The Year the Lights Came On

by Terry Kay

  Paul and the others from Our Side moved slowly outside, staring at me.

  When they left, Old Lady Blackwall leaned against the front of her desk. She had a ruler in her hand and kept tapping it against a chair in front of her.

  “Now, I want you both to know that I strongly disapprove of this kind of conduct,” she preached. “You’re far too young to be having sweethearts and I just will not have note-passing in my room. I’m tempted to let your parents know about this and let them take care of it, but I won’t. Not if you promise to stop this silly behavior right now.”

  Megan did not answer. She looked angry. I wanted to kick Old Lady Blackwall.

  “We didn’t do nothin’,” I protested. “Nothin’. It’s not against the law to draw pictures and give ’em away, and it’s not against the law to be friends.”

  “Now, you just hold it, young man,” Old Lady Blackwall snapped. She was suddenly furious. “You hold it a minute, or I’ll wear a hole in your pants, and I mean it. I’m tired of you and your brother sassing me. Talking to me like I don’t know as much as you. Well, I’m a schoolteacher and I know more, and you’d better get used to that.”

  Of course, I thought. Now I knew why Old Lady Blackwall decided to make an example of Megan and me. It wasn’t because of Megan and it wasn’t because of me; it was because of Wesley. Wesley was constantly correcting her mistakes as she attempted to teach us the conjugation of verbs or the capitals of the 48 states, or some other mystery. Wesley was a frustration to her, but she would never dare cross Wesley; such a match would have been embarrassing, and she knew it.

  “Yes’m,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

  “Now, that’s better. But I want a promise from both of you. Quit this silly carrying on. I know what it can lead to.”

  “Yes’m,” I said.

  “Megan?”

  Megan tossed her head proudly, angrily. “Yes,” she said sternly. “I promise.”

  “All right. Now you can be dismissed,” Old Lady Blackwall said sweetly. Then she added, “If either of you ever have any problems, let me know and I’ll be happy to talk to you. Go on, now, you’re dismissed.”

  Dismissed?

  Dismissed to what? Outside, Paul and Freeman and R. J. and Alvin and Otis and Jack waited to escort me to the new ground. They circled around me, like some prisoner being led before a firing squad. They said nothing, but occasionally Freeman would shove at me, his strong, bony fingers digging into my side. As we marched to the Condemned Man cadence, Dupree led the Highway 17 Gang in a victory dance around us.

  “Hey, boy, can’t you find no girls over there in the swamp good enough for you?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us you was a ar-tise, Colin? We’d of posed for you.”

  “You gonna let me have a autograph, boy?”

  “Draw me a pig, sweetie.”

  “You better watch it, boy, that girl belongs to ol’ Dupree here and he’s gonna whip your butt, boy,” teased Wayne.

  The remark about Dupree and Megan was too much. I whirled and made a dash to break through the ring of my escort. Megan wouldn’t give Dupree the time of day, and I was going to whip Wayne Heath’s tail in front of God and recess for telling such a lie.

  Freeman grabbed me by the shirt, lifted me off the ground and handed me to Alvin and R. J. Sometimes I forgot that I was the youngest and smallest of Our Side.

  “Let me go, Freeman,” I screamed.

  “Shuttup,” Freeman commanded. He turned to face Dupree. “I don’t know what you think’s so funny, Dupree. At least Colin went for a girl at school when he started courtin’.”

  Dupree’s face clouded in suspicion, and he shivered slightly under Freeman’s steel gaze. “What’re you talkin’ about? That’s not just any girl he’s messin’ around with. That’s my girl.”

  “She don’t know it if she is,” Freeman answered. “Besides, I hear you don’t got the first idea about girls.”

  Freeman’s words fell like stone on Dupree. The laughing stopped. The jeering stopped. The moving stopped.

  “You better say what you mean, hick,” cautioned Dupree.

  “I don’t have to say nothin’. Everybody in Emery knows what you did when you was spendin’ the night on your granddaddy’s farm last summer.”

  Dupree turned red. Sweat popped out on his forehead. “Did?” Dupree shouted. “I didn’t do nothin’. What you talking about, boy?”

  “In the barn,” Freeman answered. “One of your granddaddy’s hands saw you, whether you think he did or not.”

  Dupree was outraged. Sonny and Wayne stepped away from him.

  “What’d you do?” Sonny asked. A dozen answers must have flashed in his mind.

  Dupree was foaming at the lips, a mad dog cornered.

  “I didn’t do nothin’,” groaned Dupree. “Nothin’. He’s making it up. I’m tellin’ you, he’s making it up.”

  “You must’ve done somethin’,” Wayne said. “Everybody knows it.”

  “Everybody? Who, everybody?” raved Dupree. “Didn’t nobody hear nothing, because he just made it up. Didn’t nothin’ happen on that farm when I was there last summer. Nothin’.”

  “Don’t sound right,” Sonny replied.

  “It’s not,” exploded Dupree. “Freeman’s makin’ it up.”

  “Well, that’s for me to know and for you to find out,” answered Freeman in a voice so deep it had the sound of coming from a man. He turned easily and pushed us away toward the new ground. “Yessir, for me to know and you to find out,” he repeated, laughing.

  “I’ll pay you back for that, Freeman Boyd,” shouted Dupree. “I swear to God and Jesus, I’ll pay you back, boy. You gonna hate this day before I’m through with you, boy.”

  Wesley was hurt and displeased with my behavior, and I knew he was remembering the lie I had told him about being in the classroom with Megan. I wanted to explain about the lie. I wanted to tell him I had hidden away in Black Pool Swamp to find courage, but that was an ancient transgression. The discovery of my drawings in Megan’s Blue Horse tablet was the issue. I had broken our code. Worse, I had broken our code because of a girl.

  The punishment was proposed by Paul and it was severe: I was denied the privilege of running with Our Side for a month. No matter what happened, I could not belong. A beating would have been far kinder, far less painful. For the first time, I would be separated from Wesley, and for the first time I experienced the fumbling, remote feeling of insecurity.

  *

  I stayed to myself the rest of the day, voluntarily removed from Wesley and the others of Our Side. Freeman’s cloudy accusation of Dupree’s conduct was a higher grade of gossip than any awkward romance, and I was soon forgotten in the crossfire of charges and denials, speculation and certainties (it was shocking how many people remembered hearing “something” about Dupree).

  I entertained my aloneness by thinking of my punishment as a sacrifice for Megan. In geography we had studied about monks in several Asian countries and how they could go forever being alone and purifying themselves with the harsh discipline of inner meditation. If they could do it, so could I. I was the descendant of a Cherokee Indian—even if the English and Irish and Scottish coagulation did dominate 95 percent of my heritage—and everyone knew Indians could sit for hours without moving or blinking.

  I was thinking about this, and imagining Megan off in a whispery, other world, when Wesley interrupted.

  “You better c’mon,” he said. “The school bus is loading.”

  “I’m not ridin’ the bus,” I answered defiantly.

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “I’m walkin’ home, that’s what.”

  “Daddy’ll give you a whippin’, too.”

  “What’d I care?”

  “No need to be mad,” Wesley said gently. “You knew the rules. You got to live by them, just like the rest of us.”

  I wanted to tell Wesley that it was his fault, that Old Lady Blackwall punished me because of him. But I couldn
’t. That would’ve been babyish. Besides, Indians knew how to take punishment and I was a descendant of a Cherokee.

  “Don’t care,” I finally said. “I’m walkin’ home just the same.”

  “All right. But there won’t be nothin’ I can do when Daddy whips you.”

  I waited below the canning plant for the school bus to leave, carrying its chattering, writhing, covey of birdlike passengers to be deposited at mailboxes, intersections, and turn-offs over thirty-three miles of unpaved, red, washboard country roads. Watching them leave numbed me. A cruel, sarcastic reality echoed in an obscene falsetto of the chattering and laughter trailing the bus: one of its covey was missing and no one cared.

  I tucked the two books for study in the crook of my arm and began walking rapidly through Clarence Sosbee’s cotton field, headed for Clarence Sosbee’s woods, where the finest natural spring in Emery bubbled up at the roots of a stately beech tree. Sosbee’s Spring had the sweetest water in the world and there were Negroes in Emery who swore the nectar of that water cured illnesses, and that it was somehow connected to the Jordan River by an underground channel that ran through the middle of the earth. I had believed that story, or half-believed it, for years, and I could never pass Sosbee’s Spring without cupping a swallow of water in my hands and drinking slowly, waiting the miracle of the Jordan River. There were times when my body would tremble as the water released its coolness, and for the briefest flickering of time, I would see wholly the vision of Shining Heaven and Shining Jesus wearing a crown of stars.

  I needed the water and I needed its curative, mystic powers. I had betrayed Our Side, but it was I who felt betrayed. Long, snaking vines of emotion twisted and climbed the trunk of my neck, choked off reason and sapped whatever false energy my defiance had forced to surface. The water was cool, sweet with the sweetness of moss and earth and roots and millions of years of slow evolution. I listened for the muted, whistling sound of the spring water happily swirling down the throat of a slender gully, playing against the delicate reeds of swamp grass that folded its leaves into the water. Somehow, to me, that sound was in perfect concert with the lyrics of mockingbirds and sparrows and wrens that flitted through the small undergrowth of mountain laurel, and that sound enveloped anyone who stopped to listen, and wonder.

  I was slumped against a pillow of leaves when Megan spoke.

  “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

  I rolled to one side and brushed the leaves off my shirt. Megan. Pale green eyes, hair as blond as a full moon.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not mad. How’d you know I was here?”

  “I watched you. Why didn’t you ride the bus?”

  “I wanted to walk home,” I answered. “Wesley was pretty upset about everything.”

  “Pleasing him means a lot to you.”

  “Naw,” I lied. “Naw. I just didn’t want to ride the bus, that’s all.”

  “Oh…”

  Megan sat beside the beech tree that fed from Sosbee’s Spring. She picked up a long stick and began to make cursive sweeps across the top of the water, skimming the surface like a nimble water spider racing its own reflection in the silver of sunshine that had shattered on impact. She looked very peaceful.

  “It made me mad, what Mrs. Blackwall did,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “I meant what I said in that letter,” she added boldly. “I will be missin’ you this summer. Sometimes I wish school wouldn’t take off for the summer.”

  “Yeah, well, me, too. Sometimes,” I agreed. “Especially after workin’ all day in the fields.”

  “I don’t have to work in any fields.”

  “You’re lucky and just don’t know it,” I said. “Gets hot.”

  “I watch the workers come in sometimes, down at Dupree’s daddy’s store,” she sympathized. “They look all used up, or somethin’.”

  “You didn’t have to mention Dupree,” I replied cynically. “You not his girl, are you?”

  Megan’s face snapped up. She was angry. “No. Where’d you hear that?”

  “What he said,” I told her. “That’s what he said, and Sonny and Wayne said the same thing.”

  “Well, they’re liars, that’s what. I wouldn’t snap a ringer for Dupree Hixon.”

  Megan’s denial of Dupree pleased me, made me alive and joyful.

  “You mean that?” I asked.

  “Of course I mean it. I don’t know how you could even think such a thing.” Her eyes sparkled with anger. She threw the stick to one side and stood.

  “Well, you don’t have to go gettin’ mad at me,” I said. “I didn’t do nothing but tell you what they said.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “All right. You say it’s not, it’s not.”

  “You don’t know anything, do you, Colin Wynn? If I got a boyfriend, it’s you. I bought you enough Three Musketeers to prove that, I guess, and it was me who wrote that letter and got caught at it. Me.”

  “Well, don’t get mad at me,” I said, standing. “I didn’t do nothin’.”

  “I got to go,” Megan said quickly. “Mama’ll be wonderin’ where I am if I don’t get home.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  Megan paused and turned to look at me. “Well, are you?” she asked.

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you my boyfriend or not? I don’t want to go spendin’ the whole summer not knowing.”

  “Uh—yeah—yeah. I reckon. Ah—what—what am I supposed to do?”

  “Do? You don’t have to do anything. Goodbye.” She pivoted and walked briskly away. Then she stopped and again turned to me.

  “Uh—goodbye,” I replied feebly.

  “I just wanted you to know something,” she said. “You remember when I won that last spelling bee for being able to spell the word ‘semicolon’? Well, I remembered how to spell it because I broke it down and sounded it out to say ‘See-Me-Colin.’ And that’s all I want you to do. See me. Sometimes when I think you don’t notice me, it hurts so much, it—it burns. And—and—goodbye.”

  See-Me-Colin. See-Me-Colin. Megan wanted me—me—to notice her.

  I ran the two miles home. Daddy whipped me for missing the school bus. I didn’t care. It didn’t hurt. I had been to the Jordan River and the Jordan River could cure pain even before it happened.

  8

  FOR THREE WEEKS I OBEYED the probation that had been approved as punishment. School was closed and we worked the fields from early to late, from gray smoke of morning to gray smoke of night. It was hard work, hard and silent and tediously slow. But it gave dreamers a chance to dream, and in the repetitive swing of a hoe or the again-and-again curl of dirt sliding off the sweep of a plow, I began to realize wondrous changes were taking place in my life. I was older and I had wrestled with the sensitivity of caring for someone who did not belong to my north and south, east and west isolation. The REA was coming, and its thin wires would knit us into the fabric of the huge glittering costume, Earth. We watched the survey crews, with their tripods and funny little telescopes, and hand signals that said, “No, no. To the left. Too much. Ah, that’s it. That’s perfect.” At night, sitting in the orange-yellow light of a kerosene lamp, we would talk about electric stoves and electric refrigerators (“It’ll be a Frigidaire,” declared Mother) and running water and an indoor bathroom, and we imagined our home beaming and twinkling with light, a Christmas-tree home in dark nights.

  Sundays were gloomy, painful days during the three weeks of probation. Wesley and Freeman and R. J. and Paul and Otis and Jack would ride with Dover or William Pruitte to Harrison to watch Alvin pitch baseball, and they would return home to tell splendid tales of Alvin’s exploits. Their stories hurt more than not being with them.

  Wesley must have sensed my longing. On the Sunday of the fourth week of probation, he said, “C’mon. You can go with us.”

  “Wait a minute, Wes,” objected Paul. “He’s got today left before he can tag along. That’s what we said.”

  �
��Well, let’s cut it short,” Wesley replied. “Bein’ out of school, and all that, he’s not been with anybody to play with.”

  “Well…” Paul stammered.

  “Aw, let him come along,” agreed Freeman. “Alvin’s goin’ after his third no-hitter today.”

  “All right,” Paul muttered, “but it’s not exactly right.”

  *

  As the Harrison Hornets’ only pitcher, Alvin had become a legend in less than a month. William’s prediction had been conservative: Alvin was probably the greatest pitcher of baseballs in the entire world, not just the state of Georgia.

  According to Freeman, Alvin’s accomplishments in baseball were due only in part to The Secret. More important was the inspiration of an unusual bargain.

  As Freeman interpreted it, Alvin’s career in baseball almost ended before it started. Alvin had begun dating the daughter of a Holiness preacher, discovering a new meaning to the scriptural admonition about God moving in mysterious ways. Alvin, said Freeman, did not know the difference between a holy twitch and a hug. He was inclined to become disturbed with either intention, and the preacher’s daughter was given to holy twitches.

  William and Fred Thaxton, who managed the Harrison Hornets, became distraught over the thought of losing Alvin to all-day church services when Sunday games were being played, and they plotted to divert Alvin’s attention.

  And that is how Delores Fisk became involved.

  Delores Fisk was known for her talent of making men trail after her like a beagle after a rabbit. She was pretty and sassy and loved to make men blush with embarrassment the way she cooed around them, the way she winked and blew kisses. The boys called her a flirt, even to her face. It was a word that made her laugh.

  When Fred explained to her the plight of the Harrison baseball team—the possibility of losing Alvin to the preacher’s daughter—Delores agreed to help the cause. She began to flirt with Alvin, telling him she couldn’t wait to see him at the ball games. Alvin forgot about holy twitches and hugs.

  Fred later thanked her for her cooperation.

  “Well, he’s not much to look at,” Delores reportedly told Fred, “but he’s kind of cute when he’s trying to say something.”