Jim the Boy (8 page)

On the far side of the bottom, they passed out of the corn and into the ribbon of tangled woods that marked the passage of the river. They carefully followed a narrow path through the poison oak. With each step, the river-smell grew stronger; the gurgling sound of water seeking its way through smooth, flat rocks grew louder. The path ended at the wide, flat rock from which the uncles liked to fish. Beyond the rock, the river bent suddenly toward South Carolina, as if intent on leaving their country for good. This was the place that for Jim marked the boundary of home; on the far side of the river lay another place entirely.

Uncle Zeno hopped from the bank onto the rock. Jim followed him and sat down near the water. The rock had been warmed by the sun, but the air near the water raised gooseflesh on his arms. Jim stared at the green water; he lay back and stared at the blue sky. He wondered what was going on in town. He thought jealously of not just Penn, but of all the kids who would get to the school before he did.

“You got ants in your britches today, don’t you, Doc?” Uncle Zeno said.

Jim didn’t say anything. If he had been at Big Day, he would have been in line for the Ferris wheel first.

“Don’t worry,” Uncle Zeno said. “It’ll be Big Day all day.”

“How many people do you think will be at Big Day?” Jim asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Uncle Zeno. “The weather’s good. Several hundred, I reckon.”

“Do you think it will be the most people to ever be in Aliceville at one time?”

“Hmm,” Uncle Zeno said. “I hadn’t thought about that. Could be.”

“More than when Alice came?” Alice was the little girl for whom the town had been named.

“I don’t know. There were a lot of folks in town that day. That was a big day, too.”

“How old were you when Alice came?”

“Five,” said Uncle Zeno. “You sure you want to hear this again?”

Jim nodded, and for the first time all morning began to think of something other than Big Day.

“Well, this happened during the last century,” Uncle Zeno said, glancing slyly at Jim.

He always began stories that happened before he was seven years old by saying, “This happened during the last century.”

“Little Corrie and Little Allie hadn’t come along yet, nor your mother, and I was the only little fellow running around the place. Now, my granddaddy (that’s your great-granddaddy) and my daddy (your granddaddy, who died in 1918 with the flu) were doing pretty well. They were farming in a big way and they had the gin and the store and the mill and business was going good, and there was a tannery here then, and the tannery ran a big crew, and a sawmill, and Abraham and his bunch lived up on the hill, and it started to look to everybody like they lived in a regular town. Only they knew it wasn’t a real town because they couldn’t get the train to stop. You could flag it down, but if the flag wasn’t out, it went on through without even slowing down. And Granddaddy hated to see that. Everybody knows you ain’t got much of a town if a railroad track runs through it but the train won’t stop.

“So one day Granddaddy packs a bag and flags the train down and goes to see the superintendent down in Hamlet and asks him if he’ll make the train stop. But the superintendent, he says, ‘My train only stops in towns. You can flag the train down like the rest of the country folk.’

“Granddaddy comes back home, and he drives a big, iron stake right in the middle of town and he surveys out a half a mile from that stake in every direction, which made a circle a mile wide, and he gets everybody who owns property inside that circle to sign a petition, and he takes that survey and that petition all the way to Raleigh and files articles of incorporation. Then he goes to Hamlet and he says, ‘Now, look here. We got a town. We got a survey. We got articles of incorporation.’

“But the superintendent, he says, ‘I don’t care about your articles of incorporation. You ain’t got a depot for the train to stop at.’

“So Granddaddy, who by now is getting kind of aggravated at the superintendent, comes back home and with his own money builds a depot right over the top of that stake, beside the railroad track, in the dead center of town. Then he goes back to the superintendent one more time and he says, ‘All right. I made you a town. I built you a depot. If you’ll make the train stop, I’ll
give
that depot to the railroad.’

“Now, Aliceville, as you know, was at that time called Sandy Bottom. That’s just what it had always been called. So the superintendent, who wasn’t too crazy about Granddaddy, either, he says, ‘I don’t care how many depots you give me, my train ain’t stopping at no place called Sandy Bottom.’

“Granddaddy comes back home and he thinks about it, and he decides that maybe this time the superintendent has a point. Sandy Bottom ain’t much of a name for a town. So he asks around to see if anybody can think up a name, but nobody couldn’t think of anything good, nothing anyway that would stop a train.

“Now, the engineer of the train at that time was a fellow named Bill McKinney. He was raised not far from here, down a little ways on the other side of the river, and his people still lived around. He was a big old handsome fellow with big waxed mustaches, and he was proud of that train. And the only thing he was prouder of than that train was his little girl, Alice. And everybody knew that.

“So one Sunday in church, Granny (that’s your great-grandmother), it came to her that all this time Granddaddy had been talking to the wrong man. She thought that maybe instead of working on the man who was in
charge
of the train — but lived all the way down in Hamlet — they ought to work on the man who
drove
the train and came through here every day. She’s the one who thought up the name Aliceville.

“Now Granddaddy thought that was a pretty smart idea, even if he didn’t think of it. He talked it around and everybody else agreed that it was a pretty good name for a town — everybody liked Bill McKinney, you see — and anyway it was better than Sandy Bottom. So Granddaddy painted ‘Aliceville’ on a sign and climbed up on a ladder and nailed it to the side of the depot. It’s the same one that’s up there today.

“Now Bill McKinney, when he heard about what was going on from his people, he didn’t believe it. The first time the train came through after Granddaddy put the sign up, he stopped and climbed down out of the cab to take a look. And, big as he was, Bill McKinney almost broke down crying when he saw it, he loved Alice so much. He told Granddaddy that as far as he was concerned, the flag was always out at Aliceville, and he was going to stop the train every day, going and coming, no matter what the superintendent said.

“Things went on that way for a while, the train stopping twice a day even though it wasn’t supposed to, and one thing led to another, and pretty soon the superintendent gave in and put Aliceville on the regular schedule. Oh, that was good news. Everybody in town got together and planned a celebration, because now Aliceville was an official town, as much as Shelby or New Carpenter or Charlotte or New York City, and they asked Bill McKinney if he would bring Alice.

“The celebration was set for a Sunday, and the train made a special run. Everybody came in from the country and brought their dinner and stayed the day. They had mule races and footraces and sack races and three-legged races and a greased-pig chase, and they had a greasy pole–climbing contest — which I didn’t do no good at, I was too small — and sometime in the middle of the afternoon we heard the train whistle, and we looked and saw the smoke coming in the distance, and everybody ran down to the depot. When the train came up to the depot and stopped, it was all shined up, and it had flags and banners hung all over it, and Alice McKinney, the girl they had named the town after, was up in the cab with her mama and her daddy. She must have been six or seven, just a little older than I was.

“Lord, Jim, I can still see her. She was wearing a white dress and a little crown, and I thought she was the prettiest thing I had ever seen, standing up there in the cab and waving at everybody. We cheered and cheered. Granddaddy had covered the Aliceville sign on the side of the depot with a sheet, and Alice got down off the train with her mama and daddy and pulled a rope and the sheet came down and everybody cheered again. I was just five years old then, and I thought that was the grandest day there had ever been. I thought Alice McKinney was like a queen or a princess, something out of a picture book, and I couldn’t believe I was standing there looking at her. Everybody was so happy. Town seemed like a different place. It finally seemed like
somewhere.

“But, one day not long after that, the train came through and Bill McKinney wasn’t driving it. A substitute man was. And the substitute man got down and told us that Alice had come down sick. She had the whooping cough or diphtheria, I don’t remember which. And as long as she was sick, people waited for that whistle, and when the substitute man pulled in, everybody stopped what they were doing and went down to the depot to see how Alice was. And every day he told us she was getting a little worse, that she was sinking a little lower. Women from here started frying chickens and making pies and cakes and sending them back with the substitute man.

“Then one day we heard the train whistle start up way outside of town, long before it got to the crossing, just a continuous blast, and it got louder and louder, and it didn’t let up, and everybody ran fast as they could down to the track to see what was wrong. I remember running down the street holding Mama’s hand. Well, the train didn’t stop that day. When it came through, it was going so fast and the whistle was so loud, you could feel the ground shake. I’d never seen a train go that fast. And in the instant it flashed by, we could see that Bill McKinney was driving. He was staring straight ahead. He didn’t look left nor right, and he had this awful look on his face, and that’s when we knew that Alice had died.

“That was the last we ever saw of Bill McKinney in this country. Seeing that sign on the side of the depot pained him so much that he got off the train at New Carpenter and refused to get back on it. They had to send a man all the way from Hamlet to drive it back. They say Bill McKinney walked all the way back home overland, staying on the other side of the river to keep away from Aliceville. He and his wife packed up and moved away from here, and he got a job driving trains in Oklahoma or somewhere, that’s what his people said, and if he ever came back through this country, I never heard of it.

“Everybody felt just awful, and nobody knew what to do. They talked about changing the name back to Sandy Bottom, or changing it to something else, but that just didn’t seem right. They worried about how it would make Bill McKinney feel if they changed it, and they worried that it would dishonor Alice, which nobody wanted to do. But at the same time, not changing it didn’t seem like much of a bargain, either, because the sign reminded everybody of what had happened. So nobody did anything, and the sign stayed up on the side of the depot, and after a while people stopped thinking about it, which is just how people are.

“But let me tell you something, Jim. It don’t happen every day, it don’t happen every week, but there’s still days that hearing that train whistle makes me remember how I felt looking up at Alice that one time. And I remember the awful look on Bill McKinney’s face. I’m forty-three years old now, and all this happened thirty-seven, thirty-eight years ago, but sometimes I can see it just as clear.”

Jim lay back on the rock, his face covered with his arm, pretending to be bothered by the sun.

“Oh, well,” Uncle Zeno said, patting Jim on the leg. “That was a long time ago.”

Jim rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“How old would Alice be now if she hadn’t died?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Forty-four, forty-five, not too old, just a little older than I am.”

“Do you think you would have married her?”

Uncle Zeno looked startled. “What in the world kind of question is that?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Jim. “I was just wondering if you would have married Alice if she hadn’t died.” “I never met Alice. What made you think of that?” Jim shrugged. “Whenever you tell that story, I just wish you could have married Alice.”

Uncle Zeno looked off somewhere and smiled.

“Well, you know, Doc,” he said. “Just between me and you, I wish I could have, too.”

“Why didn’t you and Uncle Coran and Uncle Al ever get married?”

“I don’t know. I guess a man can get too busy when marrying time comes, or there might not be enough girls to go around for everybody. Before you know it you get locked in to what you’re doing and you just keep doing it. It’s best not to think about it too much. You ready to go back?”

An Unexpected Guest

W
HEN JIM
and Uncle Zeno walked in the back door, Jim knew something was wrong. Jim thought at first that they had stayed away too long, but when Mama furrowed her brow slightly at Uncle Zeno and tilted her head toward Uncle Al’s house Jim knew it had nothing to do with them.

Jim followed Uncle Zeno out onto the front porch, where they found Uncle Coran sitting on the steps, cleaning his fingernails with a knife. Uncle Coran whistled in a descending tone, like a bomb falling, and pointed with his chin toward Uncle Al’s. Uncle Al was sitting on his porch with Whitey Whiteside. Uncle Al and Whitey Whiteside looked over at them and waved.

“What’s going on?” Jim asked.

Everybody seemed as if they were about to laugh at a joke he didn’t quite understand.

“It looks like Whitey Whiteside is going to go to Big Day with us, is all,” Uncle Zeno said. “Is that all right with you?”

Jim didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He shrugged and watched the Ferris wheel turning on top of the hill. It didn’t seem so urgent that he ride it now, although he couldn’t say why.

“Let’s shake a leg, then,” said Uncle Zeno.

Jim led the way up the hill to the school, lugging the peach basket that held their lunch. With each step he took, the basket banged against his leg like a drum. Behind Jim, Mama walked between Uncle Coran and Uncle Zeno, clinging tightly to their arms. Uncle Al and Whitey Whiteside brought up the rear about ten yards farther back. Uncle Al carried a gallon jar of tea in the crook of his arm as if it were a baby.