Some Go Home

by Odie Lindsey

  But Syl don’t know this. She can’t foresee anythin’, save the ruination of the memories she lugs around, farm to farm, year to year. Her fossil thoughts of handmade chairs and cast iron. A dowry of linen from somewheres, Carolina. Of family land, of commune.

  Curse all that history. Cast it all off. This here, now, is about the driving of the exodus, about the deliverance of this farm to the future. To a place beyond the clear-cutting of land by Allis-Chalmers and International Harvester. Hell, Mr. Wallis even swears they’ll move the whole goddamned big house into town! Make a monument of it in Pitchlynn proper, then build a country club out here on the land.

  A club?

  A club. Fancy housing in the footprint of tenant shack. A whole new community, like some limp jeremiad. A castrate place, producing nothin’ at all, and with no ability to further legacy.

  Hell, Hare thought. I’ll take it.

  Syl thinks I don’t know, that I cain’t hear her footfalls so quiet across them boards. That I’m sound asleep, imaginin’ the creak and bow of the floor to be some dreamlike drift, some vessel on water. As if the puff of breeze from her sneaking by me on the porch was some sea gust. As if I don’t know where she’s off to. As if I was asleep, unaware.

  I love her, goddamn her.

  8

  Gabe opened his cabin door and beckoned her inside. Syl looked around nervously and said nothing. The purple evening light was dimming into navy, and the smell of stew put a sumptuous undercurrent on the cabin air. She paced the room and stood near the dying fire, her eyes avoiding her host. Gabe stepped over to the cabinet and produced a glass of tart, so-called “Blackbird” wine.

  The orange light of mellowed embers. The now-and-again crack of splitting hickory. Syl could visualize their exodus with everything she had: her boy in tow; the three of them on the Illinois Central, toward Chicago. Away from the coming purge. She felt the future burning in her abdomen; movement had been happening all around them, all their lives. She could not and would not bear the idea of abandoning her life to the failure of expectation, or in this case, kindred hate.

  She believed that Gabe could save her. That they could change each other’s stories. The boy’s, too. Forever.

  “Chicago,” she whispered. “Can’t we go? Shouldn’t we both be born again?”

  The wine, having fermented for no more than a month, scratched her throat, flushing through her like dye in water. Like blood in water, billowing into diffusion. We can leave this place together, she thought. We’ve been pushed towards this all our lives.

  “Help me,” she whispered.

  Gabe sat down beside her, his dark skin shiny in the firelight.

  “You’re the only one who can take us,” Syl continued. “Me and the boy. There’s nobody else on this farm who can help. Nobody free of the obligation to Wallis, or of the violence that’s ’bout to boil up all around this place.”

  She reached over, slowly, and put her hand on his. “We have got to leave this farm, now. I must save my child. And I swear, you will find restoration in yours.”

  Gabe stared at her, and nodded, but he didn’t say a word.

  “Chicago,” she said. “Help us all.”

  9

  The next morning, Junior Bates and his SNCC compatriots stood on the small, splintered porch in front of Gabe’s cabin. They called to him, and knocked. When no answer came, they knocked again.

  Unsatisfied with the turnout at their meeting the night before, the activists had come to realize how vital local folks like Gabe really were to the cause. In particular, they had come to understand their tactical soft spot, their ambitious near-novelty without the involvement of community leaders. They had discussed this late into the night, discussed the local people while camped out in the pastorium in back of the single-room church, the Wallis Farm A.M.E. On military cots, in the stuffed air of the rectory, their bodies went unwashed and their fingers clasped cigarettes. They whispered of strategy, and felt powerful, felt adult. They were guerrillas, freedom fighters. They were out to reshape a nation.

  They could only glimpse the magnitude of history around them. Yet because they knew this limitation, they knew to trust only facts: it was August 1964, the end of Freedom Summer. It was gaspingly hot as they lay on creaking canvas cots. They knew Wallis Farm was nowhere near the coast, yet one of them had brought up Gilbert Mason anyway, a kindred example of civil disobedience in that Mason’s call to action had not gone right the first time. This, too, was a fact—this history was truth—and so they smiled upon hearing the man’s name: Mason. They imagined him down on the coast, in Biloxi, huddled with his community in their own clandestine meeting, 1959. The boys pictured their predecessors, the budding activists, all of whom had pledged to walk together onto the Whites Only beach, arm in arm, before wading into the Gulf waters, unstoppable.

  “Whoo,” Junior Bates had said with a chuckle. “Can y’all even imagine?”

  On their cots, in the dark, the young men recounted how things had actually unfolded after that first Biloxi meeting: Dr. Mason had shown up to that initial beach protest, that “Wade In” as it would be known . . . only to find that he was alone. Not a single one of his comrades had shown up.

  This was the first-ever direct-action protest in Civil Rights Mississippi.

  “Nineteen fifty-nine,” one of the young men had whispered. “I was only thirteen!” They had giggled at this, and then took turns recalling the story: how Dr. Mason had walked out onto that beach anyway, alone, onto the white Gulf Coast sand . . . whereupon he was hassled, and shackled, and lugged off by the cops.

  “Persistence,” another had stated, the word as packed as a prayer.

  A week after Dr. Mason’s arrest, he had marched right back out onto that same strip of beach. This time he’d been joined by eight others. And a week after that arrest, he’d been joined by over a hundred men, women, and children. The lot of them were beaten with pipes and pool cues.

  “Bloody Sunday,” one of the young men had whispered in the chapel.

  No matter. Dr. Mason and the others had returned to the beach the following week. And then they went again. And again, and again.

  The young men knew these facts, at least. “Tomorrow,” one said, tamping out his smoke. “We go to Gabe again.”

  Yet Gabe wasn’t at home. They figured that maybe he’d ridden into Pitchlynn, for the colored half of Saturday. They did not note the absence of his feist, June, who should have terrorized them from the shade beneath the raised cabin floor. They stepped off of the porch and then walked off of Gabe’s property, and back onto Wallis Farm, and the fight. They would try again later. Call on him again, and again, for however long it took.

  In the cabin, in the bedroom, in a ribbon of honeyed light, Gabe lay naked on the sheets. His body was chiseled by years of task and diet. His skin a smooth contradiction to the decades of sun.

  Gabe’s face and skull were collapsed like some caldera, having been battered beyond identity. Blood and serous fluid now coagulated in the heat, and a swarm of humming black flies skittered in and out of the wound. The tap stick club, bloodied, lay on the floor by the bed.

  The only other claim made on his body were his genitals, which were now shorn and littered in a far corner of the room. The serrations around their absence made his skin appear petaled. The laceration itself wept into the soak beneath his legs.

  SOME GO HOME

  1

  Colleen came to at daybreak, in the driver’s seat. One eye was swollen shut, and her jaw thrummed from being struck. A swarm of pain amassed around the exposed nerves of her bottom teeth—teeth that had punctured her lower lip before chipping off against the steering wheel.

  This was in the time before Derby, but just after the war. Four, maybe five years before she got pregnant.

  The sunlight was gentle through the haze of humidity. She looked out at the vast field of green corn she’d swerved into the night before, and the massive sprinkler truss she had hit head-on. The hood of her car
was wrinkled against the pivot irrigator tower.

  She held her breath, and twisted the keys in the ignition. Trembled with relief when the motor somehow cranked. The tires rubbed the battered wheel wells as she drove in reverse, doubling back in her ruts until she reached the county road.

  She passed boll buggy and row crop, farmhouse and hamlet, past clutters of country folk on warped wooden porches, their hair wild, their Quikrete carports attached to long-rooted double-wides. She passed buttoned-up single-family homes on modest acreages, houses that were clones, somewhat, of the one she’d grown up in (and the one she would one day wind up in with Derby).

  She followed the yellow line between Highways 7 and 15, toward Pitchlynn proper. At a stop sign just in town, the car’s engine light lit up; the vehicle shuddered as its power seeped away. She managed to turn toward a three-store strip mall before the engine was starved and the steering wheel locked. Colleen listened to the change in the asphalt grade as the Cavalier rolled dead in a beauty parlor parking spot.

  She lumbered out of the car in her miniskirt and desert combat boots. Her white blouse and pink tank top were marbled by blood. She had to steady herself against the vehicle before wobbling into the salon, and posting up against the reception desk.

  The air was frigid from industrial AC and fouled by the tang of hair dye. The room was loud with the yikyak of middle- and old-aged ladies, and the young and middle-aged women who primped them.

  Colleen stared around the room, the white of her open eye flared by a ruptured blood vessel.

  “What in the world?” a woman in foil strips hollered.

  “Lord have mercy,” another gasped.

  “Who is that?”

  The braid of mostly elder voices rose into a high-toned, full cackle, their comments spanning fear and fascination. Of course, nobody did anything, save lower their glamour mags and shake their heads in disbelief.

  “Land sakes, she’s bleedin’!”

  “She shore is.”

  “Well, how do you think she—”

  “Jesus, y’all,” a young beautician finally barked. “Somebody get up and give her a chair.” This woman did not wait for a volunteer, but instead cocked the hood back on a commercial hair dryer chair and yanked a client out from underneath. She then helped the broken stranger into the seat.

  “You’re okay, gal,” she said. “You’re okay.”

  Colleen tingled from the beautician’s touch. She sat down slowly, her contused back in spasm. Looking up at the young woman, she could not help but smile—which reopened the splits beneath her bottom lip.

  “Bitch!” she yelled, before the pain knocked her semiconscious.

  “Call the ambulance!” someone shouted. Though half of the room had been immobilized by profanity, the other half dug through large vinyl purses, clutching for clunky, pay-go cell phones on which their grandkids had preprogrammed 911.

  “Huh-uh,” Colleen mustered. “My folks can’t afford the bill.”

  The beautician spied the ball chain around Colleen’s neck and pulled the dog tags out from her tank top. “Scratch that, y’all. Somebody call the VA, quick!”

  “Hell, no.” Colleen shook her head violently. She tried to stand but doubled over, falling back into the chair.

  Again, the woman put her hand on Colleen. “VA clinic’s just up the road, girl,” she said. “We’ll drive you.”

  “No friggin’ way. That place wasn’t built for my body.” Colleen straightened up, even managed a tiny grin. “Anyhow, I swear, this is only as bad as it looks. I just need to get home. Please.”

  The beautician took a deep breath and glanced around the room. She shook her head, then called out, “Okay, y’all. Somebody get a damp towel. And some Goody’s powder. And grab that little first-aid kit in the reception desk. Pronto!”

  “Ice her dang face!” another woman ordered.

  “They’s a tube of Orajel in my purse somewhere!” yelled the most aged of the bunch.

  Colleen sat in a daze, reeking of bourbon and body oil, as the squad applied a hodgepodge of remedies. The ladies doted on her, and did their best to patch her up, before the young beautician announced that she was driving the stranger home.

  “I’m Deana,” she said, helping Colleen to her feet. The two ambled out the glass door, arm in arm.

  Colleen stopped in her tracks when they approached the totaled Cavalier. (She did not know whose farmland she had plowed through the night before, nor could she explain why, exactly, she’d swerved into the field at full throttle.) Deana said to keep moving, that they’d worry about the car later.

  “Just straight home, right?” Colleen asked as she sank into Deana’s passenger seat. “No VA. Promise, Deana?”

  “I promise,” Deana answered, patting the patient’s bare knee.

  Colleen muttered her address, and passed out.

  2

  She had redeployed a few months earlier, from formation at Fort Bragg to a picnic at her parents’ house, their porch banister and clothesline T draped in red, white, and blue bunting. A proliferation of plastic decor was brought in from Walmart, as were the red-checked tablecloths, blue plasticware, and plates. A posterboard sign boosted a hand-scrawled WELCOME HOME!

  It was glorious, Colleen thought. Really was.

  Her mother, Jeanette, would not let her lift a finger to prepare for the picnic, ordering Colleen to stay inside, where she sat impatiently, watching Extra and TMZ. Her friends and former coworkers had been invited, as had her mother’s friends and her father’s cohort, the latter mostly clad in coveralls with brass buckles, in work boots and net-backed ball caps. A hunk of the church group was on hand to rejoice.

  The card tables on the lawn showcased a brigade of ceramic and Tupperware potluck. A large cooler was full of Miller Lite, Milo’s tea, and Co-Cola. A Boston cream pie seemed to sigh from the heat, then collapsed onto its foil crust container. When at last Colleen ventured outside, people hugged her and shook her hand. They asked her how it had been, and she said, “Not too bad,” and they smiled and they nodded and thanked God, their enriched hamburger buns stuffed with the pulled pork that her father, Brice, had spent all night tending.

  “So glad to have you home,” folks said, and they meant it. They then moved on to speak of Sunday school or stormcasts, or to swap Pitchlynn gossip.

  Colleen did her best to be thankful for the fact that things had carried on without her. She told herself this was a good thing, that she didn’t need them to have needed her, and that wanting them to have needed her was not only unrealistic but selfish. As the picnic wore on, she tamped down all that needing, that wanting, and she instead smiled, and answered questions about her well-being and her plans.

  Ultimately, it was the clothes that unspooled her. The women at the picnic wore jeans whose back pockets featured button-down flaps with elaborate stitching. Silver thread loops and jags drew great attention to their asses. They were so odd and luxurious: these asses, these jeans. Colleen wondered when on earth people had moved to wear such embellishments. She was curious as to how folks had come to envy the flashiness of the gesture, the frivolity of it during a time of deployment, and devastation.

  Only a hiccup of culture had transpired without her. But those jean pockets? After she noticed them, she had noticed that the women’s hair was shorter and more angular. From there, it hit her like a slap: she didn’t know the songs on the radio, the new sitcoms or celebs, the gossip, the recently deceased, or, somehow, even those living in the spotlight. She was being lauded as exceptional, plated up as a hero with a heaping side of sacrifice, though not even a crumb of disposable culture had pause to mark her, their, absence.

  Brice, her daddy, had ordered the hog pre-gutted at the processing store, having long grown tired of using his own gambrel hooks, likewise of hair-scraping and blood collection. Colleen went with him to pick the pig up—a castrated male, not a gilt—and helped him sling the paper-wrapped cadaver in the truck bed. At the house, they had positioned the hog
on the expanded metal grate atop his pit, then lit the rick of hickory that was to be tended all night long, its smoke seeking him with every wind shift, his sweat pouring as he swabbed the steaming carcass with a newly bought floor mop, its yarn tendrils sopped in vinegary sauce. Hour after hour Brice had smoothed sauce onto flesh, while stoking or subduing the coals beneath the hog’s exposed, gutted belly. Colleen knew this ritual. It was familiar and homelike. In fact, the only real difference between this so-named “pig pickin’ ” and the many her daddy had put on before she deployed was that Brice now sipped Pepsi instead of Budweiser. (He’d experienced what was referred to as “an episode” while she was away, something her folks had not wanted to bother her about. The term worried Colleen sick—an “episode”—though her parents were dismissive if not defiant whenever the subject came up.)

  She blushed when the picnic guests toasted her service. Struck down beer after beer, eating neither pig nor pie, though patting her belly whenever Brice looked in her direction. She drank and she grinned until the visitors had peeled off, to better parties, or to relieve sitters, or to go over the next morning’s Sunday school lesson. When the party was over, only head and hooves left on the grate, Colleen started to help clean up, and was again banished by Jeanette. She grabbed a couple more beers and walked into her old bedroom. Stretched out on her bed, turned on the television, and shot the remote, again, again.

  3

  Over weeks, into months, the beers became a rope for Colleen. That is, they were utility versus celebratory, pulling her from one place to the next. At just about any joint in town, a new Miller hit the bar top before the swill of the last passed her lips. The barkeeps knew she was good for a tab. Most nights, anyway. And even if she wasn’t, the dude hovering around her would be. Roughneck to frat boy, country-clubber to queen; for Colleen, they, too, were utility.