Calloustown (20 page)

Since the invention of the minibus, sixth-grade boys at Calloustown Elementary spent the night at Ms. Whalen's house, for early in the morning her husband, whom up until this point I'd always thought an otherwise good man named Ben who somehow broke away from local DNA and closed-mindedness, would get us together and drive us around the countryside in order to point out what General Sherman missed by swerving away from Calloustown. The sixth-grade girls, I learned, all stayed at the other sixth-grade teacher's house, a woman named Ms. Harrell, in order to learn about what was going to happen to their bodies soon. I don't know if it's true or not, but before the minibus the Calloustown kids stayed at other ex-teachers' households for the night before embarking on mule-led wagons. And before the mules, those poor Calloustown kids had to plain walk to, say, the Finger Museum, which probably only held one finger on display.

“Do not bring up how we're Democrats, Luke,” my mother reminded me as she pulled up to Ms. Whalen's house. “If anyone asks you if you're a Christian, it's best to go ahead and lie. What's it going to matter, seeing as we don't go to church anyway? If your teacher offers you a baloney sandwich for breakfast, just go ahead and eat it seeing as it's not going to kill you much.”

I said, “Why am I here again? What's going on?”

My mother put the car in neutral, and then seemed to experiment with reverse and one of the lower gears. She said, “Are they not teaching you any existentialism at Calloustown Elementary?”

I didn't get it. I said, “Tell me again who Sherman was?” It's not like I wasn't from the South—it's just that my parents watched the news at night, and read books written by people who won awards, and they didn't sit around moaning about how things could've been, like my classmates' parents seemed to do. “And go through Jesus again, just in case.”

My mother laughed. She leaned over and kissed my forehead and said, “You'll be fine. I got you some special gray flannel pajamas packed up for you to wear so you'll fit in. I tried to draw a stars and bars on your sleeping bag but it just came out a giant X. If anyone asks, say it faded and ran in the washing machine.”

I didn't get those remarks, either. I said, “It's Valentine's Day. Do they do this everywhere on Valentine's Day?”

General Sherman burned Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17, 1865. According to the denizens of Calloustown, he should've burned their town on the fifteenth, if he had any sense of the right thing to do, on his way back north.

My mother said, “More or less.”

General Sherman didn't consider our ancestors' town worthy of torching, and the consequences, over the next seven or eight generations, weren't unpredictable: a miniscule region of high-voiced men and women whose families intermarried endlessly, producing higher-voiced offspring, ad infinitum, all Yankee-hating, distrustful stumpgrinders and third-shift health professionals at what still got called the Calloustown Home for the Feeble and Discouraged. I exaggerate, but not much. Beginning in sixth-grade civics class a variety of students would blurt out, “Sherman didn't think Fairview Plantation was good enough to burn! Shows you what he knew! They got them four bedrooms there, and two roomses!” et cetera, their larynxes squealing in such incredulous-filled manners that at times—say later in South Carolina history class, or eleventh-grade American history when the Civil War section took up two nine-week grading periods—it sounded like one of those trick crystal glass band members wet-fingering a rim ceaselessly. It sounded like the emergency broadcast system's television test most days when the prodigy of Munsons and Harrells wailed out their disgust in regards to William Tecumseh Sherman's notions of aesthetics: “What's so good about Atlanta, Savannah, or Columbia? Sherman was stupid! He said he wanted to march to the sea, and Calloustown starts with a C.”

I hate to think that I've always considered myself of a higher ilk than the typical Calloustowner hell bent on grasping worthful arson, but it's true to a degree. My parents arrived at my place of training only after surrendering law practices right before offers of partnership. They cashed in some savings, did some research, bought the cheapest arable land available in Zone 8 in regards to that Hardiness Scale, began an organic farm long before it became commonplace and chic, and then had their only child—me—in their late thirties. By “long before” I might really mean 1981, right after the Iranian hostages got released. Because of the hostages and a certain doomful outlook regarding economic growth and détente, and without doing research on how vengeful their new neighbors had become, my parents settled on a crossroads neither known to blues songs nor sulfurous flame.

I grew up with Munsons and Harrells alike pissed off that someone considered our cows, sheep, hogs, and chickens inedible, our women unattractive, our spring houses tainted. Maybe that's why my mother never allowed me to read the Bible in general, and Job's story in particular. It's a wonder that more than a few of us non-Munsons and -Harrells escaped with self-esteem higher than a collard stalk.

“If they ask you if you hunt, say yes. Fish, yes. Hate everyone north of Virginia, yes. If stupid Bobby Harrell asks you again about your pets, say you own a cottonmouth and a fire ant farm.” My mother had a whole list that she went over daily as I shoved books in my backpack. My father started every morning reciting Latin terms he knew by heart before entering his torporous berry patches. “If one of the Munson boys keeps asking you if you've been with a girl, here,” my mother would say, pouring Chicken of the Sea tuna water on my palm. “Tell him to sniff your finger.”

That was another little action or saying that I didn't get, of course. But the half-feral cats that lived inside the school liked me, which, of course, got me called Pussy.

Mr. Whalen sat in his living room with a fishing pole. There were bags of store-bought ice all around the hole he'd fashioned into the floor, and the hook on the end of his line descended down into a crawlspace. Bobby, Donnie, Larry, and Gary Munson held poles, too, as did Lonnie, Ronnie, Billy, and Stonewall Harrell. These were my classmates. These were my sleepover comrades the night before the “What Does Sherman Know?” annual festival.

“Get you a pole, there, Luke,” Mr. Whalen said. “We're playing a little game called Ice Fishing in Minnesota. We don't got no need to ice fish around these parts ever, so I thought I'd teach you boys a little bit about it.”

I said hello to all of the two-syllable-named classmates. None of them said anything back. I said, “Do you have fish in the basement?”

“We're fishing for rats and mice,” Ben Whalen said. He patted the lid to a plastic cooler next to him, as if there were caught vermin inside. “Put you a chunk of cheese on your hook and drop it on down.”

These were bamboo poles, probably macheted over on the edge of Mr. Morse's tree farm. I threw my line into the hole and squeezed in between Gary and Lonnie. I tried to peer down into the hole, but couldn't tell how deep it was. I said, “Did you cut this hole in the floor by yourself?” because I couldn't think of anything else to say.

Bobby Munson yelled out, “Luke ain't a Christian!”

I said, because I'd been taught to do so, “I'm the only one here named after somebody in the Bible. There isn't a Book of Bobby.”

“Boys,” Mr. Whalen said. “This is all of y'all, right?” He drank from a plastic cup, and I could smell the booze in it. “Boys, while I got you all here I might as well use this opportunity to tell you about the birds and the bees, it being Valentine's Day and all.”

Later on I figured out that because we had no male teachers in the sixth grade, one of the teachers' husbands would have to take over. Over at the girls' sleepover, it probably wasn't so uncomfortable for a woman to explain sex.

I think it was Lonnie Harrell who said, “My grandmother has a beehive in her backyard.”

“I got pictures of my grandmother with a beehive hairdo,” one of the Munsons said.

“I ain't talking about real birds and bees,” Mr. Whalen said. “Let's pretend that I'm talking about mice and, and…I don't know. Let's just say I'm talking about mice, seeing as they reproduce like all get-out.” He took a big swig from his cup.

My sixth-grade teacher came in the room carrying a tray. She wore blue jeans, which kind of freaked everyone out, and said, “Who wants some Pepsi?”

You'd think none of the Munson or Harrell kids had ever had Pepsi, which might've been true. Half of them dropped their poles down into the hole and rushed our teacher. They grabbed and kicked each other out of the way. Me, I sat there thinking about something else my parents had told me: “Pepsi Cola” rearranged came out “Episcopal.” So I said, loudly, “We drink Pepsi Cola all the time at our house because it's ‘Episcopal.' That's what we drink. At my house. Because it's a Christian drink.”

Everything seemed to stop. It wasn't my imagination that all of my male classmates shut up and turned to me as if I'd spoken in tongues. Ms. Whalen—I should mention that her maiden name was Munson—said, “What did you say, Luke?”

I said, “I mean, we drink Gatorade.”

I didn't think I had said anything blasphemous—in retrospect, I think all these children of Pentecostals had never heard of another denomination, except for maybe Baptist. I was glad that Mr. Whalen broke the tension by yelling, “I got one, I got one, I got one,” and then pulling up a fake mouse that, like a blue crab breaking the surface and experiencing air, he somehow got to let go of the cheese and drop back down into the crawlspace.

My sixth-grade teacher screamed and took off running for the kitchen. My classmates brought their Pepsis back, and one of them said, “Hey, Luke, go under the house and get our poles we dropped.”

I said, “You dropped them down there. You go get them.”

“You scared to go under the house, son?” Ben Whalen said. Yeah, Mr. Whalen. You'd think that Lonnie, Donnie, or Ronnie would've dared me, not my sixth-grade teacher's husband, a man I'd up to that point thought to have escaped inbreeding disasters.

“Luke rhymes with puke,” Bobby said.

I don't know why I thought it necessary to prove myself, to say, “Somebody at least give me a flashlight.”

I walked outside the Whalens' house and didn't look back to see if anyone stared at me through the window. I could've walked home—it wasn't but a mile—but I knew my parents would've been disappointed. Somewhere between my father mumbling,
“A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi
” and
“Ubi fumus, ibi ignis
,” he always said to me that enduring frost only made one stronger. I walked up to Mr. Whalen's six-wheeled truck—this is why I thought he had escaped the normal Munson/ Harrell mindset—a silver refrigeration vehicle that he drove around a few-county area with
FRESH
MEAT
ON
WHEELS
written on the panels. He offered people rib eyes and filets and hamburger patties, chicken and fish and pork chops, for prices much lower than Winn-Dixie, Bi-Lo, or the A&P—grocery stores that might be thirty miles from Calloustown.

I went around the side of the house and paid attention not to get snagged by briars or the Whalens' neighbor's pit bull on a long chain, and then the back of the house where a short door led to the crawlspace. I turned on the flashlight and thought, somehow this is going to keep me being made fun of. In a normal world kids would say, “That Luke—he's brave.” But in the land of Calloustown, a day before the “What Does Sherman Know?” celebration, it would probably come out that I was one with Satan, what with my non-fear of all things rabid that live beneath our abodes.

I got in and waved my light around. As it ended up, the Whalens' crawlspace was nearly high enough to count as a basement—six feet high, at least, where the hole stood—with a hand-troweled cement floor. I found the dropped bamboo poles right away, and saw light streaming in from above. I took a few steps and heard Stonewall say, “That's not how I learned how it works,” then took a few more steps. Mr. Whalen yelled down, “Are you there, Luke?” but I didn't respond.

I walked right to the edge of the bastardized ice hole and heard my sixth-grade teacher's husband say, “That is how it works. It's just like this here hole. The sperm's the cheese, and the hole's the hole, and once the cheese hits the hole it don't take long for a baby to come out of the hole. The rat.”

I was twelve. We were all twelve. Mr. and Ms. Whalen didn't have children at this point, and perhaps this was why. I yelled up at the hole, “Here,” and started shoving poles upward. Somebody, one of my classmates, yelled back down at me, “Don't step on any of the babies down there.”

Somebody else said something about a stork, and then Mr. Whalen said loudly, “I give up,” and “Monetta, I've done my job here.” Then he might've fallen over, for there was a noise, and one of the Harrell kids said, “Are you all right?”

I wasn't paying attention much. I'd come across a cache of Matchbox cars—vintage ones, though I didn't know the difference at the time. Someone had built a miniature Grand Prix road course of sorts, complete with barriers, army men onlookers, trees fashioned from those colored-cellophane toothpicks, and what appeared to be the Calloustown Courthouse that never existed in the first place. I might've said, “Hey, can we play down here later?”

Or I might've kept it to myself, thinking that if Mr. and Ms. Whalen ever die in a fiery wreck, I'm coming back down here to get some things before anyone else finds them. Again, my parents hadn't gone over those Ten Commandments at this point, especially the one about coveting your neighbor's 1:43 scale die-cast toy cars.

I walked into the circle of light and looked up at all the little Munson and Harrell blank faces looking down at me. I said, “What's going on up there?”