Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

My grandpa slammed the door, and it made the whole truck shake. “Goddamn it!” he said. He punched the steering wheel as hard as he could, and it made the horn honk. “Goddamn it,” he said again. He put both his hands on the steering wheel like he might try and tear it off and throw it out the window, and his knuckles went white because he squeezed it so tight.

“You better get on out of here!” Mr. Messley hollered from behind the screen door.

My grandpa looked over at him, and then he cranked the engine and pulled down the gearshift and stomped on the pedal. The tires squealed, and we flew out of the parking lot and turned onto the highway and then it was quiet again except for the sound of the engine carrying us up the hill away from the lights of Mr. Messley’s store.

All that hollering had scared me, especially after what I’d seen at Miss Lyle’s house, and I tried as hard as I could to keep from crying. I didn’t want my grandpa to see me, and I turned my head to let the air come in the window and dry my face. I wanted to stop crying once and for all, but I couldn’t. I’d just about given myself a headache with all the crying I’d already done.

My grandpa reached over and patted my leg. He had hands like Daddy too, and it felt like sandpaper scratching against my blue jeans. I pulled my feet up into the seat, and I wrapped my arms around my knees to make it harder for him to touch me.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “It’s all right. I didn’t mean for none of that to scare you. Messley’s a friend of mine. It’s all right; I don’t want you being scared of me.”

I quit crying and sat up straight and put my feet back on the floorboard and used my shirttail to wipe the tears out of my eyes.

“I ain’t scared of you,” I said.

My grandpa looked over at me, and then he looked back at the road. He got out his pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and shook one loose and put it in his mouth. He pushed the lighter in and waited for it to pop.

“You shouldn’t be,” he said. “You shouldn’t be scared of me.”

MY GRANDPA STOPPED HIS TRUCK IN FRONT OF OUR HOUSE, and he just sat there and looked up at the porch like he hadn’t ever seen the house before. I looked past him out the truck’s open window to where the shadow of the barn leaned toward the ridge on the other side of the yard. When I looked closer, I saw a bunch of tiny lights flying around in the darkness.

“Look at all them fireflies,” my grandpa said. He looked over at me. “You want to catch one?”

“No,” I told him. “I just want to go inside.”

Me and Stump used to catch lightning bugs all the time and put them in Mama’s Mason jars, but they didn’t do nothing once they were in there except beat their wings against the glass. Then they’d start to smell funny and they’d just up and die before you knew it. Daddy said they died so quick because they didn’t have any air down in there, and he showed us how to punch holes in the lids with nails so they didn’t get smothered to death. That was just too much work to think about right then and I didn’t feel like messing with them, especially without Stump. He was the one who liked catching them anyway. He liked to turn the lights out and sit the Mason jar in the middle of our bed and get down on his knees and look in at it and wait for it to glow. Sometimes I’d get down on my knees on the other side of the bed and look through the Mason jar at Stump’s face. It made his eyes and his nose and mouth all different sizes, and after a while looking at him was like looking through a magnifying glass. He’d kneel there by the bed like he was praying and wait for the lightning bug to glow, and when it did I could just barely see him smiling through the glass with that yellow light spread out across his cheeks.

“Your face looks funny,” I’d tell him, but he’d just sit there and watch that lightning bug and wait for it to glow again.

The Christmas before, when I was in the second grade, my teacher, Miss Bryant, taught us how to make Christmas tree ornaments out of nothing but clay and pipe cleaners. She said we should make an ornament for somebody in our family for Christmas to show them how much we loved them. I thought about making a cross for Mama, but it would’ve been too easy and too skinny and it wouldn’t have looked much like anything hanging on a big old tree. I wanted to make a tractor for Daddy, but it was too hard. I decided I’d make me a firefly and give it to Stump since he liked looking at them so much. I rolled out a piece of that clay until it was about as long as my pinky finger and just a little bit fatter. And then I bent two pipe cleaners into the shape of wings and stuck them in the clay before it dried. The next day, after it was all dry, I dipped the bug’s tail into some yellow paint. It looked pretty good to me, and Miss Bryant thought so too.

Mama made a fuss over it when I brought it home from school, and then she hung it on our Christmas tree after Daddy’d sat it up in the front room. I showed Stump where it was hanging on the tree, and even though he wouldn’t touch it he stood there and looked at it up close for a long time. I reached out and poked it, and it swung back and forth on the branch like it was flying around.

“Does it look like a firefly to you?” I asked Stump, but of course he didn’t say nothing.

But it was gone off the tree before Christmas even came. I asked Mama about it, but she said she hadn’t seen it. I figured Stump probably took it down and hid it somewhere in our room. He was always hiding things he liked and things that belonged to him. You could open his drawers or look under his pillow and find all kinds of things: rocks, sticks, dried-up flowers, toys he didn’t want getting lost or broken. The only things he didn’t hide were the rocks that were ours together. We sat them on the shelves in our room that Daddy’d made for us. Me and Stump would look at our rocks together and try and find stuff about them in Daddy’s old encyclopedias. I knew Stump wouldn’t ever think about hiding any of those rocks because he knew that we shared them. They were ours together.

THE HOUSE WAS DARK INSIDE, AND I FELT AROUND ON THE WALL BY the front door until I found the switch and the table lamp beside Daddy’s chair turned on. My grandpa walked right to the refrigerator and opened it and started pushing stuff around like he was looking for something. He looked in the freezer too. Then he closed the freezer door and I watched him go over to the counter and look through the cabinets where Mama kept the food.

“You want something to eat?” he asked me.

“I ain’t hungry,” I said. I hadn’t had nothing since dinner, but I knew I couldn’t eat nothing then.

“Well, you need to eat something,” he said. “I ain’t too much of a hand in the kitchen, but you need to eat something.”

He walked over to the cabinet where Mama kept all the plates and the cups, and he opened it and ran his hand over the plates and then he felt around behind them. He opened another cabinet and just stood there and stared up into it.

“Goddamn it,” he whispered. He turned around and looked at me where I stood in the front room just inside the door. “Your daddy smoke in the house?” he asked me.

“He don’t smoke,” I said.

My grandpa turned around and looked at the cabinets. Then he opened one he’d already opened and he looked inside it again.

“Of course he don’t smoke,” he said.

I had to pee, and I walked through the kitchen and down the hallway to the bathroom. I flipped the light switch, but nothing happened. I flipped it a couple more times, but the light over the sink still wouldn’t come on. It was dark in there, but I still thought about opening the toilet lid and peeing without the lights, but I couldn’t hardly see anything and I was afraid of getting it everywhere. I walked back out into the hallway and opened the back door and looked outside. We had to use the privy out back before Daddy had built us an indoor bathroom, and I saw the outline of it across the dark yard. There wasn’t no way I was opening that old door and going in there at night without a flashlight and with nobody to hold the door open for me so I could see a little bit by the moon. In this kind of dark it probably had snakes and all kinds of things hiding out in there. I didn’t want to ask my grandpa to hold the door open for me because I didn’t want him thinking I was a baby, and I didn’t even know if I could pee with him standing there watching me anyway.