“Yes, but—”
“But nothing. We’re going down there and we’re gonna fight anyway.”
Pete looks at me hard.
“But, Pete, we’re gonna lose,” I cry.
“What difference does that make to whether we fight?” he asks. “Load up another wedge.”
I pause. Sniffle a little.
Pete is still looking at me hard.
I do like he says and slide another wedge into place as he lifts that sledge again.
There’s a heaviness in the air when Dad leaves for the council meeting. He’s leaving early to make sure the council don’t vote before it’s supposed to, at three o’clock. He wears his one and only suit, gray, with his brown shoes and the tie Ma got him for Christmas a few years back. Our family gathers on our sinking porch to watch him go.
I’m wrapped up in my quilt again. I got that hot lead feeling in my stomach, but I know it ain’t from any Lyme disease. Butch sits next to me and rests his chin on my lap.
Sometimes, when you know a good thing is over and done and won’t ever come back, everything about it gets a whole lot sweeter. Each little leaf becomes something beautiful. You see the sunlight glowing through it, tracing out all those tiny veins inside. Each blade of grass is suddenly its own living thing, and not just one of a billion others that you stomp over on your way somewhere else. Suddenly it all appears in a way you’ve never seen it before, and it’s so beautiful you wonder what in the world you were looking at in all the time that came before.
You notice it about people too. Looking around me, I see the lines around Ma’s eyes and at the corners of her mouth appear deeper, and for the first time, I see the gray in her dark hair.
I see the scar on Will’s chin where he busted it on the hearth one winter, years back. His face is the color of pale clay, like when he first learned about Bobby Kennedy’s killing. Will was gone for days then. Where could he walk, if all our land got flooded?
Frankie cries silently. It don’t matter it’s not his house or that he’s leaving come summer’s end. Stairways has become his home, and he’s losing it forever too.
The Ford rumbles to life. Dad looks once more at us, at Ma, and then puts the truck in gear and starts off down the lane. We watch him the whole way to Hopkins Road. An awful quiet falls over us then.
I wish like mad somebody would talk. Desperately I search for something to say, but I can’t think of a thing.
Ma speaks in a soft, slow voice: “Pete, fire up the grill.”
Going on in that same, even voice, she tells Will to get all that beef ready and to bring the glassware down from the cupboard. Frankie she asks to put a kettle on the stove for sweet tea.
“John Thomas, I’d like you to rest. On the porch if you like, or in bed, but I don’t want you moving about.”
None of us moves.
Suddenly Ma whirls about and charges across the porch for the screen door. Whipping it open, she shouts over her shoulder in a voice that is suddenly harsh and near to breaking. “Boys, do not make me tell you twice.”
In the yard, my brothers stand about the charcoal grill’s shimmering fire. Will holds the plate of beef patties, bloody in the day’s heat. He has to wave his hand every so often over the plate to keep the flies away. Any other summer afternoon, it would be perfectly ordinary to see them like this. Not today.
None of it makes one lick of sense to me. Feels like somebody’s taken the edges of the world in their hands and is tearing it right down the middle. Dad off to a meeting of liars who will flood our valley; Ma ordering us to prepare for a picnic.
Butch barks.
Turning from the grill’s heat, I spy Sam Williamson coming up the lane. He parks, climbs out, and we see he’s wearing a wrinkled blue shirt that’s too small for him, with a faded brown tie. Blue suspenders hold a pair of pants high over his big belly. Never in my life have I seen Sam in anything but his long underwear, floppy hat, and mud-caked hunting boots.
“Figger better to be early.” Sam stuffs another wad of chewing tobacco in his cheeks and goes to work on it.
Ma’s glassware is set up on the picnic table. We watch from the yard as she pours Sam some iced tea. Sam leaks brown juice over the porch railing before accepting it.
“Pete, you got any idea just what is going on?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I am at a loss, Jack.”
“You see Sam wearing a tie?”
“Didn’t think Sam even owned a tie.”
It is not long after that more cars come up our lane. Four, five, six. Tires grumble over the stones, and clouds of white dust rise slowly out behind them. The cars park in a row in the field before our house. Butch trots down to investigate, but we stay in the yard, watching.