Little Boy Blues (9 page)

We were deliberately cavalier about getting there on time—just because we could be—but then, so was everyone else in those days, when you could still come and go whenever you liked while the movie was in progress. I don’t remember when theater owners began clearing the theaters between shows, but throughout my childhood and for several years thereafter, we often arrived well after the credits and then, when it was over, we sat through the previews and the start of the next show until we got to the part where we’d entered. Then someone always had to state the obvious: “This is where we came in.” If it was my mother, that was the signal to leave. As far as she was concerned, we had done
our duty and there was no point in lingering. But on those rare occasions when I was with my father, it meant we had a decision to make. We might stay if we liked what we’d seen, especially if a good scene was coming up. He liked Westerns to the exclusion of almost everything else, and he quietly but adamantly refused to go to war movies. He never said why, but I always figured it had something to do with his service in World War II, because he never talked about that either, except when he came home drunk. Then he would fall back on the sofa, grab me so hard it hurt and sing a song, or part of a song, that he had learned while stationed in North Africa. “The cigarettes are ranka down in old Casablanca, but the girls are ooh la la.” My mother hated that song. She hated all my father’s songs, I guess, because he never sang unless he’d been drinking. The song she hated most was “Good Night, Irene,” because one night down in Kershaw, she and Daddy had gone over to the Clyburns and the men got drunk and sang “Good Night, Irene” for three hours straight while their wives huddled together on the front porch.

Once Bobby’s grandfather had nodded us in, we ran behind the concession stand in the tiny lobby, grabbed some popcorn and candy and headed inside. More often than not, we were the only customers for the first show, so we changed seats as often as we could, just because we could. We sat in the back and down front, looking up the nostrils of the actors on-screen. We sat together and apart, throwing popcorn at each other if no one else was around. Sometimes we left and walked around town and then came back. Sometimes we came in late, and sometimes we left early. It was the first time in my life where for hours at a time nobody knew where I was, and as far as I know, no one cared.

What else did we do to fill those long, hot days? Played cards,
watched television, walked all over town, up to the mill and back, out to the graveyard and then into town. Sometimes on sunny days I fetched the big magnifying glass from its spot beside the phone book at my grandmother’s and we used it to set fire to scrap paper and dead leaves on the sidewalk—we tried igniting ants, but they were too nimble for us. If it rained, we went up in the Parkers’ attic, where someone had long before abandoned a miniature pool table with child-size cue sticks (I ripped the felt when I missed the cue ball and was shocked when no one cared). Once in a while we talked an adult into driving us out to the town swimming pool, where the concession stand sold frozen Zero bars and I finally managed to go off the high dive when a yellow jacket chased me off the diving board. Mostly, though, we went to the movies. With Bobby Parker that summer, I learned for the first time about doing something purely for the fun of doing it. Until then, everything in my life, from church to school to movies, was about learning a lesson. Morals and messages were, as far as I knew, tied to stories like strings to kites, and living with my mother was like living with Aesop. I don’t remember my Presybyterian kin ever doing anything just for fun. Even when we played games at home, Parcheesi and Rook were turned into lessons about how to be a good loser (I wasn’t). Those hours Bobby and I spent in the dark were something else, something more carefree. We never acted out what we watched. We liked some things better than others, and we talked about what we saw, mostly to debate if we wanted to sit there and watch it again. If we decided to stay, and we almost always stayed, we’d dash back to the concession stand, grab more popcorn and then settle in for the next show. That summer, the movies were, for the first time in my life, not just a treat or a diversion but their own reward. Bobby and I
had no goals, no purpose. We never tried to figure out what lessons we’d learned from what we watched, and there was no arguing about what was proper or unworthy. We did what we did because it was there to do—and because there was air-conditioning. I don’t believe it ever crossed our minds that we were experimenting in the esthetics of pleasure, of savoring something for its own sake. There was a lesson here too, obviously, but I was blessedly spared the awareness that I was learning it.

  Collision at Jones Crossroads  

This time there was no ride to the cemetery after the church service, because the graveyard was right outside the church door. That disappointed me, because this was the first funeral I had even been allowed to attend, and I had been looking forward to riding in the caravan of cars that snaked slowly to the cemetery, all of them running their headlights in the middle of the day. Back then people still pulled off to the side of the road when a funeral procession drove past, and if you were a member of the dead person’s family, you got to ride in one of the limousines at the head of the convoy. This time everyone just walked a few feet to the grave site, a sharply edged hole in the ground surrounded by folding chairs under a green awning set up by the funeral parlor. I was disappointed that I did not get to ride in a black limousine, but I was still pleased that I got to sit under the awning with the family, because Daddy was one of the dead man’s brothers. I sat between my parents. It was the first time I had seen my father in several months, because he had been living with his brothers there in South Carolina. I was used to this by now, my father
going off for several months and then returning home. This was the longest he had been away, and he hugged me through the whole service inside the church and outside under the tent. It was hot and still under the awning, the sun having passed noon only two hours before, but the preacher proceeded with typical Presbyterian efficiency—an efficiency married to the sort of courtesy that made things move along without ever seeming rushed, a talent, I was surprised to discover, possessed even by a country preacher. By a little after three everyone was back at the home place. My father held my hand all the way back to the house, making sure I was in the middle between him and my mother.

When Uncle Buddy died and they called on Saturday and said the funeral was the next day, I was sad because Uncle Buddy was my favorite of my father’s three brothers. Every time he saw me, he’d slip me a silver dollar, a coin so big that it filled the palm of my hand. The brothers all lived in the country outside Lancaster at Jones Crossroads. Uncle Richard was a big, noisy man who ran a corner store. He was the only brother who was married. He and his wife lived behind his store. Uncle Buddy and Uncle Robert were aging bachelors who lived in the home place up the road, and sometimes Daddy went to live with them, the way he was living now. Uncle Buddy had worked for the post office in Lancaster, and Uncle Robert was a farmer. They owned one of those Studebakers that looked the same whether you stared at it from the back or the front. They were Daddy’s half brothers, the children of my grandfather’s first wife. Daddy and his two sisters were the children of my grandmother, whose name was Mae but whom everyone called Mother Jones. I dreaded visits to her apartment in Lancaster, because there was nothing to do there but watch television and try to catch her parakeet whose name
was Bird and who had the run of the apartment. Bird’s favorite perch was the mirror in the bathroom, where he could lurk for hours until you’d forgotten he was there. Then he would scream and take flight, scaring the daylights out of anyone unlucky enough to be sharing the bathroom with him at the time. My grandmother was a no-nonsense woman who didn’t even pretend to know how to play with a little boy. When I got parked with her, she usually ignored me and got on with her cooking, although sometimes we watched
The Edge of Night
, her favorite soap opera. Mother Jones lived with her two unmarried sisters, Annie, a sweet spinster with a high-pitched, whispery voice like a little girl’s, and Wood, a spectral presence whose conversation amounted to endless questions: When did you get here? When are you leaving? Did you come with your mother? Are you going to eat with us? Wood’s only occupation was playing solitaire, and if she caught you playing, she told you which card to put down before you could figure it out for yourself. Grandmother said that Wood was brilliant when she was young, but that something happened to her, but I never found out what that was. Nor did I ever find out her real name. Mother refused to understand why I didn’t like my grandmother, whom she complained about incessantly but whom she professed to love whenever we argued about it, and once we spent a half an hour in the car outside my grandmother’s apartment arguing after I refused to get out of the car and go in, relenting only after my mother convinced me that I was being selfish and making a scene.

Because the funeral was at two in the afternoon, no one had had time to eat dinner between church and the funeral service. So
when we got back to the house where Uncle Buddy had lived with Uncle Robert, everyone fell on the food as though it were the last meal they would ever see. I was secretly glad to see the mob in the tiny kitchen, because this meant I could postpone eating and maybe avoid it altogether. I hated eating in front of my relatives, because those occasions brought out the bully in my mother: she would make me eat anything just to prove that her boy wasn’t picky. Standing in the living room, I noted that for the first time, the house lacked the stale man smell that I had come to expect as soon as I crossed the porch and entered the front room. The aromas of food filled the neatened, tidied space: ham and salad, cold fried chicken, frosted cakes, jugs of iced tea. The curtainless windows were open because there was no air-conditioning, but someone had pulled the shades on the sunny side of the house, preserving its habitual, ambered dimness. The only other child there was one of my girl cousins who was too nice to play after a funeral and who had gone back to the kitchen and found a job pouring tea into glasses. The men took their food out to the front porch and the unpainted front steps that led down to the bare dirt yard. The women stayed back in the kitchen.

I drifted from one group to another until Mother swooped down, filled a plate and told me to eat. I found a spot on the end of the sofa, in a dark corner away from everyone, where I pushed food around on my plate and listened to the women murmuring back and forth in the kitchen while they fussed over the food. After a few minutes, my father’s sister Mary came and leaned on the door between the kitchen and the living room with her back to me. I watched while she rooted in her purse for a cigarette. I heard the match strike, heard her inhale. She was talking to my mother.

“Is he still playing with those dolls?” I flinched, waiting for Mother’s reply.

“You mean his marionettes?”

“The puppets, yeah.”

“He gave a performance at his school last month. A photographer from the paper came out. I sent a clipping to Mack. I’ll send you one, too.”

I didn’t wait to hear more. I left the living room by the door that led to the hall that ran the length of the house. At the back of the hall, when I was sure no one could see me, I threw the paper plate, still full of food, in the trash and went out the back door.

My cousin Mary Maxwell was sitting on the steps. I got her to go with me to look at Uncle Robert’s mule, but it stayed on the far side of the paddock and we couldn’t tease it into charging us where we hung on the fence. When my cousin got bored and went back to the kitchen steps, I decided to go up front where the men were sitting. As unobtrusively as I could, and without looking at anyone, I found a scrap of shade thrown by the porch and squatted down, balancing thighs on calves and rocking back on my heels.

“Hey now,” one of my uncles said, “don’t he look just like a country fella, a-settin’ there on his heels in the shade. I reckon he must be a real Jones after all, right, Mack?”