“But the narrowness, the censure,” Mike protested. “I don’t know how you can take it Sunday after Sunday. All in the name of religion. I don’t know why it just doesn’t kill something in you.”
He was silent so long that she leaned closer across the table and peered into his face. In the guttering light from the candle stub jammed into the grimy Chianti bottle, it seemed to shift and change, as though different muscles than any she had ever seen were coming into play. He looked up, and a stranger looked out of the green eyes: unformed, austere, painfully young.
“It did,” he said. “It did indeed. Want to hear about what of mine religion killed, Mike?”
She realized that he was not a little drunk.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to hear.”
“Well,” he said, settling back into the booth and propping a foot up on it, “I was a preacher once. Still am, I guess; I haven’t been un-ordained yet. A bona fide, Bible-toting, ordained minister of the Southern Baptist Church, graduate of Marian Breathitt Bible College in West Tennessee, shepherd to the good flock of the Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Ottley, Mississippi, population nine hundred eighty-eight after I got there, twenty miles west of Greenville in the Mississippi Delta. Good preacher, too. Baptized eleven people at my first revival. Started the country’s first Christian preschool program. In demand all over Washington County for weddings and baptisms and funerals. Does any of this surprise you?”
Mike stared at him across the burn-scarred Formica, slowly shaking her head. A part of her was speechless with surprise, but an older, deeper part was not. She could imagine his stocky figure in a stark country pulpit; see the coiled power in his arms as he gestured, the fervor in the narrow green eyes, the light on the slant-planed, sunburnt face.
“Well, it didn’t anybody else, either,” he went on, tossing down a swallow of Canadian Club and grimacing. “Least of all my mother. My mother was a saint, Mike. You don’t want to mess with one of those. Loretta Jasper Canaday, born, lived, and died a saint in Birmingham, Alabama, without ever leaving home to go anywhere but the company store and church. Married my dad to reform him, had my older brother and sisters and me, much later, and then threw him out when I turned six and he wouldn’t give up the booze. I guess you couldn’t blame her … he used to beat up on her some. I remember the bruises and the Band-Aids. She’d never complain about them, but we’d all get down on our knees and pray for Daddy an extra hour after one of those sessions. I don’t remember much about him. I heard later from my aunt Doreen that he died in Texas after my mother did. Anyway, my brother was old enough to go into the mill when Daddy left, and so there was a little bit of money, and the girls helped out some, and Mother made cakes and pies and things for neighborhood affairs. All so little Samuel could be a preacher. I don’t know how it got into her mind that that’s what I should be, or why I went along with it, but I was so accustomed to praying and being prayed over that it seemed to me the natural thing to do. I got used to thinking of myself as special and sanctified. Besides, I had no desire to go into the mill like Daddy and Frank, my brother. Godalmighty, but Tennessee Coal and Iron cast a long and dirty shadow over my childhood. I remember the stink and the burns and the filthy clothes when they came in. Uh-uh. No way. Not for little saint Sammy. I took a job as assistant to the sexton in our church when she decided I was old enough to do a little seemly labor, and that’s what I did until I got out of high school. The Lion’s Club sent me to Marian Breathitt on a scholarship, and since Mama died right after I graduated, I didn’t go back to Birmingham. Not for a long time.
“But before she departed, Mama picked my wife out for me. Oh, yeah, Mike, I was married; it was almost a scandal for a young Southern Baptist minister to take his first church without a wife. People might get to wondering if he was spilling his seed upon the ground like Onan, or worse. And God knows I had the seed. I met Jackie at Marian Breathitt when I was a junior and she was a freshman, and Mama approved, and we got married the day I graduated. Jackie was a pretty thing then, little and round and red-haired with a little turned-up nose and crinkly blue eyes and almost as many prayer calluses on her knees as Mama. It was a marriage made in heaven. Me, Jackie, and Mama. I guess she felt like she could go on and die after she got our knot tied, and that’s just what she did. We went to Memphis to the Peabody Hotel for a weekend on our honeymoon, and of course little Jackie got pregnant the first time she took off her panties, and so by the time I was settled in Ottley and knew my way around town, Frannie, our little girl, was born, and we were the perfect little preacher family. Looked like we ought to be on the top of a wedding cake, all of us. Cute little cusses. It was 1961 and I was twenty-one years old and she was nineteen. We had a tiny little asbestos-siding house right by the church, not much more than a shack, really, but it was ours, and neither of us had ever even had a room of our own before, and we thought we were in grown-up heaven. She planted flowers and tomatoes and beans and a row or two of corn, and I built a little fence and got a barbecue grill from the A&P and a push lawn mower, and Frannie grew a head of curls that the Gerber people would have killed for, and her first word was Dee-sus. For Jesus. Really. They could have hung a Pray-TV series around us.”
He fell silent, lost in some 1960s idyll that Mike had not known actually existed; it was so alien from her own first days of marriage. It was hard for her not to Stare at him. His air of stolid aloneness was almost complete, had been since she had first met him. She could not imagine him kissing a small, round wife or fondling a little curly-haired daughter. She thought he was not going to continue, but finally he did, looking up and smiling at her. It was not a pleasant smile.
“I don’t guess I have to tell you what happened,” he said. “The same thing happened to you, and in Mississippi, too. Except I didn’t go looking for the Civil Rights Movement. Lord God, no. Outside agitators down here stirring up God’s order of things? What would the Southern Baptists say? What would Mama say? So the movement came to me. There wasn’t anything on the order of Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1961, but there were advance people down there starting a voter registration program, college kids from the North and East, and some young blacks from King’s organization in Atlanta. You might even have been in jail with some of them a couple of years later. Well, they were just my age, and it was inevitable that they’d seek me out and try to enlist me. A young, white southern preacher in their ranks? I would have been a perfect agent in place. I was morally outraged, but I decided that the only Christian thing to do was hear them out; guess I thought I could convert them. Hell, I thought I could have converted Genghis Khan in those days. So I met with a few of them at the parsonage.
“Jackie carried on like they were devils out of hell. Took Frannie and went in the bedroom and locked the door. Prayed the whole time they were there. At least they had the good sense not to bring a Negro with them. Not then, anyway. The first time they came, I had the Bible out, all ready to match them Word for word. Only it never came to that. They didn’t even need to fire a shot across my bow. I was in the ranks after two hours.”
He looked at her intently. “Do you remember what it was like, Mike? Those early days in the movement? You must. It got you too. The camaraderie, the sense of yourself as part of a small, elite band of idealistic revolutionaries; the exhilaration of danger; the … sensuality of it, somehow; the sheer charisma and force? Do you remember?”
She nodded wordlessly. She remembered.
“Well, I’d never been a part of anything attractive in my life. Never been a self-activator, but only a follower. Followed my mother, Jackie, my teachers, the Lord. And here came this bunch of self-assured, immensely attractive, Ivy League kids who brought with them a world of books and ideas and cities and easy manners and smart talk and good clothes; who came down there following a cause so noble and selfless that you’d have to be made of iron not to want to fall in behind it. Like your Richard. I’d have probably followed that dude clear back to Cambridge. And there was the she
er physical glamour of the danger. The electricity in your gut. It didn’t take long for them to show me a Sam Canaday I never knew was in there. Fearless, reckless, committed, passionate, dashing … me. Dashing. I learned to smoke cigarettes and drink, Mike, and not the way an Elyton Village mill hand smoked and drank, either. I learned to really read; I read constantly, night after night, till dawn, and got up without being the least bit tired. I learned to say shit and fuck and squint through cigarette smoke. Pretty soon I was marching and working for the poor, shit-scared blacks in Washington County, who only wished I’d shut up and the Yankees and city niggers would go home, and then I started putting up the visiting blacks who came over to Mississippi in the parsonage. I worked with SNCC and CORE, and I traveled around Mississippi with one of the advance teams for a week one summer, setting things up and saying shit and fuck and squinting through smoke. Jackie was terrified and furious. She was at the point of leaving me and taking Frannie back to her folks in Tennessee, but by that time she was pregnant again, and had gained almost fifty pounds, and she just couldn’t get around very well. Of course, the church was ready to throw me out, but I was oblivious to all of it. I was doing God’s work; I had found me a new God, one the country Baptists didn’t know existed, one who said it was all right to say shit and fuck, one who said it was meet and right that Sam Canaday from Elyton should be a charismatic and fearless freedom fighter. Looking back, I really believe I thought I was immortal in those days.”
“We all did,” Mike said. “It was pretty heady stuff. Stronger and older heads than yours got turned in those years. And after all, Sam, if a pastor can’t be in the vanguard of a fight that’s so obviously for the right, who can?”
“I wasn’t a pastor by that time, Mike. I didn’t give a shit about the welfare of my congregation. I hardly even spent any time in the church. And I’m not sure the movement itself mattered all that much to me. I spent all my time sitting around in curtained rooms late at night, with the lights turned off so the Klan wouldn’t get suspicious. Drinking and smoking and saying shit. What I was was a world-class, monumental, pain-in-the-ass romantic. The movement itself was romantic in the extreme. All revolutions are. Christ, we were like the RAF, such little elitists … but what we really were was killers.”
“Come on, Sam …” Mike broke in.
“Yes.” His voice overrode hers. “Killers. Romantics are the ultimate killers. I read something in Esquire just last week; a guy from Harvard being quoted as saying, ‘Romanticism can lead to Dachau.’ It’s true. A romantic refuses to look at things as they are, and that’s the most dangerous thing in the world. I know. I was one, and I killed my wife and child.”
“Sam!” Mike’s breath hissed out in cold, pure shock.
“Oh, I didn’t beat ’em or shoot ’em or anything like that, Mike. I just preached one too many sermons about the blacks in a white county in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s, or took in one houseful too many of blacks and Yankee agitators. I’ll never know which it was. Jackie kept telling me it was dangerous. God, she was scared; she was terrified, cried all the time, wouldn’t go out of the house. I remember that I felt nothing for her but a kind of holy contempt, for her blubbering, and anger for making a coward out of my daughter. Frannie was cringing at her shadow by that time. I should have listened to her. One night a carful of night riders came easing by the parsonage, vroom-vroom-vroom, and pitched a little old homemade bomb into the house, and blew fat little Jackie Jefferson and her curly-headed kid into very small pieces. Hardly even found a chunk of either one big enough to bury. They never got the guys.”
“Oh, Sam,” she whispered. “Oh, my God. I had no idea …”
She remembered only the night before, her own voice saying, “If you’re such an expert on loving, where’s your family?” She closed her eyes in pain. Salt burned behind them.
“How could you know?” he said, in a normal, even cheerful voice. “No reason you should or could have known. Listen, Mike, I’m not telling you things to make you feel sorry for me, so save the tears. It was a very long time ago, and I’ve done what atoning I can for it. There’s no grieving left for me to do. Come on, now. Don’t you want to hear how I overcame my sorrow and became a world-famous legal advocate?”
“Sure,” she said, looking at him through a swim of faintly tipsy tears. “I guess so. Sam … those scars on your hands. Were they … were you …?”
“Naw. I wasn’t even home. I was off in the next town in a black juke joint down by the river saying shit and fuck. The fire was almost out by the time I got home. No, I got these working in the mill. The good old Tennessee Coal and Iron, back in Birmingham, where I started out. It got me after all.”
“You went back and worked in the mill?”
“Yep. I couldn’t have stayed in Mississippi after that. If the Klan hadn’t gotten me, my own congregation would have. And I couldn’t preach anymore; I was still too much of a romantic for that, if a failed one. God is not a romantic. And I wasn’t fit to do anything else. So I went back home and moved in with my sister and her family, and spent the next ten years puddling steel and drinking everything wet in north Alabama and fighting and whoring, and when I was sober and not working, I’d hole up in my room and read. I never lost the itch to read that those rich, liberal white kids lit in me that year. And I never forgot that other world that they showed me. I think, even if Jackie hadn’t—died—I would have soon outgrown her, Mike. God help me, I was already on that road. I don’t know what I’d have ever done about it. Eventually I just got tired of sulking in a tenement room in Birmingham, and I came over to Atlanta and went to Georgia State at night and on to Oglethorpe Law, and … here I am.”
“Is it better for you?” Mike said. “Is it different, the law? Are you different?”
“I don’t know.” He frowned into his glass. “I thought it would be. I thought I was. But maybe not. I’m still carrying on like a romantic, and I really do know better than that.”
“The law is hardly romantic,” Mike said.
“This case is. It’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Or maybe not. He can’t win, but maybe we can help him win something else.”
“What? After he loses his house he’s going to die. What’s there left to win?”
“Haven’t we been over this already?” Sam Canaday said. “Come on, Mike, use your imagination, like a good and true romantic.”
“That’s one thing you can’t accuse me of,” Mike said. “There’s no such thing as a romantic journalist.”
“Are you kidding?” Sam Canaday jeered at her, holding his half-full glass of Canadian Club aloft in a toast and squinting at her through it. The past half hour might never have happened; the searing, intimate words might never have been said. “You’re as hopeless as Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell put together. Take your daughter, Rachel, the would-be nymphet, she of the prepubescent sensuousness. I quote: ‘I’ve always tried to be a mentor to her, a sister or a friend.’ Romantic bullshit, Mike. It’s dangerous, remember that. You’re her mother. Stop being her friend and be her mother. And be a mad mother.”
He laughed, and some of the whiskey slopped over the glass onto the tabletop. “Be one mad muthuh, sister. God, this is disgraceful. I think I’m drunk. I haven’t been drunk since I left Birmingham. We’d better get out of here, before I revert completely and put the move on you. Do you think you can drive the Toyota?”
“Of course I can,” she said stiffly. His remark about Rachel stung.
Outside on the wet pavement, he put his arm heavily around her shoulder and peered into her face.
“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said, and his voice was clearer. “I didn’t mean to dump on you or jump on you. I’m not a good drinker, and it was a great night until I got started. Don’t let this ruin it.”
“I won’t,” she said. “It didn’t. I … like knowing about you. It changes things.”
“Not too much, I hope,” he said.
“No. Not too much.”
He walked quite steadily beside her through the cool dampness of the deserted streets to the parking lot and fished the Toyota’s keys out of his pocket and paid the somnolent attendant, but when his head touched the back of the front seat his eyes closed, and he leaned against the door on his side and slept. Mike did not know how to get home on the freeway, so she pointed the car home the old way, straight down the old Roosevelt Highway beside the Atlanta and West Point Rail Road track. It was like driving through the demilitarized zone in West Berlin: the wet, oil-slicked, barren streets and the row after row of deserted and padlocked warehouses. It occurred to Mike that they might be in real danger if she were forced to stop the car, but somehow the thought did not bother her. An occasional unbroken streetlight cast a halo of sodium orange over broken railroad tracks and weed-buried cement blocks, but she saw no living thing, not even a cat or a rat. The green glow from the dashboard showed the time to be past midnight.
After half an hour she was out of the city and on the road home, passing through one after another of the shabby, quiet little industrial towns that lined the highway toward Lytton. Traffic thinned, and soon only an occasional set of headlights swept through the Toyota, and then none at all. She switched on the radio, and Nat King Cole’s voice swam out of the green-lit darkness: “‘She wore blue velvet, and bluer than velvet were her eyes …’ “
Sam Canaday muttered something in his sleep and shifted his weight so that he slumped over toward her. His head rolled against her shoulder, his cheek loose and vulnerable against her upper arm. She flinched and started to shrug away, and then, feeling suddenly shy, did not. He murmured again, louder, and she put her head closer to hear him, and her lips brushed his hair. It felt cool and silken, and looked very pale in the dashboard light. She did not flinch away this time. “What?” she said.
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