by Randy Reynolds
She knew the sound of an encyclopedia hitting the table. Without turning from the stove she asked, "Are you going off somewhere to read all day?"
"I guess so," I said.
“Aren’t you selling peanuts for Sister Griffith today?”
“Nope. She said she’d call me when she gets some more.”
"Well, go out and play ball with the other boys, then. And y‘all stay out of the intersection. There's a perfectly good field over yonder by the warehouse. For the life of me, I can't understand why y’all prefer to play in the street."
"Because it's smooth and it's shaped like a baseball diamond--each street corner is a base."
"Ya'll are going to get yourselves killed playing in that street. Now, I mean it, ya'll play in the field."
"Don’t tell ME! Tell Ricky. They’re HIS friends, not mine.”
She set a glass half-filled with tan liquid before me. "You're looking puny. Drink this Ovaltine and forget about reading for today. What you need is some activity!"
"Yuccch! I hate this Ovaltine! And who says r
"Don't sass me, young man. No more reading today. And Ovaltine is good for growing bones."
"That's only when you add milk, Mother. It's not the same with water."
"We don't have milk today, unless you want goat's milk."
"Yucch."
“We’ll have regular milk when we can afford it.”
"Will you get me another encyclopedia when you go back to the grocery store?"
"Didn't I just buy you the 'F'?"
"It was the 'E-F' combined, so you got two for the price of one. And that was last month, Mother. Volume 'G' is probably in by now."
"You may have to wait another month, Randy. We can't afford any extras right now."
"But, Mother…"
"Re-read the 'E-F.' Doesn't it have a lot of stuff about flying in it?"
She was stirring the grits again and didn’t see the face I made behind her back.
I wasn’t going to tell her that the ‘E-F’ was a big disappointment, that there were words missing between “Fuchs, Sir Vivian Ernest” and “Fucshia." I spelled one of the missing words a different way and came up with Funk, Jim--the pioneer who'd had most of the adventures later attributed to Dan'l Boone, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the boys at my school brought up Funk's name so often!
Daddy came in, kissed the back of Mother’s neck, tapped her fanny with his Bible and sat down across from me.
He said, “Coffee woman!” And she scurried to make him a cup of instant.
After serving Sanka for daddy and grits for me, she went over to the screen door and stared out, idly running her fingers back and forth on the coils of the door spring. There was nothing to see back there but an old shed and a thicket of bamboo that separated the church property from the family behind us. When she quit scraping that door spring, the silence caught my attention and I looked up and caught her stealing a glance over her shoulder at me, then quickly looking away. It made me wonder what she thought of me sitting there with my daddy, both of us lost in books, not talking. And it occurred to me that she must have been thinking that I was already a boy of 10 who not that long ago was her sweet little angel baby and now I was almost as tall as her and I already knew some things she didn't know and was in a hurry to learn more.
I cleaned my plate, because if I didn’t she would tell me the thing about starving children in Red China who had to go without food so that I could have enough, and that it was my Christian duty to eat everything on my plate. I couldn’t stomach the Ovaltine, though, so I left it where she’d placed it and if she could get it to China, they were welcome to it.
Mother said, "Yes, you may."
“I need you to sweep the church,” said Daddy without looking up.
“Mother told me I could go ride my bike.”
“Okay,” he said, turning a page in his Bible.
I ran out the door, encyclopedia in hand, and Mother called after me, “Be careful on your bike!”
“I will!” I yelled.
“And no more reading today!”
I didn’t reply to that because I didn’t want to lie.
That was the day Billy Griffith saw me riding my bike down the middle of the unpaved street with no hands, reading my encyclopedia. Before that day, I was just one of the boys who sold boiled peanuts for his mother. Afterwards, though, I was something different.
He called out from their porch, "You're gonna fall and kill yourself!"
I glanced his way and my front wheel wobbled even as I assured him, "Nah, I never fall."
I tumbled butt over bicycle and landed flat on my back, still clutching the encyclopedia. To preserve my pride, I lay where I had fallen, lifted my book and continued reading, there in the middle of the dirt road in the morning sunshine, as if this is what I had intended all along. Billy Griffith strode into the street and stared down at me.
"Kid, you've got savoir faire."
"You mean the economic system of
He laughed. "You're thinking of laissez faire. Savoir faire is the French word for cool. You're cool. You nearly kill yourself, then lie there like nothing happened. Now that's real cool. Shows you can take pain."
“What pain?” I said, trying not to groan.
"Why aren't you playing baseball with all the other boys?" he asked, pointing toward the intersection of the two dirt streets where a noisy game was in progress.
"They’re all younger than me. I'd rather read."
He pointed to the church, then to his mama's house."You know, I've got a good view of the church roof when I'm sitting in the swing there on the porch. I've seen you up there reading your books."
"Well, when you've got a nosy brother, and four little sisters, you have to find some privacy."
"I don't think I've ever seen anyone reading on a roof before. Or a bicycle, for that matter."
"I have a dog, too. If I try to read on the ground someplace, he bothers me, or my brother and sisters do. Or Daddy will give me a project. He hates to see me wasting my time reading even when all HE’S doing is reading.”
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop," he said, tapping out a cigarette from a pack with a red circle on the front and lighting up.
“LSMFT,” I said. “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.”
He took a drag and smiled. “Is this the brand you smoke on the church roof while you’re up there with a book?”
I struggled to a sitting position. “I’m a Tareyton man, myself. They got that charcoal in the filter and that makes them healthier.”
Billy grunted. “Sometimes it looks like you’re smoking the longest cigarette in the world up there. Like a tree limb or something.”
I was embarrassed. “Oh, that’s just fan handles from the church. The handles are porous sticks. You rip ‘em off the fans and straighten ‘em out, you can light ‘em and the smoke just pours through. That’s what I learned to smoke with back in second grade. I only smoke 'em now when I'm out of cigarettes.”
We heard a car coming, and Billy Griffith picked up my bike and rolled it to his side of the street. I hurried after him, careful not to lose my place in the encyclopedia.
“I got something I want to show you in my garage,” he said, propping the bike against a chinaberry tree.
The stand-alone garage—actually an old carriage shed from a bygone era—was over to the side of their lot, separated from the house by a jungle of south Georgia vegetation.
I limped after him, thinking, What a cool guy. A grown man who talks to me and wants to show me something in his garage. I'd never been in his garage before. I couldn't wait to see what he wanted to show me.
