A Land More Kind Than Home Page 22

“I made it,” I said. “I get another shot.” He bounced me the ball.

  “What’s it like having a new grandpa?” he asked me. I looked down where my shadow stretched out in the dirt in front of me, and I thought about how to answer that question. I held the basketball against my stomach and turned sideways. It made my shadow look like I was pregnant.

  “He ain’t new,” I said. “He’s always been my grandpa.” I took a shot from where I stood, but it hit the backboard and bounced off the rim. Joe Bill chased it down and picked it up.

  “But you hadn’t ever met him before,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “But that don’t mean he’s new.”

  “Have you asked him where he’s been?”

  “Lots of places,” I said. “But I’m not really supposed to ask about it, so don’t bug me.”

  “I was just wondering,” Joe Bill said. He bounced the ball a couple of times, and then he said, “What was it like when you went over to his house?”

  “It was okay, I guess,” I said. “It’s just a trailer.” I’d had to go out there on Tuesday after school because Daddy said I shouldn’t go to the funeral home to see Stump that night, even though I told him I wanted to because I was old enough to do that kind of thing. Mama might could’ve talked him into it, but she wasn’t there to do it. She’d been at Miss Lyle’s house ever since Monday, and I hadn’t even seen her except once when one of the women from church had brought her out to the house early on Tuesday morning to get some clothes before I went to school. I couldn’t go to Stump’s funeral either because Daddy said that he didn’t want me missing school. He said he didn’t even want to go to the funeral home himself because it wasn’t going to be Stump laying there anyway. He said Stump had gone off to Heaven and would just be sitting up there watching the whole thing and wondering why everybody was so sad.

  My grandpa’s trailer sat way back up in a holler over in Shelton. On the way over there he told me it was so far up in there that it almost looked like midnight even in the morning, but when he parked his truck and we got out I realized that I could see everything just fine. His trailer was made out of metal and it had a flat roof and a couple of little steps that led up to the door. I slid my book bag off the truck’s seat and slung it over my shoulder, and then I followed him up the steps. It was dark inside there when he opened the door, but then he pulled open the blinds in the front room and went into the kitchen and pulled open the blinds over the sink. The trailer smelled like it had been closed up for a long time, and I could see the dust floating through the light where the sun came in the windows.

  “How long have you lived here?” I asked him.

  “Just about a month or so,” he said. “But it’s been mine a long, long time. I grew up on this land before I moved up to Gunter Mountain when your daddy was a little boy.” We stood there looking at each other for a second, and then he turned around and opened the refrigerator, and I could hear the sound of bottles clinking together. “You want something to eat?” he asked me. “Or a Coke or something?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. I walked over and dropped my book bag on the sofa and sat down beside it. The sofa cushion was soft, and I sunk deep down into it and my book bag fell over into my lap. I picked up my book bag and sat it down on the floor and unzipped it and got out my spelling book and a pencil and some paper. I opened the book across my lap.

  “You got some homework to do?” my grandpa asked.

  “A little bit,” I said. He looked at my book, and then he looked out the window over the sink. He twisted the cap off the bottle of beer he’d taken out of the refrigerator.

  “I’ll stay out of your hair, then,” he said.

  That night, after it got dark, my grandpa made a fire on the hillside behind his house, and we sat out there and roasted hot dog weenies on metal coat hangers. He didn’t have any hot dog buns, and I didn’t want to eat hot dogs on white bread, so we just dipped them in mustard and ketchup and ate them right off the coat hangers after they’d cooled off. He’d sat a bag of potato chips in between us and brought a two-liter of Coke up there too. He poured some Coke into my cup and then he poured some into his, and then he took a little metal flask out of his pocket and poured a little bit of that into his cup too. He’d stopped drinking beer once it had gotten dark outside, but just before we left the trailer and come up to the hill he’d taken a bottle of liquor down from the cabinet and filled the flask. He put the flask back into his pocket and took a sip of his drink. Then he leaned back and settled himself on his elbows.

  “This is what men do,” he said. “You know?” I lifted my hot dog out of the flames and looked over at him, but I didn’t know what to say. “This is what men have always done,” he said. “They’ve always been outside, underneath the stars, cooking their food over an open fire.” He took a long drink. “That’s what the Indians did,” he said. “The same Indians that used to live on this land, hundreds and hundreds of years ago; they did the same thing you and me are doing now.” He looked over at me. “You feel like an Indian?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I pulled the hot dog off the end of my coat hanger. It burned my fingertips, and I sat it on my lap so it could cool off before I ate it. I opened the plastic pack of hot dogs and took out another one and stuck it on the end of the hanger. My grandfather put his hand over his mouth and then slapped his lips and hollered and made a sound like an Indian.

  “I feel like an Indian,” he said. He elbowed me, and my hot dog brushed against one of the logs on the fire. Sparks rose up out of the flames and drifted up into the dark sky. He laughed. “You do it,” he said. I put my hand over my mouth and made a sound like an Indian too. “All right,” he said. “Now we’re both Indians.” He finished his drink, and then he opened the bottle of Coke and poured some into his cup. “This is what men do,” he said again.

  We ate those hot dog weenies and sat out there on the hill by the fire until it had just about burned itself out, and then he let me go up into the woods behind us and find some sticks to put on the fire. I knew that Daddy had told him to make sure that I went to bed on time because I had school the next day, and I knew it was already way past my bedtime by then, but we just sat out there on that hill and looked at the fire.

  “You got you a girlfriend?” my grandpa asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  “You like girls yet?”

  “They’re okay, I guess,” I said. “My mom says I’m too young to have a girlfriend.”

  “That sounds about right,” my grandpa said. He turned up his cup and drank what was left in it and tossed it into the fire, and then he reached into his pocket and took out the metal flask and unscrewed the top and took a long drink. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and let out a long sigh like he was thinking about something he didn’t want to think about. “That sounds like these women up here,” he said. “They’ll cut off your pecker before they’ll let you play with it.”

  I thought about telling him I didn’t know what that meant because I hadn’t ever thought about a girl cutting off my pecker, but my grandpa just looked into the fire like he didn’t want me to say nothing, so I didn’t. He took another sip from the bottle and spit into the fire and the flames shot up a little bit and I could feel the heat from the fire on my face. My grandpa looked over at me and opened and closed his fingers like they were a pair of scissors. “They’ll cut it clean off if you let them,” he said. “Just like that.” He laughed a little at what he said and I laughed too, and then I lay back on the ground and looked up at the sky and watched little glowing pieces of ash float up toward the stars and disappear.

  “It don’t surprise me that your mother would say something like that to you,” he said. “About you being too young to like girls. It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “Did you ever meet your mama’s mama? Your grandmother?”

  “No,” I said. “She died before I was born. I never met her daddy either.”

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bsp; “I never did either,” my grandpa said. “He’d been dead for years when her and your daddy met. Her people lived up in Mars Hill, and I didn’t know a single one of them. I only met her mama once on the day those two got married up there.” He stopped talking and unscrewed the cap on the flask and took a swig, and then he put the cap back on. “Your grandmama was a big woman, bigger than you can imagine her being.”

  “How big?” I said.

  “You know how big a washing machine is?” he asked.

  “Yes.” He sat there quiet for a second, and then he looked over at me.

  “Have you ever seen a Volkswagen Beetle?”

  “She wasn’t that big,” I said. “There ain’t no way she could’ve been.”

  “You never saw her,” he said, laughing. “She was a big woman, biggest woman I’d ever seen. She was a strong Christian too. Mars Hill’s a dry town, and they held that wedding in a little Baptist church by a cornfield. It was early in the summer, and that corn was just as bright green and shiny as it could be. Your grandmama’s name was Margaret, I think, Margaret Sampson, and she was already sitting right down front when I got to the church. And then, after the wedding, I walked outside where they’d set up some picnic tables with food, and there she was just sitting in the shade under a great big oak tree. I never saw that woman move, and I couldn’t ever figure out how she got out there so quick.

  “And let me tell you,” he said. “She sat out there and watched the folks at that reception like she was a hawk. She held the wedding and reception both there at that church and there wasn’t going to be any dancing and there definitely wasn’t going to be no drinking. I reckon folks knew that before they came. I ain’t never seen a woman so intent on getting her way, but that’s how she brought your mama up. Religion was important to them. I didn’t bring your daddy up that way; I didn’t bring him up much of a way at all. But your mama was brought up to be religious, and folks don’t change,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how bad you want them to.” I heard him unscrew the cap off the flask and take another drink. “Sometimes it don’t even matter how bad they want to change themselves.”

  I thought about that, and then I thought about how much Daddy had changed in just the past few days, and then I thought about Stump sitting up in Heaven watching all the things that were going on down here. I wondered if he’d been watching me and Grandpa sit out there by that fire roasting those hot dogs, and then I wondered if he was watching me right then as I stood on the dirt court in Joe Bill’s backyard with Joe Bill trying to dribble the ball between his legs right there beside me. He stopped dribbling and looked up at me.

  “Can I ask you something weird?” Joe Bill asked.

  “All right.”

  “Do you think Stump’s in Heaven?”

  “Of course he’s in Heaven,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know,” I said.

  “Was he saved by the Holy Spirit?”

  “What?”

  “My mom says that’s the only way you can get into Heaven,” he said. “She says you’ve got to confess your sins and be saved by the Holy Spirit.”

  “I guess he was saved then.” I knocked the ball out of his hands and carried it out to where the free-throw line would’ve been if it was a real basketball court.

  “But how do you know?” Joe Bill asked.

  “I just think he’s in Heaven,” I said.

  “How?”

  “What do you mean, ‘how?’”

  “How’s he in Heaven if he can’t talk? How could he have confessed his sins and been saved by the Holy Spirit?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just think he’s in Heaven. My dad told me he’s there.” I remembered how Mama used to tell me and Stump that you’d know you’d been saved when you felt the Holy Spirit move inside your heart. I tried to imagine what that would feel like, but it was too hard for me to think about it out there behind Joe Bill’s house with that thunder rumbling out over the mountain and Joe Bill running his mouth.

  “Maybe that’s why they were trying to heal him,” Joe Bill said. “Maybe they wanted him to talk so he could confess his sins and go to Heaven when he died.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” I said.

  “I wasn’t talking about it,” Joe Bill said. “I’m just saying that maybe that’s why they did it.”

  “You don’t know why they did it,” I said. “You didn’t even see it. You ran away. And you don’t know what they did on Sunday night either.”

  “Neither do you,” he said. “You weren’t in there.”

  “You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Neither do you,” Joe Bill said again. I looked at him and thought about tossing that basketball into the grass and busting him in the nose, but instead I just dribbled it once and then shot it as hard as I could. It bounced off the backboard so hard that the pole shook in the ground. The ball rolled toward Joe Bill’s house, and we both stood there looking at it. I wanted to tell him about what I’d seen on Friday afternoon when Stump fell off the rain barrel, but I knew it was too late. I knew that if I was going to tell anybody about that I should’ve done it before Stump went into the church on Sunday morning, and I definitely should’ve said something before Mama took him back in there that night. But it wasn’t going to make no difference telling Joe Bill about it now.

  “Go get my ball,” Joe Bill said.

  “You get it,” I told him. “It’s your ball, and it’s your shot anyway.” He looked at me for a second, and then he walked toward his house and picked up the basketball. He turned back toward the goal and stood there looking at me like he was thinking about saying something else. I could see the road in front of the house over his shoulder, and I saw Scooter and Clay tearing down the road on their bikes. Gravel dust flew up behind them from under their tires, and I watched as they got closer and closer.

  “Your brother’s home,” I said.

  Joe Bill turned around, and we watched Scooter and Clay pull their bikes into the yard. Scooter slammed on his brakes and slid his back tire around in the gravel. They dropped their bikes in the driveway and walked toward the carport. Scooter saw us standing in the backyard, and he stopped walking and just stood there and stared at us. Clay stopped walking and stared at us too. I didn’t know what to do, so I raised my hand and waved at him. Scooter flipped me the bird.

  “Fuck off!” he hollered. I heard Clay laugh.

  “I’d better go home,” I said. “It’s getting late. It might rain too.”

  “If you want to, you can stay a little while longer,” Joe Bill said. He turned and looked at me, and then he looked back up at the house. “My mom will be home soon. You can wait until she gets back, and then she can drive you back to your house.”

  I knew Joe Bill said that just because he didn’t want to be left alone with Scooter and Clay without his mom being there. I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t say nothing to him about it. I wouldn’t have wanted to be at home by myself with Scooter and Clay either.

  “I’m glad we weren’t shooting his gun when he got home,” Joe Bill said. He was still staring up at the house, and I looked down where he held the basketball and I knocked it out of his hands again. “Hey,” he said. “It’s my shot.”

  “I’m taking another turn,” I said. “That last one didn’t count.” I walked away from the goal to the other side of the court closest to the house. I took a step toward the basket and shot it. I watched the basketball hit the rim this time before it bounced out onto the dirt.

  “Almost,” I said.

  “Almost ain’t close enough,” Joe Bill said. He picked up the ball off the ground and wiped some of the dust off it. “You shouldn’t shoot from so far,” Joe Bill said.

  “I’m getting closer,” I said. Something like a bumblebee buzzed past my ear, and I ducked my head and flicked it away. “What was that?” I said.

  “Don’t move,” Joe Bill whispered. I looked up at him a
nd saw that he was staring over my shoulder back toward the house. I turned around and saw Clay standing in the backyard by the carport. Scooter was down on one knee beside him with his BB gun pointed right at us. He cocked it and gave it two pumps. He raised it up to his shoulder and took aim at us again. I realized it was a BB that had just buzzed past my ear.

  “He won’t shoot us if we don’t run,” Joe Bill whispered.

  I heard Scooter take a shot, and a BB bounced off the basketball. Joe Bill dropped it in the dirt, and his throat made a sound like he was about to cry.

  “Don’t, Scooter!” Joe Bill screamed.

  “Did y’all touch my gun?” Scooter hollered. Joe Bill looked at Scooter, and then he turned his head slowly and looked at me. He had his mouth open, and I could hear him breathing hard. Thunder rumbled out over the mountain behind him.

  “I did,” Joe Bill said. He looked at Scooter. “I took a couple of shots, but then I put it right back where it was.”

  “I told you not to touch it,” Scooter said.

  “I know,” Joe Bill said. Scooter lowered his BB gun and stared at Joe Bill for a second, and then he looked over at Clay.

  “Go get them, Clay,” Scooter said. Clay jumped like somebody had just scared him, and he set off across the yard toward me and Joe Bill.

  “Jess,” Joe Bill whispered. “Run.” I looked from Clay to Joe Bill. “Run,” he said again. It was a long way across the yard up to the road, and even though I knew Clay was too fat to catch me I was still scared of Scooter running after me, and I didn’t know what I’d do if they chased me on their bikes. I also figured Scooter might try to shoot me if I ran off. I felt something land in my hair, and I realized it was raining. It must’ve surprised me, because I lit out of Joe Bill’s yard and didn’t stop running even though I could hear Scooter and Clay hollering for me to come back. I swear I even heard a couple of BBs whiz past my ears.

  The rain was coming down so hard that by the time I got up to the road my shirt and my shorts were soaked all the way through and I could feel the water sloshing around in my socks. I knew those wet socks would make my toes all wrinkly.