They decided that Gubber’s dancing free eye was a good thing. It meant that he could see not only what was right in front of him, but the whole of the sky and stars at a glance. They whispered into freshly dug wells to stay cool and not grab any small children. They reminded crooked saplings to straighten up their act.
That shield gave them a new boldness so they ran wild up and down Liberty Township, adding unflattering letters to lovers’ names carved into tree trunks, swimming and splashing in Marion Lake, snatching Sarah Geoffrey’s drawers from the line and taking turns smelling them. They stole so many of Clem Rankin’s peaches that the man was forced to shoot buckshot at them or go broke at harvest. They hid brilliantly from the seven rowdy Rankin boys, standing up to them only when a church elder was present.
In 1939, the boys watched with the rest of their neighbors as thousands of White soldiers pitched tents in the woods and on the embankments of Liberty Township and Shankleville — the only Colored towns in the vicinity. Watched as they tromped through the woods in full battle regalia, with what they later learned were M1 Garand rifles high on their backs. Ephram and Gubber secretly and courageously moved the red or yellow cotton ties marking the boundaries for the battalion’s army maneuvers. They hid as soldiers, wearing faded yellow or red armbands, crept closer, and held in their terrified giggles as the soldiers stopped, checked, then double-checked their maps. Kicked a tuft of grass, whispered, then turned back cussing. Two years before Pearl Harbor and the one year after, over ten thousand men came to occupy that little corner of the piney woods, camped in tents, some not twenty yards from Black folks’ back doors. Like any occupied town in the world, mothers and fathers kept their daughters locked indoors and their fighting-age boys out of sight. More than one girl had run home in tears, clothes torn; more than one boy had become the butt of regimented, orchestrated cruelty. K.O.’s older brother Taylor had been found shot to death. His daddy went to the Funeral Home in Jasper to dig the army-issue bullet out of his boy himself when no one else would do it. Taylor’s mama walked all the way into Newton to show the Sheriff, who’d taken the bullet, looked her in the eye, said he’d investigate. He had then promptly thrown it in the trash receptacle.
In 1940, Mussolini decided to join Hitler against France and Britain, France surrendered to Germany, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City and Ephram Jennings almost died from eating a persimmon. Ephram and Gubber had been plastering the bright orange fruit across their faces, into their mouths, until one of the seeds lodged itself in Ephram’s nose. Gubber tried to fish it out and managed to jam it in so deep that blood began to spurt. Gubber ran screaming into his house. With the Reverend preaching out of town, Gubber’s daddy had to drive Ephram, Celia and Gubber the forty-three miles to the Leesville County Hospital, the only medical facility in a hundred miles with a Colored wing. He lost so much blood on the way the intern said it was a miracle he was still living. Apparently the persimmon seed had punctured the “lower dorsal artery” and Ephram could have easily bled to death. They took a special pair of tweezers and, with great pain, retrieved the seed. The inside of Ephram’s left nostril needed twelve stitches. He remained in the hospital for one night, until word got through to the Reverend, after which he promptly yanked Ephram out of the hospital bed so that he could convalesce at home.
One year later, in the summer of 1941, the boys had seen Sarah Geoffrey’s visiting cousin Lily take off her bra for Percy Rankin in the Geoffreys’ blue barn. Percy had told them to hide up there and for 5 cents each, he’d show them what big titties looked like. Gubber had been thirteen and Ephram twelve and they had stopped moving, even to breathe, as the lipsticked girl slipped off her blouse and unbuttoned her bra. It wasn’t the way Percy squeezed her breasts or the way she laid down on fresh sweet hay with her panties around her ankles that Ephram remembered most, or the way Percy moved over her and she pushed up to meet him. It was the way her breasts fell out of her bra, the way they spilled like sugar cookie dough onto the flat of her stomach.
He and Gubber snuck into the same dry barn early Sunday mornings before Gubber attended the Piggly Service. There, as dust floated in slatted sunbeams, the boys would “play Lily,” they called it. Gubber laying carefully on the same golden hay, Ephram over him, hands running the length of Gubber’s body. They kissed, Ephram’s full lips to Gubber’s warm mouth. Discovering the use and need of strength in pleasure.
That was the year, the moment in Ephram’s young life, when he’d felt a tickling desire, a wish for the things that other men hold dear, that called forth secret winks of approval on Saturday nights. He had wished for a straight-haired, light-skinned woman to love him. He had wished for height and a loud, echoing voice. A mist green Lincoln Continental Cabriolet. He wished for Sarah Geoffrey to giggle high and sweet at him like she did with Percy’s brother Charles. For friends to crowd about him and reel out their laughter over a pint of whiskey and a smoke.
But even then there were things more dear to him, and their dearness made him different. He loved the smell of honeysuckle, so much he’d wear it in his ear when he slept at night. He’d watch a spider weaving its web for hours at a time. He loved the way Gubber kind of gurgled when he laughed. He enjoyed lying on his back with his friend in the evening and painting big dreams against the starry sky. Moving up north. Joining the merchant marines and sailing to Alaska. Playing baseball in the Negro Leagues.
None of which had set well with Ephram’s father, the Reverend Jennings, who followed his son to that barn loft one early Saturday morning, and after the shock of seeing the two boys kissing on the hay, beat Ephram to within an inch of his life. He busted his lip, cracked two ribs and sent his last two baby teeth, the right upper canine and the molar beside it, down his gullet.
Ephram had taken it in silence and shame, accepting each kick and punch with only enough shielding to save his father from a jail cell or worse. Gubber had heroically remained until the Reverend snarled that he would kill them both if he didn’t “GET!” The Reverend Jennings had dragged Ephram home and thrown him on the hall rug for Celia to tend to. “No hospital this time” was all he said. In fact that was all the Reverend would ever say on the subject. He also never looked directly at his son again.
One year later the Reverend found a small parish in Farrsville where the minister was ailing and he lived in and preached there three weeks out of four. Although Reverend Jennings had strictly forbidden it, Ephram snuck into the woods and met up with his friend Gubber most days. It was autumn, hot yet morning cool. They were heading to Marion Lake for a dip. It had been so hot of late that they’d planned to swim in the cool water until supper, so they’d run through the woods, trees making stepping-stones of sunlight ahead of them on their path. They’d leapt from sun patch to sun patch, laughing if they touched shadows, when Ephram felt a sudden shade across his body. He looked up and saw the Reverend standing high above him. He threw his hands up to block a blow. A flash of sun stole off his daddy’s face, the Reverend so high, mouth so wide that Ephram lowered his hands, opened his mouth to say what he was doing there. Then he saw the rope. Then saw his daddy turn in the air. Gubber peed down his leg. A cloud passed in front of the sun. There was blood on the floor of leaves beneath his daddy’s feet. One of his shoes was flung off way over there. His bare sock had a hole. All turning two feet above the earth. The sound of Gubber crying thick snot and water. The way his daddy’s head was like a crooked balloon, lips screaming, eyes dead but wide and asking Ephram something so he heard, “What, Daddy?” croak out of his throat. There wasn’t a sound of water or frog or bird; death had drawn her chalk circle here and not a thing could breathe. Black flies covered his daddy’s mouth like a blanket until Ephram saw the severed thing stuffed there.