Page 33 of The Night the Lights Went Out
Sugar wrinkled her nose. “Ask for a paper cup that I can take home so I can drink it later.”
Without questioning her logic, Merilee stood and broke into line at the front to ask for a travel cup before returning to the table to transfer the coffee. She held the door for Sugar, then followed her down the steps, keeping close to her elbow in case the older woman tripped, but being very careful not to let Sugar know.
As Merilee unlocked the minivan, Sugar pointed up to the sky. “I do think that’s a brown-headed cowbird.”
Merilee followed her gaze, spotting the glossy black bird with the chocolate head and gray beak.
“They’re parasitic birds. Jimmy told me that—because they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and hope the other birds will raise them.” Sugar leaned against the side of the minivan, as if the memories were weighing her down. “That was the best part about this particular patch of land—all the different birds Jimmy found here. There were thick woods back then, more than we had, even. When Jimmy wasn’t working on our farm or doing his chores, he’d come over here. Couldn’t ever pass up an opportunity to make a check mark in his book when he saw another bird.”
Merilee pulled the door open and stood close to Sugar in case she wanted to lean on her to get in without asking for help. “Did Curtis not mind?”
“Oh, he minded. But that never stopped Jimmy.” Her fingers, bony and sharp, dug into Merilee’s shoulder as she hoisted herself into the passenger seat. “He minded a lot.” Sugar turned to Merilee, an odd smile on her lips.
Merilee pulled herself into the driver’s seat and started the minivan, then drove home slowly as Sugar began to speak.
Eleven
SUGAR
1939
Ijiggled the reins attached to our old cart horse, Grace, trying to get her to go a little faster. I had a wagonful of chickens I was trying to sell, and if Grace didn’t get a move on, they’d bake in their feathers under the August sun.
After the boll weevils ate all our cotton fields and most other people’s, from what I could tell, Daddy had been busy figuring out what else he could do to make some money to at least pay the taxes on the farm and maybe buy up some of the abandoned farms dirt cheap. I thought he was crazy, and might have even said so, but he laughed and said the hard times wouldn’t last forever and land would be worth something again. I hoped he was right, because if he kept on buying, we’d own most of the county pretty soon.
We still had our mama’s vegetable garden—even though I did all the tending now—so we wouldn’t starve to death, but he said we should get some more cows and hogs. We could keep what milk and meat we needed, sell what we didn’t, and maybe even give a job to a few of the poor souls who knocked on our door just about every other day. Daddy believed in being a good Christian by practicing charity and letting Lamar stay in the house he’d shared with Rufus. Or maybe that was because he knew that the circumstances responsible for the way Rufus died weren’t all accidental.
It had been my idea to sell chickens. We had so many, and I ended up giving away a lot of eggs. I told my daddy if we could sell chickens, people would at least have eggs to eat, and maybe something to fry up once in a while. When I was little it would have hurt to see my chickens go live with another family, but I was long past being sentimental. Watching farms get abandoned, and whole families walking barefoot down dirt roads, carrying satchels and looking for work and food, put everything in perspective. It helped that I’d stopped naming the chickens when I was a little girl after Harry told me I had just eaten my favorite hen, Martha, when I was still chewing.
Happiest day of my life was when Harry was sent to live with relatives in Cairo, Georgia, to work at the lumber-planing mill. Daddy could’ve used his help on the farm, but he’d begun to run a little wild with Curtis Brown, and this was Daddy’s way of clipping his wings. At least for a little while, anyway. But we were stuck with Curtis, who was now running the little tenant farm my daddy owned. Running it into the ground, I’d heard Daddy say to Dr. Mackenzie more than once. But he felt sorry for poor Mrs. Brown on account of her husband running off, and couldn’t see fit to turn her and her little girls out just because her son was a no-account. When Mrs. Brown got sick and died and the county people came and took the girls, Curtis promised Daddy he’d do his best to maintain the farm. It was a good thing Daddy didn’t put much store in Curtis’s words, because he would have been sorely disappointed.
The chickens were really just an excuse. Although it was Sunday and I wasn’t technically supposed to be working on the Sabbath, I was on a mission to find Jimmy—and Lamar, since the two separated only when it was time to go to sleep—before Daddy found out that he’d run off still in his Sunday clothes right after church. To ruin a good pair of church pants was like a sin to Daddy, and I’d brought along a pair of dungarees for Jimmy to change into.
I knew he was off looking for birds, and that was why he didn’t want to wait to go home and change before setting off. With Harry gone, everybody had to do more work, even Bobby, who did things so slowly and so poorly it was hardly worth having him take up space on the farm.
We were all working can to can’t—from when you can see in the morning to when you can’t see at night—which was why Jimmy never had the chance anymore to find his birds. I didn’t blame him one bit, but if he got a hole in his good pants, there’d be trouble and more work for me to mend them. And if I passed a house and they wanted to buy a chicken or two, then my time wouldn’t be wasted and I wouldn’t be lying if Daddy asked me where I’d been.
Even if I hadn’t known where I was, I would have known I’d reached the Brown farm by the fence that was supposed to mark the outside boundary. Or what was left of it. I knew they’d burned most of the rails last winter when it got so cold and Mrs. Brown was doing poorly. The woods were heavy and dark on the south side of the property, but Curtis was too lazy to lift an ax and get busy making firewood. I sure didn’t want to be around when my daddy found out what had happened to the fence.
Grace stopped without me telling her—she was always looking for an excuse to stop—at the beginning of the drive. It was rocky and rutted because nobody had bothered to smooth it over, and it didn’t look like a cart had passed over it in quite some time.
Pop. Pop.Grace barely raised her head at the sound of gunshots, but the air vibrated inside me like the string on a fiddle. What seemed like an entire flock of crows flew out of the trees on the edge of the woods just at the same time I saw something that looked like a person fall from one of the trees.
I’m not really sure what happened next. All I remember is how quiet everything was, like the birds couldn’t sing because of their own sadness, and how I forced Grace into a trot before leaving her and the chickens under the shade of a half-dead oak. I remember that much. That tree, with the black slick of bark slashed across its trunk from a lightning strike. I remember falling against it as I jumped off the cart and began running as fast as I could toward the woods.
I ran past the run-down house, hardly noticing Curtis standing on the rotten back porch with the missing steps, his hunting rifle still resting on his shoulder like he wasn’t done. I kept running, daring him to shoot me in the back. Because if he did, I’d have a reason to tear him apart with my bare hands like I wanted to.
His angry voice shouted at me as I ran. “Tell your idiot brother and his nigger friend to stay out of my trees if he don’t want me to think he’s a squirrel. And if you all don’t get off my property I’m gonna shoot you for trespassing.”
“Go to hell, Curtis,” I shouted without slowing down, knowing he was too much of a coward to shoot me in the middle of a field, because then he couldn’t say he thought I was a squirrel in a tree.
I was a fast runner, most probably because I had older brothers who were always chasing me down, trying to put dead snakes (sometimes live ones) and other irritations like that down my dress. I thought this was normal until Willa Faye told me her boy cousins (she only had a sister) would have gotten a whipping if they’d ever tried such a thing.
I ran so fast that I didn’t notice Lamar until I almost stepped on him, squatting down near the ground. It was a good thing his face was so dark, because it was easier for him to hide in the woods. I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that Curtis would have shot him, too, if given half the chance. That’s when I noticed he was squatting next to Jimmy, my brother’s face looking up at the tree toward his beloved birds, his legs turned at places they shouldn’t have been.
“Are Granddaddy’s field glasses all right?”
I almost cried to hear him talk, because I thought he surely must be dead from a fall like that. There was no blood or anything, so I was thinking he must have fallen on a big pile of leaves and as soon as he caught his breath again, we’d walk out of those woods and tell our daddy what Curtis had done.
