The Year the Lights Came On (4 page)

Dupree pledged to meet Freeman later.

“Better bring Mason,” advised Freeman.

“I will, buddy,” Dupree retorted. “I’m not puttin’ up with you much longer.”

After school we strolled confidently below the lunchroom to witness the scheduled bout. We were amazed at the punishment Dupree could endure.

Dupree and the Highway 17 Gang were waiting.

“You ready, Candyface?” Freeman asked, smiling.

“I’m ready,” answered Mason, Dupree’s cousin.

Freeman was surprised. “Well, all right,” he said. “You know what you lettin’ yourself in for?”

“Better’n you,” Mason replied icily.

We circled them in two half-moons, the Highway 17 Gang and Our Side. Dupree was cracking his knuckles and giggling.

Freeman rushed Mason, and Mason stepped neatly to one side.

He caught Freeman by the shoulder and turned him. Then Mason assumed a boxer’s stance.

“Get him,” shouted Dupree.

Mason hit Freeman with three quick left jabs, faked a right, faked a left, and then exploded a right cross on Freeman’s nose. Freeman fell backward, dazed.

The Highway 17 Gang laughed and cheered. They began dancing around Freeman and chanted, “Freee-e-man got his butt beat. Freee-e-man got his butt beat. Freee-e-man got his butt beat.”

Wesley stepped between Mason and Freeman.

“I don’t know nothin’ about you,” Wesley said to Mason, “but you have just made a mistake.”

“He’s my cousin, Wesley Wynn, and he’s a Golden Gloves champion,” Dupree hissed. “And he’ll whip your butt, too, buddy.”

Wesley did not move. He kept staring at Mason.

“Dupree knows that Freeman’s got a temper,” Wesley said, his voice
low and soft. “Now, I can keep him off you, if you tell him you’re sorry.”

Mason’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Kiss my tail, hick,” he snapped.

Wesley smiled and stepped aside. “Freeman,” he said.

Freeman rose slowly. Blood seeped over his top lip. The crowd became silent.

“C’mon,” teased Mason, motioning Freeman toward him.

“Get him,” Dupree urged. “Get him, Mason.”

Freeman stepped in, ducked a jab, reached through Mason’s defense and slapped him on the face with an open hand. Mason rolled to his right, stunned. Freeman lunged forward and landed five bruising blows so fast it sounded like an automatic rifle. Mason crumpled to the ground.

No one moved. Mason swayed on his knees, looked at Freeman through two glass eyes, then fell playfully on his side.

“Dupree,” Wesley said quietly, “you ought to know better.”

4

THE GREAT DEPRESSION and World War Number Two had been our only experience with the Larger World, and we had inherited—through some curious process of osmosis—a possessed sense of belonging. Belonging was our constant defense, our way of warding off the suspected Great End. The Larger World had issued messages that we lived in a temporary time, that we, ourselves, were temporary. (The atomic bomb was one thing; now, in 1947, there was rumor about a bomb of such unpredictable destruction that certain international scientists were afraid it would create a molecular reaction and Earth would disintegrate in a series of explosions, like a string of Chinese firecrackers.)

Because of the Larger World, and what it said to us in the voices of the Radio Evening News Network and eight-point type of
The
Anderson Independent,
we had been mightily influenced and had adopted the habit of clustering, as though clustering was an affirmation of our existence: if we saw one another, spoke with one another, then it must be true—we had survived.

In clustering, we became isolationists; in isolation, we assumed identities; in identity, we were assigned value; in value, we learned of imperatives; and, in imperatives, we realized perspective.

To the members of Our Side, perspective was conditioned by boundaries. Boundaries gave us reach, held us, dared us; boundaries tutored us in the deeper significance of belonging.

Wesley and I lived by the boundaries of Black Pool Swamp, circling us in a horseshoe from the south and east and west. To the north we were somehow contained by Banner’s Crossing and Rakestraw Bridge Road.

There was a sense of being centrifugally leashed to the center of our north and south, east and west boundaries; the center was Home and Home would spin us out, but only to the invisible, protective edges of where we wandered, and then Home would draw us back again.

We could not mark those boundaries by stake and flag. They were not taught by a line drawn in shoe-edge, or plotted on some map from the Official Office of Official Boundaries. Our boundaries were established by instinct. We knew. We simply knew. We could chase after laughter and echoes of laughter until we were exhausted with exhilaration, and we could wander farther and farther away, safe, protected, until that one step—that one step too far, too threatening—and then we would retreat. No one told us to return. We knew. We simply knew. We knew when we had ventured too far, as though our sense of equilibrium had been savagely attacked.

But the Highway 17 Gang did not understand about boundaries. Highway 17 was alive with people moving, going great distances,
and once having passed, whizzing by in their automobiles, they were not likely to return that way again. The Highway 17 Gang watched those passing people and believed directions—north and south, east and west—were gray concrete roads drawn in heavy lines on service station maps.

The Highway 17 Gang did not have boundaries. They had yards. Somehow, they believed they were blessed.

*

To Dupree and his friends, we were mutants, outsiders, and when we argued or fought, it was to defend against the hurt of our treatment. We won our battles, those private, quick, angry battles, but we could not assuage the ache. We wanted to know why—
really
why—we were mutations. Why plagued us. Why gnawed at us, made us wonder about our traditions of Christian forgiveness. Why made us doubt our birthrights as premium Southerners, whose bloodlines had been purified in the mating beds of humble but bold English and Irish emigrants, with an occasional Indian partner to make the claim of being American a genetic fact as well as an assumption. Why was a forever question. Why was an initiation chant we learned as first graders, when we were tiny and frightened and willingly asked anyone who would listen, “Why?”

We were told excuses, not answers.

And as we grew older and perhaps more vulnerable, the Highway 17 Gang continued its assault. They laughed at the way we dressed. They giggled when one of us committed an embarrassing error in school. They made obscene little tooting sounds and pointed accusing fingers at the smaller children of Our Side.

They called us white trash, or hicks. And no one could tell us why—
really
why.

Until spring, 1947, when Time became placeable for us. Until Wesley’s year.

*

Two weeks after our first day of softball practice, as competition festered for positions on the team, Jack Crider slapped a double past Wayne Heath in a choose-up game. Jack belonged to Our Side; Wayne was a member in good standing of the Highway 17 Gang. As Jack stood on second, clownishly accepting our cheers, Wayne retrieved the ball, rushed to second, pushed Jack off base and tagged him out.

Jack did not appreciate the tactic. He determined that Wayne should be retired from softball and proceeded to administer the service. Dupree rushed to Wayne’s aid and Freeman sprinted after Dupree to even the conflict.

Jack was dismissed from the softball team for two weeks. Freeman was sternly lectured. Wayne was sent home to get a shirt with buttons. And Dupree’s eye was dressed in an ice pack.

It was an ancient argument, and it had occurred too often.

At recess the following day, Wesley led Our Side below the school lunchroom and canning plant, into a small stand of new ground pines and oaks. Freeman kept his rabbit tobacco buried there in a Prince Albert tobacco tin and at recess he loved to get in a couple of quick puffs.

“It ain’t right,” complained Jack. “Shoot, Wesley, I didn’t do nothin’ to Wayne. I was just standing there on second and he come and knocked me off and tagged me out. It just don’t seem right.”

A chorus of yeahs endorsed Jack’s anxiety. Wesley nodded his
head and picked up a pine needle and began to braid the three slender shoots. Freeman rolled a cigarette out of a torn front page from a
Grit
newspaper.

“Somethin’ ought to be done,” Freeman declared, tipping a kitchen match to his cigarette.

Wesley stared at the braided pine needle. He ran his fingers over the sharp intertwining. He said, “Well, I guess I might know somethin’ about what’s wrong.”

“What, Wesley?” I asked.

Wesley dropped the braided pine needle and picked up another. He began to twirl it. He was being deliberate. “I got a notion why everybody living on Highway 17 thinks we’re different,” he said simply.

“Well, that’s easy, Wesley, they got a paved highway. Makes ’em think they’re better’n everybody else,” replied Freeman, puffing frantically to keep his rabbit tobacco burning.

R. J. spat through the slit in his top teeth. “Yeah, they think dirt roads is for hogs, or somethin’.”

“Maybe. I think it’s more’n that,” countered Wesley.

Freeman blew a smoke ring that grew into a perfectly round cloud and stood swirling six inches in front of his face. He then blew three smaller smoke rings through the center of the big one. He thought Wesley was playing. “Well, we’re waitin’, Wes.”

“Yeah,” I added.

“It sounds crazy…”

“C’mon, Wes,” Freeman urged.

“Freeman, if you laugh you’re gonna have to fight me right here, and I mean it,” Wesley vowed.

“I’m not gonna laugh, Wesley. Shoot, not me. Cross my heart. What is it?”

Wesley tied his pine needle into a knot. He folded his arms around his knees and laced his fingers together. He looked intently at each face surrounding him.

“It’s because they got electricity and we don’t,” he announced somberly.

Freeman started to smile, then remembered Wesley’s warning. He could easily have defeated Wesley in a fight, but it would have been embarrassing. He sat back against a tree and a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces crawled into his frowning face. “What?” he asked.

“It’s because they got electricity and we don’t,” Wesley repeated. “Electricity, that’s what it is.”

“Why you think that, Wesley?” asked Paul.

“Simple. It’s the one thing we don’t have, but they do. Paved roads are paved roads. Anybody can ride on a paved road. Electricity is somethin’ else. You got electricity and you got somethin’.”

“Yeah,” Freeman exclaimed quickly. “Yeah, Wes. It don’t make sense, but, by shot, I’ll bet that’s it.”

Paul whistled softly in disbelief. We sat stunned, looking at one another.

“By granny,” R. J. muttered, and spat through his teeth again.

Freeman began laughing easily. “Wes, old boy, you may be right. I never thought about it before. Electricity. I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Been hangin’ there all the time, big as day, and we never saw it because we was lookin’ at it.”

R. J. tried to spit through his teeth, but couldn’t. He was dry. “By granny,” he repeated.

“How come you never said anything, Wes?” asked Freeman. “You knew, why didn’t you say somethin’?”

“Because there wasn’t nothing we could do about it—until now.”

“Now? Why now?” I wanted to know.

“Well—” Wesley hesitated. “You got to promise me you’ll keep it quiet. All of you.”

We nodded eagerly. “I’ll shuck corn for a whole year if I say anything,” I promised. I was the youngest of the group. Sometimes I said things that didn’t make sense.

“I’ll bust their butts, they say anything, Wesley,” Freeman volunteered. “On the Big Gully Oath, boys. Cross your hearts and hope to die.”

We crossed and hoped.

“Well,” Wesley began, satisfied with our pledge, “I heard this man talkin’ to Daddy last month, and he was saying that the REA was comin’ through for sure this summer, and by fall we’d all have electricity.”

Otis moved closer to Wesley. “What’s the REA, Wes?”

“It means the Rural Electrification Association, or Authority, or somethin’ like that,” Wesley explained. “Daddy said Franklin D. Roosevelt got it started because he got mad about how much electricity used to cost down at Warm Springs, where he went for them hot water treatments for polio.”

“Yeah, I heard about that place,” Otis said, whispering the words as though Warm Springs were a leper colony.

Freeman pushed his cigarette into the ground, burrowing it under some pine needles with his thumb. He began to giggle happily. “Boys, we have got the answer,” he declared.

“I mean it,” Wesley warned. “Don’t nobody say nothing about this until the time is right.”

“They promise,” Freeman said. “Electricity. I swear. That’s it.” For the rest of the day, Emery Junior High School was a whisper, and there was a rippling laughter that never quite surfaced, was never quite heard. The only suggestion that something remarkable had taken place was the again-and-again winking and exaggerated crossing of hearts.