The Essay A Novel (8 page)

The words were no sooner out of her mouth when I knew the place I wanted to revisit. I had thought about it often.

I never thought writing was that difficult. Like so many aspects of my education, I never put any real effort into writing because I saw no future in it. But, despite the fact that the rest of my family seemed to shun outside intellectual stimulation, I had become a reader. In our house there was a staticky AM radio in the kitchen, no books or newspapers except for the supermarket tabloids my mother brought home from the truck stop, and rarely a television. Occasionally, Mom would buy a used black-and-white TV from the appliance store in Chillicothe or find a bargain at a flea market, but generally they didn't last long. If the tubes didn't burn out, my Dad found their screens wanting targets for beer bottles during his drunken tirades, and after a few such incidents, Mom just quit buying them.

I was not immediately drawn to reading in my first years of school. I was always relegated to the slower reading groups, not for a lack of ability, but for the fact that I refused to read aloud. I was terrified of making a mistake and subjecting myself to even more derision, so when called upon, I would shake my head and sit with my shoulders hunched forward, staring down at my desk.

The summer following my fifth-grade year, I climbed into the attic for the first time in my life. In my younger years, Edgel and Virgil had told me that human-sized bats lived there and swooped into the upstairs hallway at night in search of food, particularly tasty second graders. I peed my bed on several occasions because I was afraid to walk down the hall to the bathroom. By the time I was twelve I was relatively sure that bats didn't grow to the size of humans. Still, before entering the attic, I slowly cracked the trap door in the ceiling and scanned the rafters, just to be on the safe side.

It was not unlike any other attic—dark, dusty, and stifling hot. I retrieved the flashlight from my hip pocket and shined it around the attic, which was cluttered with old newspapers, a mound of clothing peppered with mouse turds, an open and empty suitcase, a broken kitchen chair, a stack of shingles, and a petrified carcass of either a rat or a squirrel. I explored for a while, looking for nothing in particular but hoping to discover some long-forgotten treasure, when I opened a cardboard box resting atop an old steamer trunk. It was full of books—the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the Bobbsey Twins— apparently left behind by the previous owners of our house.

I brushed the dust off the top book and with my flashlight began reading about the adventures of teenage detectives Frank and Joe Hardy and
The Mystery of Cabin Island.
I read until the beam of my flashlight began to fade, by which time I was two chapters into the mystery. I went outside, climbed into the crook of a low-hanging apple tree limb and read without interruption until I had finished the book in the late afternoon. There was barely enough time to get back into the attic and exchange the book for another Hardy Boys mystery before my father got home from the sawmill.

From my father's perspective, reading was just one more indication that I was an unfit Hickam male. He never once told me not to read, but there was something about the sight of me sitting with a book on my lap that rankled the old man. On one of the few occasions that he caught me reading that summer, he said, “Hey, prissy boy, got nothin' better to do but sit around with your nose in a book? Let's go outside. I'll find something for you to do.” I spent the rest of the day picking up stones around the house and piling them behind the shed.

It didn't stop me. The day I discovered those books in the attic was the day I discovered freedom. I kept the cache to myself, reading the books in the solitude of my room or in the apple tree when my dad wasn't around. By the end of the summer, I had read each book twice.

The following summer, I was slinging skippers across Salt Lick Creek when an old school bus that had been painted lime green and had steel plates welded over most of the windows rolled up Red Dog Road. It stopped near our drive and the man behind the wheel motioned me over to the open door. He had a brush cut of white hair, black horn-rims, and an easy smile. Leaning forward with his arms crossed atop the steering wheel, he asked, “Do you want to get some books?”

I frowned and peeked inside. The seats had been taken out of the bus and replaced with shelves, which held hundreds of books.

“What is this thing?” I asked.

“Why, it's a bookmobile. It's a library on wheels. Haven't you ever seen one?”

I shook my head. “No, sir. Never in my life.”

“Well, do you want some books?”

“I don't know,” I said, unsure of the proper answer.

“Can you read?”

“Sure I can read.”

“Do you have a library card?”

Again, I shook my head. I didn't. There was a library in McArthur, but I had never set foot inside. “No, sir.”

“Do you want one?”

“How much does it cost?”

He held my gaze for a moment, and then I saw the familiar look of pity in his eyes. “Not a dime, son.” He turned off the engine and spun sideways in his seat. “If you get a library card, I can let you borrow some books to read.” He affixed a sheet of paper to a clipboard and handed it down to me. A piece of string was tied to the steel clasp on the clipboard and taped to a pen, which I used to fill out my name and address.

He nodded and filled out a blue, cardboard library card, handed it to me and said, “Okay, James L. Hickam, pick yourself out some books.” I wandered up and down the aisle several times without so much as touching a book, almost paralyzed with fear of the opportunity before me. “You can take four. I'll be back about this time next week. When you bring those back, you can get four more.” I looked, but didn't touch, and couldn't make a decision. “What are you interested in?”

I shrugged. “I don't know.”

“You're not much for talkin', are you James L. Hickam?” He walked back and pulled a book with a red cover from the shelf. “Do you like pirates?”

“Sure.” Polio and I played pirates in the big oak tree across the creek.

“
Treasure Island
,” he said, handing me the book. “There are lots of pirates in that one. Here's
Peter Pan
, there's a nasty bit of a pirate in that one, too.” He pulled out two other books, the titles of which have since escaped my memory. I thanked the old man and scampered back up the hill.

We walk through many doors in our lifetime. It is the accumulation of these seemingly minor passages that shape our lives. Most often, it is years after we pass over a threshold before we realize the significance of the moment.

That was not the case with the books I read that summer. I remember distinctly sitting in the crook of the apple tree and realizing the impact they were having on my life. It was as though a seal around my brain had been broken and my imagination was finally free to roam. I enjoyed the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but the books I read from the bookmobile enabled me to create in my mind's eye a world beyond Red Dog Road. I began traveling the world and beyond with Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Herman Melville. Our high school had a library and I checked out books regularly, often forsaking my texts and school work for the fiction of John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway.

I did not associate reading with education. I associated it with escape, if only temporarily, from the dust and despair of Red Dog Road. Over the years, I envisioned worlds beyond the one in which I lived, though my imagination was not great enough to fathom an escape.

I certainly had no intention of winning the essay contest. I was sure that some of the smarter girls with their flowery prose and excessive use of adjectives would win. That was fine. I didn't make the decision to put effort into the essay because I thought I had a chance to win the competition. That wasn't the least bit important to me. Rather, it was important that I demonstrate to Miss Singletary that she had made the right move by allowing me to advance to senior English.

After dinner that night, I went out back to the shed where Edgel's Rocket 88 rested under a tarp covered with dust and pigeon droppings. The last of the evening sun had disappeared beyond the mountain of red dog, but the stark boards of the shed radiated the heat of the afternoon. I squatted down on a cement block and leaned against the shed, closing my eyes to the last of the orange rays. My mind's eye took over and slowly, I began to focus on a time and place years past. At first, I was surrounded in a muted gray fog. Then, like a gentle breeze forming up behind me, the fog began to part and I could see the water. It was greenish-brown and still, and then the tip of the canoe cut through the river, pushing a tiny wake toward the shore. At the helm of the tiny outboard that was clamped to the side of the canoe was a young boy in a faded, hand-me-down T-shirt and dirty canvas sneakers with holes in the toes. There was a red cooler, sandwiches, bass in the snags, and a pie-faced man with sunburned cheeks and an affable grin. The images continued to grow. There were foot falls in the shoals and the eruption of the sandy bottom where crayfish darted as the craft scraped on its way to deep water. Snappers sunned themselves on outcroppings and dragonflies danced inches above the water's surface, taunting the bass below.

Occasionally, I would open my eyes a sliver to jot down ideas in my notebook, small phrases that I wanted to retain. For the next week, I kept the notebook in hand, recording ideas as they crossed my mind. As the story began to take shape, I found it difficult not to think about the essay. By the following Monday, the day of the competition, I had practically memorized all that I wanted to write.

As we entered the cafeteria, we were each handed a blue notebook into which we would record our essay. A round little woman from the Alpha & Omega Literary Society explained that the completed essays would be sent to the English Department at Ohio University for judging. The judges would select the top three essays.

A portable chalk board was dragged to one end of the cafeteria where Miss Singletary wrote, “A Place and Time That I Wish I Could Revisit.”

Miss Singletary said, “No talking. There are to be no other papers on your table. Spelling counts, but you may use your dictionary. You have until the end of third period to complete your essay. You may begin.”

Chapter Five

I

had not openly expressed affection for a girl since the Rebecca McGonagle debacle in the fifth grade. Or, as I referred to it in later years, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. After that particular incident, girls were off-limits to me as a possible repeat of that humiliation was more than I could bear.

Rebecca McGonagle had a cute, round face, a slight overbite, and wore her hair in an auburn braid that swung like the rhythmic movement on a grandfather clock when she walked. Her voice was soft and lilting, and she spoke as though she were always short of breath. Rebecca's desk in Mrs. McKinstry's fifth-grade class was diagonally in front of me, so I could catch glimpses of her without fear of being caught. I would often daydream that we were married and living in the shed out back of the house, which I had, with my own hands, converted into a dream home where we ate popcorn, drank sodas, and cuddled under a quilt while watching television.

I was so enamored with Rebecca that I made her a special Valentine's Day card out of construction paper, a paper doily that I found in a buffet drawer, and a candy heart that had “I Love You” printed on it. I folded a piece of red construction paper in half, pasted the doily to the front of the card, added a heart of pink construction paper, and then pasted the candy heart in the middle of the one made of paper. Inside I wrote:

Dear Rebecca:

I like you. A lot. Will you be my girlfriend?

Signed
,

Jimmy Lee Hickam.

The card was too big for any of the envelopes we had around the house so I used red foil Christmas wrapping paper to make a special envelope. At our class Valentine's Day party, I watched as Rebecca emptied her Valentines on her desk. Mixed in with the small, store-bought Valentines was my oversized envelope. I struggled to keep a smile from consuming my face as I watched her separate my envelope from the also-rans. She shook her head and shrugged as the girls around her desk asked who it was from and urged her to open the envelope.

She smiled as she gently pried open the foil while the other girls gathered around. When she opened the card and the others saw it was signed, “Jimmy Lee Hickam,” they sang like a perfect chorus, “eeeew,” then began laughing. They sang:

Rebecca and Jimmy, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G;

First comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes Rebecca with a baby carriage.

As the girls continued to laugh, Rebecca burst into tears and ran from the room. Mrs. McKinstry sent two of the girls to the restroom to check on Rebecca and then inspected the card. She stared hard at me and sneered, “You shouldn't embarrass people like that, Mr. Hickam.”

I had never meant for anyone but Rebecca to see the card, but it got passed around the room so that everyone had a chance to laugh at Jimmy Lee. They were unmerciful in their teasing of Rebecca and I felt bad for having put her through the ordeal. Subsequently, I stopped daydreaming of the two of us living happily together and eating popcorn in the shed.

After that day, I did not give girls much consideration. The change in this policy was initiated two weeks into my senior year when, as we were walking off the football field after practice, Hugh Figurski asked me if I was going to the homecoming dance. “Probably not,” I said.

He frowned. “Why not? It's your senior year. You have to go to the dance.”

To that point, I hadn't given it a second's thought. Social events had never been part of my life. It was bad enough getting shunned at school. The last thing I wanted to do was provide an additional venue for abuse. But since I was the captain and one of the stars of the football team, I convinced myself that that would make me more appealing.