Down Sand Mountain (21 page)

“It’s all going to be OK,” I told her again, and this time she smiled like she might even believe me.

When we got home, there was a car I had seen before, a blue Ford Fairlane with red doors, parked in front of our house. The passenger side looked like it had sideswiped a tree, only not too recently, and the door was tied shut with a rope, and when I saw that, I knew for sure whose car it was: Walter Wratchford’s.

WALTER WRATCHFORD WAS SITTING in the front room, on the couch, wearing his army uniform like the time I saw him at Mr. Rhodes’s funeral.

Mom stood up when we walked in, and Walter Wratchford did, too, after a second. Then Mom said, “Corporal Wratchford, I’d like to introduce my children. This is my son Dewey Turner. Dewey, you can shake Corporal Wratchford’s hand. And this is my daughter, Patricia.”

I don’t know which surprised me more — Walter Wratchford being there in the first place, or Mom introducing him as
Corporal.
I shook Walter Wratchford’s hand like she told me, and Tink did, too. He said, “Pleased to meet you,” to Tink and just kind of smiled at me. He settled back on the couch after Mom sat down, but his eyes jumped around like he had to check out everything all at once — the front door, the windows, Tink, me, Mom, the pictures of Mom and Dad getting married, the pictures of me and Tink and Wayne when we were babies, the Readers Digest Condensed Books that came every month lined up on the bookshelf built into the wall.

Mom turned to me. “Dewey, Corporal Wratchford has come by to ask a favor of you.”

“For what?” I said.

“For you to play your bugle this afternoon.”

They talk about in stories how somebody’s heart sinks when they find out something lousy happens, like their star pitcher is missing and it’s the day of the championship game and it looks like he’s not going to show up. That’s what it felt like to me when Mom said that, like my heart sank down about to my stomach, and then when Walter Wratchford said, “It’s for a colored soldier shot and killed in Vietnam. I believe he’s the first from here we’ve given up to that particular war,” it sank about all the way to my shoes.

Mom told me to go run and put my Scout uniform on, but Walter Wratchford said to wait; he only wanted me to do it if I wanted to. “It’s at a colored church, too,” he said. His voice sounded froggy. Then he said, “There’s just going to be colored people there.”

I looked at him pretty good right before I answered. His eyes were red, I guess from smoking his cigarettes and maybe not sleeping much. If he’d been drinking liquor, Mom would have smelled it on him and she wouldn’t have even let him come in the house.

I didn’t really have to think about it, anyway. I just said the only thing I figured you were ever allowed to say to a grown-up: “Yes, sir.” That wasn’t quite good enough for him, because he said, “Yes, sir, you don’t mind if it’s at a colored church?” and I just said, “Yes, sir,” again, with my heart so low now it was about six feet underground with the dead bodies they buried in the cemeteries, white or colored.

Actually Walter Wratchford
was
drinking liquor. He had a bottle in his car that said
VODKA
on the label, but you couldn’t smell it. He handed it to me along with a little half-empty carton of milk once I’d changed into my Scout uniform and we were driving, and he said, “Pour some of that into there, would you?” I started to pour the milk into the top of the liquor bottle, but he grabbed my hand and almost made me spill some and said no, he meant the other way around, so I poured as much of the liquor into the milk as would go. He took the carton back and told me to put the bottle under the seat, which I also did. From the way it looked, if somebody like a police officer or sheriff saw Walter Wratchford driving along, they’d just think he was having some milk.

The whole thing still made me nervous, as if I wasn’t already nervous enough going to a colored church to play “Taps,” but at least he didn’t try to get me to drink any of it, too. I asked him if he knew the colored soldier whose funeral we were going to, if they were in Vietnam together. Walter Wratchford shook his head. “Nah. I never met him. I saw one of his buddies that told me.” He said the colored guy used to play football at the colored high school out in the county and used to be pretty good, too, and must have played at a colored college but he got drafted for the war. I didn’t know what to say back. I hadn’t even known there
was
a colored high school out in the county.

Walter Wratchford didn’t say anything after that, but just drove us out of town, across the Peace River bridge, and past The Springs, where I had heard he went on the weekends and brought his big carved bird finger he got in the war. There was a dirt road off to the right that I must have seen a million times but never went down, but we went down it that day and bounced along in Walter Wratchford’s old Ford Fairlane at the edge of a field on our left and some woods to the right. Occasionally you could look through and see the Peace River even though it was narrow there and the bank was steep. Everywhere around us there were black cypress knees and cattails, and it smelled like mud and rotting leaves and alligator breath.

It took me a while, but finally I got up enough nerve to ask him about being in the war and what was it like in Vietnam and was he ever in any of the Vietcong tunnels. That made him laugh a little bit, and he said, “Heck, no, I wasn’t inside any of those tunnels — are you crazy? They got all kinds of booby traps down there. They take a snake, one of those poison vipers, and tie him to a piece of string hanging from the ceiling of a cave, and if you come crawling along not knowing where you’re going, you bump right into him and he bites you in the face.”

I said, “Right in the face?”

He grunted. “Right smack-dab in the face. I saw a guy one time, his face was the size of a watermelon it swole up so big.”

“From a viper?” I said.

“You’re dang right from a viper,” he said, and then he said again, “You couldn’t pay me to go down those tunnels. And I don’t want to hear about you going down there, neither. OK?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He took a drink from his milk carton. “I know I told you not to call me sir, since I’m not an officer.”

I said but I thought he was a corporal and he said he
was
a corporal, but a corporal wasn’t an officer, it was a noncom. I nodded like I knew what that was supposed to mean, and I didn’t call him sir anymore. Not that I had much of a chance to, anyway, because Walter Wratchford finally stopped his car at the place where the road ended. It was a clearing of a couple of acres, and other cars were everywhere, mostly old cars that looked like they should have been in a junkyard, but a couple of shiny almost-new ones, too, including a big black Cadillac with fins that looked like the Batmobile from a certain angle. There were five or six gray-board shacks with porches and raked dirt yards like they had down in the Boogerbottom, and across the clearing was the church, which was wood painted white and a steeple also wood painted white with a cross on top painted gold. Most of the colored people must have already been inside the church, because we could hear singing and clapping and somebody banging on a piano a lot louder than they ever did in our church, where they played the organ for hymns instead. But there were still a few colored people, some men, standing outside next to a low black hearse at the side of the church. They all wore suits, black suits, with the coats buttoned up, and they all smoked cigarettes.

Walter Wratchford lit a cigarette, too, and when he wasn’t taking a puff, he was flicking it, tapping it, fidgeting it around, sort of worrying it until it looked so wrung out and limp that it was hard to believe he could still be smoking. I felt stupid in my Scout uniform, when he got out of the Fairlane and motioned for me to get out, and seeing the colored men in their suits, I was embarrassed by how Walter Wratchford looked, too, with his uniform and long greasy hair. I was afraid he was going to make me go inside the church, but he didn’t. He walked over to the colored men by the hearse, with me a little ways behind him, and he told them we were there to pay respects to the fallen soldier. That’s what he called the colored man who died — the fallen soldier. The men just nodded, but I could tell they thought Walter Wratchford was strange, and when they looked at me, I could tell they thought I was strange, too, and they didn’t want us there any more than those colored kids had wanted me and Wayne delivering flyers down to the Boogerbottom. I wished we could just get the heck out of there before people came out of the church.

About that time, somebody did leave the church. It was a boy about my age. The door banged open and he stumbled outside, crying really hard and yelling. He fell down on the concrete-block steps and started hitting his face with his fists, and then hit his head on the steps one time before the colored men next to the hearse could get to him to grab him and make him stop. Some colored women came out of the church and rushed over to him, too, but he pulled away from everybody and ran away, yelling and crying, and saying, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

I wondered if the boy was related to the colored soldier that got killed — maybe his little brother — and that made me wonder how I would be if Wayne ever died or got killed in the war. I doubted I would hit my own head or run off like that boy did, but I knew I’d be sadder than just about anything. Just thinking about it made me want to go home and crawl in my bed.

Walter Wratchford dragged me back a ways while the colored men chased after the boy and caught him, which wasn’t hard, because he seemed like he was blind, running into cars, throwing himself on the ground even though he had his Sunday suit on, then getting back up and running again. They took hold of his arms and had to hold him up, because once they got to him, his legs crumpled and he couldn’t stand anymore. Other people came out of the church, and one must have been his mom, because they brought him over to her and she took him in her arms and sat on the steps and just held him. She called him “baby-baby” and said that over and over like it was one word or one name. I felt like crying from seeing all this, but the service inside never stopped the whole time, except they weren’t singing now. But the preacher was shouting instead. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, partly because of the way he talked, or shouted, and partly because the people in the congregation said things back, not like the readings from the back of the hymnal we had at the Methodist Church, where the minister read one sentence and all of us down in the pews read the next sentence together.

The boy on the steps with his mom wasn’t yelling anymore, but just shaking, his face buried in his mom’s lap while she rubbed his back until the colored men and some other ladies helped them both up and they went back inside the church. Walter Wratchford lit another cigarette from the butt of the first one, and I just stood there with him, not wanting to move unless somebody might notice us again. I looked down at my uniform and was glad at least I was wearing the long khaki pants instead of the shorts with the high green socks and red garter belts.

I asked Walter Wratchford if we were going in, too. He said no, they didn’t want us in there, and he didn’t like churches besides, so we waited in the sticky afternoon and there wasn’t any talking after that. I hoped if I was just silent this might all end without me having to do anything except eventually just get back in Walter Wratchford’s car and him drive me back home.

The wind shifted and the sky got darker, but I couldn’t tell if it was storm clouds or smoke from the tire fire.

Walter Wratchford reached in his car for his milk and drank the rest of it, and the doors opened from the colored church and out came everybody, starting with the preacher, a tall, crooked old man with a big Bible, followed by six colored men in black suits carrying the wood coffin. At Mr. Rhodes’s funeral there was an American flag spread out on top of the coffin, but there wasn’t one this time. It was a nice box, though — some kind of dark polished wood with shiny brass handles. The six men carried it up on their shoulders and didn’t seem to have any trouble getting it down the steps. They headed off not to the hearse but around the side of the church, where everybody followed. I didn’t know most of the colored people except for a few: Chollie Ellis, and the fried-chicken lady Miss Deas, and the boy that had run outside the church before, and his mom holding on to him like she was afraid if she didn’t he might run off again.

“Come on,” Walter Wratchford said. “Get your trumpet.”

I started to tell him it wasn’t a trumpet, it was a bugle — a trumpet had keys to change the notes, and a bugle was just about how you positioned your lips and how you blew in it — but he probably didn’t want to hear all that, so I didn’t say anything. We didn’t follow the crowd of colored people directly, but went the opposite way around the back of the church instead, where it turned out they had a little cemetery. They didn’t have any grass there, either, just like in their yards, but they took good care of it, anyway, and there was one big tree right in the middle, an oak tree that spread out pretty wide so it shaded most of the graves. Where they brought the coffin wasn’t in the shade, though, but just outside it, in the sun. The wind must have shifted and blown away the smoke from the tire fire. It was actually a pretty nice day except for the funeral.