We’ll Start a New Country Up
From the time they were kids, they just couldn’t wait for something bigger than their small Alabama town.
It’s funny what we remember. And how we remember it. Our heads are not neat timelines, but we are inextricable jumbles, all the things and people we have ever been, all at once.
I’m a grown-ass man, as old as my parents were when I left them to go to college and to my life, a life I felt like hadn’t started and wouldn’t start until I was gone from that place. But I’m also a five-year-old boy, and a sixteen-year-old hothead, and a drunk eighteen-year-old on a concrete platform above a central-Alabama airstrip, and twenty and afraid of not knowing who I was, and twenty-two tripping-balls on a deserted beach, and twenty-five and just married a few years later, and twenty-eight and my sister is dead from cancer in the hospital room while I stand cold and empty in the hallway. And I’m a proud father in the delivery room, and I’m alone and I’m full of love and surrounded by love and afraid, and I’m so many things I’m still trying to sort out.
I’m trying to pull each strand loose, but they stick to each other, and I’m going to take them as they come, in tangled clumps. My friends and loves and regrets. Like Woody.
I used to think our story started like this: “Woody and I were friends.” But until a few days ago I had forgotten the real beginning.
I was sitting on my porch, watching a night sky flash electric from a lightning storm over the lake, hearing the delayed rumbles of thunder. It all came back to me, a year of my life, the year we lived in Tomsville, Alabama, when I was seven years old, rolling into eight. The most important details had been locked away, in holes I hadn’t realized were there. Looking back, seeing it for the first time since it all happened forty years back, from this far-enough distance where I can discern the true beginning and it’s not all just a non-linear mishmash of angst and life, I’m pretty sure that our story starts like this:
I loved Woody, and I lost Woody.
It was raining that day in Tomsville in the dreary spring of 1978, so second-grade recess was inside. Some twenty or thirty of us ringed around the perimeter of the classroom. Our arms were extended, fingertips touching fingertips, spacing ourselves so we wouldn’t flail into each other. Woody was to my right. In my memory, that ring was evenly intermixed, white child then black child then white child then black child, but memory is more ideal than reality, I know now. Though it is beautiful.
Woody was my best friend then. I could talk easy to him, usually after school and on the weekends as we would explore the edges of the cheap apartment complex we lived in. If it was in a bigger town, you might call where we lived in Tomsville “the projects.” But there wasn’t a lot to Tomsville. Most folks lived out past the fringes of the old railroad stop downtown, old houses on old land, or small collections of new ranch-house neighborhoods built on former cotton land, fronted by gas station mini marts. If you had anything real to do, you would drive thirty minutes up the road to Meadowview, the county seat twenty-five thousand people strong. That was our big city. Montgomery was an hour farther on. Birmingham two hours or a little more north. Mobile two hours south. Tomsville was in between everything and nothing.
In my memory, that ring was evenly intermixed, white child then black child then white child then black child, but memory is more ideal than reality, I know now. Though it is beautiful.
My parents had moved there the summer of 1977, right before I started second grade, my Dad drummed out of the Army in the wave of post-Vietnam drawdown, brought there by endless piney woods that stocked a gargantuan lumber and paper mill with all its jobs, hungry for workers to feed into it. I worked there one summer during college. It was like a city, bigger and more advanced than any of the towns around there. It generated its own power. Bright lights and metal towers and roaring boilers and clanking chippers and digesters and screaming saws and an endless stream of hard-hatted men and women, tired in and tired out, shift after shift.
When we moved into the Tomsville Apartments that June, Woody was the first kid I met, out at the edge of the cracked asphalt parking lot, heat-shimmers making him dance in my vision while he stooped and jumped, stooped and jumped, fishing long strands of weed-grass down ant-lion holes. I walked over to the rutted red clay and sparse weedy grass where he crouched. He was still, watching a long-stemmed weed in front of him poking out of a pencil-width hole in the ground. After a moment, without looking up from the weed, he said, “Who’re you?”
“Tommy,” I said. “Just moved in.”
He stayed still a moment longer, and just when the silence felt awkward, the weed began to turn in the hole. He grabbed the end and jumped up, and on the end was a creature with the body of a grubworm, but a large orange head with black pincer-like jaws and short black legs all at the front of its body, the pincers and legs clasped around the stem, not letting go. The boy dropped back down into a crouch, rubbed the antlion off onto the ground, where it scuttled off to the side and into a clump of grass. He dropped the weed back into the hole.
“What’s your name?” I asked. He looked up, his deep brown eyes studying my face.
“Elwood,” he said. “Call me Woody.” I plucked another long weed out of the ground, found another hole near his, and started fishing for ant-lions next to him until the sun hit the top of the tall trash trees growing out of the gully that dropped off the side of the parking lot.
The sun persisted long into mid-evening in summer, and my parents were fine I was outside and away when Dad would come home from the mill and he and Mom would try to figure out how to piece back together a life. Woody became my constant companion, and I was his. I could talk to him about southern Missouri and Fort Leonard Wood, the Ozarks and fishing for rainbow trout from a little dock, the pack of friends I ran with in the base housing, how I missed them, how I was intrigued by Alabama and how it felt on my tongue when I said it. Woody would listen and pat me on the back but he would also punch me in the arm and tell me how much a fool I was how my eyes followed Carla, our next most constant companion, when her mom called for her, always sooner than when our moms called for us.
The Fourth of July that summer was on a Monday, so the town shot fireworks on the night of the third, to keep folks from going into work on Tuesday too hungover to do much good. It was as hot as any other day that summer. And Sundays always seemed especially stifling. As soon as I’d changed from church clothes into cutoffs and a hand-me-down T-shirt of my sister’s from the year before—Spirit of ’76—I tore out of our apartment just as Woody came down the stairs from his. A voice called out from another side of the courtyard, and Carla was running over to us, light brown curls wispy around a face framing eyes gray like storm clouds, a face that rarely smiled but that looked intently at me, like she could see inside of me to the things I couldn’t even admit to myself.
We spent the afternoon down in the gully. With its leafy trees and sticker vines and drainage creek at the bottom, trickling through banks lined with the brown muck of the past year’s rotting leaves and flinty shale of soapstone and sand and gravel and chunks of concrete with protruding rebar, it could be anywhere we wanted it to be. It could be a rainforest in South America or a savannah in Africa, with wide wild rivers teeming with piranha and crocodiles, lions resting on its banks, and we would be explorers, conquistadors, naturalists discovering new species. Or it could be the botanical gardens of a king or queen in old France, where we would be spies or whole armies waiting to chop off their royal heads, or explorers and conquistadors again, returned home to receive our riches, their thanks and praises, feasts of acorns and pebbles and ground-up leaf mash. Or it could be a Vietnamese jungle, like the one my dad came home from and Woody’s dad didn’t, and we could be on a recon through enemy territory, machine guns at the ready, our trigger fingers itchy on our sticks. Or it could be America, new and fresh, and we could be the first non-native people to lay eyes on its riches, smoking pipes and exchanging promises with the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the four great tribes of the land that would become Alabama. Woody would tell us of these people, and how his mama told him at night they were his ancestors along with the women and men who had escaped from horrible enslavement by wretched planter-men. And then our gully would be a last refuge, and we would be friends together against the world, hiding quiet from ugly-voiced men up in the parking lot, from hoots and hollers and dogs baying and hunting.
That’s what the gully was to us on that day, the third day of July in 1977. We played almost wordlessly. We gathered tree limbs and propped them against a trunk, making a lean-to big enough for the three of us, then we carefully ripped blackberry brambles out of the clay walls of the gully by their roots and dragged them over and arranged them to cover the stick walls, scratches on our hands and our arms and our legs, blackberry juice staining our chins.
“No one’s gonna be slaves,” said Woody. “Nobody’s going to hit anyone,” said Carla. “Nobody’s gonna be poor,” I said.
When we were done, it was cool and dark inside, the smell of earth tinged with fruit and the muskiness of lichens. Carla sat between Woody and me, and she reached out and touched our hands, and we sat like that, my head swimming with what felt like passing out, like my heart bursting, like crying and like laughter, and Carla said, “Shh. Let’s be as still and quiet as we can, until we can hear the whole town.”
Slowly, noises began to open up our ears. A log truck on the main road, its engine brake rattle-roaring as it came over the little hill on the edge of town. Kids’ tinny voices, a sprinkler splattering water on pavement. Men arguing about when to flip hamburgers, the metal clang of tongs on the side of an old oil-barrel charcoal grill. A woman singing a hymn through an open window to a tinkly piano. The hard slap of a hand on someone’s face. A country song blaring from a truck window. Dogs barking. A snake slithering through fallen leaves. A murder of crows landing squawking on a power line. Clouds pushing against humid air. Tree leaves rustling.
“We hold these truths,” said Carla, and Woody and I murmured in agreement, but none of us knew any of the rest. We just knew that we were experiencing truths in that moment, dirt caking our bare legs, sweat dried on our foreheads.
“Let’s build a new country,” she said.
We crawled out of our shelter. We used sticks to carve furrows in front of the tree, then planted acorns and sycamore pods. We cupped our hands into the creek and brought sloshing water to the new garden. Woody found a long branch bearing leaves, blown down by some recent storm. “Our flag,” he said, and we burrowed a hole to plant it in, its leaves waving above us, announcing our intentions and our unity. And then we came up with laws for our new country.
“No one’s gonna be slaves,” said Woody.
“Nobody’s going to hit anyone,” said Carla.
“Nobody’s gonna be poor,” I said. We continued to go around.
Food for everyone, good food.
Pretty houses, with grass to run in and swings to play on.
No one stealing your sister’s bike or your Big Wheel.
Sno-cones every afternoon.
Ain’t nobody calling people bad things.
And no whooping up and being mean to people.
No one being lonely, unless they want to be.
No brussels sprouts.
We laughed at that one and agreed. “No broccoli, either.”
It got dark in the gully first, as the sun dimmed below the tree-tops, so we stacked more limbs and sticks in front of the entrance to our shelter, then balanced along a fallen tree across the creek and clambered back up the side of the gully, scrapes on our knees and red clay staining our socks and our shorts.
For a while, we caught fireflies and dropped them into a Mason jar Woody had, him screwing the top down again quick each time so none escaped. And then we went out by the main road, and the whole town was there, watching to the west, past the big gravel pit, and as soon as it was full-on dark the fireworks started up, five minutes of booming and red and white and blue stars exploding, beer-drunk daddies and mamas hooting, small children screaming, and Woody and Carla and me full-hearted, guarding our jar of lights, having already started a country and listed our freedoms.
When the echoes from the last barrage had diminished to nothing but the sound of car doors slamming and engines cranking, I looked over and saw Woody’s face all pinched up.
“We ain’t free, though,” he said, and I nodded, though I didn’t really know why.
By the end of the summer, we’d rebuilt the shelter in the gully three times. We’d eaten all the blackberries. We’d sucked all the honeysuckle. Carla had gotten covered in flaming red poison-ivy rash and we’d lost her for a week.
When school started back up, days were drearier, but on weekends we still ran through the same wide world together. The heat of summer let go toward the end of September, and snatches of chill mixed into the breezes.
Woody was with me when the Doberman who prowled the complex caught me one Saturday in November, its teeth leaving a neat pattern of red punctures in my butt and upper thigh because I was the slow one, or at least slower than Woody. Woody could have gotten cleanly away, but he turned and punched that asshole dog in the snout. The dog let go of me but it didn’t run off, so we ran again, bounding up the stairs and into my family’s apartment, and my Mom was in the kitchen as we slammed the door behind us and leaned against it, panting, hearing the Doberman’s claws scritching against the outside. And when I started to cry, Woody didn’t make fun of me, and he never made of fun of me later, either. Anyone else would’ve.
I think that friendship saved our lives, probably more times than I know. Woody and Carla and I would go into one old lady’s apartment and she would serve us little red and yellow port-wine cheese cubes that had an oddly sweet taste, and also sugar cubes that she would soak in brandy and light on fire, and our eyes would widen as we watched them burn. Our noses would fill with the caramelizing scent, and then she would hold the plate of burning sugar cubes out to us and we would blow them out and then eat the blackened crusty morsels along with the cheese cubes, and she would laugh this laugh, her own eyes lighting up.
Woody was there, looking for me, and I told him that the old lady was wanting us to come over, and so I hopped off my Big Wheel and Woody and I walked over there. Her smile fell, and she growled at me, “Had to go get your boyfriend, didya?”
During Christmas break that second-grade year, I was by myself on my Big Wheel, peeling around in the back parking lot near the old woman’s unit. Her door was open, and she was sitting just inside on an old kitchen chair in her house dress, watching me. I smiled at her and waved. The next circle around, she beckoned with a crooked hand, making that soundless laugh that reminded me of my chain-smoking grandma back in Missouri. I smiled and waved and made another round around the parking lot, back around by the other buildings where Woody and I lived. Woody was there, looking for me, and I told him that the old lady was wanting us to come over, and so I hopped off my Big Wheel and Woody and I walked over there. Her smile fell, and she growled at me, “Had to go get your boyfriend, didya?” And then she slammed the door shut. And that’s how Woody and I were best friends, or at least he was mine.
So that rainy April day in 1978, there we were, Woody to my right, fingertip-to-fingertip distance from each other in the classroom, doing jumping jacks or something, when I decided to pretend to stumble and fall into him, and I kissed him on the cheek, because he was my best friend, and though I don’t know if I would have said it this way, I loved him.
He punched me, hard, said, “Get offa me, boy,” and the teacher stopped the jumping jacks, and I was sent to the principal’s office. I’m sure I said it was an accident, that I had tripped and fallen into Woody, and I’m sure the principal said something snide like, “Fell into him with your mouth?” I’m certain it felt like I was in trouble, and so then I started to believe that I had just tripped and stumbled into Woody and that it was all a misunderstanding, and by the end of the school day I had been made to go back to the classroom and apologize to Woody, which I did, most sincerely, telling him how sorry I was to have fallen into him and for it to have seemed like a kiss because obviously I wouldn’t do that, because, as the principal had told me, boys don’t kiss boys, that’s wrong.
Woody just looked at me with this stare I couldn’t categorize, like he’d never seen me before. He said, “Okay,” when I apologized and told him it wasn’t a kiss, and “all right, whatever,” when I told him that no, I really was sorry. But he didn’t sit by me on the school bus on the way back to the apartments. Nobody did, though it felt like they were all whispering and staring at me but not staring, kind of like it felt in that Sunday School classroom on the weekends.
And when I got home, I remember being in the bedroom that I had to share with my older sister because there were only two bedrooms for our four-person family. The door was closed. My parents’ voices rose and fell in the kitchen. Then the bedroom door opened and my Dad was there.
“Tommy,” he said. “I’m going to believe you that you just fell into Woody. And I think that school has made too much a deal out of it, whatever it was. You’re seven.” I reminded him I was almost eight. “Well, your Mom and I are going to move us out of this situation as soon we can, I promise. But listen up. You listening?”
I was.
“If Woody doesn’t want to hang out around you as much now, maybe that’s okay. Because we are going to be moving soon, maybe up to Meadowview, and you don’t need to be getting all involved with friendships that can’t last anyway. Maybe you’re too close with him.”
Woody’s family moved to Meadowview, too, and I don’t think he remembered, and I didn’t remember, not until a few days ago, really, any of what had happened at the end of our friendship in Tomsville. Woody and I were immediate and fast friends again.
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I felt guilty, like I’d done something wrong. But I would be glad to be out of those apartments, out of that little town. But also, I would miss Woody. And I would miss Carla. And I would miss our own country down in that gully, even if our shelter, our palace, hadn’t survived the winter. I didn’t get how I couldn’t be friends with them forever.
“This isn’t a place where some things can be okay,” my Dad said. “Woody is colored.”
I knew Dad learned the word from Grandma, because I heard her using it when we visited her in her apartment in Kansas City before we moved down here, and so I guessed that was an all right word to say. Not as good as friend, maybe. But I didn’t say any of this, and Dad continued, “Maybe that’s not the right word, I don’t know, but folks down here use far rougher words for it. And they don’t much like white folks and colored being too close, you know?”
This was the first I’d heard about that.
“Your Mom and I, we’re not like that. But we worry for you, is all. It’s time you be aware of the world around you. Be careful, son, okay?”
I’m sure I nodded and said, “Okay, Daddy.”
But what I remember is this. The next morning I told Woody as we were all putting our backpacks on our hooks and getting our lunches into our cubbies, “I don’t care that you’re colored, you know.” And Woody said, “What did you call me?” And I told him, “Colored,” and Woody didn’t punch me, but he looked at me like I’d punched him. We weren’t friends anymore for the rest of that spring.
As soon as the school year was over, we moved to Meadowview, into a three-bedroom house on the west side of town. There was another creek that ran through a bottomland right next to it, and I got to know new folks, and some of them became my friends, even though many of them didn’t. A hell of a lot of them made fun of me, and as we grew older, I didn’t give a shit. But in junior high school, Woody’s family moved to Meadowview, too, and I don’t think he remembered, and I didn’t remember, not until a few days ago, really, any of what had happened at the end of our friendship in Tomsville. Woody and I were immediate and fast friends again. When we were old enough to drive, we would drive over to each other’s houses after school or on the weekends and shoot ball. Or we would drive around and trade out tapes in each other’s tape decks in our used junker cars and talk about getting the fuck out of that place. We would have plans and we would share them.
But there was a distance, too, on some weekend nights, where I would go places with my girlfriends, and he would go places with his girlfriends, and the only time we were in the same places on those kind of nights, nights with dates, with girls, would be school dances, homecoming, prom, that kind of thing, maybe a criss-crossing moment at the McDonald’s out on the highway, but other than that, our friendship paused until Mondays.
We couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Tad Bartlett was born in Ankara, Turkey; grew up in Selma, Alabama; and married into New Orleans. His nonfiction has been published by Salvation South, online at Oxford American, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Peauxdunque Review, and others, and he has had a "notable"-designated essay in Best American Essays (2017). His fiction has been published in Massachusetts Review, Carolina Quarterly, Baltimore Review, and many others. Tad is working on a novel based on the characters from his short story, “We'll Start a New Country Up.” When not writing, he practices environmental and appellate law for the good guys.