A Land More Kind Than Home (17 page)

“Y
OUR DADDY AND ME TOOK A WALK IN HIS FIELDS THIS EVENING
,” he said. “There's a lot of burley tobacco to be brought in. A lot of work that's needing to be done.” He sat there, and I could tell he was trying to think of something else to say so it wouldn't be so quiet while we drove.

“Mr. Gant helps Daddy do all that stuff,” I said, just to let him know that Daddy didn't need him around all the time just because he'd decided to come back and surprise Daddy all of a sudden. I felt him look over at me, but I stared straight ahead at the road.

“Did you know that when your daddy was your age me and him used to work tobacco together?” I shook my head no. “Well, it's true,” he said. “I used to have me some burley patches, and I'd take your daddy out in the field with me when he was about as big as you. Now there's a whole mess of tobacco in your daddy's field, and I'm the one helping him.” I felt him look over at me again, and I turned my head and looked out my window and watched the rocky sides of the mountain whip past the truck in the darkness.

“We're going to need some help getting that burley in and getting it hung up in the barn,” he said. “Would you be interested in helping?”

I didn't answer him. Instead I laid my head back on the seat and closed my eyes and pictured me and Stump hiding out in the barn and spying on Daddy and Mr. Gant like we used to before Mama caught us and whipped us for doing it. Daddy and Mr. Gant have got the sled full of burley, and they're carrying it inside the barn where it's hot and dusty and dark. I like the way our barn smells, and with the burley hanging up in there and drying it takes to smelling sweet and I like it even more. I watch my daddy and some other men climb up the beams toward the ceiling and they wait up there until Mr. Gant starts jerking the burley off the sled. It's so quiet with none of them doing nothing but breathing heavy and passing those sticks of burley up, up, up toward Daddy. I think about looking up to see Daddy way up high off the ground, and I think about how if they'd let me help them my hands would get good and sticky from the tar and I'd try to pick it off my fingers while I waited on Mr. Gant to hand me another load so I could pass it on to somebody else until it ended up in the rafters with Daddy. I opened my eyes and took a quick look over at my grandpa.

“You'd be a big help if you've got a mind for working,” he said. Then he said, “Let me see your hand.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Just let me see it,” he said. I held out my left hand, and he took it in his. His fingers were tough, and the skin of his palm felt thick and hard. He rubbed his thumb over my palm, and I felt his hand jumping and his fingers twitching like he couldn't keep them still. “You've got them,” he said. “I figured you would.” He let go of my hand, and I put it back in my lap.

“Got what?” I asked.

“Farming hands,” he said. “You got hands just like your daddy. Yes, sir,” he said, “just like him.”

He turned the knob on the radio and tuned it in to old-timey country music.

“You can put it on whatever you want,” he said.

It only took me a second of listening to the song before I knew it was Patsy Cline. Daddy used to play her records all the time and try and get Mama to dance with him. He said a sweeter, sadder voice never came out of the mountains. I listened to her sing, and I heard that it was a sad, slow song, but I didn't change it. I wasn't interested in listening to nothing else.

“Y
OU WANT A COLD DRINK
?”
MY GRANDPA ASKED ME
. H
E
'
D PULLED
off the highway into the parking lot in front of Messley's store and stopped the truck under the little roof by the gas pump. I shook my head no because I didn't want him thinking he had to buy me something just to get me to talk to him.

“I'll get you one just in case,” he said. He opened the door and got out and slammed it shut. The driver's-side window was rolled down, and he folded his arms and rested them on the door and looked in at me. “What kind of drink you want?” he asked.

“It don't matter,” I said.

“You like Sun Drop?”

“It's fine,” I said.

“What about a Nehi Peach?”

“It don't matter,” I said again.

He turned, and I watched him walk out of the light coming from under the roof and across the dark parking lot to the screen door that led inside the store. The fluorescent lights were bright in there, and they made everything right outside the store seem even darker than it was. Some folding chairs and a couple of rockers sat outside the screen door, and I knew Mr. Messley and some other old men would stay outside and talk and smoke pipes and cigarettes all day when it was hot. Daddy said Mr. Messley was so old that his spine had gone crooked and that was why he was so hunched over and always carried a cane. When he sat outside he leaned his cane against his knee, and he kept it there until it was time for him to get up again. When people walked by on their way into the store, they said, “Hey, Messley,” and Mr. Messley grumbled under his breath because he knew he had to get up and go inside just to see if they wanted anything.

There was a bug zapper plugged in and hanging just under the metal roof by the gas pump, and I sat in my grandpa's truck and looked through the windshield and watched it fry moths and mosquitoes. It glowed purple, and every now and then I heard it zap a bug and I saw a little spark shoot out. I could hear the crickets out in the shadows too, and I listened to them chirping, and then I heard my grandpa's voice inside the store. I heard a loud noise like something had just crashed to the floor, and then I heard Mr. Messley and my grandpa yelling at each other.

My grandpa pushed open the screen door so hard that it slammed against the wall and swung back and slammed shut again. Mr. Messley opened the screen door behind my grandpa and came hobbling outside with his cane like he was chasing him. His face was red and angry-looking, and he was shaking his fist.

“I ain't never done it once on a Sunday!” he hollered. “And I sure as hell ain't going to start doing it for you!”

My grandpa walked toward the truck, but he stopped and turned around and looked at Mr. Messley. He stood there and stared at him for a minute like maybe he was thinking about punching him, and I pictured him hollering for my daddy and running through the yard before he kicked that man in the face, and in my mind I watched that man's nose spray blood all over his shirt. But my grandpa didn't do nothing to Mr. Messley. He just stood there and stared at him. The sound of that bug lamp zapping those moths was the only thing I could hear. I couldn't even hear those crickets now. My grandpa opened the door to the truck, and Mr. Messley went back inside. I could see him watching us through the screen door.

My grandpa slammed the door, and it made the whole truck shake. “Goddamn it!” he said. He punched the steering wheel as hard as he could, and it made the horn honk. “Goddamn it,” he said again. He put both his hands on the steering wheel like he might try and tear it off and throw it out the window, and his knuckles went white because he squeezed it so tight.

“You better get on out of here!” Mr. Messley hollered from behind the screen door.

My grandpa looked over at him, and then he cranked the engine and pulled down the gearshift and stomped on the pedal. The tires squealed, and we flew out of the parking lot and turned onto the highway and then it was quiet again except for the sound of the engine carrying us up the hill away from the lights of Mr. Messley's store.

All that hollering had scared me, especially after what I'd seen at Miss Lyle's house, and I tried as hard as I could to keep from crying. I didn't want my grandpa to see me, and I turned my head to let the air come in the window and dry my face. I wanted to stop crying once and for all, but I couldn't. I'd just about given myself a headache with all the crying I'd already done.

My grandpa reached over and patted my leg. He had hands like Daddy too, and it felt like sandpaper scratching against my blue jeans. I pulled my feet up into the seat, and I wrapped my arms around my knees to make it harder for him to touch me.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “It's all right. I didn't mean for none of that to scare you. Messley's a friend of mine. It's all right; I don't want you being scared of me.”

I quit crying and sat up straight and put my feet back on the floorboard and used my shirttail to wipe the tears out of my eyes.

“I ain't scared of you,” I said.

My grandpa looked over at me, and then he looked back at the road. He got out his pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and shook one loose and put it in his mouth. He pushed the lighter in and waited for it to pop.

“You shouldn't be,” he said. “You shouldn't be scared of me.”

M
Y GRANDPA STOPPED HIS TRUCK IN FRONT OF OUR HOUSE
, and he just sat there and looked up at the porch like he hadn't ever seen the house before. I looked past him out the truck's open window to where the shadow of the barn leaned toward the ridge on the other side of the yard. When I looked closer, I saw a bunch of tiny lights flying around in the darkness.

“Look at all them fireflies,” my grandpa said. He looked over at me. “You want to catch one?”

“No,” I told him. “I just want to go inside.”

Me and Stump used to catch lightning bugs all the time and put them in Mama's Mason jars, but they didn't do nothing once they were in there except beat their wings against the glass. Then they'd start to smell funny and they'd just up and die before you knew it. Daddy said they died so quick because they didn't have any air down in there, and he showed us how to punch holes in the lids with nails so they didn't get smothered to death. That was just too much work to think about right then and I didn't feel like messing with them, especially without Stump. He was the one who liked catching them anyway. He liked to turn the lights out and sit the Mason jar in the middle of our bed and get down on his knees and look in at it and wait for it to glow. Sometimes I'd get down on my knees on the other side of the bed and look through the Mason jar at Stump's face. It made his eyes and his nose and mouth all different sizes, and after a while looking at him was like looking through a magnifying glass. He'd kneel there by the bed like he was praying and wait for the lightning bug to glow, and when it did I could just barely see him smiling through the glass with that yellow light spread out across his cheeks.

“Your face looks funny,” I'd tell him, but he'd just sit there and watch that lightning bug and wait for it to glow again.

The Christmas before, when I was in the second grade, my teacher, Miss Bryant, taught us how to make Christmas tree ornaments out of nothing but clay and pipe cleaners. She said we should make an ornament for somebody in our family for Christmas to show them how much we loved them. I thought about making a cross for Mama, but it would've been too easy and too skinny and it wouldn't have looked much like anything hanging on a big old tree. I wanted to make a tractor for Daddy, but it was too hard. I decided I'd make me a firefly and give it to Stump since he liked looking at them so much. I rolled out a piece of that clay until it was about as long as my pinky finger and just a little bit fatter. And then I bent two pipe cleaners into the shape of wings and stuck them in the clay before it dried. The next day, after it was all dry, I dipped the bug's tail into some yellow paint. It looked pretty good to me, and Miss Bryant thought so too.

Mama made a fuss over it when I brought it home from school, and then she hung it on our Christmas tree after Daddy'd sat it up in the front room. I showed Stump where it was hanging on the tree, and even though he wouldn't touch it he stood there and looked at it up close for a long time. I reached out and poked it, and it swung back and forth on the branch like it was flying around.

“Does it look like a firefly to you?” I asked Stump, but of course he didn't say nothing.

But it was gone off the tree before Christmas even came. I asked Mama about it, but she said she hadn't seen it. I figured Stump probably took it down and hid it somewhere in our room. He was always hiding things he liked and things that belonged to him. You could open his drawers or look under his pillow and find all kinds of things: rocks, sticks, dried-up flowers, toys he didn't want getting lost or broken. The only things he didn't hide were the rocks that were ours together. We sat them on the shelves in our room that Daddy'd made for us. Me and Stump would look at our rocks together and try and find stuff about them in Daddy's old encyclopedias. I knew Stump wouldn't ever think about hiding any of those rocks because he knew that we shared them. They were ours together.

T
HE HOUSE WAS DARK INSIDE, AND
I
FELT AROUND ON THE WALL BY
the front door until I found the switch and the table lamp beside Daddy's chair turned on. My grandpa walked right to the refrigerator and opened it and started pushing stuff around like he was looking for something. He looked in the freezer too. Then he closed the freezer door and I watched him go over to the counter and look through the cabinets where Mama kept the food.

“You want something to eat?” he asked me.