The Year the Lights Came On (2 page)

Dupree was an only child and when he became old enough to count change, his father had positioned him behind the candy counter in his general store (“Ain’t he cute? Daddy’s little helper,” people used to croon), and there, behind the candy
counter, Dupree learned to behave in an arrogant and lordly manner.

If you cared to cater to Dupree’s demands (and they were mostly nasty and harmful), you might expect special favors—free jawbreakers, or Bazooka bubble gum, or, occasionally, a whole candy bar. That is how Dupree became the leader of the Highway 17 Gang. At Emery Junior High School, Dupree was always rationing out penny Kits, bribing attention. Penny Kits were great persuaders. It was almost impossible to refuse penny Kits.

Once, Freeman and R. J. Waller and Otis Finlay told Sonny Haynes and Wayne Heath that they had observed Dupree dipping Bazooka bubble gum in a small pail of mysterious liquid, and then rewrapping it.

“If it’s what I guess, it’s that stuff farmers use killing pig worms,” whispered Freeman.

“What’s pig worms?” asked Wayne, paling.

Freeman laughed. “It’s worms that grow in a pig’s guts,” he said. “But they get a couple of drops of that medicine and it cures ’em, or it makes ’em sick as a mad dog. One of the two.”

Sonny and Wayne spent the rest of the day quivering and rubbing their stomachs, their lips dry and cracked, their faces splotched with anxiety.

Later, when they confronted Dupree with the fear that they were dying, Dupree found Freeman and began to rage. “I’m warnin’ you. You quit sayin’ them things about me, and I mean it. You nothin’ but a Boyd, anyhow, and everybody knows what a Boyd is. No better’n hogs, that’s what. That’s where you oughta be, over there in that old swamp, wallowin’ with them hogs. Cause you nothin’. Ever’ last one of you. You nothin’. All of you. Maybe someday. Maybe someday, but that’s a long time comin’.”

Freeman hit Dupree very hard. Freeman did not like people shouting at him.

On Sunday following, we pledged on the Big Gully Oath to be alert for future trouble.

And Otis cried, “Ain’t nothin’ never comin’ between none of us!”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

We were bold and we were loud. But we could not shout away the echo of Dupree’s anger: “Maybe someday. Maybe someday, but that’s a long time comin’.”

2

MAYBE SOMEDAY, BOY.

We often heard those words—heard them in voices, heard them in contemptuous stares, heard them in silky, knowing smiles.

Someday was Time.

To Dupree Hixon and his friends—those who accepted his favors and tagged obediently after him—Time was their advantage. In their thinking, they had attained Time; to them, Time was position.

To us, Time was bodyless, formless. Time begged to be dimensional, to be real, to be touchable, to be placeable.

When you are very small and people sentence you to Someday, you understand how Time begs to be placeable.

Though we did not know it, Time began to have meaning for us in 1945.

In 1945, the war ended.

The fighters stopped fighting, convinced by the finality of two puffy clouds polluted with itchy little particles of death. Two puffy clouds billowing up and lapping their shadows over Japanese
cities called Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the people caught in the umbrellas of those clouds watched horrified and defeated as skin and flesh and bone melted in the most peculiar pain anyone had ever known. Right or wrong, that was that. Period. Argue it forever. Condemn Truman, or praise him. It happened.

(It is a personal aside to that first atomic day, the day of Hiroshima, but I remember that Wesley and Freeman and R. J. Waller and I had been playing War in the Big Gully. It was a day of fury, of bullets splattering about us like great raindrops, but we were not afraid. We had become accustomed to Imaginary Death with Imaginary Men falling back through their lives, their voices weakening to primeval crying, and then vanishing into the remembered wombs of their mothers. But the dying, even of Imaginary Men, had given us a stern resolve: the war must be ended. Freeman suggested bombs, and we gathered an arsenal of dirt clods and bombed to smithereens every supply road and suspicious straw hut in the Big Gully. And then it became late in the day and we heard the yodeling call to supper. In Play War, there was always sundown, always the lure of home being only a racer’s sprint through the woods, and we would put away our machine guns and pistols of mountain laurel and chinaberry sticks, and we would rise up from our wounds and bid those we had fought a peaceful rest. Then we would One-Two-Three-Go into our racer’s sprint. At sundown, War was just a game. And so it was on that first atomic day, when our dirt clods killed Hiroshima.)

*

Those who lived in Royston emerged cautiously from a bomb shelter of fear and trembling after World War II. There was a feeble effort at a street celebration, but no parades, no jubilant shouting, “We’ve won. We’ve won.”

No confetti.

No foaming bottles of champagne.

The people of Royston looked about, took their dreaded census, and mourned those who had been spent in death at such places as Corregidor, Manila, Bataan, Iwo Jima, Belgium, the Hürtgen Forest, Morocco—faraway places, places with names as foreign as the realization that a son or a husband had been murdered in what mankind regarded as a curious dignity.

For a sliver of time (it passed so quickly into ether), the people of Royston lingered in cemeteries with rakes and shovels and hedge clippers, and tended the graves of their dead, their long dead. It would be months, perhaps years, before the United States government returned the bodies of the soldiers, but there was a need to be in cemeteries, a need to become acquainted with the mood of that postdated anguish; a need to trace, in the mind’s tracing, the exact spot for that exacting rectangle. And there were the thoughts, always the thoughts.

Oh,
Heavenly Father, What to Do?

How Can I… We…?

This, You See, Was
the Last Known Photograph of Him—See,
by His Gun.

He Never
Saw the Baby—Never…

Remember, Sweet Jesus—Sweet, Sweet Jesus—Is Thy Comforter and Thy Strength. Forever
and Ever.

Amen. Amen. Amen.

In that lingering, in that sliver of time, the American Rehabilitation began. Reforms and pledges and G. I. Bills and no more collecting scrap iron, boys. No more rationing, Mother. Keep your eye peeled, Bargain Hunter, because—Lordamercy—there’s lots of bargains going up for the War Surplus Auction Block. And it
was Over, Over, Over. Too bad FDR had not seen it through. Never mind, they’d not forget him. There’s that four-column newspaper photo of FDR at his best, a stylish tilt to his cigarette holder, a sharp, affable gleam in his eye, and if you are Democrat and American you’d better, by shot, have it thumbtacked to the wall.

In that beginning, that sliver of time, all of this happened in the American Rehabilitation, and the people of Royston did not realize it had happened. Everything was spinning too fast. It was the tag end of 1945 and the world was on an endless drunk, whirling to a carnival barker’s call—sassy and tempting. The people of Royston, like people in thousands of other places, were still anemic and pale from the Great Depression, and now this, World War II, and all these men, these men gone to God or Forever or Worms or Wherever.

That was the puzzle. The bewilderment. The lamentations of ministers saying God and Sweet Jesus and Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, and Blessed Are They Who Suffer, but there was no one to answer—really answer—why these men were gone.

There was only one mercy:
it
was over. The Great Depression. World War Number Two. It was over.

A moment to rest, please. A moment to linger. Let the American Rehabilitation go forth with all good speed. One moment longer, please.

A sliver of time to take it all in.

*

After their moment, the people of Royston began again. It was a silent, numb beginning. Farmers from the tiny communities that surrounded Royston and were, by Rural Route, U.S. Postal Service, part of Royston, met on Saturdays in a ritual that was ancient and honorable. They came from Emery, from Vanna, from Harrison, Eagle Grove, Goldmine, Redwine, Sandy Cross, Airline, Canon, and other dirt-road directions, and they stood in twos and threes, like stark landscape paintings. They stood in front of Bowman’s Drug Store, or Silverman’s Clothing, or Foster’s Hardware, and they talked in whispers about their sick, used-up land. They were all solace-seekers, a convention of solace-seekers, and they lingered, lingered, lingered, waiting for something—perhaps miracles. It was as though they believed someone (a Moses) would arrive to lead them away to some place better, some hauntingly beautiful place where the land was rich and they could plant crops in spring without being always a year behind in payment to the Boss, or the bank.

But Moses never appeared.

Just before sundown, each Saturday, on some cue instinctive to them, the farmers would drift off and climb upon their mule-drawn wagons that had been parked in a lot below the depot, and they would say their low, resigned goodbyes to one another. Their children would take their faces away from the windows of Harden’s 5 & 10 and join their fathers. Always at sundown, you could see rings on Harden’s 5 & 10 windows, where shallow-faced children had pressed their noses and breathed moist circles as they stood motionlessly and made up games with the dolls and balls and bats and gloves and toy cars teasing them from brightly painted counters.

*

In 1946, Time began to be identified with newness.

The economy bristled and people began to be healed of the disease of uncertainty.

You could hear it in voices, see it in faces, sense it in the energy
of games and laughter, anger and restlessness. There was a mood, a fever, to 1946. Men who had returned from the war assumed positions of responsibility and admiration. They made inspiring first-person speeches about liberty and what it meant, and how the bullies of the world had better mind their manners. Occasionally, they even told light, breezy stories about the war, laughing heartily at themselves as though humor freed them from the inescapable seriousness of what they had seen and known.

The cotton mill placed an advertisement in
The Royston Record
, seeking employees. A sewing plant was officially opened by His Honor, the mayor. Farmers began to listen to what County Agents had to say about subsoiling, land-testing, seed-treating, or about planting kudzu and lespedeza to stop topsoil from washing away in the ugly scars of erosion. The sound of John Deere tractors stuttered even at night. There was a rousing demonstration against some northern union which tried to infiltrate the labor market, and a group of noble people, born of the heritage of independence, staged a funeral and buried the union in rites that were both circus and frightening. Everyone seemed aware of being embraced by a new history of the world, and everyone knew it would be a history never forgotten.

The awful years were tender, healing scars by late summer of 1946. The World Series became a festive event again, and Roystonians began telling outrageous lies about Ty Cobb, who was a native and a legend. If you were born in a twenty-mile radius of Royston, you were reared believing, without compromise, in God, Santa Claus, and Ty Cobb. Older citizens who had known Cobb as a boy, loved to trap strangers with the trivia question, “What was Cobb’s lifetime batting average?” It was .367, the best of them all,
and that, by shot, was more than most north Georgia towns could talk about.

*

And, then, there was 1947.

Time became placeable in 1947.

The ump-pah-pah was everywhere, a rhythm like a Vachel Lindsay poem, with reader and chorus, cymbal and trumpet. It was a year for putting pennies in loafers, for “Just a sec,” and mustard seed necklaces, for giddiness and once-a-month socials at Wind’s Mill. It was the year the Home Demonstration Club was organized, and the Eden County Fairgrounds Committee advertised an all-out, better-than-ever Fall Fair, with rides and thrills and games of chance and (Freeman told us) a freak show with the most astonishing membership of any freak show in the world.

Ump-pah-pah.

Ump-pah-pah.

1947.

Wesley’s year.

I think of it as Wesley’s year because Wesley was the real and touchable and placeable something of 1947.

Wesley was eighteen months older than I. Lynn, our sister (people often called her Lynn-Wynn, fusing her name with a hyphen), was eighteen months older than Wesley. In the spring of 1947, Lynn was in the ninth grade, Wesley was in the eighth grade, and I was in the seventh grade. Nine, eight, seven. Seven, eight, nine. A, B, C. Mother used to call us her triplets, her Stair-Step Triplets. It was Mother’s way of confessing her failure in selective family planning. That failure was humorously extended because she had had ample practice: before her Stair-Step Triplets, she had given birth to eight other children. I am told Mother vowed I would
be the last; eleven children represented a superlative effort. Six years after I was born, Garry arrived, and he was not adopted as we often told him he was.

By adhering to the most elastic of mathematical permissions, we learned to round off numbers and concluded that an average of two years separated the first eleven children. We had to omit Garry from this formula; to include him would have forced us into fractions. And two years was a neat, certain figure, accountable and rhythmic. I preferred to think I was accountable, not accidental.