Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [10]
As soon as Peter arrived inside the house, Alyne informed him of what had transpired. He stared down both boys, then grabbed Walter by the collar and took him to a back room. Just as he drew back the switch, Walter wailed, “I did it Daddy! I did it! But Edward Charles was with me, too! He was right there!”
Both boys were pummeled. “That was the worst ass-whuppin’ we ever got,” Eddie said. “Both of us.”
Not quite. Although Alyne spent most of her time either working, cooking, or gardening, her hobby was collecting old coins. Whenever Alyne stumbled upon a vintage piece of currency, she’d place it to the side and save it. “I had four to five hundred silver dimes,” she once said. “And ‘V’ nickels.” One day, little Walter figured out that his mother was stashing the loot in a closet by the staircase. “First he tries to pick the lock,” Pam, his sister, recalled. “Then he just got a hammer and beat off the door.” Walter filled up his pockets, taking—among other valuables—his mother’s prized 1805 silver dollar. “That evening I lined everyone up,” Alyne said. “I knowed who got the money. Who spent those dimes. But they had to tell me. My husband, he saw the whites in my eyes and without a word he went out and got a switch and started plaiting it. They were all sitting there looking pitiful. Pam and [Eddie] kept saying, ‘Walter, why don’t you tell Daddy you’ve got the money?’ And Walter, he’d just sit there with a straight face and say, ‘Why don’t you tell Daddy you’ve got it?’ ”
Finally, after failing to elicit an admission, Peter Payton lined up his three children. He started with Walter, and unleashed a beating remarkable for its power and duration. “Before he was through Walter fessed up,” Pam said. “So the others didn’t have to get whipped.”
Eddie and Walter took special delight in tormenting Pam, an easy target for the two boys. The brothers would wedge a bucket of water above her door, then wait for Pam to walk through and have it spill atop her head. In the middle of the night they scratched against her wall and made spooky sounds. “But the best thing we ever did,” said Eddie, “is we put this sheet outside her window, then started shaking it back and forth like a ghost. She freaked out . . . probably didn’t sleep for a month.”
Years later, when Walter was asked how he developed his football skills, he thought back to the torturing of Pam. “When you have an angry sister chasing you with a broom and a wet dishrag,” he said, “you pick up moves you never had before.”
In a typical sports narrative, Walter Payton should be a star athlete from the very beginning—the fastest, strongest, toughest, most hard-nosed fella on the black side of Columbia. He should be the can’t-miss kid; the hero in the making, bestowed with an uncanny greatness perfectly suited for a future in the NFL or NBA or major leagues.
With Payton, there is little of that. He certainly wasn’t uncoordinated. The speed was good, the strength above average. But in the fall of 1960, as he entered the first grade at the segregated John J. Jefferson High School,1 Walter was merely one of thirty-two black faces in Mrs. Vonceal McLaurin’s class. He was on the short side, with closely cropped hair, noticeably dark skin, and wildly expressive eyes the size of his mother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. Two years earlier, Eddie had begun his schooling at Jefferson, and the staff of gym teachers had immediately recognized something special in the boy. Walter, by comparison, merely existed. Whereas Eddie ran with the power of a motorcycle, Walter glided along, content to be just one of the kids. Eddie carried himself as a champion. Walter did not. If he longed to excel in sports, it was a tightly kept secret. “We didn’t have any great equipment or sandboxes at