JULY 1972
Dickie and I took a load up the hill at dusk, and he set up the tent. I cleared the fire pit and arranged the rocks, then gathered firewood. Crickets sang as we made a final trip for sleeping bags and food. Frogs charummed and croaked in the creek and ponds. The whole world came alive after the sun slipped below the hills. We found Ben’s sleeping bag in storage, on a high shelf in my grandmother’s garage. Just pulling it out and smelling it brought memories, and I wished Ben were there. He would have loved Jesse and Dickie. I harbored the dream that he would walk up the driveway one day, just like Dickie felt about his father.
My father came from a meeting at church and climbed the hill carrying a flashlight. He helped us get the fire started and brought out two potatoes wrapped in tinfoil that we put at the bottom of the fire. We assured him we would be all right.
“No staying up all night,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He looked at Dickie. “That’s a fine tent. I can tell you’ve set it up a time or two.”
Dickie smiled. “Yes, sir. Mostly in the backyard when the landlord says it’s okay.”
My father smiled and looked out over the twinkling lights of the community below. It reminded me of the verse that said Jesus looked at the people with compassion. There was something about Dogwood that felt white unto harvest, at least to my dad.
Watching him walk down the hill, the light flashing on the path in front of him, was exciting and lonely. It was my first night away from them since moving to Dogwood. Part of me felt sad. What would happen when I went to college? I’d never had these thoughts but they came in waves as we popped the tops on sodas and ate the rest of the ham and cheese and chips.
Dickie began singing the words of “In the Year 2525” and making comments about life twenty, thirty, and a thousand years in the future. He spoke of UFOs and pointed out constellations. He was a big fan of Star Trek and had seen every episode that ran for the three seasons it was aired. He believed within ten years we would all have communicators.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, a way to talk to each other.”
“Like a phone?” I said, not having watched much Star Trek. “How are you going to get a wire long enough to go to the store?”
“You won’t have wires with it. You don’t have a wire on the radio and you can hear people talking, right?”
“So everybody’s going to have their own radio station?”
“It’s not like that. And it won’t just be a phone. You’ll take your blood pressure, your temperature. You’ll push a button and order a pizza. Call your family anywhere in the world.”
“Sounds like the Jetsons.” It was too wild to believe but Dickie could see it like he could see the fire in front of us.
My mother had put marshmallows in the cooler, unbeknownst to us, and we cut branches with Dickie’s pocketknife and sharpened them and roasted the marshmallows over the fire until they bubbled. Dickie held one in too long and burned it. When we’d eaten plenty, we burnt the rest, seeing what kind of glop they would make on the firewood.
It was just before midnight when we crawled into our sleeping bags. It was too hot in the tent, so I pulled my sleeping bag outside by the fire and stared at the stars.
“Hey, we didn’t eat the potatoes,” I said to Dickie.
“We’ll have them for breakfast,” he said, yawning. “Now if Mothman comes, you wake me up.”
All the Mothman and UFO talk revved my imagination. The flickering fire made the field and tree line swim. Soon, Dickie was gone and the light snoring became a gale force wind. My mother conjectured that Dickie had a broken nose that hadn’t been repaired.
At the edge of the fire, mosquitoes and gnats were chased away by the heat. Fireflies swirled from the earth, but as the night wore on, their numbers dwindled. I watched the sky, hands behind my head, and wondered if there was life on a distant planet. I wondered if Ben was looking at the same sky. Did he miss us? Would he ever come home?
Something moved along the tree line and I sat up. There was something down there. Maybe a deer. It looked too big to be an opossum or raccoon. I peered into the darkness, wondering if it could be a wildcat. The fire would keep it away, I reassured myself. Someone said a bear had pillaged trash cans the previous summer. I also knew from Old Yeller that animals with hydrophobia acted irrationally. My father had told me about a man from his childhood who had been bitten by a rabid dog and said it was a horrible death. He’d never filled in the details but my imagination ran wild.
Something white came up the hill. My heart beat wildly. Was it a ghost?
“Dickie, I think there’s something coming,” I said in a loud whisper.
Nothing but snoring from the tent.
“Dickie, you’d better get out here,” I said, full-voiced now.
And then I heard someone chuckle. Up the hill, into the firelight, barefoot through the tall grass came Jesse Woods, her hair lifting in the night breeze.
I gave a sigh. “I thought you were the Mothman.”
She put a hand on her hip. “You sure know how to compliment a girl.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.
She waved a hand and stood over the fire, then sat at the end of my sleeping bag. I wished we hadn’t burned all the marshmallows because I wanted to offer her one. A can of Faygo was all we had, and she opened it.
“What in the world is that noise?” she said.
“Hurricane Dickie. You should have heard him in the hotel.”
“It sounds like a chain saw with the croup.”
I laughed. “How did you know we were up here?”
“I didn’t. I saw the fire from the road yonder. I figured it was probably you and your dad. How’d the birthday trip go?”
“Wait. You ride your bike at midnight?”
“Sometimes, when I can’t sleep. It gets so hot in the house in the summer, even with the fan going and opening all the windows and taking off . . . Well, it’s hot no matter what you do. Sometimes I climb up on the roof to find a breeze.”
I told her about the trip, the games, what we saw and ate and how the Pirates lost. I tried to hold back on some of the fun we had so she wouldn’t feel bad.
“We got Daisy something in the gift shop,” I said. I described the bobblehead and a peaceful look came over her.
“She’ll like that. And I bet Dickie had fun.” She picked up the transistor radio and flicked it on. At night, the AM band pulled in stations from around the country and it felt like the world came and settled down right next to me. Voices from Chicago and New York and St. Louis. Jesse stopped at a twangy guitar song from a station in Texas. A country singer laughed and sang, “When you’re hot, you’re hot. When you’re not, you’re not.” Jesse wiggled and held up her hands and bit her lip as she moved to the music. I couldn’t help but stare at her shape and the easy way she moved. She caught me looking at her and smiled, shaking her hips in exaggerated movement.
When the song ended, she turned off the radio and put it down, staring at the stars. “Sure is pretty, ain’t it?”
I agreed. “Do you really think there’s a Mothman? I know you guys are trying to scare me, but the pictures Dickie describes sound real.”
“I ain’t never seen him, so I can’t give you an eyewitness report. And I think Dickie wants there to be a Mothman. You know, something out there trying to help. Those people up in Gallipolis saw something. There was too many who seen him.”
“And what about the Martians the government is hiding? The ones who landed in New Mexico. Are those real?”
“Some things in this world you can’t explain. Like the Loch Ness monster. Bigfoot. God. They’re all the same. They keep us guessing and trying to figure out what we’ll never explain.”
“You think God and Bigfoot are in the same category?”
She grabbed a handful of grass and pulled it, tossing it in the air. “I ain’t saying this to offend you, PB. It’s just that—”
“PB?” I said.
“Preacher Boy.”
I smiled.
“I don’t know if there’s a God,” she continued, looking straight up. “Maybe he’s hiding behind some star. And if he is there, I don’t know that he cares much.”
“I think he does.”
“You think he does because your daddy’s a preacher. You’ve got skin in the game.”
“That has something to do with it. But I believe God is there because it’s true. Whether my dad is a preacher or a coal miner doesn’t matter.”
She picked up a stick and broke it and threw the pieces into the fire. “It would be easier if there wasn’t a God.”
“How do you figure that?”
“All the pain and suffering in the world would make a lot more sense. Some people are rich. Others have nothing. Kids in Africa starve to death because they was born on the wrong continent. If there ain’t no God and we’re here by chance, trouble just comes to you. But if there is a God, it means you got to explain things that can’t be explained.”
I hadn’t considered the suffering masses as much as I had considered the Pirates’ losing streak. Leave it to Jesse to help me see life globally.
“I’ve heard that we compare God with our fathers,” I said. “We make him out to be what we’ve experienced.”
Jesse shook her head. “If that’s the case, I sure don’t want nothing to do with him.”
We listened to the fire crackle and I remembered the potatoes. I offered her one and she dug it out of the ashes with a crooked stick Dickie had whittled. She tried to unwrap the potato but dropped it when steam came out.
“I wish your mom would have let you come with us,” I said.
“Yeah. It was probably for the best. Did you swim?”
I nodded. “They had a nice pool. All the white people got out when Dickie got in, though.”
“Figures. Dickie’s just looking for a break, you know? Hoping his dad comes back in one piece. That’s one of the reasons he wanted to go to your church.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, the day of the picnic. We talked about coming early to the service. He said he wanted to get his daddy on the prayer list.”
“You don’t have to go to our church in order to get us to pray.”
“Well, he seemed to think you did.”
I told her I would pray for Dickie’s father every night until he returned.
“That’s nice of you. He’ll appreciate that.”
“Why didn’t you come to the service?”
She tried to pick up the potato but dropped it again. “For the same reason we didn’t stay. I swear, Matt, them church people are meaner than snakes.”
“We can all be meaner than snakes.”
We listened to the noise coming from the tent. Instead of talking about what was on my mind, I made a joke about Dickie getting married someday and what his wife would endure.
“Maybe he’ll marry a woman with a hearing aid and she can take it out every night,” Jesse said.
I laughed and the silence between us unnerved me. The thought of Dickie’s father and his war service brought the conversation in the car to mind—the one my mother had tried to quell. The secret about my family felt like a weight holding me underwater.
“Jesse, can I tell you something? Something nobody around here knows?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“It’s hard because pastors and their kids are supposed to be perfect . . . It’s like living in a fishbowl. It feels like everybody looks at you.”
“What’s the big secret?”
“My brother got drafted. He was supposed to go to Vietnam. But he didn’t.”
“I thought if you were drafted, you had to go.”
“I know. But he didn’t.”
“Where is he? Hiding in your grandmother’s pump house?”
“He went to Canada. He and a friend went to somebody’s house up there.”
“A friend?”
“His girlfriend.”
“Whoa. I’ll bet your mama and daddy don’t like that much.”
“I don’t know which is worse: living with a girl my parents don’t like or running to Canada to avoid the Army. I feel real bad about it because of Dickie’s dad . . .”
I could see the tumblers going in her head. “He’s a draft dodger?”
“If you knew him, you’d like him. He’s nice. I think he didn’t wanted to kill people.”
“He didn’t want to die is what he didn’t want.”
“Maybe so.”
She stared at me, but it seemed like she was looking through me. “People run from their problems all the time. I understand him being scared. But when your country calls, it seems chicken to hightail it.”
“You think it’s okay to love somebody who makes a bad choice?”
“The way I look at it, you ain’t got no choice who you love. You either do or you don’t. And you don’t control what other people do. You can’t help that your brother ran off.” She grabbed some more grass and tossed it at me. Then she pointed a finger. “But I’ll tell you one thing. You’d better not tell Dickie. He gets worked up about stuff like that. There’s a lot of folks who didn’t want to go or send their kids but they did. There was a boy down the next hollow who got drafted a few years ago. He was coming home, riding in a Jeep somewhere over there, when some sniper shot him from the trees. I think that’s what Dickie is afraid of. His daddy will be ready to come home and something will happen.”
“My parents don’t talk about Ben. It’s like he’s dead. He always remembered my birthday, but I didn’t hear anything from him this year.”
Jesse frowned. “You and birthdays. Don’t nobody remember mine and I’m not the worse for the wear.”
“When is it?”
She picked up the potato gingerly and tore it in two, steam rising again. She blew on it and took a bite. “It don’t matter.”
I didn’t press her. “Sometimes I look at his stuff, the books he left. This sleeping bag. His ball glove. I wonder if things will ever be the same.”
“Probably not. But just because they’re not the same don’t mean you can’t live.” She took another bite and said she wished she had some cow butter and salt. When she finished the potato, she wadded the foil and threw it in the fire. “You better hope Blackwood never finds out. He’ll use that against your daddy.”
“Use it for what?”
“I don’t know. To get what he wants. That man has so many people in his back pocket, it’s a wonder he can walk straight. Nobody stands up to him. He’s had his eye on our property for years.”
I recalled Gentry Blackwood saying something about that at the picnic. “Why would Old Man Blackwood want your place? He owns most of the county, doesn’t he?”
“Some people are never satisfied. Always got to have a little more. Always got to have what somebody else has.” She stared at the fire and I wondered what was going through her mind. The light flickered in her eyes. “I think he want us out of the way. He thinks our family is trash.”
“You’re not.”
She looked at me, then at the fire again. It seemed she was trying to decide something. Finally she lay down beside me on the sleeping bag with her back to the fire, one arm crooked under her head. Her hair hung in her face and she gave me a stare that was unnerving because I couldn’t stop staring back. I thought about the girl in the swimming pool in the bikini.
“I won’t say nothing to nobody about your brother.”
“Thanks,” I said, swallowing hard. I had never been this close to Jesse or any other girl. I could smell the potato on her breath. “I appreciate that.”
She looked down and opened her mouth, running her tongue along her lips.
“Jesse, what’s wrong? You didn’t come out here to watch the stars and eat a potato.”
“I reckon I don’t know why I came out here,” she said, sitting up.
“No, don’t go,” I said, touching her arm.
She lay down, on her back this time. Watching her was a transcendent experience. She blinked her long eyelashes, her eyes roaming. Finally she whispered to the sky, “Can you keep one of my secrets?”
“Sure.”
“This is something you can’t tell nobody on God’s green earth.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
She cocked her head. “Don’t get smart. This is serious.”
“Okay, I won’t tell anybody.”
She rolled onto her side and looked me in the face. “This is a cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die kind of deal. Swear on a stack of Bibles. I got to know if I can trust you.”
I held up a hand like I was swearing in a courtroom. “I solemnly swear I won’t tell anybody what Jesse Woods is about to say. So help me God.”
She put her hand on my arm and something came over her face I’d never seen. There were tears welling in her eyes.
“My mama died,” she said.