Black Sunshine: A Novel, page 15
The next day, Lloyd shows up while Will and Ricky Dan are in the garden hammering posts into the ground for Ma Sparrow’s pole beans. Their glances connect only once—Will’s eyes issue a fiery, challenging warning; Lloyd’s are confused. And that’s it. They never speak of it, never mention the day again. It is as if it never happened. But no matter how hard Will tries, he is never again able to embrace the innocent friendship he’d had with Lloyd before that day.
And he never trusted Lloyd again.
CHAPTER 18
WILL AND JAMEY came down the road out of the woods and found Granny sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch. Her hands worked crochet needles, pulled thread through and hooked it over and over.
“Find any ’sang?” she called out when she saw them.
“No, but we almost got shot,” Jamey replied. Minutes after the bullets whizzed by him, Jamey had completely forgotten his fear. Storm clouds never lingered long in the blue sky of Jamey’s world.
Granny dropped the crochet needles into her lap. “Got shot?”
“Aw, it was nothing,” Will said. “Some poacher wasn’t looking where he was shooting, that’s all.”
Will didn’t believe that for a minute, but any other explanation begged all sorts of questions he couldn’t begin to answer.
He and Jamey had reached the bottom of the porch steps. “What are you making?” he asked.
Granny studied Will for a moment and he had the uncomfortable feeling she knew there was more to the story than he had told. Then she picked up the crochet needles and went back to work.
“You ’member Cora Talbot? The least of her girls—Jackie—this here’s a blanket for her baby.” She gestured toward the ball of blue yarn. “That girl ain’t far enough ’long to be hardly showing and they already know the baby’s gonna be a boy. Already got a name picked out ’n everything.” Granny shook her head. “The older I get the more there is in this world that don’t make no sense to me. They’s gonna know that child’s a boy his whole life—ain’t it no fun no more to wonder for just a little while?”
As she spoke, her big hands continued to maneuver the hooks in delicate movements that should have looked clumsy but didn’t, working so fast it was almost impossible to follow the hooks’ progress.
“Your grandmother has probably crocheted a thousand miles of yarn in her lifetime,” Will said to Jamey. “Doesn’t even have to think about it—her hands do it automatically.” He turned back to Granny with a big smile. “Remember what Ricky Dan said about you crocheting?” He looked at Jamey. “Your daddy said one time…” Will did his best imitation of Ricky Dan’s voice. “I figure if they’s to put needles and yarn in yore coffin during visitation, you’d likely make up a right nice sweater ’fore they started shovelin’ in the dirt.”
Jamey laughed; Granny smiled a gentle smile. You could tell the memory was poignant, but no longer painful.
Jamey held up the burlap sack with the potato digger inside. “I’ll put these with the dryin’ rack,” he said. “Then I’m gonna do me some more work on my arts.” His sunny grin went flat line. “It’s a sad one, Granny. I hope it ain’t another one’s gonna make you cry.”
He turned and headed up the hill to his shed in the woods.
“He’s carved statues that made you cry?”
“Just he’s so good ’n all, makes things so lifelike. Sometimes they’s hard to look at.”
Clearly, Granny didn’t want to talk about that any more than Will wanted to discuss the poacher. So he sat down on the bottom step of the porch and patted the smooth wood next to him.
“Come sit with me, Granny.” The old woman spoke so softly, you needed to be near her to carry on a conversation. And the rocker she sat in had a flat, slat seat and no cushion; the porch step would be just as comfortable.
Will looked up the hollow to the bare spot where the old house once stood. “We used to sit out on the porch at night and watch the fireflies. Remember?” When he turned back to face her there was a look of consternation on her face.
“I’ll go in and get a chair out the kitchen so’s you can sit up here with me,” she said and began to rise. “I made some fresh lemonade if you—”
“Something’s wrong, Granny. What is it?”
It hadn’t escaped his notice that Granny had the rocker jammed up against the wall of the trailer so tight there was hardly any room to rock, or that she had not left the house in the three days he had been there, had not gone out to the mailbox on the road or into the garden in the backyard. He’d seen several ripe pumpkins in the garden when he and Jamey went sangin’. Why hadn’t she picked them?
“I cain’t.” Her voice wasn’t just quiet, it was small, almost like a child. He’d never heard her speak that way before.
“Can’t what?”
“I…got me a phobia, that’s what JoJo says.” She immediately became very interested in the yarn and hooks that danced in her lap, wouldn’t look at him. “She went out and learnt all ’bout it. It’s got a name, but I disremember what it is.”
She stopped, gathered herself and looked at him. “Anyway, I got to stay here. I don’t go nowhere no more.”
Will got up, climbed the steps and crossed to her rocker, then sat down Indian style on the porch in front of her. “Tell me about it.”
In a whisper-soft voice, Granny told the story. She explained that she only felt safe in the mountains. They were like a fence, a protective wall. But then the fence had begun to close in on her.
She put down her crochet needles, leaned over, and stroked Will’s hair. “I ain’t never had to tie words to all them thoughts and feelings before. Sayin’ a hard truth like that, it ain’t some’m you can spit out simple to just anybody.” She paused, considered it, then continued resolutely. “And it…” she made a sweeping gesture all around “the whole of it…scares me some.”
Will said nothing, merely reached up and took her big, gnarled hand in his.
“I know how it’s gonna end.” Her voice was level, but Will could feel her hand begin to tremble. “I done seen it comin’ a long way off. The circle’s gonna get smaller and smaller until it squeezes the life outta…until they carry me out this house in a pine box.”
She seemed to take off in an entirely different direction then, but Will sensed there was a connection somewhere, that it fit together somehow.
“That mural of Bow and me gettin’ married. Bowman standing all stiff and tall in that suit he borrowed with the collar too tight. Me a-standin’ next by him, wearin’ the white dress made out of Irish lace my own granny’d wore when she got married—brought it in a trunk from the old country. We got married in the morning and Bow went back to work in the mine on the night shift at three o’clock.” She sighed. “My Bow ain’t here, now. It’s jest me. We all end up jest us.”
Will realized that the years had healed her wounds, but nothing had relieved her solitude. No matter how many children, grandchildren, or friends she kept close around her, Granny remained set apart by the emptiness of the space beside her. And none of them, however well-intentioned could bridge that gulf; nobody would ever be able to quite get to her again.
“Have you tried to do anything about your fear? There are ways to deal with—”
“Ain’t nobody can do your livin’ for you. Or your dyin’. That’s yore job.”
“But you can’t let your grief make you a prisoner, lock you away from the world.”
Granny cocked her head to one side. “Yore a fine one to talk about lettin’ grief make you a prisoner. You been a prisoner for all these many years. Only difference ’tween me ’n you is my grief locked me in and yore grief locked you out.”
“It was more than grief kept me away.”
“Where did you go, Will? Where you been all this time?”
He released her hand, leaned back against the railing post and stared up at the wind chime that dangled by a string from the porch ceiling, silver pipes that made a haunting sound a little like an old church organ.
“Well, I thumbed a ride on a coal truck all the way to Somerset,” he said, as memories dragged him back into a reality he didn’t want to revisit. “I was on my way to the bus station. Had no idea where I was going to, just wanted to put space between me and where I was coming from. I figured I’d buy as much distance as the money I had would pay for.”
He stopped and looked up at her sheepishly.
“And I got distance that day, more than I ever bargained for. Across the street from the bus station in Somerset is a Navy Recruiting Center. I walked in and listened to the guy’s spiel. I needed a job and a one-way ticket out of the mountains. So that day I became a sailor.”
“The Navy?”
Will shook his head. “Granny, if I’d sat down and plotted out the single worst possible decision I could have made that day, joining the Navy was it.”
“How come?”
“I was running away from a coal mine! From everything that even remotely resembled a coal mine…small and tight, the walls closing in and…” He shivered. Then smiled a little at the absolute absurdity of it all. “Granny, do you have any idea how narrow the passageways are on a destroyer? And the berth space.” He saw the confused look on Granny’s face. “A berth is a bunk…a bed. They’re stacked so tight you have to get out to turn over!”
“Them fellas you’s in the Navy with, did you get rid of your accent so’s you’d sound like them, fit in?”
“That was part of it. But it would have taken a whole lot more than an accent change for me to fit in with men who actually wanted to be sailors, who’d dreamed their whole lives of going to sea.”
He barked out a little laugh. “I’d been in boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Station outside Chicago for almost a week before it dawned on me I’d actually have to physically get on a ship. That I’d have to sail out into an ocean on a ship, live on a ship.”
He stopped, shook his head in wonder.
“I was horrified, but I didn’t let on. I wasn’t about to confirm everybody’s stereotype of a dumb hillbilly. I sucked it up and…drank a lot. And started fights.”
Thick with cigarette smoke and the stink of beer and sweat, the air almost resists Will as he passes through it, like it’s water. He’s drunk, his natural state. He plops back down into his chair as the deck is passed to him.
“Deal the cards, hillbilly,” says the sailor with a big nose and a pronounced New Jersey accent who is seated across from him. “That’s five each. You can count that high, can’t you?”
“Aw, come on,” sighs Cowboy, the guy from Texas on Will’s left. They’re all tired of listening to the New Jersey guy give Will a hard time. “Don’t start. Let’s just play cards.”
Will picks up the deck and begins to shuffle. He has to concentrate hard because he’s had way more to drink than the other sailors. He spends every shore leave plastered. Usually has to be carried back on board, because if he had to walk up that gangplank under his own power…
“You hollered in your sleep again last night, hillbilly.” The New Jersey guy keeps at it. “Yelling all crazy. You been hitting the moonshine? Or is it that your feet hurt because you’re not used to wearing shoes?”
Will sets the deck of cards carefully on the table in front of him.
“Dealer calls the game, right?” he says. The other three sailors groan and nod. “Okay…” Then Will turns his Kentucky accent up full throttle on the name of a silly childhood game he used to play: There’s a Bear.
“I call Thar’s a Bahr.”
“What?” says the black sailor from Detroit. The others roll their eyes and grumble.
“S’real simple,” Will says. “I say, ‘Thar’s a Bahr.’ ” Will points off to the right like he’s seen something and the others glance that direction in confusion. “And you say, ‘Whar?’ ”
Cowboy reaches for the deck of cards. “Com’on, Will, we—”
“And then I say, ‘The bahr’s right…’ ” Without warning, Will dives across the table and grabs the front of the New Jersey sailor’s shirt. “ ‘…thar!’ ” And he slams his fist into the man’s face, hears his big nose snap.
“I finally got hauled in front of my commanding officer for assaulting another sailor, broke his nose,” Will said. “I thought I’d finally done it, that he was going to throw me in the brig.” His voice was hollow. “I’d have lost it in there. Little cell with no windows. I couldn’t have…”
Granny reached out and stroked his hair again but kept silent.
Will took a deep breath. “His name was Burkhead. Commander Leonard C. Burkhead. And he could cuss almost as creatively as Ri…” Will caught himself. “…anybody I ever heard.”
Will stands at rigid attention, a steel rod down his spine, as Commander Burkhead yells at him. Will is certain he’ll be looking at the four walls of a cell in the brig before the commander’s through with him. He is equally certain he will never see daylight again if they lock him up.
Gradually, the commander winds down. A whistling teapot taken off the stove, his built-up steam finally sputters out.
“I’ve read your file, sailor,” the commander says. “You’ve been written up…let’s see…” He picks up the folder and begins to thumb through it. “…three…four…five…” He drops it back on the table. “I’ve read every one of them. You refused to sleep in your assigned berth. You tried to punch out Seaman Perkins because he closed the door of the head on you. You…” He sighs. “Besides the fact that you’ve got some serious anger-management issues, there’s a common thread in all these incidents. And I think I’ve figured out what it is. I’m just not sure what I’m going to do about it.”
His eyes riveted straight ahead, Will can still see out of the corner of his eye that the commander is studying him. The man says nothing, looks at Will for what seems like a very long time, then leans back in his chair like he’s come to some kind of decision.
“Says here…” The commander tapped the file. “That you’re from Aintree Hollow, Kentucky.” He paused. “I know what happened in your hometown a couple of weeks before you enlisted.”
Will must have looked surprised.
“You hillbillies don’t get out much, do you? That coal mine explosion made national headlines; the whole country heard about it. Twenty-five miners killed, wasn’t it? Or thirty. I know only two made it out alive. I remember reading that part, and one of the survivors had this odd last name that stuck with me.” He paused again for a beat. “Gribbins.”
The commander leaned toward him. “That wasn’t a brother or an uncle or a cousin was it? It was you.”
“Yes, sir.” Will struggles to hold onto his composure—to remain emotionally as well as physically rigid.
The officer is silent for a few moments, then asks softly, “Son, why in the name of common sense did you join the Navy?”
“Commander Burkhead recommended I be transferred—to supply. I worked on the dock in Norfolk—outside!—drove a forklift until my hitch was up. Even went to college at night and took a few classes. In history. Thought maybe I could teach, but...”
Will was silent for so long after that Granny finally asked softly, “What did you do then?”
He didn’t answer.
“Will…?”
“I crawled down into a bottle of booze and never came back out—at least I wouldn’t have if it’d been up to me.” He lifted his faded blue eyes to meet hers and saw such compassion there he had to look away. “I became a drunk, Granny. Not all at once. It takes a while. Lost my first job after the Navy—worked construction—because I showed up late. Lost the next one because I didn’t show up at all for two days. Tried a change of scenery—the geographic cure. Hitched from one city to the next to the next, crashed in flophouses as dreary and featureless as all the nameless cities. Went from bourbon to cheap wine to…eventually I ended up a filthy, slobbering, falling-down, homeless, under-a-bridge drunk.”
Granny’s eyes sparkled with tears. “Oh…Sugar.”
“I went as far down as you can go. It was me and a bottle and dying.”
He didn’t realize he was still talking until it was too late to hold it back. “There at the end, I could actually see his eyes, Granny. A gray wolf with yellow cat-eyes circling around me, growling and drooling.”
Will had never admitted that, never said it out loud to another human being. Not even to his sponsor. Granny wasn’t the only one who’d bared her soul today.
He pushed resolutely ahead into the silence that followed.
“Then one day, I couldn’t keep on keepin’ on anymore.” He looked up at her. “I was done.”
He felt a little like that now; he was finished. He’d finally been honest. He hadn’t said all that he needed to say, but what he had said was the truth. “My life was ending, Granny, and I was glad it was over.”
CHAPTER 19
Will is certain he’s dying. You can just tell a thing like that. It was like that time he went camping and could feel the air mattress under his sleeping bag slowly collapse. He can feel himself deflating, sinking. Out some little hole somewhere, what little is left of his life is silently whishing away, and when it is all gone, he will be, too.
And he’s okay with that. He is waaay okay with that. Let’s ring the curtain down on this baby so we can all go home.
All around him is white light and shiny metal and he can hear bustling activity, the swish of hurrying feet and the babble of urgent voices. He doesn’t know what they’re saying, though. He might be able to tell if he concentrated, but what’s the point? He’s dying. He wants to tell these people that there isn’t any rush, they can calm down and slow down; he’ll be gone soon.
