Heading Out to Wonderful Read online

  With that hearty, joyous plaudit:

  “Weary Pilgrim

  Welcome home.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE ANNUAL OYSTER Supper at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, just outside of town on a low rise by the highway, was pretty much as good as it got. Every white person in town went, and some from as far away as Lexington. It started at three, with games and gossip until suppertime, and it went on until dark, with old Rooster Ruley playing the fiddle, and the ladies of the church cooking all day long.

  The oysters came from down on the Chesapeake Bay, shipped in a few days before in big wooden barrels filled with shaved ice, and they were kept in the cool dark of the church basement, where the ladies fed them with cornmeal every day, thinking it would make them fatter, and maybe it did.

  They made oyster stew, scalloped oysters with cream and butter and nutmeg—so rich it threatened to stop up every artery almost immediately—oyster fritters, and fried oysters. There was a raw oyster bar, where men shucked oysters and other men slurped them down directly out of their shells, smothered in a sauce so hot it burned your tongue.

  Oysters in a land-locked valley weren’t so much a food as they were a rarity, an exotic way to while away a late summer afternoon.

  There were hot biscuits with country butter, soft and rich gold in color, and corn on the cob, picked that morning, and tomatoes from the vine, and cole slaw and sweet iced tea and lemonade.

  And there was ice cream, two kinds, mixed from Louisa Stephens’s grandmother’s recipe, butter pecan and peach, made with heavy farmer’s cream and sugar and barnyard eggs. It was made the night before by the teenagers of the church, cranked by hand in old wooden barrels packed with shaved ice from the ice man, and rock salt to make the cold set, the boys and girls cranking in turn until their arms hurt and then passing the job on to the next one. Then it was packed in more ice, and wrapped in muslin, and stored in the chill of the basement, and brought out, vat after vat, all day long.

  There was softball in a freshly mowed field in back of the church, and the boys played all afternoon, and in the evening the men played and even some of the women, the ones who had just begun to wear pants and smoke during the war.

  Even the twins came, Elinor and Ansolette Gadsden, old maids so identical that they could hardly tell themselves apart. The line that divided them as people had long since disappeared. They looked alike, of course, the creases in their sixty-year-old faces matched line for line. They also dressed alike and walked hand in hand and finished each other’s sentences.

  When they were young, they were beauties, the old ones said, the people who remembered them as girls, and Elinor and Ansolette still had a certain quality about them, a refinement, that set them apart. Their people, of whom they were the last, the end of the line, because of their stubborn refusal to marry and thus be separated, had lived in the town since the town began. They were highly sought after because they were aristocrats, and because they had buckets of money, and they were the only Gadsdens left.

  It was said that the reason they never married was because they used to tease the boys, changing places now and then, so that, when a hapless young man asked for Elinor’s pledge of marriage, he was met with a peal of laughter, only to find he was reaching out for Ansolette’s hand. They were both called Miss Allie, by everybody in town, and even Boaty Glass treated them with extreme respect and even affection.

  The old ladies played softball. They didn’t field, they just took a turn at bat, once a year, going in turn and striking out at the soft, easy pitches the men threw to them. They swung identically at any pitch that was thrown to them, in their identical dresses, and, in six swings, their athletic endeavors were over for another year.

  But that day, that day in 1948, it was Charlie Beale on the ball field who won every heart. He played tirelessly, with the boys, with the grownups, and it was a thing of beauty. He took off his white shirt, and played in his strap undershirt, so you could see the size and shape of his body, not big, but strong and slender and young, his neck and shoulders rosy from exertion. He had the power and grace of a natural athlete, and the gleam that came into his eyes whenever the ball was near him, or the bat was in his hands, was something to behold.

  He could stop any ball that was hit his way, catching a ball on the first hop, jumping and swiveling in the air to rocket it to any base before the runner got there. He would dive and roll in the grass for a hard-hit grounder, and he would be up in a shot and his aim never missed its mark.

  Sam Haislett was entranced. He couldn’t be coaxed or begged away from the edge of the field. He just had to watch every move.

  At the plate, the bat seemed a natural extension of Charlie’s long arms. He took a stance like a pro, legs wide, angled far back from the plate, and when the ball was pitched to him, even by the fastest of the fastball pitchers, he would lean slightly back, and smack that thing into kingdom come, every time, any pitch.

  Sam watched his every move, and he fell in love. His Beebo was all the baseball pictures in all the newspapers come to life. He was Jackie and Joe together. To watch him swing, or swivel and throw, his eye unnerved, his aim true, gave Sam his first sight of the power and possibilities that lay dormant in his tiny body. He had never seen anything so beautiful.

  Nobody had. The edges of the diamond filled up with onlookers, and they all picked up on the nickname Sam shouted out, until every time Charlie swung the bat, every breath was caught, every voice yelled out, “BEEEEEBO!!” at the crack of the hard wood bat on the scuffed leather of the ball. They were seeing something they’d never seen before, man or woman, not in real life, and nobody there ever forgot it, and the nickname was fixed in their minds from that day on, like Babe, or Joey D.

  “Must have played some ball, that boy,” said one of the men. “Maybe even pro.”

  “Probably not. Maybe Triple A. But he’s played.”

  When he finally came off the field, Charlie Beale’s neck and his shoulders were rosy and running with sweat, and the crowd drifted away with him, losing interest once he’d left the field. Without him, the game was over.

  Somebody grabbed a towel from the trunk of a car, and he thanked her, and wiped himself down, and put his shirt back on, and every woman watched him until the last button was buttoned. The men stood around, clapping him on the back. Way to go, Beebo. Way to go. It was their way of saying Beebo was fine with them, wherever he came from, however strangely he talked, he was okay.

  With the crowd drifting off, Charlie noticed Sam, and he walked him on to the field, and knelt behind him in the batter’s box, and gave the boy his first lesson in how to hold a bat, how to keep his eye fixed on the ball and never waver, and swing from the hips. Sam never again swung a bat in his life that he didn’t feel Charlie behind him, Charlie’s hands on his, Charlie’s arms leading him back and forward again and into the ball, sending it into the far reaches of the field where the eye couldn’t even follow it. For the rest of his life, every time he waited for a pitch he heard Charlie’s voice in his ear, telling him that the power came not from the arms but from the hips.

  Later, cooling off, Charlie sat with Will and Alma, while Sam still hung out at the edge of the ball field, waiting for the minute Charlie might pick up the bat again, not wanting to ask but not wanting to miss it, and Alma told him everybody’s story.

  “They seem like nice people,” Charlie said, looking out at all the folks, everybody in clean shirts and dresses, greeting each other as though they hadn’t seen one another for a long, long time.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” Alma said. “A story my mother told me, from back in the Depression. The town drunk is sitting on the courthouse steps. A tramp walks into the town, like this, like any town, and he stops and says, ‘What kind of town is this?’ he asks, and the drunk lifts his eyebrows, looks him over, and says, ‘Oh, it’s a terrible town. It’s full of liars and cheaters and people who live for nothing but being mean.’

  “And the tramp thanks him
and moves on to the next town, hoping for better. A little later, another tramp stops by. ‘What kind of town is this?’ he asks. And the old drunk tells him, ‘It’s a wonderful town. The people are kind and good, and take well to strangers, and bring their children up right.’

  “So the tramp decides to stay a while, and he finds a handout or two, and then he finds some work, and then some more work, and pretty soon, as times get better, he’s got a wife and a little house and some children of his own. And he, like the rest of the town, brings them up right.”

  They watched the crowd for a minute, then Charlie looked at her. “Is that story about the town, or the drunk, or the tramp?”

  “I think it’s about finding the thing you expect to find. What do you expect to find, Mr. Beale?”

  “Are you ever going to call me Charlie?”

  “Lord, Alma, the man sleeps under our roof.”

  “Will, things will be this way between me and Mr. Beale. At least for a while. These are good people, Mr. Beale. I teach their children. You can tell a lot.” She turned and smiled at Charlie. “I’m just shy, Mr. Beale. Will doesn’t like it, but that’s the way I am. It’s the way you are when you don’t meet many new people.”

  “However suits you, ma’am.”

  She laughed, and touched his hand. “Just because I’m shy doesn’t mean I’m your mother, either. Call me Alma.”

  “Seems a little unbalanced.”

  “It won’t be long. One day, just by accident, I’ll call you by your name.”

  “I’m patient.”

  Will turned to him. “Alma’s right. Good people. Happy, by and large.”

  “And we have good manners. That makes up for what happiness doesn’t provide.”

  Will laughed. “Sam Mohler said to me once, when I was real young, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think people pretty much decide early on how happy they’re going to be. And then they just go on and be it.’ Course, that was just a month before he got run over in his own front yard by Jackson Taylor’s son, who was driving drunk at the age of sixteen. Jackson Taylor sold cars. Jack Junior had borrowed one from the dealership seven minutes before he ran Sam over. It’s not all peaches and cream, whatever Alma says.” He stood up. “Speaking of which, let’s get some ice cream. Get out amongst ’em.”

  The women, Charlie knew from the store. The men, Will introduced him to, and so Charlie gradually put the town together, husbands with wives with children, and they all greeted him with the same friendly distance, and nobody asked him how he had ended up working in a butcher shop in Brownsburg, Virginia.

  Will got three bowls of ice cream, and joined Alma and Charlie, where they had moved to a picnic table in the shade, the ice cream already starting to melt. A long black car pulled up and parked, and Boaty Glass got out of it, and went around to the other side, and opened the door—men still did that—and then she got out, and there she was. Brand new all over again.

  She was wearing a full-skirted dress, royal blue, silky, sleeveless, a cocktail party dress, not the kind of thing you’d wear to a social in the backyard of a Baptist church. She had a perfect figure, rounded, soft and fleshy for a young girl, although she seemed willowy next to her bulky husband. Her legs were long and beautiful, and her blonde hair was tied back with a ribbon in a way that reminded Charlie of someone else, some other girl, perhaps in a magazine.

  She was tall, taller than her husband. If she’d been standing next to Charlie, she would have been just slightly taller than he was, especially in those shoes.

  She looked like the kind of pinup girl men had carried pictures of off to the war, and looked at in the lonely nights, after they had written to their sweethearts. A pinup girl in sunglasses, her eyes hidden from the world. Together, Boaty and Sylvan looked important, like people you’d see in Life magazine.

  “Him you know,” said Will. “You’ll want to know about her. Tell him, Alma.”

  “I only know what everybody in town knows.” She paused, as if she were trying to recall some tale, a myth she had heard as a child. “There’s a place about fifteen miles from here called Arnold’s Valley. It’s hard to get to, but it’s very wild and beautiful, lovely. It’s untouched by time, like Eden. I’ve only been there once, a long time ago. The same fifteen or sixteen families have lived there for generations, since before this town even started, and they don’t like strangers, and they don’t much like modern life.

  “Nobody goes there, except occasionally people from the state, who go and try to get them to send their children to school, and, for a couple of years, men from the army who tried to get the boys to sign up for the draft. The boys hid in the woods, until finally they were left alone. But, still, their children don’t go to school, and their boys never went to war. If anything goes wrong, they decide it themselves. When they marry, if they church marry at all out there, or if they die, they take care of everything themselves. Nothing leaves the valley.

  “Once in a while, you’ll see them in town, buying shoes, or sugar, things they can’t grow themselves. But not often.

  “Harrison Glass was a bachelor until he was forty-eight years old. He took care of his mother, I have to say that, a difficult woman who had spells and seizures and was not only sick but a hypochondriac. Thin and romantic, like she’d been planted in weak soil. And three weeks after she died and he watched her go into the ground, he drove out to Arnold’s Valley for the first time. Everybody thought he was going to buy some land there. He didn’t talk to anybody, and nobody talked to him, just watched that big car of his wander the dirt roads. But it wasn’t land he was after.

  “He went out twelve times, they say. On the third visit, he saw a girl walking in a yard, and then he went more often, and looked for her, in the yard, in the fields, sitting on the porch.

  “On the last visit, he stopped his car and got out in front of her house. He walked into the yard, knocked on the door, and spoke to her father. Then he bought her for cash, along with the farm neither one of them ever went back to I don’t believe, bought her for one or two thousand dollars, although it could have been more, could have been less. She was seventeen.”

  “He bought her like a head of cattle,” Will added.

  “That was three years ago. He brought her to town, and he married her. We went to the wedding, such as it was, Will and I. Except to say ‘I do,’ she never spoke one word during the whole day. Then he took her to the one place she wanted to go, Hollywood, so she could get on a bus and take a tour of the stars’ homes—five days out, a week there, and five days back.

  “And, since that time, she’s hasn’t spoken much more. He bought her her own car, and she drives into Lexington every other day to go to the movies. She’s crazy about the movies.

  “Her name is Sylvan. Isn’t that a lovely name? It might be her real name, some old mountain name, or she might have heard it on the radio or made it up out of some movie. Sylvan Glass.

  “She goes to the movies and sees some getup, or she cuts out a picture from a movie magazine, and then she gets a woman in town to make a five-and-dime version of what they wear in Hollywood. That’s how she learned to speak in that fancy way, first by listening to soap operas on the radio from the time she could walk, and then by watching movie stars, once Boaty got her that car.

  “And, yes, that is her real hair color. Everybody in Arnold’s Valley is blonde, pretty much. She’ll never go back there.”

  “Alma drove out there once, it’s that big house on the way to the slaughterhouse, and asked her to come into town and have an iced tea and a visit.” Will looked at his wife.

  “She said she’d be happy to,” Alma said, smiling. “Sweet as she could be. But she never came. I never asked her again.”

  Charlie never looked at Sylvan the whole time Alma was talking. He just took it all in. From his first sight of her, that day in the butcher shop, she had burned herself into his mind, vivid and beautiful, the effect she had on most men, and women, too.

  “It’s a paradise ou
t there in Arnold’s Valley,” Alma said. “Tended. Cared for. They have nothing, no money, no education—no regular morals, a lot of people say although I don’t believe it—nothing except for their land. They don’t know anything about what’s going on in the world. They only care about their place, farm after farm. They never leave it. Maybe it’s religion. Maybe they’re just private people. The only things Sylvan knows, she’s gotten from the radio, and, in the last three years, at the movies.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Charlie said as he stole a glance over to where Harrison was laughing loudly while Sylvan stood silently by his side.

  “Don’t say that too loud,” said Will. “Boaty Glass’ll cut your ear off quick as that. He was a good boy, my best friend, but he’s a mean man now with a lot of money and a quick temper and a nasty disposition.”

  Charlie stood up. “Sam, let’s go say hello to Mr. and Mrs. Glass.” He took the boy by the hand, and they walked over to where the couple stood and Charlie shyly shook Boaty’s hand. Then Sam shook Boaty’s hand, too.

  Sylvan turned to him, took off her sunglasses so her green eyes flashed in the sun, and she, too, shook both of their hands, first the boy’s, then Charlie’s, without a word. But you could tell the way Charlie let his hand hang just for the moment in the air where her hand had been that something, some word of recognition, had passed between them. It was as though whatever was going to happen between them had already happened, was already over and done with.

  If it had been winter, there might have been a static spark, something visible, but it was too warm. Something had been said, but she was the only one who knew what it was.

  Charlie let his hand drift in the air for a moment, a long moment, watching the last of her gaze as her sunglasses went back on, and then he put his hand in his pocket, holding on to the warmth of her brief touch. Then he nodded, first at her, then at her husband, and he and the boy returned to their places.

  “She smells nice, Mama,” said the boy. “Like she cost a lot of money.”