The Essay A Novel (19 page)

Coach Battershell waved at the ground three times with his right hand, a tacit signal to relax and keep my mouth shut. Mr. Lynch pinched at the material in the back of the jacket and asked, “How does that feel?”

“Feels great.”

He held up some ties, showing me how they would look with the jacket. “Do you know how to tie a neck tie?”

“No sir. I've got a clip-on that I wear on game days.”

“It's not hard.” He put one around his neck and instructed me to mimic him. “Make sure the tip of the long end is hanging at your crotch,” he said. “When it's tied it should just cover your belt buckle.” It was easy.

I stood in the three-way mirror, with khaki slacks, white shirt, navy jacket, and a maroon-and-gold-striped tie. I could feel myself tearing up a little when I turned to Miss Singletary. “What do you think?”

“I think you're a handsome young man.”

I smiled. “Don't say that in front of Coach Battershell. You know how he gets.”

I changed back into my other clothes, which suddenly seemed woefully inadequate, and Mr. Lynch walked the new clothes to the seamstress in the back room. He came back out to the main desk and began adding numbers and talking to himself. “Let's see, one jacket, um-hum, four pair of slacks, hmmm, five shirts, pick yourself out an oxblood belt from the rack behind you, five ties, um-hum.” I put the belt on the counter as he said, “How's a hundred and sixty-five dollars sound?”

Ridiculously low, I thought, but I said, “It sounds great.” I counted out the money and placed it on the counter top.

“Thank you. It was a pleasure doing business with you, young man. Are you going to the game?”

“Absolutely,” Coach Battershell said.

“Good. I'll get Alice working on them right now. Stop by after the game and you can take them with you.”

As we walked away from the building and headed toward campus, I said, “He practically gave me those clothes.”

“Someday, Jimmy Lee, you'll have a chance to do someone a good turn. When that opportunity presents itself, do it. It's called paying ahead.”

The air was heavy with the smell of burning leaves—the first-burners, shagbark hickory, and buckeye. The hillside that surrounded the campus was still awash in gold and maroon and orange as the maples were only starting to drop their foliage. It was two hours until kickoff and Coach Battershell and Miss Singletary walked me around the campus and through a dormitory and a classroom building. “What do you think?” Coach asked.

“It's pretty big. How do you find your way around campus?”

“If you're on the football team, they give you a personal chauffeur to drive you around.”

“Really?”

“No, not really.” He grinned and arched his brows, a little disappointed, I think, that I fell for that.

“Who cuts all that grass?” I asked.

“Students on academic probation. It's part of the university's program to give them the incentive to do better.”

I didn't bite that time. “How many times did you have to cut it?”

“Never. I was a four-point student . . . almost.”

Miss Singletary groaned.

We were buying a hot dog and soda under the stands when the Ohio University band marched into the Peden Stadium. The drum section beat out a cadence that was like rolling thunder out of the hills, reverberating through the stadium. I had goose bumps from the top of my head to my ankles. We climbed the home stands and watched the game, an Ohio University loss to Bowling Green, but it was no less satisfying.

Afterward, Mr. Lynch was waiting at the store to hand me my clothes. He wished me good luck in the writing contest and we went to dinner at a restaurant outside of town that a hundred years earlier had been a warehouse on the Hocking Valley Canal. I ordered a steak and was the first to put the napkin in my lap.

Chapter Fifteen

T

he Vinton County chapter of the Alpha & Omega Literary Society would host its countywide essay competition on the third Saturday morning of November, the night after our last football game of the season. Although I was not privy to their conversations, I had the feeling that the scheduling of football and the essay competition was creating some angst between my football coach and my writing coach. My football coach, of course, wanted me focused solely on Friday's game with McArthur Central Catholic. We were both undefeated in the conference. A win would give East Vinton its first conference championship in decades and a chance to make the state playoffs.

My writing coach, however, was less concerned about McArthur Central Catholic than the Saturday morning competition, which began at 8 am. She was drilling me hard during my study hall and sent time-consuming evening assignments home with me. This dissatisfied the football coach greatly as he wanted me spending my free time watching films of the McArthur Central Catholic Crusaders. As we were jogging out to the field on Wednesday, he said, “You need to be spending more time in the film room.”

There was no one within earshot. “I know. Do you want to talk to Miss Singletary about it?”

One side of his mouth curled up and he said, “Not really.”

On Monday morning of that week, my dad showered, shaved, and put on his only set of good clothes, the same ones he had always worn when we had visited Edgel in prison. As I was leaving to catch the bus for school, he was sitting at the kitchen table staring into a cup of black coffee, a cigarette burning in the crease of his yellowed fingers. He was twisting at the steel wristband of his watch the way he did when he was nervous. “Good luck,” I said as I opened the back door.

He didn't look up, but nodded once and uttered a barely audible, “Thanks.”

On that brisk November morning, Nick Hickam was swallowing his considerable pride and going back to the sawmill to apologize to Mr. Morgan and ask for his old job, or any job he would give him. He didn't care any longer. He was out of money, out of credit at the bars, and he simply had to work. I would imagine that this was about the most difficult and demeaning task of my dad's life, but he didn't have many options. Jobs were scarce in Vinton County, Ohio, and he was ill-qualified for anything beyond the mundane and dangerous confines of a sawmill. Virgil had called him a week earlier and told Dad that he could get him a job with the carnival, which was touring in Florida and Texas during the winter. I always figured that the prospect of working alongside Virgil at the carnival was what motivated Dad to go talk to Mr. Morgan.

I didn't like my dad, though I wanted to. In every failed relationship, each party usually carries part of the blame. But the only thing I did wrong was want to go to college. We didn't have much of a relationship before that pronouncement, but that sealed it. My dad was a bitter man who hated his lot in life, but was unwilling to do anything about it, and he took out his frustration and anger on his sons and wife.

That afternoon at practice, while I was waiting my turn at a blocking drill, I looked up to see the Farnsworth brothers' red, flatbed Ford parked along the drainage ditch on the far side of the parking lot. A green Pontiac station wagon with a crushed front end was chained to the bed. Edgel was in the stands watching practice. About once a week, he would stop by to watch when he was passing by and saw us on the practice field. Edgel liked watching me on the field and hadn't missed a game since getting out of prison, even standing in the pouring rain at the Brilliant Memorial game, wearing nothing but a vinyl jacket and his grease-smudged Farnsworth ball cap.

It was surprising that Edgel had taken such an interest in me. During the years of visits to the prison, he seemed so indifferent to his family. He had wearily tried to appease my mother by answering her many questions, but was often verbally confrontational with the old man and barely civil to Virgil. I was treated as an afterthought—the little brother that he didn't know. Now he was acting more like my father than my father. At least he acted more interested. When he got home each night, he stopped by my room and asked about the writing assignments. He read them all, every once in a while stopping to ask me the meaning of a word. I was afraid it would embarrass him, but he liked it. After he read each paper, Edgel would shake his head and say, “I can't believe a brother of mine can write like this.”

I enjoyed the visits. I was actually getting to know Edgel. For years, I had been led to believe he was inherently evil. Every time the old man got mad at me for even the slightest infraction, he would slap me upside the back of the head and say, “You're going to end up in Mansfield, just like your brother.” He intimated that Edgel was the devil incarnate and for years I had no reason to believe otherwise. But now, I found that I really liked Edgel. He was soft-spoken and thoughtful. He liked to talk about school and football. He wanted to know why I didn't have a girlfriend. “I thought the captain of the football team always had a girlfriend,” he said.

“I don't have time for girls.”

“Boy, there's always time for girls.” He winked. “You ain't funny, are ya?”

“No, Edgel, I ain't funny.”

“Just askin'.”

Edgel told me on several occasions that he never wanted to go back to prison, revealing bits and pieces about the brutality inside the walls. “It's no place to be, and that's all you need to know about prison.”

He had been working steady for the Farnsworth twins almost since he got home, driving and fetching wrecks and parts and occasionally stripping out cars in the junkyard for customers. The twins paid him cash and it was keeping him busy, which was a good thing for Edgel. He needed to find something a little more stable than the junkyard, but it put money in his pocket and kept him occupied.

After practice, Edgel was waiting outside of the locker room, leaning against the driver's side door of the Ford and scraping the grease from under his fingernails with a pocketknife. “Wanna ride?” he asked. “I've got to swing past the junkyard and drop off the Pontiac.” He hadn't seen me since my trip to Collegiate Corner. He pointed at me with the tip of his knife and said, “Them's some pretty fancy duds, little brother.”

I was wearing a pair of khakis and a blue shirt. “This is what I spent my money on,” I said.

“Looks good. Maybe you'll get ya a girl now.”

I checked the passenger seat for grease, covered a smudge with one of my blue notebooks, and slid in. Luke Farnsworth met us in the junkyard with a fork lift. Once he had the Pontiac a foot off the bed of the truck, he said, “T-t-take 'er a w-way, E-edgel,” and Edgel pulled the truck forward.

“See you in the morning,” Edgel said.

“N-n-night,” Luke said.

We got into the Rocket 88 for the short ride back to Red Dog Road. Edgel had been tinkering with the car. It was still covered in primer and needed some serious work on the interior, but its engine sounded like it had just come off the showroom floor. Edgel Hickam was not without his shortcomings, but he was good with his hands and a wizard under the hood of a car.

Edgel pulled the Rocket onto the gravel pad in front of the shed. Once he had killed the engine, we could hear my dad scream, slurring his words, “Do you think it makes me happy, woman? Huh, is that what you think?”

Edgel looked at me and blew air from his mouth. “Good God, not again,” he moaned.

Through the torn screen of the storm door we could see my parents in the living room. Mom was crying and holding both hands to her cheeks. Dad was struggling to pull on a jacket that had gotten hooked under an elbow. The television news was on, something about the president and Watergate. Both parents turned and looked when they heard the squeak of the opening storm door. When we were both inside and the door closed, Edgel asked, “What's wrong?”

Mom held out an open hand toward Dad, her lips clenched shut and jaw quivering as she tried to fight back tears. She had a streaked red spot on the side of her cheek, the evidence of a Hickam backhand. Her eyes were red and her chest heaved. She looked exhausted and ready to collapse, and I assumed they had been at it for a while.

“I'll tell you what's wrong, that cocksucker Morgan, that's what's wrong,” Dad yelled.

“He wouldn't give you your job back?” I asked.

Dad looked at me with a familiar look of disgust. “No, college boy, he didn't. I got in there and was ready to practically beg for my job back and he had me thrown off the property. He called the cops and said if I ever set foot on his property again, he'd have me arrested.” He looked for a moment as if he would cry, then he raised an index finger and pointed it at my mother. “This is all your fault, bitch. You're the one who made me go down there. ‘Ask for your old job back, Nick. Please. Mr. Morgan will give it to you; he's a nice man,'” my dad mocked my mother. “Well, you see what he gave me, didn't you? Jack shit, that's what.”

After being rejected by Mr. Morgan, I assumed that the old man had gone straight to the Double Eagle Bar, drinking away whatever cash he had in his pocket, and then mooching drinks for the rest of the afternoon. Like an ember that smolders in a couch for hours before erupting in an intense fire that quickly consumes everything around it, the old man had done the slow burn at the Double Eagle so that his temper could be in full rage by the time he got home.