A Particular Madness, page 3
The whole family, even Gea, crammed into Dad’s ’49 Chevrolet coupe, to help carry the body home, I figured. Mom and Dad didn’t say anything all the way to town. I think they were sad to spend the place payment.
The doctor’s office was painted white. The doctor wore a white coat, and the nurse wore a white cap with wings on it. Everything was white, except my shoes, which were red with mud, and the soles were loose and flapped when I walked. I held my feet back under the chair.
The doctor checked my heart to see if it was still beating and looked in my mouth. He could see my heart, and he made humming sounds.
“Jacob,” he said, “where does it hurt?”
I pointed to my ear. “Every time I move or touch it,” I said.
He put his flashlight in my ear. He smelled like shaving soap, and his breath was warm on my neck.
“Oh my,” he said. That’s what doctors say when you’re dying.
“My folks have some money,” I said. “But it’s the place payment.”
“Do you have a pet, Jacob?”
“Just Fuzzface. He gets skunked all the time.”
“Lie down on the table, Jacob. I need to have a closer look.”
He stuck his tweezers into my ear, and the noise in my head exploded. My eyes watered, and my stomach rolled. I thought I was going to be sick all over his white coat.
“Would you look at this,” he said, holding up the tweezers to show me a tick working its legs back and forth like rowing a boat. “This was on your eardrum, Jacob,” he said.
“No it wasn’t,” I said.
“It’s a wonder you didn’t come down with encephalitis. I’ll put it in a bottle so you can take it home.”
I didn’t want to take it home, but I took it. The nurse shook her head at me when I left.
No one said anything all the way home. When we turned at the mailbox, I threw the tick out the window.
Gea said, “What if my friends find out, Mom?”
“Who’s to tell,” Mom said.
“Jacob will be bragging all over,” she said.
“We could have taken that damn tick out for nothing at home,” Dad said.
Chapter 6
It was rare we ever went anywhere, what with Dad working a job and trying to raise cattle too. We milked eight cows morning and night and sold cream once a week at the creamery in town. Mom bought staples with the cream money. ’Course, we had chickens and kept a couple hogs for butchering in the fall. We rubbed the hams and shoulders down with Morton’s Sugar Cure, wrapped them in brown paper bags, and hung them in the basement to cure out.
By the time they were cured and ready to eat, I’d pretty much forgotten the smell of hog guts and singed hair. Dad brought ice home from the ice plant at the roundhouse to keep the milk fresh. But keeping beef iced was out of the question. Dad always said the Rolands were ass deep in beef and couldn’t buy a hamburger.
We planted a garden every spring with high hopes of fresh vegetables, but we had no water, save for what we hauled in from the county well and put in the cistern. Dad’s old truck had a three-hundred-gallon tank on it, and once a week we drove up the hill to the county well. Sometimes we’d have to leave it sit until the windmill pumped it full. It could be an exciting ride back down the hill, what with a full load of water on, and bad brakes.
Between the Oklahoma heat and the grasshoppers that arrived on schedule every August, it was hard to grow much more than okra. Dad said he’d as soon eat tractor grease.
Sometimes Gea and me would beg Mom to go to the movies. Mostly, it was me did the begging. Gea said I did it better.
Mom would say we couldn’t go to the movies, what with a place payment coming up, but that we could have a picnic instead. She’d fix an iron skillet full of potatoes with a gob of lard on top, and we’d go to the shelterbelt and fry potatoes over a camp fire. They were good, but not as good as the movies.
But then there was always the Roland reunion to look forward to every summer. The center of the clan was my Granddad and Grandma Roland. There were eleven offspring. Most had married up and produced more cousins than I could count. Granddad Roland was a preacher, an old-timey preacher, who had ridden the circuit back in territorial days. He lived by the Bible and expected all his children to do the same, no matter they were grown up on their own. They were Rolands and would live their lives as he saw fit, if they expected to live at all.
He hated the government, education, and papists. The government stole a man’s will, he said, not to mention his money. Papists worshiped idols, and education was a false god. He raised his family on cornbread and pork and refused to take his Social Security check. He sold watermelons and plums in the summer for cash, and if any man objected to the price, he gave them away free.
When Granddad said something, it was Jesus Himself talking. He’d memorized thousands of verses from the Bible and quoted them one after another, not in any particular order as far as I could make out. But the words were mysterious and drawn from the darkness, and didn’t need understanding. He’d look at me, and his eyes would fill with tears, because he could see the evil inside me. He knew about the magazine I’d hidden in the hollow of that old cottonwood down on the creek, the one Rudy Joe had given to me with the naked girls in it, and he knew about the cigarette butt I’d smoked in the outhouse. He never said, but I knew that he knew.
The Rolands would arrive in the heat of the summer, seventy or eighty strong. A brush arbor would be waiting, built by Granddad Roland’s own hand. A fatted calf would have been butchered and smoked by the darkies down the road, and the sermons to follow would be long. Hymns would be sung, followed by yet more verses. My stomach would growl at the aromas of smoked meat, corn on the cob, homegrown tomatoes. And when I was on the verge of collapse, a final prayer would be offered up, disguised as yet one more sermon.
My Grandma Roland, a small woman with braided white hair, would sit with folded hands and listen to sermons she’d heard a thousand times. She’d nod her head and cling to the words in her quiet way. Some said she was part Indian, coming out of the Cherokee country in northwest Arkansas, but if she was, she never said, not to anyone, not ever.
Odd things can sometimes be normal, you see. It was true that Uncle Berko rarely said anything, that he drank coffee all day long and smoked cigarettes through yellowed fingers, that he talked to himself. I knew it and expected it, because it had always been so. It was also true that Uncle Ward saw Germans coming through his windows, but it was no more than that. I’d seen glimpses of sadness in some of the Rolands’ eyes, too. I’d seen them quiet with their heads down. But it was like being born with a missing finger—it’s unusual only if it grows back. What was had always been. We were the Rolands and that was that, until now, because something in me had begun to change.
That summer, the steam engines were taken from railroad service and, one by one, parked on the siding north of town to await salvage. Dad’s job changed from the machine shop to the ice plant and his hours to the midnight shift. Sleep came hard, and his temper shortened. There was never enough time to do what had to be done. Mom and me struggled to help, but there was so much we couldn’t do. The milk cows stepped on my toes and swatted me with shit tails. The bucket calves sucked my elbows when I tried to feed them. The hogs knocked the slop bucket into the mud, and then me, too, when I tried to get it. They bit the head off my pet duck and ate it—the head, not the duck. A cow gutted herself on a tin culvert that had been ripped up by the road grader. Dad had to shoot her. We tied a ladder in the back of the old truck to paint the peak of the house, and Mom backed it through the wall.
I couldn’t fix the fence or run the tractor. I put water in Dad’s gas tank instead of the radiator. Fuzzface killed forty baby chicks and then took a nap under the car. Our boar hog escaped into the shelterbelt. Mom and me built a woven wire fence around him and left him there. The calves got screwworms in their heads where they’d been dehorned, and they had to be dug out with a stick. We pulled a calf at three in the morning, and I threw up when the afterbirth came out.
Dad worried and fretted about the work left undone. He developed boils on his neck that had to be lanced, and he grew thin from lack of sleep. He was angry to go to work and angry to get home. The more we tried to help, the worse things became. There was so little I could do, and even less I could do right.
What with the steam engines being salvaged, there’d soon be no work at all, Dad said, no cash money, and then what the hell was he supposed to do? He started going to work early and coming home late. Mom said he was playing pitch at the pool hall, but sometimes I’d see her lying on the bed crying.
September came, and the shelterbelt lifted its bare limbs skyward. There was the smell of wood smoke trapped under morning fogs. Gea would be off to school in town this year, and I would be back to West Liberty. While I wasn’t looking forward to it, I figured to survive. Perhaps I wasn’t the smartest kid at West Liberty, but I would never be as dumb as Rudy Joe, and, with luck, the schoolhouse would burn before field day came around again.
But it was not to be. West Liberty School was closed at the last minute, and the lot of us were to be bussed into town to school. It struck me as a mistake to send a young kid like me to town alone.
“I think it’s illegal, Mom,” I said.
“You’ll like it, Jacob. All those new friends.”
“What if I get lost and die?”
“I’ll send a note to your teacher,” she said.
“Mom,” I said, whining, “I’m serious.”
“Gea will be there, if you have a problem.”
“Gea hates me,” I said.
“I can’t figure why,” she said.
“Do they have field day in town?’
“Get your coat and get out there before you miss the bus.”
“If they have field day, I’m not going,” I said.
“Go,” she said, pointing to the door.
Chapter 7
The bus ride was an hour and a half of red dirt roads. The bus driver smoked a cigar and watched us in the mirror. We passed Rudy Joe working in the field next to his dad. He stopped and watched us go by. I guess he was through with school. Maybe he feared false gods, or maybe he was just fed up trying to learn words.
My new teacher’s name was Mrs. Scarsdale. She had braided white hair stacked on the top of her head, and her eyes were black and beady, like the bull snake Dad killed in the cellar. She marched us into this big room and told us where to sit. She took a paddle out of her desk and had us count the holes aloud as she pointed to them. Six holes altogether. She said that holes in a paddle would take the skin right off your legs, so she hoped that she didn’t have to use it. I hoped so too. She laid the paddle on her desk and then looked each one of us in the eyes, just daring us to say something. No one did.
I’d never seen so many kids my own age all gathered up in one place before. There were kids whose parents dropped them off at school in nice cars, and there were Mexican kids from Mexican town out by the roundhouse. They had black hair and black eyes and didn’t talk much. One of them, a girl, sat in front of me. She looked back and smiled but said nothing.
There were other girls too. Some smelled like soap and wore dresses and giggled a lot. They passed notes when Mrs. Scarsdale left the room. Sometimes they would push the boys or pull them around by their collars. The boys had new shoes, new pencils, and new boxes of crayons. They stood around with their hands in their back pockets and acted like they knew something no one else did.
Recess came twice a day, with an electric bell that rang when it was time to go and time to come in. There was an indoor bathroom down the hall and a urinal where you could stand and go to the bathroom. The playground had slides and swings and a merry go round.
One day, the little Mexican girl who sat in front of me didn’t come back from recess. Later, Mrs. Scarsdale came in with the principal. She was crying, and the principal told us that the little girl had hit her head on the schoolhouse wall while playing red rover and was killed.
Her coat hung on the back of the seat in front of me.
No one paid me any mind, except to look on my paper or to ask if I had gum. At recess the boys played games and chose up sides. The girls chased the boys and pushed them down. Mrs. Scarsdale had a million tortures she used to keep us quiet: Sit under the desk with your knees under your chin. Sit on the floor with your legs out in front of you and with your back straight. Put your nose in a circle on the blackboard while on your tiptoes. Stand in the corner with your arms straight out in front of you. Sometimes she’d just get out the paddle. Count the holes, she’d say. Six of them. Does everyone understand? Count them again where I can hear you. One, two, . . .
I had to sing choir after school one day and stand next to the prettiest girl in class. We held the songbook together. Her fingers touched mine. When choir was over, she looked back at the others and said, “I smell cow manure.” I didn’t look at my shoes. I didn’t need to.
For three weeks the seat in front of me was empty, the one where the little Mexican girl had sat, and then one day there was a new kid sitting in it. He was larger than me, he wore thick glasses, and his hair was cut high on the sides.
He turned. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Jacob,” I said. “What’s yours?”
“Danny,” he said. “Am I sitting in a dead person’s seat?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did old lady Scarsdale kill her?”
“Yes,” I said. “And there are six holes in her paddle.”
“Want to hang out?” he asked.
“I don’t play games.”
“Only freaks play games,” he said.
We met in the shade of the junior high building after lunch. He took out a pocketknife and sharpened the end of a stick.
“What’s the matter?” he said, looking up.
“Nothing.”
“I make science stuff all the time,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like, I made a magnet out of a battery and a spring coil. Do you make stuff?”
“No,” I said. “But I think stuff.”
He stopped whittling and looked up at me. “Like what?”
“I thought up a poem, and it was in the school paper.”
“That dumb paper? All they got in it is the cafeteria menu and a picture of the principal.”
“I think up other stuff too,” I said.
“Yeah? Like what?”
I told him my idea about adults living underground and kids living on top. He thought about it for a little bit and said, “That’s nuts.”
“Why?”
“There’d have to be hundreds of tunnels, and how would the people breathe?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.
So I told him about how I figured out how to live forever. And he said, “To start with, you ain’t a thought. You’re made up of bones and guts. You have to keep your body from rotting if you want it to live forever.”
“How?” I said.
“By freezing it,” he said. “You could stay alive for a million years.”
“In a million years, someone’s going to thaw it out before that,” I said.
He stuck his pocketknife blade in the ground and lay down on his side, his head propped up on his hand. “Why think up stuff in your head if you can’t use it?” he asked.
“Because I can’t help it,” I said.
“If something can’t be made out of it, it’s just dumb.”
“Maybe it’s dumb to you,” I said.
“Want to come home with me sometime?”
“Sure, I guess,” I said. “If my folks let me. Where do you live?”
“The Railway Hotel,” he said. “My grandparents own it. I have a room all to myself, and I have a stash too.”
“A stash?”
“That’s right.”
“Where?”
“I’m not saying right off, because I don’t trust you yet. For all I know you’re in with Scarsdale, torturing kids and the like.”
“I ain’t,” I said.
“Friday night,” he said.
Mom said she guessed it would be all right if I stayed the night with Danny. Dad said I hadn’t gathered the eggs like I ought, and the coons got ’em, but that I could stay over if I promised to keep up with my chores, so I promised.
Gea said she didn’t want me showing up at school looking like some orphan.
“I wish I was,” I said.
“Don’t talk that way,” Mom said.
“She talked that way first,” I said.
“Jacob, you won’t be going anywhere with a busted lip,” Mom said.
“I saw Gea holding hands with Biff Housely on the school ground at noon the other day,” I said.
“I was not,” Gea said.
“All cow-eyed,” I said.
“Mom,” she said.
“I better not catch you holding hands. You ain’t too big for a licking just yet. Now, there’s the bus,” Mom said. “Dad will pick you up Saturday, Jacob, and mind your manners.”
Me and Danny walked to the Railway Hotel after school, which was right next to the tracks. His grandparents were really old and wore foggy glasses. We went to his room, which was on the top floor. I could see all the way to the roundhouse from his window.
We sat on the bed and looked at comic books. He had more comic books than I’d ever seen before.
“Why do you live with your grandparents?” I asked.
“My folks are dead,” he said.
