Deep in the Heart of Me (41 page)

Christmas morning, I don't feel the deep kind of empty I knew at State School. But it's close.

But I ain't going to be sentimental about it. My dad raised no fool on understanding my job. In these times the shame of it is many men haven't been able to find work. But not the Clannans. Dad and John and Frank, I have to give them their due on this.

So what I have to do next is so clear to me—work my ass into the ground.

I see it all around me. Opportunity. I just can't stop seeing it.

So here I am, waiting at the side of the road where farm boys run their sleds, fast with their girls beside, or slower for their families. If you want to ride you get out there, stand along the road. So I am stepping out when one of those sleds comes near. The kid driving tells me to climb on, and I do. I tell him I'm a Clannan, and we bought the station, and he knows that, knows someone from Mauman bought it. His dad only has horses, but they are hoping in the next couple years to get gas-powered machinery.

Well, the kid is. His dad is tied to the old ways. He says his old man can't even see the need to pay for electricity.

That's not my energy—electricity. But gas is. So I talk it up. I tell that kid I'll talk to his dad. A small voice in my head wonders what I'll say, but that don't stop me.

I get started like that.

Over the next few days, I'm so busy there really isn't enough time to do all I mean to. Folks are friendly, and I can do them some good by bringing the fuel to them, they see that. I get invited to dinner and supper. One day I eat dinner twice. And I eat more Christmas cookies and cakes than ever in my life. I make up for last year.

And I decide to grow my whiskers. After three days they are showing some faint color. I need help in looking older cause folks are always asking my age.

I say, "Eighteen," but that don't go over so I say, "Seventeen," and they seem to trust me on the possibility.

I know how to fit right in. State School might have made it more so to where I feel at home no matter who I'm with. Maman has taught us to look for the good in folks, and Dad has taught us to be careful with our trust, so I've come out in the middle I think. I fit at most tables even when I'm wondering what I got myself into.

Girls are the hardest part so I have to figure an approach and stick to it.

They get silly around me. Or quiet and they stare.

Now I see the value of that gaggle I've put up with. Surviving them prepared me to keep my wits.

First off it's like that on the farm, anyone new is interesting for a minute at least. But then I'm of an age where girls are looking more like women. Some of them…are women.

I aim to treat them like mothers or sisters. That means, "Please, thank-you," and after that do my best to ignore them.

One girl even tries to kiss me, a story I'd rather not go into, but I've committed no crime to deserve the attack, and it is that plain as day. They tell her to show me to the barn where the father is supposed to be when I can easily see the barn. But she leads me to a shed, and she says, "He's in here," while I say, "Ain't the barn over there?"

She goes in that shed, and I round the doorway and say, "Miss?"

Next I know she comes out of the dark, and I get ambushed.

She is substantial in size and strength and for a minute, I'm fighting her off.

"Now why'd you do that?" I say digging for my handkerchief because she got me good.

"You look just like my favorite star from the pictures, Tom Brown the First," she says. "You're not going to tell my father, are you?"

"Take me straight to him," I say wiping my lips some with my handkerchief. She's got lip rouge on, and now it's on me.

I hope to scare some sense into her. Then I wonder if she's going to switch this story some. I could get shot.

She starts to boo-hoo.

"I'll forget about it," I say, "but never again. I have a sweetheart!" Least I did have.

I leave her there in the shed, and I go to the barn. Whole time I'm talking to this man I'm waiting for her to show up saying I attacked her or something, but she never does.

So by Saturday, I am going over my ledger before the sun is up even. I nearly forget it's New Year's Eve. I've been invited to a doings or two, but I say no thank you, I have plans. I don't say what cause I don't know. But maybe Sobe will come home. Part of me is mad I want her to so badly, and part of me is miserable as a dog. Either way, I don’t want to advertise that I'm leaving the station for two whole days. But soon as I finish my figures, I am putting a call through to her school. Finally, I get somebody who knows Sobe Bell. But she can’t get her to the phone or give a message. Sobe Bell is on tour with the chorale group, has been since before Christmas.

That means soon as she returned to school she took off. Rivers said that. “What about the concert?”

Well, she didn’t waste any time.

Like it or not, and I don’t like it…Sobe Bell wanted out.

I get some liquor, and I don’t remember much about bringing in 1936 but come morning I’m lying outside in the snow, and there is a large fire simmering down. I guess that’s all that saved me from freezing to death. If I had any luck left, I guess I used it on that.

A week after my wake-up in the snow I head to Maumen to meet with Uncle Frank. It is my first business meeting, of sorts. I have to make my case for Ulie and the future. The roads are pretty clear, with snow piled high on their sides. I get three rides to Maumen. When I see Uncle Frank, I brag on myself. Mike is listening, and he has an opinion on everything I'm doing. "How am I gonna set all those tanks, yak yak…," and like that.

"I'll get it done," I say. I tell them about Ulie coming out in May. "He's strong," I say. "He can drive if we can get another rig."

Uncle Frank is listening. Mike says the next truck is his. "You and Mike can do it," Frank says to me meaning I can take Mike as my partner instead of Ulie.

"Me?" Mike says like we got more assholes named 'Mike' somewhere.

"I can do it," I say, "with Ulie. He's of age. And I just have a couple months by then." I'll still have six until I can drive, but that's not much. Unless you're locked up.

"I don't hire Coloreds. Get that started, they tell each other, and there's no end," Frank says.

"I don't care about all that," I say. "Ulie gets out he's coming to the farm. I already worked with him…."

"A criminal Colored," Frank says like I'm out of my mind.

"No, Sir," I say. "Ulie isn't in State for a crime. He got pulled in cause the adult he was with got charged."

"Uh-huh. You think low-down don't run in families?"

"Well," I say, trying to keep a lid on my temper, "look at us then." I don't know how much Dad tells Frank but we've got that tie-in with Otto Smith, and Dad had liberty to kill Belly and no one came after him for it. He didn't get that kind of clout by going to church every Sunday. But he might have got it during Prohibition. Maybe the Clannans ran more than gas.

Frank doesn't look at me, but he does have to smile and even laugh some. Mike laughs too, but that doesn't mean anything.

"Better watch yourself, boy," Frank says.

"I take responsibility for Ulie," I say.

Frank does look at me now. He's tipped back in his chair in front of his nice warm fire. "You take responsibility? That mean you'll pay if this kid messes up? You got some thousands of dollars lying around?"

I don't bring up my dad buying both his brothers their farms. Dad was the best of them at making money. That's all I know.

So what I think I know I can't say because I'm not supposed to know it. Even if I do.

I had to get away, get locked up to see it clear as it is. I talked it over with Ulie, and we puzzled it many and many a day.

And it became so clear to me. My family has run on both sides of the law.

So Frank can get off his high horse. Ulie is working with me. And I have to get money for a truck. And I will because…I have my dad in me.

Mike drives me home. He tries to lecture me all the way on what a hand he's had in making the business go and what I need to do, and we're nearly home when I say, "Thank God," so I can get away from him.

If you could see me from a bird's view, you'd see me standing on the running board of Uncle John's truck talking fast and waving my arm. I'm trying to get him to go along that I need another truck so I can build that route in Medford County.

"You been reckless a time…." he says rubbing his shoulder then taking a nip from a flat bottle.

"Yes, Sir. But not since I got out," I say, and I am flipping through my mind to see if that's even true. And…it isn’t.

He takes another nip. "Pat says you went across the river standing on a train."

I always thought Pat was more closed mouth.

"That was the night I got out," I say to defend myself.

He nods. "Reckon that accounts for it."

"Not that I wouldn't do it again," I laugh.

He laughs too and caps his bottle.

He's in my corner pretty much.

Then you'd see me talking to my dad and he says I need to work that station and wait until I'm old enough to drive at least, but I prevail on him and hand to the Bible had I not gone to State, well I wouldn't be branching out like this cause he wouldn't have sent me off to work the gas in the first place, he'd keep me around to work on the dairy, but since I came home, and he did send me off I am trying to make him see the possibilities and that dark spot he's got with doing things just exactly like the law says, keeps him open and also…he has guilt toward me.

"We don't need to give your mother a line by line on this," he says. Then, "I'll talk to Frank."

"I will," I say. I will talk to Frank, and if he doesn't listen, then Dad can talk to him and bring the twelve apostles too for all I care.

This is happening.

And after all that if you were a bird and still looking down on me you'd find me all over that county talking to this one and that and setting tanks and lining up my route, standing on running boards, climbing on wagons, picking up a shovel to muck, pouring oats in a bin, helping adjust a carburetor, handing some John Buck farmer a pair of pliers. You would see me with an ant's dedication and a cricket's energy, that's for sure.

I hire a local guy to run the station. He's got one leg but he doesn't cry for himself, and he's stone sober until sundown, I can count on that, and he never lets the drinking make him late next morning, he told me that when I hired him and anyone tries something funny he's always packing. A Luger.

"Ain't you still the age for school?" he asks me when I hire him, and I say, "No." When did school stop a Clannan man? Ain't a one of us graduated more than eighth grade so far. School is for girls and men who can't find a better idea for themselves. That's what I tell Benny, my one-legged veteran.

So us pulling up to State School, and me stuck in the truck, it's pretty sad when you think about the fearless man I've become. I'm nothing, just like they want.

I talked to Pat about it. He said go in there and spit on Boss's shoes. He said pee on them first.

So here we are at State School, and all I can wonder about is, "Can I walk in there?"

"You can't let it hold onto you," Dad says. "It's just a place, like any other."

Maybe he wouldn't say that about going back to some of those battlefields in Europe. I don't think what I went through here compares to what he did, what his division accomplished in war. Me, I wasn't doing a thing to put in the history books that year I got stuck here. But it's not a good place and my memories have soured it to such a degree I feel sick.

In my hopeful times I figure, by the time I die, this is just a chapter called, "The Boy Goes to Reform School," and maybe it had to happen because it figures into something I haven't done yet.

Time will tell.

These low buildings, the office covering over solitary like the whited wall in scripture. There could be boys in that dungeon right now. I get sick and sweaty just thinking it. What if they killed Ulie before we could save him?

I see him then, side of the dining hall. He's taller I think. He can't get thinner. He's what they call gangly. His grin, it makes me laugh, that hasn't changed. Something opens in me. I'm about read to cry. I get out of the truck then, stop being a little girl about things. Ulie only has this one bag, and it's brown paper. I about laugh at that. It ain't funny, but it is too. Truth is no one wants to bring too much from here.

So I walk with Dad. I wondered if we'd feel strange—me and Ulie after this time of nothing. We go to the gate. Same old clod-hoppers checking us in. I see boys walking across the way out back, coming in from the fields to milk. Maybe I know them, maybe I sewed their shirts.

We get through the gate, and Dad needs to sign papers in the office so he goes in there and I go to Ulie.

"Hello Citizen," I say, because they were always telling us they were forging us into being good citizens.

We shake hands. It's not going to be strange at all. Soon as I get close to him, I know that. I know him.

"Boss still here?" I say.

"Where else that jackass gonna go?" he says to me, and we laugh. Then, "Didn't change your mind I see."

"We're never coming back here," I tell him.

"That right? Federal prison next?" This is his old joke. "You still got the warden's daughter?"

We are walking toward the gate. I ain’t gotten as much as a postcard.

I don't want to get him started. He was always begging me for any scrap of news on Sobe.

We get to the gate, and we know those two guards. "Make sure you don't come back," one says.

"Yes, Sir," Ulie says. "I don't want to wear out my welcome."

"Take care for the company you keep," other one says. He looks at me. He is warning Ulie about me.

I spit.

"We're going out," I say.

"Not him. Not until we get the right papers," first one says.

"We are in no hurry," Ulie says to me. He grins and just like that I remember how many times he held that kind of line, and I calmed down.

You can't fight here. You just hold on. You don't look for what's just or fair. You just ride it low as you can, and you tell yourself that will keep you alive.

Dad comes then, and he's got papers. He gets to us and shakes Ulie's hand and asks if he's ready for some of those big pancakes because Dad can't come to Springfield without stopping and getting those.

"Yes, Sir," Ulie says.

Dad hands the papers and the guards look them over and hand them back. We follow Dad out then. Ulie looks at me and grins and shakes his head. I take his bag and throw it in back of the truck.

"Figure it's gonna rain?" he asks.

"Maybe," I say, hopping in first beside Dad. Ulie squeezes in next to me. I swear he did grow.

"Well," Dad says, "you're a free man."

"I guess," Ulie says under his breath. "Thank-you for getting me out."

"You're welcome, son," Dad says. "They say you're a fine young man."

"Boss say that?" Ulie says.

"He did," Dad says starting the truck. I notice his hands on the wheel, the fresh split across the knuckles on his right hand.

"We had some words," he tells moving the injured hand to the gear shift.

"What did you say?" I want to know. I mean, what did he do?

"I told him there's a cubby-hole in hell has his name on it…just waiting."

"Did you punch him?" I say because they won't take that.

"His desk," he says. "And I broke some kind of…trophy…when it hit the wall…by his head."

He looks over his shoulder and backs out.

"Thing is that lawyer says this…plantation, cause that's what it is, has been investigated plenty of times. They give them pat answers, and that's all the more investigating they do. They figure these boys have good work and three squares so they're way ahead of the ones running about the country."

"Dad…I…," I say cause I don't want a crusade against reform school. I told him that. I want to forget I was ever in a place like this.

"My lawyer is filing a complaint. We use the system we have even if it's filled with reprobates and devils," Dad says.

Ulie gives my arm a nudge, and we look at each other, but then we're looking over State School as we drive by the newly planted fields, see the boys scattered across that fresh-turned earth. Slaves.

"A man needs to pick his own damn cotton," Dad mutters.

We don't turn around after that.

And I don't look at Ulie or any man when he's crying.