Lunch-Box Dream (2 page)

The story was that Grandpa had a heart attack trying to lift his car out of a sandbank. It happened in Florida on a newly opened bridge, which he had wanted to see because he was an engineer and had designed bridges when he was younger.

Bobby had been told that during the Depression his grandfather was paid with canned fruit instead of money, and he wondered what kind of bridge you built if you only got peaches for it.

Grandpa was sixty-six years old and had retired with Grandma to Florida the previous July, had enjoyed his house for seven months, had visited bridges, had not even gotten around to changing his Ohio license plates, and then was dead.

Bobby had glimpsed him, briefly, in his coffin at the family service in Youngstown. His sharp white nose, straight lips, and colorless, unmoving hands. His thin-rimmed spectacles over closed eyes.

“Richie, sit,” Grandma said, patting the straw place mat next to her. “Finish your French toast. Come and sit, please.”

Ricky didn't. Not wanting to see her face as Ricky went on dancing, Bobby bent his head to the plate and dug into his toast.

As he ate, he remembered his mother telling him that a gravestone had been cut with the names and birth dates of both his grandparents, and his grandfather's death date, but that it hadn't been finished before Grandma needed to return home.

Last month his mother had told him: “This summer is the first time Grandma can arrange for someone to drive with her from Florida to Youngstown to see the finished stone on the grave.”

“But he's in there, right?” asked Bobby.

“In there…?”

“He's been in the grave since he died, right?”

“Of course! It's just that it took time to carve the stone, and Grandma couldn't wait for it.” She had paused, frowning, then added, “Bobby, of course he's there.”

He now imagined two or three men jabbing at the dirt hard as iron, their shovel blades pinging a few times, then looking up to meet the eyes of the man whose job it was to see they did the work right.

Did chocolate men dig graves? Did they dig the holes for everyone, no matter what color they were, because other people wouldn't do it? Bare brown arms shoveling. Or no. It was February in Youngstown. Coats and gloves.

“We're going to take the long way around,” his mother continued, flapping the notebook in her hand. “I already know how we'll drive. They made up a TripTik for me at the Triple-A—”

“Can I see it?” asked Ricky.

She handed him the notebook bound at the top with a coil of black plastic. “Five, maybe six days driving down. Through Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia, then a day or two in St. Pete, then back—”

“But wait,” said Bobby. “How will we get home? How will we come back if we leave the car with Grandma?” He had just thought of this. “We're not taking the bus home, are we? There are always chocolate people on the bus when we go downtown. And they…Is it really a thousand miles? On the bus? Not on the bus—”

Her smile tightened, and she shook her head.

“No. And I don't like to hear you call them that, Bobby. After we leave the car with Grandma we'll fly home from Tampa. Your first airplane, boys. How would that be?”

“Yes! Yes!” said Ricky, twirling on his heels again, up and down the floor. “This is so neat!”

“Richie, please sit.”

“Fly home?” said Bobby, barely able to keep in his chair, either, and smiling at his mother now to show he was sorry for calling them that. “We'll fly home? Really, Mom? A plane? You promise?”

Taking her eyes off Ricky, his mother smiled warmly at him. Everything was all right now. She wasn't mad anymore. “In a plane, absolutely,” she said. “That okay, Bobby?”

If they had to be mushed together in the car, all four of them for a week, in order to fly on an airplane, it might be okay.

“I think
so
!” he said.

Every second since, Bobby had to hear his brother sing the strange music of those names.

“Chickamauga!” Ricky said, accentuating the “mawwww” of the word. “Shiloh, Chattanooga, Allatoona Pass, Kennesaw Mountain, Missionary Ridge!”

To Bobby the names sounded of the deep past.

Something dark lived in them, like the blurry old photographs in Ricky's books, and he certainly wouldn't go around saying the names as if they were cereal brands or car makes. The words might conjure ghosts out of ditches, from rutted paths, or the long roads that browned away into the distance in those old pictures. He imagined sunken folds in the earth, culverts, Ricky called them, that you tumbled into after nightfall when your pistol misfired and you lost  your soul and your friends forgot they ever knew you.

“The year after next will be the really big year,” Ricky said, flopping onto his bed with his Civil War atlas. They were alone now, their mother stepping out to drive the car up into the driveway to “air out,” while their grandmother slid off to the den where she slept with the door open. “The centenary is still two years away,” he said, “but I know they're restoring the battlefields for tourists already. The newspapers are full of stuff. They have to be ready. Two years is nothing.”

Ricky stacked three large books in the suitcase sprawled open on his bed and kept one to look through. It was a book of photographs and prints of the Atlanta Campaign.

“We'll drive right here,” he said, turning the book around and holding it up so Bobby could see the page, then tapping his finger on a scratchy brown photograph of ruined buildings. “Right here,” he said, as the same finger slid across the photo to what looked like a mound of bodies rolling by in a blurry wagon. “Can you believe it? Right where it happened.” He twisted the book back to himself. “It's so neat.”

“Yeah,” said Bobby.

When he had turned seven, Ricky had asked for an atlas. Their father had bought it happily; their father, who was now at college in Washington, studying to be a history teacher—professor, it turned out, when Bobby understood it. Since receiving the atlas, Ricky had spent hours redrawing many county and state borders with his collection of colored pencils. He had sketched in the lines of opposing armies, great curved arrows converging with other-colored arrows on some miserable landmark. Once, Bobby pulled the atlas from the bookcase when Ricky was in the backyard and saw where his brother had recast the standard outlines of states with dotted lines of permanent ink. Circles appeared around minor towns; these represented the sites of imaginary battles. Casualty counts were scribbled in pencil up and down the margins of the pages. Horrific numbers, under the headings CSA and USA. Thousands upon thousands. Bobby couldn't imagine how high the numbers were. Was this how many men died in war?

“Okay,” said Bobby. “But how long has it been? Since the Civil War?”

“In years, months, or days?”

“You dope,” said Bobby.

Ricky snickered. “The war started in 1861. I keep telling you that. What do you think ‘centenary'  means? The Rebels shelled Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.”

“Shelled? You mean—”

“Fired shells at. Cannons. That was the beginning. Armies spread out after that, all over the South.”

“And stuff is happening at the battlefields now?”

“Look.” Ricky unfolded a creased clipping of yellow newspaper that he slipped from inside one of the books in his suitcase. The headline read: “Civil War Battlefields Tour: Two Weeks of Leisurely Driving Through Famous National Shrines.” The article was dated April 5, 1953, and had been saved a long time by their father before he gave it to Ricky, who then kept it pressed between the pages of the atlas. The paper was browned at its edges and stiff. Ricky held up the map that accompanied the article. It was labeled “Highways to American History.”

“And because most of the fighting was in the South,” he said, “there are lots of battlefields to visit.”

“Because the South lost,” said Bobby, pulling his own red suitcase out from under his bed.

“That doesn't have anything to do with it,” Ricky said, sounding annoyed. “It's because most of the fighting was down there. I told you that, too. The real big northern battle is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but we won't be going that way. But some of the best are on the way to where Grandma lives. Even Kentucky has a couple. But Tennessee and Georgia, oh boy.”

Bobby didn't care so much, except that he was supposed to care. It was battlefields. The bluecoats and the graycoats. Cannon blasts and cavalry. Swords and pistols and flying bullets. You were supposed to want to walk around where so many fought and died.

Ricky had already taken two shelves of their small bookcase for the Civil War. Worst of all were the collections of photographs their father had bought for him: bodies lying in fields, bodies in shadowy dens, bodies stacked next to one another near fences, bloated and unreal, their hips twisted the way they fell, their stiff hands reaching to touch something that wasn't there. Did shovelers break those hands and arms and legs to get them into coffins? Bobby imagined the sound of snapping bone, the pop of swollen flesh. Or did they dig oversize graves and just shove the dead, body after body, into the trenches? Did chocolate men dig graves back then, too? Didn't they have to, if someone told them to? Wasn't the war about them?

“We're going to see all these fields. Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga. Chickamauga is huge and right near Lookout Mountain,” Ricky said. “Kennesaw Mountain is outside Atlanta, which we're driving through.” He started to breathe over his pictures.

“Neat,” said Bobby, slowly opening his drawer of the dresser and looking inside at the folded clothes. “As long as we don't have to take the bus. Chocolate people always sit behind you.”

“We won't,” his brother said. “But that's how they all come here.”

“What do you mean? On the bus?”

Ricky didn't look at him. “Clam up and let me read.”

Friday, June 12

Jacob rode the bus from Atlanta north to Dalton this morning. He left with my husband Hershel. Then Hershel will come back home and Jacob will stay in Dalton.

It will only be for one week.

Let me tell you about it.

I went to the bus terminal with Jacob, in the colored door. The man at the ticket window must have been thinking about something else. After I paid him, he passed only a single ticket to Dalton through the hole and not a ticket back. “Next,” he said. But I didn't leave my spot. I reminded him politely what I had paid and asked for the return ticket, and he apologized and pushed it through to Jacob.

Jacob doesn't own a fishing pole, but I had packed Hershel's old lunch-box with Hershel's tackle from when he was a boy in Dalton. It was settled neatly inside with socks in between. I told Jacob to be careful and not eat the baits and flies.

He looked at the red lunch-box and laughed. “Weeza!”

He had a brown suitcase, too.

“Uncle Frank and Aunt Olivia will meet you at the bus station,” I told him when we took our places on the platform, “so don't be afraid.”

“I'm not afraid,” Jacob said. “I'm not afraid of anything. Poppa will be with me.”

“That's right, as soon as he gets off night work.” I saw the time on the waiting room clock, and I remembered thinking that since I had money only for Jacob's ticket, Hershel still needed to buy his. But I  wasn't worried. Hershel wouldn't be late for this. I kissed Jacob twice while we waited on the platform.

Jacob calls Hershel Poppa, but Hershel is not his poppa. Jacob is my little brother, not our son.

Hershel has a big family. His mother Ruth and stepdaddy Ellis live with us in Atlanta. His brother Frank is married to a nice girl named Olivia, and they live outside Dalton with Olivia's family, including her mother and father and her younger sister Cora, who is fifteen.

I have only my Jacob.

I am Louisa.

Weeza.

Then Hershel hurried onto the platform, shaking his head and waving his ticket. “Just in time,” he said. “They made me do extra.”

“We weren't worried,” I said to him.

“Naw,” Jacob said. “We weren't worried.”

I kissed Jacob once more before he went up the steps onto the bus with Hershel. I watched him go to the back and find a seat near the last open window. Hershel sat on the inside of him. Then the white passengers got on, then the driver.

“Goodbye, Jacob,” I said up to him.

“Bye, Weeza.” He waved. The window was open a crack at the top. There was a man in one of the front seats, and I could tell he looked at me from the window because I have a figure and I can't hide that. I knew Hershel saw him looking because he stared at the back of the man's head when he was looking at me. “Bye-bye,” I said to Jacob. I blew a kiss to Hershel, too. Then the man looked back at Hershel, but Hershel looked only at me then.

The bus drove off. I watched until it was out of sight. Then I left the platform.

Jacob is nine years old and tall for his age, but he is still a boy to me. Hershel loves Jacob like I do. They grew up hard together, Hershel and his brother, Frank, and they don't always get along now. I know stories about their daddy hitting them, but Hershel won't say much about it.

Like Hershel and me, Frank and Olivia have no children, but they did have one who died a baby. A boy. That's why Jacob is visiting them now that school is over, to be like a family with them. There are creeks in Dalton, and the country is cooler in the summer and open, and safer. Jacob has known only Atlanta, though he might remember a little of Mobile from when he was very young.

He has lived with Hershel and me now since Momma went to Ohio to be with my grandma when she got sick. Hershel said Jacob would stay with us until Momma returned. But Momma never left Ohio when Grandma died five years ago; she just stayed in Columbus. She says it's because up north she can work at the counter in a white store and not have so many problems.

Hershel and I were married not long after she left, and it has been fine having Jacob live with us like our own son. I don't talk to Momma as often as I should, and Hershel never does.

I love Jacob with all my heart and want him to have a good stay in the country, but I already miss him. He promised he would call every day from Dalton, and I know he will.

Frank and Olivia don't have a telephone, though there is one in a Negro clothing store, which they'll let Jacob use every afternoon. I'll wait anxiously for his call just before supper, except for Sunday when the store is closed.

What else? Well, we have been to Dalton a few times over the years, all of us together, but not since the car has stopped running. I laugh sometimes when Hershel's stepdaddy Ellis tries to fix it (heal it, he says). He's no good with that car, but he tries. But since we walk to our jobs and the open market is near and Ruth is picked up by Mrs., we don't need a car much anyway.

I just miss my little Jacob and wish he was home again.