The Year the Lights Came On

by Terry Kay

  Oh, Heavenly Father, What to Do?

  How Can I… We…?

  This, You See, Was the Last Known Photograph of Him—See, by His Gun.

  He Never Saw the Baby—Never…

  Remember, Sweet Jesus—Sweet, Sweet Jesus—Is Thy Comforter and Thy Strength. Forever and Ever.

  Amen. Amen. Amen.

  In that lingering, in that sliver of time, the American Rehabilitation began. Reforms and pledges and G. I. Bills and no more collecting scrap iron, boys. No more rationing, Mother. Keep your eye peeled, Bargain Hunter, because—Lordamercy—there’s lots of bargains going up for the War Surplus Auction Block. And it was Over, Over, Over. Too bad FDR had not seen it through. Never mind, they’d not forget him. There’s that four-column newspaper photo of FDR at his best, a stylish tilt to his cigarette holder, a sharp, affable gleam in his eye, and if you are Democrat and American you’d better, by shot, have it thumbtacked to the wall.

  In that beginning, that sliver of time, all of this happened in the American Rehabilitation, and the people of Royston did not realize it had happened. Everything was spinning too fast. It was the tag end of 1945 and the world was on an endless drunk, whirling to a carnival barker’s call—sassy and tempting. The people of Royston, like people in thousands of other places, were still anemic and pale from the Great Depression, and now this, World War II, and all these men, these men gone to God or Forever or Worms or Wherever.

  That was the puzzle. The bewilderment. The lamentations of ministers saying God and Sweet Jesus and Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, and Blessed Are They Who Suffer, but there was no one to answer—really answer—why these men were gone.

  There was only one mercy: it was over. The Great Depression. World War Number Two. It was over.

  A moment to rest, please. A moment to linger. Let the American Rehabilitation go forth with all good speed. One moment longer, please.

  A sliver of time to take it all in.

  *

  After their moment, the people of Royston began again. It was a silent, numb beginning. Farmers from the tiny communities that surrounded Royston and were, by Rural Route, U.S. Postal Service, part of Royston, met on Saturdays in a ritual that was ancient and honorable. They came from Emery, from Vanna, from Harrison, Eagle Grove, Goldmine, Redwine, Sandy Cross, Airline, Canon, and other dirt-road directions, and they stood in twos and threes, like stark landscape paintings. They stood in front of Bowman’s Drug Store, or Silverman’s Clothing, or Foster’s Hardware, and they talked in whispers about their sick, used-up land. They were all solace-seekers, a convention of solace-seekers, and they lingered, lingered, lingered, waiting for something—perhaps miracles. It was as though they believed someone (a Moses) would arrive to lead them away to some place better, some hauntingly beautiful place where the land was rich and they could plant crops in spring without being always a year behind in payment to the Boss, or the bank.

  But Moses never appeared.

  Just before sundown, each Saturday, on some cue instinctive to them, the farmers would drift off and climb upon their mule-drawn wagons that had been parked in a lot below the depot, and they would say their low, resigned goodbyes to one another. Their children would take their faces away from the windows of Harden’s 5 & 10 and join their fathers. Always at sundown, you could see rings on Harden’s 5 & 10 windows, where shallow-faced children had pressed their noses and breathed moist circles as they stood motionlessly and made up games with the dolls and balls and bats and gloves and toy cars teasing them from brightly painted counters.

  *

  In 1946, Time began to be identified with newness.

  The economy bristled and people began to be healed of the disease of uncertainty.

  You could hear it in voices, see it in faces, sense it in the energy of games and laughter, anger and restlessness. There was a mood, a fever, to 1946. Men who had returned from the war assumed positions of responsibility and admiration. They made inspiring first-person speeches about liberty and what it meant, and how the bullies of the world had better mind their manners. Occasionally, they even told light, breezy stories about the war, laughing heartily at themselves as though humor freed them from the inescapable seriousness of what they had seen and known.

  The cotton mill placed an advertisement in The Royston Record, seeking employees. A sewing plant was officially opened by His Honor, the mayor. Farmers began to listen to what County Agents had to say about subsoiling, land-testing, seed-treating, or about planting kudzu and lespedeza to stop topsoil from washing away in the ugly scars of erosion. The sound of John Deere tractors stuttered even at night. There was a rousing demonstration against some northern union which tried to infiltrate the labor market, and a group of noble people, born of the heritage of independence, staged a funeral and buried the union in rites that were both circus and frightening. Everyone seemed aware of being embraced by a new history of the world, and everyone knew it would be a history never forgotten.

  The awful years were tender, healing scars by late summer of 1946. The World Series became a festive event again, and Roystonians began telling outrageous lies about Ty Cobb, who was a native and a legend. If you were born in a twenty-mile radius of Royston, you were reared believing, without compromise, in God, Santa Claus, and Ty Cobb. Older citizens who had known Cobb as a boy, loved to trap strangers with the trivia question, “What was Cobb’s lifetime batting average?” It was .367, the best of them all, and that, by shot, was more than most north Georgia towns could talk about.

  *

  And, then, there was 1947.

  Time became placeable in 1947.

  The ump-pah-pah was everywhere, a rhythm like a Vachel Lindsay poem, with reader and chorus, cymbal and trumpet. It was a year for putting pennies in loafers, for “Just a sec,” and mustard seed necklaces, for giddiness and once-a-month socials at Wind’s Mill. It was the year the Home Demonstration Club was organized, and the Eden County Fairgrounds Committee advertised an all-out, better-than-ever Fall Fair, with rides and thrills and games of chance and (Freeman told us) a freak show with the most astonishing membership of any freak show in the world.

  Ump-pah-pah.

  Ump-pah-pah.

  1947.

  Wesley’s year.

  I think of it as Wesley’s year because Wesley was the real and touchable and placeable something of 1947.

  Wesley was eighteen months older than I. Lynn, our sister (people often called her Lynn-Wynn, fusing her name with a hyphen), was eighteen months older than Wesley. In the spring of 1947, Lynn was in the ninth grade, Wesley was in the eighth grade, and I was in the seventh grade. Nine, eight, seven. Seven, eight, nine. A, B, C. Mother used to call us her triplets, her Stair-Step Triplets. It was Mother’s way of confessing her failure in selective family planning. That failure was humorously extended because she had had ample practice: before her Stair-Step Triplets, she had given birth to eight other children. I am told Mother vowed I would be the last; eleven children represented a superlative effort. Six years after I was born, Garry arrived, and he was not adopted as we often told him he was.

  By adhering to the most elastic of mathematical permissions, we learned to round off numbers and concluded that an average of two years separated the first eleven children. We had to omit Garry from this formula; to include him would have forced us into fractions. And two years was a neat, certain figure, accountable and rhythmic. I preferred to think I was accountable, not accidental.

  The reason it was necessary to understand and accept the reference to age separation, was that there were inevitable occasions when someone, somewhere, would exercise their right as an Official and request Facts of the Family. It happened each year at the beginning of the school term: we had to introduce ourselves to classmates we had known all our lives, and we were expected to know the names, ages, and whereabouts of our brothers and sisters. To me, this was an ordeal considerably more agonizing than the multiplication table, but I had learned a dependable system: my answer was a monoto
ne reading of names, slyly clicked off on behind-the-back fingers; I had ten older brothers and sisters and ten fingers (God is marvelous in the way He complements things). Each brother and sister was a finger, a special finger.

  I would say, “My name is Colin Wynn, and the way you say it is Co-lin, not Col-in. I have a little brother, named Garry. He lives at home and gets what he wants.”

  Then I would continue: “I have a lot of older brothers and sisters. Some of them live at home; some do not. Their names are…”

  And I would begin with Wesley. Wesley was the little finger of my left hand. Lynn was my ring finger. And I would work my way around the left hand—“Louise, who is the oldest one living at home… Hodges… Susan (who was the thumb of my left hand)… Frances (little finger, right hand)… Ruth… Thomas, who was killed when I was little… Amy… And, Emma, who is my oldest sister.” Emma was the thumb of my right hand. According to our equation, Emma was twenty years older than me.

  Each year, I offered the same recitation. Each year, the teacher oohed over the unusual size of my family. Each year, my classmates giggled.

  Because we were the Stair-Step Triplets, Wesley and Lynn and I were extremely close. We even behaved as triplets at times. But Lynn, being a girl, was not entirely reliable as a playmate, especially when we were very small. She was inclined to play Doll and House and Princess—fantasies that were as confining as they were senseless. Wesley and I were far more serious. We performed games requiring strength and cunning, daring and justice. He was Batman; I was Robin. He was Red Ryder; I was Little Beaver. He was the Green Hornet; I was Kato. He was Captain Marvel; I was Captain Marvel, Jr. Occasionally, Lynn would agree to masquerade as Mary Marvel. Usually, though, it was Wesley and me.

  We were close, the three of us. But Wesley and me… Wesley and me—it was special, that closeness.

  And it was beautiful.

  He was my brother, and I was prejudiced, but in those years when it was easy to trust unreservedly in the magic of people, I regarded Wesley as the most gifted person I knew, or would ever know. He was an Always There person. Once—I was eleven, I think—I was certain I saw a cosmic blessing descend on Wesley.

  He had walked out of the sunlight into the shade, and the sun twisted and bent to follow him. Wesley had presence, and that presence filled the emptiness of many moments and many lives. In his sometimes-sad face, people recognized the simplicity of a powerful confidence (faith?) that could not be tempted, or distorted. I once heard my mother say, “I just gave him birth; Wesley got what he is from somewhere else.”

  I believe that. Wesley was born with a divine appointment to be special.

  *

  But in 1947, when Time became placeable for us, Wesley was thirteen years old. He had not reached the considerable influence of his manhood. He was merely a leader of boys—me and Freeman and R. J. and Otis and Jack Crider and Paul Tully and a few others who were reared south of Banner’s Crossing, in the community of Emery, in the county of Eden, in the state of Georgia. Emery was south of Royston and Royston was northeast of Atlanta by one hundred miles, and east of Athens by thirty miles.

  Emery was a pencil speck on the state map, a quarter-inch distance from the Savannah River and, across the river, South Carolina.

  Wesley did not look like a leader, even of boys. He was skinny. A map of freckles spread like the Hawaiian Islands across his nose. You could slip a dime between his two front teeth. He looked very much like Butch Jenkins, the actor. Girls used to giggle and call him Butchy-Boy, and Wesley would blush and I would get angry and Freeman would cuss until Wesley stopped us with a firm “That’s enough.”

  Wesley could lift a hundred pounds of dead weight. In softball, he played shortstop and it was like watching Marty Marion’s ballet motion when he siphoned off a skimming grounder, pivoted on his left foot and whipped it to first base. In basketball, he had a magician’s hands. In pasture football, he had more moves than Don Hutson. (In pasture football, you had to have more moves than Don Hutson to dodge cow splatterings.)

  Wesley was a better shot than Sergeant York. One afternoon I saw him bring down a crow from two hundred yards with a Remington short-range .22 bullet. We were walking through the pasture and Wesley saw a lookout crow perched on the top limb of a majestic water oak. He stopped, and in a graceful, unbroken motion, he dropped to one knee, lifted the rifle and fired. The crow rose up, the oil of its purple-ebony wings glistening in the sun; the crow rose off its perch, fluttered one heroic, desperate, clawing fight with escape, then tumbled through the tree. It was an unbelievable shot. Wesley’s face trembled and he slumped to both knees. He was very quiet, as though he had witnessed something I could not see. I do not think he ever again fired the gun at any living thing.

  3

  SPRING. 1947. WESLEY’S YEAR.

  “Boys,” said Wade Simmons, “this is going to be a team that is organized. A-to-Z organized. Now, I mean there won’t be any favorites one way or the other. Softball is a sport and a game and we’re going to keep that in mind. We’re going to practice, and practice hard. We’re going to learn to hit and run and throw. We’re going to learn to slide. We’re going to learn fundamentals. That’s F-U-N-D-A-M-E-N-T-A-L-S. And that means how-to. We’re going to learn the lesson of playing together, as a whole, one team for one purpose. Organization, boys, that’s the key. Organization. Now, when we don’t have games, we’ll be practicing and playing choose-up with the old game balls and keep the new ones for when we do have games. Understand?”

  No one answered, or moved.

  “O.K. We’ve got our first game against Bowersville in two weeks, I think it is. That’ll be up there. Then we’ll be playing two games here before we go off again. Understand?”

  “Yessir,” Dupree said in his big-shot, know-it-all, behind-the-candy-counter voice. “Yessir, got it.”

  Mr. Simmons continued. “All right, now keep one thing in mind. Keep the trademarks up. Every broken bat means money out of PTA.”

  “Trademarks up, yessir,” echoed Dupree, acting like Babe Ruth.

  Freeman spat on Dupree’s shoe. “Dupree broke three bats last year, Mr. Simmons,” Freeman volunteered.

  “Didn’t,” shouted Dupree.

  “Did.”

  “Didn’t.”

  Mr. Simmons interrupted. “Makes no difference, boys. We have to remember to keep the trademarks up. This year’s another year, Freeman. Teamwork, that’s what counts.”

  “Yessir.”

  “All right, boys, now go on and choose up and get in a practice game and let’s see if you remember what you learned last year.”

  *

  Wade Simmons was principal of Emery Junior High School.

  He was also a man of wisdom.

  He used the word organized because it was a teacher’s obligation to suggest orderly conduct, but Mr. Simmons knew there was nothing organized about us. We knew rules, yes. Sometimes we even employed them. But we were not organized. We knew too well the difference between Victim and Victor. Losers were Victims. Winners were Victors. Being a Victor often required the First Law of Primitive Boldness, which scientists of social behavior have defined as survival. If you exercised the First Law of Primitive Boldness and won, the losers referred to the practice as cheating. None of us considered it a compliment to be accused of cheating, and many of our choose-up games were terminated behind the lunchroom after school. On those occasions when we did obey Mr. Simmons’ doctrine of Orderly Conduct, it was out of respect for his patience and the PTA budget.

  Wade Simmons had a talent for keeping his duty as principal and teacher in perspective, and for presiding in a dignified manner over the good and bad of Emery Junior High School—a school that belonged to the quaint system of housing elementary and junior high students in one building, grade one through grade nine. He and his wife, Margret (a woman I loved and the first person to distill words into an intoxicating liquid for me), had lived and taught in Emery for three years. They were the most influential peop
le any of us had ever known, and they worked with uncompromising devotion to improve the ambition as well as the deportment and academic standing of their students.

  Teaching was more than a profession to them; it was an obsession. It meant developing civic awareness as well as instilling the What and How and Why of formal knowledge. Teaching meant demonstrating the practice of decency and good manners, and we spent hours rehearsing how to walk quietly, or the procedure of closing doors with a butler’s reserve, or how to correct our slouching posture. Sometimes, Wade and Margret Simmons surrendered to despair. Sometimes, you could read in their faces the torture of inevitable failure with such people as Freeman, who could not tolerate the indignity of a book balanced on his head.

  It was not an easy determination, but the Simmonses’ method refused to accept the theory that education was qualified only by the A-B-C-D-F barometer of a Six-Weeks Report Card. There were other experiences, wondrous experiences that spilled out of books, overran the pages, and flooded the mind with a narcotic vapor. But those experiences could not be imposed. Wade and Margret Simmons knew that. Persuasion was their technique. Persuasion for discipline and order, and out of discipline and order, we were to discover freedom.

  Persuasion was one reason Mr. Simmons exhorted the gospel of organization in sport. He organized a basketball team to complement our softball team. He taught us the Side-Straddle Hop and Toe-Heel-Toe-Kick. He lectured on fundamentals. He even had the mothers of the Home Demonstration Club tailor red-and-white basketball uniforms for us, and he solicited money from the PTA to purchase caps for softball.

  But realizing sport was competitive, and recognizing our flair for the First Law of Primitive Boldness, Mr. Simmons organized a Boy Scout Troop. We were the Lone Eagles. The fierce, proud face of an Indian brave (Freeman said it was a copy of the Indian on the hood of the Pontiac car) was our emblem and the sweet night music of the whippoorwill was our secret call. We were positively splendid Boy Scouts, strict in our allegiance to the Boy Scout commandments—until the night, camping on Broad River, when Freeman tied Dupree’s foot to a tent peg and then released a king snake inside the tent.