Jimmy by Robert Whitlow Read Free Book Online

pocked with run-down houses inhabited by slow-talking residents. Piney Grove had an Alabama counterpart twenty-five miles to the west.
    Boys in Cattaloochie County grew up scratching chigger bites after picking wild blackberries and assumed the most common type of jelly on earth came from dusky muscadines. People knew their neighbors, and if a local family bought a new car or pickup, they couldn’t expect to keep it a secret. Compared to the slow pace and simplicity of life in Piney Grove, Atlanta occupied another universe.
    The heart of Piney Grove was much the same as when Jimmy’s father walked its tree-lined streets as a twelve-year-old boy. But change pressed in from the Atlanta side of the county, and in recent years a few national chain stores had opened their doors. Lee Mitchell complained that Atlanta would eventually swallow Piney Grove. That, too, puzzled Jimmy.
    Six months out of the year, the sun beat down on any exposed red clay and baked it brickyard tough. Jimmy didn’t mind the heat. He didn’t know there were places where cool mountain breezes blew or refreshing afternoon showers fell. He and Buster played outside even if the summer sun made the air above the brown grass shimmer with heat.
    Just like his paternal grandfather and father, Jimmy attended the Piney Grove Elementary School. Jimmy couldn’t imagine Grandpa young enough to go to elementary school, but he’d shown Jimmy pictures to prove it. In one photograph Grandpa was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, standing next to the flagpole in front of the red brick building. The only difference in the school between then and now was the size of the trees along the sidewalk.
    S ATURDAY MORNING DAWNED SO BRIGHT AND CLEAR THAT Jimmy had to squint his eyes against the sun shining through the window at the end of his bedroom. The sun only woke him up on Saturday or Sunday. During the week, Mama made sure he was up in time to eat a good breakfast and get ready for school.
    The first thing Jimmy did every morning was put on his glasses. He kept them in a little basket that Grandma helped him make from the straw of an old broom. Jimmy lost his glasses a lot, so Mama kept an extra pair at the house and another in her pocketbook. She bought five or six pairs of glasses every time she took him to the eye doctor. People who knew Jimmy returned his lost glasses if they found them, but sometimes they stayed lost. There was a pair of glasses at the bottom of Webb’s Pond and another pair in the woods somewhere between Max’s house and the field with the black cows in it.
    Jimmy had a bathroom next to his room. Mama and Daddy slept at the other end of the hall in a bedroom that was as large as the living room beneath it. There were two other upstairs bedrooms, but nobody stayed in them unless relatives from out of town came for a visit. One of the guest bedrooms had a big bed with a white canopy on top. The other had two small beds, each the same size as the one in Jimmy’s room. Sometimes Jimmy would take a nap in one of the beds like his.
    On one wall of Jimmy’s room were shelves for his caps. Jimmy loved caps. When he wore a cap and pulled it down over his forehead, he looked like any other boy with glasses. Without a cap, people who didn’t know him sometimes stared at him for a second or two.
    Jimmy didn’t know how many caps he had. Every time he tried to count them, he missed one that was in the closet, underneath his bed, downstairs in the den, or stuck inside another one. He didn’t wear all his caps—the ones signed by baseball and football players were only to look at and show people who visited his room. His favorite caps to wear were a white-and-red one from the University of Georgia, and a green-and-yellow one from the John Deere Company. Daddy went to the University of Georgia, and Grandpa cut his grass with a lawn mower made by the John Deere Company. When Jimmy and Grandpa went fishing, they often