A Gathering of Old Men

by Ernest J. Gaines

  “I christened him,” Auguste said. “I’m his parrain. You must know how I feel.”

  “Ain’t we wasting time, Fix?” Luke Will asked, from the back of the room again.

  “Jean and Gi-bear say no, Luke Will. Even my good friend A-goose says no.”

  “A-goose is an old man, and don’t have all his senses,” Luke Will said. ’Gilly and Jean want to keep their good names with the niggers. Gilly want to play football with niggers, mess around with them little stinky nigger gals. Beat Ole Miss tomorrow, that’s what he wants. As for Mr. Jean there, he has to sell his hog guts and cracklings to the niggers. No decent white man would buy ’em.”

  “Is that so, Gi-bear?” Fix asked Gil. “Your brother’s honor for the sake to play football side by side with the niggers—is that so?”

  “Luke Will’s days are over with, Papa,” Gil said. “Luke Will’s days are passed. Gone forever.”

  “And mine?” Fix asked him. “Mine, Gi-bear?”

  “Those days are gone, Papa,” Gil said, “Those days when you just take the law in your own hands—those days are gone. These are the ’70s, soon to be the ’80s. Not the ’20s, the ’30s, or the ’40s. People died—people we knew—died to change those things. Those days are gone forever, I hope.”

  “What day is gone, Gi-bear?” Fix asked him. “The day when family responsibility is put aside for a football game? Is that the day you speak of, Gi-bear?”

  “I’m not speaking of family responsibility, Papa,” Gil said. “I’m speaking of the day of the vigilante. I’m speaking of Luke Will’s idea of justice.”

  “So I’m a vigilante now, huh, Gi-bear?” Fix asked him.

  “That’s what Luke Will wants us to do,” Gil said. “He and his gang still think the world needs them. The world has changed, Papa. Luke Will and his gang are a dying breed. They need a cause like this to pump blood back into their dying bodies.”

  “And Beau?” Luke Will asked Gil. He had to speak to Gil’s back, because Gil would not give him the respect of looking round at him. “Beau,” Luke Will said again. “He’s more alive than I am at this moment?”

  “Well, Gi-bear?” Fix asked.

  “Beau is dead, and I’m sorry, Papa,” Gil said. “But I would like people to know we’re not what they think we are. They all expect us to ride tonight. They’re all waiting for that. I say let them wait. Let them wait and wait and wait.”

  “And you there, Mr. Butcher of hog-gut fame?” Fix said, looking up at Jean.

  “They want something to happen,” Jean said, wiping his face with a handkerchief. He wiped the palms of his hands and put the handkerchief back. “I go along with Gilly.”

  Fix looked up at him, nodding his head; then he looked around at the rest of the people in the room.

  “And the rest of you, how you feel?” he asked. “You feel that this, this butcher and this, this All-American got a point?”

  “We’re wasting time,” Luke Will said.

  No one else spoke out. They only mumbled among themselves. Neither Russ, Claude, nor I said anything. I was not about to open my mouth.

  “Well, Gi-bear?” Fix asked.

  “They’ll listen to you, Papa,” Gil said. “Make them see that it’ll hurt the family. It’ll hurt our name.”

  “But especially yours, huh, Mr. All-American?”

  “It would hurt me, Papa. Yes.”

  Fix looked from Gil to the woman sitting on the bed with her head bowed. She had been quiet a long time, but never once raised her head to look at anyone. Fix looked at the little boy in his lap and patted him on the leg.

  “You know this little boy I’m holding here?” he asked, looking back at Gil. “Tee Beau. No more papa.” He looked at Gil awhile to let those words make an impression; then he nodded toward the woman on the bed. “You know that lady sitting there—Doucette? Huh? No more husband.”

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” Gil said. “I’ll do all I can for Tee Beau and Doucette.”

  “Sure, you will,” Fix said. “We all will. But now her husband, his papa, your brother, lay dead on a cold slab in Bayonne, and we do nothing but sit here and talk. Well, Gi-bear?”

  Gil lowered his head, and didn’t answer.

  “I wait, I wait. I wait for all my sons, but especially for you. The one we sent to LSU. The only one in the family to ever go to LSU. The only one to ever get a high education. The educated one, Alfonze, A-goose. We wait for Mr. Educated All-American. What does he say? He says don’t move. He says sit, weep with the women. Because he wishes to be an All-American. The other one I can understand. He must sell his hog guts. He never was bright. An elementary education was his schooling. But this one—all the way to the university.”

  “We’re doing nothing here but wasting time, Fix,” Luke Will said again. “Mapes needs help.”

  “I won’t go without my sons,” Fix said. “All my sons. There will be no split in this family. This is family. Family. The majority, or none.”

  “And let those niggers stand there with guns, and we don’t accommodate them? They want war, let’s give them war,” Luke Will said.

  A couple of the other men agreed with him.

  “I’m not interested in your war, Luke Will,” Fix told him. “I’m interested only in my family. If the majority feels their brother is not worth it, then the family has spoken. I’m only interested in my family.”

  Gil raised his head to look at his father. He was crying.

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” he said.

  “Sorry, Gi-bear? About what, Gi-bear?”

  “Everything.”

  “No. Explain, Gi-bear.”

  “For what happened, Papa. For Beau. For us all. That you think I’ve gone against you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for those old men at Marshall. Yes, Papa, I’m sorry for them, too.”

  “A regular Christ,” Fix said. He made the sign of the cross. “A regular Christ in our midst, Alfonze, A-goose. Feels sorry for the entire world.”

  The two old men, very thin, sat as erect as boards, and remained quiet.

  Fix continued to look at Gil. Then his head began moving back and forth, back and forth, so slightly, though, that it was almost unnoticeable. The longer he looked at Gil, the more his head moved back and forth. His dark pig eyes narrowed to where they were almost closed. He was still looking at Gil, looking at him as though all trust and belief and hope had vanished. Now he jerked his head toward him.

  “Leave, Gi-bear,” he said. “Go on. That is your mon’s bed you sit on. Where you were born, where Beau was born, where all you were born. Now you desecrate the bed with your body upon it. Go block. Go run the ball. Let it take the place of family. Let it bring flowers to that cemetery, La Toussaint. I don’t wish to see you in this house, or at that cemetery. Go. Go run the ball.”

  Gil could not believe what he was hearing. None of us could. He stared at his father, wanting to say something, but he could not. Fix’s small dark eyes in his broad, sunburnt face assured Gil that he meant every word he spoke.

  “Fix.” The old man nearest him leaned forward and touched him on the arm. “Fix,” he said.

  “I’m dead, Alfonze,” Fix said. “The one we worked for, hoped for, sacrificed for. I may as well go lay beside Maltilde.”

  “You’re not dead, Fix,” the old man said.

  “They say I am—the All-American and the butcher. They say my ideas are all past. They say to love family, to defend family honor, is all past. What is left? All my life, that is all I found worthwhile living for. My family. My family. No, there’s only one place left to go now, to the cemetery there in Bayonne—Beau and me beside Matilde.”

  “I’ll go to Marshall with you, Fix,” the old man said. His face did not show much emotion, and the long bony finger touching Fix’s arm did not show too much life, either. “I’ll take my gun and I’ll go with you, if that is your wish,” he said.

  “Two old men, Alfonze? A-goose was right. That is a farce.”

  “Others will join us, I’m sure. G
oudeau will join us—he has fire in him still. Montemare, Felix Richard—Anatole will get out of that chair.”

  “This is family, Alfonze,” Fix told him. “I have no other cause to fight for. I’m too old for causes. Let Luke Will fight for causes. This is family. A member of the family has been insulted, and family, the family must seek justice. But these, they say no. They say it is past when man must live for his family. So what else is left but to go lay in that cemetery with Beau and Matilde?” He looked at Gil sitting on the bed. “I told you to leave. Take your brother Mr. Hog Gut with you. I don’t wish to see either one of you ever again. Go, change your name if that will help you be All-American. Get out of my house. Go tell your friend Mapes this old Cajun will come to Bayonne at the law’s convenience. Now I have no more to say.”

  He took a big red print handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. He put the handkerchief back and held the little boy close to his chest and looked down at the floor.

  Gil stood up and turned to his brother Claude. Claude was scraping one of his thumbnails with the little pearl-handled knife.

  “Claude?” Gil pleaded with him. “Claude?”

  Claude went on scraping his thumbnail without answering Gil. He wouldn’t even raise his head. Gil turned to one of the old men, old Alfonze. “Parrain,” he said. “Haven’t I been a good boy, Parrain? Haven’t I always obeyed my father and obeyed you? When I come here to visit my father, don’t I visit you and all the rest of the people on the bayou? Don’t I go to mass with the family? Don’t I get tickets so all of you can attend the games? Don’t I, Parrain?” The old man looked at Fix, not at Gil. “Monsieur Auguste,” Gil said to the other old man. “Aren’t I a good boy, Monsieur Auguste?” But the old man only stared across the room. “Doucette?” Gil said to the woman on the bed. “You don’t like me anymore, Doucette? You don’t want Tee Beau to be like me anymore, Doucette? Hanh, Doucette?” The woman kept her head down and did not answer him. Gil looked around the room. The only people to look back at him were Luke Will and the other rough-looking guy, and they were not friendly looks, not by a long shot.

  Gil turned back to Fix. Fix sat in the chair, head bowed, slumped a little forward, like a stone bear.

  “Beat me if you want to,” Gil said. “I’ll get the whip. Beat me if you want to, but don’t send me away from this house. Don’t send me away from home, Papa?”

  Fix sat there like stone. He was not hearing anything anymore.

  Russ put his arm around Gil’s shoulders and let him out of the room, with me a step behind them. The people in the other room had already heard what had happened, and they were not looking at Gil the way they did when he first came there. They gave him plenty of room to pass this time, and I saw a woman holding back the same little girl who had spoken to him before and wanted to come to him again. The little girl struggled and struggled, but the woman held her back, pressing the girl’s head against her thigh.

  We pushed our way out onto the porch. Through the screen, I could see the sun going down behind the trees on the other side of the bayou. A thin purple cloud lay across the sun, making the sky look like a nice, serene painting.

  “You had to do what you did,” Russ said.

  “I could have run the other way,” Gil said.

  “And that would have been better?” Russ asked him.

  “It couldn’t be any worse,” Gil said.

  While we stood out on the porch, Luke Will and that other rough-looking guy came out there.

  “If you think this is the end of it, you’re crazy,” Luke Will said to Gil.

  “Get out of here, Luke Will,” Russ said. “You don’t speak for this family.”

  “Somebody better do it,” Luke Will said.

  “Nobody voted for you,” Russ said.

  “Maybe I’ll just take it as my duty, on principle,” Luke Will said.

  “I don’t want no trouble out of you, Luke Will,” Russ said. “Stay away from Marshall, and stay out Bayonne. I’m warning you.”

  “You don’t scare me, Russell,” Luke Will said. “You or that fat belly of a boss you got there don’t scare me the least.”

  “Just don’t start any trouble,” Russ said. “I’m warning you.”

  “The trouble already been started,” Luke Will said. “When niggers start shooting down white men in broad daylight, the trouble was started then.”

  “We don’t need your kind to settle it.”

  “Somebody got to do it ’fore it gets out of hand,” Luke Will said. “Next thing you know, they’ll be raping the women.”

  “That’s how it is,” Russ said to me. “If they can’t get you one way, they’ll bring in the women every time.”

  “Maybe you don’t mind if they rape your wife or your little daughter,” Luke Will said. “Maybe something like that’s been going on all the time, and you just don’t care.”

  He grinned at Russ. He wanted Russ to take a swing at him. But Russ was too cool for that.

  “You see the psychology behind it all?” he said to me.

  But I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t going to say a word while those two were standing there. I wasn’t going to even breathe out of my mouth.

  “You and your kind, your time has passed, Luke Will,” Russ said.

  “It ain’t my time you better worry about,” Luke Will said.

  “I’ll be around when you and your kind are long gone. You might kill him off in there,” he said to Gil. “But I’m go’n be around. Let’s go, Sharp.”

  They let the screen door slam behind them. They were both big men, big country red-necks, the kind Bull Connor used as his deputies back there in the ’60s. They went across the road to a white pickup, which had a gun rack in the cab and two guns on the rack. The truck also had a CB radio, and Luke Will got on the radio and began talking. The other guy, Sharp, started up the truck and drove away. We watched it go down the road.

  “What are you going to do?” Russ asked Gil.

  “I don’t know,” Gil said.

  “You want my opinion?” Russ said. “Go on back to Baton Rouge, try to get yourself some rest, play football tomorrow. Play the best game you ever played in your life.”

  Gil looked at Russ as if he couldn’t believe what he had heard him say.

  “What?” he said. “My brother is dead. Papa in there hating me, Claude hating me, Doucette, Tee Beau hating me—and you talk about a football game? Are you crazy?”

  “There isn’t a thing you can do here tonight,” Russ said. “Tomorrow you can do something for yourself, and for all the rest of us—play the best game you ever played. Luke Will and his kind don’t want to see you and Pepper in that backfield tomorrow. He doesn’t ever want to see you and Pepper together.”

  “And what about my brother?” Gil asked. “Claude? Papa? Doucette and Tee Beau? How would it look to them?”

  Russ shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “A lot wouldn’t understand. Many would hate it. But that game is going to be seen on TV by millions, and more of them will be pulling for you and Pepper than pulling against you.”

  “Damn the public,” Gil said. “I’m talking about my family. Not the damned public. My family.”

  “I’m thinking about your family, too,” Russ said. “Especially Tee Beau.”

  “And Papa?” Gil asked Russ.

  “Tee Beau,” Russ told him. “Tee Beau. Tee Beau’s future. You want to do something for your dead brother? Do something for his son’s future—play in that game tomorrow. Whether you win against Ole Miss or not, you’ll beat Luke Will. Because if you don’t, he’ll win tomorrow, and if he does, he may just keep on winning. That’s not much of a future for Tee Beau, is it?”

  “What about my papa?” Gil asked. “I’ve already killed him. Bury him tomorrow?”

  Russ laid his hand on Gil’s shoulder.

  “Gilly,” he said. “Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow. You c
an help Tee Beau tomorrow. You can help this country tomorrow. You can help yourself.”

  Gil looked away from him.

  “Well,” Russ said. “No more speeches. I have to report to Mapes. I’ll be out there in the car if you want to talk.”

  He left the porch, loosening his tie. Halfway to the road, he had already taken off the tie and the coat. He hung them on a hanger in the back seat of the car; then he got in front to speak on the radio.

  “He is right, Gil,” I said. “We ought to go back.”

  Gil didn’t answer me. He was looking across the road toward the trees along the bayou. The sun had sunk a little below the thin layer of purple cloud.

  “What you say, Gil?”

  “Leave me alone,” he said. “I just want to think. Dammit, don’t you see I just want to think?”

  Jacques Thibeaux

  aka

  Tee Jack

  He comes in just before sundown every day for his two Jack Daniels on the rocks. He talks sometimes; most times he’s quiet and moody. The rest of the customers, no matter how long they’ve known him, won’t start a conversation unless he speaks first. He has his own place, in the corner by the cigarette machine. From that corner he can look at the door where the nigger room used to be. He took that spot years ago so he could tell when one of his niggers came into the nigger room, and he would nod for me to go serve him something—beer, wine, whatever he wanted. Well, the nigger room’s been closed now some fifteen, seventeen years. Happened when all that desegregation crap was going on—niggers didn’t want to be segregated no more, so they stopped going in there. They would come to the store now and get their bottle and go squat against the wall outside to drink it, but they wouldn’t go into their own little private room no more. And surely they wouldn’t come in here round my white customers. Oh, once or twice, couple of them got up the nerve to try it, but from the way my white customers looked at them, and from the way I served them (shoving them their drinks and slopping some on the bar), they soon found out they wasn’t welcomed. So they quit trying to desegregate the white drinking room, and just bought their bottle out of the store, and went outside or in their cars or took the bottle back home to drink it. You see, this here ain’t no Marriott, and it ain’t no Holiday Inn, either—not yet, and I doubt if it ever will be. This here ain’t nothing but a little old bitty combination grocery store and liquor store setting in the fork of a road between a bayou and a river, where you got a room for white customers and another little private room for black customers, and that’s all there is to it. When they refused, some fifteen, seventeen years ago, to come into their own little bitty room, why I just sold them their bottle from behind the counter in the grocery store and let them take it on the outside, or anywhere else they wanted to drink it, didn’t make me no never mind, long as they wasn’t in here bumping up against my white customers. You can call me anything you want, but that’s how things are in little places like this. This ain’t no Baton Rouge and it ain’t no New Orleans, and it ain’t no Marriott and it ain’t no Holiday Inn—not yet, and God I doubt if it ever will be. Say what you want, I don’t care.