like a chicken’s head. That was what we used to mark the spot where the other person’s turn to carry began. On the way back after Sleetie had filled the jug up with the skimmed milk, we would both have to keep a hold on the wire handle to be able to carry the thing home.
“Weldon held Barbara Ann upside down in a tub of rinse water last Saturday,” Nancy said. “Mrs. Overstreet had to hit him on the back of the head with a bleach bottle to make him quit.”
“He was probably just trying to worry her some,” I said and shifted the milk jug from one side of my chest to the other. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, of course, and I didn’t like the way the sweat felt between my skin and the glass of the jug. It would catch and slide against my flesh with no warning, and every time it did it made my skin crawl like I’d seen a snake.
“He was trying to drown her,” Nancy said. “Not just worry her some. He was out to drown his own sister in a tub of rinse water that had done had several loads of clothes run through it.”
“Well,” I said. “Maybe. But Maggie Lee got him loose from her with that bleach bottle.”
“Had to hit him four times, Maggie Lee told Mama. Until Weldon forgot about Barbara Ann and looked back to see what was stinging him.”
The chicken’s head-shaped pine was coming up on the left, and up ahead through the heat waves rising off the highway whatever it was that was standing in the middle of the road hadn’t moved a peg. It was there like it had been bolted to the ground by somebody with a big wrench, and he had leaned back hard and taken a couple of extra turns to make sure it was fastened for good.
“It’s that young bull,” I told Nancy. “That’s all. See, I can tell it’s got horns on its head.” I turned my face sideways and squinted through an eye, and it did look like I could see something sticking up from the top of the dark bulk beyond the shimmering curtain of heat.
“Could be a hat,” said Nancy. “Or some sticks tied to his head.”
“Weldon don’t do that no more,” I said. “Tie things to his head with string. Not since Brother James told him it was what heathens did.”
“He’d sneak off and do it,” Nancy said. “I know he won’t wear it to Sunday school or church no more, but he’d do it off in the woods or when he’s off by himself walking the highways and roads.”
I knew my sister was right about that, so I didn’t say anything back to her. Weldon Overstreet would do one thing inside the Camp Ruby Baptist Church building and then another one just the opposite of it outside. Everybody knew that.
Like the time he began praying out loud for the boys on the battlefield and kept that up for several months each Sunday whenever the preacher would call for voluntary offerings to the Lord. When we told Daddy about it, he said Weldon must have heard something about the war in Vietnam on the radio and it had caught his imagination.
“I expect that’s not the last you church folks are going to hear from Weldon about the boys on the battlefield,” my father said. “He’ll be praying for them long after LBJ sends all those Vietcong back to their rice paddies. Weldon likes the sound of those words. Boys on the battlefield. It’s got a ring to it.”
“If he cares so much about them,” I said, “why did he thump that soldier’s ears in the Fain Theatre in Livingston, then? He did that until the popcorn girl had to call the deputy sheriff to make him stop.”
“He held that soldier from behind with one hand and thumped his ears with the other one,” Nancy said. “Delilah Ray saw him do it. Said that soldier’s ears was as red as fire by the time Weldon got through with them.”
“That Fain Theatre has been a major drawing card to Weldon Overstreet,” Daddy said and laughed real big. “It seems to get him all excited and makes him want to do things. I think his daddy is still paying some every month for all those seat backs he sliced up that time in the Fain.”
“You know what Weldon told them about that?” I said. “Said he liked the way the cotton stuffing popped out through the holes when his knife went through the plastic.”
“It was a feature showing Weldon didn’t care nothing about that time he got to using his pocketknife,” Nancy said. “He didn’t look back once at the screen after the first two minutes had passed, Delilah Ray said.”
But that had been all talked about back in our house there across the road from Estol Collins’s store, and right now there was something big up ahead bulked up in the middle of the highway. I wanted a better look at it, and I wanted it before we got much further on up Farm-to-Market 1276.
“Hold this for a minute,” I said to Nancy. “I’m going to try a trick way of seeing things way off.”
“Just set that jug down on shoulder of the road,” Nancy said. “It’s not my turn to carry it.”
She backed off with her arms close to her sides and kept a close watch on me as I found a smooth place to set the jug down. I understood and didn’t blame her. Several times before she got old enough to be wary, I had tricked her into holding something for me and then run off at top speed, leaving her to carry it the rest of the way to wherever we were going at the time.
“It comes from a book,” I said, setting the milk jug down and twisting it in the sand of the shoulder to make sure it wouldn’t tump over when I let loose.
“You get down real low like this and look under the heat rising off the water and you can see whatever you’re looking at a whole lot better.”
“It ain’t water. It’s a blacktop highway,” Nancy said, watching me lie down on the edge of the road in a push-up position to keep from getting burned on my bare chest and legs by the rocks and sand.
“Same thing, same thing,” I said and tried to sight along the stretch of highway running up to the thing way off in the middle of it.
“Is not, is not,” Nancy chanted. “Is not, is not.”
What I had read in the book was right. I could see better under the heat waves rather than through them, but just as I was zeroing my sight in on the bottom of the thing bolted to the road ahead, it moved off at a pretty good clip to the left, and I lost it in the stand of pines it walked into.
“He’s gone off the road,” Nancy said. “Now he’s hiding in the woods to jump out and catch us when we walk by on the way to Sleetie’s.”
“I doubt that,” I said, hopping up and brushing my hands together to knock off the sand and gravel. “Since he had four legs that I counted.”
“Did he?” said Nancy. “Was it four you counted? Don’t tell me no story again, brother.”
“Four,” I lied. “I counted them. Nothing but a cow or Wylie Knight’s bull.”
“I hope that’s what it is, all right,” Nancy said. “I hope that thing’s chewing on grass and leaves instead of quarters and nickels.”
What she was talking about was Weldon Overstreet in church on Sundays, the way he would carry his money in his mouth while he waited for the collection plate to come around. If one of the younger deacons was passing the plate, he’d make Weldon take all the coins out and wipe them off with his handkerchief before he’d let him put them in the collection.
But
