Down Sand Mountain (31 page)

Dad walked right up to the porch and stuck out his hand to shake, and Mr. Ellis got up and shook Dad’s hand but he didn’t come down to the yard. Dad said he was so sorry for what happened, and it wasn’t right, and he said he was sorry again and he wanted to help. . . .

Mr. Ellis waited until Dad finished, then he just said, “What’s done is done, Mr. Turner. No used a man to cry over spilt milk.”

Those low dogs swam around me and Wayne’s legs and I wanted to get back in the car. Dad seemed to remember we were standing there just then and said, “Boys, you can introduce yourselves to Mr. Ellis.” Wayne went first. He walked over to the porch and shook Mr. Ellis’s hand, which I wasn’t sure you were supposed to do with a colored person, even though your dad had done it.

Mrs. Ellis stood up at about that minute and frowned and walked inside the house without saying anything. The screen door slammed behind her and the dogs started howling until Mr. Ellis yelled at them to quit. We were all quiet then, and Mr. Ellis looked at the porch and kicked a loose board with his shoe. Nobody said anything for a real long time, even Dad. I stuck my hands in my pockets. Finally Dad pulled an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to Mr. Ellis. “I thought this might help a little, and I’ll let you know if I hear of anything workwise I can pass along,” he said.

Mr. Ellis took the envelope and stuffed it in his pocket like he wished he could make it disappear, which in a way it did. He nodded like he appreciated it, but also like maybe nodding was just something he did when he didn’t have anything else to say. I remembered that night of the Rotary Club Minstrel Show when Walter Wratchford’s dad called him “Mistuh Chollie” and how he nodded and nodded then, too. It was obvious he wanted us to leave.

Dad said good-bye, then him and Wayne went ahead and got in the car. But I held back for a second since I still hadn’t shook Mr. Ellis’s hand. I walked over to the porch and did that then. I don’t know why exactly. I said I was sorry about everything. Once I got started telling him how sorry I was, I couldn’t seem to quit right away and I said, “I’m sorry for doing my business in your grass at the high school, too. I just wanted to tell you that.”

He didn’t smile, but he nodded some. Then he said, “It’s no need to speak about it.”

I said, “Yes, sir,” and he said, “Plenty of worse things than that,” and I said, “Yes, sir,” again.

“You love your mama?” he asked me.

I said, “Yes, sir.”

“Love your daddy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Love Jesus?”

“Yes, sir. I try to.”

“Well then,” he said, “you going to be all right.”

And he turned and went inside.

“Is he your friend, Dad?” I said after we’d been driving a little while.

“I like to think he is,” Dad said.

Wayne said he was glad Dad was friends with Mr. Ellis. That kind of surprised me. Except for that story about Darla and the colored boy, I hadn’t thought I knew anybody that was friends with anybody colored. But then I got thinking about what all Mr. Ellis had done for Dad’s campaign, and how he lost two jobs from trying to help people, and how he never even mentioned to Dad about me peeing in the bushes at school, and I said I was glad Dad and Mr. Ellis were friends, too.

Then I said, “I don’t think Mrs. Ellis liked us, though.”

Dad was hunched over the steering wheel like he needed to get closer to what he was looking at to help him drive up the dirt road. It was so dark I could hardly see Wayne in the front seat ahead of me, even when I leaned way forward.

“Mrs. Ellis is upset about the situation,” Dad said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with us directly. Just the situation.”

“It’s a lousy situation, then,” Wayne said.

Dad said that yes, it was. I wanted to say something, too, something like they were saying, but didn’t know what.

I got lonely sitting there in the back by myself, so I asked Dad if I could climb over the seat to be with him and Wayne in the front. He said OK, but just be careful when I did. Wayne scooted way over so I wouldn’t fall onto him, and once I got settled in the seat, he didn’t even seem to care that our shoulders and arms were touching. We rode the rest of the way home like that all together — Dad driving, Wayne shotgun, me in the middle.

I HAD DREAMS ABOUT DARLA. I couldn’t remember most of them when I woke up except that she was somewhere and I was somewhere else and I couldn’t get to where she was. Mom took me to see Dr. Boughner again, and I told him about the dreams. He asked me, “Can you remember more about where you and Darla were and what else was going on in these dreams?” and he even got a watch out and tried to hypnotize me. But it didn’t work.

So he said, “Well, never mind, then, but what do
you
think the dreams mean, Dewey?” I said I didn’t know, but couldn’t he just tell me? It was probably in one of his books, like the phallus symbol he also kept talking about, and that I finally figured out, and now I saw those things everywhere I looked. He wouldn’t give me the answer, though, so I said all I thought about my dreams was that I must just miss Darla and I guess I wished I could have been there and saved her from that phosphate train that blew the whistle and scared Bojangles, and from that car that hit them.

“Is there anything else?” he said.

“You mean like anything to do with my mom?” I said.

He nodded.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so this time.”

He seemed pretty disappointed, but he tried to be nice, anyway, and said he thought it was understandable that I missed my girlfriend and that I had the grief about it in my dreams. I tried to explain to him that Darla wasn’t ever my girlfriend and I didn’t know where the heck he got that idea anyway, but Dr. Boughner just smiled like he knew better.

After about another week I had a different dream, and this one I did remember. There wasn’t much to it, just me and Darla tap-dancing on the stage of the Sand Mountain High School auditorium. That dream didn’t make any sense, though, because I hadn’t ever tap-danced with Darla or had a lesson in it from her mom or anything. When I woke up that night, I didn’t know where I was. The room was almost as bright as the day and I went to the window and saw it was a full moon. Somebody was banging on something outside and I didn’t even think about it; I just followed the noise even though I was in my pajamas — out the front door and down the steps and into the front yard, where the grass was wet from the dew, and I saw my shadow even though it was in the middle of the night. There was a woodpecker hammering on a telephone pole over by the street, and I watched him for a pretty long time, and the longer I watched, the sadder I felt about Darla not being there anymore, and someday Mom and Dad not being there anymore, and Wayne, and Tink, and even me. I got cold all of a sudden. Maybe it was the wind, or how wet my feet were, or how lonely I was. This sounds crazy, but I wished God would have been there — God or just about anybody — to pat me on the head and tell me everything is going to be all right. I went back inside and then into Mom and Dad’s bedroom, which was something I hadn’t done in a while but used to do all the time. I wanted Mom to wake up but couldn’t make myself make her wake up, I don’t know why. I just needed for her to know I was there, and for her to pull back the covers and let me crawl into bed with her and Dad. But she didn’t, and Dad didn’t, either, and for a second I got worried that they weren’t even breathing and what if something had happened to them, but then Dad snored and Mom rolled over and I went back to my own bed.

I didn’t sleep much, and the next day, after school, I did something that Mom had been trying to get me to do ever since the funeral, which was go over and play with Darwin. I thought maybe I had a guilty conscience, and maybe that was what was making me have insomnia.

When I got to their house, Darwin opened the door and said, “Hey,” like he was expecting me. I said, “Hey,” back, like it was just the usual thing with us, and then we went up to his room to find something to do. I was worried that he would want to play that Turn Off the Lights game of his, but he never even mentioned it. Instead they had an old chessboard he hadn’t ever used, and I taught him how to play. Dad had taught me when I was about in first grade. I hadn’t ever beat him, though, and one time he beat me in three moves, which I always remembered. Darwin learned it pretty quick, and since I felt sorry for him, I let him win. We didn’t talk much, and when it was time for me to go, he said, “You don’t have to come over here. I know you only liked Darla and not me.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said, even though it was true. I asked him if he ever played cribbage, which my dad also taught me when I was little, and always beat me at, too. Darwin said no, and I said I would teach him next time I came over if he wanted.

“OK,” he said.

Their mom was downstairs and she hugged me so hard when I was leaving that I couldn’t barely breathe. Her voice was hoarse when she talked. She said, “You promise me you won’t stop coming over here for dance lessons. Darla would have wanted you to keep practicing. She speaks to me in my prayers. Did you know that, Dewey?”

I didn’t know that, and it scared me for her to say it, but I said, “Yes, ma’am,” anyway. I hoped she wasn’t going to turn into a crazy person. Darwin kind of rescued me from her. He pulled her hand off my arm where she squeezed so tight it left marks of her fingers on my skin. When I was finally actually leaving, Walter Wratchford came driving up in his old blue Ford Fairlane. I guess Darla dying made it OK for him and Mrs. Turkel to be together and not just in the middle of the night on top of the Skeleton Hotel. He gave me a salute like we were both soldiers.

The granddad died in December; I think it was his cough that finally killed him, and it wasn’t too long after that that Mrs. Turkel sold their old house and took Darwin and moved away to Tampa. Walter Wratchford moved over there, too, after a little while, at least that’s where I heard he went, but I don’t know if him and Mrs. Turkel got married or what they did. I didn’t ever hear from Darwin, but one day I was watching TV and on the Tampa station they had a commercial for Del Webb’s Sun City, where all the old people lived, and in the commercial there was a boy standing next to a shuffleboard with an old lady who was smiling at him. They were both holding shuffleboard sticks and he said, “My gramma has so much fun at Del Webb’s Sun City, I wish I could live here, too.” I couldn’t believe it, and neither could anybody else, but the boy in the commercial was Darwin.

One night in bed I asked Wayne if he ever thought about Darla much. The mattress springs creaked like he was turning over on his stomach. Finally he said that he did, but he guessed he didn’t want to talk about her right now. I said that was OK, and then I asked did Darla ever tell him that me and her went sneaking out one other time when Wayne was asleep and we discovered who the Howler was?

Wayne kind of laughed and said no, she never told him about that.

I said, “Well, we did,” and I bet he couldn’t guess who it was.

Wayne said he bet he could and I said how much did he want to bet? He said, “A buck-two-ninety-eight,” which was this dumb thing he was always saying when you asked him how much anything cost, and then he said heck, everybody in town already knew who the Howler was a long time ago.

I said, “They did?”

He said, “Yeah. Walter Wratchford. When he drank liquor sometimes, he yelled and stuff up on top of the Skeleton Hotel. It was probably from being in the war and all.”

I asked him why he hadn’t told me and Darla that to begin with and he said he just thought it was funny us sneaking out like that to find out and he figured he would just go along to see what might happen. I didn’t tell him about Walter Wratchford and Darla’s mom up on the Skeleton Hotel. Except for Darla and me, I guess nobody ever knew about that.

One thing that bothered me for a long time was I hadn’t ever given Darla one of my school pictures. Mom said maybe I should write to Mrs. Turkel and send her one; she said she bet Mrs. Turkel would like to hear from one of Darla’s friends. So I did that. I wrote the letter and sent the picture. Mrs. Turkel wrote me right back a note thanking me, and she gave me one of Darla’s pictures, too, from when we were in sixth grade. I guess nobody had burned them like Darla wanted.

At first I was happy to have it. But the longer I looked at it, the less it seemed like Darla to me, and more like just some other girl, until finally I put it in my bottom dresser drawer and didn’t look at it again.

Our church had a live Nativity scene at Christmas and they set it up on the lawn of the high school, facing First Street, because there wasn’t enough room at the First Methodist. The men from the church built a real stable that was open in the front facing the road, and a manger inside, and a pen where they had real animals from somebody’s farm out in the county: a couple of donkeys, a couple of goats, a couple of sheep, a couple of cows. It was too bad there weren’t any camels around for the “Three Wise Guys”— that’s what Wayne called them — but people were pretty impressed anyway. The roof of the stable was chicken wire stuffed with palmetto fronds, and they built a little platform up there with a stool and sort of a cross where the Angel of the Lord could sit and put her arms on top of the cross so her wings spread all the way out without her arms getting too tired holding them up. On the programs they printed up, they wrote, “The
Angle
of the Lord,” instead of the
Angel,
but nobody noticed in time to fix it.