mud from midthigh down.
“Three of ya?” he asked. “The other two as dirty as you?”
“Well, one of them is, for sure.”
“Why one of ’em?”
Couldn’t he see I was drowning while he stood and chatted?
“Well, sir, it’s kind of a long story, but our one friend is blind. It’s his car, and we’ve had him steer while the other two of us pushed. I mean, whenever we got stuck this morning.”
He sucked on his teeth and nodded. “Blind boy’s got hisself an automobile.”
I nodded back.
“So you let him drive while you pushed.”
“Something like that.”
“Well.” He reached an arm over his head and scratched above the opposite ear. “You can’t set foot on my wife’s clean floor like that. Why’n’t y’all set up in the barn, and I’ll see what she can scare up?”
“Much obliged, sir. Much obliged.” I threw it over my shoulder at him, already running to tell the others.
The clothes in my duffel were wet, but not like the ones I was wearing. I changed in the barn, shivering enough to make buttons hard to manage. Paul changed too, while Henry just stripped down to his drawers like the evening before. We slung our stuff over the doors of empty stalls and said hello to a pair of draft horses stamping their feet and snorting at us.
Henry said, “Do you think we can find a dry match?”
That was the moment the farmer appeared in the open doorway wearing a full-length slicker and carrying a five-gallon bucket draped with oilcloth. “Don’t even think about it.” The man had his chin down like a bull ready to charge. “I’m none too fond of puttin’ the three of you up and feedin’ you to begin with, but my wife takes that shit in the Bible serious about angels comin’ to your doorstep in disguise, and she w
on’t turn nobody away. Me, I don’t care if you’re Jesus H. Christ his own self—you ain’t gonna burn down my barn. You hear?”
Paul and I just about broke our necks nodding. Henry held the man’s gaze.
“You’re trouble on the hoof.” The man nodded at Henry. “And it looks like somebody’s already tried to get that through your head lately. Now, I mean it. You start a fire with all this hay around, I’ll kick your butt so hard you’ll have to breathe through your asshole.” He stalked off, head ducked against the rain.
Cold fried chicken. Hot biscuits. A jar of pickled beets and another of last year’s green beans. We tore into the food in that galvanized bucket. There were tin cups on hooks above the pump there in the barn, and that water tasted as cold as melted spring and as sweet as tea. The farmer might have begrudged us the grub, but as far as I was concerned, his wife had earned her throne in heaven.
When Henry and I had inspected the bucket two or three times and reconciled ourselves to the fact it was empty, I took a look outside and wondered if we ought to be building that sweet woman an ark. It was raining so hard I couldn’t even see the Ford.
I pulled down some horse blankets and threw one to Paul. “Kind of scratchy,” I told him, “but better than the hay. May as well make up for that rude awakening this morning. We’re goin’ nowhere today.”
Some people say they can’t sleep in a thunderstorm, but I am not one of them. Thunder, even a big rumble that shakes the house, sounds like a lullaby to me. Maybe because my mom always said that thunder was just God’s way of saying hello.
I had no idea how long I’d slept, but there was no question what woke me up. Nothing else in the world sounds like a shell chambering in a shotgun. Cha-chung.
I shot upright and saw the farmer filling the doorway with a gun pointed just left of me. Henry was standing in his underdrawers, hands up in surrender. In front of him was a little pile of wood scraps, the kind you find around anybody’s workbench. And in one hand, he held a match.
Damn him to hell anyway. I looked past the farmer outside. At least the rain had let up.
I nudged Paul awake.
“Huh?” He rolled himself tighter into his blanket.
I pulled it away and hung it back where I’d found it. “Come on, Paul. We’re movin’ on. Get your stuff.”
“Why? You’re the one who said we weren’t going anywhere today.”
“That was before Henry wore out our welcome.” I pulled Henry’s clothes off the stall door and slung them at him. While I was at it, I grabbed the match out of his hand and jammed it into my pocket.
The other two walked out with their gear, and I hung back. When it was just us, I turned to the farmer. “Sir, I know I have no right.”
The barrels of the gun came up again.
I talked faster. “But if you could see your way clear to give us lengths of saw board—whatever you can spare, but I mean two—it might help us get farther away from here in this mud than we could without ’em.”
I could see him weighing it. Finally, he pointed with the gun one-handed toward the back of the barn. “Go get yourself two pieces of board, and don’t even look at nothin’ else.”
I ran like a rat. “Thank you, sir.” I passed back through with two lengths of pine board under my arm.
“Go” was his send-off. He did not suggest that God travel with us.
We made it out of his lane and onto the road before we had to get out and use the boards the first time.
“Goddamn it, Henry,” I said.
“Oh, right. Like it’s my fault it rained.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. I can’t imagine God likes you any more than I do right about now.” I had wedged the wood in front of the back tires and taken my place at the back axle.
And so went our day. We would slither side to side no more than two hundred yards at a stretch before getting mired down in the wagon ruts. Henry and I got out, Paul slid over, and pretty soon we moved on without a word. My boots came to feel like they weighed about twenty pounds each.
By midafternoon, the clouds had burned away and the sun was so hot steam came off my damp clothes when I got out to push. We kept the canopy up on the car just for shade. There wasn’t a tree in sight—nothing but flat acres of mud that looked like they might start to boil.
“Damn it,” I told Henry. We were shoulder to shoulder at the back axle for what might have been the hundredth time. “I am going to personally burn those clothes first chance I get, and right now I don’t much care if you’re still in ’em. You smell like a damn pigpen.”
He grunted as he pushed. “Well, I’m sorry to offend your sensitive nose, Nelly.”
I shoved him down before I knew I was going to, and he came up as fast as a wet cat. A fresh swath of mud went up to the crown of his head. Then I was spitting mud and digging with my fingers to get that moldy-tasting gumbo out of my mouth. He had pushed me back hard enough to roll me down the embankment.
A lot of grunting and cussing went with all this, and I guess that and the car not moving told Paul what was going on. He stepped out in his goddamned spotless clothes just as I finished fighting my way back up in the boot-sucking goo. It was like climbing a hill of molasses.
Paul said, “Now, ladies—”
I punched him, God help me, without a thought. Straight on the jaw.
He was no more down than Henry spun me around by a fistful of shirt. “What the hell’s wrong with you, hittin’ a blind boy?”
I jerked away. “He wants to be treated like everybody else, fine. That’s what a smart mouth gets.” I brought up more nastiness and spat it out. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Only time you seem to care is when somebody else is being mean to him. Why? Is that your own personal province?”
He came at me, and while we rassled, Paul tried to push us apart. But his feet got tangled with ours, and we all went down the embankment together, one rolling and grunting ball of mud.
At the bottom, it took us a while to get separated. When I could, I sat up and wiped mud out of my eyes. Henry had landed face-first in a murky puddle and came up sputtering and coughing. Paul pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face clean. We all panted like dogs in the afternoon sun.
Nothing happened for a good long minute. Then Paul reached in another pocket and came out with a coin. “Heads, we go on. Tails, we kill each other here.”
I stood up and slogged my way up the embankment before he tossed it. I was pretty sure it would come up heads.
We got stuck a hundred more times that day, but something in the air between us had cleared. Stupid as it was, what Paul said had reminded us that for the time being, each other was all we had.
Along about starving o’clock, we saw the first farmstead we’d come to since Farmer Shotgun’s. Sunlight reflected off the brass weather vane on the barn like a beacon.
I wanted to stop and have a talk with Henry, but that would mean getting stuck again, and I was just about all in. As I gave the Ford some gas and fishtailed up the lane, I just said, “Henry—”
“I know, and don’t worry. I paid for that today.”
I shot him a look that was only a little hateful, seeing as how we were getting along.
“Oh, okay. I’m sorry,” he said. “But I wanna get dry bad as you do, okay? I won’t do nothin’.”
“You won’t do anything,” Paul offered.
“Oh, jes’ shut up.”
Paul smiled for the first time in recent memory.
We had barely come to a stop under the canopy of a huge sycamore before two men banged out the back door of the house and came at us. One of them had a little hitch in his get-along, but other than that, they looked like exact copies and moved as fast as men thirty years younger.
I looked down at myself caked in mud. Mud they owned, no doubt. Their land and us, trespassing on each other. “Oh, shit,” I said. “Get ready to go on.”
But we would come to know that the Heverson brothers, for that was their name, ran a be
tter boarding house than Mrs. Bentley back in Missouri. “Hello! Hello! Welcome!” they said as they got close to the car and looked us over. “What a fine automobile!”
“Well, good heavens, look at you! You’re wearin’ half the countryside!”
The Heverson brothers didn’t get a lot of company, would be my guess. They were unloading our gear before we could even ask to stay.
When they started for the house, I said, “Sirs? We can stay in your barn. That’s plenty good.”
“Nonsense,” one of them yelled over his shoulder.
“You heard the man.” Henry grinned, and either his face had come close to finished healing since morning or the mud provided some good camouflage. “We’re just angels in disguise.”
I had to smile in spite of myself.
Once we got inside the house, one of the brothers held out his hand and said, “I’m Orville.”
The other said, “I’m Amos,” and he shook with us too.
We must have looked confused, because they both busted out laughing. They were on the short side and looked a little like potbellied stoves wearing overalls. Their whole middle sections shook when they laughed.
“Don’t worry,” Amos said. “Even we forget which one of us is which sometimes.” They laughed at this too. Their shiny red faces were creased with smiles baked in by the sun.
After supper, they shooed us off to the back of the house into a room that looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. On one side there was a big bed with a fancy carved headboard. A matching walnut dresser and chest of drawers sat against the wall facing it. The bed was covered with a fine-pieced quilt that looked like something my grandma might have made, but it was an ivy vine design I’d never seen. Its reflection in the mirror made it look like twins too.
On the wall there was a portrait of the brothers taken when they were babies and another from when they were about four years old. I couldn’t imagine how their mother had told them apart. If she had.
Their present-day versions came back with a cot that one brother unfolded while the other shook out sheets and a pillowcase. Then they said, “Good night,” and left us alone.
Seeing America Page 10
