Down Sand Mountain (29 page)

“You could give me one,” I said. “And I could give you one of mine.” Except for my mom and dad, I hadn’t ever given anybody any of my school pictures, or had anybody ask me for any, either.

Darla thought about it for a minute, then said she guessed it was OK if I gave her one. But I couldn’t have one of hers. She said it was her policy to not give any away or let anybody see them.

“Your ‘policy’?” I said. She nodded. Her Shirley Temple curls bounced.

“My policy,” she said.

I asked why she had a policy about something like that, and did she have other policies?

“Oh, yeah,” Darla said. “I have a lot of policies. I have a policy about just about everything.”

“Like what?” I said. “Or do you have a policy about not telling anybody the rest of your policies?”

Darla smiled. I could tell she liked that. “Maybe I do,” she said. “And maybe I don’t.”

It was about the dumbest conversation I’d ever had in my whole life. It made me pretty happy.

When we went back downstairs Darla put on a record and said it was for slow dancing. She leaned her cheek on my shoulder and I felt her breath on my neck. Something like that would have been ticklish once, but it wasn’t now. It wasn’t kissing — we hadn’t ever done that again, or the other thing, either — but it was kind of like kissing. I could feel her heart beating, too, and I tried to count the beats until the end of the song, but dancing so close like that, I kept getting mixed up on which ones were hers and which ones were mine.

There was a canoe trip with our Scout troop down the Peace River that weekend, which was the last weekend in October. I didn’t want to go on account of all the torture and stuff that went on at the last Scout trip, but Dad said I had to. It had turned real cold by the time we started out Saturday morning, so our hands and fingers got numb right away from holding on to our paddles and getting them wet and getting our clothes wet from splashing. The whole day was pretty miserable, but Mr. Ferber and Mr. Dick wouldn’t let us stop and build a fire or anything, except when we pulled the canoes over to eat lunch and have a couple of snack breaks.

About the only time I got warm all day was when we took one of those breaks, next to a cow pasture, and a bunch of us climbed the fence. I don’t know where Wayne was, but I was walking next to David Tremblay and I said, “I bet you can’t catch one of those cows,” so of course he said, “I bet I can,” and he took off running. We all ran after him and chased the cows around for a while, yelling at them and waving our arms and stuff. It was a lot of fun.

Mr. Ferber saw us and got mad, but we pretended we couldn’t hear him yelling from across the field, and when he came to make us stop, he stepped in two cow patties, one with each boot. Somebody told him that me and David Tremblay started it, so he made us take his boots down to the river and wash them off, which got my hands even more freezing. I kind of liked it, though, that for once — even doing something disgusting like that — it was me and David together and not just him and Wayne.

The cold got even worse at night. Nobody brought enough clothes, and we slept wrapped up in our ponchos on the ground. At least we did until about midnight, when Mr. Ferber and Mr. Dick got everybody up yelling “Pee call! Pee call!” because they didn’t want anybody peeing in their sleeping bags. We woke up shivering the next morning, expecting we’d have a fire, but nobody had covered the wood, so it was all wet from the dew. Mr. Dick hadn’t even brought any gasoline. We ate beans out of cans and then got in the canoes.

A bunch of us just sat there, at first, and said we wanted to quit and go home, but Mr. Dick and Mr. Ferber said the only way out was to paddle, so we paddled and paddled all day Sunday, and didn’t even care when we passed a meadow with about twenty alligators sunning on the bank. The sun was silver and just about as cold as the night, and probably colder because of the wind that blew where there weren’t any trees. We would stop paddling and breathe on our hands every now and then until we felt our fingers, but that almost made it worse once they got wet again and cold again and numb again. Mr. Ferber started this song, which he made us sing over and over, that he said was what the Canadians or the Eskimos always sang when they paddled their canoes way up north. We were supposed to sing it and paddle at the same time, and it was supposed to help us, so we sang it for about ten hours:

Everybody hated it.

When it was over and we got to the place and dragged the canoes out and loaded them on the cars, everybody just sat there frozen until they yelled at us and poked us and threatened to not stop at the 7-Eleven on the way home. Then we dragged ourselves into the cars and sat
there
frozen instead — nobody talking, nobody moving, nobody doing anything but sitting, even the guys that fell asleep. They just slept sitting up, was all.

They dropped David Tremblay off at his house, and me and Wayne at our house. All I wanted to do was get in the hot shower. Mom was waiting for us in the kitchen, where she was cooking dinner, and Dad was in there, too, drinking a cup of coffee, and Tink had a coloring book, even though she was too old for coloring books and even though she was good at drawing her own pictures, too, like that picture of Suzy.

I’m not sure how, but I could tell something was wrong as soon as we walked in. I wondered if there’d been another letter, like the tire-fire one, about the election or something. I said, “What’s the matter?” Mom put down her wooden spoon on the counter and twisted her hands in her apron. Her face was red and puffy. Tink started to cry.

Dad said, “Just put your gear over there by the door, then I want you boys to come sit down.”

Wayne said, “What is it, Dad?”

We sat next to each other on the old church pew we used for a bench at the kitchen table.

Dad squatted in front of us. “There’s a girl in Dewey’s grade, Darla Turkel.” He said it like a question and I said, “Yes, sir,” and Wayne nodded.

Dad looked over at Mom, then back. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but there was an accident while you were gone.”

All the air went out of me and I barely could hear Dad when he said the rest about Darla — that she died.

I HADN’T EVER BEEN TO A FUNERAL where I didn’t wear my Scout uniform and bring my bugle, so it felt funny putting on my Sunday suit. Wayne already had his on and he sat on the bottom bunk, not watching me exactly, but just sort of there. He hardly knew Darla the way I did, but you could tell he was upset, acting real quiet, like the way I was when they wouldn’t let me go to school and they thought I was the one that poisoned Moe.

I had trouble tying my tie even though I’d done it a million times, and Wayne finally got up to help me even though I didn’t ask. “You got it all wrong,” he said. He untied it and tied it back, and it wasn’t much better, but I left it that way, or I would have except Mom saw it when we came out of the bedroom, and she made us redo it until finally it was about right.

Mom wore a black dress, which was what you were supposed to wear to a funeral, but it had gotten warm again and Tink had on her Easter dress, which was pink, with a pink hat and little white gloves. Mom tried to get her to change but Tink was stubborn, so Mom gave up and said, “You children hurry out to the car; we’re going to be late.” I’m not sure why Mom wanted us all to go. I guess she must have known Darla’s mom from Dr. Rexroat’s office, the way everybody in Sand Mountain knew everybody at least a little unless they were colored, but me and Wayne hadn’t told her anything about either of us and Darla except that we knew her. Probably it was like visiting the shut-ins — Mom just thought it was the right thing to do.

Dad was out in his shed. Mom called him, once we got to the car, to come on, we were all ready. He smelled like a cigarette when he got in behind the wheel.

“Daddy smoked,” Tink said.

I told Tink to shut up, no he didn’t, and Mom said, “That’s enough out of both of you. You should be thinking about others today, not yourselves, and you shouldn’t be ugly to each other.” That made me feel bad, that I wasn’t acting right even when we were going to Darla’s funeral, but that’s just the way it had been for me since we heard.

Even the day before, when I made Wayne and David Tremblay go with me to where it happened, to the Old Bartow Highway out past Moon’s, I didn’t understand how I could be so curious instead of just sad. When Darla had died was Sunday, that second cold day of the canoe trip with the Scouts. She went riding on Bojangles by herself, and they said the last person to talk to her was Walter Wratchford. She rode the same direction we did that day I went with her, out the Old Bartow Highway, with the railroad tracks on one side and the old mines on the other that they never did reclamation on. The guy in the car that hit them said he saw Darla up ahead of him, on the side of the road, riding her horse. The train conductor of the phosphate train said he saw Darla, too, riding Bojangles, and he saw her pump her arm up and down the way you do to get a truck driver or a train engineer to blow their horn. He said at first he wasn’t going to do it because he wasn’t supposed to, but he didn’t see the car, he just saw Darla riding old Bojangles and thought, What the heck, not having any idea that it would spook Bojangles and he would run out in the highway and suddenly the car would be there, too.

Me and Wayne and David Tremblay saw the skid mark. Where it stopped must have been where the car hit Bojangles, only it didn’t kill Bojangles; it broke his legs, and Officer O. O. Odom, who was the one that came out after they got the report back at the police station, had to shoot him to put him out of his misery. Actually, the way they said it was that Officer Odom had to “put him down.”

There was still the dried blood on the road, too, when we went out there. It was black instead of red, so it didn’t look like blood. Somebody said they got a tractor and had to drag Bojangles’s body back up to Moon’s, where they buried him in one of the fields.

Darla got thrown off Bojangles when the car hit them. It threw her fifty feet to where she landed. We looked all over to find that place, or rather David Tremblay and me looked all over. Wayne just sat on his bike and said, “What difference does it make?” and could we please just go home? But I had to know exactly what was what, the way it always was with me with stuff like that.

We finally decided it was a place in the ditch where a lot of the grass was torn up and it looked like people had been walking around, and maybe a car, or the ambulance, or the hearse had pulled off the road. But it still didn’t seem quite right. “Don’t you think if she landed here it would of been soft and she might not of gotten hurt so bad?” I asked David Tremblay.

He said he didn’t know. He said maybe she just died when the car hit them. I said that wouldn’t have happened, because she was up on top of the horse and the car just hit the horse, so it must have been when she landed, maybe she hit her head, but there weren’t any rocks or anything hard except the ground, but there was plenty of grass, and a little water in the bottom of the ditch, so it was even kind of muddy down in there. “I just don’t get it,” I said, and it bothered me for a long time that I couldn’t make it make sense. I wished I could go out there with Officer Odom or at least ask him, but I was afraid to talk to him since that day we were in Mr. Straub’s office and he wanted to put the handcuffs on me.

“Come on,” Wayne said. “Let’s get out of here.” I could tell David Tremblay would have stayed if I wanted to stay longer, to try to figure everything out some more — probably because he still felt so bad for letting everybody think I was the one to poison Moe instead of him. But Wayne looked mad now and I hated it when he got mad at me, so I said, OK, we could go.

There weren’t too many people at the funeral, and that was when I realized Darla and her family didn’t go to any church. They didn’t even have the service at a church or a funeral home but just out at the Peace River Cemetery, where I had played “Taps” that time at Mr. Rhodes’s funeral.

I found out later that Mom had called Mrs. Turkel to see if she could help, and Mrs. Turkel asked if Mom could get Reverend Dunn to do the funeral at the cemetery. Also in that conversation Mrs. Turkel told Mom what a nice boy I was, and how good of a friend I was for Darla and Darwin, but Mom didn’t tell me any of that at the time.

So Reverend Dunn was there, but you could tell by what he said that he didn’t know Darla at all: “She was popular with her schoolmates; a gifted singer and dancer; a natural beauty; a spirited girl who greeted each new day with a song of hope and joy; a devoted daughter, sister, and granddaughter; a child of great faith in a better tomorrow; a young person who truly believed, to quote our late President John F. Kennedy, that you should ask not what your town can do for you, but what you can do for your town. How many of us will not soon forget her vibrant performances on the stage at County Fair with her brother, Darwin? Our hearts go out to Darwin, and to Darla’s mother, Elaine Turkel, and to Darla’s grandfather, Mr. F. N. Turkel, all of whom join us today for this graveside service on this glorious afternoon God has created. Blessed be the Lord, He has received unto Himself a new angel. Amen.”