The Boys Who Woke Up Early Read online

  Made me see waters gliding, hear the nightingale sing!

  I wanted to play songs that could make somebody hear the nightingale sing. But my twelve-year-old sister and her friends were playing pop records in her room, and the walls were thin, so the words that actually went through my brain were about tan shoes and pink shoelaces. I won’t risk repeating them, because they might stick in your head and you’d blame me for putting them there. The song coming through the wall had at least four verses, and I hated each one more than the last.

  I gave up the idea of practicing guitar, went downstairs to the kitchen, and took my father’s .22 rifle, a pump-action Winchester, from the nails where it hung over the back door. Then I took a box of fifty cartridges out of the dish cabinet. I closed the back door behind me and walked down the back streets and out of town, climbing the hills into the groves of oak, hickory, and maple. There was little game so close to town, but squirrel season gave me an excuse to be in the woods where it was quiet.

  Some trees were just beginning to turn red or gold, but most were still green. Their shade made it cold in the woods for that time of year. I came into a power line right-of-way, cut clean of trees but full of tall grass. I lay down in the grass, which was high enough to cut any wind, and let the bright sun warm me. There were birds singing, and I fell asleep wondering if Mary Lou Martin, living up a mountain hollow among the trees, had ever heard a nightingale.

  There was still plenty of daylight left when I got back to town. I had bagged no squirrels, and had unloaded the rifle and was carrying it with the action open, the butt resting over my shoulder like a baseball bat. This was a clumsy way to carry a rifle, but I hoped it would reassure people that I wouldn’t blaze away at a squirrel in their front yard and maybe shoot some family member by accident.

  A red Chevrolet Impala pulled up to the curb beside me. It was one of the new ones with an engine in it big enough for an airplane. Jack Newcomb was driving it, and he offered me a ride home. I had pegged Jack as a pretty odd duck, but it was rude to decline a ride, so I got in. The car smelled of wax outside, and inside it smelled of new car. It was his father’s car, of course.

  Jack asked why I was carrying the rifle, and I explained.

  “Are you a good shot?” he asked.

  I told him I was. I thought it was true at the time, but that was before I knew what good shooting was.

  Jack said, “I have a ten-point buck rack at my uncle’s house in Petersburg. Got him at three hundred yards with my uncle’s Savage .30-06.”

  I was impressed. “This last season?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” Jack responded. “About five years ago.” That would have made him no more than twelve when he shot that deer.

  “I didn’t think you could buy a big game license till you were sixteen,” I said.

  Jack didn’t speak for a second and then said, “Well, this was in North Carolina. Down near Wilmington.”

  His hesitation made me suspect he was lying. Also, I knew people who hunted Carolina swamplands, not far from Wilmington, and they had told me everybody there used shotguns, even for deer. They’re supposed to be safer than rifles in flat country where there are no hills to stop a bullet. They say any of the nine big buckshot from one 12-gauge shotgun shell can kill a man out past a hundred yards, but not a mile away like a high-powered rifle bullet, such as a .30-06, might.

  “Does your uncle’s .30-06 kick very bad?” I asked.

  “Not too bad,” he said. “No worse than a 20-gauge shotgun.”

  He was lying, all right. People bought little 20-gauge shotguns mainly because they didn’t kick as badly as bigger guns. By contrast, I had shot my own uncle’s .30-06 deer rifle just the year before, and it felt like the time Todd Powell hit me with his homemade wooden knuckles. Jack had been twelve years old when he supposedly bagged that buck. I guessed there were twelve-year-olds who could shoot a .30-06 well enough to kill deer at three hundred yards—but they would have remembered it kicking them like a mean mule.

  “All my guns are at my uncle’s place in Petersburg,” Jack said. “Can I come shooting with you sometime?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Pick a day.”

  He said he’d get back to me. When I pointed to my parents’ driveway, he turned into it and let me out of the car. I saw no reason to reveal I had seen through his hunting story. He wasn’t the first new kid to tell me a whopper. When you start over where nobody knows you, you can make up a past that includes all you wish you’d done and leaves out the stuff you regret. I dreamed of some opportunity to do that myself.

  But Jack seemed embarrassed anyway, as if he knew I didn’t believe him. Without a word, he started backing out the driveway. Then he threw the car into low gear and came forward again, so expertly that the car seemed to reverse direction without stopping, yet the gears never even scraped. Only a few of the best drivers—stock car racers and some state troopers, for instance—could do that. Jack could do other stuff besides lie, it seemed, and some of it was right cool. Once he had accomplished his driveway magic, Jack regained his air of confidence.

  “Why don’t you come over and watch some TV tonight?” he asked.

  = = =

  Nobody in Early bothered to put street numbers on their houses, but I had no trouble finding Jack’s. The sixth house on the right going out Orchard Drive had always been rented to some middle-class family like Jack’s, either in town for a year or two with no intention of staying, or looking to buy some other house that suited them better. So, while the yard had a medium-sized silver maple tree and a few boxwoods, there were none of the flower beds and azaleas and serpentine brick borders that people establish once they put down roots. It was a well-kept brick house of two stories and three bedrooms, one of the smallest houses in a good neighborhood, but that was okay because Jack was an only child. There was a free-standing two-car garage and through its open door, next to the Impala, I saw a ’57 Chevy station wagon, an excellent car though not an expensive one. It was two-tone, sky blue and robin’s egg. Even in the limited light from the streetlamps, I could see it was waxed as shiny as the new Impala.

  Jack’s mom—a pretty, middle-aged blonde, wearing a dressy dark-green suit—came out the door as I started to knock. She greeted me with perfect manners, and I knew she would remember my name. She shook my hand and excused herself to go to some meeting at the church she had already joined, and then drove away in the station wagon.

  Jack stood with his father in the open doorway. Mr. Newcomb was a tall, stoop-shouldered man who wore a slide rule dangling from his belt in a sheath like a short sword; on the opposite hip he wore another short scabbard that held a black briar smoking pipe stem down, like a pistol in its holster. He wore a white shirt and a green knit tie like a desk worker, but when he gave me a firm handshake, his mitt was so muscular I could hardly get mine around his. I saw his knuckles bore the scars of a lifetime tinkering with machinery; old cuts had been permanently tattooed onto his knuckles by healing over before he’d been able to get the grease out of them. My father had hands like that, so I liked Mr. Newcomb immediately.

  “I met your dad today,” he said. “He invited me to Rotary Club. He seems like a real capable guy.” He’d sized up my dad accurately; capability was one of his main characteristics. Though it was well after seven at night, Mr. Newcomb immediately excused himself to get back to work in his office.

  “My dad works all the time, too,” I told Jack. “What does your dad do?”

  “He’s an industrial designer,” Jack said. “They’re putting in some new machines down at the DuPont plant, and he’s figuring out what kind and where to put them on the plant floor. He’s going to redesign all the assembly lines, make it all more efficient. When he’s done, we’ll move somewhere else, to another job.”

  “How long will it take him?” I asked.

  “Two years at most,” Jack said. “This is the seventh sc
hool I’ve attended.”

  The Newcombs had moved to town only that past weekend, but they were already settled in because they had learned to travel light. The living room had good Early American–style furniture, but no bric-a-brac. The den had comfortable overstuffed furniture and a bar, but the same lack of clutter as the living room. Jack turned on the TV and flopped down on the couch, saying nothing while he waited for the TV to warm up and eventually show us the black-and-white picture. I automatically reached for a magazine to leaf through while I waited. There was a current copy of some hot rod magazine, but no back issues of The Saturday Evening Post or Life like the ones that piled up in my own living room. It felt like watching TV in some motel lobby.

  The show we watched was Peter Gunn. Craig Stevens played a tough detective who hung out in nightclubs and listened to jazz. Of course, there wasn’t much time for detective work in the twenty-odd minutes remaining after commercial breaks, so Gunn generally resolved the plot by shooting somebody with a snub-nosed .38 revolver. That night’s program was particularly interesting to me because I noticed that a minor recurring character was a beatnik jazz clarinetist. Now I had an idea why Jack wore a beret and sunglasses to school.

  Another night we watched a program called, I think, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, whose central character was a high school kid who mostly chased girls. In this episode, the character noticed the style of earrings a girl was wearing, bought a pair just like them, and the next time he saw her asked, “Did you lose an earring?” Of course, the girl said, “No, I have both of mine.” At which point Dobie asked, “Want another one?” In the world according to television, that broke the ice and let Dobie start a friendship and possible romance.

  A day or two after we saw that episode, I spotted Jack in the costume jewelry section of the dime store, shopping for earrings. I watched too much TV, God knows, but Jack took notes! And tricks like that actually worked for Jack. Within days I noticed Ernestine wearing an extra earring clamped to the collar of her blouse.

  “Did you get that extra earring from Jack Newcomb?” I asked.

  “Ye-e-e-s-s,” she replied, drawing out the answer. “I know where he got the idea, but I thought it was cute of him to try it.” Of course she knew, I realized. Only two TV channels were available in Early in 1959, so most everybody watched the same shows.

  Pretty soon Jack was doing his homework at Ernestine’s house. I guess they were really doing homework and not playing parlor baseball, because Jack made good grades from then on.

  = = =

  The following Saturday afternoon, my father summoned me to ride with him to buy a few bushels of apples to store in our cellar. He bought them every fall from Mary Lou Martin’s father, who worked in a mill like most people around Early, but also had a small orchard on the tiny mountain farm where he had grown up. He had taken it over after his parents passed away. Dad liked Mr. Martin’s apples because they were tasty, old-fashioned varieties. He hated the modern commercial types that could be shipped without bruising but tasted flavorless as a raw potato.

  Dad drove his old Chevy pickup truck out the main road toward West Virginia. He turned off just after crossing Sourwood Creek, and then followed a narrow two-lane road that paralleled the creek as it wound through rich bottomland past a few cornfields, pastures, and farmhouses. The pavement gave way to gravel as Sourwood Hollow became narrower. Nearly a mile after that, we finally came to the Martin place, the last farm on the last patch of arable land at the head of the hollow. The dirt farm road took us into the orchard, where we pulled off among the trees, into a tractor lane. We stopped next to a dozen or so baskets of fruit left there for sale to casual customers like Dad.

  We each opened a door and climbed out. I could hear voices farther out in the orchard, and then through the trees I spotted a man I knew, Grady Penn, coming toward us carrying a basket. He was a black man who worked for my father, as a janitor at the knitting mill my father managed. Dad was pleased to see him there.

  “Hello, Grady,” said my father. “Hope the Martins pay you better than I do!”

  Mr. Penn laughed. Dressed in a plaid shirt and bib overalls, he had a clean-shaven face the color of a Hershey bar. He was of medium height and middle years, looked strong but had a little paunch. He was carrying the bushel basket in front of him, resting against that paunch, so the apples rolled around in the basket when he laughed.

  “Not quite so much, but he pays me same as white men, and that’s worth something,” Mr. Penn said.

  My father’s smile faded. “Now, you know I can’t do anything about that, Grady. Wish I could.”

  “I know that, Mr. Shelor,” he replied, “and I know you tried.” He changed the subject quickly. “It’s an unexpected pleasure seeing you on the weekend. I’ll get Mr. Martin to sell you some apples.” He set down his bushel and walked back among the trees.

  “What was that about?” I asked Dad.

  Dad drew a deep breath and said, “I tried to give Grady a raise a while back, but the company said he was making top dollar for a janitor. Grady could run any machine in the plant—hell, he could build any machine in the plant—so I ought to promote him. But the company says I can’t ’cause he ain’t white.”

  That surprised me. “The owners live in Connecticut,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like something Yankees would do.”

  “It’s exactly what Yankees would do,” Dad said. “They didn’t come to Virginia to spread brotherly love and equality. They built mills down here because people here work cheap, and they know the way to keep white people working cheap is to make sure that niggers work cheaper. I mean Negroes.”

  Mr. Martin came out of the orchard then. He was nearly six feet tall, with a sunburned complexion and wide-awake brown eyes. He was pushing sixty, but he still had all his curly brown hair and he looked strong enough to hunt bears with a fly swatter. He wheezed a little, though, enough to tell me he probably had first-stage silicosis. He had worked in the mines of West Virginia for years, but finally recognized the good wages there were an illusion in the inflated economy of the company town, where the miners were actually poor and mostly sick. He came back to the tiny farm where he had grown up and revived his parents’ orchard.

  Mr. Martin and his wife also worked full time at the mill my father ran. They worked third shift, late at night, and my father worked days, so my father didn’t see them much. But Dad and Mr. Martin had known one another since grade school, and they shook hands warmly. When they fell to talking about apples, I wandered out among the trees, hoping to see Mary Lou.

  About ten workers were scattered through the orchard, climbing wooden ladders leaned against the tree branches, picking into hand baskets and lowering them with ropes to the ground. A black kid, maybe a year younger than me, was at the foot of a ladder, receiving each lowered hand basket and tilting it gently onto the grass. Then, while the picker atop the ladder hoisted the hand basket and began filling it again, the kid took the apples from the grass and packed them into a larger bushel basket. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was muscular, like Mr. Penn. He gestured at my school khakis and short-sleeved shirt. “You gonna ruin those fine clothes, picking apples,” he said.

  Mr. Penn scolded him from the next tree. “Roosevelt, don’t you tease the less fortunate. Not everybody’s been raised with all the advantages you’ve had.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” answered the boy he called Roosevelt. Then to me he said, “I guess you’re one of Mary Lou’s admirers? She’s over yonder.”

  Is it that obvious? I wondered. But I said, “I’m one of her classmates.” And I walked in the direction he pointed.

  Mary Lou was about ten feet up in a tree. She wasn’t even using a ladder; she just wedged herself between the tree branches themselves as she picked the fruit with quick hands. Her long hair was wrapped up in a kerchief to keep it out of the way as she climbed. She was wearing tight jeans, probably because floppy ones
would catch on the tree spurs, or maybe just because most girls wore them tight. Either way, I appreciated how they showed off her long, strong legs and her cute, muscular backside. Equally, I appreciated how her light blue blouse stretched tight over her pointy young breasts as she reached this way or that.

  Yes, indeed, Roosevelt. I am an admirer.

  I called to her and she flashed a smile but kept on working. As she filled each basket she lowered it to a young woman on the ground. This woman wore bib overalls and looked like an older, female version of Roosevelt, and she packed apples into a bushel basket as he had.

  “Stony,” Mary Lou called, “if you’re going to be here a few minutes, could you take over for Susannah and let her go get a drink?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The young woman smiled and walked away toward the springhouse on the hill behind the Martins’ house. “Can I bring you one?” she called to Mary Lou.

  “Bring me a Sun Drop if there’s any left. And a Grapette for Stony.” Somehow she knew my favorite soft drink.

  As I packed apples into the basket I tried to think of a subject for conversation with Mary Lou. Mostly I was thinking about how much I liked her, and I couldn’t bring myself to talk about that. I saw nobody else was around, so I asked her how her dad could afford to pay colored folks the same as white.

  “He says it works out in the end,” she said. “The whole Penn family is here today. They all have other jobs, but they come here Saturday afternoons, every fall. And they’re orchard workers from way back, really know what they’re doing. They like working for him so they do a better job in less time than most people would.”

  I said, “I hope it really works out that way.”

  “He’d do it anyway,” she said. “Says it’s the right thing to do.”

  I said, “He surely didn’t learn that in Early County.”

  “No,” she said. “We used to live in West Virginia. It’s different where we lived. Colored people and whites didn’t exactly like each other, but they could work in the same mines. The coloreds had about as much money as we did, and could spend it in the same stores, so all the stores were kind of prosperous. None of this horseshit about having two different streets of stores, both starving for business.”