Page 57 of Demon Copperhead

Some guys started mumbling heritage and nothing personal, and Mr. Armstrong took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looking as usual somewhere between interested and flat-out flummoxed.

“Whose history are we talking about?” he asked.

“Because Virginia voted to join the Confederacy, that’s true.

To support the plantation owners. But the people here in this county were not represented in that vote. ”

Nobody wanted to tangle with him. Of all of us still out there that hadn’t yet got on buses or edged back into the building, I’m going to say not one person would have taken up a rifle for any plantation fat cats.

We were actually glad of what he told us, that the mountain people of Virginia rounded up their own militias to try and fight on the other team, Union.

He said we should feel free to pass on this info to certain guys, and we shook our heads like, Those assholes, regardless some of those assholes being brothers or friends or dads.

Because that was Mr. Armstrong. Even if you didn’t necessarily want to, you would end up on his side.

Melungeon turns out to be another one of those words.

Invented for hating on certain people until they turned it around and said, Screw you, I’m taking this.

These people were mixed, all the colors plus Cherokee and also Portuguese, which used to be its own thing, not white.

The reason of them getting mixed was that in pioneer days Lee County was like now, with nobody having a pot to piss in.

These folks being poor as dirt just had a good time and ended up with the all-colored babies.

If they went anywhere else, these kids got the hate word, melungeon, which Mr. Dick said is some other language for mixed-up piece of shit.

Mr. Dick got into my Backgrounds project in a big way.

It would have taken three or more kites to hold everything he wrote down.

He explained how in those times a person would get called the n-word if they were even the smallest tad of not-white.

Meaning they couldn’t vote, have their own farm, etc.

So these mixed-ups that everybody called melungeon went to the courthouse and said okay, that’s what I am.

Write it down. (Proper noun, capital M.) The courthouse people probably studied on it but couldn’t find a thing in their books to say a Melungeon couldn’t do this or that, so. Nice trick.

Those were my people. Mr. Dick and Miss Betsy’s father moved away from here to find Jesus, but mainly to stop being one of these people.

If his kids ever wondered about aunts or cousins, they’d get leathered for asking.

They never heard the word Melungeon. But they still got wind of these dark-skinned, green-eyed people back in Virginia.

My dad grew up asking if it was true. At the time he ran off, he and Miss Betsy were hurt at each other so not speaking.

She never knew if he’d made it back here till he wrote the letter saying he was in Lee County with a girl, fixing to have a baby.

The little green-eyed Copperhead he’d never see.

Mr. Dick wrote all this up and gave it to me in an envelope and said to read it later, by myself. And I’ve never been one to get choked up or weepy, even as a small kid. But after I read about my people and my dad, I shoved my face in the pillow and cried like a baby.

Angus said I’d better start a little notebook on my girlfriends, to keep them all straight.

This was just Angus being Angus, not mad, more like she’s proud of my success.

I never had that many at one time, or for long.

To be honest, the most interesting female type of person in my life right then was Ms. Annie, art teacher, obviously out of the girlfriend running.

Also I might have been pretty far gone for Linda Larkins, the big-sister math genius and killer flirt from the homework club, but ditto, not a real thing. She was seventeen.

As far as these others that actually liked me, they kept me busy.

We were too young yet to do anything in cars like normal kids, but where there’s a will there’s a couch and blankets or my bedroom, if everybody else in the house was asleep.

Study sessions that ran long. It got to where if I wasn’t doing something with a girl, I was thinking about doing something with a girl.

My body went on wishing even if I managed to get the brain on something else.

Exactly like it does if you’re hungry. I’d been a no-toucher person for a lot of years.

I vaguely recalled Mom being a big hugger, but then came Stoner, and family life turned into a whole other kind of contact sport.

This skin-on-skin was all new. I did get nerves over not knowing what I was doing or what was allowed, these middle school girls being dead set against going all the way, like they’d made a girlwide agreement.

But I knew where all the bases were now. I got tutored.

Once in the blue moon I’d go with the Peggots to see Emmy, but over and out on that onetime romance.

Maggot swore she was dating Hammer Kelly now, which she denied.

She made fun of Hammer’s countrified haircut, and said the only person in love with him was Mr. Peg, that took him hunting.

So Hammer was not the problem, Emmy was just not that hot on me anymore.

I was hurt at first and then wasn’t, because like they say, plenty of fish in the sea.

Jump in there wearing your football jersey to school on a Friday and my Lord, it’s like that Bible miracle. Fishes coming out of everywhere.

For the record, gifteds can and do play football.

Some of the guys found me out, but they didn’t give me that much grief over it.

I never missed a practice. These guys were solid, future Generals all.

Cush Polk for one, our JV quarterback, decent as milk, a preacher’s kid from way the hell over by Ewing.

Tall, blond, actual red cheeks, the type that still said “Yes ma’am” to teachers.

He claimed he got his speed from being youngest in a family of nine, and his mom only ever cooked for eight.

And Turp Trussell for another, that once drank a shot of turpentine for purposes that remain unclear.

Big clown, built like a brick shithouse, boldness of a bull in rut.

Brain of a deer tick, but that’s not something to hold against a running back.

My main gifted thing was twice a week after lunch riding over to the high school with Fish Head and the Vo-Ag crowd.

They did auto mechanics, I got an hour with Ms. Annie in her art room.

I thought she would make me do fruit pictures, but no.

If it’s cartoons I cared about, she said, draw them.

I just had to use the different media to see how they worked.

One day she sat still and let me do her portrait.

Which I’d been doing secretly anyway. She didn’t always wear long skirts, sometimes it was these big balloon pants with all the pockets full of brushes, rulers, paint knife, pocket knife.

Hippie food items like cereal bars. Always the scarf on her long blond hair, and the dangle earrings.

She was a small lady in big, swishy clothes.

She had unheard-of things in her art room, watercolor, gouache.

I got to try them all. She made me use perspectives, vanishing point, etc.

She gave me human body charts to copy out for learning the muscles, because a cartoon isn’t a realistic person but there’s a real person under it.

Like the skull and the face. That room, those hours.

I can still smell them. I would be just getting into something before it was time to put away the paints and get on the bus back to middle school.

Never in my life have I known time to fly away like that.

Angus got on a tear that year to start an academic team, which nobody knew what that was.

She explained to me that it’s like a sport, only between teams trying to know the most of all the different units like math, literature, etc.

A victory of smartness type of thing. She was in high school now, with her big crazy dreams. I said it’ll never fly, that bird has got no wings.

She said it’s already flying. They actually did this in other high schools.

She heard of it from her friend Sax’s cousin that lived in Northern Virginia.

Kids up there evidently had brains coming out their ears, to the extent of needing to meet up with other kids for brain-to-brain combat.

I said what Mom always did if I wanted to do something extra like make my bed: Why make life harder than it is?

Angus ignored me and wrote a proposal that Sax’s cousin’s teacher helped her with, over the phone.

She had this whole presentation she practiced on me prior to giving it to a teacher’s meeting.

I said maybe tone down the outfit, which was a DC Brainiac shirt and giant glasses she found at Goodwill, but other than that, perfect.

So she gave it for the teachers and then the PTA.

Next, the freaking school board. I’m sure they thought, this weird girl is getting no dates, fine, let her fill her empty life.

Then snoozed till the word competition came up, which meant going to other schools, on buses.

Meaning money. They all said the same thing: This category is already covered in the budget.

Gifted kids got to take a school trip in sixth or seventh.

By high school, evidently if you’re still gifted, you just need to get over that.