Earthly Possessions (11 page)

I read it twice. Then I looked at Jake.

“Now, that I couldn’t abide,” said Jake.

“What’s that?”

“My son to be born in a prison.”

“What’s she in prison for?”

“She ain’t in prison, she’s in a home for unwed mothers.”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

“Her mother is this devil, real devil. Sent her off to this home her church runs, never let me hear word one about it till Mindy was packed and gone. Mindy is a minor,” he said.

I was slow: I thought he meant she worked in a mine. I saw a rich, black, underground world opening at my feet,
where everyone was in some deep and dramatic trouble. I felt too pale for all this and I drew away, folding the letter primly. “She’s too young to have a say,” said Jake, but even after I understood I kept picturing her in someplace dark. “She’s not but seventeen years old. But in my estimation they should have let her decide for herself, and me as well. I mean me and her been going together for three whole years, off and on.”

“Well, wait,” I said. “Three
years?”

“She was fourteen,” said Jake, “but right well developed.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“Okay, Miss Priss, but it wasn’t
my
fault. She just set her heart on me. She just fixed on me and wouldn’t let go. See, she lived down the road from me and my mom a ways, Route Four outside of Clarion on the Pimsah River. Know the place? We’d been half acquainted for years, but not to speak to. Then her and her family come to watch this derby, and it just so happened I was driving in it and won. I guess in her eyes that must have made me some kind of a hero. After that she commenced to following me around, calling me on the telephone and bringing me picnic lunches and beers she had stole from her daddy. Her daddy was Darnell Callender, owns a feed store, you may have heard of him. Always wears a Panama hat. Well, at first I thought she was too young and besides I didn’t like her all that much but I couldn’t seem to shake her. She was forever hanging around and didn’t take offense when I sent her away but went off smiling, made me feel bad. Just a
little
gal, you know? It was summer and she wore these sandals like threads, real breakable-looking. Finally it just seemed like I might as well go on out with her.

“But we weren’t never what you would call steady,” he said. “I would oftentimes be seeing other girls and all. I would ask myself, ‘Now how did I get mixed up with this Mindy anyhow, what’s the point of it?’ She talked too much, and not about nothing I cared for. Sometimes it seemed like she was so
boring I just couldn’t find enough air to breathe when I was around her. But sometimes, why, she’d say something to me direct that showed me how she watched me, how she
saw
me, you know? And I would think, This person is bound to have something to do with me. I mean it ain’t love, but what is it? Worse than love, harder to break. Like we had to wear each other through, work something out, I don’t know. I swear, she like to drove me crazy. I’d say to myself, I’d say, ‘Why, she ain’t nothing but a hindrance. I don’t need to put up with this.’ Then we would part. But like always, she’d go smiling. And then later she’d keep coming around and
coming
around, and somehow I’d end up in the same old situation again. You understand?”

I nodded. I could see it all happening but had not, up till now, imagined that it could happen to Jake.

“Then last fall, she calls me on the phone. Tells me she’s expecting. A fluke: we were having one of our partings. I hadn’t been near her since August. Ordinarily I would try not to tamper with her anyway, but you know how it is sometimes. And I
will
say she had some part in it. A big part. I mean she would just … so there I was. What could I do? It had come up so sudden. Well, if she had wrote a letter maybe, give me time to think. But no, she has to telephone. ‘Going to have a baby, Jake.’ Happy as a queen. Says to me, ‘I think we better get married.’

“I was surprised, that’s all. If I’d have thought I would have said, ‘Now cool down, Mindy, we’ll figure some other way of doing this.’ But I was surprised. I said, ‘Are you out of your flipping mind? Have you lost your marbles? Do you really believe I would get married, go that whole soft-living route?’ I said. ‘Let alone marry
you.’
Then I hung up. I was fit to be tied, I was as mad as I could get. But I know I should have handled it better than what I did.”

“You were just startled,” I told him.

I didn’t mean to take his side like that. But I was touched by the tense, despairing way his hands were gripping the steering wheel. His bitten fingernails pained me. “I would have said the same thing,” I told him.

“Well,” said Jake. “Week or two passes, month or two passes, I get to thinking. I hadn’t seen her in all that time and was starting to notice she was missing. Pictures would pop into my mind. Them perky little bandannas she wore. Way she was always after me to do my magic tricks, and clapped when I was through. Like she was really just a child, you know? Always humming, skipping, swinging my hand when we walked … then I got to wondering how she would stay with her mother, devil of a mother; they hadn’t never hit it off too good. So I thought, Well, least I could do is be of some help to her in this. It’s true I never asked for it but I would hate to feel to blame in any way.’ I mean, I’m not a
bad
man. Am I?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“I called her house. Her mother says, ‘Too late, Jake Simms.’ Took me three full weeks to track her down. I had to ask her Cousin Cobb. Then I wrote her a letter. I wanted to know if she was okay and needed anything sent. And she wrote back, ‘What I need is
out
. Please come and get me.’

“Well, I could do that. Question was, where to put her after I got her. If she was just older she might have some married girlfriend or such that she could stay with, but I don’t guess she does and so I thought I would take her on to Florida and look up O.J. Him and me have always kept in touch, you see. He sends me these Christmas cards. And I like to think about him a lot and him reading his books no matter who locks him up.

“I figured Mindy could stay in Florida till the baby comes and then we’d give it out for adoption. I don’t think Mindy would make such a hot mother anyhow. Then she could go on back but I might stay in Florida. They have very fine derbies in
Florida. Maybe Oliver and me could room together, like the old days.

“But to get to Florida first you got to have the money, right? And I didn’t have none. I was unemployed; this body shop where I sometimes work had fired me unfairly. Derby season was over and I hadn’t done so good there anyhow. I was having to hang around the house, just rising late and hunting in the icebox and watching TV. Soap operas. Game shows. People winning a thousand tins of cat food or a heart-shaped bed, and all you got to fill your mind is, ‘Wonder where they’ll find the sheets to fit it?’ Stuff like that. I’d always been the kind to spend what I got when I got it and now I didn’t have no savings, couldn’t even help on the groceries. It was sorry times.

“And friends? Used to be you could borrow from your friends, but I don’t know, lately it seems to me like all my friends have gone and married on me. Some of my coolest, finest friends have up and married. I can’t get over it. Leaving me right lonesome, and you know how little cash a married man would have free to lend. Seems like they’re always saving up for a automatic grill and such. There wasn’t no hope there.

“Well, I tell you what I did. I went to my brother-in-law, Marvel Hodge. He runs Marvelous Chevrolet. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Anytime anything gets to happening on the ‘Late Show’ they break it off and here comes Marvel, wide-faced man with scalloped hair, grinning and slapping a fender. Why my sister married him I’ll never know. I can’t stand the sight of him, myself.

“But I went to him. I drove in to see him in Mom’s old Ford. (Has he ever given her a free Chevy? No. No, nor not even a used one.) I found him out on the lot, kidding around with some customers in this ho-ho way he has. I said, ‘Marvel, like to talk with you a minute.’

“He says, ‘Go ahead, Jake.’

“Right in front of all those people, that’s the kind of man he is.

“I said, ‘Marvel, even though you’re supposed to be some relation to me I’m not such a fool as to ask you for a gift or a loan. I do need money bad but I ain’t going to ask that. All I want is a job, fair and square. Just to tide me over,’ I said. ‘You know full well I’m smarter when it comes to cars than any three men you got. How about it.’

“Know what he did? He started laughing. Starts laughing and shaking his head. Right in front of these customers, whole family: man and wife and two little girls and some kind of uncle or something. ‘Boy,’ he says, ‘now I’ve heard everything. A
job
, you say. Give Jake Simms a job, that never was out of trouble since the very first day he was born. Why, I’d have to be a total fool.’

“I kept my temper, I will say that. I said, ‘Marvel, I may have done one or two hasty things in my younger days but you got no right to hold that over my head. I’m a grown man now,’ I said, ‘and never get in no more trouble than taking a extra drink or two on a Saturday night. I’d like you to reconsider your words, if you please.’

“ ‘Grown?’ says Marvel. ‘Grown? I doubt I’ll live to see the day,’ he says. ‘Go on, boy, leave me to these good people here.’

“Well, I
still
kept my temper. Walked back to my Ford, real quiet—felt like I was about to burst but I didn’t say a word. Climbed in, started the engine, fixed the rear-view mirror a little straighter so as I could prepare to back out. But I didn’t back out, I went forward. Well, I don’t know how it happened. I mean I did intend to do it but I didn’t
know
I was going to do it. I just raced full forward into the car lot, and Marvel sprang left and his customers sprang right. Hit a new Bel Air, buckled in the whole right side. Backed off and hit a Vega. Set on down the row of them, crushing everything I come upon. Fenders was crumpled like paper, bumpers curled, doors falling off—and this crunchy feeling every time I hit and everybody screaming and dancing. Of course my own car got dented some too,
but not what you would expect. I believe I could’ve drove her on home, in fact, till I took this notion to hit a Monza head-on. See, in a derby you just don’t hit head-on. The rules don’t allow it. So I got this urge. I hit head-on and the two of them cars went up like the Fourth of July, and I rolled out as quick as I could and was picked off the concrete by three cops.”

I laughed. Jake glanced over at me as if he’d forgotten I was there.

“Later they all tore into me,” he said, “even Mom, asking how come I hadn’t held my temper. But I kept telling them I
did
hold my temper, for I could have mowed down Marvel and his customers as well but I restrained myself.

“I restrained myself in the jail too and tried hard not to escape. I had determined to be a reasonable man, you see. I just sat tight and waited for my trial. No one that knew me would bail me out, and my mom didn’t have no cash. I had to stay in. It wasn’t easy. I had these funny kinds of sweats at times and hives come up over nine-tenths of my body, but still I held back from escaping.

“Now, this lawyer they got me said I ought to plead guilty. He said there wasn’t no question about it. I said I would be telling a falsehood, if I did that. I said I had been forced to wreck that place, had no choice in the matter whatsoever; Marvel Hodge just drove me to it. ‘Call that guilty?’ I said. ‘No sir, I’m pleading innocent.’ We argued back and forth some over that. And time was passing. Understand that every day was just stretching me one more inch beyond the breaking point. But I held tight, I held tight.

“Day before the trial, Mom brought me this letter. She was my only visitor, see. Sally, my sister, she wasn’t speaking to me. And naturally Marvel didn’t come. If he had of I’d have killed him. Broke out of my cell and killed him.

“Mom brought this letter from Mindy, one I showed you. Addressed to the house. Evidently Mindy hadn’t heard about my trouble. Her mother either didn’t know or hadn’t passed the
news on, one; though I can’t imagine her missing the chance. Anyhow, here’s this letter, asking if I wanted for my son to be born in a prison. That tore me up, I tell you. Seems like I just went wild. How come this world has so many ways of tying a person down? Now there is no
way
I would sit by and let that happen.

“Next morning they come to take me to the courthouse and on Harp Street I slipped loose, with this one guard’s gun handy in my pocket. Nothing to it. They watch you less careful on the way to a trial; they know you’re thinking far ahead, got some hope of being cleared. Except me. I didn’t have no hope at all. I was like, barred, boxed in. Everybody carried such a set notion of me. I knew the only hope I had was to get away.

“How did I go so wrong? I thought I would clear a thousand at least, hitting that bank. Thought I would be free then and unencumbered. But here we are. Seems like everything got bungled. Every step was stupid, every inch of the way. Every move I made was worse than the one before.”

“You were just unlucky,” I told him. “Never mind.”

“When you think,” said Jake, “that I set all this in motion just to show I ain’t a bad man, don’t it make you want to laugh?”

Late in the afternoon we arrived in Linex, which seemed to be one very wide, empty street. We stopped in front of a grocery store to use the phone booth. “Now the name of this place is the Dorothea Whitman Home,” said Jake. He was leafing through the directory, which was no thicker than a pamphlet. His stubby finger slid down the columns. He had kept the door open and I looked past his shoulder to see, of all things, butterflies, spangling the yellow air. We truly had traveled; we’d left that cold false Maryland spring behind and found a real one. “Look!” I said, and Jake spun toward the door. “Butterflies,” I told him.

“Will you let me get on with this?”

I wasn’t wearing my raincoat any more and he had unzipped his jacket. We were showing whole new layers: identical white shirts. Glassed in the way we were, under the last of the sunlight, we both had a thin shine of sweat like plants in a greenhouse. “In Clarion, it may be snowing,” I said.