“Do not bring up how we’re Democrats, Luke,” my mother reminded me as she pulled up to Ms. Whalen’s house. “If anyone asks you if you’re a Christian, it’s best to go ahead and lie. What’s it going to matter, seeing as we don’t go to church anyway? If your teacher offers you a baloney sandwich for breakfast, just go ahead and eat it seeing as it’s not going to kill you much.”
I said, “Why am I here again? What’s going on?”
My mother put the car in neutral, and then seemed to experiment with reverse and one of the lower gears. She said, “Are they not teaching you any existentialism at Calloustown Elementary?”
I didn’t get it. I said, “Tell me again who Sherman was?” It’s not like I wasn’t from the South — it’s just that my parents watched the news at night, and read books written by people who won awards, and they didn’t sit around moaning about how things could’ve been, like my classmates’ parents seemed to do. “And go through Jesus again, just in case.”
My mother laughed. She leaned over and kissed my forehead and said, “You’ll be fine. I got you some special gray flannel pajamas packed up for you to wear so you’ll fit in. I tried to draw a stars and bars on your sleeping bag but it just came out a giant X. If anyone asks, say it faded and ran in the washing machine.”
I didn’t get those remarks, either. I said, “It’s Valentine’s Day. Do they do this everywhere on Valentine’s Day?”
General Sherman burned Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17, 1865. According to the denizens of Calloustown, he should’ve burned their town on the fifteenth, if he had any sense of the right thing to do, on his way back north.
My mother said, “More or less.”
General Sherman didn’t consider our ancestors’ town worthy of torching, and the consequences, over the next seven or eight generations, weren’t unpredictable: a miniscule region of high-voiced men and women whose families intermarried endlessly, producing higher-voiced offspring, ad infinitum, all Yankee-hating, distrustful stumpgrinders and third-shift health professionals at what still got called the Calloustown Home for the Feeble and Discouraged. I exaggerate, but not much. Beginning in sixth-grade civics class a variety of students would blurt out, “Sherman didn’t think Fairview Plantation was good enough to burn! Shows you what he knew! They got them four bedrooms there, and two roomses!” et cetera, their larynxes squealing in such incredulous-filled manners that at times — say later in South Carolina history class, or eleventh-grade American history when the Civil War section took up two nine-week grading periods — it sounded like one of those trick crystal glass band members wet-fingering a rim ceaselessly. It sounded like the emergency broadcast system’s television test most days when the prodigy of Munsons and Harrells wailed out their disgust in regards to William Tecumseh Sherman’s notions of aesthetics: “What’s so good about Atlanta, Savannah, or Columbia? Sherman was stupid! He said he wanted to march to the sea, and Calloustown starts with a C.”
I hate to think that I’ve always considered myself of a higher ilk than the typical Calloustowner hell bent on grasping worthful arson, but it’s true to a degree. My parents arrived at my place of training only after surrendering law practices right before offers of partnership. They cashed in some savings, did some research, bought the cheapest arable land available in Zone 8 in regards to that Hardiness Scale, began an organic farm long before it became commonplace and chic, and then had their only child — me — in their late thirties. By “long before” I might really mean 1981, right after the Iranian hostages got released. Because of the hostages and a certain doomful outlook regarding economic growth and détente, and without doing research on how vengeful their new neighbors had become, my parents settled on a crossroads neither known to blues songs nor sulfurous flame.
I grew up with Munsons and Harrells alike pissed off that someone considered our cows, sheep, hogs, and chickens inedible, our women unattractive, our spring houses tainted. Maybe that’s why my mother never allowed me to read the Bible in general, and Job’s story in particular. It’s a wonder that more than a few of us non-Munsons and — Harrells escaped with self-esteem higher than a collard stalk.
“If they ask you if you hunt, say yes. Fish, yes. Hate everyone north of Virginia, yes. If stupid Bobby Harrell asks you again about your pets, say you own a cottonmouth and a fire ant farm.” My mother had a whole list that she went over daily as I shoved books in my backpack. My father started every morning reciting Latin terms he knew by heart before entering his torporous berry patches. “If one of the Munson boys keeps asking you if you’ve been with a girl, here,” my mother would say, pouring Chicken of the Sea tuna water on my palm. “Tell him to sniff your finger.”
That was another little action or saying that I didn’t get, of course. But the half-feral cats that lived inside the school liked me, which, of course, got me called Pussy.
Mr. Whalen sat in his living room with a fishing pole. There were bags of store-bought ice all around the hole he’d fashioned into the floor, and the hook on the end of his line descended down into a crawlspace. Bobby, Donnie, Larry, and Gary Munson held poles, too, as did Lonnie, Ronnie, Billy, and Stonewall Harrell. These were my classmates. These were my sleepover comrades the night before the “What Does Sherman Know?” annual festival.
“Get you a pole, there, Luke,” Mr. Whalen said. “We’re playing a little game called Ice Fishing in Minnesota. We don’t got no need to ice fish around these parts ever, so I thought I’d teach you boys a little bit about it.”
I said hello to all of the two-syllable-named classmates. None of them said anything back. I said, “Do you have fish in the basement?”
“We’re fishing for rats and mice,” Ben Whalen said. He patted the lid to a plastic cooler next to him, as if there were caught vermin inside. “Put you a chunk of cheese on your hook and drop it on down.”
These were bamboo poles, probably macheted over on the edge of Mr. Morse’s tree farm. I threw my line into the hole and squeezed in between Gary and Lonnie. I tried to peer down into the hole, but couldn’t tell how deep it was. I said, “Did you cut this hole in the floor by yourself?” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Bobby Munson yelled out, “Luke ain’t a Christian!”
I said, because I’d been taught to do so, “I’m the only one here named after somebody in the Bible. There isn’t a Book of Bobby.”
“Boys,” Mr. Whalen said. “This is all of y’all, right?” He drank from a plastic cup, and I could smell the booze in it. “Boys, while I got you all here I might as well use this opportunity to tell you about the birds and the bees, it being Valentine’s Day and all.”
Later on I figured out that because we had no male teachers in the sixth grade, one of the teachers’ husbands would have to take over. Over at the girls’ sleepover, it probably wasn’t so uncomfortable for a woman to explain sex.