Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  When I’m four or five and George A.’s still a toddler, I start to ride with Bill in that rattling tin can of a delivery truck, and we roll the windows down and sing “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “The Wabash Cannonball,” and when we reach the farms, Bill unspools the hose and fills the tanks while I run with the children in the yard. Sometimes they ask us to dinner, which is to say the noonday meal, and if it’s the last stop, Daddy sits with the men, and the moonshine comes out in quart Mason jars with a pickled peach suspended like a shrunken head in each. Even at five and six, I note the way my father’s accent changes when he talks to them, how he works these men with such good humor that they no longer care they’re being worked and send us home with grocery bags filled with okra, squash, tomatoes and string beans. People like him. He seems happy. I’m happy being with him. He’s my Dad, there’s no one like him. So I remember thinking.

  And on Thursday nights in summer, he and Pa Rose leave the Plant at 5 P.M. and pull into Four Roses at 8:30. They start the fire and throw on the steaks they brought from the Henderson Winn-Dixie where Pa is on close terms with the butcher, and we sit down to eat at 10 P.M. and Pa, who’s had a couple, says, Good bread, good meat, goddamn let’s eat!, the same grace every Thursday, and we laugh every time he says it, and Bill laughs, too. I remember that he laughed, back when he was Daddy, he seemed happy on those nights like we were, like I was, and we were a family and believed that family love was stronger than time or death, except it wasn’t.

  Because Bill often stays out gambling and drinking, and Margaret, at 1 and 2 A.M., will sometimes call his father—so she tells me later. And the Principal, Bill Sr., drives downtown to seek his son and namesake in whatever smoky joint young Bill is holed up in in whatever darkened alley. And one night at the Moose Lodge Bill loses $30,000 and is in the parking lot of the First Citizens Bank at 9 A.M. when the doors open the next morning. He goes in and takes out a mortgage on our house as we’re waking up and eating breakfast. Someone at the bank calls George A. Rose, who’s a director, and Pa goes down and pays the note, and later, Margaret tells me, Pa drives out to Ruin Creek and tells her, I don’t know what’s going to happen to you when I die, Margaret, I just don’t know what’s going to happen to you and the children, and he’s crying when he says it.

  And by 1968, my eighth-grade year, as Bill sits reading “Prufrock,” Margaret has started coming down to breakfast with black eyes saying she slipped in the shower or ran into the car door. And some nights now when Bill’s been out and Margaret locks the door against him, I lie downstairs flinching as he puts his shoulder to the front door and it starts to shatter in the door frame and I imagine George A. and Bennett, our new brother, not yet two, upstairs awake and frightened just like I am. And in this phase, too, Bill—the president of Rose Oil now, who hires and fires, controls the checkbook—sells a stand of Mary Rose’s timber on the q.t. and puts the money in his pocket, thinking he’s too slick for anyone to catch him. When this comes out in the divorce, he’ll have to forfeit his Rose Oil pension and retirement and leave town with nothing in order to avoid the possibility of prison.

  I believe Bill loved me, and long after they’re divorced, he’ll say that Margaret was the great love of his life and that he loved the first George A. and considered him a gentleman, but somewhere deep inside through all those fourteen years, I think Bill regards Margaret and the Roses as his enemies, and by day he works for Vichy and salutes and by night builds bombs for the Resistance, and ultimately in order to escape the trap he’ll blow the whole thing up. In a hotel room in Boston in September 1969, the night before I enter Exeter, Bill blows up our family, his marriage, himself, and me into the bargain. And by this route, he ends up up there on those back roads in the Shenandoah, searching in his father’s and his father’s father’s country for Who He Was and whatever he lost or left or had taken from him by Margaret and the Roses and probably someplace long before he knew them. And I don’t think Bill ever found the answer, because after forty years of wandering, one morning in 2008 in his house in Florida, he sits down on the toilet and puts a pistol to his head and pulls the trigger.

  And would it have been worth it, after all . . .

  To have squeezed the universe into a ball

  To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

  To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

  Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

  If one, settling a pillow by her head,

  Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.

  That is not it, at all.”

  And the dark force is already working this afternoon in 1968 while Bill sits reading me “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As he reads, Margaret sits beside him on the sofa like the woman in the poem, and the explosion is one year off now, one year in the future. And there’s danger in this room, I sense it, as does Margaret; that’s why her posture is erect and formal. Looking back, I doubt she knows what he’s up to with “Prufrock” any more than I do, but she knows the ship is sinking and that whatever Bill’s agenda with the poem, under it is hers to get out and get us out with her—and me first, the oldest, and Exeter’s the lifeboat. And that, I think, is how the package showed up on my doorstep wrapped in silver paper stamped with gold crests.

  One day while scanning Vogue or The New Yorker—I imagine this is how it happens—Margaret stumbles on the name: “Exeter,” the Phillips Exeter Academy. Someone famous went there and went on to do great things. The first George A. is dead now, so Margaret gets the money from her mother, Mary, and enlists Bill in the project. And I suspect one reason he agrees is because their marriage is in trouble, and this is something Margaret wants, and he can help her get it and maybe thereby salvage something.

  So he puts me in the Country Squire and drives me up, we make our visits, and we both know Exeter’s the one the moment we first see it. The stately Georgian buildings on the lawn, the elms and maples red and gold with autumn. The new library designed by Louis Kahn has a quarter-million-volume shelf capacity. The new Love Gym has 220,000 square feet—two ice hockey rinks, three b-ball courts. There are thirty acres of playing fields, a domed observatory with a motor-driven telescope.

  All this in the silver package stamped with gold crests. And here we are in the living room. He and Margaret both regard me with solemn expectation. It’s time to decide, time to go down to the wharf and climb aboard the ship, time to smell the North Atlantic brine and listen to the seagulls’ cries and give three heavyhearted cheers and plunge like fate into the dark Atlantic. And what if I say, Yes, I want it? What if I reach out and take something neither of them had, something no one in our family has had before me?

  And indeed there will be time.

  To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

  I feel like the point man walking into ambush. I’m excited, but I’m also frightened, because I can’t shake the feeling that if you want nice things and ask, bad things happen. And Exeter is something very nice, much nicer than a Gibson, and there’s danger in this room, years and years of danger, and Bill doesn’t say, Exeter or Woodberry—what’s it going to be, son? He reads a poem, and the poem makes it a riddle, and only Bill knows the answer and if I get it wrong, I don’t know what’s going to happen, and if I get it right, I don’t know what’s going to happen either.

  I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker

  Bill’s stopped. His voice is hitched.

  –What’s the matter, Daddy?

  He turns a fierce, wet look at me. His eyes are red. He shakes his head and goes on. The poem is all the answer I receive.

  And now he reads on to the end and there’s a heavy beat of silence. He looks up.

  –Do you know why I read you this?

  –No, sir.

  I stand there with the pressure in my lungs and chest—the cinch—knowing to a dead certainty I’m going to fail the test
.

  –What do you think it means, David, to measure out your life with coffee spoons?

  A moment passes now, a second, and suddenly it’s as if a draft wafts through, blowing all the doors and windows open.

  Bill sees me get it, and his eyes burn.

  I’m Prufrock, don’t you be, David. Measure out your life in gallons, bushels, hogsheads, don’t be dissuaded by the woman or the women on the sofas, even if she’s your pregnant girlfriend or your wife or mother and you love her, ask your overwhelming question and don’t let anybody stop you, go, Godspeed, goddamn you, go, and may you have the victory I thought I’d have but stepped aside to give you. This is your fate, written in the manifest, not in ink but in the blood of our parental sacrifice.

  An afternoon in Henderson, North Carolina, in 1968, and my future is decided by the reading of a poem. Go, he says, and I do. Four years later, at Exeter on graduation day, I declare to all my teachers that I’m going to be a poet. They look at me, these men in their bowties and rumpled tweeds, who seem so mild and old at thirty-three and thirty-five, they regard me with amused, defeated eyes, and say, Ah, Mr. Payne, ah, well good luck to you, it may not be so easy. I already know there’s nothing else for me, and looking back, I wonder whether it was freedom and a shot at larger life that called or if I went to Exeter to win my parents’ love and their approval and thereby lost what George A. won by staying.

  And here he is, my smart, good-looking brother, drinking and getting high with me at 9:30 in the morning. Just off his job on the Kill Devil Hills sanitation truck, in a week he’s heading back to school to try out for the varsity. Woodberry Forest, the place our parents once upon a time suggested wasn’t good enough for me, is good enough for him, apparently, because that’s where he’ll be playing football if he makes it. Strange, though, isn’t it, I get Exeter, and there he sits with the Gibson I could never ask for, and on his finger, Pa’s gold signet, which Margaret gave him though I was the oldest. And two years beyond this summer, he’ll pledge DKE at UNC—the first George A.’s fraternity—and become a business major, and the traditional values passed down in our family become my brother’s values. So when I, aspiring poet, Taoist, stand in the shadows on S Columbia Street, gazing into Big Frat Court as into a diorama, I’m seeing not just who our grandparents and parents were and who I might have been, but who George A. will be and is already on his way to becoming. The children dancing there look happier than I am.

  How were these lots assigned and these decisions made? By whom? And why? Who I Am is all bound up with Who We Were. It’s part of you, George A., and part of me, and how our parents saw us and apportioned their love between us.

  It is impossible to say just what I mean!

  But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen

  So I, the child of Bill and Margaret’s failed escape from Henderson, will be about divestiture and leaving, George A., the child of their return, about staying and accumulation, and who Bill and Margaret were when they conceived us is who we’ll be and each of us will walk that path forever after. How explain it?

  Not one of them is like another.

  Don’t ask us why.

  Go ask your mother.

  In his old One Fish Two Fish, this passage, too, has stars and exclamations.

  The music’s come up now.

  –Who’s this?

  –Blind Boy Fuller, George A. tells me.

  I don’t recognize the name, or his real one either, Fulton Allen, which George A. offers with the joint he passes, and we’re quiet and I listen as I’ve listened to the other blues LPs he brought back from Woodberry last semester, his new obsession. All summer, as I’ve whipped him into shape out on the beach, George A.’s played me bits and pieces of this music. It has a strange familiarity and I’m curious and can’t decide completely if I like it. It sounds tinny, small, arcane and lonely, not like the blues I’ve come to know. It’s not like “The Lemon Song” with Jimmy Page or Keith and Mick on “Gimme Shelter” or Clapton covering Big Bill Broonzy. The way those English white boys play it, the blues lifts you up and takes you someplace it feels good to be in, but this other blues that George A.’s brought home isn’t like that, and it’s not Robert Johnson and the Mississippi Delta players either. The stuff he’s listening to is from the same place we are, the Eastern Piedmont—Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry from up the road in Durham, and back before them, Bull City Red and the Reverend Gary Davis. This music is like being in a bus station late at night, and some old fellow with a cardboard suitcase offers you a swig of something and you don’t want to insult him so you drink, and then he tells you how his child got sick and died because he didn’t have the money for the medicine because he drank it and his woman left him and here he is at midnight, no longer young, with a cardboard suitcase, and he’s telling you the truth and offering no relief because he has none, and the worst part is, as he speaks, it dawns on you it’s midnight and you’re in the same bus station he’s in. And there isn’t the same uplift in this music, no rocking out the way there is with Jimmy Page and Keith and Clapton and the other English white boys, and I don’t know that I want to hear this old man’s story or drink with him or sit beside him in the station, and how exactly did my little brother find his way here, and why exactly did he bring me?

  As the song concludes, George A. lifts the needle and starts the whole thing over and, settling the Gibson, plays through the turnaround into the resolving I chord in the first beat of the twelfth bar, and as he picks this old black music that issued out of poverty and deprivation, Pa’s gold signet flashes on his finger. He tries it twice and can’t quite get it, though the second time is better.

  –Close, I tell him.

  –No cigar, though.

  –Maybe a cigarillo?

  With a fatalistic shrug, he puts the guitar facedown on the bed he slept in and turns up the volume.

  –Guess how old he is, he says.

  –How old?

  –Guess.

  –Sixty, sixty-five?

  He shakes his head.

  –He died when he was thirty-three. He was twenty-eight when he made this.

  He puts the roach into a clip and offers me the last toke.

  Silenced, I listen more closely now to the antique hiss and crackle on the tape, and George A. leans back in the rocker as Fulton Allen sings, in this scratchy old recording from the ’30s, “Stealing Bo-Hog,” “Boots and Shoes,” “If You See My Pigmeat,” and “Funny Feeling Blues.”

  My brother’s eyes are closed, his chin lifted slightly toward the ceiling. Though it may be only concentration, there’s a pained quality to George A.’s expression, and as I listen with him, it’s as if the downstairs room we’ve shared since we were boys has become a kind of church, and we’re here together at a funeral for someone important, someone to whom we’re both indebted, and at the time I don’t know who, but now I think about a photo of him as a toddler. Standing close behind George A., her index fingers clutched in his small fists, is Eva Brame, who raised us, raised me from the time that I was one and George A. from the cradle.

  While Bill and I were out in Warren County playing hooky with the farmers and Margaret was at Altar Guild, George A. was home in the gray-shingled house with Eva listening to the radio, to the station Eva would have chosen, and as George A. lay on the floor playing with his cars or coloring, Eva hummed and did her ironing, and when the cardinal flashed past the window, it was Eva who said “bird,” and George A. will first say bird the same way Eva says it, which is subtly different from the way our mother says it, though when Margaret’s had a couple and gets into that certain mood and wants to put on music, her accent changes, the rhythms of her speech relax, for she, too, was raised by a black woman, Otelia Franklin. And when Nanny, Margaret’s mother, speaks, her speech is filled with Black English idioms and rhythms more pronounced than either Eva’s or Otelia’s.
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  On and on and back and back it goes, this mixing, black on white and white on black, I heard it in Keith and Jimmy Page and Clapton, and back before them, Elvis, and it’s on frat row in Chapel Hill where those white kids are dancing to beach music and as I stand in the shadows on S Columbia it’s part of my attraction, part of what I’m seeing in the diorama and why I sometimes long to cross the street and join them. And it’s here now in the lair with us in George A.’s music, his new obsession which isn’t really new, and I don’t know my brother’s heart, I barely know my own, but I wonder if the reason why my brother looks as if he’s grieving goes back to Eva, who cared for me, too, but was with him from the cradle, long before he knew that she was black and that he wasn’t or that Eva was in a subordinate position and that to be with us she wasn’t there with her own children who had to miss her so that we could have her. And maybe George A. once believed, as I did, that Eva belonged to him and he to Eva, but she really didn’t and he didn’t really either, he had Eva—we did—because once upon a time our people took from hers what they didn’t wish to give us, as once upon a time Margaret took from Bill what he didn’t wish to give her, as Bill later took from Margaret and the Roses what they didn’t wish to give him, and now Eva’s gone, too, we’ve lost her just like we lost Bill and Margaret, and George A. and I are all alone here. And I see now what this scene is, it’s the last one of our childhood, once we leave we’re never going to be together here in the same way, and we’re all that’s left to each other who once believed that family love was stronger than time or death, except it wasn’t, and I’m going to lose him, too, and George A.’s going to lose me, and maybe that’s the funeral, and here we are in the station and the old man’s telling us his story, which is our story also, the differences are minor, and it doesn’t lift you up and take you anywhere you want to be in, the only consolation is that the story’s true and we’re here together as we listen.

  –You know he’s buried up in Durham, George A. tells me as he lifts the needle.