Free Littlejohn by Howard Owen Page A

right by here on the way to the Blue Sandhills, the Yankees right behind them, and they hid there until the next morning, when they went north to try and ambush them on the Mingo Road, after the Yankees had burnt up everything.But they was too late. Probably just as good, anyways. There wasn’t many of them home guard boys left by then, and they was all either too old, too young or too lame. There wasn’t much to do but go home and rebuild.
    “When we got to Geddie Station,” he’d say, talking about what’s Geddie itself now, “the smoke was hanging in the air, and we could see that they’d ruint the railroad and burnt down the station. Mr. Gib Carter was standing alongside the road. He was real old, maybe eighty-five. And he was crying, which was peculiar, because Mr. Gib was a tough old bastard, had to be dragged off his horse by his two daughters to keep him from riding with us. And Mr. Gib said, ‘Ain’t no need to go farther, boys. Geddie’s gone.’ We could see this real thick smoke rising to the east, and it turned out to be the sawdust pile, which caught fire when they burnt down our sawmill. And there wasn’t nothing left here. They even burnt down the washhouse and smokehouse and the two barns. One of them had hitched his horse to the grapevine that Momma planted in 1847 and pulled that down. Pa said he sure was glad she hadn’t lived to see that. We had it back up by next summer.”
    He said it took all the summer just to build a kitchen and big room for everybody to sleep in, and that the house wasn’t like it was when I come along for at least six years.
    Daddy told that story right many times, and while Century wished she had it all in writing, it didn’t bother me. They say that when somebody goes blind, that the other senses all double to make up for it, kind of God’s way of making allowances. Well, maybe that’s why I can remember things so good.
    In primer and first grade, it hadn’t been much of a problem. We would see the letters on the board and recite them all together. Momma seemed concerned that I wasn’t picking it up as fast as Lafe and Century did, but she didn’t have much time to fret about it.
    But then, in the second grade, I got Miss Beulah Bullard. Miss Bullard expected you to be able to read out of the book, and write. It looked simple enough when the other young-uns did it, but to me, all them letters might as well of been in Egyptian. I would watch her write letters in chalk up on the board, and then I’d try to do the same thing, but sometimes the “b” would come out “p” or the “m” would be a “w” or worse. Miss Bullard would take my hand in hers and lead my pencil along the right lines, but when she left me to do it myself, it’d get all turned around, and she’d get wrong with me.
    It didn’t help any that Momma and my first-grade teacher had, between them, made me right-handed, sort of. Ever since I could first throw a rock at a cat, I had been left-handed, something Momma and Daddy hoped I’d grow out of. But when it come time to start school, and I was still using the wrong hand, they couldn’t ignore it anymore. Being left-handed, back then, was looked on as something between retarded and sinful. So Momma made me use my right hand at home and Miss Carter, my teacher, made me use it at school. Problem was, I wasn’t real good with my right hand. Walking down the swamp road that Daddy and them cut when they started to using the swamp for farmland, headed for the old school on the Ammon Road, I’d throw rocks left-handed at squirrels when we passed the little stand of woods by the Lockamy place, then throw dirt clods into thewater at Lock’s Branch the same way, then go into the schoolhouse and pick up my pencil from my desk with my left hand and put it in my right. By the second grade, I had got used to it, but my writing was what Momma and Miss Bullard called chicken scratch. Sometimes, when I wasn’t sure which way the letters or numbers