Yellow （1977） #3
“They’re gonna send us to camp,” he blurted, pausing in his perambulations.
“Camp?”
“In the mountains! They’ll make us sleep outside and pump our own water.”
“Huh?”
“They’re going to send us to a camp to make us straight.” He began pacing again.
“What? That’s just stupid,” I said.
“They’re gonna do it!”
“How do you know this?” I asked. He stopped in front of me.
“My mother told me. I don’t think she meant to. It just sort of slipped out.”
His mother, Esther, is a thin wan woman who always walks behind her husband; she is little more than his wife, an obligation or maybe an expectation. She follows behind Reverend Jack like an early morning shadow and is as insubstantial; she offers little comfort to Jackson and none to anyone else.
“Your brothers ratted us out.”
“How? They don’t speak.”
“Apparently, they do. Maybe that gibberish they speak is some sort of secret language only they and your grandfather understand—I don’t know—but they told your grandfather, and he went to my father, who now wants to send us both to that camp.”
I saw an immediate future of electroshock treatments, perhaps a lobotomy, beatings with a specially consecrated Bible while we were naked and wet.
I would survive; Jackson, for all his defiance and masculine vigor, would not.
He was like a dancing, celebratory flame on a candle wick—all it would take was a pair of spit-damped fingers to snuff him out.
When I remained quiet, Jackson resumed his aimless, troubled walking.
“Will you stop pacing?” I snapped. “I’m trying to think.”
Jackson paused his movements and looked at me hopefully. He hadn’t looked this hopeful since the day he’d told me he liked me and asked me out on a date. “Look,” I said, “we’ve graduated. I start college in a few weeks. You can come with me.”
“What?”
We hadn’t talked about it. I think we’d both assumed this—we—would end once I left for college.
Jackson had made no plans for after graduation; it was almost as if he hadn’t expected to graduate after twelve years.
He insists he isn’t college material. “And I don’t want to go to Bible college for sure—”
“Bible college?” I asked.
“Reverend Jack wants me to go. He wants me to take over his ministry.”
“I can’t see you in Bible college,” I said.
“Me either. You want me to go to college, though, don’t you?”
“I don’t want you to do anything but be you—and love me. I don’t agree that you’re not ‘college material.’ It’s more that you don’t want to go to college, which is fine, by the way. You just need to figure out what you want to do and do that.”
He said he’d thought about joining the army to escape what he calls the town’s “Jesus Fever,” and the claustrophobia of being a preacher’s kid.
He’d miss me, he said, and the army might give him some perspective, some other things to think about while letting him see the world, experience life in other places free of the pall of fire and brimstone and the false promise of salvation as he learned to live without me.
I know ours will never be considered a legendary romance.
No one will write a song or even a poem about us; we are too ordinary, too prosaic, but we have loved each other, lifted each other up, fought and struggled to stay together.
We have each, separately, dreamed the impossible dream of loving and being loved in return, and we are.
I suddenly realized I couldn’t—wouldn’t—leave Jackson behind.
“Look, I have a work-study job and a housing allowance. You probably can’t live with me on campus, but we could get an off-campus apartment. You could get a job.”
“You want me to go with you?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but only if you want to—”
He hugged me then, lifting me off my feet. Just as Mrs. Lewisohn pushed open the door to the breakroom.
Saturday, August 20, 1977, Locust Hollow—Jackson and I plan to leave tomorrow right before church, so this morning, I went to the bank to close my accounts.
I got up early because technically, the bank is open until noon on Saturdays, but sometimes Fontella Bass, the lone teller, closes early to get her hair done or because she’s bored.
It’s usually not a problem, though, because folks just call up the bank manager and he goes down and reopens the bank.
I handed Fontella my bank slip; I was withdrawing two hundred and fifty dollars in cash and taking the rest as a money order and closing my account.
“I hear that Mr. Fabricant down at the high school has been encouraging kids to apply to college. Sounds kinda uppity to me—and he should know better. Kids from these here parts, people like us aren’t meant to be ’sociating with college folk—even Reverend Jack says so—never mind attending college alongside them. ”
Fontella ran out of steam as I ran out of patience with her stream-of-consciousness rambling. She looked at my withdrawal slips. “Oh! These withdrawals will close your account. You don’t want to do that,” she said, pushing a fresh withdrawal slip towards me.
“Why wouldn’t I want to do that?”
“You listen to me. That Mr. Fabricant has filled your head with nonsense dreams of glory. Dreams and glory are for other people. Once you’re in the city, you’ll miss us and our quiet ways.”
I’d miss no one, I knew, except Rio maybe.
Rio. Handsome, popular, distant Rio. My singular obsession until Jackson came along.
Though our interactions had been few and far between, he’d always been kind to me.
Once, he’d draped an arm across my shoulders, until a group of equally popular boys called him away.
My shoulder had burned where his arm had lain; a week later, the sensation, like a sunburn, peeled away leaving just a depth of feeling and the shadow of a smile.
Fontella was still talking, advising, when I tuned back in. “You listen to me. Leave some money in this account so when you come back with your tail between your legs—”
“I’m not coming back,” I said. “So, either give me my money or I’m going to call the bank manager, who will.”
I’d grown up around these people, and I tried to be respectful, but I was at my wits’ end.
Just the idea of being forced to stay in Locust Hollow at this point would destroy me and Jackson.
To my relief, she handed me my cash and money order without another word.
I stuffed everything into the front pocket of my dungarees and headed out to my bike, which I’d left lying on the sidewalk outside.
I pedaled around the block to calm down, and as I passed the bank, I saw Fontella turn over the “closed” sign and lock the doors. It was 10:15.
When I got back to the farm, I called Jackson.
We agreed not to see or talk to each other until we meet up to leave tomorrow so, as we’d planned, I called his house, let the phone ring once, then hung up and called back, letting the phone ring once more before hanging up so he’d know my trip to the bank had been successful.
Sunday, August 21, 1977, Locust Hollow—“Why aren’t you dressed for church?” my grandfather demanded, coming upon me as I stood, my back to the sink, eating a bowl of cereal.
“I’m not going,” I said.
He lunged at me, grabbed, and twisted my ear savagely. “Yes, you are.”
“Why?” I asked, struggling against the pain. “Going to church isn’t going to make me what you think a man is, any more than going makes you a Christian.”
His slap was swift and stinging. I could feel a bruise rising. My skin was as sensitive as I was; another of my failings as a man. The cereal bowl fell from my hands and smashed on the stone floor; milk, like blood, flowed around my feet.
“Look what you done!” My grandfather lunged at me again.
I reached behind me and grabbed the Brown’s soda bottle that stood on the drain board waiting to be turned in for a penny. I smashed it against the cast iron sink. At that moment, I ceased being a child, anyone’s child. Wielding the broken neck of the bottle, I taunted him. “Come on. Hit me again.”
My grandfather fell back a step; his mouth hung open a little. “I never thought I’d live to see the day a child of mine would raise his hands against me.”
I laughed a little. “I am no one’s child and certainly not yours. You have always beaten me as if I was a man. Today, if you raise a hand against me, I will kill you like a man.”
I could see my brothers gathered in the doorway to the kitchen looking confused and a little frightened. Still holding the bottle like a torch lighting a dark path, I slipped my backpack awkwardly over my left shoulder and picked up my suitcase. He seemed to notice my luggage for the first time.
“What?” he asked, confused, but he stepped to the side and my brothers parted, allowing me to pass between them. Outside, I threw the bottle to the ground and spit in the dust. I could see Jackson in his battered pickup truck waiting for me on the road at the edge of my grandfather’s property.
I retrieved the box I’d placed in the crush of corn plants clustered beside the driveway.
In the box was all I had left of my parents: their wedding album, my father’s Henry Mancini albums and a half-empty bottle of my mother’s favorite perfume, Wind Song by Prince Matchabelli.
I’d once had a Laguiole penknife with a rosewood handle that my father had given me the summer we moved to the farm when I was seven.
His father had given it to him when he himself was seven.
It was my most treasured possession. I’d kept it hidden with all my childhood treasures in a shoebox secreted under a loose floorboard beneath my bed; only my dad had known where I kept it.
The morning after my parents died, I went to look for it, hoping it would bring me comfort, but it wasn’t in its hiding place.