By Gwynn Wills
Jimmy, who lived six doors down from me on Pike Street, died when he was seven years old. He rode past my house once on a red Schwinn bike with his little brother trailing behind on his two-wheeler with training wheels. When my Grandma Dorothy saw Jimmy, she whispered, “I thought he was sick.” He looked puffy to me—like a pasty, white marshmallow. I ran out to the sidewalk to greet both boys. The younger of the two, John, was in my kindergarten class at school. I had recently moved back to live with my grandparents in Indiana. Living in Illinois with my mom and stepdad wasn’t working out for me, so I started my new school mid-year. I thrilled at the thought of having some neighborhood kids to play with.
Jimmy stopped and planted his feet on either side of his bike while John took off, spinning the pedals so hard the training wheels almost came off the ground.
I try to remember that day. I hope we played together that day. I hope Jimmy remembered having fun and carried that memory with him, to whatever plane of existence he traveled. I hope I shouted, “We can play again tomorrow.” And most likely, with enough momentum, the boys went airborne over the speed bump caused by maple tree roots pushing up under the sidewalk. I’m sure I giggled and waved as they rode away.
I never saw Jimmy again, but I learned two things from a boy I saw only once. I
learned that a word, a really long word, could make you sick. “Leukemia” was a
mouthful for a five-year-old. I didn’t know what it meant, except Jimmy stopped
coming out to play. I also learned that a little kid, almost the same age as me, could
die and miss out on life.
About three years after his death, I remember going to visit Great Grandma Luddy, my
Grandpa Jack’s mother, who lived across the street from the cemetery where Jimmy
was buried. After I nibbled at a butter and salt sandwich, played with her old dog,
Tippy, and stared at the disembodied ceramic head which held her hairnets, I
wandered over to the cemetery. I was at the peak of my “hop on anything off the
ground and pretend it’s a horse” phase. The gravestones were just the right height for
me to get a leg up and over without any help.
When my butt became too sore to sit any longer, I walked around the rows of stones reading the inscriptions. And then, I happened upon Jimmy’s grave. He’s immortalized in an oval black-and-white photo, most likely a school picture. Dressed in a white shirt with suspenders, he has a crew cut and is smiling with his mouth closed. Beneath the photo is the inscription:
James Donald Ball
Son of Margaret and Steve
1949-1956
Seeing his picture on that block of granite knocked the breath from my mouth
down to my stomach. I turned and ran back across the street to Grandma Luddy’s.
She met me at the front door with a scowl on her face. She was a no-nonsense kind of
woman, rail thin and crippled with arthritis. Her gnarled hands grabbed at me.
“What were you doing across the street?”
“I was just looking at the gravestones and walking around,” I blanched as she reared
her head back and stared at me over her wire-rimmed glasses.
“That’s not what I saw,” she countered. She must have peeked out her front window
and saw me “galloping” on the gravestones. “Don’t ever do that again!” she said, raising her voice. I nodded meekly, ashamed that my passion overtook my actions, a fate I would suffer many times over in my life.
Back around the Pike Street neighborhood, I still played with the surviving brother, John. He would often come out and play with the all us kids as we charged around the block
on foot or on our bikes. On Sunday mornings, he walked with his mom, dad, and sister three blocks toward town to attend church. And I wonder if he thought about Jimmy? I wonder if he missed him? I am still haunted by Jimmy’s memory and the sadness I feel when I think about what he missed.
***
What Jimmy Missed
1956-1961
• Playing capture the flag with the rest of the neighborhood kids. (Every kid on the block showed up in the alley between Pike and Main Street most summer nights around dusk. Interlopers from other neighborhoods came just to play).
• Guarding the flag, or tackling someone to the ground when they tiptoed too close to home base.
• Looking into the dollhouse where I kept my collection of praying mantises
• Holding grasshoppers while they spit brown tobacco juice in our cupped hands and not getting grossed out.
• Watching potato beetles crawl across my front porch using nightshade as the lure to get them to move.
• Helping hunt for zebra-striped caterpillars on milkweed so we could grow and hatch our own monarch butterflies.
• Joining kids from all over town at the community rec center right across the street from our houses.
• Jumping on the trampoline or making crafts in the room off of the side stairs with Ms. Frances, my first in-person encounter with a woman of color.
• Buying pretzel rods for a penny from a tall glass jar.
• Shooting hoops on the basketball court outside.
* Having me explain to him that I was moving across town, but I would still come to visit.
***
In 1962, my grandparents built the first four-level home in Crawfordsville. The house stood at the front edge of an immense cornfield on a little rise. The builder showed it off by giving an open house right before we moved in. Brand new furniture from a local store filled the rooms. Some folks from our old neighborhood on Pike Street stopped in out of curiosity. The Padgetts, the Lookabills and the Balls dropped in to ooh and aah over the sunken family room and the small apartment attached to the side of the house. This is where Great Grandma Luddy would live and die a few months after she moved in with us.
I went to a new school and made new friends. My Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Tom moved into Great Grandma Luddy’s old house so I still visited the cemetery where Jimmy was buried. I also located the sites where my Great-Great Grandma Clouse is buried and my two great uncles who died when they were eighteen and nineteen years old. I always went to check on Jimmy’s grave and thought about what he missed.
***
What Jimmy Missed
1962-1965
• Crouching under a desk at school while practicing an air raid drill.
• Securing a place in the basement and designating it as a bomb shelter stocked with canned foods and boxes of mac and cheese and candy.
• Wondering how many pigs lived in that bay in Cuba and why America and Russia were fighting about it.
• Watching John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth three times in four hours and fifty-five minutes, on a little black-and-white television set.
• Longing to grow up and be an astronaut so you could ride a spaceship to the moon.
• Hearing an announcement over the PA while in school on November 22, 1963 that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas.
• Grabbing schoolbooks, your coat and leaving school early to go home to both of your parents.
• Staying glued to a tiny Admiral TV set in the family room for three days as the everyone watched the events of the tragedy unfold.
• Wondering why a prancing black horse with no rider had a pair of boots tucked backwards in the stirrups on the saddle.
* Learning about the passage of the Voting Rights Act for Black Americans and why white people were so angry about something that should have been in place since 1870.
***
Sometime in the spring of my sixth-grade year, I noticed Grandpa Jack had grown
really quiet. He often sat at the sliding glass door staring off into the back yard and
beyond. I remember the deep sighs and the “Oh me’s” he uttered. I noticed big red
welts on his arms crusted over with pink calamine lotion. Deep down, I was really
concerned, but also caught up in pre-teen turmoil. I was chubby and wore white cat-eye glasses with points swept up at the corners and donned clip-on bows in my
flipped up hair. I wondered how I would fit in since all the sixth-grade students from
the city and county would be feeding into one junior high school for seventh grade.
A For Sale sign went up in the front yard of our home in Pleasant Meadows and we moved back to the old house on Pike Street. All of my new bedroom furniture from Pleasant Meadows fit into the two upstairs rooms I had to myself. My twin beds were placed on either side of an elongated window that looked out over the front yard. I could sit and watch as the neighborhood kids walked or rode by. Two from my old gang would be in my seventh-grade class; John and a girl named Barb. It was good to live near them again. John still looked the same. Seeing him again reminded me of Jimmy’s picture. Jimmy would have been getting ready for high school that fall of 1965 and there were so many things he was going to miss.
***
What Jimmy Missed
1966-1970 and beyond
• Girls developing breasts and swaying hips and Clairol Summer Blonde hair
• Flirting with girls and taking them to the Strand Theatre so he could make out in the balcony.
• Picking tassels off corn for DeKalb as a teenage rite of passage in Indiana.
• Standing in line at the Dari-Licious, home of the cone with the cherry on top, and girls greeting him with, “May I help you?” while sliding the glass serving window open.
• Taking Driver’s Ed with Coach Knecht joking the whole time you are trying to drive.
• “Bombing” around the “Dog” and the “Diner” on Friday and Saturday nights to see and be seen.
• The loop of honking, speeding, and slowing so taunts could be shared and tales could be told on Monday morning back in school.
• Graduating from Crawfordsville High School in 1967, then heading to Colorado to drive
a snowplow or work on the ski lift for the sake of getting a “Rocky Mountain High.”
• Missing a really good chance of dying like Lloyd or Sam in a war not many people understood, few people wanted, and nobody won.
• Fretting over a birth date in the draft lottery and being one of the first to go to Vietnam.
• Suffering with the effects of Agent Orange or post-traumatic stress disorder well into his adulthood; maybe the rest of his life.
• Hippies, Flower Power, psychedelic mushrooms, tripping on acid, Beatlemania and a purple haze
• Marriage, children, and growing old
***
Today I went for a walk in my old hometown of Crawfordsville, Indiana. I have been gone since I was seventeen and we moved back to be closer to my husband’s mother. I walked up the hill past my Great Grandma Luddy’s old house with new gray siding and flowers and shrubs planted and arranged neatly in the mulch. I crossed the street and turned onto the gravel roadway that snakes along either side of the cemetery. I paused at my Grandma Dorothy and Grandpa Jack’s graves. I stared at the weather worn names and dates of the relatives who passed long before I was born. I walked on up around a copse of bushes with a tall fir tree in the middle. I passed a row of headstones lining the right side of the road. When I almost reached the end, a sense of déjà vu came over me. I turned to see the photo of a little boy with a closed-mouth smile. It was Jimmy’s grave and I almost missed it.