Because of Winn-Dixie

  “Did he get killed?” I asked Miss Franny.

  “Good grief,” said Amanda. She rolled her eyes.

  “Now, Opal,” Miss Franny said, “I wouldn’t be standing in this room telling this story if he was killed. I wouldn’t exist. No ma’am. He had to live. But he was a changed man. Yes ma’am. A changed man. He walked back home when the war was over. He walked from Virginia all the way back to Georgia. He didn’t have a horse. Nobody had a horse except for the Yankees. He walked. And when he got home, there was no home there.”

  “Where was it?” I asked her. I didn’t care if Amanda thought I was stupid. I wanted to know.

  “Why,” Miss Franny shouted so loud that Winn-Dixie and Amanda Wilkinson and me all jumped, “the Yankees burned it! Yes ma’am. Burned it to the ground.”

  “What about his sisters?” Amanda asked. She moved around the desk and came and sat on the floor. She looked up at Miss Franny. “What happened to them?”

  “Dead. Dead of typhoid fever.”

  “Oh no,” Amanda said in a real soft voice.

  “And his mama?” I whispered.

  “Dead, too.”

  “And his father?” Amanda asked. “What happened to him?”

  “He died on the battlefield.”

  “Littmus was an orphan?” I asked.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Miss Franny Block. “Littmus was an orphan.”

  “This is a sad story,” I told Miss Franny.

  “It sure is,” said Amanda. I was amazed that she was agreeing with me about something.

  “I am not done yet,” Miss Franny said.

  Winn-Dixie started to snore, and I nudged him with my foot to try to make him quit. I wanted to hear the rest of the story. It was important to me to hear how Littmus survived after losing everything he loved.

  Well, Littmus came home from the war,” said Miss Franny as she went on with her story, “and found himself alone. And he sat down on what used to be the front step of his house, and he cried and cried. He cried just like a baby. He missed his mama and he missed his daddy and he missed his sisters and he missed the boy he used to be. When he finally finished crying, he had the strangest sensation. He felt like he wanted something sweet. He wanted a piece of candy. He hadn’t had a piece of candy in years. And it was right then that he made a decision. Yes ma’am. Littmus W. Block figured the world was a sorry affair and that it had enough ugly things in it and what he was going to do was concentrate on putting something sweet in it. He got up and started walking. He walked all the way to Florida. And the whole time he was walking, he was planning.”

  “Planning what?” I asked.

  “Why, planning the candy factory.”

  “Did he build it?” I asked.

  “Of course he did. It’s still standing out on Fairville Road.”

  “That old building?” said Amanda. “That big spooky one?”

  “It is not spooky,” said Miss Franny. “It was the birthplace of the family fortune. It was there that my great-grandfather manufactured the Littmus Lozenge, a candy that was famous the world over.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” said Amanda.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “Well,” said Miss Franny, “they aren’t made anymore. The world, it seems, lost its appetite for Littmus Lozenges. But I still happen to have a few.” She opened the top drawer of her desk. It was full of candy. She opened the drawer below that. It was full of candy, too. Miss Franny Block’s whole desk was full of candy.

  “Would you care for a Littmus Lozenge?” she asked Amanda and me.

  “Yes, please,” said Amanda.

  “Sure,” I said. “Can Winn-Dixie have one, too?”

  “I have never known a dog that cared for hard candy,” said Miss Franny, “but he is welcome to try one.”

  Miss Franny gave Amanda one Littmus Lozenge and me two. I unwrapped one and held it out to Winn-Dixie. He sat up and sniffed it and wagged his tail and took the candy from between my fingers real gentle. He tried to chew on it, and when that didn’t work, he just swallowed the whole thing in one big gulp. Then he wagged his tail at me and lay back down.

  I ate my Littmus Lozenge slow. It tasted good. It tasted like root beer and strawberry and something else I didn’t have a name for, something that made me feel kind of sad. I looked over at Amanda. She was sucking on her candy and thinking hard.

  “Do you like it?” Miss Franny asked me.

  “Yes ma’am,” I told her.

  “What about you, Amanda? Do you like the Littmus Lozenge?”

  “Yes ma’am,” she said. “But it makes me think of things I feel sad about.”

  I wondered what in the world Amanda Wilkinson had to feel sad about. She wasn’t new to town. She had a mama and a daddy. I had seen her with them in church.

  “There’s a secret ingredient in there,” Miss Franny said.

  “I know it,” I told her. “I can taste it. What is it?”

  “Sorrow,” Miss Franny said. “Not everybody can taste it. Children, especially, seem to have a hard time knowing it’s there.”

  “I taste it,” I said.

  “Me, too,” said Amanda.

  “Well, then,” Miss Franny said, “you’ve probably both had your share of sadness.”

  “I had to move away from Watley and leave all my friends,” I said. “That is one sadness I have had. And Dunlap and Stevie Dewberry are always picking on me. That’s another sadness. And the biggest one, my biggest sadness, is that my mama left me when I was still small. And I can hardly remember her; I keep hoping I’ll get to meet her and tell her some stories.”

  “It makes me miss Carson,” said Amanda. She sounded like she was going to cry. “I have to go.” And she got up and almost ran out of the Herman W. Block Memorial Library.

  “Who’s Carson?” I asked Miss Franny.

  She shook her head. “Sorrow,” she said. “It is a sorrow-filled world.”

  “But how do you put that in a piece of candy?” I asked her. “How do you get that taste in there?”

  “That’s the secret,” she said. “That’s why Littmus made a fortune. He manufactured a piece of candy that tasted sweet and sad at the same time.”

  “Can I have a piece to take to my friend Gloria Dump? And another one to take to Otis down at Gertrude’s Pets? And one for the preacher? And one for Sweetie Pie, too?”

  “You may have as many as you want,” said Miss Franny.

  So I stuffed my pockets full of Littmus Lozenges and I thanked Miss Franny for her story and I checked out Gone with the Wind (which was a very big book) and I told Winn-Dixie to get up, and the two of us left and went over to Gloria Dump’s. I rode right past the Dewberrys’ house. Dunlap and Stevie were playing football in the front yard and I was just getting ready to stick my tongue out at them; but then I thought about what Miss Franny said, about war being hell, and I thought about what Gloria Dump said, about not judging them too hard. And so I just waved instead. They stood and stared at me; but when I was almost all the way past, I saw Dunlap put his hand up in the air and wave back.

  “Hey,” he hollered. “Hey, Opal.”

  I waved harder and I thought about Amanda Wilkinson and how it was neat that she liked a good story the same as I did. And I wondered again . . . who was Carson?

  When we got to Gloria Dump’s, I told her I had two surprises for her and asked which one did she want first, the small one or the big one.

  “The small one,” said Gloria.

  I handed her the Littmus Lozenge and she moved it around in her hands, feeling it.

  “Candy?” she said.

  “Yes ma’am,” I told her. “It’s called a Littmus Lozenge.”

  “Oh Lord, yes. I remember these candies. My daddy used to eat them.” She unwrapped the Littmus Lozenge and put it in her mouth and nodded her head.

  “Do you like it?” I asked her.

  “Mmmm-hmmm.” She nodded her head slowly. “It taste sweet. But it also taste like people leavin
g.”

  “You mean sad?” I asked. “Does it taste like sorrow to you?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “It taste sorrowful but sweet. Now. What’s surprise number two?”

  “A book,” I said.

  “A book?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “I’m going to read it out loud to you. It’s called Gone with the Wind. Miss Franny says it’s a great book. It’s about the Civil War. Do you know all about the Civil War?”

  “I have heard it mentioned a time or two,” said Gloria, nodding her head and sucking on her Littmus Lozenge.

  “It’s going to take us a long time to read this book,” I told her. “There are one thousand and thirty-seven pages.”

  “Whoooeee,” said Gloria. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her hands on her stomach. “We best get started then.”

  And so I read the first chapter of Gone with the Wind out loud to Gloria Dump. I read it loud enough to keep her ghosts away. And Gloria listened to it good. And when I was done, she said it was the best surprise she had ever had and she couldn’t wait to hear chapter two.

  That night, I gave the preacher his Littmus Lozenge right before he kissed me good night.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “It’s some candy that Miss Franny’s great-grandfather invented. It’s called a Littmus Lozenge.”

  The preacher unwrapped it and put it in his mouth, and after a minute, he started rubbing his nose and nodding his head.

  “Do you like it?” I asked him.

  “It has a peculiar flavor . . .”

  “Root beer?” I said.

  “Something else.”

  “Strawberry?”

  “That, too. But there’s still something else. It’s odd.”

  I could see the preacher getting further and further away. He was hunching up his shoulders and lowering his chin and getting ready to pull his head inside his shell.

  “It almost tastes a little melancholy,” he said.

  “Melancholy? What’s that?”

  “Sad,” said the preacher. He rubbed his nose some more. “It makes me think of your mother.”

  Winn-Dixie sniffed at the candy wrapper in the preacher’s hand.

  “It tastes sad,” he said, and sighed. “It must be a bad batch.”

  “No,” I told him. I sat up in bed. “That’s the way it’s supposed to taste. Littmus came back from the war and his whole family was dead. His daddy died fighting. And his mama and his sisters died from a disease and the Yankees burned his house down. And Littmus was sad, very sad, and what he wanted more than anything in the whole world was something sweet. So he built a candy factory and made Littmus Lozenges, and he put all the sad he was feeling into the candy.”

  “My goodness,” said the preacher.

  Winn-Dixie snuffed the candy wrapper out of the preacher’s hand and started chewing on it.

  “Give me that,” I said to Winn-Dixie. But he wouldn’t give it up. I had to reach inside his mouth and pull it out. “You can’t eat candy wrappers,” I told him.

  The preacher cleared his throat. I thought he was going to say something important, maybe tell me another thing that he remembered about my mama; but what he said was, “Opal, I had a talk with Mrs. Dewberry the other day. She said that Stevie says that you called him a bald-headed baby.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “I did. But he calls Gloria Dump a witch all the time, and he calls Otis retarded. And once he even said that his mama said I shouldn’t spend all my time with old ladies. That’s what he said.”

  “I think you should apologize,” said the preacher.

  “Me?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “You. You tell Stevie you’re sorry if you said anything that hurt his feelings. I’m sure he just wants to be your friend.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. “I don’t think he wants to be my friend.”

  “Some people have a strange way of going about making friends,” he said. “You apologize.”

  “Yes sir,” I said. Then I remembered Carson. “Daddy,” I said, “do you know anything about Amanda Wilkinson?”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Do you know something about her and somebody named Carson?”

  “Carson was her brother. He drowned last year.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yes,” said the preacher. “His family is still suffering a great deal.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Five,” said the preacher. “He was only five years old.”

  “Daddy,” I said, “how could you not tell me about something like that?”

  “Other people’s tragedies should not be the subject of idle conversation. There was no reason for me to tell you.”

  “It’s just that I needed to know,” I said. “Because it helps explain Amanda. No wonder she’s so pinch-faced.”

  “What’s that?” said the preacher.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Good night, India Opal,” the preacher said. He leaned over and kissed me, and I smelled the root beer and the strawberry and the sadness all mixed together on his breath. He patted Winn-Dixie on the head and got up and turned off the light and closed the door.

  I didn’t go to sleep right away. I lay there and thought how life was like a Littmus Lozenge, how the sweet and the sad were all mixed up together and how hard it was to separate them out. It was confusing.

  “Daddy!” I shouted.

  After a minute, he opened the door and raised his eyebrows at me.

  “What was that word you said? The word that meant sad?”

  “Melancholy,” he said.

  “Melancholy,” I repeated. I liked the way it sounded, like there was music hidden somewhere inside it.

  “Good night now,” the preacher said.

  “Good night,” I told him back.

  I got up out of bed and unwrapped a Littmus Lozenge and sucked on it hard and thought about my mama leaving me. That was a melancholy feeling. And then I thought about Amanda and Carson. And that made me feel melancholy, too. Poor Amanda. And poor Carson. He was the same age as Sweetie Pie. But he would never get to have his sixth birthday party.

  In the morning, me and Winn-Dixie went down to sweep the pet store, and I took a Littmus Lozenge for Otis.

  “Is it Halloween?” Otis asked when I handed him the candy.

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well, you’re giving me candy.”

  “It’s just a gift,” I told him. “For today.”

  “Oh,” said Otis. He unwrapped the Littmus Lozenge and put it in his mouth. And after a minute, tears started rolling down his face.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Do you like it?” I asked him.

  He nodded his head. “It tastes good, but it also tastes a little bit like being in jail.”

  “Gertrude,” Gertrude squawked. She picked up the Littmus Lozenge wrapper in her beak and then dropped it and looked around. “Gertrude!” she screamed again.

  “You can’t have any,” I told her. “It’s not for birds.” Then, real quick, before I lost my nerve, I said, “Otis, what were you in jail for? Are you a murderer?”

  “No ma’am,” he said.

  “Are you a burglar?”

  “No ma’am,” Otis said again. He sucked on his candy and stared down at his pointy-toed boots.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

  “I ain’t a dangerous man,” Otis said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m lonely. But I ain’t dangerous.”

  “Okay,” I said. And I went into the back room to get my broom. When I came back out, Otis was standing where I left him, still staring down at his feet.

  “It was on account of the music,” he said.

  “What was?” I asked.

  “Why I went to jail. It was on account of the music.”

  “What happened?”

  “I wouldn’t stop playing my guitar. Used to
be I played it on the street and sometimes people would give me money. I didn’t do it for the money. I did it because the music is better if someone is listening to it. Anyway, the police came. And they told me to stop it. They said how I was breaking the law, and the whole time they were talking to me, I went right on playing my music. And that made them mad. They tried to put handcuffs on me.” He sighed. “I didn’t like that. I wouldn’t have been able to play my guitar with them things on.”

  “And then what happened?” I asked him.

  “I hit them,” he whispered.

  “You hit the police?”

  “Uh-huh. One of them. I knocked him out. Then I went to jail. And they locked me up and wouldn’t let me have my guitar. And when they finally let me out, they made me promise I wouldn’t never play my guitar on the street again.” He looked up at me real quick and then back down at his boots. “And I don’t. I only play it in here. For the animals. Gertrude, the human Gertrude, she owns this shop, and she gave me this job when she read about me in the paper and she said it’s all right for me to play music for the animals.”

  “You play your music for me and Winn-Dixie and Sweetie Pie,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “But you ain’t on the street.”

  “Thank you for telling me about it, Otis,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

  Sweetie Pie came in and I gave her a Littmus Lozenge, and she spit it right out; she said that it tasted bad. She said that it tasted like not having a dog.

  I swept the floor real slow that day. I wanted to keep Otis company. I didn’t want him to be lonely. Sometimes, it seemed like everybody in the world was lonely. I thought about my mama. Thinking about her was the same as the hole you keep on feeling with your tongue after you lose a tooth. Time after time, my mind kept going to that empty spot, the spot where I felt like she should be.

  When I told Gloria Dump about Otis and how he got arrested, she laughed so hard she had to grab hold of her false teeth so they wouldn’t fall out of her mouth.