Maybe it was because I never sat still long enough to think about anything, much less deep things like divine providence, but life had just always seemed so random — like there was really no plan at all, maybe not even a Planner. You might go outside to recess, and since the pittypat court was already full, you might go over to the swings and start playing with somebody you’d never even seen, all the while thinking how all this was just a notion that was causing you to walk northwest to the swings rather than east to where they were pitching washers. But then when that person you start swinging with turns out to be your new best friend, you begin to wonder if maybe Somebody you can’t see whispered to you, “Don’t pitch washers today. Swing.” You wouldn’t think that right at the moment, of course, because some time would need to pass before you knew she would turn out to be that friend. But gradually, little by little, if you were ever still and quiet enough to think about things like why you do this and that and whether or not decisions are all a series of chances, you would probably come up with the concept of The Great Whisperer.
This is what was secretly happening to me the day that I began playing with Janie Simon. Janie was not in the band, and so she was in Mrs. Byrd’s room memorizing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and “The Village Blacksmith” (the latter of which was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom I later learned was one of my dead relatives) while all of us musical kids were getting whacked day in day out by Mrs. Gravitts’ infamous board. Janie told me later that she worried so much when she heard all of that violence going on down the hall that whether she knew who was out there getting hit or not, she would immediately start praying for whoever it was.
She was a quiet girl whose daddy had died recently, and she lived out in the country with her mother and her five brothers and sisters. She even rode the bus to school, which is something I cannot say anybody else did that I was friends with. I also cannot say that anybody else I knew would have thought to just haul off and start praying for somebody they didn’t even know right in the middle of memorizing the Declaration of Independence when they weren’t even at church, about to eat a meal, or about to go to sleep at night. But this is pretty much the way Janie was. She seemed to know who I was even though I didn’t know her, and she certainly didn’t have any reason to want to play with me that day since I had not ever even bothered to know who she was like she knew who I was. But she was as friendly to me as a speckled pup; in fact, she was so nice you would have thought I had pulled her out of a burning building.
On days that I didn’t eat Billie’s hamburgers, I would go home for dinner. (I later learned that most other people called dinner “lunch,” but we didn’t say that word in Azalea Heights. It seemed to us like one of those hoity-toity practices like pronouncing almond “ahlmond” or calling a frog a “frahg.” For us there was just breakfast, dinner, and supper, always in that order, and I wouldn’t hear folks really use the “l” word on a regular basis until I was eighteen and in college out in West Texas.) This was at the beginning of when I had vowed to give Mrs. Gravitts some peace, and let me tell you, by dinnertime every day I was worn out from disciplining myself. I was having to tell my very own self “Shut up,” “Be still,” “Get to work,” and “Be nice,” and it was exhausting. I was used to other people doing it for me, and this was a whole new ballgame. Every day when I went home for lunch, I would be as creative as any ten-year old could be about new sudden-onset diseases, but there seemed to be no way to get Mother to buy any of what I was saying. She had learned well to distrust antics like this way back when I was a second-grader and had broken several thermometers in a week’s time by exploding them in the space heater. Nothing could break her skepticism.
So one day I decided to take the law in my own hands and began around ten-thirty in the morning to make a plan for the afternoon. I would play hooky. And since I had been wanting Janie to come over, this would be the perfect time to take her home with me for dinner.
I was pretty sure Janie wouldn’t go along with the hooky-playing idea, so I just went over to Mrs. Byrd’s room as soon as the dinner bell rang and asked her go eat with me at our house. After dinner, we left to walk back to school, but on the way, I delicately suggested that we just take a break this afternoon. She looked really confused, and for a minute, I thought I had made a bad choice for an accomplice, but after I promised to have her back in time to ride home on her bus, she allowed me free rein with her next three hours.
I knew exactly what we would do; it was all part of the vision I had dreamed up during arithmetic: we would wait until Mother and Daddy went back to work, go back to the house, get some of Daddy’s cigarettes and matches, and head for the ravine over behind Woodrow White’ house, who was the ex-mayor of Azalea Heights. I had always thought those woods were particularly pretty with their wild redbud and dogwood trees commingling with the tall pines that seemed crammed full of singing robins. They were all part of my vision.
But right off the bat, reality took a sharp turn from my dreams when Janie started asking lots of questions. The first one was “Now why do we want to smoke?” It was asked innocently and without judgment. She just thought she must have missed something in the explanation of our fun-filled agenda. I didn’t know WHY; it seemed pretty self-explanatory to me. We wanted to smoke because we COULD smoke. We had made a plan that would work; we had worked the plan, and now we just plain DESERVED to smoke. Next came the realization that unlike my dream scenario of loveliness, this was not springtime, the redbud and dogwoods were not blooming, there were no birds as far as we could see, and if there were, they were sleeping or mute. This was January, we were sitting in a ravine in the dark woods, and it was cold. Janie took an obligatory puff from her Lucky Strike, cocked her head, and asked me next, “Is this the fun you were talking about?”
We had almost two hours to go, and the prospects for having any real thrills suddenly looked bleak. We couldn’t go back to the house and get my b-b gun because my mother came home early from work many days, and we couldn’t go back to school because being tardy was worse than being absent. You’d get ushered up to Mr. Peeler’s office and he would start using his telephone to ruin your life. And then while you waited for your meanest parent to come to the school, he would bend you over his desk and paddle you with a heavier board than even Mrs. Gravitts had. So we just sat in the ditch shivering and occasionally jumped around and smashed chinquapins to generate a little heat.
You’d think that Janie would have decided then and there that she could find a better caliber of friend among all her choices at Azalea Heights Elementary School, one that she wouldn’t have to follow into perdition or retrain from scratch about how to have fun, one that she wouldn’t have to interrupt her memory work in order to pray for every time she heard Mrs. Gravitts wielding her paddle out in the hall, but for some reason — maybe it was The Great Whisperer again — she decided to stick with me and come over and spend the night the next Friday.
