Mrs. Shays lightened up now, listening. Then she said, “You say he can get all that on account of him running?”
“Yes. He runs very fast.”
“Well, he probably got that from his daddy,” Mrs. Shays said.
“Was he fast, too?” Miss McIntyre said.
Mrs. Shays sighed. “That man got feets of clay now, miss. Why you poking ’round in my business? What’s in it for you?”
“Nothing. I just need his birth certificate so he can run in track meets here in the city.”
“Why can’t he do that now?”
“They need to know his age. From his birth certificate.”
“Why would my boy lie about his age?”
“Miss Shays, there’s several coaches from some good high schools looking at him.”
“If they so high and mighty, why can’t they get his birth paper?”
“They’re not his mother. Only his mother can do that.”
“Miss, you yelling down an empty hole. I ain’t got no birth papers for him. I’m his mother. He’s my son. That’s all. I got no birth papers for him.”
“You get them from where he was born.”
“That would be Kentucky.”
“They have colleges in Kentucky, too,” Miss McIntyre said brightly. “I bet they’d love a boy like Seymour on one of their college teams.”
“I wouldn’t send him to Kentucky for all the lollipops in the world,” Mrs. Shays said. “I ain’t never going back there.”
“You don’t have to go there. Just write a letter to the state. The state keeps all the hospital birth records.”
“Seymour wasn’t born in no hospital,” Mrs. Shays said. “He was born in a house.”
That made us laugh. Dex blurted out, “Goat was hatched like an egg.” By now we had parked our butts on the stoop of my cousin Herbert’s house in full view of them so we could hear it all. Then we looked at the door and seen Goat peeking behind his mother’s dress. He seen us laughing and when he seen that, he come out from behind his ma and said, “Miss McIntyre, I don’t want no scholarship.”
“That’s crazy,” Miss McIntyre said. “Don’t you want to go to a good school?”
“No.”
“What you wanna do then?”
“I wanna get a bike and ride to work like my daddy.”
Well, that got Mrs. Shays hot. She turned around and slapped Goat right across the back of his head. Pow! “Boy, I’ll drop your britches and warm your two little toasters right here.”
“I don’t wanna—”
“Quiet!” she said. She turned to Miss McIntyre. “What’s that birth paper called again?”
“A birth certificate. You write a letter to the state or the county. And they’ll send it to you,” Miss McIntyre said.
“Even if he was born in a house?”
“Yes. They file records somewhere.”
“Ain’t nobody filed nothing for me in Kentucky. I picked cotton. That’s all the filing I was doing. I filed cotton in a bag.”
“It’s state law.”
“To pick cotton?”
“No. To file birth certificates. They have to do it. You just write them and ask them and they’ll send to the proper county records birthing office or the census office, and the county will find it.”
Mrs. Shays sighed. “That sounds awful complicated,” she said.
“Don’t you want him to go to college?”
“Sure I do,” Mrs. Shays said. “But writing letters to counties and all, I don’t know about them things. Plus we’re talking Kentucky. This is Fayette County, Pennsylvania, miss. White folks mostly follows the laws up here. In Kentucky, white folks got all the mojo and say-so. They won’t give me the time of day down there.”
“It’s a simple letter. Takes ten minutes to write.”
“I got too many problems to set about writing some old letters,” Mrs. Shays said.
“What kind of problems would stop you from getting your boy a good education?” Miss McIntyre asked.
Later on, I think Miss McIntyre was sorry she asked that. She was a young thing and didn’t know. Only a fool would ask somebody in The Bottom to spill their guts about their troubles unless they got a year to set and listen.
Mrs. Shays started right in. “Well, Popcorn was hauling lumber down in Mason County . . . ,” and on and on she went, and before long it was dark, and poor Miss McIntyre was sitting out there on Goat’s front steps in her pretty little dress, barefoot now, ’cause she’d taken her high heels off, and by then three hours had passed and Goat had got bored and cut out for the soft drink factory with Dex to see if they could scare up some empty bottles to sell, while I sat there alone on my cousin’s steps listening because I like Miss McIntyre.
I sat there a long time, hoping Miss McIntyre or Goat’s mom would at least notice me and say hello or feel sorry for me and wave me over and offer me a glass of water or something, because I was so thirsty I’d’a been happy to drink some of that nasty chittlin-smelling water they probably drink in Goat’s house, but they never done that. Mrs. Shays talked the whole time, and after a while she come out the door and sat next to Miss McIntyre on the steps, still spilling her guts. She told Miss McIntyre about how Goat’s dad, Mr. Popcorn, married her back in Mason County when she was seventeen and rode her around on his bike handlebars when they was young and happy, but after they got up here to Uniontown, Pa., and The Bottom and he got laid off at the steel mill, he rode his bike home from work every night from Monday to Thursday and don’t look at her twice and every Friday he gets dead drunk like clockwork and she has to throw him out the house and how he comes back on his bike every Sunday saying he’s sorry and promises to change and she lets him in again, and how he been doing the same bit for years while she can’t pay the light bill and can’t get Goat no new sneakers or dungarees or nothing.
And I got to thinking about Goat, how he really never did have nothing and how raggedy he always dressed, being poorer than most folks in The Bottom who make fun of him for being country when they is altogether pretty country themselves. I heard more than I wanted to hear.
Miss McIntyre listened the whole time and didn’t say hardly nothing but “uh huh, uh huh,” and once in a while she offered little suggestions and stuff, and I could tell by the look on her face that she got more than she bargained for. But she was hanging in there until the story got worse when Mrs. Shays started talking about how Tory got put in jail for robbery and when I heard that I said to myself, “I knew he wasn’t in no Job Corps,” and then finally Mrs. Shays busted into tears and said: “The Army wants my boy. They want my boy to join up and I don’t know what to do. He’s my best boy.”
“Seymour?”
“No. Minnie Jug.”
“Who’s Minnie Jug?”
“Sylvester’s his name. They call him Minnie Jug. My oldest boy. He’s nineteen. The Army wants him. They sent him a letter. Wanting to send him to Vietnam. That’s where Mrs. Cruz’s boy got killed. And Ellie Boyer’s son, too. Both of ’em dead over there. Killed fighting some white man’s war. Now they want my son, too.” She boo hooed some more.
Miss McIntyre sat quiet for a minute and then said, “I’d like to see that letter from the Army. You have it?”
“No.”
“Where is it?”
“Minnie Jug got it. But it ain’t no use, miss,” Mrs. Shays said. “I can’t read no way. I know a few wee old letters and can write my name, but that’s it. That’s why I can’t get no birth paper for Seymour. And I can’t write the Army to ask about my son. I’m in a hard position.” Then she boo hooed a little more.
Miss McIntyre didn’t say a word for a good while. She coughed once or twice, then drew a handkerchief from her pretty little purse and gave it to Mrs. Shays, who wiped her face. Then she said, “You should’ve told me that first. That would’ve save
d us some time. Just because you can’t read doesn’t mean you’re not smart. You’re a bright woman.”
“When you have been spit on,” Mrs. Shays said, “it don’t matter much what else you think you know.”
“What about your husband?”
“He can’t read neither. And even if he could, he ain’t no real help to me. I thank you for trying to help my boy, miss. But Seymour ain’t right for no scholarship no how. I put him in God’s hands.”
With that, she got up and turned to go in the house, opened the door and stepped inside.
Miss McIntyre said, “There’s alternatives, you know.”
Mrs. Shays turned around. “You got a good heart, young lady. But if you fool around with us colored folks here in The Bottom, you’ll end up dwelling in sadness. I know how to handle my boys. And Popcorn, too.”
Miss McIntyre nodded and rose up and put her shoes on, then looked around. It was dark all around The Bottom now. Pitch-black, ’cause there’s no streetlights, but up the hill past The Triangle you could see the lights of downtown Uniontown far off, the tall buildings all lit up and looking rich and happy.
“Get that letter from the Army and send it to school with Seymour,” Miss McIntyre said. “And tell Seymour the name of the town where you had him when he was born.”
“I don’t think that Seymour knows how to write it,” Mrs. Shays said.
“He can write all right,” Miss McIntyre said. “And he can spell, too. Because I taught him.”
Then she got in her car and drove off.
Mrs. Shays watched Miss McIntyre’s taillights till they vanished, and still kept staring long after they was gone, just looking into the dark. Then she glanced over and seen me staring, setting on my cousin Herbert’s stoop, then went inside her house, which was dark now, lit by candles inside, like it most always was.
• • •
MAYSVILLE. THAT’S THE NAME of the town where Goat was born. Miss McIntyre found it out after Goat brung that name to school on a piece of paper. She got busy with him and kept him after school and they wrote to Maysville, Kentucky, and they sent Goat’s birth certificate right to Miss McIntyre at school. Miss McIntyre took that birth paper the day she got it straight down to Falls Point where Goat should’ve got that medal. She showed it to the people over there and said, “I told you he was only twelve.” They still didn’t give Goat no medal, but one of them white coaches down there from one of them big white high schools said, “I’ll take that kid onto my track team right now.”
But he had to wait till the school year was over when Goat could be in high school, so Goat stayed in school with us. That coach wanted Goat so bad he let Goat practice with his track team anyway and showed Goat some things about running the hundred-yard dash. And Goat took them things the coach showed him and runned for our school. He was the only member of the George Washington Carver Middle School track team. He didn’t have no real track shoes, just some old basketball sneakers he got from someplace, and he didn’t have no real track uniform neither. Miss McIntyre was his coach. She coached him by getting him a uniform from the school basketball team and he runned in that. That was all the coaching he got. And he tore ’em up all over the city and in Fayette County, too.
He became a star. Well, as much a star as The Bottom seen, for we never had too much in the way of stars, unless you count Rev. Jenkins, who gets in the news by starting as much trouble as he stops, or the time somebody in the church stole all the Christmas club money and a cop came in to investigate it and the church secretary, Mrs. Friday, was showing him where the hiding place was in the church basement and she fell down the basement stairs and broke her leg and knocked over a kerosene heater, which started a fire down there and the cop picked her up on his back and brung her out. That don’t seem heroic really, unless you know that Mrs. Friday weighed about four hundred pounds. And the cop weighed two hundred pounds. So that was six hundred pounds altogether that he lifted and brung up the stairs. That was a white cop, too, and when Mrs. Friday got well she told everybody what happened and the newspapers got hold of it and made a big deal about it and that church put so much chicken and punch in that cop and all his friends when they came around off-duty one Saturday afternoon nobody knowed who was who, for somebody from the church had spiked the punch with moonshine and everybody knew it, and the whole bunch of ’em was staggering around drunk and playing cards and telling lies, until Mrs. Friday’s husband threw up and said if they’da thrown his smooth Georgia white lightning in the punch instead of Mr. Johnson’s old South Carolina hootch, which ain’t nothing but gasoline, nobody would’a got sick off it, and the cops said, “Don’t say no more,” and they left.
But wasn’t too many star kids from The Bottom, mostly because the kids from The Bottom don’t get far enough in school to stay in sports, or they move away, or they end up working jobs or go to jail by the time they is old enough to really get some kind of scholarship. And that included Minnie Jug.
He was working a job down at the same waste oil place as his daddy when Goat asked him about that letter to join the Army, for Minnie Jug was the one who had it, not his mother, ’cause Minnie Jug could read, and his ma and pa couldn’t.
At first Minnie Jug wouldn’t give it to Goat. Minnie Jug is more serious than Goat. He don’t laugh as much. He’s bigger and taller and could’ve been good in sports, for he is cut something serious with muscles. But he’s kind of hard. He told Goat, “I ain’t showing no letter to no teacher.”
But a funny thing happened to Goat after he got that birth certificate, something bigger than even winning track meets and all. He started getting something he never had before. He got confidence. He started reading books Miss McIntyre got him about other people in track, like a white man named Glenn Cunningham who they said would never walk because his legs was burned up in a fire, but he ran anyway and became a world champion. And Tommie Smith, a black man who broke the world record in the Olympics and raised his fist for black people on the medal stand. Goat got interested in them things.
So when Minnie Jug said, “I ain’t showing no letter to no teacher,” Goat stayed on him and said, “Why you wanna go to the Army and make Momma all worried up?” He stayed on him so much Minnie Jug gived him the letter and Goat brung it in to Miss McIntyre.
I was in class that day, for Goat walked to school with me and Dex most mornings after he runned behind Mr. Popcorn and seen him off to work, and when we walked to school he showed us the letter from the Army. It wasn’t nothing much to look at. It was just a little letter that said “Sylvester Shays so and so” and a bunch of numbers and such.
When he gave it to Miss McIntyre she read it, and Goat watched her close.
“Well, it says he’s one ninety-eight,” she said. “It doesn’t mean he has to go into the Army. It means he has a chance—a good chance—that they might call him up for service. But they haven’t yet. So go back and tell your ma we’re gonna try some things. But I need to write for all the birth certificates of all your brothers.”
“I ain’t got but two. Minnie Jug and Tory.”
“All right. Tell her I’m gonna write and get those.”
Goat done that, and Mrs. Shays agreed, for Miss McIntyre wrote the letters and Mrs. Shays signed them. So Miss McIntyre sent them letters off to Kentucky, and while we was waiting for them birth certificates to come back, Goat kept winning. He cooked like that the next few weeks, getting better and better, winning all the time. He growed into a star in Uniontown, beating boys from all the high schools in town. By the time the spring came around, he was the best in all Fayette County, and now they was talking about making him run up in Pittsburgh, the big city. Racing the big boys. A boy from The Bottom. Unbelievable. And when they had that same big track meet in Falls Point that next winter, the place where it all started, he runned again against that one guy who beat him before in the hundred-yard dash and beat the pants off that guy. And this
time, they did give Goat a medal.
I was there when he runned that race. He was so excited after that race he didn’t know what to do. It was a small race for him, really. By then he was beating lots of faster boys. But that’s where it all started, and he wanted a lot of us to see it. His ma wasn’t there, of course. Neither was his daddy. They was too busy working. But me and Dex seen it, and Miss McIntyre, because she drove us there in her little red car and took us out for ice cream afterwards. Then after ice cream she drove us home to The Bottom and dropped us off at The Triangle, that very place where she had once drove through and stopped our game. Goat had was so excited to show his ma his medal he had one foot out the door before Miss McIntyre even stopped the car. “You ought to come see my ma,” he said to Miss McIntyre.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Tell your ma I’ll write her a note soon. You can show it to her.”
“Whyn’t you come see her now? She’s probably home from work.”
But Miss McIntyre had a funny look on her face. “No, Seymour, it’s fine. Tell her I . . . I have some more information about your brother Minnie Jug.”
“Is it bad news?”
“No, Seymour, actually it’s . . . it’s good news. But you go home. I’ll send her a note soon.”
So Goat got out and runned home. Then me and Dex got out and Dex vanished to his house—but I lingered. I seen something in Miss McIntyre’s face that worried me, so I headed around the corner, doubled back, and stood behind a pole in the dark to watch her leave, just to make sure she was safe getting out The Bottom.
But she didn’t leave. She sat there at the wheel of her car in the middle of The Triangle, staring into the dark. Then she done a U-turn and pointed the car towards the hill that led out towards the city. Then she stopped again, staring out. The car didn’t move. It sat there, the motor purring. Her glasses was the only thing I could see in the dark, reflecting off the dashboard lights, and them glasses didn’t move. Seemed like she was thinking about something. Finally she put the car in gear and drove up the hill and was gone.