Littlejohn by Howard Owen Page B

“white bitch” during the day. Already now, three weeks into it, I know that this baby is fail-proof. There are kids in Montclair who have failed grades without being real dumb. Down here, they seemed determined to pass everyone, at least until they quit school.
    Kenny turns out to be okay, though. He said he went into the Army because his father was killed in Vietnam, but after he got in, he knew that three years would be enough. He said he decided to go to State on the GI bill and become a farmer because that was like all his family had ever done. He also said it was too bad that there wasn’t anything there to farm by the time he decided that was what he wanted to do, but that he was saving his money to buy some land. It’s a trip to walkwith him on the little plot Granddaddy lets him farm. He’s only got four rows, about a hundred feet long each, but he’s got corn and tomatoes and okra and squash and about four kinds of beans, and cantaloupes and watermelons. He has some peanuts planted that he says won’t be ready to pull up until fall, and there are all kinds of greens, too.
    He has a metal detector, and sometimes he goes down to where the old shack is and walks around with it, trying to find things. I went down there with him one day, and he came up with a couple of old coins and some kind of metal cup.
    One afternoon, he brings me home and, after we have some iced tea, the three of us get in his car and go down past the shack into what they call the swamp. Kenny turns left on a trail beside this big ditch until we get to the family cemetery, a cheerful spot. Granddaddy and Mom and I would come out here sometimes, although Mom never seemed to care much about it; it’s been like five years at least since I’ve seen this part of the farm. Over on the other side of the ditch, we can see people picking their own blueberries, with their cars parked off in the distance. That’s Granddaddy’s berry farm, which Mom says made more money than all the other crops they ever raised here. They take them out in the fields in this big wagon, like you’d use for a hayride, and it’s supposed to be a big deal that they can eat all they want while they pick. Granddaddy says that nobody can eat enough berries to do you much harm like that.
    We help Granddaddy out of the car, and he and I walk over to the tombstones, but Kenny goes right for this big rock sitting like fifty yards off from us that they call the Rock of Ages. Granddaddy says it was the corner of the original McCain land, and that it was mentioned in the first grant oneof the Geddies got, back before the American Revolution. He showed me this old piece of paper once, so old that he said when he took it out of his mother’s cedar chest after she died that it almost fell apart into nine pieces. Granddaddy had it put back together and laminated, so that you can pick it up and read it without doing any more damage to it. It’s as brown as Granddaddy’s neck and hands, but you can still read it, and where it says “the old stone corner, next to Locke’s Branch,” the stone corner is the rock, and Locke’s Branch is the ditch.
    “It was here when the first white men came here,” he tells me, looking toward Kenny and the big rock. “It sure looks like it’s going to outlast me.”
    Granddaddy doesn’t know why they call it the Rock of Ages, except that his father called it that and said that had always been its name. The rock is like four feet high, which is maybe three feet eleven inches higher than any of the other rocks I’ve seen around here. There’s nothing but this flat, sandy land anywhere around it, except for the little hill that the cemetery is on. Across the ditch, or branch, or whatever, is the place Granddaddy calls the Blue Sandhills, where the sand is as white as it is at the beach. There’s a big lake back there somewhere.
    Granddaddy is standing there, resting on his cane, which is sinking into the sand so that he’s like leaning to