A Place with Promise, a novel

Part III

Ain’t Nothing at All

  Izella Wiggins, originally from Monroe, Louisiana, married when she was sixteen and had two children. Her husband died when she was nineteen, leaving her with no means of support except peddling hot lunches to sawmill workers. She used a bucket to carry the lunches and a jar of hot water to keep them warm. Sometimes her children helped her. She had a son named Billy, but he called himself Bull, and a devil-of-a-daughter whose name was Kay Linda. Mexicans loved Kay Linda better than anything. They were always saying her name and that worried Izella.

  At the age of fifteen Kay Linda married a man named Fred Womble who came from a place called Pine Island. When they weren’t getting along, which was most of the time, Kay Linda and her three children moved in on Izella. Izella liked that, especially after she lost her son. Billy had been her cross to bear, and she always had trouble admitting it. “There wasn’t a thing wrong with him except a little bit of meanness. He didn’t do nothing wrong and he didn’t do nothing right either.”

Bull married a woman named Velma Barlow. He called her Velma B. and she called him Billy Bull. For years they tried to have children. Bull wanted a boy that looked exactly like him, but eventually he was forced to admit they would never have a child. He blamed it on Velma B, and Velma B. blamed it on him. Finally, they resorted to kidnapping.

  The town of Hotel Dew was full of families at that time, so they went there first and chose a baby by the way it cried. It had a laughing sort of cry that appealed to them. Another thing they considered was the size of the household. There were eleven children in that particular family, and they felt that one less mouth to feed wouldn’t disturb anyone. As it turned out, they were right. They kidnapped the child in the middle of the night, took him home and named him Billy Wiggins.

  “I guess they couldn’t think of anything else,” Izella said.

The child was about a year old. He had bright red hair and large ears, fleshy lips and a wild-eyed stare. His new mother and father worshipped him, but not for long. A month after the kidnapping, the proud parents were on a fishing trip upriver. Isaac Overstreet was on the water that day and watched their boat vanish into a whirlpool that suddenly appeared from nowhere. The river was like that, especially in the spring, and especially that year. The year of the Rains was how it was remembered. The boat went down as though some creature had opened its mouth and swallowed it. Bull and Velma rode it down, but they didn’t ride it back up again. The boat surfaced without them and a day later their bodies washed ashore near Navasota Blackburn’s sandbar and she burned them in a secret place.

  That left Izella with the kidnapped child to raise. “You ain’t never going to amount to anything,” she would tell him when he misbehaved. “You ain’t nothing at all and never will be nothing at all because you don’t want to be nothing at all.” Eventually he became accustomed to hearing that.

  “That’s right,” he would say. “I ain’t nothing, and I’m glad of it. I wouldn’t want to be something for anything.”

  Mary Twitchell kept saying, “Izella, I believe that boy’s halfway retarded.”

But Izella refused to admit it. “My grandbaby’s real smart,” she said. “He’ll be able to understand a lot of things most people have trouble with.”

  As soon as she considered Billy Wiggins old enough to know about his parents, she tried to set him straight. “Some people have two sets of parents,” she told him, “and you’re one of those people who do. Your parents who are not your parents are living somewhere nearby, but no one knows just where or how to find them.” Billy Wiggins asked which set was the best and Izella told him, “Your parents who were not your parents were the best by far.”

  Billy grew up with that in mind and when he was almost thirteen he decided it was time for him to see the place where the boat went down. Isaac took him not far upstream where the river had broken through one of its meandering curves. An oxbow lake was on one side and a break in the trees on the other.

“It was right about here where they went down,” Isaac said, pointing with his fishing hat.

  Billy Wiggins hung his head over the side of the boat. He had the feeling he was seeing all the way to the bottom of the river, but he wasn’t. The water was too deep for that, too muddy too, but Isaac let him believe what he wanted.

  “I see them down there said Billy. Before Isaac knew it, the boy had jumped in. He went down and stayed down a long time. Then he came up and went down and came up and went down, and finally Isaac grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back into the boat. On the way home, Billy Wiggins said he went all the way to the bottom of the Sabine and opened up his eyes. Down there he saw a catfish twice as long as Isaac’s boat. “On the back of that old fish I saw my father who’s not my father and my mother who’s not my mother,” he said. “And I got to know them too. I got to know what they look like, and I got to know what they think like and I got to know a lot of other people who look and think just like them. Now, the place where all these people are living has its own name, a name you wouldn’t naturally think of as being the name of a place. They call it Ain’t Nothing at All, and the people who live here are called Ain’t Nothing At All People, but if you don’t have time to say their full name or just don’t want to say their full name you can call them Not People just to get it over with. Now here’s the way it is: Every Halfway Not Person who dies and goes to Ain’t Nothing At All gets a chance to become more of a Not Person than he could ever become just walking around on dry ground.

  “I don’t get it,” said Isaac. His head was swimming from listening too hard.

  “Then let me tell you another way,” said Billy. “Some people have two sets of parents. That’s the first thing you got to understand. There’s the parents who bring you into this world and they don’t count. They don’t count because they leave you alone and don’t care a thing about you. Then there’s the parents who take you out of this world, and they’re the ones who do count. They do count because they’re Not People. And because they’re Not People, they’re the very hardest ones to understand. Right at first it might seem like they don’t know what they’re talking about, but they do. Ain’t Nothing At All is what’s on their minds, and Ain’t Nothing At All is what they’re always talking about every time they’re talking.

  “You lost me a long time ago,” said Isaac, as they drifted down the Sabine. “I guess you’re too smart for me today.”

  “I might be too smart for you every day,” said Billy, “but that don’t matter to me if it don’t matter to you.”

Isaac accused him of having too much mud on his brain, but Billy Wiggins said he didn’t have a drop of mud up there and never would because he knew what he knew, and he also knew what he didn’t need to know.

What his knowing came down to was this: His father wasn’t really his father and his mother wasn’t really his mother, but they were more like his mother and father than his real mother and father would have ever been. No one had to tell him that, he just knew it. “There’s a kind of kin that’s a lot closer than blood kin, and that’s the kind of kin we were to each other.” He knew what he was talking about. He understood. And for a long time he wondered why no one else did.

  Then he learned a new word. Lottie Faircloth, attempting to help him understand himself a little better, told him he was a special person. After that Billy Wiggins went around telling everyone exactly how special he was and how special he was sure to become. He said that he was not just special, but special in a special sort of way. ‘Specially, special, he sometimes called himself and was constantly on the lookout for anybody who came close to being ‘specially like him.

  Lottie Faircloth said that she felt like a complete failure because she had taught Billy Wiggins the meaning of a word he didn’t need to know. But Billy Wiggins was certain that he needed to know the word because it was another way of describing people who were on their way to being Not People but didn’t know it. He was one of those people, but he knew it, and that made him a halfway Not Person, or a ‘Specially Special Person.

  Oh how tired Lottie was of hearing it, and how she wished she could stop listening but she couldn’t. Billy Wiggins wouldn’t let go of her ears. He told her there were a lot of people halfway like him but not all the way like him. He kept a list of the people who hit the halfway mark, and from time to time he put them to test, just to make sure his instincts were correct. The list was kept in his head, and the test was never the same. “You can’t test everybody the same way, and you can’t test the same person the same way twice in a row.” That was the rule he followed, and that’s what he told Lottie.

  “Billy Wiggins, don’t you dare stand up and tell me how to test somebody.” Lottie Faircloth just hated to be lectured to. “I happen to be a schoolteacher, and let it be known that I know how to give a test.”

“So do I,” said Billy Wiggins. “I just gave you one. I told you something you were supposed to understand and you didn’t understand it, and that was your test, and you didn’t pass, and now, I can’t give you another one because you failed too bad.”

  “Well, that’s the only test I’ve ever failed in my entire life,” said Lottie. “And I’m glad I failed it too. If I had to take it over again, I’d try to give the exact same answer, whatever it was.”