Chapter 18
Epiphany Jones
J. Norm and me figured out on our first morning in town that the quickest way to make enemies in Groveland, Texas, was to go around looking for a copy of Mrs. Mercy White’s book. People gave us weird looks anyway, when we walked into places like the library, and the Timber and Railroad Museum, and some antique and junk stores that dealt in books. I guessed it wasn’t every day they saw an old white guy in nice clothes hanging around with a teenage girl who for sure wasn’t white, but once I called him
Grandpa
a time or two, they got the picture. After that, how they’d react was anybody’s guess. Sometimes people were friendly enough, sometimes they gave us hateful sneers, and sometimes they caught J. Norm’s eye with a sympathetic look, like they were trying to tell him they knew it wasn’t his fault his daughter’d got herself knocked up by some guy who wasn’t white. Some redneck dude in a junk shop was just plain unfriendly. When J. Norm asked him about Mercy White’s book, he curled his lip and said, “We don’t have
anything
like that in here.” Then he shrugged toward the door, like that’s where we oughta be going.
J. Norm blinked at the man once, twice. J. Norm probably hadn’t ever been treated that way in his life, but it didn’t surprise me. Mama and me had been in enough backwater places for me to know how things were. Mrs. Lora always said to just ignore it.
Nasty comes from the inside
, she told me.
It doesn’t have anything to do with you.
Just to get on the junk shop guy’s last nerve, I took a few more steps away from the door, toward the aisles and aisles of flea market booths in his big old metal building. “Hey, look here, Grandpa.” I pointed to a booth that had old hats like the one J. Norm gave me out of his wife’s closet. “Hats.”
The man at the counter flashed a dirty look, and I just smiled, like,
Yeah, what are you gonna do about it? It’s a free country.
J. Norm played right along. “I believe we’ll look around awhile.” He egged me on while I tried on hats and feather boas, and pretended I was going to buy the prettiest dancing dress I’d ever seen. I held it up in front of me and waltzed along the aisle. The dress floated like a patch of blue sky, glittery up top, and the bottom was made of net, like the skirt of a ballerina, only longer. It was in perfect shape, but I could tell it was old. Someone must’ve kept it in a closet, all wrapped up in plastic, like J. Norm’s wife did her clothes.
“Beautiful!” J. Norm said. “You’re a vision, an . . . epiphany, even.” Both of us laughed, and I danced a little more. It was fun having somebody around who wasn’t too tired, too busy, or too ticked off to bother with me. If that’d been Mama standing there, she would’ve told me to put that stupid thing down and quit messing around before I broke something.
But J. Norm just clapped and laughed, and treated me like Cinderella in glass slippers. It felt good.
After we figured we’d annoyed the shop guy long enough, we left without buying anything. On the way out, J. Norm said it was a good thing we hadn’t found our book there, because it would’ve been against his principles to give that guy any money.
“If he’d of had it, we’d of bought it, though, right?” I asked as we walked along Main Street. J. Norm had spotted a sign on a corner store that said, HAND-DIPPED BLUE BELL, and he was in an ice-cream mood again.
“Most likely not.” He was looking up at the buildings, his mind in another place. “A person must have principles, Epiphany. That’s the one thing no one can take from you. The only way you can lose your principles is to give them up. Remember that.” He went on studying the buildings, like that was all he had to say on that subject.
I thought about it while we walked. Principles. I guess I’d always figured those were something for old people and rich people—something you could only afford if you were part of the group who could chunk down nine hundred dollars for a computer and not even bat an eye. The rest of us lived in the real world. Whenever I complained about how things were for us, Mama always said,
Well, who do you think you are, the princess and the pea?
The way Mama figured it, you did what you had to do to get by. Like putting up with some lousy job or living with some loser who treated you bad. She wanted me to know that’s how it was for people like us and I shouldn’t expect anything different.
But now I wondered if J. Norm was right. Maybe anybody could stand for something, if they wanted to. You could make up your mind that you weren’t gonna drop out of high school and shack up with some loser like DeRon, and have some baby you didn’t even want, and then end up doing a job you hated and spending your weekends camped out at swap meets or in a bar someplace. You could decide that you were gonna have principles and then not let anybody take them away.
We got to the ice-cream shop, and J. Norm opened the door. Like always, he waited for me to go through first. Every once in a while when he did that, he’d say,
Any man who doesn’t hold the door open for a lady is no gentleman, Epiphany. You keep that in mind.
But this time he didn’t say anything. He didn’t follow me in, either. He sort of hung in the opening with the door pushing against his back.
“J. Norm?” I said, stopping in front of a counter that looked like something from an old-time movie. A long bar with bar stools ran along the wall and curved into a cash register area at the end. Behind the bar, there were old mixers and soda fountains, and lots of wooden shelves with glasses on them, and a big mirror, like in the saloons in those old John Wayne movies Russ liked to watch. The place was empty right now, but I could hear noises in the back. “J. Norm?” I said again, but he was just standing there. Finally, I walked back and waved a hand in front of his face. “Are you all right?”
He blinked, then shook his head. “I remember this place. . . .” His eyes glazed over, and he tripped on the little rim where the wood floor met a square of tiny white octagon-shaped tiles. I jumped to catch him, but he stumbled sideways, grabbing one of the bar stools.
“You mean, like, from when you were little?” I looked around the store, and goose bumps prickled on my arms.
J. Norm put both hands on the barstool, stared down at it, smoothed his fingers across the seat, then twirled it hard enough that it rattled. “I loved to run along here and spin each one, and Cecile would say, ‘Little Mis’a Willie, you best cut out that nonsense, or there ain’t gonna be no soda float for you.’ ”
“But your name’s not Willie.” A cold feeling passed over my skin, like it had when the guy at Ward House told me about the little girl who died when she fell out the window, and about all the slaves they used to keep upstairs in the attic, even little children sometimes. I felt like I was surrounded by dead people.
J. Norm’s face went white, and the rims of his eyes, where the skin sagged tired and red, turned moist and teary. “I think it was. That was my name. Willie . . . William.”
A cloud went across the sun outside, and the room turned shadowy. I touched a bar stool, then pictured a little redheaded boy running along, twirling each one. It was almost like he was really there.
A swinging door smacked open halfway down the counter, and both J. Norm and me jumped. “Afternoon!” A man came through the door carrying a tray of tall drink glasses. “I help you folks?” He tipped his head back, squinting at us through eyeglasses with black rims around the edges. His thick gray hair was slicked back on the sides, and kind of combed into a puffy swirl on top, like J. Norm in that old picture where he looked like a redheaded Elvis. “Y’all from out of town?” he asked when neither of us answered.
“Yes, sir,” I told him, and laid on the manners, because I figured it couldn’t hurt to make a good impression on the guy who was about to dip up your ice cream. J. Norm was still staring at the walls like there was no one else in the room. “My grandpa says he remembers this place. He used to live here when he was little.”
The man braced his hands on the counter and leaned up against it, giving J. Norm an interested look. If it bothered him that there wasn’t any family resemblance between my grandpa and me, he didn’t show it. He just smiled at me and said, “When abouts was that?”
“We’re not real sure.” I looked over my shoulder, and J. Norm was wandering down the aisles of candy and groceries like he was gone in the head. “A long time ago, maybe 1941, but he remembers this store.”
The man seemed proud of that. “Oh, well, lots of kids would. This store’s been in my family since my dad bought it in the forties, but it was around a long time before that. Lots of kids been through here for penny candy, and Coke floats, and ice-cream sun-deys.”
The back of my mouth started to water. I wished J. Norm would snap out of it so we could order. He was just wandering around the store, looking up and down the walls, taking in old metal bread signs and advertisements and a few black-and-white pictures of the town.
The ice-cream man stuck his hand over the counter and shook mine. “Al Nelson.”
I told him my name and stayed on my best behavior. It wasn’t until after I said my name that I thought about the fact that I’d used my real name, and maybe that was a bad idea. But then, really, why would Al Nelson in the corner store in Groveland, Texas, care? Nobody from back in Dallas even knew I was gone. Nobody’d be looking for me.
Unless the principal and the counselor had called the police after they talked to DeRon, and the police were looking for us . . .
I put that thought out of my head, and since I had Al’s attention, I decided I’d come right out and ask about the house fire. J. Norm acted like he didn’t want people to know why we were here, but I figured at this point we needed to make progress any way we could. It didn’t look like we’d be finding a copy of Mrs. Mercy White’s book anytime soon. “My grandpa remembers something about a big house burning down. Some kids died in the fire. Five kids. We were trying to figure out where that house was, so we could, like, drive by that spot, maybe. Grandpa thinks he probably lived on that same street, but he doesn’t know for sure, and my great-grandparents are dead, so there’s nobody to ask. We just thought if we came here, like, for a little vacation, he could remember some stuff.” The lies slipped right out, smooth as silk, which made me wonder about that talk earlier about principles. Considering all those times Mrs. Lora had brought me to church, she was probably turning over in her grave right now.
But so far, J. Norm and me were getting nowhere fast, and half the day was gone already. We couldn’t stay in Groveland forever, although if it took a few more days, that wouldn’t bother me any. Mama and Russ wouldn’t be home for a while yet.
Mr. Al Nelson drummed all ten fingers on the counter, thinking. “You’re talking about when the VanDraan house burned down, I bet,” he said, nodding. “That was a little before my time, but my sister used to tell that story. Whole family died in that fire, the mama, five little kids, and the black nanny, too. I remember that the old house stood there burned-out for years. Could be that’s why your grandpa remembers it.”
“Was it near here?” My mind tingled with the idea, and I noticed that in the back of the store, J. Norm had stopped and turned our way, finally dialing in.
Mr. Nelson pointed out the door. “A mile and a half down Main, right on Dogwood Street, go three blocks, but there’s a mini storage there now. For years, the lot was empty—nothing but some rocks from the foundation and a three-story chimney. City finally took over the lot for taxes and knocked the chimney down. The town kids used to play a game—see who was brave enough to run up there and touch the chimney. Many a ghost story was told about that place. Passel of tall tales. Not really anything left of the house now, except you can still see where the stone corner posts were, and there’s a bit of the iron fence back there in the weeds. The whole VanDraan family is buried about two miles farther down, in the old Dogwood Cemetery.” Mr. Nelson leaned on the counter, like he had all day to visit. J. Norm came back from the other end of the store, now that the conversation had turned interesting. I decided that maybe we wouldn’t need Mrs. Mercy White’s book, after all.
“Well . . . how’d the fire start?” I asked, because that seemed like the
logical next question
, as J. Norm would say. “Didn’t anybody get out? I mean, did the whole family die?” If there was nobody left, then how could J. Norm remember the fire? Maybe he didn’t live in the VanDraan house after all, but someplace near it. He could’ve gone over and played with the kids, and that was why he knew them. “Couldn’t the neighbors or the fire department help them get out?”
Mr. Nelson seemed surprised that I was so interested, but he was happy enough to go on talking. “Well, like I said, that was before my day, so I don’t know all the facts. The daddy, Mr. VanDraan, didn’t die until years later. He was playing cards in a poker joint when the big house fire happened. There’s been a lot of rumors and speculation about that whole deal over the years, but mostly, people kept the whispers behind their hands. Mr. VanDraan was a powerful man in this town. Had money. Owned the mill, the bank, the timber company, and this store before my pap bought it. Most of the folks in Groveland worked for him in one way or another, or owed him for the notes on their farms and houses. But a town doesn’t forget about six people in one family lost all at once, you know?”