The Promise of Jesse Woods (22 page)

“It kindly got away from me” was all Uncle Willy said. My father said he complained of a bad back for years afterward.

“He should have known better than to get on that thing,” my mother said at dinner that night. “And you should have known better than to let him.”

My uncle took the bike to a friend who owned an arc welder and mended the broken plate, but the bike was never the same. You had to point the handlebars in a slightly different direction than straight. I wound up selling it to a kid up the hollow who rode past every day wearing goggles and a football helmet.

I was rolling these memories around as my uncle went inside and called his wife with a shout. Aunt Zenith was also fascinated with people’s weight but was more of a minor league observer, perhaps because of her own struggles. She appeared in the doorway bent with age and shuffling slightly quicker than her arthritic poodle beside her. Her hair was curly and gray but she had lost a lot of it. She carried a fistful of pictures and I rose to meet her. When she gave me a kiss on the cheek, I caught a whiff of dill pickles on her breath.

Aunt Zenith was not the most comely of women, but she was kind and loved her family. There was always room at her table.

“Look at you, Matt,” she said. “Look at what a handsome man you’ve made. My goodness, look at you.”

She sat in the metal chair, and it was like watching a crane positioning something from a great height. The chair bent backward and sprang forward and she wobbled a good two minutes, proving some theory of Einstein I had forgotten from school.

“I found these this morning,” she said, holding out the pictures.

A vivid memory from when I visited Dogwood as a child was sitting on Aunt Zenith’s couch and going through mounds of black-and-white pictures. She would point at faces and name each person. I had no recollection of them, but later my father would tell me it was polite to simply allow her to show the pictures. She was sharing her life and memories.

“But I don’t know those people.”

“You don’t have to,” my father said. “Pretend you’re interested. It’s about caring for your aunt Zenith.”

“She does that because that’s the way she shows love,” my mother added. “Putting those pictures in front of you is like me putting a piece of pie in front of Uncle Willy.”

I would much rather have had pie, of course, but this made sense. Each time we visited, I found the most comfortable spot in the room to sit, knowing a photo avalanche was coming.

Once, I held up a picture frame from the pile and asked
who the people were. They didn’t look remotely related to our family.

“I don’t recall who that is,” Zenith said.

Uncle Willy was brought into the discussion and he was mystified. It wasn’t until I opened the frame and saw the thin paper the picture was printed on that I solved the mystery. The picture had come with the frame and gotten mixed in with the family heirlooms. They had adopted the family as their own.

Aunt Zenith held out the photographs and I took them. Some were Polaroid shots I had taken the first summer we moved to Dogwood.

“Where did you get these?”

“You gave them to us a long time ago,” Zenith said, cackling, her double chin moving like a turkey wattle.

One photo showed a family gathering that included Zenith and Uncle Willy at our house—my birthday party.

I picked up one of the Polaroids and held it out to my uncle. “Remember this camera? I got this because of you.”

“Is that right?” Uncle Willy said.

“You gave me money for my birthday. Remember? I bought the Polaroid.”

“As I recollect, I counted it as a tax write-off because you wanted to use it for a charitable cause.”

“DOORS,” I said. “Dogwood Outerspace Observation and Research Society.”

He nodded.

“What were you all doing with that camera?” Zenith said, scratching her head.

“Dickie and Jesse were into UFOs and the Mothman and other unexplainable things. We started cataloging all the dead cows and dismembered cats we found. They convinced me to buy a Polaroid so we could take pictures of flying objects.”

“Did you ever see any?” Uncle Willy said.

“I took a few blurry shots of something in the sky, but DOORS closed almost as soon as it started.”

I studied the birthday party photo. My father had taken it with the family camera. My mother, Willy and Zenith, my grandmother and I stood in the shade of the hickory nut tree. In the background were Jesse, Dickie, and Daisy Grace.

“You can keep those if you want,” Aunt Zenith said.

Uncle Willy pulled a black-and-white photo from his shirt pocket and it was clear that, even before I arrived, he had planned to show it to me. “You recognize these two?”

A man and a woman stood side by side along a split-rail fence. The man had his arm around the woman’s shoulder. I recognized the man from his impish grin, but I couldn’t place the woman.

“That’s Wendell and Ada Woods,” Aunt Zenith said. “They used to come over here and play dominoes.”

“You knew them?” I said, looking at the faces more closely. I recalled Dickie’s dictum about a young lady becoming her mother later in life. Jesse had the same slim figure and hair as her mother, but I had never seen her smile this way. There was something free and engaging about it. The photo of her father’s smile brought up different emotions.

“They came over every now and then,” my aunt said.

“I never met Jesse’s mom face-to-face,” I said.

“She was an uncommonly thin woman,” Uncle Willy said.

Again I stared at the batch of Polaroids I held, the muted colors and blurry faces bringing back painful memories I couldn’t quell.

“Take those with you,” Aunt Zenith said to me. Then to Uncle Willy, “Go get him a poke.”

Uncle Willy went into the house and came back with a paper bag, and I dropped the pictures inside. I leaned down and received a good-bye kiss from Aunt Zenith, her face a little scratchy. Uncle Willy walked me to my car, pointing out his zucchini patch.

“You always grew the biggest pumpkins,” I said.

“Got out of the pumpkin business,” he said through clenched teeth. “Everything good has to come to an end.”

I nodded and shook his hand. He held on, blue eyes piercing mine.

“I expect your mom and dad were surprised to see you back, Matt. Especially with the wedding. Don’t suppose they told you about it.”

“No, they didn’t.”

“Well, I understand that. They’re trying to help.”

“How does marrying Earl help Jesse?”

“How does you coming back here help her?” he said. “Seems to me you’re complicating things. Unless there’s something you want.”

“I want the best for her. Nobody looked out for her.”

“So you’re riding in to rescue the damsel who doesn’t know she’s in distress.”

It was the first time I’d realized my uncle could focus on anything but weight, and his words hung heavy on me. Then he smiled and the way he held his mouth reminded me of my father.

“When we were kids, your daddy was always the one who climbed the tree to rescue the cat. Maybe it’s in your DNA. But sometimes the cat’s there because it wants to be. And it’s a long way down from the top limb.”

I waited until my parents left for church, then drove up the hollow to Jesse’s place, but there was no car in the driveway. The little house she and Daisy had lived in had been torn down but a trailer sat on a slab of concrete. It wasn’t a brick house, but getting indoor plumbing was a huge leap. People in the community had pulled together for Jesse and Daisy. Even people from the church. There was no light on inside the trailer. I knocked on the door but no one answered. I went to the church parking lot and watched people park and file inside, the scent of mildewed carpet and the sound of the heater firing up swirling in my memory. My mother had said Jesse worked with the youth on Wednesday nights, and as long as I could avoid Earl and his relatives, I figured I could snag a few minutes with her.

Younger children were taken to the steel building in the back, clad in gray shirts with medals and patches sewn onto them. I noticed an older woman get out of her car and recognized Mrs. Talmage. She was the go-to person for anyone
with an ailment or medical problem because of her nursing background. Her husband had died recently—my mother had informed me. It was a car accident or a heart attack or maybe both. I hadn’t paid attention to the description of the events or the obituary she had sent. As Mrs. Talmage passed two men smoking on the front steps of the church, she stopped and said something, wagging a finger.

Several teenagers noisily took the steps two at a time and laughed and pushed each other. When Basil Blackwood pulled up in the same red truck I remembered, the sight of him caused those outside to scurry. He leaned forward as he walked as if there were some unseen tether propelling him. His imposing figure and our history caused my heart to race.

It’s always in situations like these that you think of the things you’d say if you ever had the chance. And I had a few words for Blackwood I’m sure my father wouldn’t want me to say.

Earl drove up and let Jesse out near the front. She had on an Awana leader’s shirt and hurried toward the metal building. I wondered if she’d have to give up the shirt once people found out she was pregnant. And then I wondered if all of that were true.

Earl parked and followed her inside. I watched the door close and drove away.

JULY 1972

As soon as Dickie went home the day after the campout, I raced to Jesse’s house. The closeness I had felt drew me like a magnet. She opened the front door and waved me inside.

The first thing I noticed was the strong scent of mildew. Then I saw their couch, a tattered, green-and-black plaid with a throw pillow at one end. Above the couch was a crooked picture of Jesus with a staff and a lamb. There was nothing else on the walls except cobwebs. On the other side of the room on a kitchen chair was a black-and-white TV with two broken rabbit ears. The channel knob was yellowed and the tube had a child’s handprints all over it.

The linoleum floor had bubbles and ridges. Each room had a different color, and at the edges the linoleum pulled up so it was easy to trip going from one room to another. Dishes were stacked in the kitchen sink next to a bucket of water. The refrigerator was short and rounded like an old Buick. I had seen a similar one in my grandmother’s basement, unplugged, the handle removed. Dickie told horror stories about children playing hide-and-seek and suffocating inside refrigerators.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said last night,” I said. “I think you need a phone.”

Jesse shook her head. “A phone costs money we don’t have. And they won’t install one without a grown-up’s signature.”

“Well, we need a way to communicate. Like if you’re in trouble and need help, some way you can tell me.”

“Why wouldn’t I just ride over to your house?”

“Because my parents will ask questions.”

“Maybe a birdcall,” she said. “I can do a mean bobwhite outside your window.” She made the sound and it was frighteningly similar to the bird.

“We need to be able to talk whenever we have to.”

Jesse snapped her fingers. “Dickie’s got a CB. He talks to truckers up and down the interstate.”

She put Daisy Grace in the basket and we rode to Dickie’s house. He showed us his setup, a small CB hooked to an antenna on the side of the garage.

“How much do those cost?” I said.

“You can get a cheap one at Heck’s for $20.”

I was pretty sure I had enough birthday money to cover the expense. I knew Jesse couldn’t afford it.

“What about the antenna?” Jesse said.

“Depends on how far you want to talk. What do you want it for?”

“I got to be able to communicate with the outside world,” Jesse said, repeating the line I made her memorize.

“How much of the outside world?” Dickie said.

“Just Dogwood,” I said.

“You two want to talk to each other?”

“Or talk to you,” Jesse said. “If I need somebody to make a phone call, it’ll save me a trip on the bike.”

Dickie dug around in the corner of the garage and blew dust from a black box with a microphone. “The channel knob is broke on this. It stays on 17. But it still worked last time I checked.”

“Where’d you get it?”

He looked sheepish and finally admitted he had found it in someone’s trash.

“I could use some birthday money and see if my parents would take me to Heck’s,” I said. “What else would Jesse need to get it to work?”

“Just an antenna and coax.” He thought a minute. “There’s an old boy down the street who put up a Moonraker—it’s this big antenna on a tower that turns. He helped me set this up. I think he’s got a little antenna he doesn’t use anymore.”

It took some finagling, and Dickie had to promise to mow the man’s yard the rest of the summer, which Jesse
said she would do, but the man gave us an antenna and the metal pole it was mounted on, plus the coax, a thick cord from the antenna to the CB that looked like a blacksnake. Dickie and I carried the antenna to Jesse’s house and it felt like we were setting up the transcontinental railway. Each step brought us closer to breaking the communication barrier.