Lightning Song (3 page)

“You're soaked!” Leroy's mama was saying to Swami Don as he came into the house. Swami Don was an odd name, nobody seemed to remember why he was called that. He took off his John Deere cap and shook the rain off onto the porch floor. Swami Don was a big man, with just one good arm. The other one was just a withered limp little wet rag of an arm. Old Pappy had shot him when he was a child. It was an accident. Swami Don didn't hold any grudges, he had said this plenty of times, Leroy had heard him. Leroy didn't mention that Old Pappy had died and come back to life. Swami Don
shook himself in a funny way, like he was a dog, and this made everybody laugh. He said, “A towel, somebody!” and Laurie came a-running.

Later on they ate dinner together, all of them. They sat around the little kitchen table covered with checkered oilcloth. There were big white bowls of steaming food, a wooden salad bowl with lettuce out of the garden and red chunks of ripe tomato. Leroy thought about Old Pappy up in the attic, breathing, but he didn't say anything. Elsie had made a big chicken stew, with carrots, green peas, and potatoes and onions, and served it in a big crockery bowl in the middle of the kitchen table. There were other dishes, too. She had also made biscuits, which were golden and fragrant, and placed them in a wicker basket with a blue towel over them to keep them warm. A little plate with butter sat with a butter knife perched on the side. Little Molly made a fuss and wouldn't sit in the high chair, but that was all right. Laurie got a big pillow and put it on a regular chair for her to sit on. Swami Don said, “She's growing up, that's all, first thing I know, she'll be married, they'll all be married, and I'll be a granddaddy.” He smiled and winked when he said this. Elsie said, “Oh, please!” and this made everyone laugh. Leroy tried to laugh with them, but he couldn't do it. He was wondering if Old Pappy had died again yet. He grinned, that was the best he could do. He felt Old Pappy's cracked lips again upon his own.

Chicken stew and biscuits was Leroy's favorite supper. He
looked at the steaming bowl, the wicker basket of bread, the butter dish, and thought he could never eat enough chicken stew. He was as hungry as a wild dog for chicken stew and biscuits. He would never get enough, he just knew he wouldn't. He was suddenly so hungry he was ready to fight for chicken stew. He grabbed the bowl even before his daddy could get any. He dug into it with the big serving spoon and shoveled it onto his plate. He piled up his plate, he spooned it on, dollop after dollop. He grabbed up his fork and ate so fast his teeth were clashing against the metal loud enough to hear in the next room. His mama finally said, “Whoa, honey, slow down.” He felt wild, he wasn't sure he could slow down. He forced himself to eat more slowly. He ate and ate. When he was finished with the stew, he buttered a biscuit, then another, and put both on his plate and poured syrup over them. His daddy said, “Guess who's hungry tonight?” He smiled at Leroy. “Is that some good eating?” Leroy ate as much as he could. He was so full he was about to bust, but he couldn't quit eating. He drank two glasses of milk. The storm was blowing, the lightning was cracking, fireballs danced through the house. He said, “Is anybody going to check on Old Pappy?” Elsie said, “I was up there earlier today.” He sat at his plate, sodden with food. He didn't know what to say. When he went to bed his stomach felt like he had swallowed a basketball. Old Pappy wasn't dead when he left him, that's all Leroy cared about. If he was dead now, it wasn't Leroy's fault. Later on Leroy's mama came into his room and sat on the edge of his bed. The
rain was falling and falling and making big puddles in the yard. The lightning had moved on through. A light from the llama shed, which burned all night, shined a dim glow in the rainy darkness that he could see from the bed. He could see the outline of his mama's form beside him. He could feel her weight on the side of the bed. She said, “Are you okay, sweetie? You ate so much, I was afraid you were going to make yourself sick.” He said, “I didn't kill Old Pappy.” She put her hand upon his face, as he had put his own hand on Old Pappy's face. She said, “Well, of course you didn't, darling. Of course not.” Leroy said, “He ain't dead.” “I know, punkin,” Elsie said. “He's in a coma, we've talked about this, he's just sleeping right now, you remember. You didn't do anything.” “Are you going to check on him?” “Well, sure. I always check one last time before I go to bed. Don't you worry about a thing.” When she leaned down and kissed Leroy on the forehead, her lips felt cool on his skin. She told him the bedtime story she always told when any of the children were sick or scared, the drive into the country, the wide field at sunset, the musical sad voices coming from far off in the distance. It was llamas, singing to the setting sun. They sang and sang, this strange song. “Those innocent faces,” she said.

When she was gone, Leroy lay in the bed looking out his window and listening to the falling rain. It was hard to do, but he stayed awake until he heard his mama go up the stairs through the trapdoor and find Old Pappy dead. He heard her whisper this to Swami Don. He heard his daddy crying and
knew that she was holding his daddy's head in her lap and touching his hair. He heard the ambulance come and heard the men come in and take Old Pappy down the stairs and out the door. He heard the ambulance drive away in the rain.

I
t was one of those blue-sky summer Sunday afternoons in the red clay hills of Mississippi. Sometimes Elsie told Leroy to walk down to the end of the lane and down the blacktop and over to Mr. Sweet's store for her, she might need some bread or something. It was kind of far, and the macadams did have traffic sometimes, but if you were careful it was pretty safe. She said, “Ask Mr. Sweet does he need me to bring him his supper tonight. He's been poorly.” Leroy looked across the llama pasture, in the direction of Mr. Sweet's store. He saw the white cottage there, surrounded by big pecan trees, a few old cars in the yard. Some new people had moved into the cottage not long ago, before that the house had sat empty for a long time. Everybody called them the New People. Nobody knew them, they kept to themselves. If they had another name, Leroy didn't know about it.
He looked over at the New People's cottage. Nobody had met them yet. Leroy was starting to have him an idea.

He said, “Can Laurie and Molly go with me?”

Elsie said, “You might have to carry Molly partway back.”

He said, “Okay.”

She said, “Well, y'all walk in the ditch, I don't want you close to that road. Molly, you hold hands, you hear.”

E
verybody talked about the New People. Nobody knew much. They seemed different from everybody else. They didn't dress like farm people, maybe they spoke with a foreign accent, nobody was sure which country. The postmistress, a woman named Lolly Pinkerton who raised and sold cockroaches to fishermen, said she heard they came from Venezuela, maybe Trinidad, though if you talked to her long enough you could tell she had no idea that these were foreign countries. She seemed to think her boy, who was grown now and lived in Arkansas, had once played football against those teams, sometime after integration, down in the Delta maybe. How did she get that government job? Mr. Sweet, the old man who ran the store and gas station out on the highway, had them mixed up with a late uncle of his who had fought in the Mexican War, which made no sense at all. Mr. Sweet was failing. Poorly didn't hardly cover how Mr. Sweet was doing. It was hard to get good information about the New People. Leroy felt the calling. Leroy was planning another creepy-crawly. This one was too big to do alone.

It took a good long time to walk all the way to the store. It
was hot, too. You could work up a sweat. Leroy started wondering if he'd made a mistake dragging his sisters along with him. Laurie wore a pair of new yellow boots, even though she didn't need them, the weather was dry, and got a blister on one heel, first thing. She said, “Shit.” Molly said she had to go tee-tee, and Leroy said, “Don't go in your pants,” but she did anyway. It ran all down her leg. Man, that was pretty bad. Leroy cleaned her up as well as he could. When did this start up, this pants-wetting? She'd been pretty well trained. Leroy told Laurie she could go barefoot and he'd carry her boots for her. She said, “If I step on a nail, I'm going to slap the shit out of you.” He made Molly take off her underpants and he wadded them up and stuck them down in Laurie's boot while she wasn't looking. They walked past the New People's cottage on the way to the store.

Leroy said, “Want to go for a visit?”

Laurie gave him one of her slap-your-stupid-face looks.

He said, “Sort of explore?”

They walked on past the house and then along the blacktop. If a car came along they all three jumped in the ditch. Leroy finally pulled open the screened door of Mr. Sweet's little store and the three of them went inside. Sometimes Mr. Sweet gave them each a cold drink, Leroy liked Nu Grape or Yoo-Hoo, but he'd take anything. The handle on the store's door was a faded tin contraption in the shape of some kind of cola drink that Leroy had never heard of anyplace else. The one gas pump out front was a brand of gasoline nobody else ever
heard of, with a dinosaur drawn on the globe. A man named Hot McGee was in the store trying to buy a jar of pickled pig's feet. Mr. Sweet said he couldn't remember what they were. “Describe pickled pig's feet,” Mr. Sweet was saying to Mr. McGee. “Give me enough clues and I might be able to come up with it.” Hot McGee had a son Leroy's age named Screamer McGee who could lick his own penis, double-jointed, he was well known in the county. Leroy had tried that trick and got nowhere close, it was a gift. Hot was a man with strange red arms, with forearms bigger than his biceps, a funny-looking guy if you wanted Leroy's opinion. He carried a chair and a bullwhip with him wherever he went, like an animal trainer, though he wasn't one. “Pickled pig's feet, Mr. Sweet, you remember, come in a jar, real tasty, special good with beer, maybe some crackers, come on now, you can do it. Kind of pink? Got a knuckle and a toenail sometimes?” “It's about to come back to me, I think I'm about to remember,” Mr. Sweet said from behind the little empty meat case. The meat case had one package of wieners and a shriveled-up fryer chicken in it. There were a couple of flies crawling around on the inside of the glass, so it probably wasn't too cool in there either. “There you go,” Hot McGee was saying. “Now you're talking. You can do it.” Mr. Sweet was a toothless little man with one leg shorter than the other. He walked on a built-up shoe. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully with his hand. Leroy didn't know what a pickled pig's foot was either, and proud of it.

Finally Mr. Sweet said, “Now what was it you were asking me? Seem like you were about to ask me something.”

Hot McGee let out a long sigh. He uncoiled his bullwhip and Leroy worried for about a second that he was going lash the living shit out of Mr. Sweet with it, but he didn't.

He coiled it back up again and picked his straight-chair up and turned to the door. He said, “I'll come back later, when you're feeling better. Miz McGee, she'll be calling later on to check on you. I think you've got them pig's feet, if you'd just put your mind to it.”

L
eroy had actually seen the New People once before. Talking about Mr. Sweet's store was what made him think of them in the first place. This was where he saw them that time, right here in the store. Leroy had walked down to Mr. Sweet's by himself for some little something, milk maybe, or a dozen eggs, and there they were, standing there picking up a few groceries, just like regular people. The New Guy was what you might call skinny, although Leroy's mama saw him one time and said he was slender. His face was on the leathery side, with creases in his skin. Leroy's mama said his face had character. His hair was a silvery shade of gray and he had a short-cropped beard, stiff as a brush. Well, that part looked pretty good, even Leroy had to admit that much. He was wearing a tweed jacket and silk tie. The New Guy's wife seemed like she might be a lot younger than her husband. She had olive-colored skin and high cheekbones and black, black
eyes. Her long hair was wild and wiry and black. It stood out from her head like a bush. You could have said she was skinny, you could have probably even said she was slender, it wouldn't be going too far to say she was beautiful, but Leroy's mama said she looked like a bag of bones, she didn't know what an attractive man saw in a bony old hag like that, it just made her mad to see an attractive older man just throwing his life away on a young little money-grubber, boy oh boy, did it ever make her mad. Leroy remembered hearing Mr. Sweet ring up the amount for their bag of groceries. Mr. Sweet had the New Guy mixed up with some family member who had fought in the Mexican War, a brother maybe, an uncle.

Mr. Sweet said to the New Guy, “I still got them uniforms out in the garage if you ever need them.”

The New Guy took his change and gave Mr. Sweet a kindly look. He said, “No, no thank you.” Mr. Sweet looked disappointed. He said, “Bayonets?”

That was an earlier day, today the children were the only customers in the store. Leroy said, “Hey, Mr. Sweet.”

Mr. Sweet rocked along on his one built-up shoe behind the counter.

He said, “Well, Leroy, how are you? To what do I owe this pleasure?” He saw the girls and swept the paper butcher's cap from his head and bowed a deep, comical bow. “Miss Laurie, Miss Molly, at your service.” Some days were better than others, Leroy guessed.

He said, “What can I do you for?”

Leroy said, “Mama said would you like some supper. She'll bring it to you.”

“Why, my boy,” he said, sincerely, “how could I resist Miss Elsie Dearman's exquisite suppers? I'd be honored, son, honored. I dine promptly at eight, your mother will remember, and I am watching my saturated fats.”