The Year the Lights Came On (8 page)

We waited anxiously, hidden, until Mr. Simmons and our father returned from the apple orchard and Mr. Simmons drove away in his Hudson.

“C’mon,” Wesley said. “We might as well get it over with.”

We walked in full view of our father, but he did not say anything. He ignored us.

We walked away, then retraced our steps, moving closer to him. Being ignored was not a happy omen; usually, that meant pressure was building.

“Uh—anything you want us to be doin’?” asked Wesley.

Our father knew how to handle us. He hammered off a heel bolt on an upside-down plow and inspected the dull gopher. Then he said solemnly, “Catch the mules and hitch up the mowing machine. That high grass in the flat needs cuttin’.”

“Yessir,” Wesley replied. “Yessir. We’ll—we’ll get to that right now.”

We left quickly to find the mules.

“Wonder why he didn’t say nothin?” I whispered.

“He will,” Wesley predicted. “Don’t worry. He will.”

*

That night, after we had eaten, he spoke—our father spoke. “Wesley, was all that fighting worth the trouble it caused?” he asked.

“Uh—yessir,” answered Wesley. “I think it was.”

“Mr. Simmons is letting you off this time. Said he’d expel you if anything else like this happens. He means it.”

“Yessir.”

“I don’t like you boys fighting, but if there’s a right cause for it, I don’t want you turning tail and running.”

“Yessir,” said Wesley.

“Yessir,” I echoed.

“All right,” our father continued, satisfied that he had fashioned a moral and presented it as irrefutable truth, “I told Mr. Simmons that the two of you would help him at the school tomorrow, doing some cleaning. I expect you to be there and work and not say anything else about this fight. You understand me?”

Wesley answered, “Yessir, we understand. We’ll be there.” Then he asked, “Daddy, we were right, weren’t we? Electricity makes a difference, don’t it?”

The question lingered. “I guess, son. I guess,” our father finally answered, staring into the kerosene lamp on his rolltop desk.

*

My father had always been a giant to me. I had marveled at his stories. My father knew—actually knew—men who had fought in the Civil War. He had sold Bibles in Kentucky, had worked in Florida as a carpenter, and had once supervised the farming operation at Madison A & M. Now he was a farmer and a nurseryman, and a man all other men respected. He had an obsession for seeing things grow and he was a genius with trees. My father could take one tree—any tree—and explain the most perplexing and incomprehensible mysteries. A tree was a cycle of life, reproducing itself again and again, remaining part of itself, and, yet, becoming part of everything around it. A tree purified the air, pulverized the soil, trapped water, deposited quilts of leaves to decay. A tree bloomed green, flowered, faded, colored in a final ceremony of splendor, and then bloomed green again. A tree could do more rooted to one spot than most men rushing about the globe, high-stepping in the name of Ambition. To my father, the most astonishing fact about a tree was that it grew out, not up. He used that fact to confirm the shortcomings of man, and to teach us the difference
between taking what we could get and reaching for those things that exhilarated us. Expanding, my father declared, was greater than conquering. “Put a nail in a tree trunk and it won’t move a hair in a hundred years,” he said. “A tree grows out, not up; a man grows up, not out.” How did that happen—that about the tree? The Almighty, my father said. He was stubborn in his use of that description of deity. Other men pondered over Scriptures and discovered answers in arm-long words. My father took his budding knife and slit the bark of young tree stalks and, gently, he slipped delicate baby buds into the wounds—buds shaped like tiny sailing ships—and then he watched his trees become an appointed fruit: Yellow Delicious, Red Delicious, Stuart, Orient, Bartlett. That act was his scripture and easier read than the Bible. It was my suspicion that my father could not understand why a man needed to seek Great Answers if he had ever budded a tree and watched it live.

Because my father had known many experiences and because he was quick to feel what others could not feel, Wesley and I escaped the wrath of the angry parent lashing out. There was something about the fight, about Wesley’s deliberation, that agreed with my father’s observations of man’s shortcomings. It was not that we had fought and won—not that at all; we had fought for a reason, and that reason was more in the name of reaching out (for something romantic?) than in striking back.

My father also understood the immense release of that fight. Wesley had confused Dewitt Hollister with a declamation on the REA, and Dewitt Hollister forgot about the issue of Shirley Weems. But to us, the fight
was
about Shirley Weems and Walter Weems. Hitting Dupree and Sonny and Wayne and the others
was pleasurable because we were stealing from God’s thunder and fighting in the name of vengeance. But it was our privilege—even more than God’s. It was our privilege because we had endured, and because the fight was a sign of the Right Time. It couldn’t have been righter; our nerves were frayed and knotted from such long waiting, and Mr. Simmons was away from school. (Perhaps God did have something to do with it.)

*

It was not easy confronting Wade Simmons on Sunday afternoon. He was not a man to dodge responsibility and the fight was his responsibility; it could not be dismissed until we had learned The Lesson of it. That conviction was Mr. Simmons’ most distinctive characteristic, and the reason he was a brilliant teacher: he knew the difference between a lesson and The Lesson.

“Hello, boys,” Mr. Simmons said, smiling. “I appreciate you coming over and helping, it being Sunday.”

“Yessir,” I mumbled.

“We’re glad to help,” Wesley added.

“Well, c’mon. A couple of the others are already doing some picking up in the auditorium,” replied Mr. Simmons.

Freeman and Otis were moving chairs and sweeping. They smiled awkwardly and muttered hellos.

“Won’t take long, boys, now with all of us working,” Mr. Simmons assured us. “Not long at all. I really appreciate this, and I mean it.”

We knew immediately what had happened, and later it would be confirmed by the whispered comments of the Highway 17 Gang: we were being punished, but not openly, not as public nuisances, not in ridicule, not as examples to deter the temper of others. We were being punished quietly, on a Sunday afternoon.

If anyone saw us and wondered, Mr. Simmons would praise us for our unselfish willingness to volunteer a Sunday afternoon in spring.

As we learned, there had been a compromise. The parents of the Highway 17 Gang were indignant over the fight—Wesley had started it and Our Side had won it, and we were guilty. Their sensibilities had been offended and they demanded retribution in discipline. Mr. Simmons had pleaded our case, had responded with the story of Shirley Weems’ being subjected to a degrading insult, but the parents of the Highway 17 Gang dismissed that argument. “Kids will be kids,” they said. “Our boys didn’t mean anything by that.”

But Mr. Simmons would not accept dictated terms of punishment. He would not discipline the entire school, he warned. He would discipline certain participants; symbolically, the few would represent the whole. And he imposed one other condition: no one would ask who had been selected for punishment.

And, so, on Sunday afternoon at Emery Junior High School, Wesley and Freeman and Otis and I swept floors and washed blackboards and emptied pencil sharpeners and dusted erasers and scraped away year-old dirt-dauber lodges and obeyed all the other suggestions of Mr. Simmons. We did this agreeably, if not eagerly. We did it because we understood Mr. Simmons was trying to tell us that he believed in us, that he endorsed our awareness of a social Maginot Line splitting Emery. We did it also because being treated with dignity and as very important people was a most novel method of discipline.

*

In midafternoon, Margret Simmons arrived, driving the Hudson. Mr. Simmons interrupted our window washing and led us to the
lunchroom, where Mrs. Simmons was spooning generous portions of home-cranked ice cream into soup bowls.

“This is peach ice cream, boys,” Mr. Simmons announced, reaching for the dasher. “Now, you may not like it, but I do, and if my wife’s doing the turning, then it’ll be peach. And that’s something you boys will do well to remember: when you’re looking for a wife, find a woman willing to crank the ice cream freezer—or at least find one that’s willing to help you do it.”

We laughed fully. It was the first time we had ever heard Mr. Simmons attempt humor.

Mrs. Simmons spoke warmly to each of us. She offered oatmeal cookies. She praised us for working on Sunday. She playfully massaged my neck.

I loved Margret Simmons.

We enjoyed the ice cream, the ease, the calmness, the informality of being with our teachers. Wade Simmons was relaxed and—and
unorganized.
His voice was different—lighter, quicker, less official. And she—she was girlish, free with laughter, slyly playing sly games with her husband, telling him in her own language that she was proud of what he was doing.

The mood was party, and even the question Wesley asked did not change that mood.

Wesley said, “Mr. Simmons, did you have electricity when you was little?”

Mr. Simmons laughed. “No, Wesley, I didn’t. And on that farm where I grew up, it’s still not there.”

“You mean, you didn’t have electricity, either?” responded Otis, surprised.

“Not at all, Otis. Not at all,” Mr. Simmons replied. “You know
what I remember about electricity? What I remember most about it? You know what it was?”

We did not know.

“Well, it was reading a story. A story about a chicken in Kentucky. It was, I think, nineteen-thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Anyway, this chicken was raised in a hen house that had electric lights, and one day the chicken up and produced an egg shaped exactly like an electric bulb.”

Freeman was amazed. “I don’t believe it,” he exclaimed. “Is that right, Mr. Simmons? A light bulb?”

“That’s right, Freeman. That chicken was known as the Inspired Kentucky Pullet, but that was just a name. Pullets don’t lay eggs. Still, newspapers all over the world carried stories of that egg. It was even displayed in the World’s Fair in New York. That chicken had sermons preached about it. Yessir, there were some preachers who said it was a sign from God that electricity was hatching and, someday, electricity would be everywhere.”

We were sincerely moved by the story of the Inspired Kentucky Pullet. Otis was very nearly converted, for he confessed openly that it must have been God’s work and he would give anything to see a picture of that egg.

“I’ll try to find one for you,” promised Mr. Simmons. “Once, in college, I wrote a paper on the effects of electricity on farm families, and it seems to me I have a clipping of that egg.”

“I’d be grateful, Mr. Simmons,” Otis said. “I surely would.”

“Well, I guess I know how you boys feel about electricity,” Mr. Simmons continued easily. “Growing up the way I did, the way you boys are growing up, I used to wonder why we were always being put down, too. You know, it just goes to show you that people are curious. People are always and forever looking down on other people for the strangest reasons—like not liking somebody because somebody else said he came from a bad family, or not wanting to eat certain kinds of good, nutritional food because somebody else said it tasted awful, or not wanting to see other people do good because their nose is too long, or their eyes are brown, or their skin is black or red or yellow…”

And we sat, listening and nodding agreement.

Later it occurred to us that Wade Simmons had performed his noblest teaching on that Sunday afternoon. We had accepted The Lesson, and we did not realize it.

*

For several days, we were gentlemen beyond our training and inclination. Whenever we became tense, we instinctively moved into the physical presence of Wade Simmons, as though Wade Simmons were an incantation to deafen the hissing slurs we were receiving from the Highway 17 Gang.

But on Friday afternoon of the following week, the unsteady peace ended.

Delano Ford, prissy Delano Ford, called Betty Tully a “heifer.”

Betty was not lean, but she did not waddle when she walked.

Betty was Paul’s sister.

Paul proceeded to inflict minor damage across prissy Delano Ford’s skull, and the rest of the Highway 17 Gang rushed to the scene like sharks after blood.

Freeman and Wesley and Otis and Jack and I formed a circle around the two combatants.

Dupree was astonished. He said to Freeman, “You mean you ain’t doin’ the fightin’ for Paul?”

Freeman shook his head. His face was contorted in anguish. He looked like someone struggling with a terrible temptation.

“I don’t believe it,” exclaimed Dupree.

“Aw, shuttup, Dupree,” whined Freeman. “It—it just don’t seem right to pick on Delano.”

“Why?” asked Sonny.

“Well, you know. He’s got FDR’s name,” Freeman declared defensively. “Besides, he’s not big as a gnat.”

“I don’t believe it,” Dupree repeated. “I just don’t believe it.”