The Year the Lights Came On Read Free Page A

counters.
    *
    In 1946, Time began to be identified with newness.
    The economy bristled and people began to be healed of the disease of uncertainty.
    You could hear it in voices, see it in faces, sense it in the energy of games and laughter, anger and restlessness. There was a mood, a fever, to 1946. Men who had returned from the war assumed positions of responsibility and admiration. They made inspiring first-person speeches about liberty and what it meant, and how the bullies of the world had better mind their manners. Occasionally, they even told light, breezy stories about the war, laughing heartily at themselves as though humor freed them from the inescapable seriousness of what they had seen and known.
    The cotton mill placed an advertisement in The Royston Record , seeking employees. A sewing plant was officially opened by His Honor, the mayor. Farmers began to listen to what County Agents had to say about subsoiling, land-testing, seed-treating, or about planting kudzu and lespedeza to stop topsoil from washing away in the ugly scars of erosion. The sound of John Deere tractors stuttered even at night. There was a rousing demonstration against some northern union which tried to infiltrate the labor market, and a group of noble people, born of the heritage of independence, staged a funeral and buried the union in rites that were both circus and frightening. Everyone seemed aware of being embraced by a new history of the world, and everyone knew it would be a history never forgotten.
    The awful years were tender, healing scars by late summer of 1946. The World Series became a festive event again, and Roystonians began telling outrageous lies about Ty Cobb, who was a native and a legend. If you were born in a twenty-mile radius of Royston, you were reared believing, without compromise, in God, Santa Claus, and Ty Cobb. Older citizens who had known Cobb as a boy, loved to trap strangers with the trivia question, “What was Cobb’s lifetime batting average?” It was .367, the best of them all, and that, by shot, was more than most north Georgia towns could talk about.
    *
    And, then, there was 1947.
    Time became placeable in 1947.
    The ump-pah-pah was everywhere, a rhythm like a Vachel Lindsay poem, with reader and chorus, cymbal and trumpet. It was a year for putting pennies in loafers, for “Just a sec,” and mustard seed necklaces, for giddiness and once-a-month socials at Wind’s Mill. It was the year the Home Demonstration Club was organized, and the Eden County Fairgrounds Committee advertised an all-out, better-than-ever Fall Fair, with rides and thrills and games of chance and (Freeman told us) a freak show with the most astonishing membership of any freak show in the world.
    Ump-pah-pah.
    Ump-pah-pah.
    1947.
    Wesley’s year.
    I think of it as Wesley’s year because Wesley was the real and touchable and placeable something of 1947.
    Wesley was eighteen months older than I. Lynn, our sister (people often called her Lynn-Wynn, fusing her name with a hyphen), was eighteen months older than Wesley. In the spring of 1947, Lynn was in the ninth grade, Wesley was in the eighth grade, and I was in the seventh grade. Nine, eight, seven. Seven, eight, nine. A, B, C. Mother used to call us her triplets, her Stair-Step Triplets. It was Mother’s way of confessing her failure in selective family planning. That failure was humorously extended because she had had ample practice: before her Stair-Step Triplets, she had given birth to eight other children. I am told Mother vowed I would be the last; eleven children represented a superlative effort. Six years after I was born, Garry arrived, and he was not adopted as we often told him he was.
    By adhering to the most elastic of mathematical permissions, we learned to round off numbers and concluded that an average of two years separated the first eleven children. We had to omit Garry from this formula; to include him would have forced us into fractions. And two years was a