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  My mother laughed. She leaned over and kissed my forehead and said, “You’ll be fine. I got you some special gray flannel pajamas packed up for you to wear so you’ll fit in. I tried to draw a stars and bars on your sleeping bag but it just came out a giant X. If anyone asks, say it faded and ran in the washing machine.”

  I didn’t get those remarks, either. I said, “It’s Valentine’s Day. Do they do this everywhere on Valentine’s Day?”

  General Sherman burned Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17, 1865. According to the denizens of Calloustown, he should’ve burned their town on the fifteenth, if he had any sense of the right thing to do, on his way back north.

  My mother said, “More or less.”

  GENERAL SHERMAN DIDN’T consider our ancestors’ town worthy of torching, and the consequences, over the next seven or eight generations, weren’t unpredictable: a miniscule region of highvoiced men and women whose families intermarried endlessly, producing higher-voiced offspring, ad infinitum, all Yankee-hating, distrustful stump grinders and third-shift health professionals at what still got called the Calloustown Home for the Feeble and Discouraged. I exaggerate, but not much. Beginning in sixth-grade civics class a variety of students would blurt out, “Sherman didn’t think Fairview Plantation was good enough to burn! Shows you what he knew! They got them four bedrooms there, and two roomses!” et cetera, their larynxes squealing in such incredulous-filled manners that at times—say later in South Carolina history class, or eleventh-grade American history when the Civil War section took up two nine-week grading periods—it sounded like one of those trick crystal glass band members wet-fingering a rim ceaselessly. It sounded like the emergency broadcast system’s television test most days when the prodigy of Munsons and Harrells wailed out their disgust in regards to William Tecumseh Sherman’s notions of aesthetics: “What’s so good about Atlanta, Savannah, or Columbia? Sherman was stupid! He said he wanted to march to the sea, and Calloustown starts with a C.”

  I hate to think that I’ve always considered myself of a higher ilk than the typical Calloustowner hell bent on grasping worthful arson, but it’s true to a degree. My parents arrived at my place of training only after surrendering law practices right before offers of partnership. They cashed in some savings, did some research, bought the cheapest arable land available in Zone 8 in regards to that Hardiness Scale, began an organic farm long before it became commonplace and chic, and then had their only child—me—in their late thirties. By “long before” I might really mean 1981, right after the Iranian hostages got released. Because of the hostages and a certain doomful outlook regarding economic growth and detente, and without doing research on how vengeful their new neighbors had become, my parents settled on a crossroads known neither to blues songs nor sulfurous flame.

  I grew up with Munsons and Harrells alike pissed off that someone considered our cows, sheep, hogs, and chickens inedible, our women unattractive, our spring houses tainted. Maybe that’s why my mother never allowed me to read the Bible in general, and Job’s story in particular. It’s a wonder that more than a few of us non-Munsons and -Harrells escaped with self-esteem higher than a collard stalk.

  “If they ask you if you hunt, say yes. Fish, yes. Hate everyone north of Virginia, yes. If stupid Bobby Harrell asks you again about your pets, say you own a cottonmouth and a fire ant farm.” My mother had a whole list that she went over daily as I shoved books in my backpack. My father started every morning reciting Latin terms he knew by heart before entering his torporous berry patches. “If one of the Munson boys keeps asking you if you’ve been with a girl, here,” my mother would say, pouring Chicken of the Sea tuna water on my palm. “Tell him to sniff your finger.”

  That was another little action or saying that I didn’t get, of course. But the half-feral cats that lived inside the school liked me, which, of course, got me called Pussy.

  MR. WHALEN SAT in his living room with a fishing pole. There were bags of store-bought ice all around the hole he’d fashioned into the floor, and the hook on the end of his line descended down into a crawlspace. Bobby, Donnie, Larry, and Gary Munson held poles, too, as did Lonnie, Ronnie, Billy, and Stonewall Harrell. These were my classmates. These were my sleepover comrades the night before the “What Does Sherman Know?” annual festival.

  “Get you a pole, there, Luke,” Mr. Whalen said. “We’re playing a little game called Ice Fishing in Minnesota. We don’t got no need to ice fish around these parts ever, so I thought I’d teach you boys a little bit about it.”

  I said hello to all of the two-syllable-named classmates. None of them said anything back. I said, “Do you have fish in the basement?”

  “We’re fishing for rats and mice,” Ben Whalen said. He patted the lid to a plastic cooler next to him, as if there were caught vermin inside. “Put you a chunk of cheese on your hook and drop it on down.”

  These were bamboo poles, probably macheted over on the edge of Mr. Morse’s tree farm. I threw my line into the hole and squeezed in between Gary and Lonnie. I tried to peer down into the hole, but couldn’t tell how deep it was. I said, “Did you cut this hole in the floor by yourself?” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Bobby Munson yelled out, “Luke ain’t a Christian!”

  I said, because I’d been taught to do so, “I’m the only one here named after somebody in the Bible. There isn’t a Book of Bobby.”

  “Boys,” Mr. Whalen said. “This is all of y’all, right?” He drank from a plastic cup, and I could smell the booze in it. “Boys, while I got you all here I might as well use this opportunity to tell you about the birds and the bees, it being Valentine’s Day and all.”

  Later on I figured out that because we had no male teachers in the sixth grade, one of the teachers’ husbands would have to take over. Over at the girls’ sleepover, it probably wasn’t so uncomfortable for a woman to explain sex.

  I think it was Lonnie Harrell who said, “My grandmother has a beehive in her backyard.”

  “I got pictures of my grandmother with a beehive hairdo,” one of the Munsons said.

  “I ain’t talking about real birds and bees,” Mr. Whalen said. “Let’s pretend that I’m talking about mice and, and… I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m talking about mice, seeing as they reproduce like all get-out.” He took a big swig from his cup.

  My sixth-grade teacher came in the room carrying a tray. She wore blue jeans, which kind of freaked everyone out, and said, “Who wants some Pepsi?”

  You’d think none of the Munson or Harrell kids had ever had Pepsi, which might’ve been true. Half of them dropped their poles down into the hole and rushed our teacher. They grabbed and kicked each other out of the way. Me, I sat there thinking about something else my parents had told me: “Pepsi Cola” rearranged came out “Episcopal.” So I said, loudly, “We drink Pepsi Cola all the time at our house because it’s ‘Episcopal.’ That’s what we drink. At my house. Because it’s a Christian drink.”

  Everything seemed to stop. It wasn’t my imagination that all of my male classmates shut up and turned to me as if I’d spoken in tongues. Ms. Whalen—I should mention that her maiden name was Munson—said, “What did you say, Luke?”

  I said, “I mean, we drink Gatorade.”

  I didn’t think I had said anything blasphemous—in retrospect, I think all these children of Pentecostals had never heard of another denomination, except for maybe Baptist. I was glad that Mr. Whalen broke the tension by yelling, “I got one, I got one, I got one,” and then pulling up a fake mouse that, like a blue crab breaking the surface and experiencing air, he somehow got to let go of the cheese and drop back down into the crawlspace.

  My sixth-grade teacher screamed and took off running for the kitchen. My classmates brought their Pepsis back, and one of them said, “Hey, Luke, go under the house and get our poles we dropped.”

  I said, “You dropped them down there. You go get them.”

  “You scared to go under the house, son?�
�� Ben Whalen said. Yeah, Mr. Whalen. You’d think that Lonnie, Donnie, or Ronnie would’ve dared me, not my sixth-grade teacher’s husband, a man I’d up to that point thought to have escaped inbreeding disasters.

  “Luke rhymes with puke,” Bobby said.

  I don’t know why I thought it necessary to prove myself, to say, “Somebody at least give me a flashlight.”

  I WALKED OUTSIDE the Whalens’ house and didn’t look back to see if anyone stared at me through the window. I could’ve walked home—it wasn’t but a mile—but I knew my parents would’ve been disappointed. Somewhere between my father mumbling, “A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi” and, “Ubi fumus, ibi ignis,” he always said to me that enduring frost only made one stronger. I walked up to Mr. Whalen’s six-wheeled truck—this is why I thought he had escaped the normal Munson/Harrell mindset—a silver refrigeration vehicle that he drove around a few-county area with FRESH MEAT ON WHEELS written on the panels. He offered people ribeyes and filets and hamburger patties, chicken and fish and pork chops, for prices much lower than Winn-Dixie, Bi-Lo, or the A&P—grocery stores that might be thirty miles from Calloustown.

  I went around the side of the house and paid attention not to get snagged by briars or the Whalens’ neighbor’s pit bull on a long chain, and then the back of the house where a short door led to the crawlspace. I turned on the flashlight and thought, Somehow this is going to keep me being made fun of. In a normal world kids would say, “That Luke—he’s brave.” But in the land of Calloustown, a day before the “What Does Sherman Know?” celebration, it would probably come out that I was one with Satan, what with my non-fear of all things rabid that live beneath our abodes.

  I got in and waved my light around. As it ended up, the Whalens’ crawlspace was nearly high enough to count as a basement—six feet high, at least, where the hole stood—with a hand-troweled cement floor. I found the dropped bamboo poles right away, and saw light streaming in from above. I took a few steps and heard Stonewall say, “That’s not how I learned how it works,” then took a few more steps. Mr. Whalen yelled down, “Are you there, Luke?” but I didn’t respond.

  I walked right to the edge of the bastardized ice hole and heard my sixth-grade teacher’s husband say, “That is how it works. It’s just like this here hole. The sperm’s the cheese, and the hole’s the hole, and once the cheese hits the hole it don’t take long for a baby to come out of the hole. The rat.”

  I was twelve. We were all twelve. Mr. and Ms. Whalen didn’t have children at this point, and perhaps this was why. I yelled up at the hole, “Here,” and started shoving poles upward. Somebody, one of my classmates, yelled back down at me, “Don’t step on any of the babies down there.”

  Somebody else said something about a stork, and then Mr. Whalen said loudly, “I give up,” and, “Monetta, I’ve done my job here.” Then he might’ve fallen over, for there was a noise, and one of the Harrell kids said, “Are you all right?”

  I wasn’t paying attention much. I’d come across a cache of Matchbox cars—vintage ones, though I didn’t know the difference at the time. Someone had built a miniature Grand Prix road course of sorts, complete with barriers, army men onlookers, trees fashioned from those colored-cellophane toothpicks, and what appeared to be the Calloustown Courthouse that never existed in the first place. I might’ve said, “Hey, can we play down here later?”

  Or I might’ve kept it to myself, thinking that if Mr. and Ms. Whalen ever die in a fiery wreck, I’m coming back down here to get some things before anyone else finds them. Again, my parents hadn’t gone over those Ten Commandments at this point, especially the one about coveting your neighbor’s 1:43-scale die-cast toy cars.

  I walked into the circle of light and looked up at all the little Munson and Harrell blank faces looking down at me. I said, “What’s going on up there?”

  Mr. Whalen reappeared and said, “Hey, I got an idea. We might as well go through the whole nine-month process,” and he told the boys to throw their hooks back down. To me he said, “Hey, Luke, do me a favor. This is going to be fun! Place all the hooks around your belt loops. Go ahead! I won’t let you get hurt none.”

  Ms. Whalen’s sixth-grade boys pulled me up through the hole in her den floor. I have no clue what kind of test line they used, or how the bamboo poles didn’t break under my weight hanging there in the crawlspace, but Ben Whalen told me to start screaming like crazy, and I did. What else was I supposed to do? I couldn’t see any of my unlikely deliverers, for they’d had to back down the hallway pulling.

  Mr. Whalen stood there leaning against a bookcase that held a dictionary, a number of ashtrays, some candles, and framed photographs of dead deer. He yelled out, “Okay, y’all run back in here,” as I gathered myself on the lip of the hole, surrounded by ice bags.

  No one said, “Are you all right?” Ms. Whalen yelled from a back room something about how we needed to settle down so as not to fall back in the hole.

  Ben Whalen said, “And that’s how a baby is born, but without the ice or clothes that Luke is wearing.”

  MY TEACHER’S HUSBAND shoved what ice hadn’t melted over the hole’s lip. He slid the makeshift hatch over his own crawlspace, and covered the exposed wood with a rug that wasn’t much bigger than the jagged edges it needed to hide. “I’m going to make a spiral staircase down there one day,” he said, apparently to himself.

  I said nothing about all the cool Matchbox cars my sixthgrade classmates and I would sleep directly over. I wanted to tell someone about it, but already understood that, if I revealed what I had discovered, somehow a Donnie, Lonnie, Gary, or Billy would label me a big baby for liking toy cars over the real ones that they swore they drove around all the time when their parents weren’t home.

  My teacher said, “Now, no horseplay tonight, boys. Y’all stretch out your sleeping bags in here and go to sleep. Mr. Whalen will be waking y’all up early-early-early. ‘What Does Sherman Know?’ is a long and tiring day. I made some special treats for tomorrow in the freezer, so don’t go around snooping.”

  “Goodnight, Ms. Whalen,” we said in unison. I have no idea what happened to her husband, but I heard the back door squeak open while our teacher warned us against cutting fool all night.

  She turned off the lights. We made no noise. Then Stonewall Harrell giggled. He’d commandeered the flashlight at some point after I got birthed. Stonewall said, “I know what a woman’s nookie looks and feels like for real. It ain’t like what he told us.”

  I don’t want to say that my organic-farming, ex-corporatelawyering parents sheltered me. But I’d never come across this “nookie” term. I knew poontang, beaver, snatch, trim, twat, quim, muff, quif, box, cooter, and meat wallet, but not nookie.

  Lonnie and Donnie said, “No, you don’t,” and then there was a bunch of uh-huhs and don’t neithers.

  “I can prove it,” Stonewall said. “Y’all cover me. I’m going into the bathroom.”

  I didn’t mean to say nookie out loud, but I did just to get a feel for it. It’s not the kind of word, I knew, that I could use daily, like when I said something about a box or beaver.

  “Stonewall better not come back in here dragging along Ms. Whalen,” Donnie said.

  He didn’t. No, Stonewall returned with a gigantic blue jar of women’s nighttime facial cream. He said, “What I’m about to show y’all is something my cousin taught me last year. Now, everyone slop some of this stuff on your wiener, and then come stick your wiener in my armpit.” He slung off his T-shirt and got down on his knees. “You got to close your eyes, though, for it to work best.”

  I’M NOT SURE what happened after that. This isn’t one of those “selective memory” occasions. I’m not being judgmental for what those Munson and Harrell children did the night before “What Does Sherman Know?” but I didn’t join in—perhaps because I thought a joke was being played on me. I got up from the floor and grabbed the flashlight. I went to the bookcase and opened up the dictionary to find everything marked out by black
Magic Marker. It’s like an entire language disappeared, page after page. I turned to the G’s to see if maybe they’d left “God” there, but they hadn’t. I turned to the J’s, for Jesus, but it was marked out, too. I picked up the dictionary—this was one of those Thorndike Barnhart red hardbacks, probably stolen from our classroom at Calloustown Elementary—and went out the front door with it. I walked without paying attention, as if on automatic pilot—which they say General William Tecumseh Sherman mastered above all else—and skirted the briars and next-door pit bull successfully. No noises emanated from the den at this point. I opened the door to beneath the house and found Mr. Whalen seated cross-legged, surrounded by his Matchbox car collection. He had a drop light hanging from a floor joist, and he didn’t turn his head.

  “You want to play a little game I like to call ‘What Does Henry Ford Know?’” he asked me. “You want to play a little game I like to call ‘What Does Detroit Got that We Don’t?’” I should’ve jumped, but I didn’t. I should’ve either said yes or no instead of pointing to the floorboards above me and whispering, “They’re fucking each other’s armpits upstairs with your wife’s Noxzema.”

  Mr. Whalen said, “Now, not everyone likes a tattletale, Luke. I do, though, so you came to the right place.” He handed me his plastic cup, told me to take a drink if I wished—I did, only to learn that he partook of Pepsi and George Dickel, a combination I’d had before—and got up from the cement floor without grunting. He whispered, “Unfortunately, your teacher threw away all the boxes to these cars. They’d be worth a lot more money if I still had the boxes. Don’t forget that, Luke. Sometimes a box is more valuable than what goes inside it.”