Page 41 of The Night the Lights Went Out
Sugar’s hands tightened in her lap. She never talked about Tom to anyone. Never. Especially not to someone she barely knew. She wanted to ignore the question, to dismiss it as simply an effort to divert a discussion about Merilee’s own life. Except Sugar knew that wasn’t true. Despite all her attempts to keep her new tenant at arm’s length, a tenuous connection had been formed, its foundation loosely based on proximity and loneliness, and a stubbornness to survive a life that wasn’t of their own choosing.
Sugar turned her head, wishing she had her own sunglasses to block the glare from the window. “I was nineteen. And the first time I saw him, I thought that if I could ever fall in love, it would be with him.”
“What about Tom? Did he feel the same way?”
A small smile lifted her mouth. “Oh, no. The first time he saw me, I was trying to kill someone. I suppose you can say he saved two lives that day.” She looked up at the bright blue sky, and remembered.
Fourteen
SUGAR
1942
Ilooked down at the top of Jimmy’s head as he sat in his wheelchair, taking a moment to catch my breath. His beautiful reddish blond hair was a total waste on a boy, but beautiful to look at from where I was usually standing behind him. It was just like our mama’s, which was why she probably pretended he didn’t exist. Nobody wanted a mirror image of themselves that was less than perfect.
I was panting from pushing the wheelchair toward the granite Goliath known as Stone Mountain. Some people actually drove their automobiles up the gentle slope all the way to the summit, but all the pleading from Jimmy and bullying from Harry couldn’t get me to do something so foolish. Instead, I parked at the bottom of the trailhead and began walking, planning to continue until the path got too rocky or I ran out of steam.
It was cold for April, and my breath made smoky puffs as I exhaled; the sky had started out with timid clouds, but they now seemed to be gaining confidence as they grew in size and color, nearly obliterating the sun as we climbed. I’d never been to Stone Mountain before. Only the carving of General Robert E. Lee had been finished since the entire idea had begun back in the twenties, and I had enough to keep me busy rather than spending my day looking at what happened when people didn’t have the wherewithal to finish what they started.
Today was supposed to be just Jimmy and me on account of Lamar being sick. It was just a little cough, but he said he felt poorly enough to stay home. He was now living with another family of tenant farmers, the Scotts, who didn’t have children and treated him like a son. They’d moved into the house he’d once shared with Rufus, and it all worked out since now he had a family again.
I suspected that Jimmy might have caught whatever Lamar had, but he was too stubborn to admit it. That was how people could always tell we came from the same family. I saw him shivering and made him put on a sweater, and he didn’t fight it, which should have told me to make him stay home. But that would have been like making a cow stop producing milk just by talking to it.
We heard the whoops and hollers from Harry and Curtis behind us, and I started pushing again, not wanting them to catch up. They’d not been invited, but Harry had said it wasn’t fitting that a girl should be driving all by herself (even though we both knew I was a better driver than he was) and I would more than likely wreck Daddy’s Plymouth because I was a girl. I knew they were both looking for a place to smoke where Daddy wouldn’t find out—Daddy could not abide tobacco, most likely on account that his tobacco crop had failed ten years ago and set him back in a bad way. But even Harry knew that Daddy wouldn’t have let him take the car if I hadn’t been with them.
It was our big family embarrassment that Harry and Will were of age yet not in uniform. They’d managed to avoid the draft so far, but after Pearl Harbor, when just about every able-bodied man had voluntarily enlisted, they remained civilians. Even Bobby, my quiet, smart brother, whose favorite thing to do was read, had signed up. Bobby promised he’d come back, but I didn’t see how he could promise such a thing. Three boys from the county had been lost in France already, and they thought they’d be coming home, too. Mama took it hard when Bobby enlisted and hadn’t spoken a word to anyone since.
“Go faster,” Jimmy said, leaning forward. “I want to stop up there and look through my binoculars.”
Granddaddy’s field glasses hung around his neck, the strap fraying now. I didn’t know for sure, but I thought he still slept with them. Harry and Will teased him, saying he was a baby because he still slept with a toy. Jimmy never defended himself because we both knew he did it so Harry or Will wouldn’t steal them while he slept.
With a quick glance behind me, I started moving as fast as I could. The path at the base was wide and mostly smooth, so I didn’t have to struggle too much, although the muscles in my calves had already begun to burn. I passed a young man—not too much older than Harry—in uniform who turned to look at us, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence owing to Jimmy’s bright hair and my running like I was being chased.
He didn’t look away as we passed, and I felt like I had to turn my head to look, too. The first thing I noticed was his eyes. They were dark brown, almost black, but they were turned up a little bit at the corners like he’d smiled so much that they got stuck there. He wore a khaki navy uniform, which wasn’t a rare sight because of the nearby Naval Air Station in Chamblee. Willa Faye was always swooning over a man in uniform, which I told her was silly because they were still just boys under the uniform, and there was nothing special there from what I could tell. Maybe I saw things differently because I was raised with so many brothers and she just had one sister.
But it wasn’t his eyes or his uniform that made me take a second look. It was the way he looked at me. Not like he wanted to whistle at my backside, but like he wanted to know my story.
I suddenly felt self-conscious that I wore saddle shoes and bobby socks that made me look younger than my nineteen years. Willa Faye sometimes painted a line on the backs of her legs when she went out dancing so people would think she wore nylons, but only after she left her house so her mama wouldn’t see. There wasn’t enough privacy at my house to do such a thing, plus I didn’t have the patience. But at that one moment, when his eyes met mine, I wished I’d given a thought to what I looked like.
I kept going, pushing Jimmy to the point where he wanted to stop, then waited while he put his binoculars to his eyes. “Do you see anything?”
He shook his head. “Not many birds—no trees up on the mountain, so I wasn’t expecting to. But you can see pretty far—I think that’s the road we drove up on.”
He handed me the glasses and I took them, aware of the man in the uniform still watching me, his hands in his pockets, his hat at an angle that made him look mysterious as well as handsome.
It took me a while to get anything to come into focus, my fingers clumsy as I attempted to adjust the binoculars. I just saw lots of blue sky and then, lowering the glasses, a road and a single car moving slowly across a background of green grass.
“See it?”
I nodded, following the progress of the car, seeing how I could make out the occupants of the front seat even from this distance.
“I like the way things look through my binoculars,” Jimmy said. “No matter how different something looks from up close or far away, objects don’t change. They’re still the same. Just like people.” He tugged on my arm and I relinquished the binoculars.
“Jimmy!”
Curtis suddenly appeared beside me, taking hold of the wheelchair while Harry grabbed me around the waist and pulled me backward. They smelled of cigarettes and alcohol and I turned my head in disgust while quickly grabbing for the handgrips of the wheelchair.
Harry pulled me back. “It’s not fair that Jimmy gets a free ride up the mountain, so we’re going to take turns rolling him back down.”
