Sweet Everlasting

9

And so my daddy was a Burt and my mama was a Sims, and somehow they met one another and fell in love, but they never did tell me that story. They had me, and they wanted to have more children too, but Mama couldn't, and so it was just us. And then just Mama and me, and then before too long, just me. 9 Isaiah was Otis and Essie Mae Cutts's oldest boy. They had three boys and four girls, and all of them had Bible names. You had Isaiah and Ezra and Ezekiel, and you had Mary and Martha and Sarah and Ruth. Ezra was about the same age as me, but we didn't play together too much. Him and Ezekiel, and the girls too, they always wanted to play ball and I didn't have no interest in that. They'd get them a old rubber ball and play with it till it split, and then they'd tape it up and play with it some more, till it fell apart. They didn't have no real bats. They'd use different kind of handles, broom or axe or pick handles, or they'd take them a length of board, like a two-by-two, and they'd carve them out a grip on one end, smooth it off real good, then swing that. I remember one time Ezra found him a real baseball in a ditch up at Ricksville, and he brung it home, and they tried to play with it, but it messed up the game, since you couldn't hit it good with the bats they had, and the ball was too heavy and too hard to be throwing all-out to somebody that didn't have a glove. And then too, they had a twist on the rules that let them get somebody out by hitting them with the ball. Instead of throwing the ball to somebody so he could tag the runner, they'd just aim for the run66 ner. With a real baseball, if you played that way, somebody could have got hurt. Neither me or Isaiah was big on baseball. I always had a hard time judging the ball since I wasborn with a bad right eye. It don't look no different from the other eye; I just can't see good out of it. That's the reason I never went to the war. Isaiah didn't care nothing about playing neither, but for a different reason. He was the slowest moving human being I ever seen, before or since, so slow running the bases that even if he hit a long one over somebody's head, knocked it way out in the pasture —and Isaiah could do that, could knock the soda out of a biscuit — even then, they might get it back in and throw him out before he made it home. He was so slow it made folks laugh when they even thought about him running. One of the other children would start telling about Isaiah running, or else imitating him doing it—like Ezra used to do—and everybody would break up. Isaiah, he'd laugh too. He walked slow and he talked slow, and if you asked him a question, at first you might have thought he didn't hear you, from the way he'd wait before he spoke. But he'd be thinking it over, and even if he was going to say, "I don't know," he might not say it right off, before he'd thought about it a bit. He was about five years older then me, and I did have some questions about things, especially things I couldn't ask about at home without feeling funny. Me and him would go off down to the creek while the others played ball, and if they seen us heading out, they'd make jokes about how it would be dark before we got there, and such as that. Isaiah would just wave at them and keep walking. It was like he had some kind of heavy thing inside him that made him move so slow but also give him a kind of balance 67 that other folks didn't have, and he didn't let the little things throw him off. Isaiah was tall and lean, and real dark-skinned like his daddy. Their...