I said, and we broke like a covey of quail in opposite directions, Nancy going to the left with her sandals slapping the pavement like rifle shots and me aiming for the far right ditch, the grass burrs I had been avoiding no longer a consideration.
We’d have both made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the milk jug. It began to slip because of the sweat all down my right side and when I looked down to grab it with my left hand, I took my eyes off where I was going and stubbed my right foot against a sweetgum root and started to fall. As I did I got my left hand under the milk jug and turned sideways in the air as I went down in full gallop, sending the milk jug flying like I was deliberately trying to throw it up after the buzzards.
The sun caught it in its rise, and it glittered in the air like a block of clear ice in a blue lake. That’s what took Weldon Overstreet’s eye, and he went to his left like an outfielder after a line drive and speared it with one hand as it started down for the roadbed of Farm-to-Market 1276. With the other hand, he scooped me up and in what seemed less time than a lightning bolt I was opening my eyes about two inches from the side of Weldon Overstreet’s head and looking deep into his right ear which I could see had a tangle of stiff red hairs growing right in the middle of it.
“Uh-huh,” Weldon said, and I could feel his voice rumble all through my chest and stomach where he had me grabbed up against him, “uh-huh, I caught you and the milk jug both.”
That close to him, the main thing that came to my mind was the way I was afraid Weldon was going to smell when I finally had to take a breath. I tried to push away from him with my free arm, the one that wasn’t stuck under his, but when I did he just tightened up, and I took that breath I was dreading before I realized it.
It wasn’t much at all, the smell, even hot and sweaty and worked up as Weldon was. It was like hot metal, maybe a pan that had been left out in the sun all afternoon and I had to pick it up and bring it in the house to wash. Just flat and even, not a stink to it at all.
I looked over the top of Weldon’s head for Nancy and saw her about twenty feet away, walking back toward me and Weldon and the milk jug at a steady pace, her bangs down in her eyes and a frown on her face that made her bottom lip stick out.
“Run,” I started to tell her, but about then Weldon cut loose with a bellow that filled up the pines and the yaupons and the sweetgums and the underbrush on both sides of the road, and my voice got lost in his and the echoes he set ringing.
“Holler,” was what he was hollering. “Holler, holler, holler.”
“Weldon Overstreet,” Nancy said after about the eighth or ninth bellow, “quit saying holler, and put him down on the road.”
She was standing right in front of him when I turned my eyes away from looking down into Weldon’s mouth where all the noise was coming from, and she was reaching up to grab at the bib of his overalls to get his attention.
“Put my brother down and hush up that racket,” she said in the crossest voice I ever heard her use.
“Nuh-uh, Nancy,” Weldon said. “I ain’t. I got him and the milk jug both. holler.”
“All right, then. If you won’t, you got to pick me up, too,” said Nancy and put her arms down stiff by her sides to be lifted up.
“Take the milk jug and don’t let it tump over and bust,” Weldon told her, leaning forward to hand it to her and then after Nancy had taken it and put it on the blacktop, sweeping her up in the air on his other side.
I didn’t know anything to say. I just hung there, smelling hot metal and looking back and forth from the wad of red hair in Weldon’s ear to the pooched-out lower lip of my sister.
“Hum,” Weldon said. “Hot, hot.”
“Yeah, it is,” Nancy answered and twisted around to get more comfortable underneath Weldon’s left arm. “Weldon,” she said, “I know that wreck you had with your daddy’s pickup wasn’t your fault.”
“No,” Weldon said in a long drawn-out syllable and the woods came back with the same sound, “Noooo.”
“I was coming to where the little road runs into the big road,” he said, “and I looked and there wasn’t nobody either way. No truck and no car. So I speeded up and put in the clutch just like Daddy said I was always supposed to do when I shifted them gears. It was to make them smooth. And then I turned the wheel to go to Livingston, but the pickup wanted to go straight off into the woods. And then the trees came up and hit at the bumper and the fenders and made the pickup stop and not run no more.”
“I don’t know nothing about shifting gears yet,” said Nancy and threw her head back to get the bangs out of her eyes, “but I know it wasn’t your fault, Weldon, that the trees hurt the pickup.”
“I bumped my head when it happened,” Weldon said. “It made the bleed come out and made a mark. Mama made me put a big bandaid on it. It was a sore place for a long old time.”
“Where?” Nancy said. “Right there where the scar is?”
She reached out her hand and touched a finger to a white line right in the middle of all that red skin on Weldon’s forehead and then she leaned forward and kissed the spot. Just a touch of her lips that made a little smacking sound in the center of that hot day on Farm-to-Market 1276.
“Now,” she said, “I kissed it and made it well. Let us get down to go get our milk, Weldon.”
“Harold’s got to make it well, too,” Weldon said and leaned his forehead toward my face. I never said a word. I just kissed that white spot, smelled metal, tasted Weldon’s sweat, and felt the heat rising from his big red head.
“Don’t drop this milk jug,” Weldon said, setting us down and handing the jug to Nancy. “It’s hard to find a bottle this big with a screw-on lid that fits it.”
“We won’t,” Nancy said. “Come on, brother.”
“I like to get off in the woods,” Weldon called after us as we walked off on up the road toward Sleetie Cameron’s. “I like to walk on to where there’s a bunch of high trees. I like to see where the squirrels have their nests. I like to watch the squirrels play on the tree limbs. I like to lean my back up against a big oak tree. I like to let my belly rest.”
“That bird was too living down inside that armadillo,” Nancy said to me as we pushed on up the highway. “Just like Frankie said. It flew out of its neck when she poked it with a stick. It was alive inside that dead thing.”
“All right,” I said to my sister as we walked together side by side. “O.K., fine. Here, give me the milk jug. It’s still my turn to carry it.”
That one yonder is the head dog then?” said B. J., looking at the black and tan hound curled up in the dust by one of the sections of oak stump supporting the front porch of the house. It was getting on toward evening, and the long shadows of the afternoon sun fell across all of the dog but his head and part of one front leg.
“Yeah,” said Uncle Putt Barlow, “he ain’t gonna lie to you on trail.”
As they watched, the sun-lit leg kept
