In Memory of Junior Read online

  “TechComm Commons,” he says.

  “TechComm Commons, with all them ugly buildings with windows that won’t even open in the summertime. Hell, no windows, period. No windows. Let’s go,” I say. “You got a car, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “At least let me get out there and let’s get started.”

  “Right now?”

  “I don’t see why not. Your daddy’s gone. You got a car. We got the time. I got the money honey if you got the time. Leave the boys a note and tell them you taking me around to some of my old stomping grounds.

  “First thing we do is find some shovels and a pick. Then, after that, we go down to the corner of Third and James at the railroad tracks and get some help.” There’s where, as long as I can remember, you could pick up niggers looking for work.

  Bill

  I got this eye that look off to one side. It’s got more and more that way the longer I live, and I lived a pretty good while. People I don’t even know draw back and say, “What the hell you looking at me for?” I say, “It just look like I looking at you.” See, my eyes is splayed off in different directions—I don’t see with the one you think’s looking at you. Except sometimes I do see with that one, but I don’t understand how it work myself.

  I come from my daughter’s, down the tracks, to see I can get a little work, and I’m standing around with Melvin, Duck, and Jo-Jo, and two I ain’t seen before, when this car pulls up and stops. There’s a boy driving, and this old man in the passenger seat. About time they stop, the old man say something to the boy, the boy rolls down his window, and the old man hollers, “Work!” and the boy jumps—scared him.

  Jo-Jo walked over to the window and bent down, and listen, and then he come back and say, “Not me.”

  “What?” I say. They still sitting there looking. The little old man yell again, “Work!”

  “Digging a grave,” say Jo-Jo.

  I walk over to the car. The boy he look spoiled, the old man kind of dried up. “What you paying?” I ask.

  “Two dollars an hour,” say the old man.

  “Shoot, man. That ain’t nothing.”

  “Hell,” the old man says, “there’ll be three of us doing work for two. You’ll get a lot of time off. And there’s a bonus.”

  “Three-fifty,” I said.

  “I’ll give you three.”

  “I’ll do it for three twenty-five.”

  “Get in.”

  I get in, and ask the old man, “What kind of bonus?”

  “You’ll see,” he says.

  “What kind of grave? Cow or something?”

  “Nope.”

  “What you burying?”

  “You ask a lot of questions. Me.”

  “Me what?—burying you? Oh. That’s what you gone do. You ain’t feeling too good?” I said.

  “No, I ain’t. What’s your name?”

  “Bill.” Old white man figure he got him a nigger now.

  At the graveyard, the old man—well, hell, he ain’t too much older than me—lays out the grave. He’s got a couple of picks, shovel, even a posthole shovel. And he was real particular about how he laid it out.

  “My daughter says I’m senile,” he say.

  I’m standing there leaning on a shovel.

  “She says it when she don’t think I can hear her. Hell, I can hear a cricket fart in a fast-moving train.”

  I couldn’t exactly figure what was going on, cause then he said he had this story about a dog. I wondered if maybe he was gone bury a dog out there. It’s been done. Specially in fresh graves, where the digging’s easy. “What about that dog?” I ask him. He was sitting on this rock wall.

  “Just a story.”

  “That’s what I was asking about.”

  “I used to raise dogs from the dead.” Then he tell this story about a man bring this little dog back to life with that mouth-to-mouth. Funny story. Then he says, “Dig.” Then he says, “What the hell you looking at me like that for?”

  I explain about my eye. My eye goes a long way toward explaining why I ain’t ever made no money.

  8

  Grove

  This nigger—Bill—turned out to be a good worker. But it was taking too long, and so we drove over and got a buddy of Bill’s and left them to finish up. Paid them good. Me and the boy, Morgan, had to get back so things wouldn’t look fishy.

  The boy done all right. Promised to keep his mouth shut. Nothing happens, and I can get me a coffin made, then tomorrow night is the night.

  Looks like poor old Glenn will be out there too—in the graveyard. Poor old Glenn spent his last ten years inside the house. I don’t know how he done it.

  I never had nothing against Glenn. I feel sorry for that wife having to put up with them sisters, so forth and so on, but at least she didn’t have to put up with his mama and papa for too long. Whew.

  It would have been nice if somebody could have got a holt to that farm back when, and kept it up.

  Me and the boy got back from digging before Tate and Faison got back from the homeplace. The boy changed his shoes. Since I was supervising, mine were mostly clean. He showed me some more stuff about his computer. I made out like I understood. Four-Eyes, my daughter’s husband, has got a computer. Beyond me. I asked the boy how he felt about his granddaddy. He said he’d never known him to be anything but sick. Shame.

  I turned on a ball game in the living room and the boy went on with his computering.

  When Faison and Tate come in they were both a little shook up. It was up in the air who was going to get the homeplace, looked like. Tate wanted to talk to—let’s see—it would be his stepsister, but Faison wanted to hold off. They got to figure who gets the land, see.

  That used to be a nice piece of land. I remember it well. Evelyn wanted to get off it and into town for some reason. Poor Evelyn.

  Me and the boy went to the grocery store. I got us some corn on the cob, ham, and cabbage. Tate set up a little card table and a white tablecloth in his living room there and we all pulled up chairs. I was tired, and hurting some. It had been a good, long day.

  “You don’t like cabbage, boy?” I says.

  “No.”

  “No sir,” said Tate.

  “I beat Junior’s ass for not saying ‘sir,’” says Faison.

  “We never knew not to say it,” I said. Then I says to Morgan, I says, “If you gone be able to out-fart me, you got to eat some cabbage.”

  He looked at his daddy. “Out-fart you? I didn’t know we were going to have a contest.”

  “I’m sleeping in your room, ain’t I?”

  “I don’t know. I—”

  “You’ll be sleeping in my room,” said Tate. “I’m going to sleep out here on the couch. It’s a foldout.”

  So I’m sitting there at a little table with a white tablecloth eating cabbage and ham with the family. Sitting with these boys I tried to half-raise—done grown, boys of their own. Well, one boy. Everybody else dead or gone. I had to decide what I was going to do. Shoot myself and get somebody to bury me? Wait and die? Run off? I was tired of hurting every afternoon. I didn’t want to go through something like Glenn went through.

  “You boys ever see Albert and them, anymore?” I said. “What’s his name, over in Draughn?”

  “Once in a while,” said Tate. “Not much.”

  “Least they got a little piece of land,” said Faison.

  “Well, it’s a damn shame you boys could lose the farm. But listen to what I’m fixing to say. You got your health. Think about that—and you both got a job.”

  “The land stuff should be settled by Friday,” says Faison, “but I’m going fishing anyway, come hell or high water.”

  He said he was going down to McGarren Island, down there among some of them Outer Banks, where I used to fly to. Wanted to know didn’t I want to go.

  I had to tend to my business. One way or the other. I told him we’d see.

  I suggested we get out the whiskey and dri
nk a toast to the old man. We did, with the boy looking like he won’t sure what was going on, and damn if Tate didn’t start to crying. Hell, they don’t have to be good to you for you to miss them. I told him to go ahead, it was okay, and things were a little shaky until we had another round or two and the boy got to giggling—course he won’t drinking—about something I said, hell, I don’t remember what, and the next thing I knew I was telling them all about the time back in ’36 when I got that load of pure alcohol on Bud Dumby’s first run. Now that was the time. Pure alcohol and I didn’t know it. I thought it was whiskey. But this was pure alcohol, stole from the government.

  Well, what it was, I pulled in up there at Midway, this side of Savannah. I always stopped there and got a bite to eat. Knew the people well, you know, and they made some of the best biscuits in there I ever eat, and if they didn’t have them hot when you got in there, they’d just slip them in the oven, see. And so I pulled up to the gas tank, and I said to the boy was with me on that trip, just a kid, Bud Dumby—you try to say it: Bud Dumby. We ended up calling him Dud. I says to him, I said, “Dud, ten to one our biscuits will be hot.” They were too.

  This guy in there told me the location of my pickup in New York, and said it would all be in fifty-gallon drums and five-gallon cans. Nothing unusual about that. So we drove on through Washington and into New York.

  We got up there, to the spot, and me and Dud was sitting there and it was almost dark and I seen this fellow come up out of the under park—you know, where they’ve got them trains all under New York. And when he come up out of there he had on a overcoat. I said, “There’s the man, right yonder.” And sure enough it was. He walked on over to us, and he said, “Do you know anything about Boston Post Road?” And I said, “Yes, that’s part of one of my runs.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll go out and hit the Boston Post Road. I’ll lead you to the place.” This driver comes up in a big black car and picks him up. I said to myself, This is unusual. But I didn’t want Dud to know. This was his first run and all.

  We finally pulled in behind that black car at Andy Reece’s truck stop and the guy in the overcoat was already out of his car. Another man in a overcoat come up from somewhere and said, “Back it right down side the station here.” I was thinking to myself that if I saw we were about to get shot—for the truck, you know—we might have to make a run for it. It was a little tense there. This is when I seen this guy standing over here and another one over here, round there was another one—all in overcoats with their hands in their pockets. This was not at all what I’d been used to, you know what I mean.

  Did I say this was Dud’s first run? Well, it was. And when I said, “Dud, something’s fishy here. We might have to make a run for it,” well, Dud started shaking. Just a shaking. I was thinking hard as I could the way to make a break for it—probably on foot, or once we got inside, out the bathroom window, or somehow, and I looked at him sitting there in the cab, and his knees were hitting together, his hands were shaking, and damned if his head won’t jerking around and I’m thinking this is just what I don’t need. This was his first run, young boy in the bootlegging business—his wife and kid had seen him off, kissed him and everything—and he looked like he was gone faint. So I said, “Son, you think you can hold still?” and he said, “No sir, I don’t think I can.”

  The first guy walked over next to the step-up and yells up to me, “Let’s go in the restaurant and get us a steak.” Well, he might as well hit me between the eyes with a hammer. This kind of stuff just never happened.

  “Bring the boy, too,” he says.

  Right here is where Dud starts in with this low moan. I say, “Let’s go, Dud, I don’t think we have no choice,” and he goes, “Ahhhhh ahhhhh.”

  We get inside and sit down in a booth. Dud’s shaking like something’s got a hold of him. Louise, the waitress—I knew her—drops a wet rag in front of him and says, “Push that around a minute, honey. I’ll be right back.”

  He puts his hand on the rag, looks up at her walking away, and he’s as white as a sheet, and his head falls right over onto that wet rag. Out. Then in a few seconds his head comes back up. He looks at the man in the overcoat. His head goes over again.

  “What the hell is wrong with him?” the man asks me. He’s across the table from us.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess he fainted.”

  A couple of people have noticed.

  Dud’s head comes back up. He looks at me, desperate-like. See, when your head falls over, the blood to your brain brings you back around. If your head’s propped up, you stay out.

  “Hold on a minute, Dud,” I said. But he’s gone again. If that rag hadn’t been there he’d a hurt hisself, sure.

  A lot of people have noticed by now.

  Dud is up again.

  “Next time,” says the man, “prop his head up so he’ll stay out, goddammit. This is ridiculous.” Something like that.

  Dud straightens up. Starts back down. I catch him and sort of prop his head back in the corner of the booth and finish wiping off the table.

  Louise comes with her order pad out, looks at Dud, leaning back, out, and she says, “What’ll it be?”

  “Steaks,” says the man.

  “Is he okay?” she says to me.

  “Yeah. He’s napping.”

  “What kind of steaks?”

  “T-bone.”

  “How you want them done?”

  “Rare for me,” says the man.

  “Medium,” I say. “And he likes his well-done.”

  When Louise left the man whispers to me pretty direct and sincere, you know what I mean, he whispers, “This is making a goddamn scene. We don’t need a goddamn scene, Grove. Wake the boy up, get him outside and around back. My boys will watch him.”

  I didn’t think that was a very good idea. This man hadn’t even told me his name yet. “Let’s get him some horseradish to nibble on,” I said. “That’ll keep him awake and, you know, looking normal. I think that’ll cause less trouble than taking him around back. This is his first run.” Hell, I didn’t know if horseradish would work. But I just walked back in the kitchen and got some.

  It worked. Brought him out of the fainting, but not the shaking. The steaks came and we ate them—except Dud didn’t eat much—and by that time the truck was back, loaded, with what turned out to be pure alcohol, not whiskey. These boys had stole it from the U.S. government and if I’d got caught, I’d still be in jail.

  We brought it all the way back down to Darien, Georgia. Dud stopped shaking somewhere in Tennessee.

  It all worked out fine. Yeah, it worked out fine. We unloaded and me and Dud washed her down. And in the end, as per normal, I got two dollars a mile for the whole trip. And this was in 1936.

  Morgan

  Uncle Faison left after this long story Uncle Grove told. Man he’s been through a lot. He’s a good storyteller. He makes these really old stories seem like they just happened—right outside somewhere. But he’s a little crazy, too. I can see why Uncle Faison ran away to go live with him.

  Dad was talking on the phone to the funeral home, and then somebody else, then to this lawyer. Uncle Grove was watching “60 Minutes.” This grave-digging stuff had to be some kind of joke or something. But I figured he could do whatever he wanted to. The footstone had his name on it. He said he mailed it to Dad and Uncle Faison. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I hadn’t told because I promised him I wouldn’t. We like shook on it.

  I cleaned up the dishes and stuff in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to put the cabbage in. I put it in this bowl and put a little plate on top for a cover. I loaded the dishwasher, put in the detergent, and when I came back in Dad was off the phone and Uncle Grove was talking about bird hunting—all this stuff about watching a dog work and all. Then he said he wanted to tell me about this gun I was going to get. Then he went into this stuff about somebody named Ross shooting a hole in the wall with it one time. Then he said, “We let that nigger h
ave it to—”

  I flashed. He said it before and I hadn’t said anything about it. “They are not ‘niggers.’ They are people,” I said. “They are African-Americans.”

  “I call them niggers,” he said. And he goes right ahead. He wouldn’t pay any attention if he didn’t want to. Sometimes he would look right at me and call me by name and all this, and then next time around if I like said something he didn’t want to hear, he’d ignore me.

  He was telling about somebody tearing up a liquor still close to their house when he was a little boy. He explained where it was. He explains by pointing to where this place was, then runs his finger along an imaginary road and points, like there’s a little map right there in front of you. He’ll say, Our house set back here, and here’s the old road coming, turned down here, and went around here, come right back in down here by the old barn. Right across old man Fernigan’s place and right over there is the still. He calls this man a “nigger” but Dad doesn’t say a thing. His name was Shaw and Uncle Grove said he could “call out weights. Ten eggs is a pound; pound of wheat flour is a quart.” Such as that. He said he used to take a fertilizer sack and wash it, clean it good, cut holes in it, and like that’s what his children used for clothes.

  Grove

  And we give that nigger that gun. I think he had six shells. And he didn’t go down the barn path. He walked right straight across the field. And he wadn’t gone ten minutes when we heard that shooting over there. If he’d had that rifle or buckshot, he’d killed every one of them.