Eli the Good (2 page)

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but she looked at me as if I were stupid. “It’d be interesting, that’s all. Don’t you think it would?”

“Yeah. But he wouldn’t tell me nothing.”

“You never know until you try.” This was one of Edie’s mottoes. She believed in trying everything, in not being afraid of new things. She believed in not judging other people based on how they looked and in having what she called “an open mind.” She was eighteen months older than me, but we had been friends before either of us could remember, so it didn’t matter that she was older. She hung around with all of us boys because there were no girls on our road. I don’t believe Edie would have played with girls even if there had been some, though. She was as good as a boy, anyway, and all of us knew this, even if we never would have admitted it aloud. She was tough. She could balance herself as she walked across the narrowest fallen tree, carry more rocks to build the dam than anyone else, climb the steepest cliff without shedding a tear if her legs got all scratched up from the rocks. All of us boys lived in secret fear of her, to be honest. We all knew that she could beat us at most things. It was bad enough to lose at something, but to be beaten by a girl was the ultimate humiliation. Once, Paul Shepherd had tried to put his hand down Edie’s shorts and she had hit him in the face with her fist and called him a Communist pervert. He ran away crying, blood streaming out of his nose, and Edie just laughed.

“Run to Mommy, little wussy!” she called after him, then turned to the rest of us, who stood nearby, mesmerized. “That’s what he gets for messing with me.”

Lately, though, Edie had started looking more like a girl. I hadn’t really noticed, but Matt Patterson, who lived four houses down the road, had been riding bikes with me only a week earlier when he had asked if I had seen Edie’s boobs.

“Boobs?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“You know, stupid,” he said, and put on his brakes, causing the back wheel of his bike to take a crooked, sliding halt in the dirt. I stopped next to him and watched as he used his thumbs and forefingers to make two little tents at the top of his shirt, pulling them out. “Like
Laverne and Shirley.
”

“No, she don’t,” I’d said, and took off, pedaling hard so that it took him a while to catch up with me.

Edie lay back against the tree, tucked into an indentation of the trunk that seemed to fit her perfectly.

“I’ve been getting up every morning and sitting against the tree,” she said, with her eyes closed. “It has a good soul.”

“You’re crazy, man,” I said, although I didn’t believe this. Lately I had started putting
man
on the end of my sentences, the way Josie did.

She stood on her knees, the way my mother had been doing in the bed, comforting Daddy. She grabbed my wrist. “Here, put your hand on it.” I let her direct me to the trunk of the willow. I noticed that she had on white fingernail polish. I had never seen her wear any kind of makeup before. I laid my palm flat against the tree and was surprised by the cool bark. “Now just be quiet, and listen.”

We sat there in silence for a time. I watched her face, waiting for her to tell me more. “Close your eyes, and feel,” she said.

I did. I shut my eyes and listened to the birds. Her hand remained on my wrist for what seemed a long while, but she eased it away. Then the birdcall faded and there was a big silence that made me notice only the sensation in my palm, where my skin was tingling from contact with the old willow.

“You feel it, don’t you?” she whispered. “The trees, they can talk to you if you listen hard enough.”

I was listening hard.

Often, when I met someone for the first time, I could tell if they were a good person or not. I just
knew.
And that’s the way I felt in that moment, like the tree was good, too, and that I knew it without knowing why.

Lately I had realized that I was different from most other people, and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I had begun to think that I might be a writer. I definitely read more than normal kids. I read and wrote all the time. That year alone I had already read
Sounder, Where the Lilies Bloom
(my favorite), two Louis L’Amour westerns,
Where the Red Fern Grows,
and
The Light in the Forest.

My idol was John-Boy Walton, and I had started saving every dime I could scrape up to buy myself a little typewriter like the one he had on
The Waltons.
Meanwhile, stories popped into my head and I scribbled them into my black-and-white composition book.

I hadn’t told anyone of this. I liked the idea of having this secret as my own, during a time when I felt nothing at all belonged to me. Being a writer was a fate I had accepted, although I was not as open to accepting that I was weird.

I was also a country boy. My father was very proud of us being country people, so I strived to please him in this regard. My greatest hope was to make Daddy proud of me, and I would have done anything to make this happen, but the fact was that I would have been a country boy regardless.

Suddenly there was a faint, building buzz in my hand, as if the tree was humming beneath my palm. The willow was sending me some kind of reassuring message. I was sure of it. The trees were a part of me.

I jerked my hand away, like someone who has gotten too close to a flame.

“You’re weird,” I said, not sure if I wanted her to know how weird I was, too. I rubbed my palms together, trying to rid myself of the sensation in my right hand.

“I like being weird,” she said. She looked pleased with herself, smiling at me. Edie had very blue eyes, which is the thing everyone always remembered about her. “But you felt it. I know you did. I could see it in your face.”

I stood, tapped my kickstand up with the side of my shoe, and hopped on my bike. “Come on, let’s go riding.”

We pedaled up the road and watched the world come awake. The houses along our road were almost identical: small, plain, all with a porch that ran the whole width of their fronts. Since everybody had pretty good jobs but no intentions to move, many of the families had built on an extra room or a screen porch. These additions only made the sameness of the houses more noticeable, though. The add-ons looked as if they had fallen out of the sky and attached themselves.

These homes had once been company housing. The women all tried to make them look different with paint and flowers, but they were all still just alike. Blue trim around the windows or doors painted red or forsythia bushes didn’t change anything; all the houses were the same underneath.

One by one, each little house showed life. My mother’s best friend, Stella, who lived three doors down, came out with a laundry basket propped on her hip. She let it fall at her feet and immediately began to pin sheets to the clothesline. Finley Hopkins fired up his truck and backed out, heading to work at the Altamont Mines. Old hateful Miss Lawson was sweeping her front porch in a great fury, swinging the broom back and forth as if the fate of the world might depend on the cleanliness of her porch.

On the other side of the road from the houses were the shoals of the Refuge River. The water was never more than six inches deep there during the summer. Teenage girls like Josie carried lawn chairs on up the river, past the big cliffs where the kids weren’t allowed, to lie in the sun. There they lay back with their fingers occasionally scooping up water to splash out over their naked bellies. They talked about Leif Garrett and listened to ABBA and Steve Miller on a transistor radio. Farther up the river was a big biscuit-shaped rock that hung out over a deep swimming hole where the water was suddenly still. I was too young to remember, but Josie claimed that when she was about ten we had lived through the hottest summer in history. She said the heat had been so bad that everybody on our road had come together at the swimming hole on one ungodly hot July day. Even the old people. “You never seen so much white flesh in your life,” Josie said. “God, it was horrible.” But something in her face told me it had been nice somehow, too.

Soon we were past all the houses and up where the woods took over one side of the road and the river widened on the other side. Stripes of mist moved down the hillsides and burned away in the new morning. We raced. We each rode a stretch without holding our handlebars, a trick Edie had taught me.

After a while we turned around and headed back the way we had come. I clicked on the radio and the deejay was encouraging everyone to stock up on fireworks for the bicentennial celebration on July Fourth. Then he gave the weather and said it was going to be the hottest day of the year so far. “I’m going to play a big hit from the summer of ’74 to get you all up and moving this morning,” he said, and then “I Can Help” came on. Josie had this record and still played it all the time. We pedaled in rhythm to the song, let our bicycles sway and veer across the road along with the weaving music. We both knew every word and sang it very loud. Stella heard the music as we coasted by and turned from her work at the clothesline to snap her fingers and dance a little. We laughed at that and kept singing. Everyone loved Stella.

When we rode back by my house, I realized that Daddy had already left for work at the station. I had wanted to tell him good-bye. When I noticed his truck was gone, I stopped in the middle of the road and stood with my legs on either side of my bike, watching the house as if he might magically reappear. Edie had sped on past me, but now she had noticed that I was stopped in the middle of the road, staring at the house like a dullard. She hollered and laughed at me but I couldn’t move for a time, and eventually she rode away, putting her arms in the air to ride with no hands.

I
ran up the path as dusk came in with purple and red and a kind of whiteness I cannot explain. The light was different that summer, a clean light that filtered through the leaves and made them look like pieces of typing paper that had been cut in the shape of leaves. When the sun went down, everything cooled instantly, leaving the world to smell like cooked greens.

I sat in my secret place: the roots of my beech tree, where I could look out over the valley, waiting for my mother to come onto the porch to call my name. This was the only time of day when I felt she actually knew I existed, when she stood there on the porch, holding on to the banister and calling for me, the pulsating air of the gloaming around her.

I waited, my chin resting on the tops of my knees. The sun was melting fast, spreading out along the horizon like butter. The breath of wind that had been stirring the leaves stopped. All birdcall ceased. Not one dog barked; no one hollered out as they ran across a yard. Everything became completely still as if the whole world realized this moment without knowing it. This hushed time of day carried its own scent, too, a low sweetness like honeysuckle that hadn’t bloomed yet, like honeysuckle that didn’t even know it was about to bloom. The sun sank lower and lower and then: “Eli!”

My mother’s voice. If I had moved from my spot and crawled out onto the edge of the bluff, I could have seen her standing out on the back porch, her elbows in her hands as she scanned the yard. “Eli! It’s time to come in now!”

I held my breath and felt like the whole world was waiting with me.

“Eli?” A question now. The shoals of the river were quiet; all the other kids had gone home. It was the same every day of summer. Now she would call out more firmly — “
E
li!” — and then I would stand and take one final look at the sunset before running through the woods, down the old path, and into our backyard.

My mother didn’t see me coming out of the trees. She walked to the corner of the screen porch, leaned against one of the posts, and called my name again, a long stretching of the two syllables of my name, turning “Eli” into a little song that I never tired of hearing.

It’s important that you know this: my mother was beautiful. Everybody said so. She must have driven the boys at the high school absolutely crazy, pacing back and forth in front of the blackboard while she tried to teach them biology. Her hair was always just right, even though she didn’t pay a bit of attention to it. Daddy always said she was one of those women who have a talent for pulling her hair up in a matter of seconds without a thought. Usually she pinned it up with a single barrette in the center of her scalp, showing off her broad, smart forehead. Her eyes were green and clever, alert to everything happening around her. At the same time, there was a distance about my mother that was most noticeable in her eyes. A mystery there kept everyone — even me, especially me — from getting too close, although we all wanted to be close to her more than anything, wanted to know everything about her.

She was only thirty-three years old that summer, and her beauty was in full bloom, a kind of peach tint that overtook her face and caused her to glow from within. People stopped talking when she dashed by on the street. There was something about the way she moved. She was set apart from the other women we knew because of the gracefulness she possessed. It was more than that, though. She was unusually confident, a strength that showed not only in her eyes but also in the determined steps she took in everyday motion. She always looked as if she had somewhere important to go.