The Promise of Jesse Woods (3 page)

JUNE 1972

My father was a Chevrolet man who believed buying anything other than an American-made car was a betrayal of our founding fathers or, at the very least, Henry Ford. That belief was sorely tested in the later 1970s with the oil crisis, but he doggedly hung on to the Chevy Impala that we drove from Pittsburgh to Dogwood, pulling a U-Haul. We set out early, before sunup, just like we did for every vacation to “avoid traffic.” We were going to a land where the concept of traffic was two farmers on tractors passing each other.

We’d hit I-70 by the time I awakened to Bill Withers’s pleading voice singing that he was right up the road and
it wouldn’t be long till he needed a friend. I glanced at the scenery, and around the time homes disappeared and there was nothing but land, my father pushed in the eight-track. After a clunk, the strains of the “Blue Danube” waltz flowed. My parents were classical music aficionados. Though they had both been raised in the country, there was something about Mozart and Debussy and Strauss that spoke to them. I remember running into the house and hearing opera on Saturday afternoons while other homes moved and breathed to George Jones, the Statler Brothers, and the Oak Ridge Boys.

My father drove without the aid of a map, as if pulled by some unseen force to the place of his birth. My mother sat in the passenger seat, clearing her throat and pointing out homes she liked and features in yards that might be a nice touch to the parsonage. If my father’s driving was an involuntary action, my mother’s instructions filled in the gaps. She would comment on the dwindling gas gauge, the roadkill he should avoid, and a thousand reasons to speed up or slow down. She always preferred that he drive, but it felt like she controlled our speed and direction. Control was big with my mother.

The closer Dogwood came, the more I realized how much my life was about to change. I had visited through the years for a week in the summer. Going fishing with an uncle or hunting on my grandfather’s property was an exotic once-a-year event. Now they would be my daily reality.

I can see myself, at thirteen, looking out the window
as we exited the interstate and wound our way through a neighboring town. We passed a stately bank building and a beauty salon, a feed store with two gas pumps, then farms and open land, a cemetery (there were several in the area and this was a point of contention among family members—where you were buried was almost as important as where you lived), and finally the sign that said,
Dogwood, Unincorporated
.

My father slowed and pointed. “That’s the church up there.”

“Calvin, take Matt over and show him,” my mother said. “And watch out for that pothole.”

Dutifully he drove off the paved road and up the gravel path. The church sat on a little knoll, a square white structure with a steeple. Behind it I saw a rusty basketball hoop nailed to a tree and a dirt patch for a court. At our house in Pittsburgh, we’d had a hoop over the garage and a flat patch of concrete.

“This is it,” my father said. “This is where the Lord is calling us.”

I didn’t have questions or comments. Who was I to argue with the Lord’s calling? At almost fourteen, you go with the tide. You eat what’s in front of you. Life is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

“And that’s the parsonage over there,” he said, pointing.

A half-built house stood in the distance, and for some reason my father didn’t take us there. We drove past the elementary school, and I was glad I didn’t have to endure time in the run-down structure.

We drove through Dogwood, a town without a stoplight, and wound our way to the long road that led to my grandmother’s house. Unpaved and dusty—the window down left grit in my teeth from passing cars. I could see why John Denver would sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.

My grandfather had died three years earlier, a few days before Christmas. The phone rang late one night and my father answered, his voice low and rumbling. I was reading
The Swiss Family Robinson
in bed and heard him speak a few words and then gently weep. My older brother, Ben, home from college, leaned into the room, his hair hanging. There was contention about the length of it.

“Pawpaw died,” he whispered.

I nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

“You okay?” he said.

I nodded and kept reading.

We drove over the creek and up to the farm, past walnut trees that lined the driveway. My mother said not to park over the septic tank. My father stopped beneath a towering hickory tree. There were two ponds above the house where cattle used to roam and a decrepit barn that looked like it wouldn’t last the winter. Grandmother Plumley, known to us as Mawmaw, toddled out of the house to welcome us and hugged my parents. When she got to me, she squinted through thick glasses that made her eyes look ten times bigger than they really were.

“And look at little Matt,” she said, her breath stale with
morning coffee. She moved her mouth from side to side, adjusting her dentures. “You’re just the fattest thing, aren’t you?” She looked at my father. “He’s getting wider than he is tall. Just a butterball.”

My father forced a smile. My weight gain had been painful to him. I had heard him and my mother talking about how moving to Dogwood might help me exercise more, working on the farm and climbing the hills. I didn’t understand the importance weight gain played for the people of Dogwood, but the longer I stayed, the more I’d realize it was like box scores for baseball. An extra ten pounds on a person was like counting walks or strikeouts. A person eating rhubarb pie might turn to a neighbor and say, “Have you seen how big Vestel is getting?” as if it were part news report, part prayer request. “If she keeps eating like that, we’ll be able to fill her with helium and fly her over a golf tournament.” The not-so-subtle message was that thin was preferred to fat. And I longed to be thin. I longed to run fast like my brother. But somewhere in my childhood, when my mother’s depression caused her to turn to cooking and baking, I could not assuage my stomach’s longings nor the longing to save her. The cakes and pies and casseroles beckoned like gastronomic sirens, and there was no one to lash me to the mast. So I lost myself in them as I lost myself in books until I became “Fat Matt.” This was the only reason leaving Pittsburgh felt good.

My father was not one to criticize or cajole. He had the heart of a pastor, an encourager. He wanted to help my mother and me, just never figured out how. But once he
entered the kitchen while I was at the table eating brownies my mother had baked with fistfuls of walnuts in every bite. He glanced at me, then away, shaking his head. “Big as you are and still shoveling it in.” I stopped eating for a moment until he exited, stage right, then took the brownie into another room and read.

My humiliation always reached its apex when my mother shopped for clothes at the start of the school year. She would buy “husky” pants. But at the beginning of sixth grade, even husky wouldn’t fit. The pants were so tight I couldn’t get them buttoned. The woman in the clothing department took out her measuring tape and leaned down, wrapping it around my girth and pulling it tight.

“We’ll have to go to men’s,” she said. “How old is he?”

She spoke as if I weren’t there, as if I were an inanimate object without feelings or emotion or appetite. As if my weight prevented me from hearing.

The woman frowned at my mother’s answer and said, “Somebody needs to lay off the gravy.”

The first thing Mawmaw said after greeting us and observing my plumpness was to offer lunch. This was the other constant in Dogwood. If people weren’t commenting about how thin or fat others were, they were offering food. When you arrived and before you left. When company came. Something’s on TV? Let’s eat. Everything that happened in the house began and ended at the kitchen table.

Mawmaw’s kitchen featured bacon fat that hung as heavy in the air as wet quilts on a clothesline. You could hear eggs crackling in her iron skillet in the next county.
That day she fixed toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and I ate tentatively, watching to see if my father might object to me having more potato salad, which I loved. Mawmaw’s potato salad was a concoction that could be fed intravenously and still enjoyed. Creamy and thick and good by itself or with saltines, it garnished all significant meals.

“Matt, why don’t you get your bike out of the U-Haul and take a ride?” my mother said after lunch.

“That’s a great idea,” my father said.

I had no desire to explore the road that led past my grandmother’s house—I had never been that way alone. But the appeal of getting out of the little house with the old-people smell and the creaky wooden floor and the conversation about my weight propelled me to the U-Haul. I tried opening it, but the metal handle was wedged tightly. I was round but short for my age and appeared younger than thirteen. I went back inside to ask my father’s help.

“So you’ll be staying here how long?” Mawmaw was saying as I stepped inside.

“Just until they get the parsonage finished,” my mother said quickly.

“And what about Ben? Where is he?”

“He won’t be coming with us,” my mother said.

“Why not? Is he still going to college?”

“No,” my father said.

“He’s not with that girl, is he?”

“He’s finding himself,” my father said.

Silence followed. My brother’s situation was a constant cause of concern. One of the unspoken prayer requests on
Wednesday nights that simply caused a raised hand. My grandmother’s reference to Ben’s girlfriend was unnerving to me because I knew very little about her.

“Is he still wearing his hair down on his shirt collar?” Mawmaw said.

“I suppose he is,” my father said.

“Mmm-hmm.”

You could tell a serious conversation was underway when my grandmother said
mmm-hmm
. It was her way of processing news she didn’t like. The other thing she said was
well
—the sign she didn’t agree with something someone had said but wasn’t about to address it. Conflict was best avoided in the house of Plumley.

“Mmm-hmm,” she repeated. “Well, we’re all trying to do that, aren’t we?”

My father seemed anxious to get outside, so he gladly opened the U-Haul when I asked. The contents had shifted and my bike was smushed into the back corner.

“When will the rest of the stuff get here?” I said.

“We’re going to put that in storage until the new house is ready. There’s not room here at the farm.”

“How long before we move in?”

“It’ll be a while. A month or two.” There was a bit of apprehension in his voice. “It’s going to be nice, Matt. This will be a new life for us. A fresh start.” He got a far-off look in his eye. “I used to hunt and fish all over these hills when I was your age. Built a tree house. Your uncle Willy and I used to swing on grapevines and pretend we were
Tarzan. . . . Go on and get your bike out. Watch out for snakes on the road, though. It’s that time of year.”

He walked toward the barn and I struggled with the bike. I had asked for a ten-speed for Christmas and replaced the tiny seat with one more comfortable for my backside. The handlebars were wedged tightly under a box, and I pulled hard and heard a sickening crunch of glass. Something fell to the ground—my baseball glove. There’s nothing in the world that could make me feel sadder than a lone baseball glove. I had written the names of all my favorite players on that glove. Clemente. Stargell. Sanguillen. Mazeroski. Zisk. This was the glove I had used to pitch with Ben, a highlight of summers past.

I put the glove safely into another box, closed the door without seeing what might have broken, and coasted down the driveway, past the walnut trees, and onto the little bridge over the creek. I paused at the end of the driveway and looked left and right, the road stretching out in both directions. I turned left, making the choice that would forever change me.

JUNE 1972

Dogwood in June is a little like Eden. Corn rises from the earth’s loamy soil and supplicates. Beans wrap around stalks and poles while melons stretch out along the ground in praise to the giver of everything seeded. Trees sprout leaves and reach heavenward in the heat and humidity, and the world feels like a greenhouse.

I didn’t notice all this then. I was simply part of it, riding a bike on a gravel-strewn dirt road. In the middle, things were tamped down and smooth, but if you got to the side, your tires got lost in the cast-off rocks that flew with anyone traveling more than twenty miles an hour. Involuntarily, I began to sing the tune I had heard in the car. “‘It won’t be long till I’m gonna need somebody to lean on.’”

A low rumble sounded behind me and I pulled into the gravel. A pickup truck passed and all I could see was a weathered hand waving near the side mirror. This was something I learned quickly about hill people. They always acknowledged others making their way along the road of life. The simple gesture of throwing a hand up, noticing the image of God struggling along the path, was the least a person could give.

Dust settled and I learned not to look into the cloud with an open mouth or eyes. I spat the grit from my teeth, then followed the truck. It took a turn on a smaller path and I kept going, passing the few houses and trailers dotting the landscape. Nicer houses were farther back from the road, while those in trailers wanted closer access.