SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Thirty-Five

255 Thirty-Five The road led from the highway, wandered off through the trees, crossed one small, shallow creek and ended at the Homeplace, less than a mile from the blacktop. It was a one-lane dirt road. At least, I thought it was dirt; the layer of pine needles on the road was so thick I could never really see the surface. There was a hole in one of my sneakers and as I shuffled along the narrow lane the needles would work in through there, sticking into my toes. When I walked out into the tiny village flashes of West Virginia bounced off my mind, clattering around until I saw something that held the memory in place; fixed it. Like the houses. Most of them sat squat and gray, unpainted, the square little boxes I remembered from Crum and Black Hawk, the same houses I saw in Doane and out on the edge of Williamson. Two rows of them here, facing each other, as though someone had thought to place them so one could always watch the other, each house with a guardian neighbor across the flat, wide yard, almost like a park, that separated the rows, brooding pine trees hanging tall above everything. You could drive a car right up between the two rows of houses, but nobody did. They pulled their cars off under the trees and left them there, mostly out of the way, the cars that would run parked next to cars that wouldn’t, cars that hadn’t run in years, cars with chicken nests in the back seats. It was just like it had been the first time, when Jason handed me my motorcycle, and John Three had handed me a dollar. I had tried to get Yvonne to come with me, but she wouldn’t. Said if Wimpo found out about it, she’d lose her job. Said I shouldn’t go, either, not if I wanted to fit in. 256 They seemed to know I was coming. There were people on the front porches and in between the houses, sitting, swinging on porch swings that looked to have been hand-built. They were there, in their places, and they seemed relaxed, comfortable. But they didn’t take their eyes from me. A tall, slender man in a sleeveless undershirt was stirring a fire in a metal barrel that had been cut in half. He put a wire refrigerator shelf over the top of the barrel and started taking pieces of chicken from a bucket, dropping them on the shelf. Almost immediately you could smell them cooking. A woman in a bright flowered dress pushed a small child in a swing hanging from a pine tree. The swing was an automobile tire, hung flat, level with the ground, the center covered with a burlap bag tied loosely there, hanging down through the center of the tire, the child nestled down in the bag, laughing, watching the woman intently. From somewhere down the row of houses I heard a screen door slam and a child yell and a dog bark, both of them chasing someone, something. I just kept walking, slowly, hoping I could find Brother Jason or John Three or somebody who maybe had seen me at Murphy Beach, somebody who would know I wasn’t there to cause any trouble. Hoping I would see Evangeline. At the first house on my right an old woman was sweeping her bare dirt yard, the broom moving in slow, short arcs in the sun, pushing the pine needles and the chicken droppings without raising dust, the heat of the dirt rising up around her long skirt. As I walked past her she stopped sweeping, holding the broom in front of her with both hands and turning as I went past, her face flat and open, unafraid. It was her. The old woman from the hotdog stand. I thought I should talk to her, say something, anything, but before I could get any words in my brain and in my mouth I heard 257 Brother Jason’s deep voice from somewhere up the line of houses. “Lookie here, y’all, we got ourselves our very own white boy come to Sunday dinner.” Brother Jason and John Three and Evangeline and a bunch of people I didn’t know and me . . . we sat at a huge plank table in Jason’s back yard...