Down Sand Mountain (32 page)

Wayne was one of the Wise Guys and had a box he held with
FRANKINCENSE
written on the side. At least they were able to spell
that
right, even though David Tremblay kept calling it “Frankin
stein.
” I was never sure if he was joking around or if he really didn’t get it. I was supposed to be a shepherd. Wayne got a fancy costume that the church ladies made, but I just wore an old bathrobe, with a towel on my head and a rope tied around it. That was what was supposed to happen, anyway, except that on Christmas Eve the girl that was the Angle got sick, so they made me do it instead. “You’re the only one small enough,” Mrs. Ryland said, right in front of everybody. We were in the high-school office putting on our costumes and eating doughnuts, before they sent us out one at a time to replace the kids on the shift before ours, which was for an hour. Mrs. Ryland was the Burning Bushes Sunday School teacher and a boy named Skip Ryland’s mom. Skip was a Wise Guy with Wayne and David Tremblay on our shift, and he laughed the hardest about me having to be the Angle, until his mom snatched his doughnut and made him apologize because it wasn’t Christian to be that way.

I said I wouldn’t do it, and some of the other kids said I shouldn’t have to, too, including Boopie, who I had kind of been friends with lately and who was also a shepherd like me. But then Reverend Dunn showed up and you couldn’t say no to Reverend Dunn when he wanted something, so they put me in the white nightgown with the gauze sewed all over it, and attached to the sleeves were the big wings made from goose feathers glued to cardboard painted white and gold, and the next thing I knew I was climbing up the back of the manger and sitting on the stool on the platform they had up there and spreading my wings out on the cross.

Once we got to our positions, we weren’t supposed to move, even to scratch our nose if it started itching, so that’s what I did. They had a record player with about a thousand feet of extension cord from the high-school office, and Mrs. Ryland put on the Christmas album that played through the loudspeakers they also had set up there: “We three kings of Orient are,” “Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining,” “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright,” “Good King Wince the Louse looked out on the feet of Stephen.”

From where I sat on top of the stable, I could see everybody who came by, and it seemed like just about the whole town did during that hour we were there, either walking or sitting on a bench across the street or driving in their cars. At first I was embarrassed because I knew everybody would tease me about being a girl after the Nativity was all over, even though in the Bible the angel was a guy, not that my telling people that would make any difference. After a while I didn’t think about it, though, I just liked being up there in the sky with my wings on, looking down on the whole world, or at least the whole world of Sand Mountain.

I saw David Tremblay’s mom sitting on that bench across the street. She looked so tired but also looked like she could sit there forever instead of going home, which was nice and sad at the same time, especially when I thought about David’s stepdad and how things were at their house. Boopie’s mom came along and sat with David’s mom and they started talking, and you could tell David’s mom liked that a lot because of the way she kind of turned toward Boopie’s mom and didn’t look so tired anymore.

My mom and dad came along, too, and Tink and that little friend of hers, Scooty. Tink and Scooty snuck over to the pen and tried to pet the animals. They got kind of loud, saying stuff like, “Here, cow. Come over here, boy,” which I could hear all the way up on top of the stable until Dad told them to hush. I could see Mom studying the shepherds, wondering where I was, and then finally realizing it was me as the Angle. She pretended to reach up and brush some hair out of her face but really it was to give me a little wave that nobody would see.

I saw W.J. Weller, the kid that got his arm broke by Darwin that time. He went by with his family and their old dog, whose doghouse I hid in that one time for a while on the first day of school, back in August. And Mr. Juddy the dragline operator with his wife, who I hadn’t noticed before walked bowlegged just like him. And Connolly Voss with his four sisters and his mom, who was taller than his little dad. And that colored lady who made the Sunday dinners, Miss Deas, with about a hundred kids piled in an old black Chevy like my grandmother had up in Virginia. And Officer O. O. Odom, also, all alone in his police car. He drove back and forth a bunch and I figured he must really like the live Nativity and the Christmas music and all, but Wayne said later he bet Officer Odom just wanted to see if he could get some of our doughnuts.

Of course I started thinking about Darla after a while — the real Darla, not the one from that sixth-grade picture — who more than anybody in the world would have loved to be the Angle of the Lord. She would have been good at it, too — better than me, better than Shirley Temple, better than anybody. All you had to do was sit on top of the stable in the costume for an hour and not scratch your nose, but with Darla you know it would have been a lot more than that; it would have been like in the Bible: “And an angel of the Lord appeared before them and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid.” Only I wouldn’t have been sore afraid to see her there instead of me. I would have just been happy.

I WAS SAD ABOUT DARLA FOR A LONG TIME, and just about stopped going to certain places like Sand Mountain and Bowlegs Creek because when I did I couldn’t help thinking about her, which led to me missing her, which led back to me feeling so sad. I was always thinking about the funerals over the past year, too — Mr. Rhodes’s way back in the early fall, and the colored soldier’s when Walter Wratchford told me there was only one category for dead, and Darla’s.

Maybe all that’s why I didn’t get upset or anything when Dad told us we were going to be moving. It was in the early spring. He had a new job lined up in Crystal River, which was a ways north of Tampa, almost on the Gulf of Mexico, and he said we would stay in Sand Mountain to finish out the school year and then pack everything up in June. He didn’t tell us the other part — Mom did later — that they were having layoffs at the mine and they hated to do it but they had to let Dad go. Wayne said, “Who else did they let go?” and he bet there wasn’t anybody else, or not any of the engineers, anyway. Mom said, “Never you mind. Your father says we’re going and that’s all there is to it. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you planned, but we have a job to go to and I don’t want your father to hear any of you children complain. Now, count your blessings and go set the table for dinner.”

When Mom talked like that, there wasn’t anything to say back to her except, “Yes, ma’am,” which Wayne did and so did I and so did Tink. It seemed like David Tremblay and that girl Scooty just about started living with us after the announcement, and they both said they wanted to move with us to Crystal River, too. I wished I had a friend that liked me as much as David Tremblay and Scooty liked Wayne and Tink. Who I had had like that, or sort of like that, I guess, was Darla.

So I decided I was kind of glad about moving. It meant I would never get to be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy in the minstrel show, but I didn’t want to do that anymore anyway. There’d been enough people making fun of me all year long, and making fun of Darla. I guess I didn’t have the heart to want to be up there on the Mighty Miners stage making fun of anybody else, which was all they were really doing in that minstrel show: making fun of the colored people. I didn’t want to be any part of that kind of meanness.

Besides that, I was thinking about calling myself by a different name when we got to Crystal River, and I was thinking that name might be Charlie, which was a name I kind of liked, I’m not sure why. It just sounded regular, I guess, and I thought maybe when we got to a new town I could let everybody think that’s what I was — somebody regular.

A week after Dad told us about moving, Tink started crying late one afternoon and she wouldn’t stop or couldn’t stop, I didn’t know which, for about an hour. Mom and Dad tried everything, but Tink just sobbed and sobbed. It turned out she thought we were going to have to leave Suzy behind when we moved, and when Mom and Dad found that out, they said, “No, sweetie, no — we would never leave Suzy,” and they were so relieved that that’s all it was, Mom told Tink she could choose anything she wanted for dinner that night, and she could decide what we would watch on TV.

Tink said she didn’t care about dinner or TV, she just wanted to go to Sand Mountain and slide down from the top, which Mom and Dad hadn’t ever let her do before because she was too little. Dad said it was still cold out — it was the end of March but it had been a long winter, especially February when frost killed off a bunch of the groves — and he also said it would be dark soon. But Tink looked like she was about to start crying again, so he said, “OK,” what the heck.

For once David Tremblay wasn’t over, but he came riding along on his bike just when Dad was backing the car out of the driveway, and said his usual, “Whatchyall doing?” so we took him with us, too. Dad was in a good mood, and him and Mom even sang a song on the way to Sand Mountain. Things were so lousy with the job and moving and all, plus the stuff that happened from the election, you would think Mom and Dad wouldn’t be happy or anything, but for some reason it was just the opposite — when things got bad, they might be low for a while, but then they always kind of got better together.

I hadn’t been to Sand Mountain since the last time I went with Darla, and I was dreading going now, on the way over, but it turned out not to be so bad once we started climbing. I even kind of liked thinking about the times her and me had gone there before.

It took us the longest time to get to the top of Sand Mountain because we practically had to carry Tink. Actually she wanted to be dragged
up
the mountain on the cardboard, even though we kept telling her to get the heck off, that wasn’t how it worked. The sun wasn’t even there anymore by the time we finally made it, but the sky was still light enough to see OK, and over the phosphate mines, it was streaked red and orange just like the last time I was there with Darla, which seemed like a really long time ago by then.

David Tremblay and Wayne hopped onto their cardboard right away and yelled, “Geronimo!” and disappeared over the side. I guess they didn’t care about looking all around the way the rest of us did, especially Tink, since it was her first and, as it turned out, last time. The Tire Tower way over in the Boogerbottom next to the Peace River had flared up again about a week before — a couple of months after they said they were sure it was done burning — and we could see a line of black smoke going straight up to the sky like somebody drew it there with a Magic Marker.

We watched the smoke for a while except for Tink, who was busy running from one edge to the other, to the other, and Dad said, “Oh, by the way,” he guessed he hadn’t told us yet, but the W. R. Grace Company was going to re-mine Sand Mountain.

“What?” I practically shouted when he said that, and Dad said, Yeah, they were going to reprocess the whole Sand Mountain because they discovered there was a lot of phosphate still left in the tailings, which is what the sand of Sand Mountain was, but now they had a new process that the chemical engineers had invented that they could get the rest of the phosphate out with. They figured there was probably ten million dollars’ worth of it still in Sand Mountain once they moved it back over to the plant — kind of the opposite of how they made the mountain in the first place.

“And there won’t be a Sand Mountain anymore?” I said.

Dad said, “That’s right.” Another two years and where Sand Mountain stood would be as flat as the rest of Florida. I guess Dad didn’t think it was all that big of a deal, because he went over to get Tink so they could slide down together on their cardboard, which left just me and Mom the last ones standing on top. No more Sand Mountain. Dad could have told me the Russians just dropped the bomb or the Vietcong just won the war and I wouldn’t have been shocked any more than I was. No more Sand Mountain! I looked around in all directions, trying to memorize everything I saw.

West was the phosphate plants and the faded sunset and the torn-up land. South was the woods with Bowlegs Creek and probably that half man–half gator. East was the town with the Methodist Church, and Darla’s house, and our house, and the high school, and the Skeleton Hotel, and the Boogerbottom, and the Tire Tower, and the Peace River, and that colored church — even though you couldn’t see most of those places on account of the trees. North was the Pits, which Mom one time said looked like the four chambers of the heart, and Moon’s Stable at the back side of the Pits, and the Old Bartow Highway. Where Darla . . .

Mom said we had to go now and there was just one more piece of cardboard, so we’d have to ride down together and did I want front or back. I guess I didn’t move right away, so she put her arm around me and squeezed me. “Dewey Markham Turner, you’re too young to look so sad,” she said.