“I don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t blame you for lying. It ain’t easy to sit in your own shit.”
“You can leave my property, Mr. Holland.”
“I will, in just a minute. But first, my nephew tells me you beat Billy Haskel here out of a day’s wage. Now, Billy’s a poor man and I think you ought to dip down in your billfold, Preacher.”
Mr. Willis’s face grew tighter and he tried to hold his gaze on Uncle Sidney’s eyes. Then his hand went woodenly to his back pocket as though he couldn’t control it.
“I’ll pay him just to get you off my place.”
“No, you’ll pay him because I told you to. And the next time you send thugs around my house, I’m going to catch you in town, out in public, and you’re not going to want to live around here anymore.”
We drove out to Zack’s on the blacktop, and Uncle Sid bought two six-cartons of Lone Star and filled the cartons with cracked ice to keep the bottles cold. Then we headed for the house of the next farmer on the list, and by noon we had worked our way across the county to the town. Warning must have gotten there ahead of us, because the hardware-and-feed store was locked, a farmer who hadn’t been home earlier almost ran to his truck when he saw us, and a deputy sheriff’s car began to follow us through the streets. People stared from the high concrete sidewalks at the blackened cross in the bed of the pickup while Uncle Sidney sat casually behind the wheel with his arm in the window, his beer bottle filled with amber sunlight. At the traffic light a man in a straw hat, colorless denims, and laced boots stepped off the curb and walked over to the running board.
“Mr. Holland, I’m a member of the Association, but I didn’t have nothing to do with this business,” he said.
“I didn’t figure you did, Mr. Voss.”
Mr. Voss nodded and crossed the street.
“This is so much fun we ought to do it all over again,” Billy Haskel said.
That afternoon Uncle Sidney told me to drive the cross down to the creek bed and dump it, but I replied that I’d like to keep it in the truck until the weekend. On Saturday evening I picked up Juanita and took her to the drive-in movie, ignoring her argument and her glances through the back window at the cross vibrating under the boomer chain. People whom I hardly knew said hello to us, and during the intermission some boys from the baseball team gathered around the truck and drank warm beer with their feet on the running boards. The truck became not only the respected center of the parking lot for every group there but an excoriated symbol of difference that ennobled the individual who was allowed to stand in the circle around it. The beer cans rattled on the gravel, the laughter rose louder, people crawled and banged around on the cab roof, and finally the manager threw us all out. That was in 1947, the year I pitched four shutouts and learned not to think about them.
LOSSES
for Philip Spitzer
Strange things happened to me in the fifth grade at St. Peter’s Catholic School in 1944. One morning I woke up and felt guilty because I had thoughts about the breasts of the Negro women who worked in the lunchroom. Then I started to feel guilty about everything; an idle or innocent activity of only a few days ago now became a dark burden on my soul. I had looked at a picture of a nude statue in a book, repeated profane words I’d heard older boys use down at the filling station, noticed for the first time the single woman next door hanging her undergarments on the clothesline.
I confessed my bad thoughts and desires to Father Melancon but it did no good. I felt the light going out of the world and I didn’t know why. My sins throbbed in my chest like welts raised by a whip. When I lay in my bed at night, with the winter rain hitting against the window glass, my fists clenched under the sheets, my mind would fill with fearful images of the war and eternal perdition, which somehow melded together in an apocalyptical vision of the world’s fiery end.
Out on the Gulf southeast of New Iberia, Nazi submarines had torpedoed oil tankers that sailed unescorted out of the mouth of the Mississippi. Shrimpers told stories about the fires that burned on the horizon late at night and the horribly charred sailor that one skipper had pulled up in his shrimp net. I knew that the Nazis and the Japanese had killed people from New Iberia, too. When the war broke out, families hung a small flag with a blue star on a white field in the window to show they had a boy in service. As the war progressed, many of those blue stars were replaced by gold ones; sometimes the lawns of those small wood-frame houses remained uncut, the rolled newspapers moldered in the flower beds, the shades were drawn and never raised again.
I believed that a great evil was at work in the world.
My mother, who was a Baptist from Texas and who did not go to church, said my thoughts were foolish. She said the real devil in the world lived in a bottle of whiskey. She meant the whiskey that made my father drunk, that kept him at Broussard’s Bar down on Railroad Avenue after he got fired from the oil rig.
I heard them late on a Saturday night. It was raining hard, lightning jumped outside the window, and our pecan tree thrashed wildly on the roof.
“You not only fall down in your own yard, you’ve spent our money on those women. I can smell them on you,” she said.
“I stopped at Provost’s and shot pool. I put some beers on the tab. I didn’t spend anything.”
“Empty your pockets, then. Show me the money I’m going to use for his lunches next week.”
“I’ll take care of it. I always have. Father Melancon knows we’ve had some bad luck.”
“Jack, I won’t abide this. I’ll take him with me back to Beaumont.”
“No, ma’am, you won’t.”
“Don’t you come at me, Jack. I’ll have you put in the parish jail.”
“You’re an evil-mouthed woman. You’re a nag and you degrade a man in front of his son.”
“I’m picking up the phone. So help me . . . I won’t tolerate it.”