Sweet Everlasting

18

That boy comes back to me, bringing with him the cotton field and his own shadow he can see against the dirt, and the blue sky reaching almost to the road where it cuts through the pines, and I see him set down his cotton sack, and I see him start out for the creek. 18 Fve never been big on the sorts of things like you'll see in movies, where there's two people in love and the whole story is how there ain't nobody else in the world for either one of them. I don't think the world works that way,don't think it's even anywhere close.You find somebody to love like Susan and me did each other, you're just plain lucky. The world goes on regardless. It don't plan and it don't care. It don't even notice. I'd spent time with other women before, and I knew a little bit about them, enough to know how different Susan was. Sometimes a woman will know what's going on when a man won't, and there are women that will use that against a man to get what they want, turn him every which way without him really knowing it. Susan never was that sort. And there's women too that don't want to be nothing except some man's woman, but Susan couldn't have lived that way. She had her own ideas and her own work, and none of it hinged on me. I said I didn't believe in those stories like they have in the movies, and I don't, but that's mainly because I don't think the world fixes itself to suit folks. It don't set up a neat little story 144 for you to play out, and if you think it does, you're on the road to some sad times. On the other hand, it might really be true that I could have traveled all over the place and never found nobody like Susan. And that's pretty much what Fve come to believe now, whether it matters or not. When Fd take my break, sometimes I'd go outside and sit on the loading dock and light up a cigarette and lean back against the bricks, and I could feel Susan there with me. I'd get that good heavy feeling you get in your bones when you been workinghard. I'd draw in the smoke and it would ease me down. I'd sit there looking at the rocks and gravel shining out in the street, looking at the clouds go by, and I'd think about Susan. I didn't like holding things back from her, things that I knew put space between us, and I hadn't ever talked with her about my spells. I'd had them when she was around, but I'd always been able to hide them. I'd feel one coming on and I'd go off into the bathroom or somewhere I could be by myself. One Sunday night after we'd come back from church — it was the next day after we'd gone up to Atlanta with Renfroe and his family to see the Atlanta Crackers play—we put W.D. to bed and then we sat in the glider out on the front porch and I told her about my spells. How they'd hit me just about any time and there wouldn't be nothing I could do to stop them, how I'd feel sick and weak and about to blow up inside but paralyzed, and I told her how scared I got. I told her I'd been to the doctors, and about how they'd done all them tests but couldn't find nothing, and that I had pretty much give up on doctors, but how it didn't really matter now, since I hadn't had a spell in a long time. I told her about the time I went H5 down to Mt. Zion and heard Brother Oakley preach and seen him heal some folks and not heal others. I told her about the little deaf boy that didn't get healed and how he stuck out his tongue at me and laughed when I looked back at him. I don't know why I...