It Will End with Us (5 page)

I remember my father taking the three of us for long aimless rides in the car on hot evenings. We rolled down all the windows and tilted the vent windows to make more wind, and though the air was hot the wind made us feel cool.

Images of unpainted shacks and tumble-down sheds in small acres of poor-looking fields, mules in paddocks, hogs in makeshift slab pens, and strange dirty barefoot children my own age standing among the wandering chickens in the yards, looking up at our car, staring, unsmiling usually but sometimes waving, unsure, flow through my mind the way they flowed past the car.

I remember looking out the rear window at a cloud of dust curling behind us, and coming to a stop and the dust catching up with us and rolling over the car.

Images from different times, flowing together now.

Miles of pine forest there now, broken by roadside clearings and trailers and little brick houses without porches, and nobody outside because of air-conditioning and television, I noticed, passing in the car with Lester down the same roads, unable to attach those other images to anything there now.

Mama, Papa, Lila, Verdell are dead now. Edward too, for all I know.

I remember hot summer nights when all three of us slept on iron bedsteads that Verdell set up on the screen porch, the dogs out there with us.

The time we made music by banging on the metal bed rails with sticks and spoons as hard as we could, Papa yelling at us to stop.

The time Edward fell out of bed and then Thornton fell out of his bed on purpose, but I was afraid to fall out of mine.

I remember Mama on the porch, her back to me, working a handful of raw cotton into a torn place in the screen to stop mosquitoes getting in, immobile in that posture, in that image.

We sometimes heard, even above the continuous shrill vibrato of insects and frogs, the whistle of a freight train crossing the trestle half a mile downriver, though never the fainter clickety-clicks of the wheels, as we could sometimes in the mortuary silence of winter.

Steam locomotives, and the breathy melancholy of their whistles, were among the first things that I became aware of as having disappeared.

A steam locomotive took my mother to New York when she was young and she never forgot it.

The time I rode a train to Connecticut with Thornton and my father, taking Thornton back to college, it was a diesel locomotive.

Thornton uses an airplane to travel now.

Hearing the Cessna overhead, I would run to get Mama and rush with her into the yard and we would stand there waving.

Waving and waving while the little blue plane banked and came back over the treetops, roaring overhead, almost scraping the roof, it looked from below, the dogs frantic, leaping and barking, and
the plane going away, disappearing behind the trees in the direction of the county airfield, the sound of it vanishing finally, and having scarcely time to get ready and get Mama ready before Thornton would be driving up to the house.

Showing Maria the photograph of Thornton standing by his airplane.

Maria has never flown in an airplane.

Sometimes I get Lester to take me out in the car and we just ride around.

When Lester drives me I ride in back.

When Mama or Papa drove Lila home, Lila rode in back.

The road to Lila’s house went past a big sinkhole, a nearly circular pool of black water fringed with
stumps of sawed-off cypress trees and a few gnarly tupelos left standing because they were trash trees not even good for burning, the grain of a tupelo log running every which way and no man alive able to split it, my father said.

If a cow went to drink in that hole and fell in, it would sink forever, Lila said.

I went to Verdell’s house with my father and a goat knocked me over.

Before Lester there was Vernon, before Vernon there was Huey, and so forth.

Before Maria there was Ruth, before Ruth there was Beth, before Beth I was at Spring Hope, wandering from room to room, as I mentioned, with dogs, as I also mentioned.

It is generally true, I think, that very little of importance happens now.

I am aware of a long stretch of time, but it is mostly undifferentiated, without markers.

If I try to imagine “a long stretch of time” I picture a level landscape without trees and a narrow unpaved road running across it all the way to a distant horizon.

A long beige ribbon of time.

Even though I have never actually seen a landscape like that.

If I had to describe my situation in a word, my living situation and psychological situation, and so forth, it would be
indeterminate
.

Odd that a word like that, being quite indeterminate itself, can describe a situation so precisely.

Going on vacation with Thornton might be considered important, I suppose.

Considered important by me, naturally, though it might not be by anyone unaware of my circumstances.

The journey of the body is across physical space, on foot, horseback, bicycle, in cars, airplanes, and so forth, on foot again, stumbling, crawling at the end, metaphorically speaking.

The journey of the soul is through time. I like the odd phrase:
a space of time
. A gap between one time and another, a continuum without content, a kind of sinkhole into which weeks, months, and years have sunk from view.

I am traveling, it seems, through the space of time, falling through it actually, it feels to me now.

The body stops, but space goes on and time goes on.

The fact is I have no clear idea of what I mean by the word
soul
.

A great whoosh of feathers, and a pair of doves descends on my feeder, startling me and sending sparrows flittering off in every direction.

If a sparrow tries to come back, alighting cautiously at the very edge of the feeder, the doves puff out their chests, hunch their wings, bat-like, and strut and jut about on the feeder looking terribly frightening.

Hummingbirds, oddly, are also quite aggressive, though mockingbirds are easily the most aggressive birds I know.

Excluding hawks and falcons, of course, who are positively murderous.

Even so, birds cannot be considered neurotic.

Any bad feelings they have they get rid of by flying, I imagine.

On second thought, though, remembering now, some chickens are horribly neurotic.

And parrots, of course, as everyone knows, the ones in cages anyway, plucking out their own feathers.

As did my mother, with her hair, pulling most of it out.

I have always been crazy about birds.

Even so, I don’t care for Poe.

And of course it was a crow, not a raven.

The shops had screen doors and slow-turning fans on the ceilings when I was a child.

The grocery store, the hardware, and the feed store had floors of broad wooden planks with wide cracks between them.

When you jumped on the floor of the feed store a cloud of dust came up.

The drugstore had a floor of black and white linoleum tiles. You had always to step only on black tiles or something awful would happen.

I remember Thornton, one day when he was angry at me, deliberately walking on the white tiles.

The colored man who worked in the feed store had a daughter who was born with six toes on each foot. Her father chopped the extra ones off with a kitchen knife, Mama said.

I remember Mama cutting okra at the kitchen table. She looked at my bare feet and at her knife
and said, “Hmm, looks like this child’s got too many toes.”

I remember pretending to be frightened, and at the same time actually being a little bit frightened.

The odd phrase: “She was half pretending.”

I was half frightened, I think, because I sensed that my mother was only half pretending.

We, meaning my brothers and I, liked to pretend we were orphans.

The cat sits in a patch of sunlight and washes itself. It likes pretending it doesn’t care about my sparrows.

I lean across the desk, close to the open window, and wave. The cat stops washing and looks.

I remember a wizened halfwit named Doc who rode a bicycle. He was the only grown-up who rode a bicycle in that town.

The time Thornton and some other boys ran behind and pummeled him with dirt clods.

I have a clear mental image of his face, the skin of his face like creased leather, but I can’t tell from the image if he was a white man or a Negro, pedaling as hard as he could.

I remember when Brazil nuts were called nigger toes.

I remember black boys swimming in Johnson Creek below the bridge, where one day we saw a very small boy with skin as white as a fish’s belly.

“Look, there’s an albino Negro,” Edward said.

Which was how I learned the word
albino
.

Mama told us only trashy people said nigger toes.

The times Thornton fought Edward to sit in front, screaming
shotgun, shotgun
, running out the door and down the front steps, racing for the car. If Thornton reached it first Edward would drag him out, while the dogs ran around the car barking.

The time Papa grabbed Edward by the shirt collar and jerked him back so hard he fell down.

The school had tall windows that opened with cranks. Only certain boys were allowed to turn the cranks.

The car had fuzzy brown upholstery that tickled my legs if I wore shorts. We were not allowed to wear shorts at school.

The time Miss Alfa said she was going to squeeze the mush out of me in first grade, and not understanding what she meant and being frightened.

The time Thornton wouldn’t let me speak to him at recess anymore, turning away and walking off, when I was in second grade.

Looking at the clock and closing my eyes and counting to a hundred and opening my eyes and looking at the clock.

I remember people asking me how I liked school, and saying “fine.”

On our way to the store after school Edward stopped and yelled
phooey
and slung his books into a water-filled ditch. Then Thornton yelled
phooey
and threw his books, and then I threw mine, I believe, though I don’t actually remember that part.

When we got home Papa took Edward out by the clinker pile and whipped him.

The time Edward said he wanted to be a jockey and ride racehorses, and Papa said that was a good way to end up a nobody.

The time the whole school walked to the cemetery on Confederate Memorial Day and stood among the graves and sang “Dixie” and “The Bonny Blue Flag.”

The time I put Thornton’s paper dolls in the fire, after he wouldn’t talk to me at school.

Lester flips through
Road & Track
while he eats. When he comes across something that interests him his eyes bulge and he stops chewing in order to move his lips as he reads.

Lester is crazy about cars.

We walked to the store after school and rode home with our father. We went a long way down the same street the school was on, over the train tracks and on down that street, turned at the Presbyterian church and on down past the Amoco station, Baptist church, drugstore, movie theater, pool hall, beauty parlor, ten-cent store, ice house, furniture store, every day after school the same, walking behind Edward and Thornton.

I remember a penguin on an iceberg and the words “It’s Cool Inside” on the door of the drugstore and on the ticket window at the movie theater. I remember stopping to look at movie posters. I remember a movie cost twelve cents, but I don’t remember any of the posters.

The times we walked faster to get quickly past the pool hall on hot days when they had the door wide open, propped back against the wall by a dilapidated green armchair set out on the
sidewalk. I remember pool tables one behind the other receding into the dim far distance, each in a cone of light cast by a metal-shaded lamp suspended above it, cigarette smoke drifting and curling in the cones, beer and tobacco smells floating out onto the sunlit sidewalk, and the hard bright clicking of the balls.