The front half of the house smacked your eyes out. It had a wrap-around porch with fresh-painted balusters and a half dozen or more rocking chairs. It had shutters and a huge oaken door with a stained-glass fanlight above it. It had plum-colored draperies in the windows and umbrella ferns in hanging baskets. The whole place shone white, like some kind of lighter-than-air marble.
Coming around the drive, though, you saw that the back part of McKissic House didn’t keep up appearances. No shutters on the sides. In places, boards overlapped on a fallen slant. Paint had cracked or curled or flaked or flat-out vanished. One tricky back wall had a two-tone color, light above and dark below, like an unfinished kitchen cabinet nailed to a barn’s weathered side. I still liked what I saw. It outdid any place I’d ever lived. It had such size and so many build-ons I imagined myself prowling through it for weeks, finding hidden passages, secret nooks, the decaying skeletons of roomers who’d lost their way and starved to death. McKissic House spoke to the strangled poet in me, stirring a wormy sort of dread into my blood. Could I last a whole summer in one of its closed-in rooms?
“You new boys,” Mister JayMac said from the bus’s step well, “make yourselves to home, best yall can. Supper’s at five-thirty, team meeting an hour later. Darius’ll settle you in. Tomorrow, spot challenges and an intrasquad tussel of big-time importance.”
Mister JayMac got off, climbed the wide fan of steps into McKissic House, and went inside. Everybody else but Darius, me, Euclid, and the other three rookies piled out after him.
“Shoo,” Darius said. “Kizzy’ll give you somethin befo dinner. Yall gots to be hongry.”
Ankers, Dobbs, and Heggie got off the bus and jostled up the steps. I held my seat.
Darius said, “You deef as well as dumb?” He regarded me in the rearview.
I shook my head. I thought Darius would coddle me a tad, give me a little encouragement. Instead, he shut the Brown Bomber’s door and jammed the bus into gear. He bounced it off the gravel drive, through a lane of pecans and dogwoods, and past one of McKissic House’s shabby pine-board fire escapes to the backyard. To keep from cracking my head on the bus’s tin ceiling, I hung on for precious life.
Darius braked by a screened-in porch on the side of the house, not far from an old carriage house. The porch’s fly-blown screen had tears in it; its splintery steps, just off the kitchen, canted this way and that. The house’s rain gutters had rusted through; sections hung loose, like chutes at a gravel quarry. The eaves, if you looked up from under, had neat little holes bored into them, like somebody’d corkscrewed hooks in there, to swing mum or begonia pots from. Carpenter bees had drilled the holes, though, not a flower-mad lodger. The only decorations between the porch and the carriage house were a compost heap, some rusted-out metal pans, and a tractor cannibalized for war scrap.
Through the porch screen, I could see a long row of kitchen windows. Through those windows, the yarny-looking gray head of a colored woman bobbed back and forth behind a counter. The woman’s face had caved-in cheeks, bulgy lips and eyes, and a beaklike nose. Her hair had braided rat tails coming down behind her head and over her shoulders to the front, a more squawlike than a mammylike do. From the bus, her head seemed to lack a body; it rolled here and there in the kitchen’s steam and clatter.
“Kizzy,” Darius said. “She either feed you or use you in a pie. Whynt you see which it gon be today?”
Just then, though, I saw Mister JayMac strolling through a big victory garden toward the old servant quarters behind the main house: a neat little bungalow. It had hydrangea bushes with smoky blue flowers big as cabbages, and a red-tile roof that made it look more Spanish than Suthren.
“Office back there,” Darius told me. “Office and bedroom. Him and Miss Giselle got to have they privacy.” I watched Mister JayMac amble, thinking Darius might say more, but he added only, “Git out, Danl. Go on. Git.”
I stood up. I’d reached my “home.” Never mind I had no notion what to do now or even how to make my feet move.
“Holy Jesus,” Darius said. He came down the aisle, grabbed my arm, and dragged me off the bus and up the decaying steps into the kitchen. “This young man hongry and speechless,” he said. “Feed him, Kizzy, but don’t spec no thanks.” He slammed on out of the kitchen through a swinging door more like you’d see in a restaurant than in an old Victorian home.
Euclid came through another door from the dining room and the parlor beyond, where Hellbender ballplayers, from kids like me to grizzled codgers like Creighton Nutter, were listening to the news and debating the capture of Attu in the Aleutians.
“Stupid,” somebody said. “Shoulda let the Japs have it. Two-bit icy rock aint worth one GI’s life, much less five hunnerd’s.”
“You betcha,” a second player said. “Troops up there’d be more use here to home kicking striking miners’ butts.”
“You don’t know squat, Fanning,” somebody else said. “My dad mined coal. If not for baseball, the mines’d have me too.”
And so on. I remember the argument because my dream of Umnak and the tidal wave of Marsden plates clattering down still sprocketed through my head. I could close my eyes and relive the nightmare in milky black-and-white.
Euclid gave me his Plastic Man comic book. He climbed up on a stool next to the wood stove and asked for something to eat. Kizzy poured him a fruit jar of buttermilk and gave him a plate of tomato slices with a crumbly chunk of cornbread.
“Danbo too, Awnt Kiz,” he said.
“Whynt you eat in the dining room wi the other mens?” Kizzy asked me. “Got a full spread out there.”
I shook my head. They’d ask me questions, just like that farm boy Ankers at McKissic Field had done, and the silence I gave them back would irk or tickle them in troublesome ways.
Kizzy (if she was Euclid ’s aunt, she had to be Darius’s too) had hands like long ash-colored mackerels. She sliced me a chunk of cornbread and sloshed me a glass of buttermilk even bigger than Euclid ’s fruit jar. I wolfed the cornbread and the buttermilk standing at a dough-rolling counter in the middle of the kitchen, sweating in the heat pouring off the wood stove. The kitchen’s wallpaper-calico-gowned ladies and top-hatted men on old-timey bicycles-peeled in strips, steamed away by heat and the fumes from boiling kettles of greens or tea.
“Meetin in parlor, six-thuddy,” Euclid said. He put a dollop of strawberry jam on his cornbread and wedged the whole chunk into his mouth. “Yo hea?”
Kizzy gave me all I could eat, including a bowl of greens with some pepper sauce and a piece of cold chicken, and shoved me into the backyard with my comic book and a baseball-sized green apple.
“Iw caw you fo supper,” she said.
I sat in the rusty metal seat of the junked tractor reading Plastic Man and shooing away noseeums. From the parlor, I could hear dance music on the radio, jokey arguments over a hearts game, a soap opera, more war news. I dozed, tuckered from my train ride. I woke and thumbed back through Euclid ’s comic. I dozed again. Next time I woke, I got down from the tractor and explored the house’s spread-out grounds. I stood clear of the bungalow out back, out of respect for Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle’s privacy, and maybe the simple fear he’d shotgun me if I bothered them. Eventually, I dozed off again.