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Now, lying in bed alone, thinking of him, I can hear our words rushing through the air and across the dark and separating miles between us.I love you, O.And I, you. The words echo around the valley’s basin and in our hearts like a lullaby, sending us both separately but happily to sleep.
Saturday, September 25, 1976, Locust Hollow—“Where are you going?” my grandfather demanded.
“To meet Jackson.”
“You’d better watch yourself!”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You think I don’t know? You think I’m a fool?”
When I said nothing, my grandfather continued, “First it was that wetback up at the orchard. You following him around all picking season like a lost puppy. And now you’re trying to poison Reverend Jack’s son with your filth. Don’t think you’re fooling anybody. Your schoolmates all know and are telling everyone you’re freaks.”
I remained silent, though I was trembling. I thought it was ironic that our classmates had insisted Jackson, the preacher’s kid, was a spy for Jesus when, as it turned out, he was the one being spied on and reported. God, the great jokester in the sky!
“You need to stay away from that boy, or you’re going straight to hell.”
“I’m already there. If this town isn’t hell, I don’t know—”
His slap was swift and hard; I swear I felt my teeth rattle in my head. I quickly ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth. No loose teeth.
“I will not have an invert under my roof. I will not have everyone laughing behind my back. I raised you—”
“Reared. You raise chickens. You rear children.”
“You think you’re so damned smart. That’s why no one likes you. That’s why everyone thinks you’re an invert,” he snapped astonishingly, as if speaking proper English was suspect, proof of sin.
“That’s fine,” I said mildly, with a learned casualness that I knew he found maddening. “I don’t like any of you either.” And I didn’t. How had I ended up in this tribe of savages, ignorant and rude, complacent in their ignorance, in the smallness oftheir dreams—a good crop, more female chicks than male, a new transistor radio for the kitchen?
That’s when he punched me in my face. I lost vision in one eye for some minutes as the capillaries beneath my skin burst; blood poured from my split lip. I could hear my brothers’ laughter somewhere behind me.
Invert.So, there’s another word for me, for what I am. I pulled a bag of frozen peas from the refrigerator to place over my eye. I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror over the kitchen sink. A black eye like a scarlet letter tattooed my face. The skin around my eye was a reddish-purple in the corner, darkened to black below my eye, and lightened into a yellowish green at the outside edge. For a moment, my grandfather looked shocked, almost on the verge of apologizing. I noticed he too was trembling. He looked at me hard then walked away.
Invert.The word rang in my ears.Refraining from touching my aching face—I refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing just how much he had hurt me—I moved towards the kitchen door, my vision blurring.
Leaving the violence behind, letting itgo, I got on my bike and concentrated on pedaling as fast as I could downtown where I was meeting Jackson.
The Hollow’s town center is presided over by great husks of empty buildings, in front of which gutters choked with leaves and trash overflow, damming rainwater so the streets are smooth lakes of muddy water moving pointlessly to-and-fro, wherever the aimless wind pushes them. I love its ghostliness, its feeling of abandonment. Most afternoons we meet there, arriving separately so as not to be seen together too often. We run gloriously through those restless muddy waters, spraying ourselves and each other with the water’s bitter bounty, and feelfree. We often come to have sex, privacy and Vaseline being abundant.
When I arrived, Jackson was already there. He touched my face, already swelling, gently. “What happened?” he asked.
“I had a fight with my grandfather.”
“He doesn’t seem very nice.”
“He isn’t. In fact, he’s awful. I hate him.” I’d never allowed myself to think these thoughts, let alone express them to someone else. But I feel safe with Jackson.
“Don’t you have any other relatives you could live with—who would be kinder to you?”
“No. My parents were both only children, and my dad’s mom died when he was little. And Grampy Eddie died—he was murdered, actually—a few months before my mom’s mother died.”
“That’s when you moved here, right?”
“Yeah, but really, we left Springfield because of Grampy Eddie. I’m not sure what happened, but after he got killed, my dad said there were mean people who might try to hurt us now that Grampy Eddie wasn’t around to protect us, so we should make ourselves scarce for a while. They woke me up early one morning and put me in the back of the Buick Electra Dad inherited from Grampy Eddie and drove us here.
“My parents grew up here. And they went to high school together, which is how they met. My mother was born on the farm. After my dad’s mom died, his father put him in the children’s home while he went off to Springfield to build a better life for the two of them. My father never said much about the orphanage except that he had been taught how to clean and cookand sew—all things he taught me—so he could help take care of the younger children.
“A month after he graduated high school, Grampy Eddie sent for him to come live in Springfield. By then, Grampy Eddie was a successful numbers man, buying a new Buick every two years and never being seen outside without a fedora and one of his custom-made suits. My mother was devastated my father left but promised she would wait for him. Telling me the story, she said, ‘What else could I do? Your dad was the finest boy in Locust Hollow. All the rest were riffraff with no ambition, dirt under their nails, and bad teeth, destined to become potbellied ne’er-do-wells drinking away their Friday and Saturday nights and gambling away their earnings every other night of the week.’
