The inside of my pot shone like a cannon bore. My hands ached from the scouring I’d given it.
“That’s a Highbridge story. A Mister JayMac n Miss Giselle story. I didn’t work fo them then, but I heard that story quick nough afterwards. Miss Giselle was among the last to hear, and she’s mebbe never gon stop suffering from what that fool doctor done after her gal baby born, then again after the po thing passed.”
Crickets chatted and whistled on the screened-in porch. Outside, fireflies bobbed, turning their flashlights on and off. One lit up at the sill of Darius’s window, rose a foot or so, and got blotted out by the brighter light coming from the room behind it. Darius crossed in front of the window. For a second or less, the firefly scorched a point into his dark form. Kizzy stood at my side, both of us gawping at the buggy house, straining our vision through the screen. Honeysuckle leaked its easy smell into the yard, and the night hung down around us black as overripe muscadines.
“That Darius,” Kizzy said. “He’s jes ashes n wormwood to Miss Giselle.”
I looked at Kizzy.
“Why?” she said. “Cause he’s Mister JayMac’s oldest living chile.”
28
The next day, after a light workout at the ballpark, Jumbo borrowed Mister JayMac’s Caddy-he did get perks no one else did-and drove off into Alabama again. Why? He had no living kin there, although he’d lied about that before (if he wasn’t lying now), and even a quick trip over and back could leave you panting. On a steamy Georgia day, I’d’ve rather played some more ball than go for a ride in a blazing-hot auto.
Upstairs, I had lots to mull. Mama’d nearly found out I’d slid back into dummyhood again. To muddy the waters more, the Elshtains would arrive this weekend to visit the McKissics, and they’d easily discover what I’d tried to hide from my mama over the phone. Mama would find out from the Elshtains later, and although she might see, and even forgive, my lie as an attempt to spare her pain, she might also decide I should come home to Tenkiller for treatment and TLC.
I didn’t want to leave Highbridge. Despite the South’s summer swelter, the torments Buck Hoey and friends had aimed at me, and a roommate big enough to scare a Marine, I’d begun to adjust. To the weird rituals of McKissic House. To my role on the team. I liked playing ball for the Hellbenders. I didn’t want to return to the mile-long apron strings and the boredom of my life in dust-bowl Oklahoma. I loved Mama Laurel, sure, but I’d truly begun scrapping for my manhood-a sense of my stand-alone self-in the CVL.
While Jumbo prowled the oiled and gravel byways of Alabama, I had nothing to do. A few guys had gone to their part-time jobs at Foremost Forge or Highbridge Box & Crate. A few others had caught a trolley uptown to a matinee, and everybody else’d settled in to nap, play cards, or letter-write. I’d mailed Mama a letter just that morning. Cards, with no cricket chirps or dance-band music to play by, appealed to me about as much as a swig of bicarbonate.
Upstairs, I had idle hands. So I fired up a cigarette, crossed my arms, and rocked on my heels like a tough in a gangster show. Humphrey Bogart? George Brent? Lloyd Nolan? I had to’ve looked like one of em, right?
By degrees, though, I ambled across the room to Jumbo’s space: his humongous bed, his pine-plank-and-tin-can bookcase, his bedside wash stand and lamp table. I stood there puffing my Old Gold and eyeballing all this stuff. The book shelves I’d examined before. Along with new library books, they held poetry, novels, philosophy, history, and religious texts, many old and some in French or German.
I walked around the bed, sat down on it by the bookcase, and opened something in French by a woman named Christine de Pisan. The book’s paper smelled like dried beetle wings-dusty sharp, I mean-and sour ink. I couldn’t decode a word, once past stuff like le and la and amour. It all just stymied me. So I shut old Christine and stuck her back in the bookcase. Something-boredom, curiosity-made me look back between my legs. Up under Jumbo’s bed I saw crammed what looked like a small boat, a kind of Eskimo canoe.
Yeah, a kayak!
I dragged the skin-covered frame out from under the twin plyboards Jumbo slept on. There was barely room for it in the space between bed and bookcase. I had to turn it longways and straddle it. It hadn’t slid all that easily either, probably because Jumbo’d loaded it with stuff through its central manhole. Dustbunnies furred its sides.
The first thing I found in the cockpit was the mat he’d hung as a curtain until my angry fit in LaGrange. He’d folded it five or six times and stuffed it down into the manhole as a plug. I pulled it out and looked under it. There sat a loose bag of animal hides, tied at the neck with cords of sinew and knotted with little ivory beads. It smelled fusty-funny, in a way I can’t describe.
No matter how I resisted, that bag felt like a dare, a dare to look inside it. Pulling a kayak out from under a bed hadn’t struck me as prying, but removing that folded mat had inched me towards a bad self-feeling, and the bag posed an even harder test of my honor. I’d stooped, so to speak, to snoopery, and Mama hadn’t raised me to pry. But Jumbo needed unlocking worse than his bag did; maybe untying it would open him too.
Inside the bag, I found a journal bound in split and marbled leather, with a bundle of ribbon-tied letters between its last page and its back cover. The letter sheaf had the bulk of a small book. I studied it closely, but didn’t unknot the ribbon. The paper felt brittle, crisp as fallen leaves-I feared I might crumble some pages. At last, I withdrew the top letter, eased it from its envelope, and unfolded the first of four or five thin pages.
The handwriting-with all its squiggles, smudges, and such-was in English, not some unspeakable foreign lingo. The first letter, addressed to an English woman, was dated “December 11th, 1798.” It said, “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.” It took a minute to decipher that sentence, but once I’d figured it out, I read it again and went on to the rest.
The writer was a young “naval adventurer,” the captain of an English merchant ship sailing from a Russian port towards the North Pole. The man called himself Robert Walton, and he stupidly reckoned the polar cap a “country of eternal light,” despite the ice plains his ship would have to navigate to reach it. The English woman he wrote was his sister, Mrs Saville. In his fourth letter, which turned into a log of shipboard events, he said he and his men had seen a “sledge” on the ice. A manlike giant had mushed his dog team beyond them, out of telescope range. “This appearance,” Walton wrote his sister, “excited our unqualified wonder.” I guess so.
Anyway, his mention of a giant made me think Jumbo’d hidden the letters because they reported on his ancestors. I figured Walton had seen an early forebear of Jumbo’s on the sled, maybe Great-great-grandfather Clerval.